Wild Wild West – Netflix documentary

Back in 2003/early 2004, I remember arguing vehemently with my friend that “Bhagwan” Rajneesh wasn’t truly enlightened and was more half baked :). I was just too stubborn with my arguments and my friend had to agree with me just to end the argument. Come 2018 the documentary Wild Wild West on Netflix totally proved to me that I was right.

The documentary is a 6 part series starts from Poona ashram through Oregon experiment and ends with the death of Rajneesh. It is a great effort with capturing the story from a lot of perspectives including the followers, adversaries, interviews from those time and era, video clips from news casts in those days and so on. 

Overall I would say a well balanced view of the whole episode, worth a watch. It is disturbing at some levels specially if you are of spiritual oneself is an understatement.

Here are my n things

• Rajneesh (lets call him Mr. R for simplicity) didn’t leave India but was literally smuggled out of India in secret, no one knew where he went and all his visa applications were done in secret and flight also arranged in secret
• On the flight to USA, they celebrated with champagne, as a spiritual person I thought he would be aware that alcohol affects ones subconscious self 
• While his top aide Sheila was running the show in the Oregon Ranch by trying to rig elections, poisoning salad bars, plotting assassinations and so on, as her “guru” how come Mr. R wasn’t aware?
• His aide Sheila keeps repeating, I protected Mr. R while I was in charge of his safety, would an enlightened master really need protection and from what and who?
• Mr. R secluded himself in the ranch for almost 4 years and didn’t give a single public discourse during that time, Funny part that was the immigration case against him that he didn't do what he said he would be doing, giving discourses.. As a true master were you not interested in the growth of your disciples?
• Mr. R behaves as president or absentee CEO of a company who has the plausible deniability when all hell breaks loose and blame it on the underlings in this case Sheila. 
• Mr. R has fascination for finer things and the fascination doesn’t end till he owns it, the Rolls Royce, diamond watch and the list goes on. I am not saying he should not honor his devotees offerings but can he put forth a demand? I am not making this up it is one of the episodes “at one point the Hollywood people started showing up at the ashram and started showing Mr. R the different magazines with expensive things, Sheila had limited access to these for if Mr. R sees them he would want to have them”
• Towards the end when Sheila leaves the ranch after a series of failed experiments, Mr. R acts like a child who lost his favorite toy or as a scorned lover who is not able to handle the breakup gracefully. It is truly unbecoming of a spiritual master, to an extent one can argue he had a meltdown. Really, can a guru have a meltdown?
• In the end, when the law starts closing in on Mr. R, he does the same thing he did in India tries to fly away but USA is not India and they arrest him on his way out. I make fun of Saddam Hussein for hiding in a hole, our man as hiding behind the aircraft seat when they came to arrest him. Are you so afraid of death Mr. R?
• Mr. R while fighting the case in the court apparently said “if they fight fairly then I am willing to go to supreme court but I don’t think they will and (something about body can’t handle)”, wonderful I like that, if that were the case then why did you flee in your own personal aircraft?
• His death apparently was a case of slow-poisoning and no its not the American Government but his own network and himself are responsible     

I never had a great opinion of Mr. R and this documentary didn’t help the case in anyway. At a higher level, it was, as rightly pointed out was an experiment, that didn’t play out well. It was an experiment on how far one can push the envelope in the name of constitutional rights, an experiment on what happens when one only thinks of rights and forgets all about responsibilities, an experiment on what happens when you let the mind/ego dominate the entire process and not listen to the inner guidance.   

Always good to dust off an old book

For a while now I have transitioned to Kindle books and the my new fad is to switch to audio books (I am holding myself from doing that). Of course most books I have bought off late (in last 6-8 years) are non fiction related to finance, self improvement and the usual works. But I am proud to say I have a collection of paper back and hard bound books in my own small library. Considering the amount of time I spend these days in reading any book either kindle e-books or otherwise they have been eating dust :).

Anyways, I have become an avid listener to Dave Ramsey podcasts and he has been strongly advocating people to read a non fiction book for at the least 15 minutes a day. Come to think of it, it is a great habit and my father-in-law had recommended the same to me a decade ago and I had followed the advice for a while, as with everything in life fell off the band wagon.

With Facebook turned off, Twitter non existent and NPR given a boot, it appeared I had more time in hand and decided to pickup the reading habit again. This time around instead of picking up the ipad-mini and launching the kindle app I went down to my mini library and picked up a non-fiction book.  I had bought this one more than a decade ago and never turned more than 10 pages of the same. For the first couple of days, I literally had to drag myself to keep the book in hand for 15-20 minutes before bed time but in the last week or so I got into the groove and love reading this book.

