the personal touch....

when we think air india or indian hostesses, what comes to mind more often than not is cribs and complaints, almost habitually....read an interesting first person share on a fellow blogger's site...check it out...http://sigmund007.blogspot.com/ ......humans make all the difference, beyond roles and definitions....

close encounters....

2 recent encounters stand out...

one , a svelte socialite I know, who was going through a heart break...she was feeling abused....her last date was now an "item" at local parties with her best friend..."how could he do that to me?, she was asking me. But, dont people forever do this, day in and day out? carefully masked , maybe, but is it not almost an omnipresence...do we really know to relate?when people say, "i love you" are they really meaning, "i need you" and "i need you to need me"...i wonder....

could not help contrasting this conversation with another I had a few months back....it was with a commercial sex worker who had called me to help her father out....she was on a ngo connect...i knew that this was her step father and he had been pretty abusive to her....when i asked her about her concern for him after all that she had gone through...she just said, "sometime people have compulsions....my mother likes him....he has been able to give her some happiness...in an otherwise deserted life...how does it matter if i help out.....all of us use each other all the time....sometimes individually and sometimes collectively....some subtly and yet others not so subtly....nafrat sirf humhe andhar kha jaati hai, saab, " so saying she signed off..

there is nothing glamourous...in the way she behaved....just a mechanism she had devised for herself in understanding life....

main hoon na....

main khayal hoon kisi aur ka....immortal lines from nida fazli ( i think)....

we exist in other's thoughts as they perceive us....figments of imagination.....as different from the entitities we really are....

every moment - priceless....

moments are but peeks into the infinite, the limitless...the depth with which we savour them makes all the difference....in awareness and integrity....every moment is sacred....

kuch baat hai hum sabhi mein.....

saab, aapke paas do minute hain?

The cab driver halted me as I was getting off. I knew him by face...was a regular at the cab stand just around our locale.

I paused. He wanted to talk....... about some domestic matter that was bothering him.

we connected.....so many faceless people we meet , day in and day out....histories behind each of them..legacies of experiences , of feelings.......

if we only pause to hear.....life speaks in a million languages....

a moment beyond facades and masks..a moment where just the humans in us connect, no roles we play or identities that have got created.....just human to human.....

emptiness...

music needs the hollowness of the flute; letters, the blankness of the paper; light, the void called a window; sacredness, the absence of the self.

- Anthony De Mello

gems from the Dhammapada...

We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts we make the world. Speak or act with an impure mind and trouble will follow you..... as the wheel follows the ox that draws the cart...Speak or act with a pure mind. And happiness will follow you.....as your shadow, unshakeable.

~Dhammapada (the sayings of the Buddha)

high moral ground...

every now and then i see people resort to "high moral grounds"...closer observation reveals their emergence in a desperate need to mask oneself much more for obvious lack of integrity in everyday nuances...an observance, nay a judgement...as with everything else morality concepts seem to have become convenient props...to enable us face our lack of integrity in life...i have seen spouses lie to each other quite unabashedly, i have been witness to manipulative behaviours....with near and dear ones..and all this being "love"....morality, to me , can never remain isolated from integrity....something that seems conspicuous in its absence when one pauses to observe...

check this link...thought it was very beautiful and connected deep within...

www.enlightenedbeings.com/music/shania-noll.mp3

images...aaina..

was watching the movie Daddy after a longtime...never tire of seeing it....and the song by talat aziz, aaina mujhse meri pahle ki surat maange...one of my all-time favs....

completed the naseoh seminar today....very good participation....and we had a moderator from ndtv.....am hopeful of a few dynamic feedlines evolving...

met an indian stephen hawking....

he just said, if one is able to be mobile and access a "loo"....fundamental infrastructures, what not can be achieved....

though invariably a "panelist" sought for my expertise, i invariably end up only learning more......

just to give u a perspective, mumbai is estimated to have over 10 lakh people with abilities different from ours....while the indian estimate is closer to 100 million.

we have 30 out of 1000 buses which can cater to them....this is a recent development.....there are no public loo facilities....across india about 1 lakh differently abled people are supposed to have some employment....