The day before yesterday Alka brought to my attention a very interesting piece of news that proves that when it comes to finding solutions, the only thing that manifests a result is the desire to get the result.

There is a person in Uttarakhan (a hilly state in Northern India) who has succeeded in single-handedly increasing the forest cover of the entire state. Whereas big organizations and governments are bickering at the UN Climate Change Conference at Copenhagen with no real intention of protecting the forests and clearing up the air, Mr. Kalyan Singh Rawat has practically triggered a major ecological revolution, according to this link in The Pioneer. Instead of trying to make people aware of the importance of protecting the existing trees and planting new trees (this would have meant banging his head in the wall) he associated the act of planting a tree sapling to the marriage ceremony. Planting a tree just after tying the nuptial knot became an auspicious act.

Religion can create hurdles and given the right direction it can also usher great positive upheavals and that’s what Mr. Rawat has achieved with an ingenious idea. How did he achieve this?

A nuptial couple plants a sapling in the maternal village of the bride to be nurtured by her family: The cost — negligible. This practice spreads and becomes a tradition at every wedding solemnised: The return — a quantum leap in the forest cover of the area. This is the Maiti movement, meaning mother’s home, the vision of Kalyan Singh Rawat, an unassuming common man with an uncommon urge to protect the environment. Then a teacher in the Government Inter College, Rawat brought a humble but determined start to the movement in 1995 in Gwaldam hamlet in Chamoli district of Garhwal.

After the tree has been planted it becomes the responsibility of the girl’s family to make sure that it remains green and grows into a full tree. Since it is associated with the girl’s prosperity and fertility, a tree dies in the rarest of the rare situations and the survival rate is almost 100%.

This has significantly increased the forest cover and people of even adjacent states are quickly embracing the practice. It has taken him 15 years and almost no money, and now 6,000 villages in 18 states are following this practice.

This news reminded me of Mahatma Gandhi. He also used (at least I think so) a weakness into strength. He knew that it was not physically possible for the Indians to throw the British out (at that time perhaps). But they had a great tolerance for violence. So no matter how much violence the British inflicted upon them, they kept their movement peaceful.

Mr. Rawat has achieved the same thing. He realized that people in India follow religion and tradition like a herd and once the planting of the tree caught on, it would be very difficult to deter them from doing it. Great thinkers and philosophers like Raja Ram Mohan Rai also used religion to re-awaken people’s pride and rid the society of cruel and demeaning rituals. What if somehow we’re able to associate religion with keeping our cities clean, eradicating corruption, illiteracy and poverty and loving fellow citizens?

Right now, frankly, I have no idea what is the theme of the book and what exactly the author wants to say (I just finished reading page 99). All I can make out is, there are events in your life that can be called "The Black Swans", and they just happen, randomly, and normally their occurrence or non-occurrence is not in your hand. The Black Swans have the ability to change your perception, your life and sometimes they change the world. He uses the discovery of the black swan in Australia as an analogy. Until the black swans were discovered, swans were always thought to be white. Hence, he says we shouldn’t base our knowledge upon the facts we know.

Of course then you start thinking whether the sun is going to come up in the morning or not. The previous history of the world says that it should, but then, who knows?

The author, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, calls himself an empiricist who believes on focusing on how things cannot be done rather than how they can be done. It rather sounds like a negative attitude, but this is the perception perhaps that he wants to change. He says we live in a world defined by our experiences and the events that we remember, and this stifles our ability to see things as they are. I find myself agreeing to this philosophy, as I myself have experienced personal biases due to congealed memories of real and imagined events.

By the end of today’s reading, there’s a portion that explains how, throughout our lives sometimes, we deprive ourselves of multiple smaller happinesses in search of some bigger, elusive (The Black Swan) happiness that happens once in a lifetime. Is it worth it? It depends on how you perceive happiness. May be that bigger, once-in-a-lifetime happiness means more to you than the smaller, everyday happinesses. The problem is, that bigger happiness may or may not happen.

He explains this by terming successes of novels, books, movies, an artist or a scientific discovery as Black Swans. They may change the world, but you’re never sure of their occurrence. Their successes are unexplained. Thousands of better books never see the light of the day. Exceptionally brilliant scientists commit suicides because they are way ahead of their time. Movies that should have been super hits flop. Why? I’m still to read that portion.

