IMAGINING CHANGE

You don’t write because you want to say something. You write because you have something to say! Well, I have something to say and on this fine day, I gave it a thought. When was the world’s first college started? “Many centuries ago!”, retorted my intuition. The world has undergone a sea change in technology thanks to the internet. But centuries passed and has our college system went through any path-breaking change? Well, students now got stylish wearing trendy jeans and flaunting sleek and advanced mobile phones. That’s the only major change!

I didn’t remember the last time I followed a class strictly as for me, the lectures are completely old-fashioned; they are outdated. Lectures are invented before there was internet and TV and universities have just been reluctant at changing the way lectures are being delivered and so is our college.

Imagine a huge LCD screen along side our black board and lectures of some of the best lecturers collected via internet are being played to assist routine, boring lectures! Not only it creates enthusiasm among students but also it could be highly informative.What if our bizarrely catalogued library is transformed into an internet-based one with pcs preloaded with loads of e-books and technological videos? I believe that videos of things happening teach more than a writing of what would happen!

Robots are rarely seen in India. Our college is an exception! “Come to college; pretend to be listening to classes (people call it “acting”), swallow your lunch, and continue acting again till you listen the ringing bell and then go back home.” This is what that has been programmed in our brain’s memory chip. We are nothing different from robots. I feel we need a bit more of social interaction. A healthy interaction among young and budding engineers and with the faculties should take place and it in turn will make us feel more like humans rather than robots. For an orthodox person, this imagination may seem absurd. Yet, man’s appetite for improvisation is like a drug-addict’s wait for his next fix! I’m not an exception. College days are always fun, but we need to do classrooms and lectures fun too!

STOCK MARKET!!!!

Stock market is pretty much complicated for almost everyone unless of course you are Warren Buffet. But what I think it's pretty much simpler. Here is my take on the "STOCK" market...

Once upon a time in a village, a man appeared and announced to the villagers that he would buy monkeys for Rs. 10/-. The villagers seeing that there were many monkeys around, went out to the forest and started catching them. The man bought thousands at Rs. 10 and as supply started to diminish, the villagers stopped their effort. He further announced that he would now buy at Rs. 20/-. This renewed the efforts of the villagers and they started catching monkeys again.
Soon the supply diminished even further and people started going back to their farms. The offer rate increased to Rs. 25/- and the supply of monkeys became so little that it was an effort to even see a monkey, let alone catch it!

The man now announced that he would buy monkeys at Rs. 50! However, since he had to go to the city on some business, his assistant would now buy on behalf of him. In the absence of the man, the assistant told the villagers. "Look at all these monkeys in the big cage that the man has collected. I will sell them to you at Rs. 35 and when the man returns from the city, you can sell it to him for Rs. 50."

The villagers squeezed up with all their savings and bought all the monkeys.
Then they never saw the man nor his assistant, only monkeys everywhere!!!

Welcome to the "Stock" Market!!!!!

A LOVER AND A WIFE....

I had read this one sometime back... Hope its enjoyable...

Once a young man had a confusion about Lover and Wife. How does one decide if a girl is suited for him to be a wife.. He had heard about a wise sage who had come to his village. So he decided to go to him and place his query. When he told the sage his query, the sage told him to go to the nearest wheat field, and get the biggest wheat grain he can get from the field in half an hour.

The man went to the field started his search for the biggest wheat grain. He found one but as soon as he went some more distance,he saw another grain which looked more bigger than the one he had. He discarded the one he had taken and then took the other grain. He went ahead and found another big one.. He took the big one and continued his search. After sometime, he got a doubt, if the grain he had in his hand was the biggest or the one he had got the first was the biggest.

This went on for sometime , and the alloted 30 minute time got over. He went back to the sage and gave the grain which he had.. The sage asked him, "Is this the biggest grain which was present in the field". The man was quite sure that he might have thrown away the biggest grain. So he replied "No , Wise sage, i might have missed the biggest grain".

The Sage told him not to worry, and this time told him to go and collect the biggest grain with the same half an hour duration. This time the man went to the field, looked for some time , saw a grain which looked the biggest and then came back to the sage. The sage asked him. "If the grain he had was the biggest". The man replied he was sure that this was the biggest grain".

