Achieving Quality

In a previous blog entry, I mentioned how an ideal worker would always strive for quality in whatever he does. How does one go about achieving that?

There are a couple of things that one can do to guarantee outstanding results:

1. Strive to over-achieve
The surest way of guaranteeing quality is to over-exceed it.  If you are working with a client, try to understand clearly what are his expectations. If you fail to do this properly, you will always risk falling short.

Some clients don't exactly know what they want, so getting it right can be difficult. That is why it is extremely important to set a very high standard for yourself. Never compromise, even if you think the client has very low expectations. Always set a very high bar for yourself. Only by overachieving, do you have a margin for error.

2. Pay attention to details
Details make all the difference between a mediocre and a quality piece of work. Pay attention to things that you'd think people won't bother to notice. Even if you feel that your client is not one who would fuss over certain tiny details, never overlook them.

Details always matter subconsciously. For example, even without reading the content of a proposal, the collective effect of proper chapter organization, the right choice of fonts and carefully chose diagrams and images already exudes a feeling of "quality".

Professionalism means never compromising on the little details that make a piece of work stand out. Never cut corners, always assume that your work will be subjected to the scrutiny of an expert or a connoisseur.

3. Leave no stones unturned
Never assume. Explore every possibility, no matter how remote. The consumers of your product will use it in ways that you could never imagine. So strive to consider all the "impossible" scenarios, and tackle them proactively.

For example, a computer programmer will always try to come up with a user-interface that takes the dumbest user into consideration. At the same time he will also provide shortcuts for the power user to easily access his frequently use functions. Nothing impresses a customer more than to find out that the creator has taken the trouble to consider scenarios that are considered highly unlikely.

If you adhere to these few simple principles, you can be assured that the results will stand a good chance of being of "good quality".  Sure, quality requires a lot of hardwork. But it's worth every ounce of your sweat. For what is the purpose of work, if not to produce something of good quality?

A Celebration of Truth

The history of mankind, for better or for worse, has been shaped by religion. Everything from great acts of charity to horrific atroscities have been committed before in the name of religion. Religion is an inescapable fact of the human condition. To understand human nature, we have to understand this religious impulse that stir from deep within our psyche, a force that is as strong and primeval as sex itself.

Why do we need religion? Agnostics and atheists argue, sometimes quite convincingly, that religion has done more harm than good to mankind. Wouldn't the world be a better place if such a thing as religion doesn't exist?

Those who are on the other side of the fence insists that without the guiding light of religion, mankind would degenerate into a loathsome state of moral debasement, where all our actions are driven by selfish needs, where it's every man for himself and the ruthless law of the jungle rules supreme. In other words, we will be no different from animals--a world without kindness and compassion.

Is this true?

Maybe the agnostics are correct. Religion does poison everything. Religion does not guarantee good moral behaviour. Its teaching and practices are so open to interpretation that it only provides a convenient vehicle for individuals in authority to manipulate them for their selfish aims.

But I can hear the man of faith protesting. Those who have had a spiritual awakening would know. Once you have caught a glimpse of the divine, you see the world differently. There's love, light, beauty and compassion. There's a purpose in existence; the soul of a spiritually awakened person soars in exaltation.

I've blogged on this subject many times in the past. Spirituality is an "irrational" but basic human impulse. Falling in love is "irrational". Listening to music is a "useless" activity. But human beings spend a great deal of their waking life falling in love and listening to music, sometimes even blending the two together, to great effect.

Wipe out the entire human race and let another species rise to dominate earth. Inevitably, as this species evolves, it will develop a spiritual impulse and invent religion. Emotions, intelligence and spirituality. These are the flowers of civilization. Our great works of science and art arise from the creative force inherent within these basic human impulses.

Religion is nothing but institutionalized spirituality. It provides a framework for spirituality to find its expression. Some frameworks work better than others in certain geographies and epochs. Some grow so powerful that they forget their original intent, and attempt whatever means to perpetuate themself, by subsuming the individual and suppressing all opposition.

Let's not forget that. Religion serves humanity, and not the other way round. Human beings need a platform to express their spirituality. The institution of religion is for the sole purpose of providing this platform. And we must admit a plurality of platforms for human spirituality, like music and art, finds its expression in diversity.

No religion is truer than the other. No religion has a monopoly of truth and salvation. Every religion is but an expression of being human--a response to the yearning spiritual impulse within us. Every culture respond in its own unique way.

The doctrines of religion is not Truth, but a celebration of Truth. What is Truth? We don't know, and we need not bother ourselves too much about it. By insisting on our version of Truth, we divide. By celebrating Truth together, we unite.

The Lost World

I remember a whole without TV, without the Internet, without cellphones. Was it a better world then?

I read a lot as a child because my parents had a lot of books and encouraged me to read; my neighbours read; my friends in school read. To me reading was like breathing, eating and sleeping--it was something natural, something that everyone did.

It was only when I entered the university that I realized how wrong I was.

As a child, I was also fanatical about football. I used to wake up early in the morning, before the sun rose, to play football with my friends. I even recorded the team list and details about all the goals scored in every match we played in a dog-eared exercise book, which I still keep.

I played barefoot for many years before I saved enough money to buy myself a pair of second-hand Puma boots. I remember paying 25 bucks for it, and I still keep that pair of boots back home.

I used to take penalties for my team, because I was good at it. I had a very accurate shot. I spent many hours practicing how to place the ball just inside the goalpost. Most of the time I aim to hit the inside of the upright--if you hit it at that very sweet spot, not even the best goalkeeper in the world could save it. I knew the basics of soccer better than many of my friends because I had learned them properly--from books.

Yes, it was a world without the Internet, without cellphones, without satellite TV. But I had friends who read and friends who shared my passion for soccer--Malays, Chinese and Indian friends. It was heaven to me.

It's a different world now. I spend my days and nights staring at a computer screen. I attend meetings. I listen to podcasts while I'm driving. And I watch EPL matches beamed live to my living room.

I have more books than I could ever read in my lifetime. Why did I buy so many books? Why do I have to suffer the pain and joy of watching Liverpool play every weekend?

I know now: It is to recapture that world which I had lost.

A Scheme for Pain

How does one deal with suffering? With acceptance, equanimity and a resolve to transcend it.

And attitude of anger and rejection towards suffering only intensifies the pain. Let the pain take its course. By allowing it, one finds catharsis.

A friend's wife once called me, crying. In between sobs she told how she caught her husband with another woman. She was utterly heartbroken.

I asked her whether she would forgive him, if he was repentent. She was willing, but she told me the pain was too much for her to bear. How do you make the pain go away?

I told her to let time dissolve the pain. By allowing time to do its work, pain fades away. Accept that certain things have happened and nothing one does will change or erase the fact. Allow pain to take its course. In due time it will fade away, like everything else in this world. Even love.

There's no antidote for pain. Pain has to be suffered, consciously. To suffer pain consciously means that you understand its causes, and that you have the determination to ride through all its phases, taking every lesson that it throws at you.

Only then will you understand that what you thought was love, was mere attachment. Selfish attachment. It is your need to possess something or someone so that you yourself feel more complete, more fulfilled.

We love ourselves more than anything else in this world. That is the root of all pain. We want to build an environment where we think our personal wellbeing and happiness can be guaranteed--a well-paying job, a loving partner, children who will look up to us and take care of us in our old age.

We think the rest of the world are like props on a stage that we can place wherever we choose. Then one day we realise that these props don't always remain where they are: they move. They have their own idea of "happiness". That is how pain arises.

Are we mature enough to live in a world where things don't always go according to our plan? A world where our vision of a perfect life don't always match with everybody elses? I'll end with a quote from The Dark Knight:

The Joker (played by the late Heath Ledger):

You know, they're schemers. Schemers trying to control their worlds. I'm not a schemer. I try to show the schemers how pathetic their attempts to control things really are...It's the schemers that put you where you are. You were a schemer, you had plans, and uh, look where that got you.

Food Talk

I don't normally blog about food, but when you've only had a piece of toast and a cup of tea since breakfast, food is the first thing that comes into my mind when I opened my blog editor.

Here in KL, I try to stick to my regime of two full meals a day: if I take breakfast, I'd normally skip lunch. I'll still go for lunch when invited, but purely for social reasons. Today I skipped lunch and I also went for a jog in the evening. It's 7.30pm now, so you can imagine how hungry I am!

Breakfast is usually my favourite meal of the day. The choice of food for breakfast in Malaysia is much better than what they have in Indonesia simply because there's more variety of Chinese food here.

