Drive in Peace !

Following is another article that I have written for my office magazine. It is about driving in India without honking. It is long, so do read at your leisure.

DRIVE IN PEACE!!

Imagine driving on Indian Roads WITHOUT the noise of blaring horns! Wouldn’t it be like in the western countries …. Where traffic moves along smoothly and without the blaring horns?
Much has been said about the driving conditions in India. Some say that to drive in India requires 3 things- a good horn, good brakes and good luck! Anyone who has driven in Bangalore peak hours will agree with me that all of the three are tested to their limits every day as people go about their daily routine trying to get from point A to point B.

We Indians do not really need much of a reason to honk. We honk when –
· We are angry that the cabbie in front is not giving way.
· We are listening to music and want to keep the beat with the horn
· We are driving fast towards a cross road and don’t want to slow down at the junction. (Heaven help someone who can’t hear well!)
· We are frustrated that the traffic ahead hasn’t moved an inch for the last half hour.
· We have a monstrous truck horn on our 2-wheeler and we like to sneak up on cars and honk when we are very close! We love to see the reaction of the car driver. (Seriously, This happens !)
· We have seen someone across the road that we recognize but the other party has not noticed us.
· We need to inform other drivers that we exist.
· A group of pedestrians standing at the side of the road decide all of a sudden that they have to cross the road just before your vehicle is approaching.
· There is a ‘Please sound horn’ painted on the back of the truck in front. I mean, when the guy is requesting you……How can you not?

One day, while driving on my way to work, amidst a cacophony of horns, I started thinking the unthinkable – Is it at all possible to drive one full trip without using the horn? The peak hour traffic was as usual on a weekday morning and so it really was a challenge. Would it work? I took a deep breath and decided to try it out.

As the car in front moved forward creating a gap, a bunch of two-wheelers rushed in to fill the gap just as air rushes in to a vacuum. With steely determination, I stayed calm and did NOT honk. An Auto rickshaw, probably following Heisenberg’s principle of uncertainty (of being a wave as well as a particle at the same time), swung out in front of me from nowhere and with a loud engine to boot! And how did “yours truly” react? “Barked an abuse at him and slammed the horn and brakes together keeping the pressure on the horn longer than necessary”, did you say? Sorry to disappoint you. I suppressed years of driving instincts, and chose NOT to react! Meanwhile, a slow moving, fully loaded truck ahead of me, moved to right of the road in a bid to overtake other, slower moving traffic as it started up the flyover. A little way up the flyover, forces of gravity and inertia kicked in big time with the truck. Added to this was the antiquity of its engine and we became a big group of slow moving traffic. Imagine driving a new generation car designed to cruise smoothly at high speeds having to move at snail’s pace just because the driver ahead overestimated the abilities of his truck! “Now what?” I thought. Well, when life gives you lemons, why not make lemonade? So, without endangering surrounding traffic, I became more aware of my surroundings. I started observing the greenery around me, checked out the newer buildings that had come up on the route, listened and absorbed the lyrics of the music from the car stereo and started seeing the others around me as fellow human beings with their own cares of the world. Before I knew it, 25 minutes had passed and I was at the office. And guess what? I had NOT honked along the whole route!!! Hmmm, I thought, so it IS possible, How about I try it on my return trip? The return trip too was an unqualified success. Slowly, I extended my initiative to all my driving trips. And It has worked. Ladies and Gents, I am happy to announce, I have been on “The (honk-less) Path” for over a month now.

Well, obviously, I definitely use the horn if it endangers safety, but the needless, uncontrollable and habitual urge to honk no longer exists within me.

Here are the benefits I have experienced as a result of the “Honk Less, Live longer” initiative, as I call it.
· Reduced stress as I get out of the car at the end of a drive. Feel much calmer nowadays!
· Ability to enjoy the journey as much as reaching the destination. I tend to observe surroundings around me while I drive at a leisurely pace, even though the leisure is not of my choice sometimes!
· I have extended my “need for peace” further to switching off my vehicle whenever I need to stop for longer than a minute at any traffic light. This also helps reduce smoke pollution!
· I tend to smile at errant drivers thereby making them feel a little more relaxed and less prone to ‘errant’ driving behavior. I like to think that I have been able to reduce at least one accident or road rage related incident every day.
· Instead of honking, I stop and motion for a pedestrian halfway across, to go ahead. The look on the pedestrian’s face is pure magic ! (Disbelief followed by a broad smile, usually)

