Writing Resolutions is SO last year

Every year is kind of the same story for me regarding New Year's Resolutions. They get ignored just as easily as they get made and worse, resolution lists start converging to the same three or four staples: Eat healthier, exercise more, be more productive, yadda yadda yadda...

I think we all spend a lot of time thinking about the fact that we've failed at these lists and wondering what our problem is. We also spend a lot of time promising ourselves that "...this year will be different". All I know is that last year I received a video titled "How To Unleash Your Greatness in 2014" that I'm still getting around to watching.

After years of trying to "Be more motivated" with my resolutions, I've started to wonder about the practise itself; Maybe it's not all it's hyped up to be in terms of actually helping us grow as human beings.

Towards the end of 2014 though, I believe I've come across something that might be a bit more productive. But before I get to that, I'd like to talk about Browser Tabs for a minute.

Open tabs are the bane of my existence

At any given point, I might have anywhere from nine to thirty browser tabs open while I'm on my laptop. Also, if you use Firefox, you might be familiar with a function that shows you your previous pages if your browser crashes. What you might not know is that the feature itself allows nesting as well so at one point I probably had close to a hundred tabs open!

In addition to this being generally insane, what you might not get is that tabs are my own special kind of hell. In a way, each one represents some kind of unfinished business; Whether it's an opinion piece or buzzfeed list, the possibility exists that it could lead to something profound or useful. But this also means that now each tab is something that can't be lost lest all that potential greatness be un-unleashed (Leashed?).

And then one day... one fateful day... they were all gone! The restore function dropped every single one of almost a HUNDRED tabs!

Picking up the pieces

Now this kind of thing has happened before but never to this extent. I was absolutely mortified and even went through the five stages of grief:

• Denial
• "There must be some way to recover them, they must be stored somewhere"
• Anger
• "Stupid Firefox, can't even store some freaking tabs"
• Bargaining
• "I swear I won't let so many tabs accumulate next time..."
• Depression
• "Myyy taaabbbss... Whaaiii!"
• Acceptance
• Here's where things got interesting...

For one thing, I realized that nothing really important had been forgotten (and how would I have known even if it did). Additionally, one of the comments put me on to this Browser extension called OneTab which converts all your open tabs into a list and keeps them from getting lost. (Never Again!)

Weirdly though, I initially thought OneTab would just be a more robust version of the Firefox restore function but oddly enough, my productivity started to go waay up after just a few days!

Over the next few weeks, I've come to believe that OneTab offers a completely different way to think about dealing with "Resets" (of which New Year's day is probably the most significant).

Embracing a Fresh Start

While New Years and Birthdays are common resets we don't recognize the amount of people that have to deal with a forced reset like a natural disaster or some other tragedy.

I think the trick is to take lessons from the Forced resets and use them to enrich the naturally occurring resets. My experience with my browser crashing might have completely eliminated my backlog but I wasn't too happy about it. Where OneTab comes in is by dealing with everything super quickly, but in a way that still feels like everything is handled. If I ever need to work, I can just get to it without the open tabs eating at my (very) limited mindspace.

What I've been thinking about for a while now is how to extend the scope of the OneTab approach.  It's a common experience to be unable to focus on any one thing because of all the other stuff crowding in your mind. If there was a way to tangibly clear things away and make a little space, that could potentially be very empowering in a way that writing Resolutions simply don't provide.

OneLife

Dare I say it, you only live once. And it's too tragic to constantly be thrashing just to keep from drowning.

More radical (and braver) people than I talk about something called declaring Task Bankruptcy or ToDo Bankruptcy. Basically the steps are:

1. File everything under 'Pending'.
2. Setup some kind of system to handle new tasks.
3. Follow it in a way that doesn't let you get overwhelmed again, and
4. Make a dent in the 'Pending' folder whenever possible.

If you're able to make do with just that then great, but I've been going years without any kind of cleanup so this sort of radical cleanse is a little intimidating. For me, I'd like to expand on the first step a little more.

