365 Days that Changed Life

Have had what seems like  the  best  a la carte  year one could  have  ever asked for. Head , Heart and Soul  have all asked questions and found answers in places seldom expected.  There are a few that have  left a lasting  impressions and changed perceptions bit by bit.

I put in my work experience as 42 months these days. It’s an odd moment when you do not want to let go of the rounding error hamper you. Work experience is such a weird notional value which cant be transferred.It should be measured more in terms of the changes they result in the individuals perception on life. I have the pleasure of working in amazing MNC company and  riding the global wave along with the company. From Acquisitions to Transfers, Role Changes to Boss Changes, Blore to Delhi, Recession has made 2009 a Year of  adapting and reacting to situations by the moment. Working for a company makes you realise you are a small part of a big ecosystem. It is  not the minuteness that troubles you, it’s the illusion of  everything being in control which is a pill you take on a regular basis that is  scary.

While movies like Inglorious Basterds, Public Enemies, Dev D , GI Joe made you  go back to theaters , Movies like Wanted, Wake up Sid , London dreams made you want to take the directors one on  one on the Kotla  pitch without any  protective gear. MJ, Carnatic classical music seat of  music DK Pattamal  & Kannada actor Vishnuvardhan passing away made us all stand up and realise what  scions we lost , who need a noteworthy mention and a small prayer. Every  moment of life is  about  being thankful for the happiness and love.

Brevity is the in thing. I think Orkut finally lost its  sheen in India and Facebook became a part of the  morning office routine. While I could  barely get an idea of  Facebook status messages, twitter became the new SMS in town.  The  challenge to condense messages into a single 140 character set was something the new year did very well.  While we are getting more precise in communicating I think we are losing focus of what we are communicating and to who we are communicating. Verbose news was no longer acceptable. Reruns of Obama speeches , bureaucratic Red Tape was scorned upon. We noted what people said and what people meant. 2009 should have been a year to be remembered for  achieving more with lesser words but it fell short.

I have had the pleasure of having way too many arguments  this year. It was not that the rebel in me had woken up. It was more about having a serious interest in being actively involved. The way I relate to people  has got  defined and refined. I feel a new me at the brink of the year.The human race evolves: physically, mentally and  emotionally. One thing I learnt from this year : Nothing is absolute. We argue on half-known truths and half baked lies. If there is something to be discussed, then there are viewpoints. If there are viewpoints, one should assumed each could be right. If  each could be right , why do we discuss ?  Life is  gray, fluid and always  changing.

I have loads of things to thank for in this year.

- Everyone who stood by me in good times and bad and advised me
- Friends who provided shelter, fun, new ways of life
- People who took me out of my comfort zones
- Those that surrounded life with love
- Those that surrounded life with craziness
- All my friends who got married and  created such fun-filled occasions-Phew !!
- For having learnt & taught to cook
- For having started blogging again (Thanks a ton to who made me do this)
- For the amazing support system I have (I love you guys)
- For circumstances i find myself in
- For Orkut ( I know you are reading it )
- For Steve Jobs , Apple & Mac

No Regrets  2009 .. You have  taught me well.. You have changed me ever so slightly that I can feel it within me..

lv

Pensive

I do not write in order to be understood;
I write in order to understand

p.s: I Miss You…

I really miss you when the day gets all complicated. I think of the  times when I could just stare at nothing and still be happy because of being with you . With you in my life  every step felt different , every puddle  seemed like a amusement park and every wound just meant that you had played . Things were very  different when I could sit and  talk with you for hours. If you remember there was neither a single today when cried about yesterday ,nor a single today where we brooded over tomorrow. There was a zone in which you and I could  be ourselves. We did not need to pretend, we did not need anyone.

Those long walks with you when no one  cared to watch us. Those moments beyond  Sunset and those moments right before Sunrise will always be  treasured.

Do you remember the days when we danced and  sang without bothering if we got it right ?

Do you have a memory of  those walks in the temple where we prayed from chocolates, less work and a little  mercy (and they worked )?

Do you get pained when you think about things we wanted to do and did not do because I had to act responsible ?

Do you remember the time I got beaten for lying about my marks and I had only you to soothe my wounds ?

