Happy Birthday on your 15th!

Which is no less important than your 1st or 5th, the 10th, or the 50th to come.

This should have been a moment of great celebration. And yet it isn't. It feels a little broken. When your new iphone cracked on its very first day, you got a new one almost right away. It's not the same in life! No one can unbreak things or turn back time. One has to keep moving on! Which is OK. In fact, the higher the mountain you try to climb, the more stumbles and falls one will have. There will be many falls and even broken bones. One has to learn from falls and become stronger everyday.

Being able to recover is therefore very important in life! You are ambitious! Everyone dreams BIG. But you have an unique ability to work hard which very few people have. For someone like you 'SKY" is the limit. You are a Rocket! Always have always been a Rocket! No one can take it away from you! You are only limited by your imagination and how big you can dream! It's why Einstein once remarked that "Imagination is more important than knowledge".

To dream and imagine big, read as many books as you can, because in reading a thousand books, you are essentially living a 1000 lives through other people. Every life is unique and there is none like yours. But if you had been born in other peoples place, then you would have experienced that life.

We CAN STOP HERE! THAT'S PRETTY MUCH IT!!

Because, although words can change a life, I don't know if I have any more to say. This is it!

If I had to add a few other things it would be:

1. Life is about finding out what you truly love. It is about having a spiritual experience. One of the best life lesson is from the greatest Indian epic "Mahabharata" according to Carlo Rovelli, one of the best theoretical physicists alive today. It is that "We live our lives like we are never going to die. Although we all know quite well that we all die"

2. As we get closer to death, memories become even more important. I have seen you from the moment you arrived-

My memories of you are as follows-

But now you are a mystery to me! Given your disregard, contempt and antibodies to me, why you wanted me to wish you a 'Happy Birthday' is a mystery to me (or your mom just made it up!). In any case, every person that ever lived, is living or will live is a mystery. Even more amazing is that we are a great mystery to ourselves. That is how the story goes! A smart person once said that "As our knowledge increases, the perimeter of our ignorance increases even faster." The world itself is mysterious. And the longer one lives the more mysterious it gets.

[A Rule: When people have contempt for you, it is time to leave the relationship, whether business or personal relationships.]

3. Is Life just about having a job? We lead very short lives. Finding a job is for the guys in the picture below (picture from Mumbai from May 10). These people left their village to find a JOB thousands of miles away, so that they can buy food for their family. In the picture they are stuck trying to find a way to get back home in the pandemic. Job is to help us buy food and have a safe place to sleep in. I came to this country and found a job. But for it to be the only thing one does until they die is a waste of a life. So what do you do once you have enough food and a home? You spend time to discover yourself, you try to make sense of the universe, of nature and life itself. You even help these people. You keep moving up the Maslow's hierarchy (you can look up Maslow's Hierarchy of needs).

I may even be related to some (on the right image) and separated from them by no more than 3 or 4 generations.

Life is also about finding what you truly LOVE. So how does one find "What you love"? You will know it because you will experience goosebumps. I enjoy music and the music below and it gives me goose-bumps. Life without music would be a mistake-Friedrich Nietzsche.

You have to find what you truly love. Signing off!

If I was not the first to wish you a Happy Birthday, I was at least the last one. Sometimes being last is better than being first because of 'recency bias'. [You can look up "Recency bias"]

As you go to Lawrenceville.

June 22, 2020.

Thank you Megan!

Thank you for sharing a memorable image. Less than 200 years ago, there was no way to store such images except in our brains. Until about a 50 years ago, one could only take black and white images and that too only on paper. Often they were quite blurry. Digital images in vivid colors have been around for less than 25 years. Even some of your earlier images are on paper in a box under the bed and not on the computer. Several of the men and women who made such digital images on our screens possible are also dead. Life is short some get a lot done in very little time.

The point I am making here is that these images constitute memories over a lifetime. Life is a collection of memories and experiences. Recalling a image triggers a memory and the associated experience. It can evoke a sensation of feeling good, anger, disgust fear etc. These feelings are a result of various chemicals secreted in our brain. As an example Dopamine results in surprise and excitement.

Our brains then are a library of memories. Additionally, it has a unique capacity to create and imagine other stories which may be related or completely unrelated and even fantastic. Sooner or later you will experience a dream that make you wonder where did that come from. Your brain may also provide you answers to difficult problems in dreams. There are several stories of great discoveries occuring in dreams. In the early 1900 Otto Lewi a medical doctor working on a complicated problem related to beating of the heart awoke in the middle of the night from his dream and wrote down the solution to his problem on a piece of paper but he could not read his own writing. Fortunately he had the same dream the next night and he immediately went to the lab to perform the experiment. He won the 1961 Nobel prize in medicine for it.

In addition to dreams, it allows us to imagine anything from inside an atom to the boundary of the universe. We could not get to the edge of the universe in 14 billion years traveling at the speed of light. It allows us to imagine how things may be and plan when we are going to an important meeting. It allows us to plan for the trip and also for battle without having gone on the trip or battled yet. It allows us to come up with new ideas and best strategy. The mind can travel from the level of atom and the cell through the solar system, galaxies, to the edge of the universe in an instant. Imagination is faster than the speed of light. It is why Einstein said that imagination is more important the knowledge.

In my imagination you will always be the same little baby frozen in time, very tough but cute. No one and nothing can ever break you. You can see why Imagination is quite important as it allows me to be happy with this memory no matter what the circumstances. I can keep replaying it. If you never regarded me again, I could still evoke memories of the bygone and be quite happy in that imaginary world. Stephen Hawking could sit in his chair all day without being able to move because of ALS which was sad, and yet he seemed quite happy because in is mind he was likely having happy thoughts of traveling in space through time. The book by Christophe Galfard who was a student of Hawking “The Universe in your hand” really provides a glimpse of how one can time travel across the universe all the way from inside the atom to the outer boundaries of the universe without moving a finger. In fact who do you think was more happy a year later than they were when they won a million dollars or lost their legs. Turns out they were as happy as before. The mind has a great healing powers.

