And your running, and your running, and your running away, but from your Self you know you cannot hide… well everybody would you rise and focus your mind, search for the Truth and learn to be kind…
– from the song “Om Numah Shivayah” by the artist Apache Indian

In just the last two years I’ve seen five people suffering from depression (three depressed, two semi-depressed). Is it just something in the food or is society breaking down that bad? Just listening to them, got me wondering, is depression just a very deep calling towards spirituality, i.e. to stand on your own two feet, to take charge, to take control of yourself, i.e. to shake you out of falling repeatedly into the trap of maya.

I guess if you’re intellectually inclined, then depression simply becomes something more like intense philosophical pondering — which if not buffeted by real yoga, also has its own dark alleys now and then, like you might also enter into what in control systems theory is known as a “hysteresis loop” — i.e. get deadlocked between conflicting thoughts.

The best part is when you have dissatisfaction with even your successes, then you really know you were meant for something else! That’s when you start searching for something more deeper, more Real.

It’s like the story of a Westerner who comes across an sadhu for the first time, and makes the comment “I pity you”. The sadhu replies, “it is you that is to be pitied for being trapped in maya, instead of seeing your much larger and vast cosmic self”.

Conversely it’s like a Westerner who comes across a sadhu for the first time and makes the comment “you are great for making such a sacrifice”. The sadhu replies, “no it is you who is great, to be able to sacrifice your life for all sort of superficial and transient pursuits.”.

It’s no small wonder (and wonderful foresight) that the first chapter of the Gita is Vishad Yoga (the Yoga of Disillusionment to the point of Despondency; the Dilemma). For when you’re fully extroverted and attached to life and fully content with it, why would you to turn inward, to look for the “higher path”?

So it’s good to be proactive and listen to your spiritual yearning for a deeper experience — and do something about it pro-actively, rather than wait for yourself to fall into a spiritual rut. A mistake would be to chase after this deeper experience in two extremes: either totally away from life, or in life itself. The corrective would be to seek it in yoga, but applied to life. That is to engage life with yoga.

• India’s Antiterror Blunders – Wall Street Journal
• Why India is a Target – Yahoo News
  
• Calling All Pakistanis – New York Times, Thomas Friedman

Hindus have been doing this for ages. In Tamil it’s called thōpukaranam (தோப்புக்கரணம்). This is a typical ritual when praying to Ganesha (God in the form of “Remover of Obstacles” and “Purveyor of Knowledge”). Yet another spiritual technology expropriated from Hindus and inducted into science.

In addition, the exercise has been used as punishment (by teachers and parents) imposed on children when they didn’t do their homework, said a lie, did something mischievous, or said something that was not very thoughtful. So, today’s Hindus might not know the science behind it, but the correlation between this exercise and buddhi (intellect, smarter brain function) has been embedded in the tradition and transmitted down for ages. My dad says in his school days, when two kids are caught cheating or gossiping, the teacher would have them hold each others ears and do thōpukaranam together.

The classroom part of the video is funny, especially after I showed it to some of the kids in the neighborhood in Madurai, they thought it was pretty funny to see a classroom full of white kids doing thōpukaranam.

Super Brain Yoga is the doing of Filipino-Chinese New Age healer, Chon Kok Sui, who has visited India a couple of times; so no surprise where he got his idea from. I’d like to give him credit for his marketing (and for introducing a valuable knowledge to the West)… if only he’d have given credit to where credit is due.

The world is tapping into India’s storehouse of knowledge – ranging from patents on over a thousand Indian plant-based natural drugs (based on neem, turmeric, amla, etc) to spiritual traditions. The question is, when will [enough] Indians wake up and start doing it as well?

As a side note: I feel that the scientific validation they claim for thōpukaranam is pretty weak. I’ll wait for more data before I can say it’s been “validated by science”. That doesn’t mean it should be dismissed as nonsense either.

Here’s quite an informative site that provides information on companies, based on employee feedback, ratings, and salaries: http://www.glassdoor.com. It’s a great site, and I’d urge everyone to put in their feedback, ratings, and salaries also.

Compare that with the efficiency of plants – light-energy directly converted (with help of water and CO₂) and stored away as simple carbs. And the only waste being simple compounds like O₂. Well I guess the photosynthesis can be ruled out as it won’t be able to produce enough energy at the rate we consume (being mobile). But who knows, a slight deviation in evolution could have evolved us a totally different mechanism — like the creatures in Gregory Benford’s novel that have evolved organic electro-chemical capacitive containers to store their energy.

Also, going by puranas, “man” degenerated from pure conscious based sentient beings (in krta yuga), to energy based sentient beings (in treta yuga, when conscious differentiated into matter and energy), to matter based sentient beings (in dvapara yuga), to lame “meat beings” (in the kali yuga).

