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Showing posts from April, 2015

Vintage Whine

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Swami Gulagulaananda said: " With great ownership comes great sense of responsibility " Expectations vs Reality We like things to be perfect. We have a certain set of ideas of what perfection is. These are expectations. Then there is reality. The greater the gap between reality and expectation, the greater the disappointment. When there is disappointment, there are four things that can be done. We can sit quietly and remain disappointed.  We can try and do things to bridge the gap.  Change expectations Whine about it. Sitting quietly and remaining disappointed is not a great option. It quietly sucks out your morale and eat you away from within. There are many who do this; they end up feeling worthless. They resign to their fate. A good example of this would be women in Saudi Arabia. The society in which they live is in a certain way and they are, or feel, so powerless to change it that they have accepted their fate. Changing expectations is what Buddha suggeste

The Quota Paradox

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Swami Gulagulaananda said: " Some see the glass half empty, others see the glass half full " The reservation system in India is one of the most debated topics among people. I, for one, strongly oppose caste based reservation system. To deny meritorious students of seats in good institutions (and jobs) simply because certain seats are reserved for people who belong to a particular caste is as unjust as people looking down upon a certain caste because they belong to that caste. While many of you may agree with my argument above, I would like to pose a series of situations before you and ask you for your opinions and thoughts. I read a news article that spoke about the situation of daily soap opera makers of Tamil Nadu. 50% of Tamil Nadu's serials are local shows made by people of Tamil Nadu while the remaining 50% are Hindi series that are dubbed to Tamil. A lot of Tamilians feel that this is unfair because other serial makers are unable to compete against big bud

Greenpeace, NGOs & WYSINWYG

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Swami Gulagulaananda paraphrased Jacob Braude: " The duck seems calm and unruffled at the outset, but paddles like crazy under water " In the good ol' days when I was trying to learn HTML, there were a set of editors called WYSIWYG - What You See Is What You Get, where you could visually design web pages as you would write a Word document without writing a single line of code, and the final page would look as it did in the editor. However, a majority of the times, life is not WYSIWYG (pronounced wee-see-wig ). It is the opposite of that - thus WYSINWYG. Several years ago, before Facebook (and perhaps before Orkut) became a rage, I had a chance encounter with a website called Greenpeace. I was very young and I didn't know anything about them. The page I was looking at was campaigning for turtles against an industrial conglomerate. I immediately decided to join the fight - My reasoning at that time was simple: I love animals, I know turtles are getting extinct,