Crabby Old Man

When an old man died in the geriatric ward of a nursing home in North Platte , Nebraska , it was believed that he had nothing left of any value.

Later, when the nurses were going through his meager possessions, they found this poem. Its quality and content so impressed the staff that copies were made and distributed to every nurse in the hospital. One nurse took her copy to Missouri .

The old man's sole bequest to posterity has since appeared in the Christmas edition of the News Magazine of the St. Louis Association for Mental Health. A slide presentation has also been made based on his simple, but eloquent, poem.

And this little old man, with nothing left to give to the world, is now the author of this 'anonymous' poem winging across the Internet.


Crabby Old Man

What do you see nurses? . . . . . What do you see?
What are you thinking . . . . . when you're looking at me?
A crabby old man . . . . . not very wise,
Uncertain of habit . . . . . with faraway eyes?

Who dribbles his food . . . . . and makes no reply.
When you say in a loud voice . . . . . 'I do wish you'd try!'
Who seems not to notice . . . . . the things that you do.
And forever is losing . . . . . A sock or shoe?

Who, resisting or not . . . . . lets you do as you will,
With bathing and feeding . . . . . The long day to fill?
Is that what you're thinking? . . . . . Is that what you see?
Then open your eyes, nurse . . . . . you're not looking at me.

I'll tell you who I am. . . . . . As I sit here so still,
As I do at your bidding, . . . . . as I eat at your will.
I'm a small child of Ten . . . . . with a father and mother,
Brothers and sisters . . . . . who love one another.

A young boy of Sixteen . . . . with wings on his feet.
Dreaming that soon now . . . . . a lover he'll meet.
A groom soon at Twenty . . . . . my heart gives a leap.
Remembering, the vows . . . . . that I promised to keep.

At Twenty-Five, now . . . . . I have young of my own.
Who need me to guide . . . . . And a secure happy home.
A man of Thirty . . . . . My young now grown fast,
Bound to each other . . . . . With ties that should last.

At Forty, my young sons . . . . . have grown and are gone,
But my woman's beside me . . . . . to see I don't mourn.
At Fifty, once more, babies play 'round my knee,
Again, we know children . . . . . My loved one and me.

Dark days are upon me . . . . . my wife is now dead.
I look at the future . . . . . shudder with dread.
For my young are all rearing . . . . . young of their own.
And I think of the years . . . . . and the love that I've known.

I'm now an old man . . . . . and nature is cruel.
Tis jest to make old age . . . . . look like a fool.
The body, it crumbles . . . . . grace and vigor, depart.
There is now a stone . . . . where I once had a heart.

But inside this old carcass . . . . . a young guy still dwells,
And now and again . . . . . my battered heart swells.
I remember the joys . . . . . I remember the pain.
And I'm loving and living . . . . . life over again.

I think of the years, all too few . . . . . gone too fast.
And accept the stark fact . . . . that nothing can last.
So open your eyes, people . . . . . open and see.
Not a crabby old man . . . Look closer . . . see ME!!


Remember this poem when you next meet an older person who you might brush aside without looking at the young soul within.

We will all, one day, be there, too!

The best and most beautiful things of this world can't be seen or touched. They must be felt by the heart.

Women Grow Food Basket

from Down To Earth Magazine -- article by Aparna Pallavi


Maharashtra district revives an old farm practice and tackles drought


Whenever I went missing as a child, my mother would come looking for me in the pata, Lalitabai Meshram said, laughing out loud. “My friends and I would play in the tangled vines for hours, making dolls of corn husk and hair, eating groundnuts, beans and waluk melon. Sometimes I would fall asleep there,” recalled Meshram, now 50-plus.

Last year, after about four decades, she carved out a pata from the family’s four-acre (1.6 hectares) farm in Mendhla village in Maharashtra’s Yavatmal district. It is like an oasis in the middle of large cotton and soybean farms. Leafy vines of long beans (barbati) climbing up tall sorghum plants, interspersed with okra, pale pink bells of sesame flowers and pendulous waluk melons giving off a musky aroma. The pata now makes up the food basket for the Meshram family.

The small vegetable patch has restored the joy that was missing from agriculture, said Meshram. Agriculture in Maharashtra’s Vidarbha region had come to imply repeated crop failures, pest attacks, piling up loans and suicides.

