Scribblings from Life

This is one of the incidents which made a kind of impact in me and so I thought it might be a good idea to share this with the world as well.


I was at Belgium for a IT project. This project was at a small place at Belgium called Mechlen. We had a team of around 30+ people onsite and all of us were working for a belgian telecom company. We were working with this client for quite sometime and hence had good relations even with the employees of this company. We often end up inviting them at our places for parties and vice-versa.


The incident happened at one such party. We were all enjoying the party mood with all the gossips making ways. I was talking to one of this belgian colleague of mine. She was just chit chatting about how her kids were enjoying their childhood and some funny incidents with them. During this conversation, just out of curiosity I asked her, “Tell me what is the one thing that you really like about India ?”. I was expecting usual replies like “nature of people, your IT talent, Tajmahal” or likes. However I was moved by the reply she gave me.


She paused for a while and said, I really like the fact that when you grow older you take care of your parents.


I had never anticipated somebody coming up with such a reply. I was moved by the fact the world can watch us so closely. These are the few good qualities which we as Indians are known for in the world and I actually felt proud about the same.


At the same time I was a little worried that with the current western trends that we are embracing, are we on the verge of losing these kind of small uniqueness that we held which sets us apart from the rest of the world ?


Comments welcome.

Hi Everyone,

Wishing you all a very Happy Republic Day !

I was just surfing around to see some history about India and some facts. I thought it was indeed something which was nice to share. I think every Indian should be aware of these facts.

• Do we know that the Indian National Flag’s designer is Pingali Venkayya ?
• Do we know that in 1904, Sister Nivedita an Irish disciple of Swami Vivekananda was the first to unfurl the first flag for India which was later called sister Nivedita Flag ?
• Do we know that the music of the current version of “Jana Gana mana” is derived from the composition by “Ram singh thakur” ?
• Do we know that the scientific name of Peacock (Our National Bird) is “Pava Cristatus”
• Enjoy peacock you tube video at Peacock calling
• Tigers are located mostly in eastern and southern Asia

• Do we know that apart from India, Tiger is a national animal for Bangladesh, North Korea, South Korea and Malaysia.
• Do we know that “Banyan” is our National tree ?

I remember when we were in school we use to get some essay writing exercises and one of the topics in there was something like this.

Write an essay on “A day at the Garden”, “An evening in the Garden”.

We had a chance to actually spend an evening at the Empress Garden yesterday and I remember those school days. I thought of scribbling my experiences.

Seriously there is dirth of good Garden in this modern times. Empress Garden located near Race course in Pune hosted a flower exhibition and I can tell you it was truly an experience.

The entrance was well decorated and there were all wild animals (don’t worry they were just the statues) waiting to welcome all the guests. The little ones just freaked out looking at their favorite Elephant, Lion, Zebra and all.

The Garden was completely filled up with all different kinds of flowers and ferns. They were placed at different locations in such a decorative manner that you simply will fall in love.

There were different kinds of competition which were held at the venue. There were artists who showed flower arrangements in Japanese style “Ikebana” . Oh ! it was so cool and looked awesome !

There were quite a few stores which were showing their flowery exhibits and selling seeds and buds.

Different kinds of water fountains added to the beauty of flowers to give it a experience of its kind.

The kids had so much fun at the various outdoor playing instruments that they chilled out.

All in all the day in proximity to nature was indeed quite refreshing experience.

I use to go to the Garden for morning walk. I use to meet and see lots of people there. Today also ,as always, I went for walk in the garden and I saw the same routine there. People were talking on the mobiles, doing physical excersises, resting after a heavy workout and some were just chit-chatting.

But in all of that, I saw someone who was looking very different among all of them and looked gloomed. I went to him and asked, Excuse me ! Can i ask u who are you ? and why are you so sad ?

Her reply plesantly surprise me. She said I am Nature. I asked but why are you so sad ?  

She said God has sent me here to teach you some vauable lessons of life. And the problem is everyone is busy and nobody is looking at me. Do you know why ?  Because I am a free gift from God. And people generally think that anything which is free has no value. But that is not true. Although I am free I am precious.

I asked, how ?

She replied come closer to me and observe each and every thing that I carry and the things i do and then relate them with your life. you will start learning many things about your life.

I said ok, let me try.

I went close to nature and I can tell you I learned many valuable lessons of my life. Do you want to know what were they ?

She says I bestow you with colorful flowers and beautiful birds. Nature thus teaches us to enjoy the colors of life, decorate our lives with pleasures enjoy everything that God has given us for enjoyment in form of music, dance, art, work and much more

She says I change myself in form of seasons. It thus advices us to adopt ourselves to the changes that occur around us. It advices us to make our surrounding more beautiful with our presence.

She says, I stand firmly even in earthquaqes and famines. It teaches us to empower ourselves to fight and to be able to believe in our strenghts instead of foul cry.

She says I believe in being regular. Sun rises and sets at a given time. She therefore teaches us the importance of discipline and timeliness in life.

These are some of my observations with my meeting with Nature. I would love to hear everyone’s observations with dear nature and their learnings. You can easily write comments to this and send me your view points and your observations. Let us make this list exhaustive enough that mother nature gets smile back on her face

Watched Taare Zameen Par yesterday. I could not stop myself writing a review for the film after watching it. Simply fabulous work by Aamir. He again proved that he is an actor, director and more importantly a human being destined to make a difference.