The one wonderful unintended consequence of my new reading habit is it has caught Avni’s attention and she wants to know what is her dad reading? mind you I have had the ipad for almost 3-4 years and have read few books through kindle app on my ipad but it has rarely spiked her interest. I am guessing a combination of her age and her own reading habits that she has been questioning me constantly about what I am reading? and wants me to explain to her what I am reading? Indeed I am not successful yet at that. 

Anyways, moral of the story is "kindle, audible and other apps are good but sometimes a good old fashioned hardbound book is a great investment too".  

Movie review Padmavat

I really wanted to watch the movie in the theater but somehow missed the boat and finally caught up to it on Amazon Prime. If I can summarize the movie in one sentence “it is plain stupid” or as I told my relatives in Kannada “ಪೆದ್ದು  ಪೆದ್ದಾಗಿ  ಮಾಡಿದಾರೆ ”.

After watching the movie Sri Sri Ravishankar gave a green light, I would have told Mr. SLB to go back to the drawing board and make it a bit more realistic. Half way through the movie I lost interest, which I rarely do in a period drama.

Here are my top N things that I couldn’t comprehend in my logical brain

• The king of Chittor is in present day Lanka to get pearls and went for hunting, why was he alone where were his body guards? the same goes for the princess.
• When Ala-uddin lays siege on Chittor first time, why didn’t he come with siege equipment?, he had an insider to help and didn’t that insider give him tips on the kind of fortress he will be attacking?
• Fine he didn’t bring first time, but the siege was for frigging 6 long months and no one thought of getting them or building them?
• Rajputs knew in and out of Ala-uddin and Malik Kafur but they didn’t know who the traitor helping him and they all act surprised when they see him.
• When the Rajaguru was thrown out of kingdom why wasn’t there anyone following him, essentially where was the intelligence network
• The king goes to meet Aladdin in his almost burned out camp, so why were the body guards not surrounding the camp but were standing 200 feet away on one side?
• Besides why did the king go without his sword?, Ala-uddin didn’t put that condition to him.
• The last battle is beyond saving, the king no longer is the king but a lover fighting to save glory of his beloved.
• The contrast they have tried to show between Padmavati and the other wife of the king seems to be drawn from Ekta Kapoor’s serials.
• Escape from the prison in Delhi is totally laughable.

There are a few more but not worth my time. In the end, if you haven’t seen it, don’t waste your time. If you have, my sympathies for you.

ಆರ್ಥ ಅಥವಾ ಅನುವಾದ (Understand or Translate)

To put a disclaimer at the very beginning, this line of thinking did not come to me till recent past. Also, this blog post is more exploratory than any conclusion I may have reached.

Growing up in India with language of instruction being English, we all were by default bi-lingual. When it came to academics parents and teachers always told us don’t just learn things by-heart or mug-up but understand and read it. That’s a great idea and wonderful concept but what did they really mean?. 

So, what does it mean to understand some concept? at the time when I was studying if I can explain what I am reading in Kannada (my mother tongue) then I have understood. But that only meant translating doesn’t it?.

I remember reading a quote from Dr. Richard Feynman that “if you cannot explain to the person sitting next to you in a bar as to what you do for living, then you do not know what you are doing for living”. That’s wonderful, if I can claim I understood it, I would say “I should be able to explain to a random person with no background in my field as to what I do for a living” .

Another school of thought that came from my daughters school is from her school Principal, her quote “I want my students to explain what they are doing and why they are doing it in their own words, if that is done then the teachers work is done”. This is wonderful too.    

One can argue that concept of understanding differs from subject to subject, for example mathematics at the basic level of addition, subtractions and multiplications is all about repetition and more repetition at higher level with fractions and all one can get some chance of explaining what they are trying to accomplish. Social studies in my extensive thought, one can only learn by by-heart for the level of understanding of the implications of whatever we study will change as we grow older, so at a young age by-heart so that when you get older you can recall and amuse yourself or deepen your understanding. 

Science is probably the only one which one can even make an attempt to understand and digest what we read and/or studied. One can understand the studied concept by setting up simple experiments, may be at home or collectively at school. 

In the end it boils down to, how would you know someone has understood what they have claimed to have studied :).

Tendencies of the mind - II

Back in the days, more than a decade ago when I did my very first Art of Living program, and then repeated multiple times, we were taught quite a few good behavioral aspects aka knowledge points, One of them appears to be circling in my mind for the last few weeks (if not months); It is the knowledge point about "Tendencies of the mind", one important tendency of the mind is to cling to the negative, other important tendency is to either completely in the past or in the future and never in the moment. I am sure the course taught a few more things.

