Do Dreams die?

Do dreams really die? If I can recollect my great childhood days aka my wonder years, I was a dreamer! Always dreamt of becoming famous, famous and more famous. I wanted to be a great artist, a charming story teller.

Dreams at that time seem achievable as you are an innocent soul pure and away from all the corrupt things, and in my case destiny was also favoring my dreams. I was learning classical music, participating in school dramas, writing poems, article and stories that were recognized and appreciated. I was on cloud nine, everybody in school at that time knew me. Those were the best days of my life.

Suddenly one day I realized that I should focus more on studies as I have to become an engineer, probably a software engineer. I changed track, my focus was not that strong, but I never bothered, and eventually I became a software professional.

How the heck I became software professional? I wanted to be something else, then what am I doing in software industry for the past four years.

Is it because my childhood dreams were destined to die? or Is it because that my dreams were not meant to be materialized? I really don't know!

So, what is stopping me to dream new dreams as my childhood dreams are now dying or have already got buried. I really don't have answers to all those questions, but one thing, that I believe in is someday I have to start dreaming again, and it seems that time has come, for me to do that.

Friendship Is Like

A song that your soul sings every day! Friendship day is special, at least for me, as I have few great friends and I thank God that they are in my life. Thanks to my buddies that make my every day special whether they are with me or not.

So, I have best friends, and among them I have a special friend! Why special? because he can make me feel happy and great whenever I think of him. He is like me, um, not exactly, he is smart, girls just love him and to some extent a bit cute. So how can he is like me? The answer, I really don't know..... but still I believe he is like me. One thing is sure that I want him to be my best friend all my life, so that even if we are far away making the life to work for us, just by remembering him will make me happy.

Will our life will again give us a chance to meet and be together? I don't know, but all I know that he has done enough for me than I can ever imagine. I treasure his friendship, his support and the way he always remind me that I am also his special friend in his own distinctive ways!

The day he was leaving, we cried, I for losing my shelter for comfort and security to abandonment. Why can't a friend be like wristwatch, you take it wherever you go and never miss to check it. When he went I thought that my happiness is gone, but I was wrong! he still makes me happy, I just have to think about him, or talk about him with others.

Life is strange, it can surprise you before you plan to surprise it. I know that we all have to go through unimaginable, but he wasn't ready for that, but I have faith in him that he is going to surprise his life, and I am waiting for that day.


Right now none of my great friends is with me, that makes me sometime a bit creepy, and in that creepiness I tend to get bouts of anger, specially when something happens which I was not expecting at all, and the weired thing is that at that moment, I want to enjoy being creepy. I cannot guarantee that its not going to happen again, but I'll try to avoid hitting others with it like recently did with my special friend. My special friend may not know that but at the end I have to come back to him for support and shelter.



My friend is such a pure soul that wherever he'll go he is going to get love and friendship with abundance, but may be I'll not get a chance to meet other one like him. I feel so proud in saying that I am his friend, may be, a good friend.


So, on this very special friendship day, I thank him for being always there for me. Hope never to miss you again :-)


Happy Friendship Day!

Friendship Quotes

Below is the list of my favorite friendship quotes:

1. Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born. --Anaïs Nin

2. Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: "What! You, too? Thought I was the only one." --C.S. Lewis

3. The most beautiful discovery true friends make is that they can grow separately without growing apart. --Elizabeth Foley

4. If you live to be a hundred, I want to live to be a hundred minus one day, so I never have to live without you. --Winnie the Pooh

5. Perhaps the most delightful friendships are those in which there is much agreement, much disputation, and yet more personal liking. --George Eliot

6. "Stay" is a charming word in a friend's vocabulary. --Louisa May Alcott

7. It's the friends you can call up at 4 a.m. that matter. --Marlene Dietrich

8. When a friend is in trouble, don't annoy him by asking if there is anything you can do. Think up something appropriate and do it. --Edgar Watson Howe

9. Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art... It has no survival value; rather is one of those things that give value to survival. -- C. S. Lewis

10. The most I can do for my friend is simply to be his friend. I have no wealth to bestow on him. If he knows that I am happy in loving him, he will want no other reward. Is not friendship divine in this? -- Henry David Thoreau

11. Lots of people want to ride with you in the limo, but what you want is someone who will take the bus with you when the limo breaks down. --Oprah Winfrey

