Fall and Rise!

And another one of my favorite tracks, brings me to write this post.

"Pankho ko hawa jara si lagne do" - is an ultimate song, always left me thinking about my own dreams and pursuits.  A song from Bollywood movie Rocketsingh, about a salesman who rises, falls down and rises back. 

The song spurs up my own thinking, making me feel deep inside with its own  "Sadness and thoughtfulness of failure" and "inspiration to rise back".

In addition, the other day while talking with one of my aunts, she kinda left me with this another weird feeling by her reponse to my age, "You really crossed 25?, responsible and a wise young man now haan..". 

Sometime realization of age gives you a kick to wakeup from that 'sleep' and make you realize suddenly you are no more that school kid who used to get trophy just for participating in a competition.

Life has changed you to a grown up man, who has targets to hit. And those targets are not just targets to keep you running in a rat-race, Those are actually your own goals with a lot of emotions involved in it.  Those goals have a happiness and satisfaction hidden inside them.  Only a pursuit of them at any cost, will make you feel complete and content.

So here I mull over more about my own dreams and where I stand today.  There are things which make me feel proud what I have done, at the same time there are things which make me feel I am still left behind struggling to get what I dreamed of.   Also there are things which make me feel challenged and those are roaring towards me, asking me to strike back and show my abilities.

So after pondering over all this, I finally realize that

Life - this complex thing  has yet another meaning - A random sequence of "Rise" and "Fall" . Yes , both are essential parts of life. There is no single person in this world who hasn't passed through both of these phases.

Without falling down you never get an inspiration to rise back again to a higher peak. 

There are 2 thoughtful lines I love, in this song,

"Uljhe nahi toh kaise suljhoge

Bikhre nahi to kaise nihkroge"

:)

Wish you all best of luck for your Rise again.

Shunty

Just another day.

Its a Sunday evening and finally I forced myself to sit for a while and pen-down something. Sunday evenings have always been my super-enemy because despite the fact how-much lovely the weekend was, there is a always a following Monster Monday out there, which needs you to go back to office and work :(


Also tomorrow’s Monday is not only a Monday but it has its another deadly thing on it, called as Valentine Day. Which is going to remind me each and every second that I am still single. :) Anyways funny but a fact as we all know that Life does not turn out to be the way we think. So I won’t cry this time again about my relationship status. :) After-all I am a hopeful Ted Mosby.

OK so fellas, what is going on?

I remember my first day here when I was a little kid, walked out of India for the first time in life to work and fit himself into a complete new atmosphere and a new culture around. On my first day when I reached here, my luggage was lost and I was tired, albeit I was curious to see and know everything around.  There was this sudden change from those Indian roads covered with vehicles all time, noise of scooters, auto rickshaws, busy streets and shouting street vendors to a place where you almost don’t see a person on the road. All you see is clean roads, cars everywhere, smooth freeways teeming with billboards on sides and an intersection with a red and green signals after every few yards.

On the next day, I visited world’s biggest supply chain - Wallmart. The famous grocery store you pretty much see everywhere in United States. And now that’s a destination every weekend too as its a provider of basic necessities.

At a place where having a no driving license is like having no legs, it wasn't easy to manage things, but having friends reduced this pain. After a lot of trials and failing 4 times in driving exam, finally I got a driving license too! :)

It took me couple of more months to get used to almost everything. Taking from a black coffee and French fries to the Pizza Hut and Subways. Greeting unknown people and talking friendly with everyone whom you see around. I got used to almost everything.

This is a small quite town where winter hits like anything after October every year. Weather turns freaking cold and temperature always remains below ZERO in Celsius.  I got used to that too. Alas I still hate wiping that bloody snow off the car in early morning! :)

There is nothing which can fill up a gap of Indian festiveness and being with relatives and family. Millions of miles away where I was born and grew up -that culture is completely different than this one. Still I never missed it because there was always a group of Indian friends here to make me feel better and make me feel home. The other reason I never felt so sad about staying away from home is that, I always liked here and liked pretty much everything. The individual Independence and freedom-to-live the way you want is something you want eventually. :)

Someone has rightly said, If you truly want to enjoy something, then best way is to become a part of it.  So is here, If you really wanna be here and enjoy everything you got, then get yourself tuned into this place,culture and a weather. After all as Thomas Friedman says into his book, respecting and accepting cultural differences and getting flexible to everything around is a key to thrive in a flat world.

