- Talk without any inhibitions (without caring about what somebody will think or say or get hurt) and without getting twisted from anyone including my boss.
- Say "I Love You" to a girl and hear "I love you, too" in return.
- Sing in a huge audience (though after two minutes there might not be any audience left)
- Own a library of my own with all my favorite books arranged in an order
- Make a flamboyant speech in front of a big crowd and get appreciated
- Play tabla with a mastero
Sunday, November 11, 2007
Someday I wish to...
Sunday, August 05, 2007
What do I like about my job?
- Research – Challenging work, feels like I am actually trying to do something not just some manipulation with current ideas
- Very good guides for the work, the kind of people I love to work with.
- Freedom on the content of work
- My seniors don’t have stupid conceptions like only if I am working late in the office, or coming to office on Saturday or Sunday then only I am working.
- My seniors do understand that there is something called personal life beyond the routine job life.
What do I hate about my job?
- Very Low salary, internally as well as compared to other companies
- Responsibility without authority. Only thing I have some control on is content of my research work that too because I am stubborn and arrogant, well! My bosses do understand that I need some freedom to do research.
- My position is one of the biggest hurdles for me to do my work effectively. No one listens to me. Or of they are listening, they stop moment they know, I am just an ASE.
- Lack of understanding and support from seniors for difficulties other than work in the job
- Total darkness about how I am going to take forward what I am doing and my career
- Feeling of stranded in the middle of the ocean on support of a single wooden log and absolutely no idea of which way to go.
- There are no roads to travel; I have to build my own roads while traveling towards destination.
- Amazing amount of hypocrisy; lack of ethics, morals, and professionalism in the company and the industry in which I work.
Tuesday, July 10, 2007
So much for thinking of writing down something nice.... what bullshit!
Tuesday, February 20, 2007
The not so golden silence
My dear friend, don’t ever take virtue of silence from me. In today’s world silence is cursed. It is mistaken as dumbness; it is mistaken as lack of knowledge. Though a person keeping silence is more likely to be a better listener than who don’t, his/her silence is most likely to be taken as lack of interest than his ability to listen. Often your communication abilities are considered directly proportional to your ability talk more and more. Pointless talker is likely to be considered better at communication than a person who can explain idea effectively in few simple sentences. Listening is effective when you understand a person the way he/she wants you to understand him/her than the way you want to understand him/her. Some wise person has said that ‘Description is not described’. Even in Businesses, in presentations and meetings where essential purpose of communication is conveying the idea effectively, the same thing can be observed. Very few people understand that talking is only a part of communication and often talking more than necessary can actually make the communication ineffective. Silence gives one more time to think but that also seems to ignore in this world. So my friend, I repeat again world is of those who talk, and not those who consider silence as a virtue.
Sunday, January 07, 2007
Man as an animal - 2
The reason I used word threshold in the second line in above paragraph is because most of you must know when some characteristic of any system is increased beyond certain threshold it alters behaviour of the system very significantly. Those of you who are familiar with cybernetics or systems theory can imagine a positive feedback loop which is primarily weak becoming very strong due to a certain factor becoming extremely strong.
What supports my arguments above is:
- What we have achieved is through thousands of years of learning and not overnight.
- Whatever science ,technology, philosophy, etc. we are so proud of today (and which is the basis of all the achievements of human kind today along with its experiential learning ) is through some wise and very intelligent people who came up with ideas and the ones who could implement these ideas, all others have just adopted these ideas through the very rich communication we have.
Monday, December 18, 2006
Pessimistic me: (with broad smile on his face) see, I told you, I warned you so many times, this is what is going to happen, but you won't listen to me; you always listen to that stupid optimistic guy, he has no sense of reality. You have put yourself into deep hole, with no hopes to come out. You have managed to effectively ruin all your career prospects. You have not just made miserable yourself but also in turn will make your family miserable. You are a loser.
