Words.

TO DO Trap

2012-01-29T14:15:00.001+05:30

If there is one thing that can put in chains and dump you in the darkest dungeon its the TO DO LIST. It quite funny when we look with hope of our future and decide that a set of tasks needs to be done and sit in the present and work that out. How often have u hear people talk high of a planner, the one who plans for the tommorow, chartering his life course skillfully avoiding all the mishaps and storms, sailing through. He is governed by the TO DO LIST and the future that is not in his control. His mind is filled with possibilies of rewards and dangers.

Well there are those who are committed to the present, and we are not concerned about that.

There are those who walk the earth free and rather die to give up their freedom, no chains can hold them. They care not about the past, or the present or more so the future. Yet they would want to do whatsoever they are mandated to do. They go about doing and what they need to do goes about happening. It looks like their entire being is one, their mind, their hands, their feet all function as a single entitiy. If the mind were to pull them away from the mandated task to seek pleasure their hands and feet will rebel, they combine and harness the mind towards the desired goal. It would seem as the they have deeply ingrained their mission into every cell of their being.

Well science will say its embodied cognition. When you are in love, passionately, the emotional areas in your brain is overworked, it secretes what is called the Dopamine (feel good chemical) every time the image or thot of your lover crosses the mind. A regular secretion of these feel good juices in the brain actually makes you happy and elated and you want to think more and more of your lover. When the intensity of the thought of the one whom you love goes beyond a point the messages get transferred to all other areas in your body. That is when you realize that you want to live and live for that guys sake. You are completely immersed in love. Whatever your body does it does it with him in view. Sexual arousal is a result of this. Sometimes this arousal takes over the entire responsibility from the brain and starts thinking and acting on its own - this we call lust. When the noble dopamine rush is replaced by pleasurable orgasmic juices. The feeling of elation nevertheless.

When one is committed to a task, be it wanting to have school or restraunt or farmhouse or write a book, you actually engineer the entire process to proper planning tools and go about the task in a systematic manner. This must be the undergirding, with out this your desire will soon diminish. But is that all ? is it merely doing those things that need to be done to reach your goal? Such engineered, mathematically precisioned tasks works on a time frame. Unforeseen happenings are inevitable and the time stretches but never shrinks. Time stretching or shrinking is again a factor of ones own mind. So how does one actually work on this ?

Evolution is the key. You have to comprehend, what is called the 'sexuality of ideas' , when you actually take an idea and passionately get involved in it that it actually has an intercourse with your being. Well in simple terms we can say you have to be emotionally aroused by what you want to do. Sexuality, we know takes its course, when the 'seeds' are sown then the fertilization the embryonic implantation and then the growth begins and eventually the appearance of a new life.

So a robust sexuality of thoughts and ideas is the reason why you find some moving towards their goal, with that orgasmic smile willing to take on an challenges. Its because thats the only way they can be. To be efficient, even at their weakest hour. Such people are not governed by the TO DO LIST thats all within them, all those lists have been written in scroll and chewed up. They are just Doers.

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Responding to The Hindu Ad campaign

2012-01-28T00:42:00.001+05:30

While Iam critical of this latest The Hindu campaign directed against the TOI, I see a lot of people with positive reactions here are some I found in facebook

The Hindu's ad campaigns are EPIC!!!
i must say ....they gave it right to The Times of India :P

this is so awesome.. i had to share it again. cant stop laughin! :D

Smart advertising by "The Hindu" in answer to TOI's ad... But I read neither of them ...

Super Cool Nethi adi By The Hindu.

Obviously most of them havnt thought through before responding. Wonder how The Hindu readers can react this way. See the language used. I people are going gung ho about this campaign Iam sure they dont read The Hindu or they dont read at all. Chances of these people becoming TOI readers sooner or later is very high.

Round one for TOI

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Staying ahead with The Hindu

2012-01-26T15:32:00.001+05:30

Monumental Blunder. Casuality List Candidate. Thats what occured to me when I saw the commercial. it is weak and flatter than the flattest beer. i joined TOI way back in the late 80's when they were shedding their OLD LADY OF BORIBUNDER image to become a girl in skirts. Mr Samir Jain was the one who orchestrated this entire image revamp. The ideas, the imagination, and the resouces they invested was mind boggling. They pulled all the stops and the campaign addressed the working of the organization, not just the cosmetic aspect. TOI did all this under the sesquicentinnial banner (150 yrs) and it was out of the world.

30 yrs have gone by now you have this campaign my The Hindu. Did I say the TOI campaign was orchestrated??? Well then The Hindu campaign can be just a DOG WHISTLE compared to it.

The change of guards in The Hindu, I assume, was the reason for this silly set of videos. What have they done?? I cant understand??? Iam sure some simple minded people rolled out this strategy. Pardon my outpour on this. Iam a hardcore Hindu reader and i was proud of the paper for holding its nerve and for not not being blown away by the market forces. Now its all over. TOI will respond and they will respond in such style that you will reminded of the half burnt papers newspapes strewn on the road the morning after the Diwal fireworks carnage. Why did The Hindu even dare to take on TOI on its strengths?

The Stay ahead with the Hindu should have stayed as a Vision statement for employees to press on with purpose . Now they have muddied it in the market slush. MOUNT ROAD MAHAVISHNU are you trading your divinity for money and fame.. RAM RAM RAM...

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Management Lessons from the Indian Team

2012-01-25T11:16:00.001+05:30

The current Indian Team has probably got the best players. But they are washed and white washed so badly in Australia that as an Indian I feel utterly humiliated. Humilited not because we are weak, its because we are strong and yet playing such bad cricket. Contrast this Indian Team which is wealthy and comfortable to the Pakistani Team. The Pakistani Team has been accussed of match fixing that it reached a point that two young players were jailed. Then the bomb attack in Karachi and Pakistan cannot even play in their own country anymore. The IPL, worlds richest league, boycotted all pakistani players. Imagine a time like that torn to shreds and brought down. Yet they perform, in a neurtal venue last week they pasted the talented English team by beating them by 10 wickets.

Now this is something that we get to see staring in our face every day in our work life and yet we tend to believe what ever gives us comfort.

1. Past form or experience has no place in the present.

Time and again it has been proved beyond doubt that one cannot rest on ones laurels. The minute you think our existence for long years give us the depth of experience to take on the challenges of the present you have lost the plot. So what about experience? How does it help?

Experience is useful only if it teaches a human being to be selfless and bold. If experience were to make a person proud and haughty and give him/her a "I know everything auro" then like a two edges sword the experience factor can be self defeating.

Good experience managers or leaders are willing to do what they have to do even if it were to hurt them. They are commited to the cause or the organization. If they have to give their head to the guillotine block they will first to do it. Do they fear professional death? not at tall. In fact they beleive that nothing can bring a man down, there is always an after life. They also know that by them laying or willing to lay down their position they send the right message of boldness to the team.

Now look at the Indian Team, we have venerated players of yore like Sachin, Dravid, Laxman who are good and continue to be good in all respects. But can they become better ? Their reservoirs are more or less dried out. Yet they want to hang on. Why do they do this? They have shut their eyes and do not see the present. They are blind to the talented players who are waiting in the wings with immense potential. Cant they just pass on their experience to few of them and sit at the side and enjoy them play?

2. Comfort Kills hunger

When comfort sets in the murderous rage (kolaveri) to take on challenge diminishes. They talk about reaching the pinnacle called 'self actualization' in Maslows pyramid. The closest I can get to the meaning of the word SELF ACTUALIZATION is vegetable patch. Most people get so comfortable as they make money, they keep improving their lifestyle and pay no regard to their life. Then they reach of imcompetence and try to run their life by flashing the best cares and clothes and parties. They call themselves accomplished and then sail across to the end of time.

The Indian players including the respectable ones, allow themselves to be traded like commodities. They would not mind it as long as their bank account bloats. As some point in time these players have earned enough to take care of their entire life with out working. What drives them further is a mystery? The only thing that probably gets on the field is their hunger for publicity certainly not the love for the game or money.

We need to be challenged constantly for the juices to flow. Leaders will not look for challenges to happen they will constantly challenge themselves for they know that without challenge there is no learning.

3. Strong People are not strong.

I have told the story of the Vinayaga and Kathekeya race to many audiences. Before telling the story I always give the the scenario of a thin strong guy and a fat flabby guy getting ready for a running race. I pose the question who will win and the obvious answer is the Thin strong guy. We all know what happened the Fat man won the race.

In most organizations the so called strong senior people are the ones who do the least amount of work and create the most amount of confusion. The low paid staff at the bottom of the pyramid tireless and silently perform most of the work and keep the engine running.

Successful organizations acknowledge this and make sure the ones who really work are provided with the right climate for them to work. In fact they understand the power of the weak. This is probably the reason why most Indian companies and homes keep the Vinayaga statue upfront.

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Facebook and Low self esteem

2012-01-25T07:53:00.001+05:30

The first thing I read this morning was a Facebook post by a friend on Low Self esteem of Facebook. They specifically call it the Facebook Depression and then the article goes on to quote some study of sorts. It looks like a carefully crafted press release by a bunch of retards. Check it out here. LINK

There was very smart friend of mine who was very proud of her low self esteem, she was quite pleased about it since it pushed her to do many things to over come it. Thats when minds eye opened too. When I analyse the non facebook users I find them to have abysmally low self esteem or depression or they are plain simple idiots who think highly of themselves. On the whole they come out as unimaginative and boring and as the sort of people who blow dark clouds where ever they go.

Now as I am writing I realize that for me Facebook or Twitter and blogs actually make me think and make me accountable to a group of people on an hourly basis. Yes I love feedback and more eyeballs, but certainly I dont want to write for that sake. The red dot indicating that someone has responded or commented on my post doth excite me. But then I sit and wonder how a red dot that was used by my teachers way back in school to indicate disapproval of low performance of disobdience has today become a blotch for excitement and endorsement. I wonder how times have changed the meaning of colors too.

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To Gnana Vidyalaya with Anu

2012-01-22T08:23:00.001+05:30

Anu called me up and asked me if I can arrange anyone to train some teachers. I put up a facebook update and within minutes 3 of them responded. But then this girl vanished. She did not respond. So on Thursday evening the responsibility fell on my shoulders to do the training. Friday we spoke briefly but nothing about the training as such.

Anyway I agreed so on 21st Jan 2013 morning we left to Thiruvellore to go the school. On we way to school we caught up with some stuff on what to be spoken.

The training session went on well. I had a bunch of Teachers, all of them were women, who gave full attention. The two men who came and sat quite detatached went away. Actually Iam glad they did for they did not seem to want to capture what I was talking about. The response was good I must say.

Now when Anu told me she does not talk in public, though she is comfortable one on one, I dint want to believe it. She spoke of her aversion to microphone, strange girl aint she? There are ppl who grab the microphone and dont want to let go and here is someone who does not want to hold a microphone. Well thats not the point, I liked the way Anu was effortlessly candid about it. This actually opened up the way for some interesting conversation on various issues, and not a minute did we find ourselves in silence.

Seriously a person who has language skills has to be sharp on the cognitive front. Strangely the ones who are good on languages take this point casually, not knowing how tough it is to acqure a language. She also shared with me how she learnt in English while in school ... I was mighty impressed. Fluent in Hindi, Tamil, English and also can handle Kannada and Malayalam.... boy she now has to know what she is.

My suggestion to her was to take up reading as a habit to improve processing and sequencing skills. Surely she can touch and giving to many lives. Her language skills and her candid talk with sprinking of honesty can endear her to any audience and take her places.

To me it was a weekend well spent.

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Felix Chandran and Hannah Lauvanya

2012-01-22T01:03:00.003+05:30

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Today (21st Feb 2012) two of my friends got engaged to be married. I met Felix through a friend of mine -Vinod Simon - and met Hannah at the Social Media Meet up for the first time. After that may be twice or thrice I had met her, yet I cannot say that she is an acquaintance because of the interactions I had with her on facebook.

With Felix I could talk just about anything. So when he picked up his new bike I actually took and challenge with him. I gave him 6 months to get a girl for himself and if not the bike needs to come to me. Well I knew that Felix is not the kind of guy who will go around trying to get a girl for himself that was what I was relying on. Well this guy is so obsessed with and photography andf other creative pursuites so where will he have the time for a girl? I mused.

But then a little bird once came and told me about this the Felix-Hannah affair, I did not take it seriously and in fact I completely forgot about it, till he blurted out one day that he has got a girl finally and that he is serious about it. Two simple questions, and I got to know it had to be Hannah, but respecting Felix's privacy I did not want to probe further, hoping that he will tell the name. Apparently for some reason, I reckon it must be general shyness the young lovers suffer from, he never mentioned the name and he left hanging in a limbo.

I decided to use the power of facebook. Its like this if you go into facebook with something concrete in your mind and want some confirmation you are sure to get it. Those little comments and likes will let the cat out of the bag. I really dont remember what I saw on the comments side but I had my confirmation. What actually nailed it were the photographs of Hannah. I saw a lot of pictures wonderfully taken, skillfully color corrected and casually uploaded. Dude you have spent a lot of time with those minute details with the girl and that was a huge give away.

Dont I sound a bit like Holmes? Now its confirmed. And I wait for that day for the horse to neigh the name... Hannah Hannah... and then one day the Man did it. Over a phone call he quietly he broke the news, he uttered the Hannah word just once and with a bit of wobble in his voice. I pulled his leg and cracked some jokes and after 30 minutes I patted my self on my back and said "Benny ur good u have sluethy qualities"

Though I havent seen Hannah and found her to be light hearted, pretty and attractive. There was a time I used to enjoy the friendly banter she used to have with Prashanth and Vinay. Dunno who got exhausted the guys I assume.

I hope both these beautiful hearts and minds will build a great union that will help many lives. I also hope that they dont get sucked in the religious feel good stuff.

Congrats guys. Stay blessed

My wishy washy 2011

2012-01-07T16:50:00.001+05:30

I have been through 53 christmases and new years. As a child I had those regular fun times... putting up christmas tree and gifts and new clothes and goodies to eat etc... we then as the Bee Gees sing "But we're tall and christmas trees are small..." Maybe its those years that have rolled by. But looking back I felt anyone gently handing over a wish for a Birthday or New Year made me a little uneasy..... yes I did respond with the same lines adding a Thank you to it. I have tried escaping from this 'wishy washy' activity but alas iam too much into it.

Just when I thought i have sidestepped I have realized that the most unexpected of people utter those wishy lines.

Well this year I responded with most of those wishes by saying " hey I take the hint " and then I look at a puzzled and often disappointed face. I say WTF and laugh it off and respond with the customary and expected response. Its a pain when you have respond to mails, texts messages and facebook updates. But then this year I decided to write a nice customized stuff to a friend of mine, who actually interacts with me on a regular basis on many life issues, I poured myself into it, dealt on somethign called 'polar pairs' and sent it as a PDF ... by mail. Maybe its what I did made me expect too much out of it. But trust me it was a whimper. I was delighted when I got a call to say how wonderful the gesture was. That made me want to believe that - i would rather have some one who could rip my entrails out after reading what I have written than have some one view it casually and give those warm fuzzy words. MEANINGLESS I felt like screaming .. That was my start for a 'Wishy washy 2011' . I need to really work hard to reverse this disappointing start.

These wishes that you get is an indication of the people around you. If you get more of it and you get submerged by it... either you are successful, rich and popular that you have attracted hoards of simple folks all around you who feast of the sugar candies of life. But if you dont receive any then you are either a recluse, a complete loser, economically weak that you havemanaged to keep away the sugar candy varies in a distance. Let me join hands with Fernando Pessoa and say " I carry my awareness of defeat like a banner of victory"

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Digital Dalits

2012-01-02T14:03:00.001+05:30

I have worked with great Brahmin Bosses, whom i loved to detest for reasons apart from their moorings. I might have to agree with the author of this blog .. their greatest strength is not their intellect and subterfuge (many think that way) i think its their vulnerability personified by their vegetarian mind set is the reason, perhaps. By Vegetarian, not just in food, by in attitude and speech. History says that they were the giver of rules to exercise control over others .. they have been accused of authoring and sustaining the caste system. But I think other wise.

Their vulnerability, which is their perceived strength, is their confinement to laws and statutes.. that's why they seem to become good accountants and finance professionals. Compliance is their core competence... Their legalistic mindset has limited their creative zeal. You have to disagree with me on this if you believe Caste system is creative. I get to see some rebels struggling to get out this framework... but they are not themselves. Its easier for a camel to get into the eye of a needle but a legalist can never enter in the kingdom of Liberalism.

If they are being accused of authoring the caste system and for having plonked themselves on the top of the caste pyramid... its not right. Look at them now, most of them gravitate to engineering (a study that requires high compliance and low imagination) and end up with 'back end jobs" lets call it the BUTT JOBS.. the grunt jobs. Haven't they lowered themselves to that of the one they placed outside the cast ambit? If you don't call that noble of them what is noble and selfless ..what is noble then?

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Sasikala fav song is "why this K'veri Di"

2011-12-20T17:26:00.003+05:30

29 years ago most of the video operators worked with the old technology, I still remember those huge bulky tapes. As a leading actress who spent a lot of time behind the cameras Amma knew the power of images. Sasikala hence, like knife through butter, walked into the Poes Garden residence wilding the camera and much power. Video technology leapt ahead and stepped into mobile phones too, while Sasikala was busy weilding power she paid very little attention to learn new technology and eventually lost out.

Some where around the same locality - Poes Garden - in the year 2011 Anirudh Ravichander with Aiswarya Dhanush and Shruthi Hasan were dabbling with the new mindset and new technology. They produced this big big hit on Youtube... I refuse to even utter that word. The world sat up to take note so did Amma. Its time to change. Old technology had to give way to new ones afterall. It may be too late for Sasikala to sing "why this K Veri Di"

The next one to walk into those hallowed portals will be an expert on social media. Well done Amma

Sasikala favourite song is "why this K'veri Di"

2011-12-20T17:24:00.001+05:30

29 years ago most of the video operators worked with the old technology, those huge bulky tapes. As a leading actress who spent a lot of time behind the cameras Amma knew for sure the power of images. Sasikala hence like knife through butter walked into the Poes Garden residence and weilded much power. Video technology had made tremendous progress ever since, and Sasikala was busy weilding power that she paid very little respect to learn new technology and eventually lost out.

Some where around the same locality - Poes Garden - in the year 2011 Anirudh Ravichander with Aiswarya Dhanush and Shruthi Hasan were dabbling with the new mindset and new technology. They produced this big big hit on Youtube... I refuse to even utter that word. The world sat up to take note so did Amma. Its time to change. Old technology had to give way to new ones afterall. It may be too late for Sasikala to sing "why this K Veri Di"

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Seven Technology Predictions for 2012 Randy Muller

2011-11-16T19:31:00.001+05:30

November 2011

2011 has been a remarkable year, what with the extraordinary weather patterns, more than the usual worldwide political turmoil, and national apprehension over the delicate state of our economy. During times like these, people tend to increase their need to communicate, to give and get information, to reach out to their friends, family, community, and the world. It's all about information flow. As 2012 draws near, my predications for technology are all about communication and the information stream. Technology in 2012 and beyond will significantly shift and enhance the exchange of information for people and for enterprise organizations.

1. Corporations adopt social networking as a primary communication tool.

No longer just for the younger crowd, the impact of social media will continue to increase. The act of social networking and its corresponding sites is comparable to the introduction of email in the business environment a decade or so ago. Prior to email -- the phone was king (and the type of phone and access lines - but I don't want to date myself that much). It is a serious mistake to underestimate the power of social networks (whether it is Tumblr, Chatter, Yammer, Twitter, and IMs - though some might regard IM's as "old school"). It is truly amazing just how quickly a ground swell can be raised over a social event. Just look at how rapidly the November 5th, Bank Transfer Day was organized - or the mounting support for the Occupy Wall Street movements. Far beyond keeping in touch with family and friends, social networks have been influential in organizing popular social and music events, exposing on-the-scene political riots, and helping release people who have been incarcerated overseas. Social networks have tremendous power and influence - far more than most people realize (and probably want to accept either). The "traditional" workplace has quickly changed - more people are working from home or remotely and want and even need this contact. This does not mean the real-time interaction of the bricks-and-mortar work place environment have been lost, just changed.

