Good companion makes you pious;bad companion incites devilry

It is imperative to have the company of more and more good and ideal people in your life to blossom your characteristic traits. In your adolescence days, if you fortunate enough to get enlaced with bright, idealistic and noble people and you have their edifications continuously, you will be able to shine in  the future. So, it is your parents who has to deeply involve in your upbringing from the very little age to ensure this phenomenon. If you are associated with wrong companions, no matter whatever your goal and  objective and your desire to achieve the same, you cannot accrue the expected results to your likings because of negative influences exerted by your associates. If you plant a poor quality rose in the midst of all high quality rose bushes, the poor quality may not destroy the high quality one, but if a good quality comes into contact of poor quality rose bushes, the charm and the fragrance of the good quality rose will fade away or will not be blossomed as it should be. In the case of human being, it is also the same. It is said that a person is known and acknowledged by his company. For example, if you are desirous to be a wealthy person, you must mingle with rich people frequently. With your mingling with  various rich people, you will follow their qualities, their thinking pattern, their habits and many other qualities, which will ultimately help you to achieve your desire to become wealthy provided you work relentlessly in that direction.. If you want to become an artist, you must develop a habit to mix with the people in the same profession, watch the particular art, learn the techniques, practice the particular method of preparing the arts and continue to do some painstaking preparations required to be an artist. Similarly, if you want to become a wrestler, you need to make yourself more fit by toning your muscles, doing regular exercise, consuming balance calorie food and maintaining a disciplined lifestyle. Your close association with other wrestlers will not only make you to follow their regime of lifestyle, but also you will be leading to make yourself  a similar type of athlete. In the same way, if you want to be a spiritual person and dedicate your life to God and are very much desired to serve the underprivileged section of the society, you have to seek the company of the people who are spiritual and able to devote their lives to serving God and others. If you spend your quality time with a person who habitually meditates, obviously you will also like to meditate. Initially, you will follow, but by increasing your mingling with that particular person, you are bound to concentrate on this powerful technique of doing meditation. It is very much advisable to keep company with people, who value ethical living and practice noble virtues. This will help you to act in the same way. In today’s glamorous and wealth conscious world, people tend to mix with others based on their outward profile. But it is prudent to select the company based on the inner profile. You must avoid the  company of  rich persons, who indulge in all unethical life practice. Contrarily, a rich person with all noble qualities must be considered as a role model for your mingling and follow his qualities. He must be one of your ideal companions.  So, evaluation of your companions is a crucial exercise. Your quality friends are instrumental in  your personal growth and you must focus your attention to increase their numbers. You will always feel warm when you get their association because they are your true friends in contributing your growth. It is based on the concept of “like attracts like”, but the selection is far more important.

Our lives in this universe are precious. We have a limit of our living, up to the ages of 60, 70, 80 or even 90 years. In this period, we must define the purpose of our lives. We must plan to achieve selected goals and for that matter, it is a wise decision to select like minded people. If you are in a company of naysayer all the time, you will lose the purpose of life which you set forward. You will be motivated by their wrong advices and slowly forget your own prosperity goals.

If we are lucky enough to be in the company of noble and spiritual minded people, our lives will radiate the breath of spirituality. Being in the company of such type of people, you will be able to focus your wholehearted attention to spirituality and thereby you will be easily able to discriminate between  the company of  good and bad.

A good companion never leaves  anyone alone whether a situation is good or bad. He always cares for the others, whether living or non-living beings, loves them wholeheartedly and protects them from all troubles. Take an example of a good shepherd. A good shepherd never leaves his sheep alone. Instead, he walks ahead of the flock so that he can lead them safely. Suppose the shepherd has hired a person, but he runs away when he sees a wolf is  coming to chase the sheep. This hired person abandons the sheep because they do not belong to him and does not care for the lives of the sheep. And so, the wolf attacks them and scatters the flocks. The hired man  is leaving the sheep in the teeth of danger because he is working only for money. But if the shepherd gets a good person, who will equally care for the sheep like his owner, then he is the true companion of the shepherd despite  knowing that the sheep do not belong to him. Similarly, a good companion must be a person who never makes you alone, protects you and shows a right path to follow. He will  be always with you to encourage  to practice all ethics and virtues to live a religious life. A right companion is not the one, who makes you join the path of darkness. He protects you, quarrels with you and advises you  when you get indulged in any type of unethical activities and then  guides you to walk in the path of “light”.     

A wise selection of good companions is extremely beneficial because they only make you noble. Contrarily, the bad companions may be propitious at the face of it and you will be attracted to lot many grandeurs, but after a passage of time your life will be almost hellish.

