I was just browsing in google on the topic "Depression" and one thing that caught my eye is that most of these sites are all filled in with the pics of women. Pausing here, what exactly does this mean?? Is it that its the women gender who mostly fall in for this disorder and not only that, are we all prone to a more frequent call from this one eyed monster. :-) wondering why I gave this description for this feeling wherein we feel pity on our own selves... If you ask me that exactly is the feeling of a depressed human being - just like a one eyed monster who is incapable of seeing the other side.. the other side of life.

Depression - I dont remember listening to any of my guy friends mentioning this as the reason for any of their action. Contradicting to this, all my female friends and for that matter myself, can always link this word to all the extra shopping, a palatte of pizza and ice cream or chocolate. I am just trying to wonder the reason for this. Why???

Okie lets look at this from a different angle. What happens to a male when he is upset? He might go take a smoke, a drink in the late hours of the day or may be a chat session with his pals over a coffee cup. What happens when a female is upset about something? A long time mourning is for sure along with shopping or extra calories :-) I am more concerned on the reason for this difference here rather than looking at the reactions itself. Women who are considered to have a better mental and spiritual strength than Men are more prone to these psychological disorders. And one question that needs attention here is "Is it because they are more aware of their feelings than the Men?"

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
by Stieg Larsson




Swedish author and journalist Stieg Larsson uses the tropes of both Scandinavian and British crime fiction but he is a one-off or, rather, was a one-off - tragically, he died of a heart attack, aged 50, in 2004.


The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is the first of his Millennium Trilogy to be published in the UK. It is a violent thriller that focuses on a complex financial fraud and a powerful family's sinister secret. It starts slowly, with details of how a Swedish company is ripping off government funding to set up a fake business in Russia. The novel picks up speed when it gets into the complexities of the wealthy Vanger family's past.


Forty years earlier, Harriet Vanger disappeared off the family's private island. Nobody saw her leave, there was no sign of her disappearance and no corpse. Her uncle, however, is convinced that a family member murdered her.

A journalist, Blomqvist, in disgrace after losing a libel case arising from his reporting of the financial scandal, takes on the investigation of the woman's disappearance. Almost immediately, he sees a link with a number of other murders taking place around the same time. The family only pretends to help and Blomqvist doesn't know where to go next.

Then he hooks up with the titular tattooed girl - a very angry punk hacker. The journalist and the hacker are ingenious, believable creations, in conflict with themselves and each other. They form an incongruous but credible bond as everyone they meet is against them. In the end, the novel becomes, among many other things, something of a tender love story.

Larsson's trilogy was published in Scandinavia and continental Europe to great acclaim between 2005 and 2007, after his death. Tattoo (Original title: Men Who Hate Women) won the prestigious Glass Key for the best Nordic crime novel of 2005. The Girl Who Played With Fire (2006) won a Swedish Academy for Detective Novels award. The third, Castles in the Sky, came out early last year.

Larsson, a leading expert on right-wing extremists and neo-Nazi organisations, was editor of Expo, the magazine for a project he had set up to combat racism. He began writing the trilogy after work each evening in 2001. He claimed he enjoyed it so much that he was partway through the third before he even considered sending anything to a publisher.

This is a striking novel, full of passion, an evocative sense of place and subtle insights into venal, corrupt minds. It's sad that a potentially great crime-writing career was ended almost before it began, but at least UK readers can enjoy this and look forward to the succeeding two novels in the trilogy.

Can we rest for a while...?

"Speak when you are angry--and you will make the best speech you'll ever regret"

Anger -- one of those emotions on which action comes first and realisation the next. And I guess that's the reason why many a people find it difficult to manage or put a period on the conversation when it is pumped out at this state. This is one emotion which we can trace back to all our issues - international or mere domestic. I was just wondering why not put a little thought into this complex emotion.

Why do we get angry? This is the first question that comes to my mind.. The reasons could be many, an incident that dint hold up to your expectation, or a continuously lingering thought that managed to get its way thorough the mind and create the impact.. the reason for this emotiona l outburst could be any number crossing a thousand. But all these reasons, I guess, can be summarised and brought into one single point of thought and that according to me would be "Expectation".

Expectations... every thought in a relationship revolves around this concept. We just have to probe a person to list out his/her expectations and am sure the list would run down to pages. Mother, father, husband, wife, children, siblings, friends, manager, colleague, subordinates.. ... this is one emotion that is common in all the relationships. And forget about relationship, we should be using the word every human, known or unknown. For instance even a passerby whom you don't notice is also not exempted out of this emotion. Even he'll have the basic expectation that you'll give space for him to move through the path way. A person who is unknown to you, but then if you don't stand up to that one thought of his, the result might be an embarrassing scowl or a stare. We are so accustomed to this emotion that we don't even spare the people whom we are unaware of and it would be more than easy to imagine what would be the impact when it comes to those close relationships.

An unmet expectation lead to anger, hatred and all those emotions that is considered as toxic for our mind, body and soul. Still we humans, the most evolved of the beings go on in our way, unaware of the impacts. Is it because we are not yet ready to meet the expectation of the One above all of us, who is the creator and mentor? Talking about that I wonder, if HE also is strangled in the webs of these unnerving emotions like anger and expectations from one of His most beautiful creations - the creation with a fully evolved brain and free will!

There are few more emotions that can be talked together with, here - Ego and Fear. I guess these 2 emotions are also closely associated with Anger. Any comment or action that pricks out on a person's ego would bring out a response crammed with anger and similar is the case, i guess, with Fear too. The fear as it is can exist at different levels and it is mostly the fear of losing that pumps out anger filled statements.

