Life in Balance: Amit Chaudhary’s Blog
• • • • •

Highlights from The Way I Work: Paul English, Co-founder Kayak

• Up everyday at 6:00, Email & then Yoga. Has a meditation room.

• We work really hard for 40 to 45 hours a week, but we believe in people having strong personal lives. Over the past six years, there have been maybe five times I’ve spoken with Steve before 8 a.m., after 5 p.m., or on the weekend.

• Always drives kid to school.

• We have offices in Connecticut, Massachusetts, and California. We started with the first two because my co-founder, Steve Hafner, lives in Connecticut, I live in Boston, and neither one of us wanted to move.

• We have an open office environment. our general philosophy is that an open environment facilitates intellectual intensity. Most engineers are introverted. Here, when people overhear a discussion, we encourage them to walk over and say, “There’s another way to do that.”

• The engineers and I handle customer support. If you make the engineers answer e-mails and phone calls from the customers, the second or third time they get the same question, they’ll actually stop what they’re doing and fix the code. Then we don’t have those questions anymore.

• Real time datamining and support information. We have four monitors in the office where you can see real-time streaming information about the site — how many visitors, how many click throughs. It also displays the last customer e-mail that came in and the photo of the employee who answered it. So you’re walking by and you see, “Oh, Dan just answered a question.” We developed our own customer support software. One of the things it does is randomly select an employee response to a customer and send that response out to the entire company and to all of our investors each day. It keeps us on our toes.

• I keep noon to 2 p.m. open, because I like going out to lunch. It’s also a time for me to socialize. We have a very active work force.

• I do all of the firing. At times, I’ve fired maybe one out of every three people I’ve hired. That might make people think I’m bad at hiring, but I think I’m quite good at hiring. The only way 100 people can ever build a larger company than one that has more than 8,000 people — that’s what Expedia has — is by hiring Olympic-quality, unbelievable all stars of technology.

• Every Tuesday night, I have an open dinner at my house. Anywhere between four and 15 of my relatives will show up for dinner. I’m not a great cook, but it’s fun to have people over.

• I read for an hour every night before going to bed. I love reading books by Indian authors. I’ll also read books about global health and Africa, as well as a murder mystery now and then. But I don’t like business books. There are so many things in life that are more interesting than business.

Recently during my Yoga Ashram stay and when visiting in India, I read the Bhagavad Gita, translated by Swami Sivananda. Following are my highlights.

Balanced & Free from pair of opposites
2.45 Free from pair of opposites and acquisition. 2.48 Balanced in success and failure, evenness of mind is called Yoga **
2.50 yoga is skill in action.  **

Meditation
2.66 with no meditation, no peace and hence no joy. 18.50-52. dwelling in solitude, eating but little, with speech (silence), body and mind subdued, always engaged in meditation and concentration, resorting to dispassion. *
5.21. Engaged in meditation, attains endless peace and hapiness. *
5.27. Meditate, looking inwards. Equalize incoming and outgoing breath.**
6.10 Constant practice of meditation, in solitude.* *
6.14. Meditation steps incl sitting neither high or low.
6.15. Moderation. In eating, actions and sleep.
6.25. Little by little, quiet comes to the mind.*
6.26. Whenever mind wanders, bring it back under control.*
8.10. Fix whole life breath in the middle of eyebrows. **
8.12. Withdraw senses, gazing inwards, focusing.
8.13. Uttering OM and remembering me. **
12.8-10. Otherwise focus on me, practice Yoga constantly or do actions for my sake and you will reach siddhi (me). *
12.12. Knowledge is better than Practice. Meditation is next. Then renunciation of fruits of action. Then peace follows.**

Yoga, Pranayama & other practices
4.28, 29, 30. Yoga, Pranayama (equal breath for in & out) and moderate diet as tapas.**
4.38. Perfection in Yoga leads to knowledge within self in time.
6.40-44. A former Yogi eventually returns to his practice.
6.44. Who merely wishes to know Yoga goes beyond the written word of Brahman.*
17.6. Senseless austerities and torture of body and thereby me, are of demoniacal resolve.

Sense control, Pratyahara
3.6. Control senses during action.*
3.37. Desire leads to Anger. It is the Foe. Both in turn lead to Sin.
3.40. Desire sits in senses, mind and intellect, clouding wisdom.*
3.41. Hence control senses.
5.20. For Brahman knower, No joy from pleasant events, no agitation on unpleasant.*
12.15. He by whom the world is not agitated and who cannot be agitated by the world is dear to me.**
12.17. He who is not attached to good and evil, who is full of devotion is dear to me.*
12.19. He to whom censure and praise are equal, who is silence oriented, homeless is dear to me. *

Conduct, Actions & Gunas (Qualities)
2.42 flowery speeches by unwise *
3.5. Action always happens due to our nature. Swayed by gunas.*
3.25. Do actions without attachment for welfare of world.*
3.27. All actions due to nature. Delusion to think I am doer.
3.42. Senses are greater than Body. Mind > Senses. Intellect > Mind. The Self, the Witness, He > Intellect.**
9.1. To you who is not jealous, I will give knowledge which combined with experience will set you free. **
12.8-10. Otherwise focus on me, practice Yoga constantly or do actions for my sake and you will reach siddhi (me). *
12.12. Knowledge is better than Practice. Meditation is next. Then renunciation of fruits of action. Then peace follows.**
14.5. Sattva, Rajas and Tamas, these qualities, born of nature, bind fast in the body, the undestructable.
14.6. Sattva, which is stainless, binds by attachment to knowledge and happiness. Comparing to others.*
14.10. Each of these dominant at different times.*
14.11. When light shines through every gate in the body, Sattva is predominant.
14.22. When one transcends the three qualities, he is neither carried away nor upset when any of the gunas is dominant.
17.8-10. Food which increase life are dear to sattvic, excessive hot to rajasic and stale to tamasic.
18.48. All undertakings have some fault as fire has smoke.*

God in all, Universe    
4.35. With truth, see all beings in yourself and in me.**
5.16. Ignorance is destroyed by knowledge of self, sheding light on the highest knowledge.*
9.4. All this world is pervaded by me in my unmanifested form. *
9.6. As the wind rests in the sky, all beings rest in God. *

Devotion
7. 22. Whatever one seeks with devotion is given.*
17.3. As a man’s faith, so is he.*
17.23. Om Tat Sat, is declared to be triple designation of Brahman.
17.24. Therefore, Om is uttered by Brahman students before Tapas and Charity.

Michael at Prana Journal wrote in Meditation and pranayama before yoga about his experience on doing Pranayama before Asana.

It really did help prepare me for a more mindful yoga practice: it usually takes me 20-30 minutes to shake off what I call the “debris of life” (all the to-do lists, internal dialog and white noise that go on in my head) and surrender to my practice; this time around, I eased into almost immediately.

My own experience when I do Pranayama is that it is better to do it after Yoga Asanas, particularly since I do the Asanas only one or two times a week. The Asanas open up the body, making the Pranayama more fulfilling.

Moreso, in Yoga Sutras by Patanjali (Wikipedia link, Book by Iyengar, Book by Cope), Pranayama comes after Asanas so it is kind of a next step.
Talking of Pranayama, the best book I found is Yoga for Transformation: Ancient Teachings and Practices for Healing the Body, Mind, and Heart by Gary Kraftsow of Vini Yoga.