He will move on, the smart kid that he is, but isn’t it the same with most of us? We present a rosy picture of world to our near and dear ones, we don’t want them to worry, but what we do instead is hide from them the reality. And when the revelation occurs, it is a shock for them. A shock that is too hot to handle.

We live in a world of false reality; in a world that we create around us so that we can be comfortable living in it. We also live in constant state of denial. We assume too many things, and we procrastinate. If we cannot find a solution to a problem, very soon we give up and go in the denial mode. We start thinking that the problem is non-existent. We find a work around, which is temporary and not a permanent fix. We do not realize that the problem still exists and if not today it will come around tomorrow to haunt us.

We tend to procrastinate happiness. We don’t do things that make us happy, we don’t do things that we love to do, and we don’t do things that are important for us like staying fit. We leave these things for a future date & time, one that is never going to come.

Let me eat this samosa today, I will not eat fried food from tomorrow.  Today is Sunday let me sleep in late, I will start going for a walk tomorrow. I love to write but first let me clean the cupboard or talk to my aunt, I can always write tomorrow. I will open the library when I retire, I will learn guitar in the summers. I will start exercising from tomorrow.  That tomorrow never comes.

We don’t live in now, we don’t enjoy the present. Either we keep regretting what happened in the past, or keep worrying about the future. Life isn’t easy, it was never meant to be.  It is in our hands to find moments that matter.  Moments that count.

Face the truth, stop living in denial, stop procrastinating, and make the right priorities and choice. Write down about moments, memories that brought real happiness to you, marriage,  becoming a parent, first kiss, drenching in the rain, that extra hour of sleep, a random act of kindness, whatever that gave joy to you.   Do what you love to do and don’t worry about the rest, go after things you want, ask or the answer will always be a no, smile a lot. Be so happy that when others look at you they become happy too.

P.S: It is not preaching but note to self

Then why do married women want their husbands to remember their wedding anniversaries? Not just remember but surprise them with lovely gifts, chocolates, roses, cakes and much more.  Too much of misplaced expectations isn’t it?

“What do you lose? You still do the things you wanted” often comes the retort … Oh yea, we can’t booze without having to worry about how and to whose home are we going to wake up next day. Can’t smoke without eating mint and for the James Bond types wife, even need to rub some on the fingers. Can’t go to late night movie shows, can’t wear the same socks or the same shirt twice in the week.  We cannot step out of the house, without shaving and bathing. The need to be prim and proper, always. Can’t attend a call from an unknown number and afford to smile while on the call, have to worry about the looks in the eyes and the question “who was it”.

I can go on and on, but the fact that my wife would be reading this and I am worried about today’s dinner, let me add this, “All I wrote above is fictitious and bears no resemblance to any person living or dead. Any resemblance to anyone or anything is purely coincidental”.

Marriage is an institution (LOL), institution where only the crazy gets enrolled, and they celebrate their admission with hundreds of friends, family and relatives. I believe in this institution and my admission to it was my choice. I am glad that I made it and if losing independence at the cost of being cared and loved is what it means, I will happily be a slave ever after.

I remember my wedding anniversary (can’t afford to forget it, can I?) and I try to make it memorable every year.

So having made the big claim, let me find out when my wedding anniversary is, so that I can make it a memorable one.

This is post is in response to Reema’s post about Husbands vs Anniversaries , Reema here you go…

The book is a part “Chicken Soup for Soul” series which shares real stories of real people bringing hope, courage, inspiration and love to hundreds of millions of people around the world. (As claimed on their website)

I have not reviewed any book before and I do tend to become harsh and cruel when it comes to reviewing. My reviews of anything becomes fault finding missions at times, so please accept my apologies, the comments are intentional, but not to hurt any sentiments, only to help make things better.

To quote Kabir, “निंदक नियरे राखिये आंगन कुटी छबाय, बिन पानी साबन बिना निर्मल करे सुहाय”

To summarize the book, it contains 101 stories of entrepreneurship & creativity at the workplace. Some of them are inspiring; some of them are bedtime stories for kids, some of them questionable for inclusion, none displays creativity, but then creativity is a subjective term.

I would give the book 2.5 star out of 5, but worth reading if you get it for free.

A book is/should be known by its content not cover but let us review the book for its cover first and not just content.

World is trying to be greener, everyone is trying to save the environment except for this book, a lot of pages would have been saved, there is too much space for the titles of the stories and at many places at the end of the story a single line or the paragraph is used on an entire page. All this space could have been better utilized and the book could have been more condensed.

