Come 2014, I will not...

I have made numerous New Year resolutions in my life. I haven't been able to follow up on a single one, though. But then last year, I promised myself that I would work on my writing. And I must say if it hadn't been for my blog, I wouldn't have kept my promise. B+ helps me to be positive. It's as simple as that. Whatever I have said on my blog in 2013 is not something new. I knew it all along. But sharing those views with other people simply made it easier for me to try and integrate some of those things into my life. I guess it becomes easier to 'pray' once you have 'preached'.

I know it's been too much about me so far, but that's why I am writing a blog. So I don't intend to change it :p

Anyways, whether you make a New Year resolution or not, you definitely want the new year to be a better one. You want to be an improved person. I use B+ to improve myself. Assuming that some people read this (even if just a handful), I thought why not share my New Year Resolution here. So here you go.

Come 2014, I will not.....

As always, we will come back to the 'not' in a little while.

I have this strange habit. Whenever I see someone smoking, be it a friend or a stranger on the street, I fake coughing. Initially, I thought I was this great guy who makes people feel guilty about smoking. I actually felt good about this habit. Then I realized that it was not only the fake coughing that was my reaction to people who smoke. In the back of my mind, I formed an opinion about the person. It wasn't a problem if that person was a stranger but if I knew that person, I talked less and less with him.

The issue here is not whether people should smoke or not. The issue is about how we often react to something that 'we think is wrong'. Things are not black and white. Mostly, they are grey. But we look at them through the eye-glasses of our sense of right and wrong, which makes the grey look like either white or black. These glasses are important for taking our decisions. But should we use the same glasses to take decisions for others. Who are we to judge what is right and wrong for them? And just because their eyes have a different power, so to speak, can we dismiss their glasses as defective?

Let's come back to the not...

Come 2014,

I will not judge people who smoke.
I will not make faces when someone expresses a contrary opinion.
I will not force my opinion on someone else.
I will not judge a person by that one view of his or her to which I do not subscribe.

And on a lighter note:
I will not judge that person (or should I say, persons) who couldn't complete reading this post.

P.S - Happy New Beginnings. As we go into 2014, let us all clean our glasses to ensure that nothing clouds our judgement. B+.

Most billionaires are college dropouts BUT….

Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard.

Gates dropped out of Harvard.

Jobs' youth was riddled with frustrations over formal schooling.

All the above facts lead people to post on Facebook: “Most billionaires are college dropouts.”

BUT… Yeah, there is a BUT, though we will come back to it a little later.

What do we do when we get a project at college? Most of us copy paste stuff off the internet. What do we learn from this, apart from certain word and PowerPoint formatting features? What is the solution to this? How can we encourage students to use the internet for gathering facts but then use their own intellect to form an opinion about these facts?

The easier solution would be to start rejecting those assignments which are mere integration of material on Google and Wikipedia. But then “jugaadu” people can work around that too. The web is full of opinions about the facts too. Various articles are available on the net which can also be copy pasted. The harder and the better solution for encouraging innovation would be to glamorize the innovativeness. There is no other solution. We have reached a point where academic excellence is no longer the goal of students. Being successful is, and rightly so. We need to project innovation just like Shah Rukh Khan promotes his movies. Rewarding innovative students is one way to do it. But the rewards must be “Cool”. Gone are the days when you studied hard to be the monitor of the class. Now you need to be popular among your peer group to become the CR.

College education should in fact encourage innovation. How could that be done? To begin with, we could have an Innovation Society in every college. It should be completely open to every student from any department. There could be professors to guide the students but there should not be any rules which they need to follow. Innovation thrives “Where the Mind is without Fear and the head is held high.” Why should we feel that we have to leave college to work on our innovative ideas? Instead, why not make colleges a platform where we can come together and use our academic synergy to polish and execute our ideas? For instance, if a commerce student wants to work on an ecommerce website, he can work with computer science students to develop the website and with law students to find out the legal framework within which he has to operate.

