Why iceberg?

I don't know if you noticed, but recently I changed the name of my blog.

I suddenly realised that calling my collection of random questions thrown into the universe can hardly be called any form of education. It also felt contrary to the whole idea of starting the blog which was with the below sentence
'Men must be taught as if you taught them not...'

While I completely agree that 'Think, Learn, Apply, Educate' is still and will always the motive behind every action of mine, yet I don't in any way want to suggest that I am teaching anything through my conversations on this blog. At best I am thinking out loud, and asking for your point of view.

So, why this current name? Why an iceberg?

First, I do love icebergs. Though I haven't ever seen one in real life, yet.

Second, it reminds me of a very old friend of mine. He often said 'Rinx you are an iceberg - people only every see that part of you which is above the surface' And then the other day it dawned on me that we are all icebergs. There are very few people, perhaps including ourselves that we can claim to know more than surface level.

And life - life to me is the biggest example of an iceberg. It is one of the biggest mysteries that there is. We live it everyday, yet how weird that we never have definitive conclusions about it. Philosophers have spent their life times thinking about life. Artists portray their versions through their art and we engineers probably define it by the function that we are serving, the problem that we are solving. And yet, I can't help feeling that each one of us have an incomplete version. And this to me is the true beauty of life I think. It is an unending search for truth, for ourselves.

And now I am tired of ranting. Or maybe just tired. So will stop here, and go back and practice some breathing.

Happy weekend all.

Not so happily ever after

Sometimes I think I have learnt and gained a lot from all the mistakes or failures that I have made/had in life.

I have in the past written extensively on the importance of making mistakes, but I guess somewhere in that writing a true belief and understanding was missing. I don't know if I am any better off now, but I would like to add a few more thoughts to the topic.

Let me start with looking at the exact opposite experience to a failure - an achievement.  Personally for me, achievements  have been of two kinds
1. Got something by chance, without really working for it.
2. Worked super hard, pined for it day and night and then achieved it.

The first kind makes me feel gleeful whenever I think about them. It feels like cheating almost, or a happy coincidence and I have always considered myself lucky. But that's about it. There is no more depth to the feeling than that.

The second kind has mostly always left me feeling empty in the end. The struggle being the most exhilarating experience, once it is over, there is always a deep sense of nothingness that I feel in the end. And for some reason, every such achievement has only just made me want to go on to the next level. Like if I managed to achieve this much, surely this is nothing. And I want to prove to myself that I can do better.

But failures are different. After the initial shock and feeling sorry for myself is over, it actually makes me think. What went wrong? Did I really want it? How will I go about it next time if at all I do? What did I really want from it?

Now you can tell me that as humans we probably post rationalise our behaviour and emotions, but that according to me is what makes us so very unique. We survive and find alternative plans, all the time. We adapt and learn new things. We change our paths, and discover new ones without actually having planned it early on in life. We find different ways to feel the same way about ourselves, and satisfy our deeper urges in life.  Isn't that cool?

The point of the post is not really to glorify failures and losses in life. They do take a fair share of their toll on our existence as well. But I guess it is a reminder to myself that these experiences which sometimes make me go into very low lows, have a certain place in my life. They are teaching me something about myself,  and I should learn to respect that.

There is perhaps a reason why all interesting stories talk mainly about the struggling phase of the characters and always end at happily ever after.

Are we simply conditioned to struggle? What do you think?

High fever, science fiction and philosophy

Last twelve days have been hell for me. Not being able to get to work, being sick at home and feeling constant guilt to be sitting at home during what is perhaps the few good days of the year was just driving me crazy.
It started with the fever - and with that my manic over active mind started going out of hand. I don't know if this is a common symptom for many, but high fever makes me go into an extreme thinking and dreaming mode. My mind feels like every cell has come alive. Just like that, in a flash a lot of questions I have had about myself as well as others around me start making sense. So many ideas, so many solutions... I want to write everything down before I forget, but I can't. Because I am so weak, I cannot actually get up from the bed.
During this period I saw the movie 'Jupiter Ascending'. I will not talk about the computer graphics aspect of the movie (there was a lot of it), but it reminded me of a conversation I had had with a friend a very long time back.