I almost like everything in the movie. The concept to begin with was awesome. The acting, direction, photography, music everything was truly phenomenal.

It also made me happy to think that India is changing and changing for good. More and more people are not heading out for all the good causes. India needs a lot more of this and as fast as possible.

The scene in the movie where aamir asks Ishaan’s dad to read in chinese and again the scene where his dad comes to him to tell him that Ishaan’s mom read everything about the disease on the internet were really touching.

With increasingly competitive world that we live in today, the need of an hour is to realize the importance of creativity and make all attempts to nurture it. It is just creativity and innovation which will help any developing nation like India to make a mark in the world and not the flowing dollars. Of course flowing dollars will help, however we should not forget that in doing so if we just forget the basics, we will soon face talent shortage like many other nations today.

For e.g. look at the science and commerce graduates today. The number of such graduates is decreasing significantly. Also the number of graduates doing work which suites their profile lacks more significantly.

Look at the quality of overall education. It is degrading day by day in lack of good teachers. Schools have started becoming an institution of making money leading to students not getting base knowledge and moral values which are much more important than making money.

We are now in a race of making money and losing moral. Let us all think, act and do something to change this so that the rich India and Indian culture remains intact.

-H

I was in the US for a project. I had a chance to visit a small park at Sunnyvale during my visit there. While I was sitting with my friend’s 2 year old, there were a lot of other kids enjoying the bright sunny morning. 

There was this small girl of around 2 yrs sitting next to us. The girl was there with his grand-pa. She was enjoying playing in the sand. She had a small kit and she was playing with sand and water making things. 

After a while, her mom, came to pick her up. She was in the parking lot The girl was overjoyed. She was preparing something out of sand. Till then I did not know what was she making. However after a while she herself told me (I was just sitting near to her) that she was preparing a cake for her mom. She was so happy to see her mom here now that her cake was ready. She also had a small stick as candle for her to blow. 

Then came her hurried mom. She came running at her child. I was happy to see, that her mom also so anxious to meet her daughter. However soon I realized that the anxiety is for something else. For the mom, the car was parked in a non-parking zone and she was very worried for the car to be toed away.

She came running at the kid, who was so eager to tell her mom that she made her a b’day cake. The mom, listened to her, quickly, got some smile to please the kid. The kid then asked her mom, to blow and candle and eat the cake and what not. However the mom had the car totally controlling her mind and so she quickly spilled off the mud, got the kid clean and ran away.

The story ends here. I am not writing any conclusions. This is left to everyone’s interpretation.

Every day I get out of my home on pune roads, and every day I wish to write this blog. So finally here it comes. I saw a couple of times in the daily news that pune is short of traffic cops and the administration was assuring all attempts to find out ways to cope with these shortage. Finally they came out of this contract schemes where they contract employees from various NGO’s and other places who helps the traffic police manage pune’s ever increasing traffic.

Although this is surely a welcome move, this does not seem to solve the problem though. The volunteers are doing really nice job. But alternatively what is happening is I see now that the traffic cops are now only at the junctions for collecting money (in whatever form) and the actual traffic management is getting done by the contracted employees.

I don’t understand why there should be more than required traffic controllers at the junction. There are a lot of junctions where 1-2 traffic cops just sit on the bike and do negotiations while the other contracted employees do the traffic management.

Read this quote today.

Did you know the difference between the two democracies : USA and India

In USA, you can kiss in public but not pee. In India you can pee in public but not kiss

Extracts from one of the internet literature

CIOs like to grouse about the paltry pickings of job candidates. But experts say instead of grumbling about it, CIOs should go back to school and help beef up the labor pool.

“While CIOs like to complain about the quality of candidates they’ve been getting, they’re not actually involved in shaping the candidates,” said Samuel Bright, an analyst at Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester Research Inc.

Enrollment in computer science programs is waning — down as much as 70% in recent years, according to reports. At the same time, colleges and universities struggle to keep their curricula on par with changes in business.

“CIOs have expressed optimism about the future of the IT career, but they don’t necessarily hire at the entry level,” Bright said. “And those that do complain about the quality of the candidates they’ve been getting.”

Bright said computer science programs often struggle to align with the needs of IT organizations because they focus too much on programming. They also teach students about tools that are obsolete by the time they graduate. Bright said schools need to teach students how to work with multi-platform environments. Often they don’t teach key business skills that IT organizations are seeking, such as project management and negotiation.

In a research survey of 281 IT decision makers, Forrester found that most IT leaders do very little to reach out to local universities. Job fairs were the most common form of engagement between schools and IT organizations, with 57% of large IT organizations (500 or more IT employees) and 36% of small IT organizations participating. Job fairs are an effective recruiting tool, but if quality candidates aren’t graduating from the programs, these fairs do CIOs little good.

The next most common type of engagement between schools and IT organizations was service on a university advisory board, with 28% of large companies and 19% of smaller companies participating. Lecturing in the classroom, sponsoring scholarships, serving on curriculum review committees and donations of technology were all relatively rare.

Real world experience

“One of the CIOs I spoke with actually comes into a local university to lecture,” Bright said. “After he was done lecturing a professor said, ‘We don’t have to do two chapters because of what you just said about the challenges of service-oriented architecture. You covered what I would cover in two chapters with what you provided in real world examples.’