We , the survivors of the world post
September 26, 1983, should be ashamed that death of a true hero on May
19, 2017 went unnoticed.
A tragedy when un important
news gets viral attention and millions of views in YouTube, Twitter, Facebook
but a death of true hero "Stanislav Petrov" went unnoticed.
Regarding who Mr. Stanislav
Petrov, I request the readers to search and read.
Regarding how the news got
spread i will reproduce that unfortunate story from BBC site:
“Petrov, who retired with the
rank of lieutenant colonel, died on 19 May but news of his passing became
widely known only this month, thanks to a chance phone call.
German film-maker Karl
Schumacher, who first brought Petrov's story to an international audience,
telephoned him to wish him a happy birthday on 7 September only to be informed
by his son, Dmitry Petrov, that he had passed away.
Mr Schumacher announced the
death online and it was eventually picked up by media outlets.”
This is the state of affairs in an highly connected world. Important news is lost and lesser ones go viral.
Andre Gide rightly said “Man
cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.”
One of the best books I have read
on travelling was “The Journey Home” – By Radhanath Swami. The book captivated
me with the belief that everyone has to undertake a Journey.
An article “The Scotsman who
knows India better than many of us“in Rediff.com was an excellent one. To be
honest I have email account with Rediff and I believed that Rediff is dying slowly.
Rediff is the last place I thought I will get a fine article to read. This is
an interview by Archana Masih.
The Scotsman is Bill Aitken who
took Indian Citizenship and believed that “India has a much superior civilization
and a brilliant religious tradition”.
Bill (85 years old) is a travel
writer and has written more than a dozen books on India. The list is given below:
Now back to article. I wish to reproduce here some golden
nuggets of Bill from his interview which appeared in Rediff.com.
About India and how Indian thinking complemented his:
"It was mind
blowing. I stayed on because of Goddess Saraswati. That really decided that
India complements my thinking. The psychic -- this more than the body dimension
-- was totally lacking in the West."
"You have to
separate the concept of India as a nation State which is very young and the
Upanishadic wisdom which is timeless," he says, "You can't kill
ideas, faith or devotion."
On Religion:
"We are not born
with religion; we are born to find our religion,"
On Worship:
"India finds
worship as a natural thing to do. In Shakespeare's England there was still a
psychic dimension, but with the Age of Reason in the 17th-18th century, the
psychic reality -- like the credence to dreams and premonition -- was cut out.
It all became cerebral."
"Men of the
calibre of Shri Ramana Maharishi, Satya Sai Baba, Shri Aurobindo -- you don't
get that level of excellence in the West. The quality of Indian saints is
unmatched."
About Britain:
"I love India.
Britain has no appeal, I like the people, but it is a strange place. I feel it
is an unenlightened well meaning nation. They gave me a good education and I
can never thank them enough."
Learning from Typhoid Illness:
"The scales from
my eyes fell off."
"From that moment I suddenly saw how life is one huge
joke. We are all guaranteed to be well meaning idiots because no one questions
what is told. It has nothing to do with ideologies. Most ideologies are mostly
mental crap."
"The world is not yesterday or tomorrow, but only now.
Every person has the capacity to find within the reason why s/he was born and
the reason of life."
The way forward:
"There has been a
colonial transposing of university culture, but India has its own ancient
gurukul tradition. By all means fly a flag on national occasions, but don't
demean knowledge by assuming it is confined to one nation which is what a
national flag connotes."
"If you want to have a flag, then have a flag to the
goddess of learning (Saraswati)."
Caution:
"India has slipped
3 places in freedom of expression. It is now on the level of Zimbabwe, Pakistan
-- so there ought to be some reason for soul searching."
Accidentally I stepped on an article which turned out to be an eyeopener.
In fact many individuals who had attended high school and manage to remember something out of the science lectures attended, "Periodic Table" is well remembered.
The first name that comes is Dmitri Mendeleev. The inventor of Periodic Table.
We recapture here what is Periodic Table.
Periodic Table is arranging of Chemical elements in the order of Atomic Weights.
The unknown knowledge is that Mendeleev is incorrect answer "The
actual inventor of the periodic table is someone rarely mentioned in chemistry
history books: de Chancourtois."
He created periodic system on a Cylinder called vis Tellurique.
Alexandre-Emile Béguyer de Chancourtois was geologist who had presented a paper regarding arrangement of the elements in 1862. This was years before Mendeleev presented his paper.
