Of Latitudes and Attidudes

I am sitting at a diner located near my office and I am wrapped up in my thoughts. Work, life, progress, future, service - the usual stuff. Lately, it's been a more continuous, more sustained feeling of sorrow and loss. Not sure due to what but something seems amiss. The concept of sustained development has been ingrained in the mind but a newer concept is now taking root - sustainable happiness. That should be the metric of our success in life. For how long, and to what degree we have managed to remain happy. Simple. If we take the premise that one who is content is happy, then happiness is the mere satisfaction of our wants. But how do we sustain it? The answer simply is to control the wants and mitigate the needs. So how do we control the wants? Suppose I'm working at this office, I have a house to live in and I have a decent family. In this simple case, my wants can range from wanting that promotion or pay raise at the office, to wanting to pay out my mortage completely, to...

I was on my toes, desperately trying to see what she was doing over the counter. The cursive flow of her writing intrigued me and I wondered how women have such different handwriting than men. But I am not supposed to be here; I am not a regular. She was old and seemed patient but even in the situation I was in, I could not understand why she would simply not shove the form on my face and have me fill out the personal details. Instead, across the counter and behind the protection of a thick glass window, the practiced hand was copying details from my arrest warrant. The unexpected holiday gift was a reprieve from not having to post a bail in the amount of 6,000 dollars or go to jail. Valid only from Dec 1st to 31st. If you turn yourself in during this month, you essentially get a 'get-out-of-jail-free' card. I was here to cash in on my good luck. Armed with my checkbook, I had reached the Santa Clara County sheriff's office with the express purpose of turning myself in. I ...

Millions of years ago, the land of Upanishads and Vedas had already established its preference for vegetarian food. Grass-Eating Dinosaurs Think of dinosaurs' diets, and red meat comes to mind. Or, for herbivores, ferns and palms. But scientists in India have found the first clear evidence that some dinosaurs also ate grass. Fossilized dung of what are believed to be titanosaurs - those big-bodied, tiny-headed creatures - contains rigid structures called phytoliths, which were identified as coming from many different types of grasses. The finding is reported in Science. The fossils date from the late Cretaceous, near the end of the dinosaurs' reign 65 million years ago. That makes this one of the earliest findings of grasses in the fossil record, and shows that grasses had already diversified by then. cheers...

It's 2:45pm already. All the passengers have boarded while Dave and I are still left tapping our feet near the podium where the deligent Southwest Airline hostess is frantically sorting through myriad iteneraries. I'll have time to be sympathetic towards her later, I told myself. Now is the time to ensure that we are visible, that we get on that plane. She looks up. Another soul will get benediction , I tell myself. No smile, just an attempt to pronounce yet another polysyllibic name...Yaas..E..sas. "Shroff!", I loudly exclaim. "Yes. Is that you?" "YES!", I'm unable to hide my excitement. We're in! No time to rejoice yet as we scramble to make our way to the gate situated far away for our comfort. It would have been silly to forget both my bags now. The one strapped to my shoulder assures me that this is all I have and the pair of us within seconds are comfortably placed in the metal tube and on our way back home. Many calls to baggage cla...

Relevant to a previous post. C hoice is an interesting term - as a friend recently pointed out to me, we don't really have a choice, just a perception of it. The life, the path, the destination, are already determined for us. I am not so certain. If nothing else, it surely takes away the perception of control we have over our lives. If we are not in control of our path and eventually our destination, what cause does any divinity have to reprimand us for the wrong 'choices' we make?

The talks, the posters, the side conversations...It is an annual symposium and I'm absorbing it all, just like a fresh graduate. Correction. I want to absorb it all but increasingly frequently, the mind wanders about, trying to ensure that this is just where I want to be - here and now. For how long will this charade last, if this is not what i am meant to do? Is the journey itself meaningful or is it the destination that only matters? Take a scientific analogy to this - to present at one of these gatherings, a fruitful understanding of a phenomenon needs to occur. You could incessently go about discussing your approach - the many failed experimental setups, the minor successes - down to the very atomic thinking of your mind. But that's not why everyone is here - they want to know about your key findings, and your thinking matters only if it is insightful. So it seems, the journey of life is seldom important, it is the choice of destination that is. The journey is there by def...

There has been a pleasantly refreshing trend developing in my small circle of friends, close acquiaintances. It is about catering to the deepest urge we all have to provide service. Poverty, illiteracy, helplessness are not new concepts to me, having spent my formative years in India, yet, each time I go there, I am saddled with these emotions that I don't know what to do. It is in this context that when I hear of yet another person leaving the "land of opportunity" for the shores of India that I gain strength. Each one of us walks to our own drummer's beat. This mantra of tolerance, acceptance is what guides many of us when we encounter something distinctly different from our thinking. Whether you're running through the ragged terrain of India - NSEW - in search of those honest NGOs or if you're doing a pad-yatra to find that inner-peace, it's all good. Point is, you're doing it. I need to be in India long enough that I no longer would feel like a vis...

Want is a thing that unfurls unbidden like fungus, opening large upon itself, stopless, filling the sky. But needs, from one day to the next, are few enough to fit in a bucket, with room enough left to rattle like brittlebush in a dry wind. -- Barbara Kingsolver

There is something magical about a dozen adolescent kids reciting in unison timeless spiritual songs composed in a variety of languages: Sanskrit, Marathi, Tamil, Kannada, and Gujarati. The occasion was Pujya Swami Tejomayanandaji's visit to the Bay area. Excited at the prospect of hearing him, I woke up early that Sunday but it was the surprise performance that left me in complete awe. Had I known in advance that Swami T's talk will be preceeded by 2 hours of bhajan/kirtan sangeet by a bunch of kids, I would have deliberately arrived later and missed a great demonstration of the rich heritage of India. Sometimes you tread a certain path, knowing fully well what's ahead. You know your role, you know your destination, you have calculated how long it will take you to get to that destination. That preset journey is not interesting. It's in the fringes, the vargaries of this journey that life has found a nice comfy enclave to thrive.

I'm part of this hip, cool group that has decided to take up the study of Dharma in all its glorious facets. This month's theme is the title of this blog. The write-up is quite good, so here it is saved for posterity...an excerpt: The main vehicles to understand Vedic wisdom are from the spiritual practices of asana, pranayama, puja, mantras and meditation. These practices are all elements of Yoga. The yogic tradition among Hindus began thousands of years ago. Originally, the Upanishads were the first source of yogic philosophy; the philosophy was described in more detail in many sections of the Mahabharat. Yoga is derived from the root word yuj, meaning union. We use yoga to find the union within ourselves (jivatman) and with the cosmic being (Paramatman). There are 4 main paths of yoga: jnana (knowledge), bhakti (devotion), karma (service), and raja (technique). These four disciplines are not exclusive, nor is one better than the other. All four are equally as important and a...

I have been very lucky. Third year in a row that I got to go to desh...bharat, India, "the land of a million mutinies" and she still teaches. As with Jan 26, a terrible atrocity was unleashed by nature on Dec. 26, days before my landing. A massive earthquake triggered a tsunami that engulfed thousands on coastal area of South-East Asia. India too was not spared, coming a unenviable third in the list of casualties. Unlike the US, the tsunami remained till the day of my departure a short 2.5 weeks later on the front pages. While people will readily agree that rehabilitation counts more than anything and discussions will galore, I want to log the gist of a few stories here before memory fails me: * India giving: Common man and corporations both doled out donations generously. Gujarat govt. was proactive in sending relief supplies within 2 days of the tragedy (something to be said about the planning of the much maligned CM Mody) with the support of nearly 200 NGOs in the st...