Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Preaching thy self...

Ever had the feeling that u have yourself not being doing justice to what u say. You see i am a great believer in doing what one says, as in - practice what you preach, treat others as you wish to be treated yourself, and everything along similar lines. But a few days ago i realised that i have been saying something which if not altogether false, can only be considered otherwise because i did not know that what i was saying was wrong.

The incident was simple, i had not being playing regularly for the last week or so and hence had become a bit rusty when i got back to playing again, now trying to get back to the way i played earlier i fell back upon what i told others who asked me how to play- tilt the bat in the right way, check the speed of the ball(i play table tennis, if u are wondering). And to my utter dismay, they didn't work, now it was time for me to realise how bad the advise that i gave others was. So this time round when i did get back to playing decently, i tried to figure out what was it that i was interpreting in the wrong manner, and then came together the number of things that have always stared me in the face but i had never put them together to realise that they are all interdependent. I had written a post some while ago, it was in context of the way we learn what every emotion is, but now its time for me to realise that its not true for the abstract things only, everything that we learn is through imitation and repetition. Its the sub-conscience that does the thinking, ... I dont even know if i am making sense here... Anyways what i did realise was that there is no way to do something better than to get used to it to such an extent that one can move beyond it altogether. Practice makes a man perfect has never sounded truer to me, albeit it came from a slightly different line of thought. And what it also means is that my sub-conscience is more adept at doing a lot of tasks than me, and that implies a lot of other things, but that is a topic for another post. .. :) ..

Wednesday, November 4, 2009

The danger of a single story

To start off, this post is a culmination of a large number of things that i have seen or heard, but before that a few things one should know to understand why the idea behind this post is what it is. I am a Google addict and in no way can i imagine a life B.G.(Before Google). Now what that means is that there is hardly a service provided by google that i do not use. And if google goes down. So would most of my contacts, most of what i love, my blog, my conversations with people i admired, the chats that i still read in solitude and in short a part of me would be lost.

Now again the events that led to this post, one was a talk that i heard here(on TED by Chimamanda Adichie), second was a presentation i attended by a Yahoo guy(who was telling us what all they are doing), third was my wish to write a post on living a week without google(I am still working on that), and finally the realisation during and after the Yahoo presentation that there was so much good that's happening, and i was cut off from it, even though i was under the illusion that i am connected to the whole world.

Like most people around me, yahoo was my first email service, but then came google, and with it gradually the plethora of services that it offered to keep us engaged within the google domain. I am not saying that it was a conspiracy to cut us off, and i am not even sure that it applies to anyone else or is it just me that's tied in the bind. But i am unaware of life as it could be outside of google, maybe my future efforts to write a post will make me more enlightened, but as of now i am a frog in the well, albeit a big one(that almost feels like an ocean).

But then why should i limit the thought to things google and !google. As the talk at TED that i mentioned above very rightly shows that the same applies to the real world. The talk of real world reminds me now, there is another talk by Arundhati Roy that follows similar thoughts.

Of course i am not saying anything new here, but its just a reminder to myself that there are always better things in the world. No matter how good and comfortable u are at present. One must constantly strive to get out of the cocoon, challenge the comfort zones and make way for things that could bring about changes for the better.