Uncommon books

Tags

book, life, text, writer, Writing

I feel a sense of responsibility and a tingling of joy in listing some of the books that I have been fortunate enough to have read.

The world has seen and continues to see people who looked at life differently, unlike most of us who are caught in the same pattern of living and thinking, with little or no variation down the centuries. Their books are an invitation to take a journey together into realms of perception uncommon for most of us.

• The Diamond Sutra Translated by Alex Johnson
• The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran
• Freedom from the Known by J Krishnamurti
• Uncommon Wisdom by Fritjof Capra
• A Short History of the World by H G Wells
• Small is Beautiful by E. F. Schumacher
• Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson
• The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle
• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M Pirsig
• The Web of Life: A First Book of Ecology by John H Storer
• Ideas and Opinions by Albert Einstein
• Be As You Are by David Godman
• The Space Within the Heart by Aubrey Menen
• The Illustrated Light on Yoga by BKS Iyengar
• Cosmos by Carl Sagan
• The Gospel of Buddha by Paul Carus
• Walden by Henry David Thoreau

I hope you will enjoy reading these books as much as I have. The thoughts that spring from the pages of these books have been my companions throughout my adult life, and continue to do so even today years after I first laid my eyes on them.

I am presenting the books in no particular order. There is no common theme either. I have not read these books in the order that I have listed here. However, without an exception I am sure you will find them remarkable to a great degree.

The books don’t rely on religion or philosophy, no ideology or any body of knowledge that preceded them. They are unique in ways we are unaccustomed, in thoughts to which we might perhaps have not been exposed, in unraveling truths with which we are not familiar.

I urge you to pick up any book at random, read it leisurely, let the words sink in, read it through to the very end and then come back here to see if what I have written resonates with your experience. I promise you, dear friend, when you have read one, you will want to read more; such is the power of the thoughts in these books. They don’t influence you in any way; rather, they appeal to your innate intelligence in seeing the truth as it is presented therein.

The books belong to no particular genre. Some are drawn from personal experiences, some from research, but all of them bristle with honesty and the truth contained within these pages will stay with the reader for a lifetime. Truth as we all know is timeless and the books that carry it are eternal.

Doctors keep you healthy?

Tags

health, life, medication

Doctors charge by the hour. When you go for consultation, they bill you upfront. After you wait for your turn, you hurry into the consultation room. The doctor nods his/her head and shows you the chair to sit on. With that greeting out of the way, they wait to listen to your problem. Then they scribble something on a prescription paper and sometimes type into a computer and that’s it.

You may have a million questions to ask, but the doctor is done with you. You will soon feel like a guest overstaying. The smile from the dictor’s face is gone, if there was one in the first place. They are now ready to service the next patient. You will be asked to return after some period. If you don’t make it, then you will be charged for the next appointment. You come away partly relieved that you are now in expert hands, but your questions nag you for a while and then quietly subside, for you have to move on, right?

The state of your health is inversely proportional to the doctor’s income. So it becomes necessary for their own well-being to keep you returing to the clinic. In other words you are hooked. You have no other option but to toe the line. You are none the wiser in taking care of yourself. All you have to do is pop some pills, or inject yourselves with some medicine, and according to the doctors, you are good to go.

They doctors don’t have time to spend even ten minutes with you, to know how you live, what kind of food or exercise you take, what other problens you have had in the past, what you need to do now going forward to mitigate the problems you are facing. There is of course no time for all that – time is money, you remind yourself, especially for the doctors. The current state of your health is promising and any amelioration in it is detrimental to the doctor’s kitty.

They don’t ask you if you are allergic to a particular type of medicine. The only way to know if it has adverse side effects is to use them and see if they have any. You go on taking the medicine until the side-effects show up. Sometimes it does not immediately strike you that these new problems you are facing are because of the medication you are undergoing. And by the time your doctor comes to know of it you may have suffered quite a bit before you are given an alternative. Of course there is no guarantee that the new medicine will do its job without any side effects, but that is the nature of allopathy – what can the poor doctor do? Not poor in a pecuniary way, but poor in a sympathetic way.