If I review and talk about each story in detail, I would be spoiling the fun. What if you decide to read the book? The stories are short enough; some are real interesting and leave you asking for more, some are short so that you can quickly read them and move forward.  Some stories contain factual errors.  At times when the story is “As told to xyz” it would have lend more credibility if the person’s name was mentioned.  It is difficult to relate to a story without giving it a face, and especially to stories which are real stories by real people (as claimed on the website).

Now let me be diplomatic, nothing is good or bad, it is as you perceive it. Takeaway all the positives from the book and ignore the negatives, still priced at Rs 295, I would not go and buy the book. Not my kind really!!

This review is a part of the Book Reviews Program at BlogAdda.com. Participate now to get free books!

A hydrogen filled, red colored, heart shaped balloon suddenly came up and stuck to the window pane. He turned around to check the calendar, it was 14th of February. He realized it was not just 14^th February; it was Valentine’s Day as well.  From past few years dates were just dates, they no more had any significance to it, of course apart from the deadlines to meet. From the days of being a walking database of birthdays and anniversaries, he no longer remembered his own birthday or wedding anniversary.

Instead of asking for an office help, he went to the pantry and made a coffee for himself, the aroma of freshly brewed coffee made him feel nostalgic. On his way back to office, his personal secretary stopped him to resolve some conflicts he was having on his calendar. He couldn’t help but smell the perfume she was wearing.

Back at his desk he closed his eyes and tried to ward off all the memories that the smell of perfume had brought back. She used to wear the same perfume. She, the beautiful, the charismatic, the lovely, the gorgeous, he could just go on and on describing her with all the positive adjectives in the world.

He guessed because it was valentine’s day the air was probably charged with love, charged with romance that had made him think about her. It was not that on other days he did not but somehow he had isolated her memories from everything else. He has indulged himself so much in work that there was little or less time left for him to think about her. Still there were times like this when he thought about her. Her thoughts made him smile, he even remembered few jokes they shared and laughed out loud. But most of the times her thoughts invariably left him with tears. Time could not heal anything.

He was an emotional person; he had given everything he possibly could to their relationship, to their love. But the world was a cruel place, and love and romance were still the forbidden fruits. Even in the immortal love stories the lovers could not meet, how could they? Their love was as strong if not more as Romeo and Juliet, Heer and Ranjha.  He remembered her saying that it was for good that they could not unite, because if they had, the romance would have taken a backseat to the usual chores of a married life. The passion would be lost to paying bills and running errands. The pragmatic she, he thought probably this was the way she had dealt with their break-up. This was her way of making her heart understand, this was her excuse of not being together.

He knew she still loved him; he too was still in love with her, but their love was like day and night with no dusk or dawn to help them meet.

He wondered where she would be, what she would be doing. He was helpless, and he knew she was helpless as well. He was lonely; he felt she would be lonely too. He wanted to say a lot of things, pour his heart out, but to whom?  For how long should he stay silent? He wanted to break the norms the society has set. He wanted to revolt and push aside all obstacles that the world has created between them.  He wanted to announce his love, he wanted to meet her.

He logged onto to his computer, searched through some old emails, after years logged onto social networking sites, and even searched her on Google, and finally he found her contact number.

He began dialing the number on his cellphone and before he could dial the last digit of the number, his phone rang. It was from his wife asking him to pick their kid up while returning to home. The last digit of the number remained not dialed.

Google is getting rid of over 60 different privacy policies across Google and replacing them with one that’s a lot shorter and easier to read. ‘One policy, one Google experience’, how convenient isn’t it?

All of us who use any of the Google services like search, email, YouTube, Maps and many more are directly impacted by the policy change. You would be seeing a message pop up each time you logon to any of the Google services

March 1, 2012 is when the new Privacy Policy and Google Terms of Service will come into effect. If you choose to keep using Google once the change occurs, you will be doing so under the new Privacy Policy and Terms of Service.

So how this does impacts you and me?

Your data on the web:

1. What Google say: Say you go to the same coffee shop every morning for a latte and the same barista makes it for you every day. Chances are he’ll know your order before you even walk through the door. Websites, including Google, have learned a lot from this relationship. We’ve learned that we can serve you better if we get to know you better.
2. What it actually means:

i.      Google claims it will serve you content according to your preference.

ii.      To me it is like each time I visit the coffee shop I will be served latte by default without even asking me

iii.      What if I would want to have a look at other items in the menu? Of course I can, but by tracking my previous history it will serve me latte by default.

iv.      It will also track where I live, what I route do I take to my office and where my office is ( cookies, IP addresses, browsers), what preferences I have at office.And even at my home, during my travel and at my office it will keep reminding me that I like latte and I should have it.

