धन्यवाद् प्रेमचंद ! :-)

मुंशी प्रेमचंद से मेरा साक्षात्कार बचपन में ही हुआ था। शायद, 'हीरा-मोती' की कहानी से। तब से, प्रेमचंद मेरे प्रिय बन गए। उनकी अनेकों कहानिया, उपन्यास मैंने पढ़ डाले। उनके लिखने में कोई ऐसा जादू था, जितना पढता, उतना ही ह्रदय बाग बाग हो जाता। उनकी जीविका भी पढ़ी। कैसे एक साहित्य के मार्गदर्शक, एक महान लेखक का जीवन दुःख एवं आभाव से भरा पड़ा था। कहते हैं, मसीहा को अपने देश में कभी नही पूजा जाता। प्रेमचंद आज विश्व-प्रसिद्ध हैं। उनकी कहानियो एवं उपन्यासों का अनुवाद अनेको भाषाओँ में हो चुका है। उन्हें हिन्दी साहित्य का एक अविलम्ब चिह्न माना जाता है। परन्तु अपने जीवान काल में, न तो उन्हें प्रसिद्धि मिली, ना ही सम्रिध्य। अपनी सरस्वती प्रेस को चालू रखने में ही उनका जीवन गुज़र गया।

प्रेमचंद शब्दों में निपुण थे। अपनी भाषा, अपने लिखने के तरीके से, वो ऐसा समां बांधते, कि लगता उनकी कहानियो के पात्र कागज़ से निकल कर आपके सामने खड़े हों, व आपसे बातें कर रहे हों। उनके सभी पात्र असली थे, कोई भी बनावटी न था। उनकी कहानियो ने मुझ पर एक गहरी छाप छोड़ी। आज भी, उनकी पुस्तकें मेरे पास हैं।

मैं प्रेमचंद का आभारी हूँ, उन्होंने मेरे जीवन के कुछ क्षण बहुत ही यादगार बनाये।

धन्यवाद्!

Quotes by Richard Bandler

Brains aren't designed to get result; they go in directions. If you know how the brain works you can set your own directions. If you don't, then someone else will.

Do you want to know a good way to fall in love? Just associate with all your pleasant experiences with someone, and disassociate from all the unpleasant ones.

The reason people have problems is that they have too much time to think.

The best thing about the past is that it's over. The best thing about the future is that it's yet to come. The best thing about the present is that it's here now.

The greatest personal limitation is to be found not in the things you want to do and can't, but in the things you've never considered doing

Physics changes, but reality stays the same

"Is it true?" vs "Does it work?"

Lately, I have been so intrigued by the question "Why" that it has clouded my life-long fascination with the "How".

Trying to answer the fundamental Why questions remains a quest - its deep, its meaningful, even sexy.

Trying to answer the How is less glamorous. It is an arena filled with squabbling crooks, missionaries, conmen, charlatans, quacks and well... those like me. Since masses care about the How more than the Why, there has been commercialization of this space too.

Here is why I care about "How"

The lack of empirical evidence is more the norm than an exception of the discipline of mind-science (to use a not-so-graceful term).

John Horgan in his book "The Undiscovered Mind - How the brain defies explanation" says... (not verbatim)

Evolutionary Biologist Erns Mayr argued that no field of biology can match the precision and power of physics, because unlike electrons and neutrons, all organisms are unique. Even then, the difference between two different kinds of bacteria or different types of horses is trivial compared to differences between two human beings, even those who are genetically identical. Each individual mind may change dramatically when its owner is spanked, learns the alphabet, reads a book, takes a drug, falls in love, gets divorced, undergoes Jungian dream therapy, suffers a stroke. The variability and malleability of the human mind enormously complicate the search for general principles of human nature.

Investigations into the human mind have failed to generate the kind of applications that compel belief in a particular paradigm. Physicists can boast of lasers, transistors, nuclear bombs. Biologists can show-off vaccines, cloning, antibiotics. By-products of mind-science are less impressive: cognitive behavioral therapy, thorazine, prozac, shock therapy, IQ tests etc.

Millions and millions of people receive inputs through psychoanalysis, which Freud invented a century ago. Psychoanalysis also fares very poorly in empirical research. Freud has been described as a cult-leader who excelled at self-promotion and also as a genius whose insights into the psyche, though difficult to pin down empirically, still "ring" true. Each of these views is defensible, and the persistence of psychoanalysis proves the inability of science to offer an obvious superior explanation of the mind and its disorders. Freudians cannot point to an unambiguous evidence of their paradigm's superiority, but neither can proponents of more modern paradigms.