So let’s come back to the BUT…

What we need to stress on is the fact that,"most billionaires are college dropouts"

BUT

“Most college dropouts are not billionaires.”

and the fact that these college dropouts who turned billionaires had great innovative ideas before dropping out. Innovation is the lesson to be learnt here, not that dropping out of college or just “going through” college will make you a billionaire.  

P.S - Jobs later said, "If I had never dropped in on that single calligraphy course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts."

RIGHT TO REJECT - REALLY?

“Voters get the right to reject.”

“Supreme Court gives voters the right to reject all candidates.”

“Now, ‘None of the above button’.”

These are some of the headlines that we have come across recently. So let’s try and break up what this is all about.

The first thing that we need to know is the jist of the Supreme court verdict. As per media reports, the apex court of the country has asked the Election Commission to provide None Of The Above(NOTA) button on EVMs(Electronic Voting Machines) and ballot papers.

Is this something new?

No and Yes.

No, because under the existing provisions of Section 49(O) of the Representation of People Act, a voter who after coming to a polling booth does not want to cast his vote, has to inform the presiding officer of his intention not to vote and sign on an entry. But this violated the fundamental principle of secrecy of the ballot. Also, making such a move could lead to trouble for the voter from overenthusiastic party workers.

Yes, because this verdict takes care of the above problems as the voter gets a NOTA button. No one else needs to know about the voter’s choice.

So, have we REALLY got the RIGHT TO REJECT?

Here, I would like to paraphrase what a former Chief Election Commissioner said on television. He said, if all the voters in a constituency press the NOTA button, but only one person votes for a candidate, then that candidate will be declared the winner. So this cannot be called the right to reject.

If no, then what is the benefit of the verdict?

The apex court puts it succinctly in its observation, “When a large number of votes will press NOTA button, it will force political parties to choose better candidates. Negative voting would lead to systemic change in polls.” 

“Mere sath hi aisa kyun hota hai????

“Mere sath hi aisa kyun hota hai????”

How many times do we say this? In my case, every time “that” silly little problem comes up. Now, this “that” can be very wide ranging. From not getting a taxi when desperately needed to seeing an AC metro leave in front of your eyes without you being in it (trust me, there is no greater sorrow for a Kolkattan), from hearing “your balance is insufficient for this call” from that irritating recorded voice exactly when all you need to hear is someone special’s voice to missing the first few minutes of a movie like “Inception”, this expression just gushes out of your mouth.

What’s wrong with it, you ask?

Me too.

Every time I have said “Mere sath hi aisa kyun hota hai????”, what I have done is exaggerate the problem. You don’t feel it when you are saying it. At that time, even the silly little incidents that I mentioned above seem like an emergency. But later on, you just laugh it off. But what we forget is that slowly “this” becomes a part of our personality. All of us have that one friend (there goes my favourite line : Refer to my previous post) who is “Rotlu” and who cribs about everything under the sun (like Sheldon, if you follow The Big Bang Theory). Some of us (like me) may even be that friend. That doesn’t stop us from being friends with others but it makes people who don’t know you closely enough to form judgements about you, and if you don’t care about that, then ponder over this: it also stops people close to you from talking to you honestly, fearing negative repercussions.

So, let me get straight to what I am getting at, or I am sure I am gonna lose you (whatever few have reached this far).

I say why send out any negative vibes anywhere you go. Instead, as idealistic as it may sound, shouldn’t we be spreading positivity all around us? I know it’s not that easy as it sounds. It’s really difficult not to say “Mere sath hi aisa kyun hota hai???? “when “that” happens.

But still, shouldn’t we try to be a part of the solution rather than being a part (or whole) of the problem? At least we can try. Life can be more fun if we stop fussing about the little “thats”. B+.

Glamourise it, Energise it!

All of us have some idea or the other about what is ‘cool’. Or rather, what is ‘cool’ according to us.  But more often than not, as we go about meeting more and more people, ‘our cool’ gets lost somewhere and ‘their cool’ takes centre stage. We start changing ourselves to, what’s the phrase, fit in. We try and analyse what makes the other person ‘cool’ and follow in his/her footsteps.

