Shiva the weird man

That dog was continuously barking.

That continuously barking made me look around the surroundings more closely as I was walking casually this morning. A house was getting constructed on the side of the road. That construction site had all the necessary ingredients. 

Construction material like sand, metal, pieces of iron rods were scattered all over effectively reducing the width of the road, totally hiding the fact that there once existed a footpath for pedestrians. Some of these materials were anxiously waiting for the moment to become part of that building. Even otherwise they do not have to get disappointed; they will find a place in some natural lake which people are desperately trying to fill so that another commercial/residential complex can be erected there.

A few workers were still sleeping under blankets covering head to toe, waiting for the supervisor to come and shout at. There were fumes coming out from right hand side corner, a lady was trying to cook on a fireplace from which more smoke and less fire emanated. She was continuously blowing to keep the fire on while burning not-so-easily-combustible materials. Left side corner was reserved for people to complete necessary morning formalities such as brushing teeth, taking bath etc. One or two people were” lazy” with those acts. 

I looked at the half constructed building. A few floors or levels have already come up. On the top floor, those iron rods are still protruding up indicating that more floors are on the cards. Probably the builder is waiting for approvals from sanctioning authorities for those illegal floors. One does not need to spend years in an institution studying civil engineering to understand that some of these buildings have more number of floors compared to number of square feet at the base cross section. If one had played the “seven stone” game in his childhood, those tiny stones, seven in number stacked up one above the other with no stability, he will be able to make out how unstable such buildings are.

The scene will be incomplete without describing about a 3 year old “worker” child, holding a “chappati” , made on the previous day, in his hands thinking how to go about eating it. And of course, one or two stray dogs always in the lookout for something to smell and eat around in this set-up!

One of those dogs was the one which barked continuously. The reason for its barking? It found a pedestrian a bit odd. Had I also have the habit of barking, I would have done it as well, he looked so weird to me too. 

Wearing a loose T-shirt half torn here and there, ¾th shorts one leg smaller than the other, dragging his feet since one chappal was broken, unkempt, and unshaven – no wonder the dog had reacted the way it could. But what was interesting was that the dog was barking at the bag he was carrying, jumping to bite it.

I would have continued walking, had two cops not come on a bike noticing all this. They abruptly stopped their bike and asked this “weird” man to stop. After all they are cops right, if they can’t get suspicious who else can? “What’s your name ?” when one of the cops asked, he replied in a trembling voice. “Shiva sir, I am looking out for a job sir, I don’t have anybody in the city and I don’t have any money to survive, I am from a village, had come here looking for a job”. Cops just took these things on face value, they were more interested in knowing what smuggled goods Shiva was carrying in his bag which the dog could smell.

Shiva was made to open his bag. Things started coming out, one more equally torn T-shirt, a few old magazines, a broken umbrella – many such things which did not excite the cops much. Then came out a small bundle packed in old newspaper, everybody was interested in knowing what stolen article it contained. “Sir this a bit of chicken biriyani, left over I got from a restaurant last night, preserving half of it for today”. No wonder the dog jumped up and down smelling it.

Cops started their bike after completing their interrogation, Shiva started putting things back into his bag, and building workers went back to whatever they had been doing. 

I was also about to continue my walk when this caught my eyes. The 3 year old quietly went to Shiva and offered him the “chappati” he was holding!

We are so grown up, so knowledgeable, so pre-occupied, that many a times we jump into perceptions and conclusions to such an extent that we even forget to empathize with somebody  if not try to help.

Many of them among those workers in that construction building would have been once Shivas. Shiva is only a symptom which we have been seeing for ages. And so far, only dogs have been barking at people like Shiva. No concrete attempt towards diagnosis and cure is visible yet.