My friend and I were having a debate on religion and existence of God. (I was less intelligent those days obviously!) My friend (Christian) was deeply affected by our conversation. In the end she asked me whether I believed in the Hindu belief of reincarnation (life after death).
My parents are Hindus, however until that moment I had never actually thought about Hinduism, and never been officially told by anyone in my family that to be a Hindu, I should believe in reincarnation. However after thinking a bit I told my friend that I can believe in an interpretation of reincarnation since to me it is not that different from our genes being passed to the next generation. It is not that the exact same person comes back alive again, but another version of him may do.
My friend was very upset with my answer. She accused me of being able to relate to Hindu religious sentiments but not Christian and she walked away from me that day.
The next day she came to me and let me know that she had done a lot of thinking and concluded that she feels comfortable with her own religious beliefs that she has grown up with and chooses to keep those sentiments.
I was relieved. Relieved that my friend was still speaking to me. And I genuinely felt good that she felt comfortable.

I did not realise it then, but now I do, that having a strong belief system in life is very important. (I just wish tolerance was also a part of everyone's belief systems.)
We humans are so tiny when compared to the universe. And our understanding about ourselves, and that around us is so little. Yet we are gaining more knowledge with time, and with that it is easy to be overwhelmed.
Like when we are children, we are fearless. We are carefree and we seldom think of consequences. But as we grow up, something changes within us. We begin to get more and more scared. Scared of not meeting expectations, scared of not achieving, scared of not performing and eventually scared of old age and death. A belief system is nothing different to having a friend. Just the thought that we have an ally in this world who protects and guides us makes us so much stronger.

I am no longer in my manic fever phase. The antibiotics and medicines I am taking have numbed my mind enough to be able to think of only a few things at a time. We are most productive when we can think of a single thing for certain period of time.  Being sick at home for almost two weeks, with not much company gives you a lot of time to think about your own life and take stock. I have identified a few distractions and detractors from my life, which I will need to clinically get rid of. Apart from that I would like to give meditation a try - let' see how that goes. Will keep you all posted.

Are we human, or are we numbers?

So many things happened last year, and yet I did not even manage my yearly accounting. Not that I was so busy, that I could not write a few lines, but I guess for me the real question was what do I really want to say to the world and why do I want to do that?

Maybe I just did not have an inspiring enough story to tell, but at the same time, I also felt myself recoiling a bit with the whole new level of PDA (Public Display of Achievements) that happen these days.

Do I really want to list my achievements, or the number of heart breaks or simply the top ten lessons learnt this year on this blog? In a way, you can say that I have been rethinking my idea of summarising and examining the year gone by.

A conversation with a friend made me realise that it is very easy or us to fall prey to the ultimate number game. It starts off at a young age as 'How many toys do you have?', 'What percentage did you get in 10th std board exams?' and continues through adolescence as 'How many girl/boy friends did you have?' and as a grown up you hear 'How much do you get paid?, 'How many kids do you have?', 'How many cars do you have?', 'How many houses do you own?', 'How big is your television?' or even sometimes 'How many 'likes' do you get on your Facebook profile?'

It is as if all these numbers add up to the grand total of being the individuals that we are.

But do we really need to measure our success and failures by counting the rungs of ladder that we have climbed? Is it possible that the numbers are simply encouraging a mindless comparison between different people, some of whom would otherwise be perfectly happy with less but are now miserable since others around them have more? Moreover, can there be a single number which satisfy all the different kinds of people? [To all my sci-fi loving friends, please don't say 42!]

I want to think that there is a state of mind which is so pure and resonant with our inner self, that when we achieve it, we can revel in simply being ourselves, without the need for a pat on our back, without the need to justify, and most importantly without having to measure the feeling and adding a price tag to it. But I also know that it takes great mental strength and conviction to achieve this state of mind.

Perhaps one way would be to have regular honest conversations with yourself. To try and periodically disconnect and isolate yourself from your immediate surrounding so that it gives you an idea of who you really are.
But I am sure there are other ways that you guys have figured out. I would love to know alternative views and if at all any of you have suffered from the pressure of keeping up with the numbers, especially when it does not quite result in the contentment that we all hope for. What did you do? How did you stop counting?