Wednesday, June 14, 2006

Understanding Complications of Inner Strength

Searching Inner Strength

There is a serious misconception regarding inner strength of any individual in society. Human growth outside the domain of biological or biochemical remains very-very complex. There are many aspects which have not been given their due in the evolution of human civilization. It would be very interesting to discuss and analyze these aspects keeping human growth in mind.
Inner strength is not available as easily as is presumed to be. Like knowledge, it is also to be acquired or achieved or gained. It does not come to human beings through mere birth. Inner strength remains as illusive as money, position, caste, creed and status. It would be really interesting to analyze those sources from where they are presumed to be originating.

Sources of Origination

In general, inner strength comes to individual from three radical sources –

Inherited - You get close relatives, ancestors, background, close-associates, friends, and assets.

Circumstances and Situations - This empowers you with qualifications, knowledge, experiences, wisdom, and exposures. This results to successes and achievements, and

Human survival instincts - This forces you to acquire love of life, awakening, human behaviour and habits

All three sources are very distinct in nature. It is very important to understand the control of individual on these factors.

Detail Discussions

As it is evident regarding complications, the sources of inner strength need elaborate discussions-

Inherited - Ingredients like close relatives, ancestors, background, ancestral assets are available to the individual as inherited gifts. The irony of human beings is that the person who gets them never realizes the worth of it while the person who never gets them has to create them through very tough measures, which takes many a time a whole lifetime. Even close associates and friends are available to individual on an inheritance basis only. A person born in a backward community gets these entire ingredients mainly from a similar status. The majority of the people remain similar in nature. In the course of their lives, they are surrounded by the strength, weaknesses and aspirations of those people. That is where the question of unlearning comes into picture to reduce the anomaly in the system. The people born in a backward class family have to fight from the existing setup to come out of their hardwired backward mentality before they can do anything worthwhile in life. In real life, one has to face these challenges in an open society. Fortunately, we are born in the era when we are fighting for equality and human rights for each and everyone. All of us are linked by these situations. That is the beauty of life. When we are fighting at the organizational, country or continental level, it is imperative that every individual remains conscious about these developments. A similar problem exists among the people of other communities such as forward or scheduled castes, scheduled tribes, Americans, blacks, Europeans or Muslims, etc as it is found in backward communities. We all have inherited hardwired self-defeating qualities. To have inner strength, every individual from any community will have to understand these anomalies and fight at his/her level to remove them.

Circumstances and Situations - An individual is born in a particular place and she hardly has any control over it. Depending upon her place of birth, she faces circumstances and situations. She can hardly do anything about it. The qualifications, knowledge, experiences and exposures come from these circumstances and situations mainly. So called wisdom comes from this. One tries very hard to achieve wisdom without realizing that wisdom has its own limitations of situations and circumstances. The person acquires knowledge only from the resources available to her.

At times, we are very pleased with our simple success, thinking about self greatness without realizing the contribution of circumstances and situations. We generally think of as free and independent will even though these are illusions. Most of the time, we think and act, even react and are a lot more susceptible to outside influences than we realize. When we are living in deprived and disturbed society, we become too defensive and egoistic on the other hand, while we should have been conscious and more subtle. This results in a situation that if somebody asks a question, we come up with lot of explanations even for the things we don’t have explanations for.

Now, when tremendous opportunities evolve in prevalent situations and circumstances, there are a lot of people in the country who have taken advantages of these developments through proper unlearning. Swaraj Paul must have understood the compulsions of situations. He left his village in Jalandhar, Punjab, in the 1960s and did not come back for the next forty years. He maintained different situations for his successive growth to become one of the biggest businessmen in England. Azim Premji is a brilliant example who built an empire on his ancestral assets through totally new methods and processes. Instead of ancestral business of oil and food products, Wipro migrated to Information Technology and ITES (Information Technology Enabled Services). During the 1980s, when engineering colleges in the country were teaching hexadecimal programming (machine level language programming) on microprocessor 8085 and 8086, M/S Wipro was dealing with computers and software programming. They changed their circumstances and situations to build a separate and progressive empire.

