Spirituality Vs Religion (I am not an atheist)

I would like to begin this post with a quote which made me 'THINK' a lot,

"With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion." - Steven Weinberg

I would like to open this post with a note that I am not an atheist.  I have strong faith in my religion and my religion has taught me a lot about virtues like peace, love, compassion and definitely no violence at all.  My religion is all about showing love towards fellow humans.  I would like to not to boast on my religion as I am afraid that my valuable readers would find this post to be biased towards my religion.  This topic is a  very critical topic which I believe would be valuable to diverse group of people having different religious faiths.

RELIGION = PEACE [Is it reality?]

Basically, religions date back to thousands of years and so do religious scriptures.  Every religion has its  major divisions with conflicting opinions on their scriptures.  Religion and spirituality sound like similar terms, but they are not.  I strongly believe religion should always be accompanied by spirituality to make the  world a better place.

What is religion?

We all know what religion is, but still I referred many dictionaries and came across so many definitions.  The main keyword is 'belief' in something that one strongly believes to exist and abide by its way - God.  Religion is supposed to control one's life, steer his or her life in the right direction.  So basically there is nothing wrong in religion - then why do conflicts rise in the name of religion.  A religious person believes in rituals - obviously rituals are not wrong as they are part of religion (but not spirituality) . Likewise,  some religious people spend more time in reading scriptures and tend to misinterpret them.  This leads to chaos and shakes the fundamental purpose of religion - peace and a better world for everyone.  Religion does not encourage doing something bad or evil in the name of God, it reflects love and love and hate can never coexist.  Some people are very good enough to find "hate scriptural lines not based on God or religion but by their own perspective."   This  is done by so called religious leaders of all religions. The love of a particular religion and the set of beliefs should never lead to formation of evil cults which indulge in fighting and killing people in the name of religion.  One cannot achieve martyrdom by being a suicide bomber  and destroying other religious monuments - no offense intended on any religion.  Religious conflicts are like a chain reaction and it is very hard to break the chain - but can be prevented.

What is spirituality?

Most people equate being spiritual with being more religious, being more close to God, believing more in God and more.  That is true and acceptable, but spirituality cannot exist without reverence.  Reverence is the feeling of profound awe and respect and often love (American Heritage Dictionary).  Spirituality is a simple concept than religion - but hard to understand.  Spirituality looks upon scriptures using inner mind's enlightenment.  Only a person who has discovered himself or herself will be able to take the path of spirituality.  Religion closely coexists with spirituality.  Spirituality is never influenced by extrinsic factors, so it is more divine.  To define spirituality in a sentence, spirituality is the feeling of accepting God in one's heart and believe that God lives inside them.  All scriptures portray God to be very kind and forgiving and through spirituality a person can attain this perspective of looking at life.  When religious beliefs  are powered by spirituality a person would have no hate towards members of other religions.  This leads to peace in a community, city, state, nation and world.

What is religious tolerance?

Religious tolerance helps to control the bloodshed based on religion.  Spirituality helps a person to be more tolerant towards other religions as spirituality is based on reality and inner mind - inner mind is always pure and good in a spiritual person.  Religious persons are not very tolerant towards other religions because they rely more on literature and inspired by speeches given by their religious leaders.  Still many religious leaders have been able to have considerable amount of tolerance towards other religions - but far less than the spiritual ones.  In reality, spirituality increases religious tolerance and thereby unity.

I don't want to extend this post any further as there is no shortage of religious and spiritual leaders across the globe.  They preach to millions of people.  If these individuals are able to embrace spirituality plus religion, human race will never be divided based on religion.  If people follow their religions with a spiritualistic approach, it is the path of love which would lead the world to peace.

All religions must be tolerated... for... every man must get to heaven his own way. 

~Frederick the Great

 

Lovecriminal also knows to cook - Recipes On Demand

Eating good food is great, but making good food is even great.  When I cook, I feel like an artist, painter, sculptor, engineer, programmer, writer, singer and more - I am not crazy.   Luckily, most of my trials at kitchen turn out to be good - I have had bad burnt ones too :(.  When the recipes turn out to be good, people often ask me to write those recipes for them or send them via e-mail.  I am not good at writing (especially writing recipes :P) so I have barely written any recipes (except the KFC one for which I got mixed responses - some say it cannot be called as a recipe because of lack of exact measurements).   I am not  like the famous Captain at KFC who deliberately want to hide the recipe.  I love open source and hate proprietary softwares.  I strongly believe that ingredients and measurements are "eater-specific."  I also do not measure things while I cook.  To make sure everything is good to my taste or the people who eat them (I ask them how hot, salty they want it - texture, MSG, more soy and more) and do a "Nakkify test."  I hope people know what test I mean.  A few drops on your hand and lick it - you will never go wrong and if it needs a fix, make changes and repeat the test again.