That's it for now. I will write more!

Shunty

To My Future Kids!

[This is another How I Met Your Mother type of a post. HIMYM is a story of a Ted-Mosby who narrates to his kids, how he met his life-partner and the mom of their kids. Being single, I always see myself as a young character ‘Ted Mosby’ who is always curious to know and meet his dream girl, the mother of his future kids.

So I write this post to my future kids. I think this is one of the most candid post I’ve ever written. Hopefully you’ll enjoy it. Have fun!]

To : My future kids,

Written on : Sunday 5th December,2010

Read it on : Sometime after 2030.

Dear Kids,

Hope you’re doing very well.

This is another Sunday of 2010 and I am sitting in front of my laptop writing down to you in my apt at Cedar Rapids, USA. This is my first winter in USA, snow has started to fall, the only thing I can see out of my apt’s window is the roads,trees,houses and cars covered with ice. My roommate (your uncle Umesh Gaekwad) is singing some weird Marathi song and I am struggling to understand it, as usually it happens at my apt.

This is another year when many more scams got revealed in India, This is the year when American president Barack Obama visited India, and this is also a year when I came to my first international trip, here USA for my project. This is the year when Apple released its 4th gen iPhone-4 and I got a privilege to buy it, the costliest cellphone I have ever bought! (Yeah your grandma was totally surprised when I told her about the price of this phone).

This is also the year when I got mad after the American TV serial How I met your mother and decided to write a post to you.

This is the first ever year I got flooded with a lot of news about many of my batch-mates, friends, colleagues choosing the partners of their lives. Most of your uncles are already married, engaged while others on the verge of getting committed, or some are still looking for the one, just like me. [Yeah am still single, searching for your mom]. Your uncle Harnish has chosen her girl and getting engaged soon. Manan, Sandeep, Dipak, Rahul, Gaurav, Vatsal, Nitin and many other of your uncles, many of them even you might not be knowing, are now having a hand to hold throughout their lifetime. Even my college buddy, your uncle Imran declared recently that he’s going to be a dad soon.

Now Kids,

I am really happy for all of these people who have chosen their partners. These are pretty good times of their lives and they are moving on.

However get this, every-time I get such another news, someone inside me, asks me “Dude what about you?”. It has turned out that every engagement or marriage invitation is kind of a weird realization that I am still single! Apparently being single kinda sucks.

Well, actually I am not so-desperate to get married, especially not-in-a-way your grandma wants me to get married. [You must be knowing I am not a great fan the way marriages happen in our cast]. Also I am not so desperate to bring you guys here on earth so early. But based-on-my-self realization after couple of my friends told me, I have always been sort of little hopelessly romantic and ready-to-fall in love. So I always looked around and curiously tried to find your mother in the bunch of girls I see around, I hope that’s not something entirely wrong! [But also not entirely right! :-) ]

Now Kids,

This is also a year when I totally, madly, passionately and hopelessly fell in love with another girl in my life. I am sorry to tell you kids, but unfortunately she wasn’t the one. Yeah she wasn't your mother.

This time also things didn’t work out as it happened last two times, which sadly incremented my 'fell-in-love and came-out-of-love' count to 3.

Yes, This was the third girl I fell in love with. [:-) Just being frank]

So I don’t know how does that really sound to you, but that is something which really happened in my life, and I was totally into each one of them and every-time I felt and I was 100% sure that this one is your mom. But no, Sometime Life is funny in its own ways. it wasn’t true in each of that case.

Those could be the mistakes or may-be something which was destined to happen with me.

Anyways, Speaking of mistakes, I tell you something, You always make mistakes in life.

