SET: Go with the flow

Holding on has a way of dampening the spirit and moving you away from being in harmony with yourself, says Sandy Thibault A friend of mine has always said that there is nothing in life more constant than change. The more I learn the more I have to agree with my friend that, indeed, life is always in a constant state of flux. If there is this movement all around us, we have the opportunity to change in response to it. But the truth is that sometimes we are resistant to doing things in a new way and it is hard to let go of ideas, relationships, and the way things have always been done. It is even harder to let go of fear, anger, hurts and the resentments we carry. When I think of letting go, I can't help but think that if I have something to let go of, then I must be hanging on to something. The question itself seems to ask us to name it, the very thing we are holding on to. Sometimes we know exactly what it is as we have a long standing relationship with it. We might have even carried it from our childhood to adulthood. Whatever it is that we carry with us, we have the tendency to keep building on it, giving it more and more power until it becomes almost too big to look at. Certainly this is not a conscious act on our part, but one that happens outside of our awareness until we are faced with something that makes us look at it. People often talk about dealing with the issues of their life when faced with an illness. Eastern medicine looks at the emotional life of the person when assessing their medical condition, knowing that when we hold on to emotions, it shows itself in the physical body. Many believe that disease is really dis-ease with the emotional aspect of ourselves and literally being out of harmony with our emotions. Whether this is your belief or not, holding on has a way of dampening the spirit and moving you away from being in harmony with yourself. I know for myself, I came to adulthood with a lot of ideas about who and what I was based on what I had been told. I had been taught how things had to be and the rules I needed to abide by to succeed in the world; only to find out later that these ideas, beliefs and all the emotions around them did not fit me. I was surprised to find that what I came to believe about myself and life had driven my life in a way that kept me from getting what I wanted. It was with this awareness that I had the capacity to change it, if I let it go. In the process of letting go I could make room for something new to come in. You don't have to have something from your childhood to get familiar with letting go. The process of life itself gives us a steady stream of opportunity. In particular, I remember what it was like when my children got on the school bus for the very first time. All the parents were at the bus stop, many with fear and apprehension, unsure about this first big step in letting go. Now my youngest son has graduated from high school and will attend college in a far away state. Again I stand in this place of letting go. At first it does not feel all that different from that day thirteen years ago when he boarded the school bus, but I know that I have learned a lot about letting go. I also know that life will continually remind me in case I forget that it is a necessary part of life. It is vital to us to learn how to let go so that our burden does not become too heavy to bear. The more I have looked at my life, the more I realised that change is ever present and life is a constant process of change, making peace and letting go. I understand that this is not always an easy process but I have learned that it is even harder to hang on to it. When we let go, we energetically make room for something new to come into our awareness. Letting go of what no longer works is a wonderful freedom that allows us to imagine something else. And every time we can imagine something else we have a universe of possibility that opens to us. It makes me wonder who we could be if we were willing to let go of the things we are carrying. How would we participate in the bigger picture for our life? What if we could start each day with a clean slate? The native Hawaiian people practise something called Ho'oponopono, which means to 'make right.' Each evening they close their eyes and practice the gentle art of letting go of everything from the day. How might you find your own centre of peace if each evening you could let go of the day? Understanding that as you do this, you are making room for new possibilities to emerge. Blessings to you as you learn that letting go is a process for life.

What is it that keeps India ticking ?

