Life*

There are moments

when you soar high to touch the sky

and there are moments

when you sink down to the depths of unknown

there are moments

when eyes can't hold your tears

and yet smile represses all the fears

there are moments when partying around

you suddenly feel lost and all alone

and when sometimes sitting quietly

feel the whole cosmos around

and it is so sometimes

that you claim to have failed

and yet so sure that you'll breathe out

when inhaled

this is life

not the rise and ebb

but the pause between the two

when one learns and unlearns at the same moment

when you are nowhere ,you are nobody

and yet so sure of your existence.

this is life!!

Courtesy: http://theeternaltruths.blog.com/

Thoughts from the sands of time*

Swings of Life!
Swings are unavoidable in life. Everyone bounds to swing between heights and lows, balancing the gaps. We are just as aggregate of these swings. Aggregate can never be constant like 0 or 1, as swings are inevitable. Life is like a sine curve, moving between 0 and 1 always, 0 being the animal and 1 being the God.

All that goes up has to come down and all that gone down has to come up! This is theory of equilibrium. When you bury the seed deep inside the earth, it breaks it and comes as a huge tree. When a huge tree can be inside a tiny seed, why cant a bright future lying in current petty issues you face now?

One may argue that some seeds that are buried too deep inside may sprout inside the soil and die inside. Yes, may be, but some seeds come up even breaking rocks! So, Break the Rocks! Because all rocks are there to be broken and all axes are there to break them! Rock and Axe, both are essential for a balanced system, just like north and south poles.

Success, a Myth!
Success is not permanent. It is a small place where few sit for a moment. We cannot have success in all our attempts. Because success is such a momentary thing, which is shared by many, each one enjoying that for a moment!

Acquiring success is like well and water; the more you draw, the more water it gives. Keep drawing till you need water, after all, it is 'YOU', who needs water! If water is over in the well, search out for another well! As finely said, “Great success is a consolidated effort of smaller successes".

Success! This again is a perception. The word ‘Success’ has only relative meaning. Repeated failures can lead one person to success as repeated success does! Even when Edison failed 2000 times he succeeded finally.

When do we say that we succeed? Only when others have failed! So, what shows one as success is only the failures of others. Only darkness can identify light! Darkness is as essential as light! Only darkness can lead you to light, light can never lead you to another light!

Complements!
As said above, light and darkness are complements. Complements always help each other in identifying them; Day identifies night and vise versa; Man identifies women and vise versa. Universe is polar. It can never be uni-polar! Recognition comes by means of acceptance of success by failures!

A Ball Game!
Mind and brain do not fall into the physical age factor. They act differently. Mind is more emotional and philosophical and brain is more practical and materialistic. More they think more they throw back! It is like a Ping-Pong ball, if you throw with force it will return with same force. Throw more and keep throwing more and one day you will have a big throw for you!

Recognize!
Recognize other’s failure; that is beginning of your success! Recognize others success; that is beginning of you knowing your failure! Most of the time, success lies not in how well the thing is delivered, but how a thing is being recognized! When not recognized, that is not the fault of the kartha but fault of the society, which is not capable to recognize that!

When Nicolaus Copernicus found a theory, which was against the gospels, he was not recognized all his lifetime. Only long after his death, the world had recognized and then only the Copernican Theory was a success! So, success depends on how society looks at an action.

We recognize that Nicolaus Copernicus is successful. So it is the recognition that shows. All Maya! Society will be like that, like herd of sheep. It will take the majority voice. When majority says right then it will also say right. So right or wrong is only through lobbying. When you can lobby around then you can swing the things!

*Courtesy: http://in.msn.com

NRI Gujarati Funeral ... Excellent one

Enjoy this without thinking too much. This is only in good humour with no offense to anyone and all respect to elders. The most important is the PS at the end.

A family in Gujarat was puzzled when the coffin of their dead mother (Ba) arrived from the US. It was sent by one of the daughters.

The dead body was very tightly squeezed inside the coffin, with no space left in it when they opened the lid; they found a letter on top addressed to her brothers and sisters:

Dear Chandrakantbhai, Arvindbhai, Smitaben and Varsha,

I am sending Ba's body to you, since it was her wish that she should be cremated in the compound of our ancestral home in GUJARAT.

Sorry, I could not come along as all of my paid leave is consumed.

You will find inside the coffin, under Ba's body, cans of cheese,

10 packets of Tobler chocolates and 8 packets of Badam (peanuts) please divide these among all of you.

On Ba's feet you will find a new pair of Reebok shoes (size 10) for Dinesh. There are also 2 pairs of shoes for Radha's and Lakshmi's sons. Hope the sizes are correct.

Ba is wearing 6 American T-Shirts. The large size is for Mohan.

Just distribute the rest among yourselves.

The 2 new Jeans that Ba is wearing are for the boys.

The Swiss watch that Reema wanted is on Ba's left wrist.

Shanta masi, Ba is wearing the necklace, earrings and ring that you asked for. Please take them off her.

The 6 white cotton socks that Ba is wearing must be divided among my nephews.

