Elie Wiesel's Night

Qk.ly: http://bit.ly/bsxNight

Some folks had come visiting and what better to enjoy than becoming mall rats for the day.

We trooped to The Forum mall and, while the others checked out WestSide, I sidled away to The Landmark and ended up picking some more books:

• Night, by Elie Wiesel, who made that amazing quote
• The Hungry Tide
• Sri Sai Satcharita.
  

George Gamow's 1, 2, 3, …, Infinity tempted me with its:

There was this young man at Trinity
Who took the square root of Infinity
The number of digits
Gave him the fidgets
He gave up math and took up Divinity

but I let that pass as I didn't have the time for it, though I did have the dime ;-)

Later, in the night, Night hit me straight away with its pages 4 and 5:

Something was bothering me the whole day. Recollected that it was the b'day of a couple of Infoscions and of a third person as well. Only after I read about 40 pages of Night did I realize that the third person was Elie Wiesel!

Homagery

Sri Ramakrishna refers to an interesting incident in the illuminating Visit to Vidyasagar chapter of The Gospel: (page 105, top)

"Chaitanyadeva set out on a pilgrimage to southern India. One day he saw a man reading the Gita. Another man, seated at a distance, was listening and weeping. His eyes were swimming in tears. Chaitanyadeva asked him, 'Do you understand all this?' The man said, 'No, revered sir. I don't understand a word of the text.' 'Then why are you crying?' asked Chaitanya. The devotee said: 'I see Arjuna's chariot before me. I see Lord Krishna and Arjuna seated in front of it, talking. I see this and I weep.'"

A similar thing happens in the Thursday bhajans. Once in a while, it's the sheer bhava of the voice. At other times, it's some imagery that gets triggered off. For instance, during the song:

Garuda Vahana Narayana
He Shesha Sayana Narayana
Garuda Vahana Narayana
Shri Lakshmi Ramana Narayana (2)
Hari Om Hari Om Narayana

I was reminded of this awesome incident from Love is my Form, chronicling the first twenty five years of Swami: (pp. 167—168)

They felt the need to test and certify His Divinity by village standards. The day came when the elders of Puttaparthi, with Karnam Subbamma amongst them, approached Baba to test His Divinity. Baba, with a lantern in his hand took some of them into a room asking the others to wait outside. After they went into the room Baba closed the door and sat in a chair. He then asked, "What is it, children? What proof do you want?" They replied that they wanted some proof. The lantern went out and the room became dark. A brilliant light emerged from nowhere. The room was filled with that radiant light and they saw Baba as Mahavishnu, sitting on the serpent couch. The fierce-looking snake spread the skin of its neck into a hood and extended its forked tongue. The group trembled in fear and said, "Enough, Swami! We can't bear it. Please take it away." Instantaneously the lantern came on and they saw Baba sitting in the chair, as before. Overwhelmed by the vision, they tried to touch His feet, begging His pardon, but Baba told them, "Don't do it. You are elders."

Shaken and Stirred

Qk.ly: http://bit.ly/bsxSas

It's the 171st birth anniversary of Shirdi Sai Baba today. My younger bro keeps saying that I stop blogging about the spiritual XPs of others and write my own. So here goes.

It was another 28th (of APR.2003, a Monday) when i was going through heavy tension at work. I had this early-morning dream:

Shirdi Baba was going into a room and I followed him. He proceeded to give some instruction, which I don't recall now. He then asked me to take namaskar of a young boy seated on a throne. As He said that, the young boy stretched out his right leg. I was in a major state of tears when I knelt and kept my forehead on his leg.

At this point, I got up.

The strangest thing was that there was a peculiar buzzing sensation in my forehead (where the Third Eye is supposed to be located) for at least 2-3 minutes after I woke up!

2012 gets unusual support

Man, was quite zapped by this statement of MelG:

"The precursors to a civilisation that's going under are the same, time and time again," Gibson said after the work-in-progress screening at the weekend. "What's human sacrifice if not sending guys off to Iraq for no reason?

"I don't mean to be a doomsday guy, but the Mayan calendar does end in 2012, boys and girls. Have fun!"

Only yesterday, Suds was blogging Gored to death.

Why blogs are like the movies

A friend was wondering about what makes a blog item tick, as enough feedback was not coming.

My feeling is that blog items are just like the movies. It's hard to tell what attracts other folks. You think you blogged a good one and it falls flat. You think you blogged a bummer and that draws the most comments!

