An Elderly Person.................

An elderly person bought a donkey and was taking it to his village along with his young son.

They heard passers-by commenting, “How foolish is this person who is walking along with the donkey instead of riding over it?”

The old man obliged them and rode the horse and his son was walking.

The passers-by again commented, “Look at this old man, he is riding the donkey like a lord while his young son is walking. He has no compassion for his son at all”

He thought that he is doing something wrong and asked his son to ride on the horse and he started walking along with the donkey.

The passers-by this time commented, “Look at this, the old man is walking and this young boy is riding joyously. There is no respect for elders at all these days.

The old man got puzzled and asked his son to help him to carry the donkey and both of them started carrying the donkey and passers-by had a heartful laugh seeing these two mad guys carrying the donkey instead of riding over that.

Then both of them decided to ride on donkey’s back. Again, passers-by commented, look at these two, they have no mercy of this poor donkey.

Can you tell me what option is there here for the father and the son?

More we try to please  the world, more miserable we become!

The Best & the Fastest Way To Improve Life is to...........

The best and the fastest way to improve life is to—

Stop complaining.

Just stop it.

Go 7 days without complaining.

Then after 7 days, see how you feel, and go another 7 days. Then go 30 days.

Your life will change.

Let me explain.

First, why do we complain?

• We complain because it’s easy. It’s easier to stay in a job that you hate and complain about it each day than it is to do the research, tailor your resume, expand your network, and find a new a job.
• We complain because it’s how we start small talk. It’s less effort to make an obvious remark about the economy being shitty than it is to muster up the courage and strike a conversation with a stranger that starts with a compliment or a question.
• We complain because we’re addicted. It’s low-brain, endless activity to rattle off all the things wrong with the world and how you’re the victim and you’re right and life owes you.

OK so you just complained, now what?

• Whatever you were complaining about is still a problem. Those minutes of “feel good get it off my chest” could have been used towards actually fixing it.
• Maybe you made a new friend who also loves to also complain (oh fabulous) so now you two have this clusterf*ck of negativity whirring all around you
• You complaining is not valuable or useful to anyone. And you know what—

People do not care what you have to complain about.

Now let’s take the long term view.

Perhaps you drag yourself through life always complaining — about the smaller things (didn’t bring cash to a cash-only cafe, someone honked at you, etc.) and the bigger things (your landlord says she’s selling the building, your boss underpays you, etc).

It has become your MO.

Something happens, you complain. This is how you function.

Here’s the hard truth—

1. Life does not owe you anything
   When we were infants and we wanted something, we cried. Then hands would magically appear to cradle us, hold us close, and feed us milk.
   
   Some adults still approach life like this. They complain because they think if they complain enough, the problem will get fixed.
   
   No one is coming to save you.
   
   And all that energy you use on complaining could be used on (a) figuring out a solution or (b) changing your attitude about it.
   
   We’re all dealt our own cards.
   
   What you need to do is watch Will Smith’s “Fault VS. Responsibility” talk on YouTube.
2. The more you talk about something, the more power give to it
   If we were friends in my early 20s, you knew about my father. You’d hear me rant and worry and talk about how fucked up my situation is and how I’m stressed about it.
   
   I thought I had to atleast mention it because it always on my mind and my heart.
   
   But it’s the opposite—
   
   The more I talked about it, the more space I let it mentally and emotionally occupy. Every time I talk about it, I have to think about it and relive it.
   
   One morning, I made a promise to myself to stop bringing up my father or the details of my home life in conversation. No more.
   
   And in time, I talked about other things in my life. I started to build friendships on stronger, more positive foundations. My mind and my heart were filled with my passion for running, public speaking, and meeting people.
   
   And my father’s “space” in my head got smaller and smaller.
3. What you keep doing becomes part of your personal brand
   People remember what is most consistent. If you’re always the girl who keeps complaining about shit, you’re going to stop getting invited places.
   
   We all know someone who always wants to complain — are they the first person you call to share good news?
   
   Exactly.

Complaining is unproductive. It’s toxic language and it amplifies the negative in your life.

The next time you feel like complaining OR you realize that you’re already doing it, make the conscious choice to stop.

"Life instantly improves when you don’t blame other people and focus on what you can control." - James Clear

   

 -Kaila Lim

The Great Scientist without a Nobel Prize

 Last year Students had a Skype conversation with the old Physics legend Leonard Susskind . They asked him a lot of Questions . Here are the few of the questions . But before getting to that he mentioned that “ Sleeping during a lecture is a good thing . “

 

1. You were a plumber before you studied physics. How old were you then?

“My father was a plumber and I worked with him from the age of 13. When I was 16 he got very ill, so I had to work a lot. We were not very well off. I worked during school and in the summer. It was very hard work and very different from being a plumber now. It was in the South Bronx and the buildings were very old and had lead pipes. It was tough, rough work and it made my father sick. I did it until I went to graduate school. That was in 1962.”

