Discovery

Every moment is a discovery. It is fresh. Prior experience covers the freshness of the moment.

We read many many books from our course and from a library. Each book, its each page is a discovery. We discover that the book is boring, or its great, or its cryptic. What are these thoughts about? They are about us. We don’t discover the book, we discover ourselves.

We go to learn music. A music teacher gives us a lesson and tells us how (quality), what (the notations) and when (timings) of that lesson. We start our practice. Our effort of reproducing the quality of sound that the teacher produced initially fails. Deep in our heart we know that it’s possible for us, just that its not happening now. A few continue to create noise and not music but know that music is hidden in the same noise. A many of us just give up. Whether we take up music or give up, it’s a discovery. Its not the discovery of that instrument but discovery of the self.

Listening to music takes efforts only to reach the auditorium and occupy a chair for which we don’t have to practice unlike the musicians. There are many people who are not trained in understanding the music but the beauty is that they can appreciate it. Why? Does it touch unknown corners of our being where a thought never reached? Do we attend a concert for discovering ourselves ?

A mother loves her tiny child unconditionally. As the child grows she starts finding faults in him, in his retention, his behaviour..in comparison with other children, she still loves him. She starts correcting the child. Her attempt is to make the child discover himself. She thinks she is discovered, now its child’s turn.

I have a friend who is a die hard fan of sufi singer Late Ustad Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. Every time I meet him he makes me listen to his new discovery, new juice in the music of Ustadji. Is he discovering Nusrat or discovering himself ?

An academic teacher teaches students. The moment s/he feels that there is nothing new for her to teach, the subject is same old stuff that she has been teaching, the discovery of the self had ended. Then that teacher is dead. S/he is creating more dead souls in the classroom.

We have far too many places on the earth filled with dead people, not in the graves but in the homes, educational institutes and offices. They think their discovery is over, its of the past, they are ready to help other discover. I am no different. I too help people discover themselves. The moment my discovery is over, I’ll be dead, useless and rotten. Every hero that you have in your life, it may be your father or a movie star or an idol in a temple, just ask yourself if you are watching his every action and following him or in the process discovering yourself ? Life is about you, about your discovery that is available to you every moment, even in the moments of life that we deny…

Rhythm

Music is one of the greatest expressions of our mind! While the sur(musical notes) in a song takes flights to different heights in our hearts and minds, beats are something which express the “now” of the song. A sur is a summation of different harmonics of a frequency. In technical terms sur is an animal of frequency-domain. Shruti is defined as a smallest change in frequency that our ear can perceive, that our ear is sensitive to. There are 22 such shruti’s out of which a subset of 12 notes are used in an octave. Likewise, beats/taal is an animal of time-domain. Its measured in beats per minute. If we think what is the smallest change in beats in our day to day life it appears that the dhak-dhak of heart beat is one, daily sunrise or sunset is a slower version, the slower than that is our birthday and slower than that is our whole life, which is just one beat (Thak). On the other hand if the beats are played faster than the perception of an ear then it becomes a sur, a musical note. Interestingly, its all perceivable to the mind.

Rhythm has a certainty i.e. you know in advance when next beat is going to happen. Its like knowing the future in advance. What goes on in the mind of a percussionist when s/he plays the instrument? S/he’s playing the instrument ‘now’ and at the same time preparing for the next beat. There are 3 parts to a beat viz. what, how and when. ‘What’ expresses the syllable/bol of it e.g dhin, tak etc. ‘How’ operates on the quality of the sound of each syllable that a percussionist produces. ‘When’ is the heart of it which is the composition of a bunch of beats that s/he repeats to create a cycle of a rhythm. A slight change in bunching of beats changes the whole meaning of the rhythm. This you all have noticed when somebody tells your own mobile number in a different way. E.g. rhythm of a phone number 98860 98860 v/s 98 86 09 88 60 v/s 988 609 886 0. The number is same but if uttered in a different way sounds like an unknown number. In the cycle of one pattern the percussionists attempt is to break the pattern and present the variety to the audiences. His job is to wake up the dozing audience by breaking their pattern that they carry through in the song.

