Happy Birthday!

Some of us are fortunate to have at least one true SOS friend.
And when she turns 30, you are glad that finally she is reaching an age of some wisdom- may be now she'll tell you to do something other than punch guys on their stupid faces.
May be now she'll make better judgement calls when she is talking to your parents about you.
May be now she won't confuse your past-present-future crushes and embarrass you in their very presence.
May be now she'll not ridicule you for the gifts that you pick up for her(voluntarily & involuntarily)..

I would never bet my money or for that matter even my useless 2007 Sony Ericsson Walkman phone on any of the above actually coming true.. Its all a bunch of wishful thinking and nothing more.. She'll never change, least of all because of some bully called turning 30..

But I hear you when you talk about all the unknowns in life. The ideal version of life and how we are still so far away and still so clueless. I don't know why our mind plays this trick on us and we feel this sudden urge to be all wise and grown up one fine day, all I can offer you is:
1. Sing you your birthday song in the most ridiculous tone I can summon(check done!)
2. Dedicate a post to you complete with pictures of you in a silver crown from our golden days(check-done!)
3. Little gyan- If all of life is sorted out, then spice kahan se aayega!

Again Happy Birthday.. :)

Gravity

If there was a competition for the most popular word in October, my money would be on 'Gravity'. Let’s keep the rules simple, we decide popularity just based on online count of a word most used/searched/hash-tagged in October.

Just for curiosity sake I googled the string 'most popular word' but it looks like this pageantry has not yet made its debut. Imagine if there was a stock index for words based on the trading (conversations) we do as a society; we have been trading money and words for ages but the written and spoken word has no real (quantifiable) value. We could change all that!
I'll leave this bizarre idea to rest at this point and assuming that a competition did exist, this is why I would vote for gravity. Recently the word gravity pulled me in the following three ways:

• The movie Gravity ( the movie will get all the credit for bringing the 3D spot light on the lowly word gravity and getting all the online votes for our champion word. The movie is an impressive visual treat, kudos to the power of imagination and the hard work to execute it)
• FedEx living PSP session ( there are some aspects of corporate culture that are beyond the control of an individual, you just have to live with it. Interesting choice of word there for all things 'Gravity')
• I went skydiving last weekend and with all the talk about weightlessness and free fall gravity was self-implied.

I didn't think of the competition idea when I was suspended in mid-air and I definitely did not sing 'it’s funny how falling feels like flying for a little while' when I was ‘up’ there. My mind was mostly blank at that point, I wasn't really thinking of scary 'what-if' scenarios but in all honesty there was one thought that did cross my mind.

After the adrenaline of the free fall part had subsided, and I was peacefully suspended holding the parachute. I looked down and realized that one of my shoe laces was open and flying freely in the air. With a whoosh the ‘what-if’ thought flashed in my head, what if I trip and fall on my open shoe lace when we land? I wasn’t too pleased with myself to be hanging in mid-air with a lousy open shoe lace.
Later when I went running the next day, I took extra care to lace up my shoes.  Did I just develop a new paranoia after the sky diving experience (even when I didn’t trip on my shoe laces)? Hopefully not!

But there was one explanation that I found more plausible. I wasn't too nervous about the jump because in my mind I had reposed all responsibilities to the instructor. He was going to do all the heavyweight lifting and I just had to hang in there. People have different comfort levels when it comes to letting go of control and trust the other person to  save your a** when things are beyond your expertise. With tandem skydiving they don’t require you to have any skills to survive, they just expect you to trust the intelligence of another individual and make the jump. I could muster that trust, so I wasn’t too anxious about the jump.
However seeing the open shoe lace, the ownership of responsibility changed, it was something in my control and my mind quickly raced to do the ‘what-if’ scenario evaluation.
So the simple moral of the story is ‘tie your shoelaces’ and the not so simple analogy is about trust, responsibility and letting go. I don’t trust people blindly but when I do, I just let go of my control and no doubt I have landed either upstream or downstream on the Nile and it’s not a just world at both ends and remember it’s the wild Nile..

I have harked a bit far south here, however in the end my final vote is gravity and just to tilt the scale in my favor, I have already used the word 10 times in my blog (there is one in the label) :)

In case you would like to hear the song referenced above:

One Thing..

In life all we need to know is 'one thing', as simple as it may sound it is the most honest realization that I have ever had. I cannot claim to have explored an exceptionally wide array of experiences in life. I cannot claim to be the medallion at the end of the race. And I ain't no 'Sir Oracle; when I ope my lips, let no dog bark!”. I guess enough self-depreciating disclaimer, however we do grow wiser about some things as we go along.

When I learnt cycling back in first year in college, I would borrow it from my second year seniors and would try learning by myself in the free open spaces we had within the hostel compound. I took to the road only once I had learnt enough so that I wouldn't 'repeatedly' become the victim of cycle-hazing/ragging by the school kids who couldn't fathom how someone could make it to college without knowing something as basic as cycling. This fear wasn't a figment of my imagination; I learnt the hard way that you take to the road only when you can confidently be decently inconspicuous there! However this learning wasn't the 'one thing' that changed the course of my life. More basic than the fear of taking to the road was the challenge that I couldn't balance my cycle. I would focus on the wheel to make sure I wasn't banking either way and try to adjust the handle only to fall each time. Seeing me struggle 'the oracle doth spoke- child take your eyes off the wheels and look straight ahead...just don't look down.' He was the hostel guard; 'baba-ji' and he just shouted across to me from his watch tower and went back to smoking his bidi. Honestly that was the only fear I had to overcome, I didn't have to fight any rowdies or intimidation. I didn't have to learn to focus and align my eye, hands and feet and the wheel, I just had to learn to look away and look straight ahead. The rest would fall in place.