Gains and pains

We all know or at least we all are taught this axiom: No pain, No gain. I was watching “Life’s six rules" by Arnold Schwarzenegger in YouTube the other day. I liked his narration on hard work, the quote from Mohammed Ali, the world boxing champion. Ali was asked “How many sit-ups do you do?” He said “I don’t count my sit-ups. I only start counting when it starts hurting. When I feel pain, that is when I start counting because that is when it really counts”.

 

Few weeks back my uncle sent me information on how to publish a book of my own. Somehow my painful blogs made him realize that my hidden agenda is to write and publish a book, and to start with, the best option will be to become an indie author (If you see yourself as creative director of your book from concept to completion and beyond, then you are an indie). I started thinking seriously in those lines to avoid pains of approaching any publishing house and working out complicated contractual terms with them!  

But what I read today made me take a few steps back. It seems on Amazon site, every five minutes one new book is getting added and most probably it is an indie book. In such a scenario, one has to put in extra ordinary efforts to make people read what he writes in the hope of making some gains. I decided to postpone that venture till my mind and body get better prepared to bare such enormous pain. Till such time I decided to continue to scribble like this - to pain a few people with some smaller gains for me!

Sometimes gain happens with no pain. There was one small-time tea vendor in our area. He never used to put any additional effort to grow bigger, he never attempted more than just making tea and selling it for a small profit. He was happy. One fine day he won a lottery, that happy news was reported in all leading newspapers. With the free money, he went all out, tried all new stuff which he was not an expert of and got tired. To state that he failed miserably in all counts will be an understatement, he resumed selling his usual tea with in a year. That gain brought him only pain during the period when he blew that money and when he didn’t make tea.

 I was traveling in the state run ordinary bus. The gain was to attend to college to learn something which I didn’t have any clue how it would help me in the future. The pain was the travel itself in the jam-packed bus for an hour. But that day I was almost at the verge of gaining something additional with no effort. 

I was enjoying sitting in the middle of two well built, over-sized gentlemen, my thin body frame only made their journey more comfortable.I was trying to get out from that tangle as my destination approached, the giant in the left growled “Why are you leaving this here? Don’t you want this?”. I looked down and was astonished. A huge bundle of currency notes was lying under my feet, I had never seen such a big bundle in my life. I was so shocked, I didn’t have presence of mind to think those lessons learnt till in class III that one should not greedily take something that does not belong to him. Luckily I didn’t have presence of mind either to think that this amount would be sufficient pocket money for next one year to do some justice to my thin body frame! Just a few words came out of me as I started walking “No that’s not mine!” .

Yes, no pain, no gain. But one needs to make sure that others don’t get unnecessarily pained in the pursuit of his gain. Also, if some gains come to us with no pain, we need to accept it whole-heartedly with both hands, if it is legitimate and with no wrong doing. But then, we need to first understand how much effort one has to put in in order to achieve that gain. And make double the effort to sustain and amplify those gains. So that we don't end up in saying "no gain, no pain".


(Link for “Life’s six rules" by Arnold Schwarzenegger video :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?annotation_id=annotation_299909&feature=iv&src_vid=LuJ4hbkLiY0&v=9Kg-zbJjlyA

Rewards are useful

Few months back, one evening I was strolling on the busy main road near my house. The whole day was not much rewarding for me so I thought I would try some luck out there, with no specific aim. Suddenly I found the hefty gentleman walking in front of me barging into the medical shop on our right. Within a split second I found him catching hold of the young man at the counter and slapping on his face. He hit the shop man so hard that he had done enough for another month as far as “moral licensing” was concerned! (“moral licensing” is the idea that doing one good action can result in doing fewer good actions in the future, which is a psychological phenomenon).

Why do I say his action was good? Please read on. Once I saw the incident, I stayed back to know why at all it happened. Even though I didn’t have any immediate plans to open a medical shop, I thought it would be worthwhile to know the reasons why one medical store person could be battered so badly. As expected the hefty man narrated the story. Apparently his daughter was walking a few yards ahead of him. Medical store fellow, since there was no much rewarding business happening for him, found another innovative way to keep him motivated. He made paper bullets and using an elastic band like a catapult he targeted the young lady walking across. Curiously I looked around the area. I could find many paper bullets scattered, in complete rest probably after successfully hitting beautiful targets! And the hefty reward the shop man received that day had a long enduring effect; the medical shop is permanently closed now, no more medicines, no more bullets!