It is here that we make the biggest mistake. We don’t realize the fact that the ‘cool’ person is ‘cool’ because they are following "their idea of cool". So when they do whatever it is that makes them cool, they do it with all the energy that they have. All of us know one person or the other who is extremely lazy and yet is considered ‘cool’ by his friends. Even being lazy takes a lot of energy. You need to be prepared to finish tasks in lesser time than others as you were lazy enough not to start earlier. You need to have the energy to listen to everyone’s “If only you had done this before” when all you want is to finish the work and relax. So if you find a lazy person “cool”, it’s not lack of energy that makes his/her personality that makes it so, rather it’s the opposite.

Taking the same ‘lazy people’ (no offence to the lazy ones, as I am one of them, not having posted in the blog since more than a month) example forward, one more thing that we can notice is that they (or rather I should say, we) are happy with what the way they do things, taking pride in their methods to the extent that their so called ‘lack of energy’ becomes glamourous and infectious.

I would end by taking the example of the iphone launch press conferences. For those who have seen both Steve Jobs’ press interactions and Tim Cook’s, what I find is the former had not only energized the event, but also glamourised it with little ‘cool’ things so much so that people still miss his trademark style of introducing the new Iphone and his turtlenecks. If Tim Cooks would try to copy him, he couldn’t do anything worse because he would not have Jobs’ energy and glamour as it would not be ‘his cool’ but Jobs’.

In this world crowded with so many ‘cools’, I wish you find ‘your cool’. Once you find it, Energising it and Glamourising it will happen on its own.

P.S – Lazy people may be cool, “laziness never is”.

When I THINK I have got problems.....

When I think I have got problems, all I can do is keep thinking about them.

When I think I have got problems, I feel that I am the most troubled soul in the world. 

When I think I have got problems, I hate every person who thinks my problem is not big enough.

But when I look around, I realize . . . . . 

We will come back to my realization in a little while. Let’s try and look around first.

I look around and I see our maid doing the dishes. She gets a call (Yes, she has a mobile phone). It’s from her son’s boarding school in some far off area, saying he is not well, asking her to come and take him home. She gulps down some water and asks the person on the phone whether she could get there the same evening and get her son as she cannot afford to waste her working day as that could cost her her job. Getting the confirmation, she hurriedly finishes her work and leaves. 

After some time, I go downstairs. I see the aunty living in the second floor shouting at someone. There are two people standing. One is the security guard of the building and the other her driver. Listening for a few minutes gives me the picture of the whole situation. The driver was being scolded for sitting and talking with the guard and not standing up when she had arrived there. I move on.

I go to a small shop near my building to get a recharge done. It also has a phone booth. I give the shopkeeper the recharge details and wait for him to get it done. All the while, I could hear sentences like, “No, you cannot do this.” “How will our seven year old child go through all of this?” “Can’t we give it another chance?” “I will never stop you for anything, just come back. Please.” It was the lady in the telephone booth, crying all the while she was talking on the phone.

I get the recharge confirmation message on my phone and come back home.

Let’s come back to my realization.

When I THINK I have got problems, all I do is stop thinking about others.

When I THINK I have got problems, I feel that I should be given the most importance in the world.

When I THINK I have got problems, I hate every person who tells me the truth.

But when I look around, I realize . . . . . 

I just THINK I have got problems.

FIRST IMPRESSION IS NOT THE LAST IMPRESSION. Rather…

I have been thinking a lot about this. How many times do we come across people who appear very promising in the first meeting but as we spend more time with them, as we observe them closely, we find that our expectations were too high? On the other hand, aren’t there too many times when we underestimate the person we are meeting just because their tie wasn’t perfectly tight or we didn’t agree with their idea of dressing up? What I gathered is:

FIRST IMPRESSION IS NOT THE LAST IMPRESSION. Rather…

I will get to the ‘rather’ part in a little while. I read somewhere that it takes just one-tenth of a second for us to judge someone and make our first impression, with confidence in impression formation increasing with increasing time taken to form the impression. (Okay, I know there is a huge risk that I have lost quite a few of you after you finished reading the last sentence, but read the title and apply it here, in short: continue reading.) So what happens after we have formed the FIRST and the so called LAST impression about someone?

