I have a dream

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College life has ended. I am on the verge of entering into a completely new life, a life quite different from what I am used to as of now. A dream from a distant past has been fulfilled : I have become a professional, a working one! But today I realised that there’s no end of dreams;big or small; important or trifling dreams are a constant phenomenon.

Well yes friends, not for the first time in my life, today I say it again : I have a dream. This dream has somehow forced me to think…think about so many things; think about what have I achieved in my life? How have I helped my country? How have I rendered my services to the society? So many questions, but the answer to all of them was a big fat NOTHING. Till now, I have had nothing that I can be proud of truly.

This dream has forced me to think…what next? Is this it? Or is something still remaining? Kya Picture abhi baaki hai mere dost…or has the movie ended and the time has come for the credits to show themselves up? Well I don’t think that its over, I don’t think that the time for giving the credits has come yet…I think its still the formative stage, the dramatic climax is still to come….so keep watching because yes my friends, I have a dream!

If Only…

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Things change so dramatically, sometimes in a blink of an eye, sometimes before even you could think a thing. Today its exactly a year hence and some change or another had to be there, but a change of this nature and this proportion was something that I never expected nor a thing that I ever imagined. And today, I feel so strange, so very strange.

Every year on the 18th of July, right from 2006 we went for a franctic search for a suitable gift for Chotu as his birthday would be  at the brink…looked for it at so many places, so many shops, and then finally settled every time for a box of Ferrero Rocher and a book or a game CD (pirated of course!!). But it’s not the case today. This time there’s no box of Rocher, no book, no CD, no expectations of a great card, nothing at all.  One single incident took away so many things from so many lives…God! Sometimes it feels like blasphemy even to think that it was the work of the almighty, ever kind, the Lord God of ours.

If things weren’t like what they are at present, i.e. if everything were normal i.e only if he had worn a helmet that day or perhaps crossed that place one minute earlier or later, he still wouldn’t have accompanied me to one of those annual frantic gift searches as he would have been basking in the summer of California at Google, but there would have been a satisfaction and conviction that he would call from halfway round the globe just to wish Chotu a Very Happy Birthday…That conviction is what I miss the most and so does Chotu and everyone else who knew you…

Invictus

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I saw this ultimate movie, Invictus starring Morgan Freeman as Nelson Mandela and the poem with which he inspired the Rugby team captain.

So here goes:

Out of the night that covers me, Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
… My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

– Invictus by William Ernest Henley

About the movie : Its a yet another scintillating performance by one of the biggest names in Hollywood when it comes to “real acting”. And the storyline being real it was even tougher for him to live up to the expectations…but you know what he has dazzled. The best part was how he ingrained all the personality traits of the great Madiba and executed them with a flair characteristic of Freeman…In other words the movie was brilliant and heart-touching. Its a must watch!

And now the poem: Do you really think I have to write anything about it?? The poem speaks for itself!

Yap yap yap!

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Yeah it has yet again been a long time since I dropped by…the world has changed a lot in these few months. My world has altered almost irrevocably for the better and I no better than to utter a single word of complaint (for that matter I cant even think of any!!). Jokes apart, lots of things have happened…but some have been quite a handful and they do need mentioning.

So lets take’em on one by one :

1. India becomes No.1 in Test Cricket

Well I started watching cricket and obviously supporting India when I was in Std. III (God that’s more than 11 years back now) and believe me I had never thought that India will achieve these heights ( though I dreamed of this a many times!) Many captains and coaches hence India reached this milestone under the captaincy of the one and only, The Golden Boy, Mahendra Singh Dhoni and the coaching of the South African great, Gary Kirsten…its seems like a dream but its true and am really loving it!   (Related NEWS : Dhoni got married (yeah so?? Let him be married its his personal life man why the hell do all the NEWS channels have to telecast this story forever and ever??)

2. Life

I found my life…and she found me too…and so did the family as  a whole!!

3. I Got a Job

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Yes, finally I got a job. 5 interviews, 8 writtens later finally I landed into a job and that too when I was least expecting it! And you know what, I ma looking forward towards the joining with all my heart…if only it came a bit earlier or if only I knew when I have to join!! (Yeah I know!! Keeping my fingers crossed )

4. Back to Fatness

Now this is where the ones with a dark tinge to them appear, I mean the NEWS. I have again started piling up weight..Gone are the days when through ultimate determination and perservation I had succeeded in cutting myself down to the eighties…but somehow, due to one reason or the other I am back in business and i think the dreaded century isn’t that far away!! 😦

5. Bandhs, Strikes, Naxals and Politics

This particular week has like something I had never ever envisaged. I mean out of the seven days of the week, 4 were bandhs. One , Bharat Bandh against inflation. Two and Three, Bharat Bandh by the Naxals protesting the killing of a top guy of their cock-n-bull outfit. Four, Jharkhand Bandh protesting the vandalism of the Rajrappa Temple.