Meshram is one of the 4,000 women farmers who have come together to revive the practice of pata in Yavatmal, the heartland of Vidarbha’s agriculture crisis.

Traditionally, pata signifies a woman’s space in agriculture. Women would plant small strips of land with vegetables, fruits and spices, between the main crops like wheat, sorghum and pigeon pea. They would maintain and harvest them, depending on family needs.

“At midday or in the evening, before going home, my mother would visit the pata and pluck vegetables for the next meal or take something for a snack,” Punjabai Bhagat, a 60-year-old from village Godhani, recalled. People working in the fields could always find something to munch on from the pata. Typically, she added, the pata supplied the family platter with fresh fruits and vegetables for about eight months in a year, and with pulses and oilseeds for the whole year; crops varied depending on the season. The pata ensured nutritional variety, Bhagat said.

That was decades ago. “The practice was lost following the Green Revolution and commercialization of agriculture,” said Vijaya Tulsiwar whose non-profit Dilasa focuses on the revival of traditional agricultural knowledge and practice in Yavatmal. A survey by Dilasa in 2005 showed only 15 families in the district were practising pata cultivation.

Three of the 260 households in my village and neighbouring Lalguda had pata, said Satibai Kumre of Mahadapur, a tribal village. “They always did fairly well despite drought or soaring food prices. This inspired us to create our own pata.” Women in Lalguda and Mahadapur villages were the first to revive the practice in the region.

“We had no seeds. Together, the three families had seven varieties of seeds, against the 16 to 18 varieties that women once sowed on their pata,” said Kumre. Then there was another hurdle—land shortage.

Commercial mono-crop cultivation in recent decades has usurped the traditional space women had in agriculture. Most farmers in this region, with an average landholding of two acres, did not want to divert plots for pata and lose income in cash, Kumre added.

Tulsiwar held meetings with women farmers in 31 villages in Jhari Jamni tehsil. The women pooled available seed stocks, which Tulsiwar’s non-profit bought and multiplied in 2006-2007 by planting them on the existing patas and on its five-acre nursery.

To overcome land shortage, the women came to an arrangement with men of their families: three furrows on a two-acre farmland was decided to be the ideal size for a pata. “Three furrows amounts to two-three per cent of a two-acre farm. The farmers now had no misgivings about losing income,” said Tulsiwar. After much preparation, 750 women from these villages planted 11 varieties of crops on their patas in the kharif season last year. Meshram was one of them.

Initially, the experiment did not instill much confidence among the women. “The patas looked too small to sustain family needs even for a month,” said Tulsiwar. But the result was spectacular.

“We did not spend on vegetables between July and November,” said Sugandha Atram of Lalguda. “We ate more vegetables during those four months than we had eaten in years,” she said. Apart from okra, bitter gourd, snake gourd and beans, Atram harvested 15kg of moong, 11kg of urad and 6kg of moth (pulses). Kumre harvested a record 50kg of moong and 30kg of pigeon pea and 350 corn cobs.

Revival of patas also helped the women revive traditional delicacies like til ka laddu, made of sesame seeds, and jowar lahya (puffed crispy sorghum seeds). With changing agricultural practices, cultivation of sesame—a rich source of calcium—had declined and the indigenous sorghum variety, moti-tura, had virtually disappeared. Their consumption was restricted to festive rituals due to exorbitant costs. But last year, almost every family in the village harvested four-five kg of sesame and sorghum seeds, said Atram. “We made laddus last the whole winter,” she said.

Women from Lalguda and Mahadapur estimate the patas helped them save Rs 3,000 to Rs 5,000 last year. More than that, they offered a variety of nutritious food. “There is happiness only when there is plenty to eat,” commented Atram.

The best part was the main crop production was not affected by the land diversion for pata, said Maroti Marekar of village Godhani. “What was lost in acreage was gained in pest reduction,” he said. Maroti and his wife Ujjwala planted marigolds on their pata; the plant acts as a pest trap. “It also yielded us fodder and compost.”

