Thoughtful -- Teacher's Day

I got to do lot of thinking on my way to office..thanks to the new Airoli office (so far)!! This morning is no different. Lotsa messages floating on the Teacher's day today. I tried to flash back in time and take a silent glimpse of all the teachers who have been part of my academic phase of life. Not so surprising enough, I still do remember each and every  teacher from my school, tuition, and college days. I kept thinking....isn't it strange that these teachers have taught us only for a year, but their faces, their style, tone, and way of teaching is still fresh in my mind.

I take a deep breath, relax, peep out of the window of moving bus.. I see people on the roads... Some walking, some stalled, some talking...all busy in their chores. I take a pause and run my mind train further..have we not, at some point of time, been mentors and guides to those in need?

I hear the chattering of group of boys and girls in the bus with me.. immersed in sharing whole kind of talks..seems they have met. after years..though it's only 11 hours back that we all were in bus to home.... HOME...yes..an institution, like none other, of learning, of love.

I now go back to my teachers and think that, all these years and many more to come until my existence, I will be thankful to them for giving me education that has made me literate, civilized, and capable to see days of food and living.

But, is that good enough learnings we have had from schools to survive, to live life? Nope. It's our home where we have been taught life's principles, morals, lessons on humanity, ability to distinguish good from bad, inspiration and motivation to excel and enrich our lives, lessons on sacrifice, respect, devotion, tolerance, joy, faith, and so much more.

As my office is almost approaching near and before I hit my corporate desk, I conclude --- Parents are the best teachers we have in our lives. Wish them, hug them, be a little kind to them, or call them today just to say, "Hi, what's happening? All well?" I also believe in spreading and sharing good things, I have learnt, with my fellow beings. I see hundreds of flyovers and bridges built....but we fail to reach out to needy. On a closing note--- let's touch someone's life and then celebrate Teacher's day!!

Secured Financial Future

An easy and handy guide to manage money:
http://securedfinancialfuture.com/

~ Roshni Nayak (author of the blog)

Brain-freeze!

More cheaper a footwear is, more noise it makes when you walk; irony is, the same fact goes for the costliest footwear you'd wear!

                

Every one around ~ is so much ~ like you ~ that they don't ~ let me ~ forget ~ an iota ~ of you!

If you are at an outsourcing end; be assured and trust that you have people working just for you, but in a different uniform!

Happy Holidays!

Wishing everyone a warm holiday season & abundant happiness at Christmas-tide! 

What Do You Think?

Do you think it's the values that clash and NOT egos?

People grow with their "self-defined" set of principles or values. If they try to override or hurt these principles/values of one another, then that's a "CLASH"! Ego is only like any other emotion that we have... What do you think?

Warm, rainy morn!

On seeing me after several several days, the little-cute toddlers in my society sprung and started to call me at the top of their voices this morning, "Aunty, aunty..". They were joyed and excited; they waved; they smiled :-) 


Short, lovely, heart-warming moments of this kind, indeed lighten up your day!


Good day!

Thought of the Day!

Wonder why legends in this world are known as "the Legends"... may be because their achievements in life were/is constant and ongoing, despite all odds and downfall.


It's a struggle to maintain the tempo of your achievements. You learn to live with this struggle, and you are a legend!

Haiku

Every night,
The musical soirée of solitude play;
Breeze kisses her glistened eyes,
And the moon sparkles her face.


Behold the crescent,
She sighs;
Rising and waning,
The memoirs of life!

Every night ...

Weekend tale ...

It arrives with a full blown trumpet and departs with an outcast sprit! 


Weekend! She wonders if reallyyyyyy every one, in every corner of the globe has plans for the weekend! And an impromptu, "Yes"!! 


So, there are "Happy Birthdays"; "Happy Anniversaries"; and .... "Happy Weekend" :) 


Weekend is when everyone Rejoice; Rock; Relax; Reminisce; Restore; Rift, Re-unite ... .. donno why she put words starting with 'R' here; that is may be because these "Rs" are missing in her weekend!


Weekend, she thought is celebrating good times and may be somewhere makes us good at planning, management, leadership...... 


Ohhhh no no no!! Not again, please!! It's a weekend.. for heavens sake!

On this remark, she smiles, ... and goes back to find the missing letter of her life!

Happy Anniversary!!

May 02, 2012:

Happy Anniversary with Lionbridge, Ru!!!

It's X'mas ....

Cold, wintry night
A star shinning bright

Hymns rhyme
Carols and chimes

I am looked upon
By my Christ!

Techworld weeps..

Yet another legend rests in grave; this time, from the world of TECHNOLOGY --- the one with a revolutionary mind; the  one with an amazing brilliance; the one who CANNOT be 'equaled' ---- Steve Jobs!


