The Enigma called 'MIND'

Let me start this with a short story.

Across a crowded room your eyes lock with an attractive stranger. You look away, you look back. The first hint of a smile plays across their lips. Suddenly you're nervous, your mind goes blank, you want to go over and you want to run away, both at the same time. You try to make yourself look busy in some other chore, but your mind is only thinking of that gorgeous stranger. You turn around too fast, bump into someone, almost spilling your drink. 'Wow,' you think as you recover, 'What am I doing!'. Its more of a amazement rather than a question.

And...cut.

Unfortunately I have to bring you out of this little scene to ask a question. Do you think you'd be able to accurately describe why you find this person attractive? Indeed how good are we in general at pinpointing what it was about others that attracts us? That is, the inability to describe what is attractive about another person. That's probably why we end up using such vague words like 'energy', 'magnetism' or 'electricity'. Perhaps we genuinely don't know. This, along with many other questions are simply mind-boggling.

How do great artists create? How do brilliant scientists solve the hardest problems in their field? Listen to them try to explain and you'll probably be disappointed. Artists say mysterious things like: "The picture just formed in my mind." Writers tell us that: "I don't know where the words come from." Scientists say they: "Just had a hunch."

Of course, not all scientists, artists and writers give such mysterious answers. Some talk about the processes they went through or what inspired their conceptual jump. But their explanations are almost invariably unsatisfying. They usually can't really explain how they made that vital leap of the imagination. This is strange. Why is it that otherwise brilliant and articulate people seem unable to adequately explain their thought processes? Don't they know how they did it?

What is true of great scientific and artistic leaps of imagination is also true in everyday life. When people are asked why they chose one career over another, one partner over another or one flavor of ice-cream over another, the same problems emerge. Often, people's answers are unconvincing or they just don't know.

The process of human creativity is both fascinating and, at the same time, mystifying. Understanding the mental processes of great thinkers offers an enormous reward to any who can replicate them: immortality. Perhaps if we really understood what was going through their minds, we too could create an object or idea that would live long after our deaths.

There was a study conducted some time back in a shopping mall:
"For this study researchers set themselves up in a mall pretending to carry out a consumer survey on nightgowns and nylon stockings. Passersby were asked to evaluate what they were told were four different nightgowns and four different pairs of stockings. In fact, all four items were identical.

Quite by accident they discovered a positional effect for the identical goods: people seemed to prefer the item that was on the far right. In fact this effect was really obvious for the stockings. The right-most pair, although identical to the left-most was preferred by a factor of four to one.

When asked why they had chosen a particular item, no one mentioned its position. Even when experimenters suggested to people that the position might have an effect, most participants looked at best very confused and at worst utterly dismissive.

Result: these people didn't have a clue why they preferred one identical pair of stockings over another. "

This study shows us exactly how how little access we have to unconscious processes during everyday activities. This also shows how we often fail to spot effects that are really there.

Bike Ads in India

This has been kind of a trend in India now, for in the past 3 years, all kinds of ridiculous ads have been screened on TV. And not so surprisingly the major contribution is from the Bike makers. These ads so fake, even computer games are more real.

Let me give you the example of Hero Honda CBZ Extreme ad. These people apparently have no intentions in showcasing their product (a good reason could be that they have no likable features in that :-P). This 'dude' jumps from a building, smoothly lands on the bike, winks at a promotional chick, and in the next scene is in 'paradise'. Then apparently for no reason starts to do a wheely, and then skate boards behind the bike. So stupid. They even show sparks coming of his boots (this I think is inspired by Rajini movies). Then they show a land slide in 'paradise', and instead of showcasing a part called 'BRAKES', they show him performing a stopee, with the back tire grazing a boulder. Then comes the worst of all the stunts. A 180 degree turn around and a back flip, all the time when the rider is crossing a gorge. Seriously nothing can get more stupider(if that is a real word :-P) than this. Not even Rakhi Sawanth can beat it. I can't figure out what they are selling to the viewers. Is it some kind of death machine? None of the situations shown are remotely plausible. And on top of it all, there is a cautionary message flashing at the bottom of the screen. ****These stunts are performed by professionals. Please do not try it at home*** .WTF! Who the hell in his right mind will even think of trying it. Even if he does, can he pull of a stunt like a Skate Boarding on a 14BHP bike? I was thinking if we could sue these companies for providing wrong information to the customers about their product!