The field of social psychology - which continues to speculate about human culture - coining terms that we are so intimately familiar with as teachers - like "identity crisis", "conventional wisdom" or "learned helplessness" - these are not scientific theories but "help us think".

A slightly different approach then, would be to judge paradigms of thought, not on what they say - but for what they do. The question shifts from "Is it true?" to "Does it work?"

Early advocates of Quantum Physics could only describe results from esoteric experiments. Later, they had the supporting evidence from fission reactors, transistors, lasers, thermonuclear bombs - technologies that altered the course of history. For many physicists; whether quantum mechanics is true is almost irrelevant. It works.

I believe - the name, the label, the thought-movement or affiliations don't matter. I discovered NLP and several other philosophies in a personal quest for meaning and growth and accepted that which made sense and matched my experience. This strategy has worked for me. I cannot claim in all honesty that I have not been skeptic or unfairly judgmental of certain bodies of knowledge. However, in such cases - the loss has been mine.

When the student is ready...

I chanced upon a photo-album in my hard-drive. It had pictures of Gandhi, Richard Bach, Tim Berners Lee and others. At first, I just couldn't for the life of me remember, why I had created this album and downloaded these pictures. Then it dawned on me. I was creating an an album with pictures of people who had really made a difference to my life. Who had mattered. People who had me look at life in a whole new different way. Usually, coming across them meant an intense and immensely satisfying period of personal growth and learning. I was never the same again after crossing paths with them.

Thought it would be fun to capture this list. So here it goes - in no particular order:

Kalpana desai: 1998 - She was the trainer for a Silva program I attended. She was kind, compassionate, loving and really cared for the audience. She was the first trainer I ever knew.

Sue Knight: 2002 - I attended a two day workshop by Sue called 'Introduction to NLP'. After relentlessly pursuing NLP on my own for three years - finally getting to learn it from someone as insightful as her was a revelation. She also helped me make some powerful distinctions about myself.

Premchand: I am yet to find a better writer than Premchand. He makes me want to write. His stories and novels literally taught me the beauty of the written word.

Neale Donald Walsche: His book "Conversations with God" helped me create a model of the universe and its meaning - which held good for a very long time. It helped me build some of my core beliefs about the world.

Anthony Robbins: He introduced me to NLP

Sabah Carrim: She introduced me to pure philosophy and conversations with her about philosophy blew my mind. Everything I knew suddenly became a subset of something bigger, more wonderful. The fundamental questions I was asking about life and work changed. The brightest mind I ever came across in person.

Anne Townsend: Taught me how to facilitate. Her kindness and affection with a greenhorn trainer like me allowed me to build confidence in myself. She said one of the most powerful things I have ever heard "We are not different from each other, we're different like each other"

Mark Wedgwood: Taught me how to facilitate. Anne and Mark were my first models of serious facilitation and I blindly copied (er... modeled :) ) what they did in the first two years after I went solo. I also value his friendship and some amazing conversations we've had.

Dale Carnegie: In 9th standard, I read his book "how to win friends and influence people" - the first non-fiction book I ever read. Got me started on non-fiction.

Azam Pasha: Discussions with him about life, love, creativity and philosophy added new dimensions to my thought

Swamini Vimalananda: Attended a Chinmaya Yuva Kendra camp in her guidance when I was about 12 years old. Met her again when I was 24. Her grace, depth and self-effacing humor probably got me interested in personal growth to begin with.

Ayn Rand: Fountainhead seared itself on my mind for years. I came across her in school - while I tend to disagree with some basic tenets of her philosophy, she helped me find my own voice.

Richard Bach: Introduced me to the magical world we live in and a philosophy of life which resonated true. Illusions remains one of my favorite books.

Purushottam Rai: My grandfather - every moment with him makes you want to be a better human being. Can I be like him when I am old, please :)

Gandhi: I read his autobiography in a train journey from Ranchi to Chennai. Life changed forever. Some of my fundamental ideas about our world, war, peace and society are derived from Gandhi.

Tim Berners Lee: Thank you for having the courage to give away the www to the world for free. it changed my life in so many ways that I cannot even begin to describe. I couldn't sleep the night I came to know about the world wide web, in 1997 :)

Back to the Blog

It's been a while.
I am back.
It feels good.
A lot has happened.
But this blog is not about me. (ok, maybe a little)
It's about learning, growth, change, freedom, adventure, fun.

