Posts Tagged ‘peace’
Top 5 Modern Means of Tension
| 1. E.M.I. | |
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Works on the principle of “spending before earning”. A family tragedy, some urgency can cause us to default on EMI’s, which is followed up by goons at our doorsteps. Since we have already spent the money there is no options but to keep paying the EMI’s. This destroys the basic premise of happy living, “Live within your means”. |
| 2. Extensive Travel | |
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Globalization has its demerits. Urban lifestyle involves extensive air travel for business purposes. Many people are forced to live out of their suitcases. This adds extreme pressure. Jet lag becomes an addiction and tension keeps accumulating like anything. |
| 3. Career to Choose | |
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A son of a potter became a potter. There was nothing like, “Choosing a Career”. It has become a modern demon which destroys much of our early life and by the time we settle on a particular career, we find out we don’t like it any bit. The grumbling stays on eating into our peace. |
| 4. Power/Water cuts | |
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Sans the concept of power or water distribution, people didn’t have to deal with the cuts. Water was taken right out of lakes and oil lamps were used for light. The modern society is so dependent on power and water supply that frequent cuts (demand-supply), leaves us irritated. |
| 5. Marriage on rocks | |
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Marriage was a lifelong bond and concept of divorce was not known. These days tension created by divorce, court case, heart break is too much to handle. Good were the days when society chose a match for you and you lived ever together. |
…to follow: Top 5 Modern Means to Ease Tension
Happiness is Strange
To be honest I have had my fair share of happiness in life. Still it remains one such emotion which I have not been able to comprehend; at least the reaction to it has been an enigma to me.
Emotions and facial expressions follow each other. Sadness make the face look gloomy; fighting hard to not let the tears out, we can see lines on the face; during anger, the tension on the forehead can be detected.
But when it comes to happiness, people deal with it in their own strange ways.
Excitement: One jumps up and down. Runs around. May be to attract attention and let others know about the happiness. Or to get exhausted with all the physical exercise so as to die the excitement down.
Mona Lisa: Simple smile. Blood rushes to the cheeks making them pink. The face is beaming.
Laugh-out-Loud: This facebook lingo is something which a lot of people actually practice. Sudden bout of happiness. A joke perhaps. Little force on a small surface creates extreme pressure. Similarly a sudden happiness may create hysterical laughter.
High Fives: Joy of victory. High fives, fists thrown up and down. This is a happiness of accomplishment. Win a war, win a game. Your face shows determination. Your face might not have a smile, but you are happy within.
Peace: The face shows relief. You are happy to achieve something after a lasting struggle. Happy that that the struggle is over. After an exhaustive soccer match ending in a tie. Soldier who has been on warfront from a long time, on hearing of the truce.
Tears: Here is where it gets murky. People cry when happy. How often we seen people crying on receiving an award? This pertains to getting our due after a huge effort. Tears of happiness. Strange. Isn’t it?
How to ease the tension?
Oxford dictionary describes tension to be a mental or emotional strain. To cope with it, we all do some weird things. Some eat a lot. Some starve themselves. Some want to be left alone. Some like to party. Some smoke. Some drink. Some sleep. Some fall prey to insomnia. Guess some things are aberrant to cause and effect.
As for me, I stuff myself with food when tense. I am no medical expert but my guess is that more oxygen is needed to digest the excess food gobbled up. This extra demand of oxygen must for sure be met by diverting some blood flow from my darn brain to the belly. This might be shutting of some brain activity and helping me overcome tense thoughts. I would opt for a dead brain any day, but that’s me!
When food can’t be ordered say at the dead of the night, I opt for the next best option. Start typing whatever gibberish comes to my mind. It’s around 1:30 in the night now. All junk food is finished and I don’t have anything else but to write. Funny I can’t pinpoint the reason why I am tense. This further adds to uneasiness.
Anxiety is the exactly what I have right now. In fact for the last couple of weeks my mind has not been at peace exactly. How would I love the day when I be Joey and my brain will read blank…blank…blank…blank…blank. Void of all thoughts; bereft of any tension, if at all momentary. Alas! It’s not to be.
