Gerald D'Cunha

    “When the spirit shines, even the foggy skies make pleasant light.” Abraham Isaac Kook   B oth, joy and despair, are contagious… They spread very fast. But, in my experience, the despair spreads faster than joy. That seems to be the reason why we have so much negativity – the dark sensationalism – on our television news. Even on social media, what mostly gets viral is the negative content… This human psychology is manipulated to the hilt by the brains behind the social media algorithm… Just watch one video or post, that’s enough to open the floodgates of similar posts and videos. The mind is simply manipulated by this dangerous engineering… One happy video will be followed by a hundred more, and one gloomy story will be followed by not hundred, but a thousand more! T wo nights ago, our son explained to my wife and me the meaning of these two terms (apparently popular in psychology): the ‘triggers’ and the ‘glimmers’. On finding us, that evening, repeated...

  “We are very good lawyers for our own mistakes, but very good judges for mistakes of others.” Anonymous     S ome days ago, while I was in my hometown, one of our relatives sent a personal WhatsApp message to me. The message contained only six simple words. Incidentally, when the message arrived, there were six of us in the room. When I first read the message, I derived a certain meaning out of it. I read it again and derived a different meaning… I read it a couple of times more, and, each time, the meaning I was deriving kept changing. I was curious, if others around me would get a similar experience… Every one’s interpretation was different, every time they read it! I thought in my mind, that the proverbial elephant had come to our room… and we were the six blind men trying to touch a part of the elephant and arrive at our own conclusions: Elephant was like a rope… Like a wall… Like a tree-trunk… Like a fan and so on. There had to be a wise man to tell the...

"Fear is the lengthened shadow of ignorance.” — Arnold Glasow S ome forty years ago, when I came to this one-of-a-kind city, Bombay – now Mumbai - my uncle and aunt (dad’s younger brother and his wife) were kind enough to accommodate me in their small house for seven long years. I lived with them as their own son. I learnt to be more responsible, disciplined, and, above all, more adjustable while I lived with them. I loved my aunt’s funny one-liners. One of them was my favorite: ‘ Su endare sukrunde’ … Translated from Kannada, it meant: Su means Sukurunde! Well, ‘sukrunde’ is the name of a local (Mangalorean) sweet-laddo. So, just a ‘su’ is enough for a gossip-monger or a rumour-monger to make a nice ‘sukrunde’… It was her pet one-liner, which she used every time she would hear someone around her spinning baseless stories – gossip and rumour (Today’s ‘fake news’, which, in our local Tulu, we called ‘ Ge Suddhi’ ) - my aunt had her one...

“How can people trust the harvest unless they see it sown?” -       Lifehack s.io I had left home this morning, as usual at 7.30. I was carrying my office bag and the breakfast and lunch packed and given by my wife. I got inside a waiting auto. The young auto driver was a new face to me. When he stopped the auto near my classes, I suddenly realized that I had not carried any money with me… For a moment, my face fell, and I meekly whispered to the young auto driver that I had not carried any money with me… For a while, he became silent. As my class was to start at 8, students had not come yet… I thought of ringing a neighbor’s door-bell… but, hesitated a bit… It was too early to disturb them, I thought… By then, the auto driver said, “Sir, koi baat nahi; hota hai kabhi kabhi.” I was feeling bad… “Aap ka pehla baada hai; accha nahin lagta hai.” “Koi baat nahin Sir ,” he calmed me down, “Aur kabhi loonga.” But, I wasn’t at ...

L ong before I started blogging, I had been writing down my daily Notes in dairies… I used to write them down along with the date and I continued to do it for years and years. So, I have them written down in scores of dairies! And, what did I write in them? That’s interesting! My problems, my anxieties, my anger, my jealousy, my fears, my longings and frustrations, my hopes and despair, my resolves and my cowardice… Well, I learnt early not to disown anything in life… If they were my feelings, then, I had to capture them as they were – and as much as possible to be honest about them… That experience had been very therapeutic, very healing and empowering… Incidentally, whenever someone read them, they would exclaim, “So beautiful… So reassuring!” Blogging happened some ten years ago… and, what I did in my dairies; I did, now, on my PC… But, Notes remained Notes… My feelings remained my feelings… My objective remained the same old one: to help me heal myself! ...

“Everything in this world is created twice; Once, in human mind, and, once, outside.” Two days ago, I was talking to some people. One of them had just walked into his dream house. “I have been dreaming about it ever since I was a young boy,” this man shared, “I don’t remember a single day, during these fifteen years, when I haven’t dreamt about it.” “That is what the Law of Attraction all about,” another person said, “What we deeply like, admire and desire, we attract… Our in-most becomes our out-most.” I have always loved this famous line from Emerson, “Our in-most becomes our out-most.” So, I added an often-heard quote which was close to that: “Everything in this world is created twice; Once, in human mind, and, once, outside.” Sometimes, even the too-familiar words hit us with fresh meaning. Our discussion assumed a very profound dimension, there on. Our friend was a young boy when he had first seen the picture of his dre...