Musings that Amuse Me.....

Ah !! Work !! Deadlines, slogging, stress, long hours, that eerie feeling of overworked and underpaid and unrewarded !!! sounds familiar ? Noone escapes it - Somebody s ambition translates into more work for many. Someone wants to add a successful deal to his resume and it ends up burining out so many people s happiness [ down the hierarchy, of course - the last one is affected the most !!] Despite knowing that the deadline is aggressive, commitments are made - only for reality to stare at face soon. Running at top speed to just catch up, stress takes over and overwhelms you completely !! OH yeah !! don t we all take pride at being so busy ? 'No time, too much work !! ' is a statement that never seems to go out of fashion. Make it a point to let everyone know how much you are drowning in work, not having time to invest in personal life and still, accept the last minute change request. I m not being cynical - most of it is actually true - which is the real problem. I was wo

So often, I have heard the clause 'life turned a full circle' used to refer someone returning to do something done long ago, after trying various options - or, simply, returning to the same point after a long journey. Why circle ? Why not a square or a rectangle or a triangle, which are also closed geometric figures in which we can return to starting point ? This thought was crossing my mind as I was helping my mom in the kitchen , making some chapathis . Now, my mom had taught me the how to 'roll' chapathis in a shape closest to the ' full circle' many many years ago when I was in school. I was very enthusiastic to make them as a kid and the reward i used ask was that I would eat the very same chapathi I made - an easy task since it was the most skewed and shapeless one amidst a pack of 'full circle ' chapathis . Reality was no one else could eat it, but my mom was still proud of what I used to make, as a little boy. As I was making them, I realiz

A friend of mine posted an interesting question in FB a few days back - Is Self motivation learnt or inherent ? Probably, it applies to every virtue that we can think of. Take enthusiasm and energy levels in a person. Are we born with it ? Or do we learn over our course of life that it pays to be energetic and enthusiastic in life ? My mom travelled for 22 hours and had not slept for 36 hours continuously when she landed in San Francisco last thursday. It was another two hours before she reached home. She is 67. I was feeling so bad for making her go through this gruelling journey. Within minutes, she freshened up and made her way to her world [ the kitchen ] and took stock. Ten minutes and she had a list of things to be bought and she was ready to go out and get them. Now, this levels of energy is amazing. I don t even have on percent of this energy levels. I am very lazy, tend to postpone things and I am almost always fighting fire at work. So much so that at the end of day,

What happens when you hear or meet someone after eleven long years ? Do you still connect the same way ? I met my school friends after 17 years and hit off from the first second. Today, I met JK, my classmate in MBA , after more than a decade. Jayakrishnan [ JK, as we used to call him !!] is still the mountain of information he was during my college days. Amazing knowledge of companies, their products, their strenghts, as before. Crystal clear analysis of world economy, its perils, what India should do and not do to deal with China... JK did not change one bit from what he was during my college days. Of course, he was wiser and just like yours truly, had a receding hairline and expanding waistline. But, the connection was just as perfect. Our quest for information connected us then . It is still a factor that kept us involved for six long hours this evening. As during our college days, this was unplanned as well and it just happened when JK was browsing our group mails. Thank heavens,

For most of us - I could confidently say all of us, our first idols are our parents. If you had siblings, the eldest is probably the next idol. As we grow like birds and learn to flap wings, our idols stretch out of the nest. Someone makes a mark.... and stays the same. I am not sure how many recollect your first idol outside your family For someone with a memory like mine, no effort is needed. Actress Srividhya won my admiration. In my own childish innocence, I thought she was actually sitting behind the screen and singing the song 'Ezhu Swarangalukkul ethanai paadal' in the opening scene of the movie Apoorva Ragangal[1975]. What an impact !! I was captivated by everything from the first scene. The playback singer of that song [Vani Jayaram ] would become my favourite singer and every letter of the song would stay in my memory for ever !! Till date, I wonder whether it was Vani or Vidya who fascinated me first !! This is infact, the oldest episode I can ever recollect in my li

Last week, I wound up my residence in Philadelphia and moved to San Francisco. Some golden truths when we wind up a house and move are 1. The packing never ends. Things keep appearing out of the shelves and corners. The house is at its most messy phase. The effort tires you out. 2. Once you reach your new place, the object you want first is always at the bottom and the box containing it is always opened last. 3. The most important things are lost during the move, never to be found again. Of course, I m inflating it, but the experience is not very different for anyone I knew. With more consulting jobs and companies kicking their employees like soccer ball these days, the packers and movers are doing good business. From a luxury, it has matured as an industry and is affordable to many these days. The fundamental question - why relocate at all ? We get tons of reasons - more satisfying job, more spacious house, own house, better quality schools for kids...many of them. The common threa

