Friday, August 31, 2012

As You Receive, So You Should Give


Ex-President of India Sri Abdul Kalam answering a question by the BBC:

Qn:
Please define Birthday.

Reply:
It's the only day in your life when your Mother smiled when you cried! 
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Comment:
The cry signalled the first sign of your life after nine months of nurturing in her womb from a speck to a full-grown baby and, after safe delivery, until you learned to sustain by yourself as an adult.
Don't let her cry in her old age when she needs your help. 

Inaction signals absence of nurturing by you.
It is Nature's Law (dharma) that Giving and Receiving are reciprocal acts. The Law is implanted as instinct in all Beings except humans who, with their intellect, are expected to act according to Dharma. 

The tree that grew from a seed gives back a seed to enable growth of another tree.
The bee that receives honey from the flower gives back
by helping the flowers make seeds.
Hence it is that Khalil Gibran advises us "
to go to our fields and gardens" 
to learn this dharma of Giving and Receiving:
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Khalil Gibran's advice on giving and receiving:
Go to your fields and your gardens, and you shall learn
That it is the pleasure of the bee to gather honey of the flower,
But it is also the pleasure of the flower to yield its honey to the bee.
For to the bee a flower is a fountain of life,
And to the flower a bee is a messenger of love,
And to both, bee and flower,
the giving and the receiving of pleasure is a need and an ecstasy. 
Be in your pleasures like the flowers and the bees.   -- Gibran in 'Prophet'
MKK
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What Death Taught Me About Life

--by Thao Phi, Aug 30, 2012   http://www.dailygood.org/view.php?sid=305  
A part of my summer internship with ServiceSpace.org involved initiating conversations with people I didn't know, and one question I'd ask them is what do they know for sure in life? Something they know with certainty. When I was initially asked this question, the immediate answer that came to mind is death. Death is everywhere. And I don't mean death is everywhere in some cynical or morbid sense, but death is an inevitable part of life. Rather than seeing death as something good or bad, it is just something that happens.
 
When I was 12, I attended a boarding school that was also a temple. My parents came to pick me up to for winter break. My mom was planning on staying at the temple for a retreat, but I pleaded her to come back since I would finally be home. My mom listened to me, and we began heading back to my house. Dusk was drawing near, and the rain was drizzling. For the first time since I had gone to boarding school, my parents and I were having a happy conversation in the car without any sign of arguing. I can't say I remember the exact moment it happened; I can't even say that I remember it happening at all. The next thing I can vaguely recall is waking up in a hospital bed, and for the next few days I drifted in and out of consciousness.
 
Death rips you out of a relationship and we are to a large degree the sum total of our relationships. The relationship between a mother and child is especially unique and irreplaceable. How do you tell a child that that relationship has been severed by death? I don't explicitly remember being told that my mom passed away on site of the car accident, but it hit me when it was only my brother, dad, and I on the ride home.
 
There's a quote that says, "When someone you love dies, and you’re not expecting it, you don’t lose her all at once; you lose her in pieces over a long time." And that's how it felt for a long time. Dealing with grief as a child is a very peculiar thing. My mom's funeral was exactly a week after her passing, and I could barely process what had happened by then. I was numb and didn't know what to feel.
 
Death is so abrupt and sudden that we go into a kind of shock. That abrupt ending and then there’s no more. No more taking back all that was done, no more of the things that would’ve been. It is after that one moment that changes everything that anything else is too late. And that was probably the worst part of it all - the grief of not knowing what it would be like if my mom were there for the big and little events in my life, in the world. For years I didn't know what to do with the grief, and it probably manifested in ways that I wasn't even aware of.
 
But over time you come to reconcile with this loss. It's not that you're okay with it, but you learn to accept it for what it is.
 
“Grief can be a burden, but also an anchor. You get used to the weight [and used to] how it holds you in place." My mother's death became an anchor - in some ways it weighed me down. I found myself talking about her death way more than necessary. It was like a sad song repeating itself on a broken record-player. I tried to make it seem like me being so precocious and responsible after my mother's death was in some way triumphant and showed strength. While her death has been one of the worst experiences of my life, I came to grasp that this wasn't the first bad thing to happen to me, and it probably wouldn't be the last. Death can give an obscure and distorted view of reality.
 
