My experiments with untruth!

There has been an ongoing mental debate in my head for years now, on whether or not it is ok to lie! Please don't be judgemental as you read this post - its not like I lie for a living. But having said that, there have been times when I have found myself so deep under a mountain full of shit, and in spite of feeling immensely guilty about it, the only logical option that's remained available has been to lie (well, the  only option other than being grilled like barb-a-Qued chicken by the parents, that is!!).And c'mon people. whether we like to admit it or not, deep down inside, we know we all have lied at some point due to some reason or the other. And if someone tells me they have never lied, well that most certainly is a lie!

Since my childhood days my elders instilled avalue in me - that it is wrong to  lie and that one should always tell the truth. This thought was deeply engrained in my mind then and remains there even to this day. Back then I probably believed in this to the 't' and always told the truth - perhaps until that one day. The day when I probably did something I knew I shouldn't have done and then probably told the truth when questioned about it. I am using the word 'probably' as I suspect this must have happened so early in my life that I have no memories or even a vague recollection of it. So when questioned about it and when I told the truth, assuming that 'they' who were asking the question, will treat me like a star for telling the truth - well they probably didn't and I was probably grounded instead!! I probably learned a new lesson then - that you get grounded for telling the truth.
Moving on, I went to Christian School where again I was taught it is a sin to lie and it reinforced the fact in my mind that every time I lied about anything no matter what the reason, I was committing sin in the eyes of God and would be duly punished for it.

As a child I was extremely fascinated by 'Lord Krishna' (I blame it on the zillion of charming stories my grandmother had narrated to me about this naughty and adorable God). In so many ways I saw some of myself in him;  naughty and yet adorable and loved by everyone. I was a dedicated devotee too and never missed my morning pooja with my grandmother (God bless her loving soul), of my Krishna amid a whole temple filled with statues and pictures of various Hindu Gods. Then one day I found out something unbelivable. Something that so did not fit in with my Krishna's Godliness. I think it was while watching Mahabharat on TV(please refer wikipedia or search on Google if you are unfamiliar with the epic - trust me if I start getting into details about Mahabharata I will spend a year writing this post and for one, Google will be very happy with my post content, but that's not why I am here. :D). I found out that Lord Krishna once said that it is okay to lie - well if the lie told is for someone else's good, that is. Even so,  a lie was a lie and it would obviously be good for someone. If I was confused so far, this only made me confuseder.

There then came a phase when I did not think too much about it - I just simply lied in dire situations. And by dire situations, I don't mean ones where nuclear weapons were going to be released if I had told the truth. I mean some odd situations where telling the truth would have been awkward or would have got me into some deep trouble again with 'the parents' or perhaps 'the teachers' too now. I went on this way for some time but deep down inside I still believed that it was wrong to lie.

In the meantime, it was almost as if the Universe was conspiring to point me towards the path of the truth and I kept hearing different stories about it. One such story was that of George Washington chopping down the cherry tree and telling his father the truth about it when questioned. However, I did wonder how much of an earful I would get from my parents if I went around chopping trees and telling them the truth about it (:D).
The conspiracy of the Universe met a very lukewarm fate though as nothing changed much for me! However, I did go on experimenting every time that I lied. I would keep evaluating periodically and feeding back into my system what the patterns were telling me. Other than the fact that no matter how small the lie, it made me feel awful about myself, everything that I could infer stood against lying.

I later started to gather other people's views on the matter. One of my interviewees shared a very interesting point of view. She is a very righteous person and does not like to do things that are against Gandhian values. Needless to say - lying is second on the list (the first one being violence- yes there's a list that Gandhi ji personally showed me. Believe me - I'm not lying!!). Now it was probably ok to do this during Gandhian times, but the world now is very different. Sometimes lying is inevitable to even save yourself from being ripped off!! So what she does is to allow herself monthly 'lying credits'. Yes you read it right!! 'Lying credits' - just like 'mobile phone credit'. So she has a set 'lying budget' available, which if she runs out of in that month means she has no more lie lines left to use!! Perhaps she then postpones the lying to next month's budget or borrows sone lying credit from the next month - this I need to confirm as I did not ask her. But thats one point of view.

Next, I interviewed another friend and asked him about his views on the matter. He told me that he doesn't like to think much about it and lies whenever it is convenient or required. The frequency of lying comes upto several times a day and there's no set figure he could give me. He calls it 'supplying a lie on demand'. So his lying works on the laws of  demand and supply and he promptly supplies a lie as and when the demand arises. You're right - he's studied economics!

