Selfishness must be transmuted into selflessness before the domain of duality is completely transcended.

Persistent and continuous performance of good deeds wears out selfishness.

Selfishness extended and expressed in the form of good deeds becomes the instrument of its own destruction.

——- AVATAR MEHER BABA

[From:- DISCOURSES by Meher Baba. Copyright ©1967 by Adi K. Irani, King’s Rd., Ahmednagar, Maharashtra, India]

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Angel Tax Survey: 70% Of Startups That Raised Capital Got One Or More Notices
The survey jointly conducted by the Indian Private Equity and Venture Capital Association (IVCA) and online citizen engagement platform Local Circles, will be presenting the data to the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT) today (4 February).

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“Thankfulness creates gratitude which generates contentment that causes peace.”

— Todd Stocker

Did you know…

… that today is Thank Your Mailman Day? Honor those who deliver mail to your homes and places of business. After all, they deliver your mail rain or shine or mean-looking dog, so they deserve some form of recognition. And thankfully… in 1920, the United States Post Office banned sending children by post!

https://www.dnaindia.com/india/photo-gallery-suffering-from-multiple-personality-disorder-bjp-reminds-rahul-he-slammed-mamata-banerjee-for-chit-fund-scam-2715911

Daily Capsule | 4th Feb

Hello

Inspiration can be found in abundance. And nowhere more so than in the words of American writer, civil rights activist and academic Maya Angelou. Born Marguerite Annie Johnson, Maya died at the age of 86 in 2014 and left behind a prolific body of work, including seven volumes of autobiography, three books of essays, several books of poetry, and a list of plays, movies, and TV shows.

But what she’s most remembered for are her quotes that never fail to inspire and motivate. Sample this: “If you’re always trying to be normal, you will never know how amazing you can be.” Or this: “Nothing will work unless you do.”

Maya Angelou, who was awarded her the US’ highest civilian honour, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, had mastered French, Spanish, Italian, Arabic and the West African language Fanti. But what sprang out in all languages were her words. “My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humour and some style.” She sure did that!

Students or entrepreneurs, everyone can find lasting inspiration in Maya Angelou’s words: “You can only become truly accomplished at something you love. Don’t make money your goal. Instead, pursue the things you love doing, and then do them so well that people can’t take their eyes off you.”

If that isn’t inspiration enough to kick-start your Monday, we have a steady stream of startup stories.

Cheers,

Team YourStory

Stories you shouldn’t miss

What happens when a few innovative IIT-BHU students take a shine to drone technology? A startup is born. Here’s the story of how a few IIT-BHU alumni are using drone data to transform the infrastructure sector. Their Blockchain-powered startup Indshine offers a cloud-based drone platform, Felix, and enterprise drone solutions for various industries.

When everything is digital, why are medical records still living a paper life? This one question led Sohit Kapoor and Harsh Parikh, alumni of IIM-B, to launch DRiefcase. The startup, officially launched in May 2016, is aiming to disrupt the personal healthcare space with doorstep digitisation of medical records. It provides patients with single-point, easy-to-use access to their medical data through a mobile app.

InifiniChains works as SaaS-based scalable platform for stakeholders in a supply chain, capturing data from existing systems on to the Blockchain with the help of set business rules, making it tamperproof. The platform also wants to allow consumers to track the lifetime of the product, from the origination to the time it hits stores.

If there’s one thing you should never stop doing that, it’s upskilling. And if you’re looking to upskill staff and make them more productive, Disprz offers personalised learning management for employees. Founded by Subramanian Viswanath and Kuljit Chadha, the startup has a multilingual app that helps onboard and engage employees, increase their productivity, and continuously learn online.

The Northeast may not come to mind first thing when you think startup, but times are changing. Reason enough for this Manipur-based entrepreneur to bring healthcare to people’s doorsteps in the Northeast. Lian Thangvung founded Thangvung Privilege Services and offers a privilege card with financial assistance for medical emergencies at zero percent EMI and 24X7 doorstep medicine delivery.

Space exploration has long been the preserve of government agencies across the world. But gaining inspiration from Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, some Indian companies are now focusing on the niche area of space technology. Enter Bengaluru-based Bellatrix Aerospace, which is cutting the cost of putting satellites in space, and making them last longer.

Founded by IIT alumni Vivek Gera and Abhishek Jha, biotech startup LeucineTech could be a cure for the pharma industry’s compliance issues. The Bengaluru-based company offers a compliance software solution that automates the entire cleaning validation lifecycle, including design, qualification, and monitoring, for the pharma industry.

Delhi-based startup boAt forced the likes of JBL to cut prices in India. Here’s the story of how boAt tripled its revenues in a year and now sells 4 products every minute. Founded by Aman Gupta and Sameer Mehta, the startup has created a community of over 800,000 “boAtheads” and is on track to becoming a Rs 500-crore consumer electronics company by 2024.

