Tag: India

Procrastinating, Corruption, Meritocracy and Showering In The Rain

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Yesterday I had a little ramble about nothing at all and tonight may just evolve into similar. There are times when I can’t think of anything and they turn into some of my favourite pieces and other times when well, they don’t. I contemplated procrastinating a little more but it’s already after nine o’clock at night and this thing can’t be allowed to drag itself out too late. That and I had a quick moment of trying to be present and realising life is about one task at a time. I think I had been watching something random or a few random things which involved beautiful people or successful people and realised they probably don’t procrastinate. Or maybe they do they’re just really good at what they do in between. One day at a time though and one step at a time. We won’t achieve these anxiety inducing dreams any other way.

Politics is always an easy one to bring up, which I’ve said already I imagine. It appears a few MPs and The Good Law Project have decided to take legal action on the Government over their awarding of contracts during the Covid-19 crisis. Anyone who simply watches the mainstream media news cycle will be completely unaware of this but it turns out they’ve been spaffing a lot of tax payers money up against the wall awarding contracts to their mates, or companies with links to their mates. Quite often these companies have little expertise in the area they get the contract and in most cases they’ve completely messed up whatever it was they were supposed to be doing. For an obvious example think of the test and trace app which in itself would result in people going to jail if we didn’t live in such a corrupt society.

Talking of meritocracy I was listen to a podcast tonight called The Partially Examined Life which I’ve only recently discovered and haven’t listened to enough to give too much of an opinion. It was their discussion on The Graduate which led me to watch it the other day. I never got through the whole podcast tonight as I finished cooking my dinner and preferred to watch an episode of something crap instead but they were discussing and interviewing the author of On The Tyranny Of Merit: What’s Become Of The Common Good – Micheal Sandel. It was reasonably interesting but I had heard some of the ideas before; namely that it can result in those at the top lacking empathy as they believe they have achieved what they achieve purely through their own ability which is rarely ever the case and that it can lead to a disconnection between them and those deemed unsuccessful. It is idealistic in that it is not cohesive with modern society. He discussed about in relation to our polarised politics, or more precisely America’s but it relates to the Brits too. Basically as the title suggests he’s totally against it. I missed bits as I was distracted by cooking and also didn’t listen to it all but as I said it’s not the first time I’ve heard this and it’s an idea I have sympathy for.

Where I am in Greece is currently enduring what is apparently day one of five days worth of storms. I just had a rain shower which is always a pleasure and not one I get to experience enough. I remember dancing around in monsoon rains in India, the locals thought I was completely mad. I’m right in front of the yard security cameras with the boat so decided against taking my undies off although I doubt anyone would ever be watching. I was a little concerned about the lightning tonight as it only seems to be a couple of miles away but I’m banking on all the boat masts getting it before me. Just in case I’m unlucky though it’s also a good reason to keep the undies on, it seems to be a slightly more dignified way to go out for some reason. Isn’t human conditioning an interesting barrels of intricacies.

BR#Eleven – Breath

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Let me tell you a little about breath. Not just any breath either, the perfect breath. It turns out my shallow two second inhale followed by two second exhale may just be doing both my mind and body the type of harm you wouldn’t immediately imagine something that brings life would. In truth two seconds may even be a little generous. It is a long way from the recommended five point five second inhale and five point five second exhale, which conveniently equates to the perfect amount of breaths per minute. Five point five for those who don’t fancy the maths. This is according to James Nestor whose new book Breath delves into the art of something which we all seem to be doing wrong.

Nestor explains the science and art of breathing. He uses anecdotes and scientific research to back up and prove his theories. He discusses thousands of years worth of knowledge like ancient Indian pranayamic breathing techniques and the Buddhist Tummo. Tummo has in the last ten years been sexed up, repackaged and proven to the western world by Wim Hof. He goes into his own experiments with Stanford University of only nasal breathing and only mouth breathing, all of which are backed up by the research results which show a dramatic and scary contrasting end result. Our mouths have shrunk and our teeth don’t have enough space to grow straight anymore, three hundred years of industrial processed food haven’t helped. Heart disease, anxiety, depression, chronic fatigue, asthma – the list of diseases related to incorrect breathing seems endless. He doesn’t suggest breathing is going to cure a rampant disease of course but it can help with the preventative part, the bit western medicines ‘cut it out and cure it’ approach seems repeatedly limited in. It does turn out we’ve been breathing wrong all these years and he explains how and why.

