Babies are coming..the miracle of life ensues for a friend and my wife..Our new gated meditteranean exquisite community saw visitors and a celebration of our new home. Christine an analyst with MSCI Index gave up her job to come to India and dusty Gurgaon to work with Micro Credit rating agency visited us in Bombay and made Chocolate Mousse. We refer to our new home as the Matrix, only one way traffic. Mumbai road infrastructure is so broken that it is funny. Cars rarely sees the fourth gear and one waddles through traffic. Long live car audio systems.

Excited about Advait Utsav at AnantVan with Wasiffudin Dagar. Hopefully we can get Mallika Sherawat there. One thing that we overlook when we try to network and meet people only in a similar zone is the lack of transformational power. Einstein himself said that a problem cannot be solved by the same level of conscioussnes that created it. So similarly when we organize expriences and aim to target people in a zone than the impact is not as pronounced as someone completely out of sync. The friction, the incoherence creates energy for transformative experience. So maybe we should have a spirtual retreat with Dhrupad, Vedanta and Mallika Sherawat.

Now that comes to a new module that I have been spouting for a while and which needs to now stop because my poor wife has heard it 10 times and is now groaning in agony.. In the hierarchy of awareness in India they define each level as Chakras. Now that fact is that each Chakra is a stage of awareness and a world. And for each chakra there are a set of higher ideals, role models, economy and set of service providers.

Chakra 1 - Survival, food. The highest ideal of that chakra would be Fast food companies, chefs, defense companies. The highest products would be stinger missiles, $ 600 pastries, Mcdonalds, Starbucks. Ray Kroc is god there or so is Tarla Dalal

Chakra 2- Desires/ Sex - Playboy is the Bhagvad Gita/ Bible and Mallika Sherawat becomes Goddess Lakshmi and Pamela Anderson Saraswait. Hustler and Playboy become aspirational and there is an economy that services this chakra

Chakra 3 - Achievement = Rational domain, Einstein, Bill Gates, Mckinsey Goldman Sachs, Harvard are the temples, gods. Lakshmi Mittal. Communist bashing is prevalent

Chakra 4 - Service / Give - At this stage our awareness we live less for ourselves and more for others. Environmentall sensitive, Earth is god, sensitive to the needs of sentient beings, look for equality and humanity. Medha Patkar, environmentalist, etc. Wall Street and Business bashing is commong. Market place for this also includes - responsible travel, fair trade products,

Now where is the problem as people like Ken Wilber and Don Beck in each of the above structure think that they are right and their way is better. For instance Laksmi Mittal or Mckinsey Partner thinks Medha Patkar is impeding development and Medha Patkar would think that Lakshmi Mittal is exploiting people for profit. The world is spending billions of dollars in defense which is essentially Chakra1 needs.

Now when you move to Chakra 5 - it gets interesting. In Chakra 5 or what Ken Wilber/ Don Beck calls 2nd tier is fundamental shift in awareness as one is able to view the strenghts and weaknesses of each of the below tiers and look at holistically. One can take more perspectives and look more holistically. Gandhi operated at this level or higher. Gandhi was able to use the resources of businessman like Jamnalal Bajaj and GD Birla and include them in his experiments on social upliftment. Now the key for the next wave of evolution will be to get people at this stage then something fundamental will happen as you reach a stage where you can see Chakra 1 to 4 operating. Each one of chakras has an healthy version and unhealthy version. So in many case it is better to be healthy Chakra 2 rather than unhealthy Chakra 4. One can become eco-nazi.

Chakra 6/7 - Mystics,. One ness of all sentient beings - Ramana Maharishi, Sufi ( I am not sure here)

As I now travel I meet few people who are at Chakra 5 and are not even aware of it and that is the mystery. How the evolution happens. It is useful to get a map for the same. Ken Wilber Brief Theory of Everything was such a revelation when I read it. It just made a lot of sense to me.

