Watch-out for the signs

Few signs to tell you that you're wasting your time

1. When someone says ‘you look sooooo beautiful’ without giving you any flower.

2. 18 months in 10-6 routine. No raise.

3. When she says, “IF you felt bad, I’m sorry.” (There would be no if, simply “I’m sorry”, if she is really sorry)

4. You read any e-mail when the subject line starts with "Fwd: Fwd:”

5. You’re on diet but still saying, “McDonald's, ba da ba ba baa ... I’m lovin` it!”

6. You listen to Hard-Metal for any other reason than to show your so called COOL friends that you are COOL too.

7. When the anchor in a reality TV show starts saying, “And the winner is …” Better get up and start applying Olay Age Defying Anti-Wrinkle Replenishing Night Cream.

8. You mail shows ‘Zero New Mails’ more than 70% of the time you open it.

9. Your Boss says ‘You are almost there’ all the time. (You should have been there by now, if you were almost there last time)

10. You stare at an orange juice container because it says CONCENTRATE (I’m actually talking about being over obedient to your boss)

P.S: You can add more to the list as your comments. ☺

Sparks

These days, i've become little busy to write blogs, or rather am too much into routine that i am not gettning topics to blog on.

But have been reading quite a few of them, and felt this one exceptional - "Chetan bhagat speech @ Symbiosis pune". Read it fully and leisurely and you will surely appriciate it.

Many a times, when it comes to *selling happiness* things begin with childhood and stop with college. It feels a little odd to me, as all the time i was a child i wanted to grow *big* and when i was in college, I've have had a constant eye on the career after college. When ever i see kids trying to impress that they have grown up , i feel that i was no different from ordinary children. But still why do many a times we keep hearing people yelping about the life that is past, something that you really wanted to be the past?

When i hear a very good review about a movie or a book, i feel very excited about checking that out. And i feel disappointed sometimes even if it is good, claiming that it is not up to the expectations. May be same is the case with everyone of us, may be we fail to live up to the expectations we set for ourselves in our dreams/immaginations etc ? And may be that is the reason we fail to see these sparks in people when they grow older?
But the fact we fail to realize is - No one can go back and make a brand new start, anyone can start from now and make a brand new ending!

Coming back to the post of Chetan Baghat, this is what i liked the most of it and highly relevent to the thoughts running in me. (It sometimes feels that other people know more about me than myself)

" Most of us are from middle class families. To us, having material landmarks is success and rightly so. When you have grown up where money constraints force everyday choices, financial freedom is a big achievement.

But it isn’t the purpose of life. If that was the case, Mr Ambani would not show up for work. Shah Rukh Khan would stay at home and not dance anymore. Steve Jobs won’t be working hard to make a better iPhone, as he sold Pixar for billions of dollars already. Why do they do it? What makes them come to work everyday?

They do it because it makes them happy. They do it because it makes them feel alive. Just getting better from current levels feels good. If you study hard, you can improve your rank. If you make an effort to interact with people, you will do better in interviews. If you practice, your cricket will get better. You may also know that you cannot become Tendulkar, yet. But you can get to the next level. Striving for that next level is important."


Hope that you also enjoy the post as much as i did.

Live Differently

Are you one of those who want to live differently? Do you take extra care to make sure your presence is felt and respected? Do you dream of, yourself as an emperor in the world of yours? Then this one is just for you. Am not talking about an empire or something here, but a house (an apartment rather) that matches the hype I’ve given. If you are one of those who follow news regularly, you might have heard of this “World's first rotating skyscraper unveiled in Dubai”. The 420-meter (1,378-foot) building features 80 apartments that spin a full 360 degrees around a central column by means of 79 power-generating wind turbines located between each floor.

I am trying my best not to mull over the questions my mediocre physics had raised on the stability of such a huge structure which is free to rotate at its will (or rather at the will of its master). Check this video out to understand how different people think. An expert of the video is the architect David Fisher challenging one of the fundamental techniques in constructions that the structures are to be built to resist wind. And this guy has just taken a U turn to make use of the same wind energy to rotate them.


Read Full Story at Telegraph.co.uk

May be there will be a time in future when we see intelligent buildings that think, move and even fight among themselves. May be a subject for a fiction movie/novel something like “raise of the buildings” or “battle of the edifices”? (Gosh I am getting creative ☺).

Coming back to reality, rotating apartments is all you have as of now. The apartments will take between one and three hours to make a complete rotation, and at 30,000 dollars per square meters, Just about 36 million dollars (Rs150 crores) for a home. And not just it, there is another trade off. You have to move to Dubai if u are interested in this. (Yes, this is being constructed in Dubai). Too much to spend for a house huh? There are things that money can’t buy, but for others my salary is not enuf ☹

Cross Roads?

These days I rarely get to think of anything other than the happenings and work @ office. And should say that I’ve met an Oasis on my recent visit to my grand father’s place. A get-together of all our cousins and relatives after I entered the software world is not just a dream after all. Many things came across in our discussions and conversations but the most significant one, I think was ‘the cross roads’ (that is what I would like to call the endless series of group discussions and debates on my cousin’s after 10th academic career).
My friends from Andhra would be quite aware of such a drama happening at home, if taking biology stream was your choice, more so if you do not fall under any of the reserved sections. It seriously is amazing to see the knowledge people retain on the career-oriented stuff amid their addiction to the TV serials that take the audience to the new heights of nonsense each day (while, doing a plastic surgery to change the character artists stopped shocking me of late, a recent brain transplant stunt to retain a character’s memory after it is dead, left me bewildered. What is interesting is, they do it at the ease of changing the hard disc of my PC, and the audience still finds it convincing :O).

