When Responsibility Strikes.

A change in my attitude towards many things sparked off this blog.

Where do i start? I'll go slowly and one by one.

Never ever in how many ever years have i eaten food which was cooked in the morning at night, my mom never asked me because she knew i didn't like it . Even at the darkest hours , this was one thing that was never compromised.

Never before i had thought how much provisions someone need to buy for running a house

Never before i had thought how much of a task it is to balance the budget, although both Vijay Lavate and Suresh have given me enough thoughts about it and Suresh even went to the extent of teaching me how one can compute the current worth of oneself off the back of the hands but i never took that seriously.

Never before had i thought can i buy this stuff next month rather than this month?

I have covered most of the above scenarios in my previous blogs but in this one i want to delve into the food part of the above sequel.

Has it suddenly occurred to me that food is valuable and there are a zillion more people out there in the cold who don't have even a bowl of porridge? Or has it occurred to me that wars can erupt when food isn't available?

These are all known things and not new to me, so what has changed in the last couple of months that has radically altered my habit of storing food items in the fridge and re-heat them to be served later. This was unthinkable a couple of months ago, i wonder what has changed?

While i sit back and think , something suddenly strikes my face and tells me the cold truth. " You are now taking care of yourself".

I counter argue and say i have always been taking care of myself, isn't it? The voice says "Well, you are now taking care of yourself". This relentless press about me taking care of myself gets me nervous and got to a point where i said to myself maybe that voice is true.

I sat back with a hot cup of coffee to think about it , my mind raced to think ' what is it about that statement that is so striking , am not getting the point but it strikes me as true'. There was that commotion in my mind which only experience can explain and not words.

Sitting there and going through the statement and i began to think through it in detail.

Ah! the answer comes in a flash not as a movie or whatever , but in a single word ' Responsibility'.

Yes, that's the answer to the above conundrum that i was looking for. All along my mother used to be responsible for everything and she managed everything for me and i never bothered about how much of an effort it was to cook.

Now that i cook all for myself , the attitude of throwing away the last portions of the food has changed , it could be a salad made in the morning to a good sambar made for lunch . The responsibility of me cooking for myself has radically altered my view of eating food for dinner that was cooked for the mornings breakfast.

Lesson learnt is that when responsibility strikes, attitude towards things changes accordingly , this confirms to the old tamil saying , which i would like to put it in a dialogue sequel.

Father :- Sir , my son isn't responsible and doesn't take care of himself or us, he is just loitering around

Relative/friend:- Don't worry , get him married , when he has responsibility , it will all be OK.

Whether the bride changes anything to this poor man's life or not is debatable, but in countless instances, the sheer attitude towards life changes after marriage , why ? It's just because of added responsibility.

You could argue that my experience tell's that i didn't have common sense before and now i have but that's not the point that i wished to illustrate through this example , all i wanted to say was that when responsibility comes , attitude changes.

Learning to Eat With a Chop Stick

Self explanatory title.

Yes, i learnt to eat using a chop stick. Although the thought of eating food in a chop stick intimidates people but it actually isn't that difficult as what you think it is. That's what i found out .

What makes it interesting effort is what you eat with it, do you eat rice, noodles with it or go with food which are bigger in size?

For a novice , if you try eating rice or noodles with chop stick , well forget it, you are going to have an absolute nightmare.

So coming to story at hand or event that happened today.

I went to a Japanese food chain along with a colleague of mine for dinner. This was the second time iam going to a Japanese restaurant. The first time i went i just ate with spoons but this time i wanted to try eating with chopsticks.

We had ordered dumplings to start with, the dish came in , looked awesome but tricky part was , i was given a chop stick to eat. My colleague thought me how to use it , on the first try it didn't work the way it had to and on the next try, yeps all up and running. I finished all the dumplings six of them in my portion without spilling anything. That was quite an achievement for a first timer. I was proud of myself.

Then the main course of rice with potatoes came in , it was appealing but instead of being a hero and try to eat it with chopsticks, i was conservative and asked for a spoon and a fork. Job done.