The only consolation is that Tom Hanks is equally in the dark about makes a blockbuster. As he says at the end of the interview with RD:

RD: You once said that you don’t know when you’re making a movie if it’s going to be great or a flop.
Hanks: Anybody who says they know is lying or they’re demonically possessed. I’ve worked on a set where I would go home and say, “Man, I nailed it today.” And you see it in the movie and it lies there like a dead fish. And there’ve been days where I said, “I don’t know what I was doing today. I couldn’t even remember the lines.” And you see it in the movie, and it’s the greatest scene. The bottom line is, nobody knows anything.

xLogs

Have been using a switchboard page for all the web links I have been collecting over the last many years. I find this much cooler than using Bookmarks and, with Firefox's Tabbed Browsing feature, I can always have the switchboard page open.

Today, I collated all the blogs I normally visit under various heads:

• an for Astrology and Numerology
• b for Blokes
  
• c for Company
• e for Entrepreneurs
• f for Fun
• p for Photo.

Organizing things always gives me a nice happy feeling :-)

Lacerated Ones

The title is an anagram of Altered Oceans, a heart-breaking link sent by VSS a month back: how the world's oceans are literally going to the dogs.

A Primeval Tide of Toxins delineates how the runoff from modern life is feeding an explosion of primitive organisms. This rise of slime, as one scientist calls it, is killing larger species and sickening people:

After one man bit a fishing line in two, his mouth and tongue swelled so badly that he couldn't eat solid food for a week. Others made an even more painful mistake, neglecting to wash the residue from their hands before relieving themselves over the sides of their boats.
…
The venomous weed, known to scientists as Lyngbya majuscula, has appeared in at least a dozen other places around the globe. It is one of many symptoms of a virulent pox on the world's oceans.

In many places — the atolls of the Pacific, the shrimp beds of the Eastern Seaboard, the fiords of Norway — some of the most advanced forms of ocean life are struggling to survive while the most primitive are thriving and spreading. Fish, corals and marine mammals are dying while algae, bacteria and jellyfish are growing unchecked. Where this pattern is most pronounced, scientists evoke a scenario of evolution running in reverse, returning to the primeval seas of hundreds of millions of years ago.

Jeremy B.C. Jackson, a marine ecologist and paleontologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, says we are witnessing "the rise of slime."

For many years, it was assumed that the oceans were too vast for humanity to damage in any lasting way. "Man marks the Earth with ruin," wrote the 19th century poet Lord Byron. "His control stops with the shore."

Don't have the heart to go into more of the gory details, but leave you to click the links and see for yourself.

One of the avadhutas who was born in/was close to the family of Swami in the 19th century was heard commenting:

భూదేవి ఏడుస్తోన్దయ్య
Mother Earth is crying

Wonder what he would have to say now :-(

No. 1 is a copycat

Wonder why Times Now had to copy that famous Avis vs. Hertz byline.

You can read the Avis story here.



Their zoOm logo is another copy. More….

Pain-body and antibodies

Holidays have started for the kids and it's nice to have them around as I potter about in the garden with A New Earth.

Bought a side-walk-y copy in HYD for INR 100 at the end of July. Since I found it so good, I bought the real McCoy at Gangarams for INR 325 (not INR 420, Anand) a couple of days back.

Apart from the fact that it's much more readable, I don't think it's fair to deprive that fine gentleman of his royalty. If he'd written a lousy book, I wouldn't have given two thoughts to that. This is in keeping with the Value for Money (paisa vasool) funda of Indians.

Anyway, I was enjoying the pain-body part of the book, when this monstrous dragonfly came along. Yet to see such a monstrule (they are clever predators and you wouldn't want to be their fodder). The closest size equivalent I can think of is that creepy:

Giant Cockroach In Bathroom 'A Harrowing,Kafkaesque Experience,' Grad Student Says

A little while later, a moth with a beautiful light-green proboscis came along (somewhat like this) and started feeding off our kadi-patta plant.

That's the amazing thing. You keep thinking of the Old Man and the Old Mother keeps sending you things!

Hugo "Chafez"

Love this guy Hugo Chavez. He's a permanent burr under the @ss of George W. So when I saw this Scotsman link in Google News first thing in the morning:

Chavez brands Bush 'the devil talking as if he owned the world'

it didn't take me long to click it. The lines I liked the best:

"The devil came here yesterday," Mr Chavez said, referring to the US president's address on Tuesday and making a sign of the cross. "He came here talking as if he were the owner of the world."
…
Standing at the podium, Mr Chavez quipped that a day after Mr Bush's appearance: "In this very spot it smells like sulphur still."