No matter how much you escape from them, but you will always end-up making at-least few mistakes. Sometime little mistakes, sometime very scary or sometime very stupid. And there is always a small but a pinching regret following that mistake which keeps you reminding about your mistake.

Now all you can do is realize that mistakes are part of life. Regret for a while, say sorry to the affected ones and try not to repeat it. That’s it - move on. That’s part of life. Those are jerks who keep on repenting throughout their life for their mistakes.

So that’s all I have to share with you.

Presently I am just a simple happy single guy, living an ‘indian-engineer-working-in-usa’ life. Sometime I get nostalgic, miss my friends out there in India, while sometime I just keep working and forget everything which seems unpleasant to me. Sometime I pinch pennies and save bucks for my family and some savings for your mother while sometime I just keep on buying stuff I want. Sometime I get too much ambitious and keep on working and reading technical articles, while sometime I realize I have worked too much so I just enjoy, watch movies, read books, cook stuff and do ‘facebooking’!

I don’t know who is that girl, who is your mom, maybe someone from the list of your grandmother’s choice or maybe someone I stumble with next year or sometime later.

I just don’t know!

Cheers,

Shunty.

PS: After reading this,

1) Comment in, whatever comes to your mind.
2) Please do not ask me who were those 3 girls.
3) If you get little emotional reading it, then do not try to hook me up with any random girl, unless she is outrageously beautiful and genius. Just Kidding. BBye.

How I 'met' Soha!

[ :-) I know the title of this post is silly. Its due to my mad fascination to the American sitcom 'How I met your mother' and its characters. I love them!!]

One of the delightful thing about life is that it makes us meet new people. Every now and then. New colleagues, new neighbors, new friends, new relatives or sometime new crushes.  Sometime we get best friends out of them or sometime we end-up fighting with them. Sometime you crave to meet them again or sometime you hide away so that you don't end-up seeing them again. Some stay in your life forever while some are just accidental meets which you remember when you are thinking about past.

During one of my trips I met this actress, Well actually its lame to call it a meet. I did not actually 'meet' her but it was very much more than enough for my easily-gets-impressed and always-ready-to-fall heart. So let me narrate how I met Soha!!

"Sir, Would you like to take some wine?" fair and fatty air hostess asked me when I was trying to buckle-up by seat belt.

"Ahmm sorry?!" I missed that as my ears were still struggling to get in sync with British accent.

She repeated again.

"Ahmm! No thanks, but a glass of water would be great" I said.

It was around 3 am in the morning and Boeing 787 of British Airways was talking with the skyscrapers of Bombay.  I was in my first international trip, my work trip to here, USA.

People were adjusting themselves for the long journey, next stop was the London-Heathrow airport after 10 hours or so.

I settled myself on my seat and started to look around.

It was fun to see different people of various countries under one roof together. British crew was moving here and there serving them all, Group of Indian girls who were possibly flying to UK for study were chuckling in the row after mine. 2 American couples were chitchatting and cracking jokes on my right seat. On my left seat American lady almost 1 feet taller than me - was feeling sleepy like anything so she was dragging her cozy blanket.

I was on the front seat of the row and was able to see people clearly moving here and there in the aisle. I settled myself and tried to plug my headphones and turned on the small TV attached to the armrest of my seat.

After a while a corner of my eye noticed someone-some girl standing up in the aisle in a pink-kind of clothes. "It should be some good-looking girl, Don't miss the chance to take a look!" - 'single and always ready to mingle' part of my mind told me full heartedly and so I looked up.

Since I was on a front row of my compartment which was getting connected with business class compartment - I was clearly able to see people standing in the passage. There were couple of bathrooms which were getting shared between economy class and business class.

The first sight told me she was an indian girl in a pink colored clean and shining night dress. A perfect shaped body like some female body instructor or some actress would be blessed with. I was not able to see her face as she was looking down may be she was thinking something and was waiting for one of the bathrooms to get empty.

She must be pretty I guessed so but I was not able to see most of his face as her immensely black hairs were open.

She was a pretty much fair skinned Indian - The kind of girl we see in some fairness and beauty commercials.

