a common man ಸಂಜಯ

Opportunity like a good neighboring park has always there. But so many times we hardly use it by making time to go out for a good walk! Even inside or near offices there is a lot of walking space – so many times I’ve been negligient.

Off late we’ve managed to be quite regular. This morning after some rain it looked so heavenly that couldn’t help slowing down to take a video… so that any reader here can e-join us (but hopefully will be a start for an actual walk sooner or later! )

The sun occasionally peeping out of the clouds add a magic touch…
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When I first saw this video tweeted by @charityfocus, I wondered how sensible these children are. But then I had to remind myself from my own experience interacting with kids, that any child can be so, as long as they’re treated with respect.

This video is really the perfect living world example of the earlier story from Suresh Panje of the perfect heart!

Here the teacher says

There’s an expression I love: ‘Let people live in your heart’. There’s no limit on numbers. They tell the stories, and everyone shares their feelings. When people really listen… they live in your heart forever.

“In the award-winning documentary Children Full of Life, a fourth-grade class in a primary school in Kanazawa, northwest of Tokyo, learn lessons about compassion from their homeroom teacher, Toshiro Kanamori. He instructs each to write their true inner feelings in a letter, and read it aloud in front of the class. By sharing their lives, the children begin to realize the importance of caring for their classmates.”

This is a series… video #2 is about how he handles bullying…

some insights from this one…

‘good teachers connect theory with life’ (a japanese character looks like a mother taking care of her baby)

How he handles bullying… asks everyone to talk about it. After a while…

‘if you pick on someone, you’re not being a friend. Friends don’t pick on each other. That’s not what friends are. Think about your friends, there in your heart. Why would you pick on them? Lets get to the bottom of this.’

And later on after a discussion he says “Are you all trying to hide behind pretty words? You think you’re good boys and girls, don’t you? After all these things you’re saying, what’s missing? You’re blaming everyone but yourself! ‘I did something wrong’ who said that? Nobody! Too perfect for words! … You never wrote about this!”

In my career, I maintained a primarily technical role, with limited management experience, leading only small groups of people (though I’ve coordinated across much larger international groups). And in this role, I was definitely not the best or any kind of role model, but had a mixture of success as well as shortcomings.

With this basic background, I had found this book an excellent read and it had made a significant improvement to the way I did this role, so sharing it here.

Its a very simple book, approximately 50 pages or so with plenty of pages having just one sentence in them.

Its supposed to have sold some 10 million copies and is extremely popular (guess they say this on almost every book ) (There was also a follow up One Minute Parent that was nice as well). Not that we need to follow such books word to word, but worth reading as it has some good ideas.

Depending on your preference you could pick up a copy from a book store or even any footpath in Bangalore. Recently found that its available on the net as well in an online library:

http://www.nhecburma.org/online_library/PDF/Capacity/The_One_Minute_Manager.pdf

The following is from an online review…

The One Minute Manager is an easily read story which quickly shows you three
very practical management techniques. As the story unfolds, you will discover several
studies in medicine and the behavioral sciences which help you to understand why these
apparently simple methods work so well with so many people. By the book’s end you
will also know how to apply them to your own situation.
The book is brief, the language is simple, and best of all … it works!

I have maintained diary many times since young age. Few years back I made my diary public. But it still was only a diary – a journal – a collection of my ideas. Idea of ‘blogging’ came later where people write for others. So my site became viewed as a ‘blog’.

At some point in time I used to imagine its of value to others. I used to email links to all my friends and family “look, I wrote this/came across this – pls read it at leisure”. Over time I realised its of minimal/neglibile value to anyone, its just another ‘blog’. In the internet explosion, there are countless sites far more worth the time than this site.

Still, same intention is still there but its my journal written for my own memory and reference!
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Dear all, I’d marked full moon nights in my Google calendar, and this time just thought it would be not a bad idea to try out a group sitting in silence…

Its traditional to observe silence for someone who is departed, but why not do the same those who are alive! (Including oneself ) So let us observe silence for one hour this full moon night!

How you observe silence, sitting in some corner or staring at the moon, is up to you, but the idea is to just be with yourself – awake and at peace.

So much of energy we conserve during silence (which we’d have otherwise spent on watching TV, chatting, tossing around in bed trying to sleep, etc!) Lets use this energy to pray with all our heart for well being of every single child in the world, as if the child was one’s own!

Lets honor all the children of the world, and pray that they get food, shelter, medical care and good education, loving care and attention, and  in the midst of this complex world, they somehow find their way to peace and love!

There is a quote…

“As a mother would risk her own life
to protect her only baby child, exactly so
should one cultivate Universal Friendliness,
towards all sentient beings without exception!”

Core time would be 11 PM to 12 AM. But those who are up to it, can try a longer stretch of 10 PM to 1 AM. Well… atleast lets try to make it together during the core time!

Ideally we could all sit together in one physical location – but then there is this line from Jonathan Livingstone Seagull:

“If our friendship depends on things like space and time, then when we finally overcome space and time, we’ve destroyed our own brotherhood! But overcome space, and all we have left is Here. Overcome time, and all we have left is Now. And in the middle of Here and Now, don’t you think that we might see each other once or twice?”

So let us have try this out in spirit – in our own place in whatever time zone we are living in, we will be with others in the same time zone.

see also: why it might be helpful or atleast interesting, to keep in touch with the moon phases?

There is a children’s program I came across by chance while looking for something for my son. The “Word on the street” is “practice”. Happened to find the video online as well.

They define practice as “practice means you try something again and again to learn how to do it better“

Whatever we practice, its not a matter of just repeating something every day, course after course or day after day, but when we practice it with this attitude it helps to add more value.

This is from the venerable H2G2… This is excellent humor. And its applicable at a deeper level in many real contexts. You can recognize them, or sooner or later hopefully discover by yourself over time…

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Reposting an old quote sent by my friend Murali which had got buried amidst another old post and felt it deserved a space of its own…

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