For long, we just had our 5000-year-old culture, our heritage, our awe-inspiring traditions and our breathtaking landscapes to offer. Didn't mean much to an average American, or British, did it? But today, it's no longer difficult for us to explain the goodness in our country. From music to fashion, from cinema to art - the vibrant energy is there for all to feel. Today we have an A R Rahman rubbing shoulders with Andrew Lloyd Webber, Himesh Reshammiya performing to a one lakh-plus crowd at Wembley, actor Irrfan Khan smearing greasepaint alongside Angelina Jolie. We can boast of a Prasoon Joshi bringing home two Lions from Cannes, Aditya Chopra and Karan Johar taking to Western shores our jingoism-laden technicolour cinema. A Sania Mirza stirs as much controversy with her skirts as a Paris Hilton with her wild escapades. A designer label by Rajesh Pratap called 'Pratap' has a nervous Prada scurrying to his doors to alter the similar-sounding label. Shah Rukh Khan and Aishwarya Rai rock wherever they go, including Madame Tussauds. In short, it's no longer bindi and multani mitti packs that foreigners are buying from us. Young India is selling dreams - not only to zillions of its brethren but also to the West. When newspaper reports scream of a woman scrap dealer becoming a millionaire or a rickshaw puller's son topping the civil services, we know that India has arrived. These are stuff dreams are made of. If anybody were willing to wager a snap poll, pride and confidence in the nation would rank high with the average Indian. We may be a country, which is still a mess of antiquated procedures, with a slothful public sector and bureaucracy, but it doesn't deflate our egos or make us bury our heads ostrich-style. No, we are not trying to shrug off our Indian-ness in our rush to embrace global standards. "We are becoming modern but not Westernised. In fact, Indians are becoming more conscious of their identity as there's a new confidence to accept Indian-ness. Take our music, film, art, fashion - they are essentially Indian, showcasing India with a pride never seen before," says ad filmmaker and lyricist Prasoon Joshi. If we were to talk about our comfort level with our Indian-ness, what better than Hinglish- our own concoction of the Queen's dialect? Are we afraid of ending each oh-so-propah English sentence with a yaar? Nah! "Identities should be a healthy mix of both Indian values and Western culture. Today, there's a greater sense of confidence and optimism about India internationally than it was, say, a decade ago. The country's values are far more cherished today," says young parliamentarian Milind Deora. "Adding values is not bad as long as we don't lose our identity. But we also need not latch on to our values unnecessarily just because we are treading the path of a global superpower. The respect should come from within," explains Milind. Does the feeling come from deep within? "Being an Indian gives me strength. It makes me feel rooted," says Prasoon. The sense of pride that polo champion Angad Kalaan felt when the Indian national anthem played in the World Cup is inexplicable. "It was a proud moment. In fact, I love to flaunt my Indian roots when I compete abroad," he beams. If love's in their heart, it's in their craft too. "I've tried to weave in 100 per cent Indian-ness in my couture. To go global we need to address our roots," says designer Sabyasachi Mukherjee, whose designs have graced the New York and London Fashion Week. "Everybody wants to make a mark. To regret being part of the heritage means losing out in a crowd. It makes us wannabes," he emphasises. "The whole world is looking at India. Those who shrug off their Indian roots lack self-confidence and belief," says Prasoon. Why shy? India's never looked this charismatic and energetic before. And our new slogan is 'chakk de India'.

Truth is stronger than fact!

West has always focused on facts, while the East has focused on truth. As a consequence the west moved forward in science while the east moved forward in spirituality. When the great sages of the east looked inwards and realised the truth of their existence, they expressed these in the form of scriptures, the sruti and sastra. In order that the common man could understand these spiritual truths, some of these masters wrote the purana, the epics. These epics created role models who exemplified these truths that they had experienced in a form that anyone could understand. The purana had characters like Rama and Krishna who the ordinary person could identify with and follow. These characters were based on truth not on fact. When Valmiki talks about the monkeys that occupied Kishkinda, the numbers he uses are so large that Kishkinda could not have physically held so many monkeys. What he is referring to is the impact of those monkeys upon Rama and his mission. When Krishna as a child killed monsters and when Hanuman lifted a mountain, the incidents were meant to convey the truth and impact of the incident upon human consciousness. Incidents as recorded in the purana are metaphysical, not physical. They are not factual history but truthful experiences. Our sages recorded not day-to-day history, but only those incidents that impacted upon the collective consciousness. When a scientist conducts an experiment to prove his theory, he does so in three dimensions. These are the easily understood dimensions of length, breadth and depth. A master goes beyond these in his inner experiments to discover truth. He travels in space and time as well. He experiences, expresses and records what is permanent in different space and time dimensions. It may be difficult for you to grasp and accept this, but this is the truth. That is why our scriptures have withstood the test of time and cultures. Expressions of the experiences of our great masters were recorded as sruti. The rules and regulations that they recommended based on these experiences for societal organisation were the smruti. Sruti was the truth and permanent. Smruti were facts that needed to change over time and space. Spirituality is based on sruti. Religion is based on smruti. Both need to be used for every day life, as theory and practice. However, one needs to understand the difference between truth and facts. Truth transcends facts; spirituality transcends religions

The jigsaw puzzle of nationhood

An interesting piece.