This book makes you sleepy unless you’re hell bent upon stretching your reading abilities, or may be I have been simply too tired because I start reading it after I’ve already slogged for 6-7 hours. Lots of abstract philosophy and logic, lots of references to mathematicians and philosophers, their experiments and their observations. The humor sounds clichéd and hence off-putting sometimes, like repeatedly making fun of the French, the bankers and the financial forecasters. Nonetheless, I have found some worthy nuggets of wisdom and I plan to finish it in the coming days.

Are you feeling depressed and dejected because things are not turning out the way you had wanted? Do you think the world has turned miserable and not worth living in. Are you deciding to become a terrorist or sympathizing with them because you think the world is full of injustice and bias? Although I normally don’t like comparing adversities because we all have our own threshold levels, there are some adversities that can simply never be compared.  Take for instance being born without arms and legs.  Just imagine a single day without your thumb.  I found this video on Steve’s travel insurance blog and couldn’t resist posting it here. I don’t believe in saccharine encouragement and saying good things to people merely for the sake of saying them but sometimes you can experience the abundant confidence and determination just by looking at a person’s eyes by observing his or her body language.

In my recent posts I have been talking a lot about the Kashmir issue and what a few writers and bloggers have been writing about the recent imbroglio.  Sometimes there are comments that are entirely targeted at you and your opinions.  Of course if you share your opinions publicly then you should be ready to face counter opinions too and in fact I consider this quite healthy.  When people exchange ideas and opinions however much contrary they sound this encourages debate in the society and forces people to think proactively.  But when is it the right time to put a stop?  Is it worth it that you prove yourself right in front of everybody?  I was reading this interesting article on how to deal with difficult people — people who react to you negatively just for the heck of it.  In this article there is a very nice quote:

Holding a grudge against someone is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.

This is so very very true. I think sometimes we get in these never-ending loops of arguments and counter-arguments without realizing when the discussion has metamorphosed into a senseless talk where more than the topic the important thing is who is proven wrong and who is proven right and who gets to say the last word.

But it is not always right to keep mum and let the other opinion dominate the environment. For instance right now there is lots of misinformation and vicious propaganda in the mainstream media propagated by the so-called "secularists" and "liberals".  In this case lots of harm can be caused if something is not done to counter this propaganda. If a lopsided opinion is thrust upon the masses then lots of social unrest can crop up. All those people who can express themselves should do so in order to maintain a sense of sanity in the country.

Other than that, if there is no national level crisis being caused by your silence and nobody is going to be harmed if you don’t retaliate then it is always better to practice patience whenever somebody — who might already be having some personal problems — attacks you to vent out. Holding a grudge and resenting people for having a different opinion is not worth it.  It needlessly saps your energy and produces toxins inside your body.

The new research is revealing that the universe is like a brain cell. An average human brain has over 100 billion brain cells (neurons). So if one brain cell is like a universe, does it mean an average brain has around 100 billion universes?

Source

Our brain has infinite power; we just don’t know how to tap into that power and use it constructively. Recently I was reading this very interesting article on Wired on how with the help of a software we can improve our capacity to remember things and in the end the author has very rightly remarked:

As a science fiction fan, I had always assumed that when computers supplemented our intelligence, it would be because we outsourced some of our memory to them. We would ask questions, and our machines would give oracular — or supremely practical — replies. Wozniak has discovered a different route. When he entrusts his mental life to a machine, it is not to throw off the burden of thought but to make his mind more swift. Extreme knowledge is not something for which he programs a computer but for which his computer is programming him.

You need to read the article to understand the context. This article re-awakened my desire to make my brain stronger without resorting to gadgets and programs to manage my memory — of late I had been doing that a lot. Remember how many phone numbers we could recall? Now since all the phone numbers are stored there is no need to remember them. Similarly, even for smaller calculations we use calculators and computers. And not that we are preserving the power to utilize it on some other activity.

