Archive for February, 2009|Monthly archive page
IT efficiency contradicts spiritual awakening ?
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: ashram, Bihar, BSY, e-mail, india, IT, outsourcing, satyananda, yoga
Comments (1) I am very excited to get to the yoga ashram and already before the plane have even left the airport I have learned some valuable lessons in patience and how to react to the unknown. With a smile on your face and politeness you can get very far and this is something I will try to have with me all the way trough this journey ! May I be humble even in situations where I feel nervous and scared.
After several days of trying to call Bihar School of Yoga, BSY, in Rikhia I feel that my patience is very well tested at this point in time and I have not even arrived in India yet. My rational intellectual westernised mind wants the latest IT solutions all the time. First of all they have decided to not use e-mail, a technology that has been standardised since 1982 . What is the reason for this ? OK yesterday I sent a fax or rather I tried to send a fax to the Bihar School of Yoga head quarter. The lady in the Secretary position for all the courses kindly said that the fax will arrive next week due to the fax arriving at another place. Next week ? I have already arrived at the ashram by next week. Then she told me she could do nothing about helping me to deliver this information to the right person since the course is with another institution. The problem when I call the right institution is that usually there is nobody picking up the phone. If somebody answers the line it can be broken in a matter of seconds or minutes without warning and then I am stuck with not getting through again. English is not my first language and using the Spelling alphabet takes time over a bad line and I am usually in the middle of stating who I am and I have not even got to the subject when the line is broken. Please, Internet was built to sustain a nuclear war so please let me send an e-mail ! At the same time it could be like a quest to teach me how to trust my gut feeling and have trust in the fact that there are a lot of friendly and helpfull people in India and me with all my consumer products is a spoiled brat. I have the possibility to buy vaccination most Indians can not afford and I can travel in first class on the train. I want to turn this around and also think about what I can offer on my journey. I should take every opportunity to pay a bit extra for something that feels great in the heart and will help the rest of the world to have the luxury I have been born into. Maybe I can give some of my knowledge about IT to them ? Or at least I would like to to do that. The luxury of IT makes it possible for me to practice yoga several hours every day and spend just a few minutes on fixing a lot of tasks that used to be time consuming in the past. I rather sit in lotus position than stand in line at the post office to pay my bills.
I was very suprised in a good way that Satyananda himself is writing a blog , Satyananda’s Blog
My advice for somebody who want to travel to the BSY centre would be to plan at least some months ahead if you live on another continent like I do. Write them a letter in ordinary mail, and make a copy of this, including the following information:
- your arrival time at the course centre and your departure time (check out with train schedules at the Indian Railway homepage to make sure there is a train going at the weekday you want to travel. Information on train traveling in India. For the 3 week yoga teaching course they want you to be at the course centre at noon the day before the official start date)
- which course you apply for and which dates it will take place and at what location
- all kinds of contact information to you like e-mail, telephone and an ordinary post address
- specific questions you want to have answered regarding what to bring etc. in your return mail
In general make sure to get down all the information you would think is hard to deliver on a telephone line with the above restrictions. Include an envelope for the answers with your full address and with enough stamps to pay for the journey back to you. At the same time fax them the same information to the fax numbers given and not the ones saying both fax/telephone. Then after aprox 3 weeks, the time taken for a normal letter to arrive is pretty long and easy to forget, call them. Remember this is probably another time zone from where you live so please try to match their office hours. The office hours at the rikhia office is between 10:00-16:00 for example and will be between 5:30 – 11:30 in Denmark. use time and date if you are lazy like me to find out what the time is right now in Delhi. Check that your information have arrived and if you have a confirmation on the course ? The confirmation it self will take some days when your mail/fax have arrived so estimate for this.
Before I even contacted Bihar School of Yoga the first time I considered using a service like Your Man in India
to contact them. Now with some experience of outsourcing to India I think I made the right decision to avoid it. That would have added more confusion and more delay probably. If you already have a well established contact in India you can probably send them the application letter as an e-mail and ask them to print it out and send it to BSY. To get a contact person/assistant who is reliable with an outsourcing company like Your Man in India or Brickwork India will take weeks if you are a new customer or at least that is my experience and then you have the additional waiting time on e-mails from them once you are a customer.
I hope you got some valuable information out of this post and my intention with this post was to show you how it works from my experience so that you can avoid the pitfalls and have a really pleasant travel to the extremely beautiful country that is India. I will get back with more information after my course is over and if it is even half as a good as the incredible books they have published in this place I am well pleased.
Outsourcing Yoga to India
Right now I am curious about India in two ways. Soon I am going to yoga teacher training in the North East of India and I have started to experiment with using Indian consultants to help me with office tasks.
To give you some ideas of the difference in price on a yoga teaching course in India and in Sweden I give you an example of two educations following the same tradition.