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/Opinion/Todays_Features/View_Point/The_jigsaw_puzzle_of_nationhood/articleshow/2276384.cmsIn

• Mukul Kesavan’s somewhat underrated novel looking through Glass, the narrator, having been transported back to 1942, finds himself living through the narratives of Muslim League/Congress politics. Here, he meets a central character called Masroor, an employee at a jigsaw puzzle printing press, who works out his anxieties about the threatening partition of the country by making puzzles based on the map of undivided India. Masroor’s mother, meanwhile, ends up forming a counter to the contending political discourses of that time by forming her own political party, the “Society for the Protection of the Present”.
• Literary readings against the grain notwithstanding, history had its own telos, partition did happen, and the subcontinent is still grappling with the attendant traumatised identities and borders.
• The division was many things, but the residual guilt and burden arising out of Radcliffe’s (a lawyer with no cartographic experience whatsoever) lines inflects South Asia’s imaginings of nationhood even today.
• There were, of course, many partitions, and all remain incomplete, the fuzzy lines of invented geography and maps continuing to be the locus of bloodletting.
• The Durand line, chopping off Afghanistan as part of the Great Game, was in 1893, perhaps the first major one, and for once, thanks to tribal identities, a border that doesn’t really exist.
• The 1905 partition of Bengal was the first amputation along religious lines, foreshadowing both the Hindu and Muslim fundamentalist’s idea of segregation both along territorial and religio-cultural lines. That segregation, and for that matter any notion of nationhood, is part of the narrative of the nation as an “imagined community”. As much a falsification as the idea of sacrosanct boundaries, of the map, per se, defining and constituting the nation.
• Perhaps fittingly, no historical, political or social tract has managed to “contain” the slippages and absurdities of these partitions, these fevered imaginings, better than fiction.
• The savagery in a Manto or a Bhisham Sahni is acutely important to remember, but contemporary writers, hesitant to use the perhaps all-too-ready trope of violence, can posit the indeterminate nature of the nation rather more tangentially like, say, Amitav Ghosh in the seminal Shadowlines, where a character in Calcutta measures a map with a compass and finds, disturbingly, that an obscure town in China is much closer to ‘home’ than a central city in one’s own nation.
• Maps are the imagined nation writ large as it were, an attempt at the spatial concretisation of the myths of the nation. A small example can perhaps suffice, the uninitiated, both in India and Pakistan, would perhaps be somewhat taken aback to realise that their inherited, accepted cartography isn’t quite ‘real’.
• Both countries ‘map’ the entire state of undivided Kashmir, including, obviously, territory under the other’s control, as a part of the nation’s body. Political claims notwithstanding, a more accurate map of the actual territory of the nation is thus confusingly different, parts of the crown, Kashmir, are missing. Masroor’s anxiety about missing pieces of the puzzle, patently, isn’t simply fictional.

Fear of finance on the march

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/Opinion/Todays_Features/View_Point/Fear_of_finance_on_the_march/articleshow/2276393.cms

An interesting article explaining why people working in the finance field behind computer screens in air conditioned rooms earn much more than people doing the "real" work.

Fear of finance is on the march.

• Distrust of highly paid people who work behind computer screens doing something that doesn’t look like productive work is everywhere. Paper shufflers are doing better than producers; speculators are doing better than managers; traders are doing better than entrepreneurs; arbitrageurs are doing better than accumulators; the clever are doing better than the solid; and behind all of it, the financial market is more powerful than the state.

• Common opinion suggests that this state of affairs is unjust. As Franklin D Roosevelt put it, we must cast down the “money changers” from their “high seats in the temple of our civilisation.” We must “restore the ancient truths” that growing, making, managing, and inventing things should have higher status, more honour, and greater rewards than whatever it is that financiers do.
• Of course, there is a lot to fear in modern global finance. Its scale is staggering: more than $4 trillion of mergers and acquisitions this year, with tradable and (theoretically) liquid financial assets reaching perhaps $160 trillion by the end of this year, all in a world where annual global GDP is perhaps $50 trillion.
• The McKinsey Global Institute recently estimated that world financial assets today are more than three times world GDP — triple the ratio in 1980 (and up from only two-thirds of world GDP after World War II). And then there are the numbers that sound very large and are hard to interpret: $300 trillion in “derivative” securities; $3 trillion managed by 12,000 global “hedge funds”; $1.2 trillion a year in “private equity.”
• But important things are created in our modern global financial system, both positive and negative. Consider the $4 trillion of mergers and acquisitions this year, as companies acquire and spin off branches and divisions in the hope of gaining synergies or market power or better management. Owners who sell these assets will gain roughly $800 billion relative to the pre-merger value of their assets.
• The shareholders of the companies that buy will lose roughly $300 billion in market value, as markets interpret the acquisition as a signal that managers are exuberant and uncontrolled empire-builders rather than flinty-eyed trustees maximising payouts to investors. This $300 billion is a tax that shareholders of growing companies think is worth paying (or perhaps cannot find a way to avoid paying) for energetic corporate executives.
  