For breakfast, I'd normally go for some Chinese noodles or porridge. Indonesians would go for things like mee goreng, nasi goreng or bubur ayam. Here in Malaysia, the Chinese hawker fare is rich and varied: wonton noodles, beef/fishball/pork noodles (dry or soup), char koay teow, chee cheong fun, loh mai kai, char siew bun, pork/fish porridge, claypot yee mee, pan mee, hakka noodles, curry noodles, curry laksa, vegetarian noodles, loh see fun--the choice of noodles is nothing short of astonishing. It's something we Malaysians take for granted.

If you're old school like me, you can also go for the half-boiled egg and toast with kaya and butter. And if you feel bored with Chinese, you can always go for Malay or Mamak food--the nasi lemak, mee goreng, roti canai and tosai. Hey, there's even hawker-style Western food here in KL.

In Jakarta my favourite breakfast used to be kopi tubruk and Indomie rebus. But usually I would skip this meal. Lunch and dinner however were always occassions to look forward to: nasi timbel, soto betawi, rawon, gado-gado, soto sulung, soto Madura, nasi padang, nasi uduk, sop buntut, satay padang, nasi gudeg, nasi liwet--a fascinating array of offerings from all the different provinces in Indonesia.

I'm a porridge lover. Indonesians, unlike the Malays in Malaysia, are also quite fond of porridge--bubur ayam stalls are everywhere. The Indonesian porridge is usually served thick with a generous topping of crackers (krupuk).

Chinese always categorize food based on their "heatiness". Anything fried and spicy are usually considered heaty. When you have consumed too much heaty food, you'll need to balance it with something "cooling"--like herbal tea, which is served in many Chinese coffee shops.

I don't bother so much about the "heatiness" of food. Subconsciously I adopt the Indian system of seeing food in terms of the 3 impulses of nature: rajasic, sattvic and tamasic. But that will be the subject of another blog entry.

The one thing I like about Indonesia is that, you can get beer almost anywhere. Go to a Muslim Sudanese or Javanese restaurant, the local bir bintang is always on the menu. The only place to drink cheap beers in Malaysia are the Chinese coffee shops.

And that's where I think I'm going for dinner tonight: hmm...stir-fried venison cooked with ginger and spring onion, washed down with a huge bottle of Tiger beer...that's my idea of a good Chinese dinner in KL!

Gymnasium of the Mind

I'm on leave and that gives me a bit of space to think more clearly.

When I was in Jakarta, I used to blog daily even though I didn't even have a notebook PC at home then. I blogged from the Internet cafe: an hour there was just enough time for me to put down my daily reflection and to catch up on the latest Malaysian news. I even wrote longhand in my diary everyday.

I've lost a lot of these habits since I came back to KL (5 years ago?). Slowly, I need to cultivate these good habits again. Writing helps me to think--it puts space in between thoughts and helps me to see them with greater clarity.

I haven't been watching movies at the cinema regularly too for the past few years. This is another activity that I miss a lot. Movies give me lots of ideas and I often get inspired by them. Books, movies and music -- these things enrich life, adding colour and tone to our humdrum existence.

And of course people too. Meeting friends and strangers add to the myriad of possibilities that life has to offer. Every movie watched, every blog entry written, every conversation with a stranger or friend is another brushstroke in life's canvas.

To blog is to to distill and to savour the essence of life's experiences. It also helps to keep my writing skills sharp. Now I'm like a footballer during off-season break: my fitness is at its lowest and my agility gone.

A blog is like a gym for the mind. You have to use it regularly to keep yourself in tip top condition mentally. I'm certainly not in good form now. But give me time, slowly, I'll regain my touch...

The Art and Science of Proposal Writing

I spend most of weekends working from a nearby Starbucks cafe. It is here that I grapple with my multitude of programming problems and hack out my technical proposals and presentation slides.

One thing I've found out being an IT professional all these years: writing code is a lot easier than writing proposals. Coding can even be fun sometimes but technical proposal-writing is always a chore. In programming, most of the time, you know what needs to be done. The challenge is executing it in the simplest, cleanest and most elegant way. Writing code that works is a no-brainer, it's writing good code that's the real challenge.

A proposal is essentially a sales pitch. You are basically putting forth your value proposition--bringing the potential customer's attention to your strong points(and taking the opportunity to indirectly highlight your competitor's weakness), reemphasizing your expertise and commitment and justifying your pricing.

In any IT project, pricing is important. But what's more important is being able to give the customer the confidence that you or your product can do the job. The decision-maker's job could be at stake here. Put yourself in his shoes: can you trust this vendor to help you look good in front of your bosses?

Confidence is an intangible thing which you subtly project through your approach and professionalism. A professionally-written proposal goes a long way towards achieving this goal.

It's easy to hire programmers but finding a good proposal writer in the IT industry is like looking for a needle in the haystack. Writing is a lot of hardwork, especially technical writing. It requires someone who appreciates technology and enjoy stringing words together to illuminate difficult concepts.

Besides being able to understand technology and being able to sell them using words, there's a third skill that's required of a good proposal writer: the ability to illustrate technical architecture and concepts using diagrams. Most engineering diagrams that I see are very badly drawn. Engineers are usually obsessed with getting the interconnections between different components right but they don't have a sense of proportion, balance, contrast and colour coordination.

You see, a good diagram is also like a good proposal. It organizes things systematically for the eyes and the mind of the reader. What does the reader see at first glance? It must work like a good advertisement billboard: the main message must be immediately evident. Example: it's a star topology, or there are 3 major components in the overall architecture or client components are grouped on the left-hand-side, server components on the right. A good technical illustrator must be aware of all these things.

My personal philosophy on good proposal writing is this: it must read like a comic book. The first thing a person does when he receives a proposal is to flip through the pages. In the process of flipping, it's usually the diagrams that catch the eye. If you have a sufficient number of well-captioned diagrams scattered all across the proposal, they alone should be able to convey the gist of the story.

Does that mean that a good IT proposal writer must be a salesman, an engineer, an artist and a writer all in one? Yes and no. Yes, because all these different elements must be present to produce a good proposal. No, because these skills need not necessarily come from a single individual. If a team of people with different skillsets can combine them together effectively, then they can come up with a good proposal.

And one more thing: if you have a team of people working on a proposal, you also need a good proposal manager. He is the person who carries that big picture in his mind, understands what needs to be achieved, sets timelines, ensures that everyone delivers their portion on schedule and integrates them together into a coherent whole. This is a very challenging task, especially when a proposal involves components from multiple vendors and partners. In other words, the proposal manager must be someone with good project management skills.

Does such an ideal proposal-writing team exist in most IT organizations? Very rarely. Usually the task of coming up with the proposal is dumped onto the pre-sales engineer. He's expected to be the salesman, the engineer, the writer, the artist and the project manager. Good luck to him!

My Path

Evgeny Onegin: Can't you see where this leads? A declaration, a kiss, a wedding, family, obligation, boredom, adultery.

- from the 1999 movie Onegin, directed by Martha Fiennes

I'm single and intend to remain so for the foreseable future. Some may think that I'm a bit cynical in my attitude towards love and marriage. Some even say, I'm selfish.

Let others think what they like. I've always believed that we all have an obbligation to find our own path towards Truth and Understanding. For some, it is the path of marriage (and possibly divorce). That is the course that they have to attend to graduate from the School of Life. For some, it is the path of monkhood.

I'm neither a householder nor a monk. I'm just a fellow explorer, trying to learn and understand as much as I can about life and our place in the larger scheme of things. That to me, is the whole purpose of existence. The rest are just coursework and exercises that you choose, based on their suitability to your temperament and nature, to help you progress towards this goal.

The path of marriage is a good path. Because it has a challenging mix of pain and pleasure. And there are useful lessons to be learnt from both types of experiences. At the end of the journey, your soul advances.

To become a monk is to become a spiritual athlete. You are a professional. You live in a controlled lab environment where special experiments and trainings are performed to slowly perfect the mind and soul.

I'm not a worldly person. The everyday cares of marriage and family bores me. I'm also not fond of organized religions. Hence I'm not eager to become a spiritual athlete in any of the traditional orders.

I've chosen a path, which is kind of like a kind of spiritual humanism. I'm a student of all the spiritual traditions in the world. I believe in tackling issues the rational and scientific way, with a liberal application of Occam's Razor.

Nothing delights me more than understanding. I seek to understand. Understanding gives me a high. Life is but a quest for greater understanding. To read and to converse with people is to seek understanding. The more I understand, the more compassion and love I feel for the world around me.

I enjoy life because the pleasures that are crave for are easily attainable. I don't need a lot of money to enjoy life. Books, art, knowledge and Nature itself--these are my playthings and objects of my lust.

A lifetime is finite. The challenge is to make every moment and every experience in life count. Every moment and every word that I type brings me insight and clarity.

And I shall end this blog entry, with the satisfaction of knowing that I'm a better person than who I was when typed the first line:

"I'm single and I intend to remain so for the foreseable future..."