Following the initial success, Tulsiwar distributed 4,000 packets of mixed seeds in 180 villages in July for the kharif season; about 8,000 patas have been sown across the district. Scanty rainfall early in the season though did some damage to the legume crops, but the women harvested good quantities of vegetables; sorghum, corn and sesame crops also did well.

Those who had created patas last year have expanded them this year. Satibai, for instance, planted three patas this year, with full support from her husband. He was apprehensive during the trial run.

“It feels good,” he said: “There is shade in the farm and enough vegetables to eat. My daughter and her friends go to the pata these days to play. It is a happy thing.”

Donkey comes home

from http://www.downtoearth.org.in

The country’s only sanctuary offers professional care for the beasts of burden

I was surprised to find my donkey so completely cured, said Makkaji Ibitdar, a small farmer in the hilly district of Nanded in Maharashtra. When Dharma Donkey Sanctuary in Sagroli village handed him his animal after discharge Ibitdar could not stop smiling at it. Only three months earlier, he was planning to abandon the donkey after it became weak, developed bad eyesight and sores on the back. Ibitdar was relieved to find his donkey strong again. It was mid-October and Ibitdar needed it the most for hauling farm equipment across tough terrain to prepare his field for rabi crops.

In July when Sanskruti Sanwardhan Mandal, an educational institution in Sagroli established by social worker Babasaheb Deshmukh organized a medical camp for donkeys in his village, Ibitdar took his ailing donkey there.

It was diagnosed as having worms and vitamin A deficiency due to lack of green grass. The deep bleeding wounds on its back and feet were caused by overloading. The doctors at the camp gave her a tetanus shot and asked Ibitdar to take her to the sanctuary for treatment.

Dharma Donkey Sanctuary, unlike other sanctuaries to protect endangered species, offers shelter and medical care to old, pregnant and sick donkeys.

The only sanctuary of its kind in India, it was set up in 2000 by Babasaheb Deshmukh at the behest of Bonny and Ratilal Shah, an nri couple from usa. The Shahs, who had been associated with the Mandal since 1990, perhaps drew inspiration from Egypt, Kenya and Mexico where donkey sanctuaries are common, said Abhijit Mahajan, manager of the Mandal. They had helped the Mandal purchase six hectares to set up the sanctuary.

It now attends to the beasts of burden from 50 villages where donkeys are the primary carrier of farm goods, fertilizers and construction material. Donkeys can endure overloading and require little water and food. Since the government’s veterinary services are limited to farm animals, donkey owners have nowhere to go to treat the wounded and ailing animals.

Non-profits like Brooke Hospital in UK and Blue Cross of Hyderabad help the sanctuary conduct vaccination and de-worming programmes twice a year and organize free medical camps from time to time.

“About 8,000 donkeys come to our camps every year,” said Mahajan. Those who are severely ill, like the one owned by Ibitdar, are brought to the sanctuary. Here there is plenty of grass to feed on, three tube wells offering ample water and two caretakers are available round the clock, he added. Once the animals are cured, they are handed back to their owners. For the old and abandoned ones, the sanctuary is a permanent shelter. “As of now, we have 10 abandoned donkeys,” said Suresh Mogdekar, a caretaker. “Two have been living here for three years; we have named them Raja and Akash,” he said breaking into a smile. About 20 donkeys come for treatment in a year and stay in our care for some months. It took three months to cure Ibtidar’s donkey. Its wounds needed regular dressing and was given deworming medicine (albendazol), Mogdekar added. Since the sanctuary does not have a fulltime doctor, in case of an emergency a government veterinary doctor from Nanded town treats the donkeys.

While medicines and vaccines are often donated, funds are hard to come by as few understand the need for a donkey sanctuary. To meet the expenses, the management has created a mango orchard in the sanctuary; this earns them Rs 10,000 a year. Trustees bear the salaries of caretakers.

It may take a few years before the sanctuary receives required aid and attention, but it has changed the attitude of people in Nanded towards donkeys, said Ibitdar as he took his donkey back home. He now plans to give it a name.

Drought fails to crush a Bundelkhand village

from http://www.indiaenvironmentportal.org.in

Uttar Pradesh's Bundelkhand region has been devastated by drought and other adverse weather conditions over the past four years. Madhaiya Anghela village in Madhogarh sub-division of Jalaun district exhibits the typical symptoms: farm-related livelihoods are in tatters. Villagers say the kharif crop this year is only 20 per cent of normal years. The prospects for the rabi crop are very dim—the soil has little to no moisture.