Rewards are important in our lives. For example, take the life of a person working in a software industry. It is much rewarding right? He starts with coding, becomes a software programmer. He gets the kick out of it when each of his programs runs successfully. After some time, writing a program is not interesting to him, he moves to design. Once he starts designing, he finds that his salary and position in the organization is not satisfactory. He gets promotion and more salary, and then he finds his job is not rewarding enough. So it goes on and on as long as software development cycle goes on and he is able to see the organization structure from as high as possible. So there is a reward mechanism which is constantly working within him to keep motivated and to do more and to rise more.

Why do we like rewards?  What enables us not only to see the rewards but aslo to take action to achieve them? It’s because of Dopamine. It seems among many centres we have in brain, one of them is “reward and pleasure” centre. There is a hormone, a neurotransmitter called “dopamine” which controls this centre. It’s a good thing to have this dopamine, absence of which will result in Parkinson’s disease- as long as the drive is for good rewards, else it might cause us to behave erratically, to earn bad rewards!

Einstein once fully frustrated said “when god created the ass, he gave him a thick skin”. If a genius like Einstein had, we would surely go through those rough patches in life. Whatever good things we do, we would not be getting enough rewards to keep our dopamine highly active. On the contrary, we might well be criticized. In those few occasions, forget about “moral licensing”, keep trying to do more good stuff, continue to project them - momentarily assuming that you are somebody with a thick skin, if not a complete ass.

Percentage matters

"100 percent of the time is easier than 98 percent of the time"– Clayton Christensen.

I see an old man walking briskly every day morning at 4:30 to the nearby Balamurugan Temple. He does that without fail, while doing so he will be loudly reciting some religious verses. You may be wondering how come I get up so early every day to watch him. No. I am yet to develop that habit. In every those few days when I got up too early, I had seen him. Which made me arrive at a reasonable conclusion that he is so regular and disciplined in doing that activity. He does that 100 percent of the times, that is the reason he is able to sustain that. I am sure this walk is very important for him to start his day - like a cup of tea, newspaper, Facebook or “Candy Crush” for many of us.

Yes, habits are developed over a period of time with consistent effort. But certain things we do even without our knowledge, mostly because it is a question of survival. Take the example of breathing, a very good habit! Did anybody tell us that we need to breathe regularly?  Do we ever focus on our breath? Unless we attend a meditation class where the teacher tells us explicitly to do so. Unless we get a severe cold and our noses are totally blocked – some of us may be luckier to focus it more often depending on which part of the world we live. 

If I indicate to my dogs that we shall go out they will jump out of joy making all sorts of noises. They learnt by daily routine that it means they can roam around outside a bit. So making a habit is the best way to train these pets. But, if some of you try telling them that, they will not respond at all. It is not because you are not as “soft-spoken” as their master !!  It’s because you don’t know Konkani! So, many a times, we need a bare minimum similar ambiance to behave the way we are trained.

Conversely getting rid of a habit is equally tough. I have this habit of re-arranging furniture and other house-hold items in my house, I don’t think that habit will ever die. Destined to live in the same house for long periods of time, I invariably do some changes. To have a different interior view of my house and to get some exercise to me and to those poor movable items, which can’t move themselves otherwise.  The challenge with this approach is that I would move to the right side of the kitchen to open the fridge thinking that it still remains there. But previous day only I would have moved it to the left side corner when I felt the need of  body movement! Luckily, the number of times of searching it in the wrong place diminishes fairly quickly and would become almost 0% and I will have ample time to go for my next move! However, certain bad habits are not that easy to go away. For example smoking, there is no way one can make it 98%, and then gradually reduce it to nil, that is what at least experts say!.  In these cases, 100% should become 0% instantly, there is no mid-way approach.