What he shares is immediately relatable. This dissection of the consequences of a breathing I know I do and which I instinctively know and have known for a while to be wrong and dangerous. Nestor has managed to explain something which is hard to disagree with within our narrow prism of proved truth. We need things to be proven in certain ways that Eastern texts don’t do, Nestor manages to do this with language and information it is hard to disagree with. As I said I can relate to what he is saying though and I suspect that is probably what has led to this book being the success it has been. Good authors manage to give new information in a way that makes the author feel they’ve always known it and finally it has been confirmed. Genuinely, I want everyone, and especially everyone I care about to read this. Now then, it’s time to go practise my breathing.

One More Piece Of Track

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I sometimes wonder if I’m obsessed with habits. Partly this comes down to spending years moving around and in a way desiring the time for routine and such things. Not being fixed like a robot but just having a familiarity with how the day will unfold and what that means at certain times. Had I not been in one place these last ten months this whole experiment would have unfolded differently. Certainly I thought the summer pieces would have been full of travel and sailing adventures which would have been interesting but there’s every chance life would have been busy in a different way and possibly affected what has still managed to be one piece a day. Having a routine these ten months has helped this to happen.

I left yesterday then as I mentioned, well, yesterday, and am now at my parents until late next Tuesday. I have plenty of time on my hands now so no excuse not to write this but I am having to adapt to a new routine. That’s not overly challenging but it does require discipline to sit down when I don’t know how the day will unfold. You can’t wait until later in the day because you don’t know how later will unfold. This will likely become even more apparent next week when I find myself in Greece. How my days will unfold is anyone’s guess and like over Christmas when I was in Dublin it will likely be a case of grab any opportunity I can.

The reason I go into this is because I found myself watching random television tonight and being unsure when it would allow me the time to sit down and do this. I was going to write about the documentary on trains I watched but like happens regularly I end up just rambling as I begin writing. Trains are really cool. They influenced local and world events. The Indian railway system allowed for Indian Independence while also in a way being a positive of British rule. That’s one way of spinning it at least. The Brits also tried to build a railway from Cairo to Cape Town and got about half way, through some of the most beautiful and arduous terrain. The Russian Revolution became a possibility as the Railway Union backed the Bolsheviks during the revolution and subsequent civil war. That’s without even mentioning the remarkable Trans Siberian railway. I really want to do the trip from Cape Town to Victoria Falls. Trains are probably my favourite form of transport because they take you through wilderness in a way that roads going from town to town can’t.

I watched this program then and it reminded me how much I enjoy doing things and going places. Is that a habit? The habit of choosing the adventurous option. In a way it’s probably something learnt from what life has provided me until now. I’ve learnt this is not just an option but an option I thrive in. It could also be the habit of running away from the challenge of living a life of repetition and work, the struggles that that involves. Life is but nuance and a multitude of credible and rational explanations it appears after all. And like a slow steam train ambling through countryside, this is but one more section of track in search of the elusive final instalment.

Memories & Living With La Cabra Negra

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Humour me, I’m going to be self-indulgent. I’ve been having some weird sensations recently. It has been a long time since I’ve gone this long without travelling to another country. Even travelling within one place. The lockdown has made me change habits. You can’t run off somewhere when you fancy a change if the whole world is on lockdown. Sitting on a jungle beach in Costa Rica, diving in the Andaman Islands or maybe with a mate of mine in Brazil. Just sailing somewhere warm like Fiji or the icy cold north has also entered my little realm of fantasy recently. But I’m also in a weird way happy not to be running off. As I said habits have changed and I see possibilities with this version of normality I have created. It needs to evolve and it’ll change immeasurably before I make it in my own image but I suspect all of those things will still happen at some point before and after I reach this point. I’m really happy with this too. These sensations though have nothing to do with future desires or ways of life. These are feelings from the past.

For much time I have forgotten my adventures, determined not to be that guy who just lives on his them, repeating them to someone until they get bored and you’re forced to move on. This forgetting though has also been because I have been creating new ones and haven’t needed to dwell on things that have happened. Now though without this ability to move on and find something new to experience, I am stuck experiencing a new way which I’ve allowed forced upon me. I different kind of forward. I have found myself over these last few months remembering past events or people and this began out in a sad way as in a way I wished I could go back to these moments. This is entirely natural. This has evolved though as now I have found myself experiencing these moments and seeing them through eyes that are happy to have had them. Instead of desiring their return I have been appreciating them, but more importantly in the strangest way experiencing parts of them once more.

