Wednesday, May 12, 2010

Identity in crisis....

Have you felt the awkwardness or a type of disgusting feeling when you are in a wrong place or say out of place..%#% I am sure u do...

Well my similar feeling does not have anything to do with the place but it may be bcos of how I am professed in all these places/cities. Yes, diversity can impact anyone and everyone. I am one of those individual struggling to establish my identity...

Born n brought up in the most multi-ethnic city of India - Bangalore (Karnataka). My mother tongue is Tamil, I read & write Kannada, Hindi… speak all three… Understand Telugu and Malayalam.. I am a Christian but look like a north Indian Brahmin or some say, a total Nepali…. I have been in almost all capital cities in India where everyone thinks, I am from other part of the country...

Mumbai/Poona folks made me south ke rahane wale irrespective of which southern language I speak (Lol… all southern languages sounds same for them). Chennai folks ask me apko kaha jahana hei?. (Rickshaw guys try to cheat me but get caught when i speak in tamil). Delhi still thinks everyone from south is madarsi. Most important of all in Karnataka, apart from Bangalore, say if I am in Mysore, people think I am from the next state since my mother tongue is tamil. I really don’t understand what does my tongue got to do with my orgin.
I am still in quest of where I truly belong to...? In reality being an Indian, all these should not make any difference at all... But people put me off with all the regionalism comments etc etc... Lol!!! I don’t need to enlighten those comments, i guess...

Coming back to my reasoning, I have always felt that whatever language I speak, it’s only a medium of expressing myself to others and need not be biased on the languages i speak. Patriotism should not be distributed but should give you the feeling “we are one…” So matter of fact I decided to identify myself as an Indian living in Bangalore as a Bangalorean irrespective of the languages i speak/write/read :)

Monday, March 8, 2010

All izz well... Wats ur song?

Dunno if this story is true, but i remembered the below narration when i saw the movie "3 idiots" - The baby kicks when it hears the phrase "all iz well"...
This is one such beautiful story ...


So whats ur song which makes you come alive even when ur down in ur spirit?..

There is a tribe in East Africa in which the art of true intimacy (I would call it bonding) is fostered even before birth. In this tribe, the birth date of a child is not counted from the day of its physical birth nor even the day of conception, as in other village cultures. For this tribe the birth date comes the first time the child is a thought in its mother's mind. Aware of her intention to conceive a child with a particular father, the mother then goes off to sit alone under a tree. There she sits and listens until she can hear the song of the child that she hopes to conceive. Once she has heard it, she returns to her village and teaches it to the father so that they can sing it together as they make love, inviting the child to join them. After the child is conceived, she sings it to the baby in her womb. Then she teaches it to the old women and midwives of the village, so that throughout the labor and at the miraculous moment of birth itself, the child is greeted with its song. After the birth, all the villagers learn the song of their new member and sing it to the child when it falls or hurts itself. It is sung in times of triumph, or in rituals and initiations. The song becomes a part of the marriage ceremony when the child is grown, and at the end of life, his or her loved ones will gather around the deathbed and sing this song for the last time.

Sunday, February 21, 2010

Hunter is being Hunted....

.......Men and women marry for love, for financial security, for children and for companionship. Both arranged marriages and love marriages are popular in many parts of the world, providing a secure relationship to shepherd future generations. Love in an arranged marriage, grows through companionship and shared lives

Love
Love is an essential component to marriage. A writer writes about love and declare it to be the most powerful of emotions. It's important to recognize that love felt at the beginning of a relationship will not mirror the love felt a year into it, two years into, three years into the marriage and more. Love grows, matures and evolves. What is felt in the first stages of infatuation, that fascination, can be revisited in a more mature relationship, but the power and depth of emotion felt ten years in is worth the exchange rate in gold

Communication
communication skills is the most essential part of marriage. Too often disagreements and arguments occur due to miscommunication and not because of a tangible problem. Men and women communicate in different ways, each couple communicates in different ways and there is a rhythm and pattern to the exchanges. The best tip towards improving communication skills as you go through your marriage is to always assume good intentions. Assume if there is a negative connotation and a positive connation to what a spouse says, that it's the positive

Friendship
Romantic relationships need friendship to get through the hard times. Relationships that develop from friendship are far more likely to weather turbulent emotional upheavals than those that are based on romantic affection only. Romance and sexual attraction are like sparks in the fire, they flame up hotly when stirred up and extinguish if not properly fed. Friendship, on the other hand, is the hot bed of coals that keeps the fire going. So work on being friends, first and foremost

Team Work
A marriage thrives when the partners in it are friends and can work together as a team. Blame has no place in a team. There is no I in team, either. One partner should not sacrifice everything to make the other happy. In fact, too much sacrifice leads to both partners being unhappy. Spouses need to cooperate with each other, help each other achieve dreams, celebrate achievements and be the best they can be. Beware direct competition with each other, but playful competition can have a positive effect

