Gita Shibir

I do not know the expectation of a B-school from me. First there were Learning Management classes and then PG Lab and now Gita Shibir. From objectivity to subjectivity to a mix of both! That is what I have been oscillating around. I must have an objective goal in life and then do everything to achieve it and now I have a subjective goal of attaining the happiness which is somewhere hidden in my self. This goal is subjective because it is related to my understanding of the whole matter. Actually it is about understanding only. Once I understand and confirm the way this particular concept of achieving happiness works, I suppose I become successful in life, at least for that particular instant (considering life means integration of all such small events). Like I enjoyed a good meal or a good walk, I feel content about it, satisfied about it. That is what I need to practise in my life, to have these walks more and more. But the whole concept of happiness keeps changing as you evolve yourself. And that is why I call it as subjectivity.
So the problem is not like which way to take. As far as my understanding goes what we as b-school students or more active corporate individuals needs to make sure of this subjectivity in the attainment of objectivity. And if we do that successfully I think we have done our part.
I suppose I do not need to stop and first attain the happiness and then go about being a CEO of my dream company but in the process of becoming a CEO I should attain the happiness level required to have personal harmony. This way I will be successful and happy and probably more effective.
Do you see any problem in the above given context or you think that you will be able to do it. I don’t know whether I will be able to do it or not but my problem is I tend to get involved in one side of it. Once I feed myself with the dreams and ambitions I tend to become more objective and tend to loose the balance on being happy. And if I think about being happy then I tend to become more easy going and less ambitious towards my aim of owning a Ferrari one day.
Is that a correct understanding of the thoughts we have been exposed to. I would say no.
Let me consider a situation where I am content with my life as in whatever I have, I think is enough and does not need anything to add materially to my life. Now if I need to serve the purpose of serving to the society I need to have few personality traits which will make me realise that I should do something for the society. Personality traits like kindness, compassionate, non-violence, truth honesty. I am talking about a very ideal situation where I am content with whatever I have and now because I am very kind and generous, and when I see people in grief I try to help them. These personality traits will be my motivation to work for the society. For keep doing work for the society it becomes imperative on my part to be always content otherwise I will never be able to work for the larger cause. An easy understanding of the situation is if I am thirsty it is less likely to share the water I have. So the point is to quench your thirst first and then go about helping others in quenching their thirst.
So now I hope it is clear to have your thirst quenched first (because only then you will be able to offer yourself totally for the sake of society at a large) and then do something for others (because of your inherent personality traits like generosity, compassion etc).
How does it fit in the roles which I will be doing in my future? This is generally a mistaken thought that who is self happy will not and will not be able to change the society at large. But can you change the society if you are not a part of the system. So those who are working for the society are at that level. The more at a higher rank I am in the corporate ladder the more effective I will be in bringing about these changes. And if I posses the required personality traits then the effect on the society will be immense. Few example Ratan Tata. Ratan Tata is most effective when he has the natural personality traits (dominated in his personality) and then he achieves a rank of CEO and then brings about changes. Had he been just a happy man and not doing anything for the society would not have served the purpose of his attaining the happiness.
So objectives are few
• First and foremost to keep self happy and content with the life (subjective part of this objectivity)
• Understand that I can bring about changes in society at large only if I have the required natural values assimilated in my personality.
• Understand that I need to be a part of the system to work wonders for my goal towards the society.
• And then keep achieving objective goals by being objective at large and keeping my content quotient intact with me.
This I had put in these words but I don’t know how I will follow my own words. Probably I don’t need to follow. What I need to do is to just chill and just keep a check on my value system and make it a rule to not violate my value system whatever may come. I think rest all will fall in place automatically.

I can make stars...

I can make stars. Stars not as in bollywood star or a cricketing star but the stars on the paper with the help of a pen. Simple! That is what I do. Keep things simple. But for this also first I have to complicate things. So its like first complicate things and then emerge as a winner after achieving it.

Personal Growth "Lab"

The sheer positivism flowing around the PG lab exercise somehow made me wonder, can it really help? We face such transforming experiences in life and that certainly doesn’t come out of the class rooms. The more you have cuts and bruise the better are the chances that you will learn the lesson. Very unlikely in the classroom setting. Still the class worked wonder and people felt happy that they are a part of it.
Is PG Lab a business preposition or a real tool to create the required change in the person. It is certainly creating value for the participants as it will throw the lights on the territories undiscovered till the time. And this revelation gives a feeling that you have conquered the monkey and from now on you will be the slave of your planned approach. How many of you did not know before, that you tend to talk a lot even when it is not required (A bull in the china shop), or for that matter you don’t take feedback even when you know that the change will work wonders for you (A tortoise). The terms are assigned to the already known things. Now you know what type of a person is that called, or maybe the better use is to criticize somebody comfortably in a larger group where people will understand your wit equipped with the jargons.

