Chronicles of Nikhil Baliga

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...

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...

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, ...

Swami Gulagulaananda quoted Hajime Saitou: " A man who cannot uphold his beliefs is pathetic; in this world or the next " Let's assume you are all set to sit in your room and do some light reading or work on your laptop. Or perhaps you are tired and it's time to sleep. Suddenly you see a hint of movement in the outer regions of your field of vision. You exhibit animal like reflexes and turn around and behold a small pesky mosquito manoeuvring effortlessly like a heat seeking cruise missile. You let out a slight tsk  or a  mch at the thought of getting bitten in the least accessible area of your body, perhaps your leg under the table or perhaps your toe. So what would you do? Would you make a move and kill the mosquito immediately? Or take some kind of action like spraying a mosquito repellant or turning on one of those mosquito repellants? Or would you ignore the mosquito? The question is not a simple one - but rather one with a slight philosophical twist. C...

Swami Gulagulaananda quoted his Kannada teacher: " Swaatantryakku swechchegu bahaLa vyatyaasa ide " [There is a great difference between freedom and doing as one wishes] What separates human beings from animals? What separates a civilisation from jungle? The answer, is rule of law. Rule of law is a set of artificial rules we have come to establish over ourselves in a bid to control our natural urges. Well, animals have rules to a certain extent - Like pack leader is above others, etc. But none that are as evolved as human beings. The rule of law has been the reason for the evolution of humans from yet another animal to one that dominates the world. The rule of law is a set of rules created by people for themselves. Why? Why would humans need rules and regulations? Why can't we just be like the animals? Animals are free to do as they want. Don't you think by imposing rules on ourselves, we are unnecessarily complicating lives? The answer is efficiency. If we did...

Swami Gulagulaananda said: " Life is not a video game, you get only one life " They say, " Rules are meant to be broken " and I am sure most people will agree because of various experiences they have had. I have often wondered what makes people break rules or do something that deviates from the instruction given to them. Let us look at a couple of examples. I have to cross a road that is called 'Double Road" and the road looks as illustrated here. Clearly there are two roads running parallel to each other. The yellow lines indicate a large fenced barrier separating the two roads. Now, one of the roads is horribly maintained and is full of deep potholes, mud that has come to the road from the side and humps and elevations that appear out of nowhere. In fact, the surface of the road is best suited for an SUV commercial to demonstrate "off road experiences" The other road is extremely well maintained - The two roads serve as a quintessent...

Swami Gulagulaananda quoted: " Expecting the world to treat you fairly because you are a good person is a little like expecting a lion to not eat you because you are a vegetarian " While the original quote is " ...expecting a bull not to attack you... " but I like the lion one better. Highly recommended reading -  Aavarana - The Veil It takes all sorts to make a world is an old proverb. There are all kinds of people out there - Good, well behaved, polite, smart asses, witty, dull, dumb, arrogant, cruel, sadistic, masochistic, sadomasochistic and so on. Then there is a second proverb - Birds of the same feather flock together. We typically see these examples right from our childhood and college. The smart ones hang out together and topics of discussion are studies or study related. People call them nerds. Then there are a group of sports-guys and studs who ace in the field but flunk in exams. It's very rare that you see people from both groups hang out ...