Parallel Spirals

Standing on the shores of space-time…

Blog

  • Hindu

    It was only right before marriage when I sought to write down what my essential beliefs would be. I saw marriage as introducing chaos into my world, one which I embraced and enjoyed. Before the introduction of this chaos, I wanted to reduce my involvement in other things and prioritize them when I could not totally remove them.

    One of the things that I had the most difficult time was to select what would be the set of beliefs that I would follow. I am a Hindu by birth but I have the choice of what set of beliefs I would take in and what I would keep out in the multitude of beliefs.

    I read through books on Christianity, Judaism, Jainism, Buddhism and Islam and chose Hinduism to be the broad umbrella in which I’d like to continue to stay. Like all teenagers, I’ve been through atheism as well.

    After choosing the broadest stream that there is, in religious beliefs, there were still many more options left to choose from. Even within Hinduism there are a range of practices and beliefs. There are organisations and traditions. This too left with me far too much diversity and only increased the chaos.

    After a study of the books, I looked at how many of the people I know practiced the religion on a day-to-day basis to help me get a little more handle on things. I noticed how my grandfather practiced Hinduism. He would light the lamp at the small altar in his house and pray. He would visit temples but would stay away from elaborate ritualism but still supported the festival in the temple close to his house. He had an interest in astrology but did not let it guide him. He was content with this and had a remarkably simple practice of the religion with little interest in its theology.

    After a lot of thinking, I adopted this practice as well. I would pray every day at the altar at my house and visit the temple one day a week. I’ve had an interest in some philosophy and rather than take in too many differing views have restricted myself to reading stuff mostly  from the Chinmaya Mission and to talks on Buddhism on the Against the Stream podcast to satiate my philosophical appetite.

    Mumbai. January 4, 2016.

     

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  • Geography

    Geography is a subject that I was deeply interested in during the first decade of my life. I got engrossed in it and aced in it in Class V and just as simply left it to pursue my interest in Astronomy.

    Geography literally translates as “drawing of this world”. Representing the world around us on paper – in maps seems to have been the end result of a process. Studying the world around us, looking at the types of soil, the kind of physical features around us, looking at representing human settlements and representing them so that they may be used to understand topography, identify good places to build human settlements and also as a way of going from one place to another.

    Applying this data, various maps were made – maps of topographies, political and physical maps, maps for soil etc. This data is now available via proprietary media like Google Maps and Survey of India and is also being crowd-collected again through initiatives such as OpenStreetMap.

    I’ve always wondered of what use would it be in our daily life and how rarely we use this data to understand the world around us. We only mug Geography in school in order to obtain certain grades but don’t understand how to use it in our day-to-day life to understand the world around us.

    As in all cases, there is hope. There are groups of people around the world who are collecting data about their surroundings by setting up personal weather stations and by mapping roads, buildings and places of public interest. This data is being re-collected again by the public because it is currently closed behind private and government silos. But, as in all other things we learned in school, its application to make better decisions in our life or even simple day-to-day things seems a little far away.

    Mumbai. January 3, 2016.

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  • Romance

    Owing to lack of ideas to write about or just too many ideas, I asked my wife for suggestions for what I could write here today. She first suggested that I write about her. Since other fora exist for such intimate expressions, I digressed. The second suggestion she came up with was Romance.

    I tried to keep away from writing about it but it seems she teased me into writing this blog post.

    In my youth, my “romances” were imaginary one sided romances which involved me dreaming about girls I would love to have had a relationship with. These never left my mind and hence the girls thus involved had no idea about my interest in them.

    As I grew up I moved aside girls and made way for space. These occupied my mind and my mental bandwidth so much that I didn’t have time for relationships. It would be false to say that I did not look at girls at all in this time but I appreciated honest and intelligent conversations with them rather than anything else.

    In my college days, a single minded ambition for space took hold of me and was the only love I had in my life. I pursued this with an ambition that still amazes me but  these eventually led nowhere. Perhaps like other college romances?

