My Jumbled thoughts, A Day After The Workshop...

Yesterday was the final day of my theatre workshop (Apna Shakespeare). I performed two scenes. It marked the end of a wonderful experience that we had together. Everyone did really well. We had a lot of fun. But then it was time go home, go home but not return again. It was time to say goodbye to all the fun. I said bye to everyone, hopefully not for the last time and rushed for tennis. Later in the night my blog hit a 1000 pageviews. There couldn’t have been a better way to end such a wonderful day, a wonderful day full of fun, excitement and joy. Life was going great. Everything was going the way it should have. Just perfect.

But now, a strange fear has haunted the brain. A fear, that life won’t be the same anymore. The days of fun are passing by it seems. A fear, that something dark is gonna happen. A fear, that life won’t be the same anymore. “But why? What is wrong?” I ask myself. I will miss all the fun. I will miss the friends that I made. “But that’s no reason to fear” I tell myself. Sure, the workshop has ended. But my relationship with theatre and Shakespeare hasn’t. I can still stay in touch with my friends. We can meet up once in a while. What's’ the big deal? Why the fear? Is it because the schools are gonna start? But so what? I have to find the best in everything and enjoy myself. I just gotta have fun. Life really is too short, if I am not gonna have fun then what's the point. I can’t always think about going to college soon so that I can get out of school. I have to start enjoying in school. Enjoy what I am doing. Have fun during science class. Just start appreciating the wonderful things around me. I know I can do it. It is in my hands. I just gotta have an open mind and a willing heart. I have to let all the negativity pass. The external environment is usually not the cause for depression or stress. It is our inner being that causes us to feel like that. If we can control our emotions, we will always be happy. We should appreciate everything that’s around us. Have fun in whatever we are doing. Enjoy the present. Not worry about the future. Not cry over the past. What's done cannot be undone. Enjoy the journey. Don’t fear about tomorrow. “Success is a journey, not a destination.”

I begin to feel better. I see a ray of hope. The fear has gone. I have become confident again. I should look forward to the good things, but more importantly enjoy the good things that are happening to me right now and appreciate them.

My Experience with Shakespeare and the others

It was a Monday morning. I was at my computer searching for some workshops on the net. I didn’t realize at that point of time how valuable that search was gonna be.

I found an interesting workshop which was starting on that day itself, so I wasn’t sure if there would be a seat for me. I called them up, luckily registration was still open. So I went to this school, shishuvan, where the workshop was supposed to start. And I registered myself.

So that’s how this wonderful journey began; an interesting, fun-filled, enlightening journey with through Shakespeare. The first day, I was a little nervous. In an hour the nervousness was gone. It didn’t feel like a classroom at all. It wasn’t like I was listening to Jaimini Pathak, the great director. It was like sitting with a group of friends over tea, discussing Shakespeare. Though it was still a classroom. I was still in a theatre workshop. It was Jaimini Pathak who was teaching us. Yet there was something sort of unusual in this whole thing. The atmosphere was different. He was not teaching us anything but he taught us so much: through the games that we played, the interpretation of the scenes, the times when we were giving feedback.

In the days that followed we played many games. Many of them didn’t seem important in the beginning. In fact, initially I thought some of them were kind of stupid. But as we played along I understood the significance and relevance of each game to theatre. And like Jaimini always said, “theatre is about doing stuff”; as we did play along we understood everything.

 My favorite game of all was the zip-zap game. In this game a group of people stand in a circle and imagine they have a 100 degrees burning hot iron ball. None of them can hold it for long. So they have to keep passing it quickly. Remember it’s not a real ball. Also, when they pass it to the person on their left they have to say “zap” and when on the right they have to say “zip”. And if a person gets a wrong signal, he/she drops the ball. In  this game we are doing multi-tasking: many things at the same time. We are imagining there is a burning hot iron ball, we are passing it to the other person, we are giving the signal to the person next to us, we are listening for the correct signal, we have to drop the ball incase of wrong signal is given and so on. This is basically an alertness game. An actor needs to be alert on stage. He has to listen to what his co-actors are saying, he may have to act as if he is doing some work, he may have to run/walk simultaneously, he has to remember when to speak his lines; all of these at the same time.

