Tag Archives: Life

Superstition: An Emotional Crutch or something more?

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Do you avoid ladders when you are out? Does a thought of a black cat crossing your path make you retrace your steps? Welcome to the world of superstitions!

Superstition is the belief in supernatural causality—that one event causes another without any natural process linking the two events—such as astrology, religion, omens, witchcraft, prophecies, etc., that contradicts natural science.

As many countries are there in the world, there are as many different types of superstitions. The most common ones are the ones relating to black cats, crossing your fingers, walking under ladders and the good ol’ Friday the 13th! Here’s a list of the common by silly superstitions that all of us are probably guilty of at some point in time or the other.

I guess, like most people I am too superstitious. I don’t start any new activity or wear new clothes or use anything new on a Saturday. This belief is shared by many in India as Saturday in itself is considered inauspicious – which is why you will almost never see weddings happening on a Saturday!

Other than this, I wear a favourite colour when I am doing something important like an exam, an interview etc. This is completely random and started when I was in college I guess. I can’t remember why, but my best guess would be I did spectacularly well that day when I wore clothes of that colour and so my mind started associating success with the colour. Since then, if I have something important, that colour will feature in my clothes that day. I understand it’s an emotional crutch and this probably makes me more confident, but I am going to take what I can to succeed!

Here’s a complete alphabetical list of superstitions and some superstitions around the world. Do you recognize any that you follow?

Are you superstitious? Why? I’d love to hear from you….

The Power of Prayers

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I usually start the morning with prayers to the Lord and am trying to inculcate the same with BB & GG too!

As you probably know from my posts, I am a Hindu and am also bringing up BB & GG in the same way. I am weird in the sense, though I have rock solid belief in God, I am not a very big beliver in going to temples. I firmly believe that if you believe in God and don’t go out of your way to harm someone, then even a heartfelt two minute prayer in your heart to God will give you the same results as going to the temple. You do not need the outward manifestation of your belief to God. I posted about religion some time back, but this post is more about the power of prayers.

GaneshaLike I’ve said before, I have a very personal relationship with God and my personal God is the Lord Ganesh.

My daily routine is do a string of prayers in front of my altar at home. Hindus usually light the lamp in front of God twice a day and I do this in the morning after bath and in the evening after I am home. Once I light the lamp, I say my prayers. After this, I try to meditate for a couple of minutes and then have my conversation with him. The evening prayer is a much shorter one with a quick prayer after lighting the lamp. But I do have my conversation in the evening too, especially if the day has gone well for me, or I see his hand in something that happened during the say!

So does praying to God worth your while? My answer is an equivocal YES! Prayer is the vehicle with which you reach out to God or the higher divinity. It allows you to focus on the divine and helps a human being to become one with that one Universal Divine Being who can be called by various religions as their Gods!

Prayers also allow you to push your stress and desires on to your preferred God. This releases a lot of tensions in your lives when you move your stress to God! I remember there are days when my mind is full of things and I can’t sleep. Those days when I say a short prayer to Ganpati Bappa (Lord Ganesh) and tell him now it’s his responsibility to ensure that my problems are solved; I am able to sleep quite fast!

Do you believe in the divine and pray?

Pet Peeves

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Yesterday while going home from work, I came across this woman who was quite irritating. It was a bit of a bother for me to stop going to her and get her to stop doing what she was doing. What did she do to irritate me? Read on….

We all have some peeves which irritate the hell out of us. Urban Dictionary defines pet peeves as “an irritating experience caused by others which we cannot control”. So what are my top pet peeves? In no particular order, here are my top 5

People listening to music/watching videos in public transport without headphones
This one is inspired by the lady yesterday. What I don’t understand is why do phone manufacturers give you a pair of headphone when you purchase a phone, if not to use it? There are usually a large number of people in any public transport and to subject them to the music or video you are watching is just not done! I don’t want to listen to what you are watching, in a language I don’t understand

Bad grammar and spelling
This one is also on the top of my list of pet peeves! I really don’t like when people write sentences as if they were still using old-style brink phones of the yesteryear – you know the one where you wrote words like “dis e (this is)” etc. It’s worse when people send you emails and post on forums using this style! My fingers itch to correct it, especially when these days even primary school children carry smart phones…

I am also a big grammar nazi and get super put off when there are grammatical and spelling errors in work I see – what’s the spell check for guys?

