learnings

Message For the Day…” Do Your Work with utmost sincerity and Dedication… “

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For success in any aspect of life, three things are essential – knowledge, skill and balance. If you combine knowledge with skill, you get balance which is very important. It means maintaining equipoise in the face of praise and criticism. To stay balanced, skill is necessary. If you lose balance, suffering will soon follow. When you are given some work, you should put your heart and soul into it, and do it with utmost sincerity and dedication, to the limit of your capacity. Take for example, a person who is entrusted with planting trees and developing a garden. If he does the work wholeheartedly without getting affected by praise or blame, the plants will come up well, and the garden will get transformed into a place of beauty. When the Guru comes to see that garden and feels happy with the growth of the plants, the joy of the Guru becomes the grace He bestows on that individual, and that grace will confer great happiness to that person.

Sai

Message For the Day…” Inner Purity is the Greatest Wealth One Can Acquire…”

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Only by the light of the Divine lamp inside can  blossom  you as a worthwhile person. Inner purity is the greatest wealth that one can acquire; it is the wick in the container of the heart. Devotion is the oil and Divine Grace is the fire with which the lamp of wisdom can be lit. The prime requisite for achieving Divine Grace is to have harmony in thought, word and deed.

 

Message For the day…” Your Body is The Temple of God… “

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The scriptures declare that body is the temple and God is installed therein. Hence consider your body as a vessel for cooking food, given on loan for hosting the festival of life. Can we return it to God, the Owner, in a worse condition? Should we not scrub it clean and return it bright and free from rust and dust? When the festival of life began, we received a pure, fresh and bright body from Him, innocent of evil. We have now inflicted dents, leaks and other signs of damage, through lust, greed, hatred, anger and envy. Do not return His property in poor condition. You must return it to Him, as pure as He gave it, to be most worthy of His Grace. Remember the purpose of your birth; and leverage your full potential and capability to achieve it. Wear the garland of devotion around your neck and saturate your thought, word and deed with Divine Love.

 

Sathya Sai Baba

Watching Whales in Queensland !!!

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Gentle Giants Of The Deep Ocean …

 

 

We had a privilege  to witness one of the longest migrations in animal history right here in Brisbane’s Moreton Bay. Humpback Whales travel over 10,000 kilometres on their yearly round migration from their feedings grounds of the cold Antarctic waters to the warm tropical breeding grounds in sunny Queensland.

Of all the great whales, the Humpback is the most inquisitive and playful often leaping clear out of the ocean or slapping the surface with great fins and tail flukes in awesome displays of grace and power.   The Humpback Whale is the most surface active displaying behaviour
that will not only inspire you but leave you in awe.

Natarajan  From Brisbane , Australia

6 jULY 2014

 

Humpback Whales have:

Humpback whale tongue

  • Little or no sense of smell or taste
  • A very sensitive skin that is easily sunburned
  • Remarkable eyes with strong muscles that change the hape of the lens so they can see in the air or underwater
  • Incredible hearing ranging over many kilometres for navigation, communication and finding food
  • Calls or songs that travel hundreds of kilometres
  • Pectoral fins that are ten times longer than your arm
  • Flukes that often feature black and white markings on the underside which can be used to identify individual whales
  • The longest and most varied sign in the animal kingdom
  • An average weight of 45 tonnes which is about 1000 children together
  • An average length of 15 to 17 metres which is about 10 adults lying head to foot
  • An eye the size of a grapefruit
  • A belly button
  • Calves that are fed daily over 400 litres of rich milk which is the consistency of condensed cream
  • An expelled breath or ‘blow’ that reaches a speed of between 300 – 500 kilometres per hour as it exist through the blowhole

Few Glimpses of Whales in the Deep Ocean  spotted By us ….ME, My Wife and our Son during our  ” Brisbane Whale Watching ” Trip on 6 Juy 2014.