Business executives, employees and home users keep in contact through Facebook or other social sites, blurring the line between work and social boundaries. In many cases, these social networking sites are being used to share insights, news, results, and other information that would normally be on a bulletin board or mass e-mail. Many companies today are actively pursuing social networking collaboration technologies to further their communication reach at much reduced costs. In some cases, you may receive a discount by "Liking" a business.

The use of Microsoft's Lync or Office 365 will enable users to have both business and personal contacts in one IM interface. Business and IT leaders will have to learn to use these to accelerate the business-decision process and maintain relevance with workers. Customers will expect immediate answers to questions, and employees can accomplish more through these communications. Social networking will become one of the main, if not THE primary means of communications in many corporate environments.

2. Death of the laptop?

No, the laptop will not disappear next year or even the year after - but the decline of the ubiquitous laptop, especially in the business environment, will accelerate in 2012. The laptop will never truly disappear, but for many business users, a tablet will more than suffice. After all, the majority of the work done on business laptops is accessing and reading email, using business applications and playing Angry birds (not by all, of course) and not necessarily in this order. Laptop usage will diminish as the capabilities and accepted presence of Apple's iPad, Amazon's Fire and other such devices increase. This will hold true for other "smart" devices. Today you can control many household appliances and services through your smart device - even going as far as locking your car. You can use your smart device as a virtual wallet, it can serve as your boarding pass for aircraft - who knows, and maybe the smart device may spell the end of our wallets as well!

3. The "To the Cloud" movement continues.

"To the Cloud" - That is going to be THE mantra this year and will certainly be more pervasive and louder in the years to come. The cloud has become synonymous with almost any service/server that is no longer maintained on-premise in your organization. The advantage of Cloud solutions are many - reduced infrastructure costs, ease of growth and providing a consistent experience for local and remote users. The advantage is that this is done as an alternative to hosting and maintaining your own servers and application software. In cloud computing, businesses pay for only the resources that they consume. Businesses that host services and applications in the cloud improve overall computer utilization rates, as servers are running at or near full capacity from clients connecting remotely.

4. The need for Virtualization skills will grow exponentially.

Virtualization means moving multiple physical servers to a virtual machine environment. Virtualization vendors such as Citrix, VMware, and Microsoft are making it possible for companies to improve the efficiency and availability of IT resources and applications. Virtualization is being adopted by companies of all sizes as a means to reduce costs through consolidation of servers and lower cooling requirements. Application Virtualization has become very popular with businesses. Having the skill set to deploy applications that connect securely through a browser is critical for companies that have numerous offices.

This is one area that is going to be very interesting to watch in 2012 - especially due to the dynamics among Cisco, Microsoft, and VMware. There is no doubt that the demand for skills in this arena will grow exponentially.

5. The days of owning software are numbered.

You don't need to look too hard to see that SaaS (Software as a Service) is the wave of the future. Just look at the model used by Blizzard and other game companies. You buy the game and then pay a monthly fee for the privilege of playing the game online as well. Now, carry this forward to the major software vendors. They must be dreaming of the revenue stream when customers no longer just buy the software, but pay a monthly access fee. From their perspective, it would help reduce software piracy, no longer could you sell your old software; and did I mention the revenue stream? There may be an advantage from a user perspective - they may be able to use this model for a short term project. Instead of not buying a software package - they may be able to rent it for a period of time. Now look at the cloud and Office 365 - with Office Web Applications, aren't you in effect "renting" access to the software (and other services as well) for a period of time?

6. Real bandwidth to the household.

A New York Times report ranked the United States 26th in the world when it comes to internet access speed. According to a report from Pando networks, the US had an average of 4.93 Mbps speed to the household. In contrast, South Korea (#1) has an average of 17.62, Romania (#2) has an average of 15.27 Mbps and Bulgaria (#3) had an average of 12.89 Mbps. As an example - Finland passed a law that entitles every person to a 1 Mbps connection (supposed to rise to 100 Mbps by 2015). The US is also increasing bandwidth available. This must be addressed if the US is to continue to compete. In fact, the average peak connection speed in the United States increased 95 percent from the first quarter of 2008 to the first quarter of 2011. Internet speed and broadband availability will increase significantly next year.

7. The rise of streaming media.

What, pray tell, do you mean by streaming? Netflix had the right idea in streaming movies to the home. Now think about for this for other items as well. Streaming of TV to smart devices - you can watch your favorite show on the commute home. In those areas where cable is either not available (or does not provide the content at a cost that is acceptable), satellite TV and radio have made huge inroads. Gone are the days of the monster dishes that could have been an escapee from a bad Sci-Fi movie. Now we have small dishes, similar to ones found throughout the world. The satellite is streaming the content to our TVs, computers, and other devices (including refrigerators). Now let us add cell phone (well, let us be honest and just call them smart phones). The number of new landlines is diminishing as the number of smart devices is increasing. Why have a landline and answering machine when you can have a smart phone, voice mail, and Skype with you all the time? So long as there is wireless access, we can use our smart devices and computers (even at 35,000 feet).

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Frisking Kalam

2011-11-13T11:54:00.001+05:30

My dear Blog,

These guys are crazy. Our ex President (of India) the funny hairstyled scientist Dr, Abdul Kalam apparantly was frisked by the security at JFK Airport. Honestly you dont expect some security guy to actually know about India in the first place... and to expect him to know about the ex Pesident is asking for the moon.

Now they are putting up hate posts critizing that poor security guy who was took his work seriously. I was wondering what I would have done if I were there. Here Iam in the security section and doing my work seriously. Iam in what is called 'the zone' where I have lost myself. You see I do a very important work, and any goof on my part would mean the lives of thousands will go up in bang. So I will take my job seriously and I might not care whom Iam checking, for me it is to find if the guy subjected to the search is carry a bomb or a gun or any dangerous objects.

I remember way back in those days while we played cricket and when some hit the ball in the bushes we took the stumps and the bat and went about hitting the plants to search for the ball. While doing so we spoke to each other and after a while beating up the bushes became the prime activity that even if that red cherry were to be found we would have ignored it. Way back in school there was this warden called Jefferson Christopher (sad he became the headmaster one day) this man took it upon himself to make sure the students do not carry books or pieces of paper to copy. So he subjected the students to a search before entering the hall. The poor bloke searched the pockets the collars and fold of the pants etc. he was very strict. Yet we managed to take in fat books into the exam hall by just holding it in our hands.

I know how alert the security guy has to be, he has to take every passenger who passes by seriously. He cannot afford to get into automaticity mode. He has a tough job on hand. Cant the people understand it. So what if Kalam is frisked? Rajni I understand .. but Kalam or Sonia or MMS ..

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Bus ride for Chennai to Hyderabad

2011-11-13T08:07:00.001+05:30

It was non negotiable, I had to be in Hyderabad on 11-11-11, just 7 days to go and I have not booked my tickets yet. Went online and got some good deals on flight, Kingfisher RED it was that always topped the list of the ones providing lowest fares. I tried buying it but my online payment stuff was not working, so pushed it and pushed it and finally had to call RED BUS and get my tickets just 2 days before leaving.

I decided to cut corners so I booked for a double axle Volvo of Kesineni travels. The bus had to be boarded at Koyambedu, That place was such a mess with all that Chennai metro project work happening.Boarded the bus on time and had a fantastic journey to Hyderabad. The bus was very comfortable.

Trying to save 400 rs I took a non AC bus back to madras. Honeslty its not the airconditioning. Its the noise the dust the seats ... and ofcourse the shaking. Iam writing this from that bus. I booked for Parveen Travels and ended up taking a bus called - Sri Krishna Travels. Not bad, good staff and all that but surely I will never take this bus to save just rs 400.

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Al-Gebera man arrested

2011-11-09T15:33:00.001+05:30

A public school teacher was arrested today at John F. Kennedy International airport as he attempted to board a flight while in possession of a ruler, a protractor, a compass, a slide-rule and a calculator.

At a morning press conference, Attorney General Eric Holder said he believes the man is a member of the notorious Al-Gebra movement. He did not identify the man, who has been charged by the FBI with carrying weapons of math instruction.

“Al-Gebra is a problem for us,” the Attorney General said. “They derive solutions by means and extremes, and sometimes go off on tangents in search of absolute values. They use secret code names like “X” and “Y” and refer to themselves as “unknowns,” but we have determined that they belong to a common denominator of the axis of medieval with coordinates in every country. As Greek philanderer Isosceles used to say, “There are 3 sides to every triangle.“

When asked to comment on the arrest, President Obama said, “If God had wanted us to have better weapons of math instruction, he would have given us more fingers and toes.” White House aides told reporters they could not recall a more intelligent or profound statement by the President. It is believed that another Nobel Prize will follow.

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Al- Gebra man arrested

2011-11-09T14:56:00.001+05:30

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My trip in life

2011-11-06T15:06:00.000+05:30

I was barely 13 yrs of age, I assume. A chill December night, for a boy brought up in a Christian home, December can be very special. The festive season starts early with the sermons in church slowly tilting towards the birth of the child in a manger and as it progresses close to Christmas the revelries, with music, food and clothes take over and the child is forgotten. It should be around the third week of December when a small group of friends promised to come home caroling. I waited and waited for them to come. Your standing in society depends on how many Carol groups come singing to your home and well the quality of the group matters too. Now this group that had promised to come were real good and hence my wait for them deep down through the night was worth the while. Waiting and waiting I dozed off, the sleigh bells and the reindeer gently carried me into the land of sound sleep. Suddenly I woke up and ran towards the door, I heard the carol singers at my doorstep. It was pitch dark and walked directly into a wall with full force, hurt my full face and my head and fell down completely dazed unable to wake up.

Nearly 20 years later it was festive time again, Christmas in my job. I was doing well and I got good tidings of comfort and joy when I was told that I was fit enough to take the top job some day. This did not excite me at all but in fact I found my mission in my professional journey being prematurely accomplished with those words and found no meaning in staying there to experience it. Meanwhile I could feel the rumbling under my feet, the tectonic plates were getting ready for a face off. The industrial age was grim and still while the Information age was making a grand entry. Not many could see it for she was but a little child born swaddled in modest clothes in a cattle shed.

The Future shock by Allvin Toffler had already equipped me with some knowledge of how the world is likely to be. I was bracing up for it quietly when Tom came along with his Liberation Management. I read about Percy Barnavick of ABB and his idea of creating a crisis by foreseeing one. My eyes could actually see the unfurling of an era in which I will have no place, I could see myself talking and walking in a world that will be worn out and perish. Aging on the knowledge front scared me. I realized that by doing the same thing that I was doing I will end up in the dump yard of the Industrial waste. I had to stop doing what I was doing and do some thing completely different and new. But what is this something, I honestly did not know. This strengthened my resolve not to do what I was currently doing and I decided to walk out of it.

The following years was a life in a wilderness, I was clueless and was groping. Its just not enough to stop doing the old things yet to do something new you need to walk out from your existing social circle and find a new one. A new group that thinks the way you think. I may have erred over here. But after many years I managed to find my feet back this time the floor space was different, it was the new era, unfurled and progressing with full force.

I would call this period of nearly 8 years a time of suspended animation, hanging in a limbo I ran helter skelter, trying various things, with my foot prints all over the place. I was going crazier by the day. Failures followed failures like those ration lines for bread that you find during depression. The choice of giving up did not exist, with so much of crap around there must be a horse somewhere was my only hope.

The white steed did not appear but I found direction in my life. I stayed still for days recounting my life and realizing the purpose of my existence. In short I worked out my very own, personal, Mission statement.

CREATE BY THE WORD. BUILD GENERATION NEXT. INSPIRE THE LOWLY.

Three things the first one actually pushed me to read and write and speak. I found more meaning in dealing with children and youngsters and less meaning in the company of the old. My eyes opened to the Lowly in many situations.

Things fell in place. So when my friend Kiruba Shankar asked me what I would want to do if I were given just 3 months to live, I had to share my bucket list. Well then when he clarified and told me what he had meant I had to share my Mission with him. While sharing with him, probably doing it with someone for the first time, I realized that I was living my life in sync with my Mission.

The intensity needs to be increased for sure. I surmised that I have to put more heart into what Iam doing. Such conversations turn into a watershed of sorts in ones life.. just the way books can do that for you.

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Lakshmi Comforts at Bangalore

2011-11-06T09:53:00.001+05:30

I dont want to miss writing about this boy. Few weeks back, the day after Namma metro was launched, I went to Bangalore for receiving the Deloitte award. I cant handle numbers so I dont know the date. I had taken a train which landed up at the Cantonment station at the wee hours of the morning, rushing from the compartment with my bag I fell onto the tracks hanging a bit helpless till some people in the station helped me out. I may not remember this incident for long another shocker awaited me at the hotel. It was a short auto ride to the hotel. The main entrance was shut and in two knocks a boy emerged, sleepy and tired, yet opened the door and immediately his face lit up. It was like a loved one waiting for you at home ( well that seldom happens these days) . Homes have become so functional. From here began my time in Lakshmi Comforts.

Checking in, this boy helped through the formalities in a jiffy, handed the room keys and a bottle of Aquafina. I came back after some rest this boy was all over the place. I was sitting in the reception area pretending to read the papers but all along observing his work. He was delivering breakfast to room, volunteered to iron clothes, handling check ins and check outs, picking up phones all this he was doing effortlessly.

Now a bunch of cops walked in, and I thought in my mind they were freeloaders. The boy was not to be found, so they kept calling Vigneshu, I assumed that they must be asking for that boy and I figured out that the boys name is Vignesh and the 'u' that followed his name was an expression of love. They marched in had their breakfast and paid for it while stepping out. I assume they were attracted by the food, which was of high standards and the quality of service, and young Vignesh stood out.

Now to load all credit on Vignesh may not be proper, yes he is remarkable probably his age helps him to be agile. People with the best of enthusiasm and strength need to work if the working conditions are not good. For this boy to work with a full heart would me that there is a wonderful management behind him. While I observed the others from Manager to the sweeper, I realized it was the same commitment. While having my breakfast the floors were being cleaned. There were two ladies who were cleaning them, Without any supervision they were cleaning every nook and corner. They never disturbed me a bit, though I volunteered to move to another place. They waited for me to finish and then they proceeded with their work. I overheard a conversation the Manager was having with an employee, He we was very tough but not unreasonable, the worker responded with amazing attitude too.

I have come across a similar kind of service at Mercy Electronics at Chennai and with Vipin Sachdev of Pink Pappaya. Truly its people who can make all the difference, The management has to be credited for providing such a lovely environment for people to work,

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A Vermount Dairy farmer

2011-10-14T12:57:00.001+05:30

A Vermont dairy farmer was herding his cows in a remote pasture when suddenly brand-new BMW advanced out of a dust cloud towards him. The driver, a young man in a Brioni suit, Gucci shoes, Ray Ban sunglasses and YSL tie, leans out the window and asks the farmer "If I tell you exactly how many cows and calves you have in your herd, will you give me a calf?"

The farmer looks at the man, obviously a yuppie, then looks at his peacefully grazing herd and calmly answers, "Sure, Why not?"

The yuppie parks his car, whips out his Dell notebook computer, connects it to his AT&T cell phone, and surfs to a NASA page on the Internet, where he calls up a GPS satellite navigation system to get an exact fix on his location which he then feeds to another NASA satellite that scans the area in an ultra-high-resolution photo.

The young man then opens the digital photo in Adobe Photoshop and exports it to an image processing facility in Hamburg, Germany. Within seconds, he receives an email on his Palm Pilot that the image has been processed and the data stored. He then accesses a MS-SQL database through an ODBC connected Excel spreadsheet with email on his Blackberry and, after a few minutes, receives a response.

Finally, he prints out a full-color, 150-page report on his hi-tech,miniaturized HP LaserJet printer and finally turns to the farmer and says, "You have exactly 1586 cows and calves."

"That's right. Well, I guess you can take one of my calves," says the farmer. He watches the young man select one of the animals and looks on amused as the young man stuffs it into the trunk of his car.

Then the farmer says to the young man, "Hey, if I can tell you exactly what your business is, will you give me back my calf?"

The young man thinks about it for a second and then says, "Okay, why not?"

"You're a consultant for the National Republican Party ." says the farmer.

"Wow! That's correct," says the yuppie, "but how did you guess that?"

"No guessing required." answered the farmer. "You showed up here even though nobody called you; you want to get paid for an answer I already knew, to a question I never asked; and you don't know anything about my business........ Now give me back my dog."

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Cycling 100 kms

2011-10-11T10:54:00.001+05:30

I never thought I will be ever be able to make it. Going around my block in circles in my cycles made feel like a cyclist - that was doing hardly 500 meters. I came home sweating and satisfied. My ambition was to do 1 km shortly. The October demon got on to me and I decided to go to office in the cycle - thats 7.5 kms dude.

It was tough but I made it, while the sun was being liberal with its huge smile in the morning and managed to get back home when the sun was still grinning. There is something very satisfying about a sweaty T shirt. I enjoyed the after effects too, not much of pain though. I was like all the parts in my wanted some activity happening. A kind of long demand finally fulfilled.

Its my 7th day today. My sweating has reduced and Iam getting into a system. Another 14 days I need to do and then I hope it will become so much part of me.

I need to network with cyclists to keep this important phase going. I dont think the CFO Cyclist stuff in the Empire Avenue will be of much help. I realized that I have started riding on the wrong side of the one way road, on pavements at times. Iam not sweating like before. My waist has shrunk. My appetite is reasonable. I have saved nearly Rs1500 on auto rickshaw so far.

My facebook friend Gratian Mathew Govias has invited me to join him for a Mahabs trip, hoping to do it by November end. I have been doing 14 kms a day over 7 days I have nearly touched 100. This saturday I will take my cycle to the beach.

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Boycotting products and services of corrupt

2011-10-11T10:20:00.001+05:30

I was pretty stunned to see the NDTV news yesterday about Suneetha Reddy being raided. This morning papers drove it home. The question that popped to my mind was will Suneetha Reddy be upto such stuff that deserves to be counted with the Marans? As a daughter of the man, Dr Pratap Reddy, who is the doyen of healthcare in India, get embroiled in such activities?

Will this affect the brand image of Apollo in whom she is a major stake holder?

I have a great respect for the Reddys, while I was with them they treated me like their own. I had to part due to too much of love.

So I would hate to believe that Suneetha would have done anything that would jeopardize her name and the name of the Apollo Family. At the most she would have been forced or sucked into it without her knowing.

Lets step aside a bit. As a society we scream about corruption by politicians. Here are a group of respect industrialists in the society who are resorted to subterfuge and fraud in order to amass wealth. Now as citizens, till they are proven innocent, can we shut of their products or services? Iam calling for boycott.

The same NDTV newscapsule had a clip about 'Anna for President' stuff. Now I question Anna's motivation. Is he playing a political game by attacking the politicians on their soft underbelly to curry favour ? why is he not condemning the others, particularly the private sector, for corrupt practices. After all they are the initiators

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Empire Avenue stats of 7th Oct

2011-10-07T19:07:00.001+05:30

Over the past 3 days I saw great jump in my share price. Look at the rise in the graph. Its like a cobra ready to strike right ???

See the full gallery on Posterous

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How google to its name (mail forward)

2011-10-04T21:48:00.001+05:30

In ancient Israel, it came to pass that a Trader by the name of Abraham Com
did take unto himself a young wife by the name of Dot. And Dot Com was a
comely woman, broad of shoulder and long of leg. Indeed, she was often
called Amazon Dot Com.

And she said unto Abraham, her husband, "Why dost thou travel so far from
town to town with thy goods when thou canst trade without ever leaving thy
tent?"

And Abraham did look at her as though she were several saddle bags short of
a camel load, but simply said, "How, dear?"

And Dot replied, "I will place drums in all the towns and drums in between
to send messages saying what you have for sale, and they will reply telling
you who hath the best price. And the sale can be made on the drums and
delivery made by Uriah's Pony Stable (UPS)."