A second later, she turned her head up and I was totally right. Wow, she was an impeccably beautiful and good looking. For next few fractions of the second, my eyes got transfixed to her face- as if my mind halted serving all other organs of my body and was only serving the highest priority interrupt it has ever received from my eyes.

Fraction later when I got my senses working back, I looked in the TV screen for a while and again I turned my eyes up. This time she looked towards my side and I smiled instantly. So did she :-)

The next thought came from my mind was that why does it seem that I have seen her somewhere else?! I know her may be.

It took one more second to realize me that I was watching the great beauty Soha Ali Khan herself right in front of me. The moment I realized I I turned my head back to TV again pretending to watch something. The background thoughts running in my mind were 'OMG, She is really beautiful, goddess of beauty, So adorable. Should I rush towards her for an autograph? Or may be a snap together? Soha can we be friends?! Haah! :-)'.

I couldn't help myself and I turned my head up once again in the pretext of just watching around, to sneak another glance of her cute face.

This time again she looked at me and I summoned some guts to ask something at-least with signs.

So for the sake of communication, I tried to create a signs of a screen and asked her whether she is the film star Soha and she nodded with a smile.

Wooohoooo!!!  - A cheer up sensation passed everywhere in my body.

That moment was really delightful keeping my smile there on my face for next 2 minutes alas the American lady nearby me was still looking at me with a awkward 'has he gone mad?' kind of a look.

Well then soon after Soha got the vacant bathroom and she waved a bye bye to me. :-)

I smiled back and put my headphones back. My ears struck with a soundtrack of British movie "Love Actually" and I lost in those  fanciful, fleeting and unreal dreams.


[Yeah that was the end of my shortest accidental meet with actress Soha Ali khan :-) Of-course as I said earlier she was lucky to get a glance of this dashing gentleman ;-) ]

The world is flat - Book Review

The world is flat - Densest but the excellent book I’ve ever read. Before this one whatever stuff I read was either fiction or any inspirational things, This time I was struck with this book full of facts and figures.It was the first non-fiction book which kept my interest alive till the last chapter of the book.

Everyone who noticed the title of this heavy book in the corner of my drawing room or bedroom just said one thing, “Yeah the world is indeed flat”. However understanding the title of one-line cannot at all be compared with the amazing enlightening journey of reading this book. So yeah if you’re planning to read some non-fiction go ahead and pick up this one.

Those who have heard about this book, might already be knowing, the book is entirely written upon how the word turned flat in the era of the globalization - How various communities, industries and individuals started to collaborate, connect and work with each other using various advanced technologies - Which made this world flat.

Okay, so what was my first feeling when I realized the flatness of this earth in the initial chapters?

Being an Indian and especially being in the IT outsourcing field (Which is one of the major flattenner) - On which this book is mostly written upon, I feel someone dragged me up and showed this is how everything -whole flat-world-system is working. This is where we stand today and probably where could we be tomorrow. Like a frog of a well gets dragged up and shown the rest of the world.

It goes down explaining how world become flat starting from Fall of Berlin Wall to the start of Internet world and Mozilla browsers.  Author has explained how 10 major flatteners pulled the various regions and peoples to make the flat world.

Then various other questions like what should the developing countries like India, China, developed countries like USA, various companies  - do to thrive and succeed in the flat world.
Putting it in a short line what Thomas has tried to argue throughout the book - Following 3 basic factors are must for any country to prosper in the flat world

1. Right Infrastructure - To connect more and more people with the flat world. From Internet and mobile phones to airports and roads.
2. Advanced Education which can bring more ideas and skills for new technologies.
3. Governance which can loose the trade barriers and stay flexible based on the change in the market.

Also author has raised various concerns and has put solutions which needed to be done for the people who are living in the unflat world. -- Which is one of the burning question when it comes to the rural India.

The book which I read was updated and expanded into its original copy, where author has captured all other aspects of globalization including the geopolitical issues, terrorism and the global warming.

A must read book. Thanks to one of my friends who recommended me to read it. I recommend it to all of you. :-)