Ted Talks: Alain de Botton: A kinder, gentler philosophy of success - # 2

Truly is it only Bhutan that is concerned about the happiness of its citizens. Shouldnt we be dropping the philosophy of winners v/s losers and adopting more compassionate models of society. Yet another Americanism that should be junked

The talk is not wildly impressive but nevertheless talks a lot of sense

Ted Talks: Sir Ken Robinson: Do schools kill creativity? - # 1

What a nice talk! Great understated British (?) humour and a terrific viewing experience.

‘A Cabinet Secretary looks back. From Poona to the Prime Minister's office’ by B. G. Deshmukh

……… 1962 ………. We were advised to always carry loose cash while travelling by car in New York and offer a $ 5 note to any traffic policeman who stopped us as the New York state police were notorious and corrupt.



We found that the American people were mostly self-centred and inward-looking. They were not concerned about the outside world but only their own town or at most their state capital. By Indian standards their knowledge of the history, economics, and politics of foreign countries was poor.



………. Wankhede Stadium for cricket……… It is said that one rather unflattering remark about Marathi-speaking people made by the president of the Cricket Club of India (CCI) so annoyed Wankhede, who was then the president of the Bombay Cricket Association (BCA), that he decided to have BCA’s own stadium ………. Instead of …… Brabourne Stadium of the CCI. Chief Minister Naik fully supported him, as once he was also reportedly not treated well in the CCI.



……….. I also noticed a curious phenomenon. Many people used to come from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh to work. In the beginning one or two men would come alone. Later the would call all their male relatives who would then be followed by the family members. In one case I found that literally a whole village population had shifted from Uttar Pradesh. I noticed that politicians always interfered with the demolition of hutments because they treated them as their vote banks.



But in the ten years between 1977 and 1986, the chief minister changed six times. This political instability naturally affected the quality of governance. To add to it, Antulay played favourites and also bent government machinery to what he wanted to do or undo. The result was there for all to see. Maharashtra administration, which had been known for it's honesty, integrity and efficiency, was badly shaken and infected with the malaise usually seen in some of the northern states like Uttar Pradesh and Bihar.



Rajiv Gandhi ……… could not master his party’s political machinery and mould it in his own way. No doubt Rajiv Gandhi did try, as exemplified by his famous speech in Bombay in January 1986 at the centenary celebrations of the Indian National Congress, when he warned the powerbrokers in the party to behave or move out of the way. But the party machine was too strong for him.



The two factors that hurt him [Rajiv Gandhi] most were soft communalism and corruption.



The genesis of the Bofors affair lies in the practice initiated by Indira Gandhi and further refined by her son Sanjay for collecting funds for the Congress Party ………. Till the middle of the 1960s, during the regime of Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, collection of funds for the party was a more transparent business ……….. Collection of funds for one’s party was then not a highly competitive and corrosive practice corrupting the whole social, economic and political fabric as happened later.



B. K. Nehru writes (page 582 of his autobiography)

The day after the funeral I asked Rajiv whether the money Sanjay had collected allegedly for the Congress was safe. He said all they found in the almirah of the Congress office was Rs 20 lakhs. I asked how much Sanjay had collected. He held his head in his hands and said ‘crores and uncounted crores’.




…….. I can say without any hesitation that neither Rajiv Gandhi nor any member of his family received any amount in the Bofors case. Though his personal integrity was beyond doubt, there was strong circumstantial evidence that he knew the names of the recipients but was reluctant to expose them, maybe because they were of the Congress party or close relations or friends of the family …………. I have no doubt at all that after a few more years of experience in politics he would have put his foot down and exposed and punished those guilty of such misdeeds, even if it was his own party or relation or friend……



I have always felt sorry for Zail Singh. I think he was basically a good man but started having ideas about his importance after Indira Gandhi’s assassination. The sycophants around Rajiv Gandhi also unnecessarily raised the pitch ………


[Rajiv Gandhi] …….. was not a very lucky prime minister……… If he had been luckier he would have survived these adverse happenings, as happened in the case of many leaders who were infinitely worse than him but were luckier. If he had not been assassinated, he would have certainly come back to govern the country as a mellowed and mature leader and a better judge of men and events.
His years as prime minister should be judged and surveyed with more sympathy and understanding.



Devi Lal should have remained a district-level politician or, at most, a state-level politician; he was not only a disaster at the national level but turned out to be a destructive force also ……… Favour-seeking officers flocked to him, which aggravated the situation…….. Devi Lal was completely uncouth, used vulgar language uttering the choicest abuses in his mother tongue, Haryanvi.


