Date: 2007-01-04 23:11 Subject: The philosopher’s tone- 1 Security: Public

‘If livelihood is for life, what is life for?’ This question posed by one of my professors has been consuming my time for most of last year.*
Though I would like to know your views, as is usual in such reflections, the note serves more as an aid to clear my thoughts.

Apart from the amazing people (about whom I will write separate notes) I have been interacting with last year, some of the main influences on me last year include books like Small is Beautiful by E.F. Schumacher, The great Indian Middle class by Pawan Verma, Family Matters, A Fine Balance and Tales from Firoz Bagh- all three by Rohinton Mistry and movies like Dor, Khosla ka Ghosla, Teen Deewarein, and Iqbal. In TV viewing, Aastha channel has replaced Travel and Living from the top spot.

After living away from home for over 8 years during which period found me, last year I was back home with Mom. It was also my first year of full time employment so some of the extravagances include Bose headphones, an Ipod Nano, a cruiser bike, and some 50 books and 10 CDs/DVDs.
I found the best sport I have played in my life – squash, though I haven’t played enough.
Travel included trips to Nagpur to sell our house, to Bangalore and Chennai to meet family and friends, to Vizag and Araku valley with my friends for a vacation.

At work I have been coping with terms like Complexity Science, Self Organization, Emergence, Networks, Systems thinking, etc in the context of Management and Consulting.
The different roles I assumed included- a student, a teacher, a consultant, a researcher, a manager and a philosopher. I have realized that I want to play all these roles in my lifetime and a few more. In the New Year I would like to add roles of a writer, a sportsman, a traveler and a responsible citizen of this world.

I have described the year which I am beginning to believe will prove to be an inflection point** in my life. Over all I have gained a lot of self confidence and self doubt over the last one year.
My answer to the question in the first line has started and will be my goal for this lifetime. Subsequent notes will be the documentation of my attempts to answer the question.
My New Year Resolution for 2007 is ‘To Connect’ and this blog is one of my channels.
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*It was posed by Prof Debasish Chatterji of IIML. The context was the murder of Manjunath, an IIML alumnus. He was murdered for being a responsible and honest human being.
**A good definition of Inflection point is: Change in a quantitative aspect resulting in a qualitative change. E.g. increase in income from Rs 1000 to Rs 100000 in a relatively short time period brings about a drastic change in the quality of life than the mere proportional change in the standard of living.

Date: 2007-02-11 22:46 Subject: The whole is greater than the sum of its parts* Security: Public

Jaggi Vasudeva suggested a heuristic for life which appealed to me. Only one-fourth of a life should be spent in earning a living. This roughly translates to 40 hrs a week.
I extend this rule to the entire time we have, 168 hours per week. So take out another 40 for sleep and it leaves you with about 80 hrs every week. The balance 80 hours should cater to typically four categories of needs or activities- Physical, Intellectual, Aesthetic and Spiritual.

In my life physical activities include squash, aerobics, climbing stairs, etc. Intellectual activities comprise of reading, discussing, thinking, etc. Aesthetic activities include reading, watching movies, listening to music, eating, etc. Spiritual activities extend from reading philosophy to listening to philosophers.
Almost all the activities contribute to satisfy our spiritual needs if only we inculcate the right attitude. By attitude I mean no more than enthusiastically participating in what we do.

The proportioning of the time is dependent on the individual personality. But ignoring any of the four needs will prevent a holistic development of the individual. For argument’s sake each of the four activities should be equally focused upon i.e. at least 20 hrs per category per week.
Some of the activities mentioned above are routine. They just need to be slotted. Awareness is the key word**. That’s why my scheme does not set aside any time for routine activities. The idea is to make everything we do count. There is a difference between treating cooking as a chore and treating it as an art.
No drastic internal change can occur in our lifestyle. Only incremental changes which fit our current lifestyle are possible. So most of what I have written should seem to be easy to adopt in our life.

Most of our activities are a combination of the above categories. Listening to music while jogging and discussing while we eat are just two examples. This is where the topic of this blog entry gains significance.
We should try to maximize the Opportunities for Combination (OFCs). Coming up with OFCs and incorporating them in our lives is a creative and exhilarating experience.
Our lives can never be broken into different parts. It exists as a whole and it is the whole that WE ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR.
That life can be understood only as a whole be it a multi-dimensional whole means that we cant divide our lives. We CANNOT compartmentalize life into childhood (for play- physical activities), youth (for enjoyment-aesthetic activities), adulthood (for being responsible and disciplined- intellectual activities) and old age (for spiritual activities).

The 40 hrs we set aside for work should also cater to the four needs. My work includes intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic activities.
The idea is not to analyze at the end of every week whether we made each activity count or whether we addressed all the needs. Rather it is to reflect once in a while whether our life feels balanced.
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Life is not the linear sum of the breaths you take. It’s the non- linear sum of the times you have been out of breath
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*An interesting corollary to this which we often miss is ‘The part is greater than the fraction of the whole’.
**I believe awareness is the first step, followed by consciousness and finally enlightenment.