Although i learnt to eat using a chop stick but i would like to try and eat either noodles or rice using it. Well , next time i will try that.

It was an interesting experience.

Internet My Saviour

What , Internet saved you ..... from????

Ok ok, it saved me from starving. This is what happened.

Joe came back from office all tired , looking to cook a nice meal and eat. The choice was zeroed down to rice and sabzi.

Ok i get cracking with cutting the vegetables a mix of tomato,capsicum and onions . All done and dusted in fifteen minutes , poured the oil in the pan which was on a light sim heat. Once heated , added few mustard seeds , typical southie cooking.

Once done , added onions and stirred it until crimson brown , then went in capsicum and then tomato and all masala. So subzi ready in less than 25 minutes. Hot hot and neat, ready to eat.

Only to realize that i forgot to cook the rice , in a hurry i made sure i washed the rice and got it ready to go into my new Panasonic Microwave , brand new .

Right , rice is in its microwave cookable vessel , in it goes into the microwave , alas how do i operate the new microwave?

I have never used this model before , all funcky new stuff . I search for the manual and to my horror , i dont find it .

I search every where , it just skips my eyes. One hour of frantic search , toying around the buttons just provide a futile attempt, only irritation and anger was left.

I almost gave up , i was angry and upset. Just as i turned around to give-up my Mac magic shone bright oh a split second idea, get to the internet and search for online manual.

Open the laptop, connect the internet and open google, type the search ' Panasonic Microwave Manuals'. Off its goes , returns with what i need. I still need to find the right manual for my model, which was another five minute search and once i had all the details , it was just matter of minutes to find the manual.

All done , cooking underway . After about two and half hours hot food was ready , had to re-heat my Sabzi .

Superb Dinner for a starving stomach , just that it was too late in the night but nevertheless worth all the effort and went to sleep saying that was good and all extra calories that i built up , i can loose in a visit to gym :)

Internet my saviour , technology at its very best.

A VS A

What a wierd title , that's what you are thinking.

The first A in the title stands for Aptitude and the second A stands for attitude.

I just wanted to pen down something on these two A's and try and deduce which one is required more to succeed in life , this topic came to mind as i watched a young eighteen year old present his business case in the TV show ' Dragons Den'.

All of us every man or woman would love to have awesome aptitude or are attracted to people with awesome aptitude. Its quite true that aptitude matters quite a lot and in most important places.

Wait a minute does that mean aptitude makes you the person you are and take you places ? Think again.

This eighteen year boy who i mentioned earlier had a good idea about a small piece of gadget which simplifies Pizza making process but was unable to articulate the business proposition . He lost the pitch and got some good advice from the panel.

What hit me like a rock was the way in which he took the whole event , he walked away cooly as if nothing had happened. I was impressed by his positive attitude.

History has quite a lot of examples of where attitude scored over aptitude. Am absolutely convinced that having very average aptitude and a great positive attitude is a killer combination than a great aptitude and a shoddy attitude. I guess you all will agree.

Positive attitude matters the most , one cannot achieve things only with a great aptitude.

Priority Vs Urge to Buy

You all know am a big fan of Apple products.

Apart from being a big apple fan , in general i found out something quite interesting in the way our human brian behaves.

There is always this urge to buy or do things and not always the urge succeeds, as you will see from my example.

The current urge for me is to buy an Iphone 4. In normal circumstances being what iam , i would have bought it by now and not waited , more out of impulse. However, when the human brian looks at urge vs priority, it looks like the priority part of the brian looms large than the urge part.

Example being, my priority to set-up my house vs buying an iphone. Setting up my house is far more important and the iphone can wait for obvious reasons. I think this act of the brian where priority wins over urge is what we call common sense.

Looks like it. So far i have kept my urge to the very minimum and i've outwitted my urge because of my pressing priority of setting up my house.

So far so good, don't really know how long this is going to last. Lets see.