Blissful Life

Blog

Notice: after planning it for years, I moved this blog out of blogger/blogspot (which google has abandoned long ago) to wordpress on a fine evening in Dec 2024. This notice will stay here to warn that things might be broken. Let me know if you find anything.

  • Why Your Dreams Must Be Unattainable

    What is there in simply dreaming about things that would never happen??!!!
    You can dream, dream and dream…(like APJ says)…..but…life is not a bed of roses.

    When I showed my list of dreams, one of my dearest friends asked me the above question.

    And I answered: Because,
    Reaching the goal is not the goal. Striving to reach there is the goal 
    – Swami Chinmayananda

    To repeat Chinmayananda in my own words, dreams are not meant to be achieved they are just reminders to move on. When you are a student, score maximum, when you are writing entrance aim for the top, when you are a doctor, try to be a better doctor, and then try to start a hospital of your own. Then may be you can expand that as a chain to other parts of India, then the whole world. Or start blogging. Or travel to places. Or treat poor people in remote villages.

    Just having a dream is not enough. The dream should be sky high.

    If you have a small dream from your childhood, and you somehow achieve that dream, then you stop growing. You stop learning new things. You get stuck in life. Problems begin to pile up. Your job will have become so boring to you that you will concentrate on your problems more and innovative ideas less. And then life starts to become boring. And that is when life is really going to be a thorny bed.

    But when you dream big, you try (at least try) to make things happen. And that would require that you grow. You will have to learn new things to make your dream happen. You may have to travel. You may have to meet people. But you grow.

    If you really take life in its sense, then these are really roses.

    Heard this story?

    Two guys were walking through the jungle when they spotted a lion. One of them reached into his bag and pulled out a pair of running shoes. The other guy looked at him.
    “Do you really think those shoes are going to make you run faster than that lion?”
    “No, and I don’t have to. I just have to run faster than you.”

    Though I don’t suggest this policy, this is life these days.  You don’t have to be the best, but you can be somewhere in front of the trailing lot, and you will be surviving. When you do nothing you just rot away. But when you try to reach somewhere, you end up at least a little higher.

    So, dream high so that you move on. And remember that even though you may never reach your dreams, you will reach higher than most other people, and that would suffice almost always.

    To sum up,
    “When you stop dreaming, you stop growing.”

  • The Never Forget Rule About Reading

    Of course reading is the best habit on the planet. A man IS what he reads. This is very evident from the fact that children who are exposed to books on atheism or rational thinking grow up as atheists or naturalists and the children who are forced to read the mythological books only most often end up as hard and fast believers.
    (Well if you think the above observation is invalid then try that at your own kids. Even if they are a few years too old, when they get to read books like Daniel Dennett’s Consciousness Explained they will start telling you thousand reasons why God probably does not exist)
    Or leave all that ask a kid doing well in science whether they are/were subscribing to any scientific magazines or weeklies. The answer will most probably be “…for 4 years or so…”

    But I know reading is great. I thought you had something else to tell.

    Yes, I am coming to it.
    This might not happen to everyone. But some people when they find a book interesting, they keep on reading the same kind of books one after another. And they will never be tired, so they will read more and more of the same kind.
    Now, that is a problem.
    You should NEVER read the same kind of things.
    Because reading is supposed to gain you ideas. And when you read the same stuff, may be from the same author or of the same genre, you will end up addicted to the same. Books are all interesting. You may be finding this interesting. But it does not mean that you will not find the other interesting. And may be when you start reading the other you will find that the other is more interesting than this one.
    But you never read the other stuff, so you will never know the other side.
    It is like always having vanilla shade of ice-cream because you liked it the first time you ate it. Sometimes you may like strawberry much more.

    And this is particularly true when you are reading things that may shape your opinion.
    For example you read a a book about socialism by Karl Marx (may be Das Kapital).
    Socialism is great and Karl Marx will show you why. And that idea will seem interesting to you too.
    And then you have two options.
    Either go for the Communist Manifesto or for a “Capitalist Manifesto”
    If you go for the first you will end up as a biased frog in the well.
    But if you go for the latter you will end up learning a lot about both the ideas, about the differences between them, about the pros and cons of each and you can always decide which one is better.
    Because when you read only one, unless you are reading from wikibooks, you are hearing from just one side. And you will never know what lies they tell you.

