On Freewill !!

2 years back, influenced by Dr. Himanshu Rai, I had posted that Freewill exists for human beings as we can plan suicide.However,me and Parankush had a heated debate for taking the statement for granted.He had argued that so many animals who are living socially (like ants) can also be construed as part of the Freewill theory and human beings are not different.

This discussion as well as the discovery of the "God Particle" this year led me to a journey of the different ideas that has been found to be present in Wikipedia.I was surprised to read that things are not as simple as we make them to be.Here is the graph and link to the Wiki page
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will

So there is a theory that says that Free will is impossible and we are living a Deterministic paradigm of life ( Cause and effect is necessary and determined).The Incompatibilist go a step further and even say that we have no control of choices and results we have in life.

I am probably inclined to agree with the Compatibilist argument as a lot of phenomenon can be explained by them.However the thought that we can create something out of nothing like the "God particle" or "Bootstrapping of human body on waking up" is something that intrigues me.

So if the first particle came from nothing ,there had to be something external ( like the Large Hadron collider made in CERN labs) to initiate the process for all things in world to start. Or something in the brain cell to reprogram the state from which we had left our thoughts/memory before sleeping.Until these answers are not provided, I believe the incompatibilist have some arguments in their favour.

I will end the post with a thought in the same Wiki page from Swami Vivekananda :-

A quotation from Swami Vivekananda, a Vedantist, offers a good example of the worry about free will in the Hindu tradition.

Therefore we see at once that there cannot be any such thing as free-will; the very words are a contradiction, because will is what we know, and everything that we know is within our universe, and everything within our universe is moulded by conditions of time, space and causality. ... To acquire freedom we have to get beyond the limitations of this universe; it cannot be found here.

However, the preceding quote has often been misinterpreted as Vivekananda implying that everything is predetermined. What Vivekananda actually meant by lack of free will was that the will was not "free" because it was heavily influenced by the law of cause and effect—"The will is not free, it is a phenomenon bound by cause and effect, but there is something behind the will which is free." Vivekananda never said things were absolutely determined and placed emphasis on the power of conscious choice to alter one's past karma: "It is the coward and the fool who says this is his fate. But it is the strong man who stands up and says I will make my own fate."

Being happy..

Thanks to Sunny Jindal for this awesome link on being happy.

http://www.inc.com/geoffrey-james/9-daily-habits-that-will-make-you-happier.html?goback=.gde_79568_member_198397241

My take :-

1. Starting with a purpose 
2. Planning
3. Gifting something to every one (smile included )
4. Deflect partisan conversations (Detachment)
5. Assume people have good intentions
6. Eat good food slowly
7. Not worrying about results but job at hand (Message from Gita)
8. Turn off the background noise ( Detachment )
9. End each day with gratitude

I liked the last line and from now on will just pen down one wonderful thing that happened to me.

So for today, it was giving gyaan on why LUCK is not important.
I realized that while the moment when LUCK could be attributed as a strong factor for me, it was also the fact that I was trying to achieve the goal really badly.And probably "The Alchemist" message helped in the process.

In the last 2 years, I have not been able to have a concrete set of goals and hence have been just wandering around for the omens to come.Probably its part of the journey called Life.The below link is quite motivational in that aspect :-
http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/08/the_disciplined_pursuit_of_less.html

Reaching the highest point of contribution ( Talent ,Market and Passion) is what I was selling in Delhi in 09.Though the terms were (Aptitude,Interest and Personality). I had taken market forces as just a factor and not as a strong influencing factor during the sales and probably that's the root cause of the failure of the product.

Influencers in my life - Timeline

After Facebook published Timeline, I had this urge to recollect moments,places and people who have had strong influences on my life.So the list goes like this :-

1. Age 0-5 -> My grandfather turns to be the only person who influenced me into learning Sanskrit shlokas,some of which I can recollect and recall and bring myself to the awesome days.
2. Age 5-18 -> My father for bringing the concept of Positive thinking,Goal and Planning in life.I am not sure ,how much of it I have executed,but this was by far the single most differentiator for me from the rest of my peer group.
3. At KNIT Sultanpur,probably no single individual.But the students in general,who helped me enjoy the small things in life in difficult circumstances.There was also this book "The Magic of Thinking Big" that led me to create some real super goals in life and motivated me to reach them.
4. At Infosys, my mentor Pinaki who told me the golden rule "You do 100 good things,people don't remember you.You do 1 wrong thing and people remember you forever".Murphy's law was another of his favourite rule to use.
5. At IIM Lucknow, I was deeply influenced by Dr. Himanshu Rai. He has created such a strong framework about life ,that it seems difficult not to retrofit human beings into it.Some of his ideas that are also part of his blog,my blog and advices he gives to the aam aadmi are :-

• You must learn to love yourself for what you are. Do not seek love or approbation from outside; seek it from within. 