So, my dear friends, I sincerely urge you to give it a shot and learn to drive in peace, even under trying circumstances. Perhaps, you can move towards the goal of silence on the roads like how you kick any other addictive habit like, say Smoking. Start by deciding that you will only honk 5 times a day at the most. The next day, bring it down to 4 a day and so on…. You may think that you alone changing your driving behaviour cannot make a difference. But remember, small drops join together to form the massive power of the ocean. If the story on ‘The hundredth Monkey’ is to be believed, it only needs a critical mass of a group of people doing things a certain way for the entire group to follow suit. I do believe that together we can make a difference and create a calmer driving environment. So, if you succeed (as I am sure you will), do spread the news and inspire others to follow suit.

Did I hear you say – Let me also try it ! :-)

How to Convert MS-Word docs to PDF format

Hi,
This may be probably known to a lot of people. On the other hand, it may NOTbe known to a lot of other people. As you can intelligently gather, this post is for the second set of people
:-)

Follow the instructions to create your file.

· Click on the following link http://www.pdfpdf.com/pdf4free.html
· Click on the large blue "DOWNLOAD" button
· Click "Open" on the files download window
· Click "Next" on the Install Wizard Setup and complete the installation.

YOU HAVE NOW INSTALLED AN ADOBE PDF PRINT DRIVER

Test Installation
· Load any document (Word, PPT, etc)
· Click on "File"
· Click on "Print"
· In the printer drop down name select "Adobe PDF"
· Click "OK"
· Select the folder in which you want the PDF document stored and click "Save"

YOU HAVE NOW SAVED AN ADOBE DOCUMENT TO THE FOLDER OF YOUR CHOICE. ENJOY !

The Yoga High !

This post is an article that I wrote on Yoga. It is kind of long, but I hope you have the patience to read it fully ! Here it flows :



Disclaimer: The author does not claim or expect to be treated as an expert on Yoga. The content of this article is purely based on the personal experiences that the author has had since he began practicing Yoga. Permission has been obtained from the source for quotes/information mentioned in this article.

Although Yoga means different things to different people, depending on what they have read, heard about it, I would like to offer my view of Yoga as I have experienced it first hand.
Yoga- What does the word mean to most of us? In general, most people have the following preconceived notions:

· Yoga is a set of convoluted postures after doing which you won’t be able to figure out your left hand from the right.
· Yoga needs a lot of time and effort. I want a quick fix to my chronic health problems.
· Yoga is too passive for my liking. I’d rather go to the gym and work out vigorously to lose some of that flab around me.
· It is something taught to huge crowds in open grounds by bearded swamis and broadcast on aastha or sanskaar channels!
· Yoga is relevant to a particular creed or group and will not benefit me because I do not belong to that group!
· Yoga leads to a “spiritual” awakening and who wants that? I just want to earn money and spend it on stuff that I can chill out with!

And So on and so forth ……

In fact, I harboured almost all of the above beliefs at one point of time or the other. However, 2 years back, I started attending (Bharat Thakur’s) Artistic Yoga classes regularly and to put it mildly, I feel quite differently now. Let me explain ….

· Yes, Yoga is to do with complicated postures, but it is a lot more than just that. My initial weeks of Yoga found me grimacing and wincing through pain and sweat as I held a pose or went through the rhythmic yet strenuous motions of a Suryanamaskaar (sun salutation). My trainer had mentioned that the real benefits start pouring in provided you persevere for a month or so and she was right. I found that once my body got the message that I wasn’t giving up, it co-operated with me better. I started enjoying the pain while holding the poses. There was a sense of achievement when my palms connected to the ground without bending my knees. Pranayama, or the breathing exercises helped me to increase my stamina and I found to my joy that I could finally do what I thought was impossible- 108 Suryanamaskaars at a stretch with the rest of the class! So, essentially, Yoga helped me to break the artificial barriers in my MIND! Now, it also made me able to handle work related stress better than prior to starting Yoga. The stress did not go away all of a sudden; I was just able to handle it better without getting worked up as before.