Sunday, November 26, 2006
Man as an animal
Some great thinkers in the world believe that what separates humans from animals is consciousness, i.e. man knows what he knows but animals don’t. I don’t believe that, I think we are just too arrogant to accept, we are just epitome (I am not sure of this also) of a continuous process of evolution of millions of years of earth. We are just another animal who is more evolved than any other, and it has nothing to do with consciousness. Do we want to mean that suddenly when humans evolved from let’s say Bonobos (our closet brothers in the evolution chain) who have 99 point something percent DNA same as human we suddenly gained consciousness. If animals don’t have consciousness then every damn decision they take or every damn thing they do should be instinctive and there shouldn’t be any rationalism to it. If one does not have consciousness then every situation one faces must be new for him/her/it. Should we then say animals can’t learn, oh hell! But then I guess the n number of researchers on animal behavior will surely disagree on it. If any decision taken by an animal is instinctive then I must say we have lost great deal of instinctive powers (well, I think though we may not have lost; we have certainly forgotten our instinctive powers due to our obsession for rationalism and reasoning). Don’t think I am against rationalism, it is very essential for e.g. I can not write this post, by just saying that I suddenly realized that man is also just an animal and so accept it, but what I want to say is we are obsessed with rationalism and forget that rationalism is just medium through which we express our instincts. First we realize something and then we explain it through rationalism. Well, sorry to go off the topic, let’s come back to we as an animal. Though I am not a scientist in animal behavior, having seen 26 years of real life, enough National Geographic Channel and Discovery channel that there are if not millions there are at least thousand of example where animals show perfect consciousness about the situation they are in and what they can do in that situation.
It is very interesting how I stumbled upon this thought. Very often I have imaginary conversations in my mind with people, and in one such conversation today on movies where I was imagining a conversation with my friend, we (I) came to conclusion that “people like to see in movies what they can not do and what they don’t or cannot have but they want to do and want to have. And what sells most is action and sex, so is it that most people by instinct want to be physically strong (wanted to say violent actually ;)) and like sex a lot. Isn’t those instincts same as any other animal in the world?” Here I suddenly went into this tangent of these so called efforts by great thinkers to differentiate between man and animal.
Wednesday, November 22, 2006
More things you want to do faster the time goes
I know many people will be eager to give advice on planning, timetables, etc. etc. That works only to some extent. Anybody says more about managing work, that's all bullshit. Come on, show me a person for whom everything goes according to plan. I believe people for whom plans work perfectly, either they are horribly unambitious about what they can achieve or they are extremely lucky. I know, I know that planning is about being prepared but hell, but just being prepared doesn't get things done, you actually have to do the things.
Saturday, September 23, 2006
Job: name of thy evil
Others, are thoroughly frustrated that the job is not what they like to do or their boss or amount of work or something else. Why is it so difficult to be satisfied in a job? There are some people for whom work is the only good thing about their job, their salary is low, company culture is bad, etc. etc.
Some may blame dissatisfaction to human nature of always asking more, but is that really the reason? It may be the small part but not certainly the main reason. The way jobs are designed in most organizations make them boring. By very nature, most jobs are boring. I know I am making very strong statement but that's what I feel when I see around. Only people who seem to be happy are those who are extraordinary enough that they can progress fast enough so that they are on new challenges before they get bored with the old things. By very design is job is for a particular set of activities and when a person as identified and established for that job keep doing the same or expected to do the same, that being his recognised competency.
Though one might say this is how it is there from ages of human existence, I feel it is not so. Simply because though one has expertise in only one area how to handle that area has entirely left to the person, and like for everything decisions were in his hand. This act of taking decisions in all kinds of situations is often what gives satisfaction of facing challenges. Though there is nice theory of empowerment in Industry (at least in manufacturing industry) it is often seen that the constraints put on employees in terms of directives and process guidelines are such that the empowerment has absolutely no meaning. Most people hate doing same things over and over again and jobs seems to stress on that aspect very strongly.
We need jobs which consider human oriented approach. We need to wake up and do something about it. The arguments here are not yet complete but will come up with more thoughts at some later time.
Friday, September 08, 2006
I know what you are going to say, either you are going to say “It’s their mistake if they don’t ask,” or you are going to say “Life is unfair”. But these arguments don’t work; asking is exactly what most such people don’t like and putting everything on destiny is probably worst thing to do. Does anyone has any solution?
Wednesday, August 09, 2006
Some relief finally....
Most of the air travel I have done in night, at that time, cities look very good due to their lighting and all. However this time I started around 2 in the afternoon and the city looked terrible. Stupid concrete buildings everywhere and nothing else, absolutely ugly it was. On the contrary as I was reaching Goa, everything on the ground looking green, small houses inside the green, rivers flowing in between. It was marvelous; immediately I felt like my tour to Goa is going to be worth it. Actually it is not the usual time to visit Goa; monsoon is supposed to be off-season to visit Goa but then I like Goa in monsoon, it was just too good. In fact, being off-season there was very less crowd and we could enjoy more places in less time and like that fact very much. Also being at the rough sea in the monsoon time is a different pleasure in itself.
