Palin Haiku

Ok, so she was aksing for it. I had to do a few Palin Haikus!  Infact its like a poem of Palin Haikus!

 

Once there was a mom

A VeePee she wants to be

Shoots moose, goodness me!

 

one fine sunday, she

Saw Russia accross the sea

Foreign e.x.p!

 

High heels and lipstick,

Are her strongest arsenel

Góv’ner? Hard to tell!

 

Picked by one McCain,

Turned out to be quite a pain!

Atleast she can wink!

 

High point of it all

Was when she said “You Betcha”!

Elect Obamma!

Fear of Permanence

I have heard plenty of people say that they are afraid of change. But are there folks out there who love change and hate permanence? I fall under the later category. To know that things will remain the way they are for the next few years scares the hell out of me. It is almost like I know what is going to happen. 

When you know what is going to happen and can predict your life for the next 2 years everything seems to be boring, stable. To know that you will have the same job, will live in the same area, will be associated with the same people day in and day out seems to be a drag.

How do people deal with that? I have already written about how to create change. You can read it here http://wantonurges.wordpress.com/2006/02/28/jumpinklings/. But my question is, what if the circumstances aren’t just right for change now. You need to wait. Anger and passion subdued by reason. 

So how do you wait, when every cell in your body is pushing you forward, ready to break free? But reality pulls you back! There are logical steps to be taken. There are plans to be designed and executed. The time has come to cast off that lethargic drag.

Words are powerful in that they lift your spirit, even if only for a moment; they goad you to act right now. Goals have to be written down. A plan has to be crafted to break the goals down into little pieces and finally, most importantly, courage has to be drawn from within to stay the course and execute those plans.

Cant have that

Why is it that we want what we cant have? It could be a person, a job or a thing. But human beings seem to be built to always want things that they cant have. Or is it just me? 

Sometimes we get it, only for a moment. But our psychology is so twisted that, the moment we have it, we no longer want it. So we loose it. And then we want it all over again. I guess men and women are really boys and girls at heart. They want a car or a doll the moment its been taken away. 

Since these days marriage and relationship creep into my mind once in a while, how can you be sure of the person you are getting married to. The moment you have the person, how do you keep from not wanting the person anymore? Maybe that is why you have counsellors and overbearing friends and relatives. Maybe there is more than psychology at play in a marriage. Maybe its convenient to stay married or be in a relationship. 

By convenient, I mean the search for finding the right person was difficult, and now maybe you don’t want to go through that process again. Maybe, you have kids and now their future gives another twist and meaning to your marriage and you don’t want to break it. Maybe there are economic and societal reasons for you to stay married and those reasons overpower the desire for you to get out of the marriage or commitment. 

Well another question is when do you stop looking. I have known people who have found their “life partner” when they were very young and never want to look anymore. How is it that they are so sure that this is the person that they want to spend the rest of their lives with? Is there something more than reason and logic to life. Does love exist outside the world of romantics and idealists?

I digress; coming back to my original question. Why is it that we want the things that we cant have and the moment something is lost, we want it even more? Furthermore, how do you know that you genuinely want that or if it is just psychology taking you for a ride(like the little boy wanting the car when its taken away)? 

Maybe I am over analyzing simple things. Maybe you should be like the zen and go with the flow. There might be forces at play here and you get what you deserve and not want you want.

Her story

Today, I went to a restaurant and there I saw an old lady. She must have been in her 80s, maybe even touching 90. Though she stood upright, she walked with a walking stick and spoke in broken English. Clearly she lived most of her life outside the US and came to the US recently. Well, whats so unusual about that? You may ask; there are plenty of old women everywhere. 

But here is the context. The old woman was Indian, north Indian, most likely Punjabi. The restaurant was in the US. She was accompanied by a slightly younger woman, maybe in her 60s, who was American. I found that very intriguing. What was her story? Why was an old Indian woman accompanied by a younger American woman, eating lunch at an Indian restaurant. 

Maybe I need to inject some cultural context for my non Indian readers to fully grasp the oddity that I perceived there. Traditional Indian families are never nuclear. I grew up seeing my grandparents live with my parents. Now, I am not saying that it is only in India that parents live with their children, it happens all over the world. But in India, I have seen many old parents live with their sons and more often with their daughters. So why was this old woman not with her children? 

Wait! Before you accuse me of saying that, old Indian and American women cannot be friends, let me introduce you to the next cultural context that I feel is important. Old Indians, especially when they have spent most of their lives in India find it very difficult to adapt to another culture. They find it difficult to get along with someone from a different nationality or race, because of the language and cultural differences. My assumption of course is that this old Indian lady spent 80 years in India and spent  9 years in the US. This assumption, I validated by asking her how long she has lived in the US and she said 9 years and she learned a few words in English after coming here.