How many of us, biting into plum cake over Christmas, promised to lose the fat and become fit in 2019 but failed? Karan Murada wanted to address this attitude towards fitness. To help busy people who have not yet made fitness a natural part of their lives make a commitment to take care of themselves, Karan, with his friend Aditya Srivastava, started Fitato in 2016.

Do you know where your clothes come from? Or what is it made of, and if it is environment-friendly? NorthMist was launched by Smrity Gupta (26) and Arijit Mazumdar (29) in March 2018 as an eco-friendly brand that manufactures sustainable and ethical menswear from pesticide-free organic cotton. The founders say that its products – from seed to stitch – are Global Organic Textile Standard (GOTS) certified.

Every parent wants to ensure that their child was learning everything they needed to and this could only be solved when they owned the entire learning experience by combining online learning with classroom learning. To make this happen, in 2016, Maneesh Dhooper and Kunal Malik decided to set up Planet Spark, which essentially transforms traditional KG to Class 8 tuitions, by combining physical teaching with mobile technology.

Future of Work 2019 promises multiple niche and deep-dive sessions on technology, platforms and its impact on business. More details here!

—

Wants should be carefully distinguished from needs.

Pride and anger, greed and lust are all different from needs.

As long as man has a body there will be some needs, and it is necessary to meet these needs.

But wants are an outcome of infatuated imagination. They must be scrupulously killed if there is to be any happiness.

——- AVATAR MEHER BABA

[From:- DISCOURSES by Meher Baba. Copyright ©1967 by Adi K. Irani, King’s Rd., Ahmednagar, Maharashtra, India]

Jane Goodall’s Lovely Letter to Children About How Reading Shaped Her Life

“Books feed and cure and chortle and collide,” Gwendolyn Brooks wrote in her 1969 ode to why we read. For Kafka, a book was “the axe for the frozen sea inside us”; for Galileo, nothing less than a source of superhuman powers. “Without the writing of books, there is no history, there is no concept of humanity,” Hermann Hesse wrote in his visionary 1930 meditation on “the magic of the book” and why we will always remain under its generous spell, no matter how the technologies of reading may change.

We read to remember. We read to forget. We read to make ourselves and remake ourselves and save ourselves. “I read the way a person might swim, to save his or her life,” Mary Oliver wrote in looking back on how books saved her. Most of all, we read to become selves. The wondrous gift of reading is that books can become both the life-raft to keep us from drowning and the very water that sculpts the riverbed of our lives, bending it this direction or that, traversing great distances and tessellated territories of being, chiseling through even the hardest rock.

That life-steering power of books is what pioneering primatologist Jane Goodallarticulates with great simplicity and sweetness in her contribution to A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader (public library) — a labor of love eight years in the making, comprising 121 illustrated letters to children about how books form and transform us by some of the most inspiring humans in our world: artists, writers, scientists, philosophers, entrepreneurs, musicians, and adventurers whose character has been shaped by a life of reading.

Original art by Christian Robinson for Jane Goodall’s letter from A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader.

Half a century after Simone de Beauvoir reflected on how chance and choice converge to make us who we are, Goodall tells young readers about her formative childhood experience, as much a product of her time and place as of her singular predilections:

Dear Children,

I want to share something with you — and that is how much I loved books when I was your age. Of course, back then there was no Internet, no television — we learned everything from printed books. We didn’t have much money when I was a child and I couldn’t afford new books, so most of what I read came from our library. But I also used to spend hours in a very small second hand book shop. The owner was an old man who never had time to arrange his books properly. They were piled everywhere and I would sit there, surrounded by all that information about everything imaginable. I would save up any money I got for my birthday or doing odd jobs so that I could buy one of those books. Of course, you can look up everything on the Internet now. But there is something very special about a book — the feel of it in your hands and the way it looks on the table by your bed, or nestled in with others in the bookcase.

I loved to read in bed, and after I had to put the lights out I would read under the bedclothes with a torch, always hoping my mother would not come in and find out! I used to read curled up in front of the fire on a cold winter evening. And in the summer I would take my special books up my favorite tree in the garden. My Beech Tree. Up there I read stories of faraway places and I imagined I was there. I especially loved reading about Doctor Doolittle and how he learned to talk to animals. And I read about Tarzan of the Apes. And the more I read, the more I wanted to read.

I was ten years old when I decided I would go to Africa when I grew up to live with animals and write books about them. And that is what I did, eventually. I lived with chimpanzees in Africa and I am still writing books about them and other animals. In fact, I love writing books as much as reading them — I hope you will enjoy reading some of the ones that I have written for you.

Jane Goodall

Pair this taste of A Velocity of Being, all proceeds from which benefit the public library system, with Patrick McDonnell’s lovely picture-book about how Jane Goodall turned her childhood dream into reality, then revisit two other moving letters from A Velocity of Being — Rebecca Solnit on how books solace and empower us and 100-year-old Holocaust survivor Helen Fagin on how a particular book saved particular lives.

