Discipline should not be slavery

When a religious person goes into a ritual, it is not a ritual at all. His heart is in it; then his words have wings. I am against the ritual when there is no heart in it. Here’s a story about Moses. He was passing through a forest. He saw a man praying. But the man who was praying was saying such absurd things that he could not go further. He had to stop the man. He was saying: "God, you must be feeling sometimes very alone – I can come and be always with you like a shadow. I will give you a good bath. I am a shepherd. And I will take all the lice from your hair and your body..." 

 
    Lice ? Moses could not believe his ears: "What is he talking about?" Moses stopped him and said, "Listen! What kind of prayer is this? What are you doing? To whom are you talking? Lice in God's hair? He needs a bath? And you are saying 'I will rub your body and make it absolutely clean'? Stop this nonsense. This is not prayer. God will be offended by you." 
    Looking at Moses, the man fell at his feet. He said, "I am sorry. I am an illiterate, ignorant man. I don't know how to pray. Please, you teach me!" 
    So Moses taught him the right way to pray, and he was very happy because he had put a man on the right track. Happy, puffed up in his ego, Moses went away. 

    And when he was alone in the forest, a thundering voice came from the sky and said, "Moses, I have sent you into the world to bring people to me, to bridge people with me, but not to take my lovers away from me. And that's exactly what you have done. That man is one of the most intimate to me. Go back! Apologise. Take your prayer back! ‘‘You have destroyed the whole beauty of his dialogue. His love is true. Whatsoever he was saying, he was saying from his heart. It was not a ritual. Now what you have given to him is just a ritual. He will repeat it but it will be only on the lips; it will not be out of his being." 

    Don't learn empty gestures. Let your gestures be alive, spontaneous. Otherwise, deep down you know that this is a ritual, deep down you know that this is just a formality you are performing. And if that is your feeling inside, what is the point of going into it? 
    I am against rituals because they have killed the spirit of religion in the world. But i am not saying don't pray, but let the prayer arise. Let it be of your own. Don't repeat it parrot-like. I am not against rules, but the rules should arise out of your understanding. They should not be imposed from the outside. I am not against discipline, but discipline should not be slavery. All true discipline is self-discipline. 

Only disciplined people become free, but their discipline is obedience to their own inner voice. Let your own awareness decide your lifestyle, life-pattern. Don't allow anybody else to decide it. If you do, your life will remain superficial, it will be hypocrisy.

(Excerpt from The Perfect Master, courtesy OSHO International Foundation)

Beyond Mandir & Masjid

The Allahabad high court judgement may not bring closure to the Ayodhya dispute. The Sunni Waqf Board has indicated that it intends to move the Supreme Court on the judgement, which says that the land where the Babri masjid stood must be divided between Hindu and Muslim groups. The court has ordered that there must be a status quo at the site for the next three months. All must respect the verdict and due process must be followed in seeking redress. It’s welcome that political parties and religious groups have stressed the need to maintain peace and have appealed to cadres not to take to the streets. 

    The court appears to have used non-legal categories like faith to come to conclusions about Ram’s exact birthplace. The reasoning and evidence used by the court is hidden in the 10,000 pages that constitute the three bench judgement. But we hope the judges have based their conclusions on sound legal principles. In any case, the court judgement can be a first rather than a final step in resolving the dispute. If any party feels aggrieved, it has the right to go up to the Supreme Court. Both sides could come to a mutually satisfactory out-of-court settlement as well. 

    It must also be kept in mind that the HC ruling doesn’t condone the act of demolition of the Babri masjid carried out by the sangh parivar on December 6, 1992. The demolition wreaked havoc on the country’s multireligious fabric. It divided communities and set us back by many years. The wounds are healing, slowly. Any act that threatens to reopen old wounds must be avoided. A new resurgent India has emerged from the debris of the violent 1990s. A new generation has come of age since then and it doesn’t want to be tied down by ancient hatreds. Simply put, a mandir at what is believed by some Hindus to be Ram’s birthplace is not an existential issue for this country, especially its youth. 

