Wednesday, 3 August 2011

Have You Made Your Bucket List Yet?

What makes the middle-aged teacher pant his way to the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro, 61 year old Sheila suddenly go Bungee jumping and the portly granddad practise fencing? They are all crossing out items off their bucket list.

A bucket list – What on earth is that? Bucket list comes from the English expression kick the bucket, meaning to die. A bucket list is simply a list of all you want to see, do and experience before you die.


Different Kinds of Bucket Lists

As there are many kinds of people on the planet, there will of course be many kinds of bucket lists. Would it be natural to assume that action oriented people would like to go for adrenaline rushes like bungee jumping or climb Kilimanjaro while travel oriented people would have visiting places like Lhasa, Tibet or Lake Titicaca, Bolivia on top of their list?

No, not necessarily. A bucket list is not a continuation of activities a person habitually pursues. When one starts seriously thinking about a bucket list, it is an attempt to fathom unexpressed desires, hopes and dreams. A bucket list helps us do what we have always secretly wanted but never dared to.


The different kinds of bucket lists are:


1. Going somewhere:


  • Going places list – Lake Titicaca, Machu Pichu or Barcelona
  • Visiting places at certain times – Visiting Paris to experience the blue moment of a late summer evening, attending Hanami or cherry blossom viewing in Japan in May
  • Visiting places or venues for a sole purpose – Visiting Louvre to stand before the Oedipus and the Sphinx by Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique, being in Valencian town of Buñol to throw tomatoes at other people.



2. Learning something new:
  • Learning new skills – Learn a new language like Portuguese or Swahili or join an evening class to learn digital photography.
  • Change your attitude – Start meditating or do Tai-chi daily or pay attention to how your words or actions affects other people’s moods

3. Doing something:
  • Doing something you’ve never done – Start making new friends or go and talk with three new strangers every day, or riding a bicycle rather than drive


  • Finish something left undone – Take that manuscript out of the drawer and finish your first novel or start writing your life story or forgive your ex.

Can a Bucket list Grow?

Once you have created a bucket list and start checking items off one by one, a strange thing can happen to you – you meet similar people with their own bucket lists and you may be tempted to add items to your list or revise the list. This is perfectly natural.

There are Internet sites such as http://bucketlist.org where you can register, make your list, read other people’s lists and keep track of how you are completing the goals on your list. Copycats are copycats. Don’t give in to the temptation to live other people’s dreams. Remember, your bucket list is only about your unfulfilled hopes, desires and dreams.


What to put on your Bucket List?

This is entirely up to you. The most important thing is that the idea should have some meaning for you and come from within. You can ask some questions to help you test the ideas.
  • Where did I originally get the idea for this?
  • Where can I get more information about this?
  • Who will help me realise this dream?
  • How can I get in touch with a person who has really done this before?

Notice, there is no question ”Can I do it?” If you are wondering why not, think why haven’t you done any of the things on your list till date. Because you never could imagine yourself doing it. We think of ourselves as too old or too young, too poor or too plump to do certain things. There are so many filters and brakes on your mind, which clamp down the moment you think of doing something out of the ordinary. Remember the Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman movie The Bucket List
We can learn a lot from a young person’s bucket list. Alice, a very brave15-year old girl with terminal Hodgkin’s Lymphoma has her online bucket list here. 

An older person’s bucket list can also teach us many things about living. 
  • An 82-year-old former Nepalese minister tried to climb Mount Everest (and died) - Embrace death with a smile when it comes.
  • And an intrepid 98 years old doing her Master’s degree - It's never too late for great achievements.
  • Here is an 80-year-old celebrating 50 years of marriage by skydiving off a plane - Live in style and not full of regrets.

Here’s a funny example of a bucket list. 


But you need not copy anyone else's bucket list or ideas. The most important thing is that whatever you put on that list has meaning for you. 

For as long as I could remember, item number one on my list had been to climb Mount Kilimanjaro. Now that I have done it (wasn’t easy but worth every gasp and drop of perspiration!), my list number one becomes ”Learn to limit in myself fear and hate,  the most destructive of all human emotions.



There is a saying among the Igbo people in Nigeria: 
Onye ji onye n’ani ji onwe ya: “He who will hold another person down in the mud must remain in the mud to keep him down.”
So, get out of the mud, stop limiting others and yourself. Start now! 


