My KISS (Keep it simple, stupid!) theory

Life is simple, if we can see it that way. But, unfortunately, most of us, including me, try to make it very complicated. I always try to prepare a plan for the future. I always think in profound manner for things like career, job, education, marriage, money, family, etc and make preparations for all those. And because I know that there is an odd of one of my plans failing, I also think about the options that I can use if something or someone doesn’t behave according to my inclination. But, life doesn’t have to be planned and I think I should leave few things for time and let me make decisions at that instance.

We want certainty in our life but nature is cruel and hence no matter how many efforts we put to create full-proof plans, uncertainty always comes in our life. At that point, if the person is so used to live life according to his rules, he gets puzzled in this uncertainty and his mind floats around everywhere. This has happened me to, as well. There were few moments where situation didn’t work out the way I wanted and because I never had a backup plan because I always thought about the outcome to be in a certain way, my mind was packed with reactions and took me a while to recover from the situations.

I am not suggesting that we shouldn’t plan for the future. We should and we must. We always have responsibilities, even if we live alone or we live outside from our home country. Some people have more responsibilities than others but we always care about people around us and hence we always think about the future and plan according to it. But, sometimes, its better to leave certain things for the future to decide and not make any arrangement before actually that situation comes. This uncertainty makes us more aware of the circumstances and decision taken at those moments, though very quick once, develops self-confidence.

Therefore, think about the future and make some plan as well. But, remember, each plan makes person’s life more complicated and life doesn’t have to be complicated. Life doesn’t have to be like a flow chart, and hence, leave certain small and sometimes major situations for the future to come up with. Try to keep life simple and I am sure that that life will be more enjoyable.

Who are we to judge any person?

We often try to judge other people and make up our mind about them without knowing them personally. Most of the time, people are not bad only time upon them is bad. Therefore, their decisions taken during the bad time makes negative affects on observers or people who are closed to them. Hence, I think, we should not judge any person, and instead we should try to put ourselves at his or her position and see what choices they had when they decided to do something that we cannot justify as a positive decision.

For example, most of us think that Hitler was a bad person. I agree, that he killed so many people and he was one of a main causes to start WWII, but I don’t have any authority or I am not that much knowledgeable to make any judgement. I cannot rely upon the resources that are provided by those who have written history from one point of view and often did not depict that person’s angle. I know that there is no justification for massacre and whatever Hitler did at that time could have been avoided and he could have achieved his goals without being mass murderer but I cannot say that he was a bad person as a whole because I cannot make that decision without going through the same or similar pain he felt and the circumstances on which he chose to do such a big bloodbath. As all these things happened in the distant past, it doesn’t affect us that much in our daily life.

But, when a person close to us, like friend or relative, makes a certain decision because of which we get a lot of pain, we most often make assumptions about that person and his/her personality. We generally ignore to understand their perspectives and we do not put ourselves into their position to see why they have made such a nasty decisions. Even worst than that, if we receive some opinions from third-person on them, we generally believe third-party and we close our mind to think from our friend or relative’s point of view whose decision has caused such a great frustrations. We feel such emotions only when the person is very attached to us and hence we should try to understand him/her and should not make our judgement on what we have seen or what we have heard but on which conditions that person has made such a huge and controversial decision. If we are able to see that point of view, we generally find that he/she may be right and whatever he/she has thought is best for all the people who are involved in the situation.

We will be able to do this only when we put our ego aside and when our mind and character are strong enough to withstand whatever result may come in the future.

Change

We are used to certain things, timings, environment, arrangements, etc in our daily life. By knowingly or unknowingly, our certain acts on certain things depend upon particular sequence and if some part of that sequence changes, we get frustrated. On contrary, some people get bored of routine life at home or at work in few months or in few years.

Only one thing in our life is constant and that is change. Sometimes, these changes are very big and we are not able to take those easily and we take a while to adapt to those transforms. Personally, I like to vary few little things in my daily life on a regular basis. I generally take different route between office and home every few days, try to do experiments with my diet quite often and I am not afraid of trying new hairstyles regularly. But, I am also afraid of few hasty changes in my life and want few things to be the same as they are or at least I should have control over them. But that is not possible in real life. And when these changes happen, I struggle a bit to get used to those. I take these situations positively and try to learn from them.