Heh. Chavez and his chutzpah. May his diatribe increase. The world needs that. Having only one superpower and that too not playing fair is quite boring.

Btw, wonder what his hug-o-meter ;-) is like?

"Books, books, bloody books"

That's a line from an old ANR song.

Took the PM Shuttle bus to MG Road and picked up a few books at Gangarams:

• The entire set of The Three Investigators, including my favorite
• More How Stuff Works
• Professional SQL Server Analysis Services 2005 with MDX
• The Divine Charioteer, by Arati Iyer
  
• A New Earth
• Out of my Comfort Zone, by Steve Waugh, a fellow Gemini Snake.

Now, I have got to find the time to read these books :-)

Was going through More How Stuff Works when the stuff on Water Towers intrigued me, mainly because of the huge water tower that we have in Palm Meadows.

Ran into this amusing snippet: there's a giant peach-shaped water tower in Gaffney, South Carolina. Too bad I couldn't locate it in WikiMapia, though Wikipedia has a cool article.

Alaa Al Aswany: Voice of Reason

This month's Voices in NatGeoMag had an amazing interview with Alaa Al Aswany, who as the mag says:

Just who is the Arab world listening to? Not only radical sheikhs and militant politicians. The man whose voice has captivated the Arab public is a Cairo dentist by day and a novelist by dawn. Alaa Al Aswany's novel The Yacoubian Building (excerpt) is a phenomenon—the best-selling novel in the Middle East for two years and the inspiration for the biggest budget movie ever produced in Egypt. The novel paints a poignant and uncompromising picture of life in modern Cairo, as seen through the eyes of a carnival of characters—from the richest and most powerful to the poorest. An outspoken critic of the Mubarak regime and a friendly, self-effacing man, Dr. Al Aswany studied dentistry, and the American way of life, in the U.S. He has a humanist's love of pondering what makes people do what they do.

His responses to the q'ns by Karen Kostyal were as close to the bone as you can get. My favorite parts from the interview:

There is much talk now of a "clash" of civilizations between the Muslim world and the West. How do you see this clash?
I don't think it's a question of civilizations. Civilizations are the best part of human creation. They don't cause any kind of clash—they are a means to communicate. The clash comes from the aggressive interpretation of some religions. Religions have been used throughout history as a cause to wage war and kill people, but it's my opinion that religions are the same everywhere. They are a way to find God, a way to have positive values, to prove oneself as a good human being. I was born Muslim, so I am Muslim. If I had been born Christian, I would have been Christian.

So God is not the true impetus behind extremist behavior?
…The Western notion that Muslims are killing themselves so they will go to paradise and sleep with a woman is wrong—I myself think sleeping with a woman is much more enjoyable than killing oneself.…

There is a lot of discussion about the role of women in society. What do you think it should be?
I don't see women as women, I see them as human beings. So I don't believe that you must encourage women particularly. Introducing the issue is like dealing with women as handicapped members of society.

You've talked about the importation of Saudi values to Egypt, would you elaborate on that?
Over the past 25 years, about a quarter of the Egyptian population has gone to Saudi Arabia at some point to work. Those workers were often uneducated Egyptians, and the Saudis were rich. The Egyptians were influenced by the Saudi interpretation of Islam and brought it back with them when they returned to Egypt. That interpretation—Wahhabism—is very strict and concerned mostly with form, from wearing the veil to enforced prayer five times a day. It is an aggressive, intolerant approach that institutionalizes Islam as a state religion rather than allowing people to interpret it in their own individual ways. The Saudis have spent millions to export Sunni Wahhabism throughout the Middle East, in part because many Arabs in the Gulf States are Shiite. The Saudi princes fear the spread of the Iranian Shiite brand of Islam, which is more revolutionary and allows for more individual rights. Throughout much of Islamic history, Sunni governance has been in the hands of sheikhs who were in league with governments. The Shiites were usually shut out of power, so they had time to think and come up with a new, more humanist interpretation. I'm not comparing Iranian human rights to those in England, but in relation to Saudi Arabia, Iran has more respect for individual political rights and the people's right to know what's happening. And I must remind you that the American administration has been the most powerful supporter of the medieval Saudi regime because of Saudi oil. To support them is like having a tiger in your house.

