Guts

The other day, a car revving hard, possibly sans the silencer, in front of my apartment building was stopped. The stopper was an elderly gentleman, and the stopped was a boy in his late teens, you know, hot blooded and brash, a regular revver in my locality, I’m sure you’ve seen the kinds. But this exchange was something that one wouldn’t expect.

The gentleman calmly stood in front of the car, didn’t budge an inch. He asked the driver to turn off the engine, and step out of the car. He spoke with the voice of authority, the kind that a military background brings. The boy turned off the engine, hesitatingly stepped out of the car, and asked, “What’s your problem, boss?” The gentleman, earlier placed in front of the car, walked over to where the boy was standing, calmly put his hand on the boy’s shoulder and asked, “Who has outsourced racing activities on the streets to you?” to which the boy replied, “I’m in a hurry to get somewhere. But I didn’t crash into anyone, did I?”. The gentleman tightened his grip on the boy’s shoulder and said, “Crash? CRASH? Boy, I’ll crash you so well that you won’t be able to drive this car ever again.” And it sure looked like he meant it. The rage in the man’s voice was blistering, and cold as ice. The boy was visibly shaken.

And that was the end of that.

I wish more of us had the guts to do something like that. To stand up and speak up and to tell it out when something wrong is going on. 

To really show some guts and gumption when it comes to righting the small wrongs we see every day. 

Why must we leave everything to the system? We are the system. And we gotta fix it. One person at a time. One situation at a time. 

Well, I always sound preachy, but seeing that incident that day made me want to do something. I hope reading this makes you want to do something as well.

To get back briefly to the incident, the gentleman could simply have stepped aside, muttered something under his breath, and let the car pass, but he did not. He righted a wrong that day. Because he truly believed that doing so would make the world a better place, at least by that infinitesimally small amount.

Do you stand for something, or would you fall for anything? I implore you to go ahead and make that move against something that irks you. Grow, for the lack of a better word, guts.

Smelling Books

Well, the title might be misleading: Smelling Books.

Smelling Books

“Why do you keep smelling the book all the time?”, I ask my wife as she takes yet another sniff at the book she’s reading sitting beside me. “Are you writing your blog or are you looking around?”, she replies, chuckling.

This sets me thinking; how distracted am I? And is this cutting into my productivity? Every time I sit down to do something, I get distracted. Agreed, the human mind has an infinite appetite for distraction as Huxley has rightly said, but what does that translate into in real life terms?

Someone who is as distracted as me will open his/her email, Facebook, and 9GAG. Facebook posts would be replied to, random pictures liked and shared on 9GAG, and all the windows would be closed, the email that is to be sent in the first place would be forgotten, only to be remembered after shutting down the computer, and if it is important enough to be sent, then the computer would have to be restarted all over again, and something which ideally ought to have taken just 10 minutes, would now have taken about an hour.

And to what avail is this distraction, be it in the form of emails, or funny imageboards, or social networks, or chat boxes? A few laughs, a few moments of blissful ignorance? Or the perception of ourselves by others of being Always Available? Do we feel reassured when Outlook is always open, or the Blackberry is always on emails, so that we can reply to those messages as and when they come, leading to supposed “customer delight”? 

Is this “delight” really worth all that it is made out to be? Would we perhaps be better off logged off from all these distractions, and simply closing the more important task at hand and getting it out of the way, hence servicing people better who are on the current window, if you know what I mean.

Alt Tab is totally screwing with our lives, ladies and gentlemen, and while it is sometimes necessary to Alt Tab one’s day through work, one must use one’s discretion in knowing when to save data and close the app, keeping only the important one on, so that the eyeball doesn’t tend to roll towards that blinking Outlook icon with its tiny envelope indicating the arrival of new email.

Perhaps it’s time we took back control of our lives from technology, our supposed customers, and got it sorted out the right way so that we can use technology better and service these customers better.

The Local Tea Party

Just read a rad blog, ‘The Local Tea Party‘. Do check it out!