Of course doctors save lives. There are many among us right now, including me, who have been saved in the nick of time by the administration of timely medicine. But such cases are few and far between. They sound like fairy tales, like acts of god or a miracle happening. It shows how much we trust the doctors or their medicine. We are so used to being locked-in by the hospital or the doctor who is prescribing medicine that occasional acts of cure feel like exceptions.

The cost of healthcare is huge. We rely on medicine to take care of our health, which is a radical shift from earlier generations that relied on food, clean water and fresh air to keep healthy. The quality of food we eat has degenerated to a large extent so we don’t get the protein and nutrition that is required to sustain health. Medicines make up for the lack and the pharmaceutical industry is thriving on account of it.

Doctors are busy day and night prescribing medicines with little time to advise on prevention of health problems. It is easier, quicker and less arduous for the doctors and the patients to work on a cure for ailments after they have surfaced. Too many, far too many people to prescribe for, and too little, far too little time to deliberate on health issues.

Being Aware

Tags

awareness, life, writer

What would I do if I became an invalid? I would go where I am taken by my caregiver.

If I am on my bed, I would watch everything around me as though for the first time. In the greatest possible detail. I would watch the play of light, the shadows, the tiny scratches and marks. Everything is seen as it actually is. Taking in the whole scene and then zooming in to look closely.

People pass by, sometimes nodding at me, sometimes hurriedly without looking at me, often updating me about latest happenings and saying a few kind words. My emotions mimic those of the person next to me. Being helpless I could not think of helping another in any way.

If I am taken outside, I would sit in a wheelchair. Quietly. Watching. Taking in the sight, the light, the sounds of things and voices, the movement of animals and people. Trees hold my attention. They don’t move. They sway with the breeze and shine with the light. Leaves flutter and some fall silently or carried away by the wind. Birds make sounds that only they understand, build nests and feed their young. Nothing goes unnoticed.

I will feel so much alive when I am unable to move. The mind is still because the thoughts have lost their power to move me. Unmoving I can watch everything move, ceaselessly. My body and mind will be still, alert and watchful. All my senses will have become very sensitive to sight, sound, feel and smell. I will become acutely aware of everything around me. The body consciousness will be lost so I will be free from the tyranny of the thinking mind and the aches and sensations of the functioning body.

I wish I could do be like that right now, without becoming an invalid.

Pros & Cons

Not what you think. It’s not one against the other. Rather, it’s one for the other.

It’s the producers & consumers. The world’s commerce is entirely based on these two types of people and institutions.

An acronym came to mind for this paradigm:
UPIC – You Produce I Consume

Any institution that operates globally is definitely a producer, a consumer or both. There are of course individuals too, actually, who are the basic units in this play of Pros & Cons.

Take for instance the internet. The social media, the blogs and websites, the internet services and every transaction that is digital – all attest to this UPIC in operation.

The agriculture is another example of a global interdependence of producers and consumers. So is education, entertainment, and employment.

There’s competition among producers. Producers compete to stay in the market.

There’s imitation among consumers. Consumers desire and demand what others possess. Consumers are always conflicted between needs and wants.

Then there are influencers who position themselves as experts in the products and services offered by the producers. They have emerged as the alternative to marketing campaigns.

However, of late, the producers have built cartels out of influencers. Thereby the line between marketing and influencing has blurred.

The consumers are at a loss to find a quality product or service because more often than not they are at the mercy of marketers and influencers.

Producers and consumers are the two sides of the same coin. You cannot have one without the other. They always go together. However, it’s the influencers and marketers who bring the two sides together for the global commerce to run.

Producers maybe held responsible for producing cartels of influencers in addition to producing dubious marketing campaigns. Or, perhaps, the influencers are coming together to form cartels. While laws are there to check misrepresentation of a product or service through marketing, there is little to curtail the power of influencers.

Consumers, on the other hand, can buy a product or service based on need and not because a few others have it. Also, consumers can test a product or service before making a decision to stick with it. In short, consumers can refuse to be influenced in their needs, either by influencers or by marketers.

Ironically, when consumers become producers, the same dynamics that drive producers operate on them too. One could say, it is vicious.

