When I don't take 100% responsibility for my life I block my own
progress and happiness.
Sometimes it's easier to play in someone else's business or back
yard instead of changing what needs to be changed in my own.
Using my creative power to be a proactive participant in my life allows
me to transcend my limitations and live in joy.
The following tips will allow you to shatter both internal and external
barriers as well.
Here are 8 Ways to Live a Powerful and Joyous Life:
1. Honor And Love Yourself.
It's impossible to love anyone more than you love yourself. It's
easy to love yourself when you feel good, look great and everyone
cooperates.
The real test comes with accepting your flaws, working with your shadow
side and loving your humanness. I've learned to have compassion for
the part of me that is greedy, inconsiderate and judgmental. Self-love
allows me to heal these parts and move forward into a brighter light and
deeper love for myself and others.
2. Become Your Own Priority.
Pamper your body, mind and spirit. Take baby steps and begin to eat
right and be impeccably groomed. Take scheduled breaks through out your
day.
Feed your mind with spiritual and inspirational information. You add
beautiful, loving energy to our world as you learn to respect yourself.
3. Stop Comparing, Competing, And Criticizing.
As you eliminate draining little habits from your daily life your energy
can flow freely into your dreams and happiness. Your role in life is
like a puzzle piece that fits into the jigsaw puzzle of the universe,
the world is incomplete without your unique self.
When I find myself stuck in the three "C's" I know I'm
off track. It only takes minutes to own my projections and move forward.
I choose to live in the flow of life trusting myself with an open mind
and heart.
4. Anchor Your Being In Appreciation.
It's a privilege to be alive at this time. I am grateful for the
difficult lessons I'm learning from our economy, the oil spill, and
the war.
As I make inner changes, I see my exterior world change. In stead of
focusing on the media and negativity I focus on the difference I can
make.
Answers to our problems lie in each of us. Each morning I decide to
"wake up and smell the day."
Life is precious, I won't waste it wishing things were different. I
choose to live more consciously.
The individual changes we make will change the world.
5. Activate Forgiveness.
Perfection in life is not required.
We all do and say things we regret. I choose to learn from my mistakes.
I encourage you to be gentle with yourself and others. Resentment and
bitterness poison our mind, body and spirit.
Forgiving others will take you out of the dark and into the light,
that's available always.
6. Record Loving Moments.
Keep a journal of the happiness, love and goodness you experience
everyday. Focusing on love and good times increases love and good
times.
A journal of "good stuff" can be used as a great pick-me-up in
difficult times. You'll find there are infinite experiences to
record.
Be a part of seeing the best in every thing and every one.
I've kept gratitude journals for eight years. I'm flooded with
appreciation for my ordinary existence each time I reread one.
7. Set Your Intention.
Each morning set your intention for your day. "I intend to be
patient today. I intend to be kind. I intend to live in the moment."
You choose your attitude, energy and direction. Consciously create the
incredible and amazing life you desperately want. Resolve to choose the
best for yourself. You'll learn to brighten your own day!
8. Serve Others.
There is a story about heaven and hell…In one room a pot of
delicious stew sits in the middle of a big round table. The people at
the table are holding unusually long handled spoons which made reaching
their mouths impossible. They are thin, sick and weak. This room
represents hell.
The next room also has a large table and a delicious pot of stew as
well… The people around this table also hold long-handled spoons.
However these people are plump, healthy and happy because they've
learned to feed each other. This room represents heaven.
Find someone to serve everyday. Expect nothing in return.
It's easy to lose hope, blame others and feel victimized in our
world.
Yet, our power lies in establishing thoughts and habits of goodness and
love.
Imagine throwing your pebble of good thoughts and habits in the water.
Yours connect to other like-minded good thoughts and habits. Soon you
begin to notice and take part in a whole new world.
And everyone will ask you, "How did you get so lucky?"
The Kashmiri Pandits: An Ethnic Cleansing the World Forgot - by K P S Gill
[For original post click here]
Since late 1989, the Indian State of Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) has been in the grip of a vicious movement of Islamist extremist terrorism. As many as 36,289 [till December 30, 2003, Source: www.satp.org] lives have been lost in this conflict over nearly 14 years of a sub-conventional war that has inflicted enormous suffering on the people of the State, and transformed this confrontation between South Asia’s traditional rivals into a potential nuclear flashpoint.
