The twin Cs – elixirs for a better life

What are the things that come to our mind when we hear the word speed? If the first thing that comes to the mind of anyone who reads this blog and question is “life” or “my life”, please write to me. It would be a rarity to find someone who lives life with the awareness that speed is one of the factors that affects everyone’s lives and is a more potent killer than anything else.

I was born in the second half of the 70s in a sleepy little town. Life went on in the same vein through the 80s and 90s. When I was finishing my undergraduation in 1999, I had bare bones knowledge of mobile phones and internet and I hadn’t seen both. Internet came to my town in 2000. In another 4-5 years, I could see college going students carrying mobile phones with them. Life took off for everyone suddenly. Though this rate of growth was exponential and chaotic, the rapid growth of the internet ironed out the differences in awareness of technological advances across the world. Life changed irrevocably and it is only gaining momentum as time pass by.

Is the earth spinning faster suddenly? No. Then why are days flying by now? Because we have incorporated so many factors into our lives that demand our time and attention. Most of these factors are gadgets, products of our explosive technological advances. Do these devices demand our time and attention? No, we have pushed ourselves into a frame of mind where we need to engage constantly with these devices. When I hear people saying that we will be ruled by machines some day, I am not surprised a bit. We are already ruled by them because most of the things that are significant to us in our daily lives are being controlled by them. This takes me to my objective of this blog. Choice and Control, the twin Cs of ultimate mental peace and contentment. Unique in their own ways and subtly intertwined, using them wisely is the key to the success we all keep searching for.

Making choices is the most tricky business in our lives. From the time we wake up in the morning till we hit the bed again at night, we are swimming in an ocean of choices. The irony here is, we never stop for a moment to ponder how many of those choices are the ones we get to make with our full commitment and contentment. We are constrained in our ability to make choices to such levels that neither do we get the option to choose our own parents, relatives and siblings nor do we get to die the way we want to. Simply put, we do not have any choice in our birth or death. Between these two milestones lie the time interval called life. This life is constrained completely by society at one end and the ones who rebel are branded as outcastes and banished to the other end. People spend their lives looking to find the balance in life by trying to figure out the right choices to make, choices that are right from the purview of the society. In our lifelong battle to keep everyone around us happy, we forget to give joy to the one person who really matters. Ourselves. We have to start respecting every choice we get to make, be it even buying a toothpaste and remember that there are people out there who don’t or cannot have choices, even to buy a toothpaste. If we can make every choice of ours matter to us and choose to do what makes us truly happy, we would have achieved a lot in life.

We are all control freaks inherently. We love to control some aspect of life and the more we control we have, the more we feel better. Do we really feel better? Having control is like that guy who has stuffed up all his money inside his house. There is no peace of mind. Greater control means greater responsibilities and obligations. The interesting question is, when we have no control over our birth or death, what is worth having control in life? In our quest for more control, we never think about this. I guess people who seek greater domination of life are the ones who want to leave their mark in the world in one way or the other. We remember Gandhi and Hitler in equal measure, though they chose to control and dominate life in their own ways. There are actually very few things we can control in our lives. My understanding is, most of our miseries in life are caused by our desire to control those situations that we cannot.

We can make our lives better by choosing what to control and what to let go off. I can choose what to study and work towards it. This is in my control. But getting a job is not. I can choose to love a girl but I cannot control her choice of giving her love to me. Letting go is the road we all dread to walk on and that is when we seek greater control and try to hold on to what we desire. When we are unsure about the way ahead, it is always better to not make a choice. Thats when life steps in and gives us what we truly deserve. To not make a choice requires greater strength of character and control over thoughts and emotions. Managing these two Cs requires greater understanding of ourselves. The greater we know ourselves, the less we will be worried about the choices we can make and what we can control. Being choosy and a control freak are signs of weaknesses in personality rather than the desire for domination, thats why such people constantly tries to impose themselves on others. Having the two Cs under control is the zen state and something we can all achieve if we wish to and work towards it.

Defining success

It has to be the most misused, misunderstood, misinterpreted and misquoted word in English. It is the buzzword that drives the urban world now. It has become the synonym for many other words such as high flying corporate jobs, ever burgeoning paychecks, snazzy gizmos, high rise apartments, top of the line fashion, imported cars, the list goes on and on. It has caused expectations to rise to such dizzying heights that men’s worth is calculated in terms of their bank balance and the number of credit cards they have. Success.

