Hurt people hurt people

Often at times I have come across people who were absolutely snobbish, rude and intentionally hurtful to me and others. They constantly survive on ego-trip and just don't understand the idea of living together in peace and harmony. They always want to disturb someone or being outright rude. I cannot help but wonder why? What really drives this behaviour for them? Are they really like that naturally or is there something else which shaped them like this? Lets ponder on this today.

I am a believer of the title of this article, Hurt people do hurt people. We have long known all kinds of psychopathic murderers and criminals having gone through abusive childhood. Victims of domestic violence have a skewed perception of love. People having a bad day at office usually act rude at home. It may not be the only reason but we may have some form of an answer here. I will break this into few easy to understand points -

1) They are in pity and are suffering so they make others suffer so that they are not alone in their pity and suffering-
   They feel miserable if they see people having a good time in their lives. I mean they are having it so hard on them, how dare others can have happiness so easily?

2) It acts as a shield to their miserable personality-
     They can't give you love, even if you give them. They can't give you anything fruitful or interesting enough so their rudeness is a shield, they can't let you close as they have nothing valuable to offer so they keep you at bay by being rude - by making sure you don't come close.

3) Inability to act tenderly
      Its not that they could be anything they wanted and they chose to be rude. It's the only thing they can be. This largely again is influenced by how much love they themselves received in life. Emotions are best expressed when you practice exhibiting them all throughout your life. The more you laugh, the better you become at laughing, the more you cry the more deely you cry(and thereby cleansing your heart). Since there was nobody to show love and tenderness to, their hearts have forgotten to show them. They have simply become incapable of showing it. I absolutely love this dialogue from movie: Dear Zindagi.. It perfectly captures what I feel -

We desperately need a happiness revolution on Earth. In this mad race we have forgotten about caring for each other. We have forgotten that loving each other is the single best thing we can have on this life. We have forgotten that all we ever have here is each other. Happy people create a better home. Better homes create a better surroundings and so on. It's contagious. This needs to be a thing. I request all of you to go and spread your smile, you never know what's going on in their lives and your affection and care can change their day and eventually their lives.

See you!

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Why Spiderman is my favorite superhero

There are only a handful number of people in my life who knows that for a very very long time Spiderman has been my favorite superhero of all. The prime reason for that is just how relatable Peter Parker is. The typical shy nerdy guy who has all of his efforts almost neglected, has girl problems, has money problems, is bullied at school, overburdened with responsibility - All of this and still he is good at heart - very admirable personality. In this post I will catalogue all the things about him which I have noticed in his films which makes him my favorite hero out there.

1) He is highly intelligent-

    In every movie, he is shown as the high school genius, probably the best in his town. At a very young age, he has a knack at science being geeky and does really amazing things -

                                        

As time and again he has revealed that science is his true passion and that it always drives him forward. Apart from that, strategic planning wise, he is really cool too. He does not have an iron armor or impenetrable skin so he has to dodge bullets, heavy attacks from his enemies and always have to think up couple of moves ahead to beat them up. That is probably shown the best in Tom Holland's movies where he uses movie references to beat bad guys up.

In a nutshell, he performs really well at school, has a high IQ and a great passion for science.

2) He is a loser-

  This one is quite obvious. A typical nerdy guy with low social skills, cannot pay his rent, everybody bullies him, makes fun of him and is constantly reminded of that he ain't worth nothing. Frankly speaking it requires an iron heart just to go through life while facing just this but our kickass spiderman faces this and much much more and still inspires a lot of us.

3) Willpower -

     He barely manages to juggle between his already pathetic personal life where he runs late for everything, cant confess to his love of life, - and the superhero life which leaves him exhausted but he still gets up every morning doing basically the same thing over and over. He watches his alter-ego Spiderman being constantly traduced by the very newspaper he works in. He cannot let anybody come close to him because of the danger of what will happen once his identity is revealed despite of wanting to have a life with them. I mean man, he has god level willpower.

