Surpassing

Days roll on and thoughts keep flashing. The ceaseless urge to break the routine and getting ahead of oneself gets bigger and better. We have to agree that the world is transforming with you and me, re-organizing and evolving. We are getting more practical with customs, practices and ideas. Rationalizing and isolating facts and applying them is part of everybody's life. Pushing the boundaries is in the agenda of most of us. As an Engineer, am required to design and build new modules, understand the cause-effects, scrutinize the system behaviour and improvise. The analogical and lateral thinking adds a powerful dimension to any project. It's like an introspecting and self-correcting system always working its way forward.

Think about it. Why else would I stay up late saying all this? Meri barah baj gayi. Signing off.

Primer on personal communication

Surprisingly this is one the most ignored aspects of our day-to-day interactions. There are various terms to name this ad hoc phenomenon. Banter, chatter, ice breaking, etc. Not everybody would find this interesting but by far (in my opinion) this is a great way of setting a backdrop for interests, expectations, trust and good will. There are no rules in general. It can start with a casual remark and may go all the way till friendships. No do's and dont's. It helps a lot being yourself and just let the conversation flow along. No time or scope or limits, it can keep going on and on. What works the best is being candid and being true to yourself. Like this blog, I think it will be mostly without an agenda to start with. It goes on and on about sharing various thoughts on life-style, family, friends, interests, beliefs, work, wit, humour... blah-blah. What is interesting is the way each conversation builds up. I'm sure each of us are capable in our own ways for driving this talk. My numerous conversations with co-passengers, colleagues, neighbours, business partners, friends or cousins each are unique and special in their own way. More than the verbal, the non-verbal cues have loads to say. A half minded grin of a new person in the lift, a frowned cashier in a busy counter, a pink smile that springs from a blushing girl, are some memories that come to me. So, dear readers, never mind! Keep communicating. All you need to do is to simply (!?) speak your heart out! That's a mini explanation for my animated grin. :-) 

So close yet so far...

June seems to have a blog-trigger in me! Blogging-2011 also started with June. Here we go...
The world's getting smaller with mobile and internet. Social networks are already powerful and are influential. 
Virtually everyone is in touch with the world. However, is this connectedness merely an illusion? Are hearts expressed in dead digital content and spamming shares and app requests in the age of limited attention spans, switching minds and ever-changing expectations? Unfortunately, everything now is counted in minutes and bucks. 

I'd love to think that we have not yet gotten over the power of a friendly smile and a warm hand-shake. There's nothing like looking in the eye and speaking the heart out. Most successful organisations are working hard on keeping their operations human and personal by customising their branding and services. Human beings have a hard-wired bias for anything human. So, the organisations are targeting that pre-judice and fine-tuning this aspect to make it more commercial and at times artificial. Those who succeed in resonating with the emotions make a striking brand statement and leave a lasting impression in the minds of the customers.
   
For effectively communicating a message especially when there is a high chance of misinterpretation, what would you prefer doing? A phone call or an email or meet in person?
3D conferencing (virtual meeting place), video conferencing and telephonic calls are excellent alternatives and less legally binding if unrecorded ;) than a blog post or an email. But they are only the alternatives and remain always so. Ever wondered why some of the mails are conveniently ignored?
And finally, if you want to connect, nothing like being there in the hour of necessity! In the human form or digital form is upto you! The assurance of a nod which says "I'm here! It's going to be allright." makes a hell lot of difference. 

(Courtesy: Enlightenment in the bedroom on Saturday morning. It's probably a result of a mixed feeling of excitement, nervousness, confusion, anticipation, slight disappointment and to an extent regret. )

To be continued...

PS: Irony, this had to be a blog post! It means "I'm here for you, digitally". ;)

What purpose!

Starting and ending  this is in one way tricky. All that starts well doesn't go well and all that goes well needn't necessarily end well. ( Just a recap: In my futile attempts to connect various dots of life, I jot down a few thoughts every now and then here so that I can read back and laugh at myself later. As usual it was decently long enough since I got back to myself publicly.) I fancy looking at our life as a small part of this universe where we are some insignificant parts like a photon or a proton where our presence unless if hit to a heavy metal or pushed to a high energy state doesn't matter much. So, you may wait for that moment of truth when the revelation strikes and from then on you become an enlightened one reminding the rest of the world how mean they are. My philosophy of becoming a changing force of the world and giving back to the society, I should say, isn't so anymore! The world is getting much more focused and specific on their requirements. I saw the pet pedicure clinics and post-breakup stress consultancies and started thinking of some alternatives.
 
