Focusing on Solutions

We had a class in oneness university a year back and there was a session on the questions that arise in the mind. Had learnt that quality of questions that arise in the mind affects the quality of life. Contemplating and working on it over a year now, found that some common questions that arise in the mind can be categorized to,

+ Why,  When,  What, How etc.

These questions can lead to focusing on either the problem or solution. Solutions are always Futuristic.

When the questions of Why, What, When etc. comes up  in the mind with a past context,  ‘Why’ more often lead to regret.’Why’ for a happy event that happened in the past does not arise. ‘When’ many a times produced anxiety. ‘What’ though inquisitive was not so powerful.

The question ‘How‘ was so powerful that it changed the whole outlook of thinking. When ‘How’ was placed in the mind, it started making the mind more innovative. The mind was no longer worrying about any problem, but started to produce different solutions. The mind moves into finding out ways to achieve something.  It always gives a good feeling while contributing something very useful to someone.

• How do I achieve something ?
• How can I make something exceptional ?
• How did you do it ?

Learnt that ‘why’ can define a purpose behind  a solution that can draw people to use our products, from a ted talk, “How great Leaders inspire Action“.

 

Centeredness is something I had learnt in recent class. For arriving at a great solution, it is important to ignore our perspectives on something and hear the views from others shoes. This is to be ‘other-centered‘, rather than being ‘self-centered’. I realised this is ‘Art of Listening’.

This is very useful in all cases. Some cases where this has to be present for sure are,

+ While negotiating with someone
+ While dealing with customers/stake holders

One of the highly respected friends who serves in a leadership role in a big company said to me,  ‘I Focus only on Future’. This was implicitly conveying a message that he was always focusing on solutions. While discussing with a senior product manager, he was speaking on the importance of listening from customers view. This implicitly conveyed about ‘other-centeredness’.

Combining the two aspects ‘Asking How’ and ‘Being Other-Centered’ takes the mind to another level which is ‘Focusing on Solutions‘ 🙂

 

 

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Polyglot – Learn, Share, Collaborate – Hackfest 2016!!

Polyglot project aims to provide the summary of various choices available for each of the components while developing a web application. It details their strengths so that one can easily choose the right component to build a great solution.

I had gone through several blogs, stack-overflow/quora answers to choose a proper database, programming language, web-framework etc. to build a solution in the past. Most of them were out-dated and I had to keep track of the date for each of the posts.

So for this HACKFEST 2016, wondered how would it be if we could share the learning through a wiki and collaboratively maintain an up-to-date content. I had a hunch that this might be a problem that many would have faced and would be good to solve.

It starts with Questions/Concerns one should keep in mind before starting a project. It goes deep enough, providing a Syntax Cheat Sheet so that one can use it to directly shift the mind from one language to another by going through a single page. It also lists various WebFrameWorks and several Programming Language choices. Am a big fan of Rails and GoLang. The idea is a work in progress..

The wiki is available on github!! It would be nice to collaborate and make it better 🙂

 

C to C++ tour

I was requested during the beginning of this year to give a crash course on C++ for the developers with C background in our company. A while back, sankar gave an introduction to go language using http://tour.golang.org/ . Fascinated by the interface of gotour, I wanted to give the C to C++ tour using a similar interface but needed it in a quick time.

I discussed it with sankar and he came up with https://github.com/psankar/kuvalai/. He masters in pulling people to learning something new 😉 So I quickly learnt a bit of Go and contributed to kuvalai. It was taking a while to get it done, so we discussed and decided to hack up the go-tour. Made it to work with c++!!

Readme.txt – explains howto apply the go tour patches and get it running.

All the programs and the article is now available at https://github.com/chenthillrulz/cpp-tour 🙂 I wanted to put this up on webserver so that it can benefit others, esp. beginners to c++ and students. But since I don’t have any webspace at the moment, thats going to take time 😉

It was really challenging to construct simple, connected, practical examples for demonstrating the features. I wanted this tour to go simply like a movie. I did not know that I would enjoy so much doing this stuff 🙂 Got some happy, encouraging feedback from my peers after the training sessions. Perhaps I should thank my manager, Pradeep for persuading me to do this stuff. And my team, some of whom are still pushing me for the final session!!

Have conducted four sessions and the last one would cover advanced concepts such as traits, functors, template specialization, c++-11 features etc. The last session is taking time as I dont have practical experience on using traits, but still want to get some practical examples 🙂  Working on it!!

The descriptions in the doc. many require some polishing. It has about 42 sections at this point. And as always patches are welcome!!!

writing a blog after quite some time, refreshing 🙂

Words of silence

When Buddha got enlightened on that full moon day in the month of May, he maintained silence for a whole week. All the angels in the heaven got frightened. They knew that it was only once in a millennium that someone blossoms like Buddha. They requested him to say something. He said, “Those who know, know even without my saying it and those who do not know will not know even by my saying it.”

