Sometimes you don’t really know why life treats you harsh, I can’t call it harsh, but it’s like penance that it wants you to go thru. Though I have had many in my share and I absolutely think it works in your favor rather than against you!
With a similar experience we traveled to Egypt last week, after going thru a huge hassle of getting visa to Egypt for my better half, we were not allowed to board the flight cuz we were freaking 5 minutes late!!! That too, cuz we were standing in a long q to security check!! That blew my lid off, and after many years, I yelled on someone in public, embarrassing as it was, I felt good, sometimes the most benefiting anger management tool.
Looking at how jazeera airways is treating its customers, soon it will not have any!! Its status has been reduced from a low cost no frills airline to rude staff, labor class airline; but as seeing is believing; I truly believe it now!! I am not saying this cuz I am pissed off (which I surely am) but I am sure others who have traveled this airline when it started its operations and now, cannot disagree.
Good riddance as it was, we finally traveled Emirates, obviously we paid big moolah for it, but it was worth it!! It is always lovely to be associated with an airlines awarded for best service!!
That night, it was like this fight against time and my long on going penance. Huge deadlines at work, high filial expectations; you and your mind works 24 / 7, its ruthless sometimes cuz we cannot take life for granted even for a few seconds.
On the other hand I believe that God always shows us these signs that we ignore, to warn us and hence protect us. We had never had traveling troubles ever and did not know what was in store for us now, did the annoying troubles end, or was that just the start! At 2.30 am on a Saturday morning, wide awake from the past 20 hours, I felt so confused and exasperated!
Life has taught me to never say never; we had to make it to the pharaoh land, hook or hijack. And then, we did, though slightly behind schedule; we landed in Alexandria at 11.00 am Saturday morning. The morning air felt so fresh and crisp and it was relief to see the long night get over!
Do u think the penance was over?
With a similar experience we traveled to Egypt last week, after going thru a huge hassle of getting visa to Egypt for my better half, we were not allowed to board the flight cuz we were freaking 5 minutes late!!! That too, cuz we were standing in a long q to security check!! That blew my lid off, and after many years, I yelled on someone in public, embarrassing as it was, I felt good, sometimes the most benefiting anger management tool.
Looking at how jazeera airways is treating its customers, soon it will not have any!! Its status has been reduced from a low cost no frills airline to rude staff, labor class airline; but as seeing is believing; I truly believe it now!! I am not saying this cuz I am pissed off (which I surely am) but I am sure others who have traveled this airline when it started its operations and now, cannot disagree.
Good riddance as it was, we finally traveled Emirates, obviously we paid big moolah for it, but it was worth it!! It is always lovely to be associated with an airlines awarded for best service!!
That night, it was like this fight against time and my long on going penance. Huge deadlines at work, high filial expectations; you and your mind works 24 / 7, its ruthless sometimes cuz we cannot take life for granted even for a few seconds.
On the other hand I believe that God always shows us these signs that we ignore, to warn us and hence protect us. We had never had traveling troubles ever and did not know what was in store for us now, did the annoying troubles end, or was that just the start! At 2.30 am on a Saturday morning, wide awake from the past 20 hours, I felt so confused and exasperated!
Life has taught me to never say never; we had to make it to the pharaoh land, hook or hijack. And then, we did, though slightly behind schedule; we landed in Alexandria at 11.00 am Saturday morning. The morning air felt so fresh and crisp and it was relief to see the long night get over!
Do u think the penance was over?
5 comments:
Nature, life, situations and circumstances are funny teachers. They often act stubborn with you just to reiterate upon their supremacy and your haplessness. They try and prove it to you what a moron of epic proportions you can be. But it's only when you accept it that you end up as a moron, else you end up standing defiantly tall and on other occasions discovering something not on the list and still gainers in the end. But gotta give that to these funny teachers.. when you are able to go one-up against them, they take a step back almost as if saying, "this was the purpose of the whole exercise" and you end up being grateful to them more often than not, where you never know what actually were they upto - being tough teachers or smartly bailing out..
I remember this camping trip to Garhwal when the idea of NatGeo type photography suddenly overpowered us. We had located a female cobra in the terrain and local experts and observers told us that she had layed a clutch of eggs in a small crevice in the woods. It had been six to eight weeks and that's usually the hatching time. We followed close to the location in the crevice and waited for long for the mother snake to depart. A friend followed her up till long as he communicated a go-ahead from a safe distance through his cellphone. We rushed to the spot and to our joy one of the eggs had hatched. This meant that the others in the clutch were all to hatch within 1-3 days.
