I asked Him

I asked for strength and God gave me difficulties to face,
I asked for wisdom and God gave me problems to solve,
I asked for prosperity and God gave me brawn and brain to work with,
I asked for trust and God gave me conscienceless backstabbers to deal with,

I asked for courage and God gave me danger to overcome,
I asked for love and God gave me troubled people to help,
I asked for favours and God gave me opportunities to explore,
I asked for faith in myself and God gave me the lowest phases of my life to overcome,

I asked for humility and God gave me showers of praise to accept with a level head,
I asked for best friends and God gave me just myself to talk to,
I asked for security and God gave me the biggest insecurities to harden to,
I asked for compassion and God gave me inhuman jerks to forgive,

I asked for knowledge and God gave me profound souls to learn from,
I asked for liberation and God gave me a wonderful life to live n make a difference!

I received nothing I wanted, but got everything I needed,
My prayers have been answered.

Shutter-flutter

Having bought a new Canon A400 digicam, I've been learning a wee bit of photography.I hardly know the intricacies in the field...It's a highly fascinating hobby nevertheless. Mine isn't a high end cam either and it's extremely touch-sensitive, giving me hazy pics all the time :( I made a modest attempt at putting up even these dirty, shaken snaps on a new photoblog that I've started, spent hours together trying to tweak the template on blogger and ended up in this mess: My photoblog. Bah! I want a better cam,a better template,a drag-n-drop tool to build templates on blogger and better photography skills.Sigh!If only wishes had wings...

Outsourcing plagues a new field - Education!

Keen students with an insatiable thirst for knowledge, stepping out of the cosy comforts of their homes and pursuing academic as well as non-academic learning under the aegis of a dedicated guru is a thing of the past.Today, education is all about a lot of fierce competition, a lot of cramming, a lot of time crunch and yes!a lot of vitamin M. Teachers' time is sold for a price, study material - books,CDs,casettes etc are sold for a price.On a scandalous note,so are technical degree projects, marks cards, degree certificates,and even jobs!Commoditization of education has reached dizzying new heights.Nothing in the field of education seems to be beyond the reach of the long hands of the moolah power.

At the risk of sounding outdated, it would be worthwhile to quote this article published in Times of India about a month back.Curbing the practice of outsourcing home-works and projects may affect the lives of a zillion Preeti Shah's in India,who earn their living through outsourced home-works. However, the hazardous effects of leaving this practice unchecked are spine chilling:
First, the rich kids will hog an unfair advantage since they can 'buy' more and more quality education aids like Preeti Shah and use this to unfairly beat the genuinely brighter but unfortunately poorer kids in class, who might not be able to afford an impostor for their projects.
Second,India shall soon be churning out millions of hollow-headed so-called 'graduates','degree holders' or whatever it is that the system might fancy calling them.


Cramming in schools and homes coupled with the insane pressure on a a kid to keep pace with the furious rate at which information overflow is occuring all around us,is the biggest culprit that promotes such commoditization of education.Unless parents as well as teachers are sensitized adequately to the trade-offs involved in heavily pressurizing students to excel, this heinous practice of outsourcing shall continue to walk the streets of education with its ugly head held high; the 30-year old impostor's mind shall continue to compete against and triumph over that of a 12-year old, depriving some other deserving 12-year old of his due credit. This, in the long run,could kill the deserving kid's self-morale that eggs him onto learning and achieving more in life.If you were to be in the kid's place, would you like to look forward to a zombie-like future like that? If you answered "No", do your bit to weed out the Preeti Shah's before the menace spreads enough to make your child a zombie.

Thought for the day: The day is not far off when MasterCard's punchline "There are some things that money can't buy; for everything else there's MasterCard" will read "There's nothing that money can't buy.For everything, there's MasterCard"!

Re-opened :)

What happens when you get a nauseating overdose of the big bad world all at once...when the dose is packed into a mighty powerful explosive n hurled at you, all in one powerful blow?

That's when
Even a sage experiences the fiercest rage,
Even the staunchest theist becomes an atheist,
Even the best elastic snaps...

I shudder to think of the loads of irreversibly damaging things that one sad crazy moment could make you do.It could:

* Get even a teetotaller drunk to chase away those blues.
* Get you to stab your dearest one to death with the deadliest acerbic words.
* Get a weakling to take his/her life.
* Drive you insane enough to take someone else's life.

