Importance of Individual Resource Management

Poverty is bad resource management

Introduction

This study is about the importance of individual resource management.
Collective resource management, as in a corporate office, is not discussed here.
Every individual has resources sufficient for reaching the summit of success.
It is our choice to manage the resources well and succeed or neglect and fail.

For illustrating my argument I am using reference from history as cited in the Bible, a parable of Jesus and the famous quote about the African gazelle and the lion.

The study is secular and no theological argument is intended.

The story of a watchman

The watchman I speak of is the night watchman of the ancient days. He is called watchman because he keeps watch, keeps awake, throughout the night guarding the town with its people, livestock and wealth.

Time, during those days were divided into first watch, second watch etc.
Thus the modern wrist watch we use got its name which was later abbreviated to watch.

Watchman is the guard of the town, it's people and all precious things in the town during the night. He never sleeps.

He is an image for one who waits hopefully and patiently for the dawn of success in his life.

Fear gives Power

This is a Moorish proverb: "He who is afraid of a thing gives it power over him." The Moors were the medieval Muslim inhabitants of Morocco, Western Algeria, Western Sahara, Mauritania, the Iberian Peninsula, Sicily and Malta.

This is an old wisdom that a minority keeps in mind to resist fear. They are the successful minority.

Why do lions roar? The roaring sound of the lion sends a chill into the heart of weaker animals. The roar of lions announces their presence in and around. The bigger the sound nearer they are. The ancient Kings in war used this tactics to defeat their enemies even before the war actually begin. They scared the enemies by a show of their might.

Fear is the strongest emotion of 21 century.

What is fear?

Fear is an apprehension of sufferings and loss. Fear is an emotion over something unpleasant which may occur in future. Fear is an unwelcome anticipation of pain, hunger, sickness, torture, dishonor etc. We are afraid of loss of property, income, time, health, power, honour and life itself.

Fear is caused by the belief in the existence of other personalities or powers that is against our life.

These personalities and powers are evil people and evil supernatural powers. Fear may have its base in our past life/the life of other people.

Fear has positive side too. It effects self restraint on us. Since we are afraid of suffering and loss, we try to avoid thoughts, words and action that may cause suffering and loss to us.

Fear as a negative emotion always has an enemy on the other side. It tells us always that we will be proven impotent against the enemy at any time in our life.

So we try to keep away the fearsome suffering and loss.

HOW

1.       By trying to please the enemy/fear

2.       Entering into a compromise/treaty with the enemy

3.       By avoiding a confrontation with the enemy

4.       By joining hands with a more powerful personality

The first three methods are that are of a coward.

We are acknowledging that you are afraid of the enemy.

We acknowledge:

His existence

His power to harm you

Your inability to stand against him.

By acknowledging the above three means we agree to remain subservient to fear.

That is what the Moorish proverb says. We are giving power and authority over us to fear. Hence fear rules over you.

Fear has many arrows in his quiver to keep us servile. Once we have subdued to him, it is difficult to escape. He is a relentless enemy who follows us to the grave. He will never bless us. He will try to ruin those who are disobedient to his authority.

He will try to convince us that:

We have no authority or no free will over our life

Everything in our life is controlled by fate or by some supernatural enemy power

Every happening is predestined and hence it will happen whatever we may do

The only way of escape is to live in fear of fear and subservient to fear.

The last option to escape fear of unexpected suffering and loss is to join a more powerful personality. People call Him GOD. God is almighty, omnipotent and omnipresent. Those who have joined hands with God have decided to fight against fear.

They believe that:

God is almighty – there none more powerful than God and hence more powerful than the enemy.

God is beneficent

God does not want us to live in subservience

With God we can overcome all enemies

Their decision is to:

Fight against fear

Defeat fear

Live a life of victory

The only option available to those who wish to live a life of victory is to fight and defeat fear.

Those who do not believe in the existence of God may try to depend on the power of their mind to defeat fear.

Let us conclude:

If you are afraid of fear, you live a defeated live, subservient to fear

Those who live a victorious life over fear live resisting, fighting, defeating and overcoming fear.

Professor Jacob Abraham

The Old Kerosene Lamp

The Old Kerosene Lamp

My childhood days were different in comforts and luxuries from these days. Though it dates back to only fifty years, tremendous fast changes have happened to my country during this span of time. Electricity is not a luxury now, but an essential comfort. But in my childhood days electric connection in a house was a luxury and a sign of social status. We had to make some wiring in the house, apply for electric connection in the Electricity Office and wait for three or four years to get a new connection to our house. Even applying for electric connection and telephone connection improved the social status. We also had to go through the same road for a new electric connection.

