Would you like to Subscribe?

It has been long and soul-searching two years since the last post…its little uncomfortable to even type this having given that long a pause. But Why? No sensible answers for the pause or the uncomfort. But the only right answer is to START again!

Time has run by so quickly, but has a left scar in my blog…the longest silence ever since I started blogging a few years ago. I had told myself many reasons not to blog, but today I told myself just one reason to blog, cuz its fun and liberating. I need to find (I should say make, right??) the time to read more first! will return.

What if one of the million blogs has been inactive for a month? No big deal! less noise in blogosphere and a bit more time for my readers to do something else.

The last two months has successively been crazy at work and off work that I hardly had anything going on in my brain to write besides the mundane things!

I wonder how the internet has changed our lives for ever. There is so so so much information out on the internet (think how easy it is to shoot an email or write a blog or send a instant message or SMS, gosh! scary) that nobody knows how to deal with it.

Someone at my work rasied this very good point to our CIO (Chief Information Officer who is responsible for information systems). He simply said ‘We don’t know how deal with so much information coming in on a daily basis, everyone has their own self-invented way of dealing with information overload…’

This really stuck me hard. I think we are hitting on something fundamental here. Most of the citizens of the knowledge economy are not trained to deal with information.

Think about this simple fact : Until about two decades ago (even now in many parts of developing countries & third world; thats another scary story!), source of information is crystal clear : Postal mail Box, News papers at the door or local coffee shop, radio/TV for many and friends/family/neighbours! Period. Just enough things to digest before dinner and have a good night’s sleep!

Today, for most of the highly organized and all disorganized, except for the few ridiculously disciplined, life is god damn so complicated when it comes to information. here goes one version of it :

Postal mail box still exists (surprise!) though we pick it up, still, once a day, yet checking email about 100 times day.

There are still lot many souls who subscribe and read news papers every morning..

We still do have our friends, family & co-workers to feed us with information that is more than enough for a human being to deal with!

And here you go into the info-highway!

“You’ve got Mail!!!”….i am guessing on an average people get about 5-10 non-junk emails a day (lets not talk about the junk emails that we spend our energy and time to clean up (even if its just clicking the link that says ’empty’, think about the value of that activity in your one and only life in this Earth!). If you include emails at work, add about 50+ on average. we are already into 27th hour of the day to humanely process the information…

Cell phone has red lights blinking….4 messages unread….

You boot your computer…Yahoo slaps you with a message….19 unread offline messages….

You fire your browser, your favorite RSS reader warns (yeah baby! they warn you, you better read them or we will never stop warning you!!!) ‘1712 new posts from 267 feeds’ [Man, How proud I am at 265 feeds!]

At work, multiple instant messages conversations, emails, phone calls, multi-tasking…putting ‘continuous partial attention’ into practice.

You start driving back from work, your XM radio tells you that 28 new stations were added from Far East with one exclusive from Al Jazeera!

Get back into home, exhausted, Cordless phone beeps relentlessly until you clear up 2 marketing messages and listen & then delete to third empty message!

Go to the living room, Tivo reminds you that you have 12 shows in your queue. [my favorite]

As you switch on your TV, the red NetFlix envelope strikes you from under the coffee table reminding ‘Crash’ has been waiting for you for two weeks now…

Just as you get sick of all this and head to the bedroom, the PDA reminds you that you have 4 bills to be paid, in full, due tomorrow, that your 401K mutual funds has gained 5% more in the last month, that the 6.20AM flight to Chicago is going to be on time, that you have not downloaded the latest version of the ‘Sudoku PowerPlay’.

I hit the bed wishing God had one extra thing on the rear bottom of my head….A shutdown button!

Millions of raw coconuts are consumed all over the globe everyday. There’s got to be a consistent repeatable process-oriented way to cut open ( note not break open!) a coconut, isn’t it?

This Wikihow article, Cut Open a Coconut, points to one such sure-fire way, in 7 easy steps, with5 handy tools and about 10 or so tips, all to ensure that a coconut is treated the way it should be!

btw, wikiHow is a good on-line community to collaboratively create and edit how-to guides about virtually anything humanely possible. My favorites : How to Annoy people, Get Other Guys to Stop Staring at Your Pretty Wife and Get Other Guys to Stop Staring at Your Very Pretty Wife!

No kidding, the site has some excellent, useful guides that anyone can find use for. Check it out or better yet, contribute.

He fell in love with Srinivas…he quickly hit a 100 playback performances…
He fell in love with Karthik…who is now close to double century in playback…
ARR is in an apparent infatuation with Naresh Iyer now…time will tell if its the next love.

I wondered if there is an element of commonality with these guys? For sure, their wavelengths hit the chord the first time they met. Two, the three guys literally surrendered to Rehman, giving up their career to singing. Three, most importantly, according to me, there is a unique rawness in all of them that only Rehman could sense.