12. Depth of friendship does not depend on length of acquaintance. --Rabindranath Tagore

13. We cannot tell the precise moment when friendship is formed. As in filling a vessel drop by drop, there is at last a drop which makes it run over; so in a series of kindnesses there is at last one which makes the heart run over. --Samuel Johnson

14. Oh, the comfort, the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person; having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but to pour them all out, just as they are, chaff and grain together, knowing that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and then, with a breath of kindness, blow the rest away. --George Eliot

15. When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives means the most us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving much advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a gentle and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares. --Henri Nouwen

Review : The Lives of Others

Once in your life time , you get a chance to stumbled upon a movie that has the ability to change the way you perceive the complexities of human emotions. Ideologies are not made to be changed in a day or two, but what if your beliefs about the entire system that you are part of get shattered by an innocent and pure soul? That's what from my perspective "The Lives of Others" is all about. Its about the transmogrification of ruthless, tough East German secret service Captain into a humane individual.

The lives of others is an extraordinary cinema, at one level it is a fast past docudrama, at another it is a political thriller with just apt screenplay. But above all its a movie about triumph of honesty and innocence over lust, ambition and blind faith in what can be unjust. Its a simple fictional story that fold beautifully through the intense emotional dilemma for right and wrong.



Set in the backdrop of communist ruled East Germany, in early 80's, the film begins with Gerd Wiesler, a Stasi ( East German Secret Service) teaching his students using a tape of the interrogation to show his class how, by making prisoners awake for a period of days, can break them and get them to confess. Wiesler, a loner, is a firm believer of his ideology, and thinks that what he is doing is right. He believes so deeply in the system, that he no longer questions it at all.

Wiesler is assigned to monitor Georg Dreyman by his old friend who desperately wants to impress the minister Humpf for professional growth. Humpf, wants to have physical relationship with Christa-Maria, a famous and gifted actress and Georg's girlfriend. He must eliminate the writer from his way to fulfill is lewd desires.

Georg is one of the few "intellectuals" who vocally supports the government in spite of his close friendships with artists who are considered dangerously outspoken. Georg wired house is monitored by Wiesler for any anti government activity. uring the course of time Wiesler get to know the true intentions of minister to implicate George and how pure, innocent and good George is. Caught between the lust of power and the honesty and innocence of Georg, What Wiesler does is the heart of the movie.

I don't want to disclose any further as I want people to go through the discomforting unpredictability of the sequence of events that make it as cinema at its best.

Its the silence and facial expressions of actor Friedrich Hans Ulrich Mühe, who plays the captain Wiesler that must be applauded together with the moral dilemma of the Christa-Maria played by Martina Gedeck.

But the real hero of the film is debutant writer-director Florian von Donnersmarck, who crafted such a thought proving and awe inspiring master piece.

The discomfort and tragedy of the "Lives of others" is going to haunt you for few hours after watching it. But, as I said this 2007 Oscar Winning movie is worth a try, go for it.

Spend Money To Get Happy

Yes, Its true spending as little as $5 can make you happy, but you have to spend money on others ( e.g gift, charity) and not on yourself. So buy for someone and get happiness in return. Its an outcome of the research conducted by HBS professor Michael I. Norton and colleagues Elizabeth W. Dunn and Lara B. Aknin. The research also gives answers to how and why spending on others gives a sense of happiness.

The researchers confirmed the joys of giving in three separate ways. First, by surveying a national sample of more than 600 Americans, they found that spending more on gifts and charity correlated with greater happiness, whereas spending more money on oneself did not.

Second, by tracking 16 workers before and after they received profit-sharing bonuses, the researchers found that that the workers who gave more of the money to others ended up happier than the ones who spent more of it on themselves. In fact, how the bonus was spent was a better predictor of happiness than the size of the bonus.

The final bit of evidence came from an experiment in which 46 students were given either $5 or $20 to spend by the end of the day. The ones who were instructed to spend the money on others — they bought toys for siblings, treated friends to meals and made donations to the homeless — were happier at the end of the day than the ones who were instructed to spend the money on themselves.

“These experimental results,” the researchers conclude, “provide direct support for our causal argument that spending money on others promotes happiness more than spending money on oneself.”

Its strange but but do we need a scientific research to make ourself believe in the joy of giving? Being an Indian and a Hindu, its been instilled in our religion/way of living that giving gives divine joy and blessings from God.