In other ways, my mother's death was an anchor in the sense that it helped me stay grounded. When other not-so-good things happen, if I give myself some time and take a step back, the upset becomes smaller. Instead of seeing it as an isolated event of something bad, I can see the bigger picture. In the grand scheme of things, these moments of suffering are complemented by instances of joy. Without my mom around, I've become much closer to my dad and our relationship is great. This brush with death has made me cherish other relationships I have in my life as well. Whether it's because of death or something else, you never know when someone may be permanently gone from your life, and you don't want to take the time you have with them for granted. Her death has helped me be more open and reach out to others for support, and I've met an abundance of dynamic people. And in subtle ways, her death has taught me to be more humble about life.
 
Death is a strange thing. Even though it happens all the time, it can blindside you. To be human is to fully come to grips with how you react and deal with death. Not to be overcome by it, not to be obsessed by it. But not to let it slip too far away that you lose the immediacy of this reality. Because it's in losing something that we so closely identify with that we can begin to find ourselves.
source; http://www.dailygood.org/view.php?sid=305  

Sunday, August 19, 2012

ROBOTS Are Replacing Human Beings

"This is the Future", states this article in NY Times -
What a Future and at what a human cost for the increasing World population estimated at 8 billions by 2020. Jobs in agriculture, factories, businesses, Offices and other Establishments, Homes etc lost to Machines. One shudders in fear at this final stage of mechanisation which started with the industrial age 300 years ago. Praise be to Gandhi and 'Small is beautiful' by Schumacher.

The Times web-site has a picture of a new Tesla factory in Fremont, California where 
"128 robot arms do the same (human) work with yoga-like flexibility. Video cameras guide them through feats well beyond the capability of the most dexterous human".

A quote from the book "Star Sight" seems apt in the present context, advising us to practice self-restraint:
The danger that lies ahead in the near future then is that today's Prometheans, trusting their power to change the future will lead us into disaster and unwittingly pay the heavy price of losing the future itself ! Wisdom therefore, consists in restraint and making our choices in harmony with and not contrary to Nature's laws which we should try to understand fully. With our intelligence, we have reached a stage when anything is possible; it is now time to use our power of discrimination and choose what is holistically desirable for all of us.  
Book:  Star Sight by Patricia Wallace Garlan; Maryjane Dunstan; Dyan Howell Pike (1977)
Read a longer extract from this book at: http://kirtimukha.com/surfings/Cogitation/6Futurists.htm

Extract from the Times article:
This is the future. A new wave of robots, far more adept than those now commonly used by automakers and other heavy manufacturers, are replacing workers around the world in both manufacturing and distribution. Factories like the one here in the Netherlands are a striking counterpoint to those used by Apple and other consumer electronics giants, which employ hundreds of thousands of low-skilled workers.
“With these machines, we can make any consumer device in the world,” said Binne Visser, an electrical engineer who manages the Philips assembly line in Drachten.Many industry executives and technology experts say Philips’s approach is gaining ground on Apple’s. Even as Foxconn, Apple’s iPhonemanufacturer, continues to build new plants and hire thousands of additional workers to make smartphones, it plans to install more than a million robots within a few years to supplement its work force in China.Foxconn has not disclosed how many workers will be displaced or when. But its chairman, Terry Gou, has publicly endorsed a growing use of robots. Speaking of his more than one million employees worldwide, he said in January, according to the official Xinhua news agency: “As human beings are also animals, to manage one million animals gives me a headache.”The falling costs and growing sophistication of robots have touched off a renewed debate among economists and technologists over how quickly jobs will be lost. This year, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, economists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, made the case for a rapid transformation. “The pace and scale of this encroachment into human skills is relatively recent and has profound economic implications,” they wrote in their book, “Race Against the Machine.”
In their minds, the advent of low-cost automation foretells changes on the scale of the revolution in agricultural technology over the last century, when farming employment in the United States fell from 40 percent of the work force to about 2 percent today. The analogy is not only to the industrialization of agriculture but also to the electrification of manufacturing in the past century, Mr. McAfee argues.