Abraham thought long and decided he would let Dot have her way with the
drums. And the drums rang out and were an immediate success. Abraham sold
all the goods he had at the top price, without ever having to move from his
tent. To prevent neighboring countries from overhearing what the drums were
saying, Dot devised a system that only she and the drummers knew. It was
known as Must Send Drum Over Sound (MSDOS), and she also developed a
language to transmit ideas and pictures - Hebrew To The People (HTTP).

And the young men did take to Dot Com's trading as doth the greedy horsefly
take to camel dung. They were called Nomadic Ecclesiastical Rich Dominican
Sybarites, or NERDS.

And lo, the land was so feverish with joy at the new riches and the
deafening sound of drums that no one noticed that the real riches were going
to that enterprising drum dealer, Brother William of Gates, who bought off
every drum maker in the land. And indeed did insist on drums to be made that
would work only with Brother Gates' drumheads and drumsticks.

And Dot did say, "Oh, Abraham, what we have started is being taken over by
others." And Abraham looked out over the Bay of Ezekiel, or eBay as it came
to be known. He said, "We need a name that reflects what we are."

And Dot replied, "Young Ambitious Hebrew Owner Operators." "YAHOO," said
Abraham. And because it was Dot's idea, they named it YAHOO Dot Com.

Abraham's cousin, Joshua, being the young Gregarious Energetic Educated Kid
(GEEK) that he was, soon started using Dot's drums to locate things around
the countryside. It soon became known as God's Own Official Guide to
Locating Everything (GOOGLE).

That is how it all began. And that's the truth.....so help me God !

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3 Types of Change your Brain Adapts

2011-09-06T07:18:00.001+05:30

http://blogs.psychcentral.com/relationships/2011/08/three-ways-your-brain-adapts-to-change-1-of-3/

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Irritating pearls

2011-07-04T12:54:00.001+05:30

The difference between wild and cultured pearls focuses on whether the pearl was created spontaneously by nature – without human intervention – or with human aid. Pearls are formed inside the shell of certain mollusks as a defense mechanism against a potentially threatening irritant such as a parasite inside its shell, or an attack from outside, injuring the mantle tissue. The mollusk creates a pearl sac to seal off the irritation.

The mantle of the mollusk deposits layers of calcium carbonate (CaCO3) in the form of the mineral aragonite or a mixture of aragonite and calcite (polymorphs with the same chemical formula, but different crystal structures) held together by an organic horn-like compound called conchiolin. The combination of aragonite and conchiolin is called nacre, which makes up mother-of-pearl. The commonly held belief that a grain of sand acts as the irritant is in fact rarely the case. Typical stimuli include organic material, parasites, or even damage that displaces mantle tissue to another part of the mollusk’s body. These small particles or organisms gain entry when the shell valves are open for feeding or respiration. In cultured pearls, the irritant is typically an introduced piece of the mantle epithelium, together or without a spherical bead (beaded or beadless cultured pearls

source : Wikipedia

How to invite people onto Google+

2011-07-04T12:06:00.000+05:30

Mathew 6:33 my views

2011-06-26T14:43:00.001+05:30

My friend on Facebook, Thomas Raju, put up this wonderful Bible verse as an update. Quoting Mathew 6:33 which says -But seek (aim at and strive after) first of all His kingdom and His righteousness (His way of doing and being right), and then all these things taken together will be given you besides. Having been brought up in a churched christian household such passages are so often mentioned and even sung at church and at home that we really dont get the grasp of this.

In one my lectures, to a very non christian group, I quoted this verse in a very different context only then it made sense to me, and I started pursuing it.

I did a small demo to the participants. I kept a nice piece of cake a bottle of Soda pop and a book on the table. Now I urged the participants to choose one honestly - and most of them chose the cake (quite obviously) I told that this was a very predictable behavior. Why didnt anyone choose the book? Because the attractiveness of the cake was so powerful that the book was not seen at all. This I told them, was the seduction of the world and its riches and pleasures there off. Its the broad road to disaster.

Why did I choose the BOOK. When i said book, it meant WORD. My understanding of Mathew 6:33 hinges on the John 1 : 1 IN THE beginning [before all time] was the Word (^[a]Christ), and the Word was with God, and the Word was God ^[b]Himself.

The primacy of the word is established here. Now seeking Gods kingdom simply means make the the WORD the primary activity in ones life. Forgetting all else - food, family, children, pleasure, work - giving importance to the WORD. Which would actually mean setting you mind to seek the riches of the kingdom of God through committing oneself to reading the text that has been shared by saints over the centuries.

Is this easy? Certainly not.

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The view is as important as the action

2011-06-25T13:59:00.001+05:30

Lord Vishnu is said to be the custodian of the world. You see him resting on a serpent and at times he is flying on an bird. It is said that he has a micro view (narrow and focused) while sitting on a serpent also called Sarpa Drishti and while on the bird he has a macro view a long shot also known as Garuda Drishti.

Recently I was reading about the military technology of Drones, used by the US military in Afganistan and Iraq. The technology that was used for surveillance earlier was too narrow that it was impossible to understand the target clearly but now they are using a far advanced technology that can pinpoint very accurately – Osama Bin Laden was done in by that.

The limiting technology was called the ‘soda straw view’ while the new technology is called ‘Gorgon Stare’.

In life we often use this Sarpa Drishti or the Soda straw view to make judgements and often times they are wrong. Vision is being able to see the entire eco system will all its dynamics and interplay.

Lets assume in a family a woman is the in receiving end of what she terms as ‘deception’. To judge and reject her spouse will be the logical step. This is more of a soda straw view.

If she were to take on the Garuda Drishti or the Gorgon stare, Gorgon is a terrifying female creature with a fixed stare, the judgment will be lot more pin pointed.

Now how is this done? The lady in question must bide her time, collect accurate data not just about her direct subject but all the other subjects’ that are involved. For instance if the man who belongs to him were to be in a relationship with another, then she has to know move 2 degrees down and find out the dynamics in the relationship. In all probability relationships do not exist in isolation it will be sensed on known to the others in close proximity. People in general, detest disruption, hence they would define such aberrations with other words and sweep it under the carpet apprehending social backlash.

The lady must get to know about all these dynamics and the consequences and must be able to understand how these will affect her if she were to make her moves. Is quite complex. Such engagement with the problem can only solve the problem. Sarpa Dristi is important but to react like a Serpent is surely not the solution.

View the problem like a Serpant and an Eagle and respond like a human being.

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2011-06-23T19:36:00.000+05:30

with a thorn you remove a thorn

2011-06-20T23:37:00.001+05:30

EXPOSITION of Psalm 91:13

Verse 13. Thou shalt tread upon the lion and adder. Over force and fraud shalt thou march victoriously; bold opponents and treacherous adversaries shall alike be trodden down. When our shoes are iron and brass lions and adders are easily enough crushed beneath our heel.

The young lion and the dragon shalt thou trample under feet. The strongest foe in power, and the most mysterious in cunning, shall be conquered by the man of God. Not only from stones in the way, but from serpents also, shall we be safe. To men who dwell in God the most evil forces become harmless, they wear a charmed life, and defy the deadliest ills. Their feet come into contact with the worst of foes, even Satan himself nibbles at their heel, but in Christ Jesus they have the assured hope of bruising Satan under their feet shortly. The people of God are the real "George and the dragon," the true lion kings and serpent tamers. Their dominion over the powers of darkness makes them cry, "Lord, even the devils are subject unto us through thy word."

Fear grips every one, spares none. The moralistic issues are more feared than abhorred sometimes they are often respected. Personally I would like to trample these fears under my feet. It can be the fear of sin or jumping from a plane with a parachute.

I have been grappling with these issues for a while, the issues that seem to be spoken in muted tones with awe and fear, or those that are dismissed. I realized in doing that you feed the dragon which eventually does you in. I have decided to face it head on, handle it in close proximity. As I was discussing with my friend today, summing up and sharing all these things I realized that I have to a large extent conquered the foe. The joy you get from this conquest is immense.

Pleasure must never be central to a man.

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He knows

2011-06-09T05:52:00.001+05:30

I wish I could work like him. Look at him, he does not sit in a gallery with his easel and the brushes. He probably sits on the pavement with some colors and brushes thrown in. He pickes up his paints and he seems to be randomly putting up colors, but what will come out of all this he knows.

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Top 55 Most Popular Facebook Pages for Job Search in 2011

2011-06-08T19:30:00.001+05:30

via jobmob.co.il

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Mud on the face. Skies within reach.

2011-06-07T12:56:00.001+05:30

I was a corporate something, identified and groomed to become someone. Soon I sensed the trembling of the ground beneath, the rumblings became so unbearable that I ran for safety. Me tried my own stuff and prospered but the ground beneath was getting noisier by the day.

I moved effortless from success to failure, from a restaurant to a tea shop, from a chauffeur driven car to a bicycle or bus, from cigarettes to beedies. All this in full public view, and many have seen me sprawled on the road, and have I seen them turning their heads away in shame. He deserves it, many said and many felt pity but none came near me, save one friend who called me once in a hundred days to inquire about the depths I have covered and left me with a thin thread to climb out. Thank you Maam.

I reveled in the depths for I preferred it to the spot light of mediocrity.

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Charles Samuel

2011-06-06T12:21:00.001+05:30

The first time I met Charles Samuel (year 2006), he came across as a normal guy needing a lot of care and help. It was during a trip that we all made, as employees of Performa, that changed my perspective about him. He was one of the organizers, nay he was actually given the work that no one else would take. Yet he was so happy, proud and was buzzing all over the place.

The place we went to was Avalanche, awesome place. It was fantastic during the day and chill in the nights. So while most of them went to sleep after a lot of singing and food just two of us decided to rough it out in the cold around the fireside. We sat on the floor and covered ourselves with a nice thick blanket and found comfort in it. Just then this little guy- Charles landed up. He reprimanded us, a little gently, for messing up with the blanket and wanted us to go to the room and sleep. We ignored him. Then after a while came the thunderbolt. He was angry and this time he sent someone over, who conveyed the message that Charles was really angry. Quietly we went to the room.

This was what caught my attention. This little lamb who was pushed around and humbled in the office became a lion when it came to work. My interest on this guy took a new turn. We became good friends. We shared our personal lives without any reservation. His challenges became mine and mine became his.

Eventually he got a job at SCB that gave him stability. Every time he called me or pinged me he had something good to say about his progress in his work place.

He gets married, and I could not make it because of my work (well thats another story)

When i saw the few pictures in Facebook I was pretty amazed. You have come a long way my friend. But remember as a couple you need to be able to willingly take up challenges, forswear a life of comfort and be committed to the poor and needy. Thats what will please the one who blessed and blesses you with everything.

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How to make a tweet book ?

2011-06-06T11:38:00.001+05:30

Oieeee!!! I found this fantastic application that will help you make all your tweets into a book. How interesting can you get?

You just have to long into tweetbook.in and from there its easy to make it.

If you have done a lot of tweeting you may have to wait.

What can you do with your book? I suggest you take a nice print out make a nice cover for it wrap it up with nice gift wrapping and gift it to your friends/enemies.... now high light the tweets that you want them to read ?

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Empire avenue update

2011-06-06T09:57:00.001+05:30

Empire Avenue, is an interesting game were u can buy and sell of those whom know and dont know on social media profiles. Far from being a number cruncher, I was a little reluctant to be part of this, and then again to shout out "Hey I invested on you". Gradually I understood that one is not buying out or investing on someone, but merely acknowledging their social presence. The forward movement in your stock price is just incidental its of little value, the wealth that you create is just a mere hype. Its all about connecting and discussing with people and reading their blogs thats all.

Just check my profile at http://www.empireavenue.com/wordcreates

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How to name in the photos in 2 simple steps?

2011-06-06T06:17:00.001+05:30

Iam sure you have found this frustrating at times you have taken a truck load of photographs and they are lying in your folder with some weird numbers - then you try renaming them and you realize that life is too short to be renaming photographs. So you abort project and plan to do it another day, while some more photographs accumulate and they you dont want to see the pictures.

My friend took these 18 pictures and wanted me to upload on picasa.. I renamed just 1 and I decided to uploaded without naming .... Now here is how you can name it easily.

I just selected all the pictures with the CONTROL A option.
Clicked on F2 and had the first photo selected to be renamed
I renamed it Yoga at Ispahani and clicked enter

Now see what happened bingo all the photos got renamed.. Try it and leave a feedback behind

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Another weekend

2011-06-05T21:30:00.001+05:30

Another weekend whizzes by. I decide to do some personal work, to get my life in order. Spent time cooking and baking. Yes I did a lot of business in Empire Avenue. Got to get some new friends, got on to some good discussion groups on Social Media recruitments and connected with some Chennaites out there. The FFI LYF facebook profile was a little dormant during the weekend, most of the members were busy during the weekend I suppose. Yet I spent some chat time with Saranya, who has promised to set up a meeting for me with all the FFI Team at Ford.

Its 9.30 pm on Sunday, Iam winding up the weekend. Look forward to a great week ahead. Hoping to get some way forward with the FFI web 2.0 website

3 days = 13% of 176 hrs

5 days = 23%

8 days = 36%

That calculation can be over looked .. was just trying to work out the extent of time investment I have to make on work in the coming week

I realize that in first 3 days of the month 13% of the total working hours (176) has gone by... The way time flies

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Why do we have to complain?

2011-06-05T11:58:00.001+05:30

I had this interesting letter put up by my friend in Facebook as the city (Chennai, India) is facing frequent power cuts as we have to deal with scorching summer heat. He did not realize that more that half the country is struggling for food, water and shelter while the we the middle class have this complain about the bad roads and power cuts

An open letter to TN CM Dr. J. Jayalalithaa:
Can you, with all the powers vested in you, please make sure that ordinary citizens do not have to face sleepless nights during these summer months on account of frequent power cuts (scheduled or otherwise) during the nights? Please give the common man the necessary sleep to carry on working hard the next day too.
Thanks
Nizam (& every affected person)

He uses the phrase ORDINARY CITIZEN AND COMMON MAN to identify himself. If only he knew he is a leader in his own right, as person who is exposed to good education and endowed with basic comforts and with the power to communicate in English, he will not complaint.

As Indians our focus must not be on ourselves but on the millions who are suffering beneath us. We need to be more concerned about them, then we will never complain about what we lack for we become stronger with a good attitude in the process

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Why am I going to take Kavipriya to court?

2011-06-05T11:28:00.002+05:30

This girls is one of the most beautiful and talented girls on the block. She can dance, paint, has a husky voice,is driven with ambition, can write, and carries a lovely frame too. Why would anyone want to see her in a legal tangle? I have my reasons, the prime among them is if I want to become famous I better try to harass a celebrity…. anyway I will try that next, as of now I will sue her for she was responsible for charring my lovely pressure cooker.

It was a fantastic sunday morning, and I wanted to dish out some yummy biryani for my kids. Bought all the ingredients and requested my Mom to peel the onions. I kept the cooker on high flame poured the oil and went to get the onions as my mom was glued to the Television. I glimpsed at the TV and found this very same damsel on Kalaigar TV. The looks were familiar but her lovely voice nailed it. Then I sat and sat and watched while my cooker went up in flames… damaging a whole lot of things around it.

Why would I ever take this extreme step of a legal process if my friends on Facebook were to alert me on their achievements? I, like a cooker, would want to vent out my steam.

How I handled the first month of work

2011-06-01T11:25:00.001+05:30

I got back to a disciplined work life after a break of nearly 6 years. I realized that getting to office on time and staying back would be a big challenge that I need to surmount in the first month. There are some life systems at the home front that need to be tweaked to facilitate the scheduled arrival at the office.

My life before was a bit flexible thats a euphemism for chaotic. Sleeping late and waking up late was a the biggest problem. And then the normal morning chores including fixing breakfast for the family and I would be a haggard, free and tired by 11o clock. Then to get on to the regular work groove was the most challenging task.

This has to be changed. I got into a system by previous evening. I started working on a standard work schedule of a bath and a bit of social networking before sleep and started sleeping by max 11 pm. The tried waking up at 5.30 am the next morn to the sound of a morning alarm. Took the entire 1st hour of the morning a bit slow and increased the pace moderately by 7 pm and went into over drive by 9. And first 18 days I reached office well behind schedule navigating the choked road traffic.

Something had to be done. I started my daily time log and started counting the work hours. To be efficient I realized that I have to reach office before the scheduled time. By now my morning pattern fell in place. I just had to advance my overdrive time by one hour. So here is what I did.

5.30 am to 7 am = slow pace

7 am to 7.45 am = increased the pace

7.45 to 8.30 am = overdrive time

I managed to get to office on time, ahead of time. This helped me settle down and start actual work bang on at 9.30 am

Its a new month today. Little bit of changes needs to be done and I have to make sure the my 176 hours of office work that I have to do this month is efficient. I have developed a simple system to do that. Would share the same with you shortly.

Wish you guys a fantastic June.

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Keeping commitments

2011-05-30T07:26:00.001+05:30

Here Iam finding it difficult to make simple commitments that is actually rewarding to me, those that makes me feel good and I read about some amazing people out here like Saritha who made a vow that if Jayalalitha wins the elections she will cut off her tongue and she did it. Today I read about this man who cut off his thumb to fulfill the same vow. How does this work? I really wonder if both of them ever made an attempt to meet Jayalalitha before their vows. Lets assume they did. Iam sure they would have been pushed and jostled and roughed up and all they could had was a glimpse of that lady. Now normally if you treated that way you are expected to come home with some disgust and surely your love and respect for the lady would have diminished considerably. But in both these cases it only strengthened it.

Thats why I believe if politicians are able to understand this strength that the common man possesses and are able to leverage it skillfully why not employers. It was Jayalalitha who offered a job to that woman after paying for her operation. Did anyone in the other sectors see the potential in this lady?

I believe India will hit the main stage only if she understands the potential of th this class of people. Thats is why I believe that Shashi Tharror will never make it in politics for deep down he thinks they are 'cattle'.

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Masonry work on the Mind.

2011-05-28T22:26:00.001+05:30

Freedom eluded the East Germans, the Kampfgruppen along with the police started walling the city. Families were separated, the cry was deafening reminds one of the partition that happened in our own country (India). Our hearts went out for he people who were behind the walls, behind the iron and the bamboo curtains. My memory is very vivid when Scorpions sang the song WINDS OF CHANGE, the celebrated the change in Eastern Europe and maybe caused it in some way.

Year 1989. The Berlin Wall finally fell.

This was perhaps the inauguration of a brave new world. The information age was on the door step.

Two days ago to my post on this blog that I had shared in Facebook on Samacheer Kalvi, Akshay Jayakumar had this to say " As far as goin deep into our culture s concerned, v r very far frm it at d moment.cultural awareness begins wid awareness of d culture's history which seems quite isolated considering our syllabus... so samacheer kalvi shd include history lessons bout d whole of india's conquers nd not jus delhi sultanate, mughals nd british invasion..."

History yes, I guess they need to learn History from a different perspective, its certainly not something that happened but those are events that keep happening even now.

How else would you account for the Berlin Walls that are being built up in children's minds every day and the prohibitions that are placed on young talented people. I was reading Pranav, a FOSS Evangelist, he has written in his blog about the meaningless restrictions schools place on students forcing them to get out of Facebook. I have heard many parents and teachers complain about it too. These are the new Kampfgruppen in town. And then Pranav in his blog post SOCIAL MEDIA AND ITS ARCH-EMEMY" suggests "So instead of trying to change their minds, its better to ignore them and continue our social life in social media. The arch-enemies of social media elect to stay outdated, we can't do anything about it."

Times have changed, certainly not for the worse, but for the best - if Veeren were to listen to this he will have a point of view. Go ahead Veeren look forward to your participation. The generation today is open to a knowledge explosion, limiting them to academics can be the biggest mistake a parent or a teacher may commit. The entertainment and knowledge available at home is far more than what a movie theater or a school can deliver. So why should a child,who hungers for knowledge or fun, step out his home. We sure need to re look at school and what education system by itself can offer.

