UPANAYANAM

The Sanskrit word Upanayanam is made of Upa and Nayanam. (vision through knowledge). Literally, it is identified as the second vision known as Wisdom & knowledge.   The boy on which this is performed is known to get the second birth - first being born on the earth with physical body and second being "taking one near to wisdom".  Essentially it has two parts.  First is the investiture of the three stranded thread called Yagjnopaveetham. The second part is the Brahmmopadesam - taking one to the Brahman - a recitation into his right ear the Gayathri Mantra. This is usually performed by his father, who becomes the Teacher known as Guru to the boy.  And from this day, he begins his routine Sandhya Vandanam - a regular prayer done thrice a day - during Morning, Noon & in the Evening. 

The sacred thread consists of three strands joined by a knot known as Brahmagranthi or the knot of Brahma. The meaning of the three strands is ida, pingala and sukshama nadi, through which the kundalini energy manifests as prana and consciousness. Yajno-pavita means 'thread of sacrifice.' That is so called because it symbolizes the sacrifice of ego, Anger & selfishness.  Upanayanam does not mean just putting round the neck three strands of cotton thread. It means that there are not only two eyes but a third also. That is the jnana netram (wisdom eye). Open that eye and recognize your swa-swarupa (own form); that is what is taught. Upanayanam means additional eye. They say that the eye must be opened and for that purpose they give training in pranayama (breath control).  This sacred thread may be compared to an electric circuit. Even as any leakage point in an electric circuit will result in draining away precious electrical energy, objects like keys or rings tied to the sacred thread, serve as leakage points through which the carefully garnered spiritual power of Gayathri is frittered away. The sacred thread must therefore be kept free from association with any other object and must be worn at all times.

The Gayathri Mantra is a highly revered mantra of the Vedic tradition.  By chanting this mantra properly, one can attain purity by dispelling ignorance.  It improves communication abilities, brightens the mind and opens up the psychic vision.  Ultimately, the person who repeatedly chants this mantra attains spiritual enlightenment and becomes mentally powerful.

This practice is the rich heritage handed down the centuries by our forefathers and the sages. These rituals prepare the mind to assimilate not only the vedic knowledge but also make one a person of character. It may be argued that in the present day conditions it is not practicable to strictly perform sandhyavandana thrice a day as ordained by the scriptures nor is it possible to chant the Gayathri mantra strictly in the manner prescribed. While there may be some validity in such an argument, to the extent possible these samskaras must be practised including the regular chanting of the Gayathri mantras. In this context a brahmachari would do well to learn a lesson or two from others who even in these modern days, do not fail to perform their religious practices.

May the Supreme Lord and Divine Mother in her quintessential form as Gayathri bless us and inspire us to rediscover our extraordinary rich legacy.

"Hosur-Chennai" train once again ignored in 2014 Railway Budget

We as "Hosurians" should be disappointed to read that the Central Government has once again ignored the much-awaited express train between Hosur and Chennai.   Hosur being the industrial hub of Tamilnadu and a fast growing city near Bangalore with so many migrants from all across the country, this is an injustice to Hosurians.  Although there is no direct rail link between Chennai and Hosur, there was a proposal to run a train via Byappanahalli  (Hosur->Byappanahalli->Bangarpet->Jolarpet->Chennai).  Atleast a thrice-a-week train would have been a good start if not daily.  

I read that there are 73 trains announced in the railway budget which includes a Bangalore-Chennai daily express via Bangarpet and Katpadi.   What is the need for another express train between Bangalore and Chennai when there are more than 15 trains between the two cities including a double-decker train plying daily.  The same could have been changed between Hosur-Chennai via Byappanahalli.

This is a unjustitied and unacceptable to the people of this region.  

I hope Mr. Gopinath, a very vibrant Hosur MLA from the congress party would take up this matter seriously and get us a solution.   

Your Career Development Is In Your Hands

People have supervisors/managers and they have their managers.   Lot of us have learnt over many years that a manager is responsible for individual's development.   "Development" here is a buzzword which is often mis-understood or less understood.  It means many things from learning to career progression.   As humans, we feel motivated when we achieve something new, however small it is because there is a feeling of joy and learning.  While our managers can show the direction and "probably" guide us by giving inputs on ways to achieve it, it is in our hands to go that extra mile to conquer the territory.  Career progression is one such example.   

