God is within yourself

I am not an Atheist, but I am also not fond of or believe in day to day rituals. I am believer that you need to do your best and as long as you are sure you are right, nothing can go wrong.

But off late the books I am reading all point towards the subject I have for this blog. I recently finished Dan Brown's - "Lost Symbol".
The book is as usual woven around the cryptic symbols and how Robert Langdon solves them - again its within a time span of two days I suppose. But its a big drag towards the later half. What interested me was the idea - "God is within yourself" and this is the famed secret of Free Masons.

Post this I finished reading a very good book from William Dalrymple - "Nine Lives". Its excellent in terms of the way small stories in far corners of India are told. It is more interesting to see how our lives are closely knitted with the religious beliefs and the daily rituals associated with those beliefs. Again some of the stories in this also point out the same - "God is within Yourself".

Then I went on to read some articles about Rama Krishna Matt and again encountered the same concept.

Now I am starting to read more on the same topic, Its interesting the way so far this concept has been emphasized in my reads. Lets see where this takes me :)

Dog's Life

I got up from sleep pretty early at around 5:00 AM today. As usual the wandering mind keeps thinking. I was thinking about 3D movies in Bollywood. For some reason, we still don't have too much luck with 3D in Bollywood. May be somebody is working hard on the next one to come while I am writing this blog.

3D looks good either when the animation is either larger or very smaller than the normal human size. This was the case with Avatar, the aliens (I keep forgetting the name of the species) were larger than the humans. For a while I was thinking how good a street dog's life in a Bollywood movie be.

For one, this is unique to Bollywood since people here can relate to a street dog. Going from childhood of the dog, when it gets fed by some neighbors to the day it starts putting it borders on the road to the time it starts having puppies the whole story can be told so well and made so interesting. We could have examples of how dog has premonition of anything bad and cries out load, its a belief in India that when the dog cries, there is something bad coming up. Or when it attacks any other dog entering its territory or barks at anybody coming home late beyond 11:00PM, I usually have a lot of dogs barking at my cab whenever I end up late in the night and they all stop when they see the person getting down :). Or the idea of a dog making a girl friend or a boy friend and having puppies and protecting them. After some thought I decided this is a very good idea for movie and their ended my thoughts when my alarm rung for 6:05 AM telling me - "enough of thoughts get started for the work".

Also I recollect a lot of times - "Marley and Me", I just loved the simple story and loved the ending sentences - "How many people can make you feel that you are extraordinary? " that's an interesting question and an important one too.

Mind mistakes

1) Always wants something which it does not have control on or cannot access
2) Always thinks about things which upset you, always worries
3) Does not realize the importance of something unless it looses it
4) If every explanation of an intelligent brain is against what the mind wants then substantiates that you should still go with mind because "THERE IS ONLY ONE LIFE"

With all the advances in technology we have not reached a zone where we can distinguish between why mind sometimes gains over brain.....

Vishnu , Rama and Brahma in Grand Canyon

Recently during a conversation, we were discussing how powerful water is . As an example, we were discussing how River Colorado has carved out Grand Canyon as what it is today. I usually get a little more interested about such things and immediately get to read more details.
When I visited GrandCanyon, I was only 15 days old in US of A and had absolutely no idea about what I was going to experience. When I stood there, it just seemed as though I had gone to a totally different world. But I did not know the trivia or the geological background of it.
So this time after the discussion in office, I started reading (ofcourse started with Wiki) and looked at some of the other examples of canyons in the world. It actually surprised me that Grand Canyon is not really the biggest one in the world, its the Capertree valley in Australia.
But what amazed me out of all my readings is the variety of rock beds and how it has taken billions of years, few volcanoes and the river colarado to get Grand Canyon to what it is today. The most amazing thing is that the oldest rock bed in the layers is about 1.x billion years old and is called Vishnu Schist. Upon further reading, I found out there are Rama and Brahma Schists as well. It is amazing to see the names of indian gods to be associated with something so old. I tried finding out how they got these names for rock beds but to no vail. But just a thought got into my head - might be our Puranas and Vedas and Upanishads are all true.
After some more search , I found this link which has a beautiful picture of Vishnu Schist and also explains how these got the names, check it out Vishnu Schist

