Need Vs Want

Sometimes I am confused about whether a particular thing is my need or my want. I think it is natural and many others also often categorise their needs as wants and vice-versa. When it is about buying an iPod or having a dinner at an expensive restaurant, it is ok (or better) to ignore a perfect need-want analysis. But, I think we must know what we really need in our life as a whole.

What we want to do in our life is often not the thing what we need to. Choosing a career to earn money is our need and it is often very difficult to make a good career out of your hobby or interest. Sometimes I come across people who can easily identify (or may be they just pretend to identify) what exactly their needs and wants are. I come across people who have plans in terms of hours (or may be minutes) for months from now. These people seem to be very systematic in everything they do. But, is not that very similar to the way machines behave?! As human beings, one of the most powerful things which makes us different from machines is our emotion. It is emotion which gives us the courage to take chances – bunking classes of the deadliest of professors to play computer games with friends or to go for a 11pm movie show without having any idea how to return home. It is emotion which enables us to magnify life and to live it in terms of seconds and not in terms of months or years. Those are the things how we remember the finest moments of our life and those are the things, what I really think, are what we really need in life to remind ourselves that we are still normal human beings. That is how the meaning of ‘need’ and ‘want’ converges.

I was born intelligent. Education ruined me.

I really believe in this T-Shirt tag-line. When I was a kid, there were very few things I thought, were impossible. That is same with every child. In childhood, we have the freedom to think what we want to; to live in the world we want to. As we grow up, we understand the world the way they teach us and we start realising – “Oh! I thought that was possible when I was a kid. No, for sure, it is not.”. But it is not always about reality, it is sometimes about the creativity; it is not always about money, it is sometimes about happiness and satisfaction; it is not always about being systematic, it is sometimes about living life to the fullest…

It's me... or perhaps You too

My lecturer who was teaching me ‘Programming in C’ had made one thing very clear to me – that I will never be comfortable with programming and it would be very difficult for me to pass the final examination keeping in view the knowledge and attitude I have towards programming. Anyways, those words gave me a kick on my back and somehow I was able to get a ‘C’ in ‘Programming in C’. It needed the combined effort of me and my room-mate Mahesh.

I was very comfortable in C++. I got an ‘O’ in my lab. I liked studying RDBMS and somehow found it very interesting. Don’t take me otherwise, but it really is . Again I got an ‘O’. Then I took my first out-of-curriculum language course in summer, 2007. It was for Java. At that time, eight people (including me) were sharing a single PC to practice programming after the classes. I was catching up with things very easily. While studying the advanced Java part, I learned HTML and I liked working with it. My friends made me believe that I am really good with these things.

After six months I was the one who was supposed to design the website for the tech-fest of my college. I tried applying JSP for this but things did not come out to be so easy. Then came one of my bro – Piyush who helped me learn PHP-MySQL and helped me finish the work of the website. I found PHP a very easy language, to code, to understand and to communicate with the database. After the first website, perhaps I was wrongly taken as a good website designer by the people around me (I am trying to put things in simpler language). I got a lot of work to do and all the time I chose PHP. I used it in my curriculum-project and then after the college, I used WordPress for my website. So, until my joining at job, I continued working with PHP although I knew that it is hardly going to be my career. The chances of working in PHP in my job were very less but my interest was not.

In my job, my stream training was on MS .Net. We were using Visual Studio 2008. I had never used such a friendly IDE before. I did not know what COBOL was but I remember saying this line to one of my friends – “.Net is so easy. Thank God we are not coding with COBOL or anything.”. Coding was never difficult. We had a very good and able facilitator with us. I was very happy with I was going through the web development part using ASP .Net. I was very relaxed thinking that I am in a stream like this.

When we got our offices, I was informed that I would be working with some Mainframe technology. I laughed at myself when I came to know the programming is done with COBOL. I neither had a choice nor do I have now. I am now trying to find out something in it which would seem interesting to me. Logic and algorithm have always fascinated me and that is why I still have hope that someday I will really love working with something which would earn me my salary.

I understand that in a software industry we have to respect our work… I really understand this. I also understand that so far as Career-building is concerned, I am in a very good field to work in. Within 2-3 years I may get a chance to go abroad and earn little bigger. But I still feel like I am missing something…

Do not believe in anything
simply because you have heard it.

Do not believe in anything
simply because it is spoken and rumored by many.

Do not believe in anything
simply because it is found written in your religious books.

Do not believe in anything
merely on the authority of your teachers and elders.

Do not believe in traditions
because they have been handed down for many generations.

But after observation and analysis;
when you find that anything agrees with reason
and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all,
then accept it and live up to it.

This is fearlessness, and it is love!

Samsung Corby Mate

When I found that I had to buy mobile phone, my first choice was Nokia C3 after visiting some cellphone websites. But when I knew that C3 is yet to be launched I started looking for something new. My basic need was a qwerty keypad keeping in mind the facility of sending 500 free SMSes a day provided by my network provider .