Rhythm intertwines rules and exceptions. When mind is not attached to any rule it remains alert to exceptions. With every exception it doesn’t create a new rule. Similarly life is about a beautiful rhythm. Life is about exceptions not about rules. Every moment is an exception. Just that we have to break both, the old rules and the process of creating new rules in our heads. If you see one person in a group of people who cannot clap in rhythm and you are uncomfortable about it, its not problem with him, it’s with you. S/he was blessed with no-rhythm and you were blessed with rhythm. Its not chosen by you or me. It is, it just “is”.

Are you observing your heart beat, now?

You smiled but your acquaintance just walked past !

What happens in us when somebody we know doesn't acknowledge our smile or a shakehand but just ignores and walks past ?

The first inner reaction is my ego gets hurt. In this situation what happens to him/her who didn’t smile is less important. S/he may be in his/her own world of bliss or mess. Why that should put me in a mess? Mind starts wandering. It thinks, is it that somebody told her something against me and that’s why she didn’t smile? Is she under some pressure and hence she ignored me or doesn’t want to share something with me? Is something wrong in my face, my clothes today? Is she ignoring me? Our ego-factory can produce a lot of such crap. That’s by design. What happens to me with all these thoughts is more important. WHICH specific output of my ego-factory have I latched myself on to and HOW MUCH have I latched on to? These 2 factors will decide if we can be free even if you smile and the known person ignores. Last time this happened to me I got latched to a thought that the other person is ignoring me but he seems to be in his world of problems that’s why he’s doing so. That evening I just walked to him and said hi! We got onto regular talking terms, cracked jokes and departed. I learned a lot with this experience about the functioning of my mind, its unbeatable ability to create nonsense in my head even when everything was really fine.

In another incident the problem began when I smiled at an unknown lady misunderstanding her as an acquaintance and she smiled back with a question in her eyes. Now I’m thinking hard ;)

Selection, Rejection and Dejection in a Job Interview.

My interview was going great. I was almost sure I’m in. The final question from the interviewer was, “Do you want to go for higher education?” I said “Yes” and was disqualified. This is somebody’s true incident.

How does our flow of thoughts operate from now on hearing this incident is very important? We will easily conclude that we will say “No” if we are asked such a question. I want you to understand the dynamics of the situation and of the mind. You will find an exact negative story where person said “No” and he was still disqualified. Now where does your thought flow take you? We always feel that we are opening a gate by learning from someone else’s experience but remember that by trying to open one gate you have actually closed many other gates. With a knee jerk reaction we concluded that “Yes” created the problem. Can we look at the situation deeper than that, free of what we think is right?

The result of not getting a job is a function of both, the interviewer and the one who was interviewed. Why are we deciding beforehand what’s going to be our reaction if we encounter such a situation. Any small noise around and we immediately have a conclusion ready how I am going to behave and how everybody else should behave in that situation if s/he faces it. With these conclusions we fail to see the situation in totality because 100 such situations happen and we have 200 walls built around us. If your true answer was “Yes” then what’s wrong if you got rejected? We always love the outside result and fail to nurture the inside growth. Do we see the inside growth at all? We want best from everything, job from an interview and higher education from studying and there's nothing right or wrong about it. Problem is not with rejection, it’s with dejection of having lost control of the situation which I thought was earlier under my control. Somewhere the interviewer doesn’t believe that she can influence you to change your decision of going for higher studies and you don’t believe that you can change her decision to get you in. If you go beyond your belief only then there are higher possibilities. Then thoughts will happen to you, you don’t have to think. Can you allow things to happen to you..? Can you still win the interviewer's heart if not a job ?

The Yes-Yes fun!

One evening at 6:00pm I declared in my home that till the end of day I am not going to say “NO”. Whatever you tell me I will do it. Friends, it was an amazing experience to realize how much conscious was I about everything then on, how much no’s are a part of my being. When my 9yr and 5yr children understood what it meant they made me play all that they wanted. My wife and dad played small tricks in their sentences and made me say “yes” to everything. In spite of all this I pronounced “NO” 6 times in 5hrs. I also learned many positive ways of saying “NO”.

Just close your eyes and say “Don’t climb a tree.” The picture that the mind creates is “climb a tree” and then deny it. As students, teachers or parents if we can find clever ways of telling the other “what to do” than “what not to do” we are veeery differently empowering that person. Moreover, if you convert it into a question for right situations then you are not only empowering him/her but also giving a freedom of choice.

