Sunday, December 6, 2009

The sermon on the Mars

The sermon on the Mars
Behold here comes the TRUTH. Reading conditions apply: Girls do not read. You people are omniscient so why strain your eyes. Guys above 23 and still single, by all means read.Guys who are not single, you know you have better things to do. It's not worth the read.

Ok here it comes……..
How does it all start? It starts on that sunny day, when you see her, with her pretty hair and face, oblivious of your existence, chatting with some of her friends. That pretty smile just bowls you over. The world around you starts to move in slow motion. You tell yourself that this is the girl who was made for you. "kae jaisae tujhko banaya gaya hain mere liyae….."
You find excuses to get near her. You laugh stupidly whenever she is around. You try to come up with something witty and end up cracking some sick jokes. You silently wish to God that you find one common link. Same project, same club, same assignment, same specialization, anything. You stare at her and wait for her to look at you for an opportunity to wave and smile at her. One day you find her taking the stairs and you grab the opportunity to spend some time (proportional to the number of floors she intends to climb) with her. You silently thank God and see this as a sure sign that even God is on your side in this.
You tell yourself and your friends," No, I am not desperate or anything. If it is meant to happen then it'll happen. I just want to be her friend for now".
Let ask you people some simple questions.
1)      Do you look back to see her face as you pass any girl on the road?
2)      Do you become very conscious about what you are talking, when you are around with girls?
3)      Do you think that staying moody or overreacting would actually make a girl interested in you, when in a group?
4)      You ask a girl for lunch or coffee and she agrees do you think that shows that she is interested?
5)      A girl sits besides you for lunch or while you are having coffee. Do you infer that she is interested in you?
6)      When a girl passes you then do you secretly wish that she'll look towards you and smile?
If answer to any of the above question is YES, then you are desperate for female company. You may as well admit it.
The girl understands everything all the time. Not because she actually is omniscient, but simply because she has been going through this "ordeal" since before she even realized that she was a girl.  She blissfully ignores every foolhardy behavior of the desperate genre.
"I never thought about us in that way. I thought we were just friends." This happens to be the ultimate shield that girls happen to possess. Guys are still at a loss to find out a suitable antidote for these words. This we'll call "THE SENTENCE".
 4-5 months down the line she ends up being the password of the hapless creature. 1year down the line, he starts looking for a new prospect to act funny again.
Weak hearted people stop right here. Girls I told you never to read it. You may as well quit now.

The sermon follows…..
A girl always has it too easy. They always have umpteen numbers of options in front of them. I sincerely hope that one day this scenario would change and guys will be in demand. That would be the day when the girl has to woo a guy to fall in love with her.
Well fantasies are fantasies. People will be left aghast if we quantify the amount of time an average person spends on wooing the opposite sex; the number of exams that have gone bad thinking about her or because you had to spend some time with her; the amount of money you have spend just to impress her. There are a very small percentage of guys who get the requisite return on investment. Others spend time, money, energy and then THE SENTENCE is thrown at him. He is left without any recourse.
Let me suggest you people a different course of action. Spend the same time, not even the same time, a small percentage of that time on some peers. Buy them a coffee, or a couple "vada pao", play some cards and you can create some friends who'll last your lifetime. Life will be much simpler. You would not have to explain every one of your actions in minutest detail. You would not have to try different methods to impress her every other day.  Guys enjoy independence. Enjoy the one thing for which Shahid Bhagat Singh, Lala Lajpat Rai, Netaji Subhash and many many others gave their lives.
Yes it is very important to follow your instincts, but for heavens sake after hearing THE SENTENCE one time, grow wiser, and do a very good cost benefit analysis, before putting your capital into any venture.

Just Kidding yaar…. ;-)


Kumar Krishanu Mukherjee.





Thursday, October 15, 2009

Still in pursuit of happiness...

It was dusk, the sky was clear, our solitary protagonist was brooding...the master brooder as he always is...

