Just ask for it….whatever you need…awesome na!

The Sunday was pretty normal. I am quite enthusiastic about Sunday s as on this day I don’t need to hurry up myself… to take bath, to gulp my breakfast and to run, coz the day is to live for myself rather than for my employer…

I was going through the Sunday Times of India when I came through this article named Just ask for it. A beautiful short article about how often we don’t ask for what we want, and simply we don’t get it for most of the time.

Isn’t it that simple? Yet how often we remember this when we feel uncared for or mistreated?

Some times I read ‘The Indian Economy Blog’. I like the kind of articles are published over there. In response to such a thought provoking article Scrap The Spending Limit I gave this comment.

 We cannot always take the law for a ride, and if the enforcing agency is really willing to enforce the law, it becomes a nightmare for the violators! The brightest of the examples is the last general elections in Bihar, where many of us remember how the election commissioner personally toured every nook and corner in Bihar, sometime even on motorcycle, to ensure everything to be free and fair!

But to be very frank, how many times does it happen? You, me and everyone knows the answer! Corrupt people do get away through many loop holes that exist. It is the honest ones who suffer! But at the same time we cannot remove the spending limit as a whole, because that is not the solution.

 The solution lies in enforcing the law, strictly! It is time we have to find alternative ways to do so, rather than the traditional ones! At the same time we have to make the law more applicable by revising it to suit the time’s need!

Regards

Tara Prasad

Time and tide take its turn…. I was told. Don’t remember who and when…

Yes, they do! For sure…

Any relation between making your vocabulary vast and feeding a hungry stomach ?

Here it is. They donate twenty grains (not grams) of rice through the UN World Food Program for each word you get right. Moreover I am sure it will help you learn atleast one new word or get closer to a few you already know.

My mobile rang and it was a colleague. He works with me and I had seen him taking a call on my way office. He asked me to speak to a friend of mine…

 my friend? With him…?  One second and this many question popped up in my mind. The next voice at the other end was of a friend of me… who was there with me at college. Last I had met him after we finished college and friends had started moving by then. We had gone to bid adieu to a very good common friend and he had dropped me home after a small fair well talk over soft drinks at a street side shop.

They were calling me to the nearby café coffee day…  I am a good fan of chatting over coffee and in the process a good admirer of the coffee day concept. Soon I was there.

Best things always wait for us and one was waiting for me for sure! Cold coffee was ordered and we were all out there…with stories of college days, the memorable characters, the instances… giggling out loud, I think after quite a long time. Soon the idea of visiting the college surfaced on the table and our bikes started rolling towards the place that made an engineer (people say that I am) out of me, in fact us.

Things have changed on the way. And they are changing. In the crowd of changes and happenings we were busy identifying places, recollecting memories associated. We were looking at ourselves with a backward shift of four points in the time frame. Everything was clear, like crystal without any illusion. They were on the flashing screen of our memories and four year is not such a long time to make them blurred. So is the college, with new buildings…new faculties…and new faces. But a few were still there who could remember our faces, the drivers, the security people and the support staff. We entered the faculty chambers only to find out eyes staring at us (what we do when some stranger moves in to our place while feeling the place as entirely his). All new faces, with a few of almost our age. Hardly we could remember a few names, after considerable thinking, who were there as our faculties. Few are still there; luckily they could remember our faces, if not the names.  A few words… with people who once guided us, scolded us, whom we hated… and held responsible for every bad thing happening in our lives, whom we wondered if they at all have any ability to think ‘coz they were not at all able to imagine our problems…minus those feelings.

Once again updates on college day couples… some are married by now, some have broken up. Wheels were rolling back now, fast on superior roads than what we had, among buildings, high rises and markets that have replaced the silence of a no man’s land, leaving back the place that once was everything for us.

 One day it was all ours… now someone else is thinking it as all his. They are not seeing the change, coz they haven’t seen what we had. Even they will leave the place up to someone else only to return one day to see how things have changed. I think that’s life!

How would you feel if i tell you have to work this saturday? Yeah… that is what I felt. But it turned out to be not that bad…. Infact I could meet a old mate, a good long chat over cold cofee, then on bikes to my old college….as if the old days were back, what even it was only for a couple of hours.

Being your self is important, that is what Kimojuno is saying here…

“ You need to understand one thing: You are you. Being you may not be right for others, but it is right for you. This is not a blanket to cover yourself with, or an excuse to do whatever you want, but rather a chance to understand that you do not need to be accepted by others [or even fit in] to be happy.”

Do we run out of thoughts???  In fact can we?

I think it happens that we are not aware of what exactly we are thinking….to that we call as running out of thought!

Here Aamir says

“a place to hold the Olympic Games where the government of that place has not been responsible for human rights violations (in one way or the other), then I suspect that we would be left with very few options, if any at all“

on why he will run in the Olympic Torch Relay.

