Man and Emotions

Hey folks,

It’s been quite a long time since I posted on this blog. Not that I’ve been busy, just didn’t have the inclination to sit down and post. A lot of draft posts lined up but nothing completed. To those of you looking for a cheerful light-hearted post, don’t bother reading further. This isn’t it. On the other hand, if you’d care to know what’s been going on in my life in the last 3 weeks, please read further.

The last 3 months in life have been totally amazing. Not only on the work front but also w.r.t personal life. People who’re close to me would know that I’m a born Leo. Arun would vouch for how short-tempered I used to be whilst in college. Probably, Sathya might vouch for it too.

The day myself and Srinath started Sit, to discuss our personal value and belief systems on a quasi-public platform, we (knowingly or unknowingly) ushered into our lives a movement towards increased tolerance and openness. To many, this might sound like a statement worth ridicule. But to the few who have known either (or both) of us well pre and post Sit, the difference would be quite visible.

To this day, there are people in my circle who laud this openness and there are people who criticise it to the core. The truth is that neither of them is wrong. I chose to go ahead with the openness because somewhere inside me, it felt good to continually keep changing for the better. Irrespective of who or what brought about the change.

About three months ago, I told Srinath I would make the first ever attempt in life to remain a lot more patient. To tolerate a lot more destructive and constructive criticism. To remain calm and react to them with a balanced state of mind. A lot of people were responsible for this little attempt. Namely, Dr Annamalai from Gandhi Study Centre, Milind Jadhav, Srinath himself and finally, my greatest inspiration in life, M K Gandhi.

Randomness has been my best friend and worst enemy, both at the same time. It waited for 22 long years to let the above mentioned piece of wisdom dawn upon me. But, fortunately, it gave me enough chances to test my patience and my conviction towards the word I gave to Srinath.

As my Facebook and Twitter trail would indicate, work-life has had a lot of positive progress. So much so, that a few people who had written me off have bothered to contact me and let me know I’m doing a good job. Nice. But there have also been some really pressurising times when I used to work hours together for no apparent progress to take place.

Those pressurising times made my process of transition towards a calm, balanced self a bit more elusive. Every human being has an emotional high point and every human being makes mistakes. But, fortunately or unfortunately, they had to take place at the same time in my life. This led to a lot of unnecessary complications and a lot of emotional pressure.

I have always kinda had a fear of offending people. As a result, (in recent times) an apology from my side would never be a moment too late, if the mistake is/was on my part. Sometimes, the apologies would get a little too much. People are different. So, there is also a chance that someone would get offended by an excessive apology!

It is a little sad that I’ve been completely ignorant of that fact in life till now! A little incident involving such a person created quite a bit of emotional pressure over 3 weeks of time. Srinath, Teal, Pavithra, Arun and LVS would remember this incident. They usually know everything there is to anything in my life. I didn’t bother telling Vinay, Vinay and SrinathC for (their respective obvious) reasons best left untold here. At best, they would’ve noticed that I wasn’t normal.

I have to kneel down and acknowledge the support that all of them provided to me during this rough patch in life. But for them, I would’ve lost my cool completely, long ago. A special thanks to Saranyan for telling me a few subtle points about my own personality. Some things I had failed to notice even after some introspection.

It was VERY difficult, trust me. But, I’ve kinda made it through the rough patch with as much patience and balance I could muster on my mind. Naturally, due to work life and its pressures, I would’ve had emotional high points and would’ve lost my cool. I felt like a naxal who wanted to return to society and lead a normal life. Society would never accept him initially. But, over a period of time, even Society would change seeing the conviction of the guy towards leading a normal life and towards patiently awaiting forgiving. Though these emotional high points led to a lot of complications, all it took was one single long conversation to set things straight.

The first time I waited patiently for a person in life, it has turned out to be a nice outcome. The first time I tried to consciously maintain the balance of tolerance and self-respect-breach. The first time I stepped forward to admit all my mistakes upfront. The first time I continued to show respect for someone who was totally pissed off with me and kinda ignoring me. This moment in time, as I’m typing this post, I feel a sense of victory I have never ever felt before in life.

Not even when I’ve done my best feats and not even when I’ve won prizes. This seems beyond all that. The sense that I have won trying to do something I never believed I could do, only 3 months ago. It is truly an amazing experience.

Time might fly and people might come and go in my life. This incident will stay as the one that lead my transformation towards greater tolerance, greater patience and a stable balance of emotions.

I just felt like putting this up as a regular blog post. No specific reasons. More of gut feeling.

Will post in the coming weeks about a lot of positive and VERY happy things.

Yours Skeptically,

P.S. I have tried my best to put down the outline of incidents. The granular details need not be dealt with here. There is an alternate space for that.

The Chronicles of Insomnia

Hey folks,

This is my first blog post from college. I’m kinda having fun here. Not started studying, as may be evident from the long gtalk sessions!

It’s been a nice month, this one. I’ve realised that I was more observant than I had ever imagined. I had managed to notice a lot of things that others seemingly missed. Things that relate to most people’s lives for that matter.

Other than that, there has been a lot of progress on the work front. A social media internship for a company called Electrosocial has been the most happening thing for the last 2-3 weeks. I’m kinda liking it a lot. The content is delivered twice a week and packs a lot of insight with relevant links for further reading. I was even asked to post once on their blog and contrary to my guest-post record, the post has come out very well!

You can find it here. About a month of the internship is left and I think it’s only going to be more interesting!