Unlike the Berlin Wall that managed to insulate the communist Germany, todays walls can never do that. I prefer if someone were to confront but to be ignored entirely is the worst that can happen.

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Empire Avenue and personal Brand Equity

2011-05-28T18:09:00.001+05:30

Read my lips sooner or later the value that you create for yourself online will determine the value of you and the company that you work with. The pricing of the IPO will also be linked to this. This may seem a litter far fetched. But it will happen sooner or later.

When I got into Empire Avenue I had no clue on what I was going to do. Within minutes I realized that this is not just one of those casual stuff. Its serious. It places a value on your online persona depending on your activity in Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin etc ..dunno Iam unable to connect to YOUTUBE. And then based on your stock value people invest on you. This is what I found interesting. While I started investing on people and when others started investing on me somehow I got carried into the stream. Its real fun. It also impacts the way you work on your blog and other social media streams. A positive effect. End of the day you know it all adds up.

If you think Iam a numbers guy, no Iam now. I deleted a blog which I built over 4 years because one day I found myself writing to get more hits.. SHIT I TOLD MY SELF and dumped it. Now Iam free. Empire Avenue is a lot different. So far so good

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I took The Twitter Path

2011-05-28T17:56:00.001+05:30

Few years ago some one told me about Laurie Beth Jones and the book she has written - Jesus CEO and The Path. I got this book called The Path and ended up working out my mission statement and now that you insist on knowing what it is - CREATE BY THE WORD, BUILD GENERATION NEXT AND INSPIRE THE LOWLY. Surprisingly after this my work started falling in place. All I to do was run the opportunities that came my way through my Mission Statement (as simple as that) and it helped me process the target and reject the distractor.

Now I have come to a point that only those that are connected to my Mission come my way. Life has become simple. I have learnt to say NO and before I forget in case you plan to do your mission statement make sure its beats the Twitter limit hollow - shorter the better, and get to read The Path.

I was delighted when I connected with Laurie on Twitter. Strange how this social media, particularly Twitter can creat the path to connect to the people who are dear to you and you adore.

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How to make school interesting ?

2011-05-27T15:15:00.001+05:30

This is sequel to the post that I had written earlier on Samacheer Kalvi and the post generated a lot of discussion on the subject of education in schools. Here Iam sitting with ABHINAV SRINIVASAN of Sri Krishnaswamy Higher Secondary Matri School . He studies in 10th Std going to 11th Std. Now I was talking to him about what he would like to change to make education intereseting. I liked the insights that he provided and I thought I will share them with you.

School should be fun says Abinav. A student must want to go to school in the first place. He must prefer going to school to sitting at home with the Television or Play Station. Today school has to compete with many entertainment devices. Students prefer learning on their own, thanks to google and wikipedia. So the school must change its outlook towards education. Abinav says the solution lies in providing more time for game and other activities. This is an amazing and very simple solution, I only wish the educators are listening.

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The Idiot entrepreneur

2011-05-26T15:46:00.001+05:30

I was asked to talk in a college recently on entrepreneurship, my qualification? not because of me being an entrepreneur but I was involved in TiE Chennai very closely. So there I was with some smart materially successful people in the panel who had lots of things to say about what they are doing. I was asked to introduce myself and I said - Iam a failed entrepreneur.. failed in 4 attempts, I have fallen flat on my face. I could nearly hear the audience gasping and whispering LOSER. Oh!!!! ofcourse I have wept over it, went on to depressive bouts thrice, closed my self within thick walls, struggled. Yet I seemed to emerge back and start again and fail again.

Please dont believe this stuff about Failure being the greatest teacher, thats the lot of horseshit, Failure to me is the ONLY Teacher.

And Entrepreneurial quality that strikes me hard is the act of being able to disrupt and challenge the existing system. So a typical entrepreneur cannot be expected to behave and act normally. These streak of absurdity and pomposity is so typical of an entrepreneur. However I have come across those (me included) who put on the entrepreneurship mantle with a wrong headed approach. I was focussed on the IDEA so that it will make me RICH. That was my undoing.

After a series of FAILURES I realized that Money must not be in the frame at all. The focus must be on the IDEA or the THOUGHT. Money happens, fame happens, success happens and even if does not happen, the entrepreneur does not dither and give in. He pushes and pushes. His idea fuels him.

Well I was so fascinated when I got to understand this point of view, and it made sense particularly in the Indian Context. And I believe our culture has something very valuable to provide to us. Hence I would personally suggest that every wannabe entrepreneur gets a clear picture of the treasures our own cultural setting has to offer. Reading Indian Mythological Text is a great beginning.

Starting out with The Difficulty of being good by Gurcharan Das is a great idea

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Samacheer Kalvi

2011-05-26T10:11:00.002+05:30

Yesterday I was listening to Sanobar Sultana anchoring a discussion Samacheer Kalvi (equal education). It was battle with the panelists going berserk with their ideas and convictions. Yet there was one simple thing that stuck out. They all seemed to agree that that the content is very memory oriented and that it has to be changed. Changed to what? Thats a big mystery.

Equality in education, I feel, will produce a group of students with the same knowledge. Now assume what they have studied is the right thing (which is very much in doubt) 20 years from now you have millions of people who feel, believe, know and talk the same thing. How boring will it be.

Now coming back. Memory orientation is not good but I believe the challenge today is Attention Economy. We need to get the skill of Attention in Children. Have the ones who developed the curriculum factored in the findings of the Neuroscience findings (thanks to FmRI Scans) no how the brain is developing in the digital age? How can we prepare and equip the children as then enter the bio-tech era is the concern?

Now personally the solution lies not in going West but to dig deep in our culture and try to develop skills to take in the knowledge (content) The school should move out of this delivering content focus and shift to delivery of study skills.

My son took a break from studies for 18 months. He was stumbling along in stumble.com and googling and he used to tell me what all he learnt, he used to be so excited. And on teachers day he wanted to wish Google :)

The middle order

2011-05-25T08:10:00.001+05:30

Again cricket, this is quite an obsession. Let the game go on on one side Iam fascinated by the lessons we get from this game. When the top order fires the middle order gets into the shell and its vice versa too. Yesterday for CSK both Hussey and Vijay left early, the pressure seemed to be intense. But the calm faces of the Team owner, Gurunath Meiyappan and the Captain - MSD did not look so worried.

They know if the top order were to #fail the middle order will take up the burden and fire. Building a strong middle order is surely important. Lets say it the second line. Quite performers who are keenly equipping themselves with skills and should their be an opportunity to rise up to the occasion they grab it an perform valiantly. Ideal scenario for any organization.

In an organization all pressure and challenges are handled by the top people, sometimes they let this percolate down and most of the time they keep it to themselves. In other words they insulate the second level from 'unnecessary pressure' so that their day to day performance is not affected. Unless the middle level people are exposed to challenges they will not become strong. Surely the weak ones will crumble but the good ones will emerge.

Only Challenges can strengthen a man

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Care to do well?

2011-05-25T06:49:00.001+05:30

Cricket is having a serious problem competing with my sleep. I get to watch just one team play and then Iam off to bed. May be the heat or its the new assignment that I have that forces me to wake up early and get to work on time ( well Iam always late)

Yesterday I saw Ashwin getting hit by a Saurav Tiwary strike, right on to the face near the temple. It was terrible. Wonder how Ashwin was able to keep his eyes open. This rate we might have to get some protection for the bowlers too. The batting sure is getting aggressive. Well what I really want to talk about here is this photograph.

The look of concern on Suresh Rain was so touching. Players like Raina and Sehwag particularly get to do so much and manage to stay in the background. Dont even try to compare on contrast them with the likes of Yuvraj or Harbajan and never with Sreesanth. Tendulkar and Dhoni get their new, yet they manage to keep their sanity. No pompous words and belligerence in their speech. Well its this gesture of Raina that gives him the moral and physical strength to play. Here in this match he manged to get CSK to win with a match winning 73 or 50 balls with 6 sixers . Score card

Surely you have to be a caring person to be able to do well in life. Care for others and for yourself too. In that order.

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Handling Emotions with Cognitive strength

2011-05-16T11:51:00.001+05:30

All of us are emotional beings aren’t we? This is what makes us humans. We have fear, anger, anguish, joy, envy etc.

The other day I mentioned about how we need to train ourselves to handle our emotions by enlarging the bandwidth of our neural pathways that carry the message to the cognitive areas. I also mentioned if these pathways are not trained it will trigger the emotional side of the brain (amygdala) and cloud our cognitive thought/process.

Leadership is not about suppressing our emotions but in making sure our cognitive areas have dominion in our thought process and in leveraging our emotions.

Work is a fantastic platform to strengthen or broaden our neural pathways. We have challenges every day, every hour.

I walked into office this morning with the hope that my new laptop will help me to carry out my work. My work involves design and fairly heavy duty activities that demand a robust processing system which in turn demands a fairly large monitor too. Here I am with a laptop and a display that is far from what I expected. I was livid. I called up the IT dude to register my displeasure. My anguish need to be vented out lest I implode within in anger. I tweeted about it. I operated from my Amygdala clearly.

1. Why cant ppl just consult to check the with the one is in the receiving end of their decisions.... i feel as small as my comp screen.. #ffi

2. &$*#() #@ I hate this new computer of mine #ffi guess I will use my old one

3. Only the bottle breaking ceremony at Hari's place this evening can relieve me of my #badmoods

4. To value knowledge and experience u need to have them

I sent 4 tweets. My friend who saw this encouraged me to stay calm (the power of twitter by the way)

While doing all this I realized that no one can be blamed. Obviously the demands of design and corporate cosmetics is not the core competence out here and that its my role to instill it into the system, that has been established with is incident.

There is a calmness when the cognitive areas takeover, the mind becomes cleared out and life seems far more easy to handle. This is just an example and let me tell you I am far from being perfect.

On the G8 Day few of you bared your hearts, wonderful. The one common and constructive observation is – WE ARE ALL SERIOUS ABOUT WHAT WE ARE DOING AND ARE EMOTIONALLY INVOLVED. This is a fantastic starting point provided we move towards cognitive thought aggressively if not this same good nature within each of us can become our own nemesis / enemy.

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The beauty of being slow

2011-05-15T09:32:00.001+05:30

Its always about speed. Going around 20 blocks at average speed I could cover it in 65 minutes then add a little bit of speed I could cut down 12 to 15 minutes of time. Walking with a phone that doubled up as a stop watch, mentally measuring the time taken to cover every hundred paces... urggggggh!!!! it used to be so stressful. I came home sweating alright with a belief that enough calories and the pain of fractured muscles.

Today I decided to cover the same distance in 90 minutes. To check how slowly and how leisurely I can cover the distance. No timer, no phone, no music - just me. I realized after a few paces the running and the speed was more to reduce loneliness. It was a bit difficult the slow paced movements, seemed endless but I thought to myself its not the physical activity that I am going to focus on its the time I am going to spend with myself now.

I stopped when ever and wanted to stop, stretched, did sit ups, did not count steps, consciously reduced my speed to short paced steps. I loved it. It to me 90 minutes. I wish I can do it more often.

Now if you are a fast paced person try this once in a while. Its surely not easy

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MAY YOU KNOW

2011-05-01T09:41:00.001+05:30

ITS MAY, don't u feeling like scratching your head and wondering what is in if for me? You MAY know what is going to happen this month. There are some things that will surely happen like the sun rising and setting, the summer heat, and the laws of nature will continue to work.

There are a few things that MAY work only when we realize our role in the entire world. Personally I believe each of our actions have an impact on the future of this world. You may or may not want to contribute meaningfully but you will yet contribute - that you cannot stop. You can contribute to negativity and weakness. You must contribute in some fashion.

The problem comes when u see yourself as a piece of nobody doing something of no consequence. Then MAY wisdom dawn upon you this month.

Here is a nice may song for you ENJOY

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A triple-braided cord is not easily broken.

2011-04-28T19:16:00.001+05:30

A person standing alone can be attacked and defeated, but two can stand back-to-back and conquer. Three are even better, for a triple-braided cord is not easily broken.

Iam not into too much of numerology, yet there is something about this three that cannot be ignored. The Trishul, the Trinity .. well this can go on and on ..

Nature, Human Beings and Universe. There is a certain amount of complementary behaviour in the number three.

Now there cannot be a perfect 3, an imperfect tattered triple braided chord like the one you see here

You can see this perfect one here

Bottom line there are just the same.. however it is. Surely the the second picture may look comely and good but in strength they are the same.

Amazing aint it?

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Life and Death

2011-04-28T19:01:00.001+05:30

There used to be a time when the dead were buried outside the limits of the city. The place was deserted and eerie. Life had nothing to do with death. Today the grave yard is right next to us, the event of death has become an event to congregate, to share and also the mourn the departed soul.

No so much of mourning we will do as days go by. No we are not getting hard hearted. We have just conquering death with life. Life is to be lived in a way that it eats up death.

Hail LIFE

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Sai Baba

2011-04-24T23:25:00.002+05:30

My first impression of Sai Baba was that he was a trickster. And then as days passed by I cam across some good friends who were his followers. I knew these guys were not the ones who can be easily swayed by tricks. So what was it that made Sai Baba such a popular man?

I know very little of him but I knew he was committed to healthcare, he has managed to attract the best of doctors from all over the world to come a serve.

He has surely impacted many lives, given lots of meaning. Surely there must be something about this man.

Someday I intend applying my mind on this.

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Understanding social media the simple way

2011-04-21T23:50:00.001+05:30

Social Media stuff can be a little crazy. Now its best that we have a simple view on what it a means through an act we are all familiar with

After seeing that Pani Poori guy in action after being bullied by natures call

Just in case you saw the video and freaked out on it.. Don’t get too uptight the probability of it being fake is very high. I remember seeing a video of a few school girls who wanted to make it in life. They uploaded a video of themselves bashing up an innocent girl mercilessly. And in this case the act was real… they were charged for manslaughter. So what they became famous.
Here is a simple way to understand social media...

LinkedIn = I pee well.

Twitter = I need to pee.

Facebook = I peed!

Foursquare = I’m peeing here.

Quora = Why am I peeing? (Via EffBee)

MySpace = listen to me pee.

StumbleUpon = I just found a great place to pee

Flickr = look at my pee through the years.

YouTube = Tell people their pee is fake.

Orkut : Can we have friendship over pee

Source : Gracelyns blog Link

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Untitled

2011-04-18T12:53:00.001+05:30

<h3>Pakistan’s first female football club breaks down cultural barriers</h3>

<p class='embed_teaser'>KARACHI, Pakistan, 14 April 2011- On a scorching, early morning in Karachi, a dozen girls - some wearing shawls and burqas in the blistering heat - arrive in a large walled field, ready to practice football. Their eagerness is evident as they enthusiastically remove their burqas to reveal their practice uniforms. Hurriedly, they put on their cleats and run out to the field to meet their head coach, Sadia Sheikh.</p>

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Collection of Wills

2011-04-16T11:03:00.003+05:30

.
.
And on that day will some people who want to rule will go forth into the streets collecting the 'wills' from people for their strength comes from the 'will' of the people. They will use all their might and strength, promise with coarse speeches and seduce the people out of their 'wills' with gifts of varied nature.
The people will drop their 'wills' in little tin cans. These tin cans will be kept in secret places they will crunch and munch together and decide finally as to who got how many wills.
Now as this will take a prolonged period of time the ones who went about collecting 'wil'l have dreams and visions. Some will dream of being inseminated by a frog and will dread the days and nights, while some will dream of a prince growing in the womb.
Then the day arrives. The ones who give birth to the frogs and other ghastly creatures will realize that their quest to buy 'power semen' with money has not helped. A multitude of locusts will arise out of the north, west, and south and nibble away all their crops and wealth. Hummers wil be humped. Single stringed instruments will play a dirge though out the day on the Televison channels . There will cries and moaning.
The day fast approacheth. May the 13th day be a day of joy for those who had contributed their 'will's.
.
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Wooden platform, nails and a winning football team

2011-04-15T13:37:00.003+05:30

Some how this little saying got glued to my my mind when I stumbled on it _ A SMOOTH SEA NEVER MAKES A SKILLFUL SAILOR. Ever since I have been using this as my eye glasses, sometimes as a guiding principle to view the world. Often times I have thrown myself in crisis points thoughtlessly hoping to learn and become more skillful.
The danger of not being able to learn can finish me off. This may be a bit contradictory to my previous blog - Zombie Will I Be.
So be it. Life is afterall a struggle most of them goes through our minds. I would not attempt to resolve it, neither would I want to fuel it anymore, for my granary of stuggle is full and it may burst forth as bottle of coke with a pack of mentos.
So when i watched this video it excited me no end. I thought I must share it with you.

http://youtu.be/HFTGWcvF-aA

The summer with monopoly

2011-04-15T09:58:00.001+05:30

40 yrs ago. Trevor, Melwyn and Altia Fernando, my neighbours were my playmates. Summer holidays, we woke up early, signalled each other with a whistle and under a stairway, we spread out our monopoly board and played and played endlessly. We had such great time for days together, having a hearty laugh when we went past the 'Start' and forgot to pick up the bonus. Occassionally we broke the rules but we never cheated. We took turns to double up as bankers. Strange this taking care of money job did not excite any of us, it took our focus off the game. The thought of taking money from the bank to line our pockets to buy up stations and properties never occured to us. Even when we were broke we followed the rules.

End of the day we enjoyed those days. Wonder were my friends are?

In the real world can this happen? The ones whom we entrust authority and power end up as decievers. How can a man who has been chosen by millions of people just resort to deception and amass wealth close to Rs 2000 crores? How can this man ever sleep? What will he tell his children and wife? what will he think of himself? There is one thing Iam certain his life is real tough, and heart of hearts he must be longing to be delivered from this vortex of deception and subterfuge.

Its a pity that in this wonderful game of life these wonderful people (iam sure they are good) get carried away and decide to play the game against the rules.

Arnt they loosing out this enormous joy of being sincere and responsible ?

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Zombie I will be (repeated nth time)

2011-04-14T17:01:00.001+05:30

For the sake of special effect I would abstain from naming this huge software company ( r u adequately impressed ) It so huge that one of its small operations with 15000 employees has a man heading its function had something to say that changed my way of thinking. I didnt ask, but an inquisitive soul asked this gentle man as to what sort of people he prefers to hire. The reply was faster than how you would react if you were to be bitten by mosquito. He said AVERAGE IQ and high consistency. Now I quickly de-constructed it in my mind and heard it as ZOMBIEES WHO JUST DO WHAT HAS BEEN TOLD TO DO.

Now you would imagine that the founders of the company must be having a very high IQ in order to be able to run a huge corporation. Sorry you are wrong again. They are average minds too.

What does this actually suggest to you. The ones who think actually waste precious time. They only manage to isolate themselves from doing. TRUE. This is the biggest lesson I learnt over the week.

The ones who have high IQ let them move about pretending to be zombies. Allow let the zombie think you are one among them them and accept you.

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Choosing a leader

2011-04-12T09:44:00.001+05:30

Since cricket is a popular sport lets take that an example. The 1983 world cup and the 2011

world cup winning teams were led by captains who were more popular from the village/ district

they came from. India has no shortage of leaders. No please dont look for them in the Cities

nor in IIM's or IIT's. The real leaders know the real problems the common faces since they are

one among them.

So when you choose a leader remember that looks, education and riches of a person should

actually disqualify him from running for any elections. These guys not only have no clue about

the suffering of the majority and yet the possess the skills to make money without even

themselves being aware of it (education sure helps)

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The humor of an old owl

2011-04-11T09:00:00.001+05:30

Karunanidhi (the CM of TamilNadu) is invited for a Christian meeting and is presented with a Bible. He flips through it, and when his turn comes he enthralls the minority group by punning on the word JUSTICE. He says that he is JUST MAN. And then goes on to say that it so not because of the moral standards but because he comes from the Justice party... People go crazy at this wisdom. My Dad used to tell this, to many people.