This poor chap had taken 2 valiant decisions, 1. Wanting to be a doctor while the rest of Andhra is engineers 2. Announcing his decision and staying open for an opinion (This blog of-course is not a poll asking for what would be better for his career). Though in his case it is highly visible (at-least to me) that he is being pressurized to live others’ life, many a times there is a subtle pressure on all of us from the family/friends/society from taking the path we wanted to when we are on cross roads (be it career, hobbies, love and anything that is important to YOU). The irony is that the people who make these brick walls are the people who care for us, who are afraid that we may not succeed or that we are being hasty, immature et al.

Deep down I had an urge to support this chap, tell him that it is okie to follow what your inner voice tells you (this inner voice stuff, I read in one of the self help books recently. Its not my own!! ). But I had no answer to the thousands of questions that hushed me up when I tried to tell him that it is sensible for him to follow his heart. The best one I would say is the example one of ’em quoted about a not very bright distant relative of mine getting settled in a s/w company where as another bright (again) distant relative of mine still struggling to complete his MD/MPhil in medicine. I have no answers to any of these but for sure the concept of ‘proof by example’ is awful in practice.

When I think about all this a little later I started making complete sense of Carnegie Mellon Professor Randy Pausch saying in his last lecture that “these brick walls are there for a reason. They're not there to keep us out. They are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something”.
After all a diamond is another piece of coal that did well under pressure. I pray to god that I see another diamond being made of my cousin.

A Billion Dollar

Have you heard of the open source database MySQL? If yes, have you also heard that it is acquired by Sun Micro Systems? And it is a whooping one billion dollar deal (can some one help me finding out how many zeros does a billion have !!!!).
So here is a company started in 1998, made their first release in 2000 as an open source and now made one Billion dollars with the head count of just above 400 employees(most of them working remotely).

This left me wondering as to what it takes to achieve a feat as good as this. It is this curiosity that tempted me in digging more non-technical details about MySQL. Isn’t it impressive that “More than 100 million copies of MySQL's database software have been downloaded and distributed and an additional 50,000 copies are downloaded daily”? And what is more interesting is that only 1% of the users actually pay MySQL for using the product and their support.

“The world self divides into those who are ready to sped time to save money and those who are ready to spend money to save time ” says Marten Mickos, the former CEO of MySQL who is now a senior vice-president of Sun (sounds so simple and true once you hear it.. right?). It is in-fact true that there are more people who spend time to save money compared to those who spend money to save time. But those are the people who made MySQL famous and powerful, compared to the ones who spend money to save time.



Doesn’t it look simple? Start a company, make it an open source, increase the popularity and sell it for a Billion dollar in 5-10 years. Or may be it looks simple only to see others doing it. May be spending those 5-10 years in wild goose chase isn’t that easy after all. But the fact is ‘you'll seldom experience regret for anything that you've done. It is what you haven't done that will torment you when you look back in life. The message, therefore, is clear. Do it!’

Nostalgia

“Seasons change, friends move away, and life goes on from day to day. Flowers fade and streams go dry and many times we wonder why. Yet we can always be assured because God tells us in His World, that unlike changes in the weather, friendship goes on and lasts”

All good. But why am I thinking all this when I am supposed to watch the "Enchanted”? Is it all because my team lead is leaving the company today? Or is it because my buddy here in US office has resigned? Or because Anil pined me out of the blues and for some time transported me to the BITSian days, just to make me realize that I miss them the most. Its not the first time that I am sitting here all alone feeling nostalgic, with thoughts flowing, but the only difference is that this time I decided to tap them into my blog.

Many of us at some time or the other would have felt empty about leaving our friends or family, may it be parting or you going to a new place or it may be them, going away from you. When it is you going to a different place, this can in-fact be covered up with you trying to be busy stumbling with the change, and we call it getting settled or say adjusting to the new …(whatever) ☺. But if it is they moving away from you, you have no option but to feel helpless about the fact that you can never be the same person that you were.
The first time this happened to me was when my brother was going to his boarding school for his +2. It is not that I will not get a chance to meet him again, but my route would be completely disturbed with out him in it.
And then, you will start realizing that the life, which you thought, was all yours is not in fact being built by you alone.

And again it is completely personal as to how we react to this fact. But what I choose to pull out of it is that… We may part our friends or family temporarily or permanently, but the friendship and their love will remain, not just as our memories but also as our selves.

Screw the snooze

Blogging has always been one of my fantasies, yet didn't dare writing one myself. Has always been convincing myself that I am too busy to write one, and will start doing it once I get free time. Some thing that is as impulsive as snoozing the alarm when it starts. May be its true with all the other aspects of life, may be its true with many of us.

For sure, I feel good when i hear Srk saying 'two letters D O ' or captions like 'now or never', 'one life to live' etc etc, none of which will effect the things after that. Dunno if I alone am as hopeless as this, or its the pretty normal to be this way.

This is just an attempt to break the paradigm and start blogging, something I love doing. For all those who share something similar, keep watching.. You may find some way to screw the snooze (a simple belief that "Breaking the inertia will make a difference") or some example that will make you feel good about the fact that you are not doing what you love doing, even if it is watching the sun rise/set or going to jog everyday.