Please distribute all these fairly.


Love Smita.

PS : If anything more required let me know soon as Bapuji is also not feeling too well now a days.

Yahoo Heaped With Negative Vibes*

Between Google and a seemingly endless slew of challengers like Facebook and MySpace, Yahoo could be grilled like a panini in the battle for display advertising dollars.

Even as Google kicked seven kinds of snot out of Yahoo and everyone else in the search advertising market, Yahoo always had its display ad business as a bulwark against disaster.

That may have accounted for Yahoo president Sue Decker's breezy comment to Bloomberg in January 2006 about how Yahoo is not going to be number one in search. So long as the display dollars kept flowing into Sunnyvale in the billions, why worry?

Bloomberg came back with a reason why, 18 months later. In a recent report, Bloomberg cited some trends that have Wall Street pros muttering darkly about Yahoo:

Yahoo said June 18 that second-quarter sales will be at the middle to low end of its forecast because of slowing display growth.

Year-to-year sales growth in the category decelerated from 38 percent in the first quarter of 2006 to 20 percent in this year's first quarter and less than 10 percent in the second quarter, estimates Jefferies & Co. analyst Youssef Squali, who is based in New York and rates the shares "buy.''

"We're seeing some shifts," Yahoo spokeswoman Joanna Stevens said. "Advertisers have started to experiment with different forms of display advertising.''

Names like Facebook and MySpace have received some of the credit for picking where Yahoo has been fading. The next question: how long will co-founder and new CEO Jerry Yang want to stick it out as top executive, especially if Wall Street continues to exude a lack of confidence in the company's once-touted display ad business?

*David A. Utter, WebProNews

Buffalo!

Is "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo" grammatically a correct sentence?? It is!!!

Oh man! I just can believe this. Read the explanation and parse tree here on Wikipedia. And till now, I was under the impression that only Gujarati is a "funny" language. NO! English is no lesser!! :D:D

Stepping out of the Pyramid*

The Egyptians built the pyramids 4500 years ago, but we're still living in them. Revisit most strategic work conversations you've had, and you'll find them sprinkled with a generous dose of hierarchical thinking. Personified by the language artifacts of: tops and bottoms, the drones and the 'high-flyers', its basically an assembly line, control...

Its common assumptions:

- Fundamentally, all organization structures, boil down to the pyramid. In flatter organizations, its shorter, and in larger organizations, the pyramid is taller. So basically, there is no alternative.

- Competence, vision and enthusiasm-- or the what 'it' takes-- are in short supply. These qualities are inherent in people, and they cannot be developed. Moreover, where you are in the organizational ladder is a reflection of how much of 'it' you have got. Which brings us to the next assumption...

- The hierarchical organizational machinery is a brutal sifting force. It naturally culls out the weak from the strong, the competent from the incompetent, and those who have 'it' from those who don't.

According to this view, women don't have the quintessential 'it', whatever that is. How can they-- when there are only 6% of them in the top rungs of the organizational ladder? They obviously don't have what it takes to get to the top.

According to this view, developmental opportunities should be reserved for a select few-- the 'oh, so special high-performers, or in India, the management trainees'. Never mind, that derailment/learning research has found that labeling people as high performers might well be the first step in setting them up for eventual failure. And even you and I can intuitively attest to the fact that leadership elicits more leadership, and performance breeds more performance. So contrary to this view, when it comes to development and learning efforts, the more the merrier is definitely true!

The irony: no one in the pyramid is either happy or in control. The tops perpetually feel out of control, with an incessant fear that they won't be able to steer the humongous organizational machinery in the direction they are expected to. The middles feel clueless and caught; they are expected to know things they don't have access to; and are responsible for things beyond their prerogative. The bottoms almost always feel victimized; they know more, but can affect less; and feel they could attain a lot more if someone just consulted them.

So basically, pretty much everyone in the pyramid feels out of control. Whoa! This wasn't a surprise, was it? Because everyone is out of control. The world has gotten too complicated for any one person or group to have all the right answers, to make all the right choices. And yet, we want to cling to hierarchies and vertical orders. Even when they obviously lack the one thing it takes to get things done in today's environment: horizontal systemic thinking.

The problem is, between this pyramid and the networks of tomorrow, lies a very scary land.

But if you think about it, and no one says it better than Tom Peters, If you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance even less.

Negotiating this chasm takes a lot of things. It takes courage. It takes inspiration and access to the right technology. But most of all, it takes imagination.

Our biggest problem is not that change is not possible or that flat systems aren't productive. Our challenge is that most of us simply can't imagine a hierarchy-less world. I love the notion-- and even for me, it seems like a stretch.

But then a world in which a large scale corporation, a mid-sized out fit and a solopreneur are all vying for the same services, products and customers -- also seems like a stretch. But its not.

And if you want to be part of this new exciting and yes, scary world-- you've gotta step out of the pyramid.

