Social Media Business Card

Came across this interesting site today… Looks like paper business cards will be a thing of past very soon wth these virtual business cards. And, of course, paper business cards don’t let you share yur social media contact details.. whereas with card.ly you can do that… And as we all know, today, facebooks and twitters of the world are more important (and effective) than emil to stay in touch!

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From hedge funds to pizzas!!!

Just read another of this recession stories…. it shocked the hell outta me…

The only good part of this phase is that people are learning a lot and realizing the importance of savings… but do we really implement it till such time that we really face it?! I guess most of us don’t. And me…writing this here… have I really done something yet? No. In fact I just did some crazy shopping this weekend. And I am feeling stupid now. And so I hope I continue feeling this stupid and do something about it soon!!!

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Think before you ‘Publish’

Yes, you read it right…’publish’ and not ‘speak’ or ‘write’… both of the latter are oh-so-retarded now!

Recently I wrote an article for a magazine saying how social media is becoming more and more powerful. And oh boy…it indeed has become very powerful. Just today I came across a story which is funny, sad and thought-provoking at the same time. There is this person who got a job with Cisco and posted his apprehensions on twitter. The employer somehow read it and the poor thing most likely would have lost the offer, though he tried everything like removing the post and making it private, but it was too late by then. This is how the conversation on twitter went –

“The guy – Cisco just offered me a job. I have to weigh the utility of a fatty paycheck against the daily commute to San Jose and hating the work.
Cisco’s Reply – Who is the hiring manager? I’m sure they would love to know that you will hate the work. We her at Cisco are versed in the web.”

So guys… with the ever-rising power and presence of social media… one must be increasingly cautious of what is typed before he/she hits the ‘Publish’ button!

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This too shall pass!

One amazing article a friend emailed me today –

My Friends,

Money has no memory. Experience has. You will never know what the total cost of your education was, but for a lifetime you will recall and relive the memories of schools and colleges. Few years from now, you will forget the amount you paid to settle the hospitalisation bill, but will ever cherish having saved your mother’s life or the life you get to live with the just born. You won’t remember the cost of your honeymoon, but to the last breath remember the experiences of the bliss of togetherness. Money has no memory. Experience has.

Good times and bad times, times of prosperity and times of poverty, times when the future looked so secure and times when you didn’t know from where the tomorrow will come… life has been in one way or the other a roller-coaster ride for everyone. Beyond all that abundance and beyond all that deprivation, what remains is the memory of experiences. Sometimes the wallet was full… sometimes even the pocket was empty. There was enough and you still had reasons to frown. There wasn’t enough and you still had reasons to smile. Today, you can look back with tears of gratitude for all the times you had laughed together, and also look back with a smile at all the times you cried alone. All in all, life filled you with experiences to create a history of your own self, and you alone can remember them all.

The first time you balanced yourself on your cycle without support…

The first time she said ‘yes’ and it was two years since you proposed…

The first cry… the first steps… the first word… the first kiss… all of your child…

The first gift you bought for your parents and the first gift your daughter gave you…

The first award… the first public appreciation… the first stage performance…

And the list is endless… Experiences, with timeless memory…

No denying that anything that’s material cost money, but the fact remains the cost of the experience will be forgotten, but the experience never.

So, what if it’s economic recession? Let it be, but let there not be a recession to the quality of your life. You can still take your parents, if not on a pilgrimage, at least to the local temple. You can still play with your children, if not on an international holiday, at least in the local park. It doesn’t cost money to lie down or to take a loved one onto your lap. Nice time to train the employees, create leadership availability and be ready for the wonderful times when they arrive. Hey! Aspects like your health, knowledge development and spiritual growth are not economy dependent.

Time will pass… economy will revive… currency will soon be in current… and in all this, I don’t want you to look back and realise you did nothing but stayed in gloom. Recession can make you lose out on money. Let it not make you lose out on experiences… If you are not happy with what you have, no matter how much more you have, you will still not be happy.

Make a statement with the way you live your life: How I feel has nothing to do with how much I have.

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Talk? No. Behave!

Read this wonderful quote today –

“You can’t talk your way out of something you behaved your way into. You have to behave your way out of it.”

This is exactly what I said in one of my posts earlier (in different words of course)… All of us go so much out of our way to hurt someone.. we do things we ourselves can’t imagine… and when it comes to resolving..we say let’s talk! I am not saying that talking is not important, in fact, it is the most important part/trait of any healthy relationship… but then, there are certain goof-ups which can’t or rather shouldn’t be solved by mere talking… one must get into action!!!

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Learning “The Life”!