There is widespread hunger and malnutrition in most villages of Bundelkhand. Pulses and vegetables are a rare sight in the diet. Most families make do with roti and chutney, or worse still, roti and salt. Several families do not get enough of even this. The farms of poor families are typically close to the ravines, adding to difficulties in cultivation.A large number of people have already migrated, and many others are preparing to migrate to Delhi, Mumbai and towns in Gujarat—to look for csula labour in hazardous conditions.

This sad story gets repeated in village after distressed village. And then there is Lachmanpura.

The barren landscape gives way to green fields. The people in this village of small dalit farmers say this greenery is a symbol of a wider change—farm productivity, income, nutrition and health have improved in recent times. "We had a good crop this kharif season and the prospects for the rabi crop are looking good. In fact, a few villagers have taken a third crop of vegetables,' says Mahendra, a farmer. Gyanwati, a resident of Lachmanpura, says, "With better farm productivity in recent years, we get better nutrition, which in turn means fewer illnesses. There is no distress migration in our village.'

The turnaround in Lachmanpura owes a lot to the local voluntary organization Parmarth's resources management project. Over the past five years, the village has witnessed soil and water conservation works, bunds, and check dams. After these public works, the village has taken the assistance of a government scheme to get Rs 1 lakh for tube wells; four of these have been sunk. Women's committees spearheaded several of these efforts.

Parmarth has emphasized low-cost technologies that protect the ecology, like composting. People have been encouraged to avoid chemical pesticides. Easy availability of seeds to needy farmers has saved several of them from turning to borrowing from moneylenders. Farmers have been encouraged to use bullocks instead of tractors. Because fodder from crop residue is now abundant, animal husbandry is in better shape; livestock population has increased 30 per cent.

Some poor families have been provided goats. Parmarth has established a revolving fund which helps small peasants avoid distress crop sales. The mobilization of villagers as a part of this project seems to have increased solidarity, leading to spin-off benefits. Small farmer have started pooling their crops and taking them to bigger markets, where they stand a better chance of obtaining higher prices.

Parmarth is also working in two other villages in Jalaun district: Kadampur and Chotiber. A recent study of theirs found the per acre production of gram in the three villages increased from 300 kg to 450 kg over three years. The production of arhar (red gram) increased from 250 kg to 425 kg in the same period. The per acre income increased by Rs 1,000. The increase in income in a 180-hectare (ha) stretch in the three villages was almost Rs 5 lakh. Soil and water conservation has bought 8 ha of hitherto uncultivated land under the plough. These statistics cover only a part of the project area: the annual increase in farm income in the three villages is likely to be around Rs 9 lakh.

Similar efforts have succeeded in Manikpur block of Chitrakoot district. Here another voluntary group, Akhil Bhartiya Samaj Seva Sansthan, has carried out soil and water conservation work. It has constructed check dams, repaired tanks and dug up new ones. These have provided relief to people, particularly Kol tribals, in times of acute water scarcity.

Go, Kiss The World !!

Subroto Bagchi's Speech at IIM -- Bangalore, 2006 (COO of Mindtree Consulting)

"I was the last child of a small-time government servant, in a family of five brothers. My earliest memory of my father is as that of a District Employment Officer in Koraput, Orissa. It was and remains as back of beyond as you can imagine. There was no electricity; no primary school nearby and water did not flow out of a tap. As a result, I did not go to school until the age of eight; I was home-schooled. My father used to get transferred every year. The family belongings fit into the back of a jeep - so the family moved from place to place and, without any trouble, my Mother would set up an establishment and get us going. Raised by a widow who had come as a refugee from the then East Bengal, she was a matriculate when she married my Father. My parents set the foundation of my life and the value system which makes me what I am today and largely defines what success means to me today.

As District Employment Officer, my father was given a jeep by the government. There was no garage in the Office, so the jeep was parked in our house. My father refused to use it to commute to the office. He told us that the jeep is an expensive resource given by the government – he reiterated to us that it was not 'his jeep' but the government's jeep. Insisting that he would use it only to tour the interiors, he would walk to his office on normal days. He also made sure that we never sat in the government jeep - we could sit in it only when it was stationary. That was our early childhood lesson in governance - a lesson that corporate managers learn the hard way, some never do.

