On your marks, get set, go!

Stating the obvious

2009-02-08T13:23:00.002+05:30

Whatever i write in this post is obvious to many but frustration has driven me towards stating the obvious: " Whenever one is in a hurry one shall always encounter the lousiest of drivers, the meanest of traffic and the maximum number of signal lights displaying red. One shall be left with no option but to scream, to curse and lastly to ram one's head against the driving wheel. "

Start..Stop.. Start... Stop.... Start........................ Period..

2009-01-10T20:29:00.003+05:30

I couldn't have summed up anybody's life in a more succinct manner.. And when i say anybody's life, i mean it. Be it mine, your's, my family's, my friend's or for that matter anyone, the common pattern which emerges is: Start.. Stop.. Start............. Period....

Everyone first strives to achieve a target.. When he/she hits the target, the life feels to be rushing by. Then the person relaxes a bit and unknowingly in a span of time becomes complacent. The going is so far good.. Then some fine day any random incident hits the person sleeping ego. The person is rattled, bewildered. Then the things which have looked good so far seem meaningless.. There is restlessness, uneasiness. A need to fight a war emerges, but against whom is the moot question?
This is the start of the new cycle.. The uneasiness inside gives birth to new targets. The rush of doing something meaningful is back again. The pain of labour is as sweet as nectar. Sooner or later, after having experienced a range of emotions, the beloved target is achieved.. The going is fine again... The complacency is setting in..... Another incident is brewing in the near future......
And then one fine day the lord knocks at the door and the world is bid adieu.

The earlier me would have scoffed at leading such a life and would have declared the world not worth inhabiting. But having experienced one complete cycle of start and stop and the looking at a new start, I would rather go through the cycle again and again praying that i see a new start after every stop and then one fine day leave this world, preferably, in the thick of things simply because I have discovered the joy this life cycle gives.

In Search of a dream, a cause....

2008-11-03T00:03:00.002+05:30

Lately i have realised that the most important thing in life is not money, fame, power, companion, family or friends. The most important thing for a person to live a happy life is an idea in which he believes and is willing to passionately live and die for. Sadly i have not yet found my mission yet. It has become imperative for me to find the mission of my life soon or else i face the threat of self destruction.... God help me out.....

My Friends Have Finally Been Caught In The Daily Grind

2008-11-02T23:49:00.003+05:30

I would sadly like to announce to the world that even after several attempts at trying to create a life for myself as portrayed in F.R.I.E.N.D.S and in ' How I met Your Mother' I have failed miserably in doing so. The daily grind has got the better of my friends and me. All of us put our best foot forward but despite that the true indianess of ours has got the better of us and we have been unable to find time for each other...
Its a sad day for me...

A friend in need is a friend indeed--Really?

2008-02-05T15:19:00.000+05:30

A friend in need is friend indeed- a test handed down the ages for man to test if the person you trust is a true friend or not. I agree that its a good way to judge a man but i wouldn’t agree if it is to be projected as the only test or the finest test. I would contest in this post that it tests a person partially and does not take into account the needs of a man when he is happy.

Lets first see why it is said that a friend in need is a friend indeed. When a man is in need then he might be in financial need or an emotional need or physical need or a in any combination of the above mentioned three. Now a financial need can be satisfied monetarily, emotional need by just being there and lending support and the physical need by just extending a hand at the right moment. Anyone who is there at that hour is truly a friend but as it goes that there is light at the end of a dark tunnel. A man’s suffering, unless willed otherwise by god, does not remain forever.

Lets now analyse the same person who was once in need but is now well off, with everything going his way. At this juncture when he is happy, he needs someone to share his joy. Now if at this point that saviour friend gets jealous, cynical, jeering or at the worst despite being in the know of things decides to ignore you, then that person is at the same footing as a person who betrays when one is in need. People might say that when one is happy one can share joy with anyone but i would like to counter it by saying that when we don’t rush to every person we know when in need then why should the case be different when the tide turns? To be winning and not being able to share the happiness of winning is worse than not winning at all.

So in my eyes a true friend is a person who is truly dedicated to you. For him/her in an old fashioned way your pain is his/her’s pain and your happiness is his/her’s happiness. There’s no point in running behind people who can justify either of the roles as sooner or later they would inflict an equal amount of pain. And for everyone who has that sort of friend but is being sidelined in ignorance, to them i would suggest to wake up and take notice as such people are real gems.

