Intelligentle

Fellow men, I understand that some of us still have primitive instincts in our blood. But there's something which tell us that we came a long way from the age of hunting down and satiating our appetite; appetite for money, fame and sex. We are trying to form a civilized society, some of us are rich some are not, some are educated some are not. However, we know that our mother deserves respect and our sister needs care. So we know what is wrong and what is right, sometimes we just choose to be animals. For example, right now my brain is full of expletives and negative thoughts for the animals  who committed  this  heinous crime, just like any other middle class Indian. Deep inside me, a voice says that they must go through a life full of pain and sufferings, instead of letting them die fast by the way of capital punishment. But again, will that solve the problem forever. No? Will the aggression last forever? No. And am I able to provide a solution...

I have a personal policy which I always adhere to; never write when I'm angry, irritated or sad. Also, I try my level best not to talk when I am in any of the above moods. However, the attempt to not to talk when I'm in a bad temperament is in vain, almost always. When a conversational person goes mute, it gets noticed and then the questions follow. This ultimately leads to many more redundant verbal exchanges. The point is, when I write I try to ensure that the content has a positive tone to it. So, don't confuse the title with me being sad, I'm not. Over the last few months, I became a big fan of The Big Bang Theory and also became an admirer of Jim Parsons as an actor. And in one of the episodes, his character Sheldon Cooper says to Penny "One cries because one is sad. For example, I cry because others are stupid, and that makes me sad.". Digressing; though my IQ is nowhere near 187, I too occasionally encounter people who are too superior, in the...

He's a real nowhere man, Sitting in his Nowhere Land, Making all his nowhere plans for nobody. Miss the bus to nowhere.. Nowhere man is, primarily, a song by the The Beatles and ' isn't he a bit like you and me'?  Of course, we chase our sales targets, write that complicated code, write a brilliant article and conduct that huge successful event. Every single day we are in a rush to finish the tasks assigned to us and the laptop lid closes only when your eyes do. No, I am not preaching about the importance of slowing down again, you will know when you need to slowdown :) Today morning, as I was going through the tasks list for the day, I thought of figuring out where am I heading with my life. To be precise, it is more of an analysis on how am I faring on a scale of me 2008 to me 2012. I must admit that it was a little scary and disappointing at the same time. I am not positively (or negatively) aggressive about my life goals any more, I am just waiting for ...

Conflicts, they just don't leave us alone, do they? It doesn't even need another person for conflicts, for me it's mostly internal. Some times it might be the classic 'to be or not to be' and some other times it will be  more complicated 'what to be or what not be', of course with all other 'W's and one H in the line. And when it comes to right or wrong, we mostly use our own scale of relativity. The conflict is not as apparent as to join the darker side or to remain clean. Most of the times it is about how far we can go to the darker side. With his three movies on Batman, Nolan made me think about this a little deeper. Starting with a crime flooded city and its need for a redeemer, he takes us to endless mind games in the second movie. In the third story, it looked like an ultimate victory of good over bad but, interestingly, the conflict was between darkness and darkness. Bruce Wayne conquers his darkest fears to become Batman. He fights injus...

Life has completed another small circle after I ventured out of my state five years back for an MBA . It started from Pune, where I came across various permutations and combinations of human beings and that of tasty food. Then, like one of my old acquaintances (who was obsessed with alternate phrases and hashtags) might put it across, I had to shift my coordinates to N20.0014° N, 73.7869° E or Nashik as we call it. In between the shuttling between Nashik, Bangalore and Kerala , Bangalore became a second home. This followed by the wedlock and I shifted to Bangalore for my bread and (peanut) butter. Then one fine day, I was fed up of having peanut butter and looked out for a better meal. On a totally unrelated note, I ended up in a new job in Bangalore and my new team sits in Pune. Now I travel to Pune once in a while, completing another little circle drawn with my MBA as the centre. Though I do not get much time to explore the city, I enjoy these trips, because the...

August 13th, ,at around 9pm, I was on my way to meet my friends.  I was waiting at a traffic signal and someone behind hurled a rude 'hey' at me . I turned back and saw the 'hey source', a person in his late twenties, with a female pillion rider on an expensive bike, with an illegal, high intensity head lamp. I know, it's a lot of detailing, but it might help me going forward with this post. So, this person was trying to cut the signal and got stuck between my bike and a bus. I hate random 'heys' but I thought of understanding the motive behind that. I turned back and to my surprise, he asked me that if I am waiting for someone! Well, I could not think about anything other than the obvious and told him that I am waiting for the signal to turn green. Unintended humour I would call it, the perpetual law breaker and his pillion rider lady was laughing at me for my response, and asked me to move ahead. I did not, but he made his way through the non-existent ...