We had a sophisticated ultra-frame, high-resolution, water resistant wildlife vidcam. We carefully and safely secured a position for our encased camera and thus started the 2 day trail. We had to keep switching between the camping site, the location and our friend's local farm-house as there was the need for periodic switching and charging of batteries and monitoring of the situation. So many a times did we stand for long hours in the rain waiting anxiously for the rain to stop and the mother snake to slip away, just so that we could switch the batteries or for getting right if there had been a slight shift in the position and alignment of the camera. All the hard work could've gone a begging for a matter of just a few seconds if were to miss that magic moment. We anyways never had a parallel feed available to us even to ascertain that something sensible was being recorded in the long periods of time that we stood by. A sequence of a few seconds on a video file at that moment would've been equivalent of having stricken gold for us. The preciousness of the fruits of undiluted, tireless efforts and our imagination for grabbing our own small bite of nature.
So what do you think was the final outcome for the young wizards of handycam?
Now something unrelated.
Couldn't figure out the appropriate place for it so I'd do it here. Please don't sue me for encroachment.
I went to a forum on Orkut yesterday that was about discussing the sanctity of the Vedas as the earliest, most original and highly developed instances of Science. There I came across a guy who was highly infuriated by what everyone else had to say. He condemned everything, declaring that everyone who believed in that was a puritan and a jerk. I went on to check his profile and was amazed to find out that the guy was extremely well-read in various disciplines of arts. He was using the concepts of various philosophies and ideologies to beat down the poor kids saying, "you are in your teens and post-teens, you should rather be dealing in missionary position than missionary zeal in your age". Here's what I had to say ---
"" I went through your profile and I must say this...
It is disconcerting to find someone of your level of subscription to the free school of thought keeping himself so insulated to a particular ideology. (and almost getting outraged by the content of some isolated casual discussions of harmless and nearly futile motives)
After having gone through all those books and encountering contradictions and paradoxes as you would have, as much as it gives one the analytical abilities to launch a critique, it also gives one the deductive and inductive logics to extract the nectar out of every discipline, philosophy or for that matter, mythology. There's never a dearth of opportunities around us (to learn, to exploit, to unlearn, to criticise, to create, to convice...), all, if there, is the dearth of imagination on our part. So if I can't find harmony in Bulleh Shah's (of whom he was a fan) turbulent emotions (which can't be true, i've always been fascinated by this lyrics, the mere vision and its translation), it's my unbecoming. If you can't find your positives out of the vedas, it's yours.
Before being an MBA, I'm a software engineer, and I appreciate science. It's a good servant because it prepares you well for the explained. It's a bad master because it works very much on deductive logic, it's backward-looking and it doesn't acknowledge (anymore) what it can not understand and explain. This is where the arts come in. These are sometimes described as vague as these often don't confirm to boundaries. These are both reflective and projective. One, at best, can keep switching between the two disciplines to seek his answers. The modern proponents of scientific thinking took years before they could conceptualize the character of a human who could fly (dah..big deal). Icarus was always there, so was Hanuman. Does it take so long to replicate an idea that had always been around the corner? Lack of imagination again.
I don't believe in a lot of things in our religious literature in its present form. (I'm decently well read in it). But I must give it to the contributors of those, they surely were high on imagination in those times. Sparks have also been exhibited in the literatures in the sciences' field. Clear evidence and explanations of astronaumical science exist in the vedas. I've seen ruins of such laboratories with my own eyes (carbon-dated by U.S. archeologists, were found to date back to around 2500 B.C.). You can actually make out certain things, it's amazing. It doesn't take experts to come to an understanding from a single reading of the Ramayan (scripted around 3000 B.C.) that they knew their geography well in those times. There are other astonishing finds about the scientific progress of our ancestors. Looking at all this, i find it hard to believe that we have achieved (although so much, but) so little in the following 5000 years. There clearly are disconnects, missing links. So, I see our mythological and post-mythological literature as 'fable-ized' pieces of our actual history. A lot of pages have been ripped off and religion and prescription sociology has taken over history and science in the rest.
When INFINITY says that our history has been distorted by foreign elements, I can't rule it out. Westerners are notorious for suppressing any line of thought which doesn't match theirs, particularly oriental. Politics...I guess I don't have to quote examples in this. Science... Ariff Bongso, the father of Stem-cell research, a breakthrough biotechnological development... the man will sure have been lost in the pages of history when Cancer will be easily curable through stem-cells developed from the human embryo (we're already agonizingly close in that), because the man is humble and concentrates madly on his research and the westerners are busy filing patents for his research in their own name.