Before we ever got electric connection, we used kerosene lamps in houses. Kerosene lamps were available in different sizes and shapes made with different materials. Poor people used small kerosene lamps made with thin metal sheet with an open rope like wick at the top. The metal container at the bottom contained 100 ml or less kerosene. The lamp is lighted at the wick. The burning wick emitted light, smoke and the suffocating smell of kerosene.

We were richer than some others in the village. Our lamp was made of glass. The base was round and made from hard glass. Since it was transparent, we could see the kerosene inside. Above the glass base it had a burner made of metal. The burner held the flat cotton wick. The wick was white and clean. The burner and the wick had a removable glass cover. This thin glass canopy had a beautiful organic shape. Some of them bore small colored flowers on it as design. As the wick is lightened, the light falls through the flowers printing beautiful color patterns on the table or nearby walls.

As a small boy, it was my duty to light the lamp every day by dusk. I had to clean the bottom part, the burner and the glass canopy of the lamp from dust and smoke. My father was so insistent that the lamp should look clean. Only a clean lamp can send out clean light.

After cleaning all parts and the tip of the wick, I light the wick using a stick from the safety matchbox. I lowered the wick with the help of a small lever at the side of the burner to the minimum so that it will not emit smoke or will not put off. Then I placed the thin glass canopy over it. That was done with much precaution. After placing the glass canopy over the burner, I raised the wick slowly. This was the moment of the scientist and mathematician in me. The wick is raised to emit the maximum light but not any layer of smoke. Even the thinnest invisible layer of smoke could paint the canopy grey.  If it ever happened, my father will not be happy at the inexpertise on my part.

The smoke on the glass canopy, if it ever falls on it, will hinder the passage of light emitted by the burning wick. The lamp cannot lighten my house. The white walls of my house will not be decorated by beautiful colorful patterns from the lamp. Thus the lamp fails to fulfill its purpose of existence. The wick burns, but no light in the room. No beautiful color patterns on the wall.

It is a precautious task to light and raise the wick to the maximum light and still keep the glass canopy clean from smoke.

Life should emit maximum light and beautiful color patterns around us. At the same time, our life should never cast a smoke shadow on others life.

This is the beautiful act of balancing life.

Professor Jacob Abraham

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How to write a creative blog?

Creative writing is different from scientific or technical writings. It is different from tech blogs.

1.       Creative writing is an expression of self. There is nothing like objectivity in creative writing. No creative writer can be 100% percentage objective. No creative writer can stand off and write like a newspaper reporter. Even a newspaper reporter is not completely objective. A creative writer, even when he is writing like an objective narrator is narrating incidents as he sees it. A medium always make transformations to what pass through it. Since every medium is different from the other, the output is also different. The output is like the rays of light that comes out of a prism. So creative writing is an expression of self.

No blog reader sees the writer in physical form. The reader sees and understands the writer through the words written by him in his blogs. Words gather together to form sentences and then ideas. Ideas are a mirror image of the writer.

So express what you want your writer should know about you. Express only the part of the writer that may benefit the reader. Hiding a part of the writer is not a sin. Every person has a private face that sometimes even he may not see often.

2.       Do not be emotional over the blog unless the subject demands it. Do not emotionalize your theme. Even emotions can be presented rationally. Rational presentation is not opposite of emotional presentation. Rational presentation is restrained expression of emotions. None can predict the effect of words on its readers. Words have their own power and path. They run uncontrollable once they are set free from the writer. Once a word is written by the writer it is no longer chained to him. The writer can only watch helplessly as it run creating impressions.

3.       Be a responsible writer. A writer should have a responsibility towards the reader. Ideas near die. Ideas cannot be withdrawn. Ideas never obey ownership. Ideas have no masters. Ideas once expressed do not belong to any particular person. Ideas have magnificent power to change the society. The change may be for good or bad. History is a proof of the power of ideas. Nothing has impacted the world more than ideas.

So a writer must be careful in expressing his ideas. Do not shout in the dawn what you dreamed in the night. Permit it to go through a settlement time in which it may act and react with many other ideas and circumstances and gradually precipitate. Show the world only the precipitation.

