The Airline Industry and Lessons of Life....

I had moved from a job that got me to travel nationally to one that got me around the world.  In those years, my domestic travel was very little and the biggest casualty was my flying status with the domestic airline.  From a Gold Member, I was quickly downgraded to a Silver and then to the lowest membership level.  From all the check-in and lounge priveleges, it was suddenly, nothing.  An amazing transformation in the way the check-in counter staff of the airline looked at you when you checked in.  I watched a movie in which people went to any extent to keep their flying miles up to date - ironically, on a flight - and realised why.

I have been travelling by air for years now and the only thing I have seen happen with absolute regularity is that the size of seats has been decreasing i.e. becoming narrower.  I am sure some industrial engineer would have told them that they could stuff more seats in to a plane and hence make more profits.  I saw the worst of it on a flight to the US last month.  There was this slightly plump lady who was struggling to get in to her seat and as the flight was going full in the economy section, there was no place where two contiguous seats were empty.  Finally, the airline had to upgrade her to business class.  She struggled quite a bit before fitting in to that seat as well.

This made me think...why do I think so poorly of this industry when it is really keeping us honest!!!  We realise that our positions mean nothing when we retire.  We mistakenly identify ourselves with our positions only to realise that our own staff look straight through us when we retire or move on...by downgrading our status if we dont fly regularly, the airline industry is doing the same.  If we experience this few times, we will never get hit with retirement blues. 

Further, with all this belt-tightening (not the seat belts ofcourse!!!) and seats getting narrower, the airline industry is really forcing us to slim down.  Obesity is one of the biggest challenges that we face as a society today as it moves to become an epidemic.  Obesity, like many other problems, does not come alone..it comes with other ailments such as diabetes, back problems, etc.  This unwritten policy of "slim down or dont fly" from the airline industry has done us a huge favour. Call it Airline Social Responsibility!!!

Life has its ups and downs.  Only when we go through the troughs do we appreciate the peaks.  Troughs help us get level headed and keep our feet to the ground.  The airline industry is like these troughs.  We are well and truly grounded!!!

Attitudes and moods...

I was talking to this 9 year old girl, "Tell your friend to go away...she is really irritating me."  She replied, "My friend is not irritating you...you are getting irritated!!!"  The thunderbolt from this 9 year old hit me very hard.  For many years I have been trying not to react negatively to situations and I have succeeded in getting the better of situations many a time when I have stepped back and thought what to do next.

Most of the time our moods depend on our attitude and how we decide to react to a given situation.  Yet we blame our work conditions, our colleagues, our friends or the not so friendly ones, our families and everyone else on this earth for all stress that we have to put up with.

I read the story of a New York Cabbie who would just smile each time someone cut him off on the road.  When someone asked him as to how he could do that, he replied, "Someone is trying to dump junk on me.  It is now left to me to decide whether I am going to accept it or not.  Since I control whether to accept it or not, I have decided not to accept it."  We have heard of so many stories of violence because of road rage.  If only we could adopt the attitude of this New York Cabbie.

Another story that I have heard and think is worth sharing is about this donkey that fell in to a very deep pit.  He could not get out and started screaming.  The villagers could not tolerate the noise and when they saw this donkey in a very deep pit, they decided that the best course of action was to pour mud in to the pit and bury the donkey. So they started bringing in mud from close by and started filling the pit.  As the first few buckets of mud fell on the donkey's back, he started screaming at the villagers and how ungrateful they were for all the good work that he had done for them.  The mud started filling up and he realised that if he could jump on top of each bucket of mud poured down, he was moving up as the pit got filled.  Soon, the pit was filled up and the donkey was on top and he trotted away happily....deciding never to complain when he is stuck in a lousy situation but to figure out what to do next to get out of it.  They say that "attitude decides your altitude"...in this case, for the donkey, his attitude literally decided his altitude - from the bottom of a deep pit to the top of it!!!

Many a time when something goes wrong for us we think, "Why me?".  Instead, if we decide what to do next, life takes a different turn and, definitely, for the positive.  We can decide whether we want our lives to move positively or not.  Let us take time and decide to live a life with a positive attitude.

When mother earth hits back...

"Every action has an equal and opposite reaction", said Issac Newton and this is his 3rd law of motion.  In the 1800s we went down to 69 feet to get some oil.  Now, we dig thousands of feet in to our earth and below our ocean beds and we do this across the world.  By drilling for minerals and oil, by blasting the earth for metals, by cutting down mountains and trees in the name of development, we have set in motion a series of actions.  She has been receiving all this over the years and patiently putting up with our deeds that destroys her slowly and steadily.  Once in a way, she gets upset and decides to teach these stupid kids a lesson.

She was tired of all the drilling that had been happening all over Asia and in the Indian Ocean.  She lazily stretched her arms (I guess) and the shift in the tectonic plates (measured 9.1 on the Richter Scale) ripped through 30 kms of water from beneath the oceans and triggered of a tsunami that created waves of up to 30 metres, earthquakes that could be felt in Alaska and destroyed coastlines in 14 different countries.  The 2004 Tsunami killed over 240,000 people.  All done and over in few minutes!!!  Millions of dollars worth of property destroyed.  The death toll was 80 times the size of the attack on the World Trade Centre in New York on 11 September (please don't mistake me to being insensitive to loss of human lives in New York but was just explaining the scale).

