Saturday, August 15, 2009

Learning Curve

It is high time we stared learning for making a change,to understand the concepts and apply it usefully.What else would a B.Tech degree be useful for once we pass out?(of course one might use it to start a gas agency!).What can you do as an electronic engineer?Is there anything you could develop based on four years of study?If these questions do help some of us to take an initiative that would make a difference.So guys and girls get a reality check and make ur decisions on what is it that u want to do in life.

Sunday, July 26, 2009

India remembers Kargil war heroes!

Today,26th July 2009,marks the 10th year of Kargil Victory.
The war that ended on 26th July 1999.
The war that tested our Army with 65 gruelling days.
The war that took the lives of 537 Indian Soldiers.

Let's all Salute the real Heroes now.















I Salute the real heroes of our land whose hard work and dedication has given me and my fellow beings a safe land to live withour worries.

Friday, February 27, 2009

What's in a Title??????

It seems just yesterday that an angry, rebellious teenager entered college. Calculating the time, it has been two n a half years already. When i stepped in, i was lonely and had no one with me.Till today evening, I never knew I could feel this lonely.First year i got a couple of very good friends, all the while strengthening my bond with those friends who lived so far away... And then, in a flash,Second year brought me new friends...i had a gang. A gang, who never understood what was in my mind, nonetheless made me stay in college a pleasant one. One full of memories, all those failed love affairs of the gang members who would slip into Devdas mode(not me),mentally rape each other by cracking cheap jokes (think am d one who got torchered alot!)...Second year brought some friends closer, and yet we failed to see the inevitable. Dissolved friendships, of people who once were quite close. The gang wasn't broken but shattered,still united we stand, but can felt a division there, never to rise again as a whole, but still managd to go.. And so the story goes...College life made a rebellious teenager ease down life and it's challenges. It made me look up to new challenges in life and seek the tougher ones. It made me search for d meaning of Life. I'm still searches for d meaning, all d while living each day, appreciating the beauty and the monotony of life. I saw the way priorities changed n d things that were once important to me no longer meant anything to me. I masked myself, unmasked people, went mad analyzing complex personalities...College life made me develop some sort of connections and etched new thought systems. I saw visions of what could be and more, flash in front of my eyes...I saw how friendship could be built, broken, rebuilt, weathered and finally washed away. I realized the importance of the eternal variable called truth. I realized that I loved being rash and I loved looking for danger. I learnt how painful and beautiful attachments can be. College life all the more depressed me for living in a non-utopian world. College life made me realize that I was capable of things I never dreamed of... Good and Bad. It made me realize that I am much more than what I am or what I have let myself be.I wanted to see the difference between what I was then, and what I am now. I wanted to remember and appreciate things that were once an integral part of me, to analyze life's ups and downs, to be indebted towards my best friends who always stood by me. I wanted to remember those three girls(?) in my life who moulded me more powerfully than they ever imagined they would. I wanted to rewind d flame of nostalgia and bring back those memories of my oldgood days, d very last proposal and enhanced levels of pain that I want to give up...twisted contexts, made my way around...I admit, I made my mistakes. But I learnt my lessons too...As the saying goes, the higher you are, the harder you fall...my college life up now is one of those few memories that has defined me, redefined me, and re-re-redefined me over time. Lots of memories - some nice, some bad well d end of 2008 brought me unexpected twists in life.. new hopes, new pains and new twisted mindwarps. Made me look ahead and ask myself if I had a clear vision of my future....make me rethink who I am...Not for the first time, and definitely not the last.

Wednesday, February 4, 2009

Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005.

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.

This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

© Stanford University.

Sunday, August 17, 2008

School life vs College life

So lets move from controversial topic n let’s talk about something funny n interesting ….ok??
Hey y don’t we start talking about our school life???I had a gr8 school life f 14years… (No questions related to my studies, strictly no questions k). We were a bunch of fresh kids in school, got a chance to find a new n (supposed to be) unrestricted battle-field …or rather independence…First day as usual with parents…being the good well-disciplined kids….slowly slowly reached higher classes ….as teachers giving lectures…all of us r feeling sleepy but trying to appear damn studious , n definitely not less attentive than the nxt one sitting next to u. It is tough to look good all times tend to do many things tat r nt at all ‘COOOL’
Well, as u all know, I was an innocent guy with a very good heart…hehe...no jokes.I was a serious guy with a very grave face (Later some of my friends told me tat my expression gave them the impression that I m a born genius. Later they told me with so regret tat they sometimes felt tat me n genius are miles apart), as if these people are going to slaughter my happiness.But then my buddies just came in n first expression was just the same…n then I knew there is a lot of scope, 4 or 5 who think alike is more than enough to kick-start revolutions…. true… we never looked back…We were never the most wanted, n never the least wanted…. we never cared I guess...The fun we used to hav during our bus-trips to school… journeys n visits to our homes, friend’s homes, and the way we used to convince our parents tat we got good marks coz the class average is less than that…..The way we wrote exams…the last minute essay by -hearting…the way we used to promise our friends to leave the exam hall just before the bus timings…it was fun n all full of masti…
But when coming to our college life 1st I thought that our college was vry dull...But after sometime…after 1st yr I realized that collage is k…but d tough tym is upcoming….Hmm..s3 n s4…am in a class that having….na sry am in A 66 CLASS THAT HAVING 66 STUDENTS……by d end of S3 I realized tat I m in wrong place! To b frank this batch sucks bigtime!!! d ppl in tat class (apart frm some 5r6) all r absurd…
Now I really feel I missed my school days n my buddies a lot…All vr keep in touch …but still I wish , if I cud turn 3-4 years back in the calendar… find myself happily sleeping in some language classes xply English:) …n my bench-mate desperately trying to wake me up…I will just half–open my eye n beg him “let me sleep yar …plz....i m so tired of listening”
Hi guys …this is not enough me to write about my school life….but when u go through it ,each n everyone of u will feel ur school in u….the fresh air it brings u is tremendous….n the memories will cheer u up….Shall v get a memorable college life here??????? I wish so…

Saturday, August 16, 2008

Sixty one Years Of Independence!