The driver of the jeep was treated with respect due to any other member of my Father's office. As small children, we were taught not to call him by his name. We had to use the suffix 'dada' whenever we were to refer to him in public or private. When I grew up to own a car and a driver by the name of Raju was appointed - I repeated the lesson to my two small daughters. They have, as a result, grown up to call Raju, 'Raju Uncle' - very different from many of their friends who refer to their family drivers as 'my driver'. When I hear that term from a school- or college-going person, I cringe. To me, the lesson was significant – you treat small people with more respect than how you treat big people. It is more important to respect your subordinates than your superiors.

Our day used to start with the family huddling around my Mother's chulha - an earthen fire place she would build at each place of posting where she would cook for the family. There was no gas, nor electrical stoves. The morning routine started with tea. As the brew was served, Father would ask us to read aloud the editorial page of The Statesman's 'muffosil' edition - delivered one day late. We did not understand much of what we were reading. But the ritual was meant for us to know that the world was larger than Koraput district and the English I speak today, despite having studied in an Oriya medium school, has to do with that routine. After reading the newspaper aloud, we were told to fold it neatly. Father taught us a simple lesson. He used to say, "You should leave your newspaper and your toilet, the way you expect to find it". That lesson was about showing consideration to others. Business begins and ends with that simple precept.

Being small children, we were always enamored with advertisements in the newspaper for transistor radios - we did not have one. We saw other people having radios in their homes and each time there was an advertisement of Philips, Murphy or Bush radios, we would ask Father when we could get one. Each time, my Father would reply that we did not need one because he already had five radios - alluding to his five sons. We also did not have a house of our own and would occasionally ask Father as to when, like others, we would live in our own house. He would give a similar reply, "We do not need a house of our own. I already own five houses". His replies did not gladden our hearts in that instant. Nonetheless, we learnt that it is important not to measure personal success and sense of well being through material possessions.

Government houses seldom came with fences. Mother and I collected twigs and built a small fence. After lunch, my Mother would never sleep. She would take her kitchen utensils and with those she and I would dig the rocky, white ant infested surrounding. We planted flowering bushes. The white ants destroyed them. My mother brought ash from her chulha and mixed it in the earth and we planted the seedlings all over again. This time, they bloomed. At that time, my father's transfer order came. A few neighbors told my mother why she was taking so much pain to beautify a government house, why she was planting seeds that would only benefit the next occupant. My mother replied that it did not matter to her that she would not see the flowers in full bloom. She said, "I have to create a bloom in a desert and whenever I am given a new place, I must leave it more beautiful than what I had inherited". That was my first lesson in success. It is not about what you create for yourself, it is what you leave behind that defines success.

My mother began developing a cataract in her eyes when I was very small. At that time, the eldest among my brothers got a teaching job at the University in Bhubaneswar and had to prepare for the civil services examination. So, it was decided that my Mother would move to cook for him and, as her appendage, I had to move too. For the first time in my life, I saw electricity in homes and water coming out of a tap. It was around 1965 and the country was going to war with Pakistan. My mother was having problems reading and in any case, being Bengali, she did not know the Oriya script. So, in addition to my daily chores, my job was to read her the local newspaper - end to end. That created in me a sense of connectedness with a larger world. I began taking interest in many different things. While reading out news about the war, I felt that I was fighting the war myself. She and I discussed the daily news and built a bond with the larger universe. In it, we became part of a larger reality. Till date, I measure my success in terms of that sense of larger connectedness.

Meanwhile, the war raged and India was fighting on both fronts. Lal Bahadur Shastri, the then Prime Minster, coined the term "Jai Jawan, Jai Kishan" and galvanized the nation in to patriotic fervor. Other than reading out the newspaper to my mother, I had no clue about how I could be part of the action. So, after reading her the newspaper, every day I would land up near the University's water tank, which served the community. I would spend hours under it, imagining that there could be spies who would come to poison the water and I had to watch for them. I would daydream about catching one and how the next day, I would be featured in the newspaper. Unfortunately for me, the spies at war ignored the sleepy town of Bhubaneswar and I never got a chance to catch one in action. Yet, that act unlocked my imagination. Imagination is everything. If we can imagine a future, we can create it, if we can create that future, others will live in it. That is the essence of success.