Vishwanath Pratap Singh ……… was in the habit of adopting causes with missionary zeal some times bordering on mania, and one such cause was his drive to cleanse political life. He could have received widespread support for this if only personal vendetta and ambition were not mixed with it …….. he picked on Rajiv Gandhi as a target and his campaign against him appeared like a personal vendetta……….. St Kitts affair ….was a shameless political act by the previous Congress government to involve him and his son in a shady deal purely for political gains and that too in a most dishonourable way. But he was not vindictive ……… He took extra care that no centre of power …. Developed during his prime ministership …….. what a fine private person he is. I have read some of his poetry and seen two exhibitions of his paintings…..that reveal his sensitivity



Chandrashekhar …….. All the senior officers were highly impressed by his unfailing courtesy ………. As a private person he is a fine man. But some sort of bitterness has crept into his personality. He does not trust people easily and is always on his guard. He feels that senior bureaucrats and well-to-do people look down upon him, perhaps because of his earlier years when he had to struggle against adverse circumstances ……… He wanted to leave his mark in Indian history and be a good prime minister whom people would remember afterwards with pride and affection. …… as a private person he is a gem of a man. However, in his ambition to become prime minister he turned into a typical Indian politician. This made his prime ministership a failure ………


The Sri Lankan affair also created and nurtured a cult of violence in Tamil Nadu. The central government conducted training camps for Sri Lankan militants and liberally equipped them with arms. The state government gave them all help and full freedom …… The militants defiantly imported arms from outside which resulted in their free availability throughout Tamil Nadu. Local youth were attracted to the culture of violence ……… As a result it slowly spread into the adjoining states in southern India …….. This was a heavy price to pay for encouraging and harbouring Sri Lankan militants

From ‘Only love is real. The story of soulmates reunited’. By Dr. Brian Weiss

“My patients tell me the the soul does not enter the body right away. Around the time of conception, a reservation is made by the soul. No other soul can have that body. The soul who has reserved that particular baby’s body can then come into and out of the body, as it wishes ………….. During pregnancy, the soul is gradually more and more attached to the baby’s body ……… but the attachment is not complete until around the time of birth, either shortly before, during, or just afterward. ……… I have had cases where the same soul, after a miscarriage or abortion, comes back to the same parents in their next baby.”


“As the vibrational energy of spirit is slowed down so that more dense environments such as your three-dimensional plane can be experienced, the effect is for spirit to be crystallized and transformed into denser and denser bodies. The densest of all is the physical state. The vibrational rate is the slowest. Time appears faster in this state because it is inversely related to the vibrational rate. As the vibrational rate is increased, time slows down. This is how there can be difficulty in choosing the right body, the right time of re-entry into the physical state. Because of the disparity of time, the opportunity might be missed ….. There are many levels of consciousness, many vibrational states ……….. Humans always think of themselves as the only beings. This is not the case. There are many worlds and many dimensions ……. ” ……. Elizabeth stopped speaking


“The past must be remembered and then forgotten. Let it go. This is true for childhood traumas and past-life traumas. But this is also true for attitudes, misconceptions, belief systems drummed into you …….. How can you see freshly and clearly with all those thoughts? What if you needed to learn something new? With a fresh perspective?

Thoughts create the illusion of separateness and difference. Ego perpetuates this illusion, and this illusion creates fear, anxiety, and tremendous grief. Fear, anxiety, and grief in turn create anger and violence ……….. Stop thinking. Instead, use your intuitive wisdom to experience love again. Meditate. See that everything is interconnected and interdependent. See the unity, not the differences. See your true self. See God.

…………. You have lived in many bodies and in many times. So ask your present self why it is so fearful. Why are you afraid to take reasonable risks? ………..What’s to lose? What is the worst that can happen? Am I content to live the rest of my life this way?

……… Get out of the rut. Remember to hope.

From ‘Same Soul, Many Bodies’ by Dr. Brian Weiss

THE BUDDHISTS HAVE AN EXPRESSION: “Don’t push the river. It will travel at it’s own speed anyway.”


“I’m an only child. They [the parents] didn’t have time to neglect more than one.”


……progression into the future can help us decide which path to take …………… In my group progressions ………. I try to take the attendees to tree stops on the journey to the future: one hundred years, five hundred years, and one thousand years from now ………

What have we found?

• In one hundred years or eve two hundred years the world will be pretty much the same as it is now. There have been natural and man-made calamities, tragedies, and disasters, but not on a global level. There are more toxins, more crowding, more pollution ………….

