ILLNESS is in the MIND (Part 1)

'Our brain composed of both the Conscious as well as the Subconscious mind controls all our actions. The Conscious part being responsible for all our voluntary actions, and the Subconscious, all our involuntary actions'  - I read this way back in 2003 I guess when I was in standard \/||| in one of my school textbooks. Little did I understand then though as to what is actually meant by subconscious mind ,etc.(yet I did manage to get 90% in that subject..I guess a very simple formula existed then, where your perception fails, cramming begins!) The text went on to describe each scientific term citing examples from our daily life. Though I was'nt  clueless  at the end of the chapter yet my so called thinking self constantly nagged me asking, 'you have completed the chapter but, do you really know what is meant by the term Subconscious mind?' Answer from me - NO.

       

       Fast forward to 2010...I have crossed my teenage and my once frayed teenaged nerves are now non-chalant. During this leap of 7 years I have met people of varied ages. I have had the liberty to experience not only my own experiences but also many vicarious ones. Now, it would be fair to say that  I have been successfully able to delve into the subliminal truth of that text to a large extent. I guess almost all of you are sure of what is meant by 'conscious mind' and voluntary actions. Its the term 'subconscious' that is a bit recondite and esoteric. So let me share my perception (blog soubriquet truly justified, I hope.) of the Subconscious mind.

          [P.S- Neither am I Sigmund Freud, nor do I possess his bloody veins running in my body. If you are an ardent follower of him, then I request you to stop reading at once, and get back to those moronic social networking sites.]

       The subconscious mind actually acts as a stack of all our experiences gained at different junctures of our daily life. It acts just like a lexicon. Though biologically there is no material substance filling this part of our brain, yet it does exist and keeps a track of all our experiences and orders instructions accordingly and sub-consciously, which is why it is so named. This ordering of instructions subconsciously is of prime importance to us.The Subconscious mind pops out a particular experience from the stack, draws an assumption relating to the actual scanario at hand, derives a relation between the present and the experience, and orders instructions accordingly.  All too arcane??  Let me give you an example.

         We generally pay very careful attention while locking our doors when leaving our house. Right from selecting the proper key to bolting the door carefully and then placing the lock at the appropriate place, our conscious mind plays an important role. But it often happens,(atleast it has happened with me on several occasions) that after locking the door when we have already left our house suddenly an alarm bell rings in our conscious mind, asking us and subsequently puzzling us with questions like, 'did we lock the door properly? or did we lock it at all?'. Without any ado we rush back to check, only to find everything's fine.

       Now let's analyze. First and foremost the very obvious fact is while we were locking the door our conscious mind had been dozing, because if we were conscious while locking and since the task requires some amount of precision this whole scenario wouldnt have arised. Now the question is if our conscious mind didnt instruct our hands and fingers to act accordingly, then who did? The answer is its the Subconscious mind that did. The next question which arises is HOW? The answer is pretty simple. Our Subconscious mind had  added the experience of locking a door(taking into account all the minutiae of details), gained sometime back, into its stack. Now when it realizes that the conscious mind is unconscious, it pops out the experience of locking, relates it to the present situation and automatically instructs our hands and fingers to act, all sub- consciously, that too with near 100% accuracy. What's the conclusion to be drawn here? Its the Subconscious mind that takes control of our actions when our conscious mind actually becomes unconscious temporarily. But that in no way implies that our subconscious mind becomes active only when our conscious mind becomes unconscious. Actually our Subconscious self remains active all the time. Whatever we feel, think, see everything counts as experience and gets stacked into our subconscious self.

To be continued.......

Cricket's Shame

With the death of former controversial South African captain Hansie Cronje in 2001, we cricket lovers thought match fixing had once and for all vanished. Both match fixing and betting was unheard of  in these last nine years, leading us to believe that finally cricket and money have travelled different directions (has it really?? think about IPL) But once again match fixing with its ugly head has risen as if to remind us that it was on a honeymoon trip with its former fiancee, 'betting'. Any guesses about the country which has broken the belief this time?........No surprises, the name wont make you feel like a rabbit caught in the headlights!! . Its the country which is always in news for all the wrong reasons.The country which is trying hard to save its face from humiliation and consequent boycott from not only cricket and sports, but other spheres too. Its Pakistan.
Thank God Mr.Jinnah is'nt alive today else he would have been as good as an ostrich, burying his head underground in shame!.
      
       Strangely, Indian bookies are approaching only Pakistanis and others, but not our players. Guess they have done their homework well.They know that the coffers of our players have already overflown, thanks to Mr.Lalit Modi (somebody please exculpate him, he is too opulent a person to be incarcerated. How long is BCCI going to drag this drama??)