Will there ever be a day when man is free of all these emotions that displays the insecurity in him? Man one of the most powerful creation -- will the creator ever would have thought that he'll be the most insecure one in the whole creation? Even with all the thinking abilities, we are unsure of the results of our own actions and there's this accompanied fear of losing the identity. Why....??? Why are we so insecure in life...?? For that matter Who are we afraid of..? The fellow beings who are struggling just as we are...?? Since the only one above us is the Creator himself, who is not ready for any kind of a competition with us, i guess its our own friends and relations that we are competing with -- the fellow beings!!!!

If you ask me, I am tired.. tired of this unending struggle to keep up the pace with others in the race. I want to sit back and relax... is it possible? I am not very sure if I can make it up to the statement I just made. May be I am looking for company, another set of people who will join me to stay back, so that I am not alone -- I guess the fear of being alone might push me to join the race and move forward along with the racing group. The typical thought of the human... even the worst wrong becomes the most right if it is backed up by more than one single hand. Isnt it?

The happiness thermostat

The happiness thermostat

Dr P V Vaidyanathan Aug 25, 2008

WE all constantly seek happiness, which means different things for different people.
Many of us look forward to positive events, like a marriage, the birth of a child, passing an examination, winning a contest, achieving a landmark of goal that we have set for ourselves, which make us feel happy.

But recent research indicates that all of us are born with a happiness ‘thermostat’ which is responsible for keeping our levels of happiness at a particular level, in spite of ups and downs in life.

This study, based in Germany, and appeared in the Economic Journal, studied the life patterns of hundreds of people, over a 20 year period.If was discovered that positive events like a marriage or birth of a child did make people happy, but this happiness slowly started to go down, and by the end of a two year period, most people had come back to their previous happiness level, the level at which they were, before the event (marriage/ child birth) had occurred.

Likewise, the researchers discovered that traumatic events, like a divorce or a death in the family, caused one to become sad and depressed, but eventually with time, the person regained his or her previous levels of happiness.

This has given rise to the concept of all of us being born with a happiness ‘thermostat’, something that always pulls our emotions of well being back to a set point.

What this means is that we normally cannot remain eternally happy or sad, following positive or negative events.

This thermostat perhaps functions differently and is set at different points for different people, and hence we see people who are happier or sadder than others. This gives credibility to the old saying ‘Time heals all wounds’, and is what we commonly know as adaptation.

Another study, conducted by the Edinburgh University involving 900 twins discovered that at least 50 per cent of our happiness levels are genetically determined.
The remaining 50 per cent of happiness comes from factors like career, lifestyle and relationships. Though the research indicated that much of our being happy depends on our genes, it also goes on to say that this is not something permanent.

Many of our day to day activities influence this level. Also, writing a dairy, being grateful, willfully becoming positive in one’s outlook---many such characters can help us to override this genetically determined levels of happiness and can make us happier that what nature has programmed us to be.

Happiness and sorrow—both come with an expiry date, as the human mind is equipped with a thermostat like quality, which helps it to bring back our emotional state to a pre-fixed or pre-determined level.

Also much of how happy a person is, is determined by genes, although working hard to raise one’s positivity can help to change this level.

All this research also makes us think about things we have learned in the past, like Newton’s law, which says that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction, and the various philosophies like Vedanta and Advaita, which stress on the duality of life, and have always been saying the everything in life comes together are two sides of a coin - night and day, good and bad, happiness and sorrow, light and dark, pain and pleasure.

This current research does bring about a meeting of science and religion, so to speak.

Decisions.....

"Sometimes it's the smallest decisions that can change your life forever" was the quote that showed up in my blogspot today. Decisions.. one of the most important terms in a person's life book. It seems as if there is always an analysis done at the end of every funeral sorting out the Right and the Wrong Decisions taken by the one who is now lying 6ft deep down in the earth. And may be at the end of every lifetime the soul itself might have to stand up out there in the God's court to account for all those decisions taken during every point of that specific lifetime. Its this fear that forces every human to practice a little diplomacy in his/her Decisions in life.. the fear that at one point of this lifetime they are answerable for it all; if not then at least at the beginning of this Life after death where a per the mythology all the records are maintained by the great Chithragupta and the punishment/reward accordingly given by Yama - the embodiment of darkness.

I don't think we can ever take this subject to an analysis of right and wrong as that question depends on individual perception. We can only talk about the various decisions that's taken just like how a review is done on books or movies, jotting down the contents and leaving the analysis for the public out there. Coming back to the initial quote on which I started this whole concept on, personally I have always had this feeling that every decision we take in life is all a pre-decided one and obviously the most perfect. May be because of the various teachings that I have received from my spiritual teacher, I believe in this fact that life as it is, is just like another story book. The book is already written and that too for someone else to read and enjoy but the characters are not aware of the fact that their individual fate has already been decided by the author. Instead they struggle and thrive at various phases of their life to make it better, not knowing the fact that they can never bring in a different outcome of the situations and all the more that it is all for the best and the better. It might really be a very interesting work for the One above all of us, just like the way all the authors are proud of their efforts on a book. May be this is one reason why I want to write a book for once in this lifetime.. to take charge of another person's life and design it the way I want to.

I am not sure how many of us believe the fact that we are living a life which is already been designed by the expert hands. Nothing can wrong here and especially with the ending. It has to be the most perfect ending.. the end of all life and the end of all thoughts and most of all end of all decisions in life.. Decisions. .. the only thing that the child in a man gets to play with; the one thing that sow the initial drops of Pride in every man.