• Where does the net gain of roughly $500 billion in global market value come from? We don’t know. Some of it is a destructive transfer from consumers to shareholders as corporations gain more monopoly power, some of it is an improvement in efficiency from better management and more appropriately scaled operations, and some of it is overpayment by those who become irrationally exuberant when companies get their names in the news.
• If each of these factors accounts for one-third of the net gain, several conclusions follow.
• First, once we look outside transfers within the financial sector, the total global effects of this chunk of finance is a gain of perhaps $340 billion in increased real shareholder value from higher expected future profits. A loss of $170 billion can be attributed to future real wages, for households will find themselves paying higher margins to companies with more market power.
• The net gain is thus $170 billion of added social value in 2007, which is 0.3% of world GDP, equal to the average product of seven million workers.
• In one sense, we should be grateful for our hard-working M&A technicians, well-paid as they are: it is important that businesses with lousy managements or that operate inefficiently be under pressure from those who may do better, and can raise the money to attempt to do so. We cannot rely on shareholder democracy as our only system of corporate control. The second conclusion is that the gross gains — fees, trading profits, and capital gains to the winners (perhaps $800 billion from this year’s M&A’s) — greatly exceed the perhaps $170 billion in net gains.
• Governments have a very important educational, admonitory, and regulatory role to play: people should know the risks and probabilities, for they may wind up among losers of the other $630 billion. So far there is little sign that they do. Finally, finance has long had an interest in stable monopolies and oligopolies with high profit margins, while the public has an interest in competitive markets with low margins.
• The more sceptical you are of the ability of government-run antitrust policy to offset the monopoly power-increasing effects of M&As, the more you should seek other sources of countervailing power — which means progressive income taxation — to offset any upward leap in income inequality. Eighteenth-century physiocrats believed that only the farmer was productive, and that everyone else was somehow cheating the farmers out of their fair share. Twentieth-century Marxists thought the same thing about factory workers.
• Both were wrong. Let us regulate our financial markets so that outsiders who invest are not sheared. But let us not make the mistake of fearing finance too much. (The author is professor of economics at the University of California at Berkeley).
  

The end of risk as we knew it

Interesting article by Ruchir sharms in the Economic times.

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/View_Point/The_end_of_risk_as_we_knew_it/articleshow/2276381.cms

• Psychologists refer to it as ‘zeteophobia’ — the fear associated with making a major decision which may require far too much effort to implement. This psychological condition has afflicted global investors for much of this year.
• Although the environment for risk-taking has been deteriorating since February, many investors were frozen in their tracks, daunted by the prospect of adjusting the portfolios to a tougher regime after enjoying the rather easy money ride of the past few years. But as it becomes increasingly apparent that the unusually long period of taking on risk at any price has decisively come to an end, with the Federal Reserve’s higher short-term interest rates finally beginning to bite and the US housing sector suffering a widespread slowdown over the past year, there is panic in the financial marketplace.
• A forced liquidation of risky assets is now underway and the bears are on the hunt for all those holding low quality debt on their balance sheets. After reaching euphoric levels earlier this year, credit markets led by those in the United States are in deep funk, true to the manic-depressive nature of markets.
• The financial community took on too much risk as the good times rolled on, pricing risk progressively lower and extending credit to people who should have never been qualified to acquire debt.
• The US subprime market was the weakest link in the chain and therefore the first to be affected by the turn in the credit cycle. As losses kept mounting in the subprime segment, a more fundamental reassessment of risk got underway.
• Once psychology turns, all the practices and beliefs held by investors begin to shake. Currently, there is complete lack of confidence in the pricing of any risk in the credit markets, raising fears of a credit crunch in the system.
• For instance, Wall Street underwrote $1.5 trillion of subprime and other lower quality housing-related debt in the two years through 2006 and now analysts are predicting losses to be more than double the number initially forecast.
• The confidence crisis arises as people begin to wonder if earlier forecasts built on databases of many thousands of transactions were bad then how can any estimates related to the credit markets be trusted.
• The important question now is whether markets are merely over-reacting after being too complacent or if they have sensed a more broad-based financial problem, which has major economic implications. It seems unlikely that the unwinding of such a massive credit cycle will have no macroeconomic follow through. While some previous episodes of financial turmoil in the United States, such as the blow-up of the LTCM hedge fund in 1998 or even the sharp bond market sell-off in 1994, did not have any meaningful economic consequences, this time around the origin of the current troubles lies in the real economy — the US housing market.
• The US housing sector has been in a downturn over the past year, with prices declining in nominal terms on a year-on-year basis for the first time in recent history. Delinquency rates on all subprime adjustable rate mortgages originated in 2006 are running a massive 75% above those written a year earlier.
  