Thursday, 9 June 2011

The History of Human Resource Management (HRM)

HRM, especially Strategic HRM or SHRM is talked about everywhere nowadays. Is HRM a contemporary invention full of fads? Is HRM or Human Resource Management a product of modern organizations or does it have ancient roots? 


Photo source:
We can get a better understanding of the history of HRM by splitting the history question it into three sub-questions. 
  1. How long has the term HRM (Human Resource Management) been used?
  2. How long have functions typically covered by HRM nowadays been studied and managed?
  3. How long has there been a dedicated unit, department or system taking care of these functions?
Photo Source:

Definition of Human Resource Management - HRM


Typically Human Resource Management is the organizational function that deals with diverse issues related to employee compensation and benefits, hiring, employee retention, performance management, organization development, safety/security, wellness, employee motivation, communication, administration, development and training (though some of these may be handled by HRD (Human Resource Development) functions also.


A formal concise definition of HRM (Mathis, Jackson 2007) is 
"The design of formal systems in an organization to ensure the effective and efficient use of human talent to accomplish the organizational goals."
Another way to define would be that HRM is concerned with the policies, practices and systems that influence employees’ workplace behaviour, attitudes and performance. HRM is a process (or a grouping of processes) of managing human talents/skills to achieve the organisation’s objectives. The core aim of all management, to increase predictability and achieve better control of events is central to HRM.
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Examples of processes typically handled by HRM:
  • Employee compensation and benefits
  • Industrial relations – The relationship between employees and management directly or indirectly, through collective bargaining, affected by union-employer relationship
  • Performance and appraisal
  • Safety, security and occupational health management
  • Staffing – Job analysis, recruitment, selection and retention
Download Human Resource terminology.














How long has the term HRM been used?

The term HRM is not that old actually.
  • The term HRM evolved in USA out of the earlier Personnel Management or PM in the early 1960s.
  • Merriam-Webster dictionary claims that the first recorded use of the term Human Resource is from 1961. 
  • By the mid 1980s, the term HRM or Human Resource Management started appearing and it quickly replaced Personnel Management or Personnel Administration.

How long have functions typically covered by HRM today have been studied and managed?

This is very interesting and requires some myth busting. Most of the functions typically covered by HRM today, have a much longer history than is widely believed. The claim that Performance Management or PM in organisations was created, first in the USA, to deal with the paperwork needed to hire employees and handle the payroll is not entirely true.

Code of Hammurabi

Though not using modern terms, ancient texts have many recorded instances of current HRM functions.
  • The ancient Code of Hammurabi from Babylon in 1750 BC sets minimum wages, obligations for expert craftsmen to transfer their skills to apprentices, quality standards for builders, and healthcare obligations for owners of slaves.
  • Roman philosopher Pliny the Elder in the first century AD, warned about the health hazards of employees handling zinc and sulphur. He prescribed the use of protective masks made from animal bladder. 
  • In 1556, the German scientist Georgious Agricola in his De Re Metallica describes occupational hazards of employees and suggests methods for improving occupational health.
  • In 1700 Bernardo Ramazzini, known as the "father of industrial medicine," published in Italy the first comprehensive book on industrial medicine, De Morbis Artificum Diatriba (The Diseases of Workmen). 
  • In 1850 Abraham Lincoln viewed all American workers as potential entrepreneurs.
  • The modern usage dates from after WWII, when Personnel Management practitioners in the USA wanted to differentiate PM from other managerial functions.
Personnel Administration (PA) or Personnel Management (PM) evolved into HRM. There are some conceptual differences.
Main Differences Between Personnel Management and Human Resource Management
  • The main difference is that PM was reactive, focussed on the immediate and short-term needs of the labour force of an organisation while HRM expanded into a proactive strategy of aligning the needs of the workforce to the strategic objectives of the organisation
  • PM was focussed on traditional models of industrial relations e.g. union- based collective bargaining, HRM has moved towards a more devolved and participative model
  • HRM is more involved (often in an advisory capacity) in pay policy and job-design than PM ever was
  • HRM has more scope in influencing the nature of the work contract than PM ever had



How long has there been a dedicated unit, department or system taking care of HRM functions?


