Me Myself and I

After two engagement ceremonies and 800+ km of travel rocked and rolled my last weekend, it was time for blues. The Monday morning blues. A cacophony of alarm, wakeup calls, motivating speeches and dreadful thoughts of impending deadline finally made me see the light of the day. The ever ticking clock showed 10 when I finally relented to the call of duty. When I hit the road all roads seemed to lead me back home. By the time fear showed me the path to my office, my colleagues had almost finished half of their day. Whatever was left of pre-lunch session was effectively killed by reading e-mails and e-newspapers. After a heavy brunch, I started taking stock of things. The work to be finished seemed like a mountain and being true to my homo sapien instincts, I started looking for an escape route. I tried few things to forget work for a while like smoking, gossiping, frequenting toilet, reading news papers etc. but my conscious mind faithfully kept on beaming the picture of impending doom....

Today I attended a very interesting training session conducted by folks from our training department. Much to my surprise our country head took 30 minutes of his precious time to enlighten us on our organization's mission, vision and values as part of this training. The entire session was extremely well conducted and was highly interactive. Other than the intended objectives of his talk, we also got few tips on effective communication by just watching him. During his discourse, he conducted a small quiz. He read out mission statements of few organizations and asked us to identify the names of those organizations. I found this very amusing. Following are few interesting samples. "To give ordinary folk the chance to buy the same thing as rich people" -Wal-Mart "To solve unsolved problems innovatively" -3M (The inventors of widely used post-it notes and Sellotape) "To make people happy" -Disney "To preserve and improve human life...

A Murphy’s Law states “ If Analytical skills fail, use brute force ”. Another similar law called William’s law states “ There is no mechanical problem so difficult that it cannot be solved by brute strength ”. Today I had the great pleasure of realizing these facts. Well.... the beginning of the story dates back to last year when I joined my present organization. Like everyone, I too was gifted a cubicle with a fancy table with a cupboard attached, an ergonomic chair, a cozy dustbin, expensive office stationary, a dumb headphone etc. Ahhh how good it feels to have a place of your own even if it’s just 5 X 5 feet in dimension. However the pleasure of enjoying my fully furnished shelter was short-lived as I happened to loose the keys of my cupboard. All my stuff in the cupboard suddenly became inaccessible. It made me feel like living in a house without a TV. Initially I thought I must’ve left keys at home, but after a week of home, body and soul searching, I decided to give up the hope...

Guru is a Sanskrit word. Gu means darkness and ru means dispeller. Guru is the one who is enlightened and the one who brings enlightenment to his disciples. Our culture equates guru with god by saying “Acharya Devo bhava”. Most of us know the famous guru mantra, which again elevates guru to god status. Guru Brahma Guru Vishnu Guru devo Maheshwaraharaha Guru saakshath Para Brahma Tas mai sri Gurave namaha Every year we celebrate Guru Purnima as a mark of respect to our teachers. Other than this we celebrate teacher’s day on Mr. S. Radhakrishnan’s birthday. If I peek into my past, I see that I've learned under many teachers during my sixteen plus years of formal education. There have been some teachers who have made tremendous positive impact on me and are frequently remembered, there are some who have slipped down my memory lane and there are some whom I remember for not so good reasons. Out of all my teachers I remember the teacher who thought me the music the most. ...

The word “ busy ” is a great savior for this mortal human world. It can get one out of many tricky and not so comfortable situations with tremendous ease. Did you intentionally or unintentionally forget to keep an appointment? No problem ma’am/sir. Promptly announce you were busy with loads of work. You can slip away like sand from all the troubles you brought upon yourself. Believe me, it works like miracle. The frustrated soul who has been waiting for you to turn up and whose frustrations have now transformed into F16 bombers to blast you gets immediately pacified like an infant who has been shoved with a rubber nipple or pacifier.  The other person’s anger melts like ice and you will be pardoned from definite death penalty and a good thing about this is you don’t even have to apologize.  If you are lucky and your nemesis is low on IQ and high on EQ, you may end up profiting his/her sympathies. If you are too lazy to tidy your house up or if you can’t make your mind to c...