• A tightening in housing-related credit is likely to put further pressure on investment in this sector. The danger is a significant slowdown in consumer spending, which has been the engine of economic growth in the US for time immemorial. The consumer could well feel compelled to save more to offset the erosion in wealth from the drop in housing prices as well as due to difficulties in accessing more credit. While the consumer has been the critical linchpin of the US economy, the market bulls hope the strength of corporate balance sheets will cushion the blow for the overall economy.
• After all, on the corporate side, interest cover remains high and leverage quite low. However, with consumer spending accounting for 70% of US GDP, it seems more likely that credit woes will indeed drag down the economy. The question then becomes how deep and how long will the hit to US consumer spending last and will the rest of the world be able to weather the storm. Given the key role the US housing sector played in the current expansion phase, it seems the best case scenario for the US economy in the coming year is sub-par economic growth but not quite a recession. As far as emerging markets are concerned, until a couple of weeks ago, it appeared as if they were indeed decoupling from the US. With China contributing more to global growth than the US this year and developing countries comprising the largest economic bloc in the world economy, emerging equity markets seemed well justified to trade independently. In the debt markets as well, the US and developing economies are at opposite ends of the spectrum; the US economy is highly leveraged but the credit up-cycle has only just begun in many emerging markets. However, a sharp setback in emerging market equities over the past two weeks has once again led many investors to believe that regardless of local economic fundamentals, US still sets the trend in the global marketplace and that emerging markets remain risky assets. Well, there could still be another twist in the tale.
• It’s interesting to note that while the major indices in the US have retreated to April levels, emerging markets are more than 10% higher than April even after the latest sell-off. The theme of decoupling may well materialise in a more subtle manner with emerging markets following a trading pattern that takes them two steps forward, but then one step back due to events in the US. The current scenario could play out like the years 1997 and 1998, but in reverse. In that period, emerging markets were in crisis and at times very brutal price action in those markets affected the US as well. But in the end, the US bull market remained intact. A decade later, we could be in a situation where the US is in financial trouble but emerging markets keep heading north despite sharp volatility.
• Of course, if the US implodes completely or a new factor, such as inflation in China, becomes an issue then all bets are off. For the time being, however, the parallel to the late ’90s turned upside down should be the working assumption. In that regard, global investors will need to distinguish between the truly risky assets that got priced at extremely high valuations, such as low-grade US credit, and emerging markets, where the risk profile has changed dramatically for the better this decade and valuations are still reasonable. This marks a paradigm shift. The period of taking on unbridled risk at any price is over and a de-leveraging cycle is underway in the US. But it would be a mistake to view all global assets through the US prism. As investors go about frantically readjusting their portfolios to the new risk environment, they will soon enough realise that the risk-profile of the US and emerging markets has traded places. (The author is head of emerging markets at Morgan Stanley Investment Management)
  

Indians predated Newton 'discovery' by 250 years

• A little known school of scholars in southwest India discovered one of the founding principles of modern mathematics hundreds of years before Newton according to new research.
  
• Dr George Gheverghese Joseph from The University of Manchester says the 'Kerala School' identified the 'infinite series'- one of the basic components of calculus - in about 1350.
  
• The discovery is currently - and wrongly - attributed in books to Sir Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibnitz at the end of the seventeenth centuries.
  
• The team from the Universities of Manchester and Exeter reveal the Kerala School also discovered what amounted to the Pi series and used it to calculate Pi correct to 9, 10 and later 17 decimal places.
  
• And there is strong circumstantial evidence that the Indians passed on their discoveries to mathematically knowledgeable Jesuit missionaries who visited India during the fifteenth century.
  
• That knowledge, they argue, may have eventually been passed on to Newton himself.
  Dr Joseph made the revelations while trawling through obscure Indian papers for a yet to be published third edition of his best selling book 'The Crest of the Peacock: the Non-European Roots of Mathematics' by Princeton University Press.
  
• He said: "The beginnings of modern maths is usually seen as a European achievement but the discoveries in medieval India between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries have been ignored or forgotten.
  
• "The brilliance of Newton's work at the end of the seventeenth century stands undiminished - especially when it came to the algorithms of calculus.
  
• "But other names from the Kerala School, notably Madhava and Nilakantha, should stand shoulder to shoulder with him as they discovered the other great component of calculus- infinite series.

• "There were many reasons why the contribution of the Kerala school has not been acknowledged - a prime reason is neglect of scientific ideas emanating from the Non-European world - a legacy of European colonialism and beyond.
• "But there is also little knowledge of the medieval form of the local language of Kerala, Malayalam, in which some of most seminal texts, such as the Yuktibhasa, from much of the documentation of this remarkable mathematics is written."

• He added: "For some unfathomable reasons, the standard of evidence required to claim transmission of knowledge from East to West is greater than the standard of evidence required to knowledge from West to East.

