What've I done to my country?

I am just storing through this blog a mail that I had sent to a few of my friends sometime back. When I come back and read this blog later, if there is nothing that is done to my conscience, then I've lost both my brain and my heart in the material race. If I feel guilty, then I had lost my brain but not my heart. But if I feel happy, then I didn't lose either of them, probably I had started serving the people.

Hey,

I'm slowly starting to lose my satisfaction at job. I no longer seem to be having the fiery passion for it. Not that the job is any bad or has it become redundant, it is as good as or better than it was ever. But I'm beginning to feel that I'm not doing anything good for the people. I've been experiencing this for the last couple of years, being in the US is only aggravating it, I feel living aloof from the masses and the villages and the poor people. I seem to be enjoying the world around me when so many people do not know how to live the next day. For the first time, I'm beginning to feel if I should've chosen medicine; I could have served the people, those who needed help. I was selfish when I chose to fly to Pilani after having got admitted at the Madras Medical College, I was bothered only about my life, my growth and my prosperity and failed to realize that all these are absolute rubbish when the majority of the world around is lacking every damn thing of it.

I am not sending this mail because you could send me some consoling words, but I'm just trying to find if doing it will make me come out of this because this has been more than just pestering me. Not that I'm not able to concentrate at my work, but I'm fearing if that would happen some day. I'm feeling like selling myself for nothing but money. I want to do something for my country, my land and my men. I know I can still do it, but I don't believe in part-time charity work or percentage donations. And I am starting to wonder if the world will fine tune me one day and make me do only that, if at all I do something. I don't know what I'm saying, but I'm just penning down my pains. Be it starting a school for children or installing computers and internet in the villages or starting a journal to help people get what they deserve or something else, I feel I'm not doing anything of those right now.

Let me see, may be I'll come back, do my MBA while sustaining to barely do some work, then I want to start something, some organization that people will know without doubt that it is for them and only for them. But most probably I'll not do any of those for the wicked self that I'm; I will end up growing myself and my family, and continue to cheat myself that my work is doing good for the betterment of mankind. But then, the day when I get this same feeling again later after all those years, I don't know what I would do.

Nats
Video of the day: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ul9Xvjt83eI

Learning is not compulsory, neither is survival

Some hackneyed quotes that I liked, these are not forwarded ones but those that I accumulated over time.

• The reasonable man adapts himself to the world, the unreasonable persists in trying to adapt the word to him, and all progress depends on the unreasonable man. (G. Bernard Shaw)
• The irony of life is that it is lived forward but understood backward. (Soren Kierkegaard)
• What I hear, I forget, what I see, I remember, what I do, I understand. (Confucius)
• Formal education will make you a living; self-education will make you a fortune. (Roosevelt)
• The minute you settle for less than what you deserve, you get even less than you settled for. (M David)
• A pessimist complains about the direction of the wind, an optimist expects the direction to change, the leader adjusts the sails. (William Arthur Ward)
• Education’s purpose is not to fill, but to open an empty mind. (Malcolm Forbes)
• The only time success comes before work is in the dictionary. (Anonymous)
• There’s plenty of room at the top, for those who’re willing to spend the time and effort climbing. (Anonymous)
• The only thing I like about stones that come in my way is that once I pass across them, they automatically become my milestones. (Anonymous)
• The glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time you fall. (Chinese proverb)
• Sometimes we stare so long at a door that is closing, that we see too late the one that is open. (Alexander Graham Bell)
• I have not failed; I’ve just found ten thousand ways that won’t work. (Thomas Alva Edison)
• Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new. (Albert Einstein)
• To err is human, but if the eraser wears out ahead of the pencil, you are overdoing it. (J. Jenkins)
• The reward for a thing well done is to have done it. (R.W. Emerson)
• God does not require us to win, He only requires us to try (Mother Teresa)
  
• Learning is not compulsory, neither is survival. (W. Edwards Deming)

There goes he again

Osama slams EU over Prophet cartoons: That's news about Osama Bin Laden's tape this time threatening the European Union against Prophet's misrepresentation. Though my first reaction was "Oh this guy doesn't want good in this world, why can't he let the people live in peace?", a few minutes of thought made me reconsider. Why did Osama come into the world at all. There are multiple reasons to it, but the most philosophical of all, but quite true, is people didn't follow the golden rule "When you're at the top, be aggresive, that will keep you at the top, but dont be arrogant". He's doing all this because the people at the top were arrogant. Of course Osama is now doing the same mistake too, may be someone else will retaliate Osama later.

Be it the country of US or the Australian cricket team or the newly rich IT crowd of Bangalore, I can say a dozen of other examples. I've noticed that whenever someone reaches the top, even if he were humble, people try to pull him down; if he were aggressive, people get together to device plans to bring him down; if he were arrogant, people try all possible means to push him to the abyss. If Osama is not humanistic, neither is the US and neither is India nor is Pakistan, Israel, Palestine, the list continues. Just that different sets of people weigh one over the other.

In my opinion, people should have good moral science classes in their childhood, I didn't find a lighter way to say what I wanted to; otherwise saving this world is going to become increasingly difficult. An easy example that suits the moment is cricket. If Indian cricket comes to the number one position, the same will happen to Indian cricket if the players are going to be arrogant; every country will then want to bring India down. I'm really not sure what Harbhajan Singh and Ishant Sharma are upto, playing in Australia. You can argue that this is what we need to do to a sledging Australian team. But that's just not the way how things work. You have no business to show the batsman the dressing room when he's walking out whatever he does to you, come on, this is nursery school stuff, we are all taught not to do that. How can you forget it twenty years later? Ishant Sharma should probably go back to his school and pass it again.

If Ilayaraja can create wonders in music, why hasn't he risen above South India? If Microsoft is such an endeared company at every household, why is the rest of the industry against it? If US is the economy driver for the whole globe, why do most countries hate the US? All of them are arrogant!

Man thinks he's part of the supreme race to have ever been created by God. God tries to prove him wrong at every moment, but he fails to understand it almost always. I think it'll all stop only when he destroys himself. If that should not happen, man has to do a little bit of self-examination and realize that nothing is more important than the other, everything needs everything else to live in harmony.

Om Shanthi (Let there be peace)!