The London Trip

Following my joining in the new company, I am made to travel London on business visa for 2 weeks. 

Trip starts on 23rd May, 2010 when I fly to London by a non-stop kingfisher flight. The journey is told to be of 9 hours. Plane after taking off at 1.30 PM IST lands at 6.10 PM, London time. After getting off,  I call home informing everyone about my safe reach. I move to the underground (metro) terminal 4 station to get an Oyster card (metro card) and take train to Holborn where I have booked a hotel for stay.

After 50 mins I check-in. Hotel Citadines is actually a Apart-hotel - a hotel that has apartments too.

Following morning I decide to take the 11 no bus (a walk) to office. On my way I get to see the beautiful view of St. Paul's Cathedral. This is the most famous cathedral in London and is daily open to tourists from  8.30 AM - 4.00 PM. It hosts various religious ceremonies including marriages of VVIPs.

The whole week I try to see as many places I can as the weekend and the following week are predicted to have bad weather. First is the Tower bridge which is often confused with London bridge. I wait for roughly 2.5 hours to click it in moon-light. But couldn't as weather turns bad.

Next is the Piccadilly circus, the DDLJ one in which Mr. Amrish Puri can be seen doing the famous aao-aao. This place reminds me of the Newyork's Times Square with big neon banners. 'Ripley's Believe it or not' further lifts up the square  

Close to this is the Trafalgar square with big fountain and church.

The London eye, costing around 22 pounds, with a cycle time of 30 mins,  gives an amazing view of London.

The famous houses of parliament and the Big Ben

The week 23-29 thus ends. I spend my weekend with friend Amit and Monday on shopping. The whole week 31-4 June is not much happening. weather is also not good. Amit says, here in London, it rains 10 out of 30 days normally and 20 out of 30 days in rainy season. His wife Ashwini reminds me that I have forgotten the Palace. I visit it on Thursday which comes as a sunny day.

The Buckingham Palace

Yet I am not able to visit the Lords and Greenwich. Let's see whether I would get another chance !

I take my flight back on Friday at 9.00 PM and land here on Saturday 10.00PM IST.

The no mind

This state can be referred by many notions - self awareness, the Samadhi, super consciousness, etc, but in a layman way it refers to the time when you have no thoughts enter in your mind.

Thoughts too can be broadly categorized as macro and micro. Macro thoughts are easy to identify - just close your eyes and you can realize them. However, micro thoughts are at more depth and are not easy to realize. When one goes deep in meditation only then he/ she gets a glimpse of micro thoughts. They are more like feelings and don't have dominant words that could be interpreted as a language.

Once getting into that depth, the very first glimpse of no mind appears. And it is said that in that state only we get the taste of ourselves. What happens next ? What are it's advantages ? I have no idea as I haven't experienced it. But one thing that I know is if ever a question pops up into your mind that - who are you exactly ? what are you doing here ? Is studying, marrying, earning money, reproducing, fulfilling your desires/ dreams, are the only meanings of life ?, then the answer can be found in no mind

Basant panchmi day out

Basant Panchmi was a restricted holiday in our company, and we (me and wife Shweta) decided to take leave. The day started as a usual holiday, getting up by 11, you know a bit late in the morning.

S's dad gets up at 4 am every morning, actually every night. My mom gets up at 6. I would say very early in early morning. My dad wakes up at 7 - early morning. S's mom @ 8 am - morning.

Coming back to the holiday, we had our breakfast. As usual S wanted to stay at home, relax, watch any movie. I forced her to go out and buy a new pair of shoes for her. On the way to malls, we decided to go to Sarojni nagar market. We took the Mehrauli route to reach Delhi. We also had to do lunch. We also decided to visit ISKON temple. But before that lunch. We were eagerly looking through the windows of our i10 for a good restaurant. It was a bit foggy also. We could barely see the Qutub Minar. S asked to take let turn as  she said she remembered a good place there. It was a pointed sharp turn. After taking a right turn from the next red light we were lost. We stooped at a fuel station and quenched the thirst of i10.

