Birthday

The day is coming to an end. For most people, today is a Sunday, and as the evening gets darker, it is sign of the end of the weekend and the beginning of the "Monday Blues". In Kerala a birthday was celebrated...... Whose birthday would be the natural question? The answer would be Sree Narayana Guru.. Who is he can be a question one might hear, or maybe not..

Like my previous post on Onam, this short write up is on a Guru. Most people know him as a social reformer, as a Sadhu, as a Hindu Saint, and other ....... Kerala is known as 'God's own Country'. According to the Wikipedia, there are many places around the world that are referred to by this name. Kerala is a small state in the southernmost part of India, named as one of the "ten paradises of the world" by National Geographic's Traveller magazine. One can find many explanations some which are supposedly mythological like the Sage Parasurama threw his battle axe(towards the south) from somewhere near Gokarana and the space between Gokarana and the place where is axe fell turned to land, which is Kerala.  I also had someone tell me that in the cycle of rebirths it is the effect of your past Karma that gives the atma (soul) the privilege to be born as a human. To be reborn as human again in India is considered at a higher plane than the previous and to be born in Kerala the highest.

I was born in Kerala and spend most of life away. Back at my birth place, the on-going years till now, has been a journey of un-learning, questioning the self, introspecting, fighting belief systems of the self and surrounding, getting to understand that the more one walks into the dense forest of belief systems, the more constricted it becomes to express one's own thoughts. However it is only when one goes deeper that answers start to materialize from no-where, and the old belief systems start to crumble just like old paint on the wall to be replaced by beliefs whose foundations are built on experiences of the self, and one starts to believe that the ‘Belief System’ needs to be purified with time, for it to shine bright just like fire purifies gold. It is like the 'join the dots picture'. Anyway there are still many dots left, small bits and pieces of the complete picture has only been revealed.

Sree Narayanan Guru was born in 1856 in the suburbs of present day Thiruvananthapuram. His father Madana Asan, could have been a scholar, the word Asan certainly indicates a person of knowledge. It is said that he learned Malayalam, Tamil and Sanskrit from his Father. It is also said that the young Nanu(as he was fondly called) loved to spend time herding the cows, composing hymns and singing. He also had extensive training in Vedanta Philosophy. The Guru relied a lot on his own experiences, and teachings of the Upanishad. Apart from this he is to have studied Yoga Vasistha of Valmiki Ramayana and Patanjali's Yogasutras.

He was against any forms of community other than the Human Community. A great spiritual Guru, whose thoughts and teachings are yet to percolate into our lives. Thoughts and views that would make living simple and foster a feeling of warmth in mankind, and to look at another human being as human being first. In the words of Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore who met the Guru in 1922, "I have never come across one who is spiritually greater than Swami Narayana Guru or a person who is at par with him in spiritual attainment". The meeting of Gandhiji with Narayana Guru is supposed to have triggered a crucial transformation in Gandhiji’s approach to caste and color conflict in India and abroad.

*Biographical references http://www.sreenarayanaguru.in/biographies

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Fear of Exams

Everyone has fears in some form of the other. The 'Fear' of 'exams' somehow lives through one's life time. Off late I find this fear far greater in students, they are simply terrified....

Why should not they be, after all educational institutions actually spend more time in conducting exams and exam related activities than imparting education/knowledge. I am not joking; the schools in Kerala opened in the first week of June, and I am to believe that the FA1 assessments are over and the results published in most schools! What worries me more here is that the exam culture is inducing a results based approach to life, as in 'What will I get if I do this activity? What are my benefits? Will I be able to brag about this to others?' Now, the fear of exams is primarily because of the fear of failure. However in schools one does not have a choice, so everyone goes through the process of exams and ensures that the exam has been cleared by hook or crook. However in real life exams don't come announced.. And the so called failure of exams in life is taken seriously by the folks around. It even goes to the extent of being ridiculed and the individual is considered a LOOSER!

This leads to the most important trait that is observed in individuals today, "Let someone start, I will follow", "just in case there is a failure I will have someone to point fingers at!" Where has all this fear come from? And what is the solution ? Seriously I have no clue. Sometimes I feel life has become too easy these days. The stress to "live" has been replaced by the stress "to live better than my neighbour" The same is the case with children, they are under tremendous stress to perform at school and everywhere else. We as parents never leave a chance to ridicule them or compare someone else with them. I can hear a lot of voices shouting at me, "Come on don't be ridiculous, we never ridicule our child". You are right, I kind of agree, however what we don't realise is that we unconsciously do things, or say things that gets interpreted in the form of a ridicule. The children of this generation are super intelligent, smart, and sensitive. They can sense un-spoken words, they may never challenge you, however the experience gets stored.