Just yesterday, 10th April I saw a small clip of Karunanidhi on Televison. He was apparently addressing the people involved in the Movie Industry. The govt has alloted some huge tract of land for them. The association wanted to name the place - KALAIGAR NAGAR - the old owl started punning on the word Nagar. Nagar in Tamil has two meanings... it means a small town or locality it also means move. eeeeks... the guy sucks with his pun and so called language skills...

Plato hated Poets... at least of this sort need to be banished.

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Future Trends 2

2011-04-11T08:41:00.001+05:30

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Future Trends 1

2011-04-11T08:40:00.001+05:30

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the 10 commandments dude

2011-04-10T20:08:00.001+05:30

Personalize your messages with original hand-drawn fonts. From Yahoo! Mail, click on the "Use My Cool Fonts" application to get started. Otherwise click here to Send yours now!

If you can’t read this message, click here for more information.

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Genetic Lottery

2011-04-10T20:03:00.001+05:30

I watched this film on Youtube check it out here is the link This blind man with a modest job though he is unable to see yet he has the vision of children actually struggling in the dark while going for tutions. Well we who can see, are those who have won this genetic lottery called sight, and most of us are just wasting it away.

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If only I can be grounded

2011-04-10T19:31:00.001+05:30

On saturday i had to moderate a panel discussion. The

mantras chanted by one on all was on how to take flight,
make it, leap, grow. Am I a person without any ambitions
if I say. IF ONLY WE CAN BE GROUNDED !!!!!!

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Yes I will

2011-04-07T21:50:00.002+05:30

Param did not want to wake up, he was rolling in his bed. His wife, Shaku, is a machine, a good one at that. It was this machine that kept the kettle on the boil and the food on the table. Drowsy with a bad hang over Param steps inside his bathroom, 40 mts go by, he appears refreshed and ready to fly. Param's is buzzing, glugs his octane of a coffee and in one swoosh his car keys glues to his fingers and off past his domestic turnstile he runs.

Param has his own little rituals too, he forgets to kiss Shaku good bye, so he rushes back, plants a kiss on her head and he is on the roll. That kiss was what freaked out Shaku, though that was the only physical contact she had with Param its ritualistic nature seemed to become an aversion to Shaku.

Nearly 4 years have gone by, Shaku stayed at home while Param took on the world and brought the goodies home. You cant ask for more can you? was what Shaku's mother had to say.

Days such as these, happen in such regularity, Shaku was in intense turmoil and her problem was the reason for the turmoil was as slippery as an eel, it slipped through her delicate fingers splashing water and mud on her clothes it and rested at her feet. All she had to do was stomp out the thought and get going through another insipid day. This is what she did most of the times.

With a remote on had she jumped channels and seemed to be at rest watching the crocodile hunter. As the adventurer grappled grappled with a croc many times his size and he finally managed to subdue it. Something snapped within her. Its problem that needs to be addressed not the cause, seemed to run across her fore head as a ticker tape message.

As she wiped away the moisture left from that ritual kiss her husband planted on her......poooooffff appears a genie, entertaining her of such fun and frolic as her imagination and thoughts ran helter skelter. Her episodic memory seemed to fire with vengeance. She recalled the time when her classmate, Rabin, who was fond of her, spared no opportunity to touch her.

Her thoughts about Rabin seemed to more than sustain her, the air seemed to be filled with aroma of flowers and she felt rested within herself. Those powerful Rabinic emotional chemicals that surged within her eroded the iron cast arrangement wedlock had thrust upon her.

As the iron chains fell apart she submitted herself to life. Yes I will, Shaku said her self.

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Suraj was supposed to be fly in our spaghetti

2011-04-04T07:44:00.001+05:30

The winning Sri Lankan team had Suraj Randiv being flown specially for the game. The guy was apparently disappointed and chilling on the beach for having been dropped for the world cup. Then cometh the phone call.

Hello Suraj, we are meeting India in the finals

"I know, so what can I do about it? please do well and get the world cup home"

I called to tell you that your tickets to Mumbai is ready, pack up and we are taking the 6 pm flight and you have just 3 hours left

"why me? there is Herath, Murali, Dislhan to spin the ball for you"

But you are special Suraj, the Indians hate you for denying that century to Sehwag, you had guts to bowl a no ball when Sehwag needed one run for his century, and India needed just one run to win.

"so you want me to provoke the opposition with my presence and weaken them?

Yes you got it bang on

These guys were terribly mistaken indeed. Suraj the weed was not even in the dark corner of Indias junked rusty radar. He was just a toxic bubble. Using Suraj as a 'fly in the spagetti' or a 'pebble in the shoe' just dint work. Indians have a terrible memory for wrong doing.

But that last 6 of Dhoni will linger on for years to come, it will force many into the sidelines of depression and retirement. The new young players, Suraj-like ones, will not last. For a moment I was terribly disappointed when Australia dominated cricket. The ghost of Trevor Chappel undearm seemed to have helped them. McGrath, Warne, Gilchrist, Hayden were some amazing players who kept the ghost under wraps for a while.

I remember the Indian team captained by Bedi, being bullied and harressed by the West Indies pacemen.

Well today we talk about Bangladesh, Zimbabwe, Kenya, West Indies and now Australia in the same breath.

Pride goes before the fall. Dhoni is humble, and down to earth. Sachin is an embodiment of humility. I wish the nation learns from such people and as whole we show social grace and humility even as we excel. Only that will sustain.

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Matt Ridley: When ideas have sex

2011-03-30T23:37:00.001+05:30

When I was a student here in Oxford in the 1970s,the future of the world was bleak. The population explosion was unstoppable. Global famine was inevitable. A cancer epidemic caused by chemicals in the environment was going to shorten our lives. The acid rain was falling on the forests. The desert was advancing by a mile or two a year. The oil was running out. And a nuclear winter would finish us off. None of those things happened. (Laughter) And astonishingly, if you look at what actually happened in my lifetime, the average per-capita income of the average person on the planet, in real terms, adjusted for inflation,has tripled. Lifespan is up by 30 percent in my lifetime. Child mortality is down by two-thirds. Per-capita food production is up by a third. And all this at a time when the population has doubled.
How did we achieve that -- whether you think it's a good thing or not -- How did we achieve that? How did we become the only species that becomes more prosperous as it becomes more populous?The size of the blob in this graph represents the size of the population. And the level of the graphrepresents GDP per capita. I think to answer that question you need to understand how human beings bring together their brains and enable their ideas to combine and recombine, to meet and, indeed, to mate. In other words, you need to understand how ideas have sex.
I want you to imagine how we got from making objects like this to making objects like this. These are both real objects. One is an Acheulean hand axe from half a million years ago of the kind made by Homo erectus. The other is obviously a computer mouse. They're both exactly the same size and shape to an uncanny degree. I've tried to work out which is bigger, and it's almost impossible. And that's because they're both designed to fit the human hand. They're both technologies. In the end, their similarity is not that interesting. It just tells you they were both designed to fit the human hand. The differences are what interest me. Because the one on the left was made to a pretty unvarying design for about a million years -- from one-and-a-half million years ago to half a million years ago. Homo erectus made the same tool for 30,000 generations. Of course there were a few changes, but tools changed slower than skeletons in those days.There was no progress, no innovation. It's an extraordinary phenomenon, but it's true. Whereas the object on the right is obsolete after five years.And there's another difference too, which is the object on the left is made from one substance. The object on the right is made from a confection of different substances, from silicon and metal and plastic and so on. And more than that, it's a confection of different ideas, the idea of plastic, the idea of a laser, the idea of transistors. They've all been combined together in this technology.
And it's this combination, this cumulative technology, that intrigues me. Because I think it's the secret to understanding what's happening in the world. My body's an accumulation of ideas too,the idea of skin cells, the idea of brain cells, the idea of liver cells. They've come together. How does evolution do cumulative, combinatorial things? Well, it uses sexual reproduction. In an asexual species, if you get two different mutations in different creatures, a green one and a red one,then one has to be better than the other. One goes extinct for the other to survive. But if you have a sexual species, then it's possible for an individualto inherit both mutations from different lineages.So what sex does is it enables the individual to draw upon the genetic innovations of the whole species. It's not confined to its own lineage.
What's the process that's having the same effect in cultural evolution as sex is having in biological evolution? And I think the answer is exchange, the habit of exchanging one thing for another. It's a unique human feature. No other animal does it.You can teach them in the laboratory to do a little bit of exchange. And indeed there's reciprocity in other animals. But the exchange of one object for another never happens. As Adam Smith said, "No made ever saw a dog make a fair exchange of a bone with another dog." (Laughter) You can have culture without exchange. You can have, as it were, asexual culture. Chimpanzees, killer whales, these kinds of creatures, they have culture. They teach each other traditions which are handed down from parent to offspring. In this case, chimpanzees teaching each other how to crack nuts with rocks. But the difference is that these cultures never expand, never grow, never accumulate, never become combinatorial. And the reason is because there is no sex, as it were,there is no exchange of ideas. Chimpanzee troops have different cultures in different troops. There's no exchange of ideas between them.
And why does exchange raise living standards?Well, the answer came from David Ricardo in 1817. And here is a Stone Age version of his story,although he told it in terms of trade between countries. Adam takes four hours to make a spear and three hours to make an axe. Oz takes one hour to make a spear and two hours to make an axe. So Oz is better at both spears and axes than Adam. He doesn't need Adam. He can make his own spears and axes. Well no, because if you think about it, if Oz makes two spears and Adam make two axes, and then they trade, then they will each have saved an hour of work. And the more they do this, the more true it's going to be.Because the more they do this, the better Adam is going to get at making axes, and the better Oz is going to get at making spears. So the gains from trade are only going to grow. And this is one of the beauties of exchange, is it actually creates the momentum for more specialization, which creates the momentum for more exchange and so on.Adam and Oz both saved an hour of time. That is prosperity, the saving of time in satisfying your needs.
Ask yourself how long you would have to work to provide for yourself an hour of reading light this evening to read a book by. If you had to start from scratch, let's say you go out into the countryside.You find a sheep. You kill it. You get the fat of of it.You render it down. You make a candle, etc. etc.How long is it going to take you? Quite a long time.How long do you actually have to work to earn an hour of reading light if you're on the average wage in Britain today? And the answer is about half a second. Back in 1950, you would have had to work for eight seconds on the average wage to acquire that much light. And that's seven and a half seconds of prosperity that you've gained. Since 1950, as it were. Because that's seven and a half seconds in which you can do something else. Or you can acquire another good or service. And back in 1880, it would have been 15 minutes to earn that amount of light from the average wage. Back in 1800, you'd have had to work six hours to earn a candle that could burn for an hour. In other words, the average person on the average wage could not afford a candle in 1800.
Go back to this image of the axe and the mouse,and ask yourself: "Who made them and for who?"The stone axe was made by someone for himself.It was self-sufficiency. We call that poverty these days. But the object on the right was made for me by other people. How many other people? Tens? Hundreds? Thousands? You know, I think it's probably millions. Because you've to include the man who grew the coffee, which was brewed for the man who was on the oil rig, who was drilling for oil, which was going to be made into the plastic, etc. They were all working for me, to make a mouse for me. And that's the way society works.That's what we've achieved as a species.
In the old days, if you were rich, you literally had people working for you. That's how you got to be rich; you employed them. Louis XIV had a lot of people working for him. They made his silly outfits, like this. (Laughter) And they did his silly hairstyles, or whatever. He had 498 people to prepare his dinner every night. But a modern tourist going around the palace of Versailles and looking at Louis XIV's pictures, he has 498 people doing his dinner tonight too. They're in bistros and cafes and restaurants and shops all over Paris. And they're all ready to serve you at an hour's notice with an excellent meal that's probably got higher qualitythan Louis XIV even had. And that's what we've done, because we're all working for each other.We're able to draw upon specialization and exchange to raise each other's living standards.
Now, you do get other animals working for each other too. Ants are a classic example; workers work for queens and queens work for workers. But there's a big difference, which is that it only happens within the colony. There's no working for each other across the colonies. And the reason for that is because there's a reproductive division of labor. That is to say, they specialize with respect to reproduction. The queen does it all. In our species, we don't like doing that. It's the one thing we insist on doing for ourselves, is reproduction. (Laughter)Even in England, we don't leave reproduction to the Queen.
(Applause)
So when did this habit start? And how long has it been going on? And what does it mean? Well, I think, probably, the oldest version of this is probably the sexual division of labor. But I've got no evidence for that. It just looks like the first thing we did was work male for female and female for male.In all hunter-gatherer societies today, there's a foraging division of labor between, on the whole, hunting males and gathering females. It isn't always quite that simple. But there's a distinction between specialized roles between males and females. And the beauty of this system is that it benefits both sides. The woman knows that, in the Hadzas' case here -- digging roots to share with men in exchange for meat -- she knows that all she has to do to get access to protein is to dig some extra roots and trade them for meat. And she doesn't have to go on an exhausting hunt and try and kill a warthog. And the man knows that he doesn't have to do any digging to get roots. All he has to do is make sure that when he kills a warthog it's big enough to share some. And so both sides raise each other's standards of livingthrough the sexual division of labor.
When did this happen? We don't know, but it's possible that neanderthals didn't do this. They were a highly cooperative species. They were a highly intelligent species. Their brains on average, by the end, were bigger than yours and mine in this room today. They were imaginative. They buried their dead. They had language probably,because we know they had the FOXP2 gene of the same kind as us, which was discovered here in Oxford. And it looks like they probably had linguistic skills. They were brilliant people. I'm not dissing the neanderthals. But there's no evidence of a sexual division of labor. There's no evidence of gathering behavior by females. It looks like the females were cooperative hunters with the men.And the other thing there's no evidence for is exchange between groups. Because the objects that you find in neanderthal remains, the tools they made, are always made from local materials. For example, in the Caucasus there's a site where you find local neanderthal tools. They're always made from local chert. In the same valley there are modern human remains from about the same date, 30,000 years ago. And some of those are from local chert, but more -- but many of them are made from obsidian from a long way away. And when human beings began moving objects around like this, it was evidence that they were exchanging between groups.
Trade is 10 times as old as farming. People forget that. People think of trade as a modern thing.Exchange between groups has been going on for a hundred thousand years. And the early evidence for it crops up somewhere between 80 and 120,000 years ago in Africa, when you see obsidian and jasper and other things moving long distances in Ethiopia. You also see seashells --as discovered by a team here in Oxford -- moving 125 miles inland from the Mediterranean in Algeria. And that's evidence that people have started exchanging between groups. And that will have led to specialization.
How do you know that long-distance movementmeans trade rather than migration? Well, you look at modern hunter gatherers like aboriginals, who quarried for stone axes at a place called Mt. Isa,which was a quarry owned by the Kalkadoon tribe.They traded them with their neighbors for things like stingray barbs. And the consequence was that stone axes ended up over a large part of Australia.So long-distance movement of tools is a sign of trade, not migration.
What happens when you cut people off from exchange, from the ability to exchange and specialize? And the answer is that, not only do you slow down technological progress, you can actually throw it into reverse. An example is Tasmania. When the sea level rose, and Tasmania became an island 10,000 years ago,the people on it, not only experienced slower progress than people on the mainland, they actually experienced regress. They gave up the ability to make [bone] tools and fishing equipment and clothing because the population of about 4,000 people was simply not large enough to maintain the specialized skills necessary to keep the technology they had. It's as if the people in this room were plonked on a desert island. How many of the things in our pockets could we continue to make after 10,000 years? It didn't happen in Tierra del Fuego -- similar island, similar people. The reason, because Tierra del Fuego is separated from South America by a much narrower straight.And there was trading contact across that straightthroughout 10,000 years. The Tasmanians were isolated.
Go back to this image again and ask yourself, not only who made it and for who, but who knew how to make it. In the case of the stone axe, the man who made it knew how to make it. But who knows how to make a computer mouse? Nobody, literally nobody. There is nobody on the planet who knows how to make a computer mouse. I mean this quite seriously. The president of the computer mouse company doesn't know. He just knows how to run a company. The person on the assembly line doesn't know because he doesn't know how to drill an oil well to get oil out to make plastic, and so on.We all know little bits, but none of us knows the whole.
I am of course quoting from a famous essay by Leonard Read, the economist in the 1950s, called "I, Pencil" in which he wrote about how a pencil came to be made, and how nobody knows even how to make a pencil, because the people who assemble it don't know how to mine graphite. And they don't know how to fell trees and that kind of thing. And what we've done in human society,through exchange and specialization, is we've created the ability to do things that we don't even understand. It's not the same with language. With language we have to transfer ideas that we understand with each other. But with technology,we can actually do things that are beyond our capabilities.
We've gone beyond the capacity of the human mind to an extraordinary degree. And by the way,that's one of the reasons that I'm not interested in the debate about I.Q., about whether some groups have higher I.Q.s that other groups. It's completely irrelevant. What's relevant to a society is how well people are communicating their ideas, and how well they're cooperating, not how clever their individuals are. So we've created something called the collective brain. We're just the nodes in the network. We're the neurons in this brain. It's the interchange of ideas, the meeting and mating of ideas between them, that is causing technological progress, incrementally, bit by bit. However, bad things happen. And in the future, as we go forward,we will, of course experience terrible things. There will be wars; there will be depressions; there will be natural disasters. Awful things will happen in this century, I'm absolutely sure. But I'm also that, because of the connections people are making,and the ability of ideas to meet and to mate as never before. I'm also sure that technology will advance, and therefore living standards will advance. Because through the cloud, through crowd sourcing, through the bottom-up world that we've created, where not just the elites, but everybody is able to have their ideas and make them meet and mate, we are surely accelerating the rate of innovation.
Thank you.

How to make work-life balance work Nigel Marsh

2011-03-30T21:15:00.000+05:30

What I thought I would do is I would start with a simple request. I'd like all of you to pause for a moment, you wretched weaklings, and take stock of your miserable existence. (Laughter)

Now that was the advice that St. Benedict gave his rather startled followers in the Fifth century. It was the advice that I decided to follow myself when I turned 40. Up until that moment, I had been that classic corporate warrior -- I was eating too much, I was drinking too much, I was working too hard, and I was neglecting the family. And I decided that I would try and turn my life around. In particular, I decided I would try to address the thorny issue of work-life balance. So I stepped back from the workforce, and I spent a year at home with my wife and four young children. But all I learned about work-life balance from that year was that I found it quite easy to balance work and life when I didn't have any work. (Laughter) Not a very useful skill, especially when the money runs out.

So I went back to work, and I've spent these seven years since struggling with, studying and writing about work-life balance. And I have four observations I'd like to share with you today. The first is, if society's to make any progress on this issue, we need an honest debate. But the trouble is so many people talk so much rubbish about work-life balance. All the discussions about flexi-time or dress-down Fridays or paternity leave only serve to mask the core issue, which is that certain job and career choices are fundamentally incompatible with being meaningfully engaged on a day-to-day basis with a young family. Now the first step in solving any problem is acknowledging the reality of the situation you're in. And the reality of the society that we're in is there are thousands and thousands of people out there leading lives of quiet, screaming desperation, where they work long, hard hours at jobs they hate to enable them to buy things they don't need to impress people they don't like. (Laughter) (Applause) It's my contention that going to work on Friday in jeans and T-shirt isn't really getting to the nub of the issue.

(Laughter)

The second observation I'd like to make is we need to face the truth that governments and corporations aren't going to solve this issue for us. We should stop looking outside; it's up to us as individuals to take control and responsibility for the type of lives that we want to lead. If you don't design your life, someone else will design it for you, and you may just not like their idea of balance. It's particularly important -- this isn't on the World Wide Web is it, I'm about to get fired -- it's particularly important that you never put the quality of your life in the hands of a commercial corporation. Now I'm not talking here just about the bad companies -- the abattoirs of the human soul as I call them. (Laughter) I'm talking about all companies. Because commercial companies are inherently designed to get as much out of you they can get away with. It's in their nature, it's in their DNA, it's what they do -- even the good, well-intentioned companies. On the one hand, putting child care facilities in the workplace is wonderful and enlightened. On the other hand, it's a nightmare; it just means you spend more time at the bloody office. We have to be responsible for setting and enforcing the boundaries that we want in our life.