To-Do : Wipe the Slate Clean

This is a list of some things I currently think would be a full reset of my life right now. Lemme know if any other items come to you:

1. First off, slow down you crazy child. You're no use to anyone if you're stressed out.
• Accept that your productivity is going to dip in the short term while this list gets done. 
• See if you can give yourself the time you need, or else get it done in the time you have.
2. Get every idea and pending project out of your head and written down somewhere.
• Personally I highly recommend using Evernote in combination with the GTD system.
• Btw, sign up here if you don't have Evernote yet pretty please? Evernote Referral.
3. Save all passwords somewhere safe and password-protected.
• (I'm still looking for a trustworthy solution, let me know if you find something useful)
4. Setup Gmail Inactive Account Manager so you can designate nominees for your mail account.
• This is super important because your email account is a pretty important part of your Estate.
• If you're incapacitated for any reason it should be available for someone to handle.
• I know it's a morbid thought but yea, it's just one of those things.
5. Get a Last Will & Testament made.
• Apparently as soon as you get your first job you should get a will made up.
6. Make sure that the master passwords are included wherever someone will find them.

Once these things are done, enjoy the peace of mind it brings you for as long as possible. That feeling of open space might trigger some new ideas of their own, but those should be filed back right away into step 2; now's not the time to dive back in.

Rinse-n-Repeat step 2 until you're completely dry of pending tasks and half-formed ideas and mostly everything is written down. The mind is made for thinking, it isn't so great at the storage and retrieval bit.

Some thoughts on getting back into the groove

After putting in all this effort to extricate yourself from your commitments, it'd be madness to find yourself right back in the thick of things. Unfortunately old habits die hard and your brain was rather comfortable with the way things were till you decided to shake things up.

This is the crucial point, you will need some kind of strategy to deal with the new things that are bound to come up. The easiest thing would be to handle new tasks as they arrive or dip into your archives to search for the really important stuff.

One key thing to keep in mind is that "How" you work is not nearly as crucial as "What" you choose to work on.

• Choose your tasks for maximum impact, 
• Don't let the urgent crowd out the important, and
• Remember to have fun with it.

Eventually though, once you've gotten a sense of your priorities, a good system can help improve efficiency. One system I would recommend is the "Agile Results" system - Getting Started with Agile Results.

• For the next day, week, month, year (whatever timescales you want to use), pick three things you want to accomplish.
• Every Monday sit and review your tasks for the week, and 
• Every Friday review your learning from the week.

And if there's one thing I would impose onto your daily schedule, make a little time everyday for meditation. Your mind needs time to de-stress just as much as your body does and sadly, getting drunk doesn't count.

Please don't burn out.

Imagine for a moment that you're put in charge of about ten people temporarily and you really don't like these chaps, they're just horrible to work with. Let's say you decide to mess with them - how would you go about breaking their spirits? Personally, I think the most effective way would be to just relentlessly pile on with near-impossible deadlines, all the while raising expectations by showering them with praise. It'd only be a matter of time till they cracked and broke down crying.

If you think that's f**ked up, then what about the fact that most of us are exactly as cruel on a yearly basis... except that the mistreated employees here are the various bits of you that work to keep you healthy.

Loyal to a Fault

Sometimes I imagine my body like a dangerously loyal friend.

• Need to stay awake all night to study for that exam tomorrow? No problem!
• He's hungry and needs a sandwich but you just can't drag yourself away from your laptop? That's okay, he'll wait.
• You're both really drunk but you need to ride home safely? No worries, he'll take responsibility; he's just always so confident!

But despite this weird selflessness, it's almost become fashionable nowadays to be mean to our bodies; think of the number of workaholics who wear sleep deprivation like a badge of honour! "I'm working so hard, look at me!"

Of course the problem is that nothing comes free. Sure, you can survive with only 5 hours of sleep a night, but you'll be measurably dumber the next day. Technically you could survive without exercise but you'll become progressively unhealthier and more susceptible to mental and physical illness. What we've lost sight of is the difference between mere surviving and actually thriving! Everyone seems to be walking around in this constant mental fog, with all those little aches and pains everywhere and we think it's normal when that's not how it's supposed to be! If you need proof, you find me a healthy child who needs to warm up for 20 minutes before playing for fear of pulling his hamstring.