It’s these sensations. This is the important part, the rest is a different special. To imagine yourself back in the moment and experiencing the forest air on the nostril, the sea water on the hot skin, the rain on the face. The emotion of seeing someone or experiencing a place that leaves you speechless. Even the sounds and visuals that I felt have been coming back to me. It’s hard to explain but it’s as if I’m experiencing memories with an intensity that touches on the actual moment as it happened, not just a thought of something that runs through my mind as a movie screen. I’ll go with it because it’s fascinating and I know it too won’t last forever. It’s all just about trying to understand. That’s all we can do. Be the cabra.

The Barrier Of Conditions

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“Those who prefer their principles over their happiness, they refuse to be happy outside the conditions they seem to have attached to their happiness.”

It’s always nice to start with some Camus. These French (-Algerian) intellectuals really knew how to get people thinking and living. So thinking we must do. What conditions have we attached to our own happiness then. A momentary chance for some introspective thought perhaps. If we are honest with ourselves we will see the conditions we either try to live by or aspire to. If we are willing to take that further we may just accept an imbalance between the desire to achieve an idea over allowing happiness to happen. How much of this then is influenced by our habitual responses to moments and life. The conditions we set on life are nothing but ideas and learned responses to moments. We are fixed. If we create these conditions, or we have these conditions created for us and we accept them as such, and either refuse or are unable to view any other version of happiness, we likely set ourselves up for failure.

If there is anything this year has taught it’s that being fixed and not being able to look beyond our narrow ideas of future and desire will only lead to our own suffering. I doubt there are many people out there currently who have managed to live the exact version of 2020 as they had foreseen and hoped for when the first of January ding donged into existence. Most people are either working from home, still furloughed, back in their workplace or redundant. Had anyone here not been able to accept this change then they would suffer. Their previous conditions of happiness would be impossible to achieve. Habits have had to change.

This can only be a good thing. One benefit of immigration as people come from different cultures they view the one they’re entering with a fresh perspective. Those who live within their own culture are more likely to view their world as normal and in that case how it should be, this is just the way it is both good and bad. People see what is missing because they bring part of what is normal for them with them. They see a hole with fresh eyes, fill it and changed the habitual structure of society. The populace embrace this but fear it too.

Will what we are experiencing do similar. The circumstances and events are different, it is unlikely to be about people entering a society as our miserable little island appears more closed off than ever before, but there will be tangible changes which may only become evident in a few years. What is the point of principles if they’re so limiting as to restrict any possibility of happiness. We are living in what appears to be increasingly evolving conditions and how we deal with that will determine how we move forward as a society and individually. Habitual flexibility and happiness may just turn out to be one and the same after all.

Aeon

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Now feels like a good time to plug a favourite website of mine. Aeon is all about ideas and when you read though the titles of the different articles they publish, the mind illuminates with excitement. They generally publish essays and short videos. The essays are usually three to four thousand words and of a high enough level not to be considered light reading. For this reason I can get a bit lazy as I know it will involve a certain amount of mind effort to read one. It is things like this that allow me to realise that my use of the internet doesn’t go much further than looking at football, politics, buying things and generally killing time and shutting off my brain. The internet is the greatest invention and has the potential to revolutionise society on scale not obvious since the printing press and I use it to kill time and shut my brain off. I know I’m not alone in this. Humans are ridiculous.

Aeon then involves a little effort, if you’re me, but it is well worth it. They used to also publish Ideas that were usually around the one thousand word mark which my short attention span was more suited to but they unfortunately seem to have done away with them recently. They publish essays on philosophy, science, history, psychology, law, nature, education and every sub category within.

For example this is an article on Ashoka Maurya who was an Indian Emperor over two thousand years ago. Seeing first hand the horror of warfare he creating ‘an infrastructure of goodness’ which also included the spread of the teachings of Siddhattha Gotama – the Buddha – and changed the face of the Indian continent in the process.

This is an article on the spread of pathogens throughout history, from The Black Death to polio, and how they’re generally spread silently by the seemingly healthy.

This article discusses free will and determinism, using our understanding of the sometime random actions of molecules to give some answers to this age old argument.

This is an essay on the concept of ‘hysterical women’, how women’s pain is often medically overlooked and undertreated but that ‘believing all women’ is not necessarily the answer and oversimplifies the issue.

This discusses how not only is privatising public services bad economics but also how it undermines our social and political bonds as a community.

And finally this is an article about how fish are nothing at all like us but that they are sentient beings and that they finally deserve a real place in our moral community.