Career progression is a territory to be conquered.  It could be a hard terrain to climb.  There could be multiple hurdles stopping us from moving forward.  It is our responsibility to cross those hurdles and move forward without looking back.  Our managers are not going to solve it for us.  Bad managers can make our journey very difficult by creating more hurdles.  Good managers either clear them or show an alternate smooth path to achieve the same goal.  Often we fail to distinguish between a bad manager and a good manager, especially when we are very early in our career.  

If you encounter somone who creates hurdles and makes your tasks even more difficult, it is your respnsibility to clear those hurdles.  If the hurdle creater is your manager, it is still your responsibility to conquer them, because ultimately the goal that you have set for yourself is your goal, not your manager's goal.  

Let us take an example of a scenario when someone is denied a promotion.  "Denial Of Promotion" (DOP) creates a bottleneck and slows down your career progression goal.  It is a hurdle which I talked before.  You have to measure the bottleneck and see how genuine the DOP is.  Because, your manager will be bound by organizational policies and practices and will have only limited sphere of influence.  So, a DOP is not necessarily your manager's fault.  However, as a manager, he/she has a duty to communicate to you in a "friendly and kind" manner about why you were denied promotion and what is that you should do to improve.  Many times this dialog is often regarded as "fullfilling of ones' task" by the supervisor.  There may not be any credibility in this dialog.  A DOP would put you back by few years.   Multiple DOPs can seriously injure your career progression.  DgOP could be a traumatic expereince.  It could impact you both personally and professionally.  

So, what do you do when you are denied promotion which was must awaited for years?   How would you react?   How would you control stress and mental agony?  Here are some tips that could help you overcome this situation

1.  "Thinking about your family - those smiling faces waiting for you".   Do not build stress and agony because it would harm your health.

2   Talk to a trusted partner about everything that is in your mind bothering you.   Because, it is better to vent out your frustrations.   Your trusted partner could be your spouse or a good friend of yours but not your manager even if your manager is a good friend. 

3.  Depending upon what time of the day you were told about the DOP, as soon as you get to know about it, call it a day and go home and relax yourself.   Because the first thing to do is to relax your mind and the best place to do that is your home.

4.  Indulge yourself in some healthy and friendly activities like playing with your children, talking to your spouse, seeing a movie, going out for a dinner etc.   

5.  Go to bed early and have a sound 8-hr sleep.

6.  Next day, get back to regular work and keep your mind busy with work.   Take up something that would be interesting to work on which would motivate you.   This is the time you need motivation.

7.  Do not discuss about DOP with anyone.  If you are inadvertently/advertently pulled into one such discussion, please mention that you are not interested in taking part in such a discussion and move forward.

8. Chart out a plan in your mind as to how to move forward towards your career progression goal.  It could be looking out too, but keep it yourself and do not reveal anything.  Work on it in background.

9.  You can have further discussions about DOP with your manager as appropriate, but never ever vent out your frustrations on your manager.  Do not give a clue that you are least interested in this job and you would be looking out (even if you are planning to do so).    

10.  A healthy dialog with your manager is to ask for a development plan because a development plan is something that would still be useful in some sense irrespective of your decision ot stay or quit.

Whatever is the case.   Understand this philosophy.....

WORK IS WORSHIP AND THE ORGANIZATION IS A TEMPLE.   It should be always "Business as usual" for you.  So, do not give it up, carry on your normal job and you will get over it very soon.   Do not let your ambitions down by reacting.  The world is there for you with other opportunities if not this organization.

Sachin Tendulkar and Bharath Ratna

Sachin Tendulkar, often called the "The God Of World Cricket" is confered with "Bharath Ratna" which is the highest civilian award in India.  I tried to understand what is "Bharath Ratna" and what are the criterias for conferring it on a person and I got to understand that there is only one criteria for it

"for performance of highest order in any field of human 

endeavour."

So, it is not restricted to any specific field which makes anybody eligible to receive the award.

I am given to understand that the award is recommended by the Prime Minister of India to the President of India after a jury selects the awardee on various criteria.  In many cases, the jury may not able be take a decision due to various reasons such as lack of field knowledge, unable to ascertain credibility, incompetence in the specialization.  I have no idea what happens in such cases.  May be, the jury decides to give a lower award.   