At The End All That Remains is I

2008-02-04T21:37:00.000+05:30

It surprises how we spend our lives searching for people who will support us, love us, care for us and for that special one who will spend rest of their life with us. But i wonder why no one realises that at the end its I who is there and nobody else. Its I who lives life. Be it nourishment of the body, feeling the emotions, going to work and for that matter any activity, its I who is there. And still its this I which is treated with disdain and contempt. Its that I who is subjected to ridicule when that I decides to pursue its dreams. Its that I which is labelled as selfish by others when it decides to think for itself. And it feels painful when that I succumbs to the external pressure and yields in to the demands of killing that I.
I have been lucky to be allowed to nourish my I but i feel sad for some of my friends whose identities are being crushed under the pretence of following the mores of the society. Why can't everyone realise that even when you live, let alone die, its that I which stays along while everything else leaves?

Peace At Last!! (An out of world experience)

2008-02-02T21:42:00.000+05:30

Time stops for no one and i guess i ain't so lucky that life would make an exception for me. Its just like that college started yesterday and now the time is such that i am making plans and taking decisions as to what i would do next. It was a tough call between taking admission in an MBA college or joining my father's business. But in this case i have been lucky. God made the decision for me. He made me falter on the day it mattered and shut the doors to the colleges i desired. It hurt, hurt badly but i guess one only learns when one is hurt. The pain makes one extra perceptive to the circumstances around. Being down and out did a good thing to me. It woke true me up from a deep slumber.
When i entered college i valued learning from experience. The pleasure to do things with my own hands gave me immense pleasure. But as the college progressed things changed. The lack of resources on one hand and my own want to give 'it' a break for some time, put my earlier self to sleep. But a bad luck with the MBA entrance exams was the gun shot which broke the sleep.
But i guess it would have been better had i allowed my person to remain asleep. Its waking up to the real world which ain't the world when it slept. When my true person decided to take a break, it was at its peak. One shot and it entered one of the coveted colleges. Another shot and it scored a 90 in boards. It slept satisfied of what it had done assured that the other me would take care of the rest. But i guess my person was wrong. Life wasn't easy in college. Thrown in with a different set of people than those i had became accustomed to over a period of 6-7 years and then asked to build a life around it wasn't easy. After making these adjustments facing the first pangs of love and then being spurned for someone else wasn't easy on poor me. Life twisted and turned sooner than ever experienced before. So i wished my better person to sleep as long as possible, keeping it away from the changed scenario. To prolong the period i even tried getting into an MBA college though there were interludes when the sleeping giant grunted and advised against it. Once it even pleaded that it would kill him if i continue on the chosen path but i ignored him. I thought i knew better than 'it' and am doing the right thing. But as it goes every man has to live upto his own destiny. As it goes the winds of change started to blow. The true me, the man who wanted to be a true engineer not one of the namesakes churned out by nsit, at first started to shift, opening an eye at a time, creating unrest in the other me who by now has become accustomed to the easy going life. After nearly a month of uneasiness with my other self trying all the tricks in the book to put to sleep the sleeping giant, an accord has been reached. After rounds and rounds of negotiation the two of them for the complete me have decided to live peacefully side by side. The worldly wise other me has bought to the table its invaluable experience of seeing life from different angles while the true me has agreed to bring back the vigour, the love for work, the dogged determination which put the complete me in college in the first place. The true me has put in the contract a clause which states that if i really wish to learn now, i have to get in the ring known as world. To be satisfied for the rest of my life, i have to take all the punches on the chin advises my true self. On the other hand the other self has made it mandatory to enjoy the events of life. It has vetoed against going back to the earlier grumpy self and has threatened to kill the true self this time around if its advices are ignored.
I cannot express how it feels to be at peace with oneself. While my friends still grope in the dark with a lucky few getting hold of the candle just now, i am lucky to have seen the light. I know its a tough road, the journey is to be full of surprises and shocks, but i atleast have found peace.

I give up- pretensiousness wins!