The third observation is we have to be careful with the time frame that we choose upon which to judge our balance. Before I went back to work after my year at home, I sat down and I wrote out a detailed, step-by-step description of the ideal balanced day that I aspired to. And it went like this: Wake up well-rested after a good night's sleep. Have sex. Walk the dog. Have breakfast with my wife and children. Have sex again. (Laughter) Drive the kids to school on the way to the office. Do three hours work. Play sport with a friend at lunch time. Do another three hours work. Meet some mates in the pub for an early evening drink. Drive home for dinner with my wife and kids. Meditate for half an hour. Have sex. Walk the dog. Have sex again. Go to bed. (Applause) How often do you think I have that day? (Laughter) We need to be realistic. You can't do it all in one day. We need to elongate the time frame upon which we judge the balance in our life, but we need to elongate it without falling into the trap of the "I'll have a life when I retire, when my kids have left home, when my wife has divorced me, my health is failing, I've got no mates or interests left." (Laughter) A day is too short, after I retire is too long. There's got to be a middle way.

A fourth observation: We need to approach balance in a balanced way. A friend came to see me last year -- and she doesn't mind me telling this story -- a friend came to see me last year and said, "Nigel, I've read your book. And I realize that my life is completely out of balance. It's totally dominated by work. I work 10 hours a day, I commute two hours a day. All of my relationships have failed. There's nothing in my life apart from my work. So I've decided to get a grip and sort it out. So I joined a gym." (Laughter) Now I don't mean to mock, but being a fit 10-hour a day office rat isn't more balanced, it's more fit. (Laughter) Lovely though physical exercise may be, there are other parts to life. There's the intellectual side, there's the emotional side, there's the spiritual side. And to be balanced, I believe we have to attend to all of those areas -- not just do 50 stomach crunches.

Now that can be daunting. Because people say, "Bloody hell mate, I haven't got time to get fit; you want me to go to church and call my mother." And I understand. I truly understand how that can be daunting. But an incident that happened a couple of years ago gave me a new perspective. My wife, who is somewhere in the audience today, called me up at the office and said, "Nigel, you need to pick our youngest son up," Harry "from school." Because she had to be somewhere else with the other three children for that evening. So I left work an hour early that afternoon and picked Harry up at the school gates. We walked down to the local park, messed around on the swings, played some silly games. I then walked him up the hill to the local cafe, and we shared pizza for tea, then walked down the hill to our home, and I gave him his bath and put him in his Batman pajamas. I then read him a chapter of Roald Dahl's "James and the Giant Peach." I then put him to bed, tucked him in, gave him a kiss on his forehead and said, "Goodnight, mate," and walked out of his bedroom. As I was walking out of his bedroom, he said, "Dad?" I went, "Yes, mate?" He went, "Dad, this has been the best day of my life, ever." I hadn't done anything, hadn't taken him to Disney World or bought him a Playstation.

Now my point is the small things matter. Being more balanced doesn't mean dramatic upheaval in your life. With the smallest investment in the right places, you can radically transform the quality of your relationships and the quality of your life. Moreover, I think, it can transform society. Because if enough people do it, we can change society's definition of success away from the moronically simplistic notion that the person with the most money when he dies wins, to a more thoughtful and balanced definition of what a life well-lived looks like. And that, I think, is an idea worth spreading.

Influence in Social Media: How to Find the Top Bloggers

2011-02-23T09:03:00.001+05:30

Tags: Blogging Search

comments Posted February 10, 2011 by blur Group

Social media is all about mass participation. Millions of people have Twitter accounts,Facebook profiles and blogs – the trick is finding the most influential people and engaging with them.

How do you measure influence? There’s no definitive answer because ‘influence’ can mean many different things. But generally it can be broken down into three key types.

1. Volume: How frequently does this person talk? are they a compulsive tweeter, or do they only post once a month? The more they talk, the more opportunities you have to share your message.

2. Readership: Who (and how many) listen to them? If Stephen Fry mentions you then great! Don’t ignore people who don’t have masses of followers – consider the ripple effect – if influential people listen to what this person has to say then you have the potential to engage with them through your new found friend.

3. Relevance: What do they usually talk about? There may be a popular, frequent blogger who mentions your brand, but if their popularity is built on their expertise in a totally different area, then they may be no use to you. This is most important in specialist areas. Finding a good blogger who specialises in financial services could be the aim, but finding a footballer mentioning his mortgage might not fit your strategy!

There is data available which helps you separate the wheat from the chaff in the blogosphere. Sites likeTechnorati and Alexa have access to millions of blogs, and rank them based on traffic. A high Technorati or Alexa ranking means a high-traffic blog.

There is also many sites which monitor incoming links (or back-links). This is the number of other sites which link to the blog page you’re looking at. The greater the number of incoming links the greater the potential reach of the blog. This ties into page rank – Google PageRank is a good representation of the prominence of a blog on the search engine. Taking the example of financial services from earlier, if someone types ‘mortgage advice’ into Google, you’ll know how far down the page your blogger comes.

What about Twitter? It’s easy to see the number of followers a person has, and who they are. You can also see how many tweets they have posted, and what their area of interest is by looking at what they’ve said. However, it can be a laborious process comparing all this data to work out who the best people to engage with are.

If blogger outreach is a priority, and you want to have all the key information collated and presented in a tidy format, then social media monitoring tools may hold the answer. Yes, they can be expensive, and yes some bits work better than others, but tools like Radian6, Alterian SM2 and Meltwater Buzz will present you with analysis which could prove useful.

Radian6

Radian6 has a ‘Social Profiles’ section which can establish which accounts across social media belong to the same person. This means if you find an interesting tweet, you can see if the poster also has a blog, Facebook page etc, and look at the various stats on followers. They rate influence out of one hundre, and the criteria are customisable by the user, so if you want to focus on volume rather than readership you can do so!

Alterian SM2

Alterian SM2 has the capacity to identify important sites as well as influential people. Ranked from 1-10, it is easy to compare and play around with the system to see who is influential, and where they are talking. As with most social media monitoring tools, this analysis is automated, so be cautious, and always check who is being recommended.

Meltwater Buzz

Meltwater Buzz has the ‘Meltwater Rank’, which is an aggregation of Alexa, Technorati, and various others. You can drill down and look at the specific data making up the rank, but influencers are initially identified by how frequently they have mentioned the keyword. If a VIP mentions the term only once, they may not be picked up as an influencer.

The most important thing to remember when you find an influential person in social media is that they are influential for a reason. When you talk to them always bear in mind that they’re at liberty to write whatever they want so tread carefully. A brand ambassador with thousands of followers can be invaluable, but annoy an important blogger and you’ll have real problems!

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About blur Groupblur Group is a Creative Services Exchange where Marketing decision-makers buy the best solutions from Creative sellers.. It has been founded and developed exclusively using social media channels.

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Online presence will replace resume

2011-02-22T08:20:00.001+05:30

Dan Schawbel

PERSONAL BRANDING

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5 Reasons Why Your Online Presence Will Replace Your Resume in 10 years

Feb. 21 2011 - 9:00 am | 2,654 views | 1 recommendation | 25 comments

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

We’re seeing more and more recruiters use the web as a place to search for talent and conduct employment background searches. This trend is set to increase year over year and I’ve been predicting that an “online presence search” will become as common as a drug test since 2007. Your online presence should consist of your own website at yourfullname.com (a domain can be purchased at GoDaddy.com using promo code FAN3). This website is the core of your online presence and if you optimize it effectively, it will rank number one for your name in major search engines such as Google. Also, your online presence should contain social network profiles, with vanity URL’s, on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitterat a minimum. I would also get listed on sites, such as Spokeo.com, and obtain your Google profile.

By claiming your web presence, you’re protected from other people, with the same name, claiming it before you. You also gain control over how you’re perceived online, and thus what employers find out about you when they conduct their search. A recent study by OfficeTeam shows that more one-third of companies feel that resumes will be replaced by profiles on social networks. My prediction is that in the next ten years, resumes will be less common, and your online presence will become what your resume is today, at all types and sizes of companies.

5 reasons why your online presence will replace your resume:

1. Social networking use is skyrocketing while email is plummeting

More and more people are using social networks to send and receive messages. About 90% of U.S. Internet users visit a social networking site each month, reports Comscore. Usage of Web-based email has fallen 8%, with the biggest decline among 12 to 17 year-olds, with an almost 60% drop. Although, you may think of this as a generational trend, the highest growing demographic on Facebook is 35+, and LinkedIn caters primarily caters to that demographic too.Employers are reviewing your profiles to see what kind of person you are outside of work, who you’re connected to, and how you present yourself. Each gives clues to how well you can fit into the corporate culture. When employees don’t fit in the culture, there is turnover, and it costs the organization thousands of dollars.

2. You can’t find jobs traditionally anymore

In order to get a job, you have to be creative, attract jobs to your website, and network constantly. Applying to job postings, in newspapers and online, won’t get you anywhere and are becoming completely ineffective. Susan Adams, of Forbes.com, shared a survey by webjob.com of recently employed job seekers found

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Microphone god

2011-01-20T13:03:00.000+05:30

seldom does on get this opportunity to talk about some interesting life andreligion stuff.. this was one of those days. since evening i have interacted with two interesting friends.. One with whom I had a long conversation on human relationships and the importance of purity within and the other was on the control systems and mans desire for power.

our talk often meanders around the religious systems the church in particular. the question that often resonates is that _ why cant people just be people? why are the religious leaders heaping guilt and constraints on the people rather than setting them free and helping them to live a life of abundance.

my friend who used to preach in a church, does it even now occasionally, says that he was not popular because he actually empowered them, and told them to go forth in peace. the sheep wants a Shepard.. people want to be guided and instructed.. they would rather want to live a life with some strictures and some rules. they would rather listen to some wafer thin sermons (arul baliah would call it paper thin christ) than listen to some intense truths that are likely to set them free. so really the religious people are those who do not embrace freedom, the like to thrive within a small perimeter. social structures and entertainment prevails over the truth.

these are the ones who deserve the microphone god. the wielders of the microphone are having a field day.. preaching and worshiping and swaying the masses..

truth really cannot be proclaimed by one man, proclaiming himself to be in the second position in the celestial hierarchy … he that has an ear let him hear.

Does your body 'matter'? Its your spirit that wins dammit

2011-01-01T23:45:00.001+05:30

My evenings have become very valuable to me. I sift and sieve before deciding to attend any evening program. So when my good friend Nambi asked me to attend this Landmark Forum I asked adequate questions and finally decided to postpone a meeting to attend the Forum. The office was located in one of the prime gymnasiums – Fitness one, were people sweated out to derive their energy, purpose and strength from their own body. The entry to Landmark Forum office was at the side , and the office was narrow and small, and am sure it was a dump room of the gymnasium. I was sad the knowledge and wisdom has been tucked to a remote corner and the world and matter and body has taken over, seemed symbolic of the material age.

This actually got me to write this blog post.

Somehow I had this strange feeling that we Indian were trying to find some meaning from the west (particularly American culture). To me its like mixing water to oil. (oil is India) Its time we look at ourselves, for in us lies the future.

Devdutt Patnaik in his TED talk on East vs West the myths that mystify talks about the Alexander’s interaction with a gymnosophist (the naked wise man)

Alexander asked, "What are you doing?" the gymnosophist answered, "I'm experiencing nothingness." Then the gymnosophist asked, "What are you doing?" Alexander said, "I am conquering the world." And they both laughed. Each one thought that the other was a fool. The gymnosophist said, "Why is he conquering the world? It's pointless." And Alexander thought, "Why is he sitting around, doing nothing? What a waste of a life."

Even as early as 1980 the scientists believed to have established a ‘fact’ that universe is a “matter machine” made up of physical, individual atoms that fully obey the laws of Newtonian mechanics. Ten years late scientists came to realize that the universe is not made of matter suspended in empty space by energy. Einstiein revealed that we don not live in a universe with discrete, physical objects separated by dead space. Quantum physics talks about universe being an integration of interdependent energy fields that are entangled in an mesh-work of interacitons.

The west is propelled by American and European values, China by its ethnic homogeneity, India by its ancient religions and philosophy. Even as science is moving us towards the new understanding of proving the gymnosophist right, we Indians have suddenly found a hero in Alexander.

Ramesh Mohan writing about the Indian cricket’s team victory in South Africa says thus:

Unlike Australia's champion cricketers, who cultivated an intimidating air, doing little things that showed intent such as running onto the field after breaks, India has for the most part been calm and resilient. Where the Australians revelled in their athleticism, seeming younger than they were, the Indians have celebrated the wisdom that comes with age, appearing older than they are.

The council of elders — Rahul Dravid, Sachin Tendulkar, V.V.S. Laxman, Zaheer Khan — has about it the reassuring comfort of a dark-wood study. Although they are essentially ‘skill players', they know how to get the best out of their bodies over five days, so they can compete with faster, stronger athletes.

It’s ordained for us Indians to look within, to derive power from within ourselves. Mahabarata has numerous stories of even powerful kings who took firm vows, ate sparingly, and curbed their senses. The focus was on celibacy, purity, self control, observance of vows and reverence. Its time we Indians get to understand our strengths and work through them.

Now you need to decide if you want to build a material body and invest your time and money in a gym or understand the ways of the gymnosophist. Strengthening the spirit seems a much wiser option. Human WILL, will emerge not when every thing is perfect around you.

My next blog entry will be on finding strength in the weakest moments

source:

The Biology of Belief by Bruce H Lipton pg. 69
Rise of East in a new class of civilization by Minaz Merchant
The Hindu An appropriate end to a gainful year link

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2011 would mean that an average Man may need to be twice as strong to take on a Lady.

2010-12-31T22:33:00.001+05:30

You would have seen that ubiquitous MMXL in google. MMXL = 2011 in simple terms. Lets try to understand the key factors of this year from the numerological level and from the roman roots.

Lets start with the numbers.

After many years this has occurred. You add up the last two numbers (1+1) you will get the answer two (2). You will realize that 2 is the first number in 2011. This is a rare. Dont know when it happened the last time.. (actually dont even bother to check)
Now coming to 0 between. We as Indians know that ' 0 ' was an Indian creation. There are four civilizations that are jostling currently. The western, the Indian, the Chinese and the Islam. In the coming year since 0 is next to two it clearly denotes the emergence of India as a world power. Now how does this make it special. Iam in India, and if you are an Indian reading this you are from India too. So simply rejoice.
You add up all the numbers 2+0+1+1= 4.. it is FOUR. 3 +1 or 2+2 is also four. but these are merely 2 digits adding up to four. Four 4 digits to add up to four you will have the following combinations
- - - 1+1+1+1=4
    - 2+1+0+1=4
    - 3+1+0+0=4
    - 4+0+0+0=4
    - 2+0+0+2=4
    - 2+1+0+0=4
    - This goes on
But the beauty of this combination adding up to 4 is simply the way it looks 2+0+1+1= 4. Take a close look at it again.. even if you dont have spatial visual skills it really does not matter. Just enjoy the way it looks. Its got every thing. Two ones ( 1 ) that denote leanness. So those of whom who plan to shed weight and look thin and good will have a great year. Its got 2 which means the others too ( 2 ) fat ones who give rats ass for looks will also be forcibly given a six pack. The 0 shows that you will have zero problems with health. Over all a fantastic combination. SHALL WE CALL IT A YEAR OF GOOD HEALTH.

ROMAN NUMERALS

Now lets take the Roman Numerals. I have not applied too much of mind on the Roman system except for the little doctorate I managed to get on Roman civilization way back in ( i forgot the year). So I stand corrected if there any mistakes.

MMXL may remind you of the size of shirts.

Look at this equation on gender.

M = Male

L = Ladies

X = confrontation

Now put it together MMXL. It simply means that Men needs to be twice as strong to take on a Lady. No it does not mean 2 men should join (cheee!!!! thats bad and cowardly) Its one man with double his strength can only take on a Lady.

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Armageddon we shall call you Flora Chloe

2010-12-26T21:00:00.001+05:30

The word Tsunami has a new meaning now. Prior to 2004, at most, I would have ignored this word as a name of a Japanese hosiery outlet selling only women’s undergarments or a pretty Geisha. Tsunami (soo- naa-me) – honestly what is so horrific about this? The sounds in isolation and combined transmits peaceful Gandhian message.

If the people had been warned of Tsunami well in advance one may have found more people flocking to the beach to witness the entertainment, with touts selling tickets for seats with a better view. Katrina, Elnino, Nadine, Caren are names that come out of typical peace loving homes that embrace comfort and security. Whoever takes the decision to employ such names to such monstrous waves and twisters sure has a great sense of humor. They sure get a vicarious pleasure hanging a nice pink tag with names embedded in silver on these monsters. Perhaps is a way to tame them, which is just not possible, for these creatures don’t seem to have eyes or heart for that matter even a head or a neck to hang tags one.

The only reason for these soft names, I can think of is, to make sure mankind does not fear and worship nature, just like the way our ancestors (with simple minds) worshipped all those elements on which they had no control.

Step back for a while if we had given names like Tyron Shulaces U.G. Rection, Utits Besaggy, Juwanna Hooker, to these disasters. Someday these realistic hard sounding names may find place in the pantheon of gods. The communities that are alongside the coast will be the first adapters of these new gods, from there it will spread. Frickin Pagans !!!!!!!

We may carry a mile of ancestor memories, fearing natures elements, but that little centimeter of hope that we have over dominating the laws and forces of nature and to sit on the pinnacle of the food chain makes us want to name ice cream parlors, and coffee joints as Tsunami. We even a nick name a naughty little kid Elnino.

The fight is surely not against traditional foes today, they have been vanquished. The battle today is against us – our greed, our gluttony, our fears, our sloth, credit, mindless consumption etc. Its time we give some appropriate names to such little foes that have grown disproportionate in size.

Colors, preservatives and taste enhancers find a privileged place in most foods. Should we take their contribution and name them after their chemical structure?. If we were to rechristen Alaskan salmon Roe Caviar Malassol as antimony oxysulfide do you think it will work? At most antimony ox sulfide may become attractive and chemistry as a subject may sport a much needed sex appeal.

When greed, evil, lust, anger, pride swells up within us we seem to have given better names to nurture them. Then we even give new twists to our own identity and even festivals to strengthen our personal tectonic plates, and en-muscle them to rigidity eventually to atrophy.

Words are dead. We will soon derive our identity and aspirations as we are all set to used UID, Mobile number and our Bank account to define us.

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The Hound of Heaven

2010-12-19T17:23:00.001+05:30

The Hound of Heaven

Francis Thompson (1859-1907)

I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;

I fled Him, down the arches of the years;

I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways

Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears

I hid from Him, and under running laughter.

Up vistaed hopes I sped;

And shot, precipitated,

Adown Titanic glooms of chasmed fears,

From those strong Feet that followed, followed after.

But with unhurrying chase,

And unperturbèd pace,

Deliberate speed, majestic instancy,

They beat--and a Voice beat

More instant than the Feet--

"All things betray thee, who betrayest Me."

I pleaded, outlaw-wise,

By many a hearted casement, curtained red,

Trellised with intertwining charities

(For, though I knew His love Who followed,

Yet was I sore adread

Lest having Him, I must have naught beside);

But if one little casement parted wide,

The gust of His approach would clash it to.

Fear wist not to evade, as Love wist to pursue.

Across the margent of the world I fled,

And troubled the gold gateways of the stars,

Smiting for shelter on their clanged bars;

Fretted to dulcet jars

And silvern chatter the pale ports o' the moon.

I said to dawn, Be sudden; to eve, Be soon;

With thy young skyey blossoms heap me over

From this tremendous Lover!

Float thy vague veil about me, lest He see!

I tempted all His servitors, but to find

My own betrayal in their constancy,

In faith to Him their fickleness to me,

Their traitorous trueness, and their loyal deceit.

To all swift things for swiftness did I sue;

Clung to the whistling mane of every wind.

