30 days

I had started reading David Allen's Getting Things Done last month, 15th February. I remember the date so vividly because he said that in the next 30 days something will surely come and surprise you. "Life is always full of it! No matter what you are doing", he said.

I found the thought very intriguing. I marked 15th March on my calendar and wrote 'Did something interesting happen in the last 30 days?'. The message popped up on my phone last night. And guess what, something did happen! Not just one thing, a couple of things even happened. Things that mean a lot to me right now!

Life is really full of surprises. Its never going to be boring. And then again its what you make out of it. In perspective, I think I would have found something that happened and ranked it down on the list of surprises. It need not be a great milestone in my journey. It could have just been a sweet little surprise.

Its always about how you see it. I see it being fine. I see it going good. I see it with me and a smile.

The I will

We needed a video camera for an interview. I took up the responsibility of getting one, somehow. I went around to a couple of places I knew on campus that loaned out cameras. All of them had some reason to refuse one. I got to people who headed Visual clubs. I was unsuccessful there as well. After all the hassle,  we ended up using a friend's DSLR.

Now as I was climbing the numerous stairs in Arts and SDE, I realised that it was important to persevere what you want. I could have given up on going to these corners and enquiring. The only way to find out that we had no video camera was, however that.

I bothered a couple of friends on the way and looked at ways of them being able to help. That was again making sure, the goal wasn't possible.

In the end the message was clear, its all about the will. Yes, I did not get a camera. But, I had the satisfaction of making sure I tried everything I knew possible.

Sun rays and black tea

I love early mornings! Its the most pleasant time of the day. The sun starts taking a peek and floods my room with yellow. The sweeper is meticulously brushing leaves off the green grass. The brushing is almost a tune to the ear.

The dew on the grass is fresh. And the smell wafts through the air and in through the windows. A plain screen in front of me. And a cup of black tea by the side. Everything is in the perfect state!

Its a lovely time to think about the rest of the day; to make notes; to take some calm from outside to within; to think; to stretch; to read; to just be. I am beginning to love these early mornings. They are a pleasure to the soul.

Try it. Just one day. Go to bed early. Have sufficient sleep. Ask your mind to wake you up at dawn and go to bed. Wake up and breathe.

Wake up and do what you like the most.

Wake up and just be.

Farewell, 'confused'

I have a blog description under the title endangered. Up there, yes! I made a list of the glorious things that get me excited. Right now its the perfect way it should be.

Just a day before if you had noticed it also said confused. My blogger name was also concusfused. I was inspired by that idea for a while. I thought the confusion in me portrayed some part of me that dint know what was going on. Just yesterday though I realised something. No one knows whats going on.

We all know where we want to head. We know what we want to do in life. Some of us know exactly how we should get there. Some more of us are already doing what they want to! And me, I am dreaming up that life. I know exactly the way it should be. I am preparing with the little things that will lead up to that life. It is going just the way it should be!

Sure, I do not know what life has in store for me. However, I know what I will demand of it. I know what will make me happy!

And while this chain of thought goes elsewhere I should to stop to say, I am actually not confused anymore. Atleast not confused about my place.

Why then should the exquisite list of things that describe my life carry confused? Yes, so its out. Over and done with!

Selfless giving

We all know a mother's selfless giving! Some of us are lucky enough to experience it everyday.

It has been a season of sharing among close friends with first salaries and valentines. One close friend took up an idea of buying us gifts from her first salary! And she has been genuinely selfless about it. It sparked a sense of giving in the gang. We were speaking about it earlier in the day. It got me thinking about being selfless.

I wrote to some close friends and family in the last month. I did not expect a note in return. One doesn't have to write a note to return the love. They would do it in their own way. Aside that, I thought it was a wonderful feeling being selfless.

Right at this moment, the illusion of selfless breaks! I am not being selfless, in my head I am still selfish for their love.

In some twisted indirect way we end up being selfish. I am also referring to selfish for a good cause! You want your family/city/country to be better and that would account for selfishness as well.

As long as it means well I guess :)

“Your conscience is the measure of the honesty of your selfishness. 

Listen to it carefully.” ― Richard Bach

PS: The mother's love however is an exception. I believe its surely selfless!

Unknown unknowns!

There are known knowns; there are things we know we know.
We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns – there are things we do not know we don't know.

- Donald Rumsfeld

My professor quoted this wonderful saying at a soil lecture today. He used it to explain how there might be numerous factors involved in foundation design and we can only make sure we account until the known unknowns. 

It struck me how this quote applies to life in general. Our knowledge is a tiny speck in this huge universe. What we know about anything is only so much. Unknown unknowns account for everything that happens around us without our consent. Unknown unknowns are probably the dudes whom we have named destiny. Remarkable realization today. 