About the Bharat Bandh, it was an all party thingy (of course it means that it was led by the opposition parties) to protest the decontrol of the petrol prices, which was a inevitable step that the government had to take one day or the other. I mean it was like draining the government off  Thousands of Crores of Rupees every year which wasn’t helping India’s economic growth in any possible way. Yes the step will now cause people to dig deeper into their pockets, but I don’t think the calling and staging of Bharat bandhs is ever going to help in any fathomable way. About the Naxals and their various sympathizers like Arundhati Roy, all I can think of is SOD OFF!

The vandalism at the Rajrappa Temple was something very very unacceptable. How dare looters break the idol of the Shakti, the guilty must be caught at the earliest and the punishment should be as stringent as possible, because you can’t hurt people’s religious sentiments and get away man, you can’t ever.

6.  Rupee gets a symbol

Well this was today. Its great isn’t it…we have got a symbol for our currency : The Rupee.

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Will giving a symbol to the rupee raise its international standard, its international value? yes I know its only the fifth currency in the world to gain a symbol, but still is it going to be of any significance at all as far as the strength of the rupee is concerned? I don’t think so…but anyways lets see…

7. I BECAME AN ENGINEER!!!



Promises and Beliefs…

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Yet again quite a long time since my last post…cant help it! 😦 But I have some promises to keep (yeah so do you!) and some very important things to believe (yeah yeah you too!)…So things will keep coming and I will keep blogging. However intermittent, however irregular the posts may be, they will come, and that I can promise.

Promises and beliefs…why did I choose such a topic?? Even I don’t know a thing about it…but since it came and threatened to blow my head off with the accompanying throbbing, I decided to give it a jot.

Promises

“Promises are made to be broken“, yeah a trite saying that features only in the B-grade Hindi movies these days. Believe me this has become something archaic. These days people are making promises while totally meaning to keep them with all their hearts. If it weren’t so, would we still have been getting the water and electricity and the food that our politicians promise us while begging for votes? They keep their promises…believe it or not they do…even if the urgency to fulfill them comes to their minds only when the next polls start knocking the doors.   The frantic pace with which the roads are built, the electrifications are done and the other promises are fulfilled, all by the MLA funds and MP funds when the polls approach simply fill us citizens with hope and awe. ” Ahh!! Minister Babu is doing work…see how much he cares about us…” It is really great to see how punctual our great politicians are…poll time comes and they are like omnipresent too…with garlanded visages on every nook and cranny of the street, requesting our votes. No no, don;t worry Minister babu isn’t asking for our precious votes for free; in return he has  many new promises (and some of the old ones that he couldn’t keep). Cast your vote in his favor and see those promises come true when the next polls come!

Beliefs

Now talking about beliefs…they are the most complex and abstract of all the human emotions that God has made for our use…believe me!! Even the English dictionary confirms the importance of this absurdly absurd emotion. There are more than 100 words in the English dictionary that are related to belief only. Some mean lack of it while some mean the abundance of it. Some are severe quarrels due to them while some are peaceful marriages because of them. If we concentrate on just 1 hour of our lives…we will see how much we believe. We believe in our army for our safety, we believe in others for most of the work in the world, we believe in God and feel blessed, we believe in our parents for all nit-bits  in our lives, we believe in our spouse, we believe our friends, we believe our sports persons (most of all Sachin), we believe in luck…most of all we believe in ourselves.

SO…

All I can say is keep on believing and keep on fulfilling your promises, because whatsoever you do in your life comes back to you, in the same form or an altered one, but in the end it comes back. So do good if you want to see good thing happen to you. Keep your promises to see the promises others make to you get fulfilled. Keep on believing people and yourslef, if you want them to believe you…because thats what life’s all about!

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50 is a big number…

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Papa turned 50 today…and you know what 50 is a big big number.

I mean 5 decades –  50 years, that’s roughly around 18250 days…God that’s huge. But more than the years or days its the amount of love and respect that he has earned in the past years that matters…wherever he has gone in his tenure as the Jail Superintendent he has earned a lot of both…

He is my idol, the exact thing that I want to be…not that I wanna be the prison superintendent exactly, but that I wanna be like him. I want to have love for people like him, I want to have admiration for elders like he does, I want to be the bridge between people that he has been throughout his life. I want to be the boat that he has been in helping people cross the river of troubles quite so often.