Being Honest
Every couple experiences doubt. Every couple struggles with issues from sex to children to family to housework and finances. These are normal, everyday problems that every couple copes with. From engagement to marriage to parenthood, the successful couple copes with these problems by being honest about them. Don't keep secrets from each other; talk out what is going on honestly, particularly when problems are often resolved by a fresh perspective

Trust
Team work, friendship, honesty, love and communication are the tools of a successful marriage. Trust is what binds these tools together. A spouse can prove their trustworthiness. A spouse can demonstrate their caring and their character, but trust itself is a leap of faith. Saying "I trust you" does not come with a written guarantee, trust means believing in someone in the absence of proof or evidence. Trust is a leap of faith in a spouse

Tuesday, February 16, 2010

"Have Breakfast… or…Be Breakfast!"

"Have Breakfast… or…Be Breakfast!" - By Y. L. R. MOORTHI

Who sells the largest number of cameras in India???

Your guess is likely to be Sony, Canon or Nikon. Answer is none of the
above. The winner is Nokia whose main line of business in India is not
cameras but cell phones.

Reason being cameras bundled with cellphones are outselling stand
alone cameras. Now, what prevents the cellphone from replacing the
camera outright? Nothing at all. One can only hope the Sonys and
Canons are taking note.

Try this. Who is the biggest in music business in India? You think it
is HMV Sa-Re-Ga-Ma? Sorry. The answer is Airtel. By selling caller
tunes (that play for 30 seconds) Airtel makes more than what music
companies make by selling music albums (that run for hours).

Incidentally Airtel is not in music business. It is the mobile service
provider with the largest subscriber base in India. That sort of
competitor is difficult to detect, even more difficult to beat (by the
time you have identified him he has already gone past you). But if you
imagine that Nokia and Bharti (Airtel's parent) are breathing easy you
can't be farther from truth.

Nokia confessed that they all but missed the smartphone bus. They
admit that Apple's Iphone and Google's Android can make life difficult
in future. But you never thought Google was a mobile company, did you?
If these illustrations mean anything, there is a bigger game
unfolding. It is not so much about mobile or music or camera or
emails?

The "Mahabharat" (the great Indian epic battle) is about "what is
tomorrow's personal digital device"? Will it be a souped up mobile or
a palmtop with a telephone? All these are little wars that add up to
that big battle. Hiding behind all these wars is a gem of a question –
"who is my competitor?"

Once in a while, to intrigue my students I toss a question at them. It
says "What Apple did to Sony, Sony did to Kodak, explain?" The smart
ones get the answer almost immediately. Sony defined its market as
audio (music from the walkman). They never expected an IT company like
Apple to encroach into their audio domain. Come to think of it, is it
really surprising? Apple as a computer maker has both audio and video
capabilities. So what made Sony think he won't compete on pure audio?
"Elementary Watson". So also Kodak defined its business as film
cameras, Sony defines its businesses as "digital."

In digital camera the two markets perfectly meshed. Kodak was torn
between going digital and sacrificing money on camera film or staying
with films and getting left behind in digital technology. Left
undecided it lost in both. It had to. It did not ask the question "who
is my competitor for tomorrow?" The same was true for IBM whose
mainframe revenue prevented it from seeing the PC. The same was true
of Bill Gates who declared "internet is a fad!" and then turned around
to bundle the browser with windows to bury Netscape. The point is not
who is today's competitor. Today's competitor is obvious. Tomorrow's
is not.

In 2008, who was the toughest competitor to British Airways in India?
Singapore airlines? Better still, Indian airlines? Maybe, but there
are better answers. There are competitors that can hurt all these
airlines and others not mentioned. The answer is videoconferencing and
telepresence services of HP and Cisco. Travel dropped due to
recession. Senior IT executives in India and abroad were compelled by
their head quarters to use videoconferencing to shrink travel budget.
So much so, that the mad scramble for American visas from Indian
techies was nowhere in sight in 2008. (India has a quota of something
like 65,000 visas to the U.S. They were going a-begging. Blame it on
recession!). So far so good. But to think that the airlines will be
back in business post recession is something I would not bet on. In
short term yes. In long term a resounding no. Remember, if there is
one place where Newton's law of gravity is applicable besides physics
it is in electronic hardware. Between 1977 and 1991 the prices of the
now dead VCR (parent of Blue-Ray disc player) crashed to one-third of
its original level in India. PC's price dropped from hundreds of
thousands of rupees to tens of thousands. If this trend repeats then
telepresence prices will also crash. Imagine the fate of airlines
then. As it is not many are making money. Then it will surely be RIP!