If our perception about the other person is extremely good, then obviously we would like to meet that person again. And when that happens again and again, we come to know the person for who he or she really is. We realize they may not be that ‘spectacular’ person we had expected them to be and that they may also have some faults. It then boils down completely to us whether we want to be friends with that person. On the other hand, if we don’t find the other person ‘impressive’ enough, what do we do? Most of the times, we never make an attempt to know them. If, by any chance, we come across them again, we restrict ourselves to “hi” or “hello” and that’s it. That ‘unimpressive’ tag remains attached to that person in our mind.

All of us know people who have won our hearts in the first meeting and then remained our friends forever, even after we discovered various ‘unimpressive’ things about them. On the other hand, how many people do we know who didn’t seem ‘spectacular’ in the first meeting, but you just couldn’t have enough of them in your lives after you were forced to spend time with them and know them?

So, let’s complete the sentence:

FIRST IMPRESSION IS NOT THE LAST IMPRESSION. Rather

FIRST IMPRESSION IS A STRONG IMPRESSION.

And it’s completely up to us how STRONG we make it to be. The best thing to do is to think:

“What if I am on the other side?”

Doing something is always better than doing nothing.

Let me begin by asking you, ”What is going on your mind?” Don’t worry, this is not a social networking site which first starts by asking you “what’s going on in your mind?” and enthused by your response, gets more inquisitive and asks questions like, “what’s happening?” and “How’s it going?”. Actually, it’s my fault. I should have begun by asking the full question, “What is going on your mind when you are doing ‘something’?”

Now, this ‘something’ can be anything, ranging from playing cricket to watching a movie, reading a book to writing one, being in a relationship and caring for your loved one to hating that one person you can’t stand, watching television to reading a newspaper, getting up early in the morning at 5:30am (for those who don’t : in winters, it’s just like : “Andheri raton me, sunsaan rahon par, ek masiha nikalta hai, jise log Shahanshah kahte hain”, you need to sing it, only then you will get the feel of it. For those who are “pretty good” singers like me, here’s the link  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGYGaadeBdw) to staying up the whole night waiting for that one phone call.

You must be thinking that you are halfway through the post, and you still don’t know what I am talking about. Now, accept it as it is, that’s my way. I like building the premise.

Enough about me and my weird ways, now just think about my question. Since I cannot get your reply immediately, let me try and answer it from my perspective. When Sachin Tendulkar is on the field, is he worried about some anchor on a news channel debating how he should have retired long ago. When a salman khan fan is watching “dabanng 2”, he doesn’t think about what the critics have got to say about the plot of the movie or lack thereof. When J.K. Rowling was writing Harry Potter and when the readers were reading it, all they were concerned about was what would happen eventually. When you are talking to your loved one after a hard day, just listening to a sweet Hello can lift your mood.

Now, just imagine, you have got nothing to do. What would your mind be full of? There’s a saying “Empty mind is a Devil’s workshop.” I think there is no empty mind. There are always some thoughts in our mind. If we are doing something, these thoughts will always be about that ‘something’. The thoughts will always be about how you can do that thing in the best possible way. But, if we are not doing anything, our mind will be full of negative thoughts about ourselves. So,

Doing something is always better than doing nothing. This is the truth which, once realized, will change our entire way of thinking. But the problem is, this truth cannot be realized by reading a post. It can happen only when you are doing nothing and you get an overall bad feeling. When this happens, the trick is to just start doing ‘something’. Trust me, it helps.

 Now, this may sound a lot like preaching. But, believe you me, the fact that you are reading this is the proof that something was done so that you are able to read this. The more important question for you is “Was reading this better than doing nothing?” and for me is “was writing this better than doing nothing?” I can only answer the latter. Yes, it was. The former is for you to answer. B+.