On Valentines Day

TOTD:

There are two loves that you should never abandon quest of:
1. Find a person to love unconditionally, without ego, with full abandon. In the rare case of having found someone, make EVERY effort to keep her/him. And if you do happen to be with the person you love, rejoice every minute!
2. Find work that you love doing. Again, in the rare case of having found what you love doing, do it - without thinking of reward, its social payoff, its monetary reward, its acceptance in the world. Just do it.

But first, be the person who can love. By choosing to love, you allow yourself to be vulnerable. Fulfillment only comes to the vulnerable and the needy. It may take a while to come, but every effort spent in seeking fulfillment is worth it. It can be terrifying, giving yourself permission to love. Be of courage.

Love is the only thing that makes life worthwhile.

Single Point of Failure

"Ishikawa Diagram" - A "Cause - Effect" theory that I have known and heard about being practiced in one of the companies I worked for. For the record, I have never formally worked on it, nor have I been trained on its usage.

The idea of the Ishikawa diagram is to take a desired Effect (read expected result), work backwards and think of all the causes that can potentially contribute to it, and document them. Focus on making sure the effecting causes execute well, and the effect will automatically happen. It identifies the possible points of failures, and makes the executor aware of it, so that no point of failure can derail the expected outcome. Very elegant. It works.

Being aware of what the causes are, can and will, influence what finally happens. So far so good.

But how much of a weight does each of the causes has on the effect, is the one question that takes certainty out of the process. Finding out the weight of each cause is subjective, messy and ambiguous.

As I look back in my life, and look ahead, I find that in most cases, a single point/action defined the success or failure of a desired outcome. The weight of the action was not obvious when it happened. It was just one of those things in the action-stream. In most cases, I could not have impacted that particular causatory action. I could not have foreseen its impact. But it is true that the impact of that one action changed everything moving forward, from that point forward. Like a cascading wall of effects. If that one action at that precise time went well, everything went well. If not, then rapidly downhill. In hindsight, there are single points of failures in endeavors.

I focus these days on identifying those actions, the ones that can make/break to cause the outcome that I want out of any situation. The rest, I ignore.

No Ishikawa diagrams for me. One single point is all that I am looking for.

Who will continue to cry....

There is this book called "Who will cry when you die" by Robin Sharma. It is one of those books that exhort you to live your life in such a way that others are impacted by it, and that you are missed when you are gone.

There will be some people who will cry when I die.

There are always some people who cry when a person dies. Of course, barring the very poor, the lonelies and the sick. When some of these people die, there are in fact people who are relieved. It is profoundly sad that this is so.

The key question to ponder is about who will continue to cry after you have been dead. For a week, month, year. Think hard. Picture to yourself the day of your funeral. And then the next. The next week. The next month. The next year. Maybe three years after your death. And ask yourself this question - who will continue to cry after you have died. Picture the people doing their daily routines. Imagine the thoughts they would have, while they eat, drink, make a living, party etc. Ask yourself honestly - be brutally honest - will they spare one thought to you? Two? Several in a day? Once in a month? Once in a year? Will it be a happy thought? Grateful thought? Revengeful thought? Loving thought? These are questions you ask yourself of the people in your life today.

Life goes on. That is the tragedy and beauty of life. Everything passes. Even you.

Think about what your imagination is telling you about life after your death. About which people will continue to feel your absence, in a good, bad or indifferent way. The ones to focus on first is the indifferent ones. For the ones whose lives would continue with nary a thought for you, eliminate doing things for them in your current time. Eliminate estimating your lifes worth on what they think of you today. Or what you think they think of you. They don't really matter - in the short and long run. You do not really impact them. Maybe you never did. Purge them from your life.

Now examine the people who will miss you in a good way. Even weeks after you have gone, or even years. Nurture them, love them and try and maximise your impact in a good way in their life. You really are a part of their lives. Choose to work hard on them. It is important to you, and to them.

And now, the ones who curse you when you are gone. Look hard - if there anything you have done to have earned that blame or curse? Fix it if you can. If not, then accept their curses, eliminate thoughts about them from your head and let them cease existing for you today. These could be people who you can do nothing about. Cultivate the wisdom to accept their prickly existence in your life, and stop trying to please them.

Now, besides the people who would cry when you die, think of the people who won't cry when you die, but whose life would be impacted by what you did in life. Maybe these people have never met you. Could you have impacted some people in your life even though you did not know them? Picture the impact. Maybe your work has made them spend one hour less doing repetitive boring stuff in their lives. Maybe you helped them reach their goals with less barriers. Maybe science and thought progressed in a different way because you lived and worked. It does not matter that they were not in your funeral. They could not have been there even if they wanted to - they don't even know you exist!