There are other cool games too, like the 1-30 game, the status game (in which a person has to change his body posture as his status/rank keeps changing during the scene), the ball-in the air- game. Each of these has its own significance and relevance to theatre.

We explored five different scenes from Shakespeare’s different plays. The first one that we did was a scene from Julius Caesar, in which he is being murdered. After reading and analyzing the scene we realized that this one particular scene could be interpreted in a zillion different ways. That is the beauty of Shakespeare. And that is why he is alive 500 years later. Our final interpretation of that scene was of a mafia gang. In that scene there is a roman empire, a ruler, a senate; none of that was there in our interpretation. In our scene we have the leader of a mafia gang (Caesar), and his gang members who conspire against him and kill him. But, mind you, we didn’t change a single word of what Shakespeare has written. We used the exact same words of dialog, but interpreted the scene and characterized it in our own way.

Then we did a scene from Macbeth. It is the scene in which Lady Macbeth is going crazy after murdering the king and many other people. She is imagining that there is a red spot of blood on her palm, which is the blood of Duncan, the king. She is sleep-walking, trying to get rid of an imaginary spot, she’s shouting on her husband, Macbeth (who isn’t actually there), then she is cursing the king, then she’s thinking about Banquo’s ghost. Through this scene, we learnt about multiple focuses and change of thought in theatre. There are external and internal focuses; we learnt how we show the audience that the focus is changing by changing our body posture. This scene also involves the gentlewoman and the doctor who are observing Lady Macbeth as she sleepwalks and says all that crap about banquo and Duncanand Macbeth.

Then there was the king Lear scene which I performed. It is scene in which he is really angry and on the verge of madness, this is because he has been thrown out of his own kingdom by his own daughters. There’s a storm going on and he is taking out his anger on the elements of nature. For this scene we had split into 3 groups. The other two groups (apart from mine) got some positive feedback and some negative feedback but when I performed everyone spontaneously said “awesome” at the same time (Excuse me if I am bragging here). That was a lot of encouragement and I felt really proud of myself, at least at that moment. This scene basically involves a high level of energy and anger. I just had to feel angry and go and shout. But what made it even more attractive apart from my dialog delivery, were the special effects that the other kids had done from behind. For getting the “stormy” effect one kid was switching on and off the lights (lightning), someone was running with a stole hovering in the air to get the “wind” effect, someone was making a “wind” sound”, someone was producing the rain sound from some clay balls, someone was producing thunder by banging the door in a particular manner. All these special effects really enhanced the performance and made the audience feel and see a storm. The best part was that we did all this without any “technician” or “special effects person”; we didn’t even get anything from outside, we just used whatever we had in our room.

We did another scene from Macbeth, which is the dagger scene. Macbeth is going to kill Duncan, the king. He is hallucinating. He sees a dagger which is not actually there. He starts talking to the dagger and then talks to himself and calms down. It is soliloquy. It is perhaps the most difficult to scene to understand out of all the scenes that we did. The language is intense. And there is a continual change in focus between external and internal, sometimes there is both external and internal. In that way, it is a very complex scene. Nevertheless, one of us was able to perform it. And she did a great job.

There was another scene that we did, but could not perform due to the time constraint. It was from “A midsummer night’s dream” a comedy. This is a scene that made me realize that Shakespeare can be hilarious if you open your eyes and let them explore. This scene is truly hilarious. It also teaches a lot about theatre indirectly. In the scene, a group of ordinary workers perform a play in front of their king, since they are not trained actors they do a really bad performance. There is a play inside a play. We had some great laughs while analyzing this scene. I also came to realize: Shakespeare can be fun; by the way this is not a pun. (hey, that rhymed!)

This was, in a nutshell, what we did in this awesome workshop.