Steve Jobs has been an inspiration to thousands and will continue to stay with billions in the form of his inventions.


An excerpt from his speech: How to live before you die

"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, it's 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 it's 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."

A tribute to Steve:
"Steve was among the greatest of American innovators -- brave enough to think differently, bold enough to believe he could change the world, and talented enough to do it."
~ US President Barack Obama

"The world rarely sees someone who has had the profound impact Steve has had, the effects of which will be felt for many generations to come... For those of us lucky enough to get to work with him, it's been an insanely great honor."
~ Microsoft head Bill Gates

"Steve, thank you for being a mentor and a friend ... Thanks for showing that what you build can change the world. I will miss you."
~ Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg

"He was able in his mind to imagine what would happen when things were 10 times faster or 100 times faster and start to think about how the technology evolves... Everything he did, he was two or three or four steps ahead in thinking."
~ Google chief Eric Schmidt

"Steve Jobs always challenged assumptions, went for the impossible and pursued perfection. He set the standard for innovation: breakthrough ideas realised at nearly unlimited scale. His light will shine on and influence generations to come"
~ SAP Co-CEOs Bill McDermott and Jim Hagemann Snabe

This era of technology knows not, what thou has lost!!

On division and inequality..

I "cannot" watch the destruction of what I have lived for!

~ Mahatma Gandhi

Food for thought

Birthday --- a day when your families, friends, colleagues, and everyyyyone you know, make you feel super special! From morn until dusk, the day gives you a sense of newness and freshness within.


For the rest of days, CAN WE NOT give our best in spreading joy and light, and in making every single day SPECIAL for OUR LOVED ONES till our special day comes again, next year?


Every new TODAY is mine;
Every where I be, the sun shines!

~ Ru

Bappa Morya... departs!

11^th September, 2011: 23:15 p.m.


I am back home from Ganesh immersion.


The Visarjan day has always been special to me and my lil' sister. Every year, on this day, we join the horde of devotees on Marve Road to see Lord Ganesha depart.


Like every year, today’s day was full of energy and joy. Thousands of people had hurdled, jostling each other on the mad busy road to catch glimpses of Lord Ganesha. One-fourth of Mumbai seemed to me like on the streets! It would be right to say that this is the only day when one can walk or stroll on the middle of road without following any traffic rules!


As the sun went down, more and more processions showed up on streets heading toward immersion venue. Myriad lights sparkled the wet roads. I saw Bappa in various Avtars, colors, sizes, poise; every Ganesh idol was embellished with stunning jewellery and flowers; and every idol looked vibrant, benevolent, and special.


Ambiance was electrifying, highly acoustic, and zealous. People in procession danced frantically to tunes of bollywood songs and bhajans. Several songs are devised in bollywood on Ganesh Chaturthi; but one song that became iconic and is played every year, in every pandal is “Deva ho deva” from the movie ‘Humse Badhkar Kaun’. It still manages to give us goosebumps and nostalgia!


I enjoyed the Visarjan day whole-heartedly. To catch a closer view of ganesha, I ran after every carrier, took pictures, took blessings, and waved a big bye to Bappa. Firecrackers, incessant honking, traffic snarls, shouts of bappa, hi-tech music systems, whistles, cries, laughter, and much more were a part of pompous celebration today and raised decibels of the upbeat atmosphere to par.

With as much fervor and frill the Bappa was carried through immersion, the devotees returned home with that much despair and emptiness! I retired with a bag of mixed feelings. Bappa left behind sadness and void, but at the same time, he renewed our faith and hope to look forward to a good year.


On a parting note, I pray that my loved ones be safe and healthy always. With the visarjan of worries and troubles, I trust in you Ganpati Bappa that next year you will bring us immense joy and happiness.

Ganpatti Bappa.. Morya…
Pudchya Varshi… Lav kar ya..!!

For my fRiEnDs...

Hues in skies
Dreams so high


A hill of hope
Each of all, on our own boat


Mild breeze whispers
Memory lingers


The day is here
To write to my near-dear


My heart knows
Not a day goes


The time we spent
Was magnificientttttttt!


I remember you all
You all, I remember


With every passing day,
and every passing year!


Dear friends,
wish you a very Happy Friendships Day!!

Cheers to our Happy Times.. :-))

Sight of the Day!

A fine morning, the wet sun;
Busy streets, wheels in motion. 


And I see, I see what;
A yellow-blue-red coded police van, 
Resting in a secluded spot. 


And I hear, I hear what;
The dogs barking 
At ''the van'', non-stop!!


So, for the wrong if you do;
You're spared not.


Even the dogs make out;
Who's who, and what's what!

Lol.. :-))