But whether they swept, smoothly fleet,

The long savannahs of the blue;

Or whether, Thunder-driven,

They clanged his chariot 'thwart a heaven

Plashy with flying lightnings round the spurn o' their feet--

Still with unhurrying chase,

And unperturbèd pace,

Deliberate speed, majestic instancy,

Came on the following Feet,

And a Voice above their beat--

"Naught shelters thee, who wilt not shelter Me."

I sought no more that after which I strayed

In face of man or maid;

But still within the little children's eyes

Seems something, something that replies;

They at least are for me, surely for me!

I turned me to them very wistfully;

But, just as their young eyes grew sudden fair

With dawning answers there,

Their angel plucked them from me by the hair.

"Come then, ye other children, Nature's--share

With me," said I, "your delicate fellowship;

Let me greet you lip to lip,

Let me twine with you caresses,

Wantoning

With our Lady-Mother's vagrant tresses'

Banqueting

With her in her wind-walled palace,

Underneath her azured daïs,

Quaffing, as your taintless way is,

From a chalice

Lucent-weeping out of the dayspring."

So it was done;

I in their delicate fellowship was one--

Drew the bolt of Nature's secrecies.

I knew all the swift importings

On the wilful face of skies;

I knew how the clouds arise

Spumèd of the wild sea-snortings;

All that's born or dies

Rose and drooped with--made them shapers

Of mine own moods, or wailful or divine--

With them joyed and was bereaven.

I was heavy with the even,

When she lit her glimmering tapers

Round the day's dead sanctities.

I laughed in the morning's eyes.

I triumphed and I saddened with all weather,

Heaven and I wept together,

And its sweet tears were salt with mortal mine;

Against the red throb of its sunset-heart

I laid my own to beat,

And share commingling heat;

But not by that, by that, was eased my human smart.

In vain my tears were wet on Heaven's gray cheek.

For ah! we know not what each other says,

These things and I; in sound I speak--

Their sound is but their stir, they speak by silences.

Nature, poor stepdame, cannot slake my drouth;

Let her, if she would owe me,

Drop yon blue bosom-veil of sky, and show me

The breasts of her tenderness;

Never did any milk of hers once bless

My thirsting mouth.

Nigh and nigh draws the chase,

With unperturbèd pace,

Deliberate speed, majestic instancy;

And past those noisèd Feet

A voice comes yet more fleet--

"Lo naught contents thee, who content'st not Me."

Naked I wait Thy love's uplifted stroke!

My harness piece by piece Thou hast hewn from me,

And smitten me to my knee;

I am defenseless utterly.

I slept, methinks, and woke,

And, slowly gazing, find me stripped in sleep.

In the rash lustihead of my young powers,

I shook the pillaring hours

And pulled my life upon me; grimed with smears,

I stand amid the dust o' the mounded years--

My mangled youth lies dead beneath the heap.

My days have crackled and gone up in smoke,

Have puffed and burst as sun-starts on a stream.

Yea, faileth now even dream

The dreamer, and the lute the lutanist;

Even the linked fantasies, in whose blossomy twist

I swung the earth a trinket at my wrist,

Are yielding; cords of all too weak account

For earth with heavy griefs so overplussed.

Ah! is Thy love indeed

A weed, albeit amaranthine weed,

Suffering no flowers except its own to mount?

Ah! must--

Designer infinite!--

Ah! must Thou char the wood ere Thou canst limn with it?

My freshness spent its wavering shower i' the dust;

And now my heart is a broken fount,

Wherein tear-drippings stagnate, spilt down ever

From the dank thoughts that shiver

Upon the sighful branches of my mind.

Such is; what is to be?

The pulp so bitter, how shall taste the rind?

I dimly guess what Time in mist confounds;

Yet ever and anon a trumpet sounds

From the hid battlements of Eternity;

Those shaken mists a space unsettle, then

Round the half-glimpsed turrets slowly wash again.

But not ere him who summoneth

I first have seen, enwound

With blooming robes, purpureal, cypress-crowned;

His name I know, and what his trumpet saith.

Whether man's heart or life it be which yields

Thee harvest, must Thy harvest fields

Be dunged with rotten death?

Now of that long pursuit

Comes on at hand the bruit;

That Voice is round me like a bursting sea:

"And is thy earth so marred,

Shattered in shard on shard?

Lo, all things fly thee, for thou fliest Me!

Strange, piteous, futile thing,

Wherefore should any set thee love apart?

Seeing none but I makes much of naught," He said,

"And human love needs human meriting,

How hast thou merited--

Of all man's clotted clay rhe dingiest clot?

Alack, thou knowest not

How little worthy of any love thou art!

Whom wilt thou find to love ignoble thee

Save Me, save only Me?

All which I took from thee I did but take,

Not for thy harms.

But just that thou might'st seek it in my arms.

All which thy child's mistake

Fancies as lost, I have stored for the at home;

Rise, clasp My hand, and come!"

Halts by me that footfall;

Is my gloom, after all,

Shade of His hand, outstreched caressingly?

"Ah, fondest, blindest, weakest,

I am He Whom thou seekest!

Thou dravest love from thee, who dravest Me."

Francis Thompson (1859-1907)

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Octet

2010-10-21T23:44:00.000+05:30

Octet

The Cross and the Surgeons Blade

2010-09-22T09:26:00.001+05:30

My friend, Emmanuel David, wanted me to write a Christmas story, and I warned him that it will not be the ones that can give goosebumps and make you feel good about yourself. He said go ahead. And from that moment I started getting preoccupied with it. Surprisingly for me, things locked in pretty fast, 72 hrs later, I was sitting a getting ready to write. It happened. I liked the way the first cut came out, little bit of refinement there it was and I shared it with him.

Now I need to 'refine' it further and get the conclusion done, tried doing it but somehow it was a little vague. People want the whole solution shrink wrapped and home delivered these days, the joy of do-it-yourself is old fashioned. We have no time.

Dr K M Cherian, says there is nothing called, there is no time. People are just lazy and not committed to anything thats all. You better sit up and listen to this world famous heart surgeon who also takes care for thousands of trees and animals personally.

And if Emmy permits, I would like to blog my Christmas story. Its called 'THE CROSS AND THE SURGEONS BLADE'
If you want to read it you can mail me at benedictg@gmail.com

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Why We Get Lost in Books - Andrea Thompson

2010-09-17T05:24:00.001+05:30

Any avid reader knows the power of a book to transport you into another world, be it the wizard realm of "Harry Potter" or the legal intrigue of the latest John Grisham.

Part of the reason we get lost in these imaginary worlds might be because our brains effectively simulate the events of the book in the same way they process events in the real world, a new study suggests.

The new study, detailed in the July 21 issue of the journal Psychological Science, builds on previous work that links the way our brains process images and written words to the way they process actions we perform ourselves.

Examining these links could shed light on why some people enjoy reading more than others and how our reading abilities change with time. Essentially, some people might paint a more vivid mental picture of written prose than others.

Kick in the brain

Previous studies have monitored how the brain processes video, written words, images and other stimuli, and compared them to how it processes first-hand experiences. These studies have shown that the brain processes these two types of stimuli similarly.

For example, reading a simple verb such as "run" or "kick" activates some of the same regions of the brain that would be activated when we actually go running or kick a ball.

But reading a single word isn't quite the same as reading a long, continuous passage. Jeffrey Zacks and his colleagues at Washington University in St. Louis set out to see whether the same pattern held for continuous reading by monitoring the brain processes of study participants with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans.

The 28 study participants (20 women and 8 men) spent about 10 minutes reading four narratives, each less than 1,500 words, taken from the book "One Boy's Day." The words from the book were flashed onto a screen that the participants could read on a mirror in front of their faces.

The book follows a school-age boy during a typical day, and was created by psychologists as a research tool. The passages were used in this study because they were a simple narrative of everyday activities that participants would easily relate to and process.

The book "avoids some of the novelistic techniques that would make it a little harder for us to generalize back to the understanding of real life," Zacks said, such as skipping around through time or long inner monologues.

Brain activation

The researchers coded the four narratives for six types of changes "that people might be monitoring while they're comprehending" — changes they would notice both in everyday life and possibly in reading, Zacks said. These changes included: spatial changes (when a location changed); object changes (when a character picked up a ball, say); character changes; causal changes (when an activity occurs that wasn't directly caused by the activity in a previous clause); and goal changes (when a character begins an action with a new goal).

Monitoring such changes in the environment is adaptive, because it likely helped our ancestors to predict what might happen next: where prey might dart to next or what a predator might do. Similarly, today it helps us predict what might happen next in a story.

Essentially, Zacks and his team were trying to suss out how a reader parses an ongoing text into meaningful events.

After the participants had read the passages, the researchers would ask them questions to see if they recognized where these changes occurred in the text. They then looked at the fMRI data to see if brain activity in key areas spiked with the changes — it did.

"It turns out that there are focal areas that are selectively involved in each of these kinds of processing," Zacks said.

The data doesn't show quite the same specificity that studies where participants read a single word show. For example, while reading the phrase "raise right arm" might activate the area of the brain that controls that action, reading that phrase in the context of a longer passage only shows activation in the general motor control areas of the brain.

Zacks is optimistic though that the results showing more specific match-ups "are going to generalize to continuous reading;" they will just take more testing and lots of data, he said.

Individual differences

Understanding how our brains process the events and changes while reading could help us understand some of the individual differences in reading, for example, why some people are sucked in by stories more than others.

While some readers can actually picture what they read, others may not.

"There are readers, competent readers, who say 'I have no pictures in my head when I read'," Zacks said.

Further studies could see whether there really is a difference between how the brains of these two types of people process the words and phrases they read.

"It may be the case that some people do this more than others," Zacks said.

With further study, Zacks also hopes to tease out how this brain processing changes across life span, and how it is affected by diseases such as age-related dementia and other neurophysiological changes.

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Food and Neuron Behaviour - by Gary Wenk

2010-09-17T05:19:00.001+05:30

The foods you eat often affect how your neurons behave and, subsequently, how you think and feel. From your brain’s perspective, food is a drug.

Humans are carbon-bond consumers. Carbon bonds come into the front end of your feeding tubes in the form of fats, carbohydrates, and proteins; you then break those chemical bonds to extract energy, and excrete the residue as carbon dioxide, water vapor and various solid waste. Sometimes, however, some of these chemicals can make their way from your digestive system and into your brain; the consequences can be subtle or profound.

The distinction between what is considered a food (something that your body wants or needs in order to function optimally) or a drug (something that your brain wants or needs in order to function optimally) is becoming increasingly difficult to define. Indeed, the routine use of some substances, such as stimulants and depressants, is so universal that most of us do not even consider them to be drugs, but, rather, actual food. Is coffee, tea, tobacco, alcohol, cocoa, or marijuana a nutrient or a drug?

In truth, anything you take into your body should be considered a drug, whether it’s obviously nutritious or not. As you will see, even molecules that are clearly nutritious (such as essential amino acids like lysine and tryptophan—available in bulk at your nearest grocery store) exhibit properties that many of us would attribute to a drug.

The foods we eat, and many of our most popular psychoactive drugs, come from plants or animals. The ingredients in these plant and animal products are very similar if not identical to the neurotransmitters our brains and bodies use to function normally. This is why the contents of our diets can interact with our neurons to influence brain function, and it highlights a very important principle: The chemicals in the food that you eat will only act upon your brain if in some way those chemicals resemble an actual neurotransmitter or otherwise interact with a biochemical process in your brain that influences the production, release, or inactivation of a neurotransmitter. These “active” ingredients deserve close scrutiny.

How is it possible that plants and humans use such similar chemicals for normal, everyday functions? Plants produce chemicals that are capable of affecting our brain because they share an evolutionary history with us on this planet. Even primitive one-celled organisms produce many of the same chemicals that are in our brains. Therefore, whether you choose to eat a bunch of broccoli, a plate of sushi, or a heap of amoeba, the chemicals each meal contains may alter how your neurons function and, therefore, how you feel or think. We have all experienced the consequences of our shared evolutionary history with the plants we eat. For example, unripe bananas contain the neurotransmitter serotonin. When you eat an unripe banana, its serotonin is free to act upon the serotonin neurons within your digestive tract. The consequence is likely to be increased activation of the muscles in the wall of your intestines, usually experienced as diarrhea.

Many plants contain compounds that should be able to enhance your brain’s performance. For example, potatoes, tomatoes, and eggplants contain solanine and α-chaconine, substances that can enhance the action of acetylcholine, a chemical in your brain that is vital to memory formation. Your mood might be enhanced slightly by eating fava beans because they contain L-DOPA, a precursor to the production of dopamine, the reward chemical in your brain. Whether these food-borne compounds actually affect your brain depends upon how much you consume and your own personal physiology. This might explain why some people find it quite rewarding to eat potatoes or eggplants.

Morphine-like chemicals capable of acting upon the brain are produced in your intestines when you consume milk, eggs, cheese, spinach, mushrooms, pumpkin, and various fish and grains. Dairy products in particular contain a protein known as casein, which enzymes in your intestines can convert into beta-casomorphin. In newborns, that beta-casomorphin can easily pass out of the immature gut and into the developing brain to produce euphoria.

The pleasurable feeling produced by this opiate-like compound in newborn mammals after their first taste of their mother’s milk is believed to encourage the infant to return again and again for nourishment. Thus, being able to experience the euphoria induced by this opiate-like chemical has life and death consequences for the newborn child. Adults do not experience this euphoria after drinking milk due to the presence of well-developed blood–gut and blood–brain barriers. Perhaps if a glass of milk provided us with the euphoria of opiates and the pain relief of morphine, then dairy cows would only be sold on the black market!

Even the spices we use to flavor our food and drink may contain psychoactive chemicals that can alter the function of the brain. The spice nutmeg comes from the nutmeg tree, Myristica fragrans, and contains myristicin, which is chemically quite similar to mescaline and amphetamine. Myristicin and related compounds are also found in carrots, parsley, fennel, dill, and a few other spices—but at very low concentrations, so not to worry about getting intoxicated at the hors d’oeuvres tray. Typically, one must consume about 30 grams of nutmeg powder—or roughly the contents of an entire container of the product that you could purchase at your local grocery store—to experience its psychoactive effects. A single slice of pumpkin pie is unlikely to produce any noticeable effects upon the psyche. Reactions to nutmeg vary considerably, from nothing at all, to euphoria at low doses, to marijuana- and LSD-like experiences at higher doses, with hallucinations that can last up to 48 hours. It all depends upon the amount consumed.

Similar to the unpleasant repercussions of eating unripe bananas, one other side effect of consuming nutmeg is extreme diarrhea caused by the stimulation of sensitive neurons within the intestines. Given this disagreeable reaction, it is surprising that nutmeg has also been claimed to be a potent aphrodisiac. Perhaps for these reasons, one of my students once consumed an entire canister of nutmeg that he had dissolved in some applesauce; the weekend he spent in the bathroom rather than the bedroom demonstrated why most people never try nutmeg more than once.

Regarding caffeine and nicotine, arguably our two most beloved plant-derived drugs, so much has been written that I will not repeat any of it here. However, as a self-confessed chocoholic I am compelled to discuss why chocolate can be so addicting. Chocolate contains a bit of caffeine, but also an array of other psychoactive compounds that may contribute to the pleasurable sensation of eating it. Chocolate contains phenethylamine, a molecule that resembles amphetamine, and a small amount of a chemical called anandamide, which resembles the active ingredient in marijuana. Anandamide happens to be used by our brain as a regular neurotransmitter and appears to be critical for us to experience pleasure.

Chocolate also contains some estrogen-like compounds, a fact that may explain a recent series of reports showing that men who eat chocolate live longer than men who do not eat chocolate. The effect was not seen for women, who have an ample supply of their own estrogen until menopause. Post-menopausal women still may gain benefits from being chocoholics, though, because chocolate also contains magnesium salts that may reduce the frequency and severity of hot flashes and night sweating. And finally, a standard bar of chocolate contains as many antioxidants as a glass of red wine. Clearly, there are many good reasons for men and women to eat chocolate to obtain its indescribably soothing, mellow, and anxiety-reducing effect.

Chocolate, however, is a newcomer compared to humanity’s first known anxiety-reducing agent: ethyl alcohol. There is evidence that fermentation of grains to make alcohol-containing beverages may have begun in the Caucasus region more than 10,000 years ago. The ancient Egyptians produced alcoholic beverages and there are some passages within their texts referring to the social problems associated with drunkenness. Uisce beatha, meaning “water of life,” was the name given by Irish monks in the 6th century to a drink they prepared, a drink that today we know as whiskey. The drink was a surprisingly excellent source of nutrition, although absent some essential water-soluble B-vitamins.

The first documented distillation of alcohol was the conversion of wine into brandy during the Middle Ages at a medical school in Salerno, Italy. Once again, the new beverage became known as Aqua vitae, Latin for “the water of life.” Brandy became the primary distilled liquor in Europe until the middle of the 17th century when the Dutch perfected the process of distilling liquor and flavoring it with juniper berries to make gin.

Alcohol enhances the widespread inhibitory action of the neurotransmitter GABA and acts as a depressant on the central nervous system. For this reason, in the 19th century, alcohol was widely used as a general anesthetic. Unfortunately, the duration of its depressant action on the brain was too long and could not be controlled easily or safely. The effective dose for surgical analgesia using alcohol is very close to its lethal dose. Therefore, it was possible to induce sufficient anesthesia for a cowboy to remove an arrow from his leg, but it was unlikely that the unfortunate cowboy would survive the operation. If the arrow did not kill him, the operation certainly could. Of course, prior to the 20th century, this was generally true for many medicines and therapies.

To conclude, because of your shared evolutionary history with the plants and animals on this planet, when you consume them you risk having their chemicals affect how you feel and even how you think. The degree to which they influence your cognitive functioning depends upon how easily they can achieve an adequate concentration in your brain. As you’ve read, this depends upon how much of each chemical is contained in your diet, your age and physical health, and the status of your blood-gut and blood-brain barriers. With these concepts in mind, consider the following science fiction scenario: a spaceman is walking on an Earth-like planet and is suddenly bitten by an unfriendly fanged creature. The spaceman can see that he is injured and that the beast’s bite injected a liquid substance, perhaps venom, beneath his skin. Does he die?

No, he does not die, because his species and that of the creature on this foreign planet do not share an evolutionary past or a common ancestor. Although they may both be made of proteins formed from amino acids, their independent evolutionary paths should made it highly improbable that they use similar neurotransmitter molecules within their respective brains and bodies. Every spaceman from Flash Gordon to Captain Kirk to Luke Skywalker should feel safe walking around any planet (except their own) with impunity from animal and plant toxins. For this same reason, the intoxicating drinks and powerful medicines that always seem to be popular in these foreign worlds in science fiction movies would also have totally different effects, if any effects at all, on the brains of our plucky spaceman. Eating otherworldly foods might be the most disappointing and distressing experience of all: Even if they were filling and somehow tasted delicious, as products of utterly alien biochemistries they would probably prove devoid of nourishment for our Earthly bodies. Thus, starvation might be the greatest threat to any future explorers of alien biospheres. Unless, perhaps, they’d brought along a large supply of chocolate.

Gary Wenk is a professor at Ohio State University, a specialist in the effects of drugs upon the brain, and the author of Your Brain on Food.

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Rathambore family politics

2010-09-15T08:27:00.001+05:30

This reads like a serial on Television. The envy, the intrigue, the ruthlessness... but this time the tigers seem to have taken on the behaviour of human beings

Ranthambore Fort in the heart of tiger territory seems to be prime real estate that every tiger envies. Machli, the big cat, had ruled it for over a decade till her daughter Satara threw her out in a heartless battle for supremacy.

This moving tale of rivalry and betrayal in a tiger family in Rajasthan’s Ranthambore National Park was brilliantly captured by India’s ace cinematographer S. Nallamuthu in his documentary “Tiger Queen”. This is India’s first full length wildlife film shot in a high definition (HD) format, says Nallamuthu.

“The idea of ‘Tiger Queen’ came from the fact that I wanted to make a film that was strong on emotions and drama, and not just another save-the-tiger film or how they walk, mate, sit and eat!” Nallamuthu told IANS.

