Total Pageviews

Friday, November 6, 2009

Fourth Week - 1

Failure:
Failure is one of the most common happenings in our lives. Only the magnitude of failure makes it bearable or unbearable. In either of the case, one has to fight through it in order to succeed. Failure's properties varies with person, for me they can be:
  1. Weakness : Failure all of a sudden makes me weak and vulnerable, suddenly I feel as if each and every eye is on me and I am the weakest link in the process.
  2. Delusions: It induces delusions in me, which means the difference between fact and fiction becomes hazy.
  3. Procrastination: I tend to waste more time, it forces me into the vicious cycle of procrastination.
  4. Depression: I go into deep depression and tend to dwell more and more about the failure I faced.
These properties are the most common in me. Good news is this that I can register them and can easily identify them.
Still, what happens when you fail in front of peers who took you as their sub-mentor? What happens when a teacher fails? Well, this situation is really embarrassing and puts more pressure on the failed one.
I was supposed to help few of my peers in a particular subject as they were not able to understand it. Somehow I grew overconfident and as a result I myself failed in the mid term exam of that course. This happening forced me into a lot of stress and pressure as
I was embarrassed heavily. Eventually I came out of it by removing all the emotions from my head and analyzing things in a realistic way i.e. by comparing my strengths and weaknesses in this subject.
This thing also made me realize that the best thing I am learning in VIU is how to be specific, how to be exact while doing an analysis and how to reflect it in clear words.
Acceptance of failure is the key, we must understand the need of right amount of confidence in our lives and how we should keep on re-assessing our true potential regularly.

Friday, October 30, 2009

Third Week -2 (Class)

Procrastination: My greatest weakness of all times!
It looks as if procrastination is almost embedded in human nature by default. Still somehow few succumb to it more than others do. I am one of the victims of heavy procrastination.
The worst part is: even after identifying my problem, I am not able to improve upon it. That is mostly because I blame myself for the procrastination I do, instead I must view it as a problem generated from events in life. This is the only way to improve upon it.
We learned in class, how we must avoid procrastination in order to plan our act and then act on plan.There are many techniques I learned in the class and then from my search on internet I found many tools which can help me with avoiding procrastination.
I also learned one more thing about the social and competitive approach of Indian parents which must change now so that we can produce better and more efficient minds. Indian parents always refer to the person, while dealing with their kids in case of time management, instead to the problem. Indian families are nit very closely, which has advantages and disadvantages. A child grows up in a healthy and family oriented environment and learns better with friends among the family. The disadvantage is the unwanted pressure of competition among cousins which makes it difficult for an average kid to cope with. Indian parenting style always foster the competition and builds the pressure and which in the end unintentionally pushes the child into a nexus of high competition-fear of failure-procrastination-failure. This, over a period of time, develop into a vicious cycle and then in the adult age, procrastination becomes a subconscious or almost unconscious attribute of an average Indian mind.
Its high time now that future parents must study this pattern before hand so that they can divert this vicious cycle into a virtuous one.
I am very determined to improve on my habit of procrastination and then removing it finally in the end. I am using all the tools for time management so that I get used to them and then can improve my performance. No doubt, it's very difficult, but constant effort is the key.

"Success is going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm."
-- Winston Churchill

Friday, October 23, 2009

Third Week -1

Mid terms are round the corner and Diwali has passed us by.
The very Idea of having a class on the eve of Diwali brings chills in my body. According to Indian customs, we don't study on Diwali, it's inauspicious, which sounds a bit irrational but thats how some customs are.
This class was again a fun ride as always, the presentation on India filled me up with a sense of proud and may be with curiosity towards India in others.
I'm an avid follower of Gita - the Gospel of life given to us humans by Lord Krishna which is a part of world's oldest and longest mythological document named as "Mahabharat".
It was really nice to find out that Sir Albert Eienstein was a believer in Gita, which turned into a search and I landed on this document :


Bhagavad Gita of Hinduism... the most sacred of all scriptures existing on Mother Earth... the doctrine given to mankind by Lord Krishna is without a parallel! This is the first and only scripture available on Mother Earth that makes it possible for human beings to reach the stage of enlightenment (kaivalya jnana) and finally salvation (moksha).