Iam glad,it made me do none of these.All that it made me do was close my blog :)

Nausea passed.Blog re-opened :) Waiting for the next such blow.I shall smash it into smithereens before it realizes what hit it!

Thought for the day:A hunter tried to hunt down and butcher a dog.It wasn't the size of the dog in the fight but the size of the fight in the dog that saw it through the bloody fight.

~~Me

Bbye

This blog has been shut down, hopefully temporarily.

Crisp and thought-provoking statement, ma'am

My negotiation skills prof ended her last session with the words "I leave you with these words: In life, you do not get what you deserve.You ONLY get what you negotiate for" and the class burst into a thunderous applause.Iam still in awe of the profoundness of this blatant truth!Hope I very soon swim out of the maelstrom of ideas that this statement has sucked me into, for I've got a costing exam in 15 mins!Sigh...

Quote for the day:None.Ma'am's quote rocked!

4 days of living a dream I've wanted to live

A welcome break, a sweet victory, a sense of awe - that pretty much sums up the 4 days of the pilgrimage that Iam about to describe.12 of us set out from Mumbai to take part in one of the biggest festival melas that draws a huge crowd year after year, from all parts of India and aboroad.I spent the night of 24th Nov,2005 on a wonderfully entertaining train journey which witnessed even me,the Goddess of deep slumber, sleep for just two hours in all.After alighting at the station, we were very warmly received by our hosts,Sappy and Sunny who had come all the way from the temple to the railway station at 5am just to welcome us!A smooth ride on this chill morning through some of the best Indian roads I've seen, took us to our destination.One look at the marvel and we immediately understood why it was called an architectural wonder!What lay before us were huge lawns, carpetting an extremely vast expanse of land on which several well-spaced brick-finish blocks were carefully stacked like Lego building blocks.Following Sunny through what seemed to me like an interesting cave-like structure, we arrived at another huge lawn, which made me wonder whether this was laid out with an intention of turning it into a cricket or a football stadium some day!Some of us in the pack of 12, were so awe-struck at the sight of such beautiful architecture and landscaping that we clicked as many as 600 snaps in all, of this marvellous wonder! After completing our check-in formalities, we were ushered into our lodging rooms.Although seven of us were herded into a room meant for one, not once did we feel the discomfort during our entire stay there because we never really got to spend more than 2-3 hours a day, sleeping in the small crammed room.


The mela then began in full swing, with a zillion interesting events packed into every hour of the day.Every single hour of sleep we skipped was worth it.Even though we spent no more than 2 hours sleeping on each of those 3-4 nights, every moment was truly worth it. While some of these events tickled one's grey cells a lot, some others were studded with the most distinguished speakers dishing out immensely insightful and inspirational talks to the swarming crowd that had thronged the place.My team won the third prize in one such event and I very narrowly missed a victory in another :( An Australian team breezed their way to the first place, while the host team stood second.The mela hogged a lot of media attention as well and I, along with two of my friends were on air on NDTV for a while :) The mela also included a traditional Dandiya night.It was a pretty sight to watch even the foreigners donning traidtional Indian ghagra cholis, learning Dandiya steps from the home crowd and dancing away to glory.We were so smitten by the place, the crowd, the food - just about every thing, that we bunked some of the talks scheduled on our last day there and went around the huge premises clicking snaps instead!The inmates of this place, that deserves all the reverence it invokes in me for a lot of reasons, were a rare combination of smart+witty+down-to-earth: the kind of company I've been craving for ever since I left home.

Now let me stop beating around the bush and try being a little less cryptic.The TEMPLE in question is IIMA, the PILGRIMAGE is our recent trip to IIMA, the MELA is IIMA's fest 'Confluence',the distinguished speakers included Mr.Chandrababu Naidu,Mr.Mukesh Ambani,Mr.Vijay Mallya,Mr.Santosh Desai with his interesting ad-workshop and many more.

The first thing I had noticed at the station where Sappy was there to welcome us, was this line written on their batch T-shirt "IIMA - Don't you wish you were here?".Ahem ahem...If only dreams and wishes were horses that were gifted with wings Sappy, I'd've been your classmate now!Iam happy that I got to live a long-time dream, atleast for 4 fleeting days.Thanks so much for everthing.It's now time to return from dreamland back to a world where reality bites and I pray that March 2007 comes by asap.Amen!