Though I’m drowned in work right now, didn’t want to miss this thought…

Sameer and me were talking about this yesterday… that how we can learn even from the smallest things in life.. we went to “The Scary House” in a mall here.. it had some skeletons, scary noises, no light, and some other scary stuff.. and honestly speaking they had done a good job.. but not good enough to scare us 🙂 We were talking to the skeletons all through 😀 OK..so what was the learning? It was that it’s all in the mind… its how you manage your thought…. so instead of thinking and getting scared about what’s gonna come next in the scary house, all through we kept guessing that now this skeleton should fall or now some hand should clutch…or something and so nothing could really surprise/shock us! And so, the bottom line is that nothing can scare you unless you want to get scared!

Another example for learning from things that might otherwise go unnoticed – In Hindu marriages, there is a custom wherein both the bride and the groom have a thick thread tied on their wrists and that has seven knots in it…and tight ones! Now, both of them have to open all those knots on each other’s wrist (which is a tough job)… many, actually most, people just do it… without even thinking about it.  And most of them obviously find it really tough. But both of us were probably li’l different, we were helping each other in doing that… despite of all the opposition from everyone. And believe me…it was almost a cakewalk for us!  Now when we thought about it, we could relate it to the difficulties a couple might face in life…with each other or with someone else. So there’ll always be many problems in life, but if a couple can stick by each other in the time of adversity, it can sail through anything and everything!

These are 2 of the thousands examples I can quote here… in fact that’s a good idea, I’ll try and write whatever and however I learn anything in life… might be of help to someone else as well!

By the way, just now I gave the link to my poems on this blog to my sister-in-law and that made me realize that its been quite sometime that I got creative with my pen… and it was not a good feeling… msut write one soon..

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Detached with Detachment!

I don’t know if the title made sense or not…but anyways! What invoked this post? Two things – My irritated state of mind (yet again for no reason) and Sameer’s last post!

Detachment… I’m sure all of us have heard this word a zillion times… more so now a days as the ‘Art of Living’ is the in-thing these days… but then… what is detachment and how easy or tough is it?

To be honest…for me… its quite tough… maybe because I don’t truly believe in this word… maybe because I have some wrong perceptions of this word…maybe I’m too strong-headed… maybe I’m just immature… maybe I’ll learn it with time and the harder way… like all other things in life! But you know what… I like to learn things the hard way now… because that ways you never forget them!

Coming back to ‘detachment’… so what does it mean? Does it mean becoming emotionally numb? Does it mean remaining unaffected by whatever anyone is doing around? Does it mean acting fully rationally, without any emotions ALWAYS? Does it mean not feeling anything for anyone? Does it mean not being hurt ever? Does it mean to stop loving and living?! Do all problems end for people who think they’re detached from everything and everyone?

I know all this is probably negative detachment…if there’s something like that at all! But then where do you draw the line? How do you know when to stop? And even if you do know, is it really in your hands to stop whenever?!

There has been a phase in my life when I felt detached from just about everything and everyone on this planet! When I came out of it, I thought that was the worst time of my life. But  as time passed and I experienced more and got hurt more, obviously due to things/people I was attached to, I thought maybe it was not all that bad.

So here, today, I’ve decided to at least try and master the art of ‘positive detachment’… anybody who has any knowledge on the subject..please enlighten me!

But then… the problem with me is that the moment I want to feel detached, I just go in complete oblivion… And at those times I just can’t stand people around me…I just want to be alone… but maybe I’ll learn to get over with it with time…lets see…maybe I learn to draw the line!

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Do you hate someone?!

“If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn’t part of ourselves doesn’t disturb us.”

-Hermann Hesse

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Are you ‘on track’???

A friend sent this excerpt from Paul Coelho’s book – The Zahir… He wanted my view on this… I thought its worth writing here…rather than just emailing him… So here you go Sanju!

“I went to a train station today and learned that the distance between railway tracks is always 143.5 centimeters or 4 feet 8.1/2 inches. Why this absurd measurement? I asked my girlfriend to find out and this is what she discovered. When they built the first train carriages, they used the same tools as they had for building horse-drawn carriages. And why that distance between the wheels on carriages? Because that was the width of the old roads along which the carriages had to travel. And who decided that roads should be that width? Well, suddenly, we are plunged back into the distant past. It was the Romans, the first great road-builders, who decided to make their roads that width. And why? Because there chariots were pulled by two horses, and when placed side by side, the horses they used at the time took up 143.5 cm. (!)