In the modern context, we know precisely when it all began.
  • The first recorded modern case of dedicating a separate unit or department for HRM is from 1901 in USA. The National Cash Register Co. faced a disruptive strike yet won the battle with the unions. Learning from this, the president of the company, John H. Patterson, organized a personnel department dedicated to improving worker relations by properly handling employee grievances, discharges, safety and other employee issues.
  • Though they were not called such, people dedicated to HRM functions started appearing in the USA in the 1920s when mass production started spreading. Personnel administrators were often called welfare secretaries in the 1920s. Much of the modern theoretical work on HRM began around this period. The studies conducted by George Elton Mayo (1880-1949), especially the Hawthorne Studies is credited as the foundation of the Human Relations Movement in management.
  • The Wagner Act of 1935 in USA (also called the National Labor Relations Act) increased the role of personnel managers in addition to strengthening the position of labour unions.
  • Only after WWII can we find specially designated units taking care of typical HRM functions. In many Western countries, collective bargaining defined industrial relations and HR gained in importance.
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During WWI, more and more women entered the job market in the industrialised world to fill the gaps left by men gone to the front. This helped create a group of skilled white-collar people who were able to negotiate with labour unions as well as with new employees.

The 1920s saw "labour manager" and "employer manager" job titles in the larger engineering industries. After the great depression, larger corporations in the 1930s, began realising the increased need and value in having specialised staff for recruiting, retaining and motivating employees to perform better. The war effort in WWII, revealed that employment management and functions previously classified as welfare were linked together.


From the 1960s, the rise of Japan as a commercial power also required efficient HR systems being adopted by the Japanese corporations.



Photo source:

The spread of multinationals and large corporations created a highly skilled professional group of human resource personnel. Globally, the profile of HRM started attracting mention in the 1970s and started becoming widely recognised by the 1980s. 

Universities and Business Schools started teaching different aspects of HRM in the 1990s. Cornell University's School of Industrial and Labor Relations  was the first business school in the world for college-level study in HRM.


In the first decade of 2000, there was a strong movement to see HR as a strategic partner to business rather than as a support function system and this continues.


Challenges Faced by Contemporary HR

The most recent areas where HR faces critical challenges are:

  • managing employee performance and turnover
  • high attrition of strategic talent
  • innovative training, skills deployment and retention methods
  • ways to make workforce more responsive to turbulent business markets
  • getting high employee performance through right packaging of benefits and compensation in novel ways
  • corporate social responsibility 
  • sustainable growth both as individuals and as a business
  • business innovation
  • novel methods of engaging employees as well as stakeholders
  • taking care of environmental concerns
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Needless to mention that all this should come along with increased performance and with minimal investment in turbulent markets, which abhors making any long term commitments.


Download: 


Some excellent reference material about the history of human resource management and development:
  • BEAGRIE, S. (2004) Article - Events that changed human resources. Personnel Today. 2 November. pp22-24, 26.  
  • From personnel management to human resource management: How did this field of work develop? In: TYSON, S. (2006) Essentials of human resource management. 5th ed. Oxford: Butterworth Heinemann.
  • MACKAY, L. and TORRINGTON, D. (1986) The changing nature of personnel managementLondon: Institute of Personnel Management.
  • Mathis, Robert L. and Jackson, John H.  Changing Nature of Human Resource Management (2007) 12th edition, South-Western, Division of Thomson Learning
  • MCGIVERING, I. (1970) The development of personnel management. In: TILLETT, A. et al. (eds).Management thinkers. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
  • NIVEN, M.M. (1967) Personnel management: 1913-1963. London: Institute of Personnel Management.





Saturday, 14 May 2011

How Will Posterity Treat Osama Bin Laden?


For almost a decade he was the top of the FBI's Ten Most Wanted Fugitives List and the media’s pet bogeyman in the West. 

His death from ”Ballistic Trauma” (being shot in plain English) became a global media event instantly. Planes flying into the twin towers in Manhattan - this iconic image has spread globally and is probably forever associated with Osama Bin Laden. 

What kind of role would posterity give him?



How Osama Bin Laden Became the Big Baddie

Daddy bin Laden was a collossal achiever by any measure. Osama bin Laden’s father, was in illiterate poor lad from a poor area called hadramaut or ”death is among us” in Yemen. This poor lad became the personification of the American dream. He reaches Jeddah, begins as a porter and starts his own construction business to eventually become the favourite royal architect and the richest non-royal in the country. Religious and very loyal to his regal patrons (In 1964 he saved the broke royal house by lending them money when Prince Feisal deposed King Saud), he gave a personal touch to recycling. He divorced almost all of his 22 wives, never keeping more than four at a time.