A Good Worker

Many employers complain about the difficulty of finding good workers these days. We produce a lot of graduates every year but how many of them are of good quality?

What then is a good quality worker?

As an employer, this is what I'd normally look for:

1. Willingness to learn
I don't expect a new hire to be immediately productive on day one, especially if he or she is a fresh graduate. But if the candidate shows a passion for work and a great desire to learn, then half the battle is already won. Anyone with average intelligence is capable of learning anything if they put their hearts and minds to it. All one needs to do is to sit down, focus, analyze and start taking small steps. What disappoints me most is an employee who has now desire to improve himself.

2. Takes the initiative
There are employees who will just deliver the bare minimum of what they are told to do. That's fine if your job merely involves sweeping the floor or washing the dishes. What employers expect from an executive is not just execution of tasks (because that is a given) but also the ability to think beyond that: Is this the best way of approaching the problem? What are the possible outcomes? What could be better ways of doing it? Have we taken every fact into consideration in making this decision? What are the possible pitfalls? In other words, use your brain and not merely act like automatons.

3. Takes responsibility
This may seem obvious but a truly responsible worker not only takes full ownership of the task assigned to him but he is also cognizant of the fact that his work does not exist in isolation. He is part of a bigger picture: to be responsible means that you care how your work affects the whole. Executives are not merely assembly stations on a factory production line. Most of the time they have to work as a team, and they are are expected to be flexible and proactive enough to take whatever steps that are necessary, sometimes even beyond their scope of duty, to ensure the entire team or company delivers the end product.

4. Strives for Quality
A good employee takes pride in delivering good quality work. I've always believed that the only way to guarantee quality is to over-exceed it. An employee is expected to constantly better himself. No task is ever routine. If you have been doing something well in the past, doesn't mean there's no room for improvement. In a way, work is never ever done, because there's always a better way of doing it.

If you adhere to the principles mentioned, then you, as the worker gains the most. It is not only the pay, promotion or recognition accorded to you by your employer but more importantly, you gain skills and experience that will stand you in good stead for the future. No one can take that away from you. Your value in the marketplace increases and you gain a good reputation in the industry. That to me is more valuable than anything else.

A Ripple Arises in the Mind

What could be more sorry-looking than a blog that has not been updated for more than 8 months? Of course I have the usual excuses - work, work and more work. What an unbalanced life I lead now!

But never mind all that. It certainly feels good to be typing these words again. Since my last entry, so much has happened in Malaysia. And yes, I'm still marooned here in KL. And no, I'm not going to blog about politics, even though it is the fashionable thing for people to do these days.

It is easy to rant and rantings make interesting reading. But that is not the intention of this blog. I'll remain true to my original goal (if ever there was one): which is to explore and examine my innermost thoughts. Blogging to me is an act of meditation.

I've said it before, my blog is my "Buku Latihan"--an exercise book for me to "conteng-conteng". The act of writing sets into motion certain forces in the mind. The moment I type a word, an act of creation happens. A mental Big Bang that triggers a serious of action and reaction.

How powerful is the mind! The more one meditates, the more one is aware of its unexplored depths. This entry is just one ripple in the citta of the mind. There'll be more to come...

The Music of God

Are you always conscious of your own mental processes? Do you completely identify yourself with them? This is a crucial question that you need to answer as a spiritual seeker.

In our everyday lives, we think, act and react. We become the thinking and acting. Acting and thinking, are merely two ends of the same spectrum. Is that all life is about?

You have biological, emotional and intellectual needs, so you think and act in certain ways to fulfill them. Your entire life is spent doing that--fulfilling your needs: the need to eat, to procreate and to gratify your senses.

A need arises, which triggers a thought, which leads to some action being taken and the need is temporarily satisfied. The cycle repeats itself ad infinitum. That's your life.

And then you realize that you only feel happy when the needs are met. And when any of these needs are lacking, you feel unhappy.

Then you ask yourself: Whose needs are these? Does it come from the body? Or the mind? or both?

Can these needs ever be completely satisfied? If not, does that mean I can never ever be truly happy?

What then is there, if not the activities of the mind? When the mind is quelled of its "waves", what do you see? When there is no thought, is there still consciousness? Is there still "intelligence" as we know it?

Why are there so many questions and no answers?

Answers are created to satisfy the mind. If answers exist at all, they are merely brief resting points -- a comma or a semi-colon, rather than a period. After a while, you will realise that all intellectualization has to stop at a certain point.

You don't attempt to understand music; you listen and you enjoy the sheer pleasure of its melody, harmony and rhythm. Perhaps even dance to it.

If you want to truly appreciate music, you will maintain silence and try not to ruin the experience by talking at the same time.

Do you want to know what's behind the mind? If you do, then let the mental noise stop. 

Stop.

And listen.

When the mental noise stops, there is music. And the entire universe dances to it.

Karmic Lessons

A thought arises in the mind and subsides, like a ripple on the surface of the pond.

Another thought arises. More ripples.

The amplitude of some ripples are so huge that they manifest themselves as action or speech. Mental ripples become physical "ripples", producing consequences in the world outside.

No thought is ever lost. Its energy is merely transformed, stored or transmitted into another medium. The energy of several thoughts could be merged into a larger throught-front, creating a thought-tsunami, capable of sweeping away every obstacle along its way.

An obsessive man channels all his energy into a few focussed stream of thoughts. An obsessive man is often "successful", because all his actions are focussed and channelled towards the object of his desire.

All self-improvement books teach you techniques to be focussed. When you are focussed, you do not waste energy on things that do not contribute towards your goals; everything you do is a "right action" that leads you closer to your destination. Every move you make is either an advancement, or a correction from a deviation.

Anything that you desire in your life comes with a price. Why? Because it requires you to control the world around you. You need to act in specific ways to produce specific effects, specific results, which you yourself define as "desirable". Remember, this is your definition of "desirable", and hence whatever pain or pleasure, goes directly into your account.

Like what people say: you can't make an omelette without breaking some eggs. An egg does not transform naturally into an omelette like how a pupa morphs into a butterfly. An omelette is an artificial construction, produced by the human desire to satisfy its palate. It requires "force" for it to happen.

The force that you apply on the world to create your vision of an ideal life requires you to expend a lot of energy. It requires you to go against the current sometimes; it requires you to sacrifice time, to kick asses and to take blows. You might not mind doing all this, but that's the price you'll have to pay.

Your so-called ideal life also requires constant maintenance, because everything in the world is subject to decay. What is ideal now never remains ideal indefinitely. Furthermore, what is ideal for you might not be ideal for the people around you--your spouse, your children, your colleagues and friends. Lots and lots of energy is required to maintain it. That's another price you'll have to pay.

Ask yourself, why do you want these things? Where do these desires come from? What deeper part of the soul does it satisfy? Are you going to spend your entire life's energy attaining and maintaining this "ideal" state?

If you have decided that what you desire is worth it, then by all means go ahead. Take the pain and the pleasure that comes with it. Take it on the chin.

What's important is that you know what you are paying for and you yourself consciously take responsibility for your actions. Only then is the loop closed; only then do you learn your karmic lessons.

Reclaiming Silence

Life has been noisy lately.

The challenge for me has always been to remain engaged in the world without getting entangled in its myriad intrigues. One must learn to swim in a world of noise, without getting drowned.

Underneath all the noise is the ever-present silence; this silence is a sanctuary. It is the bedrock of one's sanity. And so I shall continue to write for to write is to reclaim one's silence, and hence one's sanity.

The mind knows when it is losing its inner silence. Judgement goes haywire; instinct misses its mark. Sloth and torpor creeps in. The mind needs recalibration. The body needs purification. The soul needs rediscovery.

How does one handle this constant assault of noise?

Understand its underlying structure of entanglements--the sources and sinks in this continuum of energy. Realise the fact that some of the noises come from yourself. Know your own contribution to this world of noise. Noise equals inefficient usage of energy. The perfect machine generates no noise.

No noise comes out from a purified mind. Everything that comes out from such a mind is music. This music lives in the air as if it has always been there, as if it belongs there--like the evening breeze and the sweet scents from garden flowers.

To produce music, one must have a sense of rhythm. The rhythm of the ticking clock; the rhythm of night and day; the rhythm of human affairs. Master this rhythm.

Life is perfect when work has the effortless quality of music. Work is produced naturally from the instrument of the mind and body. Like music from a jamming session. We are totally immersed in a beautiful world of rhythm and harmony.

Music springs from silence. And silence is a part of its orchestration. Once you have silence, everything else falls into place. Words will have the sound of music.

The Challenge of Relationships

Living together with one's spouse requires enormous tolerance and understanding. The moment either party forgets that, resentment will inevitably creep in. This resentment typically starts small, often triggered by daily events that to outsiders appear trivial; but they accumulate, day by day, until argument errupts. This release of anger allows the resentment to subside a little, but only temporarily. Resentment soon builds up again, leading to anger and sometimes physical violence. The cycle repeats itself ad infinitum.