The mind or the brain is a 3 pound jelly which you can hold in the palm of your hand is nature's most amazing creation. It can contemplate interstellar space, and infinity, and upon itself thinking about universe and infinity. Referring to the mind in Religio Medici, Sir Robert Browne noted in 1642. 'I am the happiest man alive. I have that in me that can convert poverty to riches, adversity to prosperity, and I am more invulnerable than Achilles: fortune has not one place to help me.' In other words the mind can transport one to heaven or to hell. Which ever one chooses.

So why is knowing all this so important? Because if our mind is the greatest gift to us and if it makes us who we are, helps us rocket through life, then we better know how it works. If you get in the rocket, you better know how it works, how to fix it and so on. Otherwise you will get into trouble. Imagine just getting into the car without knowing how it works and just head out to another city without having spent time to learn how things work. In fact the first lesson in school should then be to learn how our mind works. And certainly it should not be the last thing that one learns in life.

Now, I think we all agree that we are a collection of memories. Our minds store memories from the past. Is that the only memory we have? In fact there are many addition types of memory. The DNA itself is collection of recipe for proteins. It is a memory bank of how our body should be that has been figured out over 4 billion years by trial and error, also known as evolution. This memory makes sure that your heart has 4 chambers and you have 2 eyes that can blink and connect to your brain to help you make sense of the world around you. In fact the body itself is a collection of 30 trillion cells. each cell with 2 million parts. The cells have to know how to work and do what they are supposed to do. So the cell in the ear does not see and the eye does not smell. The 2 million parts in each cell are proteins which are made up of compounds. Compounds are made up of molecules, molecules of atoms and atoms of sub atomic particles such as protons, neutrons and electrons. These in turn are made up of quarks and gluons and the GOD particle (Higgs boson). Each one of them has a memory. So if you bend a rubber it pops back into the original shape. That's because it has a memory. Electrons have a memory to make sure that their charge is negative and that they get attracted to a positive charge. This memory is the property of the atom. The collective memory of everything we are made up of, then constitutes consciousness. Consciousness is also awareness.

The point here is that you are a collection of memory at many levels which is an incredibly enormous amount of information. It is what makes you uniquely who you are and no two person alike in any way. Also your consciousness emerges from all these memories. It is an emergent quality of the various memories. By emergent quality, one means the final result of the underlying effect. An example of en emergent quality is heat. So something is hot because the atoms inside of it are bouncing around and moving rather fast and striking the surface more frequently unlike an object which is cold. So atoms moving fast makes something hot which is an emergent quality. Similarly consciousness is an emergent quality of all the memories, just as heat is the combination of the movement of all the atoms in a substance.

This is a very superficial understanding of our brain. Our brain is our greatest asset and also the greatest mystery. And hopefully it will be something you spend some time thinking about. What are ones goals? What is the purpose of life? Also on discovering yourself, because life is short and it is over before one realizes it. The time to pack your bags and return where you came from will come pretty quickly. For me it has come. I have a few years left, and I could make a few more dollars but WHY? No matter where I go, which is either to Heaven to Hell (and they are next to each other) I am going Naked, just like I came. I may be allowed only to take some thoughts and ideas which in fact may be allowed in INFINITY… But nothing more.

In fact all one leaves behind is an idea or experience. It is what Socrates, Plato, Copernicus, Newton, Einstein and others did. In addition we pass on our DNA. The DNA contains all the knowledge accumulated since the first cell came about. It remember what a frog or a man or a woman should look like. If you think of a mango or avocado what is the most important part? We feel it is the pulp. But in reality it is the seed, because it is what will live on becoming a new plant for more fruits. Nature is fooling us and treating us like kids and giving us some gift or candy to keep us happy. We are like the pulp, feel all important but someone eats or it rots and that is the end of it.

Your imagination will take you anywhere in your dream. But you have to have some sense of the possibilities. So you travel and experience and study and then model everything else in your mind. Watch as many amazing videos as you can. You can model the atom, the inside of body, the cell and the universe by just carefully understanding and studying what you can see, hear, feel and experience. A guide in life will be very important. You will also need some friends on your journey-Yes together you will go far.

But one also needs a guide in life. In fact many guides and mentors. Just as to climb Denali or Mont Blanc you will need someone to show you the way first. Eventually you will become well versed and trained in climbing on your own and scale new and unconquered mountains. Laura Dekker is special. Very few are like her. She learnt it from her dad right away. The most important criteria for choosing a guide is someone you can deeply respect. Or else it doesn't work out.

Figuring yourself out will be the most difficult puzzle to solve. To do so one may have to live many lives, There is another way to live many lives. It is by listening to other people's stories and lessons they learnt. Essentially they are telling you about the mountain they climbed and by reading book you experience many more than you can scale on your own in a single lifetime. Have an ambition to read 500 pages a day. It is what Warren Buffet does. Or at least 500 pages a week or a month.

Spending more time thinking and planning which mountain to climb or where one is going is important as one does not want to end up on the wrong mountain or the wrong destination and have to start all over again.

I would spend a lot of time getting out and doing things. There is no better way to learn than to experience and be able to smell something. Think one more step ahead than you usually do. And keep thinking more steps every time. Become a deep thinker.

Finally, you are a rocket. But, even a rocket needs to have a well calibrated compass to get to the right destination. Otherwise...