There are targets, objectives, goals, dreams and desires for each of us, but the end of the day (or life), who are we to decide on what should we have. Don't stop reading, I am not getting in to the intricacies of boring philosophy, again. I had plans to continue the momentum in terms of updating the blog posts in line with the frequency of June posts. However man proposes and he, later, disposes. July started in a calm note but by the end of it, my flight was going through a lot of turbulence. As luck would have it, those were just turbulences and not engine failures. Turbulences are good, they test the mettle of an aviator, but anything beyond that might be out of his/her control. And these little issues kept me off from 'Intelligentle', and from my perspective, it should not ideally be that way. Small issues should not keep me away from writing. In other words, though we hope for minimal testing times in our life, 'that' happens. And all we can hope is for l...

In my last blog post I tried to explain how difficult it is to drive on Bangalore roads, mostly because of the attitude of drivers and riders, along with the ongoing construction works. On the brighter side, I observe some sensibility is still prevailing among approximately 60% of private car owners and among 10% of the public transport vehicle drivers, which is a relief. However the root cause is lack of traffic awareness and taking safety on roads for granted. In simpler terms, a vehicle will not slow down at intersection thinking that the vehicle coming from the small road should slow down, and simultaneously the same thought process is happening with vehicle's driver coming from the small road too. Fortunate that we do not have accidents proportional to the number of fools on the road. One point I missed out when I was writing about the traffic problems turned out to be one of the most important issues, the kids. They just started living their life and they live according to...

Bangalore is a nice and beautiful city. Nice in terms of climate, facilities available, helpful people etc. But sadly Bangalore is nicer if you stay indoor most of the time. A huge percentage of the 'helpful people' I mentioned earlier, turn out to be the ultimate propagators of road rage when they drive or ride. They never stop, unless there is a train in their way (I doubt that too!), they drive at the maximum (im)possible speed, almost everywhere and above all they are totally ignorant about the fact that road is a public space. The below tips are derived from fellow drivers/riders on Bangalore roads and in no way I can relate to any of these. So, these tips are better implemented if you are all alone in a city and only if so. Road rage is the norm here.. Image courtesy: nareshtrao's photostream on Flickr Well, let us start from two-wheelers If you have a bike, no matter the lack of space, you should try and poke it through the last millimetre available. Rear ...

Well, when I bought my first Nokia 2300 phone in 2006, I never thought I would be writing a post of this nature about Nokia. Then, I was excited to have one of the first phones with radio and polyphonic ring tones in Indian market. 'Snake' was THE game then and the phone used to grab eyeballs too! Nokia 2300 (Image source: Extra GSM ) But most of all,  2300 was durable to an extent I can describe only by the end of this post. I enjoyed music, played games and used it for the primary purposes of calling and texting over the years. The only prominent replacement/repair was that I changed the battery after 2 years of my use and yes, it came to me as a used phone in 2006. A satisfied customer, becomes a repeat buyer and hence a core customer of the company, says marketing gurus. Hence, when I had enough of disposable income to turn a small dream in to reality, I bought a Nokia N70 in 2007. I paid around 13500 INR (about 240 USD) for the N70 compared to the 2000 INR tha...

Why does India have lesser young entrepreneurs compared to the US or a lot other countries? I think there are two basic issues here; 1)As a preceding generation we are not responsible enough to nurture dreams or to motivate the younger generation 2) Bigger dreams, mostly, are not getting materialized. In this post, I shall try and elaborate on why I think these two issues are prevailing. Though I was introduced to 'Maslow's hierarchy of needs' during my MBA, just like a lot of things introduced to me during that time, Maslow lost to me in my search of 'hierarchy of survival'. Anyhow, I just dug a little bit deeper in to Maslow's pyramid recently and I think it makes sense to me in a wider perspective now. In Indian context it takes a lot of time to reach from the bottom of the pyramid to the top, after which the materialization of big dreams are supposed to happen. When you look at the pyramid, there are physiological, safety, love and esteem levels, bef...

I am starting a series about certain things I come across in Bangalore. Things which I think others should know and might help them in some way or other. This series might not be regular, you may expect random posts in between, however all related posts will be named as 'The city diaries'. These posts are supposed to be informative, hoping to add a tint of positivity. I have been a resident of Bangalore for the last 8 months only and one of the first things we possessed here was a bike. Since then I've been riding an average of 40 kilometres everyday, mostly to work. Riding is an exhausting task in Bangalore traffic, unless you do not care about traffic rules and fellow riders, like a good percentage of bike/scooter riders here. And when you think that you figured your way out around riding in Bangalore, another problem hits you; fuel. Fuel prices are growing faster than an average Indian's dream of daily survival, but that's a national phenomena (yes, the...

