002 Chakra View – Break the Cycle

There’s a few interpretations I’ve tried to incorporate into the name of the blog, and I’ll detail them here.

1. My name is borrowed from that of the Sudarshan Chakra, a discus weapon of Vishnu, the “Preserver” in the Hindu Trimurthi. Hence my views could be ‘Chakra view’
2. The Hindu sacred epic of the Mahabharata, which details a fratricidal war of the Kuru dynasty. On the thirteenth day, Kaurava commander Dhronacharya set up a massive defensive military formation, known as the Chakravyuha. Abhimanyu, son of Arjuna, knew how to enter the maze, but not how to exit. He ventures into the formation and is trapped alone behind enemy lines. Try as he may, he could not escape the multi-pronged attack and is eventually overwhelmed, overcome by physical and mental exhaustion. Half knowledge of the concepts of the game he was forced to play proved fatal. Some could draw a parallel to the game of finance that everyone alive is mandated to play. To our benefit though, unlike the Chakravyuha, concepts of Personal Finance are easy to grasp.
3. Most of us are running in a hamster wheel, conditioned to believe that true happiness and freedom is a turn of the wheel away. Experts in human behaviour try their hardest to distract us with short term gratification options benefiting themselves at our peril. It takes effort to break this default conditioning and see things for what they truly are. In this journey, our learned habits are our worst enemy, and an understanding of how they can be tweaked to benefit us is the target to achieve.

Focus, knowledge and time are tools to figuratively break this cycle and achieve our objectives. This is the blog’s focus, and hence the name. It would be my effort to get to a point where I have the option to choose how I spend my day. I believe I can get there after reading up on the thoughts and strategies of those who have tread this path before us. It is my hope to have your inputs on this journey, and your company as well, to make this ride smoother.

I’ll blog as regularly and systematically as possible. I intend to follow a basic skeleton to structure content, and build that up through iterations.