Nelson, my man.. my mai'Man

Last week after what can only be described as a long and ardous work day, came home, made some tea, sat on the couch and logged into Facebook. 

The news feed had at least 25 references to Nelson Mandela passing away. If I were to plot a histogram of the number of letters on the post (including forwarded or attached links) it would look something like this..

Granted I rounded off the letters, but still this is a fairly accurate picture. Where was I? Yes, it appeared as though my main man Nelson had carpet bombed my Facebook feed through my friends.  The one long post was a cut paste job of how the US as a country was actually trying to keep Mandela in prison as long as they could, call the ANC a terrorist organization, supported the South African government in his initial capture, etc.  and pretty much stopped short of saying "if you are American, don't bother talking about Mandela". 

After digesting the news feed at the end of the long day and doing some Googling, Twittering, etc. I came to the following conclusions:

1. Nelson Mandela had definitely passed away, and given the outpouring, had already rested in peace. It was a sure thing for the man.

2. On that day people all over the world probably said "RIP Mandela" instead of the usual "Jai Ram Ji ki" , "Allah o' Akbar" or "Praise the Lord" .. Hell even the Namaste in the Yoga room was probably replaced by "RIP Mandela". 

3. There was a clear trend of certain articles related to Mandela, but the surprising ones were the US is no friend of Mandela variety which were getting more rounds than the "did you know his middle name was Troublemaker?" type articles.

Given all this Mandela, I asked the kids "Do you know why Nelson Mandela was?" and the little one, crackerjack (mundhiri kottai translated wrong) that she is, said and I quote verbatim:

Yes. I know! Mandela was a good guy who fought for the freedom of "Africans", then they put him in jail for a long time and when he finally came out he won and helped the Africans, but the guys he fought didn't like him and so they shot him"! 

I was like "Wow".. Someone just rewrote history and mixed up MLK with Mandela. I know there are parallels with respect to fighting for black people.. but seriously! So, I broke the news to her that Mandela did die "peacefully" in his bed at the ripe age of 95. San may have had a hand in this history lesson is my guess.. 

Now where were we again? Ah, yes! Mandela had passed away. We went to Jr's winter concert band performance at her school and guess what ? The conductor is dedicating "Mozart's last requim" to Mandela as a fitting tribute. Irrespective of how he was remembered while alive, Mandela had definitely touched anyone and everyone for 24-48 hours at least, in an all pervasive way by dying.

My initial rant at seeing all the forwards was "Why are people melting icebergs by forwarding things in the name of showing some respect to a dead world leader?" Ok, I know there are folks going "what? Melting icebergs?". Let me explain.

In my day job, I make a memory. All of you use memory all the time without realizing it. When you do that harmeless "R.I.P. Mandela" post on FB and send it to all your friends, it gets written in a lot of places on a lot of memory chips, disks, solid state drives etc. Now it takes energy, a very small miniscule amout to write and read this data. However, this adds up. Just do the math. A few picoJoules of energy multiplied a few Qunitillion times is already in Mega Joules.. again crude math but you get the picture!

Was just thinking aloud "what is the piont in making a better memory and giving it to people if they don't use it wisely.. the more memory you give, the more RIP posts are going to go around. More folks will instagram their dinner. . still more icebergs will melt etc. etc." Did I say it was a long day?  Did come around eventually to accepting that irrespective of what I thought, today the world is more connected than ever and it is okay for everyone to connect in whatever way they want. Trying to regulate how someone uses something like memory was a stupid thought in the first place. Probably ranks on snobbery! So I stand corrected. 

That said, my kids did ask me what I thought of Mandela or what I knew of him as though I was supposed to know him very personally. So here is what I remember of Mandela ..

It was the late eighties. Prannoy Roy had a wonderful program that aired late night on Doordarshan (only Indian channel at the time) called "The world this week". In that we would get glimpses of world events. We got to see video clippings of Mandela and Apartheid. It was like watching the caste system on steroids running out of control and one man who was the voice of reason. I didn't give him even 50/50 odds at the time of repealing Apartheid. 

Early nineties. I come to the USA as a student to Philadelphia. Back folks don't have the same status as white folks when it come to financial equality but it was heartening to see the US as a true melting pot of races. In a way it was great that my entry to the US was in Phili that gave me this rosy view of the US. If I had gone to some place in the mid-west, my outlook on the country would have been very different. Mandela becomes president, Apartheid is no more and we are now discussing real important issues in the grad student lounge on what this means to Cricket, Allan Donald, Alan Lamb, Gary Kirsten.. etc.   Most of you won't understand, but some of you will! This meant the Indian team would be one more down in the world rankings after yet another country, "South Africa" now kicks its butt in Cricket. It was too much to bear.  On the bright side, there was one blackish looking dude in the South African squad. It was kind of like a precursor to watching Obama become president.