India is becoming a dangerous place to live day by day. A female driver was badly beaten up by another driver in front of DPS Vasant Kunj in a case of road rage. A group of hooligans thrashed passengers and assaulted girl students in a moving train. Hindu and Muslim mobs go on rampages at the drop of a hat. Doctors don’t turn up even while knowing the patient is dying. And of late, kangaroo courts in Bihar have been punishing suspects with great brutality. What does it signify?

A simmering civil unrest and total lack of justice. People don’t believe in law. Although film personalities are being sent to jail with great fanfare the common person on the street and in the villages have by now accepted that justice doesn’t exist in our country and in most of the cases police is more dangerous than the criminals. The pathetic conditions in our country have brought even law-abiding citizens to a sub-human level. Criminals roam around committing crimes with impunity and the civilians can either face daily humiliations submissively or turn into a mob and take law into their own hands.

These bursts of violence also show a deep-rooted depression. People have simply given up on their country, its people and its surroundings. Try to say hello to some stranger and you’ll know what I’m trying to say. See how people treat public facilities and places. See how we treat people from different classes and economic backgrounds.

I think both our religious ethics and social morals are all fucked up. In theory our religions preach love but in practice they perpetuate hatred and suspicion. Does it happen anywhere else that people who build a temple cannot enter that temple? Similarly, our social feelings never picked up after the independence. Whatever love we had for the country left with the British. In the name of love for country we merely have jingoism and charade. No wonder the BJP can come to power after promising a temple and the Congress strives for power by pitching communities against each other; we don’t have even a single political party in the country that truly fights for the betterment of the country.

Who is to blame for this mess? Our collective national conscious to a great extent, and I think the way we allegedly got independence. Mahatma Gandhi’s ways of non-violence perhaps gave rise to a population that was devoid of any fighting spirit. We became used to accepting violence, first from the British and then from our own oppressors. Violence is an injustice, and when you accept injustice than you lose sense of justice. And even if you accept it, at least don’t wrap it in the garb of non-violence. We were too weak, mentally and physically, to beat the shit out of them, and that was that. As a race we have been inferior and this should have been tackled either during our struggle for independence or immediately after that. Our country would have been better off had we kicked the British out with force. The centuries of defeatism and segmentation would have washed off. We should have had a general, not a Mahatma.

Consequently, as a civilization we are too weak. We turn barbaric when we face a submissive opponent and we become helpless (peace-loving) victims when a strong opponent attacks us, whether from within the country or from outside.

Solution? Abolish all kinds of discriminations severely. Let people be proud of their country by making every citizen important by providing equal opportunities and justice. Instill civil sense in them and let them know law is the same for everyone. Root out politicians that use religion and caste to remain in power.

Two things should be free in our country: healthy food (this includes safe drinking water) and primary education. Make everything else expensive if need be. Strong, educated people mean a healthy country.

When people are healthy, educated and happy, they don’t commit crimes, and they don’t tolerate injustice.

Technorati Tags: politics, crime, nation building

I often come across expressions like “I need to make a ton of money,” or “I don’t need much money to survive,” or “Money is power or lack of it is misery.” I was reading about a search engine optimization consultant who recently wrapped up his business to pursue his writing career and somewhere in his blog post he wrote: I anyway don’t need much money to survive.

My biggest fear regarding money is that what if I don’t have enough of it to save a loved one’s life? Although here too there is never “enough” but still, if you have lots of it, you don’t have to worry at least on that front. I know merely money cannot save a life, but you can avail the best healthcare facilities if you can pay for them. This is a primary reason why I want to have sufficient money. Health insurance can surely help in this regard.

In the movie Hotel Rwanda the protagonist saves his wife and a few others by paying lots of money to an army officer, and this is a true story. All his family would have been killed had he not lots of cash available, and some connections. Whenever a catastrophe happens, the poor always die more than the rich or the financially well off.

I don’t like wearing expensive clothes (I prefer good clothes), I don’t want to have a big house (but I want spacious surrounding), I don’t want an expensive car (but a decent one will do) and I have never been crazy about food (I just need healthy food and it doesn’t have to be expensive).

So how much money does one need to be comfortable:

• Enough money for kids’ education
• Enough money to purchase a decent house for the family
• Enough money to get healthy food and clean drinking water
• Enough money to avail good healthcare if there is a need
• Enough money to see you through your old age.

