Dreams and Destiny

“And, when you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it."
                                                                                         - The Alchemist defining Destiny

"Dreams are successions of images, ideas, emotions, and sensations that occur involuntarily in the mind during certain stages of sleep."
                                                                                             - The Wikipedia taken from The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. 2000. Retrieved 2009-05-07

So just like the chicken and egg conspiracy, dreams and destiny are also quite interlinked and its difficult to predict what comes first.Dreams have been subject of study in philosophical and psychological contexts.It has also been part of "Visioning" or "Day dreaming" that a lot of men do and succeed in.

"He believes in his dream for, ‘It’s the possibility of having a dream come true that makes life interesting"

On the contrary, there is also a Freewill  theory that states that Character is non deterministic. So probably dreams and destiny are also not related.One of the key lessons for me in destiny had unfolded last year leading to a life long tag.This was not something that I had dreamt of but probably some one else had already conspired about it.And all the universe conspired in achieving the goal and help it in making part of my destiny.Probably it was all about freewill.

These have been moments of doubts, lack of self confidence and a lot of detachment.I don't know if and when will I be back to normal.But going into a down time brings a lot of courage in you and makes you relate that in the end its only between you and God.

"Courage is the most essential to understanding the Language of the World…"

No one will remember you for the colleges you went or the companies you worked for or PPTs you had made or the happy family trips or the functions /get togethers you went to.

"Don’t think about what you have left behind, everything is written on the Soul of the World, and there it will stay forever…"

Its about the journey that one takes and has to take with courage. Dreams and Destiny will always conspire to take you to the next station and probably even further in this never ending learning of life.Not everything in life can be planned and surprises will happen.Else life will be too monotonous for any dream to be achieved or destiny to be realized.

"When the old man says, “The Soul of the World is nourished by people’s happiness. And also by unhappiness, envy, and jealousy. To realize one’s destiny is a person’s only real obligation. All things are one.”

And now even the below lines start making sense to me :-
"You must understand that love never keeps a man from pursuing his destiny. If he abandons that pursuit, it’s because it wasn’t true love".

“If a person is living out his destiny, he knows everything he needs to know. There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: The fear of failure."

Probably last year this time, I was overconfident of doing everything right at being at the right place at the right time and all that. I had no fear of failure and then came the shock that was to change everything.
                                                                                   
There were 4 failures that the Alchemist had referred to and I have probably experienced all of them to some extent - >Fear of thinking the dream is realizable,Fear of losing love when its the stimulus,Fear of failure and Fear of realizing the dream when its near.

And inspite or despite of these failures we continue to work towards our destiny for there are so many things that life has to offer and one cannot stop living just because there are so many risks all the time.So just believe in the omens like the "boy" and work your way to destiny.

The Agenda for Development

As per the article in Times of India today, there is a stronger correlation between getting reelected due to economic growth in the 2000's compared to 1990's.This explains why every political party cannot do away with the growth factor,although the inclusiveness, the way its portrayed,the way its executed and the way its analyzed by the "experts" will always be questionable.

Another important aspect of growth has been the lack of resources.There are statistics to prove that places with lesser resources to support growth have better economic growth like Japan.Also, places with good natural resources have less growth with examples of Indian states like Jharkhand,Chhatisgarh,Assam,etc.

So while growth of a state might be a factor of several conditions like natural resources, political conditions,skillset of man power in the state, set up of manufacturing and service units,state bureaucracy support in helping the set up etc. the net sum of growth or lack of it will affect the future of the country in general.

One of the most crucial aspect of growth which is never said is "Hard work" that people put in to gain the efficiency and economies of scale.One of the reasons for the growth of IT and ITeS sector in India has been this.Tomorrow if people will become lazy, the initiative will move on to another country.

Probably this explains what has happened to US and Europe in the last decade and if not planned in the years to come.This also explains what happened to India in the past centuries and if not planned will continue to decrease the growth rate.And surely this explains the fact that Germany,China and Japan progressed in the last 2-3 decades compared to the same position that they were with India post 2nd world war.

So the only way to get growth will be to continue the "Hard work" and the results will follow.Bringing any politics and games around it will only weaken the agenda for development unless there is some "Hard work" there as well to support the economic factors and people who want to grow..

On Freewill !!

2 years back, influenced by Dr. Himanshu Rai, I had posted that Freewill exists for human beings as we can plan suicide.However,me and Parankush had a heated debate for taking the statement for granted.He had argued that so many animals who are living socially (like ants) can also be construed as part of the Freewill theory and human beings are not different.

This discussion as well as the discovery of the "God Particle" this year led me to a journey of the different ideas that has been found to be present in Wikipedia.I was surprised to read that things are not as simple as we make them to be.Here is the graph and link to the Wiki page
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will

So there is a theory that says that Free will is impossible and we are living a Deterministic paradigm of life ( Cause and effect is necessary and determined).The Incompatibilist go a step further and even say that we have no control of choices and results we have in life.

I am probably inclined to agree with the Compatibilist argument as a lot of phenomenon can be explained by them.However the thought that we can create something out of nothing like the "God particle" or "Bootstrapping of human body on waking up" is something that intrigues me.

