Of climbing mountains, purpose of life and finding me

Actually, there is always this quest for knowing the purpose of this life.

IMO having a purpose gives you that vigour needed to wake up and do things better every day.

Till some point the purpose was not questioned as it is sort of the default mode living in this society that one goes through.

Of making money, building a house, marry, kids , foreign trips etc.

But after a point when these are fulfilled unless you are a Kamal Haasan or a AR Rahman who seem to have got that passion in whatever they do,

for normal middle class fellows who have sailed with the above as purpose in their head suddenly find that they have another 40+ years in existence.

What to do now? So far,  I never had this thought that I would ever be exhausted of the excitement brought in by life.

All of a sudden, I see a vast plain before my eyes , a huge desert with no end after climbing several mountains and hills.

How do I take this up ? Now I realize I am not what I thought I was.  I am not that fellow who was madly going after the above things.

I am not that proud employee of that MNC, I am not that owner of that posh mansion, I am not the lover who showered unconditional love on my wife or my kid and so on...

Well, you may be oblivious to these type of thinking and be blissful in continuing the way you are. No big worries. Life goes.

But what if you are the kind who feels that the mountain you were climbing is now well behind you and you see no mountains?

I believe this is were you have to start seeing some mountains on your own to climb. It can be photography, writing novels, becoming a musician, or building a product

and so on... It can be any type of mountain which earlier you could not climb because there were other mountains placed before you to climb by people near and dear.

So before and now the situation is same. You are climbing mountains. But this time, you decide the mountain to climb rather than others. Since you decide, you may

find a high enough one, a really tough one to climb and one that you climb with passion which you did not experience in all your previous climbs.

Realize one thing. The mountains were always imaginary. They were never there. Earlier you did not know. Now you know. You still do it , but with this knowing.

So you are no longer the person you were before. Qualitatively you are much different.

There will be a time, when climbing mountains or staying in plains will look the same. Then YOU disappear. You are no longer there.

Till that time, happy climbing!

Creativity - what is it?

How to be creative. I have gone through a long phase of doing things now imagining and creating a product that I can lay down some thoughts around this.


Before the 'how', the question of 'what'. What can be termed as creativity?

IMO, it should be something as a way of looking at a question, a problem and coming out with a fresh, new answer or solution to it.

The field of arts - music, painting, story, movie all require creativity , originality and the freshness in the way you express something. It is very easy to identify if a movie is a copycat of something else. Even if it is remade, there can be fine tunings done to a specific region, language or taste which shows creativity.

In technology, the first product that comes out in what can be a trend setter is a result of creative thinking. For example, iPhone even though a cliched example, is a creative vision of how a smart phone should be setting the trend for a generation of smart phones.

A Google glass or a driver-less car, even though the first in a series to come, is more technology centric and the former brings in a more augmented feature to your already existing smart phone of using eye movements to browse or trigger an App. Same with driver-less cars which are the next level or leap of thinking in terms of driving cars.

So, creativity is not just about a technology change that brings in a better comfort to the end user, rather it should bring in a sense of 'beauty' combined with 'utility' than mere 'utility'. Utilitarian enhancements cannot be termed as creative. It is just a enrichment of a existing thing.

Creativity has to be something fresh and new of even existing things, having a tilt towards beauty and what the eyes can see and admire than mere utility. This kind of rules out all things that you just get a utilitarian value. Thus the Google glass and driver-less cars do not fall into the bucket of creativity while a iPhone seem to be fitting the bill.

In software, some fantastic things with the user interface that helps you to use something differently can be termed creative. Though I have probably narrowed the definition of creativity a lot here, which many of you may not agree with, I feel a lot of software  like the OS and compilers that does the 'grunt' behind the scenes may not even appear for evaluation of being creative for a end user.

Creativity is not about the process. It is not about the how. It is always about the outcome. I can be creative in building a mobile app, but it is not about the way I built it, it is about the final outcome and how it has changed the way we look at the problem itself. If the outcome is fresh and new for a end user, then the work is a piece of art.

A very broad and more accepted meaning of creativity is about coming out with something that never existed before. I sort of align to this definition. This is the real creativity. Probably the invention of 'telephone' or 'theory of relativity' are all finest examples of creativity in science and technology.

That was not just utilitarian, it was a new fresh thinking about a problem and creating something out of nothing.

Thus I feel creativity is something that flips the way we are looking at things currently by miles enabling a totally new angle into a problem.

Interstellar - where east meets west

If i carried a watch from earth which you and me were referring to, travel @ speed of light, come back , i see your clock  has run faster (or your calendar has moved faster) and mine has moved slower....??

Does it mean, physically i came back unaltered  (young)...while you aged drastically..

Does it mean something should have happened to me while I was travelling @ speed of light from ageing..what was that? 

Is it like I shrunk into a photon myself (while at c) and when I eased up (slowed down) I kind of 'reverse entropy' into the person whom you saw leaving?

Is it like Black holes are places where our regular notion of time and space ceases to exist and we can see the arrow of time flowing in other direction , making you watch you growing up to get ready to travel to the black hole?

and on and on....

The movie interstellar just kindles all of these and more and you need to seriously go back to physics and Einstein

But if you hear our spiritual gurus, they do tell the same thing as , when you close your eyes and dissolve into a state of samadhi, time and space ceases to exist. If you read siddhars, they have the concept of siddhis (hanuman, krishna, bogar...) all had the ability to become light (in weight, a photon?) and travel at astronomical speeds crossing the universe , sort of be there everywhere....all of these sound like physics as well....

I somehow feel inside you is a singularity (sort of the space-time falls steeply into a infinite abyss) and when you feel it , drawn by it, you start feeling this entire universe within you :-)

Now do not respond to this if you are not serious :-)