The Painting on the wall

There was a king who was a great admirer of art. One day an artist came and said to the king, “Oh King! Give me a blank wall in your palace and let me paint a picture on it.”

The artist was given the job. Just then, another young man said, “Oh King! Please allow me to work on the opposite wall. I too am an artist.”  The king said, “What would you like to make?” The man said, “My Lord, I shall make exactly what that man will make on the opposite wall. Moreover, I shall do so, without looking at his work. I would even request you to have a thick curtain put up between the two walls so that either of us cannot see the other.”

Everyone in the king’s court, including the king was intrigued. He decided to give the young fellow a chance. The following day a thick curtain was put into place and both the artists got to work. The first artist brought in a regular supply of paint, oil, water etc. The second one worked with some cloth and a bucket of water. After a month the first artist told the king that his work was complete. The king sent for the second artist and asked him, “Young man, when would your work be ready? I am coming to see the first wall this evening.” The man said, “My Lord, my wall is ready too!”

The king went to see the first artist’s wall. He was very, very impressed with the painting and gave a hefty sum as a reward to the artist. He then asked for the curtain to be opened up. Lo and behold! The same painting was to be seen on the opposite wall too! Amazing! But true! Each line, each minor detail was exactly as it was on the first wall. But this man had not been seeing what was going on, on the other side of the curtain. So how had he done it?

The king wanted to know the secret. He gave a double reward to the fellow. Then he said, “Young man, I am indeed very happy with your work. But you must tell me; how did you do it?”

The lad said simply, “It’s very easy! I just polished the wall every day till it shone like a mirror!” It was a wall made of white marble! The reflection of the painting across the room, showed up in it!

That is what it means to polish yourself. World is a reflection of you. Whatever you are, the world will seem to be that too. If you are happy, the world will look to be happy. If you are sad; jealous; angry; restless... that is what the world will seem to be to you!

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Pray regularly

 There is a story of about a sea captain who in his retirement skippered a boat taking day-trippers to Shetland Islands. On one trip, the boat was full of young people.

They laughed at the old captain when they saw him say a prayer before sailing out, because the day was fine and the sea was calm.

However they weren't long at sea when a storm suddenly blew up and the boat began to pitch violently. The terrified passengers came to the captain and asked him to join them in prayer.   

   
But he replied, "I say my prayers when it's calm. When it's rough I attend to my ship." 

 
Here is a lesson for us: 
   
If we cannot and will not seek God in quiet moments of our lives; we are not likely to find Him when trouble strikes. We are more likely to panic. But if we have learnt to seek Him and trust Him in quiet moments, then most certainly we will find Him when the going gets rough. 

There is no miracle

One man went out of his village, and after ten years, he came back, advertised himself that "I have become successful in yoga practice." So naturally villagers surrounded him. "Oh, what yoga practice you have learned?" "I can walk on the water." "Oh?" So the arrangement was that he'll cross the river, walking on the water. One old man came and said, "Sir, it is very wonderful, but it is two paise worth." "Why?" "Now, you will walk and go the other side; I'll take a boat, pay him two paise. I'll do the same thing. So what is your credit?" So those who are actually intelligent men, they will question, "What actual profit you have made?” Let us say you are a chemist and you combine acid and base and you make smoke, an explosion or whatever. To somebody ignorant, that's a miracle. But for everything there is a process, and so when you see a miracle, it's just ignorance of the process. So-called transcendentalists who have no real stock of knowledge they are fond of these miracles, and for the most part, because the innocent public is generally foolish, therefore they accept these magicians as saintly persons. So one who does not know these things, they say, "Oh, these are all stories." It is not story. It is no miracle. They are all possible. So there is no such thing as miracle. It is a process of doing. One must know how to do it. There is no miracle. We don't say anything miracle. The real knowledge means science or knowing everything about something. So this Krishna Consciousness is not a miracle, it is science, and because we are Krishna conscious, therefore we know everything.

 

Let go of the fear that if you're relaxed or happy, you're going to fall

When you eat too much, the energy that is usually directed toward normal body functions – healing, cell division, metabolism, and all sorts of other good stuff – must go toward digestion. This makes you feel sleepy and lethargic. You lose motivation and energy.

There is an emotional equivalent. You can extend this same metaphor to your tendency to be overly serious and immobilized over little things. When you are angry, bothered, and annoyed, virtually all the mental and emotional energy that could otherwise be used for creativity, spontaneity, and mental ambition is taken away.

When you focus on things that irritate you, it interferes with the process of creation. It keeps you down, stuck, focused not on the wonder and mystery of life and its many possibilities but on what’s lacking, what’s wrong, and all that makes you mad and frustrated.

As you lighten up, relax, and unwind, you open the doors of creativity and joy that were previously hidden. So, starting today, remind yourself that it’s okay to relax – in fact, it’s more than okay, it’s downright important.

