Worry.................................

Worry is a misuse of the imagination......................Dan Zadra

Today's idea.............haste haste kat jaye raste.........

Sanity and happiness are an impossible combination................Mark Twain

Today's idea........rather....... "storehouse of ideas"

Jon Rubinstein...............

Resposibility.................

The day you take complete responsibility for yourself, the day you stop making any excuses, thats the day you start to the top.---------------OJ Simpson

ekla chalo re.................(Walk alone........)

Rabindranath Tagore

In Bengali

Jodi tor đak shune keu na ashe tôbe êkla chôlo re,
Êkla chôlo, êkla chôlo, êkla chôlo, êkla chôlo re.

Jodi keu kôtha na kôe, ore ore o ôbhaga,
Jodi shôbai thake mukh firaee shôbai kôre bhôe---
Tôbe pôran khule
O tui mukh fuţe tor moner kôtha êkla bôlo re.

Jodi shôbai fire jae, ore ore o ôbhaga,
Jodi gôhon pôthe jabar kale keu fire na chae---
Tôbe pôther kãţa
O tui rôktomakha chôrontôle êkla dôlo re.

Jodi alo na dhôre, ore ore o ôbhaga,
Jodi jhôŗ-badole ãdhar rate duar dêe ghôre---
Tôbe bojranôle
Apon buker pãjor jalie nie êkla jôlo re.

Tagore's English translation

If they answer not to thy call walk alone,
If they are afraid and cower mutely facing the wall,
O thou of evil luck,
open thy mind and speak out alone.

If they turn away, and desert you when crossing the wilderness,
O thou of evil luck,
trample the thorns under thy tread,
and along the blood-lined track travel alone.

If they do not hold up the light when the night is troubled with storm,
O thou of evil luck,
with the thunder flame of pain ignite thy own heart
and let it burn alone.

From a forwarded email.........

Remember, when the world pushes you to your knees, you're in the perfect position to pray .

Being happy doesn't mean everything's perfect. It means you've decided to see beyond the imperfections........

From Safar.................

There is nothing that wastes the body like worry, and one who has any faith in God should be ashamed to worry about anything whatsoever...................................... Gandhi

Immature love says: I love you because I need you. Mature love says: I need you because I love you...................................... Gandhi

The ultimate inspiration is the deadline..................Nolan Bushnell

Random Thoughts..............

When I stand before God at the end of my life, I would hope that I would not have a single bit of talent left, and could say, "I used everything you gave me."
- Erma Bombeck

Let my name stand among those who are willing to bear ridicule and reproach for the truth's sake, and so earn some right to rejoice when the victory is won.
- Louisa May Alcott

Getting ahead in a difficult profession requires avid faith in yourself. You must be able to sustain yourself against staggering blows. There is no code of conduct to help beginners. That is why some people with mediocre talent, but with great inner drive, go much further than people with vastly superior talent.
- Sophia Loren

Sometimes success is due less to ability than zeal. The winner is he who gives himself to his work body and soul.
- Charles Buxton

Love me, please, I love you; I can bear to be your friend. So ask of me anything ... I am not a tentative person. Whatever I do, I give up my whole self to it.
- Edna Saint Vincent Millay

Put your heart, mind, intellect and soul even to your smallest acts. This is the secret of success.
- Swami Sivananda

The dedicated life is the life worth living.
- Annie Dillard

I never liked the middle ground-the most boring place in the world.
- Louise Nevelson

Show me a person who is not an extremist about some things, who is a "middle-of-the-roader" in everything, and I will show you someone who is insecure.
- G. Aiken Taylor

He did it with all his heart, and prospered.
- Bible

It is fatal to enter any war without the will to win it.
- General Douglas MacArthur

Prayer is commitment. We don't merely co-operate with God with certain things held back within. We, the total person, co-operate. This means that co-operation equals committment.
-E. Stanley Jones

Blind commitment to a theory is not an intellectual virtue: it is an intellectual crime.
- Imre Lakatos

The relationship between commitment and doubt is by no means an antagonistic one. Commitment is healthiest when it's not without doubt but in spite of doubt.
- Rollo May

Creativity Page 62-63.........................