CO2, kick the habit

Today when I checked my mails, a mail from my HR with subject "Special screening on World Environment Day..." caught my attention. It says that today is World Environment Day and to mark this day, cafeterias across my organization will screen the documentary "An Inconvenient Truth by Al Gore"

Then, In our monthly group meeting, Bhaskar Paul ( My cubicle mate ) made a point to go green at individual/organization level so that we can do something for the betterment of our environment. So, now very much aware of the fact that today is the World Environment Day, I also decided to write something on it.

CO2 kick the habit, is the theme for this years World Environment Day (June 5, 2008). The theme focuses on reduction of carbon footprint by individuals/organizations/governments. Carbon footprint is a of the amount of carbon dioxide produced by a person, organization or state in a given time.

One can calculate ones footprint at http://www.carbonfootprint.com/calculator.aspx. On the net one can find thousands of article on reducing carbon footprint size. Almost all ask you to go green by:

• car pooling
• using CFL aka Compact Fluorescent Lamp
• buying energy efficient and environment friendly appliances.
• planting tress
• using renewable source of energy
• doing recycling
• and many more.....

I am personally not against all these good measures to go green, but I feel still India has not done that much harm to environment compared to more civilized western countries have. Still our total carbon credit may be high but per person carbon credit is far lesser than advance nation, as more than half the percent of Indians still live in villages where there is almost nil carbon footprint per person.

India is a developing country, and we need solid infrastructure to become a developed nation by 2020, for this we need a lot of energy that translate into high carbon emission. West has already contributed more than there share of carbon credit in their race for becoming superpower, now, its our time and we have to be at par with west in development and growth but, minimizing the mistakes that our friends have already done. Its not the time to blame India and China for the deeds that have been already done by the countries that are pointing fingers on us.

We need to be sensible and intelligent enough to find ways to save our planet together.

My Big Fat Greek Wedding

Today, I was thinking which movie I have watched more then three times. In fact there are lot of movies that deserve my coveted crown of "more than one time watched movie", but there should be a special mention to "My Big Fat Greek Wedding", a 2002 sleeper hit, Oscar nominated romantic comedy drama, in my treasured list.

I, for the first time realized, after watching it, that there are communities that share almost similar kind of emotions towards our families and loved ones like we Indian do. For more detail you can visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Big_Fat_Greek_Wedding.

The film is intellectually witty, romantic and full of family moments. Its a great watch for weekends.

Why Do We Hurt Those We Love Most?

Why do we hurt those we love most, some of you might not agree with me, but its true to some extent.

As a child, when you want something, you first request your parents to give you the object you desire of. If your parents do not accept your request, you either start crying or stop talking and eating or do anything that hurt your loved one.

As an infant you get lots of attention and positive energy, care from your parents and all this train your brain about your relationship expectation form your loved one, as you grow, your parents start decreasing the levels of emotional energy shots for you as they need to focus their energy on newer things. So, when you don't get what you expect you start bombarding negative emotion toward your loved one so that when they feel hurt, they can come back to you feeling guilty and will again increase the amount of emotional energy they give to you.

May sound cumbersome ( as I am not that much of a good writer) but all I can say is that nothing changes when you grow up in your life. When you come out of closet of your parents, you again bombarded by the emotional energies of friends and the love of your life, you again feel like new born to all these complex relationships, you thrive on the energies of all those new found loved ones.

Again, Time comes when you have grown up and the amount of energy from your loved one gets lower, and you start emitting negative energy to hurt the loved one so that their sense of guilt will get you what you need.

So thats why we all always hurt we love the most!

Lonely in the city

Today, My brother is finally relocating to Bangalore, after spending more than a decade in New Delhi. One of the main reason for me to be in New Delhi besides its closeness to Varanasi (my home town) is that I was having my big bro living at the other end of National Capital Region.

Now here, I am lonely single, not ready to mingle living in outskirts of Delhi.

I really find it strange that the reason for which I was in Delhi is not going to be there at all and, I'll have no excuse to say that why the heck I am not able to switch my job.

Now, I need to find a solid reason for not switching my job since I have joined IT industry, also for working for peanuts. Its been four years in a IT firm which was one of my dream company in my college days, its been four years of making and loosing friends, its been four years of living a life in a metro, full of unspoken dreams and pain and pursuit of happiness, and still I want more of it, no change and no gains.

but, hope still floats!

If marriages are made in heaven then?

If marriages are made in heaven then:

• Why the hell you have to look for the one that is made for you?
• Why you have been given option to choose the one?
• Why you want to get married on the earth?
  

