Ashutosh Nilkanth's Blog

Another year has nearly come to an end. A new decade is set to begin. It’s amazing how time just whisks away.

What’s also amazing is how much we can learn about ourself in time just by paying a little more attention to that sound in our head. After a year of pondering and progress, mistakes and accomplishments, I felt that I should share what I really learnt this year:

1. Just do it, and more importantly, do it fucking now! Create stuff that excites you. Do stuff that scares you. And, if you think you haven’t found your passion…

2. …Procrastinate. It ain’t that bad, as long as you have a desire to start somewhere. Most people never follow their dreams because they are shit scared to open their eyes. Start small, grow organically. The key is to start. Start!

3. Never argue with a fool. They will drag you down to their level, and then beat you with experience. Same goes for pseudo-intellects and pedants.

4. Health is wealth. I quit smoking for good this year. Took up swimming instead (after a halt of around 10 years). I’m nearing a kilometer of a swim daily, but what’s significant is that mentally and physically I feel rejuvenated.

5. Have positive people around you. I don’t think that people are inherently “bad”, but some people have a tendency to measuredly create naive obstacles to restrain you from doing what they couldn’t or can’t do. If you fail in your repeated efforts to make such people understand the reality, then at-least don’t react negatively yourself. One persons oasis is another persons reality.

6. Wife is always right. But that doesn’t stop me from doing what I want anyway, or so says the wifey.

7. If you are wrong, say sorry. If you are right, shut up.

8. Never do anything for money alone. Do it for a reason you believe in. Do it for your passion. Relatively, don’t be a miser but be frugal.

9. If something doesn’t excite you (makes you say HELL YEAH), then don’t do it. Family commitments are exempted.

10. The most important things in life are not things. An African saying suggests: “If you want to walk quick, walk alone. But if you want to walk far, walk together.”

11. Let bygones be bygones. The only way is forward, so move on. If others want to constantly whine on past grievances, then let them do so. Eventually, they’ll see the bigger picture.

12. The most effective productivity technique that works for me is to just have one goal in a day. If you happen to complete it, then have a second smaller goal, but never have more than one goal a day to start with and more than two goals to end with.

13. Make the World a better place. Again, this doesn’t have to be overwhelming. Don’t expect to change the World over-night. Reduce wastage. Help begins at home and neighbourhood. Start small with Kiva and World Vision. Giving is a good criterion of a person’s mental health. Generous people are rarely mentally-ill.

14. Not everybody agrees to the same things as you do. One must always respect other opinions (so please excuse my rant if you don’t really relate to much of it). Great things happen when people share their opinions, discuss them rationally keeping the larger goal in mind, and reach a simple solution. An interesting thing I took from one of my company meetings was that to make things happen (in an organization or with-in a group of people in general) you need 100% commitment but only 80% agreement.

15. Thank people.

Kudos to some really smart people like Paul Graham, Derek Sivers and many TED speakers who inspired me to prune and spruce my thoughts, and put it all to action in my everyday life.

May the New Year 2010 bring you happiness and good health. Merry Christmas.

When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.

This beautiful Buddhist proverb is a true declaration of an open mind, a mind of a learner. Ever since I heard this proverb, I often wondered if it reflected more than what meets the eye.

A few years ago, I discussed with some friends about our quest for a “teacher”. In our individual lives, our hive-less minds, we need a teacher to guide us. We deliberated, we concurred. But we could never find the real answer. I always considered this proverb on Prima facie, until today, when I realized that I’ve been looking at it differently all along.

After reading Rands’ words on challenging oneself, the proverb made more sense:

You’re in a hurry

Maybe you’re waiting for validation. You’re waiting for that someone you respect to say, “Yes, you bright person, you should do that thing.” It was your parents when you were you kid and then it was your first boss, but now it simply needs to be you.

What you need to understand about these people that support you is that they’re not here to slow you down, they’re here to get the hell out of your way so you can brilliant. You need discover the moment when you actually know better than everyone around you — when you make the first move without asking permission.

We all long for a validation. A validation, that we are taking the right decision, the right choice, at the right time, in the right place, around the right people, and for the right cause (or effect). But we wait. We wait for the teacher to appear and validate our thought. We are spoon-fed to the teacher’s nod, or rejection.