A marriage is stable when the oscillations of this cycle of resentment is small. Everytime it builds up to a certain critical mass, it is released. Hence the relationship remains intact. Mature couples know that this cycle well. They either consciously, or unconsciously allow it to happen. And this keeps the relationship alive.

Some couples make their relationship work by avoiding conflicts early. Through years of relationship, they would have understood what each other's sore points are. Some kind of compromise is worked out: as long as they agree not to encroach into each other's sensitive territories, everything is fine.

In most marriages, you'll have a bit of both. There'll be occassions where small fights serve as an outlet for the release of pent-up resentments, and they'll also be occassions when such situations are prevented from arising through a well-honed early-warning system.

However a marriage requires more than these two conflict-avoiding strategies to be successful. The foundation of a relationship is held by shared interests, beliefs and values. People get married because they want to share their lives with their chosen life partners. If they have nothing to share, they shouldn't have got married in first place. Remember the places, food, books or movies that both enjoyed together during those early days of courtship? Sadly, couples tend to forget that. A relationship starts to degenerate when commonalities are not emphasized and differences are allowed to be unnecessarily amplified.

How does love fit into all this? Isn't love what brings two people together in first place? Isn't love the true foundation of a strong relationship?

First, let us differentiate love from dependency. Dependency is the result of fear. We fear loneliness. We fear old-age. So we cling to our loved one to ease that pain of fear. That fear becomes a "shared value". We love our spouses because we love ourselves more: we want them to be around so that we don't feel lonely; so that we'll always have someone to be with in our hour of need. Dependency at its worst is a form of addiction.

True love has to transcend addiction and selfishness. Is this possible at all? Yes, but not immediately.

Love is an ideal that one strives for in a relationship. It is not the starting point; in the beginning there's a lot of physical attraction and emotional attachment, fuelled by the fear of loneliness. Temporary relief can be attained in the companionship of one's "loved one"; but inevitably selfishness rears its ugly head and pain results.

There's no relationship without some amount of pain. One should never be deterred by pain. Your partner could be the one in the wrong, but even the party at fault suffers pain. Pain is nature's way of pointing out our imperfections. Understand it. Trace its source. From what depths of fear did it originate? Why did anger arise? Why did such a seemingly trivial matter arouse such strong emotions?

Tracing the source of pain is like debugging a piece of computer software. No commercial application out there is bug-free. Bugs are constantly being traced and fixed. It is a neverending process. The more "bugs" that are eliminated from a relationship, the closer a relationship is to this ideal called Love.

Bugs can never be discovered if an application is not used. Only through the daily ups and downs one faces in a relationship can the sources of pain be traced and eliminated. If all couples adopt this debugging paradigm in their relationships, imperfections can be slowly rectified without resulting in catastrophic system crashes. That way, a relationship grows and matures with the passing of time.

The Chinese in Me

It's that noisy time of the year again: Chinese Lunar New Year. I don't usually care much about such festivities but this year's celebration is a much welcome break from a hectic year of work. Last year's CNY holidays was a very productive time for me, as I managed to take the opportunity to rush off a lot of outstanding work.

There's no need for me to do the same this year. But of course, out of (bad) habit, I'll still do my usual routine of making sure that every piece of software is running as it should, batch processes are executed on schedule and no extraordinary events are detected--basically making sure that "God's in his Heaven...all's right with the world!".

The good thing about public holidays is that, other people are not working; so I can be sure that I won't be troubled by urgent phonecalls and e-mails. This allows me to do my "real work" in peace.

Everytime such yearly festivals approaches, people lament how fast time flies. Of course, time flies. But time is also our ally. Our purpose in life is to make sure that time does not fly aimlessly. If it seems to fly fast, and as long as it is flying in the right direction, it also means our hardwork is bearing fruits rapidly too!

The CNY celebrations is all about reaffirming good thoughts. There's much that we can learn from the Chinese ethos. It is a culture of positive-mindedness, prudence, hardwork and success. The Chinese are always forward-looking. During CNY, we wish each other great wealth, prosperity and good fortune.

Ah, but you also see the Ugly Chinese: the kiasuism, the greed, the over-eagerness to hit it big ("the Chinese are incorrigible gamblers -- Lee Kuan Yew") and the culture of crass materialism.

When anything--even good values--is pursued to the extreme, you'll see ugliness. That is why most of the victims of Ah Longs (loan sharks) are Chinese. Of course, the loan sharks themselves are also Chinese.

Am I then the typical hardworking Chinese, driven by dreams of social and material success?

How I wish I am!

A person exercising in the gym is not "hardworking". He's sweating and puffing because he wants to shed off extra fat and also to keep himself fit. Being physically fit is a great feeling.

That is what drives me to work hard: The desire to be mentally and spiritually fit. The world is my moral gymnasium (to use Vivekananda's words). That is the true reward of work. The rest is just bonus.

Happy Chinese New Year! Gong Xi Fa Cai!

Sea of Samskaras

Samkaras is a Sanskrit word, usually translated as "past impressions", commonly found in Yoga and Hindu texts. Of course, "past impressions" or samkaras for these spiritual practices include all tendencies and experiences generated from the sum total of one's past lives.

OK, before I dwell deeper into this subject, I'm aware of the fact that some people do not believe in reincarnation and any talk about past lives smells like superstition. Well, it doesn't really matter: we don't have to believe in reincarnation or past lives to discuss about samskaras. Samskaras to me is a natural phenomenon which obeys natural physical laws.

In an earlier blog entry, I mentioned that the same external experience will not be perceived in the same way by different individuals. We interpret sensory input based on past experience (which need not necessarily have to be from a previous life) and the natural tendencies of the mind--which are shaped partly by nature (genetics) and partly by nurture (culture, upbringing, education and life experiences).

Even when a baby is born, he or she, already has certain inherent mental characteristics. A baby has not much experience and education yet, but still each newborn child behaves quite differently from one another. Why is that so? Genes? To an extent, yes.

Even when the foetus is in the amniotic sac, it already senses the world--the heartbeat of the mother, sounds and vibration from the external world. A continuous pattern of action and reaction has already been set off, which does not cease until he or she dies.

Everytime an external stimulus is fed into our minds, we react in a certain specific way. Because our starting conditions--the "boundary conditions"--are different, each one of us has a unique sequence of action and reaction, beginning from the very moment that we came alive in our mother's womb until now. Reactions can come in a passive (thoughts and emotions) or active form (spoken words or actions).

Our samskaras are coded in our hardware (genes), firmware (subconscious mind) and operating system/application (culture and education). How we react to external events continuously shapes and reshapes our samskaras.

Whenever there's no external stimuli, or whenever you attempt to limit the range of external stimuli (like in meditation), you'll be able to perceive your samskaras. Why do certain thoughts seem arise spontaneously? Why do your thoughts have a tendency to veer towards certain directions? If you observe carefully, samskaras are behind your entire personality.

Like it or not, the "background noise" of samskaras is always there. There will always be this tendency in the mind to react in its own peculiar way to every situation in life. And this is due to the influence of samskaras. If that is so, how do we deal with it?

If you have an awareness of your samskaras, then you'll be able to redirect your focus and energy to or away from certain mental impulses. The control of one's breath is the starting point of this ability. The breath is the lever of the mind. That is why most spiritual traditions have some form of breathing exercise or meditation.

Samskaras can be disolved in the light of understanding. The many virtues that religion preaches--love, compassion, forgiveness--have great transmutation powers over one's samskaras. These virtuous actions redistributes energy in the most harmonious way and irons out all kinks. When we act with understanding, love and compassion, the pattern of action and reaction--one's karma--are immediately dissolved. No fresh karma is generated, resulting in the store of samskaras being reduced.

When we have mastered what Buddhists call "Right Action", every action of ours will be like the movement of a fish in water. We swim ever so gracefully and efficiently through life, which is this endless Sea of Samskaras.

Tales of Survival

Two full meals a day is just right for me: brunch and dinner. My ideal routine for the day would be: wake up early in the morning to kick off the day with some work, then take a break during mid-morning to run errands and do brunch, before resuming work in the afternoon and early evening.

The early morning work session is great--it allows me to put in 3 solid hours of work before other people even begin their day. I reserve this 3 hours for "real work"; this includes any task that require a high degree of concentration, such as writing, analysis, coding, researching and planning. Thinking work. The rest of the day, I know I'll be constantly occupied with phone calls, meetings and e-mails--"regular work" or work that does not require deep thinking.

My ideal daily routine is broken whenever I have early morning meetings in town. Then I'd have to start off early to join the rush-hour procession of cars to the city. Usually I'll use the one-hour drive to enjoy a good audiobook or listen to my favourite podcasts.

