Rarely do I write posts which say things simply and there is nothing abstact in it, because Simplicity is just not my cuppa. Confusion and Chaos is my forte and I am the most productive when I write in that manner. Please read my previous posts for reference and excuse for simplicity.
My motto is Very simple “Productivity amidst chaos “ , why try to simplify things when making things simple would use time and need effort, so reaching equal productivity amidst chaos helps me save time and effort as I find chaos equally easy to handle as simplicity …. Ok enough of Blabber now coming to the point …
Following are a few of my practical experiences which helped me realize that when I helped others it helped me.
Incident 1
I was a faculty @IMS and use to teach LR to students. I have a helping attitude and helped most of my students in and after classes( Excuse for Immodesty ) . One of the few students who I had helped staye in touch with me throughout my MBA ( which I did post My faculty job @ IMS ) and is still in touch with me.When I joined As a brand manager with Lotto post MBA I took up four interns through vaibhav’s contact Devesh who is a BBA student. Devesh and team of Interns did a good job in their internship and Through Devesh and Team I met Another guy who arranged a football tournament where Lotto got to take part in . At this tournament I met a guy Who got me Lotto in two more football tournaments and also I met People who have helped Lotto get to places where it would not have been possible If I had not helped vaibhav and stayed in touch with him. All this happened because I helped vaibhav…….
Incident 2
One of my colleagues in the office wanted to convert a few jpeg files to pdfs . I was in a hurry with some of my work but I took ten minutes out to help him by downloading a driver in my computer which helps do the same. I just can’t remember how helpful this driver has been to me and how many times post that I have converted word,excel,bmps,jpegs to pdfs. Sometimes to reduce the size and sometimes for non editable functionality. I could do all that just because I helped a colleague out on a very busy day.
Incident 3
Again on a very busy day I was given a work by my dad to make a concept note for an event of theirs. I made 3-4 concept notes with a page of literature on all. He liked them and used one. I have used one in my newsletter: (Potpourri) and still have 2 more to use elsewhere.
Not once does the work done go waste. It always comes back in one way or the other.
Friday, October 2, 2009
Saturday, March 14, 2009
Transcript of Commencement Speech at Stanford given by Steve Jobs
This is the text of the Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005.
I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.
The first story is about connecting the dots.
I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?
It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.
And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.
It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:
Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.
None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.
Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
My second story is about love and loss.
I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.
I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.
I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.
During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.
I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.
My third story is about death.
When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.
Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.
I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.
This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.
Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.
Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.
Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.
Thank you all very much.
I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.
The first story is about connecting the dots.
I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?
It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.
And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.
It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:
Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.
None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.
Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
My second story is about love and loss.
I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.
I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.
I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.
During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.
I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.
My third story is about death.
When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.
Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.
I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.
This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.
Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.
Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.
Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.
Thank you all very much.
Friday, January 2, 2009
On the Mindless Menace of Violence
Speech by Robert F Kennedy
City Club of Cleveland, Cleveland, Ohio
April 5, 1968
This is a time of shame and sorrow. It is not a day for politics. I have saved this one opportunity, my only event of today, to speak briefly to you about the mindless menace of violence in America which again stains our land and every one of our lives.
It is not the concern of any one race. The victims of the violence are black and white, rich and poor, young and old, famous and unknown. They are, most important of all, human beings whom other human beings loved and needed. No one - no matter where he lives or what he does - can be certain who will suffer from some senseless act of bloodshed. And yet it goes on and on and on in this country of ours.
Why? What has violence ever accomplished? What has it ever created? No martyr's cause has ever been stilled by an assassin's bullet.
No wrongs have ever been righted by riots and civil disorders. A sniper is only a coward, not a hero; and an uncontrolled, uncontrollable mob is only the voice of madness, not the voice of reason.
Whenever any American's life is taken by another American unnecessarily - whether it is done in the name of the law or in the defiance of the law, by one man or a gang, in cold blood or in passion, in an attack of violence or in response to violence - whenever we tear at the fabric of the life which another man has painfully and clumsily woven for himself and his children, the whole nation is degraded.
"Among free men," said Abraham Lincoln, "there can be no successful appeal from the ballot to the bullet; and those who take such appeal are sure to lose their cause and pay the costs."
