Rain :)

Its twilight... I should draw the curtains, close the balcony door and switch on the lights...  not doing so though... the rainbeats would be inaudible then :)

The pregnant sky delivering zillions of young drops to quench our souls, and probably earth's too...

Ooooh, how much I love rains!

PS: there have been very very few, counted occasions when I have really wished rains to stop.

Learnings from a job-seeker

Frequent job changes might or might not be good for your career.... and mind you its not optional at times, there is a bit of luck involved here... The if's that can disturb an ongoing job are numerous: my-new-boss-is-a-sickening-mentally-ill-incorrigible-ba****, -its-recession-time-so-, -we-think-that-you-are-the-worst-employee-that-we-have-seen-in-our-lifetime, or may be a softer...your-performance-is-not-upto-the-mark, -the-company-owner-passed-away-so-we-are-redoing-our-strategy, -you-have-become-expensive-for-us-after-your-promotion-this-year, -we-have-creditors-banging-on-our-door-so-.... mind you I am not making these up, these are all examples of what I have seen happening to my friends/ acquaintances/ colleagues.

But thats not what I was here to talk about.... I want to highlight that a 'job-search', however tedious, irritating, and at times f***ing frustrating process it might be, it does have a positive side to it:

1. You come to know your actual 'market price'; just in case your current salary made you forget that... of course you can be currently over-valued, under-valued.... 

2. You try to revise all the stuff that you read long time ago but were no longer useful for your current profile... its nice to breakaway from the lingo of your current profile and learn about something else

3. You try 'Linked-in'-ing more often

4. You look back to your current job (before the turmoil) and say 'oh, that was nice'.... now you wouldn't have said that when you were actually at that point of time...

5. You look at your CV and suddenly realize - oh hell, its been X years since I graduated!

Happy New Year

I know its been close to 3 months that I have posted anything... I am in the process of getting inspired (to write) so request the readers to wait till then :p

... and I wonder again...

Do i love him with all my 'mind'?
Yes


Do i love him with all my 'heart'?
YES


Do i love him with all my 'soul'?
YEP


Do i love him with all my 'physical self' ;-) ? 
YEAH


and do you think the same is true from his side?? 
yes :)


Oye lucky, te tainu fikar kaisii!!

... and I wonder

Is it all worth it?

When we choose to fulfill our wishes, trampling below our feet the wishes of our near-n-dear ones... Is it really worth it?

An inter-caste, inter-cultural wedding..... happiness about getting married lost in the midst of family tensions... I know ideally that should not be the case; but can we ignore the ground situation and choose to forget about the ecosystem we live in....? And even if we make our decisions... is it really for the best? Not sure....

To all those who wish to marry against parents' wishes.... its harder than you think, much much much harder, not just for you but for them..... the hardest part is watching them go through the the hard stuff.....It might worth it, but there is a good chance that it might not be.... its hard on your partner too... So, if you have slightest iota of doubt whether he is mature enough to take this....think again.

Wish I was never writing this.... sometimes, I wish I should have taken back my step.

Karma musings....

I believe all spheres of one's life are closely tied together with one common factor - the woman herself ("the man himself"; I sometimes like to choose 'woman' instead of man as a gender neutral noun - slightly eccentric but heck its my blog!)... Lets not digress... I was saying that I believe all spheres of one's life are closely tied together one common factor - the woman herself. Whether one is confident, responsible, sincere, detail driven etc... and most important the underlying philosphy "what drives you?".
If I have to categorize my philosphy in life, its very 'karma'-centric. It draws its inspiration from Geeta's "Do your best and leave the rest to the Lord", Ayn Rand's "objectivism", Kiplings "If", Jagdish's "Sach hum nahi...", Bachchan's "Madhushaala", .... and numerous other literary works.....

This reminds me how I have lost touch with the language I loved and admired so much - Hindi... the last post on my Hindi blog is dated Oct 2007. There was a time when I was so intrigued by the language that I wanted to take that up for further studies (of course joining Investment Banking was never a part of the plan, I didn't even knew that something like that existed).There was a time when I got 96% marks in Hindi in CBSE board - and I say that here to remind myself that there was a streak in me that I did not polish properly thereafter. I should do something about it - though I have thought about it many times - but the efforts havent been, I admit, half-hearted........


_______________

The above was an unfinished blog post from I don't know when.... I am publishing it now (in its unfinished form) with this small foot note saying that I am attempting to revive my Hindi literary capabilites... You can find the proof at http://shabdaurabhivyakti.blogspot.com/... well, I know I am still not there, considering where I was as a 12-14 yr old teenager... but I am trying... :)

Lets worship Shakti this Navratri

Hindu religion is beautiful in the way its fluid. There are no 'tenets' as such. No single deity can claim supremacy. All the forms lead to a single source, God and 'his' Shakti,..... God himself is no 'being' but an entirety of what 'was', 'is' and 'can be'... So,in a transcendental sense, its nothing but energy... So, in fact God and Shakti are not two different entities... its the same. The terms would have come about probably because we humans feel a need to classify 'living' entities as 'male' and 'female'...

