ALL IS WELL

Remember Three Idiots the movie, and what people thought of it as movie.  Everyone thought it was remarkable and I thought well, its remarkable alright because the whole movie is about "miracles do happen".  If you are an Indian then miracles happen almost everyday.  Remember that visit to the hospital when so many people came to visit the doctor, and you were like wondering where did all these people come from.  Well my dear friend, they came because they wanted to know if you were all OK.  Imagine a person in a hospital read overglorified five stars if nobody is around when you are ill.  People team around you like worker bees around a queen bee because they want to know if "All is Well".  I always remember the old hindi song " Jo bhi pyar sey milla, hum ussey key ho liye".  After all life is too short to search for old friends.  So whoever you meet with love is a friend, my dear friend.  I have turned a cynic towards the late half of my life.  Turned 40 two years back, and started to wonder if anyone even takes critical, cynical people too seriously.  A dreamer they love, somebody who gives them positivity and dreams to take back home.  The dream merchants are all there, where they churn out dreams after dreams, all so real, or should I say "reel".

I confess I am not much of a dreamer nowadays, I only dream while I am awake.  Logic would dictate that, that means I am sleeping soundly most of the times.  Another song that comes to my mind "Days are Passing quickly now, Nights are seldom long", does the signify another milestone in my life.  It turned when I got married at 22, then it turned again at 32 when I was certified a misfit and again at 42 it takes a turn, don't know for what, except the only thing I realise is "that my best days are yet to come".  Do you realise how intrinsic songs are in our life.  Absolute mood busters, you wanna feel good take the ones that play on local FM channels everyday and on the other hand if you want to bust your good mood look up some old classics on youtube.  Beatles played an enormous part in bringing up my generation, you can well imagine all boys and girls in large sized goggles and sporting wide hemmed bell bottoms and tight fitting T-shirts jiving to "She loves me Yea Yea Yea".  Can you believe it, I formed a part of this group too.  I laugh my head of when I realise that I could have been carried away by such things as attitude and thoughts of who wore what and talked what before I made friends.  Imagine, if you didn't have a cool set of sneakers I wouldn't be seen with you.  What a joke matey !! .. ain't it ?  I believe that we are ignorant when we are young and even more ignorant as we grow older .. best left unsaid what I feel about myself today except that if there is a way to change then that is the way we must choose.

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Is HE for real ?

The travails of [aloofness] follow me everywhere I go.  Is this world for real ? I search for him everywhere and can't find him.  Is HE for real ? I mean does this guy even know what he means to me, he vanishes at the drop of a pin, says that I affect him in ways that keep him disturbed for days.  I can't help it if I love him so much or can I ?  My life, well it has been an ordeal with [death] for as long as I know.  From the day I was born I have struggled to keep afloat me and my family - a bunch of derelicts who can't take care of themselves forget about me, my father had to be taken care of the last couple of years of his life, he passed away when my life was just budding to aspire.  He breathed his last and I have died a million deaths since then.  When I was young he was the one person who took care of my needs, emotional and financial, I looked up to him like a follower of some saintly peer.  I have always loved him and still miss him a lot.  I have not been well eversince, some affliction or the other has bothered me for the past 5 years.  Its painful and draining.  God ! why is HE doing this to me now ?

[Death] is the cause of all relationships going sour.  I was unemployed in 2003 when I jumped the twin towers of [RP-II], needed to feel strong, need to know that there was something in me that I could admire and love.  It did work, I became strong and grew stronger, my dependence on medicine became less and less.  My darling daughter helped, she was the only one who could keep this volatile man calm and peaceful.  She found it in herself to reserve a special space in her heart that no one ever could trample upon, and when I say no one I mean no one.  The space distinctly said .. KEEP OUT, NO TRESPASSING !!!! God helps those who help themselves and ofcourse have a few people who help them.  I moved on to start a computer sales and repair business, which didn't do too well but it kept me busy for 3 years, running an office and a house.  The office space was owned by my father, but there were people staying in the house of two stories above.  I would dive into the basement where my office was, sit in my cabin trying out different equipment and networking fundamentals that I had only read about till then.  I wanted to do MCSE and CISCO which I did later on.  But I was here to sell computers, laptops and printers and provide a service outlet for the products I sold.  Experimented with everything during this time, I had time and the inclination till I realised why fate had pushed me to this business, but thats another story, of BPOs and the economy of the country.

In any case, as I would get up every morning and reach my workplace I hired two guys, one a local handyman and the other a marketing person.  I still remember the day the marketing executive arranged a meeting between me and a gentleman from Toshiba who wanted to sell his laptops through my agency.  Basvaraj was hired and trained by me, he would look upto me as his mentor, a sharp brain as you would expect of a marketing man however you always do not get what you expect.  The Toshiba guy arrived with a few demo laptop machines and our meeting went on for an hour before Basvaraj pointed out that unless he left his laptops with us to show to our clients we weren't in a position to solve his problems.  I don't know what prompted the Toshiba guy to actually leave his two laptops with us, we were total strangers but he trusted us.  Our life changed after that, we would run to every client of ours with the laptops giving demos and arranging business meetings.  Toshiba did a huge amount of business through us.  Changed us and I think changed them too to an extent. That was Basvaraj, a keen sense and intuitiveness surrounded his every action.   Oh yes, and there was another guy who was a contractor with me, Rajesh, a young guy with a bike who would run everyday to the press of the buttons on my mobile.  Hardwork had got him to where he had a bought a bike with his own money or was it a bajaj scooter, my memory fades here, but I do remember Akaash as well.  Akaash was part of my sourcing team, he was employed with a showroom but sub-contracted with me whenever it suited him, selling me stuff from his showroom.  We sold atleast 10 machines that first month through him, a strong handsome guy who wore spectacles around his ears almost signifying the only weakness on his manly well built frame.  Akaash had a very strong sense of business and was a crook at heart.  He knew how to manipulate people, and therefore stood out as very different from the 6-7 other people I was employing at that time.  As time passed I grew to dislike Akaash for his cunningness and guile.  Trickery followed each deal with him now.  Once when I sold large quantity of memory sticks to the French Consulate, Akaash sold me a dummy and almost ruined the deal.  That was my first lesson, that in business there is us and them.  To be a part of us means to relate on all crucial aspects called as values.  Otherwise it meant letting lose a serpent into a paradise.  An inside job as you would say.  Business is in my blood now.
Well nothing ventured nothing gained.