* Courtesy: http://asthaparmar.spaces.live.com/

The Eight biggest Lies they tell you*

8. Commerce: One universal truth that I have taken time to learn in this world and you will probably perceive throughout this post is that it is always about money and when someone says it's not about the money, you can be sure that it IS about the money. The people who use this lie the most are advertising professionals, lawyers, and politicians. Let me not go into the list of people who use it in personal life for emotional blackmailing purposes.

7. Wars: Everyone knows about what Bush said during the Iraq war but you would be freaking naive to think that it was only Bush who did all the lying. War-time is propaganda time as it is a great time to get your troops and your country geared towards hating the enemy while the underlying reasons of the war would probably be commerce all along. And if you think we Indians are innocent, think about how much hatred the average Indian feels towards the average Pakistani (or vice versa) without actually having met them - if that is not filtering of the news, then what is?

6. Human beings are special: Time to face the truth. We ain't that special, man. We are made from the same dust that make up microbes and we have lesser genetic instructions passed within us from generation to generation than the most mundane of plants. You heard we had a big brain but Neanderthal man had a bigger brain (and he's extinct) than us and we use <10%>= 96% similar to the chimp in genome). We are just lucky that one of our freaking ancestors got curious enough to invent a language that led to a phase change in our evolution - society wise and passing on knowledge wise and we reached the stage we are at because of that (IMHO). Nothing special about you or me except we are riding on the evolutionary bandwagon that started with those microbes we don't even see.

5. Democracy: Every man has an equal right, my foot. If the commerce and the war part didn't get you to see reality, then nothing will. No matter the number of people there will be in a country, very few people from the upper echelons of the society will get to have a say in the direction that the country takes or it's policies. You and me are too busy with our own lives and our own problems to make a striking difference to those policies.

4. Romance: The perfect man always seems to come forward in the M & B novels or the other romantic trash that fills our TV sets and radio shows and fictional books and greeting cards and songs and.... Truth is that life ain't that easy. You got to go and find your own honey dude and you got to fight for her. No knight in shining armour or pretty woman out there whom you will want to make yours as soon as you set eyes on her - such is life.

3. The world map: Yes, that thing that we are taught as kids - it is very west centric dude. It would have made sense back in the 1800s when the world was not fully discovered but it is maintained that way because some people just couldn't handle the truth and now there are many generations of people who have been brainwashed into believing that the west is much bigger than it really is. Just check out this presentation to know what I am talking about. And check out the size of Asia and Africa as compared to that of Europe (and especially Greenland) in that map.

2. Hitler is the most evil human being ever: Let's see what are Hitler's faults - "He wanted to rule the world" - hey, so did Napoleon the great, Julius Caesar, Stalin, Mao, and hordes of other great(?) people. "But he killed so many Jews and handicapped people in concentration camps." Yes he did undertake some drastic measures but was his policy unique? Answer is not so. His policy was based on the current scientific knowledge of the day (mostly American scientists) who said that ethnic cleansing was important to have a new race of people that will take the world to the next level. They believed in not letting handicapped and retarded people reproduce - Hitler believed that they would be a burden to the world and added the physically weak Jews to the list. This is not in support of Hitler - just saying that he was not that evil - he just had reasons that made his conscience believe he was doing the right thing. And there is this whole concept of the Nobel Sperm Bank that came in later and also the all new Darwin Dating (not in the same league as genocide at all but the concept remains the same). In other words, people keep trying still - what a bad way to muck up poor Darwin though.

What I am trying to say is that the victors write history. What we hear is how cruel Hitler was but we do not know the kind of experimentation that the victors performed with their army. What about the Nagasaki and Hiroshima bombings? Especially, since Japan was not even close to making an atomic bomb. Some people say it saved more lives than it took away but that is a matter of speculation and I won't believe that until it can be proven. Secondly, 40,000 civilians died and all the casualties were Japanese (which was why this bombing took place). Anyways, I am not saying that just because science said it, Hitler should be allowed to commit genocide. I am saying the opposite. I am saying that scientists should be careful about what they say and that if this theory was not around, maybe Hitler would not have commited genocide. Anyways, Hitler did do other stuff from genocide that makes him obviously insensitive and evil like experimenting on the people he didn't care about (read non-Aryans).

1. God exists: The lesser said about this, the better. But I think the person who came up with the God concept must have been a real... er... God!! I see 2 reasons why the God concept has caught on so much:
a) We were so ignorant: When the God concept came into the market, science was no where as compared to now - Earth, Water, Fire, and Wind are the four elements that make up the world - give me a break. The God concept gave a real meaning to everything that is around you - they are there for a reason because God made them and you don't have to worry about how it came to be. It gave a false sense of satisfaction to people who were probably afraid of ignorance before that.
b) Control: It is a great way to ensure that societal norms prevail. If one does good, the after life is way better - either through rebirth or by living in heaven. But before I get myself in over my head, let me just say if you believe in God, peace to you. Just don't force yourself on me :)

*Courtesy: http://bornalibran.blogspot.com/

Being a believer in God, I do not agree to all points mentioned above. However, I found the post interesting and hence published it here. Keep up the good writing mate!