Life thoughts

For multiple years i had been growing vegetables on the vacant land next to my house and in last couple of years during this covid-19 pandemic i started to build small personal garden over there. I started to plant flowering plants and vines in my garden and big trees on my street. I observed that small colorful insects  and butterflies  🦋  became frequent visitor to my garden. To feed on these insects this year small birds 🐦 have started to come and as their numbers grow i expect medium size birds and then bigger ones will start to come, which will complete the natural cycle. This brings an interesting thought that in nature for everything there is cycle, birth, growth and death. Death of one means life for another and its death in turn means life for someone else. This cycle of birth, growth and death could be as small as a day for some of the insects to hundreds of years for some animals like sharks to 1000s of years for some trees like some pine trees some of them a...

Dr. Bhim Rao Ambedkar and his team took about 5 years to write the Constitution of India. Dr. Ambedkar had studied about 60 constitutions across the world while writing ours. Notification happened and it became lan in India on 26th Jan 1950. Since then we have made more than 100 amendments to it. Was it not perfect to start with? Should we just throw it as it is not perfect? Nah, we didn't do it as people believed it was all written with good intentions & not everything couldn't be thought off until it is implemented and real life issues starts to come. With time people & societies changes and with them the needs and requirements and the scenarios so we continue to make amendments.  In 1960s when India was not self sufficient in feeding its increasing population, government did some policy changes, spent more on R&D, gave incentives to farmers to grow particular crops in fields which led to green revolution and today we are not only self sufficient but doing export ...

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...