Creativity is a combination of wonderful wild ideas and then a lot of hard work.
******************************************************************************************
Great art and great science involve a leap of imagination into a world that is different from the present. The erst of the society often views these new ideas as fantasies without relevance to the current reality. And they are right. But the whole point of art and science is to go beyond what we now consider real, and create a new reality. At the same time this escape is not into a "never-never" land. What makes a novel idea creative is that once we see it, sooner or later we recognize that, strange as it is, it is true.
*******************************************************************************************
This one is very interesting(about endurance expected from S&T people):

Yeah, there is a trick I pull for this. When I've a job to dolike that, where you have to do something taht takes a lot of effort, slowly, I pretend I'm in jail. Don't laugh. And if I'm in jail, time is of no consequence. In other words, if it takes a week to cut this, it will take a week. What else have I got to do? I'm going to be here for twenty years. See? This is the kind of mental trick. Becuase otherwise you say, "My God, it is not working", and then you make mistakes. But the other way, you say time is of absolutely no consequence. People start saying how much will it cost me in time? If I work with somebody else it is fifty bucks an hour, a hundred dollars and hour. Nonsense. You just forget everything except that it's got to be built. And I have no trouble doing this. I work fast, normally. But if something will take a day gluing and then next day I glue the other side------it takes two days---it does not bother me at all.

Open and Closed Door Research.......................

Science is a very gregarious business. It is essentially the difference between having this door open and having it shut. When I'm doing science I have the door open. I mean, that is kind of symbolic, but it is true. You want to be, all the time, talking with people. Up to a point, you welcome being interrupted becuase it is only by interacting with other people that you get anything interesting done. It is essentially a communal enterprise. There are new things happening all the time, and you should keep abreast and keep youself aware of what is going on. You must be constantly talking. But ofcourse writing is different. When I am writing I have the door shut, and even then too much sound comes through, so very often when I am writing I go and hide in the library. It is a solitary game. So, I suppose that is the main difference. But then afterward, of course the feedback is very strong, and you get a tremendous enrichment of contacts as result. Lots and lots of people write me letters simply because I have written boooks which address a general public, so I get into touch with a much wider circle of friends. It's broadened my horizons very much. But that is only after the writing is finished and not while it is going on...............Physicist Freeman Dyson, Creativity Page 66

Creativity as Autotelic Experience......Creativity Page 121 by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Autotelic: Greek word for something that is an end in itself
*********************************************************************************************
Games are designed so that we can keep score and know how well we are doing. Most jobs give some sort of information about performance: The salesman can add up daily sales, the assembly worker can count pieces produced. If all else fails, the boss may tell you how well you are doing. But the artist, the scientist, and the inventor are moving on very diffent timelines. How do they know, day in and day out, whether they are wasting their time or actually accomplishing something?

This is indeed a difficult problem. Many artists give up because it is just too excruciating to wait until critics or gallries take notice and pass judgement on their canvases. Research scientists drift from pure science because they can not tolerate the long cycles of insecurity before reviewers and editors evaluate their results. So how can they experience flow without external information about their performance?

The solution seems to be that those individuals who keep doing creative work are those who succeed in internalizing the field's criteria of judgement to the extent that they can give feedback to themselves, without having to wait to hear from the experts. The poet who keeps enjoying writing verse is the one who knows how good each line is, how appropriate is each word chosen. The scientist who enjoys her work is the one who has a sense of what a good experiment is like and who appreciates it when a test is well run or when a report is clearly written. Then she need not wait until October to see if her name is on the Noble Prize list.

MAny creative scientists say that the difference between them and their less creative peers is the ability to separate bad ideas from good ones, so that they don't waste much time exploring blind alleys. Everyone has both good and bad ideas all the time, they say. But some people can't tell them apart until it is too late, until they have already invested a great deal of time in the unprofitable hunches. This is another form of the ability to give oneself feedback: to know in advance what is feasible and what will work, without having to suffer the consequences of bad judgement. At Linus Pauling's sixtieth birthday celebration, a student asked him, "***Dr. Pauling, how does one go about good ideas?" He replied, "You have a lot of ideas and throw away the bad ones." To do that, ofcourse, one has to have a very well internalized picture of what the domain is like and what constitutes "good" and "bad" ideas according to the field.
***(oh, I remember how I was desperate during my college days to see it in front of my name one day.......I still remember when one of my classmates asked me the reason behind my interest in PhD and you know what was my answer.........This dream of adding Dr. in front of Nidhi Gupta, Dr. Nidhi Gupta, sounds good........)

Forgetting Self, Time, and surroundings.....Creativity Page 121 by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

When distractions are out of the way and the other conditions for flow are in place, the creative process acquires all the dimensions of flow. HEre it is described by the poet Mark Strand:

Well, you're right in the work, you lose your sense of time, you're completely enraptured, you're completely caught up in what you're doing, and you're sort of swayed by the possiblities you see in this work. If that becomes too powerful, then you get up, becuase the excitement is too great. You can't continue to work or continue to see the end of the work becuase you are jumping ahead of yourself all the time. The idea is to be so.......so saturated with it that there is no future or past, it is just an extended present in which you are, making meaning. And dismantling meaning, and remaking it. Without undue regard for the words you are using. It's meaning carried to a higher order. It's not just essential communication, daily communication; it's a total communication. When you are working on something and you are working well, you have the feeling that there is no other way of saying what you are saying.......................

