Need for a mentor in life!!

Life is full of confusions. Life is full of challenges. And you there is a general tendency of people to make mistakes. I am sure there is nobody who can claim that he has not made any mistakes in his life so far. After all its normal. Because, learning from mistakes, others' or self, has been the way life goes. And so there has to be someone who tells you what is right, what is not. Because, life is too short for each one of us to experience everything. So you need to learn from others' life, pick out all the good points, but know about the not so good points also. Thats where the role of a mentor comes in life.

A mentor is nothing but a trusted person, a counsellor or a teacher. Usually a mentor is a more experienced person. He is someone you can confide in. According to my understanding, there is a difference between a mentor and a teacher. Teaching is more of a profession. Mentoring is more out of a responsibility of some sorts. Teaching is about money, mentoring is about seeing the mentee (the person who is mentored) succeed. In fact some teachers can also be good mentors too.

A mentor can be anyone. It can be your dad, your professor, your boss, your friend, your brother or even your colleague. It can be anyone who you basically trust. Because everything in life is driven by one thing, and that is trust. Coming to the question of why a mentor is required, we all are really inexperienced in anything in life. This may seem a bit confusing or difficult to understand, but my only justification to that statement is that the world is too big, and learning is a continuous journey. So we all do mistakes. A mentor can, out of his experience, foresee it. He can prevent you from doing so. Many a times, we are confused about taking this path or that. Thats when a mentor will come in hand. More often than not, at life's cross roads, we are not sure what can be good and what can be dangerous. That time again, mentors play a major role. All great and successful people had mentors. Aristotle mentored Alexander the Great, Chanakya mentored Chandragupta Maurya. Freddie Laker mentored Richard Branson. So on and so forth, history can give umpteen number of examples.

We all work hard. We all put a lot of efforts. But what is the use of these efforts without knowing what is the end result expected? Why is the effort being put? So its more important, to plan better and then execute, rather than simply putting efforts. The direction of the efforts is the most important thing. And to show this direction, sometimes, a mentors experience is very important.

How does a person generally become somebody's mentor? Its not that you select your mentor all of a sudden. And its not that discreet either. A person becomes another's mentor after a lot of things. First of all, a feeling of trust has to set in. Then the comfort levels and wavelengths of each others should match. Skill sets and interests should overlap somewhere. You need to talk to each other very often. Its all about investing time with each other. The mentor should get a feeling that this person needs me for his benefit. Its not about ego, but its about some kind of a responsibility that comes due to some sort of attachment to the other person.

The greatest qualities in a mentor are patience to listen and a firmness to tell. He should be genuinely interested in seeing his mentee succeed. But his main responsibility lies in only telling what to do, and what not to. How to react and how not to. Doing it is the job of the mentee himself. The mentor does not in himself, come out and do it all for the mentee. And the most important quality, I perceive, in a mentor is he should be tough mentally. He should be a source of strength for his mentee. And you can't be a source of strength for someone else if you are not strong yourself!!! And this mental strength is required to be with the mentee, when, more often than not, he makes a mistake and needs a shoulder to cry on. Because these are all situations which just happen!!

End of the day, its some sort of a mutual benefit that will fuel this relation. The mentee getting a whole load of experience, suggestions and ideas and the mentor in himself, some sort of a satisfaction of having played a role in making someone prosper, happy and successful.

Celebrations!!!!

Celebration means......

Four friends.
Bahar barsaat.
Four glasses of beer.

Celebration means......

Hundred bucks of petrol.
A rusty old bike.
And an open road.

Celebration means......

Maggi noodles.
A hostel room.
4.25 a.m.

Celebration means......

3 old friends.

3 separate cities.

3 coffee mugs.

1 internet messenger.

Celebration means......

Rain on a hot tin roof.
Pakoras deep-frying.
Neighbours dropping in.
A party.

Celebration means......

You and mom.
A summer night.
A bottle of coconut oil.
A head massage.

You can spend

Hundreds on birthdays,

Thousands on festivals,

Lakhs on weddings,

But to celebrate, all you have to do is spend your time with your loved ones. Keep in touch with those who care for you........