Bhagavad Gita can never be understood literally. One needs reading in between the lines to understand the essence of Wisdom contained in Bhagavad Gita. Mounted with a bloated ego, wanton desires and greed for materialistic riches most human beings on Mother Earth try reading Bhagavad Gita literally! They remain wherever they are always and ever!

Bhagavad Gita gives the gist of life for both the ephemeral and the inner world. Whenever we get stuck in our day-to-day affairs of life it is Bhagavad Gita that comes to our rescue. Mahatma Gandhi relied on Bhagavad Gita most of the time. In the present times E. Sreedharan the man behind Metro in New Delhi follows the Sacred Bhagavad Gita considering it sacrosanct!

Sri Ramakrishna Paramhansa and Maharishi Ramana... both gained enlightenment in their lifetime by following the Wisdom contained in the Sacred Bhagavad Gita. Both started in search of God through the path of Bhakti yoga. At a certain stage in life the path of Bhakti yoga finally merges with the path of jnana yoga!

Truthfully spirituality is much beyond the fold of science. Spirituality starts from the place where science ends. It is something beyond proofs that paves way to understand the sacrosanct Bhagavad Gita! And that something is the power of absolute faith (aka Shraddha in Hinduism).


In the last moments of his life when Albert Einstein realized his folly... he let go his ego, the search for proofs and Bhagavad Gita started unfurling before him slowly. But it was too late by then. Albert Einstein had grown old and in spite of all his serious desires and wishes in the later stages of his life... he could not assimilate the Wisdom of entire Bhagavad Gita!

Albert Einstein throughout his life wanted to follow Bhagavad Gita from the angle of science. He bitterly failed. Science is necessary for living our day-to-day life. The Sacred Bhagavad Gita makes us reach our true inner self... our soul atman within! The moment one realizes the truth of life... one finally gains enlightenment and then salvation!

Albert Einstein is the only scientist in the world who used his brain 4%. Most human beings never use their brain more than 1%! All enlightened ones use their brain hundred percent! Albert Einstein was far above normal human beings... other scientists of his era! Whatever little he deciphered from the Sacred Bhagavad Gita... he felt absolutely elated!

http://www.vijaykumar.org/albert_einstein_and_bhagavad_gita.html

“When I read the Bhagavad-Gita and reflect about how God created this universe everything else seems so superfluous.”- Albert Einstein.


Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Life is nothing but a right mix of everything.

I have realized lately that out of the box thinking is basically about thinking about the odds.
Life is a right mix of everything, so we cannot ignore every thing and we cannot be caught up in everything either. It's a perfect combination, yet so imperfect that it's always missing of that one more right ingredient to carry on. It is the yearning of that missing ingredient that keeps the life going on.
We had a party last night, a turkey dinner (I'm a Vegetarian although) for thanksgiving thrown by a really cool classmate of mine. I really enjoyed the night, it was fun hanging out with some like minded people who had same concerns as mine : MBA! The party was really fine and the thanksgiving weekend came to a halfway halt...and then moved ahead into the next phase....the study phase.
Some times I think, how hard it would be to not have parties, saving some extra cash and studying instead. I guess, it's not really hard, but is it the right way to go about it? People can have different opinions on that, with different resources and funding, but I had probably the last party of the semester. It will be work, work and work for a while now, but that's what the point is: The Right Mix!
May be it's a mix of unanswered questions and unquestioned answers, but that's how it's going to be for a while.

"What you have to do and the way you have to do it is incredibly simple. Whether you are willing to do it, that's another matter."
Peter F. Drucker

Some reflections are just.....Reflections. Just Neutral, neither positive, nor negative.
So I am continuing the mixing in the pot of life.
HAPPY THANKSGIVING CANADA!