When I will be 50, I will really be proud of myself if can be anything that can be compared to my papa!

Papa you ROCK!!! 🙂

Man/Machine??

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Sorry for being so so so very late in posting something new here…loads were happening…so..

Anyways, why suddenly this topic??

Its that a friend and I were having quite a discussion tonight – about what man was supposed to be and what man has become. about what god intended us to be and we in the end made out of ourselves. We discussed about a lot of things, about sentiments and emotions, about relationships, about success, about winning and losing. And yet we couldn’t come to any particular solution or agreement.

We share the common view on the modern people who include me and him of course. Today, people have mostly been turned into ones who only care about winning, in any possible manner, by any possible kind of approach. They don’t think twice before asking for favors and then moving on once they get them. I mean, once the purpose from a particular person is achieved move on and never look back. All they care is about winning. Loss is something that has become exceedingly invisible from the dictionary of the modern man. Its all about working at maximum efficiency with minimum losses and minimum input. And you know what, this is what being practical has come to mean.

God created us to live our lives fully, to enjoy it to the fullest extent. But I think this enjoyment can’t ever come if we stop thinking about others. If we don’t lose a single time what is the pleasure of winning then? If someone doesn’t lose ,how will he ever experience the ecstasy of victory?

I, by nature tend to think a lot about the things that affect me in general and the world in particular.  Whenever there is a single instance of mass killing, my heart bleeds out. Whenever someone around me is sad I become restless until his/her agony subsides. Why? I really don’t  know. It may be due to my impractical nature…maybe. But if being practical means not even thinking twice before walking over a corpse just in order to gain the advantage in life, its well and superfine that I am impractical.

The modern man has become more of a machine, always thinking about winning while the way in which it happens  is inconsequential to them. But in today’s world if you have to succeed in the conventional sense then there’s no other way than to be practical . Well for me I can’t be ever this , I am human and can’t think like the robots and machines ever in my life. I would like to be a loser of a human than a winner of a machine anytime of the day.

The Union Budget 2009 : Where do we students stand?

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With all the hype after the Union Budget of 2009 the question that flashed into my mind was..where do we students stand? Did we gain anything or is the budget bad for us in some way or the other? I decided that I really needed to know this, and so fished out the speech of our Honorable Finance Minister Mr. Pranab Mukherjee that he delivered while announcing the budget of this year.I know nothing much about Economics (yeah I studied Economics in my XIIth Std, but comeon) and so most of the terms like Fiscal Deficit and MAT etc. were way above my domain of understanding. But I did succeed in finding some things that are surely going to affect the student community.

Well the major things that I came across are :

  • Friends ( I mean students of course) from the economically weaker section of the society will be able to get student loans “with a full interest subsidy during the period of moratorium“.  This will cover the loans from Scheduled banks to pursue the approved courses in technical and professional streams.   Now that is a good one !
  • The study loans taken or pursuing higher education in all fields of study, including the vocational studies pursued after schooling will be deductable in respect of interest on the loans with the amendment of the Section 80-E of the Income Tax Act.
  • This time the government has raised the amount allocated to ‘Mission in Education through ICT‘ to around 900 crore rupees. If this amount is used properly (i.e. without the officers in-charge thinking of filling in their coffers) this sure will lead to good education for the Indian youth who form quite a percentage of the totality of us.
  • The government has also allotted Rs. 495 crore for the setting up and up-gradation of Polytechnics throughout the nation. Moreover Rs. 827 crore has also been set aside for the establishment of Central Universities in each of the states that don’t have one till now.
  • Rs. 2113 crores have been allotted for the IITs (after all they are the pride of our country !!) and NITs which includes the 450 crores for the establishment of new IITs and NITs.  Overall the planned expenditure on higher education has been proposed to be raised by Rs. 2000 crore (whoops!!).
  • Pranab Mukherjee, happy with IGNOU(Indira Gandhi National Open University) has allocated Rs. 50 crore to it. In the words of the minister ” IGNOU which has been the forefront of distance education , has been provided with an allocation of Rs. 900 million that also includes Rs. 400 million for grants to the state open universities”. Well atleast we can expect a little better course material and contacts programme from the IGNOU now that they have the cash that they needed (or  wanted!!) .
  • Now since the mobile phones have become almost a necessity for the students these days, government’s decision to fully exempt accessories, parts and components imported for the manufacture of mobile phones from CVD of 4% is sure going to make the mobile phones cheaper than what they are at the present. Thats good news isn’t it?
  • Talking of students, how can we forget paper and other paper related articles. Yes they are going to cheaper too after the decision of reducing the excise duty to 4% from 8% on such items! Keep on writing and studying brothers!!
  • If there isn’t enough light around how will you study? Governemt has also reduced the excise duty from cheaper electric bulbs and CFLs…now no excuses.
  • I know many will be thinking there must be electricity to light the bulbs and CFLs which sadly India lacks on by a huge margin. There is a huge disparity between the amount of power demand the amount supplies. Pranab Da has increased the allocation of funds for the Accelerated Power Develeopment and Reform Programme (APDRP) to Rs. 2080 crore (the hike is a whopping 160%). If this money is utilized well then surely our power problems will lessen, i.e. we wont have to face the frequent power cuts (which curiously rise in frequency during the week before the exams!) that the whole country faces.
  • Yes many of the students of today are en-route of getting employed. But at this time of Global Economic Recession jobs are the most hard to find commodity. To help people get proper employment government has announce the establishment of Modern Employment Exchanges where the job seekers can register online and can approach any employment exchange. A national web portal with common software is being developed under this project that will contain all the data regarding the availability of skilled persons on the one hand and the requirements of skilled people by the industries, making the process of job seeking a bit less cumbersome.
  • Obviously not every thing can be good always can it? The prices of toothpastes are going to rise after the budget of 2009.  But oral hygeine is a must isn’t it? So nothing can be done…you have to cough up more money while colgate-ing or close-up-ing thats it.