    Political parties must recognise the shift in ground, which is best evident in the twin cities of Faizabad and Ayodhya. Local people, especially the youth, insist that their concern is not a mandir or a masjid at the disputed site but facilities that’ll enable them to improve their material conditions. People have had enough of pitting Ram against Rahim. We need to move on and the onus is on the state, political parties and community elders to ensure that the issue is not kept simmering for too long.

Our Planet with different Habitat

The natural environment in which creature lives is its habitat. For instance, in the wild, lions live in African grasslands called the savanna. Thereby the savanna is the lion’s habitat. Other examples of habitats are forests, oceans, coasts and mountains. Oceans make the world’s largest habitat.

They contain 99% of the habitable space on the planet and are home to creatures ranging from the microscopic bacteria to the largest animal that has ever lived on earth, the blue whale.

From the North Pole to the South Pole and everywhere in between, the earth holds a vast number of diverse habitats. From the Arctic fox that braves the sub-zero temperatures of the North Pole to the two humped Bactrian camel that lives in the rocky deserts of Central and East Asia, life flourishes everywhere on our planet. But this is changing now. Due to human activities such as deforestation and pollution many species are losing their habitat. Habitat loss is the main threat to 85% of all threatened and endangered species.

We share our planet with millions of creatures both big and small. As citizens of Earth it is our responsibility to live in a way that we conserve our planet with all its unique inhabitants. 

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Yours Friend

Sudarshan Singh

You Are As Big As You Think

Attention to detail is regarded as a sign of efficiency. Whatever we set out to achieve, details are usually far more important than we are likely to suspect. Nevertheless, attention to detail can be carried to excess. Some people, in their anxiety to do things properly, spend so much time and energy on details that they lose sight of the main purpose of their plans. They fuss over trivialities and lose sense of proportion. In such a situation a useful piece of philosophy to bear in mind is: a man is as big as the things he worries about. When an artist paints a landscape, he doesn’t concern himself with individual blades of grass or the multitude of separate leaves on the trees. He concentrates on a mental impression of the whole scene before him. He regards the mass shapes of the various features as they will appear upon his canvas. He studies the positions of the dominant features, the depth of perspective, the relationship of the colour masses. His chief concern is to achieve balance and a satisfying, artistic result. The details of his picture fall into place to the extent he considers it necessary to reproduce them. We would do well to look upon life as the skilled landscape artist who gazes upon the scene before him. We should try to visualize the general prospects before us. We should first of all know where we are going and why. Having decided these main issues, we can then select the most attractive advantages we hope to gain, and the most difficult obstacles we must overcome before we can reach our goal. Whatever there is to be tackled, first view the whole task, in a clear mental picture? Then divide it up into its most important parts. Deal with each part thoroughly until the details emerge for final consideration. Think big. You are as big as the thing you worry about !

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Sudarshan Singh

Moral Majority

There is a general perception that informal subgroups or even disparate large segments within many nations pursue a strict moral agenda, usually based upon a deep belief in a religion. The term Moral Majority refers to such people. Whether such people form a majority or not is highly debatable and remains unproven. Nor are there any reliable surveys devised to test such majority claims. But in the name of Moral Majority, there are always some groups who launch campaigns, often smacking of fanaticism and, even resort to criminal and offensive political or social, often a mob-like response against individuals or groups whose actions and behaviors dare depart from the perceived moral standards of the so-called majority. Every country, including India, has this phenomenon of “Moral Majority” that from time to time causes dissension or discord in society, distends issues to their extremities and pits opposing groups who abuse, confront and clash with one another—all in the name of majority. Usually, such groups are informal and disorganised but there are also some political or cultural or religious outfits who assume collective burden of watching and guarding the society as a whole against any immoral influence or action, imported manners, fads or fashions from an alien culture. In India, which is a big and secular country, there are numerous such entities who are organized and always ready and eager to jump into the fray whenever a slight occasion for moral reaction arises. It could be a book, cartoon, painting or speech or some kind of entertainment and the Moral Majority is there to condemn, howl and hurt the protagonist of any so-perceived “immoral action”. In India, the concept of Moral Majority does not appear to have had much impact on politics. In the USA, however, where the term “Moral Majority” gained wide currency, Ronald Regan’s election in 1980 and George Bush’s elections are said to have been greatly influenced and their victories attributed to Moral Majority. In fact, the

