Three strands

The mumbai terrorism shook us all....

some days later I happened to recall the song "September/The Joker (by Earth, Wind and Fire)

then I watched the movie "The day the earth stood still"

It was amazing yet saddening for me to have made sense of the meaning I interpreted from the three sources; for them to have come together like this, given my state is ironical.

I cant say much about the terror attacks, we all know what happened. But this time I felt it was so much more horrifying. the frequency, unexpectedness and impact on the landmark of the city struck most.

Then I was just selecting songs from my laptop and dug out a song I had heard long time ago. This song - September, the joker, is fun, fast and pacey. I remember it, and had downloaded because I saw it in the movie "Babel". The song is pretty long and it has been featured in the movie the complete length of it. And the song reminded me of this haunting and psychedelic imagery. I felt the shocks and the silences and sorrow of being alone in the crowd. The sorrow of being unable to communicate and the unfairness of the whole situation.
The song has been featured on Chieko, who cannot speak and hear. She is in a club where the song is playing and there are intermittent moments of silence when we get a glimpse of what she might be experiencing. Its arousing as the music is great, thumping, fast and people are dancing in the strobe lights. In the silence we feel the ugliness. ( A digression from my message, this scene has invoked a serious negative impact in few screenings). But I cannot put a name for how I felt when I watched it for the first time. The music sent my pulse racing, Chieko made me sad, the fact that she is yearning for attention, trying to dance to a tune she cannot hear made me hopeful, when there were moments of silence I was shocked, when her heart broke I was sad. When she starts walking as the last vestiges of club sounds faded, there was a moaning in the silence which i still feel. It was the reason why i watched the movie a couple of more times.



In the context of the movie, when I watched it the first time I was unable to make a single conclusion out of it. I was a bit disappointed too. I was exhausted experiencing all the events, the ups and downs in the elaborate scheme. But there are people – the humanity shines from different nationalities. An impersonal look at food, languages, and ways of survival brings the audience closer to them. Sometimes we wince too. One word screamed in my head was "unfair". And maybe yearning for love, the basic human desire misleads us, as it is true for the characters in the movie.

Then I watched "The day the earth stood still" recently which had a pertinent message. We have to change the way we have been living. Either we will kill this earth or kill each other. There is a reason for us to wake up from our routine. How many generations of majority of the population of the earth will follow this fixed path for their life:
Spend childhood learning from the best school possible in the city
attend the best classes - develop all round personality - swimming, dances, art, music, sport, hobbies - all sorts ...... be good at all these, you are a gem of gift to this universe
go to the best possible college get degrees
work for the brands, power through the rungs, claim the rocking salary
bring happiness to the lives of your young ones.... love someone, he / she will love you back you are done for life
the direction is always upwards for you, everybody says i m fine. You’ll socialize, travel, fill the online profiles and one sad day die.
In the process you didnt give a damn about the poor and needy, use up tonnes of natural resources like fuel, spread plastic, smoke, noise, and other poison on this earth.
But there is only so much we can do. Wasnt it great that i earned this amazing salary gave my parents and my children all the comforts of life? That I live in this reputed locality and work on a gem of a technology, manage a team?
Lives of majority on this earth will follow the same trajectory. Earth will suffer and one day we are doomed to be destroyed. Am I being paranoid? We know it will happen. Either life from this earth will be sucked out by the humans or the humans will kill each other. Mumbai blasts tell us the uncertainty of the timing/ location/ severity of such destruction.

What can we do? I think first thing is to realize that the capacity of human life is infinite. I can not just take care of my life but also am responsible for the community / country / earth. It is our responsibility because we live on this planet.

Secondly we have to unite, individual actions will die out. All of India adored Lagaan, proud to be in management case studies; very few among common people show an inspired initiative in life. If, as in Babel chain of events can spread terror, grief and misery why can’t it be the same about positive thoughts and actions? Can my acts of compassion here, ultimately bear fruits in some other country? Do we have capacity and will to cooperate and heal?

Which generation will see the last sunset of a healthy and peaceful planet? How close is it?

But I am just writing a blog.