The straw that broke the camel's back

But then, what happens if you end up pushing too far? In a way, the immense adaptability of the body is also it's biggest weakness. The body doesn't complain proportional to the amount of stress it's taking on. Which is kind of stupid also; if it was a proportional reaction then most of us would make lifestyle corrections waaaayy sooner than we usually do.

So what happens is that your body endures and endures and endures (with the situation deteriorating all the while) until something small finally tips the scale. It's around this stage that you get people in their 30's with heart attacks and the like. For example, cancerous cells occur naturally even in healthy people but are kept from flourishing if the immune system is functioning well. There's already a strong link established between lifestyle factors and cancer, maybe someday we'll be able to prevent cancer altogether with proper lifestyle adjustments.

Recalibrating

So what can we do? How are we to reclaim a higher standard of existence where we actually start to flourish! Personally, I think that it might be a good strategy to just start with the basic, simple joys of life... get enough sleep, eat decently (whatever that means to you) and see what happens.

Also, and this is something I struggle with, but find a way to start at soon as possible without worrying about doing it perfectly.

Eventually just start some kind of movement / mindfulness practice - something like yoga that flexes both your body and mind. If you really really want to get into it you can also look into something called the "Quantified Self" movement, which might herald the next stage of human evolution; but that's a subject for another post.

Really though it's just shocking how much of a difference the little things make, like getting a decent amount of sleep; it'd be nice to finally actually wake up for once.

Handling anxiety

There's this illustration I saw online some time ago; something about what it would look like if people talked about say, heart attacks the way we sometimes discuss depression. So there's a scene where the wife is complaining to her friend like "He just collapsed in the morning and then lay around all day, and then I had to run all the errands myself." or something similar.

Then the other day I happened to find out what Trichotillomania is. It's this obsessive disorder where the person compulsively pulls out his/her own hair; usually off the head, eyebrows or eye-lashes.  

(Check out video below, it's the one that introduced me to the condition. I think it shares the first-person feel of it quite brilliantly)

Everyone worries.

Now depression and other mental health issues only get noticed once they get diagnosed but generally speaking I think it wouldn't be a stretch to say that everyone has some amount of shit to deal with. Considering that this sort of pain seems so central to being human, I think we could all use a slightly healthier way to think about dealing with it. Not just a mechanism to help people to cope better, but something to actively aid in recovery.

Now as far as society is concerned, there are always people who will misunderstand so there's not much to be done about them. (And then there are people who do understand and for those you should be truly grateful...) But when you find yourself going through crap, the way in which you choose to think about the experience can make a tremendous difference.

Anxiety is neither created nor destroyed...

What I've been thinking a lot about lately is something that could be called a "Law of Conservation of Anxiety". The laws that conserve energy or momentum have sound mathematical backing but here my proofs are slightly more empirical, if not completely anecdotal. Basically we seem to have a talent for accepting anxiety from situations or other people. Once accepted though, the anxiety doesn't go away until it's deliberately released through some form of expression; through either a creative or destructive impulse.

Now this would all be fine, but the unexpressed anxiety tends to sit around and fester and eventually leak out in other (seemingly unrelated) areas of life and cause mental-health symptoms. It's natural that this happens but the problem is that sometimes these symptoms are the only things that are tangible enough to discuss with anyone. That can then lead to people trying to help fix the symptom since only you (may) know the actual issue.

How nots to thinks

 

Why this is difficult to discuss meaningfully is because we're not talking about anything tangible here, it's all ultimately just a collection of thoughts. Thoughts in and thoughts out. Sometimes the inward-bound thoughts come accompanied by a situation but the anxiety is almost always a thought about the thing, not the thing itself. Similarly the outbound thought might be accompanied by poetry or art or whatever but... well you get the idea.

What's particularly tricky is if the thing causing worry and the area of life experiencing symptoms are externally connected because then it feeds back on itself. So for example, let's say you worry about your health. In fact you worry so much that you end up worsening your health. So then you worry that you're worried too much about your health. Which then leads to you worrying that you really shouldn't be worrying about your worry, you should be trying to worry less. Then eventually you're just worrying that you're worried that you're worried that you're... yea.