People who cut queues
Enough said about this. Even though we live in Singapore – the land of queueing, you still get people who do not understand the concept of one. When waiting for a bus, one person will bring in 10 more friends and there goes the chance of anyone else getting on the bus!

People who don’t know the concept of personal space
Another one which happens mainly in public transport here, but which is an alien concept in India!

Loud phone conversations in public
Aah! Lets all hear about your boss or back-stabbing friend while on the way somewhere! If you need to have a conversation while in public, please do try and tone it down? Actually sometimes, its quite fun actually. You get to hear gossip about someone you don’t know and the journey becomes fun, especially when you don’t have a good book in your hands….

What’s your pet peeve?

It’s Friday!!

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Today is one of those days where a hundred thoughts are swirling in my head, and none actually seem to make a lot of sense to me.

I am at work, and it is one of those days where I am just not motivated enough to work! Also, it does not help that its Friday today and the weekend is beckoning….

So what does someone do in such a situation? I read up a couple of articles and it basically boils down to this – are you not motivated to work because you are actually procrastinating about doing something you probably don’t want to do right now? I can hear you loud and clear! Some days, you know you have to do something, but you just can’t get yourself to do it at that particular time, so you try and postpone the inevitable! In such a case, just tell yourself “So what” and then start doing it. You’ll probably not want to do it, but after a while, you start to get into the stride of the job and soon you are in the zone!

Here is a nice list of things you can do on days when you don’t feel like doing ‘real work’, but can still be productive at work and accomplish something! Note though, not all of these things in the list can be done at work, but there’s enough in here to keep curious co-workers and your boss off your back for the day! But don’t do this too often or you’ll be in trouble!

Beat the heat…..the Singapore way….

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Most days the one consistent conversation you are bound to have these days in Singapore is about the weather! We are currently obsessed with it – it’s too hot, everyone says all the time.

The late Mr. Lee Kwan Yew, Singapore’s first Prime Minister post-independence once famously declared air-conditioning to be the greatest invention of the 20th century.
Temperatures consistently hover around the mid-thirties (in Celsius, or around the nineties in Fahrenheit) with high humidity and it’s no wonder that people staying in this sunny island feel the heat….

This is probably how hell feels like, I thought this morning on the way to work. Waking up, drenched in sweat, in spite of sleeping in an air-conditioned room, the moment you come out from a bath, you are drenched with sweat. Getting to work is a pointless exercise as by the time you reach your air-conditioned office, all the time and effort you took to get ready to come to work has come to naught!

With most places in Singapore being air-conditioned, when you actually go to the great outdoors aka the non-air-conditioned spaces, the heat really hits you and completely saps your energy. Without this, you are more likely than to wilt in the heat instead of actually doing any work.

I dream of a time when the whole of Singapore is covered by a temperature controlled dome and we live in an ideal climate! Far-fetched perhaps, but knowing Singapore, this may not be something of out a sci-fi movie, but a reality decades down the line.

In researching for this post, I asked GG & BB earlier this morning if they felt the heat in school. For the sake of perspective, they study in non-air-conditioned classrooms and have around 30 minutes of recess daily (more if they stay back in school after lunch, in which case recess including lunch time will be around 75 minutes) and another 30 minutes of PE in school daily. Both BB & GG were actually quite nonchalant about the heat and said it didn’t bother them one bit while they were in school. Is this the resilience of the young where they seem impervious to heat? Or maybe it’s just me getting old…..