 

The Akshaya Patra Foundation wins Marico Innovation Foundation Award

The Akshaya Patra Foundation won the Marico Innovation Foundation award at the 4^th edition of the Innovation for India Awards 2012 under the Social Category. The Foundation shared the award with three other organisations – Fractal Foundation, St. Jude and Teach for India for the innovations in the social sector by a social organization impacting Education, Health and  Poverty. The Akshaya Patra Foundation won the award out of the 145 applicants competing under the social category.
Congratulating The Akshaya Patra Foundation and emphasising on the need to appreciate innovations in the various sector, Harsh Mariwala, founder of Marico Innovation Foundation and Chairman and Managing Director, Marico Ltd said, "India is clearly burgeoning with talent, so corporate India and government must create an ecosystem to allow innovations to thrive. The awardees stood out among all the 432 entries on the basis of sustainability, impact and its inclusive approach." The Awards followed a transparent evaluation system with a Knowledge Partner – Bain & Company and an Eminent Jury panel led by Dr R A Mashelkar.
Sri Chanchalapathi Dasa, Vice President, The Akshaya Patra Foundation, said, “The award is yet another testimony to our dedication. The recognition boosts our innovative spirit which has been the underlying essence of our success story. We have grown from feeding 1,500 school children in 2000 in Bangalore to 1.3 million school children across eight states today.”
Marico Innovation Foundation institutionalised the “Innovation for India Awards” to recognize the greatest innovations to come out of India in the recent past - innovations that have positively impacted lives and have at their core a great idea coupled with a unique insight. The awards are given away in four categories: Product, Process, Service and Business Model.
The Akshaya Patra Foundation is a not-for-profit organisation providing hot, nutritious freshly cooked classroom lunches for nearly 1.3 million underprivileged children in India.  It runs the world’s largest NGO midday meal program for underprivileged school children in India. In June 2000, Akshaya Patra started feeding 1500 children in 5 schools in Bangalore. Within just 10 years of its inception, Akshaya Patra today feeds nearly 1.3 million children in 8 states from 18 kitchens all over India.
A public-private partnership project, Akshaya Patra is a secular programme that claims to combine good management, innovative technology and smart engineering to deliver school lunch at a fraction of the cost of similar programs in other parts of the world. With an average government subsidy of 50 percent, Rs 675 can feed a child for a year. The foundation aims to serve 5 million children daily by 2020.

Everybody follows somebody

Everywhere there must be, one chief man. Either you are a political party or social party or religious party or Communist party... Just like Communist party, they have got their chief men. Lenin, Stalin. I asked this question from Professor Kotovsky, "Where is the difference of philosophy between your Communist philosophy and our Krishna consciousness philosophy? You have to accept one chief man, that Lenin or Stalin, and we have also selected one chief man, or God, Krishna. So you are following the dictates of Lenin or Stalin or Molotov or this or that. We are following the philosophy or the instruction of Krishna. So on principle, where is the difference? There is no difference." You cannot conduct your daily affairs without being dictated by somebody else. So that is the law of nature. Then why don't you accept the supreme authority? It is not possible that we can live without leadership. Is there any party, is there any school, or is there any institution that they're conducting without any chief leader or director? No. The principle is there, that you have to accept one chief. We have to accept the servitorship or to become underhand of some person. 
 
So the intelligence is that "Whom we have to accept?" There lies intelligence: "What kind of leader we shall accept?" So our principle is that Krishna should be accepted as the leader because Krishna says in the Bhagavad-gita, "There is no more superior person or superior position than Me."; and "God" means that. In the dictionary "God" means the Supreme Being. Supreme Being means nobody is greater than Him; nobody is equal to Him. 

Facebook Buys Instagram For $1 Billion- Did Zuckerberg do the right decision?? Will He be happy???

Facebook has just finished a deal to acquire mobile photo sharing app Instagram for approximately $1 billion in cash and stock. Instagram will remain an independently branded standalone app that’s separate from Facebook, but the services will increase their ties to each other. The transaction should go through this quarter pending some standard closing procedures
Last year, documents for a standalone Facebook mobile photo sharing app were attained by TechCrunch. Now it seems Facebook would rather buy Instagram which comes with a built-in community of photographers and photo lovers, while simultaneously squashing a threat to its dominance in photo sharing.
At 27 million registered users on iOS alone, Instagram was increasingly positioning itself as a social network in its own right — not just a photo-sharing app. And it was clear that some users were doing more of the daily sharing actvities on Instagram rather than Facebook’s all-in-one mobile apps, which had to be cluttered with nearly every feature of the desktop site.
With the Instagram for Android launch last week, Instagram was going to get to 50 million registered users in a heartbeat after racking up more than 1 million in the first 24 hours. And with that kind of momentum, Facebook felt like it had to move — fast. After all, photo sharing and tagging are arguably what *made* Facebook.
Whatever you think of the price given the fact that Instagram had no revenues, the reality is it was going to be worth whatever Mark Zuckerberg felt like paying for it. Both Google and Facebook had approached Instagram several times over the past 18 months, but the talks clearly didn’t result in a deal. So Facebook was going to have to offer a huge premium over the last valuation for Systrom and the board to take any deal seriously.