    So that is it. Read. And read diverse.

    Don’t narrow your collection to a single colour.

    Make it a point to read an entirely different book after you finish the one you are reading now.
    You will end up a lot more.

  • Couldn’t mind be naturally ‘supernatural’?

    I just got a hypothesis to prove that supernatural may be natural. Well I actually got that idea when I was trying to make my first post at Brights India (a group of Brights in India, Brights are the people who like the naturalistic way of the world), but there’s no way I can adapt that in another way to put in here. So I’m just copy pasting the whole thing. Keep in mind that I wrote this not to you, still I want to say this to you too.

    Let me first excuse myself, this is my first post here, I might be sounding odd.

    But couldn’t mind have powers that some of us are just being unable to use?

    Let me clarify myself.
    Our brain can convert sensory inputs from eye, ear, nose, skin, tongue (that’s where modern science is now) that is visible spectum, audible frequency, smell, temperature roughness, taste

    Now think of sharks which can sense electromagnetic field.

    To continue what I’m going to say I need to make an assumption –
    “that there could be, like the electromagnetic waves, another kind of waves or radiation or energy, which the modern science is yet to experimentally confront.”
    (and with that i must add “did anyone know about electricity before faraday (or is it oersted?) discovered it?”)

    and there’s one thing to note that if there’s such a thing it’s properties could be vastly different from any other things we have observed. It may not be like light. it may not be like particles or waves. and of course i can not tell what it will be like.

    [the whole point of this post is that assumption. if that is wrong i’m dead]

    If you agree with that let us call those rays asd rays (that’s the abbreviation of my full name – so that if in case someone finds it i can tell that i had predicted it and name it under my name, got the point? :D)

    now i hope i am right when i say that “evolution does not depend on whether we understand it or not”
    (that is to say like we have the electron behaving like a wave when we observe it and like a particle when we do not in Young’s double slit experiment)
    So I believe that
    “even if we don’t know that asd rays exist, our DNAs know it” (my goodness, that is an interesting point, could our body be knowing what our mind doesn’t? could we be knowing more than what we know?)

    And so let us assume our body has evolved mechanism to receive asd rays (like we do with light rays)

    And if we can receive asd rays we may be able to send asd rays too.. may be (like we can create sound, and hear sound)

    And may be there is some organ in our yet-to-be-studied-fully brain which CAN actually send and receive asd rays.

    now, may be the composition of asd rays is such that it doesn’t require a medium to pass through.
    and may be it could interact with things (sound can make things vibrate, light can strike electrons off)
    ————————

    OK. that is all the assumptions we have to make.

    Now my intentions are clear.

    Couldn’t there be such a mechanism in our brain or mind or body? (which can make things like telepathy, spoon bending, apple from thin air, etc. possible)
    ————————

    Reply from akshay s dinesh to asd of india

    But if there’s such an organ, our body would let our mind know it. For, do we have to learn that we can use the eye to see, ear to hear, etc. Should there be such an organ we must be knowing about it.

    reply from asd to akshay

    but do we come to realize that we have a liver, or a spleen by ourselves? (I never knew there existed an organ called spleen until I watched a mother killing her step daughter hitting on the spleen with a hammer in reality tv)
    i mean may be this is an involuntary organ.
    (like our heart rate gets automatically lowered when we’re calm and vice versa)

    ————————————

    Well I know all these are assumptions. But this is my hypothesis to make many things that we term supernatural as natural.. So that there wouldn’t be any fight at all (i don’t like fights)
    and therefore i wish to invite you to contribute to this idea too. That is to say instead of asking me questions. Help me make this idea a perfect hypothesis waiting to be proved.

    Well, that’s it. I know this is crazy. Still.
    This is the link to the actual thread.

