Life thoughts

Many of us willingly or un-willingly might have attended Amway workshop where videos of someone hammering clocks to emphasize on breaking their monotonous 9-5 job and living a happy life is shown. Few of my friends had bought the idea but i doubt they have reached a point where they can retire but these videos sow the seeds in people's mind of early retirement. Last year i met my friend's friend, Akash in early 40s, who was following this idea to get retired early. One day Akash met the financial planner, explained his financial status, his current expenses etc and queried when can he retire? He being working in IT industry for almost 20 years and living a simple and frugal life, he had saved quite a bit. Looking at Akash's finances and expenditure, the financial planner told him that he could retire at that very moment if he wishes to, from financial perspective. This was "Amrit" to his ears, i believe the same for many millions of other IT engineers, and he reti...

Other day i was talking to my mother and she said, "Govt rightly retires people at the age of 58 as they doesn't remain fit to after age of 58". For most of the government employees retirement age was 58 years and has become de-facto standard for private employees too. I thought for a while and i replied to her that it is other way round, since people doesn't work after retirement they become unfit for work very soon.  This problem happens with the salaried people who followed some routine of getting up early in the morning, getting ready and commute to work, spend whole day working to earn and in the evening come back home, spend some time with the family and go to sleep. This happens day in and day out till one get retired. Post retirement one doesn't know what to do with all the free time that is available and in the absence of meaningful activities the neurons in brain start to lose their connections with other neurons leading to the death of neuron and brain ...

Broadly we have 3 ways of transportation systems. First one is train which can move forward or backward. Secondly we have cars which can move left or right also along with front and back. Then we have planes which moves up and down also.  Lets call train, car and airplane as one, two and three dimensional moving objects respectively. If these objects had brain instead of engine then these living beings sees world as one, two and three dimensions only. Train can’t visualise second dimension and similarly car can’t three dimensional world. Similar to plane we live in and see the world as three dimensional. With this limitation we can’t understand each and everything. Einstein introduced to us the 4th dimension, “time” and it helped us to understand more about space, mass, energy, blackhole etc.  For me there is another puzzle why the Big Bang occurred and what was there before it? We don’t have answers to it. Scientists introduced another term called matter and anti-matter. They...

Since time immemorial most of the kings or emperors wanted to increase their power and area of influence. This led to small battles or full fledged wars to loot or to acquire the territory of neighbors and forcibly takeover their livestock or wealth etc. War has always been costly affair and for that kings had to increase the taxes on its citizen which used to deteriorate the living standard of common man and people living in extreme poverty leading to discontent.   Moving to 16th and 17th century, new class of Europeans merchants started trading with distant countries which were not sharing border with them. There were trade routes between Europe and Americas & Asia and to increase their profits they planned to control the produce in other continents which required military power and money to fund those military expedition. Rich people in Europe funded these but not through taxes but they gave it voluntary in lieu of profits. Companies like East India Company were part of ...

In hindi movie "Mission Mangal" actor Akshay Kumar speaks about the Indians at the top of corporate ladder in US. Be in Sundar Pichai of Google, or Satya Nadella of Microsoft or India Nooyi of Pepsico etc. There are many more Indians who have reached to pinnacle in their fields be it Amartaya Sen for economics or HarGobind Khorana in biochemistry but mostly out of India. It is not that Individuals in India didn't achieve anything, Raman got Raman effect on his name, Aryabhatta got Zero and there are more such names but they achieved much more when they were living and working outside India and we Indians didn't do justice to our potential. I wonder what makes Indians to shine outside and covered with dirt while staying India. I can't doubt our brilliance and issue can't be with individual it has to be collective systematic failure.  Many centuries or millennial back, when the things were not complex, individual intelligence was probably enough for a society to...

In Covid times, our Prime minister, Mr. Narendra Modi has given slogan of self reliant India. What does that mean? Does it mean that we produce everything what we need internally in India? Now the question arise, is it possible? Can we do that?  In entirety i don't think this is possible even and we have to depend on outside world for some of our needs. Biggest share of our imports are crude oil, electronics, precious metal & machinery. Out of these we can't produce crude oil or previous metals as they are mostly located in few geographies only. Electronics is one area where imports have grown exponentially in recent past and it will continue to grow in near future also. Can we make everything that we need in electronics? I will let you to decide. Let me take one example of mobiles phones in this category and iphone in particular, though this is more or less same for other mobile devices makers. Mobile phone required following. Chipset, Apple uses its own Application proces...

Way to look into future and visit our past In everyone's life many a times one get curious to know what had happened to him or in general in the past or what is going to happen in the future. People say that with Yog or Sadhna one can do that. It might be possible but the logical mind doesn't accept it. Let us see if there is a scientific way  for future or past travel.  Everyone must have heard and seen cloud thundering. The energy travel in two ways, one is thru sound waves and other is light wave. Speed of light is about 300,000,000 meter/sec while speed of sound is 343 meter/sec. That means that a person can see the event of thunder happening well before he can hear about it even though event has happened at the same time. If we have two friends sitting together and one is blind then the friend with vision can always predict the future and tell his blind friend well in advance that thunder is going to happen in few seconds which the blind friend will hear in few seconds an...