2. How did your family respond when you told them you wanted to study theoretical physics?

 
“Well, at first my father wasn’t happy. He wanted me to work in his business, but I said I wanted to be a physicist. He left school after fifth grade, but he was a very smart man. However, he didn’t know what a physicist was and mixed it up with a pharmacist. He said “You’re not going to work in a drugstore” and I said, “No, I mean what Einstein did”. The minute he heard Einstein, he said no more. He got very excited about it; he wanted me to be a physicist. It was a good experience.”

3. Did you party a lot when you were a student?
“Not a lot. By the time I became a physics student I was already married and had a child. I was also still working as a plumber, so did I party a lot? No I did not.”

4. What do you think of lectures? Can you learn physics from them?

 
“They’re fantastically good for learning physics. The lecturer learns a lot of physics. After my first few studies, just about everything I learned about physics came from teaching it. I don’t know if the students learned a lot, but I certainly did. So I consider teaching physics very important.” 

  

5. Do the students learn from it?

  
“I think they learn from some lecturers and less from other lecturers. My students sometimes come back and tell me they learned a lot from me and the ones who didn’t learn much probably don’t come back. So my guess is that good physicists pretty much learn from themselves. The students at Stanford cooperate and learn together and that is clearly a good thing. But I think that it is sometimes good to sit and learn by yourself. But as I said, I never really learned a subject until I had to teach it.”

Difference Between RAD & NPD

Source: pixabay

All children who have parents who are neglectful, abusive, intrusive, and unstable are likely to develop serious problems as adults. The most common problems involve issues with intimacy, relationships, trust, and self-esteem.

What is Reactive Attachment Disorder (RAD)?

Reactive Attachment Disorder is diagnosed in children, not adults. Children given this diagnosis may exhibit either inhibited attachment behavior or display inappropriate and indiscriminate attachment behaviors.

RAD is believed to result from severe neglect, abuse, and lack of appropriate attunement by the child’s caregivers. It can also be caused by subjecting the child to multiple disruptions and changes in caregivers, such as children who are in foster care and repeatedly get uprooted and sent to different homes.

In the beginning they may form strong attachments to their caregivers, but after repeated separations and disruptions, they may stop forming secure attachments because attachment only leads to pain.

In adulthood, these children are at greater risk for developing depression, behavioral problems, difficulty forming relationships, aggressive and disruptive behaviors, and low self-esteem. People with RAD are also at risk for developing a personality disorder in adulthood, but in my experience it is unlikely to be NPD.

The basic treatment for children with RAD ideally involves working with the primary caregiver to teach the person better parenting skills and to provide some form of psychotherapy for the child. There are no drugs that cure RAD.

If the child is being physically or sexually abused, he or she may need to be removed from the home. Ideally the child would be placed with a caregiver who could be consistent, loving, have appropriate boundaries, show a great deal of real interest in the child’s thoughts, feelings, and interests, while modeling appropriate attachment behaviors.

What is Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD)?

This is a personality disorder. Although it starts in childhood like RAD, it is not diagnosed in children. Children and teens may exhibit narcissistic traits, but most grow out of it as they mature. Therefore, NPD is only diagnosed in adults.

NPD can be viewed as an adaptation by a particular child to a home situation where attention and approval were contingent on achievement, love was unstable and conditional, and at least one of the parents had some form of NPD. People can develop NPD without being subjected to the conditions that create RAD in children. You can become a Narcissist without severe abuse or neglect.

Narcissistic Personality Disorder is characterized by:

• A lack of whole object relations and a lack of object constancy.
• A lack of emotional empathy for other people.
• Extreme reliance on other people for continual validation of their worth.
• Unstable self-esteem.
• Perfectionism.
• Competitiveness.
• Hierarchical thinking.
• A reliance on achievement as a substitute for love.
• A diminished capacity for intimacy.
• The drive for status.
• A preoccupation with status.
• A vulnerability to feelings of shame about the self.
• The devaluation of other people.
• Indiscriminate idealization of those people who they see as higher in status, coupled with contempt or indifference to those people they see as lower in status.
• Impulsive rage over trivial matters that most people would overlook or react to more mildly.
• The need to shift blame for their bad behavior to other people.
• Difficulty accepting that other people can have valid opinions that are different from their own.
• Projecting their person flaws onto other people.

