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Three days are all you need to understand someone deeply
Three days are all you need to discover their foibles
Three days are all you need to fall in love all over again
Three days are all you need to feel the pain of their tears on your chest
Three days are all you need to see the sad goodbye in the swelled up eyes
Three days are all you need to make the everlasting wait unbearable
The rise in global crude prices, and the rapid increase in inflation has hit the Indian consumer hard. More so for the airlines. There is no longer the kind of buzz that was seen in airports just a couple of months ago. Flying has been toppled from its pedestal as the most preferred way of traveling. People are starting to turn back to railways for a slower but cheaper way to travel. This is evident from the lack of queues for the security checks, the empty seats in the departure lounges and in the airplanes itself.
...
I can see a few passengers lazily strolling about the lounge, having coffee and chatting. They choose to ignore the PA system announcing the final boarding call for their flight. Only when the desperate airline officials start asking passengers individually whether they are traveling by that flight do they realize that the plane is waiting for them. They get up, grumbling at the half-wasted coffee (even though the coffee there is awful) and throw it away to make way to the bus.
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Kingfisher Airlines still continues to pamper its 'guests' but bother other passengers (and possibly make them envious) through multiple pre-boarding calls. Their air-hostesses are still the best-looking.
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While in the line, I think however much we may learn in MBA, we're still ill-equipped to deal with other cultures. While I'm standing in the line, a man (possibly Japanese) respectfully bows down, gestures with one hand wishing to cross the line to get to the other side. I wonder what would most of us have done in his place. Just shove and push? Or maybe spill out a perfunctory 'Excuse me?'
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Once in the plane, through the window I can see something which makes me squirm. Airports boast of being technologically modern, with conveniences of all possible kinds. But I can still see a lady sitting in a wheelchair being pushed by an airport employee in the hot Chennai sun. Why such treatment? Aren't the buses supposed to be handicapped friendly? Why can't she board the air-conditioned buses which all the other passengers use?
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The flight has ended. The airplane has stopped. Here goes everyone out of their seats fetching their baggage from the overhead storage. Why are you in such a hurry uncle? Let the doors open, let the ladder be positioned. Do you want to jump out and break your bones? Relax India.
One of the most important functions of post-offices was (is) making sure that mails reach you on time.
One of the most important functions of email providers is making sure that some mails don't reach you at all.
Inspired by an ad.
People talk about seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, but what if you're in the wrong tunnel? Where does that tunnel lead to?
I never imagined that I would devote a post on my blog to Shahrukh Khan. Many people love his movies but I'm one of those people who don't particularly like his acting, especially in movies like Om Shanti Om, Main Hoon Na, Mohabbatein. For me, my 100 bucks is better spent on books or food than watching such a movie in the theatre. But when you consider the reason for his selection of roles and the way he acts, it boils out to something very simple. He does it for the masses. People love him not what he does, but how he does it, for the intensity and the goofiness he puts in in some of the characters he portrays. While that has become, for him, a restriction of sorts, he is considered one of the most bankable stars in the Hindi film industry today.
One of the few movies in which I liked his acting, Swades, didn't do well at the box-office. This means that, Shahrukh Khan the actor and Shahrukh Khan the entertainer are totally two different persons. And one has to take precedence over the other. Further, people are likely to idolize one of these two persons.
Another reason why I like Shahrukh the person is evident in two documentaries I've seen about him. One is the Revealed series on CNN, and the other is a documentary by BBC(?) The man has had big wild dreams. In one of the documentaries, he says, as a young boy he wanted to own the city. But after all these years, it seems that the city owns him. In many aspects he is right. But what's more the city (and the country) loves him. Watching Shahrukh Khan's life story is more inspiring than watching one of his movies. The way he brought himself to Mumbai from Delhi, the way he struggled doing TV serials, the way he risked his career by taking on negative roles in his early days shows more about his calibre then his roles as Raj or Dev Saran. Watching what inspires the person who inspires a million hearts is more worthwhile than watching, frankly, most of his movies.
Some people reach a position in life for which they have given their all. And when they reach it, they have the right to be proud about it. They have the right to call themselves the King. And today Shahrukh Khan, without the backing of a filmi family, has reached that position solely on the basis of his hard-work and passion.
Lack of self control is something which one faces some time or the other in life. For me, it is a continuous battle. Mostly I lose the fight, sometimes I manage to save my face. Be it in anything as simple as sleeping for one hour less or not having that extra cold drink or piece of pastry, I totally lack control. I shift into short term mode and rarely think of the negative long term effects which this would have on my body.
Its funny when you read about all good habits but you lack to follow them yourself and one day you wake up and see that you have this disease which you could have avoided all the time along by practicing a little bit of moderation. As I said for me, cure seems to be the easier alternative than prevention much to the consternation of the people who care. I make up some excuse or sometimes blatantly lie about what I did or what I failed to do to prevent such an occurrence. I blame the weather or my genes if I fall sick. But I know I'm lying and I know I'm suffering. I know that my self respect will increase only when I learn to say no to things, and start doing things which are beneficial to me in the long run. So here goes nothing.
