Oh My God!

What does god mean to u? & How do u connect with god?

God is that fabric of consciousness that connects all things in this Universe.  Great masters in every sphere and in every time have have always understood this through intuition.  Science is also slowly uncovering this very fact by approaching it from the angle of observable data and phenomena.  We don't exist in isolation.  At the very basic level, we all are inseparably connected and God is this mesh which binds us all.

Once, we understand that God is not outside, in a specific geography or practice, but inside and also everywhere, then connecting becomes a process of realization.  It is journey within, peeling through layers of oneself - the physical, the intellectual, the emotional, so we finally get to our core energy.  To connect with God is probably the simplest thing to explain, but then again, probably one of the most challenging states to achieve.  To connect with God, one needs to become still - at all levels.  The body needs to be balanced, the mind needs to be stable and the heart needs to be unwavering - then you don't just connect with God, you become one with God.

Spiritual practices, beliefs & experiences 

This is an ongoing process of discovery, and some of these are also seasonal, haha. However, the overall urge to explore spirituality has been taking root in my life for a while now.  There is a lot of yoga, a little bit of meditation, some breathing exercises (pranayama).  I also try to keep myself positive all the time.  I don't indulge in or tolerate negativity.  I believe that when one truly, completely and unconditionally believes in something, however improbable it may seem to others, the Universe has no option but to manifest it.  Great achievers in every field have known and believed this.

what does being religious mean to u?

I am born into a religion which has a tradition of spiritual practices that can be traced back to four or five millenia at the least, if not more.  For this, I feel grateful and blessed.  We have a wealth of spiritual knowledge that has been handed down to us through the ages in our country.  Probably, no other country or land in the world has this blessing.  Today the practices themselves may be clouded through rituals and discovering the spiritual motivations beneath the veneer of these rituals and superstitions is in itself an interesting process.  To me, being religious is a way to find faith.  Different people need different tools to help them find faith.  Some hold on to religion, some to their family and friends, some to their profession, some to basic goodness and philanthropy, some to science.  Each of these is a religion, or a dharma, in its own way.  I think of myself as more of a spiritual person, than a religious one.  However, I do enjoy and follow the religious practices and traditions I'm born into.  Festivals and celebrations are a social experience and create a feeling of belonging to something bigger than yourself - a craving that every human being has.

If u got a chance to play god, what would u change?

I wouldn't change a thing, because the Universe runs in accordance with certain laws.  Even God cannot change those.  The Universe runs through freewill.  That is the power that has been given to us by God.  So, God, or any other power outside, cannot change our freewill and cannot change the Universe.  However, WE CAN.  And by doing so, we ourselves become God.  Realizing that and figuring out this 'matrix' is our purpose.

Miracles if any 

Several!  I see miracles all around.  If we open our eyes to it, every moment of our existence is miraculous.  When I was a little kid, we were in Central Station, Chennai, waiting to board a train.  You know the television monitors in Central Station that keep playing advertisements and PSAs?  Now, my brother and I made this incredulous wish that they should play Michael Jackson's "Thriller" on the television set.  One moment later, hardly a couple of seconds had passed since we wished this aloud, the television sets all over Central Station went blank and they played Michael Jackson's Thriller video.  I am not kidding you!!!  They did!  To this day, I don't know how it happened.  It was miraculous.  As we grow up, we stop believing.  We stop believing in miracles and close ourselves to miraculous possibilities.  We tell ourselves, "Such things don't happen in real life.  They can happen only in movies!".  Truth is, miracles don't happen often enough, because we don't let them happen to us.  I don't close myself to miracles - and miracles happen to me all the time.  Every time I feel the love of my wife, every time I see my child's eyes, every time an audience applauds my work, every time I bask in my family's warmth, every time a stranger helps me out of a tough situation, I know I'm experiencing a miracle.

