I then proceeded to check out what was the book all about. Interestingly it talked about one of those topics of life about which I have myself spent innumerable hours; thinking, experiencing, practicing and many a time avoiding.

“Confronting and solving problems is a painful process which most of us attempt to avoid. And the very avoidance results in greater pain and an inability to grow both mentally and spiritually. Facing our difficulties – and suffering through the changes – can enable us to reach a higher level of self – understanding.”

My mind instantly drifted to the words by a fairly renowned Sculpturist, during one of his talks during my high school days: “It is only by pain that birth (creation) happens, it is only by going through the pain of labour that lasting beauty is created.”

Didn’t take me much time henceforth to decide to get the book issued. And the person in-charge of issual, not surprisingly, gave me a look as if he is seeing an alien in his territory.

Getting back home I hit the bed with the book in my hand. And the very opening statements made the book a worthy read. And this is how it read. You guys may wanna take a look at it yourselves…

” Life is difficult… This is a great truth, one of the greatest truths. It is a great truth because once we truly see this truth, we transcend it. Once we truly know that life is difficult – once we truly understand and accept it – then life is no longer difficult. Because once it is accepted, the fact that life is difficult no longer matters”

TEDxYouth@Chennai opened with a interesting talk by Saundarya Rajesh, Founder- President, AVTAR Career Creators. Soundarya is one of the earliest voices to speak on Diversity & Inclusion in India, is a winner of the SCOPE Woman Exemplar Award 2006, the Yuvashakthi Entrepreneur of the Year award 2007. She urged the audience to aspire and acquire generational competence, the skill that empowers us with the knowledge and understanding of various generations. She encouraged the youth to seek out generational competence and to leverage its power in our everyday lives. This, Soundarya notes,” .. is an idea worth spreading”

Next up was Balaji Sampath, Founder of AID India, a non-profit organization working on Education and Rural Development. He enlightened the audience of the need to get the parents at the bottom of the pyramid to get involved in the education of their children. Balaji envisions getting people engaged as the key to fundamental and structural transformations in both education and health. Getting people engaged would be perhaps THE best way to get the government run schools accountable. This would in turn lead us to enhanced quality of education, Balaji reminded.

Armendra Kumar is a man on a mission. He dreams of making India as Clean as Switzerland in one year. He is a great believer in the power of markets in solving the challenges facing the society. Armendra is a founder and missionary in chief at CleanCredit and a Research Scholar in Public Policy @ IIMB. While explaining his concept of “Trash is Cash” he appealed to the audience to ponder why in a society like India where littering is the order of the day, why is it that dont we find beer bottles and newspapers in any of the garbage. He theorizes that the answer lies in the fact that there exists a market for beer bottles and newspapers but not for other kinds of trash. As a concluding note of his interesting and thought provoking presentation, Armendra appealed to the audience to participate in the online Satyagraha, which he names Satyagraha 2.0, and pave way for a cleaner India.

Major A.K. Ravindran better known by his screen name Major Ravi is a former Indian Army Officer and a Malayali Indian filmmaker, recipient of the President’s medal, joined the Indian army as a jawan in 1975 and graduated from the Army Cadet College to become a commando in the year 1988. He led the mission codenamed Operation One-Eyed Jack to capture suspects of the Rajiv Gandhi assassination case, the experiences of which inspired him to direct Mission 90 Days (2007). Major Ravi choose to fly down from Mumbai to address the audience and essentially to inspire them to follow their dreams and live life to its fullest. He took us through his life, right from the time when he dropped out of school in 10th, to his present passion of moviemaking. The journey was both inspiring and in my opinion would also make for a great script for his next movie..

The simple plan alas is not meant for the liberals, free thinkers or the pure mavericks, who might find themselves constrained and caged by the plan and at large by society. And as a direct consequence, they seek creative and cognitive expression.

This particular characteristic of ours used to be (and to a certain extent still is) really helpful considering its significance in the biological evolution of our species. Our brain has only so much resources and it has to employ every bit of it optimally to ensure our survival and well being. When we come across new information, our brain immediately has to decide whether its good or bad for us and accordingly prepare our entire system for fight or flight responses. And it has to do it in the fastest time possible and with the limited information available. This the brain achieves through heuristics based on associations. The crucial role of this behaviour cannot be overestimated in our quest for survival.

Modern civilized society has moved well beyond its survival threats that used to haunt our primitive civilizations. We still function with heuristics. Our brain is programmed to overemphasize associations. This per se is good, provided we make a constant effort to update and rethink our deeply held assumptions and prejudices. For these form the basis of our categorization of what is good or bad for us. For civilized society today is essentially a fleeting amalgamation of hues of grey.

The challenge of modern society in this regard, is to tune our instincts, update it from its pre programmed biological survival mode,  to be in sync with our times; the knowledge age. Classification or conviction about people and things and events is not more capable enough to provide us with a roadmap to navigate the complex turf of modern human social life, for it has moved beyond the plain black and white canvass it used to be, to the myriads of shades of grey that it can afford to be today. What it calls now is for understanding and acceptance as the essential dashboard to this gift of ours. This fundamentally needs to be part of our social fabric to be well integrated and unleash the broad spectrum of possibilities that modern civilized society holds potential for. There in lies the pathway to substantially improve upon the collective social wisdom accumulated over the years and collective social capital and scale human civilization to greater heights. It’s also time to conjure up a paradigm shift in defining what we term our right to live.

To recall the statement I read somewhere that puts these thoughts into context, “Conviction, it turns out, is a luxury of those on the sidelines”

In any case, any of them could not or rather should not have accounted for the long 3 years that took me to reach this point. In a bid to find a niche or writing something worth sharing, I pushed myself to a position where I ended up contributing nothing. Clearly, that approach wasnt working. And now I have told myself to try and look at the whole thing a bit differently. The thought process now is to just start contributing, in Seth Godin’s words to just ship it, without getting overtly concerned about what Im shipping and why. The attempt this time around is to attain some level of momentum and a critical mass of contributions, beyond which the positive vibes created around the process; the amalgamation of collective thoughts and energies of the people around me, would be incentive enough to sustain.

And between, this just cant be a writer’s block, because by definition, you got to be a author / writer first to be able to hit the block apparently!!