Ultimately these are just a few examples of articles they publish and even then they’re only the ones I’m drawn to. There’s a little of everything for everyone. I mention Aeon because they’re not a massive publishing or news company, they don’t have adverts all over their website and they produce really interesting work. It’s online magazines like this that people need to be made aware of in these times of sensationalism and factual inaccuracy.

Just because I can I’m attaching a video of sea life in the Ningaloo Canyons off Western Australia. The video is on YouTube but is from Aeon, or at least that’s were I found it. There is also a video on the creation of the police force by Robert Peel in 1829 and what that has meant for society up to the present day. Enjoy the fish for now though.

The News Today, Today

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While looking for something to write about I stumbled upon an article describing a very recent fight between the Indian and Chinese armies on the border in the Galwan Valley in the Ladakh region of the Himalayas. While border squabbles happen quite often in that part of the world, be it with India and Pakistan, India and China or China and seemingly every neighbour they have disputed borders with; this one raised a few eyebrows. While versions of events seem to differ with which nation is recounting the story, it does seem twenty Indian soldiers and an as yet unspecified number of Chinese soldiers – forty according to the Indians – were killed in the fighting. While both sides have tried to play it down, certain quite shocking details have still been released. On this border they have since 1996 agreed that there will be a two kilometre ‘no gun zone’ either side of the border which means these soldiers fought hand to hand combat. According to an Indian official fifty-five Indian soldiers with nothing but bare hands faced off against a three hundred strong Chinese “Death Squad” armed with metal bats wrapped with barbed wire. Some were beaten to death while others died from drowning in the river after falling or being push in. This all just seems completely remarkable and in a perverse kind of way; comic. To keep the border from being a flash point they remove guns but come armed with metal bats. Perhaps it’s not just the guns that are the issue here.

The second story I came across is less brutal for sure and is about Elon Musk’s quest for world domination, or at east in the realms of batteries that he operates in. Apparently he has invented or is close to inventing a game changing battery that will render the combustion engine the equivalent of film cameras in the age of digital technology. When put like that it actually sounds feasible, it’s amazing how the mind works. This will be a great step on the journey to save the world from runaway climate change. The article thankfully mentioned the ethical reality of lithium mines in South America and cobalt in Congolese mines renowned for the use of child labour. Bolivia which recently was taken over in a right-wing coup, coincidentally has vast reserves of lithium which Evo Morales didn’t make freely available to foreign corporations but perhaps that’s for another time, and I heard recently Afghanistan has such vast reserves it’s being viewed as the Saudi Arabia of lithium, lucky Afghanistan. There’s just something demoralising about us celebrating the movement away from fossil fuels to another finite natural resource. The long term implications may be unclear but it’s as if we haven’t learnt anything. It’ll also be interesting to see if we start using less fossil fuels in the world economy or this use of ‘green’ energy is just supplementing our increased energy consumption. There is certainly much evidence to suggest this is the case.

Chi Nei Tsang Me Baby

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I’m keen to give an update on how I feel after the cleanse I wrote about on Saturday. I’m wary of going on about how great these things are and how simply magical I feel because the mind is powerful and can convince us of many things, but mainly because I’ll sound like a wanker. Yesterday I didn’t feel a great difference in mood but today I have felt energised and like a weight has been lifted. It is one of those things that were someone else to read it, it wouldn’t really mean anything to them, and I can accept this because I would probably be the same. Like I said I’m wary of getting carried away but there is a distinct difference between today and this time last week or last month. I am sure you’re questioning how I can possibly give credit to a salt water cleanse for this but the gut is such a complex organ, our second brain some describe it. When it is not functioning at it’s peak then holistically speaking, we as one entity cannot either.

I back this up by an experience I had in Thailand years ago, actually just before that time I went to Burma and got the super farts. It was off the back of my travelling India and she had been a hard mistress. At one point I had spent three weeks really ill, everything passing through me and losing weight rapidly. I was down to sixty-five kilograms, or about ten stone depending where you’re reading this, and I’m six foot three or about one metre ninety. This was not a healthy look, I could see the ribs in my back. That three weeks took it’s toll on me mentally, for months afterwards I felt a heaviness to life. When I got to Bangkok, on the recommendation of a friend I tried an abdominal stomach massage called Chi New Tsang. When she had had it she said she just cried through the whole thing, I had no idea what I was letting myself in for. The premise of Chi New Tsang is that by massaging your internal organs in a particular way you release all the blocked negative emotions which have been stored within them. This idea of the body storing pain is one you can find in many eastern therapies and healing practises. I’m naturally a sceptic but I also want everything that could be good to be real. I will try most things and hopefully with an open mind, some therapies I’ve not got the same response others have from them, but this stomach massage was incredible. I never cried or anything like that but I walked out of there and especially the next day felt like a new person. I had spent the previous weeks hiding away in a dark corner but for the last week I was there I got involved with things and was happy again. I took a beating and I stored it all in my gut. This was the release.

