Sunday, April 13, 2008

Satsungs

The earliest Satsung that I remember attending was when I did not use to go to school. And the only thing I remember is that me and my sister were playing "Ichuk Michuk" (Some game you play with hands, cant explain it here). And all the people surrounding us were asking us to be quiet.

Today I went to "Radha Soami Satsang", it was held somewhere near Tumkur road. And I was surprised to see so many people there. It is organized by this organization (I like their tagline, Science of Soul).

With due respects, I really appreciate the efforts of the organization to do all the great work that it is doing, but I sometimes wonder if it is really worth it.

When people go there they break traffic lane disciplines to ensure that they reach first, without bothering about the traffic jams they cause, they would park the vehicle the way it is more convenient to them without bothering a bit about others, try to sneak in the line just to ensure that they get the best seat. It just seems to me that the ultimate purpose of these people is to attend to this function, and everything else does not matter. I find it so amusing because I guess the primary purpose of attending all this satsangs and temples is to cleanse yourself and think of others. The same thing I find with Tirupati as well, the atmosphere is anything but spiritual.


I remember once when I had gone to Art of Living, and then Guru Sri Ravi Shankar had come. And at the end of Satsung, he called for all the people who were having birthdays that day on stage, and there was this friend of mine next to me, who just went off. It was not his birthday. When I confronted him later outside, he said he did not care because he got a chance to see guruji closely it seems. To me that beats the whole purpose of coming to Satsung.

Not saying that you should not attend the satsungs, but most times I do feel that it is like getting a tick mark on their life's resume.

What if all these people instead of travelling all the way from their homes, and spending so much time, could just go to one of the NGOs in their respective town and donate some time/money. What could be a better satsang then making a positive difference in someone life.

Wednesday, April 09, 2008

Freegans :

Quite sometime back I had read about this girl (in US), who would search in garbage bins for food and use it. Not that she was poor but that she was a part of community called Freegans. I had lost the link for it, but then today again it popped up in one of the feeds.  Freegans are community where people believe in using the minimum resources required for living and conserving and reusing stuff. 
More here
An excerpt here 
"It's not a few bad products or a few egregious companies responsible for the social and ecological abuses in our world but rather the entire system we are working in, we begin to realize that, as workers, we are cogs in a machine of violence, death, exploitation, and destruction."
This is so similar to Story of Stuff

Sometimes I also wonder, being a hardware engineer about all the hi-fi tech stuff we keep making. Increasing speeds from Kbps, to Mbps to Gbps and so on. If all this is worth it?



 

Thursday, April 03, 2008

Random thoughts..

My blog had kind of gone in hibernating mode, and these are just some random thoughts.

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 Actually these days I have been spending lot of time writing for this one magazine called Sattva. You can take a peek at this, it is not a masala magazine, it is a NGO magazine. It is a monthly magazine and every month  we do a focus on different topics, like education, health, alternate sexuality and so on. March edition was on Human rights. 

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Yesterday I was having an argument with my friend regarding buying a house in Bangalore. I am totally against it. My argument being, "Why to pay EMI for next 25 years of life, for something that I am not going to carry along with me. I mean think about it, all those small, no sunlight entering, kind of houses in one of the massive residential apartments, (they always give me identity crisis),  and when you die you cant take it along with you anyways. It may sound selfish, because my parents spend greater part of life trying to build a house, but it was different in those times.  And getting a beautiful house in the place you belong is different from buying this lunch box kind of houses in Bangalore. Home town houses are something nice and they are something that maybe people in future will cherish. Hence I find this mad rush for securing this ever expensive houses in bangalore not very meaningful. Sometimes I just feel that we get caught in all this web of buying a house, buying a car and before we know life has already gone by."

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My cousin in hyderabad is in ninth now, so this year that school finish their ninth class syllabus in feb and have started giving them rigorous tenth class education. I really find it so absurd that such big schools would think in this way, and put so much pressure on this poor kids as if tenth class is one massive exam and their entire life depends on this one thing. I think they did not see Taare Zameen Par, or even if they saw it, they just wept during the movie and came back and forgot all about it. Wonder if movies make any difference?

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The other day I was talking to one of the Maths teacher, in Ananya. Ananya is the school for underprivileged kids, and the school gives them basic education to prepare them for Open Schooling tenth class Exam. And he was explaining me that most of children there struggle with Maths, not with basic maths, but things like trigonometry and algebra. Not being from any regular school they find it very difficult to grasp these subjects. This could also be because they dont find much relevance of this in their daily lives. And then we were arguing if kids really needed to understand all these, and then if you think about it you hardly use it in day to day life. Further most of this kids dont plan to become engineer or doctors, they just want to get some basic education (like Home Science) and get some decent job and support their families. 

Also read this beautiful article called "A mathematician's Lament" related to above.  Swarna forwarded this to me and I absolutely loved it.