The past few days I have been watching the debates over the budget of 2009. Well I got bored everytime I heard big words like Fiscal Deficit etc. (yeah one may refer to wikipedia for that I know) I know that is important, but for us students I guess these were the highlights of the Union Budget 2009!

Sadness…

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Sometimes you try your level best and then too all that you end up with is sadness. Yeah you do get some thumbs-ups and well-dones but at the end of the day the feeling that remains in the heart of yours is sadness. It eats you alive. It makes you burn in the scorching fire of regret, the what-ifs and the what-if-nots. It drains all your strength if it is allowed to linger, but can well be one of the best teachers if looked upon in the correct manner. No no, its not that I have suffered some recent defeat or something…I felt this when I saw Andy Roddick cry after losing the Wimbledon Finals to Roger Federer.

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Yes the Super-Server fought like a bull till the very end of the match and once even seemed to take the match for himself. He was sometimes magnificent and sometimes full of power…but in the end I think the perseverance of Federer was what undid the Roddick Dream! Yes Federer proved to the world that he is best player of Tennis that the world has ever seen. I mean not everyone wins 15 grand slams in one’s carreer and the way Federer has acheived this glory, with all the finesse and grace is something that will make him immortal in the annuls of World Tennis.

But it sure was heartbreaking to see Roddick crestfallen, although he ought to be proud of himself. But thats the point that I am trying to make…regret always makes way into your mind when you fail…even if you fought real hard to win. So, all Roddick needs is perseverance. I know its easy to say than to actually do so, but I know the Super-Server will do it.

Go Roddick Go!

The Missile Man

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I was hoping someday I could attend one of his lectures and question answer sessions and finally my hope turned into realtiy and all due to the summer vacations at my college. Bemused?? Well actually Dr. A.P.J Abdul Kalam, the missile man of India visited our city on a 2 day tour here on the 24th of June 2009, and he was to address a gathering of around 500 students of different schools and colleges of the city. Since we were having the summer vacations so only the Ranchi guys could come and luckily I am one of them!!!

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Dr. Kalam , as I had heard and read has a real simple demeanor and way of talking. His interaction with the students with the well timed jokes and several pledges made the address just fly by…I liked the way he objectivized the various ways of achieving what we want in our life and to contribute to the society…the splendid concept of succeeding with integrity was a real food for the thought. The best thing that I remember from the address is, the four things that we need to avhieve anything in life:

  • Having an aim in life
  • Gathering knowledge to achieve it…making friends with good books
  • Working Hard to achieve it
  • Perseverance…never be defeated by failure

The most important thing that I noticed was…well to be truthful I and so many others in my college lost the will to listen to other people…be it classes or the guest lectures by the imminent guests during our college fests…I just could not bear to listen after the passage of a mere 10 minutes…and today I listened on to Dr. Kalam for over an hour and even repeated some of the things he said and requested all of us to repeat with him (which I am sure I would not have if I were attending some other guest lecture!)…Man he has some charisma…certainly he’s the missile man of India…a real pioneer!