Yet we seemingly tolerate a rising level of violence that ignores our common humanity and our claims to civilization alike. We calmly accept newspaper reports of civilian slaughter in far-off lands. We glorify killing on movie and television screens and call it entertainment. We make it easy for men of all shades of sanity to acquire whatever weapons and ammunition they desire.
Too often we honor swagger and bluster and wielders of force; too often we excuse those who are willing to build their own lives on the shattered dreams of others. Some Americans who preach non-violence abroad fail to practice it here at home. Some who accuse others of inciting riots have by their own conduct invited them.
Some look for scapegoats, others look for conspiracies, but this much is clear: violence breeds violence, repression brings retaliation, and only a cleansing of our whole society can remove this sickness from our soul.
For there is another kind of violence, slower but just as deadly destructive as the shot or the bomb in the night. This is the violence of institutions; indifference and inaction and slow decay. This is the violence that afflicts the poor, that poisons relations between men because their skin has different colors. This is the slow destruction of a child by hunger, and schools without books and homes without heat in the winter.
This is the breaking of a man's spirit by denying him the chance to stand as a father and as a man among other men. And this too afflicts us all.
I have not come here to propose a set of specific remedies nor is there a single set. For a broad and adequate outline we know what must be done. When you teach a man to hate and fear his brother, when you teach that he is a lesser man because of his color or his beliefs or the policies he pursues, when you teach that those who differ from you threaten your freedom or your job or your family, then you also learn to confront others not as fellow citizens but as enemies, to be met not with cooperation but with conquest; to be subjugated and mastered.
We learn, at the last, to look at our brothers as aliens, men with whom we share a city, but not a community; men bound to us in common dwelling, but not in common effort. We learn to share only a common fear, only a common desire to retreat from each other, only a common impulse to meet disagreement with force. For all this, there are no final answers.
Yet we know what we must do. It is to achieve true justice among our fellow citizens. The question is not what programs we should seek to enact. The question is whether we can find in our own midst and in our own hearts that leadership of humane purpose that will recognize the terrible truths of our existence.
We must admit the vanity of our false distinctions among men and learn to find our own advancement in the search for the advancement of others. We must admit in ourselves that our own children's future cannot be built on the misfortunes of others. We must recognize that this short life can neither be ennobled or enriched by hatred or revenge.
Our lives on this planet are too short and the work to be done too great to let this spirit flourish any longer in our land. Of course we cannot vanquish it with a program, nor with a resolution.
But we can perhaps remember, if only for a time, that those who live with us are our brothers, that they share with us the same short moment of life; that they seek, as do we, nothing but the chance to live out their lives in purpose and in happiness, winning what satisfaction and fulfillment they can.
Surely, this bond of common faith, this bond of common goal, can begin to teach us something. Surely, we can learn, at least, to look at those around us as fellow men, and surely we can begin to work a little harder to bind up the wounds among us and to become in our own hearts brothers and countrymen once again.
City Club of Cleveland, Cleveland, Ohio
April 5, 1968
This is a time of shame and sorrow. It is not a day for politics. I have saved this one opportunity, my only event of today, to speak briefly to you about the mindless menace of violence in America which again stains our land and every one of our lives.
It is not the concern of any one race. The victims of the violence are black and white, rich and poor, young and old, famous and unknown. They are, most important of all, human beings whom other human beings loved and needed. No one - no matter where he lives or what he does - can be certain who will suffer from some senseless act of bloodshed. And yet it goes on and on and on in this country of ours.
Why? What has violence ever accomplished? What has it ever created? No martyr's cause has ever been stilled by an assassin's bullet.
No wrongs have ever been righted by riots and civil disorders. A sniper is only a coward, not a hero; and an uncontrolled, uncontrollable mob is only the voice of madness, not the voice of reason.
Whenever any American's life is taken by another American unnecessarily - whether it is done in the name of the law or in the defiance of the law, by one man or a gang, in cold blood or in passion, in an attack of violence or in response to violence - whenever we tear at the fabric of the life which another man has painfully and clumsily woven for himself and his children, the whole nation is degraded.
"Among free men," said Abraham Lincoln, "there can be no successful appeal from the ballot to the bullet; and those who take such appeal are sure to lose their cause and pay the costs."