And then people...haha..poor people take things on face value. They'll believe as much as they know. They'll be vehemently arguing that Asians are backward and are morons when it comes to greater science.
no one can ask you to become a fan of our mythological or religious texts (as in what it is like today, NOT AT ALL)
all that can be asked of you, and more so because of your interest in reading, is to remain open and not get outraged like that easily without inspecting the prism from all angles. There's surely a difference between winning (over) people and defeating them.
and then,...the best of us can learn from the kids. ""
SO, WHERE DO YOU STAND ON THIS?
And Yes, for anyone interested in this topic, i'd recommend reading an old classic of revolutionary historical literature linking vedic and hindu historical dateline, personalities and events to their global mythological counterparts. It thus has the dichotomy of the reality. The book is called "Vayam Rakshamah", authored by Acharya Chatursen.
The novel is basically about Ravan's life but the first half deals at length with the topic mentioned above.
The book has been published by various paperback publications and is available at prices ranging from Rs. 100-150 at good magazine stands, mostly at Wheelers.
Oh and the saga continued. The guy strikes back.
""
vinayak
19:27(3½ hours ago)
Has he been thrown out?
@Narayan
Usually, I would have ignored him. But, then I thought, somebody has to rock his little boat. One has to take a stand sometime.
I can understand you saying that reading should be an assimilative process. The thing called, “Learning-Unlearning”. I have read a lot of books, but I still consider myself an illiterate. That’s the reason I read more and more. But then, there is every chance that the person would begin to suffer from Doublethink(the wonderful term invented by George Orwell). It is the ability of mind to hold two contradictory beliefs simultaneously, and accepting both of them. Nothing new. We all do it. I mean I still sit for shivratri puja with my family while actually not believing in any of its religious significance. I rationalize it as a ‘cultural thing’. In my mind I remember all the critique of the Ramayana, Mahabarata and the Gita. Critique from the point of view of feminists, dalits, marxists and historians. But, I still don’t mind. But, I do mind when people try to mix things up.
I find talk about Science and its relation to Religion funny.
'I refuse to prove that I exist,' says God, 'for proof denies faith, and without faith, I am nothing.'
- The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
Again doublethink comes into play. We conveniently leave out science from the matters that concern religious belief. And I am not against it. Even I enjoy Bulleh Shah. Or Kula Shaker. I realize its only music. I mean even a lot of scientists (Indian/western) do it, the separation of science and religion. But, they don’t let it mix up. I can and I do live with this stuff. Right now, as I write this, my mother is doing her evening puja. And I am going out with a friend to have a drink. That’s how life is.
Anyway, thanks for the comment. Peace.
Narayan Adeeb
20:32(2½ hours ago)
I couldn't agree more. When I say, "a lot of pages have been ripped off and religion and prescription sociology has taken over history and science in the rest", I'm not mixing up science with religion. But I do believe that one era's science is the other's history and it's history that I am more interested in, not religion. I won't accept a software without updates, similarly I won't accept a religion without due updates according to the times, so alas I can't be a conformist.
And I do like what you do, on every other occasion you'd say that you rather won't comment and you end up doing it (to rock people's boats). Self-contradictions. (Orwell did have a lot to say about that) But it speaks for your values, your desire to express, to share, somewhere to try and make a difference and your belief in yourself and standing up for what you believe in. And as long as these self-contradictions remain constructive, these are always welcome, as these are now.
(i'd rather call the mechanism, the testing of a hypothesis. You hold one view each in both your hands. Bombard one with the other, make necessary stealth changes cyclically and come out with a highly refined theory in the end. But you gotta have your hands full with opposite polarities for that.)
Do keep posting if you have the time, clearly seems we can learn a lot from you. Peace it is.
""
I'm SO great na...? and vain.. ;-)
BTW, we're friends now. Had a lot in common.
i know sometimes timing is everything, i missed it this time!
if i talk abt your corbett stint, and not sounding negetive, the obvious answer that comes to my mind is u guys missed the hatching, but then the other side of the story can also be the cobra came and u guys flew off.. i am still to comprehend any other side to it, i can say age and lack of lateral thinking keeps u limited. it is happening to me, or i can also blame it on the grihasta ashram!
tell me more.. what happened?
as for the war of the two worlds, that you and vinayak procreate, can never end, but with what my experience goes, i dont take sides, each side is valid, and they have something to offer, i guess this is what we call personal space.
At one point of time i interpreted that vinayak caught a wrong nerve or got hooked to selective explanation i presume. but i guess we call it benefit of doubt!
I think u both should write a book togehter. :-) if that would help to keep your common interests bubling!
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