Hence it is important for children to experience failure, and accept it as a part of life. As parents we need to allow our child to FAIL, sometimes knowingly, support and guide them through the failure. They need to realise that failure is part of life and it is part and parcel of every individual. Have you bitten your tongue? I am sure each one of us has, now isn't that a failure of the co-ordination system or some aspect of our human body, that allowed this event to happen. But then we don't keep a track of it or make a list. What I trying to say is that there are so many such subtle failures that happen with us or around us, which we don't care, hence let's take the slightly bigger forms of failure also casually.

Something that struck me recently between my childhood and the present is near extinction of Story Telling. Story telling mostly or always happens in the mother tongue. Story telling was always an integral part of our culture, however the invasion of the ’idiot box’ and hordes of cable channels, have eroded into the minds of children, who instead of learning about their own culture live in a bubble formed by the utopian stories of foreign culture. The Jataka Tales, Hitopadesha, Mulla Naseeruddin and the likes of them impart knowledge, bring us closer to nature, teach ahimsa, and above all develop the humane in the human being. All these forms of stories have situations of failures which are never highlighted as failures. Hence right from the tender age these stories formed invisible armour against the negativities of failure, and hence failures were handled better.

The fear of failures evolves into the fear of exams and this evolves into the procrastination to start any activity, for in their minds they have already seen the failure and hence do not want to experience the success.

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Is this our Samskara ?

What do you mean, after all what is Samskara.... Sounds sanskrit and must be something to do with Hinduism!!!! Well you know what, if you google the word, the result displays that it is a noun, it is hinduism, and means purification ceremony or rite marking a major event in one's life; and then it says the origin of the word is sanskrit and means ‘an act of making perfect, preparation’. We can simply define "Samskara" as imprints left on the subconscious mind of the individual by experience. Now you could ask "So is it only experience?" not exactly. Let's look at a sanskrit shloka which describes "Learning" - आचार्यात् पादमादत्ते पादं शिष्यः स्वमेधया । सब्रह्मचारिभ्यः पादं पादं कालक्रमेण च ॥

AchAryAt pAdamAdatte, pAdam shiShyaH swamedhayA |

sa-brahmachAribhyaH pAdam, pAdam kAlakrameNa cha || roughly translates to "one fourth or quarter from the teacher, one fourth from own intelligence, one fourth from classmates, and one fourth only with time." So we can see that the initiators of learning is the teacher which, can be parents, siblings, relatives, social contacts and of course the teacher's at school. This means the foundation years of the individual has a huge part to what happens later. In the early years of civilization life itself was much simpler. The compartmentalization of life in its whole was minimal, arts, science, beliefs, sentiments and social institutions etc were close knitted or rather interwoven. Religion if there was something in the ancient world was used as a binding force to bring some kind of sanctity and stability for different incidents in a person's life. So if we step back a bit " purification ceremony or rites marking a major event in one's life" was a necessity, for e.g. if we take marriage as one of the events, we are all aware that this is an event which has a huge impact in the lives of two individuals, their immediate families, their extended families, friends and to some extent to all the people associated with the event. Hence marriage is a "Samskara"! We can kind of redefine "Samskara" or rather we can say that the aim of "Samskara" was to create the conditions for the development of an integrated personality of an individual, who can adjust himself with the world around him, a world full of human and superhuman forces. If we retrace the life of an individual back to their childhood, a time when the individual started to un-consciously¹ gather information from around both visually and auditory, we can agree upon that the information did get imprinted somewhere in the conscious of the individual or let's put it as stored in the brain(for the scientifically inclined)². This information that has been converted to memories when stimulated at a later age or older age can act positively or negatively for the individual. An individual's naming ceremony is also a 'Samskara' that is common to any individual in the world. We have names for ourselves and everything else. Maybe that's why we have less harmony amongst us than the other worlds of plants, insect, animals or whatever. I am sure when a tiger sees another tiger it must be saying 'Ah, there you are tiger' after all they don't have naming ceremonies to address the other tiger by name ;-) So samskaras are essential for every individual, after all it contributes to the development of the individual. Today most samskara's have tags attached to them in the form of religion or otherwise. Like I said before religion is something that bound a group of people in a certain form and sets of belief. Sounds strange!! Well the word religion has its origin from old French and Latin - 'religare' which means to bind, subsequently 'religio' which means obligation, bond, reverence. From that to today's meaning of 'the belief in and worship of a superhuman controlling power, especially a personal God or gods'. I guess this is why there is a saying 'Time changes everything'!!! I was reading somewhere the other day that religion could also mean realisation. I hope we all realise that there is something called 'Life', and as humans we are accountable (not just responsible) for our own 'Life' and 'Life' around us, that which is visible or not!!! ¹http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prenatal_memory ²http://www.ted.com/talks/elizabeth_loftus_the_fiction_of_memory?language=en

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