It has been a long and bumpy ride.A ride that has spanned over 61 years.A ride during which we have seen war and famine;victory and tragedy;violence and death.A ride highly charged with every breath.Lets take a look at India 61 years ago and now

1.Profession
Then-If you were not a doctor,you had to be an engineer,if you were not a lawyer,who the hell are you?
Now-If you don’t own a business concern,you have to be an MBA;if you weren’t a MBA,you have to be a computer expert;if not then you have to be a fashion designer,a CA,a media person…if you are none of these,are you a doctor,an engineer or a lawyer?

2.Life
Then-The basics:A roof over the head,two square meals a day,clothes to cover body and…that’s it!
Now-The basics:An air-conditioned house,a fleet of cars,a couple of cellphones,a laptop,a wardrobe of clothes with designer labels,food rich in junk value…

3.Brit Raj
Then-Brit means bad.And for years we struggled to break free from the shackles of the British Raj.Precious lives were lost.Precious time was lost,spent in prisons away from loved ones.On 15th August,61 years ago,we breathed the air that smelled of freedom,the end of the Raj,the beginning of a new tomorrow

4.Money
Then-Finding a 1 rupee coin would mean you have the jackpot
Now-Even a begger wont accept 1 rupee

5.Leaders
Then-Mahatma Gandhi,Jawaharlal Nehru,Subash Chandra Bose,Sardar Vallabhai Patel,Sarojini Naidu
Now-First there was Rajiv Gandhi.But this hero was blown up with the bofors gun deal.Then there was P.V.Narasimha Rao ,but a suitcase full of monies made him look kind of cheap.Then there was L.K.Advani,but this one got demolished with the mosque at Ayodhya.Then there was Laloo.But he got buried in a lot of fodder.And now…we are still waiting…

What Ails India?

YOU say our Government is inefficent.
YOU say that our laws are too old.
YOU say that the phones dont work,,our airline is the worst in the world,our carbon emission levels are high,mail never reaches.
YOU sat that our country has been fed up to the dogs and is absolute pits.
YOU say,say and say.
What do YOU do about it??

In Singapore,you dont throw cigarette butts on the roads.You come back to the parking lot to punch your parting ticket if you have over stayed in a restaurant or a shopping mall irrespective of your status and identity.In Singapore,you dont say anything.You do.

In Washington you would not dare to speed and then tell the traffic cop,”Do you know who I am?I am so and so’s son.Take you two bucks and get lost.”On the beaches of Australia and New Zealand you wouldn’t chuck an empty coconut shell anywhere other than the garbage pile.You do not spit paan on the streets of Tokyo,nor do you buy up the police to hush up a rape,murder or crime in Munich.You have to do a sincere and written driving test after getting International driving Licence in USA

We are still talking of the same YOU.You who can respect and conform to a foreign system in other countries but cannot in you own.You who will throw papers and cigarettes on the road the moment you touch Indain ground.If you can be involved and appreciate citizens in an alien country,why can you be not the same in India?

When it comes to burning social issues like those related to women,dowry,child marriage and femal infanticide,we make loud drawing room protestations and continue to do the reverse at home.Our excuse? ”It’s the whole system which has to change,how will it matter if I alone forego my son’s right to a dowry.”

So who’s going to change the system?What does system consist of?Very conveniently for us it consists of our neighbours,other households.other cities,other communities and the government.But definetly not me and YOU
When it comes to us actually making a positive contribution to the system,we lock ourselves along with our families into a safe cocoon and into the distance at countries far away and wait for a Mr.Clean to come along and work miracles for us with a majestic sweep of his hand.Or we leave the country and run away.Like lazy poltroons to America to bask in their glory and praise their system.When New York becomes insecure,we run to England.When England experiences unemployment,we take the next flight out to the Gulf.When the Gulf is war struck,we demanded to be rescued and brought home by the Indian Government.After a six month holiday during which derogatory comments about India and Inidan are being made and sheepishly accepted,we are ready to leave for Australia because their old age benefits and pension schemes are very lucrative.

Bribery,tax evasion,unlicensed business,unethical practices etc have not reached the same dimensions anywhere as it has in India,thanks to each citizen’s sense of involment with the country.Everybody is out to abuse and rape the country.Nobody thinks of feeding the system.Our conscience is mortaged to money.

What’s better than negative?
Being positive
What’s better than working hard?
Working smart
What’s better than a vision?
A true cause
Why cant we say “ASK WHAT WE CAN DO FOR INDIA AND NOT WHAT INDIA CAN DO FOR US”.Lets us do it…

Wednesday, August 6, 2008