Belur Math Experience

     Last Sunday I’d been to Dakshineswar and Belur Math, one of Kolkata’s great shrines.

It’s not that I’d never been there before. I’ve visited the place 2/3 times. Though I’m not of very religious kind, I like visiting the surroundings, the people, the Ganga etc.. The plan was quite instant. A friend called me up in the morning saying he’s leaving Kolkata in 2/3 days and haven’t visited any place here and asked me to suggest some place. And I couldn’t think of any, I said, “I’m not sure, you probably have visited the places I know like Dakshineswar, Victoria Palace and….”.
“No…I’ve not been to Dakshineswar”.
“All right, Let’s go then.”

It was already a bit late, because staying out in the scorching heat that almost touches 46 degree in the peak hours is definitely not a good idea. But as the plan is made and decisions taken, there’s only one option: “Get ready and come to my place as soon as possible.” I shouted and disconnected my phone. Within half an hour we were out and reached the nearest railway station to catch the Dankuni local. We were late. The next train was after 45 minutes. So we took a bus to Dakshineswar and reached almost in 30-45 minutes. I was more interested in taking him to Belur Math rather than the Dakshineswar temple as I liked the place and the journey through the Ganga. So we took hardly 20 minutes to see the deity and the temple around and left for Belur in the next boat for it. By the time we reached it was almost time for the closure. There was less than one hour left but, that was enough for us to get a quick look around.

So far the experience was good if not very good because of the weather but, it was not the Experience I mean in the title. This was just the background to the story. The experience starts now. I mean not right now,  soon.

We took a water bottle and rested in the shade of a tree for sometime looking around. Lots of people were moving around in groups of their own but still there was a comfortable noise level. Children in the groups didn’t seem to care about the heat. It was almost noon then and the temperature was still rising. We decided to go inside the main temple, spend some time there and then decide what to do next. It was a large hall with high walls. The idol of Ramkrishna Paramhamsa was placed at the furthest end of the hall. I asked my friend to go and have a look around and sat by the near by pillar. The temperature was considerably low there with large pedestal fans creating the feel of a smooth breeze inside. I felt relieved and sat leaning to the pillar and stretched out my legs. A small crouching child was playing with a ring besides his/her guardian. I smiled at the child and stretched my hand in an expression to come near me. The child looked at me and choose to stay away from the strangers.

I was just about to close my eyes to give rest to my eyelids when I saw a guard waving at me and hinting something. I couldn’t understand at first what he meant but soon realized that I was facing sideways to the idol. This was disrespectful and he wanted me to turn around. I was irritated a bit and remembered the story of a famous mystic who was sleeping in the stairs of a temple with his legs towards the deity. The temple priest came near him and asked him to turn his legs as this was very disrespectful to the God. The mystic answered, “Please turn my legs to a direction where there is no God”. I didn’t think it would be a good idea to answer the guard the same way and turned around still thinking of how to show the depth of my knowledge on philosophy to the guard and make him feel low. But then something happened. As I turned I felt surprisingly satisfied. The irritation moments ago was gone in an instant. I felt kind of impressed about the guard for being so alert in monitoring people inside. A smile came to my face without any reason while I continued to stare blankly at the idol. I was surprised by this change in mood.

As I said, I’m not of a religious sort but, something was there given away for free to everyone who faced it. You may call it blessings or pure positive energy. The guard actually suggested me the right thing to do inside. It’s not that Belur Math was special, I almost had nearly same feelings in almost every temple I visited but, never cared about these things or never thought like this before. I continued to sit in that posture while my friend came back and sat near me. I turned around and saw the child crouching towards me and urging me to play with him. I was feeling happy and smiled at him. He responded with a even broader smile. We played with the water bottle for sometime and then came out.

We took a round in the park, clicked some pictures(It was not allowed though), saw the 200 year old mango tree, visited the old shrine. We were feeling a bit hungry by then as we hadn’t our breakfast. We took the prasaad coupons and joined the queue for it. It was a simple meal but was good.

The main temple was already closed by the time we finished. We came out to the main road and took a bus to return.

Read More

The Law of Attraction

 Homo-Sapiens or any other species for that matter, I may have to disappoint you. The post below is far from being that interesting.
   If you have dived into this post in the hope for reading about the masculine-feminine attraction in

You may want to do a bit of google on the topic to get more involved as I myself doubt the clarity of my writing. 😉

The law of attraction as I perceive:

Everything that we think attracts similar objects/events in the real world around us. I would try to explain the statement with some examples. If you woke up in a happy mood say you got the news of your promotion, chances are there that you will get another good news very soon. The day at least would be a pleasant one. Similarly if you keep worrying about your career and future most of the time, you may get another jolt that would just increase your tension further. The prevailing thoughts in our mind will shape our surrounding real world.

I can’t prove this law, no one can. But you can’t disapprove this as well, as the law is not falsifiable. On the other hand realization of this may help in improving the life we live. In a sense The law of attraction means we are the only ones responsible for our life, because we are the ones that thought of this to us. If you find people treating you badly, or your loved ones seem to ignore you, it’s not because of they being so but more because you somewhere suspected them to be so. If you think life is not being fare to you it’s because you think that way. So be a positive thinker to attract the positive result into your life.

