At GunPoint

"When the going gets tough, the tough gets going." - Joan W. Donaldson

"Sawant shoots historic gold at World Championships" was the front page (right hand corner though) news on today's TOI. I bet you it would have been a stylish poster-size image of Yuvi cover driving, if he would have scored a century somewhere despite team India loosing the match... lolz. Well, jokes apart, I believe many of you have definitely gone through the news with goose-bumps running through your body. As the column continued, it revealed several jaw dropping and head spinning facts about this 29-years old sharp shooter of India. It said:

" Tejaswini Sawant scripted history by becoming the first Indian woman to clinch gold at the World Shooting Championship when she won the 50m rifle prone event on Sunday, equalling the world record in the process... The 29-year-old shot a score of 597/600 (100, 100, 100, 99, 99, 99), equalling the world record set by Russia's Marina Bobkova in 1998."


Wow! that really sounds cool, isn't it? But what made me write this blog post was the story on the other side of the coin. As I read on, the column revealed several breath-taking facts about Sawant. Some of those were as follows:


"...some years ago had struggled to pay installments for the rifle she had bought on loan... The gritty girl recalled how at one point financial constraints forced her to consider giving up shooting, but the strong support of her family, especially her father, kept her going... 'I dedicate this gold to my father,' she said. Her father, Ravindra Sawant, a former Navy officer, passed away on February 23 when she was competing at the Commonwealth Championships... 'I was shattered after hearing the news, but I could not leave the competition. I was part of the team and had I left, the team would not not have been able to participate,' Tejaswini said... "


If you haven't already watched above video yet, now is the right time coz' 99.99999 % of us remembers on our finger tips the number of century's Sachin has scored in the current cricketing year. (Yeah we love Sachin a lot and thats a fact even God can't change! ) But why is it that everything else is ignored in our nation? Why Tejaswini Sawant appears to be a name unheared each time she bags a gold and becomes the front-page news (and winning a gold is the only condition)? Whom should we blame now? Or rather who gives a damn about even thinking? We update our FB status for a single sneeze but to my disappointment, EOD I didn't find even a single post about Sawant (or may be they were not in good enough number to have survived the ever dynamic updates). This makes me feel ourselves the culprit for the condition of other games which have made us proud every now and then. How many of us even knew that there was a World Championship going on somewhere in the world for shooting? Hardly any.

You reap what you sow. Media serves what we want them to serve, and only what we want, nothing more nothing less. Nobody gives a damn if these athletes come even on 4th position at world level. And how can one expect them to, as all of us are so very busy. More than half of the Media busy in covering bullshit over the places and the remaining either are so very busy covering the laughter/dance shows or in singing songs of  cricket World Cup next year (Who says we don't spend time in preparations?). And as far as Govt bodies (who actually are given the responsibility of promoting other sports) are concerned, they have so much more to take care of... or who else will take care of the thousands of corers of rupees that are sanctioned for the sports development. And hey, how can we miss the forthcoming CWG's. The scams and money involved seems to be increasing at exponential rate as the number of days remaining are coming to an end. Read a fact somewhere a few days back which said that the CWG will cost India more than what Olympics were to China (and I have no reason to second that thought).


Well, isn't it the same vicious circle? Politics, corruption, awareness, media, youth... everything going round and round and round. But I wish from the bottom of my heart that no athlete like Tejaswini will ever have to think giving up what really makes them special and our country proud. And may her mothers dream of bringing an Olympic Gold gets fulfilled so that we can sing songs of victory for atleast one more time...


PS: OK guys, I know you are asking me "Tune kya kar liya be jo itna hero ban raha hai???" :) Well, I'm asking myself the same ;)... I'll try my best to cast my first vote next time I get a chance and this is the least I can do. This post ain't gonna do any good, but I believe will give me a good night sleep now :)... Jaagte Raho !!!

Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish

Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish

Hi Folks ! This is a speech that Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple, gave at Stanford University in 2005 for the graduation commencement. In it, Steve recounts three personal stories in which he advocates following your heart and doing what you love. I read it in a chain mail once and I accidentally came across it once more today. Each time I read it, it inspires my soul (wherever I exists in me ;) ).

Here is the complete transcript of the speech from this video. It’s just a fantastic story. Enjoy it:

"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.

Thank you all very much." - Steve Jobs

In the name of Development

What will one tribe have to do, to save everything they know?

Mine, narrated by Joanna Lumley, tells the story of the remote Dongria Kondh tribe's struggle to protect Niyamgiri, the mountain they worship as a God. London-based mining company Vedanta Resources plans a vast open-pit bauxite mine in India's Niyamgiri hills, and the Dongria Kondh know that means the destruction of their forests, their way of life, and their mountain God.