Not lagging behind are the makers of the popular bike Pulsar. Again serious crap. I feel these ad makers are confused lot. They want to showcase all these impossible stunts, all the while ignoring the features of the product (only thing we get out of these ads is the looks of the bike), and they don't want the viewers to repeat these stunts. So they are basically wasting lakhs of rupees to promote nothing! Heights of craziness.

Cheaters, Liars and Manipulators

Not so long ago, I used to play a lot of cards. A game where luck plays a crucial role. But, it is also a game where one can make his/her own luck.

Let’s engage in a thought problem:

You’re playing poker. But this isn’t just any poker game, it’s the most important poker game you’ll ever play. Besides playing for money, you’re also playing for your future. If you win, you get the girl you’ve been courting… or the promotion you deserve… or the happiness you’ve been searching for. But if you lose… you get none of it.

You’re an excellent poker player. You can recount the rules even if you are woken up in the middle of the night. You have done all the homework, studying your opponents for a long time now. You know who plays instinctively, who plays emotionally, and who plays according to the cards dealt.

But as you play… you realize that something is wrong. You start to realize that there is another type of player. One who constantly wins! At first, you start to attribute it to "pure luck", but quickly you realize that they are cheating. They’ve got cards up their sleeves, mirrors on the wall that enable them to see your hand, and other tricks designed to ensure their successes.

You want to leave the table, but you can’t. You aren’t permitted to leave. You want to make them stop cheating, but you can’t. There aren’t referees in this game. You’re stuck in the game… and your future depends on the outcome! If you quit now, you won't get the 'girl', or the 'promotion' or the 'happiness' that is eluding you for such a long time. And now you’re holding three aces and two queens, and knowing that even this great hand can’t compete with whatever your opponents have up their sleeves. You’re faced with a dilemma:

You can take the “high road”, lose the hand and the game and screw your future. Or you can recognize that the rules have changed, your life is at stake, and failing to cheat… would only be cheating yourself!

What do you do?

Many of us prefer to think of ourselves and our lives as straightforward. Sure, there are gamers who lie, cheat, or manipulate their way through life — but we aren’t like them. We play by the rules… and, we think, karma will eventually reward us for it.

These are nice thoughts… but unless we’re living in highlands of the Himalayas, they simply aren’t true. We all lie, cheat, and manipulate – to varying degrees and with varying levels of comfort – because it helps us live amicably, because everyone else is doing it, and because it can make the world a better place!

Here’s what I mean:

·When we begin dating someone, we engage in a seduction process that requires the same kind of duplicity our opponents showed at the poker table. If our house is typically in disarray, we clean it up. If we tend not to use mouthwash, we use it anyway... if only to see where the relationship might lead. Without such gaming (and instead quickly revealing our hard-to-live-with quarks and disgusting habits), seduction wouldn’t be fun and attraction would be harder to achieve.

· When we interview for a job – whether it’s for a clerk at Government Office or a VP position at Microsoft – we take the twos and threes out of our hands and replace them with the aces up our sleeves. We may prefer to wear shorts and a Hawaiian shirt to work, but during the interview we wear formals or even worse a suit. We may have been fired from our previous job for slacking… but we speak only of our glowing record there. We do this because, simply, we have no other choice. We know that every other applicant is doing the same thing, and we know that speaking candidly about ourselves would have us out on the streets and starving.

· When we comfort the friend who has just failed in a class, we empathize with him. We agree with him that the evaluators were assholes. We comfort him by telling that this is not the end of the world, that your career in no way will be hampered by this 'temporary' setback. We tell him that he deserved to get a rank. We may know that none of this is true... that he might be a dullard, probably didn't even deserve the marks he got... that he might be wasting his time in studies when he could have done something else which he is good at.

Our lives are filled with situations just like that poker game – situations in which we are forced to choose between playing it straight and losing out on what life has to offer …or lying, cheating, and manipulating because, simply, it’s better option for everyone involved.

Most of us choose to be gamers: to participate in the seduction process, to wear a suit to the job interview, to comfort our friends… but as we do it, we tell ourselves that it isn’t lying, cheating, or manipulating…. rather it’s “putting our best foot forward,” “being compassionate,” or “being diplomatic”.

And when the stakes are really high, like in the poker game, and we’re forced to examine ourselves for what we really are – liars, cheaters, and manipulators – we don’t need to grit our teeth and think something like, “Oh gosh… what does this say about my character?” We already know the answer!