  • The Truth Regarding India’s National Anthem

    There’s an email forward going around telling that India’s national anthem was composed praising King George and his queen. I don’t want to thrash this view. I just want you to hear all the facts behind it, and then decide how wonderful a poet Rabindranath Tagore is…

    The email forward says these things:

    To begin with, India’s national anthem, Jana Gana Mana Adhinayaka, was written by Rabindranath Tagore in honour of King George V and the Queen of England when they visited India in 1919. To honour their visit Pandit Motilal Nehru had the five stanzas included, which are in praise of the King and Queen.

     Well this IS right… But you have to read this after hearing what Rabindranath Tagore himself said about this:

    “A certain high official in His Majesty’s service, who was also my friend, had requested that I write a song of felicitation towards the Emperor. The request simply amazed me. It caused a great stir in my heart. In response to that great mental turmoil, I pronounced the victory in Jana Gana Mana of that Bhagya Vidhata [ed. God of Destiny] of India who has from age after age held steadfast the reins of India’s chariot through rise and fall, through the straight path and the curved. That Lord of Destiny, that Reader of the Collective Mind of India, that Perennial Guide, could never be George V, George VI, or any other George. Even my official friend understood this about the song. After all, even if his admiration for the crown was excessive, he was not lacking in simple common sense.”

     And just that clarification is enough for anyone to understand what Tagore really meant.

    But the email continues:

    In the original Bengali verses only those provinces that were under British rule, i.e. Punjab, Sindh, Gujarat, Maratha etc. were mentioned. None of the princely states were recognized which are integral parts of India now Kashmir, Rajasthan, Andhra, Mysore or Kerala. Neither the Indian Ocean nor the Arabian Sea was
    included, since they were directly under Portuguese rule at that time.

    Well, he mentioned “Punjab, Sind, Gujarat and Maratha, Dravida and Orissa and Benga.” What more would you except from a poet who was writing a poem, all the states of India? (and their capitals too?) Hey! When did Kerala come into existence?

    And then the mail continues to give some snippets of translation from all the stanzas of the whole Jana Gana Mana

    The intention of that article is clear. And that explains why only parts of the following stanzas were translated, and not the complete translation [well, if you haven’t read that article yet, go here and read it, I don’t want to disgrace my blog copy pasting the thing here]

    Click here to read the real and complete translation of all the five stanzas of Jana Gana Mana

    When you read that you can find these phrases:

    Oh! You who bring in the unity of the people!

     The way of life is somber as it moves through ups and downs.
    But we, the pilgrims, have followed through ages.
    Oh! Eternal Charioteer, the wheels of your chariot
    echo day and night in the path

    Oh! You who guide the people through tortuous path!

    Through nightmares and fears
    You protected us on Your lap
    Oh Loving Mother.

     By the halo of Your compassion
    India that was asleep is now waking

    Now tell me, was Tagore referring to King George or mother India? He got Nobel Prize not for nothing.

    Be proud to be an Indian
    (I hereby permit to make this an email forward provided that the whole text remains including this link to the blog Blissful Life @ http://asdofindia.blogspot.com)

  • Type in Indic, Greek, Arabic Anywhere, Anytime With Google IME

    Google’s transliteration feature has been of great help to Indian’s looking to type in their own languages. But to use it one had to be connected internet.

    But our dear Google (G capital for God and Google) has again come for our help. They’re providing an IME tool which when installed works as a new language in your windows system (yeah that language bar you tried so many times to hide, you’re gonna need that)
    You can just type in the language you choose even in notepad.

    Google Transliteration IME is currently available for 14 different languages – Arabic, Bengali, Farsi (Persian), Greek, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Nepali, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu.


    First you’ll have to download the language pack you need from this page.

    And don’t cut the internet connection

    Then when you run the file it will download the files it need, install itself and disappear into nothingness.

    Then when you’re clueless about what to do, go to the Google Transliteration IME help page Google Transliteration Input Method (IME) Help there. (You can’t find that link by searching, they show some Chinese pages, so rather save it now)

    There, they will tell you to enable the language bar (by right clicking on taskbar, pointing to toolbars, selecting language bar) and then to select your language to see the Google IME.

