new book-1

Ist post onThe book " Light the Lamp Within- 99 ways to build and live a beautiful, fulfilling and successful life", is placed below-




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Light the Lamp Within

Lighting the lamp within means, attaining our potential. Potential as given in Chamber’s Dictionary means possibility of successful development. All of us have this possibility. However, we have to be exploring and finding it within ourselves. We all have capabilities, many of which ,we are aware of but there are many more, we are not aware of. Knowing these and developing these creates a lot of positive energy and enlightens us to work for and achieve all what we can in our life. This is what defines the message “Light the Lamp Within”.
The very purpose of life is attaining our maximum potential. For this, the very first thing we have to do is to “Know Self”. Knowing self means knowing my strengths, my areas of improvement, my competencies and constantly exploring and testing myself in new areas to become aware of our capabilities not yet known to me.

After this, I have to decide, where I wish to take my life; which means deciding my goals and direction of life. I keep asking in my workshops the question “ Whether you will go ,where life takes you ,or you will take your life, where you wish to take it.” The adults take time to respond but youth & children immediately say “Will take it, where I wish to take it.” Working with them makes me happy and look for hope and future, which they have in abundance. Contrary to it adults mostly have past and regrets and they often talk about these. However, giving a direction to life and setting goals will mean taking ownership of life, ownership of myself , responsibility of my actions and subsequently for the results of these actions instead of placing onus on luck, circumstances or others.
The final step is living the journey of life and taking it with passion, energy and enthusiasm and utilizing every moment, every ounce of energy and investing these happily in pursuit of my life’s goals.

pursuit of fulfillment

Have been rather happily engaged with a project near Mumbai on transformation of work culture since July'09.Have been travelling intensively and had many happy experiences.A lot of water has flown and have to catch up to summarize and post on blog all these.

Meanwhile,while travelling from Mumbai to Allahabad by train,my new book is conceived. The title is " Light the Lamp Within-99 ways to build and live a beautiful,fulfilling and successful Life".My workshops with children are titled as"Light the Lamp Within"and so am writing the book mainly keeping my friends, both youth and children, who might find some value in it.

As suggested by my son Rohit,who was excited by the idea and motivated me to go ahead,every chapter will be one pager and will appear on my blog having frequency of one per week.This is being done to seek suggestions, comments and value addition by viewers of this blog.Will positively appreciate such contribution and will also acknowledge the same in the book.

The inspiration of book is drawn from a friend ,who has been instrumental in persuading and motivating me to this journey with young friends and will be value added to by a senior educationist.
But, I look forward a lot to my young and teenager friends,who have been at my workshops for making the book meaningful by their value addition and sharing of experiences.Am sure they will make me happy.

Relationships

Some family health issues kept me diverted to taking care and investing in relationships. The trying times gave a lot of learning. Understood little deeper the impact of relationships in life, the challenge of going through trying times, the support system provided by the relationships you build and many more. Also got insight into how health care organizations function ,how little importance is given to really critical human resource ,how a casual approach can create disturbance, how expectations result in frustrations on one hand ,while how on the other hand commitment and sincerity is exhibited in unlikely places and how anything done in life with selfless motive pays back and people, whom you have not even met, help you in crisis.
Remembered the 12 attributes of happiness of which optimism is one and is described as " Greater the pain,Greater the learning" ( Dan Baker in his book " What happy people know?") . SO TRUE!

lessons of life

Since last post, have been with the boys section of sathya sai school and learnt quite a few things. Understood that have to work hard on self and catch up with this generation fast to make friends with them.

Also the life transformation project at an orgaization near Mumbai is keeping me happily engaged.Have to share a lot of learnings .

Again this year, we had Light the Lamp Within workshops with Class VIII friends of Sathya Sai Vidhya Vihar, Indore from 23rd to 29th July.Lots of learning and insights for me .

When asked what are the qualities they liked in their friends, the responses were: helpful, caring, sharing, kind, loving, makes me happy, optimistic, truthful, friendly, creative, humorous, active, sporting, cool minded ,supportive, encouraging, sensitive, smiling,patient, trust worthy, listens, understands etc. Similarly their response of traits not being liked by them in some of their classmates were: anger, rude, irritating, boosting, boring, egoistic, disturbing, serious, dominating, liar, negative minded etc. This gave very useful insight to all of us as to what qualities we should have and what traits we must improve upon ,if we want lots of friends in life.

Similarly, their response to a question as to what we can learn from school,which can be of value for our entire life were: good values, manners, discipline, sportsmanship, public speaking, respecting all religions, confidence building by participation, personality development, relationship building, meditation, optimism, co-operation, compassion, team work etc. Lot of learning for all of us.

Loving and inspiring feedback was received advising and motivating me to continue these workshops. Everyone committed to work for self development, living life and being happy and making everyone happy. Interestingly ,when asked to commit to leave a habit "anger" was most common. Also LOVE again scored highest as expectation from parents. Even if they are receiving it, may be they want more expression of same and small actions to reinforce this feeling.

Surprisingly, when few of the friends were not able to fully co-operate few times and I kept on requesting them to do so, the feedback of many of their classmates was with advice to me to be more strict and discipline such friends. An interesting comment was "Today's generation needs punishment and uncle should at least scold the children". Another one was " You can be a little strict so that other children do not repeat the same mistake, which was done by us."Am amused by such simple but powerful messages, though am grateful for the advice but apologise to my sweet friends that it is difficult to follow this advice.

However, my faith in these young friends , got immensely boosted by love, affection ,positive response and overwhelming support to the workshop. Thanks to all of them.

Experiences of great value

Just finished having workshops with three lively groups of class VIII friends of Sathya Sai School.Lots of happiness, new insights, photos and memorable experiences to be shared ,when am back from Mumbai assignment in second week.

More Happiness

Had some very happy time with new friends at NTPC at their Power Management Institute, Noida and of NHPC at Fridabad at a resort. Suddenly found in the participants a lot of enthusiasm, energy and passion and love. Everyone participated wholeheartedly and enjoyed s much so that at Faridabad on second day, we had even tears overflowing at the thought of separation. When we are in teens, we are able to relate to each other and everyone so deeply ,then why it is that we start losing this quality, thereby living sometimes a life not really making us full and happy.

Thinking about all the sweet memories of great time, I had with these young friends all in teenage, become happy and fulfilled.