One helpful short-term thing might be to just arbitrarily limit your meta-worrying... (Bro, it's like Inception bro... wooaahhh) But basically at some point you have to just stop thinking or else, as Alan Watts said, you "won't have anything to think about but thoughts..."

How to thinks

 

So yea, all of this gets a little complicated but I don't think it necessarily has to be. Also, I don't think we need to re-invent the wheel in terms of how to think about non-physical pain. 

As such, we've all gotten cuts and bruises and various kinds of physical injury and we have an excellent and extensive vocabulary to deal with these situations. By and large if you fall down and scrape your knee all you have to do is clean it off, attend to it and then let it heal. The initial pain is an extremely useful thing in this scenario because it lets you know that you're hurt to begin with; without the pain you might just carry on what you were doing and not giving the injury whatever attention is necessary.

The big shift in thinking is really just realizing that emotional wounds are really not so different from physical wounds. That initial emotional pain doesn't mean that something's wrong with you - it's what's supposed to happen! Do whatever you can to tend to the wound and then just leave it alone, definitely don't spend any more time poking at it and worrying about it. Worrying that you might not be healing, or that you might not be healing fast enough is pretty pointless; sometimes things just need a certain amount of time to happen.

So yea, that was just my two cents on the subject. I'll leave you to extend the metaphor in whatever direction you find helpful. Depending on how badly you feel you've been hurt, it might totally make sense to just go get a professional to help you with the it.

Be well everyone. :)

Don't worry if you couldn't vote this year...

For the past few days my Feed has been inundated with photos of people's inked thumbs. Like all Big Events, the Lok Sabha 2014 elections caused all manner of sharing across the various media, and it's always a sight to see. But amidst all the hopeful, proud photos of people there was a saddened set of people. A fair number wanted to vote but weren't able to for some reason. Either they were traveling or they weren't registered or their names were not to be found or whatever.

To be fair, I can't even begin to imagine the sheer logistical nightmare it must be to organize an election across more than a billion people! But still it kinda sucks when these things happen. But there's hope yet, assuming that the you really wanted to "make a difference". 

Just do something. 

Do anything for that matter, anything at all!

Educate yourself about nationally important topics, read up on a little economic theory, make a video about an issue or a charity that's important to you, volunteer at your old school, mentor someone who you think you might have something to teach, volunteer on a local clean-up drive, help out at an NGO, check out your company's CSR division, do anything! If you're really into it you might even build the next social enterprise that ends up bringing clean drinking water to a whole bunch of people.

And yes, of course these things are hard. Of course these actions take time. Even to donate money to someone like a Range.org requires more time than it takes to walk to the polling station and vote. But then again, whoever said that all it took to be a good citizen was to press a little blue button once every five years. The truth is that while voting is quite important, it's really only the least you can do as a good citizen.

The truth is...

 

The truth is that you are so much more capable than you've been led to believe. 

Think of all the skills that you've acquired over all these years. Think of how much difference it would make if even one of those skills was something that could bring joy to someone else. And don't worry about "Changing the World" and all that nonsense, just tend to your little corner of the universe as best as you can.

Think of what would happen if your efforts were to start accumulating. What if others started following suit, tending to their own little corners as best as they can. 55% voter turnout in Bangalore is low? Nonsense, think of what even 55% of that 55% could do if they all started looking outward a little bit.

The truth is that you are so. much. more. capable than you've been led to believe. Some quick pointers though:

1. Don't try to do it all at once.
2. Don't assume that you always know what's best for everyone, and
3. Don't worry that your efforts aren't big enough.

Don't try to do it all at once

I think the biggest hurdle is always the first step, which is to get out of the chair and actually do something. Then last year I watched this interview with a very young entrepreneur who had her own social enterprise helping underpriveleged children, and she said something that was a real kick in the pants for me.

I think... something that they do a lot is they want their NGO's to be really large immediately, which is not going to happen... But if they start small and are practical, then it's really not that hard.

I'm paraphrasing, but you get the idea. You should really check out the rest of the interview if you can, it's quite cool.

Don't assume that you always know what's best

This should be self explanatory. Generally just try and have a good handle on all the assumptions you're making about a particular problem and then keep your eyes and ears open to see if those assumptions pan out in the real world.

