We had travelled non stop from Bangalore->Delhi->Haridwar->
Rishikesh->Rudraprayag, with a short stay at Rishikesh. We
finally decided to halt at Rudraprayag in a government tourist
house (GMVN). It was night 10 o clock. The 2 week-long trek in
the remote hills of Garhwal Himalayas was about to start soon
and we desperately wanted to have a good night sleep and rest
as much as possible. As we went to our rooms, we could figure
out that a stream is flowing nearby as the gushing sound of
the force filled our rooms with a rustic smell.
We woke up to a most delightful surprize and a superb view of
of the very identity of Rudraprayag. The whole night, we were
sleeping right next to the sacred place where Mandakini and
Alaknanda meet …. the below photo was taken from
the GMVN tourist house.
The morning chill, the place, the coffee, the long deep breaths and the sound of the
temple bells..Blessed were we to witness it..
I decided to touch the water as I waited for the sun
to rise. The breeze had a no-nonsense flair to it.
The morning waves looked harmless and not really
interested in jerking me off. It was impossible to
imagine this was one of the places where Tsunami had
occurred.
People always crib about how humid it is (especially
in the afternoon) when they are close to a beach.
But to me, it is like being at home. I have always
found it to be energizing as compared to that of any
other non beach city.
I swam around for half an hour and was back floating
in the sea when I saw the first rays of sun…those
golden strings of a mysterious musical instrument
played by the Nature.
I stood there watching the sun rise literally* out of
the sea like a new-born child coming out of the Mother’s
womb. Involuntarily, my hands caressed the sea for a
bit of water and offered the Arghya to the greatest
source of energy.
That is when I realized of the one certainty of my life
about the only certainty in our lives. I could see it
very clearly that no matter where I go and what I do, I
am going to come back to a sea. Yes, that is where I am
going to end up settling and live the rest of my life.
No Idea what that place is but I can see a smalltown
beachside shack
—————-
*all of my previous encounters with sunrise at a beach
were clouded by the cloudy morning weather.
I search for you all the time like a dusty window pane
looking for drops of rain, washing away all the memories.. The smell of first rains so pure for my muddy life..
-
and then I see you, I wish we could just stand there for eternity..
I am you and you are me and the world going hazy..
A day remembered amongst the days forgotten…
-
that one look of yours towards me for a moment, to know that you know..
the next moment you walk away with your allies..
Know then did I, we are still holding each other,
the tenderness of yours against the rustiness of mine… A moment for a lifetime and a lifetime in a moment..
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I say, you know the scent of yours I could sense from miles away.. Oh Dog, You say I am so ridiculous but the smile
of yours feels like a breeze on a hot summer noon.. You are the reason I love the world and you are the reason I love myself..
Growing up, I had always been into sports, be it Football,
Cricket or Basket Ball (which definitely deserves another post).
Somehow, I never really got hooked to baddy…probably
because I used play baddy outdoors with wooden rackets, without
the nets along with the varying wind conditions combined with
really cheap shuttles . In the past 3 years though, the story
has changed completely. I still play football almost twice a
week, but the way I am hooked to baddy is nothing short
of an addiction. I have been playing it regularly at all
possible times; mornings, evenings, late nights.
The kind of effort that goes into footwork (especially in singles),
reflexes and the smashes, long rallies and the drop shots and
not to forget the disguised shots makes it such a kickass sport.
And have no doubt about the amount of focus that’s needed to
play the fastest racket sport.
We decided to study our footwork by taking a video (thanks
to Maggie) and as you can see, below is the proof of how much
I still need to learn (consider the fact that this was early morning
and my body was still getting warmed up ).
It had been quite a while (last winter) since this video was
taken, so you can assume I am definitely a lot better now
Amongst a few good Kannada movies, this one was my favourite in the 90s
and it still is..Beladingala Baale..In this clip, actor Anant Nag explains the
4 stages of life as written by Thomas Reilly..Enjoy…
For the non kannada folks..it goes something like below,
The first stage is when a person thinks he(or she) is bad and the world is a
crappy place too…
The second stage is when the person thinks he is of no good but is in awe
of the world..
In the third stage, he thinks he is really cool but the world around him is cruel…
Finally, he realizes that he is good…and the world is nice place too..
Very simple and easily understandable as it covers all the valid input conditions
of a 2 input (the person and the world) digital circuit. You can think of it as a
2 input “and gate“. Output will be 1(life is good) only when both the inputs are 1
A beautiful song from the same movie…nenapugala angaladi…
There was a time when my birthdays were Happy Birthdays.
There was a time when I used to feel elated when people sang the happy birthday song.
There was a time when I used to get something called post-Happy-Birthday-depression, the very next day of my Happy Birthday.
There was a time when I could not wait for the next Happy Birthday and wondered why it took so long.
There is this time when, for the first time I felt my birthdays are coming a lot frequently
I have crossed quarter century and I desperately wish to go back a few years, not because I want to do anything different but because I want to have more of those years ( and because I am not sure I could manage that in the coming years).
This is a special moment folks , things are changing and I have a feeling that others expect me to be more responsible now.
Sigh! I don’t want to grow up!!
Enough Kachhings in this post. Check out the song
that starts in the middle of the below video.
I assume you remember Kevin Arnold, Paul Pfeiffer
and of course Winnie Cooper. If not, keep checking
my youtube channel for more videos of The Wonder
Years.
p.s : The graph was hurriedly made out of MS excel!!
Ok with all the initial buzz about Google Buzz in Google Buzz,
I decided to set things right (atleast from my perspective ).
Google Buzz is cool in the fact that it is embedded inside the
gmail account and one can connect multiple sites using that. Did
you notice Orkut (and for that matter facebook or any other social
networking site )is not one of them?
