Blog 're'-started

Hey my blog, it has been along time since I was here. On checking the last blog date, looks like… Oh ‘a very long time’. So what prompted me today? Believe me or not a self help book, well, not exactly a self help but close to it. It reminded me that we should do what want to do. A common theme among self help books, right! and even hypothetically if we want to do as these books says 'what ever we want' that list is always long, for example in my case it is a long list of joining Gym, learning keyboard, guitar, buying that nice entertaining PS3 game, writing a blog, my entrepreneurial initiative, calling that old friend … the list goes on. However, what prompted me today was the line in that book that says, "you need to prioritize and and the simple way to prioritize is to just figure out what is most important out of all for you and why". It just striked me, I have been longing to write a blog for some time now and recently have been even telling people that I am going to write or I should write. Plus based on my logic, it is also going to put me into a habit to take my time out of my regular stuff and start devoting some to my ulterior motive, i.s. my entrepreneurial stint :). Hence, here I am logging in and blogging on my old blog site - the place of my abstractions. Now, what should I write about??? It has been long and a lot has happened in my life and the world around me. I have moved on did some inevitable tasks like changed my job, got married (well that was a tough one ;)), have grown more professionally and so on, but to this blogging world I have actually turned back. Seeing my previous blogs I sometime feel that I was actually maturing here but just gave up in the way. For some one who is read this blog, he/she can surely figure out that how much I have lost in my blogging and writing skills. But never the less, it has been long time and I am surely going to write something here.

Life has changed a lot, lost contact with some very close friends (that I thought will never happen) and re-connected with some old ones which were lost in time, have made some new friends and a lot of new professional acquaintances, moved on from settling in US to back in India, sold my bike and moved on to buy a car, etc...

OK a lot of stuff for a revival of blog. Yes, I know a sudden and abrupt end. But well its pretty long considering the last blog i wrote was almost 2 years back.. and also what the hell.. my blog so I make rules around here, so it is a gr8 ending ;)


Leaving with the food for soul....

Life is short, make it sweet.. Do not keep all the Flowers for the grave..

Where Priest and Devil meet... with a Joker!

Well this is not an epic event, neither any hidden vantage point or any conspiracy theory, it's just the Halloween celebration.

During my US trip I got a chance to be a part of this unique celebration known as Halloween. Had read about it and also seen it in many Hollywood movies, but was still mesmerized when got to be a part of it (well even though I was not dressed up in costume). To be truthful, I never believed that so many adults would be celebrating it and dressed up as characters/personalities, but I was so 'beautifully' proved wrong. Lots of people had gone to some serious levels just to impersonate the 'real' feel of the character.

All in all it was a fun night to watch and enjoy. I got to meet the Pope, devil, saint, a lot fairies, kings and queens in the same day.. It really felt like I was in wonderland.

In the end, wishing all a very happy Halloween.

A nice Quote to share...

One thing is clear to me. You can't know everything you'd like to know. You can't do everything you'd like to do. You can't read everything you'd like to read. You must hold onto some things and let go of others. Learning to make that choice is one of the big lessons of this life...

courtesy 'real live Preacher' and iGoogle...

The Eleven Rules of Life!!!

Received today a forwarded mail that said 'Bill Gates' 11 Rules of Life...', just out of curiosity read it. The laid out rules were pretty common but listed in very straightforward and accurate manner. A sample of what is known as 'right at the money!!!'. The points may seem obvious today, but surely with the ongoing changes in our education system i.e. in the process of making it more 'friendly' to students, we might end up in the same position as US is because of its 'liberal' education system. I am not against making education less scary or simpler, but I am of great follower of the quote

"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler"

therefore making education more simpler, by abolishing exams or the fear of failure would lead to a very fragile future. Hope these rules of life would help to fight the real world out there. Additionally a small piece of information, the rules are actually not from Bill gates (See clarification here ), It's an excerpt from the book "Dumbing Down our Kids" by educator Charles Sykes. It is a list of eleven things you did not learn in school and directed at high school and college grads.

RULE 1
Life is not fair - get used to it.

RULE 2
The world won't care about your self-esteem. The world
will expect you to accomplish something BEFORE you feel
good about yourself.

RULE 3
You will NOT make 40 thousand dollars a year right out
of high school. You won't be a vice president with
car phone, until you earn both.

RULE 4
If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a
boss. He doesn't have tenure.

RULE 5
Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your
grandparents had a different word for burger flipping
they
called it Opportunity.

RULE 6
If you mess up,it's not your parents' fault, so don't
whine about your mistakes, learn from them.

RULE 7
Before you were born, your parents weren't as boring as
they are now. They got that way from paying your bills,
cleaning your clothes and listening to you talk about
how cool you are. So before you save the rain forest
from the parasites of your parent's generation, try
delousing the closet in your own room.


RULE 8
Your school may have done away with winners and losers,
but life has not. In some schools they have abolished
failing grades and they'll give you as many times as
you want to get the right answer. This doesn't bear the
slightest resemblance to ANYTHING in real life.

RULE 9
Life is not divided into semesters. You don't get
summers off and very few employers are interested in
helping you find yourself. Do that on your own time.

RULE 10
Television is NOT real life. In real life people
actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.

RULE 11
Be nice to nerds. Chances are you'll end up working for
one.

Where the Neighborhood is without the Filth

Here I present an adaptation of Rabindranath Tagore's poem 'Where the mind is without fear' as 'Where the Neighborhood is without the Filth' for a beautiful and corruption free India....

Where the neighborhood is without filth and the queues short and smooth;
Where civil-service is corruption free;
Where towns have not been broken into fragments by narrow potholed streets;
Where justice is given out quickly from the profundity of the courts;
Where a tireless workforce stretches its arms towards perfection;
Where the clear stream from the mountains has not lost its way into contaminated rivers of dead water;
Where the economy is led forward by thee into a rate of growth higher then six percent (real);
Into the heaven of liberalization, my father, let my country awake!!!

The lines above have been taken from my latest reading venture -- Games Indians Play by V. Raghunathan....

Before I present any of my views or reviews of the book, I would like every reader to read the above lines with compassion and try to visualize our India with all the dreams fulfilled and all goals achieved........


Will soon come up with the review of the book, where the author, proves using Game theory, that how we Indians are individually very intelligent and collectively very dumb.......

The verdict: A must read for every Indian!