Don't be self-absorbed about your service to the the public, that's just the worst.

Don't worry that your efforts aren't big enough

Lastly, and this is a tough one, don't worry that the issues are just too large to make any kind of dent. You'd be surprised at the number of movements that have started from just a small dedicated team of like two or three people. 

Hey and if it's really getting you down, just think of the lesson of the 'Dancing Guy'.

Closing Thoughts

There was a version of this poem in our school diaries. Must've read this thing about a million times without really getting it, but I've gotten a new perspective on it over time:

When I was a young man, I wanted to change the world.

I found it was difficult to change the world, so I tried to change my nation.

When I found I couldn't change the nation, I began to focus on my town. I couldn't change the town and as an older man, I tried to change my family.

Now, as an old man, I realize the only thing I can change is myself, and suddenly I realize that if long ago I had changed myself, I could have made an impact on my family. My family and I could have made an impact on our town. Their impact could have changed the nation and I could indeed have changed the world.

~by Unknown Monk, 1100 A.D.

Edit (20/04/2013) : 

• I should clarify that the elections as such are still on-going, it's just the Karnataka phase got done very recently.
• Also, I added some more links to some projects I'm aware of. There are doubtless many more that're as deserving. 
• Minor other changes.

Putting the cart before the horse

Our bodies are funny things really. We'd like to think that they're rational, easy to understand things but they're really not. Or maybe they rhythms they obey are still a whole level of understanding beyond our current reach. Either way, it's continually fascinating how certain processes work. 

Maybe our minds are too enslaved to the concept of causality. For example, if a person is smiling, you'd naturally assume that they were feeling particularly joyous at that moment. In other words smiling is just an external symptom that is simply expresses an internal state :

Happiness ----> Smiling

So naturally  the concept of Laughter Clubs sounded ludicrous to me initially. Like why would you randomly start laughing if you really didn't feel like it? And even more confusing, how could this forced, "artificial" laughter succeed in triggering actual happiness? But then you read about laughter clubs and not only do the participants report leaving the events feeling elated, but then you have lists of studies that suggests there might actually be benefits to the practice.

It would appear that the reaction goes both ways :

Happiness <----> Smiling

This then got me thinking about the process of trying to consciously improve oneself. Mostly everyone is on this journey, in some form or another, but this process is fraught with frustration, whether you're trying to give up smoking, lose weight or be more productive.

For me, the most irritating part of the whole thing is that generally, the different aspects of your life kind of tie into one another. So maybe you want to eat more healthily but your job is really demanding and you don't get time to cook properly. Or maybe you want to sleep more but you also have to a lot of work in your spare time for a hobby. Either way, the problems can begin to seem intractable because it looks like you'd have to overhaul your entire life in a one massive swoop.

In a sense, you wind up stuck in a phase of constantly "trying" to change instead of actually making progress and "being" that new thing. And after a while the "trying" phase itself can become entrenched which means it's now comfortable to be uncomfortable, if that makes sense.

Anyway, it strikes me that there might be another way to approach the problem. Instead of only planning out the steps between you and your goal, it might be possible to also pick out some marker that describes your future self and then start doing that thing immediately. Nevermind that you've not achieved the new state yet, this should work exactly like the laughter club thing. By doing the new, symbolic behaviour, you're no longer "trying" to change and instead you've already kind of changed, in a sense. 

And it doesn't really matter how arbitrary the marker is, it's more important that it's something physical and tangible and externally visible. These are important because if the marker is something intagible like "in the future i will always be happy", then that's just a thought. And thoughts have a way of feeding in on themselves and chasing their own tails and not getting you anywhere. Having something physical is easier because our bodies are physical and because an external thing would be easier to evaluate to know for yourself if you're doing that thing or not.

So here's my plan, I've been trying several things over the months to be more productive so for the next month I'm planning to change it up a bit. For the next month, I will endeavor to be clean shaven for the entire 30 days. I think shaving will be a good, yet sufficiently arbitrary marker for several reasons. Firstly it's a nice, physical thing that is easy to evaluate. Also, from personal experience over the past few months, it's generally the easiest thing to let slip if things start getting hectic which then has me roaming around like Mr. Crusoe. 