Oh! I am digressing from the title!!!!

We consider Navaratri as an auspicious period, or at least a 'good' period. We worship the Goddess and pay reverence to her... But do we understand her? She is Shakti.

While offering Poojas this Navratri, lets invoke the Shakti.

Shakti, for me, signifies two things: 'Female' part of our universe, 'Energy'.

- 'Shakti', the energy within us... doesn't really matter whether one is a male or a female. Lets realize and utilize the energy within us. Lets realize our potential. Potential as a human, potential as a citizen, potential as a child, potential as a sister, potential as a friend and so on.... Do we realize how much can we do... achieve... offer... to this world... and to ourselves...

- 'Shakti', the female ... A famous quote goes as follows...

“Watch your thoughts, for they become words. Watch your words, for they become actions. Watch your actions, for they become habits. Watch your habits, for they become character. Watch your character, for it becomes your destiny.”

Lets respect women through our words, actions and habits.... If you are a women reading this, it goes for you too... Lets not underestimate our sisters, mothers, daughters. Lets treat them as equals - equal as family members, equal as citizens, equal as human beings....

Lets give them equal opportunities, lets not assume them to be a 'weaker' sex... Shakti means Power, how can it be weaker?....

A society that worships 'Shakti, the female power' kills its daughters in the womb.... considers its daughters a 'burden'... considers wives to be 'nagging decorative home pieces'... considers women to be sex objects/ child bearing machines.... somewhere we all are aware of this paradox...

Let us supplement our prayer offerings with our thoughts and actions this festival season... Lets us pay our reverence to Shakti - ours and the universe's.

Is it the PMS?

Is it the PMS thats driving me to tears this rainy morning.

For the starters, two things:

1. I love rains, I consider a cloudy day a 'bright' day. Rain in no ways means gloom to me... I love love love rains. If in doubt, go back to my 2007 blogs.

2. I have always maintained that I don't suffer from PMS. There might be some physical warnings but no emotional effects of anything like a PMS on me....

First, I got so damn emotional while listening to 'tu iss tarah se meri zindagi'.. in fact I even read the lyrics on one of the blogs, and then i mailed 'A' the lyrics and told him 'I love this song'. He being quite sentimentally-handicapped hasn't bothered to reply.

Then I was watching/ listening to the song 'do naina aur ek kahani'... and tup-tup-tup... here it comes (thank God, nobody else is in office today to watch me in this state)...

and now 'likhne waale ne... asan hun tur jaana'.... [btw, its an awesome song which I think only a girl or may be a father (amongst males) would understand]

Deep down I am a pathetically sentimental person; I love her but I am slightly scared of her too... I mean she can cry about almost anything under the sun... and at times she gets too sentimental to handle and goes off into her own world... and then she expects others to understand what she is thinking about... and she might feel sad that nobody can understand 'that' part of her..... and also she might get too touchy and melancholic at such times....

But, I love her too... because she represents the intrinsic part of me; and also because her 'sentiments' can yield to best of creations (poems/ sketches/ blog posts etc etc) :D

So, I guess its not the PMS, its just the same old sensitive child-woman sitting within...

Need suggestion

If you have been reading my blog for sometime.... you would know that there is an important character that has entered my blog... my boyfriend (people choose to call him my fiance too, coz technically we are engaged).

His intials are same as mine i.e. A.

So, I started calling him A2, but thats so uncool... So, I am in the process of finding a good blog name for him..... I can obv use his second name to form an acronym but thats not exciting too...

Ummm.... May be I can call him He-A and call myself She-A...... :O

But He-A sounds like He-man..... (btw how silly the word He-man is!!, perfect example of what we used to call redundancy in C++)...

May be I can call him Mr.A and call myself Ms.A.... but I do think there ought to be better choices!!!! :|

Morning Good Morning mail

On a group mail....

A2 : Good morning all

K: (another friend on the group mail): Morning all!!

Me: Lovely, cloudy morning today!

K: Pray that you don't end up spending hours on the road by evening.

Me: I am an optimist... :D

I hope it rains and rains hard...!! roads should be clogged throughout the evening... and then it will get too late to travel with the cabbie driver.... so somebody will be forced to drive down from their Gurgaon office to mine (20 kms), and safely drop me to my house (35kms)...

K: thats the spirit! A2, u r damn lucky ;)