Yet we seemingly tolerate a rising level of violence that ignores our common humanity and our claims to civilization alike. We calmly accept newspaper reports of civilian slaughter in far-off lands. We glorify killing on movie and television screens and call it entertainment. We make it easy for men of all shades of sanity to acquire whatever weapons and ammunition they desire.
Too often we honor swagger and bluster and wielders of force; too often we excuse those who are willing to build their own lives on the shattered dreams of others. Some Americans who preach non-violence abroad fail to practice it here at home. Some who accuse others of inciting riots have by their own conduct invited them.
Some look for scapegoats, others look for conspiracies, but this much is clear: violence breeds violence, repression brings retaliation, and only a cleansing of our whole society can remove this sickness from our soul.
For there is another kind of violence, slower but just as deadly destructive as the shot or the bomb in the night. This is the violence of institutions; indifference and inaction and slow decay. This is the violence that afflicts the poor, that poisons relations between men because their skin has different colors. This is the slow destruction of a child by hunger, and schools without books and homes without heat in the winter.
This is the breaking of a man's spirit by denying him the chance to stand as a father and as a man among other men. And this too afflicts us all.
I have not come here to propose a set of specific remedies nor is there a single set. For a broad and adequate outline we know what must be done. When you teach a man to hate and fear his brother, when you teach that he is a lesser man because of his color or his beliefs or the policies he pursues, when you teach that those who differ from you threaten your freedom or your job or your family, then you also learn to confront others not as fellow citizens but as enemies, to be met not with cooperation but with conquest; to be subjugated and mastered.
We learn, at the last, to look at our brothers as aliens, men with whom we share a city, but not a community; men bound to us in common dwelling, but not in common effort. We learn to share only a common fear, only a common desire to retreat from each other, only a common impulse to meet disagreement with force. For all this, there are no final answers.
Yet we know what we must do. It is to achieve true justice among our fellow citizens. The question is not what programs we should seek to enact. The question is whether we can find in our own midst and in our own hearts that leadership of humane purpose that will recognize the terrible truths of our existence.
We must admit the vanity of our false distinctions among men and learn to find our own advancement in the search for the advancement of others. We must admit in ourselves that our own children's future cannot be built on the misfortunes of others. We must recognize that this short life can neither be ennobled or enriched by hatred or revenge.
Our lives on this planet are too short and the work to be done too great to let this spirit flourish any longer in our land. Of course we cannot vanquish it with a program, nor with a resolution.
But we can perhaps remember, if only for a time, that those who live with us are our brothers, that they share with us the same short moment of life; that they seek, as do we, nothing but the chance to live out their lives in purpose and in happiness, winning what satisfaction and fulfillment they can.
Surely, this bond of common faith, this bond of common goal, can begin to teach us something. Surely, we can learn, at least, to look at those around us as fellow men, and surely we can begin to work a little harder to bind up the wounds among us and to become in our own hearts brothers and countrymen once again.
Saturday, August 23, 2008
Health Money and Love
My perceptions change every minute I spend on this earth. I don’t know whether this happens to me or this is the case with everybody.
The last week was a real eye opener for me. I suffered from tonsillitis, sore throat; cold and finally allergy which made me go all red (btw it’s still not over). For my tonsillitis I went to one of the plush hospitals who charge an exorbitant amount as their fees and when I thought that it is over, I found it has just started coz the chemist produced even a bigger bill. That day I realized how could a poor man afford all this? The final shock came when I saw a very badly burnt guy being taken to the ICU….. So is money the biggest thing in life? Not really, I guess its good Health. Some think that health can be bought by money, yes if you want to believe in that, but what about those who are born with a disease that has got no cure? If money is that important what about those who are stinking rich but do not have parents? What’s the use of coming back home from a tiring day and find nobody home to greet you? What’s the use of so much money when one day we all are going to have “swargiya” in front of our name…? I am not questioning the “striving nature” of anybody but what I am saying is that life is short. Love, health and friendship: the intangibles have got greater value in our lives than the most tangible stuff: i.e. money. I don’t say don’t have a passion (jazba) to become something but while travelling the path to your destination, value the intangibles as much, if not more than the tangibles because when we all reach the death bed our last wish would not be to be buried with all the money in the world but to spend the last few minutes with someone we love and we will want somebody to remember us when we are gone.