Most often, the work pattern and work environment frustrates people. I know someone who gets bored and frustrated within few months in the same company. I have been with my current employer for last two and half years. I like the environment here, working style, working hours, etc but I know that if I want to work longer with this company, I have to make certain changes every often in my work style, lunch timings, things I do when I am not busy in work and I need to keep it up with technological updates so that when big change happens in the company I am prepared to adopt that easily.

Most of us like our home and love our life with family members. Hence, we try to avoid moving to new house until it becomes unavoidable, make any changes in living room or in bedroom, paint new colours in house, etc etc. We get attached to all these non-living objects so much and want them to be as they are forever.

Influence on us by people around us

As we grow old from child to an adult person, people around influence us. When a child is born, he/she doesn’t have any name, religion, identity, etc. That’s up to his/her parents to give all necessary identity and put him/her into the society. For a kid, most significant impact comes from parents. Kid learns good and bad things from parents very quickly. By knowing or unknowingly, parents influence enforce religion, believes, behaviours, habits, etc and as child doesn’t have enough power to understand or oppose, he/she will accept most of these things.

When we become old enough to understand, we generally learn new things from friends, teachers, relatives and brothers/sisters. If any of these persons have any bad habits like smoking, drugs, drinking, etc, there are chances of getting these into a person’s habits, too. Its only when we start getting understanding of life and start learning new things by ourselves we start influencing people around us.

It will depend on how strong that is. I have seen people who do not have any idea about real life situations and they have survived because of good friends and relatives around him/her. When this protection has been removed from the person, I have seen these people struggling a lot to cope up with everyday challenges.

I think person’s characteristic depends upon religion and/or philosophical believes. In Indian culture, generally, parents’ religion is imposed on child. Parents generally do not give any freedom to child to believe in different religion or follow his/her own philosophy based upon his/her own understanding. Most of the time, this believe pass-on goes undetected because by the time child has grown up, all those believes are also embedded into his/her mind. But when this doesn’t happen, family sees chaotic atmosphere in the relationships and even division in the family. Should we give more freedom to a child to choose his/her religion when he/she grew up and not that of what parents believes?

Curiosity

We, the people, had born with curiosity in our nature. Some of us have curiosity about technology, engineering, business, etc while others have more interests towards arts, history, life science etc with different level of it at each topic. Because of curiosity in our nature, we ask questions to ourselves and always try to find answers of those questions.

But what I have noticed in teenagers surrounding me that they are not that much inquisitive to normal day-to-day things. These youngsters are able to use mobile phones easily and spends hours on internet chatting with their friends, but they do not have any clue how normal things work. Or may be they do not have to worry about it?

Engineers and scientists of one generation ahead of us have created world around us in which we live today. This world is very simple to live in and hence sometimes people, including me, take most of things as granted. But, I still ask questions to people around me or to myself if I am not able to understand working pattern of simple things. This inquisitiveness is lacking in young generation. They haven’t got any clue how to replace a punctured tire in the bicycle, which bus to use in-order to go to town hall, how to replace a mains fuse, etc which are the things which I remember doing very easily even at my early teenage life.

I think its our partial fault that we not encouraging kids around us to learn new things. May be we do not want them to ask questions to us while we are relaxing in the weekend. But, in order to preserve our and next generations future, we have to do something right now.

There is no such thing like Present

I had discussion with one of my colleagues at work about how to define our time in present sense. In his opinion, no matter what we are doing, there is no such thing like Present. The moment I will finish typing this line or even this word will be counted as past because the work has already been done. My colleague argued that there is no such thing as a current time because the moment we define that time or we want to live up to that point, that second will be lost for ever. And, hence, there is only past and immediate past, next past, next past and so on.

In counter argument, I said, although this sounds right, it can't be. If there is a past and there will be a future then there has to be Present. Otherwise, none of those two things will happen. I had to do a bit search on this topic to understand what present time is and what it really means.

According to wikipedia, and according my understanding of it now, one can only see or work on his/her present time. It is not possible to observer other's present time. No matter how close you stand to the next person, time is always relative. As Einstein has already proven that space and time are relative, I can see only my present time and no one can because by the time observer gets that information and process it, it is already become a history.

Although time frames are almost same to people in one room or in one city due to small relative motion, reference to time is always different for each and every object. This is very hard to see in our everyday life and most of the time difference is very small that we don't need to worry about. Nevertheless, this time difference is significant for few technologies to work properly, for e.g. GPS.