Hi, I am Madhusudhan Bhat working with State Bank of India for the last 25 years. Just thought I would join the blog league to connect myself with the outside world.

I turned 45 recently. They say, the first 20 years of life you are sown with a dream of an ideal, egalatarian world. More aligned with leftist thoughts. After that formative years, once you join the job stream, you get wedded to the capitalist ethos of accumulating more wealth, money, fame, career progression etc etc. After another 25 years, it is again said you revert to the erstwhile childhood and youthwood ideals of an equal world. I am now at crossroads of this left and right leanings.

My current interests are leading a life with minimalist desires, minimalist style of living, sharing with others the happiness earned by me through simple ways and means. In turn. I seek similar experiences of others.

I do not believe in idol worship of God, the rituals associated with it. But I do believe that the idol worship, performing rituals gives a majority of people a great deal of happiness and feel good factor. To that extent, I like their existence. However, I wish this blind love for God is taken to a higher levels, where each of our actions in the material world are aimed at promoting a more inclusive, tolerable society. Gandhiji is my role model in this respect. He would have spent a lifetime in temples or Himalayas and earned glories. But even as he believed God, the verses, the religious texts, he had a clear action plan for himself and people around him to create a society built out of the ideals enshrined in our religious beliefs, texts, verses etc. The means to goals was as important as the ends he had in mind. Politically independent India was his dream and it was to be achieved through peaceful means. Further, political independence was only a subset of another dream of economically independent India. Thoughts like Ramarajya, Maximum happiness of the maximum number, Management is only a trustee of the business were all off shoots of that great Hindu philosophy "Sarve Janah Sukhino Bhavanthu". Praying this hundred times a day by itself will not bring about the change. Praying like that is a romantic idea and self-serve us, but in the long run it means nothing if it is not followed by an actionable plan to position ourself in this society to realise this larger aim of life. As Swami Vivekananda said, "The hand that serve are holier than lips that pray." Gandhi had ample clarity on this and led a simple life of devoid of materialism so that he could be a rolemodel to others. He used all his religious and literary learnings to good effect in dealing with the wily British and contradictions within the Indian social and economic system.

We are at that juncture of life when we have to find a golden means in almost everything. The rights and wrongs are increasingly crossing swords and getting blurred. How much of facelessness brought about by technology in our lives and how much of being social; how much of personal space and how much of private; how much of work and society, how much of family; how much of style, how much of substance; how much more of wealth to accumulate or is it a time to look back and distribute etc etc.

I have no clear answers for them. Though I am feeling time is running fast and I should give back something to the society. I have a few hurdles to cross before embarking on any new journey.

For the time being, I think I have given enough inkling of my confusion and ambivalance. Anybody can join this blog league to confound my confusion and throw light on new suggested paths.