• After this period – it could be as near as three hundred years or as far away as six hundred – there will begin a second Dark Ages ………we see a vastly diminished population ……….

Some of us won’t reincarnate in that time. Our consciousness may have changed enough so that we’ll be watching from another place, from another dimension ………. some of us may reincarnate in other dimensions or worlds ……….

• And then the idyllic, fertile, peaceful land ……….. we will get to a place on this world so like the other side that bridging them will be easy.

From ‘India in Mind’ Edited by Pankaj Mishra

It is better to go to the villages of a strange land before trying to understand its towns, above all in a complex place like India. Now, after travelling some eight thousand miles around the country, I know approximately as little as I did on my first arrival. However, I’ve seen a lot of people and places, and at least I have a somewhat more detailed and precise idea of my ignorance than I did in the beginning.


The two religious systems are antipodal. Fortunately the constant association with the mild and tolerant Hindus has made the Moslems of India far more understanding and tractable than their brothers in Islamic countries further west; there is much less actual friction than one might be led to expect


A professor from Ranikhet in north India……….Among the many questions I put to him was one concerning the reason why so many of the Hindu temples in south India prohibit entry to non-Hindus, and why they have military guards at the entrances. I imagined I knew the answer in advance: fear of Moslem disturbances. Not at all, he said. The principal purpose was to keep out certain Christian missionaries. I expressed disbelief.

“Of course,” he insisted. “They come and jeer during our rituals, ridicule our sacred images.”

“But even if they were stupid enough to want to do such things,” I objected, “their sense of decorum would keep them from behaving like that.”

He merely laughed. “Obviously you don’t know them.”


- Paul Bowles



This is invariably the case in the East; a story always sounds clear enough at a distance, but the nearer you get to the scene of events the vaguer it becomes.


- George Orwell



He was covered with the usual white rages: while around him, along that street on the periphery (if periphery and center have any meaning for Indian cities), the usual lugubrious misery, the usual shops little more than boxes, the usual little homes in ruins, the usual high stench which smothers breathing. That smell of poor food and of corpses which in India is like a continuous powerful air current that gives one a kind of fever. And that odor which, little by little, becomes an almost living physical entity, seems to interrupt the normal course of life in the body of the Indians. Its breath, attacking those little bodies covered in their light and filthy linen, seems to corrode them, forcing itself to sprout, to reach a human embodiment………..Every Indian is a beggar: even he who does not do it for a profession, if the occasion presents itself will not flinch from trying to extend his hand.


Whatever the Indian middle class is I have seen it above all in Africa, in Kenya, where there are some tens of thousands of Indians (brought there by the English to construct the railroad when the Africans were still unusable), who have become the lower middle class of the place. They have become completely washed-out. Unsympathetic to the Africans, they cultivate this family gentility around the shop which gives them the ease or even a little wealth to do so: while underneath lingers the pain of not yet being Europeans


………with turbans wound round the most beautiful hair, black and wavy, in the world ……….


Now, all the Indians are minute, thin, with the little bodies of children: they are wonderful until twenty years old, gracious and full of pathos afterwards


- Pier Paolo Passolini (1961)

From ‘A Yankee and the Swamis. A Westerner's view of the Ramakrishna Order’ by John Yale (Swami Vidyatmananda)

Anybody brought up to the reassurance of trousers at first feels exposed, undressed in a dhoti. The material is light in weight, and the garment is open to updrafts and likely to fly apart past the knee with each step. But I found a great joy in wearing ‘the cloth’. I admire its simplicity and cleanliness. One washes his clothes every day, just as he bathes every day. Being merely a long piece of yardage, the dhoti can be easily dried in the sun. It dries without a wrinkle, as though ironed. If you want it to look especially nice you may fold it precisely and place it beneath your mattress for further pressing. Putting on your dhoti each day is like wrapping yourself up in fresh air and sunlight.