How do you define enough money?

Technorati Tags: finance, money, livelihood

Too often we go through life on autopilot, going through the motions and having each day pass like the one before it.

That’s fine, and comfortable, until you have gone through another year without having done anything, without having really lived life.

That’s fine, until you have reached old age and look back on life with regrets.

That’s fine, until you see your kids go off to college and realize that you missed their childhoods. [ 39 Ways to Live, and Not Merely Exist ]

Life runs in fast-forward when you don’t do things that you think you’ll do tomorrow and then tomorrow too you do the same what you did yesterday — decided to do those things tomorrow. A line in a song says ??????????? ??? ??? ???? ?????, ??????????? ??? ?? ???? ???? ?? (you cannot beg for life, you have to move forward and snatch it). So if you want to do something, just do it. Don’t leave it for tomorrow. Sometimes, tomorrow never comes.

Technorati Tags: self improvement

I know it is not everybody’s cup of tea, but working for yourself and earning money for yourself is far more rewarding, financially and emotionally, than working for a company or another individual. It is often estimated that your employer earns more than 10 times from you of what he or she pays you, or even more. So if your employer is paying you say, $2,500, he or she might be earning more than $25,000 from your services!

I’m not saying people should leave their jobs and plunge into the uncertainties of self-employment, especially when their current jobs provide them financial security and they have no idea what exactly they want to do if they start working on their own. But in case you want to leave your job and start on your own, here are a few things you need to take into consideration:

Do you know what exactly you want to do?

This is very crucial because this can define your entire life. Clarity of purpose is the most important factor when you start working on your own. You cannot just leave your job because you want to freelance, or want to work for yourself. You should be sure of what you want to do. For that, you should ask the following questions from yourself

• Do you know what product or service you are going to provide?
• Is there really a demand for what you intend to offer, or can you create the demand?
• Do you have the resources to manufacture the product or can you get it manufactured?
• Do you have the ability to market your business enough to get you started?
• Are you REALLY passionate about what you are planning to do or simply doing it because others are making good money from doing it?

The last point — about being passionate — sees you through most difficulties.

Do you have enough money to sustain you?

It’s usually very difficult to save money when you do a job. Money slips from your hand like sand in a fist. So you MUST have a saving before you even think of starting your own work. You won’t only need money for your business, you’ll also need it to sustain yourself and your family. Believe me, business costs are as unpredictable as the direction of an eddy. And so are family costs. You need more money exactly when you think you have handled all possible expenses. Here’s how you should (according to me, you can differ) calculate how much you should save, assuming, for a year:

Your saving = money for business + money for family + buffer

Money for business will include running and marketing costs for a year. You can very well make out what family costs could be, and if possible, this should also include emergency costs like illnesses or accidents. The buffer is, in case you decide that after a year (or whatever time you want to invest), if things are not working the way they should have, you want to find a new job. It may take a month, or two months, or three months. So you should have money for that period too.

Remember that financial ruin should be avoided at all costs, nothing (except for yours and your loved ones safety) is worth it.

Do you have what it takes?

You need great discipline to work on your own, because when you do a job, someone or the other is always breathing down your neck. You have deadlines, you have appraisals, you have to submit status reports and there are various project meetings and so many people are answerable to so many people. You are always being evaluated by your co-workers and your superiors.

When you do a job, you are assigned a task or a project, and you complete it and this is how far it goes.

When you work for yourself, you not only fetch work for yourself, you also need to make sure you deliver on time. Discipline and motivation are the key. Your every move has to be self-driven. Nobody is tracking you and nobody is forcing you to meet the deadlines. Of course there will be your clients and customers but they are not going to interact with you the way your boss or your colleagues do. It’s a totally different ball game when you work for yourself: you are your own boss, you are your own employee, and the only person you are answerable to is yourself.

It’s a difficult position to be in, no matter how rosy it sounds.

Will your immediate family stand by you?