Daddy bin Laden (on the right) with King Fahd of Saudi Arabia in mid 1990s

He divorced his tenth wife, Osama’s mother, soon after the kid was born. Then daddy (with 54 children) recommends his mother to an associate, who marries her and they have four children. So Osama grows up in a household with three half-brothers and one half-sister. Though attending university, he never got a degree or acquired a profession. Being born very wealthy in Saudi Arabia, one doesn’t even have to think of such banalities as earning one’s living by working.


Photo source: Osama in Oxford, UK on a visit with family in 1971. (second from right)

At 17 Osama or Usama marries his first cousin, a Syrian woman, the first of his six wives, two of whom he would later divorce. He would father 20-26 children with his wives. Here is a link to his family tree.


Photo source: 17 year old Osama Bin Laden with family in Falun, Sweden (second from right)

Osama is seen as handsome, has polite and refined manners, loads of money and is considered gifted. Here begins the central problem of all gifted persons – what do with this gift? He has no role model except daddy, against whom he has to rebel. He can’t direct the fire, the daemon in himself to a cause. He doesn’t have the Moses-like quality of transforming an entire civilization like Kemal Ataturk. He is not willing to personally suffer the hardship of long marches like Mao Tse Tung as he travels always with his retinue of wives and children. 

Osama’s charisma is compelling but he definitely wasn’t an intellectual speaking many languages after personally experiencing the injustices of foreign powers like the swashbuckling Che Guevara in his travels. He seems to lack the spiritual depth of T E Lawrence fighting for the Arab cause. Compared to Muhammad Ahmad (1844-1885), the Mahdi or the Bin Laden of the British Empire, Osma also did not personally lead successful battles. 


Photo Source: Muhammad Ahmad, The Mahdi

So the directionless 19-year-old lad arrives in Afghanistan to join the defensive jihad of the Palestinian Abdullah Yusuf Azzam. The Mujahideen, set up and funded by the USA welcomed him, his sincere and principled devotion and his money. After Soviet Union withdraws in ignominy from Afghanistan, Osama returns to Saudi Arabia a hero. Disappointment creeps in when it dawns upon him that the regime in his own country doesn’t want him. He turns against them. Expelled to Sudan, he becomes the ultimate outsider with no country, no tribe no social class or group to call his own and fight for. He finds his home in an idea of Jihad where innocents can also be slaughtered. 

Though the outsider’s angst and miseries are a prophet’s teething troubles, few become prophets. A person destined to be a prophet, rejects the bustle of society, ventures alone into the desert and descends into himself.  The loneliness may not bring him proximity of his chosen vision of divinity, but he hears in the solitude something more than the echo of the impulse that brought him there.

Osama's Main Target Becomes America

Osama chooses to appear as a prophet, without the schooling of the lonely dark night of the soul. 

Photo source:

He takes over from Ayatolla Khomeini to rant against the moral corruption of America and their allies. His enemies want him to assume that role more than anyone else as it gives them a justification for wars and acts of retaliations. Ironically he becomes more of their creation than his own. Rather than growing to take in life as it is and could be, he becomes a pipe through which events unfold, often in spite of him. His existence and his death ultimately serve them more that his followers.

The war he joins is one of preaching and not of fighting because in preaching he finds his cause. Egoistically he aligns himself to the locus of the moving finger of history, where all great empires crumble under their own megalomania, mostly due to economic, social and moral corruption. This was the undoing of the Soviet Union, with the help of USA, and now it was to be America’s turn.

He would have liked to give America a chance to redeem itself by reconnecting its activities with the lofty idea that is America, the noble vision of the founding fathers. The rulers of America couldn’t care less, he felt, eerily like the unabomber Ted Kaczynski, PhD. This frustration echoes in Osama's statement. 
We were fighting against the communists since 1979, and now the United States was pressuring us to cooperate with those very same communists. The United States has no principles. To achieve its own interest, it forgets every principle.” 
When a person resorts to violence or terrorism against a society, what else does the system do but return the favour! An individual can turn the other cheek, but can a state law enforcement system do so?


American propaganda leaflet in Afghanistan. Bin Laden second from left (note the raised finger).