Honestly, before this workshop, my attitude to Shakespeare was not a very welcoming one. The thought of Shakespeare would remind me of his uncanny, old language (thou…Thy…doth…thee...etc). But now that has suddenly changed. Because of this workshop I feel I have become capable of appreciating Shakespeare. It involved some work, some play and gradual widening of the intellectual horizon, especially as far as language is concerned.

Today’s performance marked the end of this beautiful experience we had together. I will miss those afternoons with Jaimini. I will miss those games, I will miss the friends that I made. Sure, tomorrow will be just the same. The sun will rise, the clock will hit two, but I won’t have the “Apna Shakespeare” group anymore.

An Interesting Story...

There was once a poor tailor, mullah nasirudin. He was able to satisfy his basic needs but he wanted to be rich. He had a habit of taking lottery tickets. Everyday he used to buy a lottery ticket which would cost him 10 rupees. After a year of incessantly buying the lottery tickets, one day the postman came to his house. He said,” Congratulations, you’ve won the lottery!” “Really?!!” “Yes…you are going to get five crore rupees (around 1 million USD)”. Mullah was very happy. He got his money, and then he shut down his tailoring shop and threw away the keys. He started doing all that he had thought he would have done when he became rich. He started drinking every night, gambling, eating out everyday, he bragged to his friends about his wealth.  And gradually he started drifting away from his friends and family. They began disliking him. After a year he realized that he had finished all his money, his health had deteriorated and he had lost his wife and kids. He was regretting everything he had done in that year. He was broke, without family and friends and emotionally shattered. He got his shop’s keys made again. He reopened the shop. And after a year he was back to his good old days. But still he did buy lottery tickets everyday, it was his habit. After a year, the postman again came to his house. “Hey! You came again to my house?! This time I haven’t won the lottery, right?”

“Yes, you have!” “Oh no! Now I will want to do that drinking and gambling and all that stuff again!”

The story ends here

The lesson here is: “we should always know where we are going, but more importantly, we should always remember where we came from”

Know matter how much money, wealth, fame we accumulate, it is important to stay grounded and remember where you came from.

"We are What We Choose"

A REALLY INSPIRING SPEECH DELIVERED BY THE FOUNDER OF AMAZON.COM, JEFF BEZOS . . .



Remarks by Jeff Bezos, as delivered to the Class of 2010
Baccalaureate Princeton University
May 30, 2010

"As a kid, I spent my summers . . .

with my grandparents on their ranch in Texas. I helped fix windmills, vaccinate cattle, and do other chores. We also watched soap operas every afternoon, especially "Days of our Lives." My grandparents belonged to a Caravan Club, a group of Airstream trailer owners who travel together around the U.S. and Canada. And every few summers, we'd join the caravan. We'd hitch up the Airstream trailer to my grandfather's car, and off we'd go, in a line with 300 other Airstream adventurers. I loved and worshipped my grandparents and I really looked forward to these trips. On one particular trip, I was about 10 years old. I was rolling around in the big bench seat in the back of the car. My grandfather was driving. And my grandmother had the passenger seat. She smoked throughout these trips, and I hated the smell.

At that age, I'd take any excuse to make estimates and do minor arithmetic. I'd calculate our gas mileage -- figure out useless statistics on things like grocery spending. I'd been hearing an ad campaign about smoking. I can't remember the details, but basically the ad said, every puff of a cigarette takes some number of minutes off of your life: I think it might have been two minutes per puff. At any rate, I decided to do the math for my grandmother. I estimated the number of cigarettes per days, estimated the number of puffs per cigarette and so on. When I was satisfied that I'd come up with a reasonable number, I poked my head into the front of the car, tapped my grandmother on the shoulder, and proudly proclaimed, "At two minutes per puff, you've taken nine years off your life!"