Among the worst victims of this conflict are the Kashmiri Pandits, descendents of Hindu priests and among the original inhabitants of the Kashmir Valley, with a recorded history of over 5,000 years. Over the millennia, this community has been integral not only to the cultural and intellectual life of the people of this region, but the bulwark of its administration and economic development as well. The Pandits have now become the targets and victims of one of the most successful, though little-known, campaigns of ethnic cleansing in the world. Pogroms of a far lesser magnitude in other parts of the world have attracted international attention, censure and action in support of the victim communities, but this is an insidious campaign that has passed virtually unnoticed, and on which the world remains silent. Among the complex reasons for this neglect is, perhaps, the nature of this community itself: where other campaigns of ethnic cleansing have invariably provoked at least some retaliatory violence, the deep tradition and culture of non-violence among the Kashmiri Pandits has made them accept their suffering in silence, with not a single act of retaliatory violence on record.
January 19, 2003, marked thirteen years since what is generally recognized as the beginning of this process of ethnic cleansing as a result of which the Kashmiri Pandits were hounded out of the Kashmir Valley. On this day in 1990, a Kashmiri Pandit nurse working at the Soura Medical College Hospital in Srinagar was raped and later killed by Pakistan-backed terrorists. The incident was preceded by massacres of Pandit families in the Telwani and Sangrama villages of Budgam district and other places in the Kashmir Valley. While the Jammu & Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) claimed a 'secular' agenda of liberation from Indian rule, the terrorist intent was clearly to drive non-Muslim 'infidels' out of the State and establish Nizam-e-Mustafa (literally, the Order of the Prophet; government according to the Shariah). Accounts of Pandits from this traumatic period reveal that it was not unusual to see posters and announcements – including many articles and declarations in local newspapers – telling them to leave the Valley. Pandit properties were either destroyed or taken over by terrorists or by local Muslims, and there was a continuous succession of brutal killings, a trend that continues even today.
Ethnic cleansing was evidently a systematic component of the terrorists’ strategic agenda in J&K, and estimates suggest that, just between February and March 1990, 140,000 to 160,000 Pandits had fled the Kashmir Valley to Jammu, Delhi, or other parts of the country. Simultaneously, there were a number of high-profile killings of senior Hindu officials, intellectuals and prominent personalities. Eventually, an estimated 400,000 Pandits – over 95 per cent of their original population in the Valley – became part of the neglected statistic of 'internal refugees' who were pushed out of their homes as a result of this campaign of terror. Not only did the Indian state fail to protect them in their homes, successive governments have provided little more than minimal humanitarian relief, and this exiled community seldom features in the discourse on the ‘Kashmir issue’ and its resolution.
A majority of the Pandit refugees live in squalid camps with spiralling health and economic problems. Approximately 2,17,000 Pandits still live in abysmal conditions in Jammu with families of five to six people often huddled into a small room. Social workers and psychologists working among them testify that living as refugees in such conditions has taken a severe toll on their physical and mental health. Confronted with the spectre of cultural extinction, the incidence of problems such as insomnia, depression and hypertension have increased and birth rates have declined significantly. A 1997 study based on inquiries at various migrant camps in Jammu and Delhi revealed that there had been only 16 births compared to 49 deaths in about 300 families between 1990 and 1995, a period during which terrorist violence in J&K was at a peak. The deaths were mostly of people in the age group of 20 to 45. Causes for the low birth rates were primarily identified as premature menopause in women, hypo-function of the reproductive system and lack of adequate accommodation and privacy. Doctors treating various Kashmiri Pandit patients assert that they had aged physically and mentally by 10 to 15 years beyond their natural age, and that there was a risk that the Pandits could face extinction if current trends persist. On the conditions at the camps, one report stated that, at the Muthi camp on the outskirts of Jammu where a large number of the Pandits stayed after migration from the Valley, a single room was being shared by three generations. In certain cases at other places, six families lived in a hall separated by partitions of blankets or bed sheets.
Worse, the dangers of this ethnic cleansing are also making inroads into the Muslim dominated areas along the Line of Control and the international border in the Jammu region as well, with Islamist terrorists specifically targeting Hindus in these areas. There is now a steady flow of migration of Hindus from the rural and remote areas of the Jammu region towards Jammu city, and these trends accelerate after each major terrorist outrage.
The Pandits have rejected rehabilitation proposals that envision provision of jobs if the displaced people returned to the Valley, indicating that they were not willing to become ‘cannon-fodder’ for politicians who cannot guarantee their security. The Pandits insist that they will return to the Valley only when they – and not these ‘others’ – are able to determine that the situation is conducive to their safety. "We cannot go back in the conditions prevailing in Kashmir. We will go back on our own terms," Kashmiri Samiti president Sunil Shakdher said in August 2002 in response to the then Farooq Abdullah regime’s proposed rehabilitation agenda. At the minimum level, these terms would include security to life and property and, at a broader level, a consensual rehabilitation scheme.
