Me, myself and my brain

After a not so brutal separation from my five year love, I am on a sabbatical now. I had thought about a million things to do in my free time; all the things I so wanted to do for many many years. Now I have all the time in the world yet I seem to run out of time every day. Each of the things I want to do requires a lot of hard work, commitment and perseverance, and it would be an understatement to say that I could be working a lot harder right now than I would have if I had been working. But, the end results of my work would be helpful to me for as long as I wish to live.

Now even with all these advantages of embarking upon on an effort, with even the minimalistic success, or to an extent, failure, yielding great returns, my brain is deciding to, well, lie dormant. And when I say "dormant", I mean eat, day dream-- both awake and asleep, TV, and other things that causes minimal stress on the brain functions. Oh the selfish selfish brain! It puts itself before me. If we both were married, we would be so divorced by now. Since we are not, and I cannot live without my brain (awwww!), I have got to accept it the way it is,albeit grudgingly.

You see, over the period of year of conditioning, brain -- specifically a part of brain that's responsible of pleasure centers -- identifies what's our inherent state of pleasure is, and given an opportunity to be in this state, it will take it. And not just that, it influences -- or at least tries to -- the other parts of the brain to accept its decision by using its not so secret weapon "dopamine." And this state of pleasure is not fixed; we subconsciously define a new one at each stage of our life. For a kid, it could be play outside, for an hardworking person, it could be to just sit back, relax, beer and a game of TV. And for those who have experienced sex, the best pleasure giving activity IMO, the brain constantly looks for chances to make its "bearer" get laid. Enough said.

The weirdest thing is, this state of pleasure or blissfulness necessarily need not be just laziness or indolence. In fact, provided the brain is conditioned, one's state of pleasure could be right at the peak of a physical or a mental activity. This is what makes a scientist go after a not-so trivial pursuit of an arduous experiment, a marathon runner to push every inch of his/her muscle to the limit, and everyone of us to go very near to a cardiac arrest every time we have sex.

My state of pleasure (excluding all sexual components 'coz my private life is off limits!!) is to get to an "aha" moment, a moment of discovery, after breaking my brains and my relationships over a long period in pursuit of a solution to a very complex problem. These situations haven't had happened a lot of times before, but I vividly remember each of those episodes as it happened over the last 10 years. So this state of laziness of mine or an inertia to not get my brain or body thinking, is like the lull before storm or the crouch before the pounce. My brain, will always get make me to get into difficult situations to get as close as possible to be in reaching distance of the "aha" moments. Needless to say, it pisses me off every time it does that; but I love it exactly for this; for keeping me alive.

I am going to spend my life being a color

Those who know me, define me in two very different ways with regard to the way I approach life. One set call me an intransigent, hard-balled, calculated, cold-hearted, practical son-of-a-B@#!* about the way I go about doing my things. The other set call me an impractical, day-dreaming, wide-eyed idealist who carries on with his life with no regard about tomorrow. Truth to be told, I feel that I have got a bit of both in me. And no, it is not because I am a Gemini! (enough of that!). And I believe it is applicable to each one of us.

I believe every action that we do -- or for that matter, think -- has a mixture of idealism and pragmatism. It is this "mixture" that makes us do the things that we perceive to be crazy or mundane. What would you define someone who willingly chooses to try for the "million dollar question", knowing very well that the wrong answer would eat away more than 90% of his winnings? Or what would you say to a person who wishes to take a peek into "door #3"? What would you call Virender Sehwag who chose to reach his first triple hundred with a six? At the other end of the spectrum, we have those who stay at home because there is a chance that there is a chance to catch swine flu by chance. Again, enuff said!

Actions -- I believe -- are driven by three factors. First, is the motivation to reach one's goal.  Second, the level of self-realization a.k.a the ability to properly and consciously understand one's potential and situation one is in. Third, a (decent) dose of unadulterated & original "crazy." Think about these three components as red, green, blue colors. You can form any color (actually you can form 65536 ways, but why go into that) with either the PRESENCE or ABSENCE of red, green and blue. Notice my stress on both "presence" and "absence." Extending this analogy, a person's specific action may be characterized by which he or she mixes each of the three aforementioned characteristics.

I tend to disagree that a person's character is fixed. I believe that a person's character, and in turn, his actions are dependent on the magnitude, gravity and timing of his situation that eventually governs the way in which he mixes his "red, blue and green." I would say Sehwag had 100% motivation, 100% self-realization and 100% craziness for choosing to hit a six to reach this triple hundred. But my topic is not just about hitting sixes, it is more than that.