I have you in my life as my critic, my friend, after all we are soul mates. I am sure you are reading this out there and  asking yourself why are we not together again. Is it because you could not tolerate me ? Is it because it hurt you to see me  become  just like the rest of the world ? Is it  because I did not give you enough attention ? Is it because we disagreed on whether to get off the bed in those late morning hours ? I hope you are not hurt by the times I demanded too much from you. I just wanted to see you do better.

You did not realize, that I have missed you badly, for you do not  give me your  time, your  insight or your  smile. You seem not to care, but I know it hurts you deep  not  to feel the same anymore.  But I am done with not  facing you , I am done with running away from you in pursuits worldly and beyond yonder. I know my happiest  days were with you and will always be with you.This time I promise we will just have fun, I promise not  to act  all wise and knowing, I promise not act like a stickler for rules,  I promise to just take it  a moment at a time and savour it all.

Dear Child  in Me … I want you  back and this time I wont let you go

Pensive

p.s: I Miss You

I do not write in order to be understood;
I write in order to understand

Cafe Viewpoint

Entered a cafe and all I searched was for the closest plug point to set up my small office which travels with me in my bag.  Settled on a table that faces the entire cafe and juxtaposed to the  door gives you a  view point and an opinion on things which I would not be  forced to have otherwise.  I wondered what is it that these places offer. It’s not the ambience and its definitely not the coffee. It’s the sheer utility. In a crowded city people would  give anything to have  two moments of peace to themselves.

This  cafe has about 30 table and  90 seats and  every single one of them is occupied, sparing those next to rest room entrance. And  every table has  a character of its own. Sitting across me is single largest target segment of  any cafes , college students ( 2 guys and  3 sweet gals ).  By the looks of  it  they have bunked college or  tuitions, because the women are very conscious about the time and the guys  act like they have nothing to lose, if they were to spend the night at the cafe. One single drink is  stretched over a 2-3  hour period.And yes they proved me  right; they  left at a sharp round figure of the clock and went dutch on their bill.

On my right is a matrimonial scene that can  happen only in India. A guy walked into a  willing trap laid by a  girl and her mother. Think about it this is  the perfect place for matrimonial matchups. I mean no one passes a second glance to anyone,  except those who love to watch people like me. More importantly having spent a good deal of  ones college life in cafes and bars there is  feeling of  familiarity, which helps comfort your  nerves in such a situation. Let me note that point in memory . Might be useful to me in the near future.

Three seats  behind is a candidate being interviewed by a company. A very novel thought  Mr Employer, but you could have lost the  tie and the  glum face. I have a  big grouse with people who do not smile.  They  spread an  energy void and happiness in the world seems to flicker  every time someone  frowns. It is  said  that a Smile confuses an approaching frown . Try that next time and try it every time. Smile, if not anything else you will feel great .

Tourists, Aha  my favourite bunch. Whatever said and done we like a consistent experience when we go out. People all over India know that here is  a place which I used to frequent back home/or during college . The menu does not change, the  coffee does not but the crowd changes. It says a lot about people, that we do want change but as  I mention in one of my older posts – one  variable at  a time.

It is  ridiculously funny as how one  bunch of  people is using the  same  utilitarian value of  a  cafe for  different purposes. One  bunch uses cafe to hide behind the  cover of  anonymity where as another set come here to connect with people. I have always  loved airports, stations, trains, buses and cafes for this  single sole reason.  You get to see people , observe people and learn from people.

At some level we are all more similar than different. While each ones life purpose is to be different it does not mean we need to  disagree.   Why should an argument have only  two  viewpoint of Right   and  Wrong ? Why are we not comfortable disagreeing and  being comfortable about it ?  I think conforming to what has been  said without  questioning is the biggest insult one can do to his / her own existence and intelligence. Understanding of  science ,religion and human interactions  have to stand the test of time and  have to be questioned , pondered over and understood. Be it in a cafe or a class room questions have to  be asked , opinions have to be  formed, viewpoints have  to be changed. Life is  too large an entity for only a  bunch of people to be right or wrong.

