Let Go!

What a powerful word.

Why did i choose this as a title of my blog and what on earth am i going to write. Read on.

As humans we are packed with emotions, this emotion is what ticks the world. Without these emotion's we would be mere machine.

That being said , this emotion is what brings all the peril.

Its quite clear that we crave for things be it happiness, love, care, affection , new gadgets ... the list is endless.

This emotion defies logic , sometimes we know we cannot get it but still we crave for it. Why? we never think why, i know i cannot get it but why am i craving. Why is there no application of Brain, why no commonsense?

A classic example is a failed love. The person in question knows that its a lost case and she will not be back but the heart still craves for her. Its emotional trauma. Completely oblivious to the fact that the world around him is moving on , this emotional trauma crushes him with no end in sight.

I took the above example as its much easier to explain and put it into a context.

Its pointless to keep staring at the phone to see if that 'sms' would come from her. We just sit there and waste time all in the name of emotion.

Emotion to the right level is perfect, a step too far can be detrimental. I mean detrimental in every sense of the word.

Sometimes as often said, we need to step back and say ' let go'. Its easier said than done but it works magic , lightens the heart and gets the senses back to normal from illusion.

Once an individual let's go of that emotional attachment, all the pain starts to disappear slowly. Iam not saying that world will change upside down but its a step forward in the better direction.

Letting go of something hurts , ask any couple they would explain that to you , ask a child how much it felt seeing to loose the most cherished toy, ask a parent how much it meant marrying the daughter away, ask a person how much it means to loose a friend.

The answer in most case is always - ' This is the single biggest pain in my life?'

It hurts but lets come to reality and face it . Let go of the emotions and we should be fine and clear in our head .

Let's be more practical and not be tied down to the clutches of the sheer emotional bonding.

I dare not say that we shouldn't have emotional bonding at all but all i say is that we need to have it in the right quantity.

Some times in life , we need to say ' Let Go' . If you purely cherish it , things would come back to you.

Doesn't this contradict the statement ' Chase your dream'. I think it does slightly but when you let go of things , one gets more energy and clearer thoughts which would enable one to achieve their ultimate goal.

Am sure lot of people would have a wide view on this and most importantly i am unable to put my thoughts convincingly. It is quite apparent that the flow isn't too coherent and i could see holes in my logical break down of this problem but i think i have done reasonably well to put my thoughts across.

Don't get crushed under the weight of emotion, LET GO!

Have i tried it in recent past - YES . Did i succeed - No, would i try again - Yes.

Chaos

That word brings great emotions to lot of people , i want to write about the beauty in Chaos and the opportunity that it brings.

Of course realms has been written about how the recent financial crisis played out and how the chaos presented nice opportunity to players such as JP Morgan and Barclays.

I don't want to write about that but i actually want to write about the beauty of chaos in a ' market'. Some could argue that its no different from financial markets but for me normal markets are the mother of any other markets and i would like to focus on a day to day markets also called Mandi's.

Yesterday evening i went to buy my weekly groceries, i went to a large up-market super market store. Everything was in order, i could see signages and one could not miss the item that need to be bought.

I had a list of things that i had to buy , just went into the market and picked up the things , came off to the counter , paid the bill. All done in less than thirty minutes.

I just thought that was nice and easy, while i was just coming off, i just took a wrong turn and wandered off into a long corridor. When i came off the corridor, it was all chaos all that i could hear was frantic shouts and lots of people walking up and down.

I was taken aback , i could not understand what this was and why are so many people here and what is this noise all about.

Little did i realize that i had stepped into one of the largest weekly markets. I watched in utter dismay the voices that rose and the increased decible levels.

Even in the chaos of a free market , i could spot some savvy dealers forging very good deals, be it in selling old mobiles or selling few kilos of potato's. I could clearly see traders charming the buyers with improvised verses and also saw people who had already done great bargain deals.

It was commotion in short but not a sort that one need to be alarmed to but one where there is raw power of buying and selling.

As i stood there , i was just wandering off in my mind to villages in India where such weekly markets were the norm , i understood how much those markets were making India tick.

Its small in comparison to big supermarkets but i think i have fallen in love with the raw selling power of the merchants and the intelligent buyer spotting opportunity to make that extra savings.

I really did like it and i was watching the whole fun for almost an hour.

It was chaos all the way until Five in the evening , when order returned in the form of closure of markets for the day when all merchants had done the deals and many people were happy that they got what they wanted and even in those chaotic moments, there was beauty and opportunity.

It was true reflection of human spirit. Boy did i love it and left shaking my head with a big smile on my face.

Pure reflection of free market forces in action where supply and demand are the king.

Free market theorists would love this post!!!

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.