    Today, after an arranged marriage, my only romance is with my wife who complains that I am not a romantic at all. Yes, I confess to her, I have not had the time to learn of these things as I pursued other interests and perhaps she could teach me how to be a little more romantic?

    Mumbai. January 2, 2016.

     

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  • Nibbana

    Happy New Year. One more year to get out of the cycle of life and death – to attain nibbana. In my college days, following the spiritual path had an attraction for me. I had even considered monasteries which I could join to follow this attraction.

    I considered the Buddhist monastery in Bhutan. I dropped the idea because it would be too cold. Then I considered one of the Divine Life Society in the foothills of the Himalayas at Rishikesh. I dropped that idea too thinking there would be too many wild animals and I had no intention of going close to even a domestic animal let alone wild ones. I considered the Isha Yoga Center in Coimbatore but dropped that too fearing the constant pestering of relatives, begging for me to return to the materialistic world and because I did not want to see my parents in tears whilst I meditated and sought the answers to the various complexities of life. I finally settled for the Chinmaya Mission’s Sandeepany Sadhanalay in Powai, Mumbai.

    I went there on a very hot day, bunking college. I met a man in orange robes at the gates of the Mission. Looking at me, he asked what I wanted. I said I wanted to become a monk. He looked me up and down and asked me to return on Dusshera day to be initiated as a monk.

    I had a clear three months before the day. I prepared for engineering exams that would begin in the next week or two and finishing last minute submissions. As I was filing a journal for submission, it struck me that I would enjoy the worldly life more than one of the renunciate. I could ponder the questions of life even whilst I had my materialistic joy in between, when these questions would bore me. At that moment, I laughed and have never since considered becoming a monk myself. I do not think it is for me. It would bore me. I’d probably be done in a couple of years and I would still be left with a life to live. And that would annoy me.

    Mumbai. January 1, 2016

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  • Understand the Drive-Thru and We Can Solve All Problems

    • Recruiting engineers rather than salespeople to become our political leaders.
    • Insisting that our government use science rather than ideology when making decisions about things. The best thing you can ever experience is being proven wrong by well-gathered data, and then learning from it.
    • Studying personal happiness rather than retail catalogs and car brochures when trying to improve your lot in life.
    • Immediately giving up all forms of TV and spend that time walking and doing other things outside. How would your life and your health change, if you spent at least 4 hours out of every 24 in the great outdoors?
    • When you live by this example, you automatically pass the values to everyone around you. Whether you notice or not, people are watching you and they will follow.

    From the Mr. Money Mustache blog

  • കേരളപ്പിറവി

    On this date in 1956, the State of Kerala was carved out of the erstwhile Madras Presidency. Celebrated as Kerala Pirravi (കേരളപ്പിറവി)

  • The Bestseller She Wrote

    It had the bestseller she wrotecompletely skipped my mind that Ravi Subramanium’s latest book would be out in mid-October. As soon as I saw that his latest book was available, I boug
    ht it on my Kindle and finished it in less than 3 days, as I have the other books that he has written.

    I have enjoyed his writing style from the second book that he wrote. His writing is pacy while engaging. You begin the book and with his short chapters, there is immediate reading progress that you enjoy. In these short chapters or bursts he develops the broad sketches of the outline of his story and continues in the same speed till almost the very end. Then he begins slowing down and his finer strokes make their appearance and then the string weaves through all the threads to complete a beautiful fabric of a story.

    To this, he adds a set of contemporary characters and events that makes his work easier to relate to to a contemporary audience.

    His storytelling is a way of unravelling that I can enjoy once in a while. To me, it offered a nice change in pace and subject and I thoroughly enjoyed reading Ravi Subramanium’s latest offering.