What is the meaning of Development?

 Is it constructing  factories that exploit the wind, water, forests and all other natural resources?... Is it constructing roads that stops rain-water to seep into the ground and hence the drop in underground water-level?... Is it the building of dams which disturbs the ecological balance and cause flood in some areas while droughts in others?... Is it the deforestation in the name of expanding colonies again causing floods, decrease in amount of rain, drop in the oxygen content of atmosphere and so many other things?... Or is it the ever increasing use of  non-biodegradable products like plastics, that will take hundreds of thousands of years to degrade and in the process make the atmosphere unsuitable for human existence?


I'm really confused. At one hand I have the Mother Earth feeding us with all she has and asking nothing in return, and on the other hand is entire Human race. The most intelligent race this planet has ever seen which changes the course of events with the power of its mind. A race which guides itself to faster and swifter ways to accomplish what it thinks and what it needs... all this, along with ever increasing new inventions and discoveries. What all has this brought to us is in no terms explainable. But there is one thing that this evolution has been doing  is negligence. Negligence towards who we are, what we have been, what is the reason behind our existence and survival for so long, where our roots are still lying, looking at us from a far distance which is now almost unreachable.

Can't we find alternative ways? Ways which are more Eco-friendly. Ways which can halt this march towards self-destruction and which will help us lead towards a better tomorrow. Ways which will ensure that our children and their children will enjoy the love of Mother Earth in a similar way we are enjoying now. I believe we can find them... after all we are the best minds ever existed...

Broken Soul

Who am I?... yes, who actually am I ? or rather I should ask you the same. Do you really know who you are? Ever imagined what makes me "me" and you "you"? What is it that makes "me" creature different from "you" creature?

I do not know if "me" creature sees, smells, feels this world the same way as "you" creature dose. Is my "red" color same as yours? No seriously, when we were kids, we were taught what to call a particular shade irrespective of the fact that the shade might appear different to us than the to one who is teaching us. And now that we are grown up, we never give a damn whether it is the same shade that everyone else sees it. Oops... forgot to mention that I'm a colorblind (well that definitely makes my "red" different from yours... LOLz).

We are so fucking same yet we are so fucking different (don't pardon my language as I mean every word I say) !!! Can you feel "my" happiness as happily as I feel it or rather can I feel "your" pain as painfully you feel it, no matter how hard I try to console you and try to make fool out of myself by telling you that everything is gonna be okay even if we know it can't ? Why can't I feel the joy "you" feel even when we do an adventure together ? Why can't "you" creature feels the same anger that "me" creature feels when both lose something in common ?


What is it that separates "me" from "you"? After all, we are born the same way and end the same, leaving behind the very body that we have similar, and the only one too. Apart from this, you can never be "me" and I can never be "you".

They say that apart from our physical attributes we have a soul inside each one of us. This very soul, I think, is behind and between "you" and "me". Soul is what drives our body. Our body is no more than a junk machine without it, that will corrode away if it loses it's driver. Soul or 47-grams, what scientists have identified it as, is there in you and me separating "us" from each other. Even a child can't be exactly same as either of its parents in feelings.

Sometimes I feel we are all made of a single... very same... Broken Soul...

Mirrors

"Tell a man that there are 400 billion stars and he'll believe you. Tell him a bench has wet paint and he has to touch it." - Anonymous.

We live in a world where we are taught since our very first breath that one should not trust a stranger... one should not blindly accept what someone is telling you... one should be extra careful when someone is praising about the way you look, speak or act. They say, it might be a trap. It might be that you are drawn in, to trust that someone who is singing songs in praise of you.

So we act smart. Doubt every stranger talking to us. Wondering whats his actual motive is... what games they are trying to play. And thus we start our own games with them. While we smile across the conversation, we keep wondering what the other side of the coin is???

Yet, here I stand... in front of a Mirror... not only believing what it is showing me, but also acting cool and smart... experimenting with my hair... checking out my looks when I smile or blush or that flirty look. I know what I'm watching is the Mirror Image... ultimate lie of the whole world... still I love this lie... still I want to be told this lie to me more and more.

Yet, here I stand... in front of a Mirror... like I do every morning and tens of times each day. Faking myself... telling lie to myself... fooling myself. Don't realizing the fact that when a friend says, "You look great today!", he is actually taking about the reality and not the Mirror Image.

Still, I adore that lie each day... still I stand helplessly in front of a Mirror...

Possibly, Mirrors exhibit best Irony one can ever imagine... we have forgotten that real beauty lies... Within !!!