Fav pilgrimage sites

Has to be Kailash-Manasarovar.  Again, how this happened was also a miracle.  I was going through a very tough and stressful situation.  I told my wife that I needed to be in a place where there was nobody around for at least 3 or 4 days to get my balance back.  Within a couple of days, I got a call from Isha Yoga saying that Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev was doing his annual Kailash-Manasarovar trip and this time they wanted Vijay TV to cover it and were wondering if I would like to go along with Sadhguru on the trip.  I asked them, "So, you are offering me the chance to visit Kailash-Manasarovar, all expenses paid, along with Sadhguru, and I get to interview him, participate in all the talks and processes - and you're asking me if I want to do it or not?!!  OFCOURSE I AM IN!".  Shiva had heard my wish and had given me two weeks access to his realm.  A place where you let go of everything including yourself. 

Vanquishing the Demons of Kanyakumari!!!

It was 5:30 in the morning and I was on a call taxi from Nagercoil to Kanyakumari, also known as Cape Comarin, the tourist town at the southern-most tip of the Indian map.  I had come to Nagercoil as the guest for a corporate show.  My georgraphy isn’t on par with my science and math skills and though I knew that the Cape-town was nearby, I needed one of my acquaintances at the show to inform me that it was just 20 km away.  “Just 20 kms?!! I have to go then!!! I have to vanquish the Demons of Kanyakumari!!!!”, a voice inside my head started yelling.  Sure enough, about 16 hours later I was approaching the trisangamam, the point where three massive water bodies, the Bay of Bengal, the Indian Ocean and the Arabian Sea met.   As I made my way through a sea of another kind, a sea of humans waiting to get a glimpse of the first rays of the sun against the backdrop of the mighty statue of the poet saint Tiruvalluvar, my mind went into flashback mode.  What were these demons that I so desperately wanted to destroy?

 Magnificient statue of Tiruvalluvar silhouetted against the sunrise at Kanyakumari

I was a little kid then.  I’m guessing I must’ve been 10 years old though I may be entirely wrong!!!  My memory for chronology of events is extremely poor.  That is the reason I started photographing almost every incident in my life - so I wouldn’t forget them.  A little bit like the protagonist of the movie Memento (that would be Ghajini’s Surya or Aamir Khan for those who follow Tamil or Hindi movies respectively).  My parents and the three of us, brothers, were visiting Kanyakumari.  My chithappa, chiththi (uncle and aunt) and their children Veena and Subramani were with us.  I remember we had breakfast at a very shady looking tiffin-shop near the beach.  “Dosai, idly yedavadhu irukkaa?” (Do you have dosa or idlies?), the elder gents of the family asked at the hotel.  “Dosa-yum meen kozhambum irukku!”  (We have dosa with fish curry), came the response.  Everybody in our family frowned dutifully, as you would expect strict vegetarians to.  “Naanga PUUUUUUUUUUUREE Vegetarian!” (We are PUUUUUUUUUURE Vegetarians.).  The guy said they had vegetarian sambar too.  There were big discussions among the family members about how they would be cooking the vegetarian and non-vegetarian food with the same utensils and it would not be PUUUUUUUUUUUURE enough.  The poor guy insisted with a poker face that they used separate vessels.  However, the ladies refused to believe him.  Finally, hunger took over (as it always does) and we decided to eat there.  There are urban legends in our family that Kumar (my eldest sibling) saw them taking the chunks of fish out of the fish curry and serving it to us as vegetarian sambar!