Avoiding Distractions...............Creativity, Page120

Many of the peculiarities attributed to creative persons are really just ways to protect the focus of concentration so that they may lose themselves in the creative process. Distractions interrupt flow, and it may take hours to recover the peace of mind one needs to get on with the work. The more ambitious the task, the longer it takes to lose oneself in it, and easier it is to get distracted.

Creative Process..................Creativity by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

The creative process has traditionally been described as taking five steps.

The first period is preparation, becoming immersed, consciously or not, in a set of problematic issues that are interesting and arouse curiosity.

The second phase of the creative process is a period of incubation, during which ideas churn below the threshold of consciousness. It is during this time that unusual connections are likely to be made. When we intend to solve a problem consciously, we process information in a linear, logical fashion. But when ideas call to each other on their own, without our leading them down a straight narrow path, unexpected combinations may come into being.

The third component of the creative process is insight, sometimes called the "Aha!" moment, the instant when Archimedes cried out "Eureka!" as he stepped into the bath, when the pieces of the puzzle fall together.

The fourth component is evaluation, when the person must decide whether the insight is valuable and worth pursuing. This is often the most emotionally trying part of the process, when one feels most uncertain and insecure.

The fifth and last component of the process is elaboration. It is probably the one that takes up the most time and involves the hardest work. This is what Edison was referring to when he said creativity consists of 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration.

The elaboration part of the process is constantly interrupted by periods of incubation and is punctuated by small epiphanies. Thus the creative process is less linear than recursive. How many iterations it goes through, how many loops are involved, how many insights are needed, depends on the depth and breadth of the issues dealth with.

Life after Death.....................

We are sent to this earth in circumstances which are beyond our control i.e. our family, country and city...........Then starts that process which ultimately decides how we will leave this world...........Again it is a set of circumstances initially, when we are so helpless and depend on our elders/senior people who take decisions on our behalf...................It is frustrating sometimes and we long for freedom to execute our own choices and we wait for that time.........................and when that happens (language has word for it, maturity), we long to go back to that carefree time when it is easy to escape from any kind of responsibility for our actions.................but yes, some people are fortunate/unfortunate to enjoy that carefree life till it all ends.......they say sometimes it is only our numbers i.e. years/age which increases while our mind or heart remains like a child and then the problem arises............I can find some behavioral characteristics which can support such kind of cases like possessiveness, jealousy, hatred, ego, anger, impulsive behavior etc.......and worst part of this is when we find it difficult to acknowledge that we still need time to reach that mature state where we can see situations/circumstances from an unbiased/detached point of view...........we are so sure of ourselves and nothing can force us to behave otherwise....this limited growth is the reason of all our problems, I guess.........When I see some old seniors, I get impressed with their approach towards looking at problems..........I think why I could not look at it that way..............Is it necessary to go through this long and slow process to reach that "mature" state................ Is it the law of nature that everybody has to go through innumerable sour and sweet experiences of evolution and then when you think you are ready, you get His call and then is the time to say Goodbye to this world..............Yes, I know a number of people who seem to do so well in a particular area of life so early that we think they have reached that state, but everybody does mistakes and it is impossible not to regret..................But even after if we can reach that maturity before we die, it is an achievement I guess..........Very few "souls" can do that............and they are the people whose magnetism keeps attracting millions of people towards their views even when they leave.............two important personalities which I revere are "Swami Vivekananda" and then Baba, "Saibaba of Shirdi"..............I always wonder why we get attracted to them while they were also sent to this world just like us................it is perhaps because they left this world differently and their views and actions still inspire and teach us......................and yes these are the examples of "lives after death"........................

Hope.......................

