What is Happiness

Happiness….What is Happiness? It could carry different meanings for different persons. For one person, achieving something could bring happiness. For another person it could be outperforming peers, because they always want to compare themselves with others. Even if they achieve goals their achievement feels hollow until they outclass their peers. Someone could feel happy when others recognize them, hear them, or admire them.

Happiness is something that everyone wants to have. It is hard to define happiness but most people believe that they know whether they are happy or not. Happiness is a state of mind and it is being satisfied with what you have. It does not at all matter how much you have. One may have a lot of wealth and resources and still might be unhappy; on the other hand a person with meagre resources might be very happy. Most of us feel that they don’t have enough; but how much is enough. For most of us, enough is having a little more than what we have.
When we talk in terms of desires, the more desire a person has the more restless and unhappy he/she is. Happiness means complete lack of restlessness. Real Happiness lies in absolute absence of desires. As a human being evolves, the meaning of happiness also changes. Highest level of happiness comes when a person starts living for others too. Happiness is lasting if it comes from within and not through events/things happening outside.
Aristotle believed that true happiness was to be found in the expression of virtue- i.e. in doing that which was worth doing. Fromm described true happiness as deriving, not from momentary pleasure but from human growth. He attached greater value to pursuits that were of importance to humanity as a whole, rather than the individual’s own pleasure alone. This is a more holistic view, seeing the individual as part of a wider organism and defining happiness as that point at which your own fulfilment coincides with that of wider society. This is when you live in accordance with your “daimon” i.e. “true self”.

Social Innovation Project as a part of SOIL Curriculum

24th August 2011

This was our fourth visit to Rewasan School with a feeling in the heart that we could do something better in this visit. After our last visit we were sure that students studying in this school are very bright and will have a bright future if they are given proper attention and facilities.
Our task to make them understand the importance of education, good health, proper hygiene, discipline had already started from the third visit. During our last visit, we saw very few students in school uniform and to our surprise; there were lot more students wearing school uniform this time. On the contrary, condition of the school ground deteriorated this time because of rain a day before. It was full of water and there was very little dry space left on the ground to walk. So, this time we restricted our activities to class room only as opposed to our earlier plan of having few activities on the ground.




We segregated ourselves in to three groups of two persons each as we did on our last visit. Our main focus was to instil below mentioned attributes to them:
1. Discipline
2. Acquaintance with state names
3. Increase their confidence

We performed following activities in a playful way with students to initiate the process of learning above mentioned qualities:
A. One group was with 6th and 7th standard students asking them about state names in our country that they were taught last week and we were giving gifts to those who were able to tell at least 10 names. We were astonished to see that last week there were no students even with a single name and this week there were 5 students who were able to say 10 names correctly.



B. One group was with class 8th students, making the students aware about their future learning and why they should study further and how are they different from primary school students. Moreover, they were asked to sing songs and there was only one girl who stood up for this without any incentive offered. Then they were offered prizes which attracted them to get going with this activity.
C. Other group was with class 3rd students asking them to write about themselves and their families. Out of 30 students, there were only 6 students who were able to write something and there were 3 who wrote somewhat correct. Then they were asked to speak in front of everyone, initially they were reluctant but we were able to convince them to speak up. There was a loud noise in class and then we identified two students and asked them to make queue of students according to their heights so that we could start with national anthem. Then we sang national anthem together that filled in energy amongst the students and we could feel that.

The best thing about the overall exercise this time was that we were able to connect to the students and they were expecting us next time.

Decline of Traditional Model of Talent Management

With factors like the rise of outsourcing and internet job searches, the world is a different place than it was in the 1950s. The talent management models of that era no longer work, and so employers have moved from a model of planning to a model of shopping for talent. The fundamental challenge employers face in the modern competitive business environment is managing uncertainty.
Earlier the companies that used to give internal management training to their employees helping them to move corporate ladder faster started hiring executives from outside the company to obtain new competencies to respond to new markets.
Talent Management arrangements ran into trouble because of the long lead time inherent in a system of internal development. The number of managers who were ready for director positions, for example, was set in motion by hiring and development decisions made ten years or more before, based on forecasts of much higher demand. The organizations were not in a position to think about the future of these employees. The immediate concern was not the cost of excess employees but the consequences for their motivation when there were not enough promotion opportunities.
There are various reasons that are responsible for this failure:
a. The failure of Forecasting
b. Changes in the nature of competition
c. Changes in the Boundaries of the firm
d. The rise in outsourcing
Greater use of outside hiring was both a cause and a consequence of the decline of the traditional model of talent management. Outside hiring reduced the need for internal development and caused retention problems that made it too expensive to justify internal development. Once the internal development were gone, companies had no choice except to hire from the outside.

The human mind and soul

Mind Body Soul is a philosophy which envelopes the infinite knowledge available in the universe.
"What is 'mind'? What is 'soul'? Is there a greater 'mind' out there, and where is reincarnation in all this?"
The soul is the place where we feel pleasure. The mind is the place where we calculate how to receive the pleasure.
I generally think of myself as an embodied mind, but then when I further reflect, that is a thought, and I can think of 'the' self as being that thought or series of thoughts that do the reflecting - thus the self is a part of mind. Generally, as far as I can see the soul used to function as a synonym for mind in the sense that it was the 'immaterial' part or aspect of a person. Once the brain was identified as the 'seat' of the mind, the soul came to have a religious, third element sort of connotation.

The soul tells the mind what the pleasure should be, and the mind then has to work, like a calculator, on how that desire should be fulfilled.
If you take the time to analyze your desires, you'll discover that they are aimed at transient things - things which will eventually die away. Perhaps a moment enters here and there where you contemplate the eternal, but this moment is always followed by drives for transient things.
There is no eternal soul until we attain one in this lifetime, through working on our desire until we really want an eternal soul. Then, this desire expands our mind: it starts calculating how to fulfill this desire with eternal life.

Vivek Kumar

The human mind----

It is said that the average human being has over 12,000 different thoughts each day. The human mind can be split into two quite different parts, the conscious and the subconscious.

The Conscious Mind
The conscious mind only represents a mere 12% of the total mind's capacity, and can only be concerned with, or hold one single thought at a time. It decides what action we will take, often based upon past subconscious experiences, and constantly re-assesses a situation to ensure that the correct action has been taken. The conscious mind has no memory capacity, and therefore only deals with the 'here and now' situation.

The Subconscious Mind

The subconscious mind takes up the remaining 88% of our brain's capacity, and could be compared to a massive computer system that stores all of the information regarding our location, situation, feelings etc.The subconscious mind has a perfect memory. When a person is writing a word on a piece of paper, the subconscious mind will attempt to locate the correct spelling and then pass that information to the conscious mind so that it can instruct the muscles in the hand to act accordingly. Whilst in a trance state, the subconscious mind will accept any suggestion it receives without question. It must be remembered however that if a suggestion is not conducive with the moral code of the subconscious, or if it is perceived as a threat, then there is a likelihood that the conscious mind will reawaken to analyse the situation accordingly.

Vivek Kumar