If you are willing to help, but confused then you can put your confusion as a comment. I will try to make it clear…

….while watching Hrithik lighting the bulbs and pulling the dull sleepy dhaba to a mast mahoul…. few things flashed back in my mind…. Here goes an older post of mine of such a mast mahoul on our trip to Mussoorie… and some strange feelings after leaving back the good ‘ol friends and memories behind thousands of kilometers…

“ It was Nij who kicked me to get up and start blogging at Satyam Blog site. And very much against my lethargic body and sleepy mind I managed to sit in front of the system to open Satyam blog site and saw a post that I wrote few months back. The post was about my experience in our trip to Mussoorie.

 All my old memories flashed back in my mind. That chilled winter night of north India, eight burning souls with a desire to explore the beauty of my country, where we all stayed at a very far corner and it was the time to realize how beautiful and diverse our home was.

 As I am wondering through this post, still don’t know what to write and what I am writing, suddenly one thing came to my mind. It is a picture that I saw yesterday on Antony’s album in Orkut. It was a pic that we had taken on our way to office in Gurgaon, onthe day that was as ordinary as any other day, except the news that we were getting relocated to Hyderabad. We took that picture as our memory that we all wanted to take back with ourselves from Gurgaon. We were expecting the news that day that we never got, till one day when I got my relocation mail to Bhubaneswar, after long six months.

Still I am not sure what am I writing or what do I want to write. Any way I showed that pic to one of my colleague here, expecting to see the same emotion in his eyes, what was then in my heart, only to get a node that was as cold as the air-conditioned room. I didn’t know what that emotion was for, neither do I know now. I was as confused as I am now. About both, the pic and this post. I never know what is it that I was expecting from that colleague of mine, like I don’t know what am I writing over here and what am I trying to say. But I am feeling the same emotion now that was choking my heart then. “

At times my heart still yearns for that…

What started as a group working among university students, then came the word “re-Armament” at a time when the word got used widely this one was an exception of “Armament of morality” for a ‘hate-free, fear-free, greed-free world’….

“Bell the Cat”- I tell you that’s much easier than getting your leave approved…. it makes you astrologer, weather forecaster… much more than what your job demands !

Keeping your readers coming back to check what is the latest that you have blogged is what I feel the most important part of creating a readership. A wondering reader may end up hitting your blog through some link, but the biggest challenge is to next time make him type the URL of your blog.

I don’t know how this is gonna help you. Probably this is out of anxiety of waiting for my team lead to come, so that I can finish of my work and head for the gym !!!! 

Update :- Ah… finally I couldn’t make myself run run run and sweat !!!

Why do we call it as ‘Mother Tongue’, when we really speak the tongue of our father ???

Hint :- If a Telugu guy gets married to an Oriya girl what language their kids will speak???

There is a lot happenning in the blogosphere  about Raj Thackrey. Tons of posts are being written about what is happening and what should have happened !

Is any one listening there???

Opportunities are opportunities !

You never know when and where you will be showered with the fruits if you cash them. Same, you never know when you will get another if you miss them !!!

Sometimes what affects us more is the way we handle adversity than the adversity itself. Tough times come with problems, losses. And of course we are not pleased to welcome them. But they are there, irrespective of our liking or disliking them, and it’s really beyond of our part to have a grip on their coming into our lives.

But can’t we do a lot once they are already there? Can we reduce the shock that they create in our lives, because I feel the harshest of what we see in our lives is caused not by the tough time, but by how we try to handle it.

No I am not trying to be a visionary philosopher or a saint. I am trying to see myself as just another person in this rat race, who has to go through all those tough moments that life offers. So when I see myself, my friends, colleagues or anyone on the prime time of a news channel or on the front page of a magazine, I see him as a victim of both, the situation as well as his approach towards it, the later hurting him more than the former.  

Look at our lives and you can see many instances in past where we could have handled the situation in a better way. I know it’s difficult. To keep it calm at the time of adversity is not easy at all. It will take a price to prove others as wrong, when they say you have lost everything and lost every chance to start a fresh. But we have to pay it. Because it is our lives and no price is too high for a second chance in life. And I tell you in the longer run of life you are going to realize how small a price that was paid that got you a chance to get up and run again! Yes it is difficult. But what is more important is it’s our life and no one else is going to do it for us. Others may console but they are not going to compensate.

 Consciously we have to try to minimize the shock that comes with. When we are shaken by a tough time we are depressed and it tends to a situation where we lose the mental toughness to handle things around, which end up making things even worse. Being sad doesn’t help us in any way compensating for what we lost; but surely it drains us of our ability to save whatever is still there! So if you ask how we can minimize the shock, the simplest yet the toughest (?) answer will be by being aware of it. Being aware that you are shocked won’t be an easy thing to do. At the same time we are aware of it every time we are shaken! Confused?