Mid nineties. Remember having a conversation about Mandela with another student at RPI. "why would she divorce him after going through all that?". It was a conversation on divorcing at 70+. At the end of the conversation it was clear that I did not understand Mandela, Winnie, people in general or the concept of divorce.

Then things changed in my life. Mandela was mostly forgotten as was cricket. There was the occasional news that he was sick, dying or both and a potential backlash if he died. Never got that. Given that it has been almost 20 years since Apartheid was lifted and things have improved slightly, why would South Africans suddenly erupt in violence if a good man died at a ripe age after accomplishing something so phenomenal. Unify two races after hundreds of years of animosity and oppression? 

The answer came to me in a flash! Why did people in Tamil Nadu go vandalize shops and disturb law and order when MGR (an actor turned politician) died ? He was no Mandela, but the crowd went into a frenzy. So maybe the press was right in their thought process? 

Well, the good news is that the man and the country whose people he unified, are both resting in peace almost a week after he passed away. 

If anything, that is the true legacy of my main man Nelson! 

Knowledge is power.. looks like it!

This post may not make sense without a preview.

Almost two years ago, after realizing that the whole object of the physical aspect of Yoga, was to condition the mind to do better things, had tried a few meditation experiments which had weird side effects!

You can read about them here..

This blog is not new to my thoughts on Knowledge, higher learning and how it links to the way I was raised etc.

Recently, in an attempt to know more about the meditative aspect of Yoga, yours truly stumbled on a video link on Youtube, where Sadhguru a self realized mystic, talks about meditation, spirituality etc. It was an hour long talk recorded at Dartmouth.

Since watching that video, there was a wish to meet Sadhguru in person. Last month, we saw a booth at a local Indian festival where Sadhguru's organization "Isha" gave us a flyer that anounced his bay area visit will include a three day lecture on Inner engineering and also teach the "Shambhavi Mahamudhra" for all the attendees who make it to the last day.

This happened to be on the weekend of the Navarathri festival. After a lot of negotiating with Sangeetha and the kids, they agreed that I should go, because it had been a wish for quite a few months at that point. So off I went to meet Sadhguru and missed Saraswati pooja and Vijayadasami.

Sadhguru was as charming in person, as he was in the Youtube videos. He mostly spoke of common sense things, which we all know deep down but refuse to see head on! At least, that was my take on it.

The 2 1/2 day event was from Friday 5PM-9PM, Saturday 8AM to 7PM and Sunday 7:30 AM to 7:30 PM. Friday was a long talk by the mystic. Most of Saturday was spent on teaching folks preparatory exercises to get the spine in some shape, as well as the breathing to some sense of control before the Mahamudra was to be attempted. He taught the Shambhavi Mahamudra as the grand finale on Sunday. 

There were lot of breaks, good music and some dancing to keep the participants engaged on Saturday and Sunday, so that the food they ate made it past their stomach, before more exercise could be tried. It was a relaxing weekend for a lot of selfish reasons. For some strange reason I got visions of staring at snow out of a Days Inn window in Bloomington, Minnesotta after sitting in the same spot for a good hour listenting to Sadhguru talk.

Here was my take from the whole event.  I am going to review this, the way any "event" or "movie" has been reviewed in this blog. It was exactly that, if you looked at it as a participant in a self help workshop that my former employers have sent me to in the past. Be it a speed reading course, precision questioning and answering course or an interpersonal skills training management workshop, or for that matter a Hatha Yoga all day workshop aka Posture clinic, at the end of the day, you come out with some critical takeaways on how to do something and know what works and what doesn't!

First, the good part!

All those side effects I had experienced when trying to do something along the lines of Shambhavi, by following other Online Yogis, was to be expected! The white lights, the blinding flashes in the point 1/2 inch above the spot between my eyes on the forehead, body going through froglike convulsions, tears flowing on their own etc. wer okay and nothing to be scared of! My body experienced happiness and clam and these were initial physical manifestations of that and nothing more.

There are different teachers who have their own methodology for getting you to do this. Some folks ask you to lock your breath in after doing a series of breathing exercises (called Pranayaamas which literally means "to elongate the breath"), some make you do it while attempting to disengage all sensory organs and some folks expect you to just jump up like frogs to get you kick started into a "state of happiness".  Think of the last one as starting a car and then giving it some gas vs. pushing a car down a ramp and sparking the enginer. As long as the sparking and the movement overlap within a short time, you get to go places! 