• "Certainly it's hard to imagine that the West would abandon a 500-year-old tradition of importing knowledge and books from India and the Islamic world.

• "But we've found evidence which goes far beyond that: for example, there was plenty of opportunity to collect the information as European Jesuits were present in the area at that time.
  "They were learned with a strong background in maths and were well versed in the local languages.
  "And there was strong motivation: Pope Gregory XIII set up a committee to look into modernising the Julian calendar.
  "On the committee was the German Jesuit astronomer/mathematician Clavius who repeatedly requested information on how people constructed calendars in other parts of the world. The Kerala School was undoubtedly a leading light in this area.
  "Similarly there was a rising need for better navigational methods including keeping accurate time on voyages of exploration and large prizes were offered to mathematicians who specialised in astronomy.
  "Again, there were many such requests for information across the world from leading Jesuit researchers in Europe. Kerala mathematicians were hugely skilled in this area."

• Link to the article

http://www.manchester.ac.uk/aboutus/news/display/?id=121685

Indians predated Newton 'discovery' by 250 years

A little known school of scholars in southwest India discovered one of the founding principles of modern mathematics hundreds of years before Newton according to new research.
Dr George Gheverghese Joseph from The University of Manchester says the 'Kerala School' identified the 'infinite series'- one of the basic components of calculus - in about 1350. The discovery is currently - and wrongly - attributed in books to Sir Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibnitz at the end of the seventeenth centuries. The team from the Universities of Manchester and Exeter reveal the Kerala School also discovered what amounted to the Pi series and used it to calculate Pi correct to 9, 10 and later 17 decimal places. And there is strong circumstantial evidence that the Indians passed on their discoveries to mathematically knowledgeable Jesuit missionaries who visited India during the fifteenth century. That knowledge, they argue, may have eventually been passed on to Newton himself. Dr Joseph made the revelations while trawling through obscure Indian papers for a yet to be published third edition of his best selling book 'The Crest of the Peacock: the Non-European Roots of Mathematics' by Princeton University Press. He said: "The beginnings of modern maths is usually seen as a European achievement but the discoveries in medieval India between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries have been ignored or forgotten. "The brilliance of Newton's work at the end of the seventeenth century stands undiminished - especially when it came to the algorithms of calculus. "But other names from the Kerala School, notably Madhava and Nilakantha, should stand shoulder to shoulder with him as they discovered the other great component of calculus- infinite series. "There were many reasons why the contribution of the Kerala school has not been acknowledged - a prime reason is neglect of scientific ideas emanating from the Non-European world - a legacy of European colonialism and beyond. "But there is also little knowledge of the medieval form of the local language of Kerala, Malayalam, in which some of most seminal texts, such as the Yuktibhasa, from much of the documentation of this remarkable mathematics is written." He added: "For some unfathomable reasons, the standard of evidence required to claim transmission of knowledge from East to West is greater than the standard of evidence required to knowledge from West to East. "Certainly it's hard to imagine that the West would abandon a 500-year-old tradition of importing knowledge and books from India and the Islamic world. "But we've found evidence which goes far beyond that: for example, there was plenty of opportunity to collect the information as European Jesuits were present in the area at that time. "They were learned with a strong background in maths and were well versed in the local languages. "And there was strong motivation: Pope Gregory XIII set up a committee to look into modernising the Julian calendar. "On the committee was the German Jesuit astronomer/mathematician Clavius who repeatedly requested information on how people constructed calendars in other parts of the world. The Kerala School was undoubtedly a leading light in this area. "Similarly there was a rising need for better navigational methods including keeping accurate time on voyages of exploration and large prizes were offered to mathematicians who specialised in astronomy. "Again, there were many such requests for information across the world from leading Jesuit researchers in Europe. Kerala mathematicians were hugely skilled in this area."