I gave a lengthy speech to a school junior of mine on methodical approach to exams and importance of practice for understanding the concepts. It came down to "Well, fine! Thank you. What now? How am I taking the exams on?". We now need actionables and a bigger picture of what is expected out of them.
I, hence, succumbed to the force of growing pressure from the world around and adopted an amended version of my universal outlook. "I'm part of the world, so anything which is good to me is in turn good to the world!". That way I guess I can make my expectations specific, measurable and achievable. Think about having a goal saying "I want to do good to the society". For me, it means too big a thing to implement now. Instead, I can say "I'm going to add so many bucks to the org X" or "I am going to cut down my carbon consumption by 50%" or "Conserve water by using half a bucket for taking bath" and stuff like that. That, my friends, helps bragging later in life, skillfully weaving them into various perspectives as the situations demand. 

I, Me and Cinema

Ok... I'm not going to talk about the history, evolution and consequences of movies here! I'm very confident that a majority of us consider watching movies, "the first thing" over a weekend or a holiday or if we have an evening to spare. I have heard from the older generation that they had a similar fascination for Harikathas (a medieval form of story-telling-singing), Novels, Street-plays (Indian version of stage plays in those days) and bioscopes (Some of us might have seen these devices. Imagine how discovery channel would have been - if it had actually been - a century ago.). I feel this is the best example of minds working beyond the logic and reasoning. I would like to call it the humane tendency (or it's more an anamoly?). We completely surrender our 2-3 hours of our valuable time to this magic world. Not heeding to our logical part of the brain most of the times and letting the lesser half - like the better-half - take control of the minute part (which aggregates to a actually a significant part) of our lives, we inevitably become part of the perfect manifestation of our compromise on the state-of-ideal-affairs. Thanks to this blog, I now clearly realize what could have been going through my mind when I had done it so many times in my life.

Bottom-line: I love movies, but necessarily not all. I tried my best to enunciate my complicated feelings above! Your most favorite 5 movies reveal a lot about you, no?

Going the GenX

Welcome to the world of tablets and smart phones! Thanks to the gadget-freaky world around. While I was coming out of City Central, Chennai yesterday, I remembered the days when I used to stand in a long queue at UCO bank for a money withdrawal. During my summer holidays at school back in the year 2001, my dad and I used to do a small round up of Tirupati(my home town) to pay the electricity and telephone bills, get the passbook updated for our savings accounts from the bank, log a complaint with the cable tv connection provider and book a cooking gas cylinder refill. Since past 4 years, I didn't have to move my butt from the desk, to do any of these things. Bills can be paid online for all the things once can think of and all the things one can't. All the routine jobs like taking the orders are attended to over the phone. We made manual intervention in our jobs as minimal as possible. A decade of IT revolution in the Indian cities has brought tremendous change and hence many opportunities in the first decade of the 22nd century.

Working on PCs has already become old-fashioned. Forget about laptops! With 3G around the corner, Smart Phones and Tablets became a necessity. The local satellite cable TV providers are fading out. 3D TVs and home theatres are hitting the market. It's hard to find someone without a mobile phone! There are always means to stay informed, if you have to or want to. For instance, office mails! It is as if the world is breathing the internet. Tweets and Wallposts are the bed coffees for the net-ridden world.

Do you have some __________ ?

I have always wondered what's the greatest resource anybody has and can use. The first 4 that come to my mind are the elements Air, Water, Earth and Fire. For ages, we have been using these in one form or the other, consistently and efficiently wasting them, of course!

I am just spinning out my own gyaan here. Not going to patent it, so feel free to use it. Question it and validate it! All our ideas, thoughts and memories are 3 dimensional. Time, Space and Emotion. I see a person A and I have a graph in my head which involves my previous encounters with A. Was I enjoying it? How long was it or what was happening around us when it happened? It's all happens so quick in the sub-conscious that we often never mind it. There's something more in there... which is the scale to which these graphs are drawn. It is - as Agent Smith in Matrix trilogy says "is what defines our existense and which drives us". The objective irony of life - Purpose. I would love to believe if it's otherwise. In our co-ordinate space, if we have expectations on something beyond the purpose, it's off the scale.

I'm not against having dreams and hopes for your future. I have my own too. It is on a scale guided by our necessity, apetite, and abilities. As long as you scale the graph well, you are doing it well.

It makes me wonder what's the best thing I can give anyone! It's my "time". You don't have to mark my words. It's blogged! On a serious note, Time's the best asset we have! Every moment, there are wonders happening around us.