those small moments ..........

You hear so often that the joy of life lies in small things but how often do we get to experience the joy of small things ? I don't know about you, I don't get to do it very often. Try to think back the last time you enjoyed something really small, when you smiled spontaneously, when the sun seemed to shine just that little bit brighter, when you felt the world was smiling with you, when you felt joy in being a small part of the life of this planet ?

didn't even realize I would remember them so much, so fondly. When I try to think back, a few priceless moments that immediately come to mind are:

1. Place: Sherwood College: Time: Afternoon
The time just before founders and after the hectic house PT competition. Just lying in my cubicle - the dorm 4,5 cubicle - perhaps one of my best places in sherwood :) - feeling the may sun shine down on my face as I lay on the counterpane, my eyes closing dreamily, looking down at the front quad, thinking about my 10 years in school, savoring the best time in school.....looking forward to going home in a few days - and a large ice cream in the evening :)

2. Sitting down at the Delhi Airport with my Mom and Dad before the flight to the US. Just sitting there, trying to hold that moment forever.

3. Sneaking out at night to the 'dhobi' washerman's place to smuggle into the dorms cold 'aloo parathas' wrapped in silver foil - which he illegally got for us from town and sitting down in the locker corridor at night, munching on the aloo parathas between sharing our dreams and hopes with each other.

4. Running to the pastry man in my boarding school really hungry after swimming, realizing that you just made it in time for the last veg. pattie and the last bun ! Sitting by the pool, huddling a little after the cold swim, eating on the last vegetable pattie....I can almost taste it!

5. getting distracted by a gorgeous girl in a rickshaw, and ramming into the scooter ahead in the crowded lalbagh street. The smile of the girl as the guy ahead curses you - priceless :)

6. Sitting on the hostel stairs, way late at night at IIT, excitedly talking about what we would do if we got to go to Europe in the summer and then sitting at the same location a few days later, with Maggi plates in our hands, discussing what we will be doing when we get to Europe :)

7. Getting caught going to "All Saints" - an all girl's boarding school, by making up "sisters" we didn't have. Being threatened with a selection of hockey shots on our backsides, and timidly walking up in the middle of the whole dorm as the prefect stood waving the hockey stick and asks the whole dormitory to clap for us for being "true Sherwoodians" and giving us a pat on the back!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

going mobile !

Using the push registry to launch midlets : MIDP 1.0 specified only one way to start a MIDlet: manual activation by the user. However the MIDP 2.0 specification adds two new mechanisms to launch a MIDlet: in response to an incoming connection or at a scheduled time. While the process is not really difficult as explained in the papers and articles given on the net ( http://developers.sun.com/techtopics/mobility/midp/questions/pushregistry/ ) The actual implementation of it is tricky mainly because of the practical difficulties and platform implementations. We needed to auto start a MIDlet each time the phone boots up and the most obvious choice seemed to be using the Java Push Registry Alarm method. Having read a couple of tutorials and seen the example code given it didn’t seem something too difficult to do – however, and such is the software jungle, overcoming the practical difficulties seemed to be the biggest hurdle. For example, in my case I was using Eclipse 3.0 with the java WTK
Read more

3 Idiots and Chak De India

I'm a strong believer that who we are shapes a lot of our decisions. So assuming that hypothesis is true, let's try to look at two roles from two major bollywood actors: Aamir Khan and Shahrukh Khan. The purpose to try to see how how they perceive themselves - or project themselves if you will - based on what appeals to them in a role. The two roles we'll look at are - Shahrukh as Kabir Khan in Chak De India and Aamir Khan as Ranchoddas (Rancho) in 3 idiots. Take Racho's character, A genius , who believes the right way is to chase excellence and not success (box office?) which will chase after you if you excel at what you do. The traditional system doesn't understand him and resists his ways at first but ultimately he proves his mettle. Interesting to note that Aamir's characters doesn't do badly in the courses but tops it - despite doing things against the system, and eventually is very 'successful'. If you remove the context of the movie from the a
Read more

Expertise

Some of you may be aware of the interesting research done by Dr. Anders Ericsson around the theme of "Acquisition of Expert Performance and Deliberate Practice" An important finding is that it normally takes 10,000 hours of practice to become expert in any discipline. Of course, I can imagine this would vary a lot depending on kind of practice and how it builds on your earlier skill. So I did some quick behind the napkin math: 1. Practice Required = 10,000 hours Assuming a concentrated effort to put at least 4 hours of practice into honing your expertise in your chosen field - the other being taken up by other information tasks (e.g. did you know a large part of the so called “information work” is actually searching for information? – fun fact I gathered while working on Enterprise Search ) 2. Time required to gain that expertise = 10,000/4 = 2500 days 3. Which makes it about 7 years to gain expertise in a discipline. Interesting!
Read more