http://www.physorg.com/news106238636.html

PRINCIPLES OF ABUNDANCE

Feng Shui, Kaizan And Zen Abundance

• Our life has nine aspiration points and all are essential. They are: health, wealth, relationship, fame, children's growth, helpful friends, career growth, know-ledge and blessings.
• These are interlinked. Even if one aspiration point is missing you begin to feel uncomfortable.
• According to Zen masters there are five principles of abundance. They help us achieve our life aspirations in full.
• The first principle of abundance is: "God does not choose to discriminate while giving". For God everyone is equal. He gives all life aspirations. It is up to us to take whatever we want. We cannot blame God if any life aspirations are missing in our life. Then why are there differences between you, me and others? It is only due to two reasons. We create blockages in the mind and in the environment. Especially when we are young, we come across many people including teachers, friends, family members and others. All of them wish us good. But all have their limitations according to their circumstances and beliefs. These limitations they pass on to others also. Without awareness our subconscious mind accepts these limitations and these act as blocks in our thinking and in our growth.
• The second principle of abundance says, "Be a limitless person and accept the universe as it is". God has made you to get the best of everything in this world. You deserve it. There is no limit for your aspirations and dreams. If someone says, "It is not possible", it is his limitation, not yours.
• The third principle of abundance says, "Whatever be your intention you will get it". If you have strong intention, your efforts get adjusted to your intention and the universe ensures you achieve the same. When you have a strong intention of owning a house you somehow arrange finance. With only Rs 10,000 in hand you start looking for a new house and you find that within a short span of time you have managed the finance and moved to a new house worth several lakhs. According to Vaastu Shastra there are 32 directions in a house. Each direction is governed by a god or goddess. Whenever we speak something the deities say "Tathastu" — be it happen. The words that we speak also have energy.
• The fourth principle of abundance states, "Negative words multiply and come back to us hundred times. Positive words multiply and come back to us hundred times". When we say, "I am becoming poor", "People cheat me", "Children are not studying" or "No one loves or cares for me" — each sentence multiplies and comes back to us. For our life to be happy it is very essential to avoid negative words and use more positive words.
• Feng Shui, the Chinese science of balancing energies, and the latest Japanese management principle of Kaizan: Both have their roots in the fifth principle of abundance which believes "Clutter blocks energy". Clutter is anything which we carry in our life, which has no value for us now. We purchase a new shirt, wear it for some time and after a few years stop using it but still carry it in our storage space. This is clutter. Clutter can be anything — books, clothes, broken clocks, old electronic items etc. With awareness when we remove the clutter from our house, prosperity fills in. So, live in abundance.

60 years of Indian Independence

interesting article by Shashi Tharoor. Link to the article :
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Gurcharan_Das_Time_to_free_schools/articleshow/2274711.cms

PHILANTHROPY IN NATURE

• Evolutionary scientists teach us that human beings have evolved through a long struggle in which only the fittest have survived. The fittest are those who pass on their genes.
• But it is a mistake to believe that life is a tooth and claw struggle where only the selfish survive. Yes, we have evolved from animals — we share 98.6% of our genes with chimpanzees — but nature is replete with dharma-like goodness.
• Wolves and wild dogs bring food back for their young who cannot hunt.
• Dolphins will help lift an injured companion for hours to help him survive.
• Blackbirds and thrushes give warning calls when they spot a hawk even if it risks their own lives.
• Similarly, human parents make huge sacrifices for their children with little expectation of return. So, it is wrong to view nature as an amoral law of the jungle.

Link to the article from which the above excerpt is tken :

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Gurcharan_Das_Time_to_free_schools/articleshow/2274711.cms

calibrate our life and celibrate

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/2251762.cms
Life is celebration. In order to be able to experience the joy of celebration, you need to first learn to calibrate your life in a manner appropriate for celebration. Your life starts from a thought. The thinking process keeps generating thoughts. When you enact these thoughts you experience the fruition of your actions. Thought is the root and the outcome of action is the fruit. Life is evolving; it is changing constantly from the root to its fruit. Between the roots and fruits lie the trunk, branches, leaves, buds and flowers. These are our various thought processes. Thoughts make the mind. As are your thoughts and thinking, so is your mind. And that is your life. The 'tree' of life. Life also consists of feelings and emotions, called the manas or spiritual heart. Due to prana or the process of breathing, the spiritual heart is connected to the mind. In other words, feelings and emotions are linked with the process of thinking or its product, thoughts. This connectivity generates more thinking, creating thoughts that make your life emotion and feeling-based as well. The mind is the gateway to the brain which is the seat of intellect or buddhi. So once again, life reaffirms itself and reaffixes itself to the intellect. Your whole life revolves around your mind and intellect. Your mind and intellect together generate strong likes and dislikes — raag and dvesh — which create intense beliefs and disbeliefs. These lead us to love and hate relationships with fellow human beings and also with Divinity. When we understand this true aspect we can clearly see that our life is based on our mind, level of intelligence, strong beliefs and disbeliefs. Seers have established that we are a part of the Supreme Spirit. This is our link with the Divine source. We need to form our life around the Supreme Spirit, who is Parama, also known as the soul or atman. Soul also means spandana or vibrations. We need to get firmly established in the Divine source. We need to restructure our lives from being thinking-based to being vibrations-based. Just as an object vibrating at high speed does not allow even a single particle of dust to stick to it, intense vibrations of the soul blow away residual and negative thoughts, beliefs and disbeliefs. How should we convert our lives from being thought-based to being vibrations-based? To move from thought-based to vibrations-based life, seek the company of the holy and the wise, attend satsangs, read and assimilate wisdom from the Bhagavad Gita, Vedas, Upanishads and other world scriptures and learn more about the lives of the accomplished. Practise meditation, mantra chanting or japa, and intense sadhana. Try to follow spiritual and divine traditions. By doing so the mind, intellect, beliefs and disbeliefs, likes and dislikes, which have prevented vibrations of the soul to be felt and experienced, recede to the background and there is a spontaneous ignition of soul energy that is released. This energy release brings out waves of bliss, where we feel immense happiness, satisfaction, joy and contentment. The transition brings a blissful life without worries. We experience a joyful, thoughtless state of being, full of peace and contentment. Life is without anxiety and fear. We calibrate our life and celebrate forever. E-mail: shrinimishamba@hotmail.com . Website: www.shri-nimishamba.org .