Art of killing stress

All of us are stressed for various reasons almost regularly. After a hectic day at work place or simply getting bogged down by household chores, you feel tired. Is your work of lighter type or a mediocre?  As per the psychological edification, your action only decides what will be the outcome of the same. This action converts mediocrity to intelligence, hate to love, animosity to friendship and indignation to inspire.  Action is a given.  How you perform and what is the intensity of your desire to perform, all depends on your power of motivation.  To reduce the stress, you must focus to carry out the obligatory actions instead of focusing on desire-driven actions.  You have to increase the frequency of obligatory action, which is the quality of  any action and reduce the desire-driven action.  The later one only will lead you to thorny path, causing anxieties, pain and suffering and you become stressed.  Further, you must refrain yourself to take action on any action not fall in line with your conscience.

As long as you are sedate and mainly concentrate on your obligatory duties, your mind remains stress free and you will be able to perform any action brilliantly.  When your desires overpower, you get agitated to fulfill the same and action become flawed. When your desires outweigh your resources and capabilities, then you are lured to perform actions against your wisdom and integrity.  In Mahabharata, Krishna underlines the essence of sacrifice and the actions, which are dedicated to an extreme idealism.  He says that God has created mankind with a unique capacity to sacrifice.  You cannot come up in your life unless you devote to a spirit of service and sacrificing.

Krishna also says that there are three types of people in our society.  Chronologically, the “tamasika” is the lowest type, who is interested for his own benefit and he is always on the look out to get the benefits from others or others diligence without any contribution.  The “rajasika” type is self centered and always acts selfishly inviting anxieties and mental agitation and stress.  The “sattvika” type performs with an inherent spirit to do good for others and sacrifices his own benefits.

Try to identify your inner calling and your latent desire to embrace the action oriented path to choose a path of spirituality.  As far as feasible, you must fix the goal without your self interest.  No sooner, you start taking any action for any work on this basis; you will be able to achieve excellence.  You must let go your ego, desire and selfishness. If you can think of this line of activity and take action accordingly, you slowly find out the source of real energy imbibed in you.  Once you are able to identify this energy, you become creative. You become completely enthused at work.  Your intellect guides all your thoughts ideal, the mind is agile and alert to achieve the targeted goals and your body is energized with a positive vibe.  This stage of mind will obliterate unproductive and unnecessary worries of past, future anxieties and present turmoil.  All these negative traits, which your agitated mind ponders do not take place at all and if happens, the degree of the severity will be much less than what you anticipate.  So, allow to charge your intellect and power to destroy this wasteful thinking. Always believe in achieving success, happiness and spiritual evolution.

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One of the greatest enemies in your life is many kinds of desires. Most of your desires provoke you to become insensitive, increase your lust and drift away from the religious path.  If the desires are within your conscience, you must toil hard to ensure achievement of the same.  The other desires will probably devour you and cause a great deal of mental anxieties and stress. It will be difficult to diminish the stresses developed.  Once the desire beyond the moral value is inflamed, it becomes unquenchable and provokes to make you a flippant and savant to achieve the said desires at any cost, even sacrificing  your moral values. Further, when you get addicted to fulfill these desires, you increase your greed, envy and power of arrogance diluting your intelligence and wisdom. The most pathetic situation in our society is that everyone is determined to follow these desires so as to achieve the same to flaunt our power of wealth and fame.

By practicing and by increasing the power of mind of quality thoughts, you rise to a higher desire and automatically, the lower desire will not be able to strangle you.  So, you need to eliminate the proclivity of being attracted with glittering and tanning desires and then you will be able to kill your stress, the greatest enemy of your life.

Use the words " thank you" perpetually,not ephemerally

Life is full of many constraints and thorns and when these thorns bleed your mind and soul, no one expects you to utter these words of “thank you.”  But in adversity, if you can say these words either to God or to other people, your life will bloom like a blooming flower.  Further, the accentuation of these two magical words, not only bring glean to others to whom you say, but also provide you a solace as you are able to illuminate a glittering smile on their face.  Many of us follow this principle for a while and then forget as if, it is somewhat an ephemeral activity. You have to utter these words continually whether you are in distress or in a happy mood in your life. Some people, of course, express their gratitude to God and other people whenever something good happens in their lives and everything is going well. When people move forward, they believe that because of God’s grace and other people’s help, they lurch ahead and utter “thank you” to God. But when they are afflicted with severe pain, sufferings and despair, they desperately seek God’s blessings in desperation. If they continue to suffer, they asseverate that God is blind to hear their pleas. At that time, they feel God is not omniscient to hear them and they even forget to express gratitude.

You have to take your mental power to a level where you must express “thank you” to God and other people surrounding you, irrespective of your physical and mental conditions.  But the problem is that most of us seek God’s kindness only when they are in distress.  No sooner, the affliction is over, we forget to utter these magical words and we treat Him as if He has been just a means to serve our ends.