Do children with RAD develop NPD?

I am not an expert in RAD. I actually had to look up what these initials meant. However, I have many people in my practice who experienced RAD as children. They grew up to develop Schizoid Personality Disorder, not Narcissistic Personality Disorder.

What is Schizoid Personality Disorder (SPD)?

Schizoid Personality, like NPD, is diagnosed in adults, not children. People with SPD lack basic trust in other people because their early caregivers were abusive and neglectful. They never learned to negotiate differences of opinion because their opinions did not matter.

Most of my Schizoid clients decided by age 7 that they could not count on adults to care for them, protect them, show real interest in them, or even treat them as real human beings with any rights. They reacted to this situation by becoming fiercely independent and self-sufficient and finding ways to control how emotionally and physical close they are to other people. Some turn to animals for affection instead of people.

Here are some common characteristics of people with SPD:

• They have a fragile sense of self with weak boundaries.
• They may dissociate from their emotions, their bodies, and even their sense of self when they are stressed. This started in early childhood as a reaction to abuse.
• They tend to treat their bodies with the same indifference that their caregivers treated them.
• Like children with RAD, they may either avoid intimate relationships or become inappropriately intimate too soon with the wrong people.
• They use distancing as a defense.
• They often report feeling like robots or aliens, not real people.
• They lack whole object relations and object constancy.
• They prefer other people to be predictable.
• They suffer from existential dread. Life can seem pointless and something to be endured.
• They also suffer from what the theorist Ralph Klein calls the “Schizoid Dilemma”: If they become emotionally close with someone, this feels threatening to their autonomy. If they distance themselves and do not have enough human contact, they may become so disconnected that have trouble reconnecting.
• They are more likely to live alone by choice than most other people.

Punchline: It is really quite easy to differentiate between RAD and NPD. They have very little in common. However, in my experience, the conditions associated with RAD often lead to the development of Schizoid Personality Disorder in adulthood.

-Elinor Greenberg,PhD Psychology

The Separate Virginity Manual For Women

The separate virginity manual for women.

---

Firstly, let me tell you there is nothing wrong if a person wants to marry a virgin partner.

As I have mentioned in many of my answers, marriage is a personal choice one makes. And it is purely upto him or her, regarding whom they want to be with. Everyone has the right to choose what they want and live the life they wish, free from all judgements.

But—

The way this virginity is parameterized differently for women and seen as a regal hallmark reeks of strong misogynistic attitude.

Let me explain with an easier example.

---

There is this 1981 so-called classic film Mouna Geethangal.

The plot goes like this — The protagonist is a happily married person. He cheats on his wife by having a one night stand with a widow. Later he accidentally blabbers about that sexcapade to his wife. She gets separated from him and the rest of film shows how nice of a person he is. In fact towards the climax he threatens to marry another girl. Changed, his wife comes there, begs him not to marry another girl, and when he refuses, she dares to die with her son.

This masterpiece ran for two years straight when it released. It is considered as a great film even today. You can see the comments raving about it here 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bd4ZGgVyFW8&feature=youtu.be

  

 

And then, there is this 2017 short film Lakshmi.

It is about a housewife with a disinterested husband, who is not satisfying her sexually or emotionally and even has an affair going on outside marriage. She feels gets attracted to painter, who keeps appreciating her beauty.

This film was ripped apart on social media for spoiling the culture and corrupting traditions(

https://indianexpress.com/article/entertainment/tamil/lakshmi-short-film-review-why-we-need-to-re-think-about-how-we-see-women-on-screen-4932778/

)

. Most of the comments below the video were of the tone ‘I wish she didn’t have sex with him. They remained as just friends. Housewives expect a good friend not like this’

---

Why is there such a vast difference between a man’s sexual independence and women’s sexual independence?

Why is the former treated like some paragraph on page-454 of The Great Indian Culture, and why the later is considered as the coverpage of the The Great indian Culture?

For women alone, why this ‘virginity’ is given so much importance to the extent that it is considered as a measure of her purity?

This ‘preferential’ treatment is the actual problem in the society.

The way this virginity is overrated and considered as a checklist specifically for women is a sign of toxic patriarchy. It is not about one man’s preference anymore, rather it is the whole society ganging up to stereotype women.

This fear has gone to an extent, when a girl realises that she is in a toxic relationship, she refuses to come out of it and still continue to be in it as she was physically involved with the guy. She thinks coming out of it will only make things worse for her.

Even today, there are cases, people reject a marriage proposal just because the girl has many photos with guys in her social media profiles.

