Books and my thoughts

I wonder how people survive without reading books. For me it is no less essential than eating food and sleeping, you can postpone them for sometime but you cannot be fine without them.

I have just finished reading 2 States by Chetan Bhagat and it is worth the money. To extract the maximum value, I am planning to approach the 2nd hand book seller for an exchage. I have the Rick Riordan's final book lying with me and I am confident I can get two old books of my choice in exchange of these two new books. To be honest, I don't think it is necessary for every reader to buy a new book. I have survived because of lending libraries, and Hyderabad second hand book market. I can confidently say that there are few writers who start writing for their livelihood and I am also sure that they wouldn't mind if more than one person reads one copy of their book. I don't know why Delhi has no lending libraries. As a reader I am willing to pay 10% of book price to read it and will pay another 10% if I like it and if I want to read it again and again, I would go and buy that book. If the publishers take cognizance of this, they would save lot of paper without loosing much money. I am sure good authors wouldn't mind for this kind of arrangement.

Though I have been reading soft copies in pdf format, I don't like them much mainly because of lack of flexibility to carry and the lighting effect of LCD screen. I don't I'm ready yet for a Kindle or any other ebook reader.

I'm currently reading "Happiness" by Matthew Ricard and the second one is A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson and it is so interesting to see the connections between all these three books. As a human being, endowed with the ability to think, analyse, assimilate, theorize etc etc, we are obligated by nature, life and God (if present as a separate entity) to do something different than other living species, something better not detrimental. Instead of simply eating, sleeping, mating, dying and evolving (and adapting) like other animals, we should do more than simple physical evolution. We should evolve in certain other dimension, people keep talking about emotional and spiritual but I'm not yet sure about what they exactly mean.

This is what keeps me going and makes life interesting, not the money I make or the things I achieve(d) or the things I possess. This process, if you want to call search for meaning or continuous evolution or spiritual journey, is the only thing that keeps me engaged these days. Does it mean I'm satisfied with what I have, I don't think so, I keep thinking about so many things I want to do in future. This happens to be the most interesting phase of my life till now. Hope it will be so forever from now on

My thoughts, mixed randomly

A deep thinking classmate of mine recently shared a link through his gtalk status message. The link led me to arecent post about the commencement address delivered by J K Rowling at the Annual Meeting of the Harvard Alumni Association.

It's a great piece of reading and inspired me to come back to the blog that I have been ignoring for quite sometime. Coincidentally I came across a piece of paper on which I scribbled my thoughts long back, really long back, back then when I had no idea about what I would do in life.

I thought it would be idea not just to share the link that I could relate strongly but also share how my thoughts were long back and still are. Here it goes:

Victory brings delusions to our mind on the other hand failure brings wisdom and development of personality. Person who didn't experience is like the Lord who doesn't know truth. Failure hits truth on your face. Difficult situations evoke divine qualities such as humanity, empathy, unity etc. Great are the chances for a person to become a demon while in pleasure, for thinking to go bizarre and lead to destruction of the man.

Don't blame difficulties rather listen to silent lessons from them. Pleasure is a kind of intoxication. If you are weak, don't surrender to pleasures rather enjoy and let other enjoy life; don't become a pleasure addict. Not everyone may not be able to speak truth all the time, if you are like that too, at least accept the truth, you will slowly realize that only thing permanent is truth. Heart is like a horse, unless you tie the right blinders, it run towards the truth. If you don't do that, it will start wandering and start getting lost in the unreal illusions.

Huh, I never knew it takes so much effort translate something from my Telugu to English. So I take a break now and would come back later. Meanwhile go through
J K Rowling's address and give it a thought.

Friends, let's meet

There is a saying in Telugu that says "Brothers need not be born under the same roof." I have truly experienced this in life. Time and again whenever I was in trouble, my friends have come to my rescue.

It may appear that it is easy to make friends with people who are similar to you. But this is not true; neither is the saying that opposites attract, at least in my case. My friends are so different that if I put them all together in a single they will surely wonder if it is the same Kiran that they all know.

For my schoolmates I was intelligent but bad guy. I always made friends with the back benchers and revolted against the teachers. While I never dared to bunk classes, I was the one my friends depended for their exams. Our combined studies never benefited them but they benefited me.