So now you understand the situation. Looking through my Indian cultural lens, I would have expected her to be with an Indian family. So what was her story? I wonder if she immigrated to the US with her family 9 years back. Then maybe through a nasty twist of fate her family disappeared? And finally she found herself in an old age home where a nice American woman befriends her and takes her out once in a while. Today they chanced to be at an Indian restaurant.

The old lady came over to us and asked us where we were from in India in Hindi, and flashed the most brilliant semi-toothed smile when we replied in Hindi. “She misses her country”, the American woman told us. I left wondering what her story was.

Financial Crisis

This economy is a once in a life time situation. A sub-prime mortgage crisis spiraled into a complete financial meltdown. Banks are refusing to lend each other money. A credit crunch that affects both the wall street and the main street. Tech companies will soon find themselves without enough money for day to day operations. That would result in reduced earnings and consequently in further stock drop. The DOW is trading at a 5 year low, and could get worse. International stock markets are in no better shape. Iceland is bankrupt. Home prices have dropped by record values. Ford motors is trading at $2, GM at 5$!

What a wonderful opportunity !!! Anybody in this situation should buy in a phased manner. Buy blue chip stocks, buy homes buy whatever you can get your hands on that is trading at historic low numbers.

marriage 101

Women should be built to order. Now I don’t mean like the creepy 60-year-olds who get escort service, but like a genuine young man, who wants to get married, with certain set of requirements. However, I wonder if I will have a successful marriage if I find someone who has the exact set of characteristics I am looking for. Which brings me to the interesting question. Should there be any requirements at all?

What are successful marriages based on? Compatibility? How do you figure that out? Should two people who have similar interests get married? Chemistry? If you are attracted to each other and enjoy each others company, should you get married? Communication? I threw that one in there because my mother seems to think that is the most important component.

But the question I am playing with is: maybe, any marriage can work if the two people involved are committed to it. So there really isn’t any “right person”. There are plenty of “right persons”. And then, you make a conscious decision that you are going to give it everything you have to make it work.

So what I am saying is that, maybe eharmony.com, shaadi.com and match making aunts are really not doing anything useful. All that matters is that you are ready and you find someone who is also ready and agree that you want to stay married and will do everything to make it work.

That probably explains why arraigned marriages have been working in India for eons. Due to societal taboos associated with a broken marriage(divorce), people opt to stay married even when they are not happy. So I come to the conclusion that to stay married, all you need are two committed people, with whatever motives to stay married.

Now going back to the original question as to what good are requirements and preconditions going into a marriage, when they are immaterial anyway? Maybe it feels like you are doing the right thing if you have preconditions, maybe from a psychological point of view, you feel better when you get someone who you were looking for. But in reality, that has no impact on the success or failure of a marriage.

I suppose the preconditions and requirements are for the snobish Indian families. I suppose it is nice and heart warming for families to talk about “like us” alliances. I suppose its a matter of honor and self rightousnes for societies to be able to pat themselves on the back when their sons and daughters have led lives confined to the boundries of what is considered acceptable.

Marriage

I am by no means an expert on the subject, but I thought it would be interesting to chronicle my thoughts. I am at that age when you start thinking that marriage is probably the next logical thing to do with my life. But in that process I started wondering about my motivation to get married.

It is hard to justify getting married, when you still think that life holds limitless possibilities for you. You still can think of situations where you would like to do something crazy. Go on a trip on a ship to some land, start a company and loose tonnes of money, quit your job and go back to school. If you are married, then are these questions pointless? Do you have to start thinking “long term” and “family” and “compromise”.

Is this how most people go about finding a life partner? At some point you decide that you are ready. Ready for what? Ready for compromise? Ready for a family life? Ready for having a girl or a guy on your bed, in your apartment, in your mind and thoughts for the rest of your life?

Is it a cultural thing? Is it because I am from India, with a conservative society, where you still think about the person you are marrying as a family. Most Indian marriages are families getting married to each other with the most important characters having slightly diminished roles. Is it my parental and societal conditioning that makes it difficult for me to tear away from those constraints that limit how wide I can cast my net?

I suppose its different if you have found a person and you think it is incomprehensible to think of a life without that person being part of every decision you make. Thats the idealistic point of view where you get married not just because you want to get married, but because thats what you have to do. The reasons are compelling and there are no alternatives.

But I suppose if the world were idealistic, and every man and woman, found the person by chance that they were secretly looking for; then there wouldn’t be aunts matchmaking, there wouldn’t be any eharmony.com and there certainly wouldn’t be match making companies that maintain a database of singles around an area.