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Rise and Fall from Grace

Back .. the study on [ renewables and energy ] took its toll.  I felt ill and tired for a day, but I am back here with renewed energy and a new focus.  Been wondering so much about [death], you might think its the only thing on my mind.  But I have other things on my mind - like peace and loving [ RIP ].  Crimes, I did commit, oh and not normal ones, we are not talking about crimes of the carnal variety or love of mammon.  Come to think all this talk I try to weave on this post is all about getting to the point that is so hard to reach as it is the point of no return.  Its like getting stuck between a rock and a hard place, so if I get free I hope there is a pool of water at the bottom to fall into.  Saving grace is that I do really so want to write about it.

It all started when I was young and doing well in the city of Mysore, a lovely haven in the south of India.  Till then I had a sheltered life, living in the city of Delhi with my mom, dad and sis.  Mysore changed some things about me for sure, one I began to be counted amongst the educated elite of the country and two I picked up this habit Kleptomania.  I flicked 25 books from a shop here and shipped them to a woman in my life in Delhi as her birthday present.  How did I do it ?  Well, when a disease takes over your body, the mind is also affected.  I moved to Bangalore, another metropolis in the south, and again books were on my mind, what was it about them and this time it was Tom Peters "In Search of Excellence" that I jacked in my denim jacket to begin with.  Loved the book but I think my soul had lost the essence of its ability to read and assimilate.  I didn't know then but I was seriously ill because my ability to rationale what was right and wrong had been affected.  I just went to bookshops and picked whatever book I liked and walked out without paying for it.  What was I doing, was there a purpose, who for godsake was controlling my mind, I needed help then and now when I think of it there was no help at hand because I was looked upon as somebody who was a leader - a handsome fella with brains is always placed on a pedestal by a lot of folks.  By I needed help then as I needed help when I came back to Delhi and started this thing of stealing stuff from my own family, my cousins, from their houses - "God!! , where have you led me to and what am I doing".  The thought that occurs to me only now when I think about and repent.  Who would have thought that this tall strapping lad had such a mean streak in him.  He needed to be punished, to be brought back to his senses and how is probably another story that I will write in time. 

Suffice to say that I believe whatever crime we commit we pay for in this lifetime.  There is no afterlife only ONE LIFE TO LIVE.

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Renewables - Calling Earth, Anybody Home

AL Gore stated a long time back :

You look at the river,
The flowers and the bees,
the water as it flows along the banks
the wet grass and all of a sudden you feel
"Oh yeah I forgot about this"

I have been trying to get this message across to people for a long time, but I have failed everytime I have tried to do that.  I just didn't have the words to say what I have wanted to say.  My whole life just flashes by when I think "Oh yeah I forgot about this".  Nothing you would say, well, I have loved the rivers, green grass and trees, even the mud has made me happy slipping on it and getting dirty but what have I done to retain these things in the form I like them.  Nothing.  I was expecting them to remain the same year after year but they don't.  It gets hotter and hotter, muggier and muggier each year.  The dust and particulate matter in the air has gone up year after year.  So what happened ?

This post is about what I think happened and what must be done to prevent any more harm from coming to the earths environment.  See, the first point that caused most of the harm was the assumption which is still prevalent amongst people in power, read scientific advisors, that the earth is so big that we can't possibly have a lasting impact on it.  However the thing to remember is that one of the important things comprising the earths environment is the earths atmosphere.  The earth's atmosphere is so thin that we infact are capable of changing its composition and thus affecting the earths environment.  The suns radiation comes onto the earth in form of light waves most of which get absorbed by the earth and that heats up the earth.  Then some of the radiation that is absorbed is re-radiated back into space in the form of infrared rays and some of the outgoing infrared radiation is trapped by this layer of earths atmosphere and is held inside the atmosphere and that is what makes the earth livable.  Now heres where the problem sets in, if the layer of atmosphere gets thicker as it does with various pollutants that our emitted by us into the air then more and more of the infrared radiation gets trapped in the atmosphere causing the atmosphere to heat up called Global Warming.  The main culprit being the greenhouse gases.

Professor Roger Revelle was the first person in 1958 to start measuring the carbon dioxide in the Earths atmosphere and he did it for decades by sending up balloons from the middle of the pacific, collecting hard facts in the form of data with the help of his assistant. While this data kept showing that the carbon content was going up and up and up in the earths atmosphere, and I believe this data was available to the decision makers of the world, it was only in 1997 that the Kyoto protocol was ratified.  So many years of neglect had caused huge amount of damage to the earths atmosphere.

All this talk suddenly made me drowsy, dizzy with a back pain.  I m gonna take a break from writing and maybe discuss this more later on.

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