To start with I'll concentrate on what I eat. No more stuffing (junk) food into my stomach mercilessly. I eat only when required. Let's push my limits. If nothing else, I'll learn one thing from Total Quality Management. From today I follow Toyota's 5 whys approach. Before stuffing anything in my mouth, I will ask myself 'why.' On one hand while I may not be able to wait to ask 5 questions but I will definitely ask myself one the necessity and requirement of anything I put in my mouth. There are many people who can validate whether I'm doing this diligently or not. I may not lost 10 kgs (which I need to) using this method but I'll at least set an example for myself on which to test other things as well.
In related news, I came across another example which proved that getting a 9.x CGPA doesn't get you commonsense free with it.
Bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit fart bullshit bullshit bullshit crap bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit
(7:57)
Right now I should be buried in my Organizational Behaviour text book. I have an exam in an hour or so. But somehow I felt I had to write this post now. I think the time has come to open up this blog for its second innings. Don't have any justifications as to why now, but somehow I feel the time is right. I still don't know what I will write here; probably it will be the same old blog - my unwanted opinions on anything and everything. But one distinction I will make is that I won't post any creative material on this blog. The stories, the poems, the one-liners will stay on my other blog. Let this blog continue its journey to what I had created it for - In search of Nirvana.
What a day! Today I regurgitated 2 months of course material in around 2 1/2 hours. Whether I did a good job or not will be clear in a month when the marks come out. Never have written so much in so little a time. Next is the mother of all exams - Data Analysis for Management. Don't think I've forgotten what's after that. Financial Accounting - the grand-daddy of all exams. Two days of pain followed by two hours each of shock therapy. Lets see how many parts of the body I still have intact after that ordeal.
Today I am starting with the book 'Good to Great' by Jim Collins. Along with it, I made a Google spreadsheet to keep track of the number of pages I read daily. I have kept aside 10 days for reading the whole book and thus it works out to some 26 pages per day. By creating a chart showing the actual and the optimal reading speed, I get an idea of where I am and whether I need to speed up.
The observations I hope to ...err... observe are:-
1) Does keeping track of daily reading help me increase my speed?
2) Does it make me more regular? Is there any correlation between the day of the week and the number of pages I read?
3) Does reading faster necessarily result in better comprehension?
Update (1st May 07) - Although, I managed to finish reading the book faster than the optimal and the revised targets, a single book isn't indicative of any trend. So I plan to extend this experiment to few other books as well. Read about the review of Good to Great here.
After going through the coffee lovers' thread at pagalguy.com, I realized how far the coffee industry had come. With retailing coming into the forefront in India and with the setting up of international coffee chains, people now sip coffee named 'The Devil's own', 'Almond Frappe','Kaapi Nirvana' etc. And to think that I'm still stuck at the small Bru/Nescafe pouch. Just add water and sugar, it says, and you'll have your own espresso ready. Sip... Lick... Ummmm... it says. Well, never mind the fact that its more of sip... blechh... spit... @#$!%&*
I have never been attracted to coffee. For me it never did its job. In fact, coffee has a calming effect on me, quite the opposite to what it is supposed to do. I remember the countless number of times during my CAT preparation that I have felt asleep just after having a cup of coffee. For me the good old chai is a major addiction - especially in the morning. Don't try to talk with me before I have had my morning tea or I'll make you squirm in pain.
Whenever I have had coffee, it was due to circumstances. Coffee helped a lot in my college days. It was mainly because I hadn't come across any instant tea mix. During the submissions and the exams, the all-nighters had to be survived through. The 3Rs. Nescafe pouch helped me through those long nights. But I'm sure I was only one of some ten people in Ahmedabad who actually drank that instant coffee. I remember my roomie looking at me strangely many a times whenever I drank this concoction. Another time when it helped was at my previous company. Gathering with fellow internet surfers software developers and spending time near the vending machine was always a good excuse to get away from the boss. Eventually we had worked out a strategy which involved visiting the vending machines on all the floors once in a day. Ultimately we calculated that a mixture of 3/4ths coffee and 1/4th tomato soup will do wonders to your concentration and help you through the siesta sessions meetings. But there was a side effect on some which involved an extra visit or two to the loo (which again was a welcome break).
To me, coffee has been useful in many ways. It may have its lovers, but for me, Wagh Bakri scores over The Devil's Own.