In conclusion, I think marriages are dictated by some deadline. It could be age, it could be because you are leaving to another country, it could be because you might have to get married for someone else to get married after you. So now that you have a deadline, you are ready to compromise and say at some point that you will stop looking because your deadline is up. It could also be because you think that in the future there will come a time when you want to get married. So even if you don’t want to get married right now, you still do becuse you think in the future you would want to.

In search of meaning

Have you ever asked yourself why you do the things that you do? What you need to do in the future? What is the reason for your existence?

In the field of neuroscience and cognitive neuroscience, science has made significant advances. We can now explain the origin of diseases and suggest possible cures based on a molecular level understanding of the human brain. We know in depth about the basic signaling mechanism that lets you feel and respond to stimuli. But science still cannot explain why we think of the things we do. Why we live the life we do. Consciousness and thoughts are still a mystery.

Religion has attempted to list down a set of rules according to which we should live our life. Hinduism for example ties it to your karma and the cycle of births and rebirths. Based on how you lived your previous life, you live this one and the fundamental purpose is to break free from the cycle of births and rebirths. Other religions have attempted to explain the reason for existence as following Gods will. Taoism on the other hand talks about self realization.

Society defines how you should live your life from a practical point of view coupled with cultural and religious influences from the region where you live. For example, what is considered normal in most cultures is to study, find a job, get married, have kids and a family life and finally retire.

I wonder if most people care about the search for meaning. To live a normal life you can be oblivious to your purpose. But if are curious, then you need to know.  Why did you get up in the morning today? What set of activities will you do today that will take you a step closer to your purpose?

To know that, then I guess you need to know for certain what your purpose is. I wonder if M. K Gandhi knew that his purpose was to liberate India from the British. I wonder if Lincon knew that his purpose was to lead America through the civil war. I wonder if they too, the people with the clearest vision, were searching constantly throughout.

I am inclined to believe that no one knows. The purpose of life is to figure out your purpose. The moment you find that out life might turn out to be completely meaningless. To do that we try different things. We yearn for experiences. We try to organize our thoughts. We try to plan out our life, believing that we have control over the set of experiences we will have.

But in that process of self discovery you might drift away in a different direction and you will have to admit that you cant plan everything. There are times that you will be tossed about by situations that you have no control over. In those situations you will have to accept that experience, learn from it and move on. You can never have regrets about the situations in which life puts you. You will have to belive that, that experience was necessary for you to figure out and live our purpose.

Values, Mistakes and You

Have you ever questioned who you are? Your fundamental values and principles. Why you make mistakes and what is the relationship between mistakes and values. The past few days I had reasons to question who I have become and analyze myself.

What are values and principles?

They are what you believe in. They are the core of an individual. Things like “I will not steal.” “I will not hurt someone”. “I will respect another human being.” These values may be passed on to you by your parents, teachers and other elders. Sometimes you think and read good books and realize certain qualities in people that you would like to incorporate into your self. So you start believing in these one lines, and they become your  fundamental values. Finally they are inextricably tied to your character. When you talk about someone’s character, you are essentially talking about the set of values that person holds.

What good are values?

Life puts you in situations where you are under stress. Sometimes you might have just lost a job or a loved one. Sometimes you are frustrated with life, sometimes you have wanted something so badly for a long time but couldn’t get it.

Life also throws important decisions at you. Who should you marry? How should you raise your kids? How should you behave with others. At these decision points the only way you can make a decision is by relying on your values. You look at your principles. They are the rules that you define to help you make decisions.

So values are important because when you are in a situation that you have never been in before, you rely on them to help you make decisions. That is why having good values is so important. They help you make the right decisions when you are under stress and when you have to make important ones.

What about mistakes?

Now there are two kinds of mistakes. Say you misspelled a word. That’s a mistake you made because you didn’t know and it probably had very little consequence.

The kind of mistakes I want to talk about are the ones that claw at the core of your being. The ones that you knew you shouldn’t make. The ones where you stepped outside the boundary defined by your values.

Why were those mistakes made? Maybe you forgot about your values. Maybe you let yourself slip. Maybe you gave yourself less credit than you should have. You forgot to realize that you have the power to stick to your values. You knew them, but thought that you were weaker than that. One of the things I believe in is that only a weak person makes mistakes. Well even someone strong can be weak at times.

What to do about the mistakes?

What do you do about something that you did that was totally out of character? I hope you understand the import of those words. Out of character means that you did something that you normally would not do. If the consequences were significant, how do you make sure you don’t do something out of character again? The answer is that you have to constantly keep reminding yourself what your principles are. Furthermore you need to make sure you don’t put yourself in situations where you are weak. Because that is when you are most likely to step beyond your boundaries.