2007-12-21T21:25:00.000+05:30

Candidness would win one day. This has been the mantra which i have chanted every day of life. But candidly speaking, the world has proved me wrong. While preparing for the Personal interview round of the MBA entrance exams i got to know that people who are straight in their answers, those who declare to the world that what they present is what they truly are, are the ones who lose out the most. If i say that when i took up engineering i was immature and could not judge if the decision was right or wrong for me then i have a high chance of being grabbed by the neck and thrown out of the institute. But if i cook up the story that i had planned in my tenth that i would be the greatest techno manager in this world and engineering was taken up to satisfy the techno part and an MBA would equip me to be a manager then nine out of ten times i would be greeted with open arms. similarly if you haven't faced any significant event in your like death of a close relative which has changed your life then you are encouraged to take a leaf out of a spinsters life and learn how to tell a tale. Now its unfathomable to me as to why a person should portray what he is not. why can't a man with limited abilities but immense inner drive be allowed to enter the so called heavenly gates of an mba school? Why is it that rhetoric is given preferance over candidness? Its frustrating to know that a person who has never given a serious thought about what to do in life, who by the sheer innate ability and not any planning has reached so far is allowed to go further while a man who eats, sleeps and dreams MBA is not allowed to follow his dreams because he is true to himself and to the world and is not willing to place mask over himself. I have read, met and seen such cases and after experiencing the preparations first hand i say that I GIVE UP! PRETENTIOUSNESS WINS!

I should be cared for and others can take a chill pill

2007-12-21T20:11:00.000+05:30

When i wanted love i got love, when i wanted affection i got affection, when i wanted attention i got attention but when the time came to reciprocate i developed cold feet. this seems to be the attitude of people nowadays including myself who desire everything, receive everything but when the time demands that we adopt this role of a giver for others we shy away. What has made us so selfish?

The incident which triggered off this unpleasant train of thoughts is the way in which events are celebrated. take for instance diwali. nobody made it compulsory to give away gifts to people against one's will. but still people gift things which they wouldn't use themselves or worse forward last year's gifts which were no good to others. Now i wonder if there is a law which makes gifting compulsory. Weren't gifts meant to signify that i cared for you so much that i went to the extent of specially going to the market for it?
Another thought which troubles me sometimes is the postponing of birthday celebrations to some other day. it happens to everyone some year or the another. i feel amused as to why should birthday celebrations ever be postponed?? if they are to be postponed then they better be postponed to the same day next year as a birthday is as special as festivals like diwali, holi. eid and others. when they are never postponed as per the wishes of the people then why should birthday celebrations be postponed? i have never come across people who celebrate diwali a week or a fortnight after it was. i may sound silly hankering after a small thing as birthdays or gifts but to some it may just mean the whole world to be cared for a day

another thing which irks me like nothing else is gifting money or taking out the person to select the things which he or she wants and then telling the same person that its his/her gift.
Now give me a break!! who the hell in this world wants money as gift from people who are close to you. money gifts are acceptable either if you are broke or if the gifter is a long lost aunt.
Money gifts signify that either you are too worthless or the other person is insensitive.
the other way of gifting which involves taking out the person to a shop shows lack of creativity, insensitivity and utter callousness on the part of the gifter. frankly there are only a few people who care to gift a gift as it is meant to be. gifting involves taking out time, analyzing what the other person may like and then searching the shop for that particular thing.
its a tough tough worl for romatics who put heart over mind and care to love the small joys of life.
it may all sound silly hankering over such trivial things but if we think giving small pleasures to others is far better than waiting for a big opportunity to give. to a materialist it may all sound gibberish but a romantic can share how it feels

Why do we hold ourselves back??

2007-12-21T19:44:00.000+05:30

In a stroke of enlightenment while walking on the roads an idea struck me. i was wondering what keeps my friends, my generation from expressing themselves. the main question which troubled me as to why can't friends amongst themselves compliment each other or for that matter even reprimand when going down the wrong lane? Why is it that many times even compliments conceal a tinge of jealousy? Why is that even when we wish a friend of ours good luck and when that good luck rewards the person with some fruit, then that sweet fruit of labor turns us off?

Pondering on this question which occurs in my mind every now and then i finally struck gold! the problem according to me lies in the way children in our country are brought up. When we are toddlers we are asked to recite poems alphabets and what not in front of people to gather praise which we would not get otherwise. When we enter school from the nursery class itself, it is the brilliant boy who garners all the attention leaving behind people who try hard to garner some attention from themselves but are unable to. That sows the first seed of hatred for the brilliant in the minds of the slightly lesser gifted children and contempt for the laggards in the mind of the brilliant students. Now once the seeds are sowed, those seeds act as a dividing bush between those who perform and those who don't. But still this explanation answers some questions but leave out as to why my friends can't compliment each other. the reason is simple. though all of us belonging to a same group are exceptionally brilliant but still we are not equal. the bush which acted as a divide between us brilliant students and the laggards had its small little branches which can create divisions even at micro levels. At the school level a false sense of superiority could be nurtured but at our level where one outshines the other that false sense of superiority can no longer be satisfied. When i entered college i felt that people at the age of 18 would be mature enough to see through this futility of competitiveness which drives people away but strangely enough i have observed that older you grow the sillier you get. maybe thats the reason why people become senile at the age of sixty. why to say best of luck when you don't really mean it? why to say you are my friend when you don't wish to take up any responsibility which comes along with it? why to fake whole relationships which leave behind broken hearts?