Ok, Buzz is not another networking site per se.
Google apps which includes gmail, orkut, youtube, Reader etc has
almost every possible replacement (except for twitter)for most of
the crazy things that web 2.0 can do (and in some cases Google is
a leader in that app). With Google Buzz, they have shot an arrow
at twitter while also increasing the presence of people on Google
profiles and Reader. Taking my own example, only around 15% of my
chat contacts used Google Reader before Buzz and just in a day,
there is a huge spike in the number of requests I am getting on
Reader. Google Reader was probably the only Google app which had
not created much buzz and was used only by a dedicated set of nerds
and information junkies. Google frequently made many significant
and some trivial updates to Reader but nothing I guess did much to
increase its popularity except for being acknowledge by existing
users. Google finally must have decided..”if new users are not coming
to Reader, we will take Reader to them and while doing so, we will
also take a shot at twitter.” Google Buzz is undoubtedly the best
thing that has happened for Google Reader, we need to see how it
turns out.
If Google is listening, please consider the below for the next version.
Typically, I am not continuously logged into twitter/facebook/orkut
(I find it too distracting..I have a job you know ), but I
usually have my Reader open just to read anything interesting from
the subscribed sites. Now, whenever I write something cool on
my blog (as I am doing now ) or I read some crazy stuff,
I would love to share it across Reader,twitter, facebook,blogs etc
with just one click. Currently, the easiest way to do it is to get
stuff on my Reader, share them. There is a 3rd party application
called twitterfeed which connects Reader to twitter. Have a twitter
widget on other sites/blogs which will show the shared items.
But twitterfeed is too clumsy and at times, not realtime and limits
the number of items that could be shared. With Google Buzz, Google
has addressed the problem but not completely solved it. We now seem
to have a one way traffic from twitter to Buzz but it would be good
to have seamless two way traffic across multiple platforms so I can
share them with just one click and people can view them from whatever
sites they have logged into. Amen
Everyone has something to hold on to..Everyone has
except the ones who don’t ..For some it could
be their families, and for others it could be his/her
work!! Quite a few will do anything to maintain the
status quo and few can’t tolerate if their ego (or
religion) is touched. The impact of the actions that
people take depends on how much do they believe in
things that trigger them (whether it is good or bad).
It is always important to know this about people while
dealing with them to avoid any surprises.
Now what applies to a person in microcosm also applies
to an organization in macrocosm. Also, in general the
core philosophy changes form being specific to generic
as we move from an individual to an organization.
Based on the above loose premise , let me come
to the topic of this post…
While Motorola and Google are two big companies and
obviously would have known each others core business,
I am still surprized that they(MOTO) were a bit taken
aback when Nexus one came along.
Sometime back, Google developed Android OS for cell
phone systems, Motorola which had an ailing cell phone
business at that point and increasingly pressurized
by the foray of new smart phones coming to the market
(led by Iphone of course)was too happy to embrace
Android and introduced Droid.
Was Google more than being selfless in opening up the
Android source code? The assured answer turns out to be
a big yes though their publicly made comment was
something on the following lines “to have a healthy
competitive ecosystem in Mobile OS platforms and to
ensure Apple doesn’t become Microsoft of Smartphones”.
Anyway as we all know, Google did introduce a new
smartphone called Nexus one based on Android. Now, why
would google which was marketing Android to the cell
phone companies started to compete against its customers!
Did Google decide to enter a new industry?
A brief history…
Google has been gobbling most of the market share in
search based ad revenues over the years and things
were fine as long as the most of these searches were
PC based. Enter smart phones and you have a gradual
shift in more and more searches from PC to these phones
and google definitely wanted a piece of this (as they
were quick to recognize that smartphone based search is
the future). The profit google makes through ads is so
huge that they really don’t care if they give away turn
by turn navigation application for free (a move turning
out to be a death blow to leaders in specialized GPS
devices/apps) along with Android.
Till, apple introduced iphone, except for a couple of
companies like Palm and Blackberry, no other cell phone
companies were too keen on this high end market (since
most of their revenues came from selling low to middle
range cell phones) and were suddenly caught unaware by
Iphone which changed the whole cell phone game. They
did not have the OS/software to actually get into the
smartphone market on time while Apple with its head
start was sitting pretty. So it was not a surprize that
Google having the Android (with its varied features)
almost ready and free was too good to be left untouched
for the cell phone companies.
To summarize, the birth of Android followed by Google’s
entry into Smartphones was mainly to extend the search
spectrum for Google. Note that there were also these
rumours which made Google to have a more direct control
of its smart phone searches by having its own phone which
inevitably meant competing with other Android based phones.
This was a high risk decision and until now, it has paid
off well for google as we see that smartphone business is
increasingly turning out be a 2 player game by the day.
Coming back to Motorola??? If Motorola had known about
Nexus, would it still have embraced Android, I guess it
did not have any choice at that moment but atleast it
would have prepared for it or negotiated a better deal
with Google. And we all know once you start using
something which is good and cheap (Android in this case),
it is always hard to go back. All izz not so well for
Motorola but atleast it is good to see it is doing something and then there is this.
If you have made it till now, I think you need get the
above s**t out of your system, don’t worry Google has a
solution to that via Google toilet ..
To Fail is a shyte thing
as the smirk of the naysayers sinks in…
Failure makes you see things objectively
that had to be seen objectively… Failure when understood is liberating…
And the pursuit of excellence continues..
To Fail is a good thing
It makes you cut the crap and focus on the real things…
A friend of mine had set the below quote as his signature for his outgoing emails.
I am not sure who the author is but here it goes
“Failure doesn’t define a person , what follows does.”
…. the below photo was taken from