We are the only species credited with the power to think...and, yet, our thoughts seem to be so self-centred.  We kill millions of undersea creatures by conducting nuclear tests, we do deep sea trawling and deep freeze fish that gets eaten after few days/weeks/months, we are probably the only species that kills for entertainment, we do not respect lives of other creatures that live on this earth but expect every other creature to respect our lives.  So, why is a human life more valuable than that of the poor fish that swims happily in the oceans? Have you heard of an animal that kills and stores its food for months before eating?  Have you heard of animals that kill for the sake of pleasure? 

We have now slowly started realising that if we live in harmony with this earth, she will give you much more than what you want.  We call this "sustainability".

Our insatiable need for energy is our biggest reason for digging up our world.  If we decide to invest these dollars towards harnessing the power of the Sun, the Wind, the Oceans, our energy sources will not only be enormous but also completely clean and green.  Instead, we spend millions digging up the earth for coal/oil, create coal based power stations to generate electricity.  We believe that we generate power cheaper with coal than these other natural sources like the sun.  However, if we count the cost of displacement of people as we do indiscriminate mining, the cost of air pollution that causes us to spend millions on treating ourselves for asthma and other lung/body disorders and the real cost of waste disposal, we will hopefully understand that this is really not sustainable and far too expensive.  If she gets angry and decides to stretch her arms once again, the cost we will have to pay will be just far too high.

Governments are battling with companies that mine away in the name of creating wealth but are actually causing maximum damage to our mother earth.  Governments want to charge a special tax on their profits and use that money to fund their schemes for re-settling people, restoring other parts of earth, etc. 

We are marauding mother earth in the name of wealth creation and I believe that the cost we will pay for this will be huge in terms of lives.  Years and years of our efforts will be paid back in minutes!!!

Mathematics and God

I was talking to children who take extra tuition classes and their teachers on why tuition classes were needed and which subjects children really wanted these extra classes.  Most children take tuition in mathematics.  When I was talking to the teachers and children as to why they took maths tuition, it was becoming increasingly clear that some children were frightened of maths. They scored low marks and they just did not want to go through exams without extra tuitions.  I was wondering why this was so with mathematics.  Someone told me that it was because mathematics was abstract and, therefore, difficult to understand. She also told me that Maria Montessori (the founder of the Montessori Method of education) had made it more tangible by making use of materials to make children understand mathematics.  The use of materials to explain maths made it fun for children and it removed the abstract nature of the subject and actually made it tangible - something children learnt by touching and feeling.

This got me thinking of the questions that gets asked by many - Why do you have idol worship in India? or Why do Indians give some kind of a form to God and use photographs or paintings to pray?

Our ancestors seem to have thought through this well.  They quickly realised that the concept of God was difficult to explain because we could not see or feel God.  We had different types of people - some who said that God exists (the theists); some who said that God does not exist (the atheists); and some (the realists) who said, "we do not say God does not exist but it would be great if he/she can help out once in a way".  People were struggling to relate to God and were also struggling to explain to their children on what/who God was.  I believe that is why a form would have been created by our ancestors.  Once form/s were created, then, there had to be stories around how such Gods came about.  That is why we find so many stories on each of the Gods in India.  Most importantly, every element of nature became a God and people could relate to them easily.  This way they also started respecting every aspect of nature and preserved nature - the birth of what I call as The Green God!!!

What this all means is that when something/someone is abstract like mathematics, we need more help in understanding.  God is as abstract.  And, Gurus are these tuition masters.  They help us get closer to the understanding of this abstract God.  The term "GuRu" means "One who removes darkness or ignorance".  Gu stands for darkness or ignorance and Ru means the person who removes this.

I read an interesting interpretation of the term guru by the great Yogi Jaggi Vasudev.  He said that a guru is one who shatters the disciples’ assumptions and beliefs and shows them the truth.  So, what is truth?  As abstract, if not more, than mathematics and God. Truth, like God, is abstract and there is more than one interpretation to it in any given circumstance.

Our teachers built some models and taught us mathematics and when we solved few problems and built models, we started figuring out what maths was.  So, how do we then understand what God is?  Much more complex and that is where the concept of faith comes in.  When the concept of God gets ingrained in to us from when we are young, we start trusting what we have been told since we were young.  This trust turns to faith when things that we pray for happen.  As Paulo Coelho says in his book, The Alchemist, "When you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it."

If we understand that God is nothing but one part of us and if we could use this God in each of us to remove the thoughts in us that is likely to cause harm to others, we will understand that God resides in each of us.  To better understand this and to remove the ignorance in us, we need these teachers - the Gurus.

The concept of faith and God is in each of our minds.  Faith in God creates meaning for us in our lives.  If it is all in our minds and helps us make out the meaning of our lives, I am not sure why we fight wars and kill/hurt each other in the name of God.  I have never seen anyone fight wars and kill/hurt people in the name of mathematics!!!