The sage said to him "You have got the answer to your question.You look at a girl and feel that she looks great. You become her lover... Then you find another girl who you feel is more suited for you and then you go for her... In case of wife, you find a girl who you think is the best girl available and live with the assumption that she is best for you too...".

LIVE TO EXPRESS NOT TO IMPRESS!!!

Literatively speaking, the difference between 'Express' and 'Impress' is the first 2 letters. But its impact in our life is much beyond our imagination. Its a sad thing to note that most of us are tuned to focus on Impressing rather than Expressing. We have come to believe sub-consciously that outward appearances counts much more coz,the appearance is the first thing we see when we look at someone. So we move around in Best dresses, and fake big smiles(not always), hoping to make a good Impression, leaving our inner selves to isolation. So how does this Express and Impress come to matter..

I am not wise enough to give opinions on what is what, but this is ma understanding of Express and Impress. When we say we are expressing, whatever we are doing, we are doing by being our self. In contrast, When we want to Impress someone, our focus is more on imitating something/someone in order to influence others. In the process, we lose of what we are. Bruce Lee had said once about people imitating the big stars, that when we imitate someone, what we are doing is to imitate the outward appearance forgetting that there is a basis to that person's greatness and we cant achieve that greatness by imitating.

One of the things which the great scholars have said is that the interesting relation between Expressing and Imitating is that as one starts expressing himself , he/she will advertently end up impressing others. As Jim Rohn says,

“It's easy to let life deteriorate into making a living instead of making a life. It's not the hours you put in, but what you out into the hours that count. Learn to express rather than impress. Expressing evokes a me too'' attitude while impressing evokes a ''so what" attitude.”


To be frank, I am myself in the process of discovering how to express myself truly. Yet I hope that as one starts Expressing one self, the adage "The First impression is the Best Impression" will in turn lead to another on these lines- "Your True Expression will be the Best Impression".

I CAN'T HELP LOVING YOU...

I can’t help loving you,

Your harsh tone doesn’t deter me

May be I’m not quite like the one you dreamt of,

But nevertheless,I can’t help loving you.

Sometimes you shower me with

all affection and care,

And sometimes its pure seething anger I receive.

With reason of course.

The look in your eyes speaks of

immeasurable,fathomless love

That you want to bestow on me

Throughout my life and after.

I dared to dream because you

Reposed your faith in me.

You made me feel special.

Not only did you give me birth

But also a life.

Its all your doing Mom,

Its your life that I’m living today.

DISMANTLING OUR HEROES

Sachin Tendulkar is a hero twice over. He is a hero in the conventional sense in that he slays monsters and makes the impossible look effortless. But in an age where the very idea of a hero is under such systematic attack, he rescues heroism from under the very noses of its enemies.

And that enemy is us. In some nameless implicit way, we are all conspiring to destroy heroes and the very idea of heroism. We do this by relentlessly testing our heroes, sometimes by tempting them with unimaginable wealth, fame and all that comes tagging along with in an unbelievably short time, and at other times by ruthlessly challenging them on every action. By expecting them to be superhuman every moment of the day, and that too as per our whim and fancy, we set them up for failure. So when they do display superhuman heroism, they are merely doing their job. Anything less and they must be reviled for letting us down.

We dismantle the idea of heroism by reducing our heroes to bite sized pieces that we can consume. We attribute motives to everything they do, celebrate small feats disproportionately, single out individuals selectively and deify people so precipitously that a fall becomes inevitable. In short, we make our heroes dependent on our responses to them and in doing so, reduce them to our size.

Nowhere is this effort more evident than in the case of Sachin. Given that he has proved immune to most blandishments that we have offered him, and shown that what really moves him is still the game and not its incidental perks, we have now focused our energies on carping about every single performance of his and passing judgment on a minute-by-minute basis. So, even after playing a match-winning knock, when he fails in a couple of innings, we hear murmurs about his correct place in the batting order. As a pattern, this is hardly new. He has to fail but a couple of times, and whispers of when he should retire rise in cacophonous synchrony. And this in spite of having carried the fragile self-image of an entire country on his shoulders for as long as he has.