Cloud Atlas

Last night, completely on impulse, we went to the Koramangala PVR Cinemas to watch Cloud Atlas, and I can say, without being partial to the Wachowsky brothers, this is possibly one of the most ambitious, audacious, ballsy movies I’ve ever seen. (To be honest, I had understood absolutely nothing of it from the trailer, just like Inception. So I had also thought that I would have to explain it to my wife, Archita. But, surprise! Wifey dearest already knew about a similar concept to this before and she was the one explaining the story to me!)

The sheer scale of the storyline is mind boggling to say the least. Spanning centuries, and geographies the story proceeds at its own pace, multiple actors in multiple roles, with brilliant make up, mirror each other all along, completing the karmic cycle culminating in a grand climax. 

One leaves the theater with a feeling of awe, that such movies are still being made, that people are actually thinking about life enough to produce masterpieces like this. Hats off to David Mitchell for smoking up whatever the heck he is, and kudos to the Wachowsky brothers for bringing in Matrix-level epic content on to the screen.

In the movie, Halle Berry wonders how we keep making the same mistakes. The context is different, and she (probably) doesn’t realize how true her words are, and how true they remain to be across ages and places. Mankind continues to be a slave at the hands of a few powerful beings; some visible, some hidden, but always puppets to the puppetmasters.

Do go through the infographic for something similar to how we are likely to be(or probably already are) controlled, as shown in a part of Cloud Atlas. 

Something to say

“Writing comes more easily if you have something to say”, says Sholem Asch. 

How true! I gotta have something to say to say it, no?

Well, having said that, I do have something to say.

When you’re mad at me
For something I did
Or said years ago
I’m gladdened, my soul rejoices and I smile

For I know then
That I’m loved enough
To make you feel
That twinge of envy

To even think that
You would have to
Share me with
Anyone else is an unbearable thought for you

And I know then that I sleep
Beside an angel each night.
An angel mine forever,
Angry sometimes, mostly loving,
But an angel nonetheless.

Here goes…

Well, to cut a long story short, my beautiful wife Archita is making me blog more regularly now.

Sigh. 

It all started a while back, before our courtship, when I was still trying to impress her. She saw one of my earlier blog posts. And boy, almost seven months down the line, she hasn’t stopped talking about it.

So maybe there’s something in there after all. So I’ll take it up on a more sustained basis. I’ll write about what happened at the office, naaah! I’ll write about things that I’m really passionate about. 

Like, um… I don’t know. I think I gotta find a passion first. 

Music?

Movies?

Reading?

Writing?

Photography?

Well, I don’t know, maybe I gotta start somewhere to really get started. 

So, here’s to a new beginning.

Cheers!

English Vinglish

Amazing acting by absolutely everyone in the movie! Sridevi is still a stunner, this one is a MUST watch!

OMG!

Just realized that it’s been a year since my last post. Heights of being a lazy bum. I absolutely promise to be more regular from now on.

No idea who I’m promising this to, though. But I guess promises made to the self ought to be the ones most valuable, no? Though I for sure respect that the least. Promised to wake up early, eat healthier and lesser, be less angry, meditate, and so on and so forth. All down the drain.

Each time I say, “no more” and other such heavy lifted-from-epic-movie lines, and every time I’m back to square one.

Dang.

Wish I could figure out a way out of the rut.

Four Basic Types of Strength & Conditioning Exercises. (via The Training Geek.)

Interesting stuff for those fitness enthusiasts, one of whom I used to be until a short while back, and whose ranks I plan on rejoining soon. 🙂

There are four basic kinds of exercises in every strength & conditioning program which I prescribe. These four kinds of exercises build the foundation which you need as an athlete or even just day to day to perform your daily activites. Picture of Phillipe Nover in training. 1. Prehabilitation/Rehabilitation Exercises What are they? They can be your warm-up drills, mobility drills, flexibility movements and sport-specific drills. Why do them? … Read More

via The Training Geek.