• Next, you need to tell yourself that you have choices in life. What makes you different from other species is “free will”. Tell yourself that you have it. It is okay if you are confused right now over your future course of action. Very few of us, if any, know what we really want to do with our lives! So welcome to the world! Reflect on your achievements in the past and correlate them to the effort you made to get them. Auto suggestion is a powerful tool when used wisely. 

•   Eat healthy, sleep well and counter negative thoughts 

•  The concept of detachment as propounded by Vedic scriptures relates to living one’s life and doing one’s Karma while not attaching oneself to the fruits of the effort (Nishkaam karma). Fear is a consequence of attachment. When we are attached to someone or something, we are afraid of losing them, and it manifests itself as fear of failure, fear of success, fear of unknown and so on. 

• Other thoughts are already part of the "Leadership through Literature" posts.

6. How people remember things or become leaders can be through simple aspects like "Reading","Writing","Listening" or even "Talking" .This was part of "Managing oneself" series I was reading last year in my free time.
7. Find your zones or spheres of control.List them and change only those that you can control first.Something that I learnt while interacting with my team in Kolkata.

Does winning matter ?

Was just thinking of the topic of the blog I have created 3 years ago.
For me the answer is yes and no.

Yes .. when I see the likes of the big consulting companies that look for excellence in your academics,work ex and extra curriculars as an indicator of your future performance.They are ruthless to punish you for any mediocre performance or lacuna in something.

No..when the likes of Australian army rejects people who have been throughout winners in life and never had a single failure.They argue that never seeing a failure, will not make a person strong enough to counter and take decisions when he has failed in his job in the army.He will not be able to give corrective actions and reactions.

Its important to fail in life and strive hard to reach excellence.
But what is more important is to  enjoy travelling  from failure to excellence.
As they say in 3 idiots , Strive for Excellence , Success will come to you any which way.

Imagination is more important than Knowledge

The caption was my Orkut fortune for the day.I could not comprehend if Imagination is related to creating any fortune or not.But when I checked Wikipedia, I found an interesting example on Imagination and Perception :-

From the work of Piaget it is known that perceptions depend on the world view of a person. The world view is the result of arranging perceptions into existing imagery by imagination. Piaget cites the example of a child saying that the moon is following her when she walks around the village at night. Like this perceptions are integrated into the world view to make sense. Imagination is needed to make sense of perceptions.

It clearly signifies that we form our perceptions based on imagination and hence when we are dealing with an object,imagination can take precedence over our existing knowledge of things.Perhaps this could be the reason of so many poets,writers and painters with more imaginative powers have been able to make sense of mundane and ordinary things surrounding us.

Its also well known that things normally happen twice,'Once in the mind and second time in reality'.So we create some images in the subconcious mind and then do those things consciously.Seems logical.

The greatest example in Imagination for me are the people who wrote the ancient texts in different religions.They have created such a document through scriptures and other texts that majority of us find it difficult to even question them and fight over them inspite of the strong scientific evolutions and marvels.

Infact ,research has also proved that some of the instances mentioned in those books seem to be true through rigorous experiments.For eg. astronomical calculations to prove that Mahabharata war did happen based on the eclipse timing and all.There is a simple explanation to this phenomenon :-

Apples used to fall since time immemorial.It was Newton who suddenly got this insight that all this is due to a force called 'Gravity' and explained its nature and behaviour.

So all these texts and body of knowledge could be mere imaginary creations but they form the very basis of the Knowledge that we all live upon.Perhaps Philosophy is nothing more than imagining a different or better world and Wisdom is something that we all gain through more imagination in our experiences.

A better imagination can overrule the existing knowledge as has happened in the case of  the crisis of 2008 where people created imaginary financial products,profits and what not for years together inspite of the knowledge that it was not sustainable.