Now it is creating value for the participants as the participants are the customers or the main objective of all the exercise. Few other important aspects which stand out in the full exercise are as follows
• The place where the classes will be conducted, close to the nature. As if otherwise we have not seen trees and grass and mosquitoes and sunrise and sunsets and we are living in most unnatural of all the places (some kind of different unnatural galaxy).
• Trekking, which is always fun. Learn or not learn it is fun to trek. Few quick advantages are no classes, you can take lots of pictures for facebooks and orkuts to show the world that you are learning in a superhuman way, feel that you have conquered something which by now was hidden under the golden natural reserves, think that you did a great team building exercise even when you did not bother who has finished the trek and who doesn’t.
• Games, now this is really exciting. It is a mess to finalize a strategy. More than the strategy people think their perspective or analysis is the thing to crack the game. Well there is no right strategy for that matter, the one which worked wonder for you is the right one for you. I should write a full blog on how the politics of finalising the strategy for the game is not a matter of the innovation but more a matter of team players sticking to whatever stupid thing has been finalised.
• I guess 99 percent of Indians (I do not know much about the other nationals, and hence can not comment) love to play ‘antakshari’ and you give them a chance to play this game or let them sing under a cosy setup of bonfire and evenings and you have their happiness quotient shoot up like anything. It’s like you make them sing for some time and then ask about whether India should attack Pakistan or not and there will be philosophies raining. You know, because people are happy and their take on life is different from what it is under stress and lots of assignments.
• Thank to SPJIMR admission process that the ratio of male to female participants is something which I should not even mention (to escape from the wrath of my batch mates as it will not be a good thing to reflect), otherwise the happiness quotient of few more participants would have increased dramatically and we would have had great life changing experiences from the PG Lab.

Without going further into details of everything, the one thing which stands out in everything that has been done there is that the participants were made to believe that they are happy, they are achieving, they are rediscovering and then the effect of the lab is what you can observe. From where this sense of happiness or achievement or rediscovering has come? This sense has been injected into us without even using an injection, and that is the power of a human brain (now please don’t imagine an injection which works with your mental strength). And when you think that you are emerging as a winner you tend to accept the outcome.

This is where the crux of it lies, make life a PG Lab. Don’t wait for somebody to take you to garudmaachi and then do a locus of control of belief test and then come to a conclusion that you are a self believer. Make the surroundings natural (grow more trees for that matter, or have small plants in the so called GAMLA). Achieve one thing daily, the point is to realise the achievement (as simple as you have managed to attend all classes without your brain thinking about anything else). Be happy and don’t ask me to give you a reason to be happy. Otherwise I will ask you make a team of your reptile brain and your rat brain with the mammal brain as the referee to play a game of antakshari or to sing a group song with all the three brains, so that you can just be simply happy without any complications. PG Lab is a wonderful thing not because it discovers the territories not explored till now but because it proves that life is just about the happiness, achievements, antakshari, music, nature, sun rise and sun sets, laughter, team building, losing happily, johari window and all the wonderful drawings everybody had made.

Don’t come back, stay there at PG Lab.

Take a Chill Pill and be happy without a Reason

I know I have been writing poems/blogs as stupid as the paintings I make, and it does not benefit anybody in this whole world but that is what I like to do best in my free time, in my busy time, in my extra time and in all sorts of different times I have or I can have. So I am up to it again and will not stop before completing this genius work of art i.e. writing this blog.

In the beginning I wanted to write about happiness but the hangover turned my attention towards headaches. So it is a kind of trivial situation of happiness during headaches, which I think is a little awkward situation to write about. After drinking a couple of liters of water to safely negotiate with the dehydration, my stomach is still swollen with water inside. It is not my controlled tummy but it certainly is the water which is acting as a reason for the abnormal growth. In the midst of everything lunch time has arrived and now I have to oblige the food as its kind consumer.

I ordered for a plate of happiness as the dessert after my lunch. The lunch was very good. Very fulfilling I must say. They call this dessert as happiness as they might intentionally want you to realize the feeling when you eat it. He took more then ten minutes to bring it which is usually high with the standards of this busy restaurant but there might be some purpose of this delay I guess. They might want me to wait for my happiness and then relish it and realize it fully, once I get it.