Again not every thought in your mind becomes real. It’s only the dominant thoughts that work. So you may have the contradictory thoughts in mind but only the higher order thoughts of you will find a way to manifest. That’s why when expecting a result you already know it in your heart, regardless of how irrelevant your thoughts at that time may be. This is the reason successful people continue going up in the ladder while stressed, frustrated people find it hard to revive as they continue dozing one failure after another. Reason being the circumstances affect our thought process and that in turn attracts the similar circumstances into our life and the loop continues.

You may argue, no one wants to be a failure or stressed or want anything bad to happen to him/her. But that’s not exactly how the process works. Not wanting to fail and wanting to get success are though logically very similar, they are very different emotionally. Instead of hoping to get out of your bad luck or situation, wish something good to yourself.

The main problem here is to tame the mind to think positively. Though it sounds very difficult, once you realize the law and trust it, you will find it much easier. Try it, you may be amazed at its results.

Read More

I am NOT an option

    In a casual hour of scanning through facebook pages or some quotes forum I noticed a quote saying, “If someone is having difficulty in choosing between me and someone else then, I would suggest to choose the other one because I am not an option.”
Rarely does it happen that you come across something and get stuck there wondering, ‘this is what I was thinking of. It’s just that the right words hadn’t popped up yet.’
We come across thousands of advices and wise quotes by ALL-WISE(includes me 😉) people around us everyday. And we are real quick in responding “hmmm…”, “yeah…”, “well said” and sometimes with what a line man!!. We blurt it out almost automatically without giving a second thought on what was said/read. 
I remember one of my friends once said,”Good things are known to everyone.”, when I pointed to a statutory warning written on his cigarette case. So what is it then that makes you stuck on a particular quote and your mind keeps drifting back to that thought throughout the day if not longer.
May be because you connect to it. And may be you connect to it because you are going through it or you are deeply moved by someone else going through it.
Coming back to the title of the post, I liked the later part of the quote very much. Self respect at its extreme. I am not just merely an option for somebody to choose or put an hold for a later point of time when things will be less complicated. Saying this statement to myself makes me feel stronger, more confident and less concerned on what people might think of me. It’s kind of nerd feeling that keeps me going when I am down and deserted. It motivates me to bring the more capable ‘I’ from within.
Some people may term it as an egoistic statement but I call it ‘loving the self’. What do you think?

Read More

On a Sunday

     At last, fed up of my procrastination to start my personal blog, I have finally managed to put myself in front of it’s post editor. I did a lot of noise and nuisance to my friends while selecting a domain name for this blog. This is before (more than) 12 months ago.
Just a day before one of my friend remembered that and asked, “what are you doing with it?”.
I was organizing my words to answer that question while another blurted out, “The home page is ready. You can check out the lonely blog.”
I kept my mouth shut, for I believe in action than words (or so I think at least).
To tell you the truth, I was waiting for a big day to inaugurate my blog but, that day never came.
I initially thought of posting the 1st post on my birth day but, the day got over before I could close my facebook page and keep my cellphone away from me. Then I prepared for The New year. The day came and passed before I could think of something to write. So I decided, ‘before the week ends, there would be a post in my blog’. Any day can be a big day. So why not a Sunday? Hence the title.
Hopefully I will be able to stick to my Sunday regime. So that my blog doesn’t feel so lonely. See you soon.

Read More

Moving ahead with my final semester project

Finally I have made it to the last semester. When for the 1st time I saw the syllabus for my four semester course, I always wanted to be in the last semester. The obvious reason is, we don’t have to attend a single lecture this semester, because there are none 😊. We still have to complete a project in the due time though. The syllabus mentions it as dissertation, but I like the name project. It sounds less bombastic and comfortable.
We are said to form a group of maximum two members and submit the topic for project for approval by the committee. I found forming the group is rather easy than selecting a topic (not all my batch mates ’ll agree with me though). After banging our head to search for an excellent topic, we finally realized it’s not our job. Why there are teachers after all? But again we took too much time to realize this. Up to the date of our scheduled meeting we hadn’t any fixed project idea in mind. We had asked all of our teachers for a suggestion (but all we needed was a concrete project topic 😉 ) with no luck. All have advised us to read journals, papers, books then search then read and continue till we find a topic of our interest(or give up, they haven’t said it though). Now this is called luck. Just before the meeting we again met one of our teacher and she said, ‘you can consider this’ before leaving for the meeting. I could just read the topic before we reached the meeting and guess what, we’re called first. We told the panel the topic we had a few minutes ago and it was accepted. They just asked us to present a detailed synopsis in a few days. Many of the project ideas are rejected after us. That day my belief on luck got another example to fight my reasoning brain.
The topic that got selected was “Design and comparative analysis of time stamp based packet scheduling algorithm”. Pretty long huh……Before the final meeting we made the topic a bit shorter by removing the first two words, for we(our teachers too) knew those words can create problems afterwards. The final topic was “Comparative analysis of timestamp based packet scheduling algorithm”. The synopsis was presented by my partner Gaurav alone, for I was then enjoying my holidays at home 😄 .

Read More