4,5 euro per day, 94 euro for 21 days, fully residential yoga teacher training. This is the minimum pay and the teaching is for free and you pay for food and somewhere to sleep. I really think you should consider paying more since they work on a volunteer basis and all “extra” money goes to educating children in the area etc.
bihar school of yoga, teacher training in Rikhia, India
76 euro per day, fully residential yoga teacher training
satyanande yoga school, teacher training in Bollnas, Sweden
I have to state that the reason I go to India is that I have read a lot of books published by the Bihar School of Yoga and i really want to visit this place. If you seriously attempt to make a price cut by going to India i suggest you go for a longer stay since the cost for flight tickets, vaccination and visa etc. are the big part of the budget and once you are in India everything is relatively low cost. I will get back to you when I have finished my course and i can compare the yoga teacher training received in Sweden, see an earlier blog post for details, and in India.
Now to the office related tasks. My experience so far is that regular tasks that can be clearly define are worth to outsource but a single small task takes actually more work from me and cost me more to outsource. Some basic facts to be clear about when outsourcing.
- you have to clearly define how much time you want the outsourcing company to spend on the task. They, the outsourcing company wants to be hired for a lot of hours so their estimate has to be taken with a grain of salt.
- you have to clearly define what kind of results you want. ( If you want a long report about how to clear a photograph when it comes to copyright laws or if you want a short write up)
- you have to clearly define how you want to be contacted ( I am an e-mail person and I only use the telephone/cell phone for very important calls or for private matters. )
- If you get a personal assistant who speaks broken English and to fast it is YOUR time they are wasting when the phone call takes 30 minutes instead of 5. Minutes were you could have done other tasks.
- If you live in a country were the official language is not English the amount of tasks that a personal assistant can arrange for you is limited.
In general I am positive about outsourcing to India when it comes to office work since people in this industry make A LOT of money compared to the average Indian. I have several years of experience with working with computers and a desk is a pretty safe workplace, with the side note that you need some physical training on the side to keep healthy.
When it comes to yoga teaching India is really the place where it all started and if you want to find the real deal I suggest a longer stay in India.
The only way to success
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: exercise, gratitude, running, self help
Leave a Comment Are you like me and have a some scars from when you tried to master the art of skiing and skating when you where a kid. How did we finally manage to get down the slope in one piece ? We tried and fell and tried again. We saw some older guy who really could skate well and we wanted to be like him. Then we get older and we start to think like “I could never write a book “. But how did the now famous writers start their career ? More than one of them talk about how they sent their material to a publisher who politely said it was not good enough. Did they give up ? No they tried again. Like a child who learns to walk they tried and tried again. Every “mistake” is a step in the right direction. With every mistake we also get to learn a tiny bit more of how it is to actually walk successfully. We set out to run because we know it is healthy. It is raining outside and it is cold. We get a pain in a knee after 2 kilometers and we are really disappointed that we cannot run as fast as the guy we saw in the commercial for running shoes. We are also disappointed because we wanted to run for 5 kilometers. What about if we are grateful for the 2 kilometers we ran ? Will that not change the whole scenario ?
The secret method used by leaders world wide
Filed under: leadership | Tags: business, factory, games, leadership, motivation, politics, strategy
Comments (2) Ever wondered why some people achieve their goals and get thousand of people to work for their ideas and visions ?
do you feel that you have all the theoretical knowledge on how to succeed in your area of profession but still see people with less knowledge who earn more money and are on the covers of magazines ?
Bill Gates and Barack Obama, We have all seen their faces on cover of magazines and their mythical power to change and redefine or everyday life amazes us. What is the definition of Miracle, Is it the power to do what most of people would think is impossible ? I am sure both Barack Obama and Bill Gates have met people who thought they were straight out crazy when they described their visions and ideas. So here comes the contradiction between normal work and great achievements. Normal 9-5 work is to do the expected and arrive at 09:00 and leave at 05:00 and do what your boss tells you to do. I once had a conversation with a CEO of a very successful computer games company and he described the hassle of jet lag and how he thought that traveling around the world on different exhibitions and business meetings was really hard. I commented that I did not have those problems at all, since I at that time was the worker with 10 hours plus days at the computer games factory floor. We both had a laugh about it but what really struck me was that I could sense that he was following an inner vision on how to schedule his days and how to make up his business strategy. He was living the dream in my world and here he was sitting complaining ! I have been fortunate to work in 3 countries and have had the chance to meet a lot of interesting people and most people in leading positions are very open on how they work and how they see their responsibilities. The ordinary worker is like the man in the cocoon, if you have seen the eminent the Matrix movie you remember the scene where Neo is flushed out when he is no longer functioning , the cocoon with its limitations and false dreams have provided him with pleasurable experiences for so long time and he is totally chocked by reality. The longer time you stay in the cocoon the more afraid you become of real freedom. The freedom that also is a large responsibility. The responsibility to realise your dreams and find the truth which really feels right for you. Now it is time for me to jog on the beach !
At an early age I got interested in Buddhism and the prince who left his kingdom in the search for truth. How can I apply this story to my own life ? to be able to sit I took up the study of yoga. Is there a contradiction between yoga and science ? Sure we can get a theoretical understanding through books, but without the experience we are stuck. Why is it so hard to practice non-violence when the mosquito is landing on my neck ?