The good news is that now I know one safe and tested way to do this meditation. So far it is working, as far as calming me down. It works especially if you do it after a 90 minute Bikram Yoga session, where your body is literally in pieces and your breath is clam after the class. Sadhguru referred to this as "Accumulating Ojas" or "Stealing from the earth". Have been doing this "garnering Ojas" exericse once a day and will continue to do it on a regular basis whenever I finish a Bikram Yoga class, travel permitting.

To express it in my own nerdy way, it is like formatting a section of my hard drive which has a lot of garbage files in it. The breathing and meditative part of the 21 minute routine (which is like a 11 mintue sub-routine) cleans up the head nicely of thoughts, positive or negative. It is a brain reboot of sorts. I am reasonably sure that western science will catch up to this and find out eventually which part of the brain gets a flood of oxygen and is subsequently starved of oxygen to get this whitewash effect. I will volunteer to be a subject on this study as well. 

Also learned a few interesting tidbits of information from Sadhguru during his two hour long informal talks to keep the audience engaged. Facts do not make knowledge but intellgience does, and Sadhguru seems to follow that. Nevertheless, there were lot of facts.  Some of those were :

- The three primary sounds are Aaa Oooo and Mmmm which are the only sounds you can make without a tongue. All other sounds are made of combining these three sounds just like all colors are made of primary colors. This is why AUM has a symbolic representation and is chanted in India as part or meditative practice. It is distored to OM in South India and that makes us forget the significance of Aaaoooommm!

- There is a reason why the number 108 is used in counting repetitive manthras and chants. The ratio of the distance from the Sun to the diameter of the Sun, ratio of distance from Moon to diameter of Moon are both 108! I did verify this to be a true fact and surprisingly it was never mentioned in any of my science or math classes. Still do not know if the 108 was to remind us of some astronomical facts or there was more to it but it was interesting. I tried to do a spreadsheet with distances of planets to the earth and their diameters to see other patterns and did not find any. So this was all the more of an interesting coincidence that people 4000 years ago had figured this out without modern day telescopes.

- There are certain foods that help you when you meditate and some that deter you. Now this part I could figure out by myself while doing Bikram Yoga. Having food allergies and doing my own tests to instinctively avoid foods that caused my breathing to deteriorate, had helped figure this out. Most of what he said in this part of the talk had already been put in place at home. 

So that was the good part. 

Now for the sad part!

With every person who achieves something special in his/her field, be it a movie star, a world famous scientist, a religious or spiritual guru, certain things seem to be inevitable!

First, the person ends up becoming a public figure, if he/she proliferates a message to a wider audience.

Next, they cannot do this alone. The thing doesn't scale without a pyramid scheme of sorts.

This is usually followed by an organization that is built around the person or the message.

Finally this organization then takes on a life of its own.

The seed that grew into a banyan tree is now taken over by many creatures and at some point what seemed to be a nice small tree that miraculously sprung forth from the seed, is now spanning hundreds of square meters and has rotting branches in places, that coexists with birds, critters and people who come to enjoy the shade. 

Be it a rabid SRK fan club, a bunch of scientists who hang on to some all time great's papers and research even if it violates the very principle of what true scientific enquiry is all about, the Crusaders, Jihadists or Hindu militia, they have a similar issue.  

When anyone who gets enlightenment (you can even take this down a notch and say accomplishes something extraordinary) wants to show you the light by holding it up, there are three types of interactions with that light. There are those who want to see the path the light illuminates and use it to go places. There are those who do not want the light and they go hide in darker places.  Last but not least, there are the moths! They are fatally attracted to the light and don't get anywhere. 

This phenomena is not restricted to godmen or spiritual leaders. Have seen this happen to athesists. A former TamilNadu Chief Minister and long time poet, scholar, screen writer and politician has my respect because he talked about believing in oneself and not in god. His ardent followers decided to call him "a god" at which point I shook my head and said "they will never learn"! It is not a problem with the concept or the person. It is a problem of scalability of any message and all the issues that come with it.

The crowd at the event, seemed to be low on IQ. There was a lot of "ooh"ing and "aah"ing at things that were not exactly "ooh" and "aah" worthy! Maybe I am not used to moving in such a crowd that is so bereft of any knowledge, that little things seem like a big deal to them. 

There was also another aspect of the event that was a little annoying. There were two messages that were repeated multiple times over the event. First,  "you are all not smart enough to know beyond this.. so just do as I say and you will be happy" followed by, "this is top secret stuff and in the wrong hands it will be devastating. This method has been dumbed down to reach folks like you so beware and behold.. " , talk that was simply insulting. Then again, maybe it was a good thing, given that the crowd was actually soaking that in! 

There is only one thing that is worse than organized religion and that is organized spirituality!

Spirituality transcends religion. We all have a body that is give or take the same and a mind that is capable of doing similar things. If this was an exercise in achieving one's full potential with this body and mind, there are many ways to get there with the end result being the same. This is one other map to the same destination with its milemarkers clearly defined and that is all there is to it!