But, the real teacher is within. The real student is within. What we seek is within. What must grow is within.

Validate yourself.

“You see this goblet?” asks Achaan Chaa, the Thai meditation master.

“For me this glass is already broken. I enjoy it; I drink out of it. It holds my water admirably, sometimes even reflecting the sun in beautiful patterns. If I should tap it, it has a lovely ring to it. But when I put this glass on the shelf and the wind knocks it over or my elbow brushes it off the table and it falls to the ground and shatters, I say, ‘Of course.’

When I understand that the glass is already broken, every moment with it is precious.”

Never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence.

The first person to live to be 1,000 years old is certainly alive today … whether they realize it or not, barring accidents and suicide, most people now 40 years or younger can expect to live for centuries.

Sounds overly optimistic? A Cambridge University geneticist, and many other researchers, think it’s possible.

Immortality is one of humanity’s oldest dreams. We seem to think of life as being on a conveyor belt. You get on, travel to the end, then get off. The phenomenon we refer to as aging, has been researched extensively — both medically and psychologically.

A few months ago, I watched a documentary titled ‘How To Live To 101 Without Trying‘. It explores the towns where people live the longest:

In Okinawa (Japan), the residents actually age more slowly than almost anyone else on earth.

It’s what they don’t eat that may be at the heart of their exceptionally long lives. The Okinawan’s most significant cultural tradition is known as hara hachi bu, which translated means eat until you’re only 80% full.

Scientists call it Caloric Restriction (CR), but don’t entirely understand why it works. They think it sends a signal to the body that there is going to be a impending famine, sending it into a protective, self-preservation mode.

Eating less, does have huge merits. Some may argue, but I feel that living to 100 years, or 1000 years for that matter, may be possible through natural mechanisms such as CR. Such a diet can put the body into survival mode, causing cells to be extremely efficient, boosting the process by which cells remove damage. Research has shown that these unrecycled or damaged cellular components can lead to age-related decline.

If at all, we do end up living to 1000 years, what will be the implications? One significant transformation I expect to see is how the risk of living itself will increase with a longer lifespan. Mundane tasks like driving a vehicle or swimming in the ocean will suddenly become dangerous.

Is aging really a disease, for which we need to find a cure? Is eating less the perfect cure? Will extending the human lifespan result in social betterment? I guess it’s questions like these, and their answers, which will unravel in the near future.

Past research has suggested that certain activities like gardening, cooking, philanthropy, yoga etc. are almost therapeutic in effect. These activities are said to “heal our soul.” For some people, its even judged rejuvenating. But, what about meditation? I’ve always been curious to know, how does praying, a spiritual meditation in essence, affect us?

Across many different cultures, meditation has been practised for centuries. Whether you are religious or not, whether you’ve had a spiritual experience or not; new research suggests that spiritual thoughts and prayers have an enormous effect on a person’s ability to heal (or stave off disease).

Last year, a distant relative (whom I respect a lot) was diagnosed with cancer. When I spoke to her at that time, I didn’t really know what to tell her, or how to even comfort her. But I was amazed by her resilience when she said to me, “my prayers to God will heal me.” I truely wondered, if prayer can have an effect on sculpting the brain?

“Neurotheologians” – researchers who are studying the brain science of spiritual experience — think so. They have found that the brains of those who pray or meditate, whether it’s Carmelite nuns or Buddhist monks, operate differently from normal brains. Dr. Andrew Newberg at the University of Pennsylvania has found that those who meditate have increased activity in the frontal lobe — the part of the brain involved in concentration — and decreased activity in the parietal lobe, which gives people a sense of orientation in time and space.

Freud declared God to be a delusion, but I’m not an atheist. Hence, if praying can help you heal and reshape your brain, what does science say about the divine? Is an encounter with God merely a chemical reaction?

At Johns Hopkins University, research suggests that chemicals that act on the serotonin system trigger mystical experiences that are life-altering. Serotonin is a chemical messenger that helps regulate mood and sleep. Now those neurologists — and others — are replicating studies from the 1960s in which patients with end-stage cancer were given LSD to see if they were convinced that life exists beyond death.

The research raises the question, is God a delusion created by brain chemistry, or is brain chemistry a necessary conduit for people to reach God?