After asking so many pan waalas, we finally arrived Greater kailash market. On the entry road itself there is a restuarant ...some punjabi dhaaba. The food was really good.

We then headed towards Iskon temple. It's very close to Nehru place. One should not miss the movie that they show and also the aarti that happens at 6.30 PM. Parking is not a problem at Iskon, but yes the road from Nehru place is a bit conjested.

We spend almost 2 hours at Iskon. It is a beautiful temple. Around 7.30 we headed back towards our sweet home...

Theory of Failures

In this world there are two types of people. One - who do hard work and are at the right place, at the right time and do the right thing and other one who miss on any one of the mentioned things. We can call the combination of "right" things as Luck.

Theory: I say that whenever we encounter a failure the chances of getting a subsequent failure and of getting a big success, increase equally.

So, what we get next depends on what we choose. If we tend take negative energy and thoughts from a failure, we choose another failure. But if we take positive energy and become more desperate for success, we get that.

LOVE

Love, one of the many debatable topics, one finds getting discussed among friends, family, or with love also. Everyone has got his/ her own ideologies, concepts, fundas of love. And that's where it gets debatable. I am writing becoz I have my own beliefs of love.

Let me try to put a conceptual definition of love. Love could be defined as a feeling which is present in every living being, and being a feeling it dwells from heart. It is quite similar to other feelings like anger, jealousy, but has a different spectrum of wavelength. Being a human being, I would like to focus on love in humans.

Let's try to differentiate between a feeling and a thought. Mind deals with thoughts, unlike heart which deals with feelings. We can think about a particular entity, but we cannot make efforts to love something. Thus feelings are unwieldy by mind as it's incapable of understanding the format of feelings and same goes with love. Thus it becomes very difficult to control feelings by thoughts.

I would say all feelings lie deep buried inside our hearts. There are layers over the feelings, and can't be sensed normally because of the simple reason that we are not conscious. That's why they need an stimulus to be sensed, felt. We can say that they get aroused with an stimulus. The amount of stimulus and the degree to which they get aroused and the time for which they remain in the aroused state depends on person to person. Mind has the capability to send an stimulus to heart. We often experience such events, when someone scolds us, and our ego (which is a layer created in mind) gets hurt, and mind generates typical stimulus for the heart, which arouses the feeling anger.

As said, love is not something we can do; it happens. This goes with the above discourse.

Let's imagine that a boy meets a girl and they both fall in love. So, what happened exactly. I would say when they met something happened that acted as a stimulus and the deep buried feeling, love, got unleashed. Let's talk about what could have happened. May be they are very much physically attracted to each other. May be they were seeing each other and gradually found that they have a lot many things in common or they might had a dream image about their soul mate and they found a person matching that image. We can think of various reasons about that stimulus. But the interesting part is when we undergo feeling love, we can never realize that there was an stimulus.

So, what next. What is Love then ? I would say a feeling which obviously cannot be expressed in words, but it can be said that it's a feeling of friendliness, no hatred, equality, satisfaction. And this feeling is not bound to a particular person. When you are conscious, and you are able to sense love then you feel the same for everyone.

What does it mean when I say 'I love you' to a particular person. I would say it is the mind which binds the feeling to it's root cause. The root cause being the person who acted as a stimulus to arouse it. And that's the main reason why we say love starts diminishing after long time of being together. As it's an external stimulus, it cannot last longer. Gradually the layers start covering that feeling again. And you start feeling normal.

What is true love in context to a soul mate ? Does it exist ? I have talked enough of love and that is all I believe. But what about soul mate. What it is ? Is it a concept created by human or it does exist practically.

I don't believe in soul mates and in the stories weaved around it. But I do believe that there are some persons (not one), with whom you can mix very well. They at times complete you. They have got an attitude which you want to posses. In other words they have got those things (mentally) which you haven't got. Their wavelengths suit you. They are gratifying. And you definitely like to spend each moment of your life with such a person. That's why we want to be with such a person, to always see him/ her smiling, to always be in his/ her arms, and so on....

But I feel that it is very difficult and a great matter of luck to find even one such person in your life and moreover to be with him/ her for whole of your life.

I find myself really really lucky :)