And yet, his batting many times showed us the meaning of heroism that lies beyond the pale of mediocre scrutiny as he blurred the lines between mere greatness and divinity as he stood alone and battled against impossible odds in an incandescent display of magnificent proportions. He humbled us, all of us, regardless of whether we were believers in his sublime powers or not. He made criticism irrelevant for he batted in a language that neither critics nor fans could ever grasp.

And yet, when we have lost matches despite his heroics (remember the recent knock against Australia or the knock against Pakistan in test match), and isn’t that what really matters in the end? Shouldn’t Sachin have finished the job, as a former cricketing greats suggest from the safety of their writing desk? Shouldn’t the others have pitched in? Sport invites these questions, indeed it thrives on them, but in fact it is supremely unimportant whether we win or loose. Victory is the apparent purpose of sport; in truth it is in large part, a quest for heroes. Who cares today whether we won a series against England in 2003? Will we remember the outcome of this series in a few years time? What we do remember is the Sachin Sharjah knock, Sehwag’s triple century and KUmble’s heoic effort against Pakistan. Sport exists to elevate us beyond our existing plane of existence and to generate heroes of a purity that real life can no longer produce.

Such defeats are good for the sport in one way. Had we won, we would have buried the idea of heroism in the shrill rhetoric of triumphalism that comes so naturally to us nowadays. THE TRAGEDY OF THE HERO MAKES THE STORY EPIC. Like sad endings in film, the futility of Sachin’s pursuit makes this story a timeless one. It allows us to focus on the meaning of sport and the heroes it throws up rather than on the statistic of one more win.

The triumph of heroes is that they rise above everything, even our cynical destruction of the very ideal that sustains them. We are more comfortable today with celebrities than with heroes for they are patently the product of the attention we have chosen, sometimes, inexplicably to shower on them. Celebrities are owned commodities, who we can play with and move up and down a ‘power list’. We are confounded by the truly great, but try as we might, we cannot help but be transported into place we have never been and experiences emotions we have never dreamed possible when we encounter a genuine hero.

In a match or two, Sachin will fail and the carping will be back. But in this brief heady interval, let us savour the sweetness that sport can bring and let us exult with the giddy sense of elevation that comes from being in touch with the divine. This is why we love sport. The cheerleaders and their dance moves can wait.

BRAWN SHOWIN’ ITS BRAWN

Formula 1 has always been an unending roller coaster of excitement, but 2009 is different because the excitement has been on-track as much as off-track. Had it been a Ferrari or a McLaren winning 6 of the first 7 races of the year, we would have again condemned F1 for being boring and pedestrian, but Brawn GP has really caught everyone’s eye with their ‘zero-to-hero’ fairytale story.

Last year, after Honda’s withdrawal from F1, any ‘pundit’ worth his salt would have written off the careers of Button and Barrichello, saying they were too old and past their prime. How much can change in a few months. Nowadays, the words Jenson Button and ‘2009 Formula 1 World Champion’ are being uttered in the same sentence by many of those same ‘pundits’.

It proves, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that there are drivers out there who can win F1 races and championships if only they had the right car. Unfortunately though, it also proves that the drivers’ contribution to the performance of a team is being more and more marginalized by the skills and intelligence of the engineers and designers. And now all the teams have made some improvements to their cars, with almost all of them now running one form or other of the infamous ‘double-diffuser’.

In the recently concluded Turkish Grand Prix, the qualifying was probably the closest it’s ever been, especially in terms of lap-times, with the top 10 cars all lapping within 1 second of pole position in the Q3 session. Eventually, it was Vettel who put in a stunning lap, followed by Button, Barrichello and Webber. But in the race, Button overtook pole sitter Sebastian Vettel on the very first lap following a mistake by the Red Bull driver and held on for a 6.7-second win over Red Bull’s Mark Webber for his fourth straight win of this season. And now, Button is topping the list of drivers’ standings with 61 pts followed by Barrichello and Vettel with 35 and 29 pts, respectively and it all seems Button will be lifting his first World Championship unless something abysmal happens.