Good Don't Go

The difference between right and wrong - isn't that what most people tried teaching us all throughout our childhood? Our parents, our teachers, elders all made it a point to convince us little impressionable beings to be 'good children', 'good people' and 'good humans'. Isn't it ironic though, that most adults actually believe that in order to survive or be successful, it is important that we forget or ignore this difference? That we chose the path which will get us to the goal, giving little importance to the ethical appropriateness of our means? And we give it a flashy term too - street smartness!
I wouldn't blame them totally. I know that expecting the world to be nice to you because you are nice is like expecting a tiger not to eat you because you are a vegetarian. Also, when things in life don't end up going your way or when you are stung by the so-called street smart, it is very easy and tempting too to go all sour and bitter against the world and enroll in the 'no use being nice' school of thought. I have been pretty close (and still am) to crossing over on the other side. Luckily, stubbornness and great friends have helped me stay rooted on this side of the line.
So I wonder, given that I am in the adult minority, am I being foolhardy in believing that good will take me where I want to go? That it will take me much further than bad? Lets see - In a way the immediate benefits of changing my beliefs are many. Firstly, I can blame all that's happening in life to my 'trying to be good'. Bad can make me a winner much faster in all that I have failed to conquer. But my question is - will it keep me there? Will it make me one of those cynics who treat the whole world as 'guilty until proven innocent'? Thats like being wary of others like yourself! Will I start looking at life like a battle to be fought rather than a journey to be enjoyed? Most importantly, will that fetch me sustainable happiness? Well, I don't think so!
So it pains me every time someone from my team decides to change sides. I don't know what to promise to them if they stay on, since I haven't seen too many benefits myself. As of now its only the fact that you will be at peace with yourself. But like all good things, I guess most realize that the value of it only when its gone and its too late for anything to be done about it. Don't make that mistake! Keep the faith!

Learn To Gauge?

At the receiving end of some advice earlier today (which is not surprising given the bumpy road on which my life is traveling), I was told that I should "learn to gauge". Some background for the clueless reader - the talk was about people. Interesting thing this, I thought. How should I learn to gauge things about people? Well maybe, by generalizing - if I can figure out what people do or how they think in certain situations then maybe I can gauge whatever it is that I am supposed to gauge. But then this same kind hearted soul pointed out a major flaw in the above hypothesis - "people are different and they may not always think and react in the same way".
Well, this got me confused... Isn't there something known as rationality and logical thinking? Yet there are people who don't think and act in the same way (as I was told) and hence concluded that they don't necessarily act and react logically. I know that all humans aren't machines (heck even machines don't always act in the same logical way), so I would think it safe to accept a small margin of variance in terms of logical behavior but not enough to proclaim that no rule can be made of it (calling the variances - exceptions). Another useless hint for the still clueless reader - A 'specific subset' of all people was the target group being spoken about.
So, here I am, still left with the fundamental question of "How to gauge"? Well, people of the world (or the subset under consideration here), hear, think and understand:

"Life will be made much easier if what you want the other person to know is communicated explicitly. Speech, written words, instant messengers, SMSes, emails etc are the various means at your disposal to achieve this objective. Use them. Telepathy is NOT a reliable medium yet. Please do not expect others 'to gauge' or worse still, to 'somehow know' what you want them to.
For those of you don't agree, since I still have to share this planet with you, I am trying to learn 'to gauge'... Any help in this regard would be highly appreciated!"

Sulking - Q & A

Question: Well, why do people sulk?
Answer: Because they have the time. If you have a lot of work and responsibilities and are left with little time at the end of the day, enough only to talk to friends and family about happy things and to sleep, you will never sulk.

Question: What kind of people sulk?
Answer: Those think that life sucks and that's how it is and those who think that life should not suck.

Question: Well then who's left? Rather what kind of people don't sulk?
Answer: Those who do not have expectations from life or have rather few of them which are met easily. And those who are really really really lucky to have all their desires fulfilled.

Question: So, is sulking good or bad?
Answer: Both. A little is necessary, but as all things in life - "Too much is too bad".