Over the next few years, my mother's eyesight dimmed but in me she created a larger vision, a vision with which I continue to see the world and, I sense, through my eyes, she was seeing too. As the next few years unfolded, her vision deteriorated and she was operated for cataract. I remember, when she returned after her operation and she saw my face clearly for the first time, she was astonished. She said, "Oh my God, I did not know you were so fair". I remain mighty pleased with that adulation even till date. Within weeks of getting her sight back, she developed a corneal ulcer and, overnight, became blind in both eyes. That was 1969. She died in 2002. In all those 32 years of living with blindness, she never complained about her fate even once. Curious to know what she saw with blind eyes, I asked her once if she sees darkness. She replied, "No, I do not see darkness. I only see light even with my eyes closed". Until she was eighty years of age, she did her morning yoga everyday, swept her own room and washed her own clothes. To me, success is about the sense of independence; it is about not seeing the world but seeing the light.

Over the many intervening years, I grew up, studied, joined the industry and began to carve my life's own journey. I began my life as a clerk in a government office, went on to become a Management Trainee with the DCM group and eventually found my life's calling with the IT industry when fourth generation computers came to India in 1981. Life took me places - I worked with outstanding people, challenging assignments and traveled all over the world. In 1992, while I was posted in the US, I learnt that my father, living a retired life with my eldest brother, had suffered a third degree burn injury and was admitted in the Safderjung Hospital in Delhi. I flew back to attend to him - he remained for a few days in critical stage, bandaged from neck to toe. The Safderjung Hospital is a cockroach infested, dirty, inhuman place. The overworked, under-resourced sisters in the burn ward are both victims and perpetrators of dehumanized life at its worst. One morning, while attending to my Father, I realized that the blood bottle was empty and fearing that air would go into his vein, I asked the attending nurse to change it. She bluntly told me to do it myself. In that horrible theater of death, I was in pain and frustration and anger. Finally when she relented and came, my Father opened his eyes and murmured to her, "Why have you not gone home yet?" Here was a man on his deathbed but more concerned about the overworked nurse than his own state. I was stunned at his stoic self. There I learnt that there is no limit to how concerned you can be for another human being and what is the limit of inclusion you can create. My father died the next day.

He was a man whose success was defined by his principles, his frugality, his universalism and his sense of inclusion. Above all, he taught me that success is your ability to rise above your discomfort, whatever may be your current state. You can, if you want, raise your consciousness above your immediate surroundings. Success is not about building material comforts - the transistor that he never could buy or the house that he never owned. His success was about the legacy he left, the memetic continuity of his ideals that grew beyond the smallness of a ill-paid, unrecognized government servant's world.

My father was a fervent believer in the British Raj. He sincerely doubted the capability of the post-independence Indian political parties to govern the country. To him, the lowering of the Union Jack was a sad event. My Mother was the exact opposite. When Subhash Bose quit the Indian National Congress and came to Dacca, my mother, then a schoolgirl, garlanded him. She learnt to spin khadi and joined an underground movement that trained her in using daggers and swords. Consequently, our household saw diversity in the political outlook of the two. On major issues concerning the world, the Old Man and the Old Lady had differing opinions. In them, we learnt the power of disagreements, of dialogue and the essence of living with diversity in thinking. Success is not about the ability to create a definitive dogmatic end state; it is about the unfolding of thought processes, of dialogue and continuum.

Two years back, at the age of eighty-two, Mother had a paralytic stroke and was lying in a government hospital in Bhubaneswar. I flew down from the US where I was serving my second stint, to see her. I spent two weeks with her in the hospital as she remained in a paralytic state. She was neither getting better nor moving on. Eventually I had to return to work. While leaving her behind, I kissed her face. In that paralytic state and a garbled voice, she said, "Why are you kissing me, go kiss the world." Her river was nearing its journey, at the confluence of life and death, this woman who came to India as a refugee, raised by a widowed Mother, no more educated than high school, married to an anonymous government servant whose last salary was Rupees Three Hundred, robbed of her eyesight by fate and crowned by adversity - was telling me to go and kiss the world!

