Coming from an Indian heritage family, I used to hear my mum mention about the Indian Crab Story being spoken of so vividly and often. In a nutshell the story goes like this...
A fisherman in India caught a few crabs and placed them in a bucket and as he was about to close it, his mate says why do you need to close it?. The fisherman says well I don't want any of them to escape. His mate then goes "Don't worry about it, just leave the bucket open as none of them will escape cos when one tries to escape another crab would pull him down".
This story apparently applies to a lot of cultures around the world. I found out that its also called 'The Italian Crab Theory' or also the 'Crab Mentality' which is essentially 'If I'm not getting it, neither can you'. Wikipedia defines this as 'ensuring the collective demise of the group'. The key idea here is Jealousy/Envy which is one of the 7 deadliest sins as written in the bible.
The analogy of this to human beings is that a group will attempt to negate or diminish the importance of a member who stands out or achieve success out of envy, jealousy, conspiracy or competitive feeling. This is associated with a narrow-minded thinking which is non-constructive and self destructing in nature.
How about constructive thinking to overcome this feeling ? How about emulate the success of the person you're jealous of and in time also achieve success. Then once, you're there, do the same to others? Why not look at the bigger picture and learn to work with each other for mutual greater success? The saying is that success does rub off the shoulders of the successful, so instead of being jealous/envious why not learn from the successful and change the world you're in by helping others around you. There are loads of people out there who are less fortunate and suffering and could use a hand...
In the time being....Chilli Crab sounds tempting lahhh !!! :-)
Tuesday, September 27, 2011
Sunday, February 21, 2010
Inspiration
The title speaks for itself. All of us need inspiration in our lives to achieve greatness. We are put on this earth as souls having a human experience rather than human beings having a soulful experience.
We can do better than what we think we can do. We only have ourselves to limit our achievements. As one of my favourite movie stars Will Smith said in a television interview; 'We are not the first human beings to walk this earth, human beings have lived and died thousands of years ago and whatever good or mistakes that we encounter in our lives has already been encountered in one way or another". We have to look to the past to learn the mistakes and avoid them for the future. We cannot be Prisoners of Our Past,rather we have to be Architects of the Future.
The world has seen so many heroes, from the ancient times of Alexander the Great, Napolean Bonaparte, Genghis Khan, Jesus Christ and great civilizations with kings and leaders to present time heroes in their own capacities such as Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King as leaders of nations and causes to leaders in business such as Sir Richard Branson of the Virgin brand and Tony Fernandes of AirAsia.
Be it in any one field that we choose whether sports, music, politics, business etc. We are deemed to find someone that we inspire to be like and on top of that even better than that person. Its our guide in life that we need similar to a beacon of light in the darkness to guide us through a path.
If we put our minds and souls to whatever cause we want to achieve and believe we can do it, there's nothing that will stop us. Positive thinking with self believe will help us propel towards success. We have to keep looking at our lucky stars for inspiration and we will shine just as much and even better.
We have to inspire to be inspired !
We can do better than what we think we can do. We only have ourselves to limit our achievements. As one of my favourite movie stars Will Smith said in a television interview; 'We are not the first human beings to walk this earth, human beings have lived and died thousands of years ago and whatever good or mistakes that we encounter in our lives has already been encountered in one way or another". We have to look to the past to learn the mistakes and avoid them for the future. We cannot be Prisoners of Our Past,rather we have to be Architects of the Future.
The world has seen so many heroes, from the ancient times of Alexander the Great, Napolean Bonaparte, Genghis Khan, Jesus Christ and great civilizations with kings and leaders to present time heroes in their own capacities such as Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King as leaders of nations and causes to leaders in business such as Sir Richard Branson of the Virgin brand and Tony Fernandes of AirAsia.
Be it in any one field that we choose whether sports, music, politics, business etc. We are deemed to find someone that we inspire to be like and on top of that even better than that person. Its our guide in life that we need similar to a beacon of light in the darkness to guide us through a path.
If we put our minds and souls to whatever cause we want to achieve and believe we can do it, there's nothing that will stop us. Positive thinking with self believe will help us propel towards success. We have to keep looking at our lucky stars for inspiration and we will shine just as much and even better.
We have to inspire to be inspired !
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
Agents of Change
As part of being a good human being, I think we need to agents of change in whatever we do in our lives as this would indirectly effect others around us be it family, friends or random people. As we are born, we progress through life and we see a lot of things which are not right happening around us.
Instead of ignoring issues and avoiding confrontations, I think we need to partake in whatever form necessary or voice out whats not right. Although, we might think that this may not bear fruit at all, but on the hindsight, we do create a ripple effect and inevitably letting people know of our displeasure of how a current situation is.
I believe any individual can bring change to the world, a good example would be President Obama who is righting all the wrongs that was previously done. We could be agents of change in out workplace, family, community and you would notice how things unfold for the better. Persistency and perserverance would eventually triumph no matter how difficult or complex a situation is. The good will always triumph over evil.
Monday, January 26, 2009
Balances....
If energy changes from one form to another and mass is retained....thus the Eergy Balance and Mass Balances principles in Chemical Engineering. If we apply it to real life, a lot of things makes sense on nonsense..