 

 

Photo Credit… brisbanewhalewatching.com.au

Photo credit…brisbane whalewatching.com.au

Photo credit… brisbane whale watching .com au

Photo credit… brisbane whale watching .com.au

Photo credit…brisbane whale watching.com.au

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PhotoCredit::::Senthil Natarajan

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Photo Credit:::: Senthil Natarajan

Source:::: http://www.brisbanewhalewatching.com.au

Natarajan   July 6 2014

Message For the Day…” Who Is God … ” ?

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What or who is God? When the answer to this question is sought, one discovers that God is the glory immanent in Nature. The earth rotates on its axis at a speed of thousand miles an hour. As a consequence, we have alternations of day and night, which helps us to live on this globe. Besides, it moves around the sun at the rate of 66,000 miles an hour, causing the seasons which bring rains for crops and vegetation which sustain human life. The earth does not profit in the least by these rotations but human beings survive, enjoy life and prosper on account of them. Nature must indeed be laughing at the sterile frenzies, the endless pursuits, and the countless miseries to which human beings submit themselves to, in their search for achieving the unachievable! You must search in Nature the sacred lessons it holds for you; then, you will understand how deep and how everlasting is the Truth that it conveys to you!

Sathya Sai Baba

Message For the Day…” Do Not Allow Your Mind to Boss over You …”

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All of you are pilgrims in the journey towards the city of liberation. Every life is but a stage in the journey, your body is a rest-house for a short stay during the pilgrimage. The mind is the caretaker in the place of our rest. Do not treat the Mind as a Master or Owner, but take care of it so that the house we are privileged to occupy is not damaged or polluted. We must treat the watchman politely and not destroy its interiors. A restless mind is an important source of ill-health. Many are constantly afflicted with some source of worry or other, never free from anxiety. Why? Because they are identifying themselves with the body! One acquires their body, through their past activities and deeds, caused by the twin pulls of love and hate. You can escape from this cycle, if you realize the Oneness of the Divine being present in you and in everyone.

Sathya Sai Baba

” You Might Be President of PepsiCo…” Who Said It ? …

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Q. You come home one day as president of the company, just appointed, and your mom is not that impressed. Would you tell that story?
This is about 14 years ago. I was working in the office. I work very late, and we were in the middle of the Quaker Oats acquisition. And I got a call about 9:30 in the night from the existing chairman and CEO at that time. He said, Indra, we’re going to announce you as president and put you on the board of directors … I was overwhelmed, because look at my background and where I came from — to be president of an iconic American company and to be on the board of directors, I thought something special had happened to me.

So rather than stay and work until midnight which I normally would’ve done because I had so much work to do, I decided to go home and share the good news with my family. I got home about 10, got into the garage, and my mother was waiting at the top of the stairs. And I said, “Mom, I’ve got great news for you.” She said, “let the news wait. Can you go out and get some milk?”

I looked in the garage and it looked like my husband was home. I said, “what time did he get home?” She said “8 o’clock.” I said, “Why didn’t you ask him to buy the milk?” “He’s tired.” Okay. We have a couple of help at home, “why didn’t you ask them to get the milk?” She said, “I forgot.” She said just get the milk. We need it for the morning. So like a dutiful daughter, I went out and got the milk and came back.

I banged it on the counter and I said, “I had great news for you. I’ve just been told that I’m going to be president on the Board of Directors. And all that you want me to do is go out and get the milk, what kind of a mom are you?”

And she said to me, “let me explain something to you. You might be president of PepsiCo. You might be on the board of directors. But when you enter this house, you’re the wife, you’re the daughter, you’re the daughter-in-law, you’re the mother. You’re all of that. Nobody else can take that place. So leave that damned crown in the garage. And don’t bring it into the house. You know I’ve never seen that crown.”

