An Exciting Test

This is a small test that I came across long time back. It has only four (4) questions, and you will be surprised about the results. I will publish the results in the next blog. By that time I hope that you have got your answers ready and jotted down. Please Follow the Instruction.

MAKE A WISH BEFORE STARTING

CAUTION ! Answer the questions step by step. Read on slowly and WRITE down your answers after careful thought. This is a serious questionnaire and will tell you a lot about yourself.

Question 1.
Place the following animals in an order according to your preference.
Cow, Tiger, Sheep, Horse and Pig.

Question 2.
Write a word that qualifies / describes each of the following.
Dog, Cat, Rat, Coffee and Ocean

Question 3.
Think about someone (who knows you and is important to you) that can be related to the
following colours (do not repeat your answer). Name only one person per colour.
Yellow, Orange, Red, White and Green.

Question 4.
Write down your favourite number (between 1 and 9 both inclusive)

Hell

This is only an excerpt from an answer give by a student to a question on whether Hell is Endothermic or Exothermic.

"First, we need to know how the mass of Hell is changing in time. So we need to know the rate that souls are moving into Hell and the rate they are leaving. I think that we can safely assume that once a soul gets to Hell, it will not leave. Therefore, no souls are leaving. As for how many souls are entering Hell, lets look at the different religions that exist in the world today. Some of these religions state that if you are not a member of their religion, you will go to Hell. Since there are more than one of these religions and since people do not belong
to more than one religion, we can project that all souls go to Hell. With birth and death rates as they are, we can expect the number of souls in Hell to increase exponentially. Now, we look at the rate of change of the volume in Hell because Boyle's Law states that in order for the temperature and pressure in Hell to stay the same, the volume of Hell has to expand as souls are added. This gives two possibilities:
1. If Hell is expanding at a slower rate than the rate at which souls enter Hell, then the temperature and pressure in Hell will increase until all Hell breaks loose.
2. Of course, if Hell is expanding at a rate faster than the increase of souls in Hell, then the temperature and pressure will drop until Hell freezes over. "

I'm leaving it to you to guess the remaining part of the answer. If you want to know how the student concluded his analysis you can mail me at oddjams@yahoo.com.

Bhutan

If you got to Bhutan, a country which is predominantly Buddhist, you will find a lot of monasteries. And in almost all of the monasteries you will find a tower where you have to climb a substantial number of very steep and narrow stairs to get to the top. You really have to put in a lot of effort to get to the top. An when you get to the top, what do you find? A prayer hall? A temple with a magnificent figure of Buddha? A silent place for meditation? No. All you find is nothing. Just an empty space under a roof with the beams and struts that shoulder the roof. Then why climb all these stairs to get to the top? Is it to impress upon you that all your efforts in this world are in vain? Or is it something else. Being on a tight schedule I couldn't find out why.

World Wildlife Fund

I recommend Hotels Combined and sent $20 to W.W.F.!

You can shout and help too.

What Is Death?

What is death? Nobody seems to know. Those who died do not come back to tell us what death is. But everybody knows that death will catch up with them someday or the other. And everyone fears death. Some may say that they do not fear death but the fear of death is built into every human being ever since he started to walk on this earth. Men did not only fear death, they feared everything that they did not understand, even the darkness that they knew would be dispelled at the rising of the sun. Even if one does not fear death, the fear of how death will come to them, at least, must be there in the minds of most people; especially when we they see the different inexplicable ways that people die. The suffering that some undergo before they die. The mass death of innocent children dying in a fire. And as the time for death slowly draws nearer and nearer, there must be a tinge of apprehension in everyone’s mind, even the ones that boast of not being afraid to die.

What about the people who had near death experiences? Do not they know death? It is again doubtful whether they know death. They did not die to know death. They claim to know that they nearly died. It is only hearsay evidence. There is a claim of a near death experience. Then another surfaces and then another, of course far apart in space and time but strikingly same. They all relate that they have been led away by some unknown entities by mistake and, when the mistake is discovered, usually by another entity that maintains some sort of record as to who should be brought and who shouldn’t be, are sent back. This is the experience of the Oriental near death individual. A marked difference between the experience of the Westerner who usually sees a tunnel of light or darkness through which he passes. And this difference in the near death experiences between the Oriental and the Western makes it more suspect. Why should human beings who descended from the same root have different near death experience? He or she shares the same emotions, the same fears that the other does. Then why the difference? Could it be attributed to the fact that they do not share the same culture or the beliefs that they have regarding death. The Oriental, practically all of them, believe that there is a person who keeps track of the lives of people and that there is a kind of book of death wherein the specific time that a particular individual should die is recorded and that when the time is at hand an emissary is sent to bring that specific person to the throne of judgment, or whatever, where his acts of omission and commission are judged and he is sentenced accordingly. As such, his near death experience relates to his knowledge of the subject.

There is another curious but seemingly unexplained phenomenon that makes a telling difference in the near death experience of an Oriental and a Westerner. A Westerner almost always sees his body lying prone and the activities that are taking place around him. For example, when an operation takes place and a near death experience takes place. The individual, it seems, describes the operational procedure that was carried out and the surgical instruments that surrounded him during the operation. But this is not so in the case of an Oriental’s experience though the astral body and the silver chord are oriental concepts.