If you can picture such people, your life would have lived beyond your death in some measure.

Can't think of anyone like that? Maybe you need to look at your lifes work to know if there is some work you need to start so that someone is impacted due to your death. Someone you don't know. Someone who you still nevertheless love. Invest in that love. Invest in a ever lasting life.

The distorted popular

My daughter asked me about the interpretation of these lines from the very popular poem, "The Road Less Taken" by Robert Frost -

"Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;"

She wanted to know the exact meaning of the words 'just as fair'. As I explained it to her, I read the following two lines -

"Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same."

Wait wait... this means that the poet is saying that both the roads were pretty much the same. And I freaked out.

Not on the poem itself, because the meaning of the poet was clear. But on my own understanding of what the poem said. Or rather what I thought the poem said. Truth be told, I had never really read the poem properly, though it forms a integral part of my subconscious, and there have been several times that I have referred to it in conversations, with myself and with others. Stored as it is in my mind, the poet celebrates the doggedness of pursuing ones own unique vision, the risks involved in doing so, and passionately advocates following ones path - even though there have not been too many people who had earlier walked that path.

But the poet does not do that at all! The poet is saying that as the years go by, he probably would justify the path that he had taken by wistfully called it the "road not traveled", though in reality he had no means of knowing if the path indeed was not traveled - but the need to somehow see oneself as a hero, a lone traveler will make the poet deceive himself by calling the path so, in the future.

My appreciation of what the poet has written has jumped up several levels. My own estimation of how I think has taken two steps down. Two large steps down.

I, who snacks on words - how could I allow myself to subscribe to a popular opinion - without reading the poem itself? It did not take me even 2 minutes to know that the popular opinion and take away from the poem is very different from the way the poet intended it to be - and yet, yet, I took it to be true. I believed the popular opinion to be true, though I could have easily assessed for myself on whether it was true or not (which I did today).

Popular has the propensity to distort. Beware of the popular! And beware of your own propensity to blindly follow the popular.

Constantly

I am not what I used to be. You are not what you used to be. Constantly changing life has changed us, and will continue doing so.

Let us be aware of what each of us has come to be. If we can still love each others changed self with our changed self, it would be rare. And beautiful beyond measure.

Let's constantly create a new "Us". Shall we?

Blind Spot

TOTD: Everyone has been incredibly stupid at one time. Some at a few times, some several times and yet others, multitude of time, and of course, some see just a few moments of intelligence in their lifetime.

The propensity of mankind, myself included, to do stupid things amazes me..

The burden of guilt

Going through a Gurudutt phase. Something about his insights into the feminine psyche, specially the indian feminine.

Watched Sahib Bibi aur Ghulam yesterday. Saw it for the first time, though I had watched the songs several times on TV, specially my favorite ones - "Bhanwara bada nadaan he" and "Na jaaon saiyaa chura ke bainya".

The movie is a story of a bygone era, of jamindars and havelis and eccentric men. The movie tells the story of Chotti Bahu, played by Meena Kumari, with her quest of being a ideal wife and soul mate, seeking fulfillment in a marital relationship - and the observation of a impressionable young man, who gets acquainted with the feminine for the first time. Beautifully enacted, sensitively told story.

As I watched Chotti bahu, I realized that like Chotti bahu, indian women invariably carry a burden of guilt around their shoulders. An indian woman feels guilty if her husband is a philanderer. She is the one who feels guilty if she can't bear a child, she is one who feels guilty if her husband is a drunkard, she is the one who is demented by guilt if she touches a bottle of "sharab". Sometimes, she is also the one who is considers herself guilty if her husband dies!

She is the one who carries the onus of being pure as drivel snow. She is expected to be a goddess, no less. If she chooses not to be a goddess or the revered mother, she has only one option open to her, of being a slut.

She is not allowed to be human. She is not allowed to seek things for herself, but for the family, the husband, the children. She is defined by her relationship to them, and there she carves out an identity. And if any of these externalities of hers - her husband, her child, her family, her family's health, her family's wealth, her family's honour - is not pristine, it is all her fault. She reminds herself of her responsibilities every passing second, tormented in guilt at the deficiencies, specifically more so when they are not her own.

 Why do Indian Women accept guilt unconditionally this way?

Guilt is handed down to us from our mothers, our aunts, our friends. It is dinned into our ears, and given to us as an ornament, as a sacred robe we dare not sully. We all wear it, like a badge of honor. Refusing to see that the husband's, child's, family's guilt, in most cases, does not belong to us. Correction - it does not belong to us. Ever.

Amazing that it took a 70s movie for me to see that.