Yes it was that simple, just one thing to get the wind talking as I rode along in my purple ladybird!

The other anecdote isn't this prehistoric, this one is more recent. As I ran along the beach in Rio, I was jealous of all the people who could get into the waters and play with so much ease and absolutely no care for the world around. At that point swimming didn't just look like a physical activity it looked like a cultural hallmark. In India I felt our relationship with water is ostensibly sanctimonious or a little hypocratic in some ways. I have always loved the waters but I had never experienced this freedom and ease before. I'll have to admit that I have never been to Goa, and everywhere I did go I found myself around people who would walk gingerly along the shore secretly wishing they could throw themselves in the water with no care for the world. As a society we soak in so many inhibitions that we are afraid to be seen all free and wet and frolicking in water! All this critical realization wasn't the one learning that I needed in order to woo the waters when I went swimming this summer. 
I didn't enroll for any professional help and went all cultural. And what a cultural learning it was, my Chinese roommate was kind enough to religiously coach me for the first two days. Her Chinese bunch of friends took me under their wing and I was learning 'frog style' just as all Chinese kids in primary school! The south East Asians were the only persistent swimmers, the Americans loved to take a quick dip and then sloth and float in the summery sun. The learners, the having fun and the lazing crowd all shared the same lane and you could strike instant comradeship with the exchange of few smiles and sheepish grins. I persistently went every alternate day, initially just playing around and then slowly pushing myself a little harder. I observed others swim almost effortlessly but for me the waters were like a strong opponent that I had to fight with my hands, legs and my breathing. I had some what learnt to move my legs and hands which had some resemblance to the swimmers around me, but my breathing was killing me. I couldn't time it, and would end up coughing out or drinking in the water. I knew I was doing something wrong, I was missing something. One fine day after admiring for long a Korean guy who swam past me every time I was gaping for breathe I asked him for a helpful tip. He was caught a little off guard and in that slightly awkward exchange of English sentences mid water I could only pick up the word 'rhythm'. Yes that is the 'one' thing about swimming, following your own rhythm. 

The hands, legs, breathing all need to follow a rhythm and when you get one, the waters sing along.

Ah I feel so inadequate at times, learning to do all the things that most people seem to know since birth. And may be this should be a consolation for me that fundamentally I am just missing out on ‘one thing’ before I can join the elite club. So I tell myself it’s just ‘one thing’ that I really need to know before I can drive someday. Inshallah!

Towards a more social world.

Are we really in a more 'social' world or we have just taken a collective fancy for this word? 

What made me think about this topic is not another one of my social media consulting projects for a small business in a developing country or a NetImpact project for a nonprofit, or a class presentation for Management of Technology class. I stand guilty of exploiting the same topic –voluntarily & involuntarily in all the above cases to get my grades or make my resume meatier. There is so much interesting content on this topic freely available over the internet that it just seems the easiest choice for a lazy ass to become subject matter expert (SME). SME is a sly chide that you get when you sell the same stuff over & over again but the trick is to still have a new feather up your sleeve in every eventuality.

If the PowerPoint presentations were not already enough, the Facebook IPO caused a furor over news media. You could just gape at how all that buzz and hoopla could translate into exorbitant figures. Much worse it was the only dinner topic discussion in my section of the society- young men-women living on a student loan on foreign shores (US) battered by a dismal stock exchange (India) and betting on the IPO tanking eventually. 

So now when all this dust has finally settled, I decided I wanted to revisit the topic once again. I wanted to look at the whole social media/social-networking/business from a anthropological viewpoint. Not long ago we lived in an age where knowledge was more monopolist and private than open source. This statement may still hold true about big scientific discoveries, but I am talking about experiential knowledge- from kitchen, from garage, from camping tent from activities ranging from music, photography, dramatics, writing, singing, dancing to almost anything under the sun we are sharing our compositions, our recipes, our tips more freely and learning all the more. Has technology created the 'germ' of sharing or we always had this germ latently present in our system? I choose to repeatedly use the word germ, as some people get so affected that their private lives are not just the plain vanilla 'open book' but annoyingly jazzy 'face book' (pun intended). 

Why do we share? I would acquiesce with someone who puts his finger on the intellect but I would argue that we share for emotional reasons. I write the blog to share my thoughts but I also have my eyes on the view statistics, on the comments and on the list of followers. My blog is another way of conversation for me, and I like the dialogue. Again when I sit down to prepare marketing content for the company I am interning with, I am just not thinking about content, I have to think about building associations. I have to try to relate to the end customers, not in an emotional soapy sense but in an open sharing way. So we share because we are philanthropic and believe in enriching ourselves by learning and sharing. We share because it gives us an ego-boost, it makes us feel important. We share because ultimately we want to sell, and sharing is a way to build trust. Men & women always have a reason; we rarely do anything without reason. (This can become a new blog post).

Then again sharing can go viral. Is it an expression of our long lost tribal instinct to rally around something? If so then this instinct already existed and technology merely facilitated it. Animals also strongly exhibit this attribute, ever woken up in the middle of night and observed how one barking dog gets the entire community barking and yes you can bid adieu to sweet sleep for at least next half an hour. Yes all things viral (and barking) die out eventually to give you back your peace of mind. However these brief moments of glory sometimes define entire lifetimes. And yes we are such anomalies sometimes we take ages to build certain associations and sometimes we just clock million likes within a couple of hours/minutes(whatever!)

To sum up, man is inherently social and is always seeking (monetary/emotional/intellectual) interactions. Technology has merely facilitated this inherent need. However this facilitation cannot be qualified as unobtrusive and non-intrusive, it has altered the existing social models of communication, business and even day to day interactions. I cannot bet on the success or the longevity of the current system but the inherent need will always create different media, new models and new ecosystems and we will have to adapt and evolve correspondingly.