Becoming an expert in something is good. Today’s front page news is about one of our Rajyasabha members who prefers to sit at the back bench making sketches of his fellow members by observing them carefully. An able painter, he finds some relaxation during the dull periods in the house by making use of his core competency. I wonder how other experts, who are nominated to the house, because of their expertise in other fields like sports, movies etc can do similar things in a non-invasive manner.

We all know that to become an expert in an area, we need to put in considerable amount of effort. Develop  a habit to achieve that. If I decide that I should improve my knowledge by reading, I need to make it a habit that l read some book or other at least an hour every day. If I default it once in order to play non-stop “candy crush saga” generously gifting candies to others, I will become confident that I can default it many more times. Ultimately to become a permanent defaulter, in the process what will also get crushed is my reading ambition! We should attempt 100% of the times, like we breathe. 98% of the times will not be sufficient. There is no much logic required for our brains to console ourselves that less is just fine. And that 98% of times will become negligible, if not zero times, in no time.

Careful with words

Words are very powerful. As per Wikipedia “a word is the smallest element that may be uttered in isolation with semantic or pragmatic content (with literal or practical meaning)”.

Recently I read somewhere that researchers in a University in the US found out something interesting. The power of the word “together”. When a leader tries to increase the belonging of an employee in the group, using the word “together” helps a lot. When he/she explains a goal or a project, if he/she can manage to use the word “together” appropriately, that would increase the bonding of people and motivate them to work in the team, each one would get a feeling that he/she is not alone and there will always be somebody to assist.

“No matter what people tell you, words and ideas can change the world” – Robin Williams.

However, excessive use or repetition of a word may not do good as well. One of my friends has a problem with the word “like”’. He uses that word quite often. “I wanted to come early today ‘like’, but then it started ’like’ pouring ….”- If I had asked him why he was late that day, this would be his reply with many more ‘like’s embedded within other meaningful words. 

Once I pointed out this excessive usage of his much liked word to him, which irritated me. He had a hearty laugh before replying “I am aware of this problem, I tried hard ‘like’ to correct this, but then ‘like’ this is the end result of I stopped saying ‘as if’ repeatedly similar to like. If I ‘like’ try to stop this some other word would come in place of like”! I had to like him and his reply! You never know, he might end up in using a different, harsher four letter word. Any day ‘like’ is a better word. No harm.

I had a habit of telling something honestly more often than not! Many a times my sentence would start with “honestly speaking…”.  One of my honest friends advised me “If you start your words with the qualifier “honestly” in more occasions than required then people will doubt your honesty in occasions when you don’t start your conversation that way”! I tried to start a bit less honest from that day onwards!!

Sometimes one gets nicknames because of excessive use of the same word repeatedly. I had two teachers, English teacher – “London Joseph” and Physics teacher – “Too Simple Sridharan”. 

Joseph did not have an option but to narrate about some things about his London days whenever he had to explain some poem or other. All poems were obviously in English and most of them were written by English writers referring to huge gardens or bridges, where are such things in India, he had to refer things in London which he had seen!  At least there would be one or two instances in each class where he had to start “when I was in London” – he became “London Joseph” among students. 

Sridharan had a much complex problem, any theory whether it was simple or complex, while explaining them to us he had a habit of telling “this is too simple to understand”, probably for him! 

If I look back, there was no way they could have been told about this habit. None of us would have dared to point out these habits to them. There was no provision to provide feedback in anonymous way, I am not sure whether such formal process exists even now in education sector, students giving feedback to teachers.

Words play an important role while we communicate with others. Be cautious when you use them whether it is in your mother tongue or somebody else’s.  Try to choose them appropriately, especially when you want to strike a chord with the listeners. Only a few people are good in doing that.