And I came across this model and found it quite interesting at first. The first thing I could notice about this cell was its cool qwerty keypad with a stylish slider design. The next thing was its light weight. The number strip at the face makes it look like a unique piece. Then soon I decided that this was going to be my new call-mate. It has now been 20 days and I am quite happy I chose this phone. The features are very easy to use. The use of navigation keys in both slider and bar has been designed very wisely. The most interesting thing I found in this model is its 2MP camera. Yes.. I know 2MP is like nothing, but the output quality is really good. It also provides you facilities to take snaps in panorama mode. You can have some fun using the mosaic mode. The batter back up is good. The quality of music output in ear piece is very good. One of the few things you won’t get is 3G. But in a price of just Rs. 4800, how much can you expect?! The bottom line comes to be like – I love this cute and sexy phone. iSuggest if you are looking for this.

Full specification : http://in.samsungmobile.com/mobile-phones/samsung-corby-mate-specification

Time to question ourselves...

Few days back, while travelling in a local train I saw a little girl cleaning the floor of the compartment. She might be around 4-5 years. After completing what she was doing with utmost sincerity (what I could notice), she came to all the passengers one by one demanding what she thought she deserved. If you travel in local trains, this is a common scene for you.

People pay to visit idiots who can declare themselves as the avatar of God. Even in some places there is an hierarchy of the extent to which you can have the company of that idiot and likewise is the fee. People still pay. People pay the beggars who could easily work and get food for themselves with prestige, but the little girls like the one I mentioned are still left with nothing.

Former Iraq President Saddam Hussain had a plan for the biggest mosque in Iraq. His daughter, after watching the model of the mosque structure, asked him if there was nothing better for the citizens of the country spend the wealth to. He counter-questioned with a smile “Just imagine what the king of Jerusalem would have answered to a question like this!.” People are busy in building and demolishing religious structures. People pay to build theirs and to destroy others’ even in the countries where people die hungry.

More surprisingly, there are places where public exhibition of love and affection is considered a crime but riots and violence is sometimes supported by the so called protectors of the public.

Life will someday end like every sunrise sees a sunset. At the end of the day what we want is all about a sound sleep, not the one with sleeping peels. Let our life not be ended crowded by the acts of hypocrisy and when we grow older and older, may we not have any regrets like “I should have..” or “I shouldn’t have…”. I am not a philosopher. But this is what understood and then I took out a two rupee coin from my purse and handed it to the little girl.

Professionalism

It has just been a month I joined this company and the first important thing I learned was that the associates can never mention the name of their company anywhere in their personal profiles. Don’t know up to what extent people follow such rules, but I am trying my bit to be a professional .

If you have ever heard that being professional can make you go through a lot of compromises with your life, you have got the fact. You just sell 50% of your personal life, your personal ambitions and your talent (if you believe you have any) every month and get your salary.

After 12 years with friends in hostel I got eight months to live without friends and without work. No one can understand what that feels like except my friends who were experiencing the same level of uncertainty. It surprises people when I say that I am weak in the specialised stream I completed my B. Tech. degree in. Logically, yes, it should surprise people who know how good a student I had been in my school. Practically, it is always what you can see in me, or at least ask my friends.  I would have loved to work in a organization where people believe in creating things, playing with colours and experimenting with new ideas. But, luck takes it all because luck gives it to people who are lucky enough. I had tried my luck in Mumbai but as I had expected, I had to finally go with the flow where I had no control. Those eight months taught me a lot of things about life. The bottom line is when people go through difficult situations, they must remind themselves what they can do, even if they don’t get a chance to do anything. Otherwise they will get shattered.

After we (me and my friends from college) got the joining date, we were very happy because we all were going to meet each other after so many days and execute the plans which were supposed to be executed half a year back. We got here and on the very first day we got the look of a professional within ourselves. But I still don’t understand why the hell they wear a neck-tie (please don’t comment if your answer has any word like ‘professionalism’)!! We are more in school than office and so we are more students than employees but what it needs to fetch you a salary is ‘how professional you are’.  Nothing surely does matter, accomodation, fooding, bedding, travelling, learning or anything else, if at the end of the day you can sit with your friends, crack meaningless jokes, share the weirdest experiences and laugh out loudly without any reason. What if they plan to take even these things away from you to teach what professionalism means?!

The Modern World

“16-year-old Turkish girl buried alive for talking to boys.” And it was done by her family members after some “family council meeting”. : http://www.thehindu.com/2010/02/06/stories/2010020657381800.htm

I read this news yesterday and thought if this is one of those common news which comes to us by daily newspapers and tv channels. Is it just a news? Does not this news remind us of the fact that in this world in 21st century, when we boast of being ‘modern’, when we boast of marching forward leaving the darkness of yesterday, there are people for whom this is just a bloody ‘news’?

Few days back, while I saw a big crowd in front of the police station in my village. I, out of curiosity, asked one of the people what the crowd was all about and I came to know that it was a marriage. Didn’t get it? ok… if you didn’t get it, it is all about ‘casteism’.

Things like these are happening all around us. It is perhaps time to realise where we are… to realise what we are… to think before acting… and to act before it is too late. It is time we construct new rules that suits all genders and all casts.. all creed and all religion. And for that we must realise that we are human beings and we must treat others as we desire to be treated.

The Nature : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6a4l833Ccyo

Celebration : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyaHGKox2io

Life@UCE : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOFAQtHHoSQ

Mission Impossible : http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4780758210809876457&hl=en

Samavesh ’08 : http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2832268815476107343&hl=en

khUCEee : http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1755503575647947666&hl=en