If we play yes-yes with self then we move into a different paradigm. Lets see how this evolves when we talk about concentration. One definition of concentration is “If I am reading something, I should be lost in the world of reading. I should not know what is going on around me.” We tend to deny everything that stops me from concentrating in my studies e.g. sexuality, TV, internet, SMS. We are stuck to this definition because we have borrowed it from elders, neighbours, books and maybe, previous experience. The other definition could be “If I am reading something, I may or may not get lost in the world of words. Am I aware of every thought (we call it distraction) that happens when reading?” There are two types of thoughts viz. those which are created because of reading the subject and those which are just coming to me without asking. Can you find your definition of ‘concentration’ and question it to the core? There are thoughts that happen to us, don’t deny them. Have Yes-Yes fun with them. They are not the voluntary ones as they seem to be.

If you are filled with a lot of questions after the read, be with them.

(please go through the article that triggered the above thought process at: http://www.citehr.com/863-toxic-thinking.html)

Zero and Infinity

• 0/1 = zero; 1/0 = infinity
• We are infinite when we are born and zero when we die. Can we be zero when we are alive and infinite when we are dead ?
• Sometimes we think time doesn’t pass and sometimes we think years fly by so fast.
• Sometimes we feel each thing around me is just for me and sometimes we feel each thing around me is just because of me.
• When we go to Himalayas we feel we are so minuscule, when alone at home we feel ‘I am Himalaya’, ‘I’m the king.’
• When my body is free of any pain I don’t feel it. It just exists. When there is toothache or any pain the whole existence just becomes pain.
• The space between written words is zero and the words are infinite, the silence between the spoken words are zero and the sounds are infinite. Are the thoughts infinite and is there a zero between 2 thoughts ?
• Husband is zero, wife is infinite ;)
• Inhaling is becoming infinite, exhaling is becoming zero.
• Sometimes we think everything is under my control and sometimes we feel there’s nothing that is under my control. Not even my voluntary decision to go and drink a glass of water.
• I ‘think’ therefore I am OR I ‘think’ therefore I am not what I am ?
• Sometimes I feel zero and infinity are poles apart but sometimes I feel they are just next to each other, merging in each other like 2 ends of a same circle.

Are zero and infinity really merging in each other ? Is there a clarity in duality ?

Slowdown

We wake up in the morning, go to loo, brush teeth, have coffee/tea, bath, travel, go to college/office, attend lectures/meetings, work, come back home, spend time with friends/family, dine and sleep. There are a lot of things that we do physically which are voluntary and lot of things which happen involuntarily. Lets keep aside involuntary things for a while and look at voluntary actions. Say, brushing teeth, having coffee, bathing and similar ones. Can we slowdown the voluntary activities? Can we brush the teeth carefully, slowly, enjoy the whole process consciously, and feel each splash of water on the face? Thoughts are involuntary; they come to us like waves in an ocean. They just keep coming, endlessly. They might rule over your slowed down actions, its ok. When conscious again put your heart in your slow down. Can you wait and observe the sensations in your mouth just after brushing your teeth and before you sip a hot cup of tea and kill the earlier sensation for a new one?

We enjoyed school recess, we don’t like recession! We don’t like market slowdown, it hurts. But this slowing down of daily actions can be a different experience. It can be done now, while reading this. Slow down, just sloooow down!

In computers there are debuggers to debug(weed out bugs from) computer programs. I use to work on a debugger called SoftICE. It was an amazing tool for debugging Windows BSOD’s (you know Blue Screens?). Instead of causing Blue-Screen this tool grabs the CPU and halt the whole process. When the system was halted I was able to see the state in which CPU is, what were the RAM memory contents etc. After seeing ‘what-is’ and knowing ‘what-should-be’ debugging became easier. It was all possible because the system was halted (slowed down to 0 speed.)

Notice here that seeing ‘what-is’ is extremely important. A slowed down action or a thought helps us see ‘what-is’ really is. But, our whole thought process seems to be interested in looking at destinations, goals and what-should-be. Can you slowdown a few activities daily, say, taking 5 breaths slowly or chewing 5 bites of you dinner with your eyes closed without hurrying up for getting the next bite ready, or 5 times you blink your eyes or taking 5 mugs of hot water on your body when you take your bath?

Enjoy the slowdown only then going fast will be a fun, fun with more clarity than what it was!