I am amazed at how easily human beings can get distracted, lose sight of reality and lose their way in life for one reason. In the animal world, every moment of survival is a moment of success. They live every moment on the edge of death, their lives hanging in the balance. Every time they find food is a moment of success. Pride of female lions chase zebras, deers and buffaloes, fully knowing how capable these animals are of kicking with their hind legs. One kick could end up with the lion getting a broken jaw, death by starvation and it’s cubs also perishing. Still they take the risk, to beat hunger and to feed their cubs, because higher the risks higher the rewards. We were like this when we were cave dwellers and still are in many ways. We brave the rough sea and risk our lives to fish and we till the land, sow the seeds and wait for the crops at the risk of flood.

What I am driving at is, success can be explained just like Jackie Chan explains the concept of Kung Fu to Jaden Smith in the movie The Karate Kid. Success is in everything we do in our daily lives. But our priorities have changed with time. In the mad rush for that high flying corporate job, bank balance and everything associated with them, we have chosen to ignore our success in everything we do from the beginning of each day, right from brushing our teeth without hurting the gums. I am amazed at how many things we take for granted in life when our lives themselves are so uncertain.

There are two extreme schools of thoughts about living life. On one side is the “I am going to die anyway some day, so I want to live it up every moment with a booze-sex-drugs-rock and roll life. At the other end of the spectrum is the Shaolin Temple and it’s inhabitants. Most of us live somewhere in between these two extremes. Through the time of humanity, we have had the most diverse and weirdest ways of defining success. If bringing home food by hunting or fishing was a success for our procreation, dying in battle was the successful way of finding heaven in the netherworld for the Vikings.

So what drives this mad rush in search of success? One-upmanship, our insatiable urge and hunger to outdo competition, be it from our own kind or from the animal world. We have made life into a gladiator’s arena and unknowingly we are fighting pitched battles with one another. Success has two more synonyms in our perception. Leadership and domination. By being successful consistently over a period of time, we can become good leaders. But great leaders need only one opportunity. When normal people give up and accept the life before them, great leaders see the opportunity to make a difference. They can seize a big opportunity and also see a small one from far off. Great leaders do not project themselves as leaders and seek to dominate people. They get accepted as leaders by the people and also as one among them. This is how some of us like Gautam Buddha, Jesus Christ, Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela have become great leaders and this is what makes their success stand out.

The value system of success has evolved and changed with the passage of time. Success for us is no longer ‘in the moment’. There is no greater success than procreation for any living being and in the first 3 years of our children’s lives, every moment with them is unbridled happiness. But we are not there with them in those moments, because we are out there seeking what we believe is success and glory. When we see our paychecks every month, the feeling is not of working successfully for the month but rather that of relief, to pay our loans and bills. We no longer understand or enjoy the worth of our accomplishments because we are constantly looking for success in the wrong places and in the wrong things. The advertisement of Mastercard is so relevant here. There are some things in life which are priceless and can never be bought or obtained with the material comforts that comes with what we perceive as a successful life.

I have always believed that our souls are in the midst of a journey. We may not know where we have come from and we may not know where we are going. Birth and death are like two consecutive bus or train stations and life is the journey in between. In the vast expanse of the cosmos, time is immeasurable and our lives are simple dots in the fabric of space and time. When we truly realize who and what we are in the realm of the Universe and when we start finding joy and satisfaction in everything around us, that’s when we will truly find success in life. To top it off, there are and have been people among us who have proved that we do not even need all our abilities to be truly successful in life. Even though Stephen Hawking is immobile and can barely move his fingers, it didn’t stop him from becoming one the greatest scientists mankind has known. The best example of it all, a man called Ludwig van Beethoven did not even need his auditory abilities to create music that has been enthralling us for centuries and will continue to do so till mankind exists. These examples demonstrate something very subtle and unique. Truly successful people are neither looking for glory nor to prove themselves. They do what they truly have want to do and there is one word that defines the secret of their success and helped them defy all the odds life threw in their paths. Passion.

Mankind’s evolution – from domination to extinction

There is this one thing about humanity that beats every ounce of my understanding. Our propensities to argue, squabble, quarrel, fight, kill and wage wars with our own kind and with anything living on the planet. Add our complete lack of any compassion towards nature and the animal world and this combination truly makes us the deadliest killing machines on the planet. Today happens to be a good day to write this blog because exactly a hundred years back, we started the first phase of mankind’s madness in the 20th century. The First World War.