The Pandits appear fully justified in their reluctance to fall for the succession of ‘rehabilitation schemes’ that are periodically announced. Any proposal to return the Pandits to the Valley in the past has usually been followed by targeted terrorist attacks. Whenever any attempt to facilitate their return to the Valley has been initiated, a major incident of terrorist violence against them has occurred. The massacre of 26 Pandits at Wandhama, a hamlet in the Ganderbal area of the Valley on the intervening night of January 25-26, 1998; the earlier killing of eight others at Sangrampora in Budgam district on March 22, 1997; the massacre of 26 Hindus at Prankote in Udhampur District on April 21, 1998; and the killing of 24 Kashmir Pandits at the Nadimarg Village, District Pulwama, on March 23, 2003; these are the worst of the many examples of the terrorists’ tactic to block any proposal for the return of migrants to the Valley. These massacres and a continuous succession of targeted individual killings have ensured the failure of every proposal to resolve the problem of the exiled Pandits. It was, again, this pervasive insecurity that led to the collapse of the proposal to create 13 clusters of residential houses in ‘secure zones’ in different parts of Anantnag for the return and rehabilitation of Kashmiri Pandit migrants from outside the Valley in April 2001.
The current Chief Minister Mufti Mohammed Sayeed, addressing his maiden press conference at Srinagar on November 3, 2002, said that the rehabilitation of migrant Pandits was one of his government’s ‘top priorities’. The Pandits, however, regard the Sayeed regime’s ‘healing touch’ policy with great scepticism. The regime’s decision to release a number of terrorists and secessionists on bail and the proposal to hold talks "without any pre-conditions" with a mélange of groups actively pursuing the agenda of violence has led a section of the Pandit community to believe that the State government, "is turning a blind eye to our plight…"
For a majority of the displaced Kashmiris, the recent State Legislative Assembly elections held little meaning. Panun Kashmir (‘Our Kashmir’ – a leading organisation of the displaced Kashmiri Pandits), during the run-up to the State Legislative Assembly elections in year 2002, had dismissed the exercise as ‘meaningless’. They said the Election Commission’s decision to make arrangements for Hindu migrants to vote from outside J&K would institutionalise their migrant status. "The move to allow migrant Hindu Pandits to vote at their respective refugee camps only reinforces the mindset that there are no chances for them to return to their homes, ever," said Shakdher.
A section of the Pandits have demanded a geo-political re-organisation of the State and the carving of a separate homeland for them. While such an extreme suggestion may arise out of the increasing desperation of a people whose plight has been ignored for nearly a decade and a half, the idea itself is fraught with the imminent danger of playing into the hands of religious extremists who seek a division of the State along religious lines.
Their relatively small numbers, coupled with a tradition of non-violent protest, has made the Pandits largely irrelevant in the political discourse – both within the country and internationally – on Kashmir. It should be clear, however, that the many ‘peace processes’ and ‘political solutions’ that are initiated in J&K from time to time have little meaning until these include some steps to correct the grave injustices done to this unfortunate community.
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Dr. Abdul Kalam's letter
Dr. Abdul Kalam's Letter to Every Indian
Why is the media here so negative?
Why are we in India so embarrassed to recognize our own strengths, our achievements?
We are such a great nation. We have so many amazing success stories but we refuse to acknowledge them. Why?
We are the first in milk production.
We are number one in Remote sensing satellites.
We are the second largest producer of wheat.
We are the second largest producer of rice.
Look at Dr. Sudarshan , he has transferred the tribal village into a self-sustaining, self-driving unit.. There are millions of such achievements but our media is only obsessed in the bad news and failures and disasters.
I was in Tel Aviv once and I was reading the Israeli newspaper. It was the day after a lot of attacks and bombardments and deaths had taken place. The Hamas had struck. But the front page of the newspaper had the picture of a Jewish gentleman who in five years had transformed his desert into an orchid and a granary. It was this inspiring picture that everyone woke up to. The gory details of killings, bombardments, deaths, were inside in the newspaper, buried among other news.
In India we only read about death, sickness, terrorism, crime.. Why are we so NEGATIVE? Another question: Why are we, as a nation so obsessed with foreign things? We want foreign T.Vs, we want foreign shirts. We want foreign technology.
