An open letter to Sachin Tendulkar

Sachin Ramesh Tendulkar – The man who knew cricketing infinity, icon, god and demi-god all rolled into one. I think it is time that you called it quits! Before you dismiss me as another one of your critics let me assure you that I am not your critic. I was a fan of yours once upon a time. Not anymore! It is high time that you retired and passed the cricketing baton to a younger generation.

Here are some questions that you need to honestly answer to yourself.

You say “I will continue to play as long as I enjoy my cricket”. Does not the statement sound extremely self-serving? You are more interested in you enjoying your cricket rather than the billions enjoying your cricket. Don’t you realize that many a youngster with a larger heart would enjoy cricket in the Indian team a lot more than you.

You say “It would be selfish of me to retire now when I am in the top of my form.” I have to admit that this statement of yours is an extremely clever form of self-deception. Isn’t it more selfish to deprive budding youngsters of a chance to play in the national team? Not many will agree with your assessment that you are now in top-form when it has taken you more than a year to score your 100th century.

You say”I know when to retire”. Do really believe you do? If you did you would have quit after India won the World Cup. The other more important issue is that few will have the courage to tell you to leave. After all you have more number of runs, 50’s and centuries than anybody else.

You say “I get goose bumps when I hear the national anthem while standing along with your team mates.” While it is nice to know that your patriotic sense still burns in you imagine what a youngster who is getting a first chance to play in the national team would feel in a similar situation. His heart would probably burst with pride.

In any case with your love for the game, with your patriotic desires the best thing you could give a lot back to cricket and to India. For e.g. you could start a cricketing academy and coach youngsters on the nuances of the game. You could write a book on the “sound batting technique”. You could give so much more away from the limelight than you being in the Indian team with its hectic schedules.

I sincerely hope that Sachin the gentleman prevails over Sachin the cricketer!

Mind-maps

Dr. Daniel Siegel in his book mindsight talks about the need to have mindsight or an awareness of the activities of our mind. He suggests that we need to understand our SIFT and (Sensations, Images, Feelings and Thoughts) while encountering difficult emotions. One particular concept in his book is the concept of using maps in knowing ourselves, our dear ones or people at large.

In the book he discusses what he calls Me-map, You-map and Us-map. So what are these maps?

Me-map: Most of us are so wrapped in ourselves that we have what I would like to refer as I-map. We are the center of the universe. We are the nucleus behind all worldly activity. Our problems consume us completely. What is more important is that we have what is termed as Me-map. We need to understand ourselves. We need to be aware of our sensations, images, thoughts and feeling (SIFT) in each every encounter that we have. We have to understand ourselves.

You-map: Our daily lives are made of interactions with our spouses, our children, relatives and colleagues. But we usually run into rough weather in our relations. Why does this happen? This because with everybody we create a he-map or she-map. We look at them objectively. When our spouse or friends relate their problems or source of joy to us we mentally look at it objectively. What is really needed is that we create a You-map. We need to be able to view the problem or source of joy through their eyes and mind. We must be able to visualize what they are going through and what they are experiencing. For this we need to be good at creating You-maps

Us-maps: Very few in this world create Us-maps. When we hear of poverty or see pain we usually create a They-map. We must feel both empathy and sympathy for this. We need to create Us-maps. We must feel compassion for the suffering and pain of others. We must be able to visualize what the under-privileged are going through. We need to feel compassion (Do read Dr. Alex Lickerman’s post: What compassion is?). We need to create Us-maps.

Hence to improve the quality of our daily lives we need to become adept in creating Me-maps, You-maps and Us-maps.

Our bottom-up mind

Our mind works from the bottom up. In other words the sub-conscious mind with all its emotions drives our conscious mind.

In a day we human beings have close to 12000 thoughts. A large part of these thoughts are driven by our inner desires, our hatreds, our likes and dislikes. The conscious mind more often than not, is just verbalizing what we feel inside our deepest core. The conscious mind tries to explain or put words to our feelings.

For e.g. let us say that you resent some person. What happens is that the conscious mind comes up with ideas about all the negative aspect of the person you dislike. You will find that there are so many reasons why the person you hate is so despicable. The conscious mind will explain the inner hatred that you have. In the end you will start believing that the hatred is a consequence of all your observations rather than the other way around i.e. you had resented this person to start with.

On the other hand when we are infatuated with some body then our mind finds so many reasons to make this person virtuous. We find qualities in the person that probably don’t even exist. In many ways the unconscious mind triggers thoughts in our conscious surface.

While we may think that we are reasoning the world we see around us, in most case we just try to explain to ourselves what our emotions are telling us.

In fact in “How to know yourself”, Alex Lickerman, M.D. says that if we explore our mind we will discover things that are counter to our expectations. He goes on to say “The conscious mind, however, is a great explainer. It’s irresistibly drawn into making sense of the world and everything in it, including itself.”

In most cases it is more important to address our biases, our resentments or our anger. If we are caught in trying to argue with ourselves,verbally, then we will end up frustrated. We have to attack the underlying cause which is behind all our verbal layers that our conscious mind makes to root out the problem.

Succeeding in life

Most of us want to be successful in life. We tend to focus on the word “success”. Success by itself denotes nothing more than an accomplishment at a particular point in time or a series of achievements in a narrow field. It is an event or a series of events in a specified field. When we think of successful people we may think of a Steve Jobs, a Michael Jackson, the Beatles or Mark Zuckerberg

All of the above have achieved success in life. Clearly they were veterans in their chosen field. But there is a difference between achieving “success in life” and “succeeding in life”.

If we want to achieve success in life then we have to put our whole heart and soul into the narrow domain we are interested and keep persevering in it. There is nothing wrong with this.

However if we do achieve success in it we may still feel unsatisfied. The issue is that while we are successful we have not succeeded in life.

In order to succeed in life we have to understand that we have to succeed in the journey of life. We have often heard the saying “Success is not a destination, it is journey”.

In this journey in life we have different spheres of activity namely our personal, our professional, our social and our spiritual. Achieving success in a narrow domain will not make us feel great except in a temporary sense.

To succeed we have to focus our attention in all aspects of life while trying to excel in any narrow domain of our choice – music, technology, creative writing or sports. How often we hear of famous people complaining that their lives feel empty. How many of the rich and famous join some cult or follow some spiritual guru.

While success in life indicates a personal victory, succeeding at life is much broader. To succeed in life we may face occasional setbacks, but in life as a whole we will be able to achieve what we intend to.

So to succeed in life we need to ensure that our personal and family life is in order. We have to make sure that we excel in our professional life. We need to constantly increase our circle of friends and finally we need to make spiritual progress on a continuous basis.

In this journey we have to keep at succeeding in life rather in just trying to attain temporary success.