One thing I desperately need is some place where I can every now and then and the place allows me to relax, forget the world around me and be myself, not the stupid constrained individual who is always worried about how he can accomplish what he wants to achieve while satisfying all the stupid material constraints put by the world on him.
Monday, June 19, 2006
Me and Philisophy???????
I was kind of conscious about my patience moving towards danger zone, but my friend’s comment has made it explicit. Probably, as first measure as my friend does I must remember each time I read a book by some great personality or ‘systems thinking’ book or any other book which contains influential philosophical thoughts, that I am reading it for pure pleasure and not be very serious about it.
Monday, June 12, 2006
I came to office and followed ritual of checking mails and some news. In the news section couldn't find anything new exciting, only serious news was the grenade blast in Jammu. Somehow, the frequency of public joking of politicians have reduced nowadays. Newspapers are still following the rahul mahajan heroics, Arcelor's refusal to Mittal and so on. Football worldcup is not yet making big headlines, of course it is just first round and all the exciting matches yet to come. In between Federer despite all his amazing tennis skills has lost to Nadal in french open. I thought he might win this time. This guy Roger Federer never fails to amaze me with his skills; in each of his match there will be some shots on which you will say "where the hell did that come from?".
No no, I am not using this blog as summary of news, it was just few things went through my mind quickly. Probably it was an effort to prove that though I don't write much on social or political issues I am very well aware of them and follow them regularly ;)
After the ritual of mails and news I stumled upon the big question which also like a ritual I stumble upon every day, i.e. "what to do?", I am unusual researcher with 5-6 diferent activities related to each other in abig picture, but where to start is always puzzling. I started with sending mail to our academica collborators as a start and then wondering which book should I read for my work.
If you hapen to be reader of this blog :)) and if you are wondering why am I writing about my boring day actiites the answer is simple, " i don't know what to write about", well actually while writing this I realized there are at least 3-4 things in my daily life I can write about. I guess but at the moment I will save the the elctronic words from the bytes of my words.
Monday, June 05, 2006
Increasing blog visits
Meanwhile I few times I went through the statistics on who visits my blogs and not to my surprise I found that hardly anybody visits my blogs but as a good engineer I analysed how to get lots of visits to my blog. There are always two ways to achieve success one is by manipulation to turn things in your favour and one by being good in whatever you do. No need to tell further that in real life most people choose the former way. So, when it comes to writing blogs you must be either very good like greatbong and others or use some of the following techniques. Though these techniques won't give you success like greatbong but will definitely have the capability put you in a decent position...
- always write on current and preferably controversial topics and doing so do not forget to include some controversial or famous names related to the topic or issue
- Leave comments (take care to be among the first few to be doing so) on the blogs which are already famous, it doesn't matter whether you really read the blog or have an opinion, you can always post comments like "hey, me first!" or some such comments which have nothing to so with the blog.
- give some cross-references to some news articles or famous bloggers in your blogs, so that people searching for the news, or the famous bloggers looking who visits their blogs can bump on to your blog.
As you might have noticed that all the above three are primarily possible because of the google power and statistics counters. Though 3 seems to inadequate number as the points explaining technique for increasing your blog visits, try these first, I am sure you will be surprised with the result. Some more will be added later, If I happen to attract some people to read my blogs or some unfortunate souls bump into my blogs through some google searches and so.
Anyways, If you are good writer, you can also register at some bloggers' sites which ranks blogs and bloggers, it is a virtuous cycle as you get more visits your rank improves and as your rank improves more people visit your blog; of course only upto a limit after which quality of your blog dictates your rank and blog visits.
Monday, May 29, 2006
I don’t know, why but such incidents happen to me at quite a good rate, as I remember correctly almost once in a two weeks. Now, probably you will understand why I was such a skeptic even when I though the guy was genuine. I don’t understand this rate, is there something written on my head like “this guy will help you” or “you can easily fool this guy”. In Hyderabad largest percentage of such people asking for help will be those who went for Tirupati and lost or finished their money in between. And even after so much experience with such people I haven’t yet been able to decide whether most of these are crooks or genuine. Once I met one unique fellow, I came to know about his crookedness since one my of my roommates also happened to be asked for help by this guy. This person tells people that he is former government employee and then something happened for which he has filed some petition and then takes out a huge bundle of money and says he already has collected some money and needs last 10 rupees. I doubted him and didn’t give him money, but just a minute late saw one person giving money; and this guy asked my friend money 2 days after that.
I don't know what to do, but life is not easy anyways.
Tuesday, May 23, 2006
Bizarre...