Another view point came from someone very dear to me. She said lying is hurtful but 'hiding', on the other hand was ok. So in essence, she would hide the truth insofar as possible and leave lying as the very last resort. This was due to the fact that she feels lying hurts the person being lied to whereas concealing is not as hurtful. That makes sense perhaps!

Someone else kindly shared her views on the matter. She said that if a lie doesn't harm anyone and is spoken to not hurt another person's feelings then it was ok to lie. Well I agree to that to an extent. The danger here, however, is that if by chance the person finds out the truth, their feelings could potentially be irreparably hurt.

Hmmm. So from all my experience in my life as a liar, and from other people's experience, what have I concluded? Well, I'm the protagonist of my post and I therefore have the responsibility of doing the right thing! You guessed it right folks - I have concluded and decided I'm not going to lie anymore. Yes, this does have a lot to do with that value my elders had deeply engrained in my system many years ago, but it also has a lot more to do with something else. It has a lot to do with the fact that I am lazy and I have a bad memory!! No - the previous sentence is not a typo. I am indeed too lazy to lie!! Can you believe it? I bet you can't but once I explain the logic you will understand. Most lies that I have ever told in the past have back fired in one way or another. And when years later people have questioned me about them, I have realised that it is not humanly possible to remember exactly what you lied about and to who. However, it is possible to remember the truth as it is absolute (unless of course you suffer from amnesia or Alzheimer's due to old age!). I for one, like to have a genuine face to show people and hate that feeling of wondering whether someone knows the truth while I am telling a lie or whether I remember what I lied about exactly the way that I lied about it and me having to live a lie just because I lied in the first place. 
I simply don't have the confidence you need, to be able to lie with perfection and I am too lazy to work for it. The truth works well for me even if it means that in the short term I have to pay a price for it. I do not and will not ever lie in my life.

Well actually, everything I have said above is a lie. Believe me now this is the only truth I have shared in this entire post and I am starting to tell only the truth as it ends! :)

"You have changed.......!!"

I am sure that the above phrase strikes a chord with everyone and at some point in their life, most people have either said or have been made to hear these three annoying words, "You have changed!!", followed by a silent pause, or by a very unwelcome rant!! :)

For those of you who have been at the receiving end of this phrase, jump straight to the next paragraph please. But for those of you who are guilty of having said this to someone else, allow me to put things into perspective! I will take you a couple of hundred centuries back into time & history where I would like to introduce you to someone by the name Charles Robert Darwin. Mr. Darwin was an English Naturalist, and established some very interesting facts centred around, species, their survival and their evolution. One of these was to do with how species adapt to change.

Let's pick up a scenario that's easy to visualise. Suppose I am a rabbit that hops on land 24x7x365 going *boing-boing-boing-boing* (perhaps you just imagined Bugs Bunny with my face on didn't you?? :D), along with my herd of other rabbits just like me. Then imagine one day a  really bad flood happens to greet us (surely it lost its way to somewhere else where Mr. Drought was visiting instead - how typical!!). The flooding is potentially devastating for my herd as none of us know how to climb trees nor do we know how to swim. As a result, all of us end up drowning. All of us except one rabbit.....you guessed it..... that rabbit is me (at least I can be a hero in my imagination!!). Now you must be wondering how I possibly survived that flood that wiped out my entire herd? I did not mention a vital piece of information about myself - the fact that I am a deaf rabbit; unaware that 'we' the 'rabbits' cannot swim. As such, my brain too, was unaware of the fact and responded to an instinct so I could pull through and have the best possible chance to survive. With a lot of struggle I kept on kicking my hands and legs to keep myself afloat, till the flood finally passed. As the dawn broke, I looked around with a deep sense of sorrow to know that all my buddies were capable of swimming and surviving that flood - if only they were deaf too! I stood there and sobbed my heart away. Just then someone tapped me on the shoulder and said 'Son..(no, he actually said "hey rabbit" - I am joking!! And I heard that in spite of being deaf - its MY imagination remember??)'. I heard the voice again, 'Hey rabbit....don't cry.' As I turned around to see who it was, I couldn't believe my ironical luck. 'On this sorrowful day I finally meet that very man who inspired me to dedicate my future to research & who I had spent hours reading about when I was at my "Rabbit High School" ', I thought. The half bald head, the long white beard, those questioning eyes, and that enlightened look was unmistakable - it was Mr. Darwin - the man, the legend himself indeed, standing right there behind  me. He hugged me comfortingly and said ' Well done Mishi rabbit. You should be proud of yourself. - You're a survivor; you've just adapted to a change.'  And having said that, what was probably Mr. Darwin's real ghost (or me hallucinating after 24 hours of struggling to keep afloat amid a ferocious flood ) slowly vanished in thin air.