I do not believe Indians go on pilgrimages with the idea of doing penance. The notions of sin and atonement do not seem to be motives in Hinduism……….I think, the main reason is different…..a reason that one cannot grasp unless he has a conception of the Hindu science of ‘vibrations’………..Different minds have different powers of projection and reception, depending on their relative quality of concentration. Mental atmosphere is thus believed to be transferable from mind to mind. The condition of another will affect me when I am in his presence and my state will affect him. These subtle vibrations are also thought to permeate and remain in gross material objects. You leave a trace of yourself in everything you have had contact with: a piece of work you have done; some article of clothing you have worn; the remainder of food on your plate………One needs to grasp this Hindu science of subtle vibrations if he would hope to understand much of Indian social practice. For example, the unfamiliar notions of darshan and prasad become logical on the basis of this idea……. ‘Darshan in practice is a form of happiness induced among Hindus by being in the presence of some great manifestation of their collective consciousness. It may be a person, place or thing, and may represent past, present or future, so long as it sets up the definite recognizable glow of suprapersonal happiness.’ This is needlessly complex. All we need to say is that darshan is getting good vibrations by being in the presence of them…………….taking Prasad is the same thing carried a step further…..Prasad is an actual relic of someone, which one accommodates to himself, with the object thus of absorbing its vibrations…….Food is considered especially conductive of vibrations. Enjoying food left by an impure person or prepared by a cook whose mind is unclean can affect one adversely, while eating the remainder of food touched by a holy man is believed to be very helpful

Thus, when an Indian goes on a pilgrimage, what he is really trying to do usually is to gather up holy vibrations…….The object of veneration in a temple is believed to be charged with good vibrations. Holy men who have worshipped it have left a residue of holiness……..A sacred place accumulates good vibrations.

……….In the Bhagavad-Gita there is the promise: ‘Howsoever you conceive of Me, if you really desire Me, I will come to you in accordance with your conception.’ Once designated as holy, an object of veneration will thus have the tendency actually to increase in holiness and to become holy. I set up some representation of divinity, I channel my longing, my devotion for God into and through it. Others come and do the same. Holy men also worship there. Vibrations build up and a genuine place of sanctity is established. In time the accumulation of earnest entreaty may even induce the Reality which is being celebrated there to infuse itself fully into the representation. Then the phenomenon appears of what is known as an awakened deity. (Yes, the word deity is used even for a lingam, a natural formation, a holy tree.)……….Most places of national pilgrimage are places where the deity is considered to be awakened.


……..Shaivism as the path of renunciation, austerity. Shaivism teaches the control and sublimation of our humannesses. It is an approach to god though emphasis on the impersonal…………..Vaishnavism stresses the personal, the intimate, and uses these to take us to God………..Sri Ramakrishna said: ‘A man born with an element of Shiva becomes a jnani; his mind is always inclined to the feeling that the world is unreal and Brahman alone is real. But when a man is born with an element of Vishnu he develops an ecstatic love of God. That love can never be destroyed. It may wane a little now and then, when he indulges in philosophical reasoning, but it ultimately returns to him increased a thousand-fold’


……They will ask you all sorts of details about your family, what the original cost was of possessions you have, the state of your digestive tract. But there is nothing insinuating in any of this. The questions are put without guile, innocently as a child would do. You cannot take offence……..I was brought up in the belief that the mark of a gentleman is his ability to keep confidences. But very little is kept a secret by Indians. All news is common property, as in a home.


It has been said laughingly that to the American it doesn’t matter whether something is pure, just so that it is clean; whereas to the Indian if something is pure that makes it clean.


………..eating in hotels and restaurants is rarely done by monastics because of the unhelpful influences likely to reside in the food. Food not prepared with devotion…………devised impersonally for making money by people with their minds full of gross thoughts – can adversely influence your spiritual growth……..Sri Ramakrishna could not even keep on the storage shelf in his room food gifts brought by visitors who were lustful, avaricious, or hopeful of getting some advantage as a result of their devotions.


…..a salagram stone…….just a smooth pebble about the size of a plum, black in colour, with a hole in it, and bearing some white markings. Salagram are natural formations………Sri Ramakrishna, remarking on he fact that the whole world is nothing but materialized spirit, pointed out that God manifests himself, however, more in certain things than in others. The salagram is one of these………..


Sri Ramakrishna compared holy places to bodies of water. ‘You may be sure,’ he said, ‘that there is God’s manifestation in those spots where people have practiced spiritual disciplines a great deal.’………….Yet from another standpoint Sri Ramakrishna made light of pilgrimages. He often said, ‘One who has it here [in the heart] has it there; one who has it not here has it nowhere.’ In other words, if devotion is unfolding, the process will be enhanced by association with holy places; but if it is not, no amount of traipsing about to temples and shrines will do much good


Benaras………..So many of India’s saints have journeyed there to walk in its streets and bathe from its ghats…….that the whole place is alight with faith…….Sri Ramakrishna…….spoke of the city as hardly material at all, but rather as composed of pure sattwa guna, of purity and truth.