Towers, Airplanes and America as Important Symbols for Osama’s Life


As a poor boy, Osama’s father had dreamt of building towers and that is how he became rich. He was the first private citizen in Saudi Arabia to own an airplane and was killed in an air crash in Saudi Arabia in 1967, due to the American pilot’s landing error. His eldest half-brother Salem (the next head of the family and who had a British wife) accidentally flew his plane into power lines in San Antonio, Texas and was killed. The iconic image of the planes crashing into the twin towers in New York in 9/11 sealed his fame as the world’s most known baddie.

What do the Jokes About Osama’s Death Reveal?

Most of the American jokes about Osama’s death continue the work of the seals, taking pot-shots at the favourite bogeyman to score domestic political political.
  • "The Republicans are so happy about bin Laden they've granted President Obama full citizenship." —David Letterman
  • "Osama Bin Laden's supporters want to rename the Arabian Sea where his body was dumped Martyr Sea. Really? Martyr Sea? Hiding in your bedroom for six years? How about Chicken of the Sea?" –Jay Leno
  • Breaking News: Donald Trump is now on a quest to see his death certificate...
  • Osama's last words: "Man, I just got my iphone 4, too! How did they find me?"

Here's a pre-Ballistic-trauma joke about Osama
  • Osama Bin Laden seeks out a fortune-teller, since he knows there is a price on his head. The fortune-teller says, "You will die on a major US holiday." 
  • Bin Laden says, "Which one?" 
  • She replies, "Doesn't matter! Whatever day you die, it's gonna be a major US holiday."

The best Osama death joke is from DanaArikane who wrote: "They should have captured Bin Laden alive and made him continually go through airport security for the rest of his life." This would vibe with everyone who goes through airport security.

Deathers probably love this one.
  • "What? Not only did we kill Bin Laden, we killed him in Abottabad! Abottabad sounds like name most New Yorkers would have invented for the fictional place they would have loved to kill Bin Laden." –Jon Stewart

Conspiracy theorists would love this one:
  • Obama overheard during Bin Laden raid: "Are we shooting this in the same studio where we faked the moon landing?"
  • There is a new Cocktail called Osama. 2 Shots and a splash of water!
This one is for people who hate President Obama:
  • Obama - The first black guy that has ever had to convince the world he did do the killing.

In Pakistan and the sub-continent, the Pakistani army are the butt of local jokes.
  • "No honking: the army is asleep" and another read as: "Public Service Message from the Army: Stay alert. Don't rely on us."
  •  
  • "Pakistan radar system for sale: $99.99, buy one, get one free (Can't detect US helicopters but can receive Star Plus.)"

Pakistani blogger Syed Ali Abbas Zaidi posted some of the best bin Laden jokes on his blog: 
  • "It has been recently revealed that Osama bin Laden was a visiting faculty at Pakistan Military Academy, where he was teaching Global Terrorism 101"
  • "Osama Bin Laden's Facebook status has not changed from RIP. It was Resting In Pakistan before".

Not Jokes but Prayers for Osama bin Laden divides Muslims

Though most Muslims did not like Osama or his negative message of hate and violence, some still continue to revere him.

In Kolkata, India, the Shahi Imam of Tipu Sultan mosque, Maulana Nurur Rehman Barkati, held special Friday prayer for the "peace of the soul" of bin Laden.
In Chennai, the imam of a major mosque on Anna Salai Road announced prayers for bin Laden, and many people responded by praying.
The Al-Qaeda has vowed to avenge the killing and so the senseless killing of mostly innocents goes on and on.

Osama as The Frankenstein of the Media Age

When 9/11 happens, Osama denies twice and then almost reluctantly claims responsibility. Later he begins bragging about planning them. He continues his preaching and his stature grows as the media credit him with all kinds of evil acts and machinations. He became the justification for two ongoing wars, though the UK government officially admits that the case against him would not be a prosecutable case in a court of law. 

Interestingly, Osama has played a significant role in US presidential elections. He dutifully turned up when with some kind of diatribe and venomous preaching or evil action whenever there was a need to swing public opinion. So, now he can be killed, sorry, subjected to ballistic trauma, but he can’t be debogyfied. So the pathetic aging man (probably only a citizen of Bosnia at that time) sitting in his luxury home next to Pakistan’s West Point military academy and watching videotapes of himself reading hate messages will continue being the worst of the baddies.