Now then, ladies & gentlemen, coming back to the, 'You have changed,' business. Each and every one of us is faced in life, with several such floods, earthquakes, storms, tornadoes, droughts, or what have you, of various intensities from time to time! For those of you who like to call a spade a spade, I would like to highlight that I mean the previous sentence in a metaphoric sense. This process of encountering various challenges is a series of small or big, good or bad, floods that change your 'comfort zone' habitat and demand for you to adapt in order to survive in it. Adapting to change is therefore a constant and dynamic process that is happening to all of us even as we read this post from start to finish. Whether it tips your balance towards becoming a better person or worse is a separate matter of discussion. But what I am trying to put across to you here, is that you don't change from one time to the next, of meeting/ speaking to the person who makes that annoying comment - you merely adapt. And my point is that adaptation is essential for survival in that changed habitat.

So next time do think twice before judging someone and making the statement, 'You have changed!' And for those of you who are made to hear this statement henceforth, refer the culprit to my post here and make sure you clarify that you haven't changed; you have simply adapted!!

Hakunna Matata!!

When 'Humans' became 'Resources'!!

As an HR professional I find the term 'human resource management' quite disturbing. Yes, day in and day out I use it to describe the related department, the qualification I studied, the professional body to which I am affiliated, the workforce, my profile on Linked in, etc, but somewhere deep down inside, each time I hear or use the term it makes me think that the essence of what it entails is being undermined. I am filled with an inexplicable sense of guilt for not challenging it. To call human beings in all their wonder simply a 'resource' is demeaning and makes me picture the movie 'Ben Hur' and the hundreds of slaves in uniforms straining every sinew to keep the ship assail. Maybe I am taking things to the other extreme but it gives me the feeling that human beings are being taken for a 'resource' that can simply be bought and sold at a price. Although this may to some extent be true in practical terms, and is to do with the laws of demand and supply and how the so called 'Labour market' (another term I am not too comfortable with) functions, the thought makes me very uncomfortable.  I find in it, a real sense of emotional and spiritual deficit.

True that every employee is paid a wage and benefits in exchange for the work they do, and yet there is so much more to humans who can never truly have all their effort, creativity, insights and passion finitely evaluated with numeric values imprinted against their profiles. The last I remember, human beings had spirits and emotions that deserve to be respected.  Talking of them as resources irks me. 

I know this debate has been running for many years but little has changed, and with finance increasingly driving the agenda with various austerity measures some would say we are even going backwards.  So today I would like to propose something different, something fairer and perhaps ground-breaking for the profession. I would like to rename the term 'Human Resource Management' to a more sensitive 'Employee Management'. Everyone working for a company, including people in the HR department itself are employees. To use the term 'employee management' gives me a feeling of having a sudden gush of fresh air in my suffocating lungs. It seems to encapsulate what I have been trying to communicate to staff for a long time now - that we are here to help and support you in doing the best work of your lives. We are not here to cut your wages for no obvious reason, to be difficult, or discipline you without reason.

I appreciate in one way it is only a change in words, but deeper it is much more than that and a signal for something far more significant about the power and significance of our humanity.  So who knows, this may be the first tiny step in changing the hard, dry image of the Human Resource Department prevalent in most places. As they say, 'Well begun is half done!' :)

Looking for answers?? Naaaah!!

Ever since we are little children, we envision a life that lies ahead and picture it to be so perfect and assume its a given that all we dream of will so perfectly and so flawlessly come true. A perfect degree, a perfect job, a perfect love followed by a perfect marriage and perfect babies leading on to to lot of other perfect stuff and then a perfect old age spent perfectly with perfect little grand children. Or perhaps at that age you just think up to the perfect 30 something where everything you've dreamed of will be in your kitty and life will be so smooth. Parents always protect you inside a bubble and keep you in that rosy world till you are out there on your own one fine day and that world appears alien to you. You feel like you've spent your life so far living in some sort of a parallel universe. And then life throws its fair share of challenges at you. Unimaginable situations and some you never thought your perfect life could ever encounter. You experience various emotions you never knew existed; pain, sorrow, more pain and more sorrow and you don't think you can ever make it through that time. You wake up each day wondering why this is happening to you and what you have done to deserve this, and go to bed each night trying to figure when this will pass . You try to evaluate the situation against your 'karma' theory of life that you grew up believing but nothing makes sense anymore and everything becomes a mess. You lose yourself completely in the process!