On the other end students doing hunger strikes and all, I definitely understand protests but making the public suffer for the protests is what I don't understand. I have the same objection as I have to strikes of government servants, teachers (I have real grudge against them, as they always strike just before board exams), airport employees, etc. I got message yesterday from somebody that one person died in hunger strike, what is going on? What the heck are people trying to do? What we need is more and more support from students from all educational institutes than strikes.
Mr. Arjun Singh has absolutely no clue as to what he is talking about and how his decision is going to affect the country? If you read his interview here, you can see he seems to have no clue about background of his decision, how he is going to implement the decision and so on...
It is also very clear, that the parliament is not clear whether the reservations are needed at all?
I wish there is someone who can take wise decisions on such issues and more importantly has the authority to do so.
Monday, May 22, 2006
Food Taster...
This was in IIT, the other hotels etc, were a different story at all, except on dhaba inside IIT and one far away at a place called 'gol market', there was hardly any hotel where we didn't taste stale food once and fought with the people there. The dhaba inside IIT was good, that was the only place where one can get descent tasty food in IIT, so it had other problems, sometimes we had to wait for an hour or so for food to arrive. The 'Dal tarka' we used to get there, I am still to get that good 'dal tarka' anywhere. Thee other dhaba was damn good especially for non-veg people.
I can go on and on this topic, especially how quality of food in our hostels were ensured by a central facility, etc. etc.
Tuesday, May 16, 2006
Faculty problems...
The problem is definitely not availability of faculty, it is attracting it. If one has to get European faculty, I guess one has to attract them by paying very high and providing good growth opportunities (I am sure at the expense of existing Indian faculty, we Indians always have this bias of considering westerners better than us). If you do same thing for Indians, I am sure one can get better than better faculty than Europeans. In India, most professionals look teaching as the last or convenient option (when on is more concerned bout place or doing time-pass rather with career perspective) if all other options are exhausted.
So, what is so unattractive about being a lecturer in Indian universities and colleges? Well, many will point out pay packages, but according to me that is just one of the many things. There are many more reasons; like reputation for the profession, slow growth opportunities, lack of research and consulting opportunities, etc. I have just mentioned three of the most important ones. Of course, the first one is derivation from the others, but it is true that in our society if you for teaching profession people think that you didn’t get any other opportunity and therefore you went for teaching.
Well, what brings a good interest and develops faculty is research and consulting opportunities; this is one of the reasons why most of the IITs faculty is so good. If while teaching one gets research and consulting opportunities not only one can increase his/her but also gets familiar with the latest of happening in the filed, bring them and experience and all of it leading to teaching students well with help of experience, examples of actual application, understanding of basic concepts and latest developments. Focus must be on such issue like bringing consulting and research opportunities in the universities rather than importing faculty from foreign countries. Universities and Government has to introspect as to how such opportunities can be made available to the faculty. For such opportunities to exist Industry must trust Academia, which today does not happen. Academia itself should take initiative and do some projects for Industry on experimental basis to establish the trust, may be in initial years Government can support such collaboration. From industry side, Indian industry itself badly needs such research help in order to cope with the international competition and excel on the global level. Take example of IT industry, how many years can they survive on just giving services to foreign companies and countries they have to look at the other options. They all try to move up the value chain (God knows what that means) but what they don’t understand is with what they are doing now itself, they can change the world with different attitudes by generating value rather than lowering costs and for that they need research help from academia.
There are good solutions available than doing stupid things like importing faculty from European countries, academia must spot it and Industry itself should take initiative because after all these students are going to Industry after they complete their education and hence the future of industry depends on issues with academia.
Monday, May 15, 2006
Cheer up...
It is very important for a person to be in company with people who are always cheerful and face the life smilingly; not does it just cheers you up but also gives inspiration to face all kind of situations patiently. And exactly opposite is the situation when you are with people who are always sad over things surrounding them. Actually I was going to write this about people who always complain and cry over situations, but then I suddenly realized that not all people who complain are sad. You can say the realization might have come up from my own experience itself. When I complain I still care about the things and I am not sad, it is just that I want to improve them and contrary to that when I stop complaining I am really sad, I have given up. I find those people amazing who complain and cry over things very jokingly, and make joke on themselves.
Laughter and cheers are among the most important things in our life, without it our life will become hell. We have to turn around things cheerfully and enjoy every bit of life. All such things are better said than done. Well, hope everybody around me does it without taking wrong meaning (ha ha ha… sometime I can’t help but pessimistic. It is difficult to follow your own medicine) of it…