To be frank, I don't have much knowledge of foreign languages. Of course, I know a little French e.g. Parlez vous is the name given to the Parle-G biscuits which are exported to Paris. ich (German for I) is the cute sound which one of my friends makes when she sneezes. Puta is Spanish for umm... well... never mind. The point is that I have never learnt a language in its entirety. And that's what I'm about to do now. I'm planning to learn German. Actually its not a new thing. I have been trying to learn German since my college days. Thought that learning a new language would improve my resumé. But time and other constraints caused me to put such grandiose ideas aside and dive back into my engineering books. In the struggle to learn Java and C++, the quest to learn German went kaput.
The second wave started during my project days. SAP was implemented in the company I was doing project in, and again I dreamt big dreams of going to Germany for SAP training. Thus having a working knowledge of German would have helped me converse freely with the 'Germanese'. That stint again was short-lived.
As far as I can remember there were a couple of stints more, dictated by the situations and the spurs of the moment. But all these stints didn't help in any way. Considering my limited German vocabulary, a Yahoo chat conversation would go like:-
Me: Guten Morgen/Guten Tag
German: Guten Morgen! Wie gehst du heute?
Me: Umm... well... uh... Auf Wiedersehen.
*Click* *Click* *Log-off*
But now this bhoot of learning German has again taken over me. So I have downloaded the Complete Idiot's Guide to learning German (Extra Idioticity Edition), and this book coupled with the Internet will help me learn this authoritative language. Then I'll have a multilingual blog. Then I'll get visitors from Germany. Then I'll be ... (beta niche aaja). Anyways, if nothing else I'll feel good at learning something new.
So, Auf Wiedersehen for now, and ja, to the foot-in-the-grave politician I was talking about recently, du bist ein schwarzes Schwein (Tsk tsk. I can see you running to Google Translate. Chalo uski bhi link de deta hu).
Sigh. I finally finished reading Midnight's Children. I had taken up this book little less than a week ago. And what a journey it was. From the birth of Saleem Sinai on the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947 to his encounters with various characters who shape his life (and whose life he shapes). The book is one of the wittiest I have ever read. The literal way in which events recur in Saleem's life is a very good metaphor for the cyclic nature of everyone's life and family. Another unique technique which I have never encountered before in any book is the author's use of shifting forth in time by revealing the fate of a certain character and then coming back and continuing with the original story. The exact opposite of building a suspense. However, this technique works beautifully and does not detract from the flow of the story. Moreover it adds a lot of wit to the narration. The way in which the author carries this out shows the confidence with which he writes. This was my first Salman Rushdie read and surely not the last.
Incidentally, this is the third book related to Mumbai which I have read within a year. The first two were Maximum City, and Shantaram. An involuntary obsession for a city I love, and if everything goes fine, then hopefully a city in which I will spend the next few years.
"In allocating resources, school education must have primacy. Hence I propose to increase the allocation for school education by about 35 percent from Rs. 17,1333 crore in 2006-07 to Rs. 23,142 crore in 2007-08"
Hmm. Wonder where the money will actually go...
Had made this image a long time ago. Uploaded it now. Must be more prompt in future.
While passing through the main bazaar road of Vapi, I saw many shops selling Holi wares - water guns, gulal, colour powders etc. Children were pestering their parents to buy the latest water guns and choicest colours to spray on their friends. What was interesting is that most of these shops are divided into two areas, an inner area which is the main shop, where they sell their usual stuff; and an outer temporary stall where they sell certain things according to the season. In Diwali, the colours are replaced by fire-crackers; in Ganesh Chaturthi, idols of Ganapati are placed; in the monsoon, umbrellas hang out in the shops. Also its not that only a certain kind of shops use this strategy. Among the ones I saw were a mobile shop, a cosmetics store, an electrical store, even the old Writer stores which usually sells mouse traps among other things. It is interesting to see the owners (cleverly) supplement their income through these temporary stalls. Seeing the changing facade of these shops gives a fleeting glimpse of the changing colours of the festivals of India.
"You are never dedicated to something you have complete confidence in. No
This interesting paragraph from the book I’m reading currently Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance makes me think of the religious fundamentalism that is sweeping, not just
My life till now has been wasted potential. Or more correctly, unused potential. Like a dedh-volt battery lying in an unused torch I haven’t been able to use my energy and ability to provide light, if not for others, even for myself. Due to some reason which I do not remember I have been pushed under the darkest of the farthest corner of the shop. My only companions are cockroaches and ants. A friendly little mouse rocks me back and forth when it tries to nibble the plastic switch off the torch I’m in. Other than that I lie still. I do not know how long I have been lying here. I don’t know how much of my energy is still left. All I know is that I’m in the wrong place. All I know is that I have to get out of here. I’m waiting for the day when the shopkeeper will find me, look at me, check if I’m still working. That day I will brightly shine into his face and lighten up his shop and it will be the happiest moment of my life. I have waited long in this damp dark corner. If I can now only push, push the torch into rolling out in the open. Help me little mouse. No I must learn to do this on my own.
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