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.