Analogy for Life

Today morning started with a very sad news. A collegue in office expired due to H1N1 infection. The demise was very shocking and for a few minutes while I was on my way to office(which is when I got this news), I was thinking how cruel god can be.
The person was very young in his late 20's and had been recently married.
While I was thinking about it, life seemed analogous to the journey over a bridge in a valley at a very high altitude.
Its like a broken bridge which is connecting two sides of the valley at a very high altitude. All the time we are trying to take a step forward and be careful not to slip. There are beautiful millipedes and centipedes which we dont want to stamp. There can be snakes around, and we need to be careful. There are holes also in the rope-way so one has to be careful treading it.Once in a while we raise our heads and take a look at the breath taking scenery of the greenery and water fall.But there is also a person who has huge axe and can cut the rope which supports the bridge anytime without any notice.
The rope-way is the journey of life which we think we need to cover from childhood to youth to old age.The millipedes and centipedes are the smaller daily things which you want to enjoy but not change or disturb.The snake and the holes are the problems - bigger and smaller -which hits you and you have to cope up with.the beautiful scenery is the good moments of life.the person cutting the axe is god and the act of cutting the ropeway is the sudden and shocking demise like my collegues.
I do not know how many can understand the analogy and connect to it, but for a minute I felt so helpless. Death is the ultimate truth , but yet human beings with all their intelligence cannot come to terms with this truth. Everytime it happens it will rip apart the ground on which somebody is standing and it will shock some of us.

Sleeplessness Pill

Very often I keep wondering if we can get a pill for getting rid of sleepiness. Everyday when I catch the early morning cab, no matter how well I would have slept the previous day, I feel sleepy while entering the office. Its the same feeling I used to have when I hated going to school because, I have not completed the assignments for the day :)
During my college days, one of my good friends, used to travel quite a distance and had the same problem with early morning classes - sleepiness. She used to ask me to pinch her every once in a while , the harder I pinch, she would say harder and harder and harder :)
Today I felt the same urge when I entered office early in the morning, can somebody give me a hard pinch or a pill to get rid of sleepiness....

Picture Perfect

I was remembering some of the best songs from Mani Rathnam's movies and started realizing how well they were picturized.

When I listen to a melodious music (I like ARR's music a lot), I start having certain expectation about how the song should be picturized for the kind of the background score in the song. Since I do not really follow Tamil very well, but love listening to ARR's music , I end up listening to the song first before watching it.
Infact, the melody of the song touches the heart so much, that I go in search of the lyrics and the translation of the lyrics. Likewise ,I also start having certain expectation on how the song should be ideally picturized for such beautiful music. Often I am disappointed with picturization, the one director who is perfect in this is Mani Ratnam.
When you listen to the initial background music in "Kannathil Muttamittal", you feel there should be a slow motioned run, and when we watch the song - both male and female version - the picturization in the Srilankan Landscape is just breath taking. The "Pacchai Nirame" song is another example of beautiful picturization. Another one which I remember is "Tu hi re", for the pain expressed in the song, the way it has been picturized on the beach and in the fort especially, in between when there is a music, it is just excellent.Another example is "Narumugaye", specifically picturized in black and white to suit the song.There are plenty more like "Dil se re","Chaiyya Chaiyya","Chinna chinna aasai" or "Ye haseen Wadiya" from Roja.
In comparision, if you watch the picturization for "Mannipaya" from VVT , it is disappointing. Same way with "Aao na " song in "Kyun ho gaya na" or "Anjali Anjali Pushpanjali". I am a fan of slow beats and both of these songs are melodious and meaningful. But they have not been picturized very well to suit the song. In mannipaya for example, one of the most meaningful verse in the song, is sung by the heroine over phone :). In Anjali Anjali song, the first part of the song, which has the beautiful saxophone and keyboard part is picturized in a disappointing way.Imagine this being picturized with both scores with a beautiful background. Instead the heroine is in a bathroom :).