Also there's no need to get fanatical about it, as such I think it's okay if i don't go more than three days without a shave. The marker is chosen more for how integrated it is into the rest of your life and how much of a change it will cause if habits surrounding the marker are altered in any way. Not to mention that my particular shaving habits require almost half an hour to get a good shave.

I'll count this as my first official experiment on this blog, in the style of David Cain of the Raptitude blog. The experiment will commence on the 1st of November and I'll post the results after the end of the month. 

Lemme know if this makes sense to anyone and if you're trying your own versions of the experiment then leave me a comment. :)

Money and Freedom

I've always found that life has no shortage of difficult questions to tackle. Stuff like :

"Who am I?",
"What do I want?",
"What's the meaning of it all?"

..."How do I get my hair to look awesome everyday?"

But eventually, and this is especially true once you have to start paying your own bills, eventually you start to consider what it would take to become super, duper rich. Like diving into pools of gems kinda rich. Or maybe that'd hurt too much... gummy bears with emerald centres maybe? For diving into obviously, not to eat; what's wrong with you!

And then maybe a year or two passes and you're like, "Okay fine, not so rich also. Just one chotta sa superbike and some cool jackets and that babe Emma Watson as a girlfriend yaar, not soo much also." If this is your story too then not to worry, Uncle Joel has the answer. Nevermind all those people telling you you're an irrational dreamer... and that you need to stop speaking in that silly accent.

So the problem is this, how do I live comfortable and securely and get (mostly) everything I want while also being able to enjoy those comforts? No point in working for some 30 years till the big bucks start rolling in to start enjoying life. By then all I'll be in the mood for at the end of the day is a Scrubs marathon on my intra-eyeball, retina-resolution, embedded viewing system (with HD).

And as such, the problem I have with today's career landscape is the overwhelming feeling of having to run just to stay still. Planning, investments, loans, property investment, "skill upgrading",... just the sound of it is exhausting. Worst of all is that even if you play that game, you're still super vulnerable to waking up penniless one day if the "Invisible Hand of the Market" decides to give you the finger.

So here's my idea. Get your friends together (even if it's just you and your Teddy), and form your own little country. No not in a seditionist sense, what's up with you today! No, I mean in an economic sense. Like you pool all your resources and like give each other responsibilities and draw up a constitution (No farting on the couch!) and generally get "civil society" set up. Back in the real world though, please by all means continue to pay your taxes and stuff, except that now you and your amigos have to actually start to think about like 'How do we grow our country', 'What resources do we have', 'How do we get Zach Braff to do a Kickstarter fundraiser to get us International Aid?'

Obviously you and your friends would still go to work and get paid a salary, except now you'll are coming home in the evening and counting the money that your lil' country made from the services you provided to another nation or corporation or whatever. Of course this money is pretty worthless within your own nation state, since you and your buddies haven't really needed a currency system yet. So what do you do, you go out and buy stuff from the guys who actually use that currency. Ordinarily it'd be some permutation of beer, meat, cornflakes and milk but then maybe one of your buddies is an economics student. Then you'll might also consider buying some seeds and maybe growing vegetables out on the porch, which helps you spend less of your salaries foreign exchange.

So it's been a couple of months and things are going really well. But by this point, something starts to happen. Some other friends (maybe not super close but you'll maybe hi-fived each other once when that cute girl at the college fashion show sort of smiled in your general direction) start to notice that you guys in your little nation over there seem a lot more chilled out of late. And that you seem to have more beer lying around than they do. So they ask if they can join your club as well and that look, they have all this nice equipment they'd be willing to bring in to the country like a washing machine and a microwave that their rich parents bought for them.

Things start to get interesting now, because your country is starting to attract a lot of different skill sets. Now, you have people actually growing wheat in their balconies and baking some bread with it. Some other people might be really handy with tools, and make some DIY windmill power generators out of masking tape, cling foil and dreams. Of course in the beginning it wasn't hard to keep track of who owed how much to the community cuz it was just a handful of people. Now however, you have the sneaking suspicion that someone's eating more of their share of the pizza's and not cleaning up the cartons afterward. Not to mention there are all those "modest" types who won't bother asking you to pay them back even if they've loaned you a week's worth of groceries, we need to keep track of it somehow.