4.       Most of the readers, even a casual reader who read a blog at a railway station to waste his time, are searching for an answer to the question: “How to live?”(Matthew Arnold – Study of Poetry). Tech blogs are answering questions on technology. They cannot answer the question on life. Only creative writing can give a direction to life. Even today’s education fails to give a proper answer the question on life. There is the space and role of a creative writer. Remember, every creative writer is shaping the future of the world.

5.       Do not use jargons, complex terms and hard nut theories. None read your blog for hair splitting philosophy. Still there is no serious writing without philosophy. Serious poetry, prose and drama are presenting a philosophy on life. A great part of religion is philosophy. A serious blogger too cannot ignore philosophy. He too will have to present a philosophy on life. Then present it in everyday language that it may look like a common saying that is popular among the peasants. That is the skill of a creative writer.

6.       Blogs should be instructive and entertaining. Readers of blogs are not there for a deep thought to immerse themselves for the rest of the day.  Still being instructive is the commitment of the writer. Readers may be searching for pleasure. The writer should provide them bitter pills coated with sugar. The reader unknowingly swallows the sugar coated pills and gets healed because of the medicine inside the sweet coating.

7.       Write always for an international audience. Among your readers there may be English speaking natives, those who have learned English because of migration and many who are using it as a foreign language. Write for all of them. Give some explanation here and there for local customs and usages. English has a lot of variants as many as the nations where the language is learned. Today English is not the language of the British, but it is an international language. Since the purpose of writing is to communicate, the writer must take care that his ideas are communicated well across the borders.

8.       You should not leave anything obscure in your blogs. You may not get a chance to explain what you have written to every reader. Do not give a chance to anyone to interpret your words. Let them explain, but never interpret.

9.       Finally, make it brief, as brief as you can. No maximum length for a blog can be ordered, not even by a writer. Write not all you want to say in a single blog. If you have many more to tell, write another blog. You may suffix the title with “Part 1” or “Part 2”. Remember the great saying, “brevity is the soul of wit.” Do not go on explaining and explaining thus creating confusion. Fewer words are more powerful than loose words.

Wishing you happy blogging,

Professor Jacob Abraham

Further reading:

How do I write a blog 

Writing Blogs 

Creativity is a mystery 

Attitude towards enemies

What is our attitude towards our enemies?

I mean, what is our main concern, the destruction of the enemy or our prosperity?

Both may be our concerns. But what is our main concern?

Let us take a situation.

He was our honest friend whom we trusted over our life and expected to be our life supporting friend. We thought that until death we will not part.

Unexpectedly without any provocation from our part, he turned against us. He might have misunderstood some of our intentions. Or he might have stumbled upon some fanciful idea to turn against us for a gain. On his way to his own new fancy, he left us and created all sort of mental and physical torture to us.

He might have gained something from his new move or he might have got lost.

What concerns us first is the loss and damages came over our life. Our reputation marred, we suffered financial loss, time wasted, peace left us and we had to go through a number of sleepless life.

It took so many months and perhaps years to regain what we lost.

The greatest damage happened to us is the loss of faith in human beings.

And all these and more happened because of our new enemy.

Our natural response is a wish for revenge. Since we are a law abiding citizen, we do not take the law into our hands. So we wait to see punishment falling on him. Only destruction of our enemy can console our wounded heart.

Every day we wake up to hear his destruction. Every talk ends with a wish or his fall. All news of his setbacks is a joy to our soul. We go to sleep sad because our new enemy is still alive and healthy.

What is our main concern: the destruction of our enemy or our own prosperity?

For me it is my prosperity. I do not care what happens to my enemy.

It he prospers in his new venture let it do well for him. If he fails in his new adventure, it is up to him. His prosperity or fall does not affect my life in any manner.

When he was my friend, everything happened in his life affected me too. Since he becomes my enemy, his life is no longer related to me.

His ill fortune does not affect my life. His fall is his own and it does not better my life. His failures are no more related to me. Punishments that fall upon him do me no good.

Nothing in his life is going to better my life.

Then why should I wish for his destruction.

I would rather think about ways to better my life.

Instead of waiting for the destruction of our enemy, let us work hard to rebuild our life. We are not the first in this world to get cheated by treacherous friends. We are not the last.

The punishment on the enemy has never done any good to the victim of treachery.

Only the prosperity in our life can better our life.

So let us spend all the rest of our time to rebuild our damaged life. Let us be concerned only about our prosperity. Our prosperity affects our life. Only it can better our life.

Professor Jacob Abraham                                                                            

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