How wonderful are those moments when we give our parents something to be thrilled about ? My Mom and Dad filled my school days with so many thrills and sweet things. How wonderful to recollect them !! I still remember my Dad taking me to his office to teach me how to use the 'Telephone'. Now, in 1981, not every house had a phone. It looked and sounded like a monster. We did not have one - still, my dad took me to his office on a sunday afternoon just to teach me how to talk on the phone. I was thrilled when I heard his voice in that instrument " Hello, Yaar Pesaradhu ? Dhas a ? " My Mom would wait for me at the spot where my school van would drop me - The hitch was that my school van had no predictable time. Yet, she was there, just to make me smile - make me feel thrilled !! I was an awfully bad communicator, but my joy would express itself in screaming sounds and words that had no meaning in any language. These are just couple of examples. They have made m

In the epic Mahabharath, often considered as the 'Fifth Veda', the story of Bheeshma is a fascinating one. Prince Devavratha, born to King Santanu and Ganga, wanted his Dad to be happy. That is like any other son. What was not like any other son is this - When his father, King Santanu, was mesmerized by the beauty of Satyavati, a fisherman s daughter and wanted to marry her , Satyavati's father, out of his own insecurity, wanted an assurance that the Child born to Santanu and Satyavati should be the King and not Devavratha. No Father would be unfair to his son and Santanu was no different. He refused the deal, but could not forget Satyavati. Moved by his Father s plight, Devavratha approached the Fisherman and assured him that he would never claim the throne. The Fisherman, aware of Devavratha s unparalleled Archery skills, was still insecure as Devavratha s children could overpower his child. Then came the next promise - Devavratha promised to never get intimate with any

" Love me when I least deserve it , because that is when I really need it " What a true, powerful quote !! A friend of mine [ Nianaaz ] posted this in Facebook and I was speechless for a couple of seconds when I read it. How wonderfully expressed !! The quote set me thinking so much and so deep !! When we truly love someone, we really do not care if the recepient 'deserves' it. We just give it away, simply because we connect with the infinite at that moment - what is ' infinite ? ' - we give away, yet we do not feel any less - In fact we feel ' more' . When we are truly in love, we realize that love is something that doesn t become less because we gave it away. In fact, we become 'more loving' by giving it away. Think about mom !! what did we do as babies, to deserve mom s love ? we got it anyway and we basked in it. Life was smile, baby talk, love and fun !! 'Deserving' was perhaps the last thing the mother and baby had in

Almost all my friends and colleagues agree with each other on this one - Dash is a nice guy. Now what exactly does that mean ? I have heard nice guys finish last. I have not always finished last , but I am one of the best examples of Martina Navratilova s famous quote ' Nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with a lot of talent '. That is very unlike me !! Yes, I never said anything nice about myself so far , except cracking some jokes about myself. So, if you are one of the members of the endangered species who reads my blog, you do deserve to know more of myself - I probably killed you by not opening up at all and bottling up my thoughts. So here it goes... 1. I am driven a lot by fear. It is an emotion that overwhelms me all the time. I fear change, I fear new people, new work, anything new. I fear hurting or displeasing others. I fear disagreeing with anyone. I have learnt to handle fear much better of late, but my fear for everything has stopped me from achieving

Somehow, the word ' Relationship' sounded too personal for the Corporate world. So much so that the Business community used the word 'Professional Networking' to refer to a business relationship. The presence of money brings in a dimension to 'professional networking' that expects us to keep emotions away and evaluate purely in terms of priorities - Revenues, costs, taxes and profit. But, similar to a 'relationship' , professional networking is also built with a lot of effort,keeping commitments and building credibility . Like personal relationship, professional credibility takes years to build and minutes to destroy. However, the rewards of building it are phenomenal. My Boss [Raj Neravati] demonstrated me the power of building a professional relationship last week when we were working on a bid. I should say it was stunning for me to realize that the 'system', 'process' and all the other jargons that denote a pack of humans at work rewar

How Cruel can Time get !!! It looks like just moments ago that I was in my early twenties, travelling abroad on work, in love, and had all the best things that life could ever give me. At that point of time, I wondered if I ever deserved such lovely things life gifted me. Frankly, I thought I did not. In what seems like minutes, but actually years later, I am alone, in my late thirties, feeling dejected, disappointed, lonely in life and directionless at work ... you name a negative emotion and I seem to go through it. Again, I do wonder if I deserved all this !! Gloom , uncertainity, sorrow seems to have enveloped not just me, but the world in general. Why is true content and happiness so rare these days ? Did we travel so far away from ourselves that we lost our own self ? Life was too kind to me early on - Importantly, I perhaps deluded that life will stay that way,which is perhaps why I feel the pain and grief now, when it takes away all the nice things it gave me - a fantastic car

Somewhere along the aging process, crossing our date of birth during the year turns from joy to indifference to concern. At school, it was a lot of fun to distribute chocolates to friends, wear new clothes, be the centre of attention of everyone for a day. At least till my class 5, I remember my school did this part really well. Birthday was one day you could get out of the boring 'uniform' and wear a trendy dress. I felt 'different' just by wearing new clothes amidst others who wore the school dress. There was this ' Happy Birthday to you' song that was dedicated to the birthday boy by those innocent, sweet 'prayer song' girls who never spoke to me , but would smile at me just this day . Many teachers would not punish me that day for talking in the class or laughing secretly at a joke. No matter how much a loner I was, I always had two or three friends around me on my birthday in school. Then, during the teenage years began the 'acting big'. Tho