I read the above lines somewhere. So much truth in them! In life, we may value a lot of things!! And we dont hesitate doing anything for things we value the most in our life. The difference between value and cost was very well explained by our economics professor. "The cost of a rose may be 1 Re, 2 Rs or 5 Rs. But when a guy gets it from his girlfriend, the value of it cannot be measured." Such a nice example was given to us to explain the difference. So at the end of the day, what matters is the time we spend with what we value the most in life. The money we spend on it, the fun we do with them, the happiness we derive from those occasions are all incomparable. Because when we depart from this world, we will be remembered not for the number of mansions we owned, but for the number of people we helped live. We will be remembered not for the amount of money we earned or spent, but for the number of people who smiled because of us. We will be remembered only by people who are close to us, for we will make the biggest impact only on their lives. And to do it, the most important thing is to invest time with them. And in life, one sure and certain way to cement any relationship is to invest time in it. Thats the biggest celebration in life!!

Optimism - Its all refelcted in the language!!!

Many a times we face situations where we really do not know what will happen. And most of the times, things will not be in our control. So the maximum we can do is be optimistic and not worry too much about it, because in either ways, you cant do much about it.

Most of the times, our actions or reactions in such occasions speak volumes about our attitude. Now its important to have a good body language as to not show people that you are tensed. Many people will gauge the mood of a person, within moments of seeing him. So a successful person is one who does not allow people to read about him. And this comes from a positive body language!!

Also the way you speak is going to speak volumes about your confidence. Just compare the following two statements!! "I hope you had a great time last weekend" and "I am sure you had a great time last weekend". The words of optimism in the second statement will in fact even help in lifting the confidence of the opposite person. That's not the only example. Lots of them can be given. The essence of the matter is, how much vibration you fill in your surrounding space; how much you attract people towards you, either by your qualities, or your habits or your charm or your humility or whatever, a major chunk of it depends on your body language. How you portray something is more important than what you portray!! Many people may not agree with me on this; I too agree its a hugely debatable point, so maybe we can discuss on it some other time!!

Till then bye, and keep thinking!!!

Socially anti social????

One of the things which have always kept me guessing is how do these anti social elements thrive in the society. And I have never found any answer that has convinced me enough. Recently I just got a thought, when I was watching some movie on TV. I thought its worth sharing with you and take opinions from you as well.

From my understanding of anti social, its something which is averse to the smooth functioning of the society. Something which is, in a way, a hindrance to the society and the rules defined by it. Wikipedia defines it as person who is unwilling to socialize in a normal way or is hostile to others.

So terrorism, arms, illegal trade, piracy in all forms, flesh trade, child labour, human trafficking etc are all common examples of being anti social. I was just thinking of the root cause behind it. And all I could gather was that anything like this is because there are people who are willing to do it, and there are also people willing to take the services of it. Its very simple. Any business can survive only when there is a market for it. Any company will survive only when the products and services it offers has got a fair amount of popularity and repute in the industry. Its a golden rule on which everything in today's world survives. So unless there are people who will buy it, it wont succeed. So the simple logic I have got through is just because there are people willing to go for it, there exists a market for it, or rather they have created a market for it.

Its very simple. It all starts from us. People these days have become so lazy. We done like to stand in the queue outside the railway station booking counter, and so we give an extra commission to get it booked from someone else. An agent. Fair enough. We would like to lead a comfortable life from whatever we earn. And nobody should really question it. And also by doing so, we are creating employment to some person who is in need of it desperately. Another example is the way temples are minting money today. We dont want to waste time standing in the queue for long hours waiting to see the Lord, and so the concept of Special Darshan flourished. Another example is when we all go for movies. House full. And so we end up paying double the amount and watching the movie with half the comfort levels also.

These are all simple examples we see in our day to day life. But these are all only small ones. Something in which everything seems to be under control. But the line has to be drawn somewhere. As seen in these above examples, there exists a customer in the form of us, for these businesses to thrive. So for all such anti social activities, there exist customers in various forms all around the world. And thats precisely the reason why such things do survive. It may be easy to write down or give long speeches as to by starting the change, by closing the market for these activities, we can put an end to them. But frankly speaking, its very very difficult if not impossible. For the simple reason that, its we, the people who are involved in that. How many of us will come back from the theatre after seeing that its house full??? How many of us will go to Tirupathi and wait for as less as 18 hours to as much as 54 hours to see the Lord?? How many of us will go and stand in the railway station, in midst of crooks and that stinking smell and that hot counter, waiting for the person at the counter to finish his 10 minute tea break?? I am sure there would not be many. So as the activities escalate to higher levels, it becomes cascaded similarly.

So frankly, I feel its become a part of the way, the society functions these days. There are people who will buy drugs which are banned, there are people who will buy pirated things, be it electronic goods, or be it the cd's or dvd's of newly released movies. Be it arms, or be it child labour. Be it prostitution, or be it anything else. And I for one, have never got a satisfactory answer as to how to stop it. Perhaps, some of you can throw some light on it!!