Some people say that "Marriages are made in heaven and consummated on Earth", does that mean that if one doesn't get married then one breaks the law of heaven/earth/nature?

Does it really feels like living in a heaven after you get married?

I really, really don't know why I am so confused about the thing called marriage, may be because, I definitely see myself getting married within a year.

Am I getting married because I want to or I have to?

Am I trustworthy?

Today, my mind was so full of ideas that I unable to decide on what to blog. Hence I decided to analyze myself......

Am I a trustworthy person? The answer can be "yes" or can be "no".

I break trust only when I feel there is not going to be any kind of harm to the person who trusted on to me.

Dream Deferred

by Langston Hughes

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?

Or fester like a sore--
and then run?

Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over--
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

Time Management Strategies: Are they Effective?

I have been reading different articles of "Time Management Strategies", One thing that most of them write is time management is all about Planning and Prioritizing your tasks.

In brief almost all advise you to do the following:

• Do proper planning of all the tasks on daily basis.
• Prioritize your work, e.g. by making to do list and putting top priority work on top.
• Divide large assignments and tasks into their component parts.
• Review you plan on a regular basis.
• Eliminate interruptions by closing your office door and letting telephone calls go to voice mail.
• Learn to say "no" and to focus on what's important to achieving your goals.
• Find a calendar system you're comfortable with, and use it for all your activities.
• Build flexibility into your schedule to accommodate the unexpected.
• Learn how to effectively delegate.
• Set time limits on tasks.
• Take a break.

I find it weired that most of the article talk about only planning the time management strategy for performing a task rather than identifying minimization of time wastage while doing a task or identification of the reasons for an individual to feel the need for time management strategies.

As we all know that there are only 24 hours in a day and if we add the extra time and effort for planning and executing time management strategies, we end up at the same place. Also. our priority changes on daily basis, one cannot avoid interruptions, sometime its difficult to say no and to delegate.

There is a belief that if you just work harder you can get more things done. Time management operates on the philosophy of trying to cram more and more stuff into your calendar and you end up working harder trying to get everything done.

So the best strategy for effective time management is to identify the time one waste (e.g. long tea and lunch breaks, chatting and talking on phone during office hours, unnecessary status meetings, checking personal e-mail at office time) while going through the daily tasks/chores.

Therefore, my time management strategies are:

• to identify and minimize my wastage time,
  
• start working less than you expect by taking balance amount of responsibility,
  
• to always promise less and deliver more,
  
• to take care of my health by taking meditation/yoga/exercise,
  
• to take task as it comes and change priority as a newer task comes.

So what are your effective time management strategies?

Innovation, Innovation Everywhere

In many organizations including mine :-) there is a firm belief that to survive in a business you need to innovate and, majority of our bosses believe in that. But some times the buzz word innovation can make the basic aim of development of new products and services futile.

I quite like the IBM advertisements on innovation with punch line "Stop Talking, Start Doing". They really capture the confusion and dilemma occurring in the minds of software community people.

In a recent published article in "The Wall Street Journal" describing how car manufactures are creating new ways for drivers to start their cars. Instead of manual keys, more than 50 2008 models feature push-button starters. Drivers of push-button cars still have to carry a small device that emits a wireless signal that authenticates the driver.

I am not at all against new technological advancements, but what exactly was wrong with using a physical key to start a car? The process is familiar, it is easy to transfer a key to another driver, and the process takes about 10 seconds.

Saving 10 seconds is wonderful in today’s hectic world, but there’s a catch. In exchange for saving those 10 seconds, drivers have to make sure they don’t walk away with the activation device in their pocket when they valet-park their car. More importantly, they have to hope that their new key doesn’t run out of batteries or malfunction. While some activation systems include manual keys, using those keys involves following a complicated set of instructions, with helpful owner’s manual advice like “call your dealer.”

As we read in our school days that "necessity is the mother of all invention" is quite true. I believe that innovations are to make our life easier, and its not necessary to innovate/re innovate everything that exist just to impress others/bosses.

A beginning!

Its been nearly an year since I have been thinking of starting my own blog, but it could not happen.

I have been waiting for a great innovative idea and interesting topic on which i could start my own blog. but as you see it never happened.

So, finally I decided to just jump into the ocean and try to learn the art of swimming as the waves of my fickle mind travels during the course of the time.
And, here I am, sharing my view, thoughts, personal experiences and dreams as time passes by!

Sumantra