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The Comfortable Numbness of Gluttony

It was just a day, filled with predictable banal but necessary activities that apparently Ruben wondered he must do. He just didn’t know why. If he thought about it, he knows he will peer into a sewer that will just pull him in deeper into the smelly depths of - he didn’t know what he didn’t reach the end of that thought. He just knew he was hungry.

In the next street, maybe a building apart, Sera was leaving to go to work, she was wearing a black dress she wore for a date last night, which she now has to wear to work as well - “no time to change’’, she thought. She thought about how she felt nothing, not the one and at this rate probably no one. But she knew she was starving.

She walks aimlessly looking for that something she is craving for. Ruben is not far behind, he doesn’t feel like going to his regular place - something different. Something more. Something was the optimal word.

A stay dog joined them and ran ahead like he knew the direction of something that would satiate them. Like he was the one, the messiah leading them to somewhere - it will make sense. Sera and Ruben both noticed awkwardly that they were following the dog.

They didn’t acknowledge each other - cause that would mean asking the question what were they doing following the dog?

Then there it was a giant melted lollipop, sizzling like a brownie, almost lava like. Wait! What? They started walking towards it, like it beckoned them with each sizzling hot burst.

A voice that seems to be buried deep within them, now awakened from his stupor, scared that its host is walking into something that would most definitely burn their insides to a crisp. Noooo can do! Must survive!

They stopped together, hesitating, should I? I feel, I actually feel something, it's probably the heat but that’s something. Together they said, “Something”. They looked behind and they saw that others felt it as well, it must be right. Then a fly came in out of nowhere and sat on it… wriggled and then froze like in a trance. “It must be something they thought.’’

Without thinking, they were used to it by now, they lunged into it…greedily... both the candy and they melting into each other.

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Common ground. From introvertdoodles.com

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Messiah: Holy Hary Pottre

In the not so distant, post-apocalyptic future, a place devoid of hope and faith, on the shores of flowing acid, a hapless man finds a dusty paperback version of Hary Pottre Series, neatly tied up, with a worn-out shoe string.

It’s amazing, he could remember to read, page after page of adventures of a boy destined to be the savior of a dark world. 

He thought to himself, “if Hary came to save Wogwarts, surely, he will rise again to save us... the planet...”

Then it suddenly hit him, a rather large rock. He woke up with a concussion and an epiphany - “We must call upon Hary Pottre, the Holy Of Holies, to save us... with his divine power.”

“Why didn’t anyone else think of this?” 

And so enough, with time, he gathered a large following of similarly afflicted, they called themselves ‘HP’s’, all armed with brooms, one shinier than the next.

They built a station Holy Wall, lined up in rows in front of it, each row one after the other - closed their eyes and ran straight into it.

Then something unexpected happened.  

It hurt.

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Doesn’t everything in life feel like this...? You have to try to know, and sometimes what you find isn’t what you were expecting.

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What it feels like trying to pass for Functioning Adult when you can feel a breakdown coming on

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Maybe, it has always been this way. We don’t remember - because no one wanted to. We had to believe that things were getting better so here we are... surrounded by power hungry misanthropes who persuade us with words that come from our minds ... they know what we need and that’s their ticket. 

What if, we all took responsibility for our mess and believe that everything else would just fall into place?

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Raccoon Trouble

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In the beginning, the Universe was created. This made a lot of people angry and it was widely regarded as a bad move

Douglas Adams

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What if we STOP?

Every day, I see so much suffering around me. The story is the same I want to help. Small things just don’t seem enough!  

What if that’s our purpose? 

What if, we all stop our jobs that promote this meaningless material momentum that we stuck in - Slog>Buy>Slog. 

Giving us that momentary relief, when you forget the question “What are we doing here?”

This can’t be it. 

What if we all work towards one goal? Even one day from our daily routine towards causes that help each other, not the government, not some superficial CSR activity, but just cause you want to and because you finally have the time and means to. 

What if organizations - on one day together - all employees could work on a solution that could benefit us all. (not just one day in a year) All of us with singular direction, nothing to gain but many to lose. 

Where to start!? Where to stop!? 

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What if we STOP?

Every day, I see so much suffering around me. The story is the same I want to help. Small things just don’t seem enough!  

What if that’s our purpose? 

What if, we all stop our jobs that promote this meaningless material momentum that we stuck in - Slog>Buy>Slog. 

Giving us that momentary relief, when you forget the question "What are we doing here?"

This can't be it. 

What if we all work towards one goal? Even one day from our daily routine towards causes that help each other, not the government, not some superficial CSR activity, but just cause you want to and because you finally have the time and means to. 

What if organizations - on one day together - all employees could work on a solution that could benefit us all. (not just one day in a year) All of us with singular direction, nothing to gain but many to lose. 

Where to start!? Where to stop!? 

