The TED talk that introduced me to myself

 

This is based on the TED talk:

http://www.ted.com/talks/elizabeth_gilbert_on_genius.html

This really rang a bell some where. It made some thing in my life clear to me. It rarely happens at my age and at my stage. that's why I am thankful that it has happened and I would like other people to know about this.

750words.com, the site I use for writing my diary, rates this writing as self important. I am sure, it feels like that so take the things below with a pinch of salt. But I think these thoughts are important for some people I want to reach. Especially some of the dear friends who have been with me and really know me. I want to get them thinking in the same direction. I am just hoping they will find this at some point in time in some dusty unvisited corners of the web and then they will understand and learn. So I am daring to publish this .

Expressing myself has always been a passion to me. This was from a young age. I found myself to be an excellent performer when I found that the subject mattered to me. At this point, I would be so involved with the subject, that it will be one for me to think about myself OR think about the subject.
One such thing happened today which took me back in to the early days of stand up mimicry in my school. I just built on day to day stories I was exposed to. I used material which I found on my way to school or day to day materials in use in school or at home. I took the Belan, I took car lining and built wonderful stories out of these. Most of the stories were impromptu. In fact I failed when I tried to practice before. Those were the days I was blessed by the stage goddess. The audience danced at my fingertips. If I remember it correctly, I continued doing this for around three years. It could have been a speech competition, it could have been an one act play or any thing else to do with standing in front of people and doing my stuff.
One thing I know now that I was always considering the forth wall to be opaque. That means that I would never consider and work for the forth wall, which in performing arts jargon is the spectators. I would be in the bubble of my own in front of a crowd of multitudes. And that was my key to success.
Several important things happened in life. These included matriculation, cut throat competition in college, movement from a small town atmosphere to a fully cosmopolitan environment like my engineering college.
The fun of performing and the ability to succeed has been visiting me on and off. On my best day, I would be the best programmer, I would be the best thinker, I would be the best designer and the best student. Thankfully for me some times it happened at the right times. I was at my puzzle solving and thinking best when these two opportunities arose, in terms of my first job and in terms of my most important jobs till now, that is MS. I did so well in the projects I liked. I sucked royally in the project which did not please me. Apart from far basic, physical limitations: for example, my pronunciation in case of English theater and enunciation and lack of thoroughness in understanding the interplay of emotions and convey them properly in my body language in case of Marathi theater; it was always my intentions and involvement that decided the extent of success or failure.
So I notice that my pleasure and my expectations have a great part to play in my success. Any thing, however easy it may be, can fail if it is not pleasing to me OR I am not interested in doing these.
But the most important thing I notice is that  I always failed when I did things to impress or please some one. Even theater gave me less pleasure when it was done to impress some one. Only when I did it for myself I liked it a lot. It is something like the TED talk I am referring to. Some higher entity would stay in the abode of my body and soul for these moments.In all these cases, I now notice that I never played to the gallery. The best / the ideal came to inhabit me for some fleeting seconds when I was the most dissolved in satisfying myself with the pursuit.
Now that this thought is complete, I am relieved. I am not a software engineer who draws a huge salary. I am not even the best coder and designer. I am not the best actor that ever was there. I am not the best stand up comic.
This is what I am. I am just a conduit to all these higher forms. My day to day life is blessed with comfort because I allow all these entity to reside in me from time to time. I keep my body and my thoughts clean for these higher life forms, which may be mine, but are short lived. I should do every thing in my capabilities to ensure that my body,mind and thoughts are clean to receive these. I should always ensure that my body is flexible,supple and strong enough to achieve greatness when the greatness comes to it.
Otherwise I am just a middle class small town boy. That is the reality and I should live this reality as profoundly and clearly as possible. Any deviation from this reality will not achieve anything else but just drive the djinns away who perform through me.

Debates : Frequency hopping

I am involved in two different debates right now and life looks very good ;)

One at the office on a semi-social DL and another at the social yahoogroups of Marathi friends.

First debate was fully loaded with a lot of pitfalls. It was something related to Palestine and with a Muslim employee. I was very careful not to step on any toes as the admin would have ordered the debate off the air as soon as any distant reference to personal background would have been made.

The other side did not have any such limitations. He quickly piled on the propaganda. Before we could dispute that Jews have had a continuous presence in Israel since time immemorial, he had stepped his propaganda up to (a) this is the biggest conspiracy of the western nations (b) Palestine is the biggest problem which is one of the major root causes of the militancy everywhere in the world (c) We should look at what is driving the terrorists to terrorism. Look into the hearts and minds of them.

He never had any proofs to his claims. He could not prove that Jews did not have continuous presence in their holy land. He could not point to any Palestine kingdom there. He could not prove that this is the most essential thing to world peace. But his last statement, professing understanding of the terrorists was completely uncalled for. There was a straight and unbroken line of propaganda and misinformation here. And he put it forward in such a way that he did not need to prove any of it. And one of the closely guarded DLs in MS was used to spread the propaganda.

When I pointed this out and appealed to him not to do so. He claimed harassment based on his personal background. The administrator of the DL jumped in and made us shut up. But the damage was done and message was conveyed, without having to prove anything to anyone, a debate was won by proxy. By proving that I was racially motivated and all my points were non-sense.

Another debate was going on in parallel on the Marathi DL I mentioned before. People were debating the best way to inculcate traffic sense in Indians. One of the friends, a staunch BJP supporter, suddenly raised the issue of money being wasted in wrong schemes, the example he gave was of the Jaagore campaign.

He insinuated that because it did not raise the percentage to 90%, this was a complete failure and a huge wastage of money. since the time BJP was about to loose, he has been raising this point in a lot of unrelated debates. On being confronted, he came up with an excuse that "this was just a metaphor and not related to the main point".

So here are two main ways a very good opposition to a point can be ignored/worked around:

1. Increase the rhetoric to the next level. Jump to the next point without proving the earlier one. Let it blow full steam. If you belong to some disadvantageous group, make full use of it.

This can be called frequency hopping. Or Ghoda-Chatur debate :)

2. Make the point you want to debate in the context of another debate. Upon questioning, mentioned that it was just a metaphor. Change your frequency back to the old programming. If nobody opposes it, your point is made anyways.

A good debater should have good strategies in place to evade these tactics. If you have a very good and strong point.

If you yourselves are on a flimsy ground, you should be able to use these two tools very effectively :)