For some bizarre reason the Chi New Tsang massage is not that easy to find in Thailand, everyone just wants beaten up by attractive young girls as they crack your body back into position. I found one practitioner in Edinburgh but she was on maternity leave when I tried to contact her, a few in London and none in Athens so finding anyone is not going to be straight forward. The point is this massage works on a similar principle to the cleanse, you’re not just purging the physical detritus from your guts but in actuality the mental waste too.

The next mission is to keep myself from storing this suffering. I’ll start by hopefully listening to what my second brain tells me about what I’m putting in it. Unfortunately I have noticed butter has been making me itch which is a shame because I love it, I haven’t touched milk or cream, and I have lost all desire for coffee and alcohol. Why must those that we love most be the ones to hurt us so. Again, all I do is give my experience and as I said I have got little from things others have had strong responses to so there is no guarantee either the cleanse or the massage would do anything for you. These things are out there though, sometimes it may just be worth giving them a shot, the ol’ fuck it moment.

Salt Water Cleanse

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You were warned earlier in the week that this day would come, and just like we’re seeing what’s happening in Australia when warnings are ignored, I’m about to write an intimate piece on my bowels. You may remember that I said my first attempt at making my own beer had failed and how it had forced me to become well acquainted with any nearby toilet I could find, well this went on until arguably Thursday. Yesterday my guts still seemed to be arguing with each other and because it had been a while today seemed like a good day for a clean.

There are various articles online describing more or less the same approach to a salt water cleanse. I learnt how to do it at a Rainbow Gathering in the Tasmanian bush about eight years ago and then discovered it again when doing a yoga course in India. I had a few years before this tried colonic hydrotherapy so lets say I’ve always been a fan. When I arrived in Australia I came from Burma and at some point in my month there I had eaten something which only upset my stomach for a couple of days but gave me the most horrendous smelly farts. A friend described it as if I was just oozing rot and decay with each puff. When I heard of the shitting / salt water cleanse workshop I was all in. Let’s just say I saw things that day that’ll never leave me, scars imprinted in the recesses of memory. A boy became a man.

It’s quite a simple procedure actually. It is important to do this on an empty stomach, so a light meal the night before and perform the cleanse prior to breakfast. Boil two litres of water, dissolve 2-3 teaspoons of mineral salt per litre – very important here not to use ordinary table salt as minerals in proper salt are important – and let it cool so it is warm but comfortable to drink. You drink half a litre and then do a series of five different yoga asanas dynamically, in repetitions of eight per asana, to help the water move through the body. These asanas are; Tadasana, Tiryaka Tadasana, Kati Chakrasana, Tiryaka Bhujangasana and Udarakarshanasana, I haven’t put them as links because I’m lazy and you’re capable of pressing copy and paste into an internet search engine. You then drink another half litre and repeat until you feel it impossible to hold in. Usually for me that is a litre and a half, but first couple of times was two litres. Even once you have released the trap door that first time I would still recommend you continuing to work through the asanas to help flush anything else out. Whatever stays inside of you will just be urinated out and I’m sure it’ll do the urethra no harm getting a little cleanse too.

I’m not suggesting for a second I’m a doctor and there are all sorts of articles online making all kinds of claims regarding health and mental improvement. I make no comment on them either way as I only know what I have experienced which is that when required it does seem to have completely flushed out whatever was inside my gut doing all the damage. In the early days too I did notice that it was a good indicator of foods which maybe didn’t suit me, such as dairy products which I immediately felt a little sick from and interestingly alcohol which I lost all desire for. I have ignored both those messages from my body clearly but it was interesting to see and maybe one day I’ll do something about them. The only thing I would say which could be a potential negative is that if it is flushing out the bad bacteria does that mean it is also flushing out the good bacteria, and that must be a genuine concern which I unfortunately don’t know the answer to. I have just started to read a book called Gut by Giulia Enders which seems really interesting, I am going to email her and see if she has any insight that she may like to share with me. It is also important to stress that for the rest of the day eating a very plain diet is important as the stomach has just gone through quite the workout. I have just enjoyed the most delicious soaked oats.