I have a vivid memory of what happened, and it was not what I expected. I expected to be applauded for my cleverness and arithmetic skills. "Jeff, you're so smart. You had to have made some tricky estimates, figure out the number of minutes in a year and do some division." That's not what happened. Instead, my grandmother burst into tears. I sat in the backseat and did not know what to do. While my grandmother sat crying, my grandfather, who had been driving in silence, pulled over onto the shoulder of the highway. He got out of the car and came around and opened my door and waited for me to follow. Was I in trouble? My grandfather was a highly intelligent, quiet man. He had never said a harsh word to me, and maybe this was to be the first time? Or maybe he would ask that I get back in the car and apologize to my grandmother. I had no experience in this realm with my grandparents and no way to gauge what the consequences might be. We stopped beside the trailer. My grandfather looked at me, and after a bit of silence, he gently and calmly said, "Jeff, one day you'll understand that it's harder to be kind than clever."

What I want to talk to you about today is the difference between gifts and choices. Cleverness is a gift, kindness is a choice. Gifts are easy -- they're given after all. Choices can be hard. You can seduce yourself with your gifts if you're not careful, and if you do, it'll probably be to the detriment of your choices.

This is a group with many gifts. I'm sure one of your gifts is the gift of a smart and capable brain. I'm confident that's the case because admission is competitive and if there weren't some signs that you're clever, the dean of admission wouldn't have let you in.

Your smarts will come in handy because you will travel in a land of marvels. We humans -- plodding as we are -- will astonish ourselves. We'll invent ways to generate clean energy and a lot of it. Atom by atom, we'll assemble tiny machines that will enter cell walls and make repairs. This month comes the extraordinary but also inevitable news that we've synthesized life. In the coming years, we'll not only synthesize it, but we'll engineer it to specifications. I believe you'll even see us understand the human brain. Jules Verne, Mark Twain, Galileo, Newton -- all the curious from the ages would have wanted to be alive most of all right now. As a civilization, we will have so many gifts, just as you as individuals have so many individual gifts as you sit before me.

How will you use these gifts? And will you take pride in your gifts or pride in your choices?

I got the idea to start Amazon 16 years ago. I came across the fact that Web usage was growing at 2,300 percent per year. I'd never seen or heard of anything that grew that fast, and the idea of building an online bookstore with millions of titles -- something that simply couldn't exist in the physical world -- was very exciting to me. I had just turned 30 years old, and I'd been married for a year. I told my wife MacKenzie that I wanted to quit my job and go do this crazy thing that probably wouldn't work since most startups don't, and I wasn't sure what would happen after that. MacKenzie (also a Princeton grad and sitting here in the second row) told me I should go for it. As a young boy, I'd been a garage inventor. I'd invented an automatic gate closer out of cement-filled tires, a solar cooker that didn't work very well out of an umbrella and tinfoil, baking-pan alarms to entrap my siblings. I'd always wanted to be an inventor, and she wanted me to follow my passion.

I was working at a financial firm in New York City with a bunch of very smart people, and I had a brilliant boss that I much admired. I went to my boss and told him I wanted to start a company selling books on the Internet. He took me on a long walk in Central Park, listened carefully to me, and finally said, "That sounds like a really good idea, but it would be an even better idea for someone who didn't already have a good job." That logic made some sense to me, and he convinced me to think about it for 48 hours before making a final decision. Seen in that light, it really was a difficult choice, but ultimately, I decided I had to give it a shot. I didn't think I'd regret trying and failing. And I suspected I would always be haunted by a decision to not try at all. After much consideration, I took the less safe path to follow my passion, and I'm proud of that choice.

Tomorrow, in a very real sense, your life -- the life you author from scratch on your own -- begins.

How will you use your gifts? What choices will you make?

Will inertia be your guide, or will you follow your passions?

Will you follow dogma, or will you be original?

Will you choose a life of ease, or a life of service and adventure?

Will you wilt under criticism, or will you follow your convictions?

Will you bluff it out when you're wrong, or will you apologize?

Will you guard your heart against rejection, or will you act when you fall in love?

Will you play it safe, or will you be a little bit swashbuckling?