Social Problems

Tags

anxiety, education, inequality, loneliness, mental-health, social

According to sociologist Hornell Hart, a social problem is indeed “a problem which actually or potentially affects large numbers of people in a common way …”

Whether in developed or in developing countries, every society faces problems, albeit of a different kind, but essentially affecting ‘large numbers of people’.

Hart proposes a holistic approach to resolve social problems, because he says that these problems are interconnected and cannot be solved in isolation. 

He has identified four types of social problems:

1. Economic
2. Health
3. Political
4. Educational

Some of the causes of social problems Hart mentions are:

• co-existence of poverty and wealth
• growing population and depleting natural resources
• factors affecting mental and physical health
• political corruption and power imbalances
• access to quality education 

What is the objective of education and development?

It is basically to improve the well-being of everyone living on this beautiful earth, including nature with its flora and fauna. However, while these two are happening in every society in the world, they are neither balanced nor equally happening in all the societies of the world. Instead of spending time, effort and money on addressing these issues, the governments all over the world are building armaments, joining hands and pursuing isolating policies. Locally they are promising prosperity while globally they are scheming to destroy societies.

Educators and researchers are succumbing to ideologues and politicians are playing the fiddle. The voice of reason is quashed under the rants of bigotry and ideological sophistry.

Addressing the social problems in isolation can only lead to partial and even more controversial solutions. Hart’s suggestion to pursue a holistic approach becomes increasingly relevant in modern times. The world is falling apart from differences in ideologies, differences in races, differences in cultures, so much so that the wars are destroying everything that we have learned and built. Civilizations have come and gone but the real fundamental change in human consciousness has not occurred. Our intelligence is frail and helpless so easily overcome by the forces that are tearing at the fabric of society.

Coding on the iPad

I wanted to be able to tweak code on my GitHub repo sometimes, when I am not on my workstation. My website is hosted on a platform that deploys whenever there is a code change in my repo. And I needed a way to be able to do that while on the move.

I have looked into scenarios like a GitHub client app to clone my repo on the iPad. There are a few out there that let you do it for free. You can even open code in an editor and do all the tweaking to your heart’s content. However, there is a catch. When you are done editing, naturally you would like to push changes to the repo. But the apps expect you to either subscribe periodically or purchase it upfront. Even if you do purchase, you need to juggle from the git client app, the editor you are working on and a code compiler app if you are working on a dynamic site.

I have been looking for ways to make it a simple process so that I could be more productive, without having to worry about juggling different pieces of software. And my efforts to find it have not been in vain. The answer I found was here https://switchtoipad.com/features/how-to-use-visual-studio-code-on-your-ipad/.

Following the setup outlined in that post I connected a bluetooth keyboard and a mouse from Logitech to my iPad Pro. That’s it. That is all the hardware you will ever need.

In order to work, you need to open your GitHub repo in a browser (I use Safari because it is safe, apparently). Then on the keyboard just press “.” key. Lo! magically, the VS Code editor opens in the browser and you are back on familiar territory. You can do all your tweaks and push to the repo using the VS Code’s built in git client.

I have tried this and found it the most satisfying way to work on your repo when you are traveling.

The Rambler

For long years I have toyed with the idea of a digital niche for myself. A place where I could share my stuff without constraints. I have now found such a place.

Head over to this website The Rambler at https://the-rambler.onrender.com/. This is my personal website where I have shared my poems, short stories etc. I have also included a section on Python basics and another on English grammar.

The journey from conception to implementation has been enjoyable though it has not been smooth initially. My career in software, after a couple of decades in Mechanical Engineering, has been in Java, mostly on the web. But I needed something quick and easy to implement, something that is available on all hosting platforms and doesn’t cost a bomb.

I took the Python route. I learned Python, played with the web frameworks and finally settled on Flask. The end product is most satisfying and it is generating interest, I am happy to say, among technical people and others alike.

I wanted to keep it simple, no bells and whistles, no fancy animations, no mind-blowing CSS. The content is key and focused on the page without distractions. It is difficult to keep the visitors focussed if there are too many things trying to grab their attention.