Driving is never dull when I have my iPod with me. My current "read" is Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage by Alfred Lansing. This is an exciting account of Sir Ernest Shackleton's famous expedition in 1914 to the Antartica, to attempt an overland journey across the icy continent. On their way there, their ship, the Endurance was trapped and crushed by the frozen sea. It is a nail-biting (frost-biting?) tale of survival in the harsh sub-zero temperatures of the Antartic seas, a gripping saga of men forced to stretch to the very limits of their endurance. Even when I was trapped under the hot KL sun in a traffic-jam listening to the audiobook, I shivered and froze together with these men, as they overcame every obstacle that Nature threw at them--blizzards, stormy seas and treacherous ice floes--to rescue themselves from one of the most treacherous and inhospitable places on Earth.

Tales of adventure and exploration like this are such wonderful reads. A couple of years back, I read an exciting account of Magellan's journey to circumnavigate the globe--it was a satisfyingly thick hardcover book which I had lugged together with me during one of my projects in Bangkok. I thoroughly enjoyed it. I recently found an audio version of the book and so I intend to "reread" it again soon.

These tales are also very inspiring; they demonstrate to us the strength of the human spirit in overcoming seemingly insurmountable obstacles. We sometimes think that we face similar situations in our lives too--intractable personal problems that bother us day and night. But tell yourself to find comfort in the fact that no matter how difficult the challenges are, it is nothing compared to what these explorers had to face.

In fact, hardly any of the challenges that we face in our humdrum middleclass existence is a matter of life and death. I haven't heard of a yuppie starving to death before. Most of the time, it's just the ego that needs to suffer a bit of bruising. Compare that to losing a leg to frostbite.

The Soul of a Traveller

Tunner (Campbell Scott): We're probably the first tourists they've had since the war.

Kit Moresby (Debra Winger): Tunner, we're not tourists. We're travellers.

Tunner: Oh. What's the difference?

Port Moresby (John Malkovich): A tourist is someone who thinks about going home the moment they arrive, Tunner.

Kit Moresby: Whereas a traveller might not come back at all...

- The Sheltering Sky, directed by Bernardo Bertolucci

We are all travellers, because there's no turning back in life. You only pass this way once. Every experience in life, no matter how small, changes you in subtle ways. If you are conscious of each momentary change, then you'll learn to distill the lesson behind every experience, behind every sight and sound.

We all experience life in different ways: Each one of us could be looking at the same painting, but our impressions will be very different. There's no experience that's common to all.

We could all be watching the same soccer match and supporting the same team, but the effect of the experience--be it the ecstasy of victory or the humiliation of defeat--produces different karmic consequences, different lessons, to each one of us.

If you have the mentalilty of a tourist, you'd treat each sight and sound like a photographic snapshot to be permanently stored in the storehouse of your memory, to be recalled and savoured again as and when you choose to.

But if you are a traveller, each experience is like a death and a rebirth. You are no longer a collector of memories; you are a soul in continuous transformation.

Your life at any moment in time is the sum total of all your past experiences. At any moment in time, you are a new person, reborn from the previous moment--the fulfilment of your past karma.

Sometimes, we mistakenly think that we are tourists: we meet a friend, go to a movie, enjoy a good meal and then go back to our regular lives. We will only bother to pause and reflect when we encounter an accident or something unexpected. And we call that a "life-changing" experience.

If we'd care to observe, every experience in life is a life-changing experience simply because we can never go back to the previous moment anymore. You are not the person you were when you first started reading this blog entry. If you have the soul of a traveller, you'll understand what I mean.

A Life of Leisure

I've finally managed to complete my long overdued upgrade to the new Blogger template. When I first started blogging in 2003, Blogger didn't have a lot of the features which come standard with any blogsite today: things like comments, tags/labels and blog titles were not supported.

Only paying pro-Blogger users were allowed to upload pictures to their blogs. We had to integrate comment services and picture-hosting from other free service provider sites; blog entry titles had to be hardcoded in HTML. That is why you still see these ugly double titles appearing for all my old posts. And also, now that I'm using the Blogger commenting feature, all old comments are not displayed anymore.

Even though I have been blogging less and less frequently lately, I don't intend to stop doing so. I'll blog whenever I find those bits and pieces of time in between more "important" tasks. There are so many things vying for my time, but this year, I hope to allocate more time for leisure activities such as blogging.

Despite my hectic work schedule last year, I'm quite surprised that I still managed to read quite a number of books. Among the books that I thoroughly enjoyed last year were Chin Peng's autobiography, Alias Chin Peng: My Side of History; Marquez's Memories of my Melancholy Whore, Theroux's Hotel Honolulu plus all the 3 volumes of Ted Miles's diaries. In general however, I'd usually go for non-fiction, unless there's something interesting from Marquez, Kundera or Theroux.

One of my many eccentricities is a fondness for reading musical scores. Classical music is one of my major passions, and I find my enjoyment of the classics greatly enchance if I am able to read and listen to the music at the same time. Hence I also collect musical scores. Whenever I go to Borders, I'd try to check out their collection of music books. Among my most treasured possessions in my library now is a wonderful five-volume set containing the complete piano works of Beethoven, which I'd chanced upon in Jakarta.

The Internet is a great place to download sheet music and so many of them are available free. I also find musical notation visually and aesthetically pleasing--it's like calligraphy. (Calligraphy is also one of my many interests).

I must admit: I have way too many hobbies to pursue! That is why I am always reluctant to take up things like golf or diving--they are simply too time-consuming and not to mention, expensive. There are only so many hours in a day, and so many days in one's lifetime. I have no choice but to prioritize.

I've always believed in the healthy formula of 8 hours sleep, 8 hours work and 8 hours leisure in a day. If we manage our time well, we should have sufficient time to enjoy our favourite leisure activities, and also to blog about them too!

The Sum of All Spiritual Laws

Having to suffer two Liverpool defeats in one week is too much for me to bear. Sometimes I think my irrational attachment to the Reds is something that I purposely inflict on myself so that I can experience a bit of emotional excitement every weekend.

Maybe we all need a bit of drama in our lives simply to feel alive. Being attached to the outcome of a soccer match is a kind of harmless suffering. Yes, it can be very painful at times when your favourite team is defeated, but you are also comforted by the fact that, at the end of the day, it's only a game and no one died because of it. (Bill Shankly will certainly not agree with that).

When your favourite team does triumph in a major tournament, the joy you feel is beyond description. You earned the right to feel so because you've gone through the whole emotional journey together with them. Joy can only be earned through suffering.

That's why romantic relationships are usually turbulent. Lovers are addicted to the emotional high they get whenever they feel that they are receiving all the love and attention from their partners. But when such feelings wane--as all emotions do--they inadvertently create a drama by introducing an emotional trough ("you don't have time for me anymore"), so that an equivalent crest can be created ("Of course I do, honey. You are the most important thing in my life") . That's why you see lovers quarelling and making up all the time. It's what lovers do.
Some of us are addicted to love--or rather to the process of falling in love. If we are not in a relationship with someone, we feel that life is boring. Life is meaningless.

How do we overcome this feeling of emptiness and restlessness? And loneliness?

If you want drama, go watch a soccer match. If you need companionship, go get a dog.
Isn't love important? Yes. But what is love? Take a lesson from Gurudeva.

Passing By

Including the notebook which I'm using to type this blog entry, there are four computers in my bedroom. At least two of them are servers. By the end of next year, I hope the number reduces drastically. It's not healthy to share a room with so many computers. Computers belong to the data center. Bedrooms are for sleep and meditation (or sex, depending on your lifestyle).

The older I get, the more I long for a simpler life. A life without cars, computers and credit cards. Technically, I don't own a car and I certainly don't intend to buy one too in the future. Credit cards, I have too many of them. Why am I still keeping my Singaporean one? And the Indonesian one? That's definitely another 'C' that I want to reduce. Certainly doable.

Career? I don't have one. What I'm doing now in the IT industry, I don't really consider it a career. It's just the best way to work out my remaining IT karma. At some point, it will be exhausted, and I will get to move on to the next phase. I'm very conscious of the karmic effects of all my actions. Maybe karma should be spelt with a 'C'. That way, I can just focus on getting rid of all the 'C's in my life.

Condominium? OK, I admit, that's one 'C' that I cannot get rid of yet. Even though at present I'm not living in my condo, I need the place to store all my junk--books mainly. Someday, I'll have to get rid of them too, by giving them away. Only then will I be free. To be free from everything, including books.

Then what's there to live for?

Well, that's the whole point of life. To live is to experience and let go. Only then can one be truly free. Live life to the fullest; let go without regret. We are all just passing by. Smell the flowers along the way, but down pluck them.

Goodbye 2006, hello 2007!