  • DROP

    dropOver the whole of last week I was watching a set of videos posted on YouTube of talks given by the brahmacharis of the Chinmaya Mission. This Dusshera, Dhanya and I visited the Chinmaya Mission campus in Powai, Mumbai. It was from the bookstore there that we picked up the novel, DROP. Dusshera is about dropping your negative qualities and attachments, picking up positive qualities and then fortifying it all with knowledge, as per one of the videos I watched. This was perhaps in the back of my mind as I picked up DROP.

    The book was written by a group of Chinmaya Yuvaveers and weaves a story around a journey that a bunch of young people take as they travel “within”.

    I liked the book as a whole and would definitely recommend that other people read it as well. It comes bundled with a sort of workbook that I am yet to go through.

    I think the book has a Hinduism under-current that I am not sure if the authors were trying to fight against in some stage and were trying to glorify in certain stages. Weaving together principles of Hinduism, facts and fiction is a very tight rope walk and I think that these Chinmaya Yuvaveers have done it pretty well.

    The book offers a nice parallel between the journey inwards and the outward journey one along the banks of the Ganges to it’s source.

  • To the Brink and Back

    In December, I finish 3 years working in the banking sector. I spent my teenage years reading books about the history of science. I always had an interest in understanding the reasons for why things are the way they are.

    For some time now, I have been looking for some book on the historical facts behind the Indian economy. I have been reading Mint for a year and quite a few of the columnists there made references to the significant events that happened in India in 1991. It was there that my interest in learning about 1991 was piqued.

    I first picked up the book by Gurcharan Das, India Unbound. The book, however, turned to look at the consequences of the events of 1991 and had fairly little to offer on the 1991 events themselves, where my interest lay. It was an interview in Mint with the author that got me to this book, To the Brink and Back.

    The book is by Congressman, Jairam Ramesh and the book does have a fair amount of a biased narrative. I think Ramesh is quite frank about this. The book is about the political action taken in 1991 by Dr. Narasimha Rao and Dr. Manmohan Singh to take India through a transition period.

    The first thing this book taught me was that the reforms was one in a series of reforms measures that had been carried out since 1966. To be sure, there are many books suggested for reading in this book which make quite a handsome list. These measures were seemingly not effective or did not work out. The break from the past that 1991 created seems to be visible more as we look back at it 25 years on with changes still unravelling, as though we opened a Pandora’s box. I did not see many books on the changes that 1991 wrought written by economists and am on the lookout for the same.

    The book is one of the first accounts that I have read and Ramesh does a good job of it politically. He has also been promoting the book with the political angle that one of the most revolutionary economic changes that helped India propel into the 21st century was the unshackling of the economy and asks his fellow Congressmen to wear it as a badge. The Congress, though, still requires some unshackling of its own. The book is a good read and I think Ramesh has been quite frank and eloquent in the presentation of his books. I also loved reading his footnotes and annexures which are as good a read as the book itself and hence, don’t give that a miss like you usually do in other books.

     

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  • Birthday Post

    Every Birthday I write either on paper or on some digital media, a review of the year that is past. I usually do it on the day that is celebrated as my Malayalam birthday, partially out of fear that the Gregorian one may be banned.

    This year has been pivotal for me and hence, I felt the need to store it for posterity. Hence, this post, here.

    This year saw me getting married, go on my first foreign trip and make several important decisions which were left hanging in the air for one reason or the other. I’ll go in the reverse order of importance on this one.

    I decided to make this my main blog.

    I decided to continue following the course my career in banking will take. I have permanently left any hopes of returning to engineering as my core career option.

    I decided to follow my interest in Astronomy as a hobby. I am yet to take concrete action in this direction, but the primary decision is made, as such.

    I decided to follow developments in the world of geography and space exploration. Geography is a new addition, I will be following this with a particular emphasis. While following these developments, I will not be part of any organisation.

    I decided to take up editing Wikipedia again.

    Many of the above decisions were pushed with the fact that I got married. It led to some urgency in resolving these pending decisions that were in my mind so that my mind space could be allotted to resolving more pressing issues that involve leading a life.