Why do students always lack sponsorship?

2007-11-15T14:38:00.000+05:30

People say that when one debuts with a blog one should act like a starling who is debuting that is with a light, fun filled, comically inclined topic which the audiences can easily digest and if the project is a disaster then easily forgettable and forgivable.
But i would like to take the path less trodden. I believe in the philosophy high risk high gain no matter how much the pain. This post looks at the problem which every creative student in college faces- the paucity of funds.

Its usual in college to come across students who have big ideas about this or that event where they can showcase their technical prowess through some project but can't due to paucity of funds.

These students run pillar to post of every corporate office, retailing shops and government offices. These students always run about yelling that i need a big amount to fund their project but cannot find any sponsor to bear their expenses. I always wondered how big that amount really is? When i asked a few people who work on such projects they told me that its in range of a few lakhs, usually 2-3 lakhs for a big ticket project and around lakh for a small one . When i heard such big figures i fell off my seat, figuratively speaking, as i have never seen that much money in my life as i am yet a student.

Now almost all the students would agree that such amounts are huge and one should always look for a corporate sponsor and if one is unable to rope in a corporate sponsor then one should abandons one's plan for the projects. I say NO. If we look at the problem closely then its not much about lack of money but rather lack of insight.

Lets see. A group usually involves 6-7 people who need 2-3 lakhs as their expenditure. Lets take 6 people with an expenditure of 2 lakhs for clarity. That means each student has to bear approx 34K. Now as it usually is half the students belong to middle class families with income in the range of 20K-40K per month and the other half to the income group of 40k to 60k per month. now if we discount the people in the former group, the people in the latter group have parents who have some savings which they can spare. Now some readers may think that i am pointing towards asking the parents to lend all their savings in a tricky venture which will not have any returns. No thats not my case. I suggest that students who believe in themselves can approach their parents for loans. Yup to disbelief of many, loans from your own parents. The students can approach their parents to loan them the sum at bank rates which hovers at 10% per year compounded annually. As most of the students take up such ventures in third year, it will be like a two years loan. After two years a 34k, after a bit of number crunching one can see, will amount to just 41k at 10%ROI. I would like to point out that 41K is just a bit over the starting salary of an average engineer and hence can be paid of easily in 2-3 months. To safeguard the money involved this dealing can be registered in court too to give it a legal validity.

Now isn't this a simple idea. It safeguards the parents money, give them an assured return which is more than the return on a fixed deposit in a bank and most importantly gives life to an idea which may one day change the world. But till this idea catches on i wish the students best of luck in running from pillor to post hankering after people for funds. And for those who can make sense of the concept happy project building.

One step at a time

2007-11-15T13:43:00.000+05:30

With twenty years of experience of life under my belt i have finally decided (needed much prodding form a dear friend of mine though) to give it back to the society. I have decided to give back to the society whatever it has given to me- the good, the bad and the ugly.
one may wonder how i decided to name this blog ' on your marks, get set go'?
Being a laid-back man i have had the leisure to observe the world around me. i have assimilated many facts about life, analyze them at length and arrived at some crazy, some sane conclusions. now all this while i have just been a passive observer and refrained from being an active participant. I was happy being a passive observer and then narrating my conclusions to my friend, sidharth singh. The poor chap had to, as a duty of a friend, tolerate each one of them, until one day when he got fed up and politely asked me to air my views on the net. That idea struck me. I pondered that why not for a change i stop being a lazy bum and do something. Alright i may not be read by anyone, no one may follow anything i write or at the worst maybe lampooned by my readers, but i have to put my ideas across. The ideas maybe zany or outright boring at the two extremes but there maybe something which someday may just touch a persons life. Who knows? Its a crazy crazy world out there! (my first observation the moment i stepped into school)
so starting today i have decided to join this big race of the world( didn't want to mention rat race as it may offend the rats). i am all pepped up. all ready.
oh and by the way i forgot. i had to tell how i came up with the name, right? oh it just struck my as i was watching "jo jeeta wahi sikander" and it being a race centered movie, i had this crazy notion of naming my blog ' on your marks, get set, go!'

PS- being a first time blogger i request my readers to easy on my with the criticism. I am like a tiny toddler who has just learnt how to walk and is not expected of to run a race.