Showing posts with label Knowledge. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Knowledge. Show all posts

Saturday 2 May 2015

National Girl Child Day

24th January is celebrated as the National Girl Child Day every year. This was started by earlier government in the year 2008. It appears neither the programme was conceived correctly nor its implementation brought any results till today. It appears the objectives of the celebration of the Girl Child Day was only to enhance the image of the Nehru Gandhi Dynasty. We have seen over the past few years that many such initiatives have proved to be counter-productive.


Actually the subject is far more serious than the conception of the programme and activities normally followed. Symbolic activities to address a problem which is far more serious should have no place in the society today.


There should be concentrated efforts to ensure that girls must be provided education. All facilities should be granted. More than that, there should be initiation programme to emphasis our cultural traditions. In Hindu tradition a lady is respected as an embodiment of knowledge, wealth and power.


When we do Saraswati Puja knowledge comes easier than ever. Likewise Mata Lakshmi brings wealth. When we want to evoke power to destroy the evil in the society we prayed to Durga Mata.



Devi Pujan is practiced in all the states of the country. This is also unifying force. At many Devi temples people of all castes and sects come to pray. Invariably their prayers are answered.


It’s important for the government to do all what it can to empower women. She is the mother of all creation.

Thanks for reading.

JAI MATA DI

Thursday 30 April 2015

Happiness is not expensive.

Today when there is so much information available on all human emotions and the reasons there of no one has any right or business to be unhappy. Actually there was never a reason for people to be unhappy. Abraham Lincoln said in the early 19th century that ‘most people are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.’ However at that time there was no internet, literature was scanty and hardly available. Today, with the internet all the information and the images that one may require to collect about happiness, are easily available.

Vikram a student of 6th standard volunteered to collect the relevant information and the images on ‘how to be happy’. I reproduce the material collected by Vikram in about half an hour. When I went through it, I found that anyone who would spend some time to read the knowledge collected by Vikram and see the pictures again collected by him should be never unhappy.

He informed me that he collected the pictures from Google images. Further he collected the entire written material from Wikipedia. Please spend some time to look at the pictures and also a few minutes on reading the text which he collected from Wikipedia.








  


A smiling Rebecca L. Felton

Research has produced many different views on causes of happiness, and on factors that correlate with happiness,[5] but no validated method has been found to substantially improve long-term happiness in a meaningful way for most people.

Sonja Lyubomirsky concludes in her book The How of Happiness that 50 percent of a given human’s happiness level is genetically determined (based on twin studies), 10 percent is affected by life circumstances and situation, and a remaining 40 percent of happiness is subject to self-control.

The results of the 75 year Grant study of Harvard undergraduates show a high correlation of loving relationship, especially with parents, with later life wellbeing
Psychologist Martin Seligman asserts that happiness is not solely derived from external, momentary pleasures,[11] and provides the acronym PERMA to summarize Positive Psychology’s correlational findings: humans seem happiest when they have
  1. Pleasure (tasty food, warm baths, etc.),
  2. Engagement (or flow, the absorption of an enjoyed yet challenging activity),
  3. Relationships (social ties have turned out to be extremely reliable indicator of happiness),
  4. Meaning (a perceived quest or belonging to something bigger), and
  5. Accomplishments (having realized tangible goals
  1. Abraham Harold Maslow, an American professor of psychology, founded humanistic psychology in the 1930s. A visual aid he created to explain his theory, which he called the hierarchy of needs, is a pyramid depicting the levels of human needs, psychological, and physical. When a human being ascends the steps of the pyramid, he reaches self-actualization. Beyond the routine of needs fulfillment, Maslow envisioned moments of extraordinary experience, known as peak experiences, profound moments of love, understanding, happiness, or rapture, during which a person feels more whole, alive, self-sufficient, and yet a part of the world. This is similar to the flow concept of Mihály Csíkszentmihályi.
  2. Self-determination theory relates intrinsic motivation to three needs: competence, autonomy, and relatedness
HEALTH
  1. Richard Davidson‘s 2012 bestseller The Emotional Life of Your Brain argues that positive emotion and happiness benefit your long-term health. From a study conducted in 2005 by Andrew Steptow and Michael Marmot, findings have found that happiness is clearly related to biological markers that play an important role in health.
  2. At University College London, Steptow and Marmot collected health and well-being data from 116 men and 100 women. All 216 participants were middle-aged, British civil servants between the ages of 45 and 59. The researchers aimed to analyze whether there was any association between well-being and three biological markers: heart rate, cortisol levels, and plasma fibrinogen levels. Interestingly, the participants who rated themselves the least happy had cortisol levels that were 48% higher than those who rated themselves as the most happy. The least happy subjects also had a large plasma fibrinogen response to two stress-inducing tasks: the Stroop test, and tracing a star seen in a mirror image.
  3. In Happy People Live Longer,[42] Frey reports that happy people live 14% longer, increasing longevity 7.5 to 10 years.
  4. Steptow and Marmot furthered their studies by using their participants three years later to repeat the physiological measurements. They found that participants who scored high in positive emotion continued to have lower levels of cortisol and fibrinogen, as well as a lower heart rate.
Despite a large body of positive psychological research into the relationship between happiness and productivity,[43][44][45] happiness at work has traditionally been seen as a potential by-product of positive outcomes at work, rather than a pathway to success in business. However a growing number of scholars, including Boehm and Lyubomirsky, argue that it should be viewed as one of the major sources of positive outcomes in the workplace.