I am not a firm believer of God, but then with each passing day (in the last week) my faith in God has grown and I find myself thanking god for whatever I have. This entry in my blog has used the least number of backspaces and deletes, comes out of no intention to be grammatically correct or to produce any amount of literary delight, but is written to question the morals and beliefs which we follow without thinking . We keep on cribbing for the extra 1 lakh in the CTC, the 0.5 or 1 mark extra which could have us landed in a different course(perceived to be better by some), and the JP Morgan’s and the HUL’S. But it’s only when we sit in the general ward in a hospital see people suffer and makes us realize the ailment we have is a “bacha”, and immediately thank god for our life. We realize the value of a leaking roof only when we see somebody with no roof on his/her head. We crib about not having a DVD player until we see someone without eyes. We crib about not having the latest mobile phone until we see somebody who is deaf and we crib about not having a pair of Nike shoes until we see someone without legs. Now again the same question is it all about money? I would have written granths on this stuff but would love to make this discussion more personal, so please all of you reading this are requested to meet me at the coffee table sometime, I guess it would be more than the coffees worth to come out as a different person.
The last week was a real eye opener for me. I suffered from tonsillitis, sore throat; cold and finally allergy which made me go all red (btw it’s still not over). For my tonsillitis I went to one of the plush hospitals who charge an exorbitant amount as their fees and when I thought that it is over, I found it has just started coz the chemist produced even a bigger bill. That day I realized how could a poor man afford all this? The final shock came when I saw a very badly burnt guy being taken to the ICU….. So is money the biggest thing in life? Not really, I guess its good Health. Some think that health can be bought by money, yes if you want to believe in that, but what about those who are born with a disease that has got no cure? If money is that important what about those who are stinking rich but do not have parents? What’s the use of coming back home from a tiring day and find nobody home to greet you? What’s the use of so much money when one day we all are going to have “swargiya” in front of our name…? I am not questioning the “striving nature” of anybody but what I am saying is that life is short. Love, health and friendship: the intangibles have got greater value in our lives than the most tangible stuff: i.e. money. I don’t say don’t have a passion (jazba) to become something but while travelling the path to your destination, value the intangibles as much, if not more than the tangibles because when we all reach the death bed our last wish would not be to be buried with all the money in the world but to spend the last few minutes with someone we love and we will want somebody to remember us when we are gone.
I am not a firm believer of God, but then with each passing day (in the last week) my faith in God has grown and I find myself thanking god for whatever I have. This entry in my blog has used the least number of backspaces and deletes, comes out of no intention to be grammatically correct or to produce any amount of literary delight, but is written to question the morals and beliefs which we follow without thinking . We keep on cribbing for the extra 1 lakh in the CTC, the 0.5 or 1 mark extra which could have us landed in a different course(perceived to be better by some), and the JP Morgan’s and the HUL’S. But it’s only when we sit in the general ward in a hospital see people suffer and makes us realize the ailment we have is a “bacha”, and immediately thank god for our life. We realize the value of a leaking roof only when we see somebody with no roof on his/her head. We crib about not having a DVD player until we see someone without eyes. We crib about not having the latest mobile phone until we see somebody who is deaf and we crib about not having a pair of Nike shoes until we see someone without legs. Now again the same question is it all about money? I would have written granths on this stuff but would love to make this discussion more personal, so please all of you reading this are requested to meet me at the coffee table sometime, I guess it would be more than the coffees worth to come out as a different person.