Folks in our office are slaves to a strange culture. I prefer to call it “Sweet Culture”. We frequently get a blank email with subject “Sweets at my desk”. What the heck? I will be busy waging a loosing battle against all powerful and mighty siesta after hogging generous volume of free lunch. I will be desperately waiting for an email with some entertainment value so that I could save myself from embarrassment of being caught snoring with mouth wide open.  During such trying times I get this dead as wood blank email with a sweet subject line. Such mails bring tremendous fury and frustration in me and greatly disturb my internal peace for many reasons. Firstly, after gobbling up to dangerously high "neck level", mention of the word food can cause eruption of undigested lava from my protruding belly.  This surely degrades hygiene level in the work environment and results in loss of productivity of my colleagues. Unmindful of such a risk, some spamster crook...

I love this word oxymoron . Oxymoron is a Greek term which can be translated literally as "sharp-witted absurdity". In present day English, it is a short phrase that appears self-contradictory in a context. Some of the interesting examples are Deafning silence Act naturally Cold sweat Fuzzy logic Friendly fire Agree to disagree Another word which is similar to this is paradox . Paradox is an apparently true statement that seems to lead to a logical self-contradiction, or to a situation that contradicts common intuition. The identification of a paradox based on seemingly simple and reasonable concepts has often led to significant advances in science, philosophy and mathematics. Following are some interesting examples. When you increase your knowledge, you see how little you know. You see how much you still have to learn. God is not all-powerful as he cannot build a wall he cannot jump My personal view is that the truths of this world are not absolute, but ar...

I had a great weekend as I got to watch three movies and much to my luck all of them were good in their own right. Fluid Friday night was gulped down watching “Lost in Translation”, Saturday night was killed watching “Troy” and the weekend was ended well watching inimitable Satyajit Ray’s “Shataranj ke Khiladi” on Sunday night. “Lost in Translation”. A good film by Sofia Copola (Yup, She is the same girl who played Michael Corleone’s daughter Mary in Godfather Part III). I am sure she has inherited some of her father’s genes. This film explores a relationship that blossoms in a week between two bored individuals who happen to be in much happening capital of Japan. One is a middle aged Actor who has come to endorse a whisky brand and other a young lady married to busy fashion photographer. Brilliant performance by lead actor Bill Murray, who portrays the role of middle aged Hollywood star. “Troy”. The latest Hollywood block buster, with spectacular visuals and effects is a must...

Internet always amazes me. Whenever I think of internet’s contribution to my personal growth, internet occurs to me as a guru or a guiding light. I have got so many enlightening facts, ideas, knowledge and happiness from it. Any day I prefer internet to TV. Just like the mobile phones have become sort of extensions of our physical bodies, Internet too has become a necessity. Day by day my dependence on internet is growing. Right now text entered through key board is the most effective way to search for information on web. A day may come when we’ll be able to input voice data by singing an obscure tune and search for songs that match it. If internet not had been there, I can imagine how though it would have been for someone to gather knowledge. Probably one had to procure many books (pretty though job), read those books, collate the information, process it, contact many people, discuss with them and get their views, and then form a thorough understanding. Probably it would’ve taken ag...

Off late there is something predictable about unpredictable Bangalore monsoon. Well, It is still remains unpredictable, but the predictable thing about it is, any day it rains, damn thing rains in evenings, that too when I am about to leave after a hard day of time passing in office. Today was one of such days. There was not much work, the scheduled tele-conf got postponed, No looming deadlines. Today had all makings of a “perfect day at work”. I was planning to get back home early, clean a huge pile of newspapers and clothes lying everywhere from past one month, have a good dinner, watch some TV… etc. etc. Thunder Struck and all my plans got washed away just like few people living in low lying areas of Bangalore get washed away in drains along with their meager properties every year. Tens of people have been killed by this year’s monsoon even after our BCC having made “elaborate arrangements”. Anyways let me come back to my plight, So I started wondering what to do? Well what can...

Hi there, After much delaying(nearly a year),I managed to create my own weblog. I plan to share my thoughts on variety of subjects by posting messages regularly. Wish me luck . Cheers CK