The fact that the society makes the ‘men’ to climb a pedestal up and then ask them ‘Will you give a chance to women who is not a virgin?’ assuming that the women are at their feet, seeking the validation from these men is an insane outdatedness and stupid social norm that must go.

  

     -Srinath Nalluri,M.Sc., B. Eng. Mechanical Engineering, National University of Singapore (2020)

And They Made it.......

 

With time, as you meet more people, success stories develop a pattern.

Good family. Good environment. Great, attentive, smart parenting.

Structure.

I’m not knocking these people.

I see a lot of myself in them. We weren’t rich. But I had good parents. I had that good upbringing. I’m cut from a similar mold.

These types catch a lot more crap than they deserve. They don’t all get million dollar endowments to slide into Yale. They had to work for it. For each guy that made it, many more failed. Many blew it.

They deserve respect.

But you do know what their path looked like to get where they are. You know what the other paths are.

Every now and then you meet someone who came from an off path.

He’ll say, “I’m the first person in my family to graduate high school let alone college.”

To someone who is new to the game. It’s pretty bland at face value, “Well hooray, did you want a trophy?”

Take a few laps around the sun, and you’ll know that is a packed statement.

They grew up without money. No role model. No doting parent, good school, positive peers.

Reward system to incentivize their performance? Forget about it.

They inherited a bad reputation. They were probably seen as the poor, trashy family.

No hookups. No do-overs. No extra strikes. No summer school.

They had nothing but themselves and a dream that only they believed in. A dream they were doubted on from the moment they set out on it.

These people are born with the system rigged against them. The game was set to max difficulty on day one.

They had nothing. Absolutely nothing.

And they made it.

Something burned in them, to push them past endless obstacles, doubters, failures.

Every equation and sensibility predicted they’d land exactly where they started.

And they made it.

All on their own.

An eagle will rise.

From the dirt they came, in the corner office they sit.

  -Sean Kernan

I Remember My Childhood Friend

I remember Diego, my childhood friend.Diego was extraordinarily gifted in school and in sports. He was so good at playing soccer that he would score all the goals in the game.

Diego was also extremely competitive. He loved to glorify his successes. He even had his famous “in your face” arrogant celebration dance.

We hated when he made fun of us!

Time took care of Diego’s arrogance as he became the victim of his own success.

What things should we NEVER do?

Never be impressed by what we have done!

Diego got so excited and comfortable with his achievements that he destroyed his potential!

Diego could have accomplished extraordinary things in his life, yet he got so satisfied with his achievements that he wasn’t willing to make any additional effort to accomplish more.

Diego later became ‘average.’

NEVER stop improving yourself.

Potential is what you can do but haven't done yet. Potential is everything that is still unused inside of you.

Success is the number one killer of potential.

NEVER be impressed by what you have accomplished. That will kill your potential.

Stay humble. Always keep pushing yourself.

#BeBusinessSmart

   

   -Hector Quintanilla

Useful Mutations :

 Useful human mutations include:

• The CCR5-delta 32 mutation that makes carriers immune to HIV.
• The LCT MCM6 single nucleotide polymorphism that lets people digest milk throughout their whole lives.
• The Apo-AIM mutation that makes a group of carriers in Italy almost immune to arteriosclerosis, and lowers incidence of heart attack and stroke.
• The LRP5 mutation that makes carriers immune to osteoporosis.
• The ACTN3 mutation that makes its carriers exceptionally fast and strong (it was discovered by doing gene studies of elite athletes).
• The hDEC2 mutation that allows its carriers to function normally on only 4 hours of sleep a night (Thomas Edison is believed to have had this mutation).
• The EGLN1 and EPAS1 mutations that allow people to thrive at high altitudes without experiencing altitude sickness.
• The leukocyte antigen-B14 mutation that makes carriers highly resistant to Ebola.
• The PDE10A mutation that allows people to hold their breath for a very long time, common among the free-diving Bajau people.

That’s not an exhaustive list. There are beneficial mutations that confer tetrachromatic color vision, high-fidelity tasting, and all kinds of other cool stuff.

One Golden Rule

Want to learn something? then learn how to learn.

Want to memorize something? then learn how to memorize.

Want to be good at math? learn how mathematics is build on blocks.

I believe in excelling the learning process before learning something.

When I wanted to memorize some long answers I learned memory techniques like Memory Palace.

When I wanted to solve those complex functions and twisted PnC question, I learned about learning math.

When I wanted to read, I worked on my reading and now I can read and comprehend faster than most of the individuals.