Once the food rituals were over, we made our way to the beach.  We got into the water.  What was knee deep for the elders was waist deep for me.  As we were standing there a huge wave hit the shores.  Not huge by tsunami standards, not by general human standards, maybe not even for kids, but what it did manage to do was dislodge my feet from the sands.  I fell down backwards into the water.  Here I was gasping for breath.  I was grappling all over trying to get hold of something to pull me back to the surface.  I couldn’t find anything.   I could see the water surface a couple of feet above my head.  I was choking.  I regretted not having learnt swimming.  I was hoping someone would notice and give me a hand.  Nothing.  I thought I was going to die at the southern tip of the country.  The place from where Swami Vivekananda took off from the beach and swam to a nearby rock to meditate, would consume my life before the world knew of my greatness!  God, save me!  My entire relatively short span of ten years of living flashed before my eyes.  No… this was not how it was meant to be!  Sure enough, it wasn’t.  As the wave washed away, my feet found their spot.  I somehow recovered and my head popped out of the surface of the water.  So, was everyone around me panicking that the little kid almost drowned in water?  Nah!  They were pretty oblivious to it and hadn’t even noticed that I had fallen down and gotten up.  What seemed like an ordeal which lasted an eternity for me seemed to have been just a few measly moments in actual world time!  I had just slipped and gotten up – that’s it.  But, I vividly remember every nanosecond of that incident.  I had a headache to prove it.  I knew I had had a near death experience.  For some reason, I don’t think I told anyone about it.  Maybe I felt it made me look sissy.  We all walked away from Kanyakumari, but the demons would keep haunting me every time I got into water.  Kanyakumari followed me wherever I went.  Whenever I slipped my head back into the waters in any swimming pool – be it at IIT madras or at an apartment complex in Sunnyvale, the fear of dying by drowning would come rushing back in an instant.

There are two ways of handling fear.  One is to cope with it.  Accept it as a part of life and move on.  The other is to stare fear right back into its face.  Once you do that, fear, more often than not vanishes.  I’ve always had a proclivity towards the latter approach.  Heights scare me, so I bungee-jumped.  I once had to drop out of a difficult course (Advanced Topics in Compiler Design) while doing my Masters.  Before I graduated, I needed to take any one course to fulfil my graduation requirements and I had a whole array of subjects to choose from.  I could’ve taken a relatively easy course, fulfilled my course requirements and graduated.  But, I would’ve had to live with the knowledge that I never conquered that one course which made me drop out.  I simply couldn’t allow that to happen.  So, I took the same course again, worked my rear off, and didn’t just clear that course but got the only A+ grade on offer, that semester, in that course.

I stepped knee deep into the waters of Kanyakumari, took a few deep breaths, sat on a rock and clicked a few pictures.  Half an hour later, I was breathing easy on my way back to Nagercoil.  The demons of Kanyakumari had been vanquished.

I've become a part of the machinery that I once despised :)!

I've never been a great fan of extremely commercial "masala" movies... Yes, I did enjoy watchin' films like "Murattu Kalai" (Rajnikanth) and "Sakala kala vallavan" (Kamal) when I was a little kid, and those were commerical "masala" movies I guess... Infact, I can watch these films even now and enjoy them... Sure, they were commercial mass-entertainers, but somewhere at the bottom of it all there was an undeniable human touch... I mean, the heroes weren't flying around on all sides... Somehow, I haven't been able to enjoy the extra-dose of unbelievable, gravity-defying stunts and logic-defying song-sequences obtrusively inserted into the screenplay... If the protagonists in the film "Matrix" flew around, it was because according to the story, the whole sequence was happening inside the minds of the characters and not in the physical world!!! But, our film-makers insist of havin' a "matrix shot" in the stunt sequence just to make it look kool!

And why do the villains, especially the imported-from-other-states kind, in our films always have to be over-exaggerated and loud? One of my big problems is that I'm a fairly good lip-reader (how that happened has to be an entirely different blog!) and so I can pretty easily make out most of the Hindi dialogues that these villains are actually mouthing... And the poor dubbing artiste has to somehow try and match this with the tamil dialogues... Good luck with that!

Now, comes the twist in the screenplay of my life! I've been recently cast to play a character in a "commercial" film and the script requires me to be yelling and screaming most of my dialogues in the film!!! Hmmm... I guess I've become a part of the machinery that I once despised!!!