In pursuit of....

I had gone out this morning to meet a friend of mine. I was not very sure about the route to start with. And being tired of driving all the time, I chose to use the public transport. On the way back, I was talking to family over the phone and just kept walking along without realizing where I was going. For the initial part, I kept going in circles without making any progress. But after sometime, I intuitively figured out the way to not go in circles.

I kept walking for 6.6 km or so this way and this lead me to the metro station. Now, I must say that it had been my wish to travel on the new Bangalore metro for quite sometime. For some reason or the other I missed doing it. Today it finally happened. I found the ride on the metro to be enjoyable after a long walk! After getting off the metro, I took an auto to reach home. So, why am I posting this?

Often in life, you are lost and wonder where you are heading to. The thing is, everything usually sorts itself out and along the way you also end up doing what you wished to do. This was my learning for the day and this is how I am signing off the end of this weekend, on a positive note! :)

The rear view mirror

You look into the rear view mirror while driving your motor car. Doing it every now and then helps you navigate forward. Doing it a little too often tends to slow you down. Being fixated on it draws your attention away from what is in front of you.

I think the same holds true for life. Introspection is a necessary thing so long as it is in a limited quantity. You can look back every now and then to help you on your way forward. Too much of it just gets you stuck where you are.

The rear view mirror is not provided to look back all the time. The past is not embedded in our memories to keep thinking about it too often. The only purpose of the past is to enable us to face the future better prepared.

Three Musketeers - A good watch

The movie 'Three Musketeers' is a must watch. Ignore anything the reviews have to say about the movie. It is an entertaining watch and is fully worth the money you pay for it.

Wow, times have definitely changed... I blog sitting in the train and i have a bunch of people around me sitting with their laptops. And you had those 'good old' days when people just read books or mags or simply stared out of the window.

Here is a tribute to all the frozen friendships and broken ties. While they lasted, my life was enriched and I am grateful for that. I am an optimist (except over weekends :P) and I hope that sometime in the future some of the ties will be resurrected.

Appetite for the rainy season!

Tomato basil soup (served piping hot) + plain garlic bread at pizza hut - Two Things worth dying for this rainy season in Bangalore :) Surprisingly, the non-pizza menu items at Pizza Hut taste much better these days!

And in hindsight why does everything appear obvious? What separates the past from the now and the future? Strange are the ways of nature. It provides the experience of the past to learn from. At the same time it throws at us a future that is uncertain. Is it supposed to be a test of our past learnings or past un-learnings or a combination of both?

Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara

Very entertaining movie, fun to watch and all the songs are good. My favorite one being - "Der lagi lekin"

On a side note, Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara.. So What? In a wide wide vast universe we live in, we are not even a speck worth considering. So why all this self-importance! Deal with what you get, be happy if you get lucky, else move on, and that's all there is to it.

It is a good life! :)

A very peppy tune :) and I am humming,

Oh this has gotta be the good life
This has gotta be the good life
This could really be a good life, good life

Say oh, got this feeling that you can't fight
Like this city is on fire tonight
This could really be a good life
A good, good life

When it matters...

A couple of weeks ago I was part of this interesting training program on 'Customer Relationship Management'. The guy conducting this program was a seasoned veteran from the industry. He was giving an instance of how you win life long customers. In his example, he spoke about a situation where a customer is desperately looking to get a service/ product. The situation is so grave that his good reputation depends on successfully completing it. At that point, the business could take it as business as usual and say 'Oh, but my order log is full and i can deliver it to you in a month's time'. There would still be nothing wrong about it. On the other hand, if the person responsible for delivery senses the urgency and desperation of the customer and prioritizes this delivery above all else, and ends up delivering the product when it is needed the most, he wins the customer's loyalty for life.

Since this trainer was also giving a lot of gyaan about life in general, it struck me then that the same thing would also hold true for personal relationships. Sometimes people are the customers and sometimes they are the business. People never remember all things in the same way. All they remember is of times which mattered to them. When it matters, where you there? When it matters, did you keep your promise? When it matters, did you make a positive difference? Nothing else matters.

Of Questions...

And having broken the first and second cardinal principles, he now stood on the cusp of breaking the third one. It was always going to come to this. And sometimes he just wished a few things were simpler, straightforward and old fashioned. Why was this resistance always present? Why not just let go and roll down the slope like everyone else, if it were anyway to come to that. What invisible string holds him and ties him down to where it began? Why was there this perpetual worry about having to stay on the right side of an increasingly blurred boundary?

Theory of agnostic cause

The theory of agnostic causes states that an effect is not latent in the cause.

When a basic collection of alphabets of a language can result in a complex literary work like JRR Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, would it be a leap of imagination to think that life emerged from a source which was simple and had the potentiality to become complex? Would a transformation towards a complex system need an intelligent hand or could that be achieved through randomness, provided sufficient time is allowed to pass?

Actually, it is true - Everything happens for one's own good :)

The Moving Finger Types and Erases....

My hand begins to type what is on my mind and then a finger starts working on the 'backspace' button. And now I wonder what Omar Khayyam would say to that! :)

"The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.

~ Omar Khayyam

Idiotic Economics

Ok. Inflation sucks. Guess what they are attributing inflation to? Food demand and a growing class of consumers whose per capita consumption is growing faster than supply. Sounds like a reasonable explanation no? Actually, it is all hogwash. Demand growth is not the culprit in the current inflation equation. The problem is a supply-side one. And the supply side issues have been created by esteemed idiots sitting in the ministries of economics, agriculture and other defunct organisations. At this point let me slip into a story.

Ramu was a village simpleton and a labourer employed in agriculture. His master was a landlord who grew rice and paddy. For many years, all the landlord had to grapple with were unreliable monsoons, pests, price for his produce and of course the shark moneylenders. Then came a new devil. It was called NREGA. The government's new agenda to prove it's retardedness. Not to mention a new revenue stream for the corruption portfolio. Meanwhile, all was well for Ramu. He stopped working in the agricultural fields. Why would he need to? NREGA was providing him with a better source of income for digging up the soil and creating empty pits. He always wondered what those pits would be used for but never understood the purpose of making them. The landlord offered other labourers even more wages to stick to the farm but not too many were interested when there was NREGA to fill their pockets. Those who stayed back got more wages for their work. The prices of food commodities went up because of wage inflation and reduced supply. Monsoon was blamed. Moneylenders were blamed. And the black cat which crossed the landlord was also blamed for pushing up inflation. The NREGA policy makers realised the damage under NREGA was not enough. They felt linking the wages under NREGA to inflation would speed up their goal of looting the public even faster. Now wages would rise faster in rural farmlands, pushing prices higher and reducing supply even more. Masterstroke. So, in this way, the food inflation got out of hand. Now the Government is looking at grappling inflation with serious intensity. It has resorted to PR and confidence building statements to reduce the inflation menance. They are also considering re-indexing inflation to show a lower % change. Very ingenuous ways to tackle inflation. Polcy makers all around the world have an important lesson to learn from the Indian experience. Letting inflation slip out of hands is not the important part in all this. At the end of it all you just need to make positive statements which are farthest from the cause and also issue impossible inflation reduction targets for the future as outlooks. Neat work!

Why does it always have to be fundamental and never superficial or trivial? I am not trying to be cryptic for halo effects.