You studied dentistry at the University of Illinois in the 1980s. How did you feel about your time in the U.S.?
It was very positive, first because I was in Chicago. Before I went, I had heard about Chicago only in relation to Al Capone and shooting and all this kind of thing. And my impression of Americans was based on American foreign policy. America has supported bad regimes for years, and many Egyptians don't make the distinction between the American government and American people. But I had the chance to see that Americans are very helpful, tolerant people. They have a great ability to tolerate many cultures. I often tell a story about an experience I had one windy Chicago day. I was walking across the campus at the University of Illinois, holding my thesis, when the wind blew it out of my hands. All the people walking past stopped to help me gather the pages. This is the real American character.

What do you think of America now?
I believe America has made a big shift to the right. The whole world has shifted to the right, in a way. From the 1950s to the 1980s, people were more liberal. We don't respect free choice anymore. The globe has one superpower, and that superpower has to choose to be either a moral superpower or a capitalist superpower. This choice will influence history. America should say, "I am very strong, but I am fair." This isn't happening now.

Using that analogy, where would you put the Egyptian character, since you have a history thousands of years old?
We have been influenced by many cultures over the past 8,000 years. This has enriched the Egyptian personality. You can still even feel the pharaonic filament in our character. It makes us more peaceful and open than other people of the Arab world. It's almost impossible for Egypt to become fanatic. There will always be Egyptians who say no to this. We will never be like Iran.

How does your life as a dentist impact your life as a writer?
Very positively. You cannot make a living from writing, unless you write for the cinema. Even Naguib Mahfouz [the renowned Egyptian novelist and Nobel laureate] kept working for the government until the age of retirement. I can write independently—whatever I want—since I don't write for money. And the characters I meet through dentistry help me understand how people feel. I write about people, and I treat people. When I go from one to the next, I don't feel that I've made a very big trip. I don't see writing and the clinic as different worlds.
…
© 2006 National Geographic Society. All rights reserved.

Skypefully Yours

Was watching Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind when I get this call: "Hi, this is ..., x Motorola, now with Philips". The guy was friendly but, for the life of me, I couldn't recall him.

Then, I had a spooky thought: Did I erase him from my memory?

Anyway, there was a simpler explanation. Asked him: "Which Shastri do you want?" Some XYZ Shastri. That still didn't explain how he got my number. "Did you get my number from Skype? " He said he must have.

QED.

True Grit

Saw this message on the Palm Meadows list early in the morning:

Despite showing myself in rather poor light as being gullible and foolish, I decided to post this so others are warned.

Three days ago, I was waiting in the car near the Vijaya Bank on CMH Road, while my colleague went to the bank. Someone made franctic signals from the passenger side window. What he was trying to convey was not very clear. I got out of the car, walked around the front while he pointed to a series of (not a bunch of) ten rupee notes lying near the passenger door, indicating it fell out. He then walked on. On the assumption that it may have fallen off when my colleague got out of the car, I bent to pick the notes up. No one seemed to pay any attention. My attention was diverted for not more than about 30 or 40 seconds.

When my colleague returned, I asked her if the notes had fallen out from her purse and she said No. Very magnanimously, I said let us give it to the Blind School! Only after some time did we realise that both our Notebooks that were on the rear sear were missing!! The loss, unfortunately is not just the PCs, but years of work as well!!!

While we all do hear of such incidents, like me, some of us may not be alert to it when it happens to one. I hope this (or a similar incident) does not happen to anyone, but please be aware and alert.

Was totally zapped.

The writer of this message belongs to that rare breed of people who are attached to the Truth rather than themselves. He doesn't want others to suffer the bad XP that he did. May his tribe increase!

Way to go

VSS was referring me to One Million Ways to Die. The following was instructive:

In fact, your appendix is more likely to kill you than al-Qaida is.

Looks like Bush & junta are ripping off the American janta.

Btw, NatGeoMag had an interesting graphic of how you might go in the AUG.2006 issue. The #s I found interesting:

• Firearm assault: 1 in 314 (100 Pi)
• Hornet, wasp, or bee sting: 1 in 56,789
  

Pope Benedict: "I Slam Islam"

WTF was the Pope thinking when he slammed it: (full speech-ifying)

…
And he used language open to interpretations that could inflame Muslims, at a time of high tension among religions and three months before he makes a trip to Turkey.
…
“Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread the sword by the faith he preached,” the pope quoted the emperor, in a speech to 1,500 students and faculty.
…
Renzo Guolo, a professor of the sociology of religion at the University of Padua, who often writes about the church and Islam, said he was struck by the suggestion of Islam as distant from reason.