Buddha said, “Words cannot convey it. As many scriptures in the past have revealed, truth begins where words end.”

The angels said, “What you say is right. But consider those who are in between, who are neither fully enlightened nor totally ignorant. For them, a few words will give a push. For their sake, you speak and every word of yours will create silence.”

The purpose of words is to create silence. If words create more noise, they have not reached their goal.

— from Buddha, Manifestation of Silence
[courtesy – a facebook post from Sri RaviShankar]

What is forgiving someone – wonderfully articulated

Forgiveness can never be complete. When you say, “I forgive”, you think the other person is a culprit. However you do it, a little bit still remains. It’s not complete. But when you see the big picture that the culprit is also a victim, a victim of his/her own mind, ignorance or unawareness, compassion arises from within you. – Sri Sri Ravi Shankar

A deeper understanding of work and business

This is a little story about how Lord helped me understand why I should be working. There was a period while my relationship with my manager was bad. So the work which I did was not appreciated. It was also evident that I would neither get a good hike nor a good bonus at the end of the year. All my friends including some friends who are in the higher managerial ladder advised me to either switch teams or switch company. With these things rolling in the mind, work at office seemed dull. Every morning as I begin to start to office, above reasoning will go on in the mind and my complete energy would be lost with no answer. SriMurthy Bhagvan makes decisions for me. He, on the contrary to others said me not to change the team. Without knowing why I should work, I could not get on.

One fine morning, I sat before SriMurthy Bhagvan and said that am out of answers. I had thought enough and unable to find an answer why I should be working. It was already a dull period of a week. While I sat blank without answers, suddenly a realization flashed. It said that, I working or business is nothing but people helping each other. Every single person is blessed by the Lord with some skill (through college, courses, individual learning etc.) which may look to be due to his decision or it just happened due to coincidences. But however one might have got this skill, it has come to him beyond his free-will. Businesses, money etc. have been in place to make sure people help each other.
Once this had hit the mind, the work just started to go on. Learning was automatic since, if I do have to help people in a better manner, I better be skilled. While helping people, the smallest thanks for anything I did gave a lot of happiness. While still the relationship with my manager was bad, Bhagvan helped me correct that too explaining me the truth – https://chenthill.wordpress.com/2011/10/20/setting-right-relationships/ . As and when the realization hits, the energy just boosts up. Its all about making people happy by helping each other.

The work at office and the helping people outside remains the same now. The salary, bonus and hike are nothing but a Token of Thanks. Should there be a comparison with each other with Token of thanks, I guess no. If I realize I need a better Token of thanks, I can always ask for it and make decisions without hurting any relationship, for its all about helping people 🙂

Thanks to Lakshmi Prabhaji who urged me to write this down. Hope this might help some people 🙂

Setting right relationships

Without getting into the specfics, am going to share some happenings over the recent past. Don’t ever consider me as an expert or a philosopher. But just a young guy experimenting with what Sri Sri Bhagavan, the Founder of Oneness university taught me. And don’t ever create a image about me by this. If you do not want to read the story, skip to summary. Alright lets get on..

While at work I had been having some issues which prolonged for a long time (3+ years) and finally led me to think strongly about resigning. Last week, due to the love of my mother and SriMurthy Bhagvan who asked me to meet Sri Sri Bhagvan at Oneness, I went there. The conversation lasted for around half an hour. While I said, am going to resign, He said not to resign and asked to set right the relationship on the contrary. He explained in a great deal about the role relationship plays  which was beyond imagination and pit-falls in J Krishnamurthy’s teachings.

I did understand it theoretically but not very much practically. So while coming over in the bus, there were a lot of conversations going on. The thoughts which flowed were trying to find a way to set right the relationship with my boss. There were a lot of justifications and blames. The fluctuations in mental stands were evident and i could not find a way with it. Finding reasons for setting relationship is a play of the mind, which is a result of thinking. Suddenly in the morning, it became crystal clear.

The way was just to set the intent and be in the present. The significant part is not to think or make any effort. Thinking is a vicious circle. It would just justify itself and keep looking right always (at-least for me 😉 ). Being in the present without an intent also does not produce result, i can say this with my experience in cricket.

So intent+awareness=result is the key. Setting the relationship inside oneself leads to joy which is a clear symptom. The outward one will automatically get fixed with intent+awareness.

What Sri Sri Bhagvan explained me was, If the relationship inside is alright, rest of the part, such as job, new house, vehicle, anything etc. will come as a by-product automatically. The relationship got set-right once I came to office and I knew it was fixed even while I started my journey back from oneness university.

He asked me to take one relationship (a close one, eg: mother) and work on all aspects completely. I should remain on the findings, without trying to fix it. Started on it, lets see how it goes 😉

Am certainly very happy to be a part of oneness university 🙂

To summrize:

Intent + awareness = result.

There should not be any reason for enjoying a good relationship with people. For reasons are always bound to change.