This is how I am being fed with the happiness now days. I order it, wait for it, eat it, realize it (optional) and then pay for it. These are the few factors on which happiness is dependent. How much is the price (affordable or not), how much I can wait, how much I can eat (too much of it might not be good for health), even after eating I am able to realize it or not, and then whether it deserves the price they have quoted once the time of payment has come. Analytics have frozen my mind and heart too. And my happiness is dependent on the analysis I will be doing after having my share of happiness. Probably I should learn some tricks to sharpen my analytical skills or should do some crash course to be a well analyzed-capable-planned-happy man or should I take a Chill Pill and be happy without a Reason.

हँसना मत मेरी कोशिशों पर

Tring Tring
Me - Hello, may I speak to Chetan please?
Her - May I know who is speaking?
Me – It’s me Vikas, you know me, right?
Her - Yes I know you, so what’s up?
Me - Nothing great, actually I was thinking about you since quiet long and finally believed that I should talk to you about this. I want to meet you once. Will you meet me?
Her - I have told you before also that its very difficult for me to come to meet you.
Me - Just once, its been long since I am thinking about it.
Her - Ok I will think about it.
Me - Cool! I will be there in few more days till then you have all the time to think about it. Chalo will see you then bye and take care.

I was left with a sum of 1 dollar in the prepaid phone card I bought at the port of Jacksonville and this is how I used the card.

My life on board for the next one month was a bit different. I have got one more reason to sign off and do something which I have been craving to do since last 12 years.

She was the first love of my life. And still she is ‘the love’ of my life. She is the one who made me realize that ‘we boys’ are different from ‘those girls’. That was love at first sight. I still remember that sight. Clearly! That is one of the few childhood memories I still carry.

हँसना मत मेरी कोशिशों पर,
मेरी भावनाओ के इस इंद्रधनुष पर,
मानते हैं की जुड़ते नही,
अंत इन अंतहीन इच्छाओं के,

पर मेरी कोशिशों की कुछ तो वजह होगी,
इंद्रधनुष के रंगो में कुछ तो रोशनी होगी,
बेवजह नही बदल देते रंग वक़्त की परिभाषा,
प्यार की कहीं तो कोई सूरत होगी......

Painting and drawing the happiness

The ‘Reinvent Yourself’ class started with the introduction of the professor. I will not write the events as they happened but would pick them in a little different manner. So here you go…

I wish my name would have been happy singh. ‘Why’ you will ask and the reason is very simple. As soon as the professor told us to draw or paint happiness, people would have come to me and painted me with colors. On a more serious note, suppose if we would have had a girl named khushi or happy rani in the class. Phewww…no more serious thinking I guess.

So to continue on a rather light weight issue of identifying the happiness spread around us and then giving it a shape was truly a great exercise and can safely be assumed as a common thread of the full 3 days of rehabilitation. Don’t you consider yourself a little stuck in the present habit regime and want to shift to the next vicious circle of few better habit regimes and this time with lots of attitude and skill. So to rehabilitate yourself you must go through the full program and after that you will be reinvented. You will be able to notice that you sneeze too loud in the office, you have not cleaned the dead skin of your foot since long, half-sleeve shirts and shorts are not so formal, you don’t use hindi in between while talking to somebody, many more things which till now you were safely ignoring.

Attitude and skill, that is what I will be building there. Like a gym where you do the bench press with the weights more than the combined weight of your head, arms, heart and lungs. And this is exactly what I will be doing to build the so called attitude and skill - pressing the benches (classes) , books, quizzes, professors, mentors, seniors, soft targets, hard targets, imaginary targets more than I have done till now. And for that I have got all the reasons now as nobody will ask me ‘why’ are you doing so?

To be a little specific now one among us drew a calendar having all the days of the week as Sundays and was really a wonderful way to draw the happiness. But these guys seem to be a bit ahead in the thinking and Sunday is no more a holiday there. Instead they prefer a Thursday for a holiday. So is it a plan to convert our lazy Sunday happiness into busy working unhappiness of any other day or it is again a part of reinvention that we should start enjoying our busy working unhappiness. They really have the plans of reinventing our happiness it seems. So the next time they tell us to draw the happiness we should draw a calendar having all its days as Thursday and people will think that ‘oh how lovely, this guy seems to be liking his work a lot.’

I am sure I will be a ‘better defined human’ after this whole issue if not a better human. I will be able to draw more and clear pictures of my happiness and the happiness of people around me. So let me walk towards that better defined human and please don’t ask ‘why’!!!!!!