Checking the Trends
Who do we love more? Mom or Dad. Who do we think about more? Jesus or Satan. Do we Love more than we Hate? One would agree, these questions are quite vague to answer. Not any more. Thanks to Google’s insatiable desire to hold more and more dough over its users, we are now able to analyze the search pattern traffic over the years via Google Trends. As much as I hate Google for storing private data, I love the way they use it.
Mom vs Dad
Mom seems to be the favorite here. Time for Dad’s to buckle up or lose the battle.
IPad vs Kindle
Since IPad is quite new, let’s consider just the last year’s data. IPad beats Kindle quite easily. Despite being a new entrant, people prefer it over Kindle. It seems IPad will put out this Kindle soon.
Engineer vs Doctor
I have always taken pride in being an engineer. But my doctor friends can smile now. I concede. You win. You are more dear to people than me.
Apple vs Microsoft vs Google
No prizes for guessing. Google beats Apple and Microsoft by a margin. Microsoft seems to be on a decline and next year’s data might though some shocking statistics.
Twitter vs Orkut vs Myspace vs Facebook
Facebook is way ahead of its peers. For Twitter/Orkut/MySpace, seems a tough life ahead.
BJP vs Gandhi
I tried Advani, Vajpayee etc v/s Gandhi. They never stood a chance, anyways. I then decided to put the whole BJP against the Gandhi surname. BJP lost quite heavily. No wonder they lost the election. A surname seems mighty.
Cricket vs Football vs Basketball
Football dominates globally. Cricket and Basketball have a long way to go. As far as Indian subcontinent is concerned, it’s the other way round.
Beauty vs Brain
The age old question has been left in the deadlock again. It’s a virtual tie between beauty and the brain. It seems we still have not been able to make up our minds b/w Female beauty and Male brain.
Oil vs Blood
Oil and Blood go neck and neck showing their equal importance. Given that so much blood has been spilt because of oil, this seems hardly surprising.
War vs Peace
Man’s violent nature and urge for war is evident here. Peace seems to be the last thing on the mind.
Love vs Hate
Well there seems to be some hope left. Despite the urge for war, man has not forgotten the cardinal urge to love. We still haven’t learned to hate each other as much.
Happiness Divided
Last weekend, a discussion initiated out of boredom, led to an interesting thought. Let me put forward a number of assumptions before getting into the heart and soul of it.
Assumption 1: There exists some heavenly power, call it God if you want to.
Assumption 2: The heavenly powers created the universe and in that sense our earth and subsequently human beings. And after forming us it went into the self imposed sleep mode.
Assumption 3: Unlike Oil, Water, Thorium and Diamonds; Happiness was divided equally all over the earth. i.e. Happiness per square meter = Total happiness/Total surface area of earth.
Given the assumptions, a square meter of land should have as much amount of happiness as a square meter of ocean surface. Now the total surface area of earth is about 500 million square km, with around 150 of it land and rest 350 being water.
World population today is around 6.5 billion. This ideally gives 0.02 square km area per person. Let the happiness on earth be 1 HN per square km (equally divided). HN being happiness quotient (say). It gives 0.02 HN per person. If population density is taken into consideration we are left with a drastic difference in happiness among different continents. Given the hypothesis. Just to give you some idea:
- Asia: 0.012 HN
- Africa: 0.031 HN
- Europe: 0.014 HN
- Oceania: 0.270 HN
So Down under people have more Happiness and Asia comes the last. Is it really so? Well I don’t know if happiness can be measured someday, can be quantified or not. There have been a lot of tries though. One such try that I was reading, was http://www.financialjesus.com/2008/05/27/top-10-happiest-countries/ . They consider certain parameters and list top ten happiest countries. Here are the top 10 happiest countries in decreasing order, according to the given survey.
******************HN Rank******************
- Denmark 0.008 155
- Switzerland 0.006 6
- Austria 0.010 44
- Iceland 0.333 9
- Finland 0.064 41
- Australia 0.385 7
- Sweden 0.05 49
- Canada 0.313 12
- Guatemala 0.009 152
- Luxembourg 0.006 179
Going by HN in various countries I couldn’t find a direct relation to population density. This leaves us no where and our hypothesis seems fishy.
God might have some other distribution method for sure. Maybe equally per person, but then all of us would have been equally happy, which is not the case. However hard I try, I don’t get close to the answer. Perhaps, “God has his own designs”.
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