Thursday, October 8, 2009

Second Week - 1

Saturday has always been a half day for me because I am from India where six days working culture is more prevalent. Still, reaching the class 45 minutes earlier than anybody makes you feel a bit miserable and critical about the bus services. Never mind, sun shine helps me to ward off any ill-feeling in the morning.
So it happened that our class was already occupied by some other group, we re-organized ourselves in the nearby class (with no windows so no sun shine).
Paul's lovely gesture of bringing tea and chocolate for us is always a nice feeling and a percentage of it brings me to class on every Saturday.
  1. We started with a 'thinking out of the box' exercise. A case was given to us and we had to present it in more reader friendly text and then in Pictorial form according to BCG (Boston Consulting Group) Matrix. I didn't knew about BCG Matrix, so I made my own thing.
  2. What I discovered during the exercise that thinking out of the box means closing your mind to other trivial activities happening around you and the information trash in your head. This is the only way by which you can really think out of the box. I also learned about the importance and essence of reader friendly text and Pictorial depiction of information.
  3. Then we moved ahead with some examples on adaptation of local preferences and culture by a product in order to have a proper and smooth induction in the market. We did an exercise in which we tried to adapt and market a product in a foreign land. The decision necessary for this specific exercise was, Do we really need to adapt something or to what degree we have to change the product? My group had Bandana as our product to be marketed in Japan. We made a Kotler's Diagram for the Bandana and then gave appropriate responses according to the adaptation possibilities. I learned about how a product can identify the possibilities of an entry in to a foreign market without hurting its companies global goodwill. It can be done with the help of culture and preference study of that foreign market.

All in all a nice week and good stuff to work on for the team project.

Cheers!

First Week

It's almost the middle of October and sun is still shining on Nanaimo. What more can you ask from life...well may be a class on Saturday!

"The first and the best victory is to conquer self." Plato
I already mentioned about our first 'double' class on Saturday with a barbecue lunch in my first blog, so lets move ahead. A soccer match followed by a long class is not exactly my idea of a perfect weekend but alas, here I am. It was tough and I really ran hard and noticed to my surprise that I have weakened my stamina over the period of time by not taking part in any games or physical activity for long. This ringed a bell in my mind that I am 26 now and have crossed more than a quarter of my useful life, and I must do something to preserve the remaining. Instantly I made plans with Nikolay for a weekly workout but have not been able to trigger it yet. Still, I am alarmed as my body should support my goals.
Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being, and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity. ~World Health Organization, 1948

I will start pretty soon with the workout regime so that I can gain on my Stamina and feel young because I still am young!

CHEERS!

Vibhor.

Saturday, September 26, 2009

God is a Pixel


Ever since I had my first encounter with the fact that God exists in each one of us, in every substance and matter and in practically everything that is visible to us and in those even which are not visible to us, I’ve wondered….How?

I was not able to figure it out. Despite of my inability to make a sense out of it, I completely believed it. Well, this started after I had an experience which according to any normal human being was disastrous in nature. Anybody would have resorted to drinking, smoking or any other mind diverting stuff to get out of it. People do face difficulties in life and that’s what marks their climb ahead. Every person deals with problems and difficulties in their own unique ways. I had mine. Instead of resorting to mind diverting ideas or ways, I resorted to god. I believed in God since ever but I never tried to study him. Then when I was going through this grey patch of my life, when everything was falling apart and it never seemed to get back in shape, I tried to find solace in God. Now, again this is nothing special. Many others have done that before and many are going to do it further. However, this was the time when I realized, somehow, if I’m right, why God is omnipresent!

All life we study, learn and forget and then re-study, re-learn and re-forget. This is a never-ending cycle. In the mean while we grab few things which we never forget, we never have to learn them again and we never study them again. This net result of this lifelong exercise more or less decides what kind of personality we belong to. Some learn fast, some learn slowly, some can remember it some cannot. All these variations make us more and more diversified. No matter how diversified we become in the case of personalities, we’ll still stand on the same platter when we breathe. Nobody breathes differently. There are number of things which we do in a perfectly similar manner no matter how different we are. So this means that we all are similar and connected in some way or the other. Believe me; all the great things in this world are simple in nature. God is one of them!

When we re-examine this statement that, “God is Omnipresent”, we will quickly take it as a hypothetical statement which motivates us towards religion and belief. It certainly looks like one, but if we study it more closely, we’ll understand the logical aspect of it. Long back when I was in 5th or 6th standard, I learned in my mathematics class that you can never draw a line because a line is infinite. Whatever you can draw is a line segment but not a line. When I see it more closely, I can see one more property of a line except that it’s limitless in nature. If a line is infinite while running both ways, one can never determine a start, middle or an end to it. While line segment is the most important thing in Geometry, a line, which is in a way is the mother of the line segment, is ambiguous in nature. Why is it so? It defies our logic and our ability to prove. So, you can never draw a line because if you’ll do so, you’ll end up drawing a line segment. You can never start drawing a line, can never reach its middle and hence there is no end to it!