Some weeks back, my wife went out of the town for a project release for a couple of days and I had to deal with a bachelor's life for two long (OK, may be not that long) days. I did not get much time to stay at home as I had to finish the pre-joining procedures for my new job. In those two days, I managed to get clicked a horrifying image of mine (again) for the employee id card, had pizza for lunch, had a back breaking 1400 kilometres journey in two days. Well, there was no one to monitor me for two days and did I get in to trouble? Yes, I managed to get in to a bit of it. I was on the way to board my bus to Kerala (the first 700 kms of 1400) and it was too early to reach the boarding point, considering the fact that most of the buses operating in this route start at least 45 minutes late. I thought of catching up with my friend and got down near the forum mall and gave him a call. The unexpected happened then, I was on the footpath, which also serves as a park...

If something can bring me immediate nostalgia, rain takes the first place and music comes a close second. And whenever I had the privilege to experience both at the same time, I fall in to an infinite loop of pleasant nostalgia. It takes me back to the childhood and travel through years to reach the 28th year of my life. It's an experience which I rarely go through nowadays. As I mentioned in my earlier post, I'm at my new office for over a week now. It's a new building with a lot of amenities and a majority of my colleagues leave by 4.30 as they start early. So it's a kind of awkward silence in the office after that time except for the people who come to pick up snacks which are strategically placed near my cubicle. So when my wife called up to tell that she's opting for the company bus to a previously decided husband's bike, I was a little curious. She told me that it's raining cats, dogs and what not; hence the decision. I was surprised to know...

The blogger's block has been preventing me from posting something for quite a while. Whatever I write nowadays, ends up as an unfinished draft. Anyway, this post will surely see light as a part of a new (personal) policy implementation. Let me give some important update before getting in to the policy details. I resigned from my last job, which was largely a mix of administrations and sales support jobs, and now joined a proper (hopefully) communications job. I sincerely believe that one should do what he/she knows, or even better, what a person really wants to do. It makes no sense to suffer through a job, it has to be enjoyed and only then it will be mutually beneficial for an individual and the employer. So, what is next? Of course, juggling between work and life, because one is a matter of survival and the other one is the survival of  matter. It's you to figure out which one is which. Is it possible to give 100% at both work and life, simultaneously? I think, if you ...

I live in a civilized society, or may be that is something just in my head. When we shifted to Bangalore some six months back, I knew it's not going to be a smooth ride. But the dog eat dog attitude which I'm witnessing in fast paced cities like Bangalore is beyond imagination. I am unsure if it can be completely attributed to the non-stop life, happening 24X7, but it sure contributes to it. For instance, when on the road, all they care is about their car, time and safety. The attitude has changed to 'Life is valuable, only if it is mine'. 'Mutual respect' is a term we conveniently forget and the problems rooting from this exponentially grows, day after day. The following series of events happened in the apartment I live in, where people belong to upper middle class occupy most of the houses. That day I parked my bike at the basement and was walking towards the lift when I heard a messy argument. One of the occupants, who works in a frontline IT company in I...

One fine day I was travelling with my family. My brother was driving, dad was in the front seat and I was sitting between my wife and mom. We were talking and I made a statement; "I'm sitting between two most influential people in my life". Though my dad took a little offence on that, the fact remains ;) And why are they influential? For a lot of reasons, mostly rooted from their sincerity and innate love.  There is this stereotype of emotional women, don't go by it, women are the most emotionally balanced set of living beings I know. She can hide an ocean of emotions behind a smile and make you run for your life when they're still smiling. Her love is unconditional, unless you have done an irreversible mistake. She stick with you through thick and thin, regardless the jerk you are. Her multi tasking skills are incomparable and they hardly crib about the amount of work they do. Fellow men, now don't brag about your physical strength,...

A communication professional's job is like an abandoned drum, almost all other functions in the company beat it in the way they like and they expect it to sound awesome, all the time. When talking about overlap of job functions, the confusion will be more than what the poor police men had with the cross dressed sadhu. We do human resource jobs, administration jobs, sales jobs, marketing jobs and many more. For instance, once I sent out a mail to announce the launch of new job referral portal for HR, of course with all relevant links. And next day onwards, I started getting at least 4-5 resumes per day, in my inbox. In short, communications is not anymore a supporting function, it's the super function which unfortunately can't fly to reach everywhere. But the fun part of the work is, however, cannot be overlooked. I'll talk about just some mails here. Recently one of my colleagues, an internal communications manager, told about ...

It's again that time of the year when advertisements tell you how platinum (gold is passe) bonds you better than Fevikwik, or love. I saw red flood on my Faceook timeline and some others were expressing their anti-valentine rage. Honestly, I am not very sure about which side I belong now. I always thought and still think that the hype about Valentine's day is a consumerist proposition. If I want to celebrate love on a day, it could be anyday and furthermore, if I need to celebrate it on a special day it could be a birthday or an anniversary. And I personally think that I'm not supposed to say someone else should celebrate it or not. I just don't see the point and that's all. Evidently, we (me and wife) finished our V-day celebrations before the 14th. I gifted her on the week before, I took her for a long bike ride on the weekend (11&12) and her gifting for me was also before the V-day. Were these all part of our V...