I also got my hands dirty with a small-time market research project for the college involving life insurance. Learnt a lot of things about professionalism and how it doesn’t come with age and 2 years IT work experience for certain people. A lot of networking with some CXOs from the insurance industry as well. Not that I knew enough about insurance to engage them in conversations!

Other than that, I’ve kinda dusted my old stuff a bit and have started working on a small idea I had in the past. I’ve luckily found people to work on it with, this time. So, you can expect a post on that in the future on this blog. It would involve research, more research and even more research. But not the typical geek nerd research! This is more of logical analysis relating to life.

Me and 2 other people here have kinda developed a business idea and would be working on polishing it soon. Hope that works out as well. It’s a nice thing and fits the current market well. There is a funny thingie here! We had actually spent serious time researching for some business ideas and we thought of this one while randomly chit-chatting in class!

I’m going to be involved in organising an event in Chennai in November. Though this is still in the preliminary stages, I’m sure it would pick up momentum in the coming weeks and would be an amazingly fun experience for me.

A couple of conferences, some contests, (hopefully) one research paper, a video for Sit and some work for Mozilla are other stuff in the pipeline.

This post also serves as a reminder for me. I tend to get a little too forgetful and irresponsible if I don’t have my commitments listed in a single place!

As for the post title, I’m kinda experiencing early signs of insomnia. It’s a state I’ve forced onto myself, in a way. I’m hoping to take a week off sometime in end August. Let’s see if that works out!

Yours Skeptically,

P.S. Most of the content on this post was completed in college but the computer guy got mad and drove me off the lab. Apparently, I hear he hates working. Understandable. India still has a lot of scope for change!

When loved ones part with

Hey folks,

Yes, this is one thing that all of us wish doesn’t happen to us. The loss of a loved one. But given the abundance of randomness in life and the fact that it’s beyond human comprehension and control, one needs to cope with everything and life must just go on.

It is interesting to see a workshop being done on this. Most of us take this ‘coping with’ thing on an ad-hoc basis and don’t really realise the need to be prepared to bounce back into life after such a calamity. I am sure that attending such a workshop would be of immense use, not only when the calamity happens in your own life but when it happens in the life of someone you value a lot. This is more of a chain reaction but it is worth the process. Most of the initiatives I support are slow organic chain-reaction-based initiatives. I wish to see this one in such a way too.

Anyway, I’ve attached a DOC file about the workshop, here. Kindly look into it and see if you can attend the workshop. It’s about a month away, on July 17th and 18th. So, don’t say you weren’t informed well in advance!

Yours Skeptically,

P.S. The mini-workshops organised by Career Cats have been postponed. Will post again when they’re scheduled.

Sit, Chennai!

Hey folks,

‘Sit‘, the little informal knowledge forum that I helped start, has almost completed 14 months of existence. As an initiative towards taking the next step, we would be organizing a two-session discussion-based event on the 31st of May, the upcoming Sunday. The information document is available in the page linked above. It is an invitational event and therefore is not open to the general public, as such. Let me not sound very discouraging. If you’d like an invitation, try emailing us. We’d love to consider a few people on a case-to-case basis.

Many thanks to Baidik, Paddy, Dr Annamalai, Vinay Raghu, Ashraf, Milind and Raja M for helping us out in their own ways towards making this event happen. Folks, your commitment towards Sit and towards this unconference has only motivated us to put in more efforts!

Apart from this unconference, there is something bigger brewing in the back. It’s a mind-blowing idea that we’ve come up with and I’m hoping to write on it here very soon. If all things go well, Chennai is going to see a different kind of societal service very very soon.

Yours Skeptically,

P.S. I’ll post pictures and videos of the event, same time next week!

P.P.S. I’ve started linking to peoples’ LinkedIn profiles a lot more than to their blogs/websites. LinkedIn addiction at an all-time high now-a-days! Aaaaargh!

Stand & Deliver

Hey folks,

I’m going to write about a slightly unpleasant thing today. In the last few months, I’ve kind-of metamorphosed well from a ‘blogger’ to a ‘freelance content writer’. Apart from that, I’ve taken the liberty to help out some social and business initiatives by giving thought, logistic and contact support. Let’s keep that fact aside now.

From what a lot of people would know of me, I always love it if people tell me their intentions upfront. Due to a recent spree of events, I’ve been baffled by the inability of people to use the word ‘no’ when they need to use it!

I have been involved in organizing a small city-level invitational discussion-based event, for ‘Sit’, for the past 2 months. It has been a slowly progressing thing and has given me enough learning opportunities.

During the course of the 2 months leading upto this very day, I have had atleast 3 dozen people pledging their full support towards this event, atleast 2 dozen people vowing to dedicate their life and soul towards the success of this event and about  a dozen people ‘trying to help out actively’.

The final tally? Just 5-6 people working for the event.

I have learnt not to take any word or commitment from people unless they have a strong previous delivery record. I have learnt that there are enough individuals around us who commit and make no effort to deliver. I have learnt that there are people who have no guts to say they can’t deliver something when they can’t. I have learnt that I should not step into or undertake  any initiative unless I am confident that I can do the entire thing myself. And that any helping hand is only a value addition and isn’t really required.

This can be a cliched assumption but at the moment there is no better bet for me. Let’s see what learning tomorrow has in store for me!

Yours Skeptpically,

P.S. I’m sure those who are meant to understand the idea behind this post will certainly do so. So, there’s really no need to drop names and/or incidents.

P.P.S. Srinath, yes! I understand! I won’t say that “good friends” cliche stuff again! Point taken! Learning gained!