Sudhar's Diary

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  • Odyssey Of the Mind – my calling?

    One of my core desires is around doing something to foster creativity among children in developing nations, especially among those children, who lack awareness and resources to experience the “creative process”.

    Given that desire, my soul always looks out for anything related to it.

    I stumbled upon today’s Courier News paper at the desk of one of my colleagues at work. I was browsing through it really quickly, until I stopped at an article in the local section that said “Students prepare for World Finals of problem-solving competition” . The heading was enough for me take a minute to read through it.

    I had never heard of “Odyssey of the Mind” of before. But it sure hit a chord in me. Obviously, I returned to my desk and googled it. Odyssey of the Mind is apparently a popular competition among school-going children and its purpose is to “foster the development of children’s creative-thinking and problem-solving skills”. Founded almost 25+ years ago, seems a movement of a sort to foster creativity among children. One day, I would love to do something like this for children in India, who I am sure, given right environment, resources, time and encouragement, will beat anyone else in creativity!

    I was just fascinated to visit their website : http://www.odysseyofthemind.com. Looks like their next world finals is next week in MaryLand and a few teams from central jersey has made it to the world finals. I was telling Harini that we could go there if not for the safe arrival of our little master! Children from 20 different countries participate besides children from 50 states in the US. Indeed, India is not one of them.

    Perhaps, my “calling” came through the Courier News today!

  • You got ADD!

    pseudo-attention deficit disorder : Its sufferers do not have actual A.D.D., but, influenced by technology and the pace of modern life, have developed shorter attention spans. They become frustrated with long-term projects, thrive on the stress of constant fixes of information, and physically crave the bursts of stimulation from checking e-mail or voice mail or answering the phone. from NYTimes.

    Am I reading about myself? I have to admit that the last sentence is gem. It absolutely reflects my own situation. To be doing nothing or to be silent and peaceful, scares me these days, as much as I know I should love it!

  • The new New Media is Social Media

    User generated video content has exploded in last 2-3 years beyond one’s imagination. Beyond YouTube, Metacafe and Blip.tv (the three that I regularly browse through) there are hundreds of others who scout the world looking for amateur video. All of this in the hope of becoming the next niche media distribution channel within the Internet.

    This growth in web of websites for uploading and sharing video now has spawned a few “consolidators”. I recently tried my hands with Magnify Networks at magnify.net. I think they have done a splendid job of providing an integrated discovery and aggregation portal for user generated video. Just as most web 2.0 startups, they are in Beta and are constantly improvising. The registration, as expected was quick and easy. And I was up and running setting up my (dream) project in a no time : http://villagekewl.magnify.net/

    I like this search and consolidate model because now I can search across my favorite video portals from one place. I presume the maginify.net guys constantly look to integrate with new video providers and so I don’t have to necessarily “know” who is the new or next YouTube. All I need to think about is what do I want Maginify to search for and how to aggregate and present it on my portal at http://villagekewl.magnify.net. There are other neat set of features such as playlists, user ratings, and auto search etc. to play around with. Check it out for yourself.

    Now, the key question boils down to how effective is the video search. Obviously, its basic text search with the title and description of the video and perhaps, few other attributes defined by the host video provider. Beyond that, we got to wonder who has the best tagged video content on the web.

    While on the topic, I got to mention CoolIris, which I stumbled as I was trying to get in touch with Sashi Seth. CoolIris has a catch product, essentially a browser plugin that would transform it into 3D browsing experience. So from reading/view a sort of a page from top to bottom or right to left, with text, audio and video what if you were let into street fair or planetarium and find text, audio, video all around you and you can zip through search and view in all directions, as fast as you can? Welcome to PicLens from CoolIris. you can download and try for yourself. So who is Sashi Seth anyway? As good as it looks, He will figure out if CoolIris can make any money out of it!

  • I am back!

    The long hiatus is over and I now have an MBA from NYU Stern. No more excuses to not blog! At least, I can’t sleep at night peacefully with any other excuse!

    I have been thinking about the emotional reaction to having a business school degree now and the 2.5 years of ordeal going to Manhattan twice a week, the hours and hours of reading and case writing, working with hundreds of great students and world-class professors and finally, a spectacular commencement at RadioCity hall. It does feel unreal at times, that it is done and over!

    My father sent a note of appreciation : “[you are] really fortunate to get this higher education in New York University. Nenachukooda pakkallai. GOD IS GREAT”. Nenachukooda pakkallai means, never even thought such a thing was possible.

    I agree, from where we were as a family 12 years to where we are…I am happy for what we got and for what I had even 3 years ago. I have not thought about doing an mba, let alone in the US and let alone in the No.1 part-time program in the country. yet here I am writing this. This only proves to me what I already strongly believe : “If you put your mind & heart, anything is possible!!!” Credit goes to two individuals : Mohan Tavaroth, who really pushed me off the cliff when I was questioning my abilities to do it three years ago. The larger credit goes to Harini. She has been trooper all along and has gone through much pains due to lack of my attention and help at family front. The delayed price of which is coming in 3 weeks from now! our little boy! Timing of it couldn’t have been better thanks to Almighty!

    It may sound like a big deal? is it?

    It sure is. To paraphrase what I have learnt from my readings : “Pain and Joy aren’t comparative; A person’s pain or joy is just as big as anyone else’s pain or joy, regardless of the reasons or context”.

    With that, I am starting to blog again! I am honored & thankful for your continued readership support for my blog.