In such an ignorant existence, we can only aim to expand our tiny speck of knowledge! Why waste time judging others. We don't know what we don't know about the world. Well then why waste time on it. Why not make the known knowns matter! 

Love and live :)

Also reminded me of an e-mail I received once. An artist's portrayal of the same thought. Heres the painting made into a lovely video, do watch!

This is where it starts

I was on the phone with pigs (the darling brother!) last night. We were catching up with the stories on both the ends.

Last week, he went to a KFC outlet with his friends for a snack. For a store with only two tables filled, KFC took too long to get the chicken. They spotted a feedback counter and decided to log in the bad customer service. The manager spotted the bunch of excited teenagers, figured out what they were up to and decided to give them complimentary chicken. Apparently he doubled their order.

Pigs and his friends decided to ditch the feedback form in return for the compliments that were jumping down their throat.

Now, I am a fan of chicken. I am a big fan of KFC chicken. To be sure. To be very sure. Nevertheless, I find it extremely hard to digest the fact that they decided to go back on their feedback. Its a bunch of teenagers showing inclination towards bribery. Acceptance rather in this case.

This is where it starts, sadly. 17 years old and they don't mind free chicken for not reporting. 30 and 40 God knows what they will not mind. The future of India is with these kids.

(Yea and he got an hour of grilling on his and his friends' value system. He swore never to tell me any stories from now..)

With all my heart

"You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart"

- "I will be found by you"

Lovely.

I have this little note stuck on my notice board. I find it extremely inspiring. Everytime I think of procastinating a to-do or discarding a work or giving up on someone, this little red note flashes inside my mind.

I have been coming across the concept of 'staying longer' a lot these days. A lot of endorsement for letting the game go on till you get what you want. Profound.

Seek, I will. With all my heart.

Meditation

I am reading 'The Monk who sold his ferrari' by Robin Sharma. Its a wonderful book. EVery sentence makes so much sense. He talks about things you can do to make your life productive. And he approaches them in a very spiritual way.

One of the ideas in the book is to meditate on a rose. Its called the 'Heart of a Rose technique'. You pick up a rose and concentrate on its every fold and texture. When other thoughts enter your head you slowly refuse them and bring your mind back to the rose. It improves concentration and gives you peace he claims.

I love the idea. I have tried my hand at meditation before. I concentrate on my breath and try to be aware of every stroke of air I take in. It used to be very calming early in the morning. I remember feeling very refreshed. I lost the discipline for it after a while. Its high time I went back to this. Ten minutes of calm is the challenge! Lets see how it goes.

Irony

A bunch of close friends and I set out last night to get some ice cream. We were talking about relationships and about how its always nice to have a fling. Someone to yap to. Someone to look forward to. Haha and we were talking about the ones that got away.

It got me thinking. What we were looking for was just someone to talk to. However when your mom tries to call you, you don't really want to spend hours telling her about your day. 

You dont ever want to talk to the person who wants to talk to you. The availability makes us take them for granted? And the unavailability seems to make it interesting maybe?

Irony haa. Why do we do this? All I can do right now is call mom though :)

Stripped Walls

Its a countdown to get home. 5 more days to inexhaustible unlimited supply of hugs and love.

I decided I would pack slowly without straining myself in one day as is practice. I started off with stripping my walls down. I had written earlier here about my room and all the love I derive from it. I was going feed off the living sources of love putting the memories to a spell of break. Today it was time to put those memories into a folder for a newer and more hopeful semester.

Careful tugging of the tape that held the photos to the wall, making sure little pieces of plaster dint come off. Pinching blue tack and securing the notes carrying life lessons. A bend this way, a bend that way to straighten the photos. Plucking of board pins holding movie tickets at GV, boarding pass of first flight to uni, amma's love note, solution to rubik's cube and other romances of everyday life.

Stripping was done. I put them inside my folder and cleared the balls of tape and tack.

One look around the room and it hit me. These tiny pieces of paper were coping a multitude of things for me. They bestowed images on me and polished up everything that was missing.

The room looked eerie. Like a place that had no life. The walls alone had supplied life for the room.

And then again, its funny. How in instances like this we pin our hopes on inanimate things, and in some others even animate people wont do.

Resume writing!

Its the half year mark of third year at uni. Time to stop fooling around and get serious about life after uni. People keep popping the 'What are you going to do when you graduate?' question. To add on to the fire, almost all my close friends are going to be interning next semester.


All this made really nervous about what I should do next! So, I decided to take the first step of the journey. Make a clean resume!


I knew I could count on one person for that! He is a close friend who triples up as a mentor and family. I sent him my resume & CV and asked him to review it for me. That was the beginning of a wonderful learning experience! Every time I sent him a version he'd send it back to me with improvements. The fact that it was scanned and remarked on with a pencil somehow hammered the suggestions deep into my head. We went through a week of 10-12 cycles of review and in the end came out my resume. Something I am immensely proud of now! I also took the help of some other friends who helped me get different points of view. The effort and thought processing we put in made oodles of difference to the document.