All I wanted to be was happpy...and all i wanted from people around me was that they also remain happy...i wanted them to like me, i wanted everyone of us to be happy, so that we can all enjoy whatever time we spent together with lot of joy and merrymaking…
What do I want from life?? I want to be happy …and how I plan to do that I have no idea..some people say you must have a knack for something, find that something out and do that. You will be happy..…but what if I never find out what I am good at…….when I was a kid, primary section, I wanted to be an astronaut. In secondary school, I wanted to be a professional musician. At the same time I also wanted to be a professional footballer.
I guess that was the last time, in high school, that I nurtured some serious ambition.
However I became something pretty different.
I turned out to be an engineer. Then I went on to work for an entirely different sector. And now I am studying business management. Marketing.
Where will I stop? What will I end up being? I have no idea.
There are people, friends, acquaintances, who are so focused about where to go and what to do with their life. Sometimes I envy them for the certainty they associate with themselves. For the focus they have towards any particular goal. However, sometimes I pity them. It’s no fun reading a novel if you know what is going to happen in the last chapter.
I have lived and accepted my life as it comes. Every day has been a new, exiting game for me. There are challenges all over the way. Sometimes you solve them right, sometimes you are dead wrong, and it is then that you analyze and find out for yourself what the ideal answer should have been and apply it on the next occasion you get.
I guess it is okay if you are not sure about what you can do. That can have two explanations. Either you are good at nothing or you are good at everything. May be I am an allrouder who can do anything that is given to him(there are 2 things which I know I cannot do:1 – dancing, 2 – playing carom). Only time can tell. Till then let’s enjoy life as it comes….majja nu life..

Friday, September 25, 2009

Walking back to the future....

"Always tell to yourself, if I can't then who can. Afterwards be humble enough to say, if I can then who can't"-Anonymous.


I quote the first part of the quote to myself everyday. That happens to be purely my personal way to motivate myself. The first month was off, even before I had time to comprehend its arrival. I had been wallowing away in my 'home sweet home' for a month, after tendering my resignation another month before. Well, I wanted to work till the last day, but somehow my manager seemed very relieved the day I announced my intention to resign. And due to some sinister reason he released me a month earlier than what I expected. Recession I guess.


Anyways, the pace of the MBA course gave me a sudden jolt. We were expected to be studying 13 subjects all in one go. In engineering we had 6 subjects/semester. Somehow I could never remember the names of even those six. And now I had 13 to remember. The number 13 scared me.It reminded me of friday the 13th. It's the unlucky number. The teachers scared me. Surprise tests and all. My peers scared me. They seemed to know everything under the blue sky. It was amazing how every week we had classes of 13 different subjects. So much of knowledge was continously being bestowed on my hapless self that I always felt six feet under a stack of incomprehensive information. I felt as if I was in the open seas in a derelict canoe facing 13 tsunamis coming towards me.


I guess 3 years of smug life in a cubicle had made me too comfortable. Because within 2 months I found that it was not all that scary after all. The people around me were human too. A bit of smart time and resource management was all that was required. Well it happens to be a fact that there seemed to be lots tornados and eartquakes waiting for us during the next two years. But all that was needed was some sincere hard work. After all, as Thomas Alva Edison once said,“Genius is 1% inspiration, and 99% perspiration".


B-School life is all about living life to the fullest. There is hard work; along side there is lots and lots of fun. College life just for another 2 years! Couldn’t be better. In a span of around one and half month, we had had outbound trips, cultural fest cum competition (our very own AARAMBH), classical music programs, rock shows, extempore competetions, the list is already quite big.


It is all about enjoying whatever you are doing and doing whatever you enjoy. Umpteen number of activities is always going around in a B-School. It is all about getting involved and bringing out the best in you. B Schools are said to be grooming ground for budding managers. Yes, that is the ultimate goal, but the bottomline is to groom yourself. To find out what you are really good at, if you have'nt done that already, because more often than not, this is the last platform you will ever get to experiment with yourself. This is the ground to plant the seeds of ambition, bestow upon them the water of innovation, groom them with sincere determination so that the budding managers can bloom with grandiose. It is time to try out something that you have never tried out before. And always tell yourself if I can't then who can.