4) His relationship with Gwen Stacy-

    Okay, this is a big one. This HUGE story arc is portrayed in the Amazing Spiderman series. Here's the thing. He is really into Gwen but owing to his awkward and introvert nature is unable to talk to her. Through luck though he finally gets to date her but guess what her father is a policeman who hates Spiderman. Add to that, when he finally knows about Peter, he asks him to promise that he will stay away from his daughter because the sheer danger Peter brings with him to his near ones. DESPITE all the struggles he went through to make her his girlfriend, he KEEPS the promise even though Gwen desperately wants to be with him (since she also knows that he is spiderman) and stays away from her.

That really shows his character- of how much caring and ethical he is. But here comes the tragedy, After some time Gwen manages to convince him back to her life only ultimately leading to her father's predictions coming true. She gets kidnapped and gets KILLED in front of Spiderman. This was ultimately Peter's responsibility. Imagine this, first because of him his dear uncle died (killed by the thief Spiderman let go once) and now Gwen dies too because of him. Obviously, he gets shattered and quits being Spiderman. He is emotionally destroyed.

                             

 BUT all it takes is one recorded speech about hope from her for him to come back to business because ultimately he has a responsibility to fullfill. In comics, he was able to fully recover once MJ comes into his life (The comic book MJ is this happy go jolly extroverted girl who secretly knew all along that Peter was Spiderman and was interested in him since even before Peter was with Gwen).

5) He sacrifices his personal life for his duty-

Time and again, Peter faces hard choices whether to go on a date with his love interest or to saving a mob. And he always chooses the latter, every single time. Yes there were times when he was just fed up with his role and wanted a simple life (Far from home) yet ultimately he returned to his job sacrificing all of it. Though at this point, it can be argued that this trait is not unique to Spiderman alone and many other superheroes does that. Take for instance, Batman. He, instead of enjoying pleasures of a billionaire chooses to correct whats wrong in his city. BUT there is one major difference between Batman and Spiderman. It is that Batman is highly obsessive about his role as a caped crusader. He desperately wants  to be Batman and not some complaisant or a player or something. He begs for monitor duty during Christmas vacations in Justice League (animation), he never uses his money much on himself, he risks his life again and again without thinking even for a split second simply because he has made fighting crimes his ultimate life goal(I also relate heavily with this particular trait of Batman. There are things in my life I go all out working towards it without caring about myself. I will talk about them later).

THAT, is not the case with Spiderman however. He is just a teenager. He have his desires, attractions. He wants to enjoy his life, he wants to come in spotlight but he cannot and he chooses that way himself and constantly let go of his personal life for his duty because -

                           

You obviously know the quote here, right?

6) He is just a teenager-

Isnt't it amazing... such maturity, such sense of justice, such willingness to stick to his responsibility when his heart is dangling somewhere else, such genuine care for others, such ability to pick himself despite going through serious tragedies in life - all of this while being just a teenager. That's one of the single best reason why young audiences love him so much and are able to relate with him. Also he gets to fight some really evil villains. Take Green Goblin, Kingpin, Venom. They are pretty dark characters- too much for a teenager.

In fact, it is just ironical that a dull loser guy like Peter Parker gets to embark such twisty roller coaster of a life. It is a triumphant feel that connects with many millenials who are not able to do much in their lives as a representative analogous to, "Ohh well take THAT!" He is not a loser after all, his fucked up life actually adds to his greatness and we are nothing but truly happy that such an average joe like Peter gets to do this-

7) His sense of humor-

  He cracks up really funny jokes many times! Against his introverted weak aura, whenever he is in the Spiderman suit he becomes this self-confident funny cool guy who everyone loves to hang out with. He lets out this side of his personality while wearing the suit which is actually amazing.


So that's the end of it! Things which makes Spiderman someone I truly look upto and admire. As a final give away I have collected some really cool Spiderman wallpapers which I am going to share here - (Guess which one is mine currently :)) Enjoy!

Wallpapers link

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Philosophers I love- Lao Tzu

You cannot discuss Chinese literature without discussing Lao Tzu. A great philosopher and founder of Taoism, one of the important tradition in eastern spirituality. Believed to be have lived in around 4th century, his words of wisdom are still relatable and applicable, so enjoy his quotes!