Instead, we can smile, roll down our sleeves, slip a few aces into our hands, and do whatever else it takes to get the girl we’ve been courting… the promotion we deserve… the peace we’d all prefer… or the happiness we’ve been searching for.

The tache is gone

I don't know what prompted me into doing this. I shaved my mustache today. This is the first time I'm removing it in my life. I was shocked to see myself in the mirror. I never really thought a small strip of hair above the upper lip could define my image so much. For a second, I felt I was seeing another person in the mirror. Needless to say, I have become a laughing stock at home. :(

But at some level I'm happy I managed to do it. It was like breaking the norm. Getting out of shackles. Probably the boredom of the last week pushed me over the cliff. But seeing the end result, I will probably grow it back. Nothing like a mustache on a man's face :)

So anyone seeing me till I grow it back, please don't act too surprised :)

What are the Odds?

Well this is the first time I'm putting 2 posts on the same day. What are the odds of that happening again? Very slim. I am so bored at work, I closed my eclipse workspace as soon as I opened it. TGIF. Well this is not the odds that I wanted to talk about.

Odds in life. Which is way more important. If you have ever read Paulo Coehlo's The Alchemist, you will definitely start to believe in the concept of destiny (if you don't do so already). Well the concept of destiny is that, if something is stated to happen, it will, no matter what you do.

In my own life, the things I am most sure about are my ravenous appetite (I don’t remember the last time I ate less than five meals in a day), my addiction to TV series (I see everything from FRIENDS, PB, Lost, 24, Heroes, House, Scrubs, Numb3rs...) and many more.

Yet despite my faith that this stuff won’t change tomorrow or the next day, there’s a chance it might. Perhaps I’ll get sick and won’t want to eat; perhaps there will be a bigger strike in US, and they stop airing the serials.

Nothing’s for certain – not my appetite, not your on-time payment of taxes, and not even, according to some physicists, death. Everything in life – including the chance we will find great friendships and relationships – is an odds game!

Recognizing that anything is possible in our lives can be inspiring – hey, Miss India might walk into your bedroom in a bikini tonight. Or it can be discouraging – it’s more likely that you’ll be robbed at gunpoint or beaten up where you bruise like a peach.

Luckily, if we want something badly enough, life oftentimes gives us the opportunity to increase the odds of making it happen. For instance, if you really want Miss India in your bedroom, you can work off that pot belly, become a celebrity photographer, and get commissioned to do a shoot for her (which you bashfully suggest should happen in your bedroom ;-)).

Yes, it’s crapshoot that we’ll ever find the people we’re looking for in life – whether they are our soul mates (some of us deserve more than one :-P) or a job you like or just the peace that has been absent in your life for sometime now. But the probabilities of making these connections can be significantly enhanced or diminished depending on how we go about doing it.

Money Talks

I came across this video from a NGO Open Space, where in they go around a city asking people what they would do, if they were to be given Rs. 500/- (approx $10). This was one of the most moving 2 min video that I have seen in a long long time. Before this, if anyone told me that they could convince me about any topic and change my believes with a 2 min video, I would have probably laughed at them. It is a must watch.




$8 could buy you 15 organic apples OR 25 fruit trees for farmers in Honduras to grow and sell fruit at their local market.

$30 could buy you an ER DVD Boxset OR a First Aid kit for a village in Haiti.

$73 could buy you a new mobile phone OR a new mobile health clinic to care for AIDS orphans in Uganda.

$2400 could buy you a second generation High Definition TV OR schooling for an entire generation of school children in an Angolan village.

What do you wish to do with your money?

What would you do if you were given Rs. 500/-?

Where are you ranked in the world’s richest people list? Check out here

Two Worlds

In the past 6 months, I have come to realize one thing. That I'm living in two completely different worlds ruled by two completely different concept of 'TIME'! Surprised? Well read on...

This stuck me when I started pursue my new year resolution. More introspection! It is safe to say that, even now, I don't understand myself completely. But I'm at a better place than I was 6 months ago. But with constant introspection, I came to scrutinize my every single move, every dialogue. Every conversation I had participated in had to go under the hammer of my scrutiny. I fear I'm getting to a place where I am my worst critic. Enough rambling, and back to the topic of the post.