To give you another example, let’s just say you used Google search for Katrina Kaif (she is one of the most searched people on Google, so someone surely is searching her J (on Google I mean)). Next time you logon onto search it will show you advert related to Katrina Kaif, if you logon to YouTube all Katrina Kaif videos will be showed as your preferences and videos you should watch, you may start getting emails about her and so on…

If it is just Katrina Kaif it is still ok, but I know how sane we are and how insane our search on Google gets, trust me it has a lot more potential to embarrass you.

And it is not just about embarrassment, someone on the internet is holding onto your data, telling you it may use it as it wants, gives you no or very limited options to opt-out.  It is invading your privacy. It is like a person/company tracking all your moves in the real world and trying to sell you its product and /or services based on your movement and activities.

Not just that, under the terms and services when you upload or otherwise submit content to Google Services, you give Google (and those it work with) a worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes Google make so that your content works better with Google Services), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content.

What can you do about it?

Unfortunately the answer is nothing. Google give you no or very limited options to opt-out of it. And with the monopoly of Google at least when it comes to search you have no other option to go. What alternative you have is use Google services without logging onto your Google accounts, disable your cookies (if you do so, you may not be able to even use some services and get an error/message to enable your cookies), or probably create a fake/second/new account.

Though Google has come up with very interesting and impressing ‘The Good to Know campaign’ it expertly avoids the detailed impacts.

I have used Google just an example, and it may be true for any other services you use on internet. One that strikes my mind is Facebook which deserves a separate post.

Just be as careful in giving out your personal information on internet as you would to be to a stranger in the real world.

So why am I even writing about it? The reason is, the question which was so simple to answer and seems so common sense is extremely hard to understand and implement when it comes to performance reviews in many corporates across the world.

I recently saw a video from Sue Langley which is also an inspiration behind this post. In the video Sue tells the story of a fish, a frog, an eagle, and a rabbit who go to animal school. Monday is swimming, Tuesday is running, Wednesday is jumping, Thursday is flying, and Friday is performance review day. Each animal is told what it is good at and what it needs to improve.

So rabbit that failed miserably at flying and performed poorly in swimming is told that flying and swimming are his development areas, his weaknesses which he needs to concentrate upon. He is also informed about his relative ranking among the team and the bell curve fitting and since he failed miserably at flying and swimming compared to others he gets a poor ranking.

It demotivates the rabbit, he tries hard at swimming and flying and no matter how hard he try he fails each time and that further demotivates him. Also since all his concentration is on improving these weak areas he loses the focus on his strengths that is running and his performance starts slipping there as well.

Most corporate do the same with its employees. We emphasize improving weaknesses instead of encouraging strengths.

I am not saying that we can ignore weaknesses; we might need to lift them to a certain level but I believe we can get best out of someone if we let them play to their strength.

Imagine expecting Ishant Sharma of the Indian cricket team to score a century in each test that he plays and then when he fails to do so, telling him his development area is batting and then comparing his performance in batting to that with Sachin Tendulkar or Rahul Dravid (barring recent performances) and giving him a poor ranking. Does it even sound fair?

Won’t it be better if we encourage him to bowl better and take more wickets instead of pointing out his weakness in batting?  Definitely we can ask him to lift his batting to a certain level where he can face few deliveries and provide some resistance, but it would be hard and unfair to expect a century from him.

What change I would personally like to see is that organizations start encouraging people to use their strengths to overcome their weaknesses, and to give the employees an environment where they can flourish by allowing them to play to their strengths.

Now why Dr. Manmohan Singh can’t sing is still a mystery or is it?

As time flew by their bond grew ever so stronger, but deep down they both knew they were not destined to be together.  Of such a strong mutual love, hope was born. Hope, that they could be together forever, time would stop when they lay endlessly in each other’s embrace.

Hope also brought in assumptions, assumptions that he knew her, she knew him, as time passed the assumptions became belief that they knew each other too well, that the unspoken was understood, silence conveyed their thoughts.

Of this assumptions and beliefs expectations arose, expectations to be there when needed. Expectations those were hard to fulfill.  He never understood her endless silence and reluctances. He expected her to talk, even to fight if she was angry at him, but he never told her that and she never did it. She silently suffered and made him suffer. She never understood his aggression, she expected him to understand her silence, to read through eyes, to hold her hands but she never told him that and he never did it.