    Rest is explained nicely with pictures over here:
    Google Transliteration Input Method (IME) Help

    Just go there, start typing without pain…

  • 3 Questions to Define What is Productive and What is Not

    Time management is about knowing what is productive and what isn’t as much as Bhagavad Gita is about self improvement. When you are able to conceive the difference between productive and unproductive work, time management is just a matter of avoiding the unproductive one and doing the productive one. But how do we distinguish between the two?

    Any work doing which we are bound to benefit in the future can be termed as productive. (But only when you are doing it as efficiently as possible and have nothing more important to do, as I will explain below)
    Learning anything new, exercising, helping someone else, …

    And any work doing which we may get benefit in the future are unproductive.
    Watching a film (about which a question may be asked in the Who wants to be a millionaire? program which I’m planning to participate in 20 years from now), playing farmville in facebook (thus showing my friends my skill in farming?), chatting endlessly with friends (do you think that the amount of time you spend with your friend strengthens the bond of friendship between you?) …

    Your mind may sometimes trick you into believing that you’re being productive when you’re actually less than 10% of what you can be, as is clearly demonstrated when someone gets addicted to anything I said above (social networks, tv shows, etc)

    Let us analyze them one by one

    Social networks:
    Facebook, orkut, and all others of the genre are truly great sites when it comes to keeping in touch with friends, sharing photos, videos, clearing doubts in an online forum and so on, and I personally have a profile in each one of them. But they become evil when we start forgetting why they are there. They are meant for strengthening interpersonal relationships. But you could spend a whole day in any one of them, and still end the day gaining nothing more than what you could achieve in 10 minutes. Think of how you could post updates every 15 minutes throughout a day and 2 of your greatest friends who log in at the night sees just the last 2 of your updates and comment on them. Think of how you could post a very clever, very attractive single update a day and still have almost half a dozen people liking and commenting on your update.
    Think of how you can get back your time from these sites. Think how you can compress your activities to bare minimum.

    TV:
    The #1 time killer in most house holds even after the advent of the internet is television. Because while internet soon becomes boring especially when you don’t know more than 3 sites by their URL, TV + remote ensures that you find something or the other every time you switch the thing on. And unlike internet you needn’t even know what you want to waste time on TV.

    Time for some entertainment… Aha I’ve my favourite program in Nat Geo (well Nat Geo is after all educational)… Oh it’s commercials time, let’s see what HBO is showing. Is it Rush-Hour 3? My Goodness! Never got a chance to watch it. And it has just begun… [2 hours later]… my gosh, my eyes are paining. I think I need some rest. [Power off]

    Tell me how many of us haven’t gone through these exact routine. You get a chance holiday and think that you would finish all your pending works on that day. But at the end of the day you would find yourself just a bit further than where you started.

    Because you forget what you should have been doing. You think you are being productive when you aren’t actually.

    So the next time you are in a doubt whether or not you’re doing the right thing, just ask yourself these questions.
    #1, Is what I’m trying to do my absolute priority?
    This is another way of asking yourself whether you have a task to be completed with its deadline tomorrow, or whether you have a critical examination tomorrow. (Most people think of doing some exercise, or learning javascript at such critical eleventh hours) Just ask yourself whether there’s anything very important. Even if you are trying to exercise or learn a new language, right now it is unproductive, if you have a deadline tomorrow.

    If I don’t have anything absolutely necessary to do
    #2, Is what I’m trying to do going to be of any help for me in the future?
    Am I learning? Am I building my muscles? Am I doing something new? Am I building up on my relationships? Am I really having fun? Am I being adventurous? Am I doing something, the fruit of which I can proudly display in front of others?

    And if I’m doing something useful
    #3, Can I do what I’m doing more efficiently?
    Am I utilizing what I’m doing to the maximum? This last question can have great effects. You will soon find yourself chatting with friends just enough, such that you don’t find both of you talking about how bad your favourite actress performed in her last movie (unless you are a movie critic).
    And don’t think you will be termed as a kill-joy, or a silent person. Talk to your friends enough. But just enough. Don’t let gossips be your topic of discussion. And don’t fear that you will turn out to be an uninteresting person. How about talking about a picnic or a group work. Find topics that are productive, interesting and relationship strengthening, all at the same time.