Success to me is about Vision. It is the ability to rise above the immediacy of pain. It is about imagination. It is about sensitivity to small people. It is about building inclusion. It is about connectedness to a larger world existence. It is about personal tenacity. It is about giving back more to life than you take out of it. It is about creating extra-ordinary success with ordinary lives.

Thank you very much; I wish you good luck and Godspeed. Go, kiss the world."

Tips on Living !!

A Pulitzer Prize Winner's Speech... And what a speech !!
This was a speech made by Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Anna Quindlen at the graduation ceremony of an American university where she was awarded an Honorary PhD.


We are all faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly disguised as impossible situations.

"I'm a novelist. My work is human nature. Real life is all I know. Don't ever confuse the two, your life and your work. You will walk out of here this afternoon with only one thing that no one else has. There will be hundreds of people out there with your same degree: there will be thousands of people doing what you want to do for a living. But you will be the only person alive who has sole custody of your life. Your particular life. Your entire life. Not just your life at a desk or your life on a bus or in a car or at the computer. Not just the life of your mind, but the life of your heart. Not just your bank accounts but also your soul.

People don't talk about the soul very much anymore. It's so much easier to write a resume than to craft a spirit. But a resume is cold comfort on a winter's night, or when you're sad, or broke, or lonely, or when you've received your test results and they're not so good.

Here is my resume: I am a good mother to three children. I have tried never to let my work stand in the way of being a good parent. I no longer consider myself the centre of the universe. I show up. I listen. I try to laugh. I am a good friend to my husband. I have tried to make marriage vows mean what they say. I am a good friend to my friends and them to me. Without them, there would be nothing to say to you today, because I would be a cardboard cut out. But I call them on the phone and I meet them for lunch. I would be rotten, at best mediocre, at my job if those other things were not true.

You cannot be really first rate at your work if your work is all you are. So here's what I wanted to tell you today: Get a life. A real life, not a manic pursuit of the next promotion, the bigger pay cheque, the larger house. Do you think you'd care so very much about those things if you blew an aneurysm one afternoon or found a lump in your breast?

Get a life in which you notice the smell of salt water pushing itself on a breeze at the seaside, a life in which you stop and watch how a red-tailed hawk circles over the water, or the way a baby scowls with concentration when she tries to pick up a sweet with her thumb and first finger.

Get a life in which you are not alone. Find people you love, and who love you. And remember that love is not leisure, it is work. Pick up the phone. Send an email. Write a letter. Get a life in which you are generous. And realize that life is the best thing ever, and that you have no business taking it for granted. Care so deeply about its goodness that you want to spread it around. Take money you would have spent on beer and give it to charity. Work in a soup kitchen. Be a big brother or sister. All of you want to do well. But if you do not do good too, then doing well will never be enough.

It is so easy to waste our lives, our days, our hours, and our minutes. It is so easy to take for granted the colour of our kids' eyes, the way the melody in a symphony rises and falls and disappears and rises again. It is so easy to exist instead of to live.

I learned to live many years ago. I learned to love the journey, not the destination. I learned that it is not a dress rehearsal, and that today is the only guarantee you get. I learned to look at all the good in the world and try to give some of it back because I believed in it, completely and utterly. And I tried to do that, in part, by telling others what I had learned. By telling them this: Consider the lilies of the field. Look at the fuzz on a baby's ear. Read in the back yard with the sun on your face.

Learn to be happy. And think of life as a terminal illness, because if you do, you will live it with joy and passion as it ought to be lived".

Can Meditation Be Passionate ??

This is from an email I received.. loved it so much.. couldn't help sharing it..


CAN MEDITATION BE PASSIONATE?


Yes, that is the only way for meditation to exist. Passion is energy, passion is fire, passion is life. If you are doing meditation just so-so, without any passion, without intensity, without fire, nothing will happen. If you are praying just as a formality and it is not love that has arisen in your heart, it is meaningless, it is absurd. If you are praying to God without passion there will be no connection between you and God. Only passion can become the bridge, the thirst, the hunger. The more thirsty you are, the more is the possibility. If you are utterly thirsty, if you have become just a thirst, your whole being is consumed by your passion, then only something happens -- in that intensity, in that moment of hundred-degree passion.


