HAD ENOUGH OF YOU BEGGARS !

I am born and brought up in India and have been lucky to be born in a family that provided me everything. If you ask the general public to tell you what are the biggest problems faced by India that hinder it's capability to be conceived  as a developed nation, most of the answers would include 'poverty' as a factor. I am writing this to share my views on how to eradicate certain types of poverty stricken groups. Namely the 'beggars at traffic lights'. I am writing this having no knowledge or stats about the clockwork of the traffic light beggar community so I am very much open to criticism and corrections. As a layman in writing, I have written what I feel about them and what should be done.

I am using the term clockwork because anyone who has seen the traffic light beggars day in and day out can tell you on the basis of common sense that they have an organized system behind them which dictates the lives of these beggars. We all have seen the movie slumdog millionaire, in which we see little children taken from the slum area's of Mumbai and forced into a life of begging on the streets. That movie even sheds light on the harsh reality that children are mutilated ( single eye amputation was shown in the movie, but that's only if they are lucky ) so as to increase the grief in the hearts of the daily commuters. The scenario is unimaginable and inhuman. I have personally scene half naked children with a burnt eye being handed a cup and told to go ask for money. The pain I feel at the lose of life and the suffering one has to go through. What does a child has anything to do with the issue imposed on him. He can barely speak and they want him to go to cars with a steel cup and beg for money he doesn't even get to use.

Do you feel lucky ?

Nowadays I'm just thinking about 'luck' and how others perceive it. The diversity of general thought is just intriguing to me and so I found some views on 'luck'. Most of the people who believe in luck as being kind of an inherited trait or a trait which has a maxima and minima depending on time or surrounding are either gamblers or religious people . Some people don’t believe in the concept of luck and just accept all things as coincidences, which to my thought is a good way of thinking and accepting life. But I wonder how a person born in the slums perceives luck? I can understand that he would believe strongly in either luck or God for his misfortune. For them, just to have a decent answer of life would be one of those two, it is sad, but I guess it satisfies them.

I was writing a different post on making aware decisions and also not to long ago I was talking to a close friend of mine whose ideology of luck is just very satisfying to me. He defines luck as a good outcome of a unconscious decisions. This sentence defines certain ways of life, I feel. It is not possible to control all your unconscious decisions as you never know what may happen, but you have probability with you. I feel, me as well as the general public does things whose consequences we cant fully be aware of before it actually happens. When you work your job or do your periodic errands, it’s a conscious decision whose outcomes you are aware of, you are also aware of the outcomes if you fail to do those work. Life is as simple as that but you just need to think and analysis situations which need attention, this means you have to decide which things require your attention. The devil is in the details. So to explain this concept of unaware decision making I'll give a small personal example. Most people who travel international  would know about the harrowing process of immigration. Long queues and answering questions to officers with sad smirks on their faces. Especially at New Delhi airport, sometimes there is a queue comprising of passengers from 4 international flights simultaneously. So once when I travelled to Germany with my dad, on the flight back he had booked two aisle seats opposite  to each other, 2nd row behind the first class compartment. He did not put anything in the overhead compartment, just a briefcase under the seat. Before the plane landed, he told me to keep up with him in a tone which resembled the tone of a man telling me you're on your own. The plane landed and as soon as the seatbelt sign turned off, he vanished. I have not seen any man walk so fast, than my dad trying to get the first spot on the immigration line. Surprisingly it worked well for us. He got through on the 3rd number cause the first class people de-board first or there is no way they could have beat him. I came at, a fair guess would be near 23rd, but the best thing was that 3 flights landed with us and the immigration was packed behind us.

This just shows that in this particular case my dad is completely aware of his decision making, he's aware that he doesn't know if the queues are already going to be full. Also he knows that it's not under his control to make flights land, so being so fully aware of the situation he gets the best possible out come. Instead of majority of public who would, in the example above, probably quote,"  its just bad luck that 3 planes landed together, now we cant do anything but wait just for immigration". We should know what we are doing, know what we are eating, analysis the world we see around us not because it’s a way of life I'm promoting, but because in my experience smart, conscious and aware decisions bring good luck.           

This is special mention for a good friend of mine who believes in "luck", mystically. She took a deck of cards, shuffled it, split it in half and gave one half to me. We both would keep a card face up simultaneously and who ever got the higher card kept both the cards and the winner be the one with all the cards. It’s a very long game to finish but she did point out that I was getting a higher card more number of times than her and hence I am momentarily, mystically, more lucky. To which I argued that the cards are based on probability and over a thousand games the average outcome would be equal to result can derived by probability theory. She eventually told me its not possible to calculate such random probability and I argued you can. I tried, failed miserably. So here is a shout out to whoever is interested in doing some probability.   

Being Curious

We all in our own way are curious. Curiosity is a state of mind when you keep mentally looping question about a situation or concept which your mind craves to comprehend. It’s a good thing to be curious, its got us this far hasn't it. Being curious is a feeling we share even with our prehistoric ancestors. Its is a feeling we share with other animals as well and the people who have seen '2001 a space odyssey' ( if not then I urge you to ) would understand how similar is the behavior of man and ape when presented the same dilemma. Survival of the fittest prevailed in favor of homo sapiens not because the Neanderthals/Apes sat in a dingy corner of some cave, its because they not only explored but mastered a world full of curiosities.

There is an ultimate reason as to why homo sapiens is the only species that are commonly found in all continents, in fact we have even marked our presence outside these lands, in the oceans as well as on other planets too. It is the same reason which allows us to call ourselves as an intelligent species which is that we are curious. Everything humans have ever done is to fulfill their curiosity, the reward of that is being the masters of Earth. Its funny because now a days I see majority of the so called "masters of Earth, the most intelligent life form to our knowledge" tiring of the endless curiosity and choosing to blandly struggle to live. Sure there are over millions who still pursue wisdom and happiness, but compared to 7.2 billion that number is the minority side. Think would we even have discovered electricity if the ancient Greeks didn't bother being curious as to why fur and amber physically attract each other when rubbed together. Would we have any of the modern machinery if we didn't have the curious minds of all the master tinkerers and engineers from Da Vinci to Newton to Henry Ford to Steve Jobs. And these are the names just found in history books. Do you even realize how much medical researchers have achieved, they know the vast complexity of life forms. We can change the freaking heart of people and animals and that’s not the only organ we can replace. Realize the sense of achievements ! All this is achieved one way or another for gaining knowledge, fulfilling curiosity. No man has won a noble prize because his motive was money. Even the food you eat is because some prehistoric ancestor of ours was curious to taste cooked instead of raw food, the clothes you wear…. well I guess that’s because our ancestors got cold. But never the less we became curious in fashion and now we have such a comfortable and feasible clothes. The world is because we are fulfilling our curiosities.

But the arrogance and unreasonable pride  of the 21st century generation is deterring our interest in curiosity. Look what we have achieved throughout history owing to all the curious minds and imagine if such a small group of minds accomplished so much, what would we achieve if all the currently breathing 7.2 billion people had a thirst of fulfillment. We waste our lives trying to live another day, our priorities are unbalanced and we have stopped asking why. We think we are smart enough to google everything questioned, that makes it a crippled mind, a crippled mind like a crippled leg which needs crutches and canes to walk. Exercise your mind for the better, find your passion and let it engulf your life, who knows you might just make your mark in history. Be curious and be alive.