Well we could just have a new currency. And for simplicity we adopt a new currency with the same value as the salary foreign exchange that's still coming in. But then what would be the point, we'd be right back where we started and all the old tensions would re-appear. As soon as you have the old currencies then suddenly everything's back to square one because now nobody wants to actually produce anything anymore, now it's all about investing in derivative sub-prime equity-reimbursed buy-back mortage diversified freakin' bubble gum bonds. No, we need something better...

...There is a kind of freedom to be had in this self-employed mindset, but it vanishes so frustratingly easily. One thing is clear though is that the success of the experiment all hinges on the way the currency gets constructed.

Germany - first impressions

It's been about three months since I've been living in Germany, so it might be a little late for a "first impressions" post. Time has certainly has flown but anyway, let's start this shit up...

So by the way, I've been living and working in Hildesheim, Lower Saxony which is a smallish town near Hannover. One advantage of a smaller town is that both the serenity of the outskirts as well as the excitement of the city are both within a 15 minute bus ride of each other. Car exhibitions, flea markets and pubs are just as easily accessible as a hike through the forest.

It's a pretty awesome change being able to hear the wind through the trees and birds chirping outside the window and stuff. I haven't read the book yet but i feel (just a little) like I'm Henry David Thoreau in Walden. :)

Culture

Pretty much one of the first things I noticed after arriving in Germany was how nice everyone generally is. For instance you'll be standing at the bus stop or passing someone on the street and they'll generally wish you a cheery 'Hallo'. At the supermarkets or at restaurants and things the service people are generally quite happy and conversational, it takes some getting used to. Also service people in general tend to be quite young here and seem to be waiting tables or tending bar to generate income for something else. Perhaps school tuition or even just extra pocket money.

This age and "motivation" factor has some interesting side effects, like that they are very honest and open about their place of work. So for example, a friend was telling me he was at a store and they didn't have the specific brand of what he was looking for. So when he asked the cashier where else he might look, she directed him to another store even though it is a direct competitor! And all of this is considered pretty unremarkable here whereas other establishments might very well fire the cashier for "driving away business"

Speaking of culture more generally, it's also quite amazing to me how much of Germany has permeated into pop-culture all over the world. Right from pre-school the very word 'Kindergarten' is a German word that literally translates to 'Garden for Children'. Grimm's fairy tales as well are basically Germanic folktales that have been watered down over time to make them more palatable for a younger audience. You can check out a summary of some of the original (more gruesome) versions here.

Even depictions of Gingerbread houses then are very Germanic looking...

House-spotting in South-Germany

And the list just goes on and on.

Language

Even linguistically there's so much cross pollination that it almost goes unnoticed. Words like 'Kitsch' and 'Foosball' or even 'Gesundheit' are so commonly used that they sometimes don't even register as being German. There's apparently lots of other German words that are directly used in English, forget the ones that are derived from German. You can check out some of them here.

I also had the opportunity to attend a German language course recently and it was quite a fascinating experience. It seems to me that learning even a little bit of a foreign language gives you direct insight into the collective psyche of a whole people and culture. For instance, German as a language has a comparatively small number of words compared to languages like English. Perhaps the German reputation for straight talk springs from this since even when they speak English, they don't bother with very niche words while making a point.

Plus learning a language can be quite good fun because of all the little gems that you stumble across. For example nouns in German all have a very strict gender which is expressed by their prefixes. So 'der' for masculine, 'die' (pronounced 'dee') for feminine and 'das' for neuter. Which then makes it quite amusing to note that sausages in general have a feminine prefix whereas things like Donuts have a masculine prefix. (Note : No one said these gems were particularly sophisticated)

Public Amenities

Another thing that's extremely striking is how well organized and comprehensive all the public utilities are. For example public transport just continues to leave me speechless. In the time I've been here I've seen the bus service disrupted just once, and that too because of sudden snowfall. Even if a bus is delayed or doesn't run at a particular time that's the exception, not something to be expected.