Now the question why Alexandre-Emile Béguyer de Chancourtois is not remembered / recognized. The reason is "de Chancourtois was a geologist and his paper primarily
dealt with geological concepts so his periodic table did not gain the attention
of the chemists of the day".
Success is a perception and it is
always misjudged. The best thing is to stop judging success.
Robert Frank has rightly said that
“there are natural limits on hard work and talent”. We refuse to accept it.
Hence the concept Hard Work Pays is drilled down on every child passing out of
school.
The article on How Luck Separates
winners from losers captures correctly why we refuse to accept that there are
natural limits and luck has a role:
“Why don't we acknowledge it? Because it doesn't make for good
biography . When people look back upon their careers, “they'll remember all
those times they got up early and worked late. They'll remember all those
difficult problems that they had to solve. They'll remember all those very
formidable opponents that they had to vanquish along the way... But what
they're much less likely to remember is that there was a teacher in the 10th
grade that steered them out of trouble or maybe they got a promotion early on
because a colleague who was just slightly more qualified couldn't accept it
because he had to care for an ailing parent.“
“When you're riding a bike into a headwind you're keenly aware of that.
Every 100 yards you travel, you wish that wind would go away...You're battling
against it, it's at the front of your mind.Then the course changes di rection;
you've got the wind at your back.What a great feeling that is for about 20
seconds, and then it's completely out of your mind. You're not even aware that the
wind is at your back.“
That wind is luck.
I accidentally stepped on to a
comment by Bundy Bear about TED talk by Alain De Botton “A
kinder, gentler philosophy of success". Immediately I viewed the TED Talk. The talk surely highlights what we are missing and how things
have changed.
I will reproduce the sections
from the ted talk so that readers will be encouraged to hear the Talk:
Material Goods
“I think we live in a society which has simply pegged certain emotional
rewards to the acquisition of material goods. It’s not the material goods we
want; it’s the rewards we want.”
Envy
“The closer two people are -- in age, in background,in the process of identification -- the more there's a danger
of envy,which is incidentally why none
of you should ever go to a school reunion,because there is no stronger reference point than people one
was at school with.The problem of modern society
is it turns the whole world into a school.”
Perils of Meritocracy:
“In other words -- what is a meritocratic society?A meritocratic society is one in which, if you've got talent
and energy and skill,you will get to the top,
nothing should hold you back.It's a beautiful idea.The problem is, if you really believe in a societywhere those who merit to get to the top, get to the top,you'll also, by implication, and in a far more nasty way,believe in a society where those who deserve to get to the
bottomalso get to the bottom and
stay there.In other words, your position
in life comes to seem not accidental,but merited and deserved.And that makes failure seem much more crushing.”
“But I think it's insane to believe that we will ever make a society that is genuinely
meritocratic;it's an impossible dream.”
Influence of modern education and
system:
“You know, in the Middle Ages, in England,when you met a very poor
person,that person would be described
as an "unfortunate" --literally, somebody who had
not been blessed by fortune, an unfortunate.Nowadays, particularly in the
United States,if you meet someone at the
bottom of society,they may unkindly be described
as a "loser."There's a real difference
between an unfortunate and a loser,and that shows 400 years of
evolution in societyand our belief in who is
responsible for our lives.”
Curse of development:
“--in the analysis of a sociologist like Emil Durkheim --it leads to increased rates of suicide.There are more suicides in developed, individualistic
countriesthan in any other part of the
world.And some of the reason for thatis that people take what happens to them extremely personally
--they own their success, but
they also own their failure.”
The below statement clearly highlight
how we have stopped worshiping non human in other words on why Indian System
of having 36 crore of God is beneficial:
“The other thing about modern society and why it causes this anxiety,is that we have nothing at its center that is non-human.We are the first society to be living in a worldwhere we don't worship anything other than ourselves.We think very highly of ourselves, and so we should;we've put people on the Moon, done all sorts of extraordinary
things.And so we tend to worship
ourselves. Our heroes are human heroes.That's a very new situation.Most other societies have had, right at their center, the worship of something
transcendent: a god, a spirit, a natural force,the universe, whatever it is
-- something else that is being worshiped.We've slightly lost the habit
of doing that,which is, I think, why we're
particularly drawn to nature.Not for the sake of our
health, though it's often presented that way,but because it's an escape
from the human anthill.It's an escape from our own
competition,and our own dramas.And that's why we enjoy looking at glaciers and oceans,and contemplating the Earth from outside its perimeters, etc.We like to feel in contact with something that is non-human,and that is so deeply important to us.”
