Engaging in positive sweet thoughts during tough times

The last two weeks have been interesting. The smoke which kept us from walking for a few days that finally cleared. The blue skies were back as were the birds and little critters..

Then there was some walks in the evening with some amazing skies.. 

an attempt to make mysore pak during lunch..

the end result was okay.. put a little too much ghee and kept it on the stove a minute longer.. so while the taste was good, it was a little hard.. it has been at least 4 years since I tried making mysore pak and the next attempt will be better..

practice makes perfect.. and the one thing I finished in the last two weeks is learning the entire Shiva Thandava Stotram.. 

Made this color coded chart based on the template for understanding the meaning of every verse using a primary theme with sub concepts (green is primary message, blue second, red third, orange and gray fourth and fifth level).. helps understand the meaning and remember (uploading this one as a large jpg that prints as a single page in hopes others can use this to learn).

and here is my attempt to recite this earlier today..having a camera in front of you makes you conscious.. can say it without any glitches off camera..

The days are going by fast. The usual work, yoga routine all from a mat in the same place is still ongoing.

There is the occasional parking lot yoga practice which makes my day! 

It is just that I have been meaning to blog for a long time and never got to it. Skipping watching a debate and writing this seemed to be a better idea! 

Learning something new, practicing things and creating some things that actually put a smile on your face are much better options for spending time!

An alternative to depressing actions

Two weeks ago, given the negativity in media, way too many lies to handle on a daily basis, friends who show their true colors when it comes to divisive topics.. lets just say that it was just plain depressing.

As chance would have it, a friend shared a person reciting the Shiva Thandava stotram with a damroo(it is an instrument... a hand held drum of sorts) in some temple in the himalayas. It was mesmerizing.. 

Decided to try and learn this stotram instead. My original thought was that given the complexity and intricacy of the lyrics and the convoluted word structure, any attempt to understand the pieces to memorize it would be too difficult for a person like me who is not that fluent in Sanskrit. 

First two days was spent in doing some research, getting printouts of different versions of pdf files from sites with different fonts (Sanskrit letters which are run on have different ways of writing combined letters and that alone can be a big deal for learning something this complex), trying to check out more youtube videos etc.

There was a great story explanation of how this stotram came to be, thanks to Aarsha vidhya varshini, and the most amazing breakdown of this by the Sanskrit channel. 

Took the breakdown from that channel, color coded the entire stotram by main idea, sub ideas and sub sub ideas etc.. Ravana should be considered the orignator of nested loop programing!  The whole thing reads like a bracketed C program! 

In 12 days have managed to memorize the first 10 stanzas. Most sites show 14 total. Some have added 4 more which are explanations or appendix of sorts on the benefits of reciting this.. My goal is the first 14 for now!

As a student in Varanasi, I am pretty sure this could have been memorized by just taking the printout and sitting outside the tree in Birla Mandir on two or three evenings and the whole thing would have been entered into my hard disk drive with backups. Right now, it looks like there is a I/O issue.. there is hard disk space because I am able to memorize it.. but the quality of the memory is not good. Have to constantly keep refreshing it to push it into permanent memory and the memory bus seems to be damaged. What used to be a 64 bit I/O seems to be acting like a 16 or 8 bit I/O in just 30 years! 

At this rate of memory degradation, in another ten years, my ability to memorize anything will be severely impacted. This stotram is not easy to memorize based on what even the teachers are saying and it is a decent challenge to recite. 

My friends conferred the title of "star maggu" on me during my BHU days when memorization came in very handy for studying metallurgy. The star maggu is now struggling to keep the title. I am sure my classmates will be amused to see this post. 

The lesson in this for everyone is this... keep testing and pushing your memory periodically with something, anything. That will give you some indication of how much additional work is required to bring things back to some reasonable performance. Once you remember it, keep going back to reciting it and it will help keep your brain sharp.

My grandpa used to tell me "keep reciting the slokas from memory. it will help you keep your brain active when you are older". Somewhere I stopped exercising the brain as much as I used to in the last few months, thanks to the new COVID lifestyle. 

This was a good exercise. It also helped me be happier over the last two weeks by skipping social media. Other than wish friends and relatives for their birthdays, I have been news free. There is always the news about work or work related things that one gets in emails, which also happens to be only negative. 

If I can recite this, anyone can. So if anyone out there is thinking or on the fence and has starting trouble with reciting the Shiva Thandava stotram, take heart.. you can do it!