He was afraid, scared, scared to lose her. He knew he would. He knew there was no hope or light at the end of the tunnel. He knew that one fine day he will return home to loneliness and despair. The fear of losing her made him do crazy things. Crazy things that only one who is deeply in love and who is scared of losing someone he loves could do. Love makes one do such crazy things. But these crazy things pushed them apart. She never understood him and his weird acts. The distance between them grew so big that nothing could bridge it.

He still cared for her, loved her lot, but she started taking things for granted. He understood the aloofness but could not do anything. He wanted to fill the emptiness; the void that time had created in their relationship, but she had resigned. She no longer wanted it, as per her it was over.

His feelings were crushed; the love that seemed so beautiful years ago was now a synonym to pain. He cried, he cried even after the tears dried.

And then, fir kya “uske mohalle mai Aishwarya aaye.. ow o o.. oh o oww” ( courtesy Munna bhai MBBS song titled “kal raat apun 2 baje tak piya”.) (And then, Aishwarya came into the neighborhood) J

Everyone except for US Senate, and probably the bleeding music industry is against SOPA and PIPA, because everyone feels that it would curtail their freedom and right to express their views. Though the bills are supposed to be introduced in US senate, it would affect everyone across the globe, since internet cannot be confined to geographies.

I was not surprised to see that the blackening out happened in US and not in India. I do not think Indians can afford to or are even willing to black out.  We are concerned about our freedom of expression but deep down we know that come what may we can get around any bill, bypass any laws, have a workaround ready, juggad in place to tackle any such situation. We know no one can stop us bantering on politics, current affairs, cricket at a pan shop or at a ‘tapri’ while drinking tea.

These bills are just another reason for us to use our freedom of expression by talking about it on social networks. I wonder what the term “freedom of expression” means to us, us collectively as Indian citizens.

Many of my relatively young friends use the F word with such an ease in their talks, on their status updates on Facebook that it makes me think, is fuck synonym to freedom?

I had a subject called as ‘Civics’ in my school curriculum and it talked about our duties and our rights. I remember my school teacher beautifully put it into the words that, “We should exercise our rights only when we are performing all our duties properly.” Duties should come before rights. I wonder how many of us even know that with the 6 fundamentals rights that the constitution gives us it also includes a set of 10 duties that a citizen requires to perform in order to help his/her country to grow and prosper.

I feel that we talk, write, blabber, and complain a lot. Social media such as Facebook, twitter, orkut and blogs have helped many shy people come out of their shell and talk anonymously or even openly. We are tapping the full potential of social media to complain, but not to bring about a change. The action is missing. And now people are scared that SOPA, PIPA or any other such bill which helped them come out of shell may put them back.

It is time now to perform our duties, before exercising or even before complaining about our rights.

P.S: Even wordpress has blacked out:

Why I am even writing about him? Well he is in news, the hype is created, for whom, by whom and what for does not really matter. The point is he is news.  India is taking advantage of the fact that he is controversial and in news. Newspaper by filling in their columns, news channel by airing debates and talk shows, random people by appearing on these debates and bloggers like me blogging about it, him.

Our honorable Prime minister Dr. Manmohan Singh recently talked about malnutrition, and then there is poverty, economic crisis, corruption, shelter, food, education, my own project deadlines, so many more important issues which needs to be tackled with utmost priority, but no, no, we are more concerned about a person of Indian origin who is an accomplished writer, not being allowed to enter India to attend a literary festival.  We are more concerned on how a book written by him 23 years ago can break the harmony; disrupt the country by enticing communal violence and maybe, probably affect the reservation card played by congress in the U.P assembly election.

I keep asking myself this question getting no answers from within, where are we heading as a country and what am I doing?

I wonder if the code of conduct can actually be implemented, and is restricted to just the statues, because according to the same logic they should also order for covering up of all the live elephants in U.P, after all they are the symbol of BSP. I guess the same stands true for Mayawati as well, if you want her statues to be covered, shouldn’t she be covered as well. I know she dresses appropriately, but by covering I meant the same way as they would be covering her statue. And in any case she is far more pursuing in actual than the statues.

What about other parties? The electoral symbol of the Congress party is the palm. Who is going to cover all the palms? What about bicycle of Samajwadi party? Should none in UP be allowed to ride or use a bicycle?

I wonder how all the political parties agree to the standard without questioning. And will there be a time when the code of conduct and model during the elections is more realistic, intellectual and upright.

This article is in line with and use reference from the editorial published in Deccan Chronicle yesterday.