I was again in office on a non-working day as there were some issues those needed to be resolved on priority. But thats Ok.By tomorrow I would have broadband connection at my home and that's something I was looking for long..Below is something I scribbled few months back and so now it makes it way to my blog.

For those in their twenty-something's......

This puts it all into words perfectly. They call it the "Quarter-life Crisis."

It is when you stop going along with the crowd and start realizing that there are a lot of things about yourself that you didn't know and may or may not like.

You start feeling insecure and wonder where you will be in a year or two, but then get scared because you barely know where you are now.

You start realizing that people are selfish and that, maybe, those friends that you thought you were so close to aren't exactly the greatest people you have ever met and the people you have lost touch with are some of the most important ones.

What you do not realize is that they are realizing that too and are not really cold or catty or mean or insincere, but that they are as confused as you.

You look at your job. It is not even close to what you thought you would be doing or maybe you are looking for one and realizing that you are going to have to start at the bottom and are scared.

You miss the comforts of college, of groups, of socializing with the same people on a constant basis. But then you realize that maybe they weren't so great after all.

You are beginning to understand yourself and what you want and do not want.

Your opinions have gotten stronger. You see what others are doing and find yourself judging a bit more than usual because suddenly you realize that you have certain boundaries in your life and add things to your list of what is acceptable and what is not.

You are insecure and then secure. You laugh and cry with the greatest force of your life. You feel alone and scared and confused.

Suddenly change is the enemy and you try and cling on to the past with dear life but soon realize that the past is drifting further and further away and there is nothing to do but stay where you are or move forward.

You get your heart broken and wonder how someone you loved could do such damage to you or you lay in bed and wonder why you can't meet anyone decent enough to get to know better.

You love someone but maybe love someone else too and cannot figure out why you are doing this because you are not a bad person.

You go through the same emotions and questions over and over and talk with your friends about the same topics because you cannot seem to make a decision.

You worry about loans and money and the future and making a life for yourself and while winning the race would be great, right now you'd just like to be a contender!

What you may not realize is that everyone reading this relates to it. We are in our best of times and our worst of times, trying as hard as we can to figure this whole thing out.

Was for twenty-something friends
...Maybe it will help some one feel like they are not alone in the state of confusion that is,they have many things in mind but are not able to strike the right chord now but the fighting strive continues.

If you read this far, maybe you identified with it too...I recently read the book by Robin Sharma, titled “The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari”. With this book the writer would have got a helluva in return but somehow I didn’t like the book. It is about a 41 year old successful lawyer who gave up his legal practise to search for inner peace. What he learned on that inward journey is packaged in this 200-page new age fable. And the rest as the cliché runs is the publishing history..

Keep reading !!!!

" Dreams of Wings ".

The weekend was at home in not so complete recluse though,thanks to the global outage and no extra hours at work.Saturday read something and did some prep work and also did some shopping (jeans,sneakers and others).This was pending for long and I found something that I was looking for.Sunday was at home and read something,completed some pending coding and office work.The entire evening was reading something before we all went for dinner to a South Indian restaurant.

This week I was contended also because I got to read about someone who had a vision and has achieved it by the dint of his determinion. So I title this blog as " Dreams of Wings ".I keep a regular tab on the newspaper and magazines.Even after office hours spend about half an hour scrolling various news sites.There has been a persona (a persona not a person) about whom I had thought of scribbling for sometime and he is Capt.Gopinath ,CEO Air Deccan.My definition of a visionary : Someone who understands the common masses and tries his best at an achievable level.Someone who brings in hope and as is said hope brings in the abilityto achieve miracles . Definitely there are impediments,but perhaps that only serves to make success all the more sweet. Capt.Gopinath fits into my bill of visionary seamlessly without doubt.

Capt Gopinath is a person who would not bend down under adversity and resistance and being a former air force officer ,apparently realised that flying was the business he knew best.In a recent interview he said he never intended to compete with premimum airlines like Jet Airways.His objective was for a new and different market and he introduced the "low fares no frills"air travel to remove the social and caste barrier to flying.There was a barrier of rich and poor,the sophisticated and the rural,which is broken today bringing in tectonic shift in the Indian consumer behaviour.