    Don’t be fooled by the calendar. There are only as many days in the year as you make use of. One man gets only a week’s value out of a year while another man gets a full year’s value out of a week.
    – Charles Richards

  • Billy – Media Players Can’t Get Lighter

    Just 4 days ago I told you about Quintessential Media Player.
    But the day I started using QMP I had also installed another media player called Billy. It was very small a program that I didn’t try to run it that day. I thought it wouldn’t be having any features I wanted.
    But wait! This 665 KB (with setup and 357 KB without setup) media player can do anything including managing playlists, playing shuffled, have a tiny mode, calculate total playlist time, have sleep timer, rename multiple items, jump to playing file, a softmute (30 % of volume) and every one of those functions have a keyboard shortcut too. Even seek can be done with cursor keys. And there is a tiny visualisation too. Moreover under the seek bar it shows you the total time, elapsed time and remaining time all at once. And in the status bar it shows you the properties of the file, the number of files in the playlist, play mode, etc. What not, there is a find option which can be used to search any file in the playlist (and it can search within track information too)

    And the most thrilling part is it uses only under 1 MB of resources while running for itself (+ the size of the song)

    My God!
    At last I have found the truly lightest media player… It’s Billy…

    Download Billy Here

    Additional Info: (from Billy site)

    Features
    Freeware (no adware)
    Runs on Win 95/98/NT/Me/2000/XP/2003
    No skins, no mp3 tags, no equalizer, no nonsense – pure audio
    Supported formats: MP3, WAV, OGG
    High quality sound engine, by Un4seen Bass
    Extremely fast, loads 1000 mp3 files in a second
    Gapless trackchange of mp3 files
    Directory based or playlist based
    Filenames renamer to organize your music albums
    Calibrated dB level meter
    100% controllable by keyboard
    Low memory and cpu usage
    Queueing your next songs
    Find a specific song quickly
    Sleep timer
    Drag & drop

    Info
    Billy is an audio player that allows you to quickly play an entire directory of MP3 files. It can usually load files 2 to 8 times faster than winamp or media player. Billy plays music albums without any gaps between tracks, so an overlapping applause or beat will continue. The player is 100% controllable by keyboard and its easy finder and special rename functions help you to find and organize your files quickly.

    Download Billy right now… here

  • Quintessential Media Player – The Best Light Media Player

    I have been on the look out of a light media player which can perform all the tasks I want to do (all those shuffling, playlist organizing, etc. etc.), and I always thought that after media player classic, there’s nothing light that can do those. But ever since I started using Quintessential Media Player I have been in love with it. It supports plugins, it can shuffle playlists, it has many skins, there’s a shade mode, shows remaining time for a track and above all it runs very very light on resources.

    So what are you waiting for just go to Quintessential Player website, and get it.

    Update: I discovered Billy later which is as light as it can get, and as good as everything else.

    Related Posts:
    Billy – Media Players Can’t Get Lighter

  • Google Dictionary !!!

    Google is taking over the internet… It released its own DNS service and I thought that was the news for the day, but wait… Google has rolled out its dictionary, and unlike when it rolls out other services this came in silently. And so, there is a great chance that you may miss this. But I won’t let you do so. For, looking up words is one thing I’ve always used google for. Gone are the days when I had to type define:compere and then get a single line on something.
    Today onwards I will just have to key in the word like I do with any other search term… (Ctrl – K, then “chamois”) and see on the top right along with those big numbers a blue link [definition]

    And clicking on it I will be with the meaning…

    As you can see in the picture, there is easy starring of words (learn new words), pronunciation, synonym, categories, other languages having the same word, web links (what you would normally get with a “define:” tag. And finally there are dictionaries for almost every language. Even malayalam!!!!!

    Just go check it out Google dictionary

    And have happy days learning words…

  • 26/11 and The Colour of Life

    The true colour of life can only be appreciated when we get out of the frame and just stay as a witness.
    This, I understood when I was flipping through all the channels in my television, tonight on 26/11.