Family is no problem if you don’t have one, or if you don’t live with your family. But if you live with your family, then your decision will have an impact on your family for sure. You will change, the way you work will change, and the way you spend money will change. You may spend more time doing your work in the beginning months, or years, and you may have to allocate more finances to your business and this may disturb the finances of your family. Your spouse and children may find you distracted and constantly thinking about your work. You may not have a social life for a considerable amount of time. There will be countless periods of ups and downs and your family will need to understand that and give you the needed emotional support as well as space. The household responsibilities will have to be reallocated and the priorities will have to be redefined. Your family may have to change its lifestyle if you plan to work from home.

Hence, it is very critical that you take your family into confidence. You cannot simply come home one day and declare you have left your job and have decided to work for yourself. I think the best way to approach this is to introduce the topic casually during one of the family dinners or outings. Something like, “you know what, I wish I could run my own business.” Have a plan ready. Get everybody involved, and let it be a collective decision.

Some other things you need to be good at:

• Business networking: It’s always good to know right people at right places. If you know many people, it’s well and good, but if you don’t, you should regularly try to attend conferences, business meets and parties where you may bump into prospects and leads. Use your best charms to strike new business friendships and be as outgoing as possible. Business networking could be a crucial bone in the backbone of your business.
• Awareness: Always know what’s going on in your business. Try to be an expert in your field.
• Finances, accounting, taxation: When you do a job your company employs people to take care of all these things. Once you start working on your own you’ll have to take care of them. A basic knowledge of accounting and financial planning can save you lots of money and heartburn.
• Technology: People that snub technology are arrogant fools. Technology drives the world. Use computers, laptops and all the gadgets that can help you organize and operate your business and personal life in a better way. Gadgets like high-definition phones and PDAs save you lots of precious time.
• Inter-personal relationships: As your business expands, you’ll be interacting with more and more people, and you may even one day open an office and employ more people. Good inter-personal relationship skills help you manage employees, clients and customers well.

Does it work for everybody?

No.

So how does working for yourself make you richer?

My personal experience is that if you spend even 40% of the time you spend on your regular job on your own business, you can double the amount of money you can earn. First of all, you become focused when you work on your own, and hence more productive. You don’t waste time on travel and office politics. Your income depends on how much you work and how well your work: you can double your monthly income in a matter of a few months — this can never happen if you have a job unless something really drastic happens. Since your clients will be paying you instead of some company, all the intermediary costs will be cut, and even if you charge more, you’ll be actually costing less to your clients and customers.

The sky is the limit when you work for yourself. You can expand or contract your operations according to the need of the hour and there will no one to constrain or throttle your creativity. You become responsible for your own actions and this improves your quality of life.

More links:

• Working For Others Does Not Make You Wealthy
• Freelancing 101 – The Basics
• Farewell to freelancing: Final lessons learned
• Twenty Ways to Stay Productive When Working at Home

Technorati Tags: self employment, freelancing, home business, work at home, self improvement

On and off I’ll be writing some posts on self-improvement. They’ll also give me a chance to re-orient my own approach to the world around me. It’s quite a cathartic exercise.

To be able to charm people you don’t need to be good looking or handsome. How to be charming is all about using the right body language, saying the right words and sporting the right kind of attitude. It doesn’t mean only good-intentioned people can charm. Hitler was known to be a great charmer.

The link mentioned above discusses some traits of people who can easily charm. These traits are:

• A relaxed posture: Having a relaxed posture is very critical to creating a positive aura around you. It connotes a sense of confidence. All confident and mentally secure people move around in a relaxed manner. It also conveys that nothing is going on in your mind and you live your life in the moment.
• Give people importance: We all want to be taken seriously and instantly take a liking to people who pay special, sincere attention to what we have to say. So when you talk to people, make an eye contact, show a true interest in them, be honest with your praises and don’t say things just to flatte. And remember their names. This is something I have difficulty in. I forget names very fast.
• Control the tone of your voice: There was a time when people used to like my voice, but now I myself don’t like it. In order to charm people you don’t need a husky or a melodramatic tone, you need a tone that’s natural and free of pretensions. People generally don’t like high-pitched tones because they indicate tension and fickleness. I think the best way to have a good tone is feel good about yourself and be as natural as possible.

All these topics are discussed in detail in the link.

Technorati Tags: how to charm, art of charming, charm, charming others, self improvement