“This is maybe the strongest criticism because he doesn’t speak of fundamentalist Islam but of Islam generally,” he said, “Not all Islam, thank God, is fundamentalist.”
…
“Certainly he closes the door to an idea which was very dear to John Paul II — the idea that Christians, Jews and Muslims have the same God and have to pray together to the same God,” he said.
…
At the end of that summer, he devoted an annual weekend of study with former graduate students to Islam. In that meeting, and since, he has reportedly expressed skepticism about Islam’s openness to change, given its view of the Koran as the unchangeable word of God.

When he visits Turkey, someone should organize a meeting for him with Harun Yahya.

He might end up salaaming it!

Un peu d'air sur terre

Love those Lacoste ads. Btw, do the agencies do them at cost? ;-)

Here's an Indian version.

The latest Outlook version has another on the cover.

Personal observations on Falun Gong

Last Saturday (9/9), I was the 9th person at the Palm Meadows Shuttle Badminton Court, so I thought I should do some Falun Gong while the others finished their doubles games.

Just three rounds of the third exercise improved my concentration so much that I can say, without doubt, that a bit of Falun Gong is one way to get to play in the zone.

Another thing I noticed yesterday was that the tears of joy start flowing for all exercises except the fourth. It's amazing, esp. since I can feel that the tears are much "thicker" as well.

The true measure of a teacher

Teamed up with some x-BBU folks (all born in 1973) to design software to improve the experience of Customers visiting a retail outlet, say, a branch of a Bank. Since that's the same year both the Google Guys were born, I thought it would be a good idea to work with them.

One of the guys said he would bring us to speed on the Statistics part. So we were listening to his spiel first thing in the morning. His contention was that the bell curve would tend to some negative value on the LHS. I said: "If the variable is something like Salary, there's no tending, it's going to be zero. It can't go negative." Still he goes ahead with his bell curve and indicates a salary of -10! And gets all hot under the collar.

When some of the teachers at NIIT used to crib that the students just weren't getting it, Rampi would say that they probably got it some other way! There's no such thing as a bad audience; only bad teachers.

Also, IMHO, this is one of the issues facing jargon-loving technologists. They are so much in love with their theories that they forget which is more important: the theory or the reality they are trying to model.

As George Bernard Shaw said:

If all the economists in the world were laid end to end, they still wouldn't reach a conclusion.

Or the corollary:

If all the economists in the world were laid end to end, they would point in all directions.

No wonder the Challenger blew up in mid-air. As Feynman wrote at the end of his report on the Challenger disaster:

You can't fool Nature

Niece at Sequoia NP

There was something about the composition of this photo that I just loved. It's my niece at Sequoia* National Park.

* Btw, Sequoia is the shortest word with all five vowels.

38s and Sudden Accidents

One of the things that the guy who taught me numerology used to stress on was the danger inherent when the name number added up to 38. Such folks might end up with a sudden fatal accident.

The recent accidental death of Steve Irwin, the Crocodile Hunter, is a case in point. Idly figuring out his name number last night, I was zapped to find that it toted up to 38 (23 + 15).

In his Delhi Diary of 13.SEP.2004, Vinod Mehta misses Dhiren Bhagat, one of India’s best and brightest young journalists, who was killed in a senseless road accident in November 1988. His name also adds up to 38.

Earlier, I would scan the ToI Obit columns and, 4 times out of 5, the name would either add up to a 38 or a 35.

Just goes to show: Numerology has its own rule base.

Looking forward to your comments, Anand.

Jug-gle in Vain

Was in splits over Jug's Wash ’n’ Wipe in the Sunday Times of India:

Back from Britain, I can report that the clash of civilisations is very much in evidence there. There is an unbridgeable divide between the locals and the visitor from the Indian subcontinent. And the schism has nothing to do with being Islamic or not. It's far more fundamental, in the strict sense of the term: it's the irreconcilable difference between those who wipe and those who wash. To paraphrase Kipling:

East is lota, and West is TP
And never the twain shall meet
Not even when both stand presently
At God's great toilet seat.