Image Source : Phone Gallery

Learning the process always skills us up. 3 years ago, I was a skinny guy and with 2 years of gym, I became fit. In this time period, I studied a lot about fitness and nutrition. I had to leave working out for an year because of some reason and that increased the fat % in my body to around 18%.

I again started learning and studying about fitness and joined gym again and now I have visible light abs and body fat % is less than 13. With all my study in fitness, I applied for a course, cleared the exams and yesterday, I became a certified fitness trainer.

Fitness is just an example, I have worked in a same way in every aspect of my life. Be it academics or any hobbies.

If you want to achieve something then you must excel yourself in the process of learning.

  

  - Krishna

Trivial Knowledge That Might Save Your Life

 

Around five years back, as part of a training, we were working on the Risk Assessment for rooftop work.

One of them suggested lightning as a potential risk.

The other said ‘But when it is cloudy or stormy, we don’t go to the rooftop, right.’

The trainer then said:

Yes. You are right. You will not go to the rooftop when the weather is bad.

But say, you are already on the rooftop to setup three devices for your experiment. You finished two.

The sky suddenly starts to turn cloudy and stormy. You hear thunders.

But you don’t run. Rather, you will think, let me finish this one and leave, otherwise I have to come up again for this small work another day. Y

You will think when was the last time people died due to lightning anyway? You will continue to work.

And that is how accidents happen.

People are mostly safe and sound when they are prepared.

They get injured badly only when the accident happens in the least expected scenario.

• You carry your helmet always, but one day you don’t because you are just driving to a nearby shop.
• You drive in the opposite direction as taking a U-Turn is very long.
• You cross the road thinking no vehicles are coming.
• You agree to the intimate moments being photographed or recorded as you trust your partner more than you trust yourself.
• You say yes to the person you parents had chosen without even talking to him, thinking that they know better.

These are the situations where you least expect things can go wrong.

But they can go worse.

Hence, take everything seriously. There is nothing wrong in being extra careful. You friends might laugh at you or make fun of you for being over-perfectionist, but when you see loses you have escaped, you should be proud of yourself.

   

  -Srinath Nalluri,M.Sc., B. Eng. Mechanical Engineering, National University of Singapore (2020)

10 Points

1. As children we are encouraged to “Be ourselves.” We certainly can do this, but if we do, don’t expect others to always like us. We may lose friends, career promotions, and be alienated from family. The truth is that people often prefer the fake versions of us, depending upon whether we naturally have an agreeable personality or not.
2. The Boy Scouts of America just went bankrupt and dissolved due to lawsuits based on tens of thousands of incidents of sexual abuse of young boys. Pedophile priests and pastors ran rampant in the Catholic Church for decades. The truth is you cannot trust your son or daughter with strangers, even members of your own family.
3. There are some people who are dead inside. There is no hidden good person inside of them.
4. Many people cannot realize the absurdity of the rat race until they have completed the maze.
5. If you are a scapegoat in your family nothing you say or do can change that. You cannot “work out your differences,” “lay out your heart,” and have it change anything. In fact, they will use your vulnerabilities against you. There is only one way out—get out and don’t look back.
6. As a parent with three children you see the enormous power of genetics. Parents help nurture their children, but 80% of who we are is the product of the random combination of genes. My fraternal twins might as well be from different planets—looks, height, intelligence, hair color, and interests—all radically different.
7. One man’s heaven is another man’s hell.
8. Trust your gut. It usually ends up being right, and you realize this after you ignore it and give ______ suspicious person your trust.
9. Everything is politics—even your family. Next, you can be the most competent person in the world, but if you aren’t political, you will be passed over, bullied, or ignored.
10. The strongest form of violence is mass quiet assent.

Update:

#5 does not mean every family scapegoats. Most don’t. But for those that do, sometimes the only resolution is leaving. Next, many family conflicts are caused by misunderstandings that can be resolved. I am referring here to those which cannot be resolved by “talking it out.”

#8 Trusting your gut doesn’t mean all people are bad. Nor does it mean that your gut is always right. Some people have poor instincts related to people so their “guts” are not very good guides. I am referring to y

our average person.

#9 means the interaction between people. Politics is “us,” not just what happens in Washington DC or London. It is the dynamics of human interaction.

#10 Mass quiet assent is what enables the few or many to conduct acts of violence. It was the neighbors of Jews in Eastern Europe calling on their Jewish neighbors to be arrested and taken to concentration camps. It was the silence of the German people. It is the silence of American citizens (and the outright support) of children being separated from their parents at the Southern border.

   - Alexander Finnegan