Keep hanging there…

Gym is one of passions. One of the reasons I love exercise is that, it makes me feel good about my body and everything else I take as a dividend. But this post is not on a gym or exercise. I wanted to share one incident in my gym at Baner. Amol, my gym instructor is one of those strict instructors. Heavy weights are his favorites. As everyone of us knows push-ups and pull-ups are one of the toughest body exercise, specially pull-ups. It’s horrible when you are new to the gym world. You go against gravity with extra your pounds and you feel like you are about to break your arms.

On some Monday morning two boys came in and I think it was their first day in the gym. After warm up instructor took them to the pull-up bar and asked them to do pull-ups. Both were little clumsy because they weren’t aware of the fact of pull-ups. So, Amol demonstrated then “how to” of it. Still none of them was ready to take up the challenge. In the moment instructor asked one of the boy to hang up the bar and asked him to do pull-ups, exactly the way he demonstrated. That boy hardly could do a single repetition. Instructor asked another boy to do the same, he even wasn’t even lucky to do one. Then instructor said, “you won’t be able to strengthen your upper body if you can’t do the pull-ups. Let me give you a tip, even if you can’t make a single repetition, keep hanging there. Your arms will become stronger, they will get used your body weight and it will stretch your body as well. “ I’ve no idea about these beginners but this conversation did strike me like anything. His words were swinging in my head for a week. Then I realized, we do exactly same in our life, if we can’t be successful in the first attempt in new experiment, we never try it again, and we give up. If vulnerable boys would give up, they won’t be able strengthen their body. And If they keep hanging everyday up the bar, someday they will start pulling their body up against the gravity.

Open Religion

Whenever I hear the word “Open” that makes me take a pause. Since, I started as my career as a Java developer I’m happen to listen this word very often but some or other way and most of the time it was “open source”. As a part Java community I’m a fan of open source, open development ideas, open frameworks, best practices and so on. Open source is continuous disciplined process of design, development, upgrades, ideas and frameworks. Doing it collaboratively to make life easier of the developers and reduce cost of product or increase the profit of the organization. And world has become so interdependent collaboration is the way it has to be done, where you can have thousands of idea flowing into the single thing. World best mind working together to make something that they are not paid for. I was always inspired by the fact that how open source phenomenon is working today. Probably, it’s one of the most important invention of our generation where ideas can flow freely, regardless of the place, gender, status, and where your profile doesn’t matter. How successful that communication is though it’s not a one organization. Corporate spends lot of money on the managing the people and training them. Can we say here that people can manage themselves when they are motivated by the common purpose.

I thought how interesting it would be if this paradigm could be applied to the religions. That might sound a wild idea initially but as you go through the post it might makes sense to you. I’m interested in different cultures, naturally religion is one of favorites subjects of my research. What makes me more curious is that how group of people believe in the same discipline and follow it for centuries. There has to be some magic behind it, although when group of people come together magic is something that is supposed to happen. If our ancestor would have had internet all regions would have lot more mature than it is today. They would have created religious scripts in a way where it makes sense to all. And that would have contributed to common thought process. Books and scripts can speak about history, heroic stories, rules and limits. But it would be interesting to see new age technology helping religions to adopt their new Avatars. Nothing has changed the world so radically in the human history like internet which brings people together under the protocol of collaboration. These, new age religion would be very dynamic. They will be composed of changing thoughts, in synchronization with socio-culture, socio-economic approaches and practices.

What world need today is love, common sense, awareness, education, transparent communication and openness. We need to move in the direction of what makes sense.

Didn't the idea of Open Religion really pissed you off?

New Year and Dream Traffic

Last day of the year, excitement, planning, bookings, little clumsy about the anticipation of places being full and crowded. This year we tried to avoid all these. And planned to stay at home and that turned out to be very good. Stereotype exploded! Dolly and Nikhil and me, 3ed8 had decided to meet on 31st and do nothing. So we went up to Dolly's flat watched TV and had some planning discussion about what to do in next 2 hours. Actually everybody wanted to stay at home and do nothing.Also Nikhil was too damn tired, he has been to some freaking trekking. We were hungry so We went Chandani Chowk to have a dinner but that turned out to be bad idea since dinner places were converted in to the celebration places. It was presidential police checking everywhere specially Chandani Chowk . We came back to Kothrude and had a dinner at Rugved, a good place. It was the place where we entered in 2010 together and left 2009 behind. We did hit 00:00 of 2010 during our dinner.

After midnight we went to FC and JM road. And the shocking thing was traffic signals were on and enough crowd was there to respect them. What I liked about this crowd was, it was so cool, no rush, no horns, everybody was driving slow, smiling faces enjoying every spark and every sound of the cracker. I was feeling like I'm driving in the dream and I'm invisible (no explanation for this feeling, please!!!). All over balloons of all colors and shapes. Everybody on the road looked so happy also they seemed excited. May be the excitement of hope and curiosity 2010 is about to bring. First time I was not scared of traffic police, they were managing things nicely. And I loved the traffic first time in Pune, and felt proud to be part of it. So next year don’t miss it!

Happy New Year!