        Coming back to the epitome of this shameful saga, what is wrong with Mohammed Asif ? I guess he wants to be the next Shoaib Akhtar for Pakistan. Not too long ago Asif was banned for almost two years for getting drugged. And now match fixing. Just when it seemed his career was seaming in, directed straight towards middle stump, he has conceded a rank low full toss which has been smashed out of the park.


         What about Mohammed Aamer? Just a kid of 19 years with exceptional talent. Bowled the hubris out of the Australian batsmen in a recently concluded test series. And now this! He was compared to a juvenile tiger who had just started tasting blood. Alas! tiger himself has choosen to be vegetarian instead!. Nothing just seems to be impossible in Pakistan. So dont be surprised to see a Times of India front page quoting, 'Mohammed Aamer was indoctrinated by the LeT regarding match fixing!'


          The brouhaha and imbroglio surrounding this scandal has really shaken up a lot of cricketing pundits. Many of them are going for zero tolerance towards these tainted players. But what I as a cricket fanatic (would soon be using a lighter term though, like say, follower?) am worried about is, what about the taint these tainted players have caused to cricket? A point has come now, going by the the present trend, it can be said that cricket has lost much of its sheen(Please, for God's sake, all you IPL monomaniacs, by the term cricket my only concern is for international matches) At such a juncture this fiasco involving match fixing couldnt have been better timed!.


          With so much cricket being played it occurs neither the players nor the 'used to be' fanatics like me are  interested in international matches anymore. Like say does it make a huge difference(emotionally, offcourse) if India loses a final against Sri Lanka? (Oh! how can I separate India's better half from India itself?! In the last one year these two have featured in five tournaments and 36 bilateral ties,tests excluded!wooff!.) What it takes is a Suraj Randiv's deliberate No-Ball hungama to wake me up from sleep and remind me 'Aha! there was a match today'!
 Clearly, our passion, fervour, zest, fetish,whatever you may call, for cricket, is waning. I may be engaged in a polemic here by those IPLmaniacs but that wont inhibit me from saying that IPL to a large extent is responsible for this waning of fetish.


           May be, and i reiterate, may be, the non inclusion of Pak players in this year's IPL is a reason behind this latest scandal too. I mean who would not envy the money being virtually foisted upon the IPL players?! May be the cupidity generated from this jealousy have defiled and vitiated the minds of young Mohammed Aamer. Though its just a conjecture, the possibility cannot be ruled out blatantly.

          
           Now, its upto Mr.Sharad Pawar and ICC to deal with these tainted players(dont worry Mr.Pawar, it would be a much easier task for you to dispense than the PDS imbroglio back home). However, whatever be the output of those dealings, one cannot renege the fact that the amount of disrepute this scandal has brought to cricket, it would be a herculean task to prevent cricket fanatics like me from turning into apathetic viewers of this beautiful game!

A Student's Dejection

Exams are supposed to act as a measuring cylinder for your preparation.A student toils hard to succeed in an exam.True, exam should be viewed as a stepping stone towards the ultimate apotheosis of knowledge.It should not disappoint or depress a student in case he or she fails to succeed.Stories of Thomas Edison failing a thousand times before inventing the bulb greatly corroborate the fact that unless one falters in a test, success would always remain a pie in the sky.
            I beg to differ with those having such hackneyed ideas about examination.That "Failure is the stepping stone to Success" -I scorn at this crude old aphorism.A student can consider an exam result to be his or her true benchmark only if he or she has complete faith in the evaluation process. Now that calls for a student reposing faith in our education system.I am sorry to say this,but students are gradually losing or perhaps a large section already have lost that faith.
           As a child I often heard elders say that here in bengal you could perhaps accidentally step upon any H.S answer sheet while walking through paddy fields!. Though the verity of this statement is questionable, the fact that our educational system comprising of so many regional and national boards, have become careless, is indeed unquestionable.The last decade of controversies surrounding various exam results only corroborate this.But what has shocked me and perhaps many others is that even institutes like IIT and AIIMS, have faltered. And faltered badly to say the least. In case you are oblivious of what i am saying, let me remind you that in the year 2006, 994 meritorious superior students were denied admission to the iit's and instead 994 inferior were illegally admitted owing to an error committed by IIT kharagpur in calculation of the cut-off/qualifying marks!. Such was the obstinacy of these institutes that instead of correcting the error,IIT's have been giving different versions of the cut-off division procedure.With the complete data being made available after a period of 2 years, it is established that Eklavya and 993 other eligible candidates, including many in very high AIRs, have been illegally excluded from the merit list of JEE 2006 due to wrong implementation of IIT’s own procedure to decide the subject cutoffs. IIT has not yet produced the Chemistry scripts in which it is alleged that the wards of few IIT professors have scored amazingly high marks by manual corrections in machine graded scripts. IIT has been deliberately delaying the case by over two years by giving factually wrong and misleading information, deliberately and knowingly, to Eklavya, High Court and Parliament, and thus, has been playing with the career and lives of young innocent aspirants. IIT is influencing every agency, by its vast resources, so that justice is delayed and ultimately denied to the victims of IIT’s high-handedness.
Just imagine,world class IIT needs court to settle disputes involving simple statistics. What a paradox.!