The Cosmic Fugue

Readers of my blog will know that I am fond of writing about spirituality and religion, even though I am not a very religious person myself, in the conventional sense. Why is that so?

Religious beliefs might on the surface appear to be irrational and dogmatic and at times even bordering on the superstitous. Most of the time, religion cannot be defended logically. Furthermore history has also shown that religious people do not always conduct themselves morally. Why then do we bother with religion? Hasn't religion done more harm than good to mankind?

I sometimes suspect that, the world will actually be a much better place if we do not place so much importance on religion. I've discussed this topic before elsewhere: in general people are inclined to be well-behaved because everyone needs the company of other people to survive. If we behave in a destructive manner, we simply eliminate ourselves from society.

Over time, society evolves a set of rules, which determine the well-being and conduct of its members. It allows everyone to be "selfish" within certain limits. It ensures that the stability of the social system is protected, while at the same time allowing the freedom for people to pursue their own selfish ambitions.

However no one can be overtly selfish because in a way, part of what they pursue is only meaningful if there's the approval and respect of the society in which they live in. Many people would not bother to dress up expensively or drive a fancy car if they are not able to show off their wealth to other people. You need other people to trade with, you need other people to work together and collaborate with in order to generate wealth.

So people need society. And society can only exist if it finds ways to maintain its stability without hampering each individual's pursuit of happiness. Behaviour that threatens the stabililty of society is considered "evil" and behaviour that puts society's needs above the individual are considered "good". A society hums along just fine when there's a critical mass of so-called good people. Evil people ultimately eliminate themselves over time. If an entire society becomes evil, then it simply self-destructs.

Now, why then do we still need religion? Isn't good conduct an inevitable feature of any stable society?

Let's explore another aspect of religion: the supernatural. We have to admit that there are phenomena in this world which logic or science doesn't yet provide satisfactory answers. Doesn't that necessitate the introduction of a spiritual or divine side to the world around us? How do we explain why we are born on this earth, and what happens to us after death? What is the purpose of our existence? Isn't religion an attempt to answer these questions?

While I agree that these things do bother us, we also have to ask ourselves: why do they matter at all?

Why do we need a purpose and reason to everything that we see around us? We exist and we die. Can't we just accept that? Why do we need to invent fairytales and fool ourselves into believing that they are true, without demanding concrete evidence? Why not let science discover the secrets of nature slowly, like how it has been failthfully doing throughout the ages? And for the meantime, isn't it better to apply Occam's Razor?

Let me ask you a question: Do you enjoy music?

Of course you do. All of us do. But why do we need music? Isn't music something irrational? In what way does music help the human species to survive? Music doesn't fill our stomachs. Why then are we even willing to pay money to listen to music?

Not a single culture exists without its own music. Isn't this strange? Why do we have this desire to dance and sway to music? Is our response to music something that's hardwired in our genes? Of what survival value does the act of dancing and singing offer to the human species? Similarly with other artistic pursuits such as painting, sculpture and poetry. Are they all not completely "useless" activities?

Religion is like music and other forms of artistic expressions. It is a natural response of human beings to the world around us. Anyone who knows the meaning of beauty or has fallen in love before, already has the seeds of spirituality and religion within him. Artistic beauty and romantic love--these are but tiny glimpses of that greater impulse within all of us, which is spiritual in nature. They are all irrational and "useless" human expressions. But they are universal.

The spiritual impulse within each one of us is like individual voices--all inter-related and interwoven together in a cosmic fugue. Your spirit evolves, one voice among many voices, partaking in that grander scheme, urging you on to find meaning and purpose to your brief existence.

Does the melody know for what purpose it exists? No. It rises and it falls. It has a clear begining and an end. It's purpose of existence is to carry the song that it is supposed to carry.

We all have that religious impulse. The song we carry within each one of us is different. Some hear it more loudly than us. Is there a supernatural being called God, who composed this Cosmic Fugue? It's beyond our ability to know. Do we need to care? When the music is already playing, the composer is no longer important. What matters is the music and the beauty that it expresses.

We only know that each one of us has a melody, a voice within. We hear other voices around us. We simply evolve our individual melodies, in harmony with the others. Like musicians in a jam session, we must not only play, but also listen and improvise at the same time. Then only do we create music.

There are as many types of music as they are religions in this world. Do we say that they are all irrational, useless expressions of the human race? Is one type of music better or truer than another? Certainly not. You are but one voice in a polyphonic fugue.

Why can't we acknowledge the fact that we all like music? Your taste in music is different from mine. But deep down inside we know why we like music. Music in whatever form is always beautiful. Let's not try to read too much "meaning" into music. It is much more important to listen.

And if you listen intently enough, you'll understand why music is beautiful. No words are needed beyond that.

The Mental Clutch

The thought processes in the mind create reactions in body, like waves on the surface of the ocean. These waves always appear in familiar formations. A certain type of waves, we call Happiness. Another set of waves, we call it Anger, and so forth. All emotions are like that--familiar patterns of bodily reactions that are triggered by mental processes.

If we are aware of our mental processes, we can, with practice, control the reactions of the body towards them. For example, a thought that usually triggers an anger reaction can be detected within the split second that it arises in the mind, and instinctively defused. You acknowledge the arisal of the thought, but you disengage its usual reaction in your body--like how the car engine is disengaged from the transmission system, through the mechanism of the clutch.

The practice of meditation helps you to develop this mental clutch. Remember how difficult it was when you first started to learn how to drive? But with practice you soon learned how to control the clutch pedal in such a subtle fashion that you were able to use it to make the car balance on a slope. Can one achieve such fine control over one's mind? Well, if you can do it with your foot, you can certainly do it with your head .

We think it is difficult because we are too lazy to try. Laziness is the greatest obstacle towards a mastery of the mind. Most of us are bestowed with reasonably capable minds, but unfortunately it is often occupied by the trivialities of everyday life. Thinking is a lot of hard work; especially when you asked to think about what you are thinking about--the mind thinking about the mind. What could be more boring than that!

But if we do not have the ability to listen to our own minds, then I'm afraid we'll always be drown in the incessant mental chatter that arises spontaneously in our heads. If we do not check this source of noise, we are nothing but noise. And already there's enough noise in this world.

My Favourite Podcasts

It's been a long time since I last blogged. No, I don't intend to stop blogging, or even take a break. I want to continue, despite my hectic schedule. It has been difficult lately for me to find time to sleep, let alone blog. There's a momentary surge of work, and I'm taking it all in my stride. All shall come to pass, but blogging will always have to take lower priority than sleep, I suppose.

Anyway, I've had a good eight hours of sleep last night, and I have cleared my morning round of work. Time to blog! No boring philosophical entries this time; it's time for a bit of gobrol-gobrol. Let's talk about podcasts.

I have an iPod player which I listen to whenever I'm driving. Besides using it to enjoy my audiobooks, I also love listening to podcasts. I'm a regular listener to the following podcast programs:

1. Speaking of Faith
This weekly podcast is among the best out there. It covers topics on religion and spirituality. Host Krista Tippett interviews guests from different persuasions every week and these are quality interviews done in an emphathetic manner, with a clear intention to seek understanding of people's different beliefs. The podcasts are complemented by a wonderful website, which features Krista Tippet's blog plus additional materials not used in the podcasts and reference notes. I learned so much from listening to this wonderful podcast program.

2. Real Time with Bill Maher
No one has a more acerbic wit than Bill Maher when it comes to making fun of George Bush. Unlike other talk show hosts, Bill Maher discusses serious current issues, which he tackles with simple common-sense intelligence, slicing through all the spin and bullshit and yet still keeping the show enormously funny. The language used is adults-only which makes it even more interesting because it's like the kind of conversations that we guys have whenever we gather together in pubs. Like Lettterman's Top Ten List, his New Rules segment is the eagerly awaited highlight of every show. If you like Bill Maher, read his equally humorous take on terrorism and September 11 in his book: When You Ride Alone, You Ride with Bin Laden. I'd love to buy this guy a few rounds beer.

3. Mark Kermode's Film Reviews
This is a BBC podcast, featuring reknowned British film critic, Dr Mark Kermode. This guy actually has a Ph.D in Horror Fiction and is a world leading authority on horror films. But fortunately he is no dry academic who enjoys showing off his technical knowledge by talking about montage or mis en scene; he simply loves good narrative cinema--movies that tell a good story as it should, with flair, originality and good acting. His humorous rants are the highlights of the show. Recently movies like Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest ("lumpen direction, lousy writing and pouting performances") and Little Man ("this film is evil") have been on the receiving end of his scathing attacks.

It's been tough on me for the past two years, not having the time to watch movies. But Mark Kermode's reviews keep me in touch with the movie scene. There are so many good movies that I haven't seen. Maybe one fine day, I'll just decide to unplug my computer, switch off my cellphone, and lock myself at home for one whole week to watch all the movies I've missed, in one crazy marathon session.