As another example of degeneration, the puranas speak of the mechanism of transportation in krta yuga as simply through “thought“. Then in the treta yuga transport was through vimanas (flying machines) which were powered by vibration-engines (mantras). In the dvapara yuga, the vimanas had engines powered by mantras and yantras. In the kali yuga, our mechanism of transportation is through only yantras (i.e. purely mechanical).

Today’s finding in modern physics has opened up science-fiction writers to invent space-time travel possibilities as described in the Puranas. Like in Star Trek, where the Enterprise ship is driven to “warp speed”, opening up a fissure in the fabric of space and time, allowing one to go from point A to point B via a short cut in higher dimensional space.

Check out this funny video.

What would you like to tell young people?

Learn to love solitude, to be more alone with yourselves. The problem with young people is they’re carrying out noisy and aggressive action not to feel lonely. And this is a sad thing.

The individual must learn to be on his own as a child. For this doesn’t mean to be alone: it means not to get bored with oneself, which is a very dangerous symptom almost a disease.

- Andrei Tarkovsky

Quality time is almost non-existent these days. Whatever happened to taking quiet walks, star gazing, or just how many times do people these days spend quality time together, or even look forward to quality time, or know what it is?

Very few people stop to even appreciate the full moon. It’s just a quick “yeah nice”, and they’re off to something else (video games, bars, cell phone chat). Or for that matter anything of nature – thunder showers, streams, sunrise, trees,… or just reading a good book, or listening to a raga. That’s all quality time.

Probably an EMP (Electromagnetic Pulse) needs to explode over the city. An EMP device is a bomb that when exploded (usually above the ground) causes all electronics to get fried by a powerful pulse of electromagnetic energy (cell phones, tv, internet services, cars, traffic lights,… anything with electronics). I guess then people will come out (well in reality there would be all sort of mayhem and accidents!).

Sometimes I think the modern world’s solution to missing out on quality time is to do yoga — just that it shouldn’t be a substitute for quality-time, but be used to enhance it by integrating it with life.

What ever happened to fountain pens? They’re environmentally friendly. In protecting the environment it’s these small acts that make the most impact. Fountain pens are cool. And they don’t leak (that’s way overrated). Go buy one! You can go with the good old reliable school kid’s Hero pens (you can get it for about $1 in just about any street corner in India). Or, I’d say treat yourself to a high quality fountain pen. If they use disposable ink cartridges, you can get a converter cartridge – which lets you take in ink from an ink bottle.

I like the Lamy Safari (good quality, at just $20). The pen is a bit oddly shaped, but once you get used to it, the comfort is unbeatable. Note that Lamy nibs are one point higher than a normal nib (something I discovered later; that is, Lamy F nib writes like an M nib of other fountain pens).

See Also

• Trash/Pollution.
• It’s the small things that really make the big difference.

There’s nothing in our book, the Quran — you call it “Ko-ran” — that teaches us to suffer peacefully. Our religion teaches us to be intelligent. Be peaceful, be courteous, obey the law, respect everyone; but if someone puts his hand on you, send him to the cemetery. That’s a good religion. In fact, that’s that old-time religion. That’s the one that Ma and Pa used to talk about: an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth, and a head for a head, and a life for a life: That’s a good religion. And doesn’t nobody resent that kind of religion being taught but a wolf, who intends to make you his meal.

– Malcom X

But I found this interesting speech which is still relevant even today (regardless of whether you’re white, black, or whatever race or color). Read and judge for yourself:

There was two kinds of slaves. There was the house Negro and the field Negro. The house Negroes – they lived in the house with master, they dressed pretty good, they ate good ’cause they ate his food — what he left. They lived in the attic or the basement, but still they lived near the master; and they loved their master more than the master loved himself. They would give their life to save the master’s house quicker than the master would. The house Negro, if the master said, “We got a good house here,” the house Negro would say, “Yeah, we got a good house here.” Whenever the master said “we,” he said “we.” That’s how you can tell a house Negro.

If the master’s house caught on fire, the house Negro would fight harder to put the blaze out than the master would. If the master got sick, the house Negro would say, “What’s the matter, boss, we sick?” We sick! He identified himself with his master more than his master identified with himself. And if you came to the house Negro and said, “Let’s run away, let’s escape, let’s separate,” the house Negro would look at you and say, “Man, you crazy. What you mean, separate? Where is there a better house than this? Where can I wear better clothes than this? Where can I eat better food than this?” That was that house Negro. In those days he was called a “house nigger.” And that’s what we call him today, because we’ve still got some house niggers running around here.

