Life and Balance

Everybody is aware of the great divide that exists in India. India and Bharat. A lot has been said on this. Many lamentations.
This time I am getting to experience it first hand.
Do you belong to India or Bharat?

I am working in both. I am working in a start up which is taking on the idea and technology of an NGO and creating a business model to make it into a profitable venture and thus invite resources and grow. On one side of me is the people from the rural based NGO and on the other the enthusiastic people from modern India. Their language, attitudes, motivations, methods of working are so different.
One does it out of a desire to help people, improve their lives, evangelize the program, etc. In the process he gives away patentable technology in ways that don't help to grow. He will never have enough money to invest into R and D, to expand, publicize, etc. Often leaves a less than happy experience for the customer because of lack of professionalism.
On the other hand are the VCs and the architects of the growth of modern India. These people work in the IT age. Everything on the net, laptops in hand, PPTs, excel sheets.. They have the vision to think big and risk big too. They bring in the efficiency that gives cutting edge to any organisation. But where is the heart? The heart that beats and has a place in a person's life. The heart in you and the heart that recognizes the emotions of the person opposite. Professionalism can some time take the spirit out of an initiative.

For me, I am part of both the worlds. I have a heart that speaks the loudest and a brain that takes over the execution of tasks. I cannot live without either of them. I am a part of both the worlds. Living in one without the other is an incomplete life.

Taking on from this I talked to a couple of people in IT companies. They slog hard, close to burn out point. If they spend their weekends in the malls everytime, life becomes automatised in no time. No spirit left.
The change comes when, they do some other things like - nature activites - trekking, travel, photography, bird watching or social service activities like volunteering time with children, etc.
Unless one can balance one extreme, harmony is lost.
The bridge between the 2 worlds is in us.

What do we see? Images, Perceptions or Persons

I heard a statement in a movie once - The real magic is in the mind of the people. People don't see past the illusions because, they don't want to.
Think of this after seeing a kid's magic show or an optical illusion.

With respect to people also, do we see people as they are or we impose on them what we want to see, thus ending up seeing what we want to see rather than what is?
Thinking of all the people, particularly the people one is often close to, I think, we often have a fixed perception of that person, often based on the role they perform like mother, wife, husband, daughter, boss, HR manager, trainer, teacher, etc. This prevents us from seeing the person as a person with all the attributes of that individual himself or herself

Experiment - Think of your mother. What words come to mind? love, care, concern, nagging, patience, grace, etc?
Try imagining how she would have been as young lady, bubbling? giggling? full of energy? beautiful? hot? sexy? how would she have attracted attention of the boys?
'Aint it difficult to imagine?!
But unless one sees her as an individual who has all the parts any normal individual has, wouldn't we be living in an illusion. Would our relationship be with that person or our concept of that person?
I believe that if the relationship with person, one would be able to accept the variations, different parts of that person, basically the entire person. Consequently, one could get more from the relationship, things one did not expect too.
On the other hand if one builds a relationship with an incomplete image, it is bound to take huge beatings, and will take huge and continuous effort on both parties to maintain that image.

Carl Jung worked a lot on this - the Anima and Animus of men and women respectively, i.e Anima - the image of woman in the man and the Animus - the image of man in the woman
According to him, a man would have an image of women in his mind built by his experience of women (like mother). He would then typically search for a woman who is closest to this image and then impose this image on her. Effectively, his relationship would be with this image that he has developed and not with that person. It is of course vice versa with women.

What he encouraged was to learn more of one's own shadow (anima or animus), relate with it. This would automatically decrease the need to impose the shadow on the spouse. One can then build a relationship with the actual person which is 100 times more satisfying.

That sounds a long journey!
Wikipedia on Carl Jung' s Anima and Animus
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anima_(Jung)#Levels_of_animus_development