Wednesday, September 23, 2009

In Pursuit of happiness…

It was as if that the castle of my heart has been all morose because of her absence. Then there was news that she was coming back. And then she came, with all her grace, with that charming gait, stunning everyone around her with her quintessential beauty.
“She’ll be coming round the mountains when she comes,
She’ll be riding six white horses when she comes.
Yippeee yi yi yippee yippee yi”
Everyone rejoices at her arrival. The trees salute her with greener leaves. The clouds, her guardian angels, always roam around to keep her safe and sound.
Monsoon has come!!
The sudden squeak of the microphone breaks my flow of thought. I came back to the harsh reality. The reality of competition, the rat race for jobs, MBA, entrepreneurship, Capital Markets, statistics and bitter ugly rivalry in all spheres of life. There is no time to sit and brood about the beauty of nature. Everyone is running. People are running towards some unknown invisible magnetic force whose nature nobody knows. Some say they are running in pursuit of happiness. Some are running for recognition, fame, money. But at the end of the day all someone wants to be is happy. So it would be fair to assume that we are running after happiness. But at the end of the day are we happy? This entire saga of struggle, the study, the competition, the sleepless nights does it all make us happy?
I do not know.
Yes, we are happy when we achieve something. But sometimes I think that it would be so much better if I could leave everything and settle in some small village, with a river nearby. If I could watch sunset sitting beside the river with no worries in my mind.
But reality does not let us paint such a romantic picture. Reality has mosquitoes which tend to come and scare of people who would be watching sunset beside the river.
“Let’s take 10 mins break and then we’ll resume with the subsequent portion.”
People scurry out of the class. Some hurry to the loo, some to grab a coffee to help him combat the torturous boredom of the class. I wait. Wait and watch those incessant drops of rain coming down from the heavens. Yes even the heavens are crying on the sad plight of the human race. The race that had advanced so much, that they have forgotten that the basic right of all beings is the right to be happy. The dark clouds roam about menacingly over our head posing. A harbinger of some great calamity. A possible check to the humans who are becoming menacing to the earth’s existence itself. The heavens keep on crying on man’s plight, on the sad state of God’s favorite creation.

Monday, September 7, 2009

Cynical Gibberish!!

Why do we celebrate birthdays??? Yes, I was born on that date. But does that justify celebrating it? The world is a beautiful place isn’t it? So how can one celebrate when one realizes that his stay here has just been reduced by another year?
Let me place a whole new ideology in front of you.
Really, why do we celebrate? Is it because we realize that we have survived another year in this cut-throat world of competition? Here where survival is synonymous with struggle; we have survived. So, it's time to celebrate? Do we celebrate because we realize that the end of the ordeal has neared by another year?
Or do we celebrate because we have ripened another year. We have lost another year of our youth, most of us achieving next to nothing that we aspired for. And we have come a bit closer to being old. One year closer to our death.
A year has passed by and very few of us can actually claim that they have made the most of it.
If the year gone has been good, we should mourn that the good year has gone. If the passing year has been bad, we should mourn, because good times have not yet come, and the year has passed by, so the coming year also can be bad.
Ask anyone around this question. "Buddy, are you happy?"
"No", he'll reply, he/she is frustrated because of a plethora of reasons.
Even if somebody replies that question in the positive, be sure that he either has a habit of telling everybody that he is happy or the person is simply not willing to admit the truth or maybe just maybe, he is actually telling the truth.
There happens to exist a miniscule percentage of people who actually are happy. And they should celebrate. But not us commoners, people who have not got the better of the passing year. We should all sit and mourn, maybe even make an edifice for every past year, where we can go and mourn from time to time.
Let’s peek into just another day of just another man. He is running, to feed himself and his family. He is braving through the traffic, pollution and dealing with all the mean people of the world. To earn some solace for himself he ends up getting himself into more and more chaos.
What is the root cause of all this misery? It is that day you celebrate. It is that day, when you were brought to this world to struggle, suffer and endure.
Well, even if some philanthropist argues that the world is a beautiful place. It is all dancing and frolic and merrymaking going on all around.
Even then celebrating birthdays does not make sense, as; realize it or not, our stay here has just been cut short by a year.
We have got the concepts all wrong. We should mourn on our birthdays. Yup, we should brood on the truth behind our existence. We should philosophize about the whole chaotic world around us, about the vicious circle of life and death. Birthdays are sad. And they are too precious to be wasted by mindless merrymaking.
So people go out, make processions and arrange mass mourning sessions on your birthday because realize it or not you have just aged by another year.