Besides these three podcasts, I also listen to Naxos Classical Music Spotlight, Newsweek on Air and BBC's Documentary Archive.

And the wonderful thing about all these programs is that--they are all free. So don't complain about audiobooks being expensive. There's enough free audio materials out there that will keep you enthralled for the remaining waking hours of your life. If you have time, check out French Maid TV too.

Real Freedom

Lester Burnham (played by Kevin Spacey):
Janie, today I quit my job. And then I told my boss to go fuck himself, and then I blackmailed him for almost sixty thousand dollars. Pass the asparagus.

Carolyn Burnham (played by Annette Bening):
Your father seems to think this type of behavior is something to be proud of.

Lester Burnham:
And your mother seems to prefer I go through life like a fucking prisoner while she keeps my dick in a mason jar under the sink.

Carolyn Burnham:
How dare you speak to me that way in front of her. And I marvel that you can be so contemptuous of me, on the same day that you LOSE your job.

Lester Burnham:
Lose it? I didn't lose it. It's not like, "Whoops! Where'd my job go?" I QUIT. Someone pass me the asparagus.

--family dinner scene from American Beauty, directed by Sam Mendes

We have fears because we have attachments. We are attached to our bodies; so we fear growing old, we fear its annihilation--death.

If you are someone who take enormous pride in your physical beauty, chances are, your attachment is even stronger. And the stronger your attachment, the bigger your fears are, and the more potential pain that you have to suffer.

When you have no attachment to your job anymore and you decide to resign, you'll feel a great sense of freedom and liberation. To hell with your bosses! You are free. You don't give a damn anymore. Imagine yourself in that position. Capture that feeling. Why can't this be your permanent state of mind? Why can't the mind be always free like that?

Because we can't let go of our attachments. We want the income that comes with a steady job. We want the prestige perhaps of working for a large company. We enjoy the position that we hold--where people look up to and respect. We have a standing in society and a sense of identity.

We all need to work to feed ourselves and our families. That's fair enough. But why are we investing so much of our energy and time, at the cost of our mental and physical in so many intangibles--pride, position, prestige, identity? Why are these things important? Are they worth the price that you are paying now?

If you are willing to pay the price, then don't complain. Just take the pain. Truly successful people don't lament about the hardship that they have to go through. They know the price of success.

Now, isn't freedom also an intangible that comes with a price?

If you have to pay for freedom, that means you are not yet free. It could mean you are running away from responsibility. It could also mean that you are attached to some other object of desire that has a bigger allure. You could be divorcing your wife so that you can marry a pretty young girl. That will feel like freedom for a while, until you realize that this new relationship is also a prison in some way.

Freedom is not a goal that one should strive for like how one would go after wealth or position. Freedom is something that's inherent in us--our original state, free from any attachments, neither to the past nor to the future. Freedom is just being and taking every moment as it is. Nothing stirs your calmness. Everything that comes to your attention is tackled and handled without fuss. And you move on to the next. Like a good badminton player.

A drop of water falls on a leave, and immediately glides off its surface.

Such is real freedom.

KL and the Contempt of Familiarity

KL and The Contempt of Familiarity

When I was living in Jakarta, I used to blog a lot about Sukarno, historical annecdotes about Jakarta, Indonesian culture, Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Chairil Anwar and other observations on Indonesian life, which I find interesting. It was a lot of fun observing Indonesians as an outsider, occassionally blending in with locals, and as and when I chose to, playing the ignorant foreigner. You get to learn a lot that way.

When I came back to KL almost 3 years ago, I wanted to do the same here--to observe Malaysians like an outsider. But it proves to be a more difficult challenge because I'm a Malaysian myself and I know Malaysians too well. It's the same reason why we sometimes treat friends better than how we treat our own family members. We often behave in a less forgiving manner towards people closest to us. Familiarity, inevitably breeds contempt.

I get a bit disappointed with fellow Malaysians sometimes because I tend to judge them by a higher standard. I can tolerate litter, pollution and haphazard parking in Jakarta but such things cheese me off in KL. The dirt and squalor of a Jakartan slum is 'exotic'; the squatter settlements in KL, an 'eyesore'.

Life in Jakarta was like the courtship phase in a romantic relationship. Life in KL is like a marriage. Husbands and wives quarrel because there are expectations from each side which are not met. How do we maintain the romance of courtship in a marriage? How do we prevent familiarity from breeding contempt?

If we seek to understand first instead of insisting on meeting our expectations all the time, then the situation might improve. During courtship, we see everything in a positive light. We are more forgiving. We have hope and optimism. We laugh together at each other's mistakes. We have patience. Why can't couples do the same after marriage?

Well, I don't know. I'm thankfully, single (and still loving every minute of it). I'd rather deal with my relationship with KL first. I must learn to see squalor as 'exotic', be more forgiving towards the rude and reckless drivers that I see on Malaysian roads everyday and try not to have too high an expectation on my fellow citizens. Only then perhaps, I'd be ready to tackle the challenge of marriage--that is, if I'm even interested to do so.

A Moment's Ornament

A Moment's Ornament

She was a phantom of delight
When first she gleamed upon my sight;
A lovely Apparition, sent
To be a moment's ornament

-- William Wordsworth

In my home office, I'm surrounded by so many tantalizing books--books which yearn to be sipped and savoured like good wine. But I'm chained to my computer, with a huge backlog of tasks to tackle: e-mails to be replied to, computer programs to be written, presentation slides to be built, forms to be filled and proposals to be submitted.

But as usual, I'll tackle one thing at a time. I will certainly attempt to prioritize but the size of the queue makes no difference to the way I handle my immediate task.

Every now and then, in between more mundane chores, I'd take a peek into these delightful worlds that lie hidden within the pages of the tomes surrounding me: The Self-Made Tapestry, The Art of the Infinite, The Golden Treasury of English Songs and Lyrics, The Malayan Emergency Revisited, Historical Sites of Jakarta and so many more.

There's so much wonder and beauty to be discovered. Enough to last a few lifetimes.

And then there's also the world outside the world of the mind: people--the "interactive books". That's another vast universe to discover. How often do we find the time to catch up with old friends? Are we not preoccupied mostly with our small worlds of work, family and more work?

The pleasures in life are infinite but time is finite. So we'll have to prioritize. Our most common mistake is that we give too high a priority to work. Work is not the most important thing in life. It is not a matter of life and death. A lot of the importance which we associate with work is merely self-importance. We force ourselves to achieve to satisfy the cravings of the ego.

Work is a pleasure when it becomes a form of worship. We work because it fulfils an inner need and provides the necessary spiritual ballast. It anchors us into our world. Work becomes a joy when there's growth, creativity and expansion. If you do something with focus, dilligence and care, the quality is always reflected in the output. And that is all that one needs to be concerned about.

It doesn't really matter what it is that we do for a living. As long as we are always mindful of the task at hand, the reward is immediate. What comes after that--wealth, promotion or recognition--is a bonus. To me such rewards are a given. We don't need to worry about them. The universe will find its way to reward us, in the most appropriate way. Delegate that task to God!

If one is mindful of what one is doing every moment of one's waking life, there's nothing more that one could do. Any kind of worry, speculation or fault-finding only takes up unnecessary CPU time, and thus diminishes the quality of one's work.

There's so much to do! But still there's only ONE thing one could do at any moment in time. Doing that very thing well, makes the moment. That very task itself, becomes the moment's ornament.

Life's Continuum

Life's Continuum

It is so important to maintain an oasis of calm within when one is leading a hectic life. If one does not know how to take things one at a time, there will be tremendous stress. For the modern man or woman, stress is the main cause of a lot of illnesses.

A poised mind does not dwell too much on the future or the past. A processor executes one instruction at a time. It does not hurry. There is no point in hurrying because one instruction is all it can do at any point in time.

You cannot do more than what you are doing now. There will always be tasks waiting in your "run queue". What you can do however, is to make your utilization of time more efficient. You strive to eliminate wastage and you find more intelligent ways of doing things. That helps a lot.

I'm thankful that despite leading a busy life, I still get to read a lot more than what an average person does. This is because I make use of those bits and pieces of time which most people would normally waste--such as time spent waiting in a queue or time spent driving or getting stuck in a traffic jam. These tiny bits of time are important; they do add up significantly.

When you have a book to read or an audiobook to listen to, time disappears. With your mind completely relaxed and happily nourished, you don't hurry unnecessarily. When you hurry, you make mistakes. And mistakes can be very costly, especially when you are driving at 100 over km/hour along the highway.

Life is a continuum of experiences--not point events separated by intervals of unimportance. Your workday is not defined by a series of events, it is instead a continuous flow of mental and sensory experiences, which you, in your ignorance, conveniently lump into "chunks"--"my project meeting", "that important customer presentation", "my appointment with dentist" etc.