You know that if red, blue, and green are 100% present, the outcome is white color. Going with the tradition of having white for good and black for bad, the presence of all three characteristics would result in absolute "whiteness." If an 100% "white" action succeeds, the outcome is eternal glory; a place in history. However, I would like to point out that the type of outcome may or may not be good in character. Examples are the works of Hitler or our very own Lord Voldemort. On the other extreme, we have people who show 0% of everything in their actions. No one cares about these people. They become so insignificant that they become a bane for others' existence.

But most of us use some percentage of each of these three characteristics in our actions. Let us take a simple situation which most of us can relate to. "Should I stay with my current company or look for a job outside?" Now lets add depths to this situation. "What if there I don't like the new job? What if the new job requires to travel? What if I get a promotion in my current company?" Catch hold of 100 people, and all those 100 people will give different answers. Just like one generalizes a light yellow and a dark yellow as yellow, we tend group our answers into three categories: "take the new job, don't take the new job, or indecisive." Trust me, if you deeply analyze the specifics of decision making process, you would actually find that each decision would consist of parts of "take new job","don't take new job", and "indecisive."

So coming back to first paragraph on discussion about yours truly, what governs my action? I feel that in each of my actions, I have 100% motivation. But it is the degree of "self-realization" and "craziness" that makes me to free-climb a hill, but also to be afraid to look down from terrace. But if any of these parts is 0, I will not do it.

An action with zero motivation is a waste of time.
An action with zero self-realization will never see the the intended goal.
An action with zero craziness is boring.

So what are you made up of?

Chennai Coastal clean-up 2

“When the going gets good, the good gets going.” True to these words, Chennai Trekking Club (CTC) conducted its second Chennai Coastal clean-up campaign on Jan 9, 2011, cleaning up the entire Chennai Coastal line from Marina beach to Injambakkam with more than 500 volunteers, covering 15km of beach, and collecting more than 800 garbage bags. The purpose of this campaign was to spread environmental awareness – again – to the general public and to preserve our natural resources. Volunteers assembled around 5am on Sunday at 11 locations across Chennai city and were transported to 15 different beach zones where CTC organizers coordinated 15 different groups during the cleanup operation between 6 and 9am.

After the cleanup operation the volunteers were dropped back to their respective assembly points.
There were volunteers from all walks of life -- students, NSS volunteers, professionals and our very own fishermen – assisting CTC in this massive event. 55 NSS volunteers from Anna University, 150 employees from Nokia, 45 software professionals from HP, 72 NSS volunteers from Coromandel, 14 students from the Anna Violet College and a few members of the Tree Bank joined hands with about 200 CTC volunteers, collecting 800 garbage bags in two hours. Event sponsors BioTec Bags and Madras Cements Ltd provided with bio-degradable garbage bags and gloves respectively.

More than 8 months ago, on May 16th 2010 CTC conducted the first-of-the-kind Chennai coastal clean-up campaign covering the same 15km stretch from Marina till Injambakkam. In spite of the tremendous environmental awareness it created with general public, a reconnaissance mission by the members of the CTC in December found the Chennai coasts badly in want of another massive clean-up effort. So when the idea was put forth to the members of CTC for a second campaign, the volunteer count quickly touched 300 in just two weeks. Buoyed by this response, the organizing committee -- already armed with experience – went into overdrive to plan and execute this campaign in little less than a month’s time. Considering the scale of the entire operation including people management, logistics, official clearances, this campaign is no mean feat – even for the 10000-member strong Chennai Trekking Club.

When asked about the need for such an initiative, Hari Balasubramaniam, CTC member and one of the official photographers of the event, opined, “most of us live in an oblivion world that simply does not care about Mother Nature and more importantly, one of the most important ecosystems offering livelihood to a few million people in the city of Chennai…so the need for another herculean effort, to get the conservative Chennaite awake on a sober Sunday morning to clean the backyard of one of the most beautiful ecosystems in the world.”

In addition to the large-scale coastal clean-up campaigns, CTC also conducts clean-up campaigns targeting specific beach stretches with 30-50 volunteers every few weeks. The Chennai Trekking Club (CTC) is one of the largest and most active trekking clubs in South India (10.000 members). It's a non-profit group run by volunteers who organize treks across India during nearly all weekends of the year. CTC also engages in social treks taking out underprivileged children on 1 day treks. More information can be found at www.chennaitrekkers.org.

Second news paper article!

My Second Newspaper article on September 4, 2010 edition of NxG, The Hindu. This one is on Save Tada-2 campaign organized  by CTC.