Regards

Pensive

I do not write in order to be understood;
I write in order to understand

I want my Dosa

Here I am in Delhi and I cant stop thinking about Masala Dosa, Set Dosa, Puri Sagu. I really did not realize that I am such a big foodie.  And seriously I have been  blessed and  staying with people  who  are foodies  and  dont compromise on food. Food in Delhi is  awesome althought nothing similar  to what I have in Bangalore. There are so many varities of  Dal here  that shopping for them  felt like I it was a toy shop and I didnt know  whether to buy transformers and beyblades. (Yes I like toys for those who  still didnt know  that and yes someone still owes me a remote controlled car)

Yummy Dosa

Back to the topic I have  had some most  amazing stuff in Delhi be it the  Bread Pakoda next to my office (with  amazing  panneer in between) and Khasta Roti …yummy stuff.. I have  had the same problem in  Pune and now  in Delhi. With every region, people  eat so many different things for breakfast its not  funny. If Pune at the yummiest  Misal Pav, Sabudana Khichdi & Poha..Delhi seems much different with Alu Parantha, Batura , Broken Wheat Porridge (Dhaliya ) and what not.

What I love about the commercialization and commoditization we at least  get water which tastes similar everywhere and of good quality. I remember going to Madras as a kid for my summer holidays and I suffered so badly those two months with weird tasting water of chennai. I love the water at my ancestral place, sweet and soft on your throat. Its really a pleasure to get there , get to the well and pull out an entire “Kodapana” (not finding any equivalent word for this in English) and drink it.

And as they say when you think of something you attract similar thoughts. Got a mail about Gowri – Ganesha  Habbad oota.  Imagine this you are alone in  a city and want to celebrate your  festival like you do at home and you go pick up the entire food range for that festival . Marvelous  idea !!! Wish it was there at  Delhi too.Do check out the websites rural menu. Pathrode, Kadubu, Akki & Ragi Rotti . I am sure most of  my good friends are salivating at this point. (esp all the mangloreans)

I distinctly remember our travel plans  affected  more by the eateries on the route than by places to visit. Every visit to mysore is a gastronomical piligrimage for me. I need to visit Mylary and eat his super yummy dosas else I feel i have earned myself a place in hell. From there to this small lane  behind Rajkamal Talkies where he makes the most unique of the chats. Garlic CHakli, Nippat masala, Sev Puri and every concieveable  chat with a taste thats is  so different from what one would expect , yet at the same time yummy. An open mind and an empty  stomach will ensure a  brilliant experience.

Actual Shreyas Thali

And then there is Pune, a place blessed with amazing thali places . From the traditional marathi menus(not manoos ) of Shreyas, rich meal of  Panchvati Gaurav, crazy indian thali at Sukantha & wannabe south Indian experiments of  Rupali-Vaishali me and my partners in crime have had many a brunches after  a dinnerless night. We clearly believed in getting the maximum for our  buck. And eat we would till our limbs refused to move. Nandus parantha at Dole patil road also  served many a late nights in those  two magnificient years. How can I miss Chocolate -n  Chocolate cake at Cake-n-Counter ? The yummiest chocolate cake on the planet. You will find this shop open for  only a fraction of  year, open for  roughly about 4 hours a day and selling about 6-7 of these  cakes a day .

For those of  you interested in cooking here is  a blog of a good friend and his  experiments at the kitchen. For  some reason those i get along with well are all food lovers. There is  some kind of food brotherhood that brings about a sense of  familiarity and trust. So this  post is  dedicated to all those people who take food very seriously out there .

All said and done I miss my Dosa at home.. Simple , Elegant and Filled with love

lv

Pensive

Butterflies & Blessings

There I sat looking at the  butterfly , while it flapped around the garden settling on flowers of  random hues and  colors. Here was a magnificent creature filled with color and yet it searched for color elsewhere and I was reminded of this story I had read.

One fine evening in our world not so long ago God was resting, sitting, watching some children at play in a village. The children laughed and sang, yet as he watched them, His heart was sad. He was thinking: These children will grow old.He thought of how their skin would  wrinkle, hair  turn gray and youth would all be lost. He looked in the horizon and saw the  approaching winter and realized the  rustles of dry leaves beneath his  feet.  Yet he  felt something about the  spirit the warmth of the Sunlight, the gentle wind , the song birds and the colors of the  rainbow.  He had decided to do something for the children to look at and enjoy and he gathered his  ingredients , a little  sunlight patches, yellow  leaves of  fall, the colors of  flowers, and songs of the birds.

All these he put into his bag and gave it to the children and out came  the butterflies.