Thursday, April 23, 2009

No risk no gain says the axiom. What is a risk? What is the gain you want to achieve by taking the risk? Moving out of the comfort zone to try something new, in hope of something better is a risk as he understands it now. And in that regard he was taking a risk. Someone told him, when you are leaving something good, sacrificing your comfort zone, the settled life for this thing, you must see some return out of it. If you are trudging into a tunnel, if you are taking the plunge then you should be able to see the bright light at the end of it; said he.
Well now he cannot see the bright light. But surely hope to see one when he trudges to the end of the tunnel. And that would make the walk all the more fun and interesting. The fear and suspense of the unknown is always better than the complacency of the known. These are words that he keeps telling myself. These are very romantic thoughts. Ambitious too. But whether he can survive the test, he does not know. Whether he has it in him to fight for something with passion and determination, he does not know.
There has been times when things happened automatically. A third party arranged the stage for him, did all the ground work. He held his hand, and went along his guidance and he succeeded. Something which finds its place in his CV as a major achievement in his life; it happened automatically.
There were things in which he invested the bare minimum effort required. And he got considerable success. He achieved much better result than people who have given much more effort than him. Was that acumen? Luck? Or plain and simple someone having some good time whereas someone is not? Escapes explanation.
It is said that always look in front of you. Look at the people who scored better than you and try to analyze how they scored better rather than looking at people behind you and trying to analyze how they fared worse than you.
He had looked at these people above him and had seen that these are people that have put in genuine effort and have put in of sweat to justify their success. Was he plain lucky all this time? Or was it that he had the acumen, but he lost out with regard to the effort that he had put in. That is a question worth asking.
It so happened that when this person analyzed people ahead of him, in his younger years he never found anyone ahead of him whom he considered unworthy. But later on in his life he started finding people ahead of him whom he considered as his peers or maybe even worse than him.
What took these people ahead? Plain and simple perseverance and determination had to be the answer; acumen does not increase with age. He had seen some people taking the risk. Of a different sort of course and those paying off in the long run. Will he be able to justify his risk after some years? He surely hopes so and he surely wishes to give his best. He wants to walk not only the mile he can but also that extra mile that he now thinks he cannot.


Lets hope for the best and a very best of luck for all your future endeavours and may you be able to connect your dots very very soon.
- Team Nyx.

Monday, April 20, 2009

In Greek mythology, Nyx (Νύξ, Nox in Roman translation) was the primordial goddess of the night. A shadowy figure, Nyx stood at or near the beginning of creation, and was the mother of personified gods such as Hypnos (sleep) and Thánatos (death). Her appearances in mythology are sparse, but reveal her as a figure of exceptional power and beauty. She rules over an earth-based religion.

Nyx is Night.

Black winged Nyx, some say, laid a germless egg in the infinite bosom of Erebus, the Darkness of the Underworld, and after long ages, sprang golden-winged Eros. But others have said that Nyx is the daughter of Eros, whereas others called both of them children of Chaos. Nyx is Night, a powerful goddess whose dark light falls from the stars, and who dictates not only to men but also to gods. Even Zeus does not wish to upset Night: It happened that Hera bribed Hypnos in order to make Zeus fall asleep, so that she could have it her way during the Trojan War. Hypnos obeyed the goddess in spite of his fears; for once he had performed a similar task, and when Zeus woke up in anger, he sought him everywhere, and would have hurled him from heaven into the deep, had Nyx not saved him. For Zeus stopped and thought twice before doing anything that could displease Nyx. Some seem to think that Nyx appears because light is gone as if anything could be and yet do not exist on its own right.

In Tartarus, both a place and her brother, Nyx has her home and spreads around him in triple line like a necklace. At the gates of Tartarus and above it are the sources and ends of heaven, earth and sea, and it is told that if a man should find himself inside the gates, he would not reach the bottom for one year, being carried by blasts in all directions.

Night covers shame, spares lives.

Night restores what Day undid and destroys what Day did.

Night, they say, carries Hypnos in her arms, but if he refuses his comfort, the night-long vigils make the eyes of mortals sore. For in night-time most things and beings are restored so that they might enjoy or suffer the following day.So what is done by day is undone by night, which was known by Odysseus' wife Penelope, who wove by day the shroud of her father-in-law Laertes and undid it by night, thus deceiving her SUITORS, for she had promised to wed one of them when her work was finished.

Love, Death and Madness are best at night.Night is also a time of inspiration, and that is why it is told that the MUSES sing during night-time their praises to the gods and Nyx on Mount Helicon, and they themselves are the result of the nine nights that Zeus spent with Mnemosyne.