Yet you lose yourself only to find yourself again in due course as someone new, someone different and someone transformed! A survivor - a caterpillar who finally became a butterfly!! And when that happens you have developed a new level of strength that you never knew existed within. You stop looking for answers as you realise that somethings in life just don't fit into any watertight compartments and are completely random. There is no real reason why whatever happened with you, good or bad, actually took the liberty of happening to you and not to someone else.

On another note, I do still believe in Karma. But I believe in doing the first line of the karma shlok 'karmanye vadhikaraste' and then not thinking about what comes later. Maybe all the good/bad Karma does even out over several lives after all, and thats why some good things happen to bad people and bad things to good people!!

Here I go again.....looking for answers.....so much for saying I have stopped looking for answers.....LOL!! :))

Me then and now - Older and perhaps wiser :)

Just yesterday I was thinking of creating a blog where I could share my experiences, thoughts and findings(if you like) about life, as I progress on through its journey. I was reading about how to set up my own blog when I remembered vaguely that many years ago, I have in fact already set up a blog which has long been forgotten by me. I dug a little to remember how to gain access again and I landed back here.

Around 6 years have passed since I wrote the one and only post that I did here. I remember that time very well. When I was naive, innocent and filled with enthusiasm about anything and everything in life - the world was my oyster. When I started this blog I was going through a very confused and challenging time, wondering that, when I have never been mean out of intention or hurt someone, (on the contrary I always put 'human' ahead of 'being') and tried to help anyone and everyone in every manner possible, then why should I be going through this sort of a time. I used to see the world through my rosy tinted glasses and thought everything and everyone was either perfect in my life or not. If I loved someone because they were good people, then there were no flaws in them, at least none visible to my eye. But if someone was silly enough to be unfair to someone else (particularly my loved ones) or treat them badly, then they lost their place in my heart forever. It was a colourful world, and yet it was divided in to the black and the white, with no room for any shades of grey whatsoever. Then came a time where I just couldn't figure out what was going on and why. I had no control over happenings in my life and nothing was fitting in with my theory of life which I had been taught and that I believed in, since my childhood days. The theory that good things happen to good people and bad things to the bad. Some of the white in my life, had shown some unforeseen shades of grey which my processing system dismissed as unrecognised and did not quite understand. Whereas some of the black started fading away and becoming less intense. Perplexed about the situation, I just did not know what to do and simply didn't have answers to so many questions. Nor did I know where to find them. However, I did know that a few things kept me going through it all; my family and friends (blessed to have been granted the finest stock available with God) AND my sense of humor (and an occasional downpour of salt water from my eyes ;) )

I came here yesterday and read what I had posted here about describing myself, 'i'm still an enigma to myself...........trying to solve the mystery that is me.......hoping blogging assists the process :)' Unfortunately, my bogging experience was very short lived but my experience with life went on much further. Since then I have solved some mysteries about myself and about life in general - maybe not all but most certainly some!! And the work is still in progress.

No longer am I the person that I was those 6 odd years ago. I guess its safe to say that I have recognised my own shades of grey and I have learned to love them as much as every other element in myself. I have learned that it is ok to feel bad about certain things people say and/or do, and it doesn't necessarily make them good or bad. As long as they are not 'evil' everyone who matters has a set place in your heart. And I have learned to not bottle up negative thoughts inside me about people I love - they do nothing but make you miserable and certainly do not make you love those people any less.  Instead, I have learned that it helps to let off the steam somewhere where it can be absorbed with ease and without causing any damage (my main scapegoat is my husband and occasionally my parents - God bless them LOL :D ). I have learned that its good and very important to be nice, but most importantly one needs to be nice AND real. Even more important than that is to remember that no matter what emotion we sense (positive or negative), its what makes us human and void of it we wouldn't remain normal healthy human beings any longer.

I have returned here today with a commitment to not just keep my blog alive but to fill it with life through my experiences and thoughts. Be it personal issues, professional learning or random thoughts - it will be all about life and my reflections on it as I continue through this journey 'searching the ultimate truth of life!!! :) <3 br="">

Tathastu, Amen, Insha Allah!!