PART OF A WHOLE

A human being is part of a whole, called by us the Universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

Albert Einstein

CALIBRATE YOUR LIFE AND CELEBRATE

Our mind is a bundle of thoughts. The state of our mind decides the quality of our life. We convert most of the thoughts that arise in our minds into action. This produces the Karmic reaction which rules our life. So we see that the mind is the cause of our happiness or dissatisfaction. Our external surroundings, circumstances and relationships constantly make our mind oscillate between joy and sorrow. So our mental equilibrium is upset. When we are strongly grounded in our Spiritual Tradition, we have complete control over the mind. Regular practise of the Spiritual techniques taught by the Sages and Scriptures will help us to control our thought process and use it to generate a happy and contented life. Ordinary thoughts can be transformed into wise, dynamic and divine resolutions, which will transform our lives and bring success with effortless ease.
When we gain control over the mind, the desires which are the root cause of sorrow are eliminated. We let go of all expectations and accept each day as a gift from God. Life becomes joyous, expansive and meaningful.
A person’s profession, fame, wealth, health and success are determined by his Karma. Even if he succeeds and scales the peak in any field through hard work and training, and accumulates enough to satisfy all his material needs, he still lacks mental peace. Peace and contentment can be obtained only through the Grace of God or the Guru.
When we worship the Divine Mother, who is the creator and sustainer of all creation, the mind attains equilibrium. Our thoughts become pure and our actions are selfless. All the negative Karma is dissolved, and our life is shaped only by the good Karma that remains.
When we practise spiritual techniques that propel us towards the Divine Mother, we transcend all human limitations and spiritual awareness dawns within us. As we surrender completely at Her feet, She annihilates our ignorance. We attain a state of complete Oneness with the Cosmic Will and the entire Cosmos. This establishes us in everlasting peace, unconditional love and eternal bliss.”






www.shrinimishamba.org/Photo_gallery/Spk_Tree_3Aug07.jpg

A NEW SCIENCE OF RELIGION & INTERDEPENDENCE

• Not many people will agree that it’s time for a new religion to emerge. But before going into that let’s have a re-look at what’s come to be known as the Gaia hypotheses, or Gaia theory.
• Named after the Greek goddess of the Earth, the theory was formulated in the 1960s by the research scientist James Lovelock. Lovelock believed that the so-called living and non-living components that go to make up the whole Earth actually constitute a new and emergent property which is more than the sum of its parts. In other words, “life” modifies the conditions on the planet to make conditions on the planet more hospitable via feedback it gets through “non-life”.
• Only together, can the two components comprise a true living organism. With this initial hypothesis, Lovelock claimed the existence of a global control system of surface temperature, atmospheric composition and ocean salinity.
• His arguments were that since life started on Earth, the energy provided by the Sun has increased by 25% to 30%; yet the surface temperature of the planet has remained remarkably constant when measured on a global scale.
• Also, atmospheric composition has remained the same too even though it should be unstable. And so has the salinity of the oceans, which is a mystery because river salts should have raised the level much higher by now than is observed.
• In spite of all this, however, mainstream science has had a tough time accepting that the whole Earth behaves as a single, self-regulating system composed of physical, chemical, biological and human components. It seems simply too pre-scientific, pagan and like some New Age religion.
• Especially since the theory almost posits endowing the planet with a kind of life of its own. Palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould, for instance, criticised Gaia as merely a metaphorical description of Earth processes.
• Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, claimed “there was no way for evolution by natural selection to lead to altruism on a global scale.” Be that as it may, the Earth is now beginning to get a battering despite science and paganism.
• Global warming is no discriminator of life or non-life. In order to survive, humankind now needs a totally new kind of religion which embraces the entirety of existence and the interdependence of all its parts. Or as Gaia itself proposes, the entirety of the universe and the interdependence of all its parts too.