Our last trip to Bandhavgarh (April 2006) was another learning experience. It is amazing how in spite of the fact that this was our sixth trip in just over a year, there is always something new to learn about the jungle and its inhabitants. While we were on a safari ride into the jungle, Dhruv - our friend and resident naturalist gave us an insight into the behaviour of animals.

While driving through, we decided to stop, turn off the car engine and just listen to the sounds of jungle. We stopped near a family of monkeys that to us seemed to be playing and jumping among the trees. That's when Dhruv began explaining what was actually happening. Now monkeys have a hierarchy and follow the system of one alpha male with many females and their babies. The babies are known as black babies (these are very young - infants and still haven't developed their coat of hair and are just black in colour) and the others are the older ones but fully developed adults. The alpha male is easy to spot as he is huge compared to the females.

The alpha male is the guardian of the rest of the group and has to time and again ensure that the rest of his family is safe. All the children in the group are fathered by him.  Every now and then, this group is attacked by a band of monkeys who are all male. They basically try and drive the alpha male away so that they can take over the group. While we sat there watching the group, a band of males were trying to lure the alpha male into a fight. In this case, this case the alpha male emerged the winner. The females had huddled around the black babies forming a protective ring around them. The young males were shaking and screaming in fear and egging their father to do something about the situation.

The alpha male goes chasing the band and drives them away either by fighting them or making sounds that are aggressive. Now in case the alpha male is unable to protect his family and emerges as the loser, he is driven away from the area. He eventually joins another band of male monkeys but this time is of the lowest rank. Meanwhile the females who are taken over are raped by the band of male monkeys into submission and one among them emerges as the leader and drives the rest of the males away, and thus takes over as the new alpha male. And then follows one of the cruelest behaviour in the animal kingdom. The new alpha male kills all the black male babies - the females are spared. And the older male babies either manage to get away and join a band of male monkeys or are killed by the new alpha male. The pregnant females because of the stress caused by the entire episode hang by trees and bang their stomachs against the trees and induce self abortions.

This was a revelation to us and made us look at the monkeys in a completely new light. We can't wait to go back and learn something new about other animals. And we found out on our way out of the park as we passed by one area that we had just missed by less than ten minutes the rarest fight between a bear and a female tiger!

In Bangalore this morning at 6.00 am headed out for a jam session with a friends band called RaghuDixit Project . Our friend Raghu is a microbiologist who decided to pursue a  career as  full time musician.  I find his music moving and fresh. Integrates beautifully Indian Art Music, Indian folk, Blues, Jazz in a way that just elevates you. Has a wonderful pan Indian Global feel with meaningful lyrics, melody and rythym. He has been on the path as a musician for 8 years and working hard to get India to listen to the music. Currently he is popular in Bangalore among the younger generation of techies and professionals.

I for the first time saw how a melody evolves spontaneously. The lead guitarist mentioned he had a melody in mind and sounded the percussionist on the pattern and then got started playing snatches of the melody, and at a moment, Raghu picked up the melody and rythym and sang the latino melody with a Kannada lyrics. All this emerged in 5 minutes and lifted my spirits. Felt great.

Also reflected on our rich musical traditions but needs to go out!!..

On another note, have a new addition to my list of teachers - Ramachandra Guha. Ram Guha is a brilliant scholar, social historian, cricket historian, scholar of ecology and one of the best non-fiction writers I have read. I personally find his writing style clear, well researched and wonderfully anecdotal. A nose for tiny details that make prose interesting and alive. Pieces of what would be called trivia but with significance.

Did you know that a German engineer In 1910 Kallenbach, a rich man, donated to Gandhi a thousand acre farm belonging to him near Johannesburg that became Gandhi's famous 'Tolstoy Farm' .

J C Kumarappa an associate of Gandhi truly lived and implemented Gandhi's experiments with village economy. The philosophopy that all things needed on a daily basis needs to be sourced in the radius of 5 kms.

Verrier Ellywn an anthropologist , Shivram Karanth - a kannada icon in the field of arts,