Musings Own Thoughts

  Life is full of vicissitudes which seem to take one down the road of despair. But life is full of unexpected joys in simple occurrences. Hard as it is to face the knocks of life it is infinitely harder to remain balanced when one gets more than one deserves. At such times I am reminded of a story of the King of Persia who asked his wise courtiers to find him an object that will ensure that he could maintain a happy feeling when something sad happened in his life and ensure that he remained balanced when something good happened in his life. The story goes that they really could not find something appropriate till a minister gave him a ring with the inscription "Even this shall Pass Away". So the king had it in his hand all his life. He would see it in good and bad times and manage to remain the same. I have had many such moments in my long life and even while some may have at the time of their happening seemed the end of the world, they passed by. The joyous moments too gave

 What set me thinking about a welfare state is the problem of the disparity in wealth between the haves and have nots. While right from my childhood I have seen inequality and wealth disparity, the sheer magnitude of that is beyond my imagination. The phenomenon of this disparity and the flaunting of wealth has increased manifold after the 1991 economic reforms. A country which was governed by left leaning socialist welfare state agenda driven leadership was in a serious crisis. The foreign exchange reserves were at their lowest, the collapse of the Eastern bloc and huge negative trade deficit with the Western cutres led to a situation where India had to bow to the demands of IMF and World Bank and allow the protection barriers to Indian industry to be removed. After this date it almost seemed to me experientially that the flood gates had opened. Flaunting wealth became fashionable and splurging and spending wealth publicly became more and more commonplace. Perhaps residence of Mukesh

 At the age of 63 this as a topic of a blog perhaps should hardly concern me. However, as a matter of reflection I understand that the times are a changing and on line transactional approach is becoming a norm rather than an exception and many of us are either adopting to it out of compulsion, convenience or the fear of missing out. Some of us are just merely wanting to experience the novelty of doing things differently. Before getting into the meat of this subject I think that I will try to touch upon the context of Indian society and India as a country. The urban rural divide, and even among cities the inter city differences will be considered. The problem of Patriarchy affecting women in general and the male societal expectations which are universal and not India specific will be analyzed. Then the institution of marriage vs short term or medium term unconditional relationships will be touched upon. Finally, the expectations of a relationship and how the inability to change leading

 Passage meditation and Upanishads open up a whole vista of knowledge and words of wisdom and while I have picked up these words from a passage called Razor's Edge from the Katha Upanishad. It is indeed a very loaded sentence depicting the burning of the ego which is the cause of all the misery we face as the ignorant limited humans existing.The Upanishads have been a repository of wisdom and this verse is beautiful and worth sharing. The verse is quoted below for us to fathom its true meaning and import.   In the secret cave of the heart, two are Seated by life’s fountain. The separate ego Drinks of the sweet and bitter stuff, Liking the sweet, disliking the bitter, While the supreme Self drinks sweet and bitter Neither liking this nor disliking that. The ego gropes in darkness, while the Self Lives in light. So declare the illumined sages, And the householders who worship The sacred fire in the name of the Lord. May we light the fire of Nachiketa That burns out the ego, and enabl

  One of the important things I have realised in the last few years is the concept of Tissue banking. The very concept of using tissues and banking them comes from the assumption that after we die the body is simply an inanimate mass of flesh and we need not have any relation or attachment to it. However over the years the attachment to the body has been a part of the culture of different generations. The mummification of bodies in the Egyptian tradition is one extreme from which different religions and traditions have made their customs and rituals accordingly. While we can go on and on about the reasons and evolution of the methods of disposal of dead bodies, one thing is clear that all of us living in this world cling to dear life and are mostly attached to our physical bodies. So as in life when death occurs we tend to not want to let go of the physical presence of our loved ones and miss them enormously. Most of us want to see the body and pay our respects to the body of our loved