Equally impressive is how connected the bus system is to the train system in the sense that if you have a train leaving at a particular time there's very likely a bus that will take you to the station with five minutes to spare. So in a sense these separate systems don't leave you to work out how they fit together. As further proof, there's an app that provides you with live bus schedules. I could give the bus stop outside my house as the start point and the hostel in the other city as the destination and the system gives you all the intermediate bus and train stops to get to the station, take your train and then reach your room.

Even interacting with government offices is made so painless. When I first arrived, there is a registration form that needs filling out and by force of habit I expected it to take about half a day. But after arriving at the Rathaus (Town Hall) it was a five minute wait for a 15 minute procedure (that included the guy welcoming me to Hildesheim and handing me a welcome kit that contained a map, a schedule of upcoming city events and a coupon for the public swimming pool) and I was out of there! Honestly it's stuff like that that constituted the biggest culture shock.

Another thing that took the longest while to get over is the fact that drinking water is immediately drinkable. I mean, I love India and all but one does not simply drink water straight out of the tap!

Boromir knows what I'm talking about...

Perhaps stuff like this could just be attributed to the climate and the engineering pressure it puts on everyone. Like if it's snowing for half the year then you'd better be damn sure everything's well engineered because if it isn't then you're screwed son. But still, it is pretty impressive. Like how do you get water to flow over an entire country and have it be pure enough to drink! I'm still not completely over it actually, come to think of it...

Living and Working

For a large percentage of people around the world, one's day job constitutes a large portion of the day. But in Germany atleast, 'work-life' balance is considered extremely important and people don't generally work weekends or long hours. Most awesomely, insane hours aren't worn as badges of honour in the workplace. Instead they're recognized as being regrettable and temporary inconveniences because there was something that happened that nobody foresaw.

Generally speaking, Germany seems a primary example of what is possible in a country that is just plain prosperous. From an individual's perspective, time moves a lot slower and things aren't always running at break-neck pace. While crossing the street (at a zebra crossing, of course) drivers actually stop to let you pass. If you ask for directions people don't just point you in the right direction, they also tell you that it's a helluva long walk and that you might as well wait for the next bus (true story).

People also seem to wait longer before making large commitments to start a family or even to settle into stable jobs and maybe they'll travel or do whatever for a bit until then. Even their extra-career pursuits are also a lot deeper, I guess because there's more time to do things like build remote-control airplanes or cycle or hike or get pilot's licenses or garden or bake or whatever. There's also a lot more public art around like street performers and guitarists and things, even graffiti is more developed as an art form. Random stuff like the picture below are fairly common...

Picture courtesy facebook.com/StreetArtGermany

Then from a societal / governmental perspective, having a prosperous nation at your disposal means that you have space to actually take care of people. So quality standards can be imposed on products more thoroughly, and consumer rights can be upheld more honestly. Police staff and ambulances services can be more well funded. Even crime rates themselves are less of a problem; at clothing stores they don't make you leave your bags at the door. Not to say that shoplifting never happens but I guess it's just not as much of a problem.

Roads are also better maintained, with cyclists getting their own lanes or even their own roads in some places. And as if that wasn't enough, the sign posts for pedestrian signals actually have handles where a cyclist can hold on till the light turns green. I mean, that's insaaannee! o.0

Relections on India

All of this might seem like I'm hating on India but that's not it at all. If anything, I feel like exposure to the way that other people live their lives has deepened my understanding of my own roots and background. At the same time there's also tremendous insight to be had into the real meaning of phrases like 'development' and 'quality of life'.

For example people generally say that overpopulation is India's primary problem but larger cities like Stuttgart or Nuremberg can be quite crowded without any breakdown in public systems. And people also say that maybe government administration is easier in Germany because perhaps the people are more homogeneous. But that's not true either; German culture shows a tremendous amount of variation between North and South and then again between the Eastern and Western parts of Germany. And even port cities like Hamburg are generally quite safe

even with the confluence of cultures there.

As far as India goes, I haven't the slightest clue about how one might go about tackling some the issues we're currently wrestling with. I hope to write more about this at some point but for now I feel like I've gotten a new perspective on stories that end with "...and there was prosperity throughout the land and peace reigned for a hundred years" and jazz like that.