I am back.
It feels good.

Three Days off work

Three Days off work.
And I am off on a mini vacation!
See you Monday.
Take care and have a fantastic weekend!


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New Web Site Coming Up

A big overhaul of www.abhishekkumar.com – my web site is underway. Some very key elements to make the web site successful are yet to be figured out. I have been spending the past two days learning about Keywords, Meta Tags, and Frames etc. I went to college with computer science as a major, so I cannot claim complete ignorance of the technologies that work behind the scenes to make a web site come alive on our computer screens. I do believe, though, that the process of creating a search-engine friendly, well organized, logical web site can have a steep learning curve. Well, I am climbing.

I am also planning a series of articles on the most common personal development issues we face.

So, coming…
All this and more.
Stay tuned. (

'Topics' under Blog

Posts are now sorted into topics.

Most of today was spent trying to learn how to sort the posts in this Blog topic wise, instead of by months – as is the default provided by Blogger.

After hours of browsing and learning and looking at scripts that seemed more hostile than Chinese…finally I got it working.

On you right, you would see the topics under which the posts are divided. When you click on a topic, the page re-loads and all the posts under that topic get displayed just below the heading “Topics”

Hope this makes accessing posts for you easier.

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Blogging from Word?

Trying out this Blogger Ad-On for MS-Word.

The big promise of this software is that you need not visit the site to publish.

You can type in stuff from the comfort of you MS-Word editor and publish your blog from there.

So, does that work?

Well, if you are seeing this. It does!

Holy Cow!!

Reading this book called "Holy Cow" by Karan Chopra - it's such a delight. It's written for first time tourists to India. Our country is so colorful. And we hardly notice. Reading about the Mughals, Hinduism, Buddhism, Sadhus - it is somebody telling me everything I know....... for the very first time. And you know what? That changes everything!

For example, when Mumtaz Mahal was dying, a tear drop fell from her eyes and rested on her cheek. ShahJahan picked it up on his finger and said 'I will build a monument that looks exactly like this tear drop, descended from heaven and eternally frozen on earth...." That is how Taj Mahal was built. While Taj Mahal was being built, a small city called Mumtazabad sprang around it. Imagine this.... Taj Mahal being built... 500 elephants bringing marbles, silver and gold to Yamuna... Craftsmen, engineers, workers..... The whole place hustling bustling for over 20 years with one goal... To create an eternally frozen tear drop on earth....

Or Aurangzeb... The super-villain amongst Mughals was the least indulgent of them all. He wore white clothes, no jewels and sew caps for a living. He was a fundamentalist and he razed numerous temples and gurudwaras to ground. He did not take opium (every other Mughal emperor was big on dope) or alcohol and did not have any monument built for his death. He lies buried in an inconspicuous grave near Aurangabad (which Anisha, my neighbor has visited :-D)

Or did you know that Ganesha, the elephant God has only one tusk. He broke one off while writing Mahabharata (which was dictated in one sitting by Vyas) to use as a pen.

Or that Jain religion favors extreme form of ascetism. They wear those white masks because they do not want to kill an organism while inhaling or exhaling.

Or that Sikhism is the only religion in the world where the book defining the religion was composed while the figurehead of the religion was still alive. Sikhs do not worship statues, they worship the book - "Guru Granth Saheb"

Or that 85 temples dedicated to love and passion were built, out of which only 22 remain and Khajuraho is the most well preserved.

I am really enjoying this book. Really. It's about rediscovering what I have known all my life and there is nothing more interesting than looking at something you know and you think you understand very well in a new perspective.

PS: Do not confuse this with another book called Holy Cow by Sarah MacDonald.

Creating in Emptiness

Revisiting this blog, after almost a year. So much has happenned. I really should write more often. Make that - I really will write more often.

A friend left for a month - leaving me with suddenly empty evenings. All current personal projects, brainstorming sessions and pleasant outings came to a sudden stop. When I was done watching the latest movies I had bought - the questions has started settling in... what do I do? Such bouts of 'not-knowing' have a history of turning into some of the most creative periods of my life, and I am looking forward to it.