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Memo from Human Resources: Effective immediately, we will begin to treat humans as more than resources.

The memo that HR will never send. (via litglob)

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Man: "what m u doing here Universe? Universe: ↓↓ #Delusion

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The Offeeess - Episode 1 “The Clueless Brief”

Lots of people keep saying, “If you do what you love, then it won’t feel like work”. What if you do love what you want to do, what you are supposed to do, but the offeeess has a life of its own - it won’t allow you to.

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Science Of Sadness And Joy: 'Inside Out' Gets Childhood Emotions Right (NPR)

Hollywood's version of science often asks us to believe that dinosaurs can be cloned from ancient DNA (they can't), or that the next ice age could develop in just a few days (it couldn't).

But Pixar's film Inside Out is an animated fantasy that remains remarkably true to what scientists have learned about the mind, emotion and memory.

The film is about an 11-year-old girl named Riley who moves from her happy home in Minnesota to the West Coast, where she has no friends and pizza is made with broccoli. Much of the film is spent inside Riley's mind, which features a control center manned by five personified emotions: Joy, Sadness, Fear, Anger and Disgust.

"I think they really nailed it," says Dacher Keltner, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley who worked as a consultant to the filmmakers.

The movie does a really good job of portraying what it's like to be 11, Keltner says. "It zeroes in on one of the most poignant times in an individual's life, which is the transition to the preteen and early teen years, where kids — and, I think, in particular girls — start to really powerfully feel the loss of childhood," he says.

As the filmmakers were working, they would fire off emails to Keltner and to Paul Ekman, a pioneer in the study of emotions. The process helped create a movie that's true to the underlying science when it shows things like how emotions tend to color Riley's perception of the world.

"When you are in a fearful state, everything is imbued with threat and uncertainty and peril," Keltner says. And when Riley is sad, he says, even her happy memories take on a bluish hue.

The filmmakers get a lot of other scientific details right. Inside Riley's head, you see memories get locked in during sleep, experiences transformed into abstractions, and guards protecting the subconscious.

There are a few departures from the scientific norm. Long-term memories are portrayed as immutable snow globes, though scientists know these memories actually tend to change over time. And Riley gets five basic emotions instead of the six often described in textbooks. ("Surprise," apparently, didn't make the cut.)

Also disgust is present in a pretty mild form — the reaction a child has to eating broccoli. The film plays down a more powerful version of disgust, "like if you suddenly eat a piece of food and it has a worm in it, or it's rotting, Keltner says.

One of the film's high points, though, is its depiction of sadness, Keltner says. In many books and movies for kids, he says, sadness is dismissed as a negative emotion with no important role.

In Inside Out, star-shaped Joy gets more screen time. But when the emotions are in danger of getting lost in the endless corridors of long-term memory, it is Sadness, downcast and shaped like a blue teardrop, who emerges as an unlikely heroine.

For kids, Keltner says, that makes "a nice statement about how important sadness is to our understanding of who we are."

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Question Everything

Book Review & Take away. Sita: An illustrated retelling of the Ramayana by Devdutt Pattanaik

Same Soup

Consider the monotonous & cyclic life with little room for unpredictability. Every birth unravels a planned, & phased social existence - age, gender, social status determines where you will go, how you behave, & sometimes how far you will get (with a few notable exceptions). The right age to marry, the right gender to marry, or what you marry into, which god to pray to - what has changed? What can we freely choose without prejudice? Without judgement?

Society like us hates questions it doesn't know the answers to, it instead prefers the "it has always been this way" approach that states, since no one has questioned it before, you shouldn't either? It has nothing to do with logic, but everything to do with "fear" both real and imagined. The people benefiting from the existing system wouldn't want anything changed, even one domino falling could lead to a tide that destroys "status quo".

Not about what Sita thinks 

This book is about questions, about free will, about individual thought not policed by society - freedoms denied today as it was then.

But don't let the title fool you as it did me, it had little to do with Sita - she was portrayed as submissive as she is in all the versions of Ramayana's that you have probably read or seen. The book insists that she didn't feel she was wronged and understood the decision Ram took. It felt as though every time you'd encounter Ram's questionable decision or behavior what would follow is the justification for the same.

         Interesting Takeaways

The book features snippets of all the different versions of Ramayana from across Asia and information about folklore is commendable. Perhaps the author wants to us to arrive at the fact that it is simply another allegory – the moral of which we have yet to confront.

My favorite chapter is Upanishad - quoting Surya "Fear of death is what makes animals run towards pastures & pray. At the same time, yearning for life makes animals hide and run from predators. But human fear is unique: fuelled by imagination it seeks value & meaning. 'Do I matter? What makes me matter?' " 

And finally Devdutt's comments:

In a way Ramayana warns us about the dangers of excessive reliance on rules. It reveals the personality of a man who values r

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