The butterflies began to sing, and children listened smiling.But then a songbird came flying, settling on the Gods shoulder, scolding him, saying” Its not right to give our songs to these new pretty things.You told us when you made us that every bird would have his own song. And now you’ve passed them all around. Isn’t it enough that you gave your new playthings the colors of the rainbow?”

“You’re right”, said the God. I made one song for each bird, and I shouldn’t have taken what belongs to you.

So the Creator took the songs away from the butterflies, and that’s why they are silent.

Why the Silence ? It was Gods way of  ensuring that the butterfly did not take itself too seriously . But butterflies represent an important aspect for humans. They are supposed to  have the ability to transport human souls. They also represent an internal struggle one must endure to achieve greatness but I think most importantly they teach us about blessings. Each of us are blessed in our  own sweet way, yet we hardly ever thank ourselves of the existence of the blessings.

Like someone once said “A Good Memory is one that can remember the days blessings and forget the days troubles”

Pensive

Back to Square 1

The Pattern

You wake up one fine day to realize you are not happy with what you are  doing with your  life. You are unable to pin point one  single aspect of your  life because we do tend to get lost in intermingled issues. Maybe your  work is not  fulfilling, maybe you miss  being with your  friends, maybe you just  yearn from freedom..Yet it is not possible to see an obvious solution for this in one single  stroke. Your  day goes from bad to worse when you start comparing with others and by the end of the day you have decided that you need a  new lease of  life. How often do we see this  happening to us ?

The Rationale

There is  mathematics at the  root of everything. Every thing has to to add up to get the big picture. I always look back and  wonder how we are taught integral calculus starting from the same basic operations. There are two basic operations Addition & Inverse. So a basic operation is addition and a basic operation giving wrong results is a Inverse operation.Everything else can be derived from this. Situations we encounter in life, work and otherwise take shades of complexity over a period of time and over multiple basic operations gone wrong.

“The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak”

We as humans have a limiting factor, we learn from experience and do not  repeat mistakes or at least aware not to. Success and  Failures are seen as events rather than processes and we typically tend to identify the one thing we did right / wrong to succeed / fail. There is hardly an emphasis on the process. There is  seldom a thought given to the environment variables. What did not work last time around may not necessarily be the reason not to try it this time without considering the changes in the eco system. To explain this  simply we are not comfortable looking at  equations with large number of variables. We like a  black box approach where we can say “Press This” and “this happens”. How many times do we try changing  multiple  parameters in a situation simultaneously ?  Answer is  we struggle with uncertainty. We go by the  algebraic approach of solving one variable at a time.

The Square 1 Philosophy

“Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.”
~Confucius

I have been hungrily after the idea of  keeping it simple, breaking it down and  doing things right. First and foremost we all have our  basic happy  place. One needs to find it. Any amount of time spent in doing this  is not  waste. The happy place is  one where you are happy irrespective of your  past or future paths . It is your place where you are happy in the present. It might be a moment of  awesomeness, it might be the moment where you feel love, it might be a moment of great clarity or  it just might be a moment where you pause.

Secondly make a commitment to enjoy the process and not focus on the outcome. A commitment to the process gives you a great deal more clarity than the view of the end result. Also it helps  keep things simple as a process is  made of simple operations. Having found your happy place and having made a commitment to enjoy the process, we stick to the basic operations of breaking down our  existing situations into small milestones. Every complex problem was built by adding many basic operations gone wrong.

Back to Square 1 :

Square 1 is  place where everything starts where we do not have  preferred paths of  resolution. Square 1 is where the ego does not cloud your  decision. Square 1 is about openness and willingness to change. We are willing to change only when we see greater good in the change. To see the greater good in change we need to have a open happiness. The basic unit for a open happiness is a happy place.
Square 1 is about  re-visiting your  assumptions, re-visiting the  variables you are trying to change and most importantly re-visiting your  fears.
Its about you revisiting your happy place and starting the process afresh.

One often meets his destiny on the road he takes to avoid it.
~Oogway

Imagine the pyramids ; Imagine the engineer looking into it and saying “We just need to build a smaller square on every square”

Keep it Simple

Pensive

Return of the Blogger in Me

I last blogged on March 16, 2006  and have since been in constant search of some inspiration to make me brush my palms, stretch by brains and blog.My first post is dedicated to an inspirational source i recently stumbled on. Cheers to this and look forward to putting my thoughts here.

Pensive