In all it was a really interesting ride, with a lot of awing about the importance of having a clean resume.


Some learnings to remember -

1) Patience - I learnt the importance of waiting for things to shape-up. I am a very distracted person. It takes great love for work and motivation to keep myself at it. I always hurry thing up in the end. This time though, I waited for it. I learnt to go along with it and realize the wonderful journey/outcome. Also, from my friend. He was extremely patient with me that one week! With all the corporate relationships he is used to, I thought it was really encouraging when he waited for me to learn. Very grateful for that!

2) While 'too many cooks spoil the broth',  the master cook can always handle the broth taking all the suggestions of the other cooks - I have always been better at working by myself, doing my thing. This time though I worked with three other people! Initially I took every bit of advice and blindly changed things on the document. As the reviews increased though I learnt to negotiate. To decide which I wanted to change, which I dint. If I had done this all by myself, I know that it would have remained Dhanya_Resume_v1.pdf. This is actually my biggest learning I would say. I learnt the importance of discussion and team work, in a way. 

3) To each his own - Just like every person has a unique fingerprint, every person has a unique view/opinion on things. I could see how each one of us noticed various aspects of the document. How we saw the words. What the words meant to us. This was a very deep learning. Having such varied opinion on things, I wonder how we even manage to run things in the world this way. I guess thats where compromise comes in. 

4) Sweat on details - Every space, every comma, every dot, matters. An achievement may not seem big to me in relativity, while on the contrary it might be something big to someone else'e eyes. It is essential to analyze a detail from the hirer's point of view and to try judging their understanding.

5) Easy on the eye, faster to the head - Formatting anything and making it cohesive makes life so much better. Personally, I like to keep things ordered and clean. I realized its important to extend it to every inch of life! 

Now I am all set for the next step. 'Looking' phase. Fingers crossed on this one to make it to where I want to go!

Change

I am drinking Milo.

From 'EW-I-cant-even-dream-of-drinking-that' 2 years back to 'ooOO-I-love-milo' right now. Same reaction for Yakult also :P

A lot of my observations these few weeks seem to be about change. It is all around me. I was just talking to a close friend about friendship. She is in a tiff with her friend of 5-6 years. And now she is just perplexed at how people change over such small circumstances. Some for good, some for a while. 

I am becoming aware of a ten million things that have changed in these two years. There is change about myself, about family, about friends and about the air. I seem to perceive everything in a new light every day. I am discovering new things about old issues. Accepting things I wouldn't have dreamt of accepting in the past. 

'Things dont change, we change'

PS: I also noticed how most of my posts are open-ended. I have realized now it works for me most. When I come back to it, I seem to ponder more on the same subject!

I am growing up

It was a huge realisation last night. A couple of dots in the past few days connected last night.

A Facebook friend of mine got married! Yes. She's as old as me, a schoolmate. And she's married! I was mind fucked (Pardon the language, but I dont think there is any other word to describe my state) for a few hours. I went on and on about it. I even called my mom up to share the news. I expected her to be appalled. Well, because I was. She laughed it off. And asked whats so surprising in that. I started gushing at her and asked her HOW in the world was it normal/ or even laughable. She said she got married when she was 20. In my opinion, that was 23 years back and that does NOT count. Anyway, she went on to reason that the girl probably finished her graduation and her parents also thought she should be married. That is not how things work for me. No WAY. Aren't you supposed to be working? Or if you dont want to work, travelling? Or I dont know, do something else. Surely not marrying! To top it all the guy looked very young (I am serious. When I say very I mean 'very') and they even went globetrotting for their honeymoon.

Couple of days back a friend was talking about her cousin getting married. Again, the protagonist of this story is aged 20. She also just decided to get married. Somehow, her being from another country justified the marriage for me. I did not know anything of their culture, tradition or societal norms. So maybe it was normal. We just moved on to lavish weddings and expensive gowns.

A friend of a friend was acting in some movie and I was looking up some details. It was a love story of sorts. But yet again the heroine is 20 :O

And yes thats when it hit me that I was growing up. I wasn't a school kid anymore. I wasn't small or tiny. I was a woman. Almost 20. And it is no surprise that girls my age were making huge life decisions by now. It wasn't about the culture. It was just about time for some people.

Yes. I have chosen to do other things at the same time. I want to get my undergraduate degree, a few years of work experience doing what I love, some money in my bank account and an independent single life before I get into all the family jazz. Thats just me. Some others have made other decisions. There was nothing appalling there. And I am telling myself (as mom put it) 'Dhanya It's quite normal'.

I wonder how, I wonder why

I was at clementi mall a while back. I was having lunch with a friend at Burger King. To our right, there was a 70-something couple having their meal. The woman was in a wheel chair and the man was pushing her around. They were eating fries and were sharing a drink with two straws in it.