Lavatorial anxieties beset all visitors to Britain, a place unconscionably niggardly with its loos. It is not unusual for a three- or four-bedroom residence to have no more than a single lavatory, and that too tucked abashedly under the stairs so no one will notice. But while this paucity affects all visitors, those from the subcontinent are doubly discomfited by the singular absence of that indispensable fixture of Indic civilisation: the lota, or its more up-to-date avatar, the hygiene faucet. Instead of which, British lavatories — and those in Britain's erstwhile colonies like America, Canada, Australia and New Zealand — have paper. Reams and rolls of the stuff. But no evident means of washing up after the paperwork's done. Which of course is totally unacceptable from the subcontinental point of view, if that's the phrase one wants. For the subcontinental knows, as an article of faith, that you can wipe and wipe till — to mix metaphors and anatomy — you are blue in the face but you'll still be a dirty bum.

Every Indian (or Bangladeshi, Pakistani, Nepali or Sri Lankan) I've discussed it with, has confessed to facing this problem which strikes to the very depths of our ablutionary identity: we are the washers, as distinct from the wipers.

Curiously enough, many Europeans are also washers. In France, Italy and Spain, loos commonly boast bidets, to the great relief of the Indic traveller. Personally, however, I have had reservations about this undoubtedly well-intentioned item of equipment after an acquaintance who'd returned from the Continent expressed wonderment at how advanced these Europeans are, no? They have not one but two toilets, one for doing big job and the other to do pee-pee in. Ever since, I've had my doubts about bidets. However, I'm sure they're a source of great comfort to their adherents, so to speak. Having joined the EU, maybe Britain will accommodate bidets, along with the euro. But till then, washers have to think of ingenious ways to beat the system.

One sore-pressed soul came up with what might be described as the 'Ganga solution': take a purificatory bath each time you go to the loo. The suggestion, however, has inbuilt impracticalities. For one thing, many British bathrooms don't have showers but bathtubs, filling which is an awkwardly time-consuming exercise, with your host wondering what on earth is taking you so long in there, and an impatient queue of fellow guests building up outside the door. Moreover, immersion in the stagnant water of a tub merely means a redistribution of ritual and other pollution rather than its elimination. Another recommended the use of one's shoe as a receptacle to convey water from the tap to the site of application. True, you'd have to walk around with one wet shoe. Still, better squelchy toes than an icky bottom. But what if you're wearing open-toed slippers or sandals?

My advice? Carry a bottle of mineral water wherever you go. Though having to blow the equivalent of 85 rupees on a bottle of Evian to conduct a transaction sometimes referred to as spending a penny might make you agree with the Mahatma that western civilisation would be a good idea. For as it stands, or sits, it just won't wash. In short, a wipe-off.

Schwarzenigger

The Governator has opened his mouth to put his foot right in it again.

... apologized for making statements in which he said Cubans and Puerto Ricans were naturally feisty and temperamental because of their combination of "black blood" and "Latino blood".

Visions of Balaji

It's interesting the number of folks about whom I have been recently reading about their visions of Balaji.

Today, it was about BKS Iyengar in the F2F section of this month's issue of RD:

RD: You have written that your fortune changed in 1946. What happened?
BKS: Up to 1946, I had to worry about my next meal. Luckily my wife shared my sufferings. Then one night in a dream, Lord Balaji of Tirupati, my family deity, gave me one cereal of paddy and said, "Now your struggle is over and your outer suffering will end. Continue yoga, don't stop." My wife too had a dream that night. She saw Mahalakshmi who said, "I had taken four annas from your husband which I am returning to you today." Since then I've had no dearth of students.

In a recent Outlook appraisal of Ustad Bismillah Khan, one reads:

A devout Shia, he was an ardent devotee of Saraswati, and would recall with deep faith and emotion a vision he once had as a young boy, of Balaji.

The expanded version is stunning, to say the least:

"Mamu used to do his riyaz (practice) at the temple of Balaji for 18 years. He told me to do the same thing. I would begin my riyaz at the mandir at 7 pm and end at 11 pm during which time I usually played four ragas. After a year and half, Mamu told me, 'if you see anything just don't talk about it'. One night as I was playing, deep in meditation, I smelled something. It was an indescribable scent, something like sandalwood and jasmine and incense. I thought it was aroma of Ganges. But the scent got more powerful. I opened my eyes - and when I speak about it I still get goose flesh - when I opened my eyes, there was Balaji standing right next to me, kamandal in hand, exactly as he is pictured. My door was locked from inside. Nobody was allowed to enter when I did my riyaz. He said 'play, son'. But I was in cold sweat. I stopped playing."