Moral Majority was a political organization in the USA that had an agenda of evangelical Christian-oriented political lobbying and set up conservative Christian political action committees that campaigned on issues that, it believed, were important to maintaining its Christian conception of moral law, a conception they believed represented the opinions of the majority of Americans (hence the movement’s name). Some Indian secularists label the Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh and the Shiv Sena as organisations that represent

in India the equivalent counterparts of the US-based Moral Majority we have described above but such a view does not have much basis simply because India is so vast a nation and is so lacking in moral fibre that claims or accusations of being Moral Majority of any kind does not hold water. The same is true of the Muslim outfit Deoband that pronounces fatwas of one kind or the other that hardly rub on the majority of Indian Muslims. In India, it is the political parties and politicians who dominate and hold sway over all so-called religious lobbies and Indian politicians are devoid of any moral fervour. They are wily and make use of religion and religious moral groups only to grind their own axes. The devil is not a big concern in the Indian tradition, nor is Moral Majority an Indian concept.

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Sudarshan Singh

Virtualization

Virtualization is a cornerstone design technique for all cloud architectures. In cloud computing it refers primarily to platform virtualization or the abstraction of physical IT resources from the people and applications using them. Virtualization allows servers, storage devices, and other hardware to be treated as a pool of resources rather than discrete systems, so that these resources can be allocated on demand. In cloud computing, we’re interested in techniques such as paravirtualization, which allows a single server to be treated as multiple virtual servers, and clustering, which allows multiple servers to be treated as a single server.

As a means of encapsulation of physical resources, virtualization solves several core challenges of datacenter managers and delivers specific advantages, including:

Higher utilization rates — Prior to virtualization, server and storage utilization rates in enterprise datacenters typically averaged less than 50% (in fact, 10% to 15% utilization rates were common). Through virtualization, workloads can be encapsulated and transferred to idle or underused systems — which means existing systems can be consolidated, so purchases of additional server capacity can be delayed or avoided.

Resource consolidation — Virtualization allows for consolidation of multiple IT resources. Beyond server and storage consolidation, virtualization provides an opportunity to consolidate the systems architecture, application infrastructure, data and databases, interfaces, networks, desktops, and even business processes, resulting in cost savings and greater efficiency.

Lower power usage/costs — The electricity required to run enterprise-class datacenters is no longer available in unlimited supplies, and the cost is on an upward spiral. For every dollar spent on server hardware, an addition dollar is spent on power (including the cost of running and cooling servers). Using virtualization to consolidate makes it possible to cut total power consumption and save significant money.

Space savings — Server sprawl remains a serious problem in most enterprise datacenters, but datacenter expansion is not always an option, with building costs averaging several thousand dollars per square foot. Virtualization can alleviate the strain by consolidating many virtual systems onto fewer physical systems.

Disaster recovery/business continuity — Virtualization can increase overall service-level availability rates and provide new options for disaster recovery solutions.

Reduced operations costs — The average enterprise spends $8 in maintenance for every $1 spent on new infrastructure. Virtualization can change the server to admin ratio, reduce the total administrative workload, and cut total operations costs.

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Sudarshan Singh

Web Crawler

A web crawler is a relatively simple, automated program, or script that methodically scans or “crawls” through Internet pages to create an index of the data it’s looking for. Alternative names of a web crawler include web spider, web robot, bot, crawler and automatic indexer.

A web crawler can be used for many purposes. Probably the most common use associated with the term is related to search engines. Search engines use web crawlers to collect information about what is out there on public web pages. Their primary purpose is to collect data so that when Internet surfers enter a search term on their site, they can quickly provide the surfer with relevant web sites.