“This film is as real as it gets. It’s a chapter from the everyday life of a tiger and how jealousy and greed rule the animal world too!” he said.

As the film shows, Machli’s daughters Satara, Athara and Unnis, on the verge of adulthood, are the recent ones among the generations she had raised.

Machli has fiercely guarded her lakeside property for 11 years, even from her own cubs who were always forced to leave the place when they reached adulthood.

However, this time things are not to go in her favour. Machli faces a mortal threat not from outside but from within the family. Her daughter Satara, the dominant of the three, has made her intentions clear - she wants the prized possession.

Satara devises a plan to get rid of her mother and siblings. She first pushes her sisters out, leaving them to fend for themselves away from the safety of their mother.

Satara’s final target is her mother - and this goal she accomplishes quite easily. Her brute strength is more than Machli’s old age can endure and the latter surrenders without a fight.

Distraught Machli is left to salvage her former pride in isolation in another part of the park. The queen of Ranthambore Fort is ousted.

Satara’s victory too is shortlived, as Athais, a young dominant male, befriends her and eventually takes control of the fort. The film, of course, ends with a final showdown between Satara and Athais which ended the 12-year reign of the fort by Machli and her family.

Satara’s sibling, Athara, had been recently translocated to the Sariska National Park, also in Rajasthan, as part of the government’s tiger reintroduction programme.

“This is the second big full length film on the same family in Ranthambore. It was about seven or eight years ago when they first featured on the BBC series ‘Land of the Tiger’. They filmed Machli in her prime,” Nallamuthu said.

“HD is the acceptable format today. It’s cheaper than film and the quality is as good, and better than any format used till date. Yes, it is expensive as compared to a digi beta, but then if you want to make a film for international telecast, you have to match their standards. ‘Tiger Queen’ thus is the very first indigenous HD wildlife documentary out of India!”

A longer version of the film is also being planned for theatres worldwide by Nallamuthu’s production house, Grey Films India Private Limited, which has provided over 100 hours of programming content and high quality technical support for a broad range of genres.

The film was telecast worldwide on Nat Geo Wild.

His other recent production “Tripping on a Bicycle”, an English feature film, directed and shot by him on HD, was the official selection at the Palm Beach International Film Festival 2010 and Boston International Film Festival 2010.

He also shot “Pairon Talle”, a film directed by Sidharth Srinivasan that will premiere at the Toronto Film Festival later this month.

TiECON CHENNAI 2010

November 24

Chennai Convention Centre

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Money and Net Joy

2010-09-09T23:43:00.001+05:30

Haven't you people say say its 'tough to make the first million and then its a cakewalk'. And then there are people like
A Muruganantham who cares very little about money but his measure is providing jobs to millions. The scientists talk about a magic figure of 50k and then the net joy is the same beyond there weather its 100k or 10000k.
Net Joy? Food at some point can satiate a human, a drink can bring a man to a point of total tipsiness at some point and after that it really does not matter if you lining your intestines with scotch or water. If you job is to carry or walk on bundles of money will it become a object of repulsiveness?
Sometimes I wonder how it would like to be to be submerged in excess of wealth. Personally I would like to see others handling loads of of along with the problems the accompany it, and I would like to have it whatever- I - Want -whenever - I - Want. It does not matter if money can provide it for me.
There are times I have thought that money is a mere metric to measure success now I have grown up to believe the measure is sleep and regular bowel movements.
End of the day money grounds the dreamer to reality by being elusive to him/her. Wonder what eludes the one who has it in plenty. The chicken wanted to cross the road, the chicken on the other side of the road asked this chicken "why would you want to cross" for which the chicken replied "because there is more grass on the other side" For which the chicken on the other side replied "ahh!!! but there is more grass on your side.
But I have never heard of chickens with silk stocking wanting to walk barefoot but every chicken wants to wear a silk stocking. So much for Net Joy
TiECON CHENNAI 2010
November 24
Chennai Convention Centre

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The tyrannical rule of the Govt of MS EXCEL

2010-09-07T22:37:00.001+05:30

Carefree and running around flowers on the mountain side jumping across the streams, singing songs of love had been my youthful days. I painted my world with bright and sunny colors; my mind was free as I spoke what I wanted to speak, wrote poems and captured wonderful moments in life. Those were the best days of my life.

There were murmurs all over the enemy was taking over the neighboring land. The whiff of gunpowder and blood was occasionally carried by the gentle breeze. The air was heavy. The skies turned grey. The moon presented itself with a blood shot look. Nothing seemed right.

The crackling of the radio announced that every thing was fine, and life will become better. Volunteers wearing pink shoes and caps sported a smiley badge on their chest and with a notepad in hand collected data about every citizen. “Civilization has to progress” they said and they smiled a bright smile.

Days went by. One day all the healthy citizens, of fit body and mind, found all their names neatly arranged and printed in alphabetical order. It took me exactly 2 minutes to find my name in small box of 2 cm by 11 cm. The day ended with celebration and fanfare. There was special broadcast on the radio congratulating the ones who found made the grade. I slept rather uneasy.

Next day a letter arrived in parchment paper, names in gold and bordered with silver. The letter was simple to comprehend. We able bodied men were expected to serve the kingdom. Our services were commandeered for kingdom building. Roads, dams, bridges, flyovers, parks etc and each of use were to have our own people and our own lists in 2cm x 11 cm boxes, all minor details being specified.

Doomsday prophets within the rank said that this is the end of the world and the satanic rule has begun. These boxes were but cages. They interpreted the lines and compared it with prison bars. We are enslaved, we are doomed was the cry. The modern day enemy comes with the most endearing names and this one has a very lovable name too, said a respected man. He deciphered some prophecies in the holy book and read the final answer to a complicated mathematical riddle. He was our own Nostradamus, I must say.

Only a select few of us knew that we are indeed under the Tyrannical rule of the Government of Microsoft Excel.

The control systems were in place, every defiant breath that we breathed were captured in these boxes and notified to the authorities.

Sitting in our catacombs we discuss the great conspiracy of the evil forces. The so called freedom we were made to enjoy under the so called benign ruler ship of MS WORD the occasional concerts with the Media Player, the visual feast of Power Point exhibition centers. Was this all a grand design to enslave us with EXCEL?

We are all waiting anxiously for that girl in miniskirts to come with a sledgehammer and destroy the powers of the enemy. That day is not far off. We hope.

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In comfort we beg.

2010-09-07T09:17:00.001+05:30

Vellayi, a crushed piece of paper on the road. Sat moaning as the pangs of hunger crawled on her like red ants. Her feeble voice was drowned by the crows sitting around. She does not seem to possess the infrastructure to attract attention or handle money. When given a tidy sum a broad smile may light up the place but when she moves away she leaves it behind. A pouch or a can she never carries, carrying her own worn out attire is the challenge the aspiring medalist faces as he lifts those heavy load to clich the coveted title. But for Vellayi there is no hope in the world of hope. Its going to be the same every minute, and seconds and finally time will stop for her. She keeps no records of sorts. She knows not her age, events are the measure.
To not be concerned about the numbers, time or money is not advisable. The burning of energy in all forms to study and imbibe this is the obsession for the world. Who would not want to lighten their own burdens first and then pretend to be concerned about others? That vsm stroke the guilt muscles to sleep.
Vellayi you are a teacher. A string around the finger to remind us that life is for living. And living in our own terms however easy or rough it may seem. For nothing can crush a human with a hope on things above. In comfort we beg.
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Untitled

2010-09-07T07:15:00.001+05:30

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From Oil can to Oil Wells - LOA WHOA

2010-09-06T08:28:00.001+05:30

Rains are never factored or foreseen in Chennai. My daughter bought a cycle to commute within college, two weeks of moderate rains in chennai, the chain got jammed. So on thursday she called to tell me she was some grease to loosen the chain, "over the weekend" I will do it for you and asked her to manage for two days. So this grease, lubrication has been running in the back of my mind eversince. To my surprise from no where a small oil can appeared, I was stunned. Here Iam debunking the theory of LOA and it seems to be working. So I thought of scaling up the LOA operation. If it can work for an oil can the same principle can work for Oil wells too.
Immediately the teachings of the popular preacher ' Rev Sam Chelladurai' flashed on to my mind. I remember him talking about the wealth under the feet, the precious metals and oil. I have seriously decided to set my mind on oil. Somehow I get this feeling that Iam destined to own some Oil Wells. I was created to become an oil magnate :) Scorn if you want you unbelievers. The more you scorn the stronger my faith will emerge.
I have also, in my mind, visualized how my first OIL WELL will be in my kitty. Following are the steps. Mark my words follow it with attention. It has helped me I will help you too. First you need to identify the OIL WELL that you want to possess, google maps can help. Get the latitude and longitude right. Take a printout of the same, stick it up on the most prominent place in your room, saving it in your computer as a screen saver will also help. Now when ever you fly abroad, try to board a flight that takes you over this location. Look down and say within "ONE DAY YOU ARE MINE" and some such words. You may also take this flights in the thoughts, it helps.
I forsee there are many ways in which this WELL will come to you. I have gone one step further and also visualized how its going to come to me.
Someday, very soon, I would be taking a flight to Paris, I would be surprised when Iam upgraded to first class and window seat. There will be a man, in a modest apparel, sitting next to me. While I will be a bit dazed at the luxury of the first class seating my neighbour will be listening to some music. Out of sheer curiousity I will ask him, what music he is listening to. He would mumble something in Arabic and I will never know. Then I will plug into my IPod when my neighbour will ask me what Iam listening to. We become friends and end up talking. We talk on a host of subjects and we become friends. We fly near the OIL WELL that I want to possess and I excuse myself from my kind friend and start looking out of the window and start repeating in my mind "ONE DAY YOU ARE MINE". After 10 minutes I get back to the conversation with him and I share with him of my facination of that OIL WELL beneath. I did not want to sound funny and dont say a word about my desire to possess it some day. We talk and talk and finally the destination has come. We exchange cards and decide to talk or meet sometime. This always happen on such flights.
I get back to normal life, and one day I find this mail in my inbox from this gentleman, I had to process hard for sometime before I could recall the sender. It was the same man whom i met in the flight. He has forwarded a whole lot of pictures about the OIL WELL. All details were there. I was thrilled to know so much about my future possession. I sent you a thank you mail and then over a period of two months we exchanged mails. Then one day I get a call from his office and Iam asked to come, the flight tickets are being sent.
I land up there and cut this story short..... Iam given this OIL WELL. Yes in my name. Iam surprised but not terribly surprised.
LOA works. Now I forsee that the world is going to shun oil to alternate fuels. Iam busy trying to take over some manufacturing facilites for alternate fuels. If any of you have some pictures do me a favour, pass it on to me.
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TiECON 2010. Entrepreneurs can make music and sleep well (part one)

2010-09-04T21:00:00.001+05:30

Cricket is an easy game. There are clear metrics, runs and wickets being the ones in the forefront. Cricket is a game. How about life or for that matter entrepreneurship? Let’s take entrepreneurship as a case in point. An entrepreneur is defined as a person who has possession of a new enterprise, venture or idea and assumes significant accountability for the inherent risks and the outcome. There is no measuring line but for the outcome. The outcome in most cases will be the success of the enterprise which is eventually the financial stability or health or its potential to create wealth.

Now wealth in itself needs to be defined. You cannot dismiss a humble farmer who ploughs the field diligently and produces 100 bags of corn may not catch ones eye we may end up celebrating that ‘smart’ farmer who is able to produce ten times more without working as hard as the humble farmer. The smart farmer may be exploiting the earth leaving it barren for the future generation. So the outcome in itself cannot be a yardstick.

Sachin Tendulkar when questioned about the money power in cricket when he was being conferred the honorary rank of Group Captain of Indian Air Force, said something that made me sit up. Like an entrepreneur, that for him its passion, and says he can sleep well only if he plays well. Money is incidental it follows. Now can a good sleep can be yardstick to measure the success of an entrepreneur?

TiECON Chennai 2009 featured performers from the sports and entertainment fields. I will not call this a tribute of sorts, that may sound very condescending. The purpose certainly is to unearth the driving power of passion that propels entertainers. Entrepreneurs tend to gravitate towards the ones with passion since money in itself can never be a bean counter for measuring the success of an entrepreneur.

TiECON Chennai 2010 will have MONEY MONEY MONEY as the theme. The theme in itself may be a bit of a oxymoron for a entrepreneurship meet. Hold on. There is more to it. Since I have been part of this entire process of trying to capture the theme in its purity in communication, I guess I have to write about it.

Let me hold my horses and not write more and wait for the formal decision on the new logo. It will happen on 6^th Sept 2010. You can surely expect a post from me after that.

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How to upload a picture into your signature in GMAIL?

2010-09-04T19:21:00.001+05:30

If you have GMAIL account you can add an image that will feature in all your emails. This is how you do it

click on the settings tab on your gmail page
Scroll down to signature in general settings
You will see a box like this

You can type you name and number if you want ( I hae done it)
Now click on the insert pic button. It will ask for image url
Now to get your image url, upload the image on to picasa album
Open the pic in the browser
Right click and go to properties there you will get the image url
Copy paste on the window.. and your image gets into your singnature
If you really love yourself you can use your own pic. I my case I have used this to promote the UNCONFERENCE EVENT .

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Herding minds vs Merging minds

2010-09-03T18:58:00.001+05:30

Collective decision making or in info age terms lets call it the crowdsourced decisions - does that make sense. It sure conveys the point. I heard people say that 'two heads are better than one'. In which case many heads should be better than two. It really does not work on that progression. I remember this joke very vaguely. One Indian = Ten Japanese and Ten Indians = One Jap. That’s supposed to drive home this point that Indians cannot work together.

Image via Wikipedia

I recall the tower of Babel chaos. Now a whole lot of people with Nimrod as the leader wanted to build this tower to reach out to heavens. They set about their task. God looks down from below and says “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them." So God acknowledges that if people were to speak the same language nothing stops them from accomplishing whatever they want to achieve.

So God confused the tongues.

For many years I thought that was the reason for the multiplicity of languages in the world. God wanted us to be away from each other. I saw this amazing gadget called ‘pomegranate’ (phone) its apparently got some freakish features like coffee maker and what kind of caught my attention was ‘live voice translator’. Can this gadget help us unify language again and lead us to Babel II.?

Now get two minds to work on one problem and be assured that the problem will have the best solution. What happens is that the volunteers are able to combine weak neuronal activities residing in two separate brains to maximize performance.

What happens when two individuals are incompetent, it sure is not easy. There is a cognitive fallacy in psychology, known as the Dunning-Krunger effect. When incompetent individuals overestimating their skills to think that they are above average, its not logically possible though. If there is a person like that in the team he/she can severely damage performance.

When our subjective confidence is larger than the objective accuracy it leads to another fallacy known as the overconfidence effect. So successful collaborations have problems to overcome, only then the tower can be built.

The pick of all this is the concept of ‘social loafing’ I have been witness to this. When two minds are working fine and you add two more minds one runs the risk of reducing the social pressure of each individual in the group and will actually reduce the individual contribution.

Herding minds and getting minds together hence can make the difference between success and failure

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Brain Plasticity explained

2010-09-03T07:56:00.001+05:30

Take a lump of clay, flatten it and try sketching your name on it. Its easy isn’t it? Now take a metal and try sketching your name… ummmm you are struggling. Now try sketching you name on a piece of plastic…. Its neither easy nor difficult. A sharp object, possible a pin will help you do that.

Brain Plasticity is like that. Brain is not clay that it can change easily nor is it metal that it cannot change. IT’S PLASTIC. It can change. How can you change it? By attentional focus and consistent behaviour.

So you can change your brain. You may be rigid but your brain isn’t. Well its all the same but. I have heard many people who have keep saying “I cannot change”. This should read is I DON’T WANT TO CHANGE. Biologically they can.

How can this change happen? If brain had been like clay, changes could happen very soon. Since its plastic it takes time. How long?

Typically three weeks? In three weeks you can get your brain to accommodate a new task or open itself to something new. Three weeks is not sacrosanct … I just said 3 weeks just to drive home the point that its neither easy not hard.

So Brain is not a machine at all. It adapts very well to the changing world around us by modifying its structures and neural mechanisms. It rewires itself in response to the new demands place on its by the external environment.

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Only Australia can save cricket

2010-08-31T19:32:00.001+05:30

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I remember the watching cricket at the Marina grounds. The high profile boys from MCC came in cars, beer and the lunch arrived from The Taj. And these guys from ICF team landed up in buses carrying lunch packed in banana leaf and secured with the newspaper. On the field they matched each other and most of the times ICF won the game ( I would like to believe ). Post lunch the beer and the Taj food never really helped the MCC guys.

I remember the Indian team, my friend’s Dad who was chosen to play for India, way back in the 40s had to haggle with his dad to pay him the train fair to reach the test venue. Now I remember this cricketer Sudhir Naik who was caught shop lifting socks in Marks & Spencers and the entire team had to face humiliation.

Not too many years ago, I remember the Indian team looked very impoverished and laid low with the likes of Imran, Javed, Akram, and the likes walking the pitch as models walking the ramp. The Indians were short and puny and definitely had a complex, till some guys like L Balaji, Sehwag and Dhoni came out from nowhere to take Pak to the dryers.

Its a lot different story today. The Pakistan team is in the wrong end of relative deprivation. They have to go beyond regular cricket to match the neighbouring Joneses next door. The mammoth population that India boasts, cricket crazy nation is funding these cricketers big time. And Pakistan can never come anywhere near. Yesterday the show stopper of the day was Dhoni in his new car Hummar.

We have come a long way. Sooner or later India will dominate the scene. Is it good? Certainly not. This just a trivia, there was the time of Maharajas when India toured England for the first time in 1932. Although there were not many runs to write home about, it is said that the Maharaja of Porbandar collected more Rolls Royces than runs during the tour. The Maharaja, of course, was the skipper too. India is sure on the road to regain past glory in some way.

Suddenly I have started liking the Australians. They play dirty on the pitch but they come clean. They seem to scorn the ones who are making obscene money through the game. I will rather change my loyalties for cricket sake and support the Aussies. Yay yay Aussies you guys are future of the game. Lick all these guys like crazy. . White wash, black wash whatever but clean up the game mites. Only you guys can do it

Related Articles

Pakistan match-fixing claims: Donkeys paraded as cricketers (telegraph.co.uk)

James Lawton: Where was Clarke's disdain when Stanford came calling to buy up cricket's dignity? (independent.co.uk)

Letters: A sad day for cricket and journalism (guardian.co.uk)

'We must view the cricket scandal in its proper perspective' (guardian.co.uk)

Pakistan anger at cricket scandal (bbc.co.uk)

Alan Black: It's Just Not Cricket (huffingtonpost.com)

Pakistan's problem is deeper than match fixing | Mustafa Qadri (guardian.co.uk)

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Social connectivity

2010-08-30T11:10:00.001+05:30

I was reading this interview in Business Standard with . Lucy Jameson, executive strategy director of DDB UK and chair of DDB’s Global Planning Futures Group. She talks about social creativity and shift from traditional advertising.

“Instead, consumers today want something they can participate in, play with, may be produce something new out of it, and pass on. They are interested in things they can interact with. And, that is what social creativity is all about. We are talking about social creativity that provokes social reaction and gets passed on to people’s social networks both online and offline. It is not just about connecting people with brands but also connecting them with more people”. To me it’s all about bridging. Bridging online to offline events, bridging people, etc.

The example for this bridging is Volkswagen’s Fun Theory campaign in Sweden created by DDB. Stairs in a subway in Stockholm were turned into a keyboard. So instead of people going up and down the escalator, they started taking the stairs as it made musical notes. The experience was recorded and put online. Some 40 million people watched it, without Volkswagen having to spend any money on the traditional media. The idea demonstrated Volkswagen launching a new range of green cars and that adopting green behaviour can be fun. Volkswagen did a series of such experiments under the Fun Theory campaign for its greens cars. These are today among the most watched videos on YouTube.

The future according to me more on understanding the depth of the mind of specific consumer segments, their tastes, interests and cognitive ability.

Read the article in Business Standard

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