Some of the original art from the book is available as prints, with all proceeds also benefiting the public library system. Find more about the project, and peek inside its lushly illustrated pages, here.

French Philosopher Maurice Blanchot on Writing, the Dual Power of Language to Reveal and Conceal, and What It Really Means to See

“The job of the writer is to make us see the world as it is,”Susan Sontag asserted in considering the conscience of words. “Words are events, they do things, change things,”Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in her splendid meditation on the magic of real human communication. But this transformation has a dual power of helping us see the world more clearly and creating the illusion of seeing when we are in fact misperceiving, as Nietzsche well knew in contemplating how we use language to both conceal and reveal reality: “Is language the adequate expression of all realities?” he asked. Still, language is the mightiest tool we have for wresting meaning from reality. “We die. That may be the meaning of life,” Toni Morrison asserted in her spectacular Nobel Prize acceptance speech. “But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.”

That implicit duality of our linguistic conscience and the delicate, beautiful, dangerous relationship between storytelling and seeing is what the reclusive French writer, philosopher, and literary theorist Maurice Blanchot (September 22, 1907–February 20, 2003), whose ideas influenced such titanic thinkers as Foucault, Derrida, and Sontag, examined in his 1969 book The Infinite Conversation(public library), translated into English by Susan Hanson.

Maurice Blanchot, identity document, 1927.

Blanchot considers what writing is and is not:

— To write is not to give speech to be seen. The game of common etymology makes of writing a cutting movement, a tear, a crisis.
— This is simply a reminder that the proper tool for writing was also proper for incising: the stylet.
— Yes, but this incisive reminder still evokes a cutting operation, if not a butchery: a kind of violence — the word flesh if found in the family, just as graphy is a scratch. Higher and further back, to write is to curve meet. Writing is the curve that the turn of seeking has already evoked for us and that we find in the bending of reflection.

Three decades after Virginia Woolf proclaimed in the only surviving recording of her voice that “words belong to each other,” Blanchot weighs the duality of language as a medium capable of both connection and separation:

— In each word, all words.
— Yet, speaking, like writing, engages us in a separating movement, an oscillating and vacillating departure.

Illustration from The Little Golden Book of Words

In a sentiment of both complement and counterpoint to Le Guin’s incisive observation that “if you can see a thing whole… it seems that it’s always beautiful,”Blanchot writes:

— Seeing is also a movement.
— Seeing presupposes only a measure and a measurable separation: to see is certainly always to see at a distance, but by allowing distance to give back what it removes from us. Sight is invisibly active in a pause wherein everything holds itself back. We see only what first escapes us by virtue of an initial privation, not seeing things that are too present, and not seeing them if our presence to things is pressing.

In a caveat reminiscent of founding father Benjamin Rush’s insightful metaphor for our blindness to the truly visionary — Rush likened visionary people to “objects placed too near the eye,” whose genius is not properly apprehended by the age in which they live and is only appreciated with the distance of generations — Blanchot adds:

— But we do not see what is too distant, what escapes us through the separation of distance.
— There is a privation, an absence, precisely through which contact is achieved. Here the interval does not impede; on the contrary, it allows a direct relation. Every relation of light is an immediate relation.
— To see is thus to apprehend immediately from a distance.
— …immediately from a distance and through distance.

Two of the self-taught 17th-century artist and astronomer Maria Clara Eimmart’s stunning astronomical drawings.

A century after the great naturalist John Muir insisted that “when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe,” Blanchot concludes:

To see is to make use of separation, not as mediating, but as a means of immediation, as immediating. In this sense too, to see is to experience the continuous and to celebrate the sun, that is, beyond the sun: the One.

And yet, Blanchot reminds us, we never see everything — but perhaps that is a freedom rather than a limitation. He writes:

This is sight’s wisdom, though we never see only one thing, even two or several, but a whole: every view is a general view. It is still true that sight holds us within the limits of a horizon. Perception is a wisdom rooted in the ground and standing fixed in the direction of the opening; it is of the land, in the proper sense of the term: planted in the earth and forming a link between the immobile boundary and the apparently boundless horizon — a firm pact from which comes peace. For sight, speech is war and madness. The terrifying word passes over every limit and even the limitlessness of the whole: it seizes the thing from a direction from which it is not taken, not seen, and will never be seen; it transgresses laws, breaks away from orientation, it disorients.

— There is facility in this liberty. Language acts as though we were able to see the thing from all sides.

Couple this finite fragment of The Infinite Conversation with Le Guin on the power of language to transform and redeem, then revisit philosopher Martin Buber on what a tree can teach us about seeing the world clearly, Thoreau on being unblinded by our preconceptions, Georgia O’Keeffe on the art of seeing, and cognitive scientist Alexandra Horowitz on apprehending reality as it really is.

In Search of the Canary Tree: What a Disappearing Ancient Forest Can Teach Us About Resilience and Grace in a Changing World