RESPONSIBILITY AND FREEDOM

When we are children we have all the freedom and no responsibility. As we become school students and then college students our freedom seems to decrease and responsibility increase slightly. As we pass out from the college and hunt for a job the responsibility increases. On job there are deadlines which we courageously fight out and win over. There are no lifelines there, only deadlines! Then we marry (or don’t) the responsibility increases by the day. Freedom is restricted to weekends. And when we try to exercise our freedom, responsibility seems to take away the pleasure. Moreover, when there are some moments when there is no responsibility, its unfortunate that we adults cannot enjoy the freedom.

Freedom makes us light whereas responsibility puts a burden. Freedom attracts us to Himalayas and responsibility keeps us on plains. Freedom allows us to open a water tap to drink the water and responsibility enables us to close it. Freedom allows us to cover our body with clothes of our choice and responsibility takes care of how much and where we expose what. Freedom is about ‘how we want to do what we want to do’ and responsibility is about ‘how much we want to do what we want to do and don’t want to do’. Freedom is to live and responsibility is to let live. Letting lose a thought is freedom, holding back a certain action is responsibility. When we were children our parents had responsibility and we had freedom, when they become old they should have freedom and we take responsibility. Freedom belongs to mind, responsibility to heart. What food you take in your plate is your freedom, what you waste is your responsibility. Your responsibility gives you freedom to take action; your freedom gives you responsibility to prevent certain actions.

Can freedom and responsibility coexist? Or, do they contradict? Or is there an optimum point where weight of responsibility and lightness of freedom balance each other where life just “is?” I don’t have an answer, do you have it?

While you are on a job hunt….

My Dear Students,
While you are on a job hunt you will definitely work on your ‘altitude’ i.e. brushing up your technical skills required for the job. Following are some helpful tips for keeping a close watch on your ‘attitude’.
- Weekly, at least once, spend time talking with a close friend (could be your parent, lecturer, non teaching staff or a friend whom you confide in) about job hunt efforts, your thought process then, confidence level, your emotions and your feelings. The environment should be judgment-free for good. Writing your thought process also helps. Basically, allow the thoughts to come out of your head and let them dissipate into a careful listener or on a piece of paper.
- Get in a mode to stay with questions, especially psychology related e.g.why was I extra-nervous today before an interview? You can’t stay with a question on: What is currency of Switzerland? You have to know answer for that. Your psychological questions will trigger the thought process like doing scuba diving. You will discover the ocean of your thoughts. Many a times the surface of the ocean seems quiet. We are interested in the activity inside the depths of the mind which are hidden under years of accumulations of self and societal enforcements of beliefs e.g. I want to stay in Bombay for my job, come what may : is your self belief. Be aware and break free from your beliefs. Life is about increasing possibilities, not about cutting them down. Is your belief system fighting between words ‘Bombay’ and ‘Mumbai’?
- Be, feel and experience 100% self responsibility that you are still jobless. Don’t push the responsibility on your time or any outside factor. When the experience of responsibility sinks deep in you you will notice the change in your thought process and notice the mind and incidents going in directions that you had never even thought of.
- Envision yourself with a smile on your face appearing for an interview, shaking your hand warmly with the interviewer.
- Document your professional and emotional learnings from disqualification from each of the previous interviews (in a document like feedback.doc or so). This document will come handy to sharpen yourself for some inter-personal questions from the interviewer. This document will also give you motivation to open books to a specific page and refresh your technical concepts.
- For an interview go with an attitude that “if I am late for the train, the train will stop for me at the railway station and it will leave only after I catch it.”
- In addition to your resume.doc create a document called justify.doc in which write justification of each word and each line in your resume. I found doing this exercise very insightful, it modified my resume a lot.
- My approach of answering questions in an interview was as follows,: Knowing the answer for the question asked by the interviewer has 5 shades from ‘I know’ to ‘I don’t know.’ Device your own words for each shade when you answer the question.
o When you know the answer: You know how to deal with this.
o When ques is worth trying : You say ‘let me try’ or something like that so that even if the flow goes in wrong direction it will not put you in uncomfortable zone.
o When dicey : Say, ‘I’m not sure, but will like to give it a shot’
o When not sure : Say, “I don’t know”
o When you don’t know : Say, “I don’t know”
You are the best judge, choose words carefully. You find what your approach is.
- There may be many companies who will not respond to you after your interview. That’s their problem. For you, if you were selected and you are not satisfied with the job offer please close the loop by saying ‘thanks’ or whatever good words you find to say ‘no’. Being decisive instead of confused and letting the company know about your decision keeps you in their good books. Remember, your attitude is watched every microsecond by the peon to an interviewer, by your employer, your wife and then your children. Don’t keep the employer in a 'guessing' mode after a certain timeout. Send an email to them followed by a phone call and be done with it. You carry the responsibility of your own self, your batchmates and your college with every action that you take during an interview. Its good to be re-enterable than being one-time-types, always. You dont know who will be your boss and your reportee at which juncture of your career.