So if money is earned by someone, it is at the expanse of someone else somewhere ( a gain somewhere is a loss somewhere else). If there were loads of money in the stock market a lot of people must have made money. So how then do we explain the current financial crisis. To say that billions of dollars was wiped out does not make sense as I'm pretty sure the money has dissappeared somewhere but where and by whom??....remember Balances?
The relative effect on oil price is also baffling, its kinda like the 7/8 billion people in the world has stopped using energy for the oil prices to drop from a high of US150 to its current low. What drives it and who drives it is another question altogether.
Hmm....wonder what else is going to be new in this year ahead.
So if money is earned by someone, it is at the expanse of someone else somewhere ( a gain somewhere is a loss somewhere else). If there were loads of money in the stock market a lot of people must have made money. So how then do we explain the current financial crisis. To say that billions of dollars was wiped out does not make sense as I'm pretty sure the money has dissappeared somewhere but where and by whom??....remember Balances?
The relative effect on oil price is also baffling, its kinda like the 7/8 billion people in the world has stopped using energy for the oil prices to drop from a high of US150 to its current low. What drives it and who drives it is another question altogether.
Hmm....wonder what else is going to be new in this year ahead.
Saturday, August 9, 2008
About Human Beings and Money
Money...the mere utterance of the word sends shivers, signals, fright etc. But why? Are we slaves to money? From the moment we're born we cost money to our parents and till we die we earn money or I could just say till we are economically viable to earn money, before we start to depend on our savings, kids...etc
So in our ever pursuit to create money to buy a house, buy a nice car, go holidays, we tend to forget ourselves a lot and subconsciously compete with friends, celebrities, other peeps.
But experience has taught me that there is a downside to this.
What if someday something happens for you to loose your job, or bad investment which brings you down to a negative cash flow or I'd rather say nothing. What will happen then? What happens to the the half a million dollar house mortgage repayment, and your car repayments etc.
At that instant, the only thing you will be left with will be your loved ones who were there with you initially when you had nothing and will be there for you to lend you something money cannot buy....Support and Love. I guess in our ever lasting search for money in the Rat Race, we should never forget whats important to us as a human being. Money comes and goes, we did not come into this world with it and neither are we going to leave this world with it. Being unattached to money really helps.
So why the stress? I'd rather help the needy by giving it to them, at least I would have made their day and the world we live in would have been a better place.
So in our ever pursuit to create money to buy a house, buy a nice car, go holidays, we tend to forget ourselves a lot and subconsciously compete with friends, celebrities, other peeps.
But experience has taught me that there is a downside to this.
What if someday something happens for you to loose your job, or bad investment which brings you down to a negative cash flow or I'd rather say nothing. What will happen then? What happens to the the half a million dollar house mortgage repayment, and your car repayments etc.
At that instant, the only thing you will be left with will be your loved ones who were there with you initially when you had nothing and will be there for you to lend you something money cannot buy....Support and Love. I guess in our ever lasting search for money in the Rat Race, we should never forget whats important to us as a human being. Money comes and goes, we did not come into this world with it and neither are we going to leave this world with it. Being unattached to money really helps.
So why the stress? I'd rather help the needy by giving it to them, at least I would have made their day and the world we live in would have been a better place.
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
What is Life?
This is the question that probably goes through everybodys mind at some point in time. It has cropped up to me albeit lately and honestly I don't know the answer to this.
We go through life from the moment we are born right up to where we are right now filled with mysteries, fun, laughter, tears, misery, love, despair, sadness, joy, anxiety....the list goes on. At some point of time we feel like giving up saying that its too hard to continue and sometimes we have moments where we enjoy without thinking about any consequences. Is that the meaning of life?
My dad used to say that there are 3 phases in a mans life i.e. childhood, bachelor days and married life. Simply said its true as such that its categorized in such a way. I guess time catches up and before you know it you could have passed any one of the stages and be moving on to the next.
The question is are we prepared? I suppose we could only answer it through our actions. Remember actions speaks louder than words.
Maybe the answer to what is life is LIFE itself.......hmmmm
We go through life from the moment we are born right up to where we are right now filled with mysteries, fun, laughter, tears, misery, love, despair, sadness, joy, anxiety....the list goes on. At some point of time we feel like giving up saying that its too hard to continue and sometimes we have moments where we enjoy without thinking about any consequences. Is that the meaning of life?
My dad used to say that there are 3 phases in a mans life i.e. childhood, bachelor days and married life. Simply said its true as such that its categorized in such a way. I guess time catches up and before you know it you could have passed any one of the stages and be moving on to the next.
The question is are we prepared? I suppose we could only answer it through our actions. Remember actions speaks louder than words.
Maybe the answer to what is life is LIFE itself.......hmmmm
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
Easter as it may be
Alas, It's the Holy Week again,
I will be away from my family members back home for the first time during Easter and would be spending it with a couple of friends in Kalbari. It's something different and for me, a definite good break away from work, which had been thrown at me like there's no tommorrow.
A time to reflect I'd say and hope for peace and justice to prevail anywhere in the world. I hope I do get lots of Easter eggs this time around !
I will be away from my family members back home for the first time during Easter and would be spending it with a couple of friends in Kalbari. It's something different and for me, a definite good break away from work, which had been thrown at me like there's no tommorrow.
A time to reflect I'd say and hope for peace and justice to prevail anywhere in the world. I hope I do get lots of Easter eggs this time around !
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