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
Deadly Racist Cycle
This blog entry just came out after listening to the new song of the movie “Singh is Kinng”…The lines were like “Ek colour ke 13 patte lekin sab mein bas ek king”
What is a Leader without his followers? What is a King without his pupils? What is a CAT 100% scorer without the other 1, 99,999 (Maybe more than that) people who couldn’t crack the same. Actually everyone is unique in this society but we all have a habit of demeaning the position of others; Talking about demeaning, I think of racism. It’s a very popular word among us Indians, according to us most of the people (outside the boundaries of our motherland) are totally racist, but it’s we who have perceptions about every culture in our multicultural society. Forget cultures think about colleges, courses, schools etc. How many times have we heard he is pass out of DPS, he must be good …no offence made to all DPSites but I find it funny because over the past 12 months in Global Business I learned not to have preconceived notions about any person in this multicultural society. I don’t know how being from a particular college or a course will mean I am worthless or worth my metal. Although this school of thought cannot be dismissed totally but it is flawed, It’s the newspapers which fuel the demand for MBA courses by posting only the Rs 1 Crore packages that are given to fresh graduates of a leading B School, but then why is everybody expected to earn that amount;
All the above random thoughts come to me over a piece of music which emphasizes the fact that u need to be a King in this society, Actually the thing is its not what u see yourself as, its how the society sees you as; So I try to make an image of mine in which I try to balance my own interests and also that of the societies, so there is confused positioning of my image. Actually at this point only branding can help for the unbranded people; so the best way is to join an IIM or an IIT so the image the society has of you changes and they have an aspirational value for you and they are willing to pay for you much more than what you are worth of. But joining such an institution may lead to increased expectations on your side and maybe having a higher view of yourself and hence demeaning other people leading to racism. So a prey of racism becomes a racist….
What is a Leader without his followers? What is a King without his pupils? What is a CAT 100% scorer without the other 1, 99,999 (Maybe more than that) people who couldn’t crack the same. Actually everyone is unique in this society but we all have a habit of demeaning the position of others; Talking about demeaning, I think of racism. It’s a very popular word among us Indians, according to us most of the people (outside the boundaries of our motherland) are totally racist, but it’s we who have perceptions about every culture in our multicultural society. Forget cultures think about colleges, courses, schools etc. How many times have we heard he is pass out of DPS, he must be good …no offence made to all DPSites but I find it funny because over the past 12 months in Global Business I learned not to have preconceived notions about any person in this multicultural society. I don’t know how being from a particular college or a course will mean I am worthless or worth my metal. Although this school of thought cannot be dismissed totally but it is flawed, It’s the newspapers which fuel the demand for MBA courses by posting only the Rs 1 Crore packages that are given to fresh graduates of a leading B School, but then why is everybody expected to earn that amount;
All the above random thoughts come to me over a piece of music which emphasizes the fact that u need to be a King in this society, Actually the thing is its not what u see yourself as, its how the society sees you as; So I try to make an image of mine in which I try to balance my own interests and also that of the societies, so there is confused positioning of my image. Actually at this point only branding can help for the unbranded people; so the best way is to join an IIM or an IIT so the image the society has of you changes and they have an aspirational value for you and they are willing to pay for you much more than what you are worth of. But joining such an institution may lead to increased expectations on your side and maybe having a higher view of yourself and hence demeaning other people leading to racism. So a prey of racism becomes a racist….
Monday, July 7, 2008
Actual Expected and What???
Branding, Quality, Methodologies, Process improvements Rebranding Total Quality Management, learn unlearn and relearn, Learning Curve, Productivity enhancement etc…
We as managers use rather abuse each and every term from the above list without fail, but yeah we do it in the Global context; But do these actually hold true or are they some words out of the fantasy land, Well I learned in my short stay in Delhi that Harry potter may exist but these concepts are more academic than in reality…………..
My recent experience with a leading bank (which has just spend some millions of Rupees on rebranding) is really worth mentioning.
I landed up one fine day to close my account in the bank at 12:20 pm. I could see four people seated in a 2000 square feet of area each wearing spectacles with lenses (two inches (radius)), but all these people never use there glasses and have a habit of surpassing the big obstacle in front of their eyes by turning their face 135 degree from the vertical axis. Also I read a board, which mentioned, “ We are a bank with a goal of providing continuous customer satisfaction through Total Quality management and process improvisation”
Time: 12:20 pm
12:20 is actually close to the 1:00 break and already the decreased productivity level was evident. They delayed me enough through their super vertical hierarchy to make the clock race another 180 degree and since now it was 12:50, they close for lunch. I on the contrary had very high hopes expecting them to come by 1:30; somehow managed to wait for 40 minutes; but then afternoon siestas are never less than an hour long (A corporate lesson for me). On continuous nagging and repeatedly insisting that I am an MBA( haha) I could get the work done with 75% more efficiency; I would have left much before but each passing moment you calculate the time you invested and the return you get so it gets even more difficult to leave without the completion of your work ( Indian attitude chal na 2 ghante wait kiya adha aur sahi)
Time: 3:00 pm
I could manage to get them and pass through their super vertical hierarchy only in another two hours, finally I got 3000 Rs from the bank and you know what I really felt I have earned my money again
SO I guess that is what Earn, Unearn and Reearn means…..