[Instagram's founders from left, Mike Krieger and Kevin Systrom. Portrait by Cody Pickens]
With the deal, Instagram will gain massive design and engineering resources by joining forces with Facebook, a big change after running as a famously lean company with just a handful of employees. Still, the deal seems to let Instagram stay somewhat independent and maintain some of its company culture. Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom writes in a blog post, “It’s important to be clear that Instagram is not going away.”
This is a really big departure from the way Zuckerberg has historically run Facebook as a single product. He has always been insistent that everything feed back into Facebook itself. Keeping Instagram as a separate product and brand is reminiscent of what Google has done with keeping YouTube and Android as separate fiefdoms within the company following their acquisitions.
Instagram’s investors included Benchmark Capital, Greylock Capital, Thrive Capital and Andreessen Horowitz, along with angel investors including Quora’s Adam D’Angelo, Lowercase Capital’s Chris Sacca and Square and Twitter’s Jack Dorsey.
The early investors must be thrilled with the price. From our understanding, the later investors, who put capital into the company at a $500 million valuation, seem happy with basically getting a 2X in a few days after the money was wired last Thursday.
Congratulations to Instagram’s founders Mike Krieger and Kevin Systrom. You opened the world’s eyes to seeing art in everyday life, and now Facebook has opened its doors to you. So in your honor, we’ve made you part of the TechCrunch home page logo.

More On The Instagram acquisition

From 0 To $1 Billion In Two Years: Instagram’s Rose-Tinted Ride To Glory
Right Before Acquisition, Instagram Closed $50M At A $500M Valuation From Sequoia, Thrive, Greylock And Benchmark
Facestagram: Five New Features Facebook + Instagram Could Launch
With Instagram Buy, Facebook Officially Pushes M&A Strategy Beyond The ‘Acqui-hire’
Insta-Backlash: Twitterverse Overreacts To Facebook’s Instagram Acquisition, Users Delete Accounts
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Mark Zuckerberg posted the following letter to his Timeline about the purchase:

I’m excited to share the news that we’ve agreed to acquire Instagram and that their talented team will be joining Facebook.
For years, we’ve focused on building the best experience for sharing photos with your friends and family. Now, we’ll be able to work even more closely with the Instagram team to also offer the best experiences for sharing beautiful mobile photos with people based on your interests.
We believe these are different experiences that complement each other. But in order to do this well, we need to be mindful about keeping and building on Instagram’s strengths and features rather than just trying to integrate everything into Facebook.
That’s why we’re committed to building and growing Instagram independently. Millions of people around the world love the Instagram app and the brand associated with it, and our goal is to help spread this app and brand to even more people.
We think the fact that Instagram is connected to other services beyond Facebook is an important part of the experience. We plan on keeping features like the ability to post to other social networks, the ability to not share your Instagrams on Facebook if you want, and the ability to have followers and follow people separately from your friends on Facebook.
These and many other features are important parts of the Instagram experience and we understand that. We will try to learn from Instagram’s experience to build similar features into our other products. At the same time, we will try to help Instagram continue to grow by using Facebook’s strong engineering team and infrastructure.
This is an important milestone for Facebook because it’s the first time we’ve ever acquired a product and company with so many users. We don’t plan on doing many more of these, if any at all. But providing the best photo sharing experience is one reason why so many people love Facebook and we knew it would be worth bringing these two companies together.
We’re looking forward to working with the Instagram team and to all of the great new experiences we’re going to be able to build together.

[Additional reporting by Kim-Mai Cutler, Image Credit: Max Woolf]

You can see here each one is on the growth of building wealth. We see also that even
in this life one obtains a good education or money by good work.
Similarly, in our next birth we get such desirable positions only by good
work. Otherwise, it would not so happen that two persons born in the same
place at the same time are seen differently placed according to previous
work. But all such material positions are impermanent. The positions in
the topmost Brahmaloka and in the lowest Patala are also changeable
according to our own work. The philosophically inclined person must not
be tempted by such changeable positions. He should try to get into the
permanent life of bliss and knowledge where he will not be forced to come
back again to the miserable material world, either in this or that
planet. Miseries and mixed happiness are two features of material life,
and they are obtained in Brahmaloka and in other lokas also. They are
obtained in the life of the demigods and also in the life of the dogs and
hogs. The miseries and mixed happiness of all living beings are only of
different degree and quality, but no one is free from the miseries of
birth, death, old age and disease. Similarly, everyone has his destined
happiness also. No one can get more or less of these things simply by
personal endeavors. Even if they are obtained, they can be lost again.
One should not, therefore, waste time with these flimsy things; one
should only endeavor to go back to Godhead. That should be the mission of
everyone's life.