When a search engine’s web crawler visits a web page it “reads” the visible test, the hyperlinks, and the content of the various tags used in the site, such as keyword rich Meta tags. Using the information gathered from the crawler, a search engine will then determine what the site is about and index the information. The website is then included in the search engine’s database and its page ranking process.

Web crawlers may operate one time only, say for a particular one-time project, or if its purpose is for something long term, as is the case with search engines, they may be programmed to comb through the Internet periodically to determine whether there has been any significant changes. If a site is experiencing heavy traffic or technical difficulties, the spider may be programmed to note that and revisit the site again, hopefully after the technical issues have subsided.

Web crawling is an important method for collecting data on, and keeping up with the rapidly expanding, Internet. A vast amount of web pages are continually being added every day and information is constantly changing. A web crawler is a way for the search engines and other users to regularly ensure that their databases are up to date.

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Sudarshan Singh

The web that was and the web that will be

Well, right from the pragmatic computing environment to the evolution of the web as a concept, owing to an organization’s (the combination of CERN and Tim Berners-Lee) need to share documents located on their many computers, the world wide web has come a long way to offer many a benefit to the world of computers delimited by location.
The current web represents information using natural language. The World Wide Web is mainly based on document written Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), a markup convention that is used for coding a body of text interspersed with multimedia objects such as images interactive forms.
The web’s mettle is evident by way of its effective powerful human-computer-human collaboration. Thus, available information may be transcended beyond network boundaries form one place of computing location to another.
But the information sufficient from the web need not have semantic or meaning in simple term. For example, the current web is unaware that Comapp is a magazine published by the CAA that Michael Jordan was Basketball player of the 90’s, so on and so forth. i.e. the web is designed for human consumption, and thus lacks a sense of understanding; the web does not have a partial sixth sense in place and the knowledge domain is a mandate of the human mind.
Thus, for the purpose of limitless participation, i.e. the participation of humans as well as machines, the concept of Semantic web was evolved. Semantic web is an evolving extension of the World Wide Web where in web content can be expressed not only in natural language, but also in a form that can be read and used by software agents, thus permitting them to find, share, and integrate assimilated information more easily.
The very word semantic relates to the study of meaning and changes of meaning, the latter in English being words having dissimilar contextual meaning. So, Semantic web enforces the expelling of human intervention for browsing through search pages, reading the labels on hyperlinks, and deciding the links to traverse, by enforcing a process which would proceed on its own as a substitute for the above stated sequence of human capabilities.
Semantic Web probes to transform data located anywhere on the web accessible and understandable, both to people and to machines. Semantic Web, envisioned by Tim Berners-Lee, is prime and remains green owing to the same being an informally defined concept rather than an integrated, working system. Thus, the evolution of the World Wide Web to substantiate computing power with interpretive prowess has disembarked a new era of “Web Based Services”.
Although it is said that human knowledge belongs to the world, Semantic Web shows that computers share a small integral part of the same.

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Sudarshan Singh

Notepad Fun

Notepad Fun

Here, there are some tricks that you can check it in your notepad editor and you will see unexpected result!

Just try it:-

Trick 1

* Open a blank Notepad file (Run->notepad)

* Write .LOG as the first line of the file, followed by a “enter”

* Save the file and close it.

* Double-click the file to open it and notice that Notepad appends the current date and time to the end of the file and places the cursor on the line after.

* Type your notes and then save and close the file.

* After that open the file and see the changes. By this trick you can also use your notebook as personal diary.

Trick 2

* Open notepad.

* Type “bush hid the facts” (without quotes).

* Save it and close it

* Then open it again and see the changes.

Trick 3

* Open notepad

* Type the text “this app can break” (without quotes)

* Save the file

* Re-open the file in notepad

* Notepad displays seemingly-random Chinese character, or boxes if your default notepad font doesn’t support those characters

Trick 4

* Do you know the number of the flight that was used to attack the World Trade Center??? The flight number was Q33N.

* Now, open your notepad, type the number of the flight (i.e. Q33N)

* Now click on format->font increase the font size upto 72, and change the font style to ‘wingdings’

* Now see the amazing thing.

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Yours Friend

Sudarshan Singh