The question of life after death also is interesting. Every religion states that there is life after death. It is the kind of life that you are going to live after the death in this world that is the difference. The oriental believes that he will be reborn into this world as a human being till he attains his Karma and once he attains it he becomes one with (merges with) the godhead from whom he believes he originally came from. This is not the belief of the monotheist religions. They believe that once they die they are united with the godhead, not merge into him.

To be continued when further thoughts come into my mind ....

Friendship

Wish we humans could live like this.

Memory

Way back in my salad days, I was in charge of a motley of earthmoving machinery, lorries and other construction machinery. As I was a Civil Engineer, I had to depend totally on my boss who was a Mechanical Engineer and a stalwart in the maintenance of machinery. I remember having under my control a fleet of lorries, not much, just about what you can count on your fingers but enough to keep me pretty well occupied.

One of my duties was to send the fuel injection pump (these were diesel engines) from a lorry for servicing and fix the one that was available as a standby in the particular machine from which the pump was removed. When the pump returned from servicing it was kept as a standby till the replacement became due in the next lorry. On every servicing I had to report to my boss the fact which pump had been serviced and the vehicle where it was due to be fitted next. This cycle was repeated and it went on for some time.

It so happened that one day my boss wanted to know where a particular pump was fitted, mentioning the serial number - you know what kind of serial numbers machinery parts carry. I said that I will look up the records and let him know. To that he asked me if he should tell me where it is fitted. Being caught on the wrong foot and not immediately having the information, I kept quiet. Then he told me the vehicle where that particular pump was fitted and asked me to go and check it up. I did, he was correct, and when I informed him of the fact, he wanted to know as to how it was that he could keep track of the pumps whereas I, who was on the spot and doing the actual maintenance, could not. I told him that he had a better memory (in fact he had a phenomenal memory). To which he said: "Rot, I don't have a better memory. God has given you and me the same amount of memory. It is only that you are not interested in your work whereas I am and that is why I can keep track of the pumps".

Wouldn't you say that he was right?

Chocolate and You

Like eating chocolates? Did you know that there is a very large association between chocolate and child labour? Cote d'Ivoire is the leading exporter of cocoa beans to the world market and, most probably, the chocolate manufacturing company, whose chocolate you are relishing, gets its raw materials form this West African country. I believe that children from the age of 12 to 16 are working under the most inhumane conditions and extreme abuse in cocoa farms to harvest the beans. Some times the only food that these children get is corn paste, a far cry from chocolates. They probably do not even know what chocolate is.

It is an irony that children are forced to labour to produce something that is associated with pleasure. This only goes to show that misery in one part of the world is associated with pleasure in another part. Child labour is then, not just the problem of that country which allows its practice, but to the entire human community that allows such atrocities to take place.

Admnistration Service

I was reading the newspaper, the Deccan Chronicle, this morning when I read the article "Life As It Happens" by Joginder Singh wherein it was stated that a Hong Kong based political and economic risk consultancy ranked India's "suffocating bureaucracy" as the least efficient.

This brought in a train of thoughts and made me remember my father who, though he worked all his life in Administration and Finance, he was in Defense - Procurement, never asked any of his four children to go into Administration. He wanted all of us to become professionals, either doctors or engineers. This, in spite of the fact that he was very powerful. And the thought of entering the Administration Service also did not enter into our minds. That was some forty years back. I also remember an incident that happened during, I think my pre-final year in Engineering college when we were being briefed for an NCC Camp - it was compulsory in my college days and I personally think that it should be made compulsory now also - when after the briefing, our Commandant asked us what we were going to do after graduation. One of my mates said that he was going to do his IPS. Our Commandant flew into a rage. He wanted to know from my mate what he was doing in an Engineering College if he wanted to do his IPS or for that matter IAS. He, my Commandant was of the opinion that it would have been better if the fellow had taken up his B.Sc. or B.A. and then went into the Administration Service; that, would have left a seat vacant in the Engineering College for someone else to fill and do something constructive for the country.

But again, as I mentioned previously, that was some forty years back when doctors were known to be practicing a noble profession and engineers were building this developing country. What they are doing now is a debatable point. And what doctors and engineers are doing in the Administrative Service is even more debatable.

Why has our bureaucracy become inefficient and "suffocating"? Were they not efficient when they belonged to the Indian Civil Service and even a few decades back? I spent some 33 years in government service and during my earlier days did come across very efficient civil servants, but come to think of it, they were the older mature ones. They had matured. I particularly remember one officer who used to review some of our ongoing projects, there were some twenty three major projects going on then, for a few hours at a stretch and then call in his stenographer and dictate a comprehensive and complete report of the review out of his memory - together with figures.

The question now is: "Have the people in the bureaucracy become inefficient of their own will or have they been made inefficient?"

Fixations

I do not know if it is true, nor could I get it verified from any Internet source or otherwise (maybe someone could be kind enough to verify it for me or put me right), but I heard somewhere that Sean Connery quit playing the role of James Bond because, in real life, he started to look behind his shoulder to see if someone was following him. The role that he had played seemed to have taken a fixation in his mind. True or not but quite possible, what about our Indian heroes? Those who act in films, where in a shoot out, are being shot at by a few dozen men armed with automatic and semi-automatic weapons (and grenades to boot) and come out unscathed, nary a scratch. What kind of mental fixation will they get? A sense of invincibility?