Understand yourself

There are many vegetarian people I know, who don’t hesitate to kill mosquitoes or cockroaches. Isn’t that strange? Vegetarianism is all about not killing other living beings. And they have no problem killing mosquitoes or cockroaches? I am not here to discuss whether it is right or wrong to kill insects, that is a separate debate and I don’t want to get into it in this article. I am more interested in this behaviour where, in a person’s subjective morality, doing something is bad; but they themselves do it in some other way, or in some other context, and have no regret about it?...

We all have heard quotes like “you should work hard and your life will become easier” at least a million times by now. But I haven’t always found this to be helpful. Working hard is important, there is no debating that. But I have a problem with how the whole self help industry, philosophers and motivational speakers portray it, and how we feel about it. This might be a little controversial....

With the election season in India over, I have a few thoughts. During this election, I observed a few things with myself as well as others. A few things about what kind of people we generally tend to follow, what kind of people influence us, why do we get influenced by the people we do. This election was all about people being either pro Modi or anti Modi. A few people said this is a dictatorship, a few people were completely in love with Prime Minister Narendra Modi....

Let’s talk about dreams today. Not the dreams that you see while sleeping. The dreams that keep you awake. The ones that motivate you to get out of bed and work. The ones that give you some purpose in life. We all have dreamt of something or the other. The dreams have been of different magnitudes based on the conditions around us and our age. For example, when I was in kindergarten, I used to dream that I will become the Prime Minister of India one day and all the criminals and “bad people” will run out of India....

In the part 5 of my blog series “The Secret to Never Ending Happiness”, I had ended by saying that most of the people don’t even know what are the factors that affect their state of mind. We can identify those factors by self evaluation or introspection. That is precisely what we are going to discuss in today’s blog. So what is introspection? I would define introspection as thinking deeply about your own thoughts, ideas and feelings and examining them....