    Let me first of all salute all those heroes who died. I wish I have a death like theirs.
    It requires a lot of courage to know that you are going to die and still stand up to a terrorist. I wish to include all of them by name. But doing that would mean they have become our history. They haven’t. They are the martyrs of our reality. They are very much alive in our discussions today.

    All the channels have been airing special bulletins on 26/11 today. With a tinge of sorrow everyone reported about the deaths. And then they showed how life has came back. In NDTV, they had showed the gunshots, the burning Taj, the press lying on the floor, the firemen trying to curb the fire. And then they showed the today of the Taj Hotel. Pigeons flying. Men feeding them. Tourists taking snaps. And a small child crawling on its knees through the pigeons, happiness on her face. It was beautiful. And that is what I wish to call the Colour of Life.

    Life is so very beautiful because it is multi-centred. There is no absolute one thing that everybody wish to do. There is variety. There is diversity. There is colour.

    Just go to a city in the night. You will feel that. There will be lights everywhere. Blue, yellow, neon, sodium. There will be the fruit seller with his orange, blue, black, yellow, red. There will be the flower seller. There will be the stationary shop. There will be the rice shop. There will be restaurants, cafes. There will be the mobile coupon centres, Xeroxing stations, the cycle shop, bars, the hardware shop. There will be the hospital. And not to mention the vehicles on the road – cars, buses, rickshaws, motor cycles. And there would be the trees on the sides which we simply fail to notice in the dark, but when we reach near them we feel an eerie sense of fear of the ghost hiding above it.

    Or just flip the channels of your television set.
    There will be mourning prayers for the dead at some place. Debates about the same at some other place. And then there will be that cricket star who took 5+ wickets in his come back match. And then discussion on how he performed. Then there will be the unexpected 0-1 loss of a soccer club. And their manager’s explanation. There will be prime time movies. There will be soaps. And there will be reality shows. And there will be fashion shows. And there will be a lonely preacher talking about religion. Then there will be some ads. (These ads are the most contrasting colours. They will be so funny sometimes. Like after the interview with the NSG chief about how they finished the terrorists there was the docomo ad where a car hits another and the man who was driving the first car get down to see what happened, suddenly police surround them from all directions, and this man would be holding his hands up “Hands up”. But the police men catch some terrorists from the other car, gives a pat on his back and leaves).

    And there will be people. There will be a fisherman who talks in impure Hindi about how he saw the terrorists getting down from the rubber dingy they used to travel. And there will be a debate where different experts tell their own views about how the world should work. One foreigner telling India should unite with Pakistan. And an angry Indian saying how Pakistan hurt the “people of India”, and how they want nothing but a war. And the anchor who does not let emotion come into the debate, but still pours in questions which can be answered only through emotions. There will be sports stars, analysts, super sexy models, actors (including actresses), yoga masters, commentators, extras, junior artists, real artists, judges, showmen, and the animal planet man who goes after the largest otters. And there will be another debate, where a victim describes very emotionally about how he was terrified as well as all others when they heard gun shots, and how the hotel authorities helped them to escape, and how they comforted each other, and how the NSGs gave them cover and took them to safety under the local police. And then about how there was some report which joked at the victims who suffered. How the government was doing nothing. How Ajmal Kasab has more security than any other man in Mumbai. And he asks the minister P Chidambaram “What have you done?”
    And the minister says calmly “If you were I what would you have done. That’s the answer to that question.” (This is when I came to understand that all our politicians are not fools running after power)

    And there is this whole sense of joy, sorrow, humour, love, trust, respect, motivation, failure, desperation, solitude, business, confidence, seduction, success, hope, affection, envy, hatred, warmth,…This is called the colour of life. The way things go on. The way people come and go. The way topics come and go. But life goes on, for ever and ever.

    Just get out of the painting called life and view it as a whole. It’s so colourful. When we are inside it, seeing only our neighbouring pixel, we can’t see the true colour of life.


    Let life go on…