We as managers use rather abuse each and every term from the above list without fail, but yeah we do it in the Global context; But do these actually hold true or are they some words out of the fantasy land, Well I learned in my short stay in Delhi that Harry potter may exist but these concepts are more academic than in reality…………..
My recent experience with a leading bank (which has just spend some millions of Rupees on rebranding) is really worth mentioning.
I landed up one fine day to close my account in the bank at 12:20 pm. I could see four people seated in a 2000 square feet of area each wearing spectacles with lenses (two inches (radius)), but all these people never use there glasses and have a habit of surpassing the big obstacle in front of their eyes by turning their face 135 degree from the vertical axis. Also I read a board, which mentioned, “ We are a bank with a goal of providing continuous customer satisfaction through Total Quality management and process improvisation”
Time: 12:20 pm
12:20 is actually close to the 1:00 break and already the decreased productivity level was evident. They delayed me enough through their super vertical hierarchy to make the clock race another 180 degree and since now it was 12:50, they close for lunch. I on the contrary had very high hopes expecting them to come by 1:30; somehow managed to wait for 40 minutes; but then afternoon siestas are never less than an hour long (A corporate lesson for me). On continuous nagging and repeatedly insisting that I am an MBA( haha) I could get the work done with 75% more efficiency; I would have left much before but each passing moment you calculate the time you invested and the return you get so it gets even more difficult to leave without the completion of your work ( Indian attitude chal na 2 ghante wait kiya adha aur sahi)
Time: 3:00 pm
I could manage to get them and pass through their super vertical hierarchy only in another two hours, finally I got 3000 Rs from the bank and you know what I really felt I have earned my money again
SO I guess that is what Earn, Unearn and Reearn means…..
Tuesday, April 8, 2008
Who says mario is just a game????
The world is a place where we have multiple dimensions but its funny how a two dimensional game like Mario has a lot of similarities with our life. Some very sad but true.
First of all we start very small, only in some versions (or rather in real life in case of some people) we start big but that does not mean we will not become small as we proceed in life. We always have choices to grow big in life but not that easily, we will have to bang our head on the wall for it. Life is short and we have limited time, though we may have multiple lives synonymous to multiple personalities and phases. When we grow big, big enough to get guns, we wear a mask, a different outfit to differentiate ourselves. Whenever we get our princess, always we find that she is not the right person ,the real princess is elsewhere. We may buy lives with coins and money but we cannot buy time. To grow we have to jump on top of people (a very sad but true thing which we cannot deny). Some people from the top throw their troubles on to the people at the bottom who suffer because of them, these troubles are very difficult to tackle and only way to get rid of them is to wear different outfit i.e. butter the people at the top. One ups in life are very difficult to find, always hidden somewhere. Most importantly we always travel alone in life but we always have options , to reach the goal is very important but the pleasure of living just like playing the game should be savored every second every minute because life is really short!!
First of all we start very small, only in some versions (or rather in real life in case of some people) we start big but that does not mean we will not become small as we proceed in life. We always have choices to grow big in life but not that easily, we will have to bang our head on the wall for it. Life is short and we have limited time, though we may have multiple lives synonymous to multiple personalities and phases. When we grow big, big enough to get guns, we wear a mask, a different outfit to differentiate ourselves. Whenever we get our princess, always we find that she is not the right person ,the real princess is elsewhere. We may buy lives with coins and money but we cannot buy time. To grow we have to jump on top of people (a very sad but true thing which we cannot deny). Some people from the top throw their troubles on to the people at the bottom who suffer because of them, these troubles are very difficult to tackle and only way to get rid of them is to wear different outfit i.e. butter the people at the top. One ups in life are very difficult to find, always hidden somewhere. Most importantly we always travel alone in life but we always have options , to reach the goal is very important but the pleasure of living just like playing the game should be savored every second every minute because life is really short!!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