So if the first particle came from nothing ,there had to be something external ( like the Large Hadron collider made in CERN labs) to initiate the process for all things in world to start. Or something in the brain cell to reprogram the state from which we had left our thoughts/memory before sleeping.Until these answers are not provided, I believe the incompatibilist have some arguments in their favour.

I will end the post with a thought in the same Wiki page from Swami Vivekananda :-

A quotation from Swami Vivekananda, a Vedantist, offers a good example of the worry about free will in the Hindu tradition.

Therefore we see at once that there cannot be any such thing as free-will; the very words are a contradiction, because will is what we know, and everything that we know is within our universe, and everything within our universe is moulded by conditions of time, space and causality. ... To acquire freedom we have to get beyond the limitations of this universe; it cannot be found here.

However, the preceding quote has often been misinterpreted as Vivekananda implying that everything is predetermined. What Vivekananda actually meant by lack of free will was that the will was not "free" because it was heavily influenced by the law of cause and effect—"The will is not free, it is a phenomenon bound by cause and effect, but there is something behind the will which is free." Vivekananda never said things were absolutely determined and placed emphasis on the power of conscious choice to alter one's past karma: "It is the coward and the fool who says this is his fate. But it is the strong man who stands up and says I will make my own fate."

Being happy..

Thanks to Sunny Jindal for this awesome link on being happy.

http://www.inc.com/geoffrey-james/9-daily-habits-that-will-make-you-happier.html?goback=.gde_79568_member_198397241

My take :-

1. Starting with a purpose 
2. Planning
3. Gifting something to every one (smile included )
4. Deflect partisan conversations (Detachment)
5. Assume people have good intentions
6. Eat good food slowly
7. Not worrying about results but job at hand (Message from Gita)
8. Turn off the background noise ( Detachment )
9. End each day with gratitude

I liked the last line and from now on will just pen down one wonderful thing that happened to me.

So for today, it was giving gyaan on why LUCK is not important.
I realized that while the moment when LUCK could be attributed as a strong factor for me, it was also the fact that I was trying to achieve the goal really badly.And probably "The Alchemist" message helped in the process.

In the last 2 years, I have not been able to have a concrete set of goals and hence have been just wandering around for the omens to come.Probably its part of the journey called Life.The below link is quite motivational in that aspect :-
http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/08/the_disciplined_pursuit_of_less.html

Reaching the highest point of contribution ( Talent ,Market and Passion) is what I was selling in Delhi in 09.Though the terms were (Aptitude,Interest and Personality). I had taken market forces as just a factor and not as a strong influencing factor during the sales and probably that's the root cause of the failure of the product.

Influencers in my life - Timeline

After Facebook published Timeline, I had this urge to recollect moments,places and people who have had strong influences on my life.So the list goes like this :-

1. Age 0-5 -> My grandfather turns to be the only person who influenced me into learning Sanskrit shlokas,some of which I can recollect and recall and bring myself to the awesome days.
2. Age 5-18 -> My father for bringing the concept of Positive thinking,Goal and Planning in life.I am not sure ,how much of it I have executed,but this was by far the single most differentiator for me from the rest of my peer group.
3. At KNIT Sultanpur,probably no single individual.But the students in general,who helped me enjoy the small things in life in difficult circumstances.There was also this book "The Magic of Thinking Big" that led me to create some real super goals in life and motivated me to reach them.
4. At Infosys, my mentor Pinaki who told me the golden rule "You do 100 good things,people don't remember you.You do 1 wrong thing and people remember you forever".Murphy's law was another of his favourite rule to use.
5. At IIM Lucknow, I was deeply influenced by Dr. Himanshu Rai. He has created such a strong framework about life ,that it seems difficult not to retrofit human beings into it.Some of his ideas that are also part of his blog,my blog and advices he gives to the aam aadmi are :-

• You must learn to love yourself for what you are. Do not seek love or approbation from outside; seek it from within. 

• Next, you need to tell yourself that you have choices in life. What makes you different from other species is “free will”. Tell yourself that you have it. It is okay if you are confused right now over your future course of action. Very few of us, if any, know what we really want to do with our lives! So welcome to the world! Reflect on your achievements in the past and correlate them to the effort you made to get them. Auto suggestion is a powerful tool when used wisely. 

•   Eat healthy, sleep well and counter negative thoughts 

•  The concept of detachment as propounded by Vedic scriptures relates to living one’s life and doing one’s Karma while not attaching oneself to the fruits of the effort (Nishkaam karma). Fear is a consequence of attachment. When we are attached to someone or something, we are afraid of losing them, and it manifests itself as fear of failure, fear of success, fear of unknown and so on. 

• Other thoughts are already part of the "Leadership through Literature" posts.

6. How people remember things or become leaders can be through simple aspects like "Reading","Writing","Listening" or even "Talking" .This was part of "Managing oneself" series I was reading last year in my free time.
7. Find your zones or spheres of control.List them and change only those that you can control first.Something that I learnt while interacting with my team in Kolkata.