You feel both joy and distress in your life in a cyclic fashion as if, the sky is lit with a bright sun and thereafter, it becomes clouded and dark.  If you always expect good things to happen and then only you say ‘thank you’, the same is a wrong concept and you may not be able to embrace upon the correct type of growth and spirituality in life.  Based on your power of expressing gratitude, you will be able to sharpen your qualities like perseverance, tolerance, adjustment and flexibility. When you will be able to increase these qualities, automatically power of telling “thank you”will be on your tongue  spontaneously.

When human beings pass through various adversities and despair, become puzzled and sometimes not in a position to take any decision to come out from the impasse.  But this also makes you to search the truth, what causes these adversities. During this time, you are able to strengthen yourself to resolve the crisis, test your faith and become more God centric.

These adversities in life throw a challenge to transcend the barriers of the same and provide you an opportunity to improve upon and learn. The adversities and the disappointments, no doubt, create despondency momentarily, but if you remain unnerved and are able to increase your resoluteness and also express gratitude to God to provide you more courage in this type of unpleasant situations, you will be able to overcome the adversities.  Jesus says, “Cast your burden on me and I will take care of it.” The hidden potential of yours will be realized in your spirit, which will make you tough to counter any odd situations in the life in the future.

Another aspect of life is that adversity is required very much to get a spiritual inclination to progress in life.  Now, some people react very sharply to adversities and become angry, start shouting and even hurl abusing words to others without knowing that by doing this, they insult their inner self and God within. This particular action will also deteriorate God’s grace upon you. So, one needs to accept the adversities as a passing phase and express gratitude and say thank you to God.  Because if He makes you to entangle in distress, He only uplifts you. But the attitude of gratitude should not be diluted.

You have to believe that you bring nothing in this world and everything is as per His desire and wish. The bible also says so. When we leave this world, we don’t take anything with us. We come here, do perform as an artist, and in this process, get sometimes joy and some other times, distress and all these come to us as a gift of God.

Almost all the hardships, struggles, difficulties and bad situations must be treated as blessings as without sufferings, you cannot taste the fragrance of success. Also, joy and sorrow are the two sides of a coin.  If you get joy, then you have to receive sorrow.  We curse  and become gruff, when the sun radiates scorching heat and burn our skin and become sweaty and tired. At the same time, without sunlight, our survival will be critical.  In the absence of the same, we will not be able to remain healthy because our environment will be full of germs and pollution.

Once you are able to make a habit to utter these two words ‘thank you’ to God and any human being despite the worst situations you face, you will be able to cross both the river of the joy and tunnel of sorrow without bothering much.  At that point of life, you believe that everything surrounding you and the situations created thereof is His desire and you are only a devotee with a habit of perpetual utterance of “thank you”.   

Budget resembles to the elephant's plodding with lion's roaring

The union budget always puts you in a mixed reaction. It will never swamp you.  You will be able to gain something and lose some other things.  The political circle mainly the opposition forces will criticize with vituperative comments, but this budget presented by Jaitley scores a reasonable mark, which is also evident from the immediate surge in the share market.  Both Sensex and Nifty’s value swing up, which was not happening, at least in the past years.  The reduction in corporate surcharge and a deferral of the GAAR in all probability has helped the share market to come out a bit from the volatility  and its graph surged.  If you analyze this budget with a sharp eye for the details, you may find that many things are in the slough of futuristic growth. The only concern how the fiscal deficit is to be streamlined, which is the need of the hour.  Despite finance minister’s assurance to bring down this deficit in this year, he has now set a target of 3% of GDP in 2017-18. In fact, there will be a shortfall for the year 2015-16 also. Earlier, it was set to 3.6%, but now the same has been revised to 3.9%. This fiscal deficit will create a hindrance for growth of economic condition in the subsequent years.  In fact, the finance minister himself has expressed his deep concern about this fact and he has also said that a fiscal consolidation is a must

By reducing the expenditures alone drastically, one cannot expect the fiscal discipline.  One needs to augment the growth also. The growth rate anything below the level of 8% is not also advisable.  So, the best way is to monitor the expenditures and also the growth simultaneously and the review needs to be closely minuted and discussed for immediate remedial actions. If the revenue earning is not maintained at the level of budget’s expectation, the alternative expenditure plan must be ready to balance the situation of fiscal deficit.

There are many things adopted by the finance minister in this budget are laudable. He has announced a plethora of policies, one of which is the change in the  corporate tax rate to stimulate the investment. Jaitley has shown his inclination to speed up the infrastructure projects, mega power projects and in line with the railway budgets, he has also given a direction to speed up  the road projects. Through the setting up of National Investment and Infrastructure fund and the issuing of tax free infrastructure bonds will definitely fillip the growth. To implement all these policies, he has to now instruct  financial institutions to focus exclusively and extensively to propel the requirement of long term capital required by private sectors. As for indirect taxes, namely, adjustment in custom duties and increase in service tax is noteworthy policies announced by Jaitley.