Tesla Factory, Fremont, California, USA




Tuesday, August 14, 2012

Role Model for Positive Thinking plus determined Effort

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheena_Iyengar
Sheena Iyengar was born in TorontoCanada in 1969. Her parents had emigrated there from DelhiIndia. In 1972, Iyengar’s family moved to Flushing, Queens, where her father helped establish the first permanent Sikh temple; and in 1979, the family moved to Elmwood Park, New Jersey. Iyengar grew up in a bicultural environment, observing the tenets of Sikhism with her family but partaking in American culture outside of the home.
When Iyengar was three years old, she was diagnosed with a rare form of retinitis pigmentosa, an inherited disease of retinal degeneration. By 6th grade, Iyengar had lost the ability to read, and by 11th grade, she had lost her sight entirely and could only perceive light. Iyengar’s life had also taken another turn in high school; when she was 13, her father died of a heart attack.
In Iyengar’s book, The Art of Choosing, she explains how these seemingly random events and external influences, which shaped her life, led her to become interested in choice:
"My parents had chosen to come to this country, but they had also chosen to hold on to as much of India as possible. They lived among other Sikhs, followed closely the tenets of their religion, and taught me the value of obedience. What to eat, wear, study, and later on, where to work and whom to marry—I was to allow these to be determined by the rules of Sikhism and by my family’s wishes. 
But in public school I learned that it was not only natural but desirable that I should make my own decisions. It was not a matter of cultural background or personality or abilities; it was simply what was true and right. For a blind Sikh girl otherwise subject to so many restrictions, this was a very powerful idea. I could have thought of my life as already written, which would have been more in line with my parents’ views. Or I could have thought of it as a series of accidents beyond my control, which was one way to account for my blindness and my father’s death. However, it seemed much more promising to think of it in terms of choice, in terms of what was still possible and what I could make happen."
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Sheena Iyengar about herself, marriage to Garud Iyengar, family:http://www.columbia.edu/~ss957/about.shtml 
Extract:

"I met the man, Garud Iyengar, who would one day become my husband. We were both waiting for the Marguerite bus at the top of the oval, he with a torn ligament, me just being lazy. Garud asked me to join him for lunch at the Thai Cafe. That was December of 1993. On July 6th, 1997, we got married in a traditional wedding in Bangalore, India. We both joined the faculty of Columbia University in 1998. I teach in the business school, and he teaches in the school of engineering."

  Thumbnail for version as of 15:59, 24 July 2011
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sheena_Iyengar.jpg
Born: November 29, 1969 (age 42)
Nationality American
Alma mater Stanford University, University of Pennsylvania
Occupation
S.T. Lee Professor of Business and Research Director 
at the Jerome A. Chazen Institute of International Business
Employer Columbia Business School 
Known for: academic research on choice 


Shhena Iyengar, Role Model for Positive Thinking and Persitent Effort



Sheena Iyengar
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/ca/Sheena_Iyengar.jpg/170px-Sheena_Iyengar.jpgBorn: November 29, 1969 (age 42)
Nationality American
Occupation
S.T. Lee Professor of Business and Research Director
at the Jerome A. Chazen Institute of International Business
Known for: academic research on choice



Thursday, August 2, 2012

Servant Leadership: Helping People Come Alive


Click on this link for the article:
In his seminal 1970 essay "The Servant as Leader," Robert Greenleaf coined the term "servant leader" to describe someone who has that interest. For such a person, "It begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first. Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead."
A servant leader -- one who wants to serve first and lead second -- strives to create a work environment in which people can truly express these deepest of inner drives. Servant leadership entails a deep belief that people are the greatest asset any organization has, and to nurture their individual growth becomes the basis for all organizational development. That growth goes far beyond the limited dimension of financial benefit -- it dives into our core motivations as people.
In his book Drive, best-selling author Dan Pink talks about the evolution in our understanding of what really motivates people, especially in our professional lives. According to Pink, the latest behavioral science research points to three key drivers: autonomy, mastery and purpose. Another way to frame this is empowerment, perfectibility, and purpose, and servant leaders endeavor to create a culture that fosters each of these three intrinsic motivations: =====================In an ancient parable, three masons are sitting in a row, all chipping away at large blocks of stone. A woman observing them is curious about what they're up to. She asks the first man what he's doing, to which he responds, "I'm chipping away at this block of stone." Indeed, she thinks. She questions the second man similarly, who says, "I'm working to feed my family." Also true, reflects the woman. Finally, she questions the third mason, who responds, "I'm helping to build a beautiful cathedral." It's a powerful perspective -- holding within it a value for collaboration, agency, creativity, and meaning.=================......  by supporting people in finding purpose, servant leaders inspire true, collective service. And it's all done invisibly, such that people can truly feel that they are each "helping to build a beautiful cathedral." In the ancient words of Lao Tzu, "The Sage is self-effacing and scanty of words. When his task is accomplished and things have been completed, All the people say, 'We ourselves have achieved it!'"
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Such leaders are goal-oriented, not seeking name, fame, glory.
They are sthita-pragnyas as defined in the Gita.
Leaving no footprints in their mind as they act dynamically and selflessly, and living their lives without fear,
free from pride and regret, empty, totally selfless and pure in oneself, with no desire, no grudge, at ease
with themselves and with all of God’s creation, subject to no pulls or pushes, the saints are ever blissful
and are always in the present.
Is it any wonder that the most beautiful actions come out of such divine persons? - 
Swami Chidananda