Something similar happenned when I was at home for almost two months after TAPMI (the college where I did my post grad) convocation. I was alone at home in the city where I grew up. The streets seemed unfamilliar with no familiar faces in sight. A whole generation had left the city and a strangeness blanketed the familar 'black field', the 'football ground' and the 'community center'. Even the tennis court had looked intimidating then. My only responsibility then had been to make myself available at dinner and lunch. And I spent a lot of time walking to the browsing center and sending 'Miss You' mails to modellites - that's what our college gang called (calls?) itself. After a while of dealing with this sudden silence, something inside me began to stir. A need to create, a need to express. It appeared with doodling on blank pieces of paper, capturing an idea on the blank sides of the newspaper while solving a crossword and slowly... slowly... took form. This 'stirring' led to me writing a rought sketch of a screenplay based on TAPMI days. And I started writing a book called 'What the F is the meaning of life'. Still incomplete, the book is a potential best-seller :-) , it's just that I have not had much 'quiet time' since then...... till now!

I need these stirrings, or these 'quiet times' to create and express 'felt' things. Otherwise I just get too involved in living life. But the stirring is there. I can feel it. That is wonderful. Therefore, the return to the blog!

So, the next month or so - should ideally be extremely creative and soul-satisfying for me. Make that - will be extremely creative and soul satisfying for me.

Also, working on my new web site (which I recently registered) www.abhishekkumar.com .

Will come back.

Quote

Adversity causes some men to break... others to break records.

I am online...

It has been a long wait. Finally, I have an internet connection at home. It was in 1999 that the 19 year old me put up the first www.abhishekkumar.cjb.net on internet. I had no computer then. Working on a friend's machine, taking the files in a floppy to a browsing center (which was 1 and a half hours away by local bus) and uploading it - seems almost surreal now. The computer did arrive in 2001, but living on the net took almost five years. Using the college internet connection while doing my MBA and then again browsing centers accounted for the site that you see now. Finally, a few days back - the Sify guys came in and installed the connection. And I can now update this web site, more often, as often as I want, from the privacy of my own home. Feels great. :-) I am sure I will be able to add a lot more value, make the site even more interesting and fun now. Look out for several new free gifts coming your way and the new Abhishek's store. Hope you keep coming back. The action is just about to begin.

Crows Share

When crows get food, they do not eat it all by themselves. They go and call everyone else too. So that everyone gets to eat - the logic being that when some other crow finds food, he will do the same thing. If every crow shares - ALL crows get to eat and nobody dies of hunger. Its called an Abundance mindset. (Of course, we human beings do seem to have good reasons why thousands should die of hunger every day. World hunger exists because we think there are less resources. Its a scaracity mindset.)

I updated and quite changed the look and feel of the web site around two weeks back. Hope everyone likes the new web site. I wish everyone a belated happy new year! I pray that this new year brings you greater opportunities to grow, learn and express more of your potential.

With the Abundance Mindset, I have shared information which I think should be useful to you. Do go through the web site. 'Notes from Abhishek' is an attempt to share the insights, learnings, aha's that I have.

I hope the synchronicity of you visiting the web site leads you to answers you are looking for. All the best.

Salesman

I had read a wonderful book called 'The Greatest Salesman in the world' a couple of weeks' back. This time in B'lore, I was visiting this book Shop called Oxford and I saw 'The greatest secret of the world' which is like a sequel and application-manual for the earlier book. Bought it. Also bought "The richest man in Babylon" which was recommended by Tony Robbins. Started working on "The greatest secret of the world" - hope to continue with the program. Will take 45 weeks in total. Gotta do this one!!

Web Resources

An absolutely great and wonderful (and as a bonus FREE) web resource is HAMR . It consists of patterns for instilling positive beliefs in your mind. (HAMR stands for Hands actuated mental reconditioning).

Another wonderful site on tools for a happier life is Lollie's Tools for a happier Life. It is such a beautiful site. In a 4 hour browsing session where I was just visiting self-help sites, this struck me as the most genuine. Do visit and do read her stuff on getting over emotional pain (or using it - as she says) and love.

Of course, an old favourite is A K S World, the web site of nuclear scientist turned new ager Asoka Kumar Selvaharajan. Visit the discussion forum for dynamic discussions on Personal Development, Spirituality and Creative Writing. Lot of insights.

Do visit all these sites. They are good!!

Hi everyone!!
This starts my web journal on the net where I plan to keep all of us updated on the dynamics of my life in terms of how I have grown, what I have learnt and the latest set of experiences I am having.
Keep visiting,
Abhishek