That said, one other thing I realized is the tendency to categorize and label anything and everything (including itself). To elaborate, growing up in India and specially in south of India there were always few tensions between people, one had to do with  language (Kannada vs Tamil) and other with geographic location of your specific city in the Indian subcontinent (north vs south). As some one rightly put it, I became an Indian only after I left India. Living in America for almost 2 decades now, I have realized this place is no different, there are tensions between people but may be for slightly different reasons.

This made me think further and I realized, the human mind cannot and will not rest until it has categorized anything and everything around it. In the early days of civilization it wanted to categorize based on the color of skin, type of attire and then as civilization grew and expanded came  the division on occupation and with trade came the division based on location and later with the more industrial world and “intellectual” world, it became about the belief system (philosopher, intellectual, poet, activist, pacifist, communist, liberal, conservative and so on) then when the mind became even more evolved it started categorizing further and refining it even more, “fiscally conservative’', “religiously conservative”, “animal rights activist”, “women’s rights activist”, “right leaning”, “left leaning”, “extreme right wing”, “extreme left wing” and so on. Needless to say in between some where came the rich vs poor and my other favorite one “religion and culture” (I believe they exist together). I am sure I have missed a few categories and the timeline may not be perfect, but I am hoping the reader got the idea. 

It is fascinating to see the evolution of the human mind, to some extent one can argue that as a collective, human mind is evolving towards finer and finer divisions only to realize nothing exists in the end :). It’s all hollow and empty.  

ps: the game mind plays when combined with Ego is even more fascinating. I will leave it there :)

Kannada and its uniqueness

Few weeks ago I saw a video on Facebook that was meant for promoting usage of Kannada in daily life by telling us Kannada names for vegetables and fruits that we use on a daily basis like Tomato, Beets, Carrot and so on. When I learned from the video that the common Tomato is called Goodhe hannu (ಗೂಧೆ ಹಣ್ಣು) in Kannada, I was super elated, I was proud of the fact that while present day scientists were debating till recently whether to qualify Tomato as a fruit or a vegetable, we kannadigas had already done the classification long long time ago and called it a fruit. 

Then came the hard hitting realization, in the language of Kannada, no fruit or vegetable has just names in 1 part (barring a few exceptions), they always have 2 part names. The first part is what we in other languages call their names and second part determines status of the fruit of vegetable like its ripeness (ಹಣ್ಣು , ಕಾಯಿ ) or whether it grows above of below ground (ಗೆಡ್ಡೆ , ಗೆಣಸು ) or its status of lentil (ಕಾಳು ) and so on. Examples are numerous to name a few ಬಾಳೆ ಹಣ್ಣು  (banana), ಬದನೆ ಕಾಯಿ (eggplant or brinjal), ಆಲೂ ಗೆಡ್ಡೆ  (potato),    

Why is such a big deal, it is some what because other languages like English or for that matter our own Indian language Hindi doesn’t follow this rule.

Let me demonstrate with an example, take the fruit Banana 

English: banana it usually means a ripe banana 

Hindi: kela, still means a ripe banana 

Kannada: if you want ripe banana you will have to say bale hannu (ಬಾಳೆ ಹಣ್ಣು)

Unripe bale kayi (ಬಾಳೆ ಕಾಯಿ)

Leaf bale yele (ಬಾಳೆ ಎಲೆ)

Simply saying bale (ಬಾಳೆ) doesn’t mean a thing for a true Kannadiga. 

I am sure the closely related languages of Telugu and Tamil probably follow the same rules. Wonder if there are other languages which follow same rules.

Frozen vegetables

A while ago we had a discussion in our friends group on frozen stuff. We all were unanimous on prepared frozen food and the vote was a no. 

The votes divided when it came to frozen vegetables, some of us were all fresh and some others were arguing that if they are properly packed then they contain all the nutrients and hence what is the harm?. The discussion ended with Ayurveda says fresh is good. 

After all the time that has passed, couple of days ago I realized that when a fresh vegetable is frozen it is essentially dead. On the other hand when a fruit, vegetable or a green is plucked from the plant, it still has some life which is evident from the veggies ripening after being plucked or the evident fact that greens are able to fight off bacteria and other microbes for a couple of days after being plucked. 

Now my question or dilemma is, how important is for the plant to have some form of life left in it for our consumption? or rather does it make a difference apart from the taste?