I would like to quote something here to support my point,

Good painting is like good cooking; it can be tasted, but not explained. - Maurice de Vlaminck

The good news is that I am planning to put in recipes in this blog on demand.  I also have a couple of guest bloggers who are willing to share their recipes here.  The most notable and notorious one is going to be  my friend Aarthi's blog called Yummy Tummy.  She tries new recipes over weekends.  She says she is inspired towards cooking by so many cooks like Nigella Lawson, Anjum Anand, Aarti Sequeira, Rachel Allen and many more.  Honestly, I have no clue who these people are - will Google and do some research on these guys.

You can request for recipes using the comment box widget.

This photo stream has a few pictures of Lovecriminal @ work in the kitchen.

Thats all on this post folks.

Life is a roller coaster . . .

I regularly come across people who say life is great, good and very good all the time.  They say they are happy always.  I envy them (not much) - at the same time I have a serious doubt in what they say.  No one can sustain being excited and happy about life always (just like 24x7).  We are supposed to have a few good times, a few or more bad times coming in cycles (random cycles) - that is life.  Life is like a roller coaster ride - definitely not smooth.  If a roller coaster ride runs straight and swift - it would definitely be called as a train ride that means nothing.  The real excitement of life is the unexpected happenings it has in store for us.

We have to understand the fact that life is filled with ups and downs.  We cannot help changing it - things happen eventually.  We are charged up when something good happens to us ; on the contrary we totally get drained out when something bad happens to us.  Actually, you have to stay charged high when you are down to push you out of it.  Likewise, do not waste your energy when you are having a great time - cos as you are feeling good you need no extra charge to propel yourself.  If you are too charged ,  you would get high and start to tailspin or burn yourself out because of the extreme charge.  Reserve the power for a tough day - it may not be that far.

There is no 'brake' available during the ride to take a pause in life and think, but before you strap yourself you know that you are in for a wild ride.  Everybody knows the fact that life in reality will not be fair all the time - but they forget the fact that they sometimes have time for preparation. 

Sometimes life will just go like a swift ride - circling the same place (you do not even know what direction are you headed too) - sit back and relax because you might either get a spike or a downfall after this short circling. which would need more of you.  You have to realize the fact that the ride is gonna be wild and you gotta stick with it till the end.

 This video does not reflect anything written in this post.
The title of this song inspired me to write this post.

Tips and strategies to face this ride?

Take the ride with a pessimistic approach (preparing for the worst) which would season you to face difficulties better as you are planned.  During the ride you will have spikes like marriage, children and a whole lot of good things in life - you do not need any help during that time.  During the worst times - transform into an optimist and start looking at brighter things in life like,

• if you have money problems - you have a job and you are healthy, you can come over it through time.
• if you lose your job - you could find a better job, may be it was time for you to change your job.
• you fall sick - you know you could regain your health or at least you are not dead.
• (you can approach all the problems this way)

A small tip is to look at yourself in a mirror and say "this is worse but definitely not the worst - that makes this worse a little better."

Easy to say, very difficult to follow, lets try taking life this way.....

Valentine's Day Special - Lovers for year 2010-2011

"Sorry for this title St. Valentine, I have great respect for you."

I analyzed the most famous romantic couples on screen and off screen (reality in India).  I found that Nithyananda and Ranjitha took over Internet like a storm with the love making tape (not a scandal :)) last March 2010.  Because of Lenin's tape, they together qualify as the Most Famous Lovers for Year 2010-2011 (Romantic Year - Feb 14, 2010 to Feb 14, 2011).  I have statistical data to support how much they were  popular on the Internet.  Searches regarding both of them and the alleged tape topped  Google Trends for many days continuously and also searched extensively on YouTube (Check This for Google Trends report for 1 day alone).  The followup news on their alleged sexscapade are still selling hot whenever it happens.  People are interested on news about these lovebirds made popular by Lenin and his tape (lovecriminal's perspective).