The thing is whenever something happens to us that we did not want to welcome, we try to oppose it. We wish that it would have never happened, at a time when it has already happened.  And we try not to accept this. All these things happen only after we are aware of what has happened! The sequence is we are aware and then we started reacting, the second part of the sequence taking the major part of time and energy. There we can make a change. We have to spend more time being conscious of what has happened, there by leaving relatively less time to react to the happenings in an ugly way. Soon we will be conscious more of what is happening right now, than whatever has already happened, thus being able to take care of the present and save whatever still can be saved, instead of mourning over the spilled milk.

So the mantra is hold back when you are hit. Pause for a second. Realize that you are being shaken. Be aware of the happening and then get into the action. That would be a better deal indeed!

The purpose has to be a positive one.

What ever we do, what is most important I believe is, why are we doing it. You know that is what it takes to decide, where we are going to end up ! Comments are welcome…

  “Jeevan ko is tarah jeena ki koi mile kabhi to khud se nazar milasako…”

What else needs to be said? Always an entire book is not required to teach the lession of life… a few words will do.

(My sincere apology to those readers of mine who don’t know Hindi. The line means “Live your life in such a way, some times later you yourself can look deep into your own eyes…“)

‘It Happened in India’…..that is the title of the new book I have started, the story of a common bania becoming the Rajah of Retail. No doubt it can inspire a few more Kishore Biyani s given the story tells how some one can create one’s fortune,  in a society that keeps on telling you will fall down, as soon as you try to walk, when others are crawling.  

Doesn’t the title make justice to the book?

But on seeing some activists of a political outfit beating innocent people on the road and in the moving train what came to my mind is ……. even this happens in India !

“how about taking up blogging in a serious way”……. no i am not asking you. This is some thing that keep on coming to my mind. It happens at a regular intervals about which I am not sure whether to measure in the unit of time or some thing else.

I think the idea is good…… what say you?

“… a picture a day”

How is this idea that just came to the surface of my thought process (.. i like to call my mind by this name) of posting a picture every day and a line or two about it.

Yes…. its good idea I think, especially to keep posting some thing to this blog. And when they say a picture says a thousand words, I think its not a good idea,  its fabolous !!!

           Got to see this while browsing lazily after lunch.

  Some one said  “…lone chair is one of desolation and poverty on the one hand, and HOPE on the other.”

 …i have been going to the gym since last week. The funniest thing is that every day i have to fight some one within me who keep on telling me about so many thing for why i should not go.

… am waiting for the day when no one would tell me not to go when i look at my watch and start looking for my shoes.

How one can get a good piece of literature out of him? Any time during the day once I sit with my pen and paper, it should be a master piece of a creation, this is how most of us may prefer, and so do I. Is it possible? Yes, of course.
I think what we really read while we read is between the lines. It’s the emotions that flow out of the dumb letters, what matters, and when the flow soothes your soul, it’s a master piece. Here I ask myself a question. Does it really need to come out of us, as it is, without any effort, when and where we sit with a pen and paper? Or can we make our words speak our selves, by consciously trying to do so? What is coming out of my heart now is both the ways. What say you?

“Aame jahaku apurna kahu purnata digare taha eka pahacha” Confusions…Questions…. weird Thoughts….  Want to control life… hate Mediocrity …love Solitude….  Life…       Life… Complete control of things… in life… a quiet walk … a hot cuppa tea… a good piece of literature … a company to share thoughts with out uttering…  

 Wanna go back to the bridge… the giggling water … innocence smiles…. and … the frienz…  And the wish to never return … as the kid  on sunday night wishing the monday never arrives… unfulfilled obviously….

Has the age come when the problems of bad roads, dark streets get solved right away by a single phone call??? No… I am not asking you to leave your lucrative job and get into social work or politics. But still you can do that….if you are in Bhubaneswar. Just make a call to any FM Radio station of the city and say 123, street lights in your colony starts smiling at you.

‘Progress through Partnership’ this is the new mantra of Bhubaneswar Municipal Corporation. To take the initiative one step forward BMC has chosen a new mode of communication instead of the old long process of running from pillar to post. Its not just another government plan, but it works.

Kudos BMC….hats off to you.

    Not like any other success cookbook,’The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari’ tells the reader that success could never be yours, until you know the true value of success. Robin says in this book that success never comes with your bank balance, your high life style and your Ferrari, only when you feel the pleasure of your true self, then you can say that you have succeeded. And that pleasure should be eternal as he says ‘happiness is not a destination, it’s a journey’.          

   Mind is the starting point of every thing, says Robin. Its your mind where you create every thing before creating them actually. It’s your mind where you create your destiny. Robin compares the mind with a fertile garden which will give you back the same thing what you sow.   

