SOUND DETECTIVES

Sensory awareness plays a crucial role in Out Bound Training. One such activity is called Sound Detectives. Participants are asked to close their eyes and listen. They are told to detect the various sounds that they can hear… the nearest one… the farthest one… the loudest… the softest… eventually they open their eyes and share their experience.

The Sound Detectives activity is also done at Hall based Training, but the detectable sounds and their distance from the listener gets limited. The activity is best done in the wild or areas away from man-made-machine sounds. Participants are amazed to discover the range of sounds that they can detect… right from those of small insects to sounds of trucks that ply in the distant.

This experience holds valuable lessons of how to be better at the skill of listening. It shows that the onus of listening is primarily on the listener. To be better at listening we must be able to shut off all distractions and focus on our sense of hearing. Our ability to hear reaches and stretches far beyond our own expectations… if we would only listen!

Learn to listen and listen to learn – is a motto profound

Let’s BE BETTER at detecting the surrounding sound!

- Pravin K. Sabnis

CAREER

Results of the HSSC Board and Entrance Examinations have been declared. Those, whose results are below expectations, seem desperate and lost. And ones who have done well, also appear tense and nervous. Most students and parents are careering towards the race track of career choices. Interestingly, the term ‘career’ has its roots in the Latin word – ‘carrera’ which literally means race.

The pressure is increasing on our youth to make career choices without looking at dreams, aspirations and aptitude. Unlike earlier, when career options were limited, today a plethora of potential professions are available to plan a career. Yet, young students are being conditioned to attach value to few careers. Worse, they are being discouraged from moving towards their childhood dreams.

It is also pertinent to note that very few have the personal courage or the support to change tracks midway in their academic education. Too much pressure is generated by narrowing on select few career options. And most such career choices are at the cost of the real career – our life! It is important to not distance ourselves from real living. Career is, after all, the progress of the course of life. And living is beyond so-called status and handsome remunerations.

Surely, it would be better to make the choice of attaching value and purpose to our own living. We need to examine whether our careers will permit us to have the time for the real needs of our life – family, community, the environment… As for the dilemma of taking up a remunerative career, it is prudent to go by the only-two-choices philosophy - ‘choose the career you love or love the career you choose’.

Don’t get careered by the confusing choice strife…
Let’s BE BETTER at choosing the real career of ‘life’!

- Pravin K. Sabnis

Sandwich generation– monday muse (17 May’10)

SANDWICH GENERATION

Upon completing his training in restoration and conservation, Victor Hugo Gomes returned to Goa to take charge as curator of the Musuem of Christian Art at the Seminary of Rachol. His research made him realise that years of accumulated wisdom in agrarian practices, traditional implements, tools, arts, crafts and the valuable artefacts in and around the state, was being neglected or left to decay.

Victor went on to embark on an arduous and remarkable journey of visiting and collecting items of Goa’s rich cultural heritage. His ethnographical Goa Chitra museum is not just a fantastic collection of ancient artefacts. Adjacent to the museum is a 3-acre field that has been created using traditional organic farming methods and allows visitors to actually use some of the implements on display within.

It all began for Victor with an awareness of being part of a sandwich generation. A sandwich generation is the crucial link between major transitions in society. It stands on the threshold of time, as an increasing dependence on technology and mass manufactured products push out time-honoured tools and practices. The real loss, as Victor says, is about losing evidence of the sustainable lifestyles of our forefathers.

Victor and his wife Aldina, inspire us to be better at carrying on the legacy of long-established wisdom and practices. It is up to us in the sandwich generation to ensure that the collective wisdom of sustainable living, acquired over the ages, is not lost to the future generations due to wrong choices in our lifestyles. If cannot add, may we at least maintain the worthy legacy of forefathers and pass it on to the next generation.

It will BE BETTER if the sandwich generation…
Will make the connect with sustainable action!

- Pravin K. Sabnis
Check out http://www.goachitra.com

CURTAIN CALL

In stage shows, at the end of a performance when the performers return to be recognized by the audience for what is called a curtain call. One by one, actors, dancers, musicians and backstage artists assemble on stage to receive their rightful applause from an appreciative audience. However, the tradition is not restricted only to stage performances. In sports contests, sportspersons who perform well return to the field of play after a big play or at the conclusion of the game for recognition. In movies, the curtain call showcases the film's end credits through clips, stills, or outtakes of the various players.

The concept of a curtain call came to mind after hearing of the shocking news came of a friend who died last weekend. Some spoke, some wrote about the tragedy of a youth dying young; about his achievements and the legacy of a life cut short. But sadly death permits no curtain call. The one who is dead cannot bask in the warm appreciation or even affectionate criticism by the ones who miss him.

Hence it is important that we give performers the benefit of appreciation through a curtain call, while they are alive. What we speak or write in their memory has meaning only for the family, friends and community and others, not for the one who is dead! Hence it is necessary that appreciation of a worthy effort or achievement is immediate.

However curtain calls are not about lavish felicitations or eloquent tributes or awards. As any stage performer would tell you, curtain calls are about unadulterated appreciation. Nothing more. Nothing less. Hence it would be better if the deserving get called for the curtain call as often as they perform!

May the curtain call happen every time it is deserved…
Let’s BE BETTER at appreciating before life is severed!

- Pravin K. Sabnis

JUST ASK!

A Zen tale tells of three monks who practised meditation together, sitting by the side of a lake. One day, one monk opened his eyes and stood up to say, ‘I forgot my mat.’ Instead of walking around the lake to their hut, he stepped onto the water and serenely walked across the lake! Upon his return, the second monk declared, ‘I forgot to put my clothes to dry.’ He too walked across the water and returned the same way.

Now the third monk decided to test of his own abilities. He rose to declare, ‘your learning cannot be greater than mine… I too can match any feat you two can perform!’ he rushed to the water's edge to walk across it. He promptly fell into the deep water. Wet but undeterred, he climbed out of the water and tried again, only to sink into the water. The other two monks watched as this went on for some time.

After a while, the second monk turned to the first and said, "Do you think we should tell him where the stones are?"

Just because something appears easy for others; it may not be so for us. Disproportionate pride in our perceived abilities arises from a snooty attitude that makes us presume that we can easily do what others do effortlessly. In the quest to be better; we belittle the method and attach undue and bloated importance to our own capabilities.

So many things can be emulated successfully, only if we were willing to be humble learners! Pedro says, ‘avoid assumptions; to learn, simply ask’. After all, that’s how we learnt to do so many things in our childhood. Let’s shun childish arrogance and embrace childlike humility and eagerness to ask and learn…

May learning by humble asking never make us queasy…
sure, we can BE BETTER at doing what others find easy!

- Pravin K. Sabnis