Nithyananda and Ranjitha

Unfortunately, Nithyananda was accused of rape charges based on the sex scam video (actually love making video) by Lenin - though Ranjitha herself registered a complaint against him.  Most of us watched the video repeatedly aired on  national networks.  I did not find anything nonconsensual happening between both of them in the alleged video.  It seemed like it was happening with mutual consent at their own privacy.  Lenin got into their private space and exposed the fact that they were lovers - media interpreted it as rape, scandal and so on.  May be Lenin was motivated on extracting money from the God Man - I hope he would have got decent money from the news network that aired this video first.  The video looked like as though Nithyananda as a guru teaching Ranjitha how to attain 'eternal bliss' through him (no obscenity intended).  The video looked like one of the intimate moments between lovers (except Ranjitha was cheating on her husband on the alleged tape - I have started to understand difficult quotes  like "everything" is fair in love and war).

Lot of people accused Nithyananda of other rape and murder charges - not much have been brought into light and it seems like there is not much truth in it.  It might have been like that he fell in love with a voluptuous actress - may be true love.  I don't know whether he was in love, if he was, falling in love was the only mistake he did.

Nithyananda and Ranjitha still continue calling the tape expertly crafted and engineered.  No matter what  they say, this alleged video tape had made them very popular and the Most Popular Lovers for Romantic Year 2010-2011 in the Internet.


This is going to be a very small post - work is calling me.  I think I have made my point in this post and time to stop keying. 

How Indian women use Social Media

Social networking has become a daily activity with people being able to network even using entry level mobile phones.  Social networking activity is not restricted to using PC alone and we could find people posting from mobiles quite frequently.  Along with checking e-mail and internet search, social networking has become a vital everyday activity for both men and women.  People are spending less time in reading newspapers as they prefer going through news websites and reading blogs to keep themselves update.  These blogs can be technology related, politics, general news and more - blogs belong to the social media family.

Social networking between women depicted using vector graphics

Okay, let me get into to the core of the topic.  Around a decade back, men were considered to be major users of internet in India.  Things have changed now with every home having access to broadband internet and most mobile users powered with mobile internet.  Women along with spending time on television and shopping (both working and housewives - most of them, not universalizing) have allocated a significant time for internet - mainly Social Networking.  This blog is gonna present a few lines on how Indian women use social media from Lovecriminal's perspective.  Let me put down a few points which are not in order as they come to my mind.

• You could find very less profiles of Indian women on dating websites.  Even if they exist, they are mostly fakes.  You could find a considerable number of matrimonial profiles.  Indian women are serious on getting married than dating - correct me if I am wrong.
• Indian women prefer Facebook over Orkut (which is very popular in India).  I think it is because of some added privacy, extra features and definitely games.
• Women spend more time on social network games.  We could find them at top levels in most of the games.  Farmville according to me is ruled by women.
• If you find a profile having picture of an actress, doll, baby, flowers - you can confirm it is indeed a profile of a woman.  These people are newbies to social networking and you could find their portraits to be uploaded in the near future if they are hooked on to networking.
• I believe the reason why women spend more time on social networking is . . . . . . . . should I disclose it?.....Ya, will....We know women are good interacting with others and they start conversations pretty good among themselves even thought they have varied interests.  I think the quality of being able to gossip (suggest me another word) efficiently and naturally have made them use social networking more intense than men.  This does not mean they gossip is their main agenda on networking sites.
• The main categories of blogs they follow include food/recipes, fashion/beauty, arts/crafts, interior decoration, and surprisingly gadgets (used to be known as boys toys - not anymore guys).
• Women frequently updates message on walls or status messages and use social media networking sites more frequently.  You can find lot of women posting during office hours too - I previously worked from home and that is how I know it.  Verdict - women use FB, Orkut @ office (so do guys but not as much as women).
• Ebay and other shopping websites are gaining popularity among women, but Indian women still like to go to different shops, do a small research and buy a product.  It does not mean they go through shopping outlets posts on social networking sites.  They do go through them but I do not think they buy a lot from them.

Social Networking - Making Women Happy

Read This (Very Important):  I would like to conclude this post saying that Indian women are very active in social media.  Along being a part of social media, we could also find them contributing a lot of content through blogs, videos, and posts.  YouTube is filled with recipes from Indian women both living in India and abroad.  Likewise, there are thousands of blogs regularly being written by Indian women under various categories.  One cannot also deny the fact that Indian women have been regularly contributing some quality content in Internet through their posts on Facebook, Orkut, Twitter and more.