Sooner or later you will realize that job hunt was not about the ‘job’ but it was about ‘you’, your own experiential journey of your state of mind, of your hunger. Guys and gals, go for a kill! Wish you all the best for the hunt!!

Thank You and Sorry!

When do I thank somebody or apologise? And, when does someone thank me or apologise? There are some people whom you don’t thank, at least I know of in India. They are your parents, your spouse and your children. Language is a very interesting thing. It tries to capture the immense depth of the meaning of the feeling into a word, here its ‘thank you.’ You don’t thank your child who made you a parent. Pause for a while … and see the depth of this feeling called ‘thank you.’ ‘Dhanyavad’ is an Indian equivalent of thank you.

If we commit a mistake we say ‘sorry’. I wonder if my father would have ever said ‘sorry’ or its Indian equivalent to my grandfather. Those days, I guess, thank you and sorry were only felt in hearts and seen in eyes, never expressed in words. In our schooling system ‘thank you’ and ‘sorry’ are 2 words taught as golden words. It takes different amount of courage to say these 2 golden words depending on various situations.

By thanking somebody sincerely you take the weight off the other person. Somebody encouraged you when it was needed, a doctor who got you well, a teacher who made you understand a concept. In exchange you thanked that person. By thanking her/him you say ‘I am taking the responsibility now on, you don’t worry.’ We also take off the weight from a person when we say ‘I’m sorry.’ Again you take the responsibility and learn to move on. Somebody may argue saying ‘When I am paying for the services I am getting why should I thank somebody?’ Each of us have a ‘thank you’ and ‘sorry’ threshold. Some say ‘thank you’ and ‘sorry’ for every small thing and for some it takes a lot of energy to utter these words, they don’t say it at all. They think only they deserve thank you and sorry from people around them. All these attributes of ‘thank you’ and ‘sorry are subtle and our system (our body and mind) knows it so well that an essay is not required to measure the quality of these words when uttered by somebody.

Did you ever notice the body language when we use these words? In both these we slightly bend our back and lean forward. We give in. It’s a surrender.

Can you understand what is your threshold of saying ‘thank you’ and ‘sorry’? Can you start being conscious of these two words and enjoy the magic that they hold in the word form and in the form of feeling? Can the sound of these words from our mouth come out with a touch from our heart? Its effect on somebody is secondary. What is its effect on me? Can I fathom the depth of these words and be aware of its effect on me when I utter them or hear them?

Thank you. Yes, thank you for this read!

Sensitivity

Dear Reader,

We normally say that till XII/PUC all teachers were fine, parents were fine but now things have changed for me. All teachers don’t teach that well in higher education colleges, I have to do self-study. All good talent has gone to industry or are in US. A wife/husband says everything was fine before marriage but now things are ‘different’. A daughter-in-law – mother-in-law start more than talking. A parent-child relation takes unknown courses. Let’s all pause for a while and see who we are in the scenes above: a student or a parent or who? I have a sincere question to somebody who say’s, “I was not like this before my marriage/college/parenthood. Because of my mother-in-law I have started behaving like this.” Instead of putting blame on a not-so-good-teaching teacher or mother-in-law or wife/husband is it not that I am responsible for the problems. My mother-in-law is only responsible to show me my face which nobody else has shown to me till now. We are no saints. We are not different from any extremists or terrorists. Am I corrupt? When money is flowing in front of me which is not mine, I really need it but I don’t touch. But if I have not seen that amount of money how can I declare “I am non-corrupt.” Its just that nobody has attempted to open up that faculty of ours hence we show we are ‘cool’. Internally we are all the garbage that is outside, we are just a mirror of outside. We have lost and are fast loosing the sensitivity to the ‘inside’ of ours. We don’t trust anybody because… you will have 101 reasons to tell how your best friend betrayed you. We don’t share anything because that’s what we have seen somebody doing when we were small and we inherited that. Now that we are grown ups is it possible to be sensitive to very small things that keep happening around us? We talk loads about improving the outside world. Let all that activity go on but lets be slightly more conscious about our inner self. For those who are interested, do write down how many time we lied or how many people we hurt at the end of the day. Sensitising ourselves is the beginning of .. I don’t want to name it. You give your own name to it, it’s a journey which will keep you strong in all the storms that come in form of relations and recessions. All above is easily said than done. Its about experimenting with yourself. If you cant do your experiments on yourself then whom are you going to do them on ?