"He smiled, and disappeared. I unlocked the door. I thought a faqir may have come in. I took a lantern and searched all streets. They were empty. I ran home, ate quickly and slept. Mamu had understood what had happened. But he teased me, pretending he knew nothing, But as I blurted out the experience, Mamu slapped me, because he had asked me earlier not to talk about anything that might happen to me. Then he kissed me and asked me to go and buy vegetables. Mamu always told me 'never look back, keep going forward'. Even now I go to Balaji's mandir alone, at night and play all by myself. When I play before others, in my heart I'm listening to my gurus. In my heart, they clap for me at the appropriate time."

"In music, the sur is a clean thing, it is a pure thing. It cannot be deceived and it cannot deceive anybody. It is like a mirror in which you see the world, in which I see my own face when I play. When I start playing, the mind wanders here and there and takes me with it. But all the time I am striving for the assar. But when that comes, when the sur clicks, it is like I am unconscious and the heart has taken over. Sometimes I don't understand who is playing. Or I feel that I am playing at the mazaar, or in front of ancient sages. And all I can think of is 'he mere maalik tu mujhe lele (God, take me away), tu hi nirankaar, tu hee phool aur phal mein (God, You alone are formless, You alone in flower or fruit).'"

I recall one of my own dreams where Lord V was ablaze in gold. Wonder what that presages.

Playing in the Zone

Don't know whether it was the effect of Falun Gong last evening, but I was playing in the zone at the morning shuttle badminton.

One very noticeable thing about being in the zone is the state of No Mind, where one is just responding to the input of the moment. There's nothing like being in two minds while playing a stroke. You are in full flow, but detached. I think this is what is referred to as Fudoshin—Immovable Mind. To quote:

The highest level of skill is only attainable through a mind that is present with total sensory input (without mind chatter - No Mind) but detached—a mind/heart that is ever flowing but does not attach and thus remains immovable.

SnafuX: The Case of the Missing Admi

As Google celebrates its 8th anniversary, I saw something today that left me cold.

In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is indeed the king.

Tawa or Bust*

We were at the Sub Registrar's office for some work y'day. The place was teeming with people. Col. Kapoor, who was with us, was wondering why there had to be so many people milling about.

I asked him a simple question: "Col. Saab, do you like your chapatis/rotis from the tawa or the casserole?" He said: "Given a choice, from the tawa."

I said: "Ashté. It's the same here. The Sub Registrar and his lackeys like people waiting and dancing to their tune". That's the Synchronous Indian for you. Related blog posts:

• Traipsing to "High D"
• A Phone-y Pinging Problem, Redux
  

Unless there's a change culturally, there's no hope for seeing less crowds at offices like these. The only way I see that happening is when people stop using their work to define themselves. Even at Infosys, I saw many folks who would "collapse" if you stripped off their work from them.

* Thanks to Feynman

Teacher's Day Out

Prof. Vaidyanathan of Sea Sands once narrated this funny story of Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, when he was the VC of Andhra University. He used to say how great folks also were not spared the mundane activities of life.

Ramu, the milkman, would come with his buffalo early in the morning and Dr. Radhakrishnan would be reading the newspaper. The following conversation would ensue:

Ramu (turning his milk pot upside down to indicate that there was no water in it): Ah, చూడండి (please see)
Dr. SR: చూసాను, కానీ (I saw, proceed)

and would go back to his paper!

SnafuX: Truth or Error?

Been waiting for this snafu for a while :-)

From the mouths of babes…

…came words we shouldn't have uttered in the first place*.

At dinner last night, my elder kid was mentioning about some other girl who's already in…the 11th grade. As soon as she finished, Anurag, my younger one, said:

Oh, I thought you were going to say she's in love.

That killed us. Anurag keeps coming out with these sudden one-liners.

He took a while before he started talking, but he came out with this stupendous one to break his silence at the age of two: (in the hills of Tirumala)

Mommy's gone in the mind

We couldn't make much head or tail out of it. Manohar came the closest to explaining it when he said that Anurag must have had a dream in which his Mom went out of the room.

The one I always chuckle over is when WiFi asked him not to do something, and he retorted very nonchalantly:

Why the ph… don't you mind your own business?

This was when he was like three. WiFi couldn't believe her ears and had to run into the next room, before she burst out.

* Old RD observation.