· At one point of time, I had compared ways of self improvement and I had looked towards alternative healing techniques like Reiki because it hardly needs effort as compared to Yoga. Down the line, I realized that the benefits of Yoga are longer lasting and even permanent if done regularly. It does need time - about an hour a day at least, to really add value. But one can start off with a half hour as well. I found that the effort also reduces with time as one gets better and better. There is another type of effort involved. That of organizing your schedule so that you can commit to spending the time for your practice. This can be a tough one - what with different types of activities pulling you in all directions and with your dependence on family or even the housemaid to get your work done on time. But all said and done, there are some areas of your life where you simply cannot compromise on the quality or quantity of time you spend on it. If you take the time out and make a list of such activities, I am certain that your health will be within the top 3 priorities. If yes, then your next challenge is to work out a way to do what it takes to be able to devote time to improving your health. With some creative thinking, you should be able to fit in time for a yoga class nearby. A suggestion here is that you join a class which is continuous, that is, it doesn’t end with a month of teaching and then you are expected to do what you learnt at home, later. It almost always doesn’t work out.

· That Yoga is good for toning the body was known earlier. However, when certain yogic exercises like Suryanamaskaar are done rapidly and with breath control, they turn out to be great cardiovascular exercises and are very effective at burning fat where it matters. Usually, at the end of every class, I am sweating but also feel very refreshed, like I have just walked out of a waterfall. Also, according to Yoga expert, Bharat Thakur, aerobics and gymming out works on the larger/longer muscles of the body, while Yoga works holistically, on even the smallest muscles right down to the cellular level. Since I have never had to “lose” weight for the simple reason of never having “gained” much weight, I can only vouch for this by speaking of some of my yoga classmates visibly slimming down over the period of a few months.

· Some Yoga teachers like Swami Ramdev have popularized Yoga tremendously in India by conducting mass Yoga sessions in huge open areas where thousands are known to turn up and move arm and limb as the man demonstrates. He is also beamed down to drawing rooms nationwide in the form of TV coverage and CDs easily available in the market. So, you can’t attend a yoga class? Bring the yoga class to your home !

· Although it is true that Yoga is associated with Hinduism, It is a universal science that has risen above religion. Patanjali, who is credited as being one of the earliest teachers of Yoga has written in his definitive work “Yoga Sutras” that Yoga is the restraining of the mind-stuff (chitta) from taking various forms (vrittis)." Swami Yogananda, one of the most respected gurus to arrive in America (1920), termed yoga the "science of mind control." All the posturing and the breathing are a means to eventually achieve this final goal. Thus, there is no mention of any particular group or creed which is linked to Yoga. It is available and accessible to anyone in the entire universe who wants to go beyond their limiting selves and be open to expanding their potential.


· I am not sure whether Yoga leads to a “spiritual” awakening, but this I am sure of - the practice of Yoga with a good teacher, changes you for life. To me Yoga means - the ease with which I face my day after having got my daily morning “dose”, the sheer joy of exploring and going beyond my limits, the desperation to get back to Yoga after a 6 months gap following a surgery and more… It is not a vague theory that lives in my mind. I practice and the results are there for me to see!

There are many different “brands” and “forms” but the underlying core of all Yoga is the same. Patanjali codified it into eight limbs (called Ashtanga Yoga) of which “Asana” and to some extent, “Pranayama” are just a small part of ONE of the limbs. It is however the “Asanas” by which Yoga is now known by, mainly in the west. Funnily enough, it is only after the west took to it in a big way that we, in India, have realized its true value. When a scheme to send Yoga tips by SMS was launched by a major mobile phone company in India, it flopped, prompting someone in California to remark in a web forum, they should have done that in California, No one does Yoga in India any more!
Yoga is a Vast and varied science which evolved out of ancient sages who were true scientists experimenting with their own bodies by observing nature all around them. So, when they say a peacock dancing gracefully, they came up with Mayurasana; When they noticed a serpent rearing its hood, they devised bhujangasana; and so on ….
I could go on and on about the deeper aspects of Yoga, but I would like to leave you with something practical- a URL to a site which depicts how to de-stress yourself while at work. Go to http://spirituality.indiatimes.com/articleshow/1484325.cms to practice desktop Yoga.
So, what are you waiting for, Find a yoga class, Get (your Yoga mat), set and Go !!!