Why this obsession with everything imported. Do we not realize that self-respect comes with self-reliance? I was in Hyderabad giving this lecture, when a 14 year old girl asked me for my autograph. I asked her what her goal in life is.. She replied: I want to live in a developed India . For her, you and I will have to build this developed India . You must proclaim. India is not an under-developed nation; it is a highly developed nation.
..
YOU say that our government is inefficient.
YOU say that our laws are too old.
YOU say that the municipality does not pick up the garbage.
YOU say that the phones don't work, the railways are a joke. The airline is the worst in the world, mails never reach their destination.
YOU say that our country has been fed to the dogs and is the absolute pits.
YOU say, say and say.. What do YOU do about it?
Take a person on his way to Singapore . Give him a name - 'YOURS'. Give him a face - 'YOURS'. YOU walk out of the airport and you are at your International best. In Singapore you don't throw cigarette butts on the roads or eat in the stores. YOU are as proud of their Underground links as they are.. You pay $5 (approx. Rs.. 60) to drive through Orchard Road (equivalent of Mahim Causeway or Pedder Road) between 5 PM and 8 PM. YOU come back to the parking lot to punch your parking ticket if you have over stayed in a restaurant or a shopping mall irrespective of your status identity… In Singapore you don't say anything, DO YOU? YOU wouldn't dare to eat in public during Ramadan, in Dubai .. YOU would not dare to go out without your head covered in Jeddah.
YOU would not dare to buy an employee of the telephone exchange in London at 10 pounds (Rs..650) a month to, 'see to it that my STD and ISD calls are billed to someone else.'YOU would not dare to speed beyond 55 mph (88 km/h) in Washington and then tell the traffic cop, 'Jaanta hai main kaun hoon (Do you know who I am?). I am so and so's son. Take your two bucks and get lost.' YOU wouldn't chuck an empty coconut shell anywhere other than the garbage pail on the beaches in Australia and New Zealand ..
Why don't YOU spit Paan on the streets of Tokyo ? Why don't YOU use examination jockeys or buy fake certificates in Boston ??? We are still talking of the same YOU. YOU who can respect and conform to a foreign system in other countries but cannot in your own. You who will throw papers and cigarettes on the road the moment you touch Indian ground. If you can be an involved and appreciative citizen in an alien country, why cannot you be the same here in India ?
In America every dog owner has to clean up after his pet has done the job. Same in Japan ..
Will the Indian citizen do that here?' He's right. We go to the polls to choose a government and after that forfeit all responsibility.
We sit back wanting to be pampered and expect the government to do everything for us whilst our contribution is totally negative. We expect the government to clean up but we are not going to stop chucking garbage all over the place nor are we going to stop to pick a up a stray piece of paper and throw it in the bin. We expect the railways to provide clean bathrooms but we are not going to learn the proper use of bathrooms.
We want Indian Airlines and Air India to provide the best of food and toiletries but we are not going to stop pilfering at the least opportunity.
This applies even to the staff who is known not to pass on the service to the public.
When it comes to burning social issues like those related to women, dowry, girl child! and others, we make loud drawing room protestations and continue to do the reverse at home. Our excuse? 'It's the whole system which has to change, how will it matter if I alone forego my sons' rights to a dowry.' So who's going to change the system?
What does a system consist of? Very conveniently for us it consists of our neighbours, other households, other cities, other communities and the government. But definitely not me and YOU. When it comes to us actually making a positive contribution to the system we lock ourselves along with our families into a safe cocoon and look into the distance at countries far away and wait for a Mr.Clean to come along & work miracles for us with a majestic sweep of his hand or we leave the country and run away.
Like lazy cowards hounded by our fears we run to America to bask in their glory and praise their system. When New York becomes insecure we run to England . When England experiences unemployment, we take the next flight out to the Gulf. When the Gulf is war struck, we demand to be rescued and brought home by the Indian government. Everybody is out to abuse and rape the country. Nobody thinks of feeding the system. Our conscience is mortgaged to money.
Dear Indians, The article is highly thought inductive, calls for a great deal of introspection and pricks one's conscience too….. I am echoing J. F. Kennedy's words to his fellow Americans to relate to Indians…..
'ASK WHAT WE CAN DO FOR INDIA AND DO WHAT HAS TO BE DONE TO MAKE INDIA WHAT AMERICA AND OTHER WESTERN COUNTRIES ARE TODAY'
Lets do what India needs from us.
Forward this mail to each Indian for a change instead of sending Jokes or junk mails.
Thank you,
Dr.. Abdul Kalam