Sadhguru is genuine when he talks about the body, mind and spirit. He has a higher intelligence which on a personal basis he is able to apply. 

There are places where he does blur concepts from Hinduism into spirituality which was okay by me, because Hinduism is not defined the way other religions are. It is open ended to the point I have created a god for "first silicon" and I pray to it in my own way. At some point I plan to get enough money to build a temple for the supreme godess "Siliconeshwari" somewhere in Silicon Valley with an idol made of pure undoped Silicon. Devotees need not worry, as there will be brances in Austin, Portland, New York, Dresden, Shanghai, Taiwan, Singapore and Beijing, just to cover the prominent locations.

Any guru, self realized or otherwise, shoud not mock the people who come to learn something from him or her. I am told by many folks that Bikram Choudhury apparently does it in the teacher training sessions. So did Sadhguru. Maybe this is to appeal to the masochistic in the student to want to punish himself by going through a "tough" learning process? Maybe it is their way of playing to the inferiority complex in the "students"? I do not know. It did not feel good. 

Then again, there were too many moths that are attacted to Sadhguru's light. There are too many people who simply did not get the message. They were trying to buy spirituality at 100$ / hour and trying to transform themselves into spiritlandia by wearing bindis, chanting things they did not understand and wearing Rudhraksh garlands without understanding its significance.  Same things happen at Bikram Yoga class where I see folks on 40$ Yoga mats, paying 300$ for a three month membership and sitting in the last row on their mats watching others sweat it out over most of the 90 minute class. It takes a lot of hard work and sincere determination to effect any change in the body or mind, a fact in itself that is not something most folks realize or accept!

That was the bad part.

The whole thing could have been done in a day, but given the audience and the fact that he was trying to cover +/- 3 sigma in the distribution it was a tall order.  

It was a weekend well spent as I did do a lot of reflecting and focussing. Got to realize that there was no need to have been scared with those "side effects" in the past. If done right and regularly, this type of meditation works wonders for calming the mind. It was also good in another way.

I kept thinking "Are these people for real? These folks live around me? How could a person be in such a helpless state? Wow, these folks are really ignorant and they have no idea what they are talking about or gettin into!" etc. etc. There are lot of people around us who need help both physical and psychological and it is no easy task to help them.

How we help them is up to us, but help we must or looking the other way will come back and bite us. That part of Sadhguru's message was right on.  

On a final note... be aware of the moths!

Language barrier

Last weekend my twitter feed was going non stop, and most of those tweets were #chennaiexpress, the new Shahrukh Khan movie. 

Most of these tweets were taking offense to how south Indians were stereotyped in this movie and how the Tamil spoken by the heroine and hero were offensive because no one who speaks Tamil actually talks like that.

Think Apu of Simpsons. Indian's don't speak like that. Apu stood for all Indians which was a higher level of sterotyping. My grad student friends would say hello to me in the Apu accent! Initially it was annoying, but then again, I leant do come back with some pretty good comments on my own.

The world hasnt moved much in 20 years of my staying in the US. Twenty years ago someone asked me "so you speak Indian?" and as late as three months ago, someone asked me the same question. One would assume that in a place where 1 in 5 people is Indian and Samosa and Tea are as staple as Pizza and Soda at any birthday party, folks would know that there is no language called "Indian"... but one assumes wrong!

Was very busy with work and that meant waiting to watch Chennai Express. Finally got to see it and thoroughly enjoyed it.  There are some prerequisites to enjoying this movie. 

1. You should be an SRK fan. 

2. You should have watched all his previous films (or some of the jokes are lost on you). I was laughing out so loud when he says "I have done this earlier too" while pulling the heroine into a moving train..

3. You should not be easily offended by stereotype jokes. Watching a lot of Russell Peters, Maz Jobrani, Ahmed Ahmed etc. helps. 

4. You should get the jokes!

All that said, I had no issues with SRK who was his usual self which is what I go to watch in an SRK movie. A goofy ham of a performance. The movie was abmling along nicely till they decided on a 10 minute fight scene at the end. Why? 

In the hands of a better director, this storyline would have made a better movie.. and maybe he/she would have dubbed the heoines Tamil dialogues and it would have been a bigger hit with South Indian folks as well!

Just when I was telling San that the movie was fun, the little one says "I have an episode of our favorite serial called The Littlest Pet Shop and you are going to love it!"

So they play me this on Netflix online and it was a laugh riot. SRK being spoofed on a kid's serial!

Hopefully you clicked on all those links and immunized yourself from getting angry at language sterotypes and then watch Chennai Express.

You might enjoy it!