Thanks and regards,
Ashirwad.

Why am I blogging?

Dear Reader,
Better late.. Please allow me to answer the question "why am I blogging?"

When I was laid off in Jan09, I asked myself “What has my education and work life given me?” It gave me some good friends and money, nothing beyond that, nothing that could feed my soul. After 2 sleepless nights and a lot of inquiry I looked around and realized that nobody spoke about emotions of a student, nobody spoke about sexuality, about relations, about questioning, about laughing and crying, about sincerity, about trust, about failure.. the very important threads of the fabric called 'Life'. Its an endless list of “Life Skills”. That is where I decided to work with people after working for 14 years with machines. A friend helped me associate with his college where I started interacting with engineering students on “Life Skills.” Now I am also associated with students of a business school. Students typically talk to me what they cannot talk to their parents and their teachers. They may not get readymade answers to their questions and many go back with more questions to think about than the number of questions they came with to me. I feel making them hungry is more important than giving “do this and don’t do this” answers. With an intention of reaching more students I decided to blog and here I am. I hope I will be able to ignite fire in many hearts and create hunger in many more bellies.

I thought I should also blog for parents but decided to keep them in the same place http://ashforstudents.blogspot.com instead of creating ashforparents separately.

Your comments are always welcome!

Thanks and regards,
Ashirwad.

OVERCONFIDENCE

A few of us are overconfident in what we do. If we know we are overconfident about our studies we should do something that will show us our limits. Look at the infinitely beautiful night sky, see the sunset, see the moon, go for a tough trek (Kumar Parvat?) or into Himalayas where you (have to) look at your physical limits consciously, at every breath. See the magnanimity of wonders of nature that is around us. It reminds me of words from a comedian George Carlin who says “Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away.” Before sex came to us we were curious about ants, stamps, tops, marbles, gulmohur trees, shapes in the clouds, the twilight horizon. After sex happened our interests have moved to the swaying hips and built up machos. There’s nothing right or wrong in what attracts our attention. It is. It just happens. But the hibiscus flower or an ant doesn’t take away our breath any more the way it did to us earlier. If you are a botany student and if a hibiscus flower is shown to you, you say “I know…”. The question that arises is do you want to transcend “I know” or you want to stick to it. That’s your choice. Somewhere you say to yourself “I can finish my syllabus in next 10 days then why study now. I have so many holidays between my exams.” Studying anything is to know what you don’t know. There is a difference between ‘I can do’ and ‘I have done’. Your deceitful mind keeps fooling you with ‘I can do’, ‘I know, I can do’, ‘last semester I had done it’ and all such thoughts. Your conscience knows your mind is fooling but you like to relax in the arms of your mind, you don’t want to get down to reality, you don’t like to listen to your conscience. You have made marks as your ultimate goal. Is it possible to shift your goal from marks to something you think is bigger than that? Tomorrow your goal will shift from one ‘m’ for marks to another ‘m’ for money. Can those “m’s” be byproducts of something that you do which feeds your soul? We get marks, marks don’t get us. We earn money, money cannot earn a human (people are sold in the market and that’s a different topic of discussion). Whatever you go behind, you will stay behind it, you cannot surpass it. Go behind marks, you can get 100/100, when you go behind money the zeros behind 1000 will go on increasing and one day you will be thinking (which your parents may be already on this thought) ‘what is the goal of my life?’ Don’t search for an answer. Do a sincere inquiry into the question. Overconfidence or under confidence are conclusions made out of past experiences by a ‘clever’ mind. Conclusions are answers. Stick your aspirations to questions, not to answers. Questions are vehicles that will keep the fire of inquiry on and answers are stagnant destinations. A sincere question can change the course of your life.

Best luck for the last few papers of your VTU exams!
(see my previous blogs at http://ash-studs.blogspot.com/)