Don't be lukewarm. People live a lukewarm life. They are neither this nor that, hence they remain mediocre. If you want to get beyond mediocrity, create a life of great passion. Whatsoever you do, do it passionately. If you sing, then sing passionately. If you love, then love passionately. If you paint, then paint passionately. If you talk, then talk passionately. If you listen, then listen passionately. If you meditate, then meditate passionately.


And from everywhere you will start having contact with God -- wherever passion is. If you are painting with utter passion, your painting is meditation. There is no need for any other meditation. If you are dancing with absolute passion so that the dancer disappears and only the dance remains, it is meditation, no other need, nowhere to go, no yoga postures. This is the yoga postures: the dancer has disappeared and the dance is there. It is pure energy -- energy vibrating. In that state you contact. Why in that state do you contact? -- because when the passion is great, the ego dies. The ego can exist only in mediocre minds; only mediocre people are egoistic. The really great are not egoistic, they cannot be. But their life has a totally different direction, a different dimension -- the dimension of passion.


Have you observed these two words -- passion and compassion?
Passion becomes transformed into compassion. There is a quantum leap from passion into compassion --
but the quantum leap happens only when you are boiling at one hundred degrees. Then the water becomes vapor. It is the same energy that exists as passion and one day becomes compassion.


Compassion is not antagonistic to passion; it is passion come of age, it is passion bloomed. It is the spring season for passion.


I am all for passion. Do whatsoever you do but be lost into it, abandon yourself into it, dissolve yourself into it. And dissolution becomes salvation.


From The Diamond Sutra - OSHO

Vikram Buddhi -- Anti-Bush Blogger -- Wrongfully Jailed, says Family

The article below is from the Indian Express. Its is about Vikram Buddhi, an IIT alum and a student who till 2006 was pursuing his PhD at Purdue.. that is till the time he was imprisoned in the US on allegations of having written against ex-President Bush on his blog. I remember at my Univ at Ashland, and even other places, people so openly spoke against Bush; then why this disparity??

I am surprised that Vikram Buddhi's case has been highlighted in Indian newspapers alone. When I googled his name, there was not a single US newspaper that mentioned his plight.

From the Indian Express
http://www.indianexpress.com/news/seeking-sons-release-from-us-jail-father-says-ministers-help-assured/536339/

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Three years after Vikram Buddhi was arrested in the US for allegedly posting an online hate message against then President George Bush, his father will finally hear from the Indian government on what progress it has made in its efforts to secure his release.

On Wednesday, Dr Buddhi Kota Subbarao is set to be given a government update on the action taken. Subbarao has been fighting a lone legal battle for the release of his son, lodged in a prison in Chicago. US authorities had even deported Subbarao to India; illegally, he says, to block legal help to his son.

After several requests to the Ministry of External Affairs, ministers and senators, the Indian Consulate in US, and several officials, Subbarao was finally called on October 29 for a meeting with External Affairs Minister S M Krishna, to explain his son’s case. This was after several letters to the minister and other departments seeking government intervention.

“I explained to the Minister the gross irregularities in Vikram’s case carried out by Judge James T. Moody. The minister agreed there was no valid indictment charge mentioned in the case and Vikram apparently looked to have been framed,” Subbarao said.

Subbarao, a former Indian Navy Captain, urged the Minister for government intervention and a dialogue with the US authorities and Department of Justice for a review of his son’s case.

“The Minister noticed irregularities committed by Judge Moody and referred the case to the law department for possible options before the government in securing justice for Vikram. The minister assured me that by Wednesday, I will be receiving correspondence from the Ministry on the action taken.”

Vikram, who was studying applied mathematics at Purdue University, was arrested in April 2006 and charged on 11 counts. He was found guilty but his sentencing has been getting postponed since 2007. The next date for pronouncement of sentence is November 19.

“Whatever action is taken has to be before the sentence and the government has to act fast. I said as much to Mr Krishna who agreed with me in principle and directed his officials to act swiftly,” said Subbarao.