Family-Work Equilibrium

Maintaining equilibrium between family and work is critical because these two are opposing influences in life.  Permanent equilibrium is not possible in a short term; it is a continuous process persuaded by ever changing demands of work and family life.  Financial goals, gender responsibilities, lack of time, cultural and family background tends to sway away the equilibrium and one has to work on a tailor-fit solution based on their needs, goals and priorities.

The first step is that one has to be very professional in the work they do.  Starting work a little early will help prioritize the day’s work and deliver it in time.   Never bring family work or worries to the office because a clear mind is mandatory to excel at work.  Prioritizing work at office makes the chance of taking work back home very lean which provides invaluable after-work time to be spent with the family. 

The second step is to prioritize all family responsibilities and make use of the weekends and holidays fulfilling them.  Marriage and parenthood has to be planned.  Sharing of housework and child care among partners is vital for working couples.  Decisions are to be made jointly by the couples to avoid any future confusion.  Equal value has to be given to career goals of both.  Having a weekly schedule is very essential to plan and prioritize the weeks’ work.

Finally, never restrict the way of life too much.  Take a break and go out for a movie, dinner, or a windy drive.  Make sure these breaks do not collapse the equilibrium (a little shaking is fine – it happens).  It is hard to maintain the equilibrium but one will come up with efficient strategies once they start working on it.

Levi's CURVE ID - Jeans gets transformed again

Jeans needs no introduction to anyone.  They are trousers made out of denim - some prefer it thick and some prefer a bit thin.  In the recent times, I could see people wearing more tight ones.  If you go back and take a look at history, jeans were considered to be workman trousers and have transformed a lot lately (but it continues to be the heartbeat of many generations).  You may wonder what is the heart in a jean - it is it's color (every jean lover would have a couple of blue jeans definitely).  I am talking about the famous blue color which has become a symbol of jeans.  Indigo dye was used to dye those jeans traditionally, man would have definitely found something more synthetic and durable these days (educate me if ya know about it).  Talking more about jeans would need at least a couple of posts more, but most people know everything about it.

Why Levi's Curve ID was launched?  Levi's understood the fact people wearing the same sized jeans were different (basically at the back and do not forget the curves).  It is a truth which had never been looked upon this deep. Levi's has come up with some kind of formula which categorizes their jeans mainly into 3 types, Slight Curve, Demi Curve and Bold Curve.

Lovecriminal finds himself privileged to dig in this topic and wish you good luck in getting your own Curve ID.

Levi's supermodels showing their CURVE ID

Who are these Curve IDs for?  & What do these Curve IDs do?

Slight Curve is for women who have a almost straight figure (not completely straight because women do have a curve - I believe).  The common issue of these petite (most cases) straight figured women are that the jeans are too tight in the waist and loose on their thighs and seat.  Levi's sports nice back pockets (cutely sized) to give a balanced look at the back.  The jean engulfs the thighs the way it is supposed to be (not loose like most jeans).  The jean has a straighter side seam which tries to show off the very thin curve the almost straight figure types have.

Demi Curve is for women who are equipped with a show kinda waist (no obscenity intended).  Demi means half - like half of earth (hope you got an idea about the shape).  Most jeans fits these women but will not enhance their looks.  Levi's has come with a back to front waste band specially designed to squeezes these curves the right way.  The side seam is slightly curved to promote the looks of the curve (remember they are not straight figures - have some shakin' curves).  Levi's has also worked on this jeans to make the legs look a little elongated (long legs guaranteed).

Bold Curve is for women who are a little bigger on the back side (some people call it Booty - no obscenity intended here either).  The common problem faced by these type of women while wearing jeans the the waist usually gapes or pulls back.  Levi's Bold Curve is dedicated in enhancing the curves (already enhanced curves by God).  The higher back rise holds the jeans without gapping or pulling (happy :)).  It is equipped with a tilted front pocket which compliments your curves.  It also has a small curved waist band and side seam to make it more perfect (too much curves and a big waist band would make it look more bigger and not the right size).

All these 3 curves are available in different fits like leggings, skinny, straight, boot cut, flare, classic fit and more.  To add more denim color to your wardrobe they are also available in different colors and different washes (yes the famous washed out looks which can define you).