Life is full of surprises, you never know where and with whom you will end up with. Moreover, you could never predict if you are going to get in to a kitchen and cook someday. Seriously, now I think that there is some correlation between this blog post and me, or is it? Tasty food has always been a major interest for me and I have always been very specific about what I eat. Though a non-vegetarian for the most of my life, over the last few years I'm trying to practise vegetarianism. Anyhow, the point is, I love food and the misconception was that I thought I just love to eat food. My mom and dad are great cooks, so at home it's always a huge variety of delicacies. Sometimes they make so many dishes that I confine myself to one or two. As I said, I'm very specific about my tastes and at home it was served, without fail. And then I ventured out of home and realized that serving specific to my taste buds will just be an occasional privilege now....

Yes, I completed 28 years on this good old planet on January 28, 2012. Its been a good learning experience over the last 10200+ days, through ups and downs. There is something funny about January, I have three birthdays on this month. One is according to the regional (Malayalam) calendar, one is according to my official birth date, 26th Jan, because my dad was so particular about his 'republic day baby' :) and finally the original one. When I was home, I used to celebrate the regional calendar birthday, when I was away it was the date and the during the official birthday, I  usually get a birthday mail from the HR department. However, this time I celebrated two birthdays, one in Bangalore with my wife and second one in Kerala with the entire family. 'Chasing the dreams' So what's the big deal about 28? I see this as a benchmark age for me, though I had told that I have no plans to grow up, but it's a fact  that I'm gr...

I was on my way to work, view was fixed on the road and the brain was randomly jumping from one topic to another. Suddenly the wallet,  that small guy with a big appetite, called me by name and asked for a refill. I stopped my bike next to one of those money wending machine; those moronic creature who made the process of emptying our bank account faster. There were two automated teller machines and two people, which made me the third person in an imaginary queue. As I waited, I noted that this ATM is on a higher altitude with respect to the road. Though I was impatient to resume my journey to office, I observed a different perspective of people driving, just like I do. They were not driving or riding, it was a mad race to reach the office. 'slow down a bit and appreciate the beauty of life' Hundreds of bikes, cars and other vehicles were rushing towards their destination, and it was not even 8 in the morning. They were trying to beat signals and w...

Gamers, anyone? I'm sure a lot of them are out there, including me. So you know something called 'level up', which is the fun part of any game. Once you complete all levels and finish the game, the excitement ends there. So leveling up is the reason why we play the game well and if we play good enough we expect to level up. Leveling up cannot be confined to games, I guess it's an essential part of life too. From a toddler to a teenager, from a student to an employee, from a bachelor to a parent, we level up in different ways. But sometimes we give in to status quo, we think that we are a mere character in the game and not the gamer. We do not care about leveling up anymore and wait someone else to level you up. As it progresses we try to cling to our comfort zone and then get conditioned to this. So how important in leveling up for the humanity? Very. We had to move from bullock carts to air travels, from abacus to super computers and the list...

He was not nameless, but he does not have a name in this story. After all, why a faceless person should have a name? So, can a nameless and faceless person have a story? Fortunately yes, he had a name and face before this story started, but he first lost his face and then the name. Just like me who writes this story or you, who read this, he also began his apprenticeship as a kid on this planet. As a kid, he enjoyed the beauty and tranquility of the 80's and he was loved equally by mother and mother nature. He was scared of the little thing which talked back to him in different familiar voices and he was astonished to see how people got in to the small box in the living room. For a good part of his childhood, he was more friends with his dad's bike than anything else. At school, everyday was a surprise, mostly bad as he always forgot one or other homework. Some teachers thought that he is cute and some others as a waste of their time and energy. He was not f...

So, we are in to the second week of 2012 and it's good for me, so far. For me a new year is nothing but just another metric for time. I usually do not have new year resolutions nor have any plans of getting better. But the night of 31st is normally a happy one, or we keep it that way. Whenever I was home with my family, we (me and my brother) put on loud music and wait for the clock to strike 12'O clock. That was fun for us, permission to put on loud music at midnight, talk endlessly about the things we like. And then, I had to leave home as it was destined and I have learnt to welcome years without my type of 'celebrations'. However this year I had a sweet surprise and it turned out to be one of the best new years I ever had. In a nut shell, the future, which turned quickly in to present (as Calvin told) and then to past, showed me some ups and downs only to leave me stronger and more optimistic. We all have gone through good and bad times, and r...