So the distance between the tracks I saw today used by our state-of- the- art high-speed (French) trains, was determined by the Romans. (!) When people went to the United States and started building railways there, it didn’t occur to them to change the width and so it stayed as it was. This even affected the building of space shuttles. American engineers thought the fuel tanks should be wider, but the tanks were built in Utah and had to be transported by train to the Space Center in Florida, and the tunnels couldn’t take anything wider. And so they had to accept the measurement that the Romans had decided as the ideal. But what has all this to do with marriage?

I paused. It has everything to do with marriage… At some point in history, someone turned up and said: when two people get married, they must stay frozen like that for the rest of their lives. You will move along side by side like two tracks, keeping always that same distance apart. Even if sometimes one of you needs to be a little further away or a little closer, that is against the rules. The rules say: be sensible, think of the future, think of your children. You cant change, you must be like two railway tracks that remain the same distance apart all the way from their point of departure to their destination. The rules don’t allow for love to change, or to grow at the start and diminish halfway through – it is too dangerous. And so, after the enthusiasm of the first few years, they maintain the same distance, the same solidity, the same functional nature. Your purpose is to allow the train bearing the survival of the species to head off into the future: your children will only be happy if you stay just as you were – 143.5 cm. apart!!

If you are not happy with something that never changes, think of them, think of the children you brought into the world. Think of your neighbours. Show them that you are happy, eat roast beef on Sundays, watch television, help the community. Think of society: dress in such a way that everyone knows you are in perfect harmony Never glance to the side, someone might be watching you, and that could bring temptation, it could mean divorce, crisis, depression. Smile in all the photos. Put the photos in the living room, so that everyone can see them. ….. but never forget, these rules were established long ago and must be respected. Who established these rules? That doesn’t matter. Don’t question them, because they will always apply, even if you don’t agree with them.”

Well…to be honest…I don’t really agree with the writer here. Yes, the rules used to be those…till sometime back. But not anymore. With changing times, people are becoming sensible enough to think of themselves and their happiness before thinking of the ‘society’. That doesn’t mean we ignore the society completely…not here in India for sure… but things are definitely changing. We are moving towards more of a WIN-WIN situation..

Having said this, I don’t deny that keeping a certain distance in a relationship is very important…but can that distance remain the same always? I don’t think so… I feel it changes as the relationship evolves… otherwise how else do you define the evolution of a relationship? In any relationship, there are times when you need some space and there are times when you want someone right beside you to comfort you… and if you can understand and  respond well to those needs of your partner, that’s, by my definition,  a perfect (or close to perfect) relationship…. and not when you constantly be the same distance apart….its insane… you gotta be pretending to do that… and no relationship, according to me, can ever survive on pretence!

Can you ever say that your love for your spouse never changed from Day 1? At least I can’t! How can it not?! According to me, even if you’re dating a person for several years, things do change after marriage. Its only after marriage that you really get to know a person. And its a gradual process… its not like you get an orientation session with your partner one day and you know him! You always keep knowing new things about each other. And after a certain level, you may feel that he/she is the wrong person… he/she being the same person whom you were so in love with sometime back. Or it can be the other way round as well. But it can’t be constant…I don’t buy that!

Bottom line remains the same – If, in a relationship, you do something just because its a rule set by someone and because you have to do it, its not real. You’re not being your own self. And as I said earlier… no relationship can ever survive on pretence… how long can you be what you’re not?! How long can you hold hands in front of your neighbours if you don’t even want to see each other’s face otherwise?

So my take here is that its important to be YOU!

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Marriage – The hen laying golden eggs!

Have you heard of this story about a hen laying golden eggs? For those who haven’t, I am trying to write it down here –

Once, there was a poor farmer in a village. He had a hen that laid one golden egg everyday. For some days, the farmer sold those eggs and became relatively richer. But now, he was tired of taking care of that hen and waiting for each egg day after day. Also, he wanted to become rich quickly. So he decided to rip the hen apart so that he could have all the eggs at one go and become rich overnight. But to his disappointment, when he slit the hen, nothing came out. And now, the hen is also gone!

Now you must be wondering how does it relate to marriage…right?

Its pretty simple…. any marriage is like that hen laying golden eggs in the form of security, companionship, togetherness, fun, intimacy, etc. However, these golden eggs are only an outcome of the care, wfforts and time given to it. Just like that farmer got tired of taking care of that hen, most people get tired of taking due care of their relationships and start taking a ot of things for granted….which is like killing that hen!

In the beginning, every marriage has its rosy days but you gotta nurture it forever if you want it to continue giving those ‘golden eggs’ forever!

I really don’t know how this thing came to my mind, it just clicked or maybe I read something like somehwere, sometime back….I donno…

P.S. – By the way..I am already getting a good response to my new page…and I feel so nice helping (or at least trying to help) those people out 🙂

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