I consider my world is ruled by two times. There is the 'Mechanical Time' and there is the 'Body Time'. Former is the rigid, unyielding and predetermined, just like a clock that goes tick tock, tick tock, tick tock. The other is free, instinctive, responsive, where I make up my mind as time flows.

Many a times I feel that this mechanical time does not exist. I feel that I live life as it comes by. At these times, the 'time' is ruled by my heartbeat rather than the metallic pendulum of a clock. At these times, I really feel in touch with my emotions. The time is ruled by my desires and moods. At these times, I feel that the time flies by when it has to, like when I'm in a exam. And the same time will slow down when I'm relaxing, like when I'm on a trip, helping me to take in every single detail of nature.

Then there are 'times' when I feel I'm so predictable, that I could be easily confused with a robot. I wake up at the strike of 6 AM, do morning chores by the clock. When my stomach growls, I look at the clock to see if it is time to eat! When I'm seeing a boring sitcom, I see the time to check when it will end, rather than switching it off. It is like I have been programmed to do it. I begin to feel that my body is not a collection of wild magic, but just a collection of bones, muscles and nerves which are all hard coded before hand about their purpose at that particular time. As such the body is ordered by the laws of physics rather that laws of nature. The body at these times is a thing to be ordered, not obeyed.

I have come to understand that existence in these two worlds is inevitable. But having experienced the joy of the world with 'Body Time', I have come to despise the events that I have to 'perform' in the world of 'Mechanical Time'.
I also believe that Time in general is the only absolute thing in the world. It is an infinite ruler. It is the same for everyone rich or poor, good or bad, irrespective of religion or race. A second is a second is a second. It is the basis on which we even base our religious belief. Like the concept of 'Yuga' in the Hindu mythology.

Topic of every single conversation in the past week!

No prizes for guessing whats coming up on this post. It's about the terror strikes in Mumbai. This has been the conversational topic for the past week. And I'm sure its the same with all Indians. Although every single person agrees with the problem that our country faces today, everyone seems to have a different opinion, on what needs to be done to change things. Justifiably there has been a lot of emotional talk, but talk won't magically convert to actions, do they?

I heard one of my friends talking about joining the defence forces. It was the only source of genuine smile for me the whole gloomy week. Well, first of all, he is not fit physically to be in the armed forces. Even if he was physically fit, he has no where the amount of mental strength required. Thinking of the mental strength, I remember telling him that his heart used to race while playing CS(Counter Strike), a popular Multi player game. Think of a real situation, where he is holding a real gun and real bullets a flying past you. Well there is no reset in the real world!

I also hear a lot of people blaming the politicians for what has happened. They deserve to be blamed. They did not do their job in the right way. If the government were to be a software company, all these people would have had pink slips by dawn break. For the sake of analogy, its equivalent to me introducing a virus in a product of my company, but just way more serious than that. But the disappointing fact is that, no one seems to come up with the answer as to who the replacements are for these people. No politician in India is worth the respect a leader deserves. There is no idol among us. So that leaves us with no replacement. Lot of people are suggesting that a newly formed party should come to power. Although a Nobel idea, it would never work. Even if it does, how can one be sure that they are better administrators than the current people. So it is better to have a known devil rather than an unknown fairy.

Others are contemplating on national television of removing the democracy. Well, although I do believe that a strong dictatorship is better than a weak democracy (as mentioned in one of my previous post), I think its better to continue with democracy at the moment. Think of the 100 years of freedom struggle, all the lives lost for one purpose, to bring democracy to this country, to bring freedom. Changing this due to some bloody lunatics, is a disgrace to their courage and the selfless sacrifices they have made for their homeland.

For the moment, I would like just one change from the politicians a.k.a our leaders. "Be true to yourself". They need not be answerable to anyone. Lot of things cannot be answered in public. But they should be able to touch their heart (hope they have one!), and tell that "I think what I'm doing is in the right interest of this country".

Lastly, all I have come to hear in the past week is finger pointing. Common man points to government which in turn points at Pakistan. I have seriously introspected and come to the conclusion that I'm not even half brave to take up a job in armed forces. I'm sure that I cannot be a great leader. With those two options ruled out, the only career choice I can make now, which will at some level contribute to this country, is to accept an Administrative job in the intelligence forces. Not field work, but I think I would be good at handling the back end logistics. On that front, I'll seriously consider taking up such a job profile after I complete my MBA.

India needs leaders. Inspirational leaders. Since they are hard to find, we have to make the best use of the current ones. As they say, "Live in reality".