I decided long ago, never to walk in anyone’s shadows
If I fail, if I succeed
At least I live as I believe
No matter what they take from me
They can’t take away my dignity
Because the greatest love of all
Is happening to me
I found the greatest love of all
Inside of me
The greatest love of all
Is easy to achieve
Learning to love yourself
It is the greatest love of all

I believe the children are our future
Teach them well and let them lead the way
Show them all the beauty they possess inside
Give them a sense of pride to make it easier
Let the children’s laughter remind us how we used to be

Today google has a special image:

New Delhi: Some Google users in India might not have immediately established the connection between a tabla, sitar, shehnai and other Indian musical instruments and the Children’s Day doodle.

The doodle that Google India put on its home page to celebrate Children’s Day, the birthday of the first Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, was created by Varsha Gupta, a Class III student from Ryan International School, Greater Noida. Varsha was chosen as the winner of this year’s Doodle 4 Google competition organised by Google.

Google had announced that it would put the winning Doodle 4 Google entry on the Google India homepage on Children’s Day – 14th November 2011.

Explaining her doodle, Varsha writes, “India is a land of different cultures. In India, music plays a very important role. India has given many musical instruments to the world. Goddess Saraswati plays Veena, God Shiv plays Damaru. According to our mythological stories musical instruments used to be played on all the occasions. Even during war musical instruments were played. Lord Krishna’s flute is known in the whole world for its magical music. In modern days Mr. Zakir Hussain is world famous as Tabla Mastro and Pandit Shiv Kumar Sharma is known as a great Santoor player all over the world”.

~ IBN Live

I hear babies cryin’, I watch them grow
They’ll learn much more, than I’ll ever know
And I think to myself
What a wonderful world

On this children’s day I’d like to remind myself to take care about not to letting any of my ambitions or failed dreams affect any of the children in my life!

The best way of celebration would be to live Kahlil Gibran’s words…

And a woman who held a babe against her bosom said, “Speak to us of Children.”

And he said:

Your children are not your children.

They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.

They come through you but not from you,

And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts.

For they have their own thoughts.

You may house their bodies but not their souls,

For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.

You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.

For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.

The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.

Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness;

For even as he loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.

Some people may be interesting to get to know at first, but after a while once we get to know a bit more about the darker sides over time, a distance starts developing. Prejudices, grudges and so on keep on accumulating even among the best of friends. Most of this is we never even are aware about. Sometimes one small incident gives rise to a split in a relationship, and even though that incident in itself might be very trivial and of no major consequence. Romance is just one example, where the so called love-marriages end up becoming hate-divorces!

Human nature is such that we get a kick out of finding faults in others and criticizing others.

But with a little more patience and understanding, we can discover that there’s a much better kick in being non-judgemental. And in looking at the complete picture instead of just one or two narrow perspectives.

Gandhi had said something interesting:

“You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty.”

“drops” could even refer not just to people, but even different aspects of the same person – “A person is an ocean…”

“These are things we know that we know … there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.”
~ Donald Rumsfeld

Oprah Winfrey hosted a series of 10 live webinars with a very interesting teacher – a German born, resident of Canada, named Eckhart Tolle. Over 9 million copies of his books have been sold in United States of America. Below is just a very small excerpt.

We may even have an extremely fit body, but our mind may not match it in fitness (for example the case of Del Potro who threw his shoes into the crowd in frustration when he lost a match in the recent Wimbledon )

Here Eckhart speaks about our mind… the same basic science behind what you and me made up of. Not exactly covered in any school syllabus…

(emphasis mine)…
———-

This (“pain body”) accumulated pain is a negative energy field that occupies your body and mind. If you look on it as an invisible entity in its own right, you are getting quite close to the truth. It’s the emotional pain body. It has two modes of being: dormant and active.

The pain body wants to survive, just like every other entity in existence, and it can only survive if it gets you to unconsciously identify with it. It can then rise up, take you over, “become you,” and live through you. It needs to get its “food” through you. It will feed on any experience that resonates with its own kind of energy, anything that creates further pain in whatever form: anger, destructiveness, hatred, grief, emotional drama, violence, and even illness.

So the pain body, when it has taken you over, will create a situation in your life that reflects back its own energy frequency for it to feed on. Pain can only feed on pain. Pain cannot feed on joy. It finds it quite indigestible.

Once the pain body has taken you over, you want more pain. You become a victim or a perpetrator. You want to inflict pain, or you want to suffer pain, or both. There isn’t really much difference between the two. You are not conscious of this, of course, and will vehemently claim that you do not want pain. But look closely and you will that your thinking and behavior are designed to keep the pain going, for yourself and others.

http://www.detoxifynow.com/et_pain_body.html

Please note that the idea is to only reflect on one’s own life!

See if you can relate it to any of the following articles:

• Your resentment and misery is a source of entertainment for you!

• Misery makes you capable of attracting people’s attention!