The landing page clearly shows the sections and on every page the visitor knows where she came from and where to go to next. This is as easy as it gets. I am looking for ways to add pencil sketches to enliven the stories and I have found a way for that too.

I hope you enjoy the design and the content on my site at https://the-rambler.onrender.com/ as much as I loved building it.

Culture and Religion

Culture is born in a region. It is the way people of a region lived for centuries. The climate and the natural resources of that region dictated their way of life. Cultural traits transferred from generation to generation and so the new born by virtue of inheritance quickly adapted to that region and cultural ethos.

Culture promoted communality. People left their homes,  came out into the streets and participated in communal activities. The festivals marked the seasons, the rites grew out of their beliefs, the education comprised of their knowledge of the region they lived in, it’s soil and the climate and the place it occupied in the Celeste. The attire and the adornments of its members, primarily female, symbolized its cultural identity.

Religion, as history attests to it, began in a region that has already bred a culture. Culture predates religion.

A member of a culture underwent a phenomenal transformation in the psyche and thereby became a conduit for the divine to express itself through the person. This person then proceeded to articulate the discoveries in the language and symbolism of that culture.

A whole paraphernalia of rituals grew around these divine utterances and their interpretations (impossible to distinguish as time went by).

Religion then extended from a personal affair to a communal belief system. The group of people from among the community and closest to the so-called realized person arrogated to themselves the right to proclaim and pontificate in the name of the divine and lorded it over the whole community. Religion was thus subsumed under the culture and became entrenched and bound by it.

Culture may change over time, adapt to new situations, borrow from other societies, or devise new ways of living in a world that is compellingly cooperative, rather than communal and therefore isolating in its function.

Religion, thanks to its cultural base, is also subject to change, and the rise of fundamentalism is a reaction to prevent it.

However, it is important to note that it is not religion per se that is changing. Rather, the change is seen in the manner in which it is practised.

Religion, as it is experienced by the person in question, cannot change, for it is over for and with that person.

One may adopt a religion, but not a culture, for it is easy to practise the rituals and hold the beliefs, but culture is a whole lot more than that. It is what produced you in the first place: the dress you wear, your mannerisms, your gut reactions, language and everything you identify as the ‘me’.

e experienced the divine transformation. Rather than propounding a new religion or a sect, they explained the essence of divinity in the language and beliefs of that culture.

It appears that religion belongs neither to a region nor to any culture. Rather, it is expressed by and for individuals and therefore not a cultural or communal affair.

Power

There is power in numbers. The combined power of a group is more than the sum of its individual members.

The little pool of water gains strength after it joins a lake. The lake in turn becomes stronger when it is fed by a river. The power of the ocean enters a river when it joins eventually. Power grows by grouping.

In the forest, animals move in packs and droves. We humans derive power from communities. Whether it is a mob, a random group, or an organised group, power lives and grows in it. Religion and politics thrive around organised communities. So also radical and extremist groups. Because in them resides enormous power that the group’s leaders can wield.

Power attracts. A group’s numbers grow much as a magnet pulls iron filings to itself

Devotion

We are awed by the sound of drums beating with metronomic regularity by a mechanical device. Clapping and nodding with it we endure with pleasure the long line of people awaiting a glimpse of the deity. Carved in stone, clothed in silk, decorated with a garland of flowers and kumkum, the idol is made to look resplendent in the dim light. The chanting of the priests adds rhythm, the burning incense, the handheld diyas, all this creates a sensation that we have come to equate with devotion. 
The idol looks like any other we have seen before, made in the likeness of man and woman, an animal or a cross between. This is the god we have come to believe as our saviour. Not knowing the true essence of God, we offer oblation to an image of ourself, to which we relinquish our responsibility for all our actions. The God is endowed with human qualities – s/he can get angry, retaliate, expect subjugation, terrorise us with dire consequences and so on. All the so-called gods were in fact men with unusual capacities. Even the women who lived a devout life eventually transformed into a goddess. Men represented Shiva or Vishnu and women their consorts. And the tales woven around them are sometimes like our own and sometimes outright bizarre. But a human family nevertheless – we are talking about gods here and our adoration to them which can be seen as nothing but fantasy. 

Is it because we love our own invention that truth eludes us?