When it's tough, will you give up, or will you be relentless?

Will you be a cynic, or will you be a builder?

Will you be clever at the expense of others, or will you be kind?

I will hazard a prediction. When you are 80 years old, and in a quiet moment of reflection narrating for only yourself the most personal version of your life story, the telling that will be most compact and meaningful will be the series of choices you have made. In the end, we are our choices. Build yourself a great story. Thank you and good luck!"

HOW DO YOU HANDLE NEGATIVITY?...

Have you ever been faced with trying to stay positive when others around you are negative? Negative people can be a challenge to be around. They will bring you down and drain your energy. Whether your friend or classmate has an occasional negative day or you deal with a family member, friend or co-worker that is chronically negative, there are things you can do to remain positive in the face of negativity. . .




1. Let the Negativity Pass
Whatever you do, do not argue with a negative person. Arguing only adds fuel to the fire. A negative person will feed off any negativity that will strengthen his mood or attitude. Their negativity intensifies and the situation gets worse before it gets better. Sometimes the best thing to do is remain silent and let the negativity pass.

2. Negative People Need Love
You know how difficult it can be to give love and positive attention to negative people. Unfortunately, that is often exactly what they need. Deep inside that mean and critical person is a person that is usually afraid he or she is unlovable. It is our challenge to rise above the negative attitude and love the injured person inside. How do you show love when someone is negative? You must listen to what she is trying to tell you. Acknowledge the feelings she has by saying something like, "You sound very angry right now". Even if you don't quite understand the person's feelings, know that your reality is different than someone else's. Ask how you might help the negative person. This shows genuine interest in her happiness. Offer a hug even if you get rejected. Remember not to take a rejection of your love personally. A negative person often has difficulty receiving love from others.

3. Focus on the Positive
If you try really hard, there is always something positive to be found in any situation. Even a negative person has positive qualities. When a person is drowning in negativity, it can be difficult for them to see the positive. They forget about all the great things they are doing. I admit that sometimes a negative person doesn't want to see the positive. This might require her to shift her outlook. Negativity can become a habit and habits are hard to break. Be patient and gently remind your irritable friend or family member to look for the the silver lining at the end of the dark cloud. Hopefully, in her down time, she will begin to reflect on what you have said.

4. Detach and Avoid Trying to Change the Negative Person
Learning to detach emotionally from a negative person can greatly benefit you and the other person. A negative person will fight you if you try to change them. If you want, you can try a little reverse psychology and agree with everything she says. I once read a great article about a mother who was exasperated with her son's negative mood. Everything she tried to soothe him and make him feel better backfired. She finally gave up and started agreeing with everything he said. When her son told her his friends were mean, she agreed with him. When he complained that his teacher didn't know anything, she couldn't agree more. After several minutes of this kind of dialogue with her son, his mood suddenly shifted. He declared that he was tired and he went to bed with a smile on his face.

5. Stay Away from Negative People
If you have negative people in your life that are critically affecting your mental and physical health, you need to evaluate whether or not you want these people in your life. Some people are so chronically negative that you have no other choice but to remove them from your life. It's possible to do that with colleagues. You can find another job if your boss or other co-workers are bringing you down. Other people, such as friends and family, are difficult to remove from your life. In this instance, professional counseling may be the answer. To protect your well being, you need to enforce very strong boundaries with negative people.

6. Keep Your Own Negative Thoughts and Behaviors in Check
If you do nothing else but focus on managing your own negative thoughts and behavior, you will come a long way towards remaining positive. A negative attitude is contagious, but a positive attitude is infectious as well. Hang out with positive people that encourage you to be your best self. Use positive affirmations to overcome negative self-talk. Express your gratitude for all the positive things in your life. Take the time everyday to watch all the beautiful things going on around you. Read inspirational material and listen to joyful music. Do whatever you have to do to remain positive and happy despite the negativity you face.

The world will be a better place because of you and your attitude. And you never know, you just might help a negative person make a change to a better way of living.