The Bigger Picture

Has it ever occurred to you that what you believed, to the best of your knowledge, to be the correct picture eventually turned out to be very different? Yes, I am sure would have been your answer. I was reading the newspaper yesterday when I stumbled upon this picture of the elephant and the six blind men.
(While this article was about the National Pension Scheme and what the general investors thought about it, I took the opportunity to pen down some of my thoughts around this)
While each one describes what he felt about the elephant the complete picture turns out to be only partially correct. Slight extrapolation of the story here, would it be possible to imagine how different their answer would have been if they could speak within themselves sharing their experiences (remember they were only blind). The answer would have been different if only they were able to accept the bigger picture than what they personally experienced. That is what my blog is about today.

I am sure some of us would have heard this following joke.

There was an old couple happily married. Every time the husband would ask his wife what was for dinner, his wife wouldn't reply. The husband realised that his wife had developed some hearing problem and as a good husband decided to take her to the doctor. When the doctor examined the wife, he found her hearing powers in good condition. It was the husband who required the treatment...!


Though we might have had a good laugh at this joke but there's a bigger message in it. Is it that the problem is with someone else only? Are we willing to even explore the possibility of something else? At times we feel we know everything until something shocking hits us on the face.

Ever felt that in a relationship that the other person never understood you or listened to you? I am sure you would have understood what I am hinting at.

I am not saying that all of us might be feeling the same way and if we tried just enough, we would get the clues from our own surroundings to figure it out before it blows out of proportion. What we make out of this blog depends entirely on us.

I leave you all with one of the best forwarded messages (thanks to Aniket Acharekar from Mumbai) I came across so far..

A group of highly educated students visited their old university professor.
Conversation soon turned into complaints about stress in work and life.
Offering them coffee, Professor returned from kitchen with a pot of coffee and an assortment of cups- porcelain, glass, crystal, some plain looking, some expensive, some exquisite - telling them to help themselves to hot coffee. When all had a cup of coffee in hand,
The professor said: "If U noticed, all the nice looking expensive cups were taken up, leaving behind the plain ones. While it's but normal for U to want only the best, that's also the source of Ur stress. What U really wanted was coffee, not the cup, But U still went for the best cups nd were eyeing each other's cups!"

If life is coffee, Then jobs, money and status in society are the cups. They are just tools to hold and contain Life.
Don't let the cups drive U..

Enjoy the coffee...!

Hope you enjoyed reading this one and would love you to know your views / comments on this one. Also do check out my earlier blog Big Picture I wrote in Dec2010. 

What is a Problem?

"What is darkness? Darkness does not exist but is really the absence of light…"

A powerful thought, I was reminded of during this week's power grid failures. That too not just once, but twice.

However, the first time it happened on a Monday morning before most of us were awake and the second time in the afternoon when the sun was still few hours before setting out the nadir. So actually we were not reeling quite so literally in the darkness. The very thought of it happening in the evening gives me shivers.

For a moment everyone felt so hapless for this impacted not just a part of the city but more than 50% population of the country. I read that this was probably the worst outage in the world impacting almost 10% of the world population. Everything is so dependent on electricity. This fact was evident when railways, Metro, traffic lights, offices went off. Airports were least affected as they were managed by their back-up.

When asked about this situation, our minister said that we need to appreciate that this was restored in the shortest possible time. He quoted that when a similar thing happened in the U.S they took just about 4 DAYS to restore the situation.

Can you imagine how life would be without electricity? Well to sum it up in one word, it would be DIFFICULT…not that we would not be able to survive it.

Well, to set the right perspective of this blog, this is not about the Power Grid Collapse. This is more to do with the lessons it reminded me during that period.

Lessons learnt

1)       Don’t take anything for granted.
2)    Respect it and use it judiciously.

3)       Don’t depend on one thing only and ensure that you have all possible back-up plans.

4)       Remember that things could and would go wrong when you least expect them too.

I would like to share one of the many jokes that did rounds while we were enduring the outage.

Power Grid Failure:  India is the first country to invent a time-machine. It was tested successfully for 2 days. The North Indians were the privileged ones to travel twice to "Dark Ages" and back.

I leave you all with the second part of the opening quote….Problem is nothing but  just the absence of a Solution.

Do remember to leave your thoughts / comments on this one on my blog.