है अँधेरी रात पर दीवा जलाना कब मना है
कल्पना के हाथ से कमनीय जो मंदिर बना था
भावना के हाथ ने जिसमें वितानों को तना था

स्वप्न ने अपने करों से था जिसे रुचि से सँवारा
स्वर्ग के दुष्प्राप्य रंगों से, रसों से जो सना था
ढह गया वह तो जुटाकर ईंट, पत्थर, कंकड़ों को
एक अपनी शांति की कुटिया बनाना कब मना है
है अँधेरी रात पर दीवा जलाना कब मना है

बादलों के अश्रु से धोया गया नभ-नील नीलम
का बनाया था गया मधुपात्र मनमोहक, मनोरम
प्रथम ऊषा की किरण की लालिमा-सी लाल मदिरा
थी उसी में चमचमाती नव घनों में चंचला सम
वह अगर टूटा मिलाकर हाथ की दोनों हथेली
एक निर्मल स्रोत से तृष्णा बुझाना कब मना है
है अँधेरी रात पर दीवा जलाना कब मना है

क्या घड़ी थी, एक भी चिंता नहीं थी पास आई
कालिमा तो दूर, छाया भी पलक पर थी न छाई
आँख से मस्ती झपकती, बात से मस्ती टपकती
थी हँसी ऐसी जिसे सुन बादलों ने शर्म खाई
वह गई तो ले गई उल्लास के आधार, माना
पर अथिरता पर समय की मुसकराना कब मना है
है अँधेरी रात पर दीवा जलाना कब मना है

हाय, वे उन्माद के झोंके कि जिनमें राग जागा
वैभवों से फेर आँखें गान का वरदान माँगा
एक अंतर से ध्वनित हों दूसरे में जो निरंतर
भर दिया अंबर-अवनि को मत्तता के गीत गा-गा
अंत उनका हो गया तो मन बहलने के लिए ही
ले अधूरी पंक्ति कोई गुनगुनाना कब मना है
है अँधेरी रात पर दीवा जलाना कब मना है

हाय, वे साथी कि चुंबक लौह-से जो पास आए
पास क्या आए, हृदय के बीच ही गोया समाए
दिन कटे ऐसे कि कोई तार वीणा के मिलाकर
एक मीठा और प्यारा ज़िन्दगी का गीत गाए
वे गए तो सोचकर यह लौटने वाले नहीं वे
खोज मन का मीत कोई लौ लगाना कब मना है
है अँधेरी रात पर दीवा जलाना कब मना है

क्या हवाएँ थीं कि उजड़ा प्यार का वह आशियाना
कुछ न आया काम तेरा शोर करना, गुल मचाना
नाश की उन शक्तियों के साथ चलता ज़ोर किसका
किंतु ऐ निर्माण के प्रतिनिधि, तुझे होगा बताना
जो बसे हैं वे उजड़ते हैं प्रकृति के जड़ नियम से
पर किसी उजड़े हुए को फिर बसाना कब मना है
है अँधेरी रात पर दीवा जलाना कब मना है............... - Harivansh Rai Bachchan

Another Steve................they both started Apple

*******************************************************************************
I worked with such concentration and focus and I had hundreds of obscure engineering or programming things in my head. I was just real exceptional in that way......... Steve Wozniak
*********************************************************************************

Talking about History......................

i was searching some technical material and came across something like "History of XXXXXXX". I was in no mood to read it and then I remembered how Mazhari sir always used to start anything with a quich review of past work..........and he used to tell it in a very interesting style..................and then old and newer technologies...................He was the only teacher who used to even mention about the year and he was so fond of those numbers...............yes, history does matter since it helps us to appreciate the progress made i.e. change vs time........we are fortunate to live in an era where technology is in very advanced stage and looking back helps us to remain optimistic about the futher developments............

TOI, 14-06-2009, MIND OVER MATTER

We all have a voice inside us that will guide us. It may be God. But if we shut out all the noise, clutter from our lives and listen to it, it will tell us the right thing to do............Christopher Reeve

************************************************************************************

Recession is in the mind:

It is only our strengths and our own generosity that makes our individual world beautiful.

A fairy tail comes true only when we become the hero rather then the victim, waiting for the rescue. The biggest, most meaningful discovery is that our lives can change only when we realize that each of us is the creator of our own world. People and situations are there because we have put them there. We sustain them. They feed on our energy. If we turn our back on them, they cease to exist.

The world is a reflection of our choices. If we love, we will receive love; if we are respectful of others, we too will be respected. It is pitiful to seek solutions to life's crises from those who themselves are troubled and confused. If astrologers and self styled mystics could fix our lives, would they not fix their own?

This, of course, is not true of all mystics and saints. Millions of people continue to seek the spiritual wisdom of long-departed saints such as Kabir, Sai Baba of Shirdi, Bhagwan Nityananda and others who never owned anything and yet continue to give endlessly of themselves.

Magically, the number of devotees at Shirdi, where Sai Baba used to live, or Ganeshpuri, Bhagwan Nityanandda's ashram continue to swell despite the fact that Sai Baba left his body in 1918 and Bhagwan Nityananda left his in 1961. There is no adequate explanation for the potent and baffling mysticism that makes this possible.