From the news…

the accused was very calm at the hearing, appeared “unaffected” by the events, and was willing to explain his motives.

During the 90-minute shooting spree, he was listening to Lord of the Rings music Lux Aeterna, by Clint Mansell, at maximum volume to ‘suppress fear’. ~ news

See the ages of the victims…
“Johannes Buo, 14 Thought to be the youngest victim of the Utoya massacre.”

~ Identifying Breivik’s victims

While some are comfortable to declare Breivik as a deranged nutter … others have spent the past few days trying to decipher what drove Breivik to mass murder, in the hope that future terror attacks can be averted.

~ What drove Oslo bomber Anders Brievik to mass murder?

Religious divide, political agenda, conservative nature and all that may be reasons, but they’re merely at the surface.

Interesting and very relevant quote by Henry Thomas Buckle, which not too many of the conspiracy theorists may be comfortable confronting:

“Society prepares the crime, the criminal commits it”

The real question to each individual, to you and to me: how have we, as a human race, in spite of all our culture, technology and sophistication, produced such a personality amongst ourselves?

What have you done to make sure that your son is not the next killer?

They started playing this music (instrumental) at the pool. I’d just finished my swim, but jumped right back in just to listen to it. In the floodlit water, there were dancing circles of ripples… it had started drizzling. Holding on the edge of the pool, I floated on my back to stare at the dark sky, and the raindrops backlit by the floodlight kept falling like a stream of stars. It felt like an ethereal intergalactic journey, or maybe less poetically, one of the old Windows screen savers

Inspite of cold and cloudy weather, there had been a couple of driving forces to get back to swimming. New swimming trunks, who’s inauguration had been long overdue. And more importantly, Vijetha had forbidden me from going swimming in recent weeks, as I was pretty vulnerable to cold and cough, and especially since the rain would’ve polluted the water. Once in a way, a show of rebellion gives a good ego boost, and today was one of those days

It was too cold for a swim, but only for the first 0.01th of a second. Off late, I’ve learned that its best to just jump into the water instead of an incremental shivering ordeal. I was the only fellow in the pool and it was lovely.

After a while, a gentleman with two kids walked around the pool. The kids were pestering him to let them swim, and he kept insisting that nobody swims in this kind of weather. “But that uncle is swimming” they pointed to me. And he corrected himself “except that uncle, nobody swims…”. Well, at least some kids had given me a graduation from being a nobody

Around ten minutes later, another adult came with a kid in complete swimwear, with a cap that kept slipping off, goggles, and those life-jacket kind of straps all over his chest and arms. And this gentleman, fully clothed, was trying to coax this very reluctant little boy to get into the water. The boy (perhaps very wisely) absolutely refused. This gentleman pointed to me and said “look that uncle is swimming” and when I went nearer and waved a hi. The gentleman even volunteered me to take the boy around the pool in the water, but the boy adamantly declined, going only as far as putting his toe in the water and stepping back. I got out of the pool and said “count up to 3 and I’ll jump in”. He counted, and I jumped in with a big splash… and said “See, its so easy!” This had been an unfailing ice-breaker with my son, but didn’t work with this boy. “He doesn’t want to swim?” I asked. “No he’s afraid” was the adult’s reply. “Maybe it would help if you got into the pool to encourage him” tumbled out my unsolicited advice, after which I left them and continued with my own laps.

Reflecting on the ironical coincidence of these two encounters, I couldn’t help wondering about what a strange world we live in! Strange, but very cool…

Pogo daily strip from Earth Day, 1971. (wiki)

Its a tragic comedy that man would rather pursue breaking the sound barrier, than breaking the “somebody else” barrier.

As long as we have the “somebody else” barrier, terrorism will thrive.

Let us strive to put an end not to merely terror-ists, because they are one of us whether we like it or not, but to terror-ism.

Praying for recovery and strength of all our brethren in Mumbai.

See also:

Dear Terrorist – be my son or brother in your next life!

photo Copyright : NYtimes: People’s belongings are seen lying on the floor amongst streaked pools of blood at the shooting site in Chattrapati Shivaji Railway terminus in Mumbai on November 26, 2008. Young policeman is escorting a oldman out of blood smeared Platform. http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/images/photo/2008/11/26/1127-MUMBAI/25962244.JPG

Trust I seek and I find in you
Every day for us something new
Open mind for a different view
And nothing else matters

Construction workers’ kids just play on the street. Their play things are stones, sticks, old tyres, plastic bottles, and anything that can become a game!

Today a laborer was carrying a wooden pole horizontally. A small kid was just jumping with joy trying to hold on to the pole and swing from it. The adult had work to do, completely ignored the child and threw the log onto the pile, and went back to get the next one.

Oh… why can’t I just pick that sweet little fellow up and take him to a park myself!!

If we observe the reactions of the people, it gives us a clue about how our mind expects things to be in a certain way. It shows how this merely mechanical mental machinery comes to a halt, when it comes across the unexpected!

To be aware is to breathe life into the machinery.