  • A long long…very long time…

    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!

  • Returning soon…

    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.

  • In the meanwhile

    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!

  • Cut open a coconut

    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?

    coconut

    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.

  • Rehman falls in love with Naresh

    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”

  • Happiness…

    Its a simple thing : ‘Everyone wants happiness‘. The more I think about it, I realize that the least common denominator of the wants of every single person is ‘happiness’. I try to extend that argument and say ‘the unlimited list of things we want is not really what we want, but really the means to the real want ‘happiness’.

    It made sense to me…every want is a means to that one end want : happiness. So it appears as if that all we want is the happiness itself but are fooling ourselves by wanting many other worldly things hoping the pleasure we would feel from getting whatever we want would give that happiness. The reality is that the bottom of that list grows faster than the top and the all pleasures fail to give lasting happiness.

    But, wait a minute? happiness is an abstract term and there will be at least 5 billion definitions for it…right? Nope, thats the point…the 5 billion definitions are simply the statement of the means to that one happiness.

    Alright, I know I am driving everyone crazy here! What the heck is happiness then? In one definition, it is a transient state of mind! Note there is not one but three keywords here: transient, state, mind. Transient state because it is never permanant. If we all will ever be permantly happy, we all will be holiest of holy saints, who they say once existed! It is a state of mind because it is inside us and not ouside. Hindu philosophy says Brahma purposefully hid happiness at the deep core of our mind, the last place and most difficult place to find it!

    When we search outside there are zillion things to find and we would need a million lives to finish that search. Lets say, we all agree with that principle and start searching inside. We would soon realize that there is not much inside to search. Of course, you say. I think we would soon reach a point where we might finally realize happiness is nothing more nothing less than emptiness!

    True laughter is a way for true happiness. Art of Living’s Ravi Shankar says “Just laugh, smile. Life has no purpose, no mission. It is a game. It’s a play. Life has no message. Life itself is an expression of joy. There is nothing you have to do. Every- thing is being done by the Big Mind.”

    OK! now go watch “Rang De Basanti” 🙂

  • Secrets of life

    Swami Satchidananda of India : “If you run after things, nothing will come to you. Let things run after you. The sea never sends an invitation to the rivers. That’s why they run to the sea. The sea is content. It doesn’t want anything. That’s the secret in life.”

  • Watching snow and penguins

    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.

    march of penguins

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

  • Want to be an executive?

    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.

  • Common denominator of success

    I am reading through “Seven habits of highly effective people” yet another time. The greatness of this book is it is a lifelong read and everytime I read it after a few years gap, I understand it even better and recognize my strengths and weaknesses clearly.

    As I was passing through the Habit 3 today, I read about Stephen Covey’s favourite essay ‘Common Denominator of Success’. Intrigued, I ran a search on google. [I don’t recall doing this the last time I read this book, so makes me think that it must have been a time long long ago before Google!]

    The Common Denominator of Success by E Gray is perhaps a motivator for S. Covey. I tend to think a lot of what S. Covey had written in his book is captured in the short essay by Gray. It is very convuluted and difficult to read and assimilate but points to a simplest reasons for success.

    Habit is so powerful that it morphs into our character when we have done it long enough. Habit is not only external physical habits but also the mental thoughts and responses to external stimuli. Every thing good and bad about every individual is an acquired habit. The process begins by acknowledging them and making conscious efforts to address them until it becomes subsconscious at which point we already own it as a part of our character. Most important of all, ensure that every habit is aligned with a purpose, an emotional and sentimental purpose for life.

  • How good to be back home.

    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…

  • Back

    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.

  • Paris is awesome

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

  • Merry Christmas

    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
    [Eiffel sunrise from Wikipedia]

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

  • dream and then follow it

    I am sure everyone of us have heard of “Follow your dreams”. Most people ignore it either because they don’t dream of anything or they don’t believe their dreams are realistic (unachievable). A few people believe in their dreams and follow it and almost always “dreams come true, if only you follow it”.

    Human mind has the capacity to dream beyond impossible frontiers and our brain has the capacity to realize it, but only our heart has the capacity to believe that dreams can be realized. Without true belief, nothing is ever accomplished.

    Think about this for a minute: Everything around us exists because someone someday somewhere dreamed of it and followed it and made it into a reality. Someone dreamed of sending voice without wires, I wonder how many of us appreciate that dream when we take a call while driving. Someone had a dream that man can fly and I wonder how many of us appreciate that person when we board a flight. Someone dreamed of connecting computers to make them talk exchange data with each other, I wonder how many of us appreciate when we check our emails or shop at Amazon. Centuries ago, someone dreamed of a ink and paper, I wonder how many of us cherish that dream today when we hold a picture or a book. Of course, the list is endless.

    I don’t mean we all should stop everything spend years just appreciating all those people and their dreams. I think all the above are the reasons that everyone must dream. Big and Beyond. Not just dream, but hold on to them tight, believe it and follow through. Are you dreaming? Are you dreaming big? really big? Do you believe in it? Do you follow through?

    What if one doesn’t dream or doesn’t follow their dreams? Someone else will, for sure. After all, the only thing we bring with us when we are born is our ability to dream. This life is our only chance to follow those dreams. Many millions don’t realize it, but few million do and the world continue to be a better place to be, one dream at a time.

    “If you can dream it, you can do it” – Walt Disney

    Disney
    [Image from www.oneshare.com ]

  • Judgements

    Good judgement comes from experience;

    Experience comes from bad judgements.