Explaining the meaning of love when there was no romantic movies -

He was a spiritual leader after all -

Motivational -

Well that's deep -

Patience -

                              

"Log kya sochenge" -

                                   

True and deep -

                                    

Ready to live?

                                 

Happy Weekend!

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Yoga can change your life

Millions of people have joined the Yoga revolution since last few years. Hundreds of scientific results have been published all acknowledging the tremendous impact yoga and meditation can have on our life. It has become the new "healthy practice" popular enough to make you feel guilty if you aren't doing it.
Though, good health is just one of the benefits of Yoga, it was developed as a means to achieve something much more - To free ourselves from our compulsive nature of our mind and finally be peace with existence - just as it is and in the process, health improvement is just a fancy byproduct.

The philosophy of meditation is simple. If you realize who you truly are, you will be happy and satisfied because there is nothing more important in life than that. Meaningless desires disappear, ego disappears because you now see yourself as something much more than them. You become more in tune with existence, to the extent that your personality which comprises of ego, perceptions, prejudices, negative mindset just disappears. You become this independent mind free from any conditioning and ever-fresh!

Okay wait, how is that possible? For that lets observe this quote -

The more I am involved in doing something, the more I realize I am not the doer.

Remember the times you were so engrossed in working on a project, that you forgot where are you sitting, whether you ate or not or how much time has passed. You enter in a all-together different zone of single-pointed focus and your mind gets fully engrossed. You may have observed in this state, ideas just flow naturally. You automatically know what to do and  your hands just move in that direction, a lot of EUREKA moments happening without any conscious tail of thoughts as if in a leap. A lot of sportsmen and  artists have experienced this, scientifically this state is called flow or zone. I have talked about this earlier in my blog posts as well for example when I experience this while playing  basketball, coding, etc.

The point though is, people do realize in this hyper conscious state that a LOT of thinking process is actually happening automatically. You have no control over it. Mind creates an illusion that you are the one carrying out all the process but you really are not and we live in this illusion all the time except for those tiny little moments of zone or flow when we actually come to experience the reality. Meditation lets you see just that. You allow yourself to calm down and not interfere with anything what mind is doing. With some practice, you will see all your jumbled up memories, thoughts, fears simply popups up without your permissions and float around. We know this ofcourse by books but after experiencing it live, we finally learn how to control it.

When you realize you are not the one doing most of the things you think you are doing, you are automatically freed from the worry of doing it right. It might come as a setback to the ego but honey you are in this world to do lot more meaningful stuff instead of day-dreaming whole day!

The stress levels increase when we can't accept what is happening and instead desire to make things happen the way we want it. Stress is either worrying about something you can't control of or it is worrying but doing nothing useful as in order to sort that problem. Stress inside body is a safety mechanism to tackle with life and death problems. Imagine you are sitting inside a cave and you hear the voice of a lion. You get afraid, you get stressed, butterflies in your stomach. That's your body signalling to do something about it. So you run. In the present world though, we don't have survival stress very often but body does not know how to react differently to survival stress or emotional stress. It basically lifts up your energy levels preparing you to run. That's why mental capacity becomes decreased and you are unable to concentrate or are easily irritated. That is why it is great to exercise while feeling stressed because it acts as an outlet for the extra energy.

A much bigger problem though is that many people today have become addicted to stress. You don't need to tell them what's wrong. They will see what is there and will automatically find out what's wrong and then stress about it. Yoga/Meditation allows you to observe these mind patterns and to have an ability to control it. Also since you now know you are not the doer again you are freed of most of the stress you feed yourself.

Since meditation improves employee producitivity , corporates are also picking up the trend and actively promoting it. Lot of companies have in house Yoga sessions, instructors and a conducive environment. More and more doctors are recommending Yoga/Meditation for all kinds of diseases. Lot of artists, sports person meditate in order to increase focus. It is also extremely useful for students to beat their exam fear and to increase concentration. 

For full read of all the benefits, kindly go through this amazing compilation.

This life-transforming quality of meditation is not all that mysterious – just imagine how your life would change if you spend 45 minutes a day in the greatest relaxation you have ever known, resting more deeply than sleep, giving your body, nervous system, and brain a chance to tune for action.

So when are you going to start including Yoga in your life?

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