On one hand, we boast and take pride in our unparalleled intelligence up to the levels of using our abilities in parapsychology to view into the Universe with our minds. On the other hand, from time immemorial, from the time they say humanity was born, through every story we consider as mythological, we have been waging wars with fellow beings and slaying giants, beasts and every possible living beings. To sum it up, we have been seeking glory with blood and gore, amply exemplified by the Vikings. They used to wish and seek for death in battle because they believed that was their way to heaven and if they died in any other way including in their sleep, they would end up in hell. Ridiculous or incredulous? From when did taking a life of another being become a matter of glory? From when did violating the modesty of a woman and stealing another man’s woman become definite proofs of manhood? One single word sums it up perfectly. Domination.

It is in the nature of all animals to compete for food and the first chance to procreate, so it isn’t surprising that we inherited those characteristics from them. But one thing of significance to be noted is, animals can detect a natural calamity in advance and move to safer locations and there were times when we were terrified of natural calamities and considered them to be the wrath of Gods. Goes to show that we have never been truly part of and have never tried to understand nature and coexist with the ecosystem. In the animal world, there is unimaginable cruelty. Children are always targeted, be it for hunting for food or when apex predators like lions and tigers muscle with each other, again for domination. But when we look at it from a larger perspective, all of it helps to keep their population under control and the balance in nature. It seems nature is making us do the same thing when we kill our children in conflicts driven by our differences. Animals have not been becoming extinct and lions and tigers are not endangered animals because they have been killing each other, but we have been killing them. Reinforces the fact that we have never considered ourselves to be part of our planet’s ecosystem and the seeds of domination at the expense of everything else have been sowed inside us from the dawn of humanity.

So what makes us turn on each other? Again, the need or rather the obsession to dominate and lord over. We had to continuously keep fighting and finding ways to dominate our own kind as well as the animal world and it is amazing that we have been so successful. The reasons we have kept on creating to justify our actions are mind blowing and repulsive in equal measure. How else can we justify the belief in the 21st century that consuming the tiger’s genitals can be good for our vitality? We turned a life of togetherness in society spectacularly into a life separated by royal blood, skin colour, religion, caste, creed and race because of our need to dominate each other. We never cared, all we had to do was to dominate, be it in the way 20-30 African men still hunt a single male lion or by segregating and separating ourselves based on different categories. It has never been a fair fight and no one has ever got a fair chance, but that is the path of domination we have chosen.

Ages have passed by, but the instinct to compete for dominance stays undimmed. What’s more, it has been consistently becoming enhanced and streamlined. Pitched hand to hand combats have given way to intercontinental laser guided ballistic missiles and nuclear and poison gas bombs. We are steadily developing technology for creating the elusive cloak of invisibility and robots for warfare. This is the physical aspects of domination. Then to test our innovations, we create conflict situations based on religious and political divides. We have done some amazing things in the name of religion, caste and race through the centuries. From denying lower class people drinking water from wells “owned” by upper class people in Hindu society to the church inciting the crusades to invade and occupy Palestine with the false promise of a land flowing with milk and honey to the Muslim rulers following the policy of domination through wars and increasing their population to the slavery of African people because of their skin colour to the Aryan supremacy and the genocide of the Jews, we have made the world see it all. We are not done yet. Class system still rule the roost in India with unabated friction, Muslims slaughtering each other because of being Sunni and Shia, Jews fighting Muslims, these are some of the conflicts based on caste, race and religion. The India-Pakistan and India-China border disputes, Russia-Ukraine dispute because of which a passenger plane carrying about 300 people was shot down for no apparent reason, the fallout of the Cold War and post 9/11 in Afghanistan and so many other issues simmering in the political cauldron. Add to it, countries vying for domination on natural resources which is most likely going to end up in another conflict for access to clean drinking water. Fact is, we are continuously looking for ways to position ourselves to dominate.

Our superior intelligence has made us different in our personality, behaviour, character and perceptions of life. We are all unique in our own ways and that is enough to cause difference of opinions. But we are still managing to stay together and hold the fabric of society from tearing up. When we can agree to disagree on most of the things in life and still live together, why can’t we see this at the larger perspective of life? Because the need to dominate has become a part of our psyche and our genes. Where is all of this headed? We learnt nothing from the two World Wars. Even though we organize huge commemoration ceremonies every year to honour those who died in the war, we go back and build more powerful weapons and look to create the next chance to try them out. I guess this itch to dominate will end only when we end up annihilating ourselves with our own weapons. Ancient Hindu texts have correctly predicted this degradation and decay of human society in the age of Kali when our average life span will reduce to 20 years and we will perish at the end. All religions believe in the return of God some day. I see it as a single reason so powerful that it will force mankind to give up on all their differences and unite before nature cleanses itself of all it’s impurities and life and hopefully mankind is given another chance to start from scratch. Maybe this is the cycle of nature and the Universe and we are just going through its motions as a part of it.