India has two passions. Films and cricket. The two markets were
distinctly different. So were the icons. The cricket gods were Sachin
and Sehwag. The filmi gods were the Khans (Salman Khan, Aamir Khan and
the other Khans who followed suit). That was, when cricket was
fundamentally test cricket or at best 50 over cricket. Then came IPL
and the two markets collapsed into one. IPL brought cricket down to 20
overs. Suddenly an IPL match was reduced to the length of a 3 hour
movie. Cricket became film's competitor. On the eve of IPL matches
movie halls ran empty. Desperate multiplex owners requisitioned the
rights for screening IPL matches at movie halls to hang on to the
audience. If IPL were to become the mainstay of cricket, as it is
likely to be, films have to sequence their releases so as not clash
with IPL matches. As far as the audience is concerned both are what in
India are called 3 hour "tamasha" (entertainment). Cricket season
might push films out of the market.

Look at the products that vanished from India in the last 20 years.
When did you last see a black and white movie? When did you last use a
fountain pen? When did you last type on a typewriter? The answer for
all the above is "I don't remember!" For some time there was a mild
substitute for the typewriter called electronic typewriter that had
limited memory. Then came the computer and mowed them all. Today most
technologically challenged guys like me use the computer as an
upgraded typewriter. Typewriters per se are nowhere to be seen.

One last illustration. 20 years back what were Indians using to wake
them up in the morning? The answer is "alarm clock." The alarm clock
was a monster made of mechanical springs. It had to be physically
keyed every day to keep it running. It made so much noise by way of
alarm, that it woke you up and the rest of the colony. Then came
quartz clocks which were sleeker. They were much more gentle though
still quaintly called "alarms." What do we use today for waking up in
the morning? Cellphone! An entire industry of clocks disappeared
without warning thanks to cell phones. Big watch companies like Titan
were the losers. You never know in which bush your competitor is
hiding!

On a lighter vein, who are the competitors for authors? Joke spewing
machines? (Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple, himself a Pole,
tagged a Polish joke telling machine to a telephone much to the mirth
of Silicon Valley). Or will the competition be story telling robots?
Future is scary!

The boss of an IT company once said something
interesting about the animal called competition. He said "Have
breakfast …or…. be breakfast"! That sums it up rather neatly.
—Dr. Y. L. R. Moorthi is a professor at the Indian Institute of
Management Bangalore. He is an M.Tech from Indian Institute of
Technology, Madras and a post graduate in management from IIM,
Bangalore.

Sunday, February 14, 2010

Falling in Love again n again n again…..

Falling in Love again n again n again…..

How blissful is the experience of falling in love with the person you love, again n again n forever… Love has its own journey in every ones life. For some, its love at first sight, for others, it’s a moment of truth and the rest, may be they are still waiting for it to happen…..

Like the air we breath, Love is everywhere around us but we cannot see it. We don’t realize that we are experiencing the amazing feeling of love within us just like we don’t realize that we are breathing every single second. The day we stop breathing, the human identity is lost.. (Have you come across when someone’s loved one dies, people ask - "when is the body coming"?.. nobody ask when is he/she being brought home) It’s an astonishing truth that the world also treats differently for a human body with a soul and being soul-less. Likewise, the day we stop realizing the truth that we are in love, we have denied the truth of our human identity…

Can anyone deny that Love is not around us, We cannot close our nose and say I shall live.. Love happens to everyone, to all humanbeings.

First we need to believe in love. A spark is enough to enlighten Love between two people. We just need to open our Heart, Mind, Soul and Body to experience the amazing feeling that nourishes not only our physical being but also our spiritual self before God… Because God sees our heart, as he has created us in his own image.

Today, I realized that how late you can be to tell someone you love that I love you….. Never miss that one chance to express your true feeling to that one person you love
A son to his father… A mother to her daughter… A brother to his sister…. A wife to her husband and A husband to his wife…..

"Love evolves between two people" and "the intensity of Love grows with the evolving closeness, attraction, crush and lust" This leads to a good understanding, caring, bonding, sacrificing, being flexible etc ……. When we reach this stage of maturity of love, believe me, you would have fallen in love many times… This is falling in love once again with the person whom you love….

Happy Valentines Day...

Saturday, October 17, 2009

I soar like an eagle

We can learn so much from the life of an eagle. Its so amazing to know that eagle knows when a storm is approaching long before it does...
The eagle flies to a high spot and waits for the wind to come. When the storm breaks lose, the eagle sets its wings in a way that the wind will carry it up above the storm. While the storm rages on, the eagle is soaring above it....

God enables us to ride the winds of the storm that bring failure and disappointments in our lives. but still it is we who have to decide whether we are going to sit and watch the storm or take control of it and move on....
I believe that - "I will soar above the storm" just like the eagle.