Source:::: David Bradley, Atlantic  …Excerpts of Interview with  Indra K. Nooyi, the CEO of PepsiCo,  ….as appeared in Business Insider AU

Read more: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/07/why-pepsico-ceo-indra-k-nooyi-cant-have-it-all/373750/#ixzz36G3cdOWL

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Is a Banana “Chemical Free ” … ?

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What Your Banana Would Look Like If It Came With An Ingredient

List

Banana

The idea that there is a difference between “natural” chemicals — like those in fruits and vegetables — and the synthetic version of those chemicals produced in a laboratory is a common misconception.

Marketers often feed off consumer’s concerns that “man-made” chemicals are bad. But the fact is that all foods (and everything around us) are made up of chemicals, whether they occur in nature or are made in a lab.

Australian chemistry teacher James Kennedy wanted to dispel the myth that chemicals are bad for us. He created an ingredient list for natural products, like the banana above, to show that there many chemicals in our food’s natural flavours and colours.

And some of them have long, scary sounding names, too. We first sawthe graphics at io9.

“There’s a tendency for advertisers to use the words ‘pure’ and ‘simple’ to describe ‘natural’ products when they couldn’t be more wrong,” Kennedy writes on his blog.

“As a Chemistry teacher, I want to erode the fear that many people have of ‘chemicals’ and demonstrate that nature evolves compounds, mechanisms and structures far more complicated and unpredictable than anything we can produce in the lab.”

 

Source::::Business Insider  AU

Natarajan

Image of the day…

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One frame from a time lapse of the Milky Way, with some light pollution and fast-moving cloud cover … and an iridium flare.

Nature & Man: Iridium Flare, Milky Way, Clouds and Light Pollution by Mike Taylor. Visit Mike Taylor Photography.

Mike Taylor in Maine contributed this interesting photo. He calls it Nature & Man. It’s one frame from a time lapse of the Milky Way, photographed in western Maine. The shot includes quite a bit of light pollution and some fast-moving cloud cover. Most of the light pollution in this image is coming from Farmington, Maine which is about 35 miles from this location. Perhaps most interesting to most skywatchers is the bright iridium flare captured here. As Mike said, they are often mistaken for meteors, but, instead:

An iridium flare is a specific type of satellite flare that is made when the antennas of an Iridium communication satellite reflect sunlight directly onto the surface of the Earth. The satellites are in a near-polar orbit at an altitude of 485 miles. Their orbital period is approximately 100 minutes with a velocity of 16,800 miles per hour.

The uniqueness of Iridium flares is that the spacecraft emits ‘flashes’ of very bright reflected light that sweep in narrow focused paths across the surface of the Earth. An Iridium communication satellite’s Main Mission Antenna is a silver-coated Teflon antenna array that mimics near-perfect mirrors and are angled at 40-degrees away from the axis of the body of the satellites. This can provide a specular reflection of the sun’s disk, periodically causing a dazzling glint of reflected sunlight.

At the Earth’s surface, the specular reflection is probably less than 50 miles wide, so each flare can only be viewed from a fairly small area. The flare duration can last from anywhere between 5 to 20 seconds and can easily be seen by the naked eye

Source:::: earth sky news site

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Message For the Day…” Desire Distorts and Denigrates the Mind…”

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As a pilgrim, you are helped or handicapped by the antics of the mind. The mind has as its warp and woof, desire or thirst for something or the other, getting some gain or avoiding some loss. Desire arises from attachment, which is a consequence of delusion. Desire distorts and denigrates the mind, and keeps it incessantly agitated. No sheet of water can be calm when stones drop on it, and if there is a perpetual shower of desires, it will be pitifully restless. The bliss which emanates from the Soul (Atma) must be stored leveraging the reservoir of your mind (Buddhi). But, if the reservoir has many cracks and crevices (senses), bliss (Aananda) will be frittered away rendering the reservoir of mind dry. When the hunger of the senses is sought to be appeased, your mind becomes vacillating and wayward. Your mind’s legitimate role is to be the master of your senses, which are its servants.

Sathya Sai Baba