Question: If I have decided that I will not sulk and even then on a one off occasion, I am still whining to myself about "Why me?" or "Why not me?", is that a bad thing?
Answer: Nope, its human - At that point looking at others less fortunate than you and asking the same questions helps... Also looking at the good in your life and asking the same questions again helps even more.

Question: What is the ideal conclusion to a sulking session?
Answer: A bottle of Old Monk rum which concludes in a sound sleep with the cause of the sulking temporarily deported to a far off galaxy!
Answer (For the poor teetotalers like me) : Well, if the cause of sulking can be remedied then try your best to rectify it. If it can't, then no point crying - there is nothing you can do anyway!

Question: What if .... Hey, stop it - enough for the night! No further questions!

Just FYI, the above monologue is not the result of a bottle of Old Monk rum or any other intoxicating spirit for that matter :)

Vegetable Buying - Redefined!

Another weekend ends. This weekend had all the essentials of a good weekend - an evening out with friends, a good amount of personal and household work accomplished, a nice trek to Sinhagad on a cloudy summer day and an evening full of rest. I had planned on writing a little more on the topic of blogging, but now another interesting experience needs telling.

This experience of which I talk about, which was a rather interesting part of the weekend was buying vegetables for the house. Well no, I am not saying this was interesting because this was the first time I have bought any (I am not that hopeless you see). It was interesting for me because it was the first time that I bought them at a supermarket.

Until now all my vegetables buying experiences were at the local markets - either Shivaji market or Pulgate market. Buying vegetables at such places was nothing short of a mission. I had to go mentally prepared to survive in a noisy, crowded marketplace, with the end goal being procuring self-picked vegetables at not the most expensive price available and in the shortest time possible. The brain needed to tune itself to enter a filthy narrow corridor of a public market between hordes of fruits and vegetable sellers screaming out the prices of their wares to the whole world. The intention behind their screaming seemed more to outdo their peers in the exercise rather than attract customers. The 15 minutes spent there bargaining, selecting, ensuring the correct weighing and eventually buying the vegetables would end up being the most arduous part of the day.

This time I bought vegetables at a quiet spacious air-conditioned store (named 'more' or something like that) with polite staff ready to help you with every task with gleaming smiles. There was no need to haggle, no need to try and select the good vegetables from the bad (all the vegetables appeared to be of a reasonable quality) and no need to lend a hawk's eye to inspect the process of weighing and packaging. This was smooth sailing all the way from the entrance to the shopping and back to the exit... Well, almost smooth - being a little rusty in the vegetable nomenclature, I did confuse a couple of vegetable names, but I am sure that would not take anything from the feat achieved by buying a scooter-load of vegetables effortlessly without going through the motions of a battlefield-like marketplace.

The 'Why" On Blogs - Part 1

Lately I've been surfing around the blogosphere. That got me back to some 'why' questions about blogs. These, I had asked myself the very first time I made an acquaintance with the concept of blogging. I was told 'A blog is like a personal diary on the Internet'. I wondered why the heck would someone want to put up their personal diary on the Internet? I had an electronic personal diary at the time, but I could not imagine putting that up in the open for all to read, analyze and judge. Why? Because they were thoughts which needed to be expressed somewhere but were not suitable for public consumption. Mind you, some of the entries would definitely have ruffled many a feather! Isn't that why people write personal diaries in the first place - to let out your thoughts which you think you can't even share with your friends? And for all the other thoughts one wants to share, you always have friends and family. With this simple chain of thought, I happily concluded that blogging was only for some lonely souls who had no one to lend a ear to their thoughts and were trying to seek solace in the hope that their transmission in cyberspace would increase the chances of them being heard. I did create a blog to see what it was all about and blogged anonymously for a short while but I soon lost interest. Thus, after corroborating my theoretical conclusion with practical experience, I dismissed blogs from my online itinerary.
The time at which the above research was conducted was while I was in college, i.e. when I lived the majority of my life in the real world. Since I graduated and joined the software industry, I see many things (blogging included) in a different light. So if you were wondering, why the heck has this guy spent his time to write a blog post if he doesn't believe in the concept in the first place, I must tell you that the new light to which I was referring to earlier has led to newer thought chains and newer conclusions, which I shall elaborate on, in a subsequent post.