Another significant aspect to monetize gold will delude people not to hold gold as an asset.  With the spiraling effect of increase in gold price and high inflation trend, gold becomes a hedge against inflation. The not so attractive return on bank deposits could have been acted as a disincentive to consider gold as an asset and hold the same.

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Jaitley has described the expenditures in details in the budget; of course, many are in line with the existing policies. The subsidies are not lowered to accrue the benefit derived from the reduction in oil prices.

Overall, Jaitley has attempted and proven him as a gallant finance manager to think for various goals need to be achieved. His anticipated goals are a higher rate of growth, increase in investment, wider safety net with a special emphasis and thrust on health insurance sectors. Though neither he is a savant in this field of economics nor he is a financial whiz-kid, but his first full fledged budget reflects the inherent desire of Modi to increase the economic growth of the country, reduce the fiscal deficit as early as possible and also to make provision through taxes to implement the slogan of Modinomics, namely “Make in India”, “Swachh Bharat” and “Retrieve the stash money”.

Overall, this budget is praiseworthy, but it is not explicitly clear how to achieve the target of fiscal deficit if the revenue growth is slackened. Because a high level of fiscal deficit will make government to cripple under the influence of growing debt and interest payment, which will be a nightmare for them and in that case, they have also to enlace themselves with the messy financial situation like the earlier UPA government.

Economic prosperity does not advocate stimulus of public spending

The monstrous theory to increase only the public spending to speed up the growth of economic front as professed by a section of  economist is not that encouraging and viable proposition considering today’s scenario of India. If you see the past history of many countries, namely Russia, China and Brazil whoever have resorted and embraced upon this populist method has failed miserably.  In fact, all these countries experienced a full-throttle experiment to increase spending only to land in a languor. The history has been dwelling on the economic front expansively to show that the emerging country’s barring China, average growth as 2.5% presently, which was more than 7% in 2010 when the public spending spree was at the top. This growth of 2.5% is the lowest one what they had experienced in the past forty years. The leaders of these emerging countries are now shying away from advocating the theory of public spending.  This type of campaign of more public spending was vehemently pushed forward at the end of the year 2008 when western economies and demand curve were passing through a vicious cycle of recession. To offset the recession, the theory of stimulating the public spending as advocated by emerging economies did not yield much desired results at a subsequent stage.  Among the G20, if you consider the major emerging and developed economies, they spent a sum equal to 4.2% of the gross domestic product; these figures are taken away from the published data of the International Labor Organization. During those days, emerging nations could afford to spend more as compared to the rich countries in the world. Afterwards, the economic scenario got changed and these emerging nations went into the recessionary trend because of the fall in demand worldwide, of course, with little public debt, huge pool of foreign currency reserves and budget surplus.  

The believers of public spending got elated in 2011 and teamed up with ILO and European Union to prove the truth of this theory and convinced the world that a trajectory growth of Asia’s economy is because of widespread stimulus of spending.

As for China, they went for a big scale of spending to the extent of 12% of GDP, but since 2010, its growth rate started sliding down and almost touched a figure of 7%. They now suffer a wide scale of financial crunch. The recessionary trend has completely engulfed the other countries say Brazil, Russia, who is spending a whooping 10%, of course, phase-wise of GDP.   

The emerging nations advocated for more public spending to speed up the growth, but ultimately, now in a financial crunch and disastrous.  They are in a mess in their budgets, which are red and the productivity has touched a significantly lower benchmark.  These poor economic results of the emerging nations force IMF to predict their GDP growth at 4% and below for the rest of the decade.

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As for India, there was never a school of thoughts  to advocate for a big spending mission.  The combined government deficit is 6.6% of GDP, which is one of the highest in the emerging world. Further, the government of India’s debt when compared to the total percentage of the economy, it stands at a higher level of 60% and this figure is really a panicky one considering the meager per capita income of below 2000 dollar. 

More public spending supporting to continue the reforms is easier said than done. It is difficult to implement both the issues simultaneously. We have somewhat experienced this syndrome from the period of 1990 and the decade thereafter.  By the end of this period, most of the emerging nations were starved, there was inadequate money circulation to manage the anticipated growth. The lenders were breathing on their neck.  Ultimately, some of them  were compelled to open up the path of big reforms, tried to clear the burden of bad debts and pushed the companies to be more productive and efficient to sustain in the market.

 India is  more prone to accept the suggestion of Chinese Prime Minister Li Kegiang, who told that more public spending does not necessarily guarantee growth, but create problems only. The same is also echoed through the voice of the Mexican Central Bank President. More public spending will inevitably lead to higher deficits and inflation, which today we are passing through. The incremental value in public spending without adequate generation of revenues, resources and infrastructure will not be a fruitful exercise for the country’s growth.