Life and Spirituality

A Lakeside road in Nainital M y childhood was spent in the beautiful Himalayan Town of Nainital. Aside from its bewitching beauty, there was something else in the town that was even more valuable. The lives of most people were filled with simplicity and goodness and that added to highly stress free and happy atmosphere. It seems that goodness and beauty are frequently two sides of the same coin. Unfortunately this town has not remained so with time and commercialization of the modern age. In later years, I have lived in many parts of the world for education, work and living but never found the same level of goodness prevailing. An increase of greed, lust, anger, jealousy, selfishness vitiates the atmosphere of any town or village and destroys this sense of peace and happiness. When a mind is obsessed with a desire arising out of greed, anger, lust, jealousy, pride etc it has obviously no space or capacity to enjoy the many joyous wonders life has to offer without aski...

There are two older posts  ( here and here ) on coconut in this blog, on the tree and on its health benefits. A great recipe called Mother’s Bounty has also been described. However without mentioning the contribution of coconut to human beauty the information would be incomplete. Coconut oil is great for adding beauty to human skin and hair. It appears to restore damages to both rather quickly. It tends to solidify in winter but if one takes a spoonful and rubs it in the palms of one’s hands it melts immediately. The best way to use it for hair is to rub it into the hair and scalp about half an hour before a bath and then wash it off during a bath with a mild soap or shampoo. It will add health to the hair and act as a natural hair conditioner. It may be left on the hair all day too but then a greasy look is not at all fashionable. In India women and men in the province of Kerala use it regularly on hair and the people of this province have the thickest and healt...

Linking Bosses Pay to the Lowest wage The Swiss 1:12 Initiative The Internet has made propagation and access of information widely available. Just about anyone in the world can post his her ideas and once posted they become available to just about everyone, anywhere in the world with a few clicks of the mouse. One does not have to search for it in a library as was necessary a few decades ago. Although many thoughts may be of little relevance as thoughts often tend to be, some have the potential to cause significant and valuable changes in the way humans live, love and work. This blog has been publishing articles on health, environment, life style, economy, politics and spirituality for the last several years and some of them have made a difference to our world, hopefully for the better. An article (now deleted) urging a referendum in the Falkland Islands lead precisely to that. An article on inflation in this blog provided a key to how the Japanese could leverage def...

Over the past couple of centuries or so there has been much poverty in large parts of India. There has been some poverty reduction recently but it still continues in the rural hinterland. One effect of poverty is near or total illiteracy, another is poor nutrition. The Lord has been kind in seeding our planet with much grass and this is the direct or indirect source of food for many animals and humans that live on the planet. Sugar, Wheat, Rice, Corn etc. all come from grass. Because of its abundance wheat is also one of the cheapest sources of food. Therefore the diet of poor rural persons around my area primarily consists of unleavened bread. When such persons come into the city they make good money nowadays, but human habits persist and they tend to continue with the same sort of diet they ate in their villages. This is where I have to intervene and explain to such persons  the importance of proper nutrition along with some nutrition facts. If one were to try and t...

Different species of plants and animals have evolved for millions of years on the planet providing mutual sustenance and life to each other. The very waste air we breathe out is fresh air for plants and the oxygen plants breathe out as waste is our breath of life. Plants provide our food too. Such food that comes from life, consumed in its raw form or with natural processing such as drying, fermenting, pickling and cooking may be regarded as natural food. With advancement of science, over the past few centuries humans have also learned to produce synthetic food and food additives. Such synthetic foods do not occur in nature but may be produced through a combination of elements or by modifying natural foods through chemical or other extreme processes not common in nature. Basic wisdom would indicate that foods that have been consumed for hundreds and thousands of years are far more likely to be safer and beneficial for life rather than synthetic foods that may have harmful...

A Photo from the Backyard of the author's home. A horror of modern life is the time, pollution, risks, expense, fatigue and stress caused by commuting to work everyday. This is a major factor leading to a reduced quality of life for very many humans in the modern world. In a much older satirical article in this blog - seven steps to unhappiness - this was mentioned as one of the seven contributing causes of unhappiness amongst modern humans. A day has twenty four hours. On the average if we take away eight hours for work and eight hours for sleeping one is left with eight hours for other things. Of this half or four hours on the average may go for essential work such as  meals, shopping, cleaning, bathing etc necessary to maintain life. Just four hours of free time is left. Imagine if two hours of this is lost in commuting, an hour each way, fifty percent of time in a day is lost that could have been spent on making life happier and better. Not just this, more time is ...

A Modern Uncle Tom R ecently a lot of hue and cry is being made about the fact that an American agency has been spying on a lot of communications around the world. Personally I do not think much of it because if there is nothing to hide in one's doings then one need not worry about being overheard, even all google and yahoo communications. There is often something unethical in a communication one wants to keep secret. Criminals and Terrorists definitely want to do so and it is here this American agency helps by disrupting such activities and making the world a safer and better place. However, it seems that this agency got carried away with its ability to snoop and even eavesdropped on friendly leaders such as Angela Merkel. True when such snooping is done American laws may not have been broken. It is always possible to carry out the dirty work on foreign soil to prevent that as it is possible to incarcerate fellow human beings forever on Guantanamo Bay.  But, wh...