           Having a childhood dream to get into IIT, such unfortunate candidates have been silently observing now that their once-in-a-life-time-opportunity dream has been shattered not because of their own mistakes, but due to the large scale bungling by a few top executives of IIT Kharagpur. Memories of last year's failure of IIM's in proper implementation of PROMETRIC is still fresh, more in the minds of those who suffered due to it. Some will say there was a re-exam for particular candidates, but even a gullible would not believe that its possible to scrutinize each candidate's entire test time across hundreds of test centres and pick out the ones who actually suffered due to the fault, that too through a cctv. As a result there were many who had suffered yet were'nt fortunate enough to sit for a re-exam.
             I could just go on and on citing instances when our education system has been mired in controversies, but this article is about what it feels like when a student after working his ass off, experiences an unexpected result.It is about the mental trauma, and the despondency that unfortunately surrounds one from which one finds it as difficult to get out from as from quicksand-the more he reflects back trying to reason out why he failed the deeper the grave of trauma he digs for himself. The more one retrospects the more unanswerable questions start insidiously affecting the mind.And you become as confounded as your parents about yourself. The conscious mind then divides itself into two antonymous characters.One 'The Optimist Me', and the other 'The Pessimist Me.' And the fight begins....

             This is what a student in our country goes through when results dont match upto his or her expectation.Worse, as the saying goes you are only as good as your last result is.No matter how much you convince others that you deserve much more than what your institute suggests,people will always value you by your institute's name.Such is our educational edifice that some exams sometimes assume life changing proportions.With such limited opportunities these exams no longer remain a two or three hour test in black and white.It is high time Mr.Sibal and Co.realize what the students of our country are feeling and are going through.They have to realize our agonies.I hope that our system understand this and strives to make the evaluation process of examinations,be it any competitive exam or regional state exam,more transparent more convincing,and not just sit with a conniving eye....

'A Greenhorn's Dream'

Here I am penning down my first article for my blog. As I sit in front of my lappy, editing my blog, a novice at that, I dream of that rare possibility of my blog being visited by a socialite, or a mandarin some day.

          To start with, I must mention this that this blog is for you my friends.The reason behind the birth of this blog is motivation. Motivation to change. Change the outlook. Change the perception of some aphorisms. You will get to know gradually.


           But let me first introduce myself a bit. I am what you call a simple, fun loving boy who wishes to be hugely successful and happy in life.You may think ' huh!, what's new in that? every human being on this planet  has the same trite congenital wish'. All I have to say is, I am no different. To be different just for the sake of it wont serve any purpose, according to me. 


          The twenty years of my life so far, have taught me a lot and has immensely helped me in shaping up as a mature adult. Before I put my first step forward towards being a responsible citizen of my country  I stand alone and still. Reflecting back, my experiences so far, some good ,some not so good, I try to recollect them. People close to me say, dont dwell on the bad ones just ignore them. But how can I, when these are the ones which have taught me the most? 


          Experiences gained at different junctures of life are the ones that a person carries with him forever till eternity beckons him. Experiences gained by me at school, at home, with friends, and with relatives have helped in shaping me up to what I am today. 


          As one grows older his or her perception of the things happening around also grows. Gradually, he or she begins to voice his or her opinion. I too am passing through that phase. Facts which were just pedestrian G.K questions, social issues that were just a mere passing fad, until recently,  have suddenly assumed paramount importance and have begun incessantly occupying a large part of my thinking self. Probably this is what growing up is all about. Probably this is what being mature is all about. 


          Standing at this juncture of life, the subliminal truth is, I dream of becoming an author. My friends, dont get shocked to hear this. Though I am pursuing my  bachelors degree in electronics engineering yet I have come to realize that this is something which I was never passionate about. In our country a child rarely gets the opportunity to hone his or her own interests, own talents. But I also do know that to cherish my dream I must first excel in my present so called 'foisted' interest. 


          So, this blog is about my perception , my opinion, and my experiences of not the ostensible but the unfeigned truth.
           
           Do feel absolutely free to post your comments and suggestions, (even abuses). Without your support and ideas my perception would be incomplete.


                                                                                                                             
   Yours truly,
    
    Koustav