His plan of action was simple.If in the emerging India flooded with young middle class andlower middle class confident as never before and ready to deliver the world,companies likeSamsung,LG and P&G can post double digit growth quater on quater,why not an airline ?He visited to the remotest of the villages on his helicopter and when he saw TV antennas sticking out of small mud huts,he decided that the emerging India was not about one billionhungry people,but about "one billion hungry consumers".I admire him for his simple logicand reasoning.With a flurry of premium airlines, Indian cities such as Delhi,Mumbai,Bangalore,Pune,etc are already well connected.In a growing economy to sustain a double digit growth and to cater his services to common masses he brought small towns and cities into the air travel radar.He also adopted the popular cartoonist R.K.Laxman's "Mr.Citizen" as his logo to symbolise he stands for Indian people in general.The ticket fares are affordable and there are no frills on board of the airline.

In 5 years from a single aircraft to twenty two aircrafts and flying more than 4 million passengers by the end of this year (half of what Indian Airlines achieved in 50 years) clearly signifies the paradigm shift brought about by this simple common man.
There are lot of challenges in the form of poor infrastructure but he being a true entrepreneur is not waiting for a change and he is himself an agent for change.It also brings to my mind a simple quote from NDTV "Suruwat tau karo baadleega INDIA".

Dreams are to be followed with a die hard commitment and there will be opposition and at times you feel insecure but then thats life. I have felt this myself but that feelingof insecurity peppers your zeal all the very more.This I have learnt and seen first hand in my small stint of 3 years so far in Bangalore.

13th Oct'05 was officially a non-working day but had to work for some reasons. It was a wet day at Bangalore and was raining intermittently, perfect weather to remain indoors and read a book of your choice with regular supply of coffee or tea.

I managed to do that only late night and slept quite late.I started reading a book titled "Siddhartha". "Siddhartha" is a novel based on the life of Buddha,inspired by the author Hermann Hesse's visit to India before the First World War.The novel is about the young brahmin Siddhartha's search for self-realisation. Disturbed by the contradictions between his comfortable life and the harsh reality around, he takes to the life of a wanderer. But an ascetic life, and shunning all temptations, does not give him a sense of fulfillment either. Despairing of his condition, he goes to the riverbank,sitting there quietly. And then in the silence , he coluld hear himself, his inner self. In the end he grasps the wholeness of life, experiencing the sense of fulfillment and which come with it. The book is written in a very simple style and as per me it is a classic book dealing with the meaning of life.

I have not read beyond a quater of the pages and plan to complete it in the next four or five days and then post my learnings and views on the same book.

When I was having dinner, I managed to see something for which I was waiting for long unveiling of the new video-enabled iPod by Apple Computer's Steve Jobs.He is renowned in technology circles for his skepticism about video on portable devices.

Just how ridiculous did he consider the concept? Jobs joked in a conference call with reporters last year that if Apple were to add video to the iPod, it might as well turn the device into a toaster, too. "I want it to brown my bagels when I'm listening to my music," he said at the time. "And we're toying with refrigeration, too."

His change of heart could have big implications for the media and entertainment world. In addition to announcing its new, video-enabled iPod this week, Apple introduced a departure from the TV industry's traditional business model -- generating revenue not by embedding advertising in the shows but by charging a small amount to download them.

Under Apple's deal with the Walt Disney Co., commercial-free versions of such programs as "Desperate Housewives" and "Lost" will be available for download from Apple's iTunes store for $1.99. The episodes can be played back on a computer or transferred for viewing on the new iPod.The shows will be available for download the morning after they air on traditional television. Echoing comments by Jobs at the Apple announcement, Disney Chief Executive Robert Iger called it a "breakthrough" deal. It also works to Apple's advantage, providing content for the video-enabled iPod.

Steve Job's job is well done and deserves a pat and tons of accolade and probably this is the right to launch the product in the market when in a few weeks from now the holidaying season will start and also Christmas is round the corner. Although the video-enabled iPod is marked at 300 plus dollars, I feel once it is consumed in the niche markets, Steve will definitely slash down the prices to make a dent in the emerging markets. Probably thats how you do business.