We’ll leave line to where it is. Let’s talk about a pixel. What is a pixel? Pixel: Each of the small areas of uniform illumination of which the image is formed on a television or computer screen etc. This is the literal meaning. Pixels join each other and create an image. A pixel or a point is the lowest unit of a picture. To testify this you can enlarge any picture to the maximum and you’ll find small pixels joined in a manner so that they can form a shape. Here is the catch, all pixels join and make a beautiful picture, but what are these pixels made up of? Well, if u guessed it, u are right, another set of pixels! Again, take one pixel out of this set and try to determine what this pixel is made up of. Another set of Pixels!! Can you reach somewhere? I’m not sure. You can never ever find the last pixel! That’s because the last pixel is always made up of another set of pixels. There is a limit of zooming into it but there is no limit of its existence. This goes the other way round as well. If you zoom out from the picture up to the maximum, it’ll become a pixel in itself. A picture itself is always a part of a bigger picture. It’s a block that we take out from the complete view. If we start joining these pictures together by zooming out and converting them into a pixel, we’ll again never be able to find an end of it. We can keep on zooming out and we’ll get a picture of our planet in between and then still we can zoom out and will reach our galaxy but we can zoom out still more to convert that galaxy into a pixel! Universe never ends. Take an example of Google Earth. You zoom in to your city and then to your home and then you can zoom out and see the earth as well. So this way we can deduce the properties of a pixel. It never starts, there is no middle and there can be possibly no end to it. As you can see pretty easily now that properties of pixel and line are somewhat similar in nature. There is a difference though. A line is always made up of pixels but a pixel is never made up of lines. Even if you say that a square pixel consist of horizontal and vertical lines, still those lines are again made up of pixels!

Pixels and lines are inter-related though and in a very beautiful manner. A line J passes through a pixel say X, this imaginary X is neither a start nor middle and definitely not an end of this line. This pixel is just a random point on this unlimited line. Random it may be but X can be a point of concurrence between line J and another line K. Now we are talking about only two lines here but can you determine how many lines can pass through this pixel named as X? If we imagine it in our head, thousands of lines passing pixel X, slowly the unison of this pixel as a center point and all the lines passing will emerge into a circle. Now as we know for sure that lines are limitless, can you determine the circumference of this circle or the area of this circle or the diameter? It’s impossible.

Still, while if some of us are trying to determine the size or value of above quantities, again there can be innumerable circles amidst circle one. There can be infinite lines passing from other circles as well, consisting of infinite pixels. Infinity is taken as a value in mathematics in order to prove some typical problems, but infinity is an imaginary value, no one can determine it. One can apply science with the definite values only. Something which is indefinite in nature goes beyond science and human intelligence. Our planet looks like a pixel when we zoom out and see Milky Way in form of a picture. We live in this pixel. And we ourselves are a part of this pixel. We ourselves become a pixel somewhere!

Let’s come back to the statement of God being Omnipresent. We surely do believe that God is everywhere, and then too we are not able to find him. That is because we forget that we are a part of that, ‘everywhere’. If God is really there everywhere, then I say that God is a Pixel. We are a pixel too. Anything which is so abundant in nature that we are unable to determine the start, middle or an end of it, is bound to be God only. We think of God as our savior and our mentor, which he surely is but we must understand this fact that God is the material from which we all are made. No matter how good or bad we are we were produced from the same material that is God. Zooming out resembles to leave a focus and looking at a bigger picture. Leaving a focus, leaving a position, leaving a smaller block of picture, in short, leaving brings us near to something much bigger. If you keep zooming out of the short picture, you are leaving something but technically you are gaining more. Being an ascetic connects you more with the material of life. No matter how much you zoom out, the picture you are looking at will still be a pixel of a next bigger picture. You can determine the size of your pixel, if you want to see god in the form of an astronomically large galaxy or in the form of a simple dot on a piece of paper, it depends on you.

God will remain same everywhere!

Saturday, May 16, 2009

Preamble.

ॐ नमोः भगवते वासुदेवाय !

Hi friends and all....
well since long i wanted to share my thoughts with everybody and anybody...
I'll take some time to start...
till then...
न बचा बचा के तू रख इसे, तेरा आइना है वो आइना...
के शिकस्ता हो के अज़ीज़तर हैं निगाहें आइनासाज़ से.....