This modern house Negro loves his master. He wants to live near him. He’ll pay three times as much as the house is worth just to live near his master, and then brag about “I’m the only Negro out here.” “I’m the only one on my job.” “I’m the only one in this school.” You’re nothing but a house Negro. And if someone comes to you right now and says, “Let’s separate,” you say the same thing that the house Negro said on the plantation. “What you mean, separate? From America? This good white man? Where you going to get a better job than you get here?” I mean, this is what you say. “I ain’t left nothing in Africa,” that’s what you say. Why, you left your mind in Africa.
….
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The field Negro was beaten from morning to night. He lived in a shack, in a hut; He wore old, castoff clothes. He hated his master. I say he hated his master. He was intelligent. That house Negro loved his master. But that field Negro — remember, they were in the majority, and they hated the master. When the house caught on fire, he didn’t try and put it out; that field Negro prayed for a wind, for a breeze. When the master got sick, the field Negro prayed that he’d die. If someone come [sic] to the field Negro and said, “Let’s separate, let’s run,” he didn’t say “Where we going?” He’d say, “Any place is better than here.” You’ve got field Negroes in America today. I’m a field Negro. The masses are the field Negroes. When they see this man’s house on fire, you don’t hear these little Negroes talking about “our government is in trouble.” They say, “The government is in trouble.” Imagine a Negro: “Our government”! I even heard one say “our astronauts.” They won’t even let him near the plant — and “our astronauts”! “Our Navy” — that’s a Negro that’s out of his mind. That’s a Negro that’s out of his mind.

– Malcom X

Population of India: 1.2 billion (4x that of the USA and represents 1/6th of the worlds population)

Population of the big 5 cosmopolitan cities:

• Mumbai – 18 million
• Kolkata – 13 million
• Delhi – 11.6 million
• Chennai – 6.6 million
• Bangalore – 5.5 million

Let’s start with what we know: most of the pop-culture following occurs as a small percentage of the upper middle class and above, in the big 5 cities. How much is that in figures? Let’s compute this:

1. Total population of the big 5 metropolitan cities (Mumbai, Kolkata, New Delhi, Chennai, and Bangalore) is 54.7 million
2. Let’s generously assume that 30% of this represents the upper middle class and above. That’s 17 million.
3. Of this, we can generously assume that 10% are pop-culture influenced – 1.7 million

So, that’s 1.7 million out of 1.2 billion Indians. We need to take the percentage (as the numbers are meaningless as it doesn’t take into account age distributions). That comes to less than 0.15%.

Most of the media attention and alarm about the displacement of Indian values by western pop-culture is focused on this 0.15%.

Hindu culture has shown itself to be very vibrant, strong, and resilient, and has shown to have the ability to absorb and assimilate encroaching cultures without displacing its value system, as it has done for over 6,000 years. Hindu culture is highly knowledge (and innately spirituality) centric which is what gives it its resilience.

And who are these 0.15%? mostly (i.e. not all, but most) the lowermost rank of the IT industry: call centers, data entry (medical transcription, etc.), IT infrastructure (human resources, administrative personal, etc.). These are folks, coming from a lower middle class, probably the first in their family to get a white collar job, probably have never seen such huge salaries. Now they suddenly find themselves catapulted to upper-middle class, with a lot of money to spend. They get bombarded with extrasensory experience (consumerism, mass market pop-culture) – to be cool, fashionable, hip (influenced by what they see on the big screen): brand names, discotheques, night clubs, dating, drinking, smoking, etc.

While many folks head towards the Caribbean for their vacations I head to Madurai, in particular away from the city. I finally got a bit of land purchased here. My vacation "spot".

What is it about Madurai that I keep coming back to it? Why? Madurai is by no means anything rosy — like anything in India, it has its share of contrasting realities and harsh ironies – from the quaint obliviousness to the concept of etiquette (like awaiting your turn in queues!) to the more ugly things which I won’t care to mention here.

I think one of the main reasons I prefer to stay around in Madurai longer (apart from the fact my parents are settled here) is because the town is still raw and earthy. One thing refreshing about rural folks is that there isn’t a bone of pretension in their body – no swooning after pop-culture, no material excess, no snob factor. If it all there is any clamoring it would be after their culture, their native festivals, their way of life. There is no chasing paper air planes, no illusions, no “American Dream” (which is no longer just “American” these days).

Like I hardly find rural folks turning into snobs no matter how big the make it in life. Rural folks may be technologically backward and technologically unrefined, but at least they sure as hell are not pretentious. I can always depend on a person of rural background in the USA or wherever. Probably the competition of the city makes relatively more city folks (i.e. not all) sort of two-timing and always in it for themselves.

Even my dad says among his former PhD students (all placed in top universities or companies in the USA) those who show gratitude and return it in some way or the other to their native place, even after 20-30 years later, are those of rural background and/or those who didn’t buy into the pop-culture of the cities.