During this period of opportunities evolution, one more very interesting thing happened in India. The people with high calibre, zeal and enthusiasm changed their circumstances and situations consciously. At the changed place, they continued working in a changed environment with a different set of people. They earned professional satisfaction and earned achievements, the whole world recognized them. Chandrashekar, who won the Nobel Prize for Physics and Amartya Sen for Economics were the famous ones. The changed environment have provided immense growth possibilities. Today, in 2006, we can proudly say that Indians have the highest educational qualifications of all ethnic groups in the US. Almost 67 percent of all Indians have a bachelor’s or higher degree (compared to 28 percent nationally). Almost 40 percent of all Indians have a master’s doctorate or other professional degree, which is five times the national average. Today, these statistics makes Indian proud, but just think of twenty years back, people had to take hard decisions to leave their near and dear in this country and settled in a new environment. In better environment, they preserved their caliber and excelled individually. The credit also goes to USA or other European nations to provide healthy atmospheres.

Human survival instincts - There are a few prerequisites for human survival. If those prerequisites are met, then only does the human being grow to adulthood and then think of progress and growth. The basic survival is based on tremendous inner strength of the individual. The further progress and growth has to be based on separate and exclusive factors. Human survival instincts come from within. They are habits, awakening, human behaviour and love of life. They generate a force in human beings. This is the force which contributes in moving life. They help an individual to grow, help an individual to be conscious of surroundings, get educated, and learn all good behaviour and human traits. The inside force is very natural and forceful. If, fortunately, one has these forces in a supporting environment, they help the individual to sustain and at times helps her to grow, but if unfortunately, circumstances and situations are not understandable nor cordial, society gulps up these individuals. The powerful force within itself kills the individual. The individual is not able to exploit these forces. Terrorism is a clear cut example of such futile situations. The society, family, individual and above all humanity become the biggest losers.

Just think of the situation during the era of Brain Drain. Plenty of high caliber individuals remained in the country to avoid brain drain in 1970s or 80s. They were patriotic and disciplined individuals. They were hard working and devoted. They excelled in their field. But if we try to count them today for their contributions, we will find them marginal compare to the contribution made by NRI (Non-Resident Indians). Today, after 30-40 years, when we have one of the finest economists of the country as a Prime Minister of India, he reminds us that it is was not Brain Drain during the Congress rule of the 1960s or 70s or 80s, but it was a Brain Gain. He is correct. Today, a developing country like India is flourishing on those drains which flew in the United States of America, the United Kingdom and other European countries for the last thirty years. The flourishing growth, which we observe today in India and even in Asian countries and we are proud of are those brains. The Brains which were left behind in India must have been rotten, or rather they would have gone down the drain. Those brains in this country are still stinking at places. It is not very difficult to observe and meet such brains in our national news papers articles and media. There are plenty of examples; a good and brilliant brain left behind in the developing country during those periods with all forceful energy in this environment, survival remained a challenge for them. It is important to understand them. It is essential that the force within is preserved in correct environment.

Final Analysis

The sources of inner strength are limited. They have their own inherent limitations. A person has to grow and develop within those limitations. The growth and development of inner strength are generally taken for granted. In a society of the developing world and even developed world, it is essential that we concentrate and harness the sources of inner strength. It is said, ‘Changes provide opportunities’. The changes which I have explained and elaborated in the previous pages must have provided all of us plenty of reason to believe, the availability of opportunities in the world. In society, we have plenty of examples of these opportunists like Narayana Murthy, Dhirubhai Ambani, APJ Abdul Kalam, Amartya Sen and so on. They have taken advantage of changed situations by creating different circumstances. The rising and successful people are the result of improved circumstances and situations. It is important that we remain conscious to create a better situation to generate stronger inner strength. The few important steps can be summarized as follows-

1- Detach from past,
2- Understand and believe on your potential,
3- Enhance you knowledge,
4- Demand for your contribution,
5- Never rely easily on others,
6- Never get evaluated by inferior person,
7- Listen to expert Advises,
8- Always look for new ideas,
9- Review your thinking and actions.

Thinking and actions depends upon so many factors. Once we understand these limitations, we should never take our thinking and action for granted. We should never be overconfident in our thinking unless we have been able to change the ground situations. The confidence and utilization of inner strength can then only be ensured. Feel free to raise any doubts because that will ensure clarity in your inner strength.