In Sachin's case, his fame, glory and the credibility he has bestowed on Indian minds and on world cricket puts no doubt that he is worth the award.  

The Ubiquitous Smart Phone

I was wondering if it is right to call a Smart Phone as really a phone.   Well, phone is just one of its functionalists but there are many other things that you do with the device.  So, I was contemplating on what to call it,  a 'Smart Device' ?   That would be a very generic name.   A 'communicator' ?  That would again be very specific to couple of its functions.  Hence, unable to coin the right name, I got convinced and still settled down with the same name.  Yes, indeed, it is a 'smart phone' because whatever be the case, phone is its major functionality.   May be, some one more smarter than me would give it a better name.  

So, what is this 'Smart Phone' and why do we call it smart?   Look at the home screen of my HTC Desire VC dual SIM smart phone running Android below

Smart Phone Home Screen

It has camera, messaging, mail, phone, impromptu news, connectivity to internet, alarm clock, twitter bar and finally a task widget.    Well, this is what a common man does in his day to day life such as these

> Send/Recieve mails
> Lookup news
> Make phone calls
> Message texts
> Tweet
> Capture images/video as appropriate
> Manage tasks

If you were to do these using your phone, then you have to enable your phone to make you smart.   How do you do that ?   So, in my opinion, the first thing to do in a smart phone is to smartly decorate your home screen.  Most smart phone users do not do this which makes the smart phone less navigable and more cumbersome to use.  They blame the phone to be more complex to use than re-configuring it. We are living in in he age of smart phones with large screens that gives you more real estate on your home screen to put many useful things.   So, my first mantra to make your smart phone smart enough is to re-configure and decorate your home screen with useful widgets.  

Email As A Service

Sabeer  Bhatia was instrumental in creating the innovative Hotmail in the 90s.  Prior to that,  emails were thick client programs that had to be installed on a PC.   Accessing Internet itself was seen as a wave and modern.  It is interesting to understand the intellect and vision behind Sabeer's idea of web-based email.  The idea itself was revolutionary and forward looking which paved way to modern web-based emails including G-Mail.

Today we talk about SAAS, PAAS and cloud computing at ease because the economy of IT industry and reducing cost of hardware and internet bandwidth is making this possible.   Sabeer did not have all these luxuries in those days.   He probably had to run http, email and storage servers on extremely costly hardware which he might have provisioned from his funding agencies.  And scalability and performance would have been a major  challenge to him although I can understand that the Internet traffic was not as high as what you see today.  He probably could not sustain the exploding Internet traffic and his data centers were probably unable to scale till Microsoft took over Hotmail and was able to revitalize it using high-end  data centers.   That gave hotmail a new life.  Had it been today, Sabeer would have used cloud computing footprint to run Hotmail and probably would not have been depending on large organizations.

Whatever be the case, Hotmail would have been extremely efficient in resource management and data processing.  We must salute this gentleman for his innovation, visionary thought, candid judgement and entrepreneurship.  Being a fellow Indian, I would like the  Indian Government to recognize his work and felicitate him.  This would nourish and motivate innovation in our country and the IT world.

The Greatness of Tamil Culture

Heard this from Kaviko Thiru. Abdul Rahman.

This story takes us to the Sangam age.

It was a beautiful day and rains had just settled bringing beauty and serenity on mother nature.
A king, longing to see his beloved lover for many weeks gets a call from her.
Overjoyed, he gets his chariot ready and asks his driver to go as fast as possible as he could not resist his feelings.  The chariot roars ahead like a bullet. 
The king happens to pass through a wooded region where he notices the colorful flowers having just blossomed on the rees and plants which makes makes him feel even more happy and rich.  
Just then, the king asks his driver to stop the chariot and get some twigs to tie the chariot bells so that it makes no sound when the chariot is in motion.
Taken by surprise, the driver humbly requests the king to explain the reason.

Now this is where the story brings in charm and showcases the culture.....

The kings says,  "Oh my humble driver!   Didn't you notice those two honey bees sitting on the flower sucking nector and enjoying the togetherness?  The sound of the chariot bells would disturb their togetherness and they would fly away getting separated.   How can I be so cruel on those poor little creatures when I am braving all risks to see my beloved"

....and the chariot gently passes by the woods.

Thus is the greatness of our rich culture and heritage which we should take pride in.

-Krishnan