Skip to main content

Posts

Strings Attached

"Acting wholeheartedly with wisdom means appreciating the relationships and interactions between ourselves and others," say Joseph O'Connor and John Seymour in their book on NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming).  (The above illustration is taken from that book.)  You can't really conquer peaks of success all alone simply because everything around you is linked to you.  With an invisible string.   When you think you are conquering the peak alone, with no rival beneath you because the sole rival in sight is about to fall off, remember that his fall may mean your fall too.   Why do people actually want to push others down to the bottom?   Helplessness, I think.  Inability to manage others.  Sheer inability.   Weakness makes us aggressive? But is it only weakness?  Can aggression be fun? I was watching a young boy playing a race game on computer.  Whenever he came across a rival in the game he would do something like hit the rival on his

Teacher’s Day Gift

Riding around in Delhi on a rickety scooter is one of my few hobbies.  It gives me a feel of earthiness, a feeling that I am a nobody amidst the costly cars that fly by me.  It makes me feel humble, arrogant as I am.  It helps me to check my dreams.  It roots me in reality, the harsh reality that I like to confront honestly. A traffic policeman stopped me today.  I took off my helmet with a smile that comes rather artificially to me these days. “I’ve broken the law, you can punish me,” I said.  I think the smile had not vanished from my cheeks.   I had jumped a red light.  I had not intended it.  My scooter got stuck on the gravel and the lights turned red before I could cross the range.  This was the first time that I was ever caught in my 12 years of hobbying in Delhi by the omnipresent traffic police of Delhi.  “License?” asked the policeman. I handed him my licence. “... school ...,” he read it aloud for the benefit of his senior officer who was standin

Barrel Life

Historical Fiction “I’m going to die,” declared Diogenes.  He was 96.  By the time you reach the age of 96 you will have acquired the wisdom to know when to die.  You can have such wisdom even earlier.  Depends on what life taught you.  Rather what you cared to learn from life. Diogenes was on a street in Corinth.  Dying.  The street was his home.  When the weather was too good outside he chose to get into a barrel.  Somebody had gifted him that barrel.  Why somebody?  Greece was mad enough to understand the madness of Diogenes and appreciate it.  But Greece was not so mad that Diogenes was prompted to declare with the certainty that comes only to godmen that “Most men are within a finger’s breadth of being mad.” “It takes a wise man to discover a wise man,” declared Diogenes with the same godman-certainty when Xeniades of Corinth bought him from the slave dump.  He had been sold as a slave by one of the administrators of Greece who wished to get rid of his ravi