     The light house in the fable (around which the entire book revolves) symbols the importance of a tall purpose in your life. Only when we are aware of the aim in our lives we will be able to prioritize things accordingly. Knowing where we are going is of utmost importance to achieve some thing.  Then comes the nine feet tall nine hundred pound sumo wrestler who symbolizes the importance of continuous effort towards self development. Here Robin says about the ‘Ten Rituals Of Radiant living’, where he speaks about ten simple yet powerful formula for self development. The pink wire cable which covered the private parts of the sumo wrestler in the fable symbolizes discipline and self control which has a tremendous role in building an enlightened life. Robin says ‘it is flimsy and weak. But together their sum is much greater than their constituent parts and the cable becomes tougher than iron. Self control and will power are similar to this’.   

    The book speaks about the most precious commodity, time and the significance of time management in achieving success in life. Now comes the term of selflessly serving others. Robin means to give yourself to others and contribute in a meaningful way when he says ‘the quality of your life will come down to the quality of your contribution’. By this one can get the inner joy and satisfaction.    Through out the book one thing Robin emphasizes in our lives. Success is not creating mountains of wealth, luxury, reputation, but being calm and peaceful at mind and enjoying the small moments of joy while we move towards our destiny. Because the road is as important as the end, as Robin says.   

Drama sells…. N so do Anu Mallik s…

It was a gala evening in the Indian Idol - 3 and Sonu Nigam was the special judge. Suddenly the popup blocker in my mind got disabled and a thought popped its head. I got my plot for this post.

Of late reality shows are here. When a generation is raring to go places, these shows are here to stay for a quite longer, because these shows are the platforms where the young India is getting its launching pad. Any way my intention is not to discuss that.

Anu Mallik  sells…..n so do drama…

Here there is a guy who is basking in the glory of Indian Idol. If the people were given a chance to vote a judge out of the show, I am sure the unanimous choice would be Anu Mallik, at least I feel that way. But he is there…. starting from Indian Idol -1 till date. You know why? Because he is the person who adds drama to the show… and he does it every way n every time he does some thing. Be it praising some one to heaven or walking down on some ones self respect or arguing with fellow judges….he does it everyway he can. He makes the show interesting…. he forces the audience to wait n watch what is coming out of his lips… I may switch the channel when some body else is speaking but never I can do the same when the mike is in Anu Mallik’s hand, because….you guessed it right. Yaa no one knows what this guy is going to do and what is that he is going to say. And that’s where he adds spice to the show and that’s where he adds TRP to the show. Be it mud slinging on some one on the panel, creating a controversy of crush between Chang and Deepali where none existed or showing his artistic talents of creating Dhuns on the spot….by any means this guy just adds TRP. And there he becomes the eyeball of the channel and rules the show… if I am wrong; at least I feel  he is trying to do so.

I was confused. Confused of whether I am really confused or not. I was not happy, neither unhappy. I was dissatisfied for being neither satisfied nor unsatisfied. I wanted to call someone. I called Gadanayk, but could say nothing except a ‘Good Night’.  

   What is this? Is there anything that is trying to come out of me, from my unconscious or sub-conscious mind to my conscious mind? Have I understood the problem? Or I am trying to find the answer without even getting the question?  

Posted By Tara Prasad

Adversity is the best teacher. But can’t we mange to learn without that? Can we always afford to learn at the expense of some thing? The philosophy of losing the battle but winning the war goes fine, but can’t we win the war without losing even a battle?

I am asking a hell lot of questions. But without them I am feeling suffocated.

What am I doing? What am I getting? Is that the worthy getting or is that worthy doing? I think I am getting what I am giving.Then why should I complain? Why should I go and ask any one’s favor?  I should not cry… because I don’t deserve that. It’s me who is responsible for whatever is happening. Why should I give that responsibility to some one else? Why should I give that opportunity to some one else?

Background checking to make the company fraud-free?

Niranjan Rajadhyaksha writes in ‘The Rising of India ’ as,

“Some changes are already evident in the rural economy. It can no longer be blindly equated with the agricultural economy. Economist Omkar Goswami and marketing consultant Rama Bijapurkar have constructed a detailed representation of rural India based on economic, demographic and consumption data from 530 districts in the country. They say that rural India accounts for 52% of India’s GDP. They break this into the three basic components: agriculture accounts for 46%, industry for 21%, and services for 33% of the rural economy. So a moribund agricultural sector does not necessarily mean a dead-end rural economy. In a newspaper article, Goswami and Bijapurkar give one indication: the 1991 census showed that only 30% of rural households lived in permanent houses. Ten years later, the next census shows that 41% of rural households have decent housing. This fact does not quite fit in with the politically attractive view that the whole of rural India is suffering because of problems on the farm.”