“When the student is ready, the teacher finds him”

we couldn’t have chosen a better day; Jersey is packed with almost two feet of snow and there is nowhere to go but stay put. Just before the snow, I grabbed the dvd “March of the Penguins”. If you are ever inspired by nature, you will be spellbound by watching this documentary, in the form of a movie.

I vaguely remember the fact about penguins breeding but had never imagined how much they endure during a few month period to procreate. In one of the harshest places on the planet, these penguins show us what love, caring and true survival means. At times, it was scary thinking about the ruthless winter nights and blizzards the penguins must face. At other times, the way they help each other and the cute babies they raise were so adorable, you start loving them endlessly. The cinematography was spectacular and narration by Morgan Freeman was affectionate. Just to realize that these creatures live such an admirable life just at the other part of the earth, I get goose bumps.

I must also salute the people who had the courage and passion to film this great act of nature.

Right Management Consultants’ latest survey on ‘skills that most organizations are looking for in executives’ has lead to the two most desired qualities : Ability to motivate others and the ability to communicate.

It might seem obvious and simple but it is still very difficult in practice. Knowledge, confidence and trust precedes good communication which precedes motivation. Jack Welch said, “You’ve got to be comfortable with yourself to make a good boss.”

More desired skills and the detailed survey results here.

I had earlier written without much contemplation ‘…its good to be back home…’ and I later remembered this from T.S.Eliot…

“We must not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we began and to know the place for the first time”

Ah…true, there seems to be some profoundness in it, I felt I got a glimpse of it. My sense is that Eliot had written this from a self exploration perspective “seek outside to find yourself only in the end to know you self inside…”. I think it also interestingly applies to material explorations…

It feels good to be back home even if it means taking a bite or two from the US immigrations officer 🙂 After that bite, when we pass thru the US Customs, one thing that I proudly sneaked in undetected was my deep nose-waterning cold from paris!

There is lot to say and even more to be reminescnet of a week well spent away from internet, cell phones, cooking, work, commute, traffic and books! New year under the eiffel tower was less extravagant than we had expected. Neverthless, to hang out amongst a few thousands people in this great city under the lits of the tower exchanging “BONNES” (Happy New Year in French pronounced ‘bownaney’) is a unique experience.

Wishing you all a very very happy, prosperous and healthy year(s) ahead.

not enough words to explain, but it is great here. will write more stories soon. I am reserving my comments about french people 🙂

Employers are happy to give you a week off during the week of christmas and new year. It will only be wise to take advantage of that isn’t it?

We are off to a week of sight-seeing to the greatest city in europe! Hey, Eiffel, here we come.

[Eiffel sunrise from Wikipedia]

On this Christmas Day, May God grant good health and peace to everyone.

Harini dressed up a bare bear for a charity. I believe the bears are given back to poor orphan kids as gifts from Santa. I got their snaps before she was sent on her way to a new home.

I just unsubscribed Sun TV willfully without much grief that I am dropping the only Tamil channel I had access to. Of late, Sun’s programming has been awful and their attitude turning arrogant. I will certainly miss a couple of good series, but in a modern democratic society where every consumer purchase denotes a vote of support, I don’t think I support them anymore.

That saves some bucks, so we are trying the new Dish package from Voom. Their lineup isn’t that great, but I am looking forward to a few months of trial on variety HD programming.

We had the chance (after all my classes and mid-term tests, I found a bit of time) to watch “Napoleon Dynamite” this past weekend. Off the bat, you have to have grown up (or at least know a lot about) in the middle-America to appreciate the content of the movie. If I hadn’t read anything about the movie, I would called it a waste of time and the crew as Idiots. But then thats like saying people in India still ride on elephants and horses to school and work : sheer Ignorance. Thankfully, I educated myself before watching the movie and I can say now that it was funny, original and creative.

If a 007 flick or a Bourne Identity can be fast, upbeat and thrilling then thats the type of such movies and the characters that play in it. Napolean Dynamite (official site) takes an exact opposite stance given the context of the movie and its characters. Let me borrow the word “The movie is deadpan” from a lot of reviews I had read about this movie. When time, emotions, and music (very minimal) is taken away from the medium, what you get is a raw form of art. You have to be able to understand and experience it before we could appreciate it. I have only begun to comprehend the originality of such movies. If you go by the definition of “Hollywood”, this is not even close. But by the definition of “real story telling as an art form”, bet you got a winner in this. Napolean Dynamite has garnered a cult classic status and no kiddish achievement for young 24 year old writer/director couple.

If Acting is all about emotions, then how would you describe and act characters with almost no emotions? Isn’t silence is a form of music? And to be able to use silence intelligently is not an easy thing. Much in the same lines, To “act” without emotions but only depth of character and conviction is indeed challenging : Jon Heder‘s and most of the crew’s performance is easily a breakthrough.