At college, friends came from different backgrounds. I become close I fought with initially. All my previous bosses are my good friends even today. Few others became my friends because we shared passion towards certain things in life.

I am planning to get all my friends together sometime in December this year at ISB during the Solstice week. I have not started any work on this but this is an event I am looking forward to.

If there is one thing I am surprised about friendship is that it doesn't need any reasons, similarities or commonalities except that you have spent some time together and shared some thoughts and moments together.

Happy friendship day.

Random thoughts about Politics, Economics, and Society

Finally the last major party in AP that was not supporting Telangana has a rift. Devender Goud decided to resign and come out of TDP and pursue telangana on his own. This puts a big question on Naidu's hope to come back in the next elections. While Devender Goud is not a big crowd puller, he can get all the telangana guys in TDP and weaken the party. Devender Goud must be fancying his chances after KCR's TRS failed miserably in the recent bye elections.

One question that occurred to me while thinking about this issue is - How are these politicians able to get so many supporters. I guess the reason is totally economical and then sociological in nature. One side of India's story is that more and more youngsters are getting educated and getting good jobs. On the other hand there are many others for whom life has not changed in any way, in fact it becoming worse for them. While democracy provides the biggest intangible benefit of "freedom" though curtailed due to different forces, tangibles are becoming a problem. The free market economy that is talked about is non-existent in its ideal state anywhere in the world. Even the so-called free market proponent's - UK and US, are not allowing free market fully. The social objectives are not being met by Democracy fully due to the individual indiscipline.

Think about a middle-aged guy who studied till high school and couldn't further it due to various issues - self, family, society etc etc. What can he do in today's economic scenario? Many times his life is stagnant and he is looking for something that he can do enthusiastically, something that can give him social and economic benefits and participation in political action seems to fit the bill accurately. This exactly works in the opposite for a young and educated person in India, which is why we don't see any smart guys entering politics. As the economic divide is becoming bigger and bigger, there will be different forces that try to reduce the disparity, some of them are quite crude. The form of these forces include corruption, theft, cheating, mafia, terrorism, corrupted and self serving politicians etc and etc. Only after the scenario becomes worse by which time the loss from these forces is more than the benefit of ignoring them, educated people would take action to eliminate these forces.

While corruption, theft, crime, mafia, terrorism, naxalism are all viewed negatively, one must keep in mind that all these are due to the failure of political system in achieving social objectives that they are entrusted with.

End of the day what does every human being living wants? They want a happy life, while the "happy" word has different definitions and meanings to different people but broadly everyone should be able to lead a life that he/she would like to as long as their actions do not harm others. Others should not only include human beings but also all other things on earth. The word "Survival" generally indicates a short-termness in nature but similar to "life" it is continuous in nature. One survives or lives every moment, so there is no short-term or long-term to it, it is only our limited knowledge and thinking capabilities that make it short-term or long-term.

There is so much that we human beings have no clue about - including the environment about which there is so much of "green talk" happening, that our ability to take decisions that are good for Earth can be questioned.

As a race we have moved so much away from "basic living" that we have forgot why we are doing all these things. One side is the inquisitive nature of ours that keeps pushing us to explore and understand everything, on the other side we have the pleasure seeking nature that keeps us at work and trying to improve things of comfort. The pleasure seeking nature is the main fuel behind the business world and therefore the search is endless.

Sometimes I wonder that we are forgetting what we need basically need and instead take things for granted. For some reason, human race has chosen to live together and thus created the "Society," which is constantly evolving and the increasing population is a proof that it has been successful so far but the miseries of so many human beings alive is also an indication of its shortcomings. In earlier days, religion attempted to correct the social shortcomings but now religion seems to have lost this capability due to overuse and increasing knowledge.

Looks like it's time for us to cool down a bit and think why we are doing what we are doing and then take a call about what to do next. I know that one person thinking wouldn't make a difference but it can make a beginning. Let's think about this and do something that makes sense.

I know that this post is quite long, complicated and intertwined but I would greatly appreciate thoughts from the readers. Have fun