Would historians a century from now be tempted to say that Osama was successful in bringing down not one but two superpowers, the Soviet Union and the USA as the costs of these wars are many trillions of dollars and not even the mighty US economy can bear it for too long? This is extremely unlikely!

The likelihood that he will soon be forgotten and end up as a footnote in history is also very  probable.


Wednesday, 20 April 2011

The Extraordinary Origins of Easter


Easter is the most important religious festival for more than a billion Catholics and Orthodox Christians. Even the non-religious cannot escape noticing Easter in most non-Islamic countries. However, there are many Christians (The Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Quakers) who do not celebrate Easter at all.

Easter day is celebrated as the day when Jesus Christ is said to have resurrected two days after his crucifixion on Good Friday. These events are thought to have taken place between A.D. 26 and 36.


Pagan Origins of Easter

As a festival, Easter is much older than Christianity itself. Many scholars of ancient religions claim that the name Easter originates from the name of the Saxon Goddess Eostre or Ostara. 

  • Some scholars even trace links way back in history to Astarte or Ishtar from Babylon in the Bronze Ages (3300-1200 B.C.). Eostre, Ostara, Astarte and Ishtar were goddesses of fertility, love, war and sex or symbolised dawn. 


  • There is another clue to this link in Old Church Slavonic, where Za ustra means early morning.

A strong claim to this link can be suspected in the dating system of Easter as it was based on the old lunar calendar rather than on the solar calendar. Currently, Easter is generally observed on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox.

Easter's Connection to Ancient India

A fascinating twist in the origin of Easter takes the story to India. Barbara G. Walker in The Woman’s Encyclopaedia of Myths and Secrets seems to have found evidence that Saxon poets considered India’s ancient Great Goddess Kali to be the same as Eostre. She quotes from the Old English epic poem Beowulf, from the 8th century A.D. these words “Ganges’s waters, whose waves ride down into an unknown sea near Eostre’s far home.[1]

Strange Easter Customs


As in the Halloween tradition, small kids dress up as witches and collect candy from door to door in exchange of reciting words of blessing the Sunday before Easter in the Nordic countries of Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden. 

People in the Hungarian speaking areas in Hungary, Kárpátalja, Southern Slovakia, Serbia and Transylvania exchange Easter eggs for sprinkling perfumed water on Easter Monday or “Watering Monday  (Locsoló Hétfő).

Another Nordic tradition is the paint boiled eggs and gift them to family and friends. Few people guess that this has roots in Iran. This is an ancient tradition from Persia dating to about 3000 B.C. as a symbol of resurrection of summer at spring festivals.

In many countries people light bonfires ("Osterfeuer" in German and in Dutch: "Paasvuur") and some young people often jump over them. Polish people make a lamb like figure out of butter (Baranek wielkanocny) and eat it.

Pagan Origins of Easter Symbols

The Easter Bunny, very bountiful in laying eggs is again a pagan fertility symbol. Its origins can be traced to ancient Egypt. Hathor-Astarte lays the golden egg of the sun.

The Easter lily has even older links. Lilu is the name of the magical genitals of Lillith, the Sumerian creation goddess (5000-6000 years ago), from which the entire creation comes into being.


The most treasured Orthodox hymn/greeting for Easter "Christos Anesti" in Greek, proclaims: 
"Christos Anesti ek nekton, thanato thanaton patsies, kai tis en tis mnimasi zoin harisamenos" 
or 
"Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death, and to those in the tombs, granting life." 
Are you one of those in the tomb? 

Photo source:

Easter is a time for renewing oneself. To start with, getting out of your tomb would definitely help you.

If we do not run after distractions but drink from the river of silence, we begin to see and to connect. All religion is reflection. 
  • Reflect on the marketeer’s or the leader's promises. Do you define yourself by what you don't have?
  • How do you know that the light at the end of the tunnel is not the headlight of an approaching train?
  • Reflect on what you have already. Gratefulness opens your heart. An open heart lets you see.

A wise or holy person may not lead you to the house of his wisdom but in the interaction you can find your way to the threshold of your own heart. Your own heart is the only tool, which can really set you free and make you happy.

What will you do with the happiness?

Happy Easter!



[1] Goodrich, Norma Lorre. Medieval Myths. New York: New American Library, 1977.