I haven't seen something so awe and so cute and oh-god in sooo long! It made me wonder if I'd want that if I was ever in a wheel chair. I do. I am guessing almost every other person would too.

And then again I saw this video on facebook. About an excellent singer on X factor. He was a handicapped Iranian by origin, adopted by an Australian Mother. His performance was moving for many reasons. What I noticed was however, the mother - Moira Kelly. She runs Children's First Foundation in Australia. To sum it up - she has changed the lives of many kids and continues to do so.

These two encounters got me thinking about my life and what I want (Yet another time! - I do so much thinking, sometimes I forget to live it :/) Anyway, I was just contemplating. Would I give up having a regular life with a regular family to change people's lives? Can I try and manage both?

I wonder.

Why should I?

I have been noticing this habit among people around me. So whenever there is a lot of talking/discussion going on, there is always one or two people constantly saying 'Chill man'. I dont get it. Honestly I dont.

Why should I? What exactly is the motive of the person who says it? I havent figured this one out yet. Its putting off, really. If I want to be excited about something. I choose to be. Why would you try and shut me up? Occasionally my mom has also used it. I see it around a lot. A LOT.

Wouldn't it be much simpler if you choose to be delighted in the persons excitement. Or if it is bothering you so much, just ignore the person. Let them dwell in their own bubble. After all its a bubble, it ought to burst sometime.

I think it takes a bigger person to be able to do this.

Procrastination can actually be good?!

Theory of Structured Procrastination!


So what you need to do is:
1. Make a list of tasks that you need to accomplish. 
2. Arrange them from most important to least important. 
3. Then, procrastinate doing something that is higher on the list by doing something lower on the list.
How simple! This way, we would do the least important thing, procrastinating the most important thing the whole time. Getting all the work done, yet being a procrastinator. I think it would fool the mind. Trying right away!


Interestingly, this is not the first time this concept came about: Robert Benchley used this principle in 1940,   “The secret of my incredible energy and efficiency in getting work done is a simple one. I have based it very deliberately on a well-known psychological principle and have refined it so that it is now almost too refined. I shall have to begin coarsening it up again pretty soon. The psychological principle is this: anyone can do any amount of work, provided it isn’t the work he is supposed to be doing at that moment."  from “How to Get Things Done” (1940)

The source article is here!

Its really about sticking with it all the way!

I have a really dabba(sad-outdated-gone) phone. And it has just one game. Quadrapop. Cats/Fishes/Crabs/Monkey/Frogs come flying from top and you need to get four of them together for them to pop. And thats about it. The highest score was by Pigs(brother) around 60k. And the maximum I got to was always 20k.

Its my favourite past time when I am on the bus or in the loo. Popping those animated things away. However, everytime I was playing I wanted to get past 20k. I always wondered how Pigs got to 60k. He was always better at games than me. But this seemed waaay pro even for him - a difference of 40k. This piece of fact was always stuck in my head when I played he game.

Today though, somehow I never once bothered to look at the score. I just kept playing, concentration completely on the game and when I looked up at the scores - VIOLA! 58k. The joyy. I worked a little bit more and neared 60k and lost the game. A little short of beating his score. Suddenly, I was pro at the game too!

Though I did not entirely win, I take the learning back. Maybe I shouldn't be so bothered about the result all the time. The process matters. Enjoy it and guess what, when you are doing your things right you'll eventually get there. For sure!

Arguments

I argue.
A lot.
I just cant bear it when someone says something unreasonable.

However, following a resolution last year, I have reduced my arguments. By a TON. My close friends even noticed this change! (YAY)

I had accounts tutorial earlier today. My tutor is a pretty entertaining guy. He is a CEO, yet here only on friday evenings to try and impart his knowledge of accounting. Today he said something that made me think.

He was talking about Bank Reconciliation. And in trying to explain why we need to match the bank balance with the record balance, he said 'When one person says one thing, and another person says another thing. One of them is wrong. Except in bank reconciliation. Both are right, even though they show different amounts. This is because both are exposed to different information.'

Isn't this the reason for argument ALWAYS? I know 'x' things about something and he knows 'y' things about the same thing. When we both get talking, we are surely going in the direction of an argument if 'x' and 'y' are opposites. No one is right. No one is wrong. We both just know different things.

The peace my mind felt when it all became clear. Ah.

Why?

I came across Indu Antony's work today. About destitute women and the mentally ill in a home in Bangalore. Heart wrenching.

Why is the world so cruel to people who are not capable? Does the 'survival of the fittest' theory have to be so harsh? Can not a not-so-fit person make it out in this world? What describes 'fittest'? What is the point of life? Most importantly, what can 'I' do to change this?

I have many questions. And not a semblance of answer.
Like Kanta, all I can ask and keep thinking is 'Why'.