Harini has started collecting her animation and graphic design works at another blog at blogspot. Its got everything that she created from the day 1 of her basic animation/illustration classes. Its fascinating to see a budding eArtists in the making. Moving on to advanced classes this winter, we can expect some more cool stuff to come our way.

My favourite so far is this cute restless caterpillar which never stopped for a moment of rest!

The weather in this part of the world has been sporadic with windy days, stormy showers, ice cold nights and occasional sun, if at all we are lucky. As I hear from my kith and kin in South India, the weather there has also been less merciful. With relentless flooding and rain in the past few weeks, I can imagine how hard life would be in India. As I had once lamented, the Gods are only getting angrier day after day as the continuous natural disasters (including the unwarranted tornado today in Indianapolis) only stand to prove my suspicion.

Strangely, I saw on Sun TV the other day that India has fully developed in strange ways that the camera crew of cable media arrives at disaster spots much much quicker and ahead of time than the police and other forms of help! What a pity that the directors of the cable television take pride in showing live, dead bodies being pulled all around from the Andhra trains crash wrecks. In the name of freedom and consumer eyeprints (a.k.a market-share capitalism), some of India’s cable channels seem to be losing common sense.

It has been an awfully gloomy week. Cloudy, drizzling, heavy overcast and persistent rain have confiscated Sun altogether. Getting up in the morning, for no strange reasons, feels as if I was sleeping for 2000 years. Perhaps, Mother Earth is sober and shedding tears for the heavy losses in Pakistan and Indian Kashmir.

I continue to have this strange feeling that the human civilization, with all the industrial, technological and bio developments, is becoming an uncontrollable acute virus occupying Earth. An analogy might help. When we get cold or allergy, we take pills, which induce anti-bodies in the body to control the virus. I wonder if earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, giant-scale epidemics (SARS, Influenza etc) and other natural outrages are indeed symptomic of the earth’s resistance to an intelligent, exponentially growing lethal virus – humans. One could even speculate that Mother Earth influences the collective human conscience resulting in terrorist attacks and bloody, expensive, resource-depleting wars.

Arun Vaidyanathan’s shortfilm has been selected for screening at the Indo-American arts council’s film festival, come this nov 3-6th in Manhattan. I think this is a significant milestone for Arun, to be screening alongside movies such as Deepa Mehta’s new film”Water”, much appreciated and oscar nominated “Born in Brothels” and a lot of other acclaimed shorts. Good luck to Arun and all the crew of ‘Thaniyoru Manidhanukku’ (for a soul). Many of you might remember Harini and I took great pleasure in helping Arun in the making of one of his earlier short-films that continues to recieve good reviews at TriggerStreet.

This past weekend’s retreat was great and i returned with sore body-parts but inspired thoughts. I had the rare opportunity (i am sure more of it would come) of meeting a billionaire, Ken Langone (co-founder, HomeDepot) and a multi-millionaire Mark Patterson (co-founder of MatlinPatterson Global Advisers). Their speeches and words of encouragement were truly inspiring. Frankly, I have never been this close to people of so much wealth and accomplishments under their belts so I had all the reason to cherish the occasion.

A few words of advise phrases of the weekend.

Ken : “The greatest pleasure of creating so much wealth is in sharing it”. [Hmm…I guess he could say that. Someone asked him what kind of risk he is taking (in business) these days, he answered (rude?) that he has amassed enough wealth that he doesn’t risk anything these days!]

Ken : “Making a mistake or being wrong doesnt make you bad. So be brave enough to make mistakes. If you aren’t failing or making mistakes, you aren’t learning. of course, Don’t make the same mistake twice!”

Mark : “Both you and your spouse/children should have the same goal for you. Otherwise, they will be surprised or even leave when you finally accompolish your goal”. Think through this one, there is more to it than it sounds.

Mark [drives million dollar race cars for fun] : “One thing I learnt driving race cars is NOT to look at rear view mirros […and lose track]. In life, never look back to worry about mistakes, always look forward into whats coming with cheer, excitement and inspiration”

Mark : “Have a reasonably good idea of where you want to be and what you want to do life, but be ready to make twists and tweaks. Don’t hurry there, the greatest pleasure is the journey and not at the destination” – This was in response to the question i had asked Mark about if he had figured a goal early in life.

Believe me or not, At some point during Mark’s speech I started dreaming about a speech I am giving in some future (hope near future!) when I have become successful enough to be asked to address 100 business school students.

I am waiting here (At Stern reception hall infront of one of the hunderds of network pcs on the hallways!) to get on a bus to go here [Iroquois Springs], as part of this[PTLF]. Unfortunately, harini couldn’t accompany me (sorry baby!) and will be missing her (And she swears that she will do more than flipping channels :)) ). Hoping to have some fun and good time with fellow Sternians.