Thanks for reading.

3 Aspects of Personality.

Simply said, any person must assess himself/herself on the 3 important aspects of personality: i) Acquiring knowledge ii) Developing an ability to explain what you know iii) Using your knowledge for your work and activities.

1. Acquiring Knowledge: One acquires knowledge with formal educations. More importantly practical knowledge is acquired once you entered your business or profession. Every day can give us some lesson provided we sit down and contemplate to review the day. So knowledge is a continuous, never ending process. Even when we have learnt something in our formal education, we may have to supplement the same with additional information during life.                                                                             

2. Ability to transfer knowledge: Anything that we do is a collaborative effort, today. Thus, you have to communicate your ideas, your views and so on. Unless you are adept in this aspect of personality, your growth will have some kind of limitation. So ability to transfer knowledge and make others do what you want to them to do is crucial to the success of your project. If there is any deficiency in this ability to communicate, the same will show in the progress of the project.  

 

3. Putting knowledge to work: One may have acquired great knowledge but unless they put it to use its value will never be discovered. So, thoughts are not enough. Thoughts must be converted in to action. It is the action which can bring about any result. The more efforts you put in, the better results are rewarded. But one should never have the expectation that all efforts will bring in results. Some time you work very hard but the result are not commensurate with the amount of efforts made. That is the way life works. No one should ever expect the poetic justice in life.

It is observed that those who excel in the first aspect of personality may become philosophers and the kind. They are generally good advisors but not so good in performance. They need to develop a perspective so that they are not lost in the ocean of knowledge. Knowledge is unending, indeed. They have to limit themselves to what is needed by them.

Other people, who are quiet, apply their mind and rely more on action. They are often the risk takers. They are the mostly likely people to become business leaders. They hire people for various functions which they feel that they are not able to perform. But because of their rich and sometime checkered experience, they have a lot to talk about. But they tend to become self centered.

People who develop excellent ability to transfer knowledge become teachers, lecturers, public speakers, trainers and performers. The nucleolus of their progress always remains communication skills. The world today, is heading toward the situation where communication skills have assumed a great importance. We spend more time on conference calls, on social media, on organizing/conducting/participating in meetings and so on. The human communication skills have only brought about all the progress that we see around us. During the last century world has seen maximum material progress which has been achieved with maximum communicative collaboration.

Thanks for reading.

Friday 31 May 2013

What is most Important for Success- Knowledge, Power or Wealth?

At our learning centre, we recently held a discussion on- “What is important for success- knowledge, power or wealth?”
knowledge
Importance of Power
The participants in the discussions were entrepreneurs, corporate executives, bankers and others. Different views were presented by the speakers. Some considered knowledge as most important factor. They enumerated examples of successful people who had risen from being unknown to highly rated successful individual by consistently acquiring knowledge and gainfully using it. Knowledge in such cases did not necessarily mean any university degree or such other qualification. Knowledge, here, denotes application of mind of the practical knowledge received through any medium and using the same for earning name, fame and wealth. Steve Jobs is one such example. Our own Dhirubhai Ambani is another. Even Warren Buffet’s story is no different. It is rags to riches. While academic Knowledge has also helped lots of people to become successful and famous.

power
Importance of Power
The role of power in success, too, cannot be undermined. Politicians achieve power and then use the same to achieve greater power. This is how power helps them to be successful. In the present scenario, a powerful politician can introduce his/her son or daughter to become a nominated leader and in the process achieve success in politics. Many politicians, today, are following this model of leadership succession. Likewise, a powerful bureaucrat can use his power to help his friend relative to achieve success.

wealth
Importance of Wealth
Wealth can buy knowledge and power. So, one may say that if you have money, you can achieve any goal by hiring people, facilities to create any large project and achieve success.  But without Knowledge achieved through experience it is very difficult to see the success of a large project. Political leaders can no doubt introduce their wards in leadership succession through the power they wield, but unless they   ensure that the latter gain sufficient experience, the entrant may not be successful.  Knowledge acquired through experience alone will bring success to them. Here too, Knowledge gained with experience becomes important. Power alone will not work.

So, the fact of the matter is that knowledge learnt through studies or gained through experience is indeed very important in any field.

But, it needs to be remembered that the meaning of success has to be defined by each and every individual in his/her own terms.

How should one do that? That will be a subject of another post.

Thank you.

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