When you think of life in terms of events, you tend to treat the intervals between them as unimportant. That's why you hear the expression: "killing time". Those tiny bits of time between important events are to be "killed". But why kill time? Remember: your lifetime is finite. To kill time is to kill yourself.

Why not experience time as an ever-present flow?. Like a fountain that is replenished by a steady stream of fresh water particles, but yet maintains a steady shape. You don't try to chase time. You allow it to flow into your life, allowing it to bring forth the fullness and essence that is in every moment.

Life is a continuum. You don't selectively lump a series of events together and label them "happy" or "sad". These so-called "defining moments" are not your life. Your life is not something you've achieved in the past or something that is yet to come in the future. Life is now. The ever-present Now. It is all that matters, it is all there is and ever will be.

The Beauty of Anger

The Beauty of Anger

It has been a good month of World Cup action, even though it coincided with one of the busiest periods for me this year. Still I managed to catch most of the important matches, especially those that involved my favourite team, Germany. I'm pleased that they managed to secure at least third placing, even though, with some luck, they could have gone all the way to the final.

Most people like the Brazillian brand of soccer because it is exciting to watch. Brazillian players are skillful, spontaneous and creative. German soccer is comparatively dull, mechanical and "boring" but there's great tactical discipline and teamwork.

I enjoy watching both styles; To me they represent the two types of beauty which Robert M. Pirsig talked about in his cult classic, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: Romantic Beauty and Classical Beauty. If you choose one over the other, you are simply missing a lot of beauty in life.

I'm not going to comment about the Zidane-Materazzi incident in the final, but it got me thinking about the level of patience and tolerance that we possess in each of us. At what point do we have a right to say, enough is enough? How much provocation is considered too much for an individual to bear?

Our patience is something that is tested all the time: think of traffic jams, supermarket queues, telemarketeers, government departments and nagging spouses. Each one of us has a different threshold of tolerance. When the threshold is breached, we are no longer our recognizable self. And that's an ugly sight behold.

I try not to get angry easily because to me, anger is "easy". We feel strong, powerful and right when we are angry. It is an easy way to feel right. It doesn't require great skill to feel incensed but it requires great wisdom and insight to see beyond anger and understand the underlying resentment and pain that triggered it in first place.

It is much more productive to just acknowledge the anger rising within us, and then channel the energy towards something that would help alleviate its cause.

Anger is simply wasted energy--like heat loss in electrical transmission. The amount of heat generated is indicative of the amount of current that's coursing through the wires but the heat itself is energy that is forever lost. When anger arises, see it as an opportunity to tap this sudden inrush of energy.

Anger is simply the signal of an energy windfall; so use it wisely, use it creatively.

Systems of Spiritual Energy

Systems of Spiritual Energy

In the gospel of Matthew, there's a famous chapter where Jesus speaks about marriage, divorce and celibacy. Let me quote some lines here:

"...that at the beginning, the Creator made them male and female, and said, 'For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh. So they are no longer two, but one. Therefore what God has joined together, let man not separate". (Matthew 19:4-6)

When a disciple commented that,"it is better not to marry". Jesus replied:

"Not everyone can accept this word, but only those to whom it has been given. For some are eunuchs because they were born that way, others were made that way by men; and others have renounced marriage because of the kingdom of heaven. The one who can accept this should accept it." (Matthew 19:11-12).

A married couple is, as Jesus said, "one flesh". Two lives are intertwined so tightly that it is impossible for one to suffer or enjoy anything without having an effect on the other. Marriage, if practiced properly, is a good way to work out your karma and hasten your spiritual evolution.

By having a partner to share your life, you will always have a "mirror" to reflect your shortcomings; you can see yourself better because all your actions trigger immedate reactions from your partner. I've also given another analogy before: a married couple is like a binary star--two stars caught up in each other's gravitational field, and hence have to evolve as a single system.

If marriage is so important, why then did Jesus say "others have renounced marriage because of the kingdom of heaven"? Is that also a legitimate path to enlightenment?

In general, Jewish rabbis and priests do not practice celibacy. Only certain Jewish sects such as the Essenes do so. There are of course, many academic debates as to whether Jesus himself was also an Essene. And despite the intriguing speculations made popular by the Da Vinci Code, there are no conclusive evidence indicating that Mary Magdalene is Jesus' wife either.

What's more interesting though is the fact that Jesus himself seem to acknowledge the fact that there are those who renounce marriage in their quest for spiritual enlightenment ("the kingdom of heaven"). And it is not a path suitable for everyone ("only those to whom it has been given").

The path of the celibate--the Sanyasin--is one that requires great spiritual discipline. The renunciate chooses the path of celibacy not because there's anything "sinful" about sex or relationship with the opposite sex. Instead he chooses to walk the spiritual path alone because he is like a scientist who wants a controlled "lab environment" to conduct his experiments. Instead of a binary star system, which is more complex to analyze and tackle, he chooses to isolate his own soul so that the variables are more manageable.

Now, this approach has its dangers too if one is not careful. The renunciate, in his isolation, might end up hardening his ego, because he does not have someone close to him to curb his ego-centric tendencies. He deludes himself into thinking that he is "superior" to other more ordinary souls, who prefer a more worldly path. He can easily collapse into the equivalent of a Black Hole, if he is not vigilant.

On the other hand, those who choose the path of marriage has to be strong enough to take the emotional roller-coaster ride that comes with human relationships. The pain and pleasure that comes with the life of a householder must be handled with equanimity. It is so easy to loose one's balance. Selfishness in a marriage hurts the partner and the immediate family members most. In bad cases, instability results and the entire binary star system collapses.

In the mystical language of the yogis, the renunciate learns to control the two spiritual energy currents in his body--the ida and the pingala--into the spine's central energy current, the shushumna. When these vibratory currents are merged into the shushumna, then spiritual awareness slowly unfolds, as the energy rises up the spine.

A family is but a similar energy system on a larger scale. The husband has to bear the energy of the pingala channel and the wife, the ida. When the energies are well balanced, with each person understanding his and her role, within the structure of the family, then the harmony of shushumna is achieved. This is the spiritual quest which all families must be conscious of.

A dysfunctional family is the result of a warped energy system. Maybe there's selfishness on the part of the wife, or maybe the husband is unfaithful. Or perhaps there's an overall excessive preoccupation with material pursuits. Such a family loses its spine--that unifying energy of shushumna. There will be quarrels and unhappiness. If the family members are not aware of their spiritual roles, they will have to suffer a great deal of pain in the process.

How important it is for each one of us to be aware of spiritual energy behind every thought and action and its effects on the larger systems around us. We must be conscious of the forces that operate within our bodies and minds first and then, and see their affects on the world around us--our families, communities and nations. If we have no consciousness of the micro thoughts and actions that spring from our minds, then we must suffer its painful effects in the macro-world.

Start with that energy system within you first. Feel its vibratory power. Learn to control it. And then channel them wisely into the right direction.

Present Perfect

Present Perfect

Time to blog. Time to enter into an oasis of calm. To let go of the past and the future, to remain poised in the present. To enter The Now, which is all there is, and all there ever will be.

When one is mindful of the present, events distill themselves into their pure essence. Things shine with great clarity. You see all the underlying forces that are at work and you understand why things are the way they are.

The present is always perfect. If you take a snapshot of the sea, the image you that capture shows a state of energy, frozen in time. Every individual molecule of water in the sea reacts to the tug and pull of the forces surrounding it. At the particular instant when the picture is taken, every particle is where it should be, given the configuration of forces present during that time. The shapes of the waves are perfect. It cannot be any other way.

Similarly with this moment. The thought that appears in your mind is a direct consequence of what you have been thinking in the past and what you desire for the future. Your state of mind is 'perfect'--it cannot be any other way. You deserve it.

If you are feeling fear, pressure and anxiety now, it is merely a direct consequence of your reaction to the forces around you. What are the forces exerting themselves on you? Examine your surrounding: your family, your friends, your colleagues, your neighbourhood, your environment. Why do these things affect you the way they are? Examine your attachment to them. Why do they matter to you? Perhaps more importantly: why do they matter to you the way they do now?

When you are aware of all the forces that are at work, you will know what is the best course of action. A perfect understanding of the moment generates the perfection response--what the Buddha calls "Right Action". When you don't have a perfect understanding of moment, then all you could do is react.

How does one achieve "perfect understanding"? Let go of the past, accept the present and do not fear the future. You only give power to these forces through your unconscious attachment to them. When you let go of them, all these external forces collapse. You true self shines forth.

Be completely conscious and aware of this present moment. That is all that you need to do. You can only tackle one moment at a time, one thought at a time. So experience it in its complete fullness. Experience the present, in all its glory and perfection.