I felt about the soul of earth - its like Chieko, she cant speak, has no ears to listen to our reasons or excuses and in the end of the film is naked, yearning for help if someone ever can listen to her. We are confused like the character of little boy (jaden smith) from TDTESS. Our motives are selfish, we are more geared for survival, will kill the stranger just to make sure it’s not a danger to us. A moment in TDESS stands out for me when jaden smith asks the alien (keanu reeves) to show him the way home. Our species is just unaware and lost in the path that we have chosen towards modernity.

I am 24 and I stand at crossroads. I feel that life is full of cumbersome trivialities which suck time and energies out of it. I think only 20% of life's activities count for 80% of life's meaning. There is no fun in most of my life.
I am in love with zooey deschanel, anushka sharma, lauren gottlieb, and some other girl that i dream of that leaves me positively befuddled.
I am passionate about dancing, and i dont do anything about it.
I have spent large portion of my life talking, thinking, writing. I wonder if I could really empirically find of the % of time of 24 years that was spent staring the movie screen, listening to music with eyes closed, reading a book, staring the void, walking...... going nowhere.
My time spent has not led me to any concrete outcome, which leaves my parents disappointed. They want things to move faster - so that they can reach a place where everything is in place. And i dont want to be "in place".
And life is passing me by.

Inspiration

Inspiration is what I need right now. Many links on the link below...

http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/Randy/

The person who has opened my mind in so many ways, Randy Pausch.

And so also the universe needs such souls which live on, show us the right path.

I am here now.

I have collected a lot of stuff stuff on GTD - time to make execution.
I feel distinctly unsettled after seeing "Stay Hungry Stay Foolish" as a title of a book. No matter how inspired you are from Steve Jobs, staying original should be a priority. I put the book down at blossoms, last weekend.
Lot of things to do, learn, talk about.....
less people to talk with.
obviously i am not going to speak here no matter how friendly the url www.envydee.blogspot.com might seem to me after so many years of camaraderie.
Interestingly i experienced a second instance of backstabbing.
"Did my back hurt your knife?"
as rachel would say.
i hate myself when i cant say things to people .....
but what good is it to hold bitterness in your heart ? ..... i calmed myself down by watching "City of Angels" the magic of touch, fresh air, sunlight, good food, fresh fruits, love, "music in the sunlight" compassion, is what i feel after seeing this movie.
also bought the lake house cd at jassi's recommendation.
Time to prioritize, be selfish, let it flow ......

I think roger ebert reveals a LOT of the plot of a movie. The first time i read his review of the dark knight and i thought "gee, whats the big deal with this review? he has revealed so many parts of the story!" Review of Transformers didnt help.
then i read his review for adaptation. and i was impressed. and i thought American beauty should be the real test, and he passed it. A very objective point of view but written with great wisdom.
But it did irk me that he tells the incident blatantly, really a dampener if you like to not know before watching. If secretly he thinks that revealing would make people happy then i would say its a cheap trick.
I reached his site because i was reading about alfred hitcock. i read about the "McGuffin" and i was surprised that there is a mcguffin in transformers.

A long way down ......

Oh i should tell you this! i had such a good time.....
my head felt light and i am currently feeling giddy at the thought of its memory.
Today morning, an hour before i left for work, I read first 37 pages of "A long way down" by Nick Hornby. and it turned out to be just what i needed. it is a very good read. nick hornby is unlike i have ever read; he is 'soo' good. i havent read anyone who uses mundane language spoken by the not so smart people of his novels. it is such a fine experience listening to four completely different people. the authenticity is unmistakable.

yet every now n then i did feel nick hornby getting reflected in each of the four. and a couple of times he struck gold with simplicity, carefree flow of thoughts .... it was smooth and real. it felt purgatory to me. maybe that was my state of mind. i needed that.
thanx a million nick.

since when did boundaries between

managing a team
managing people
getting work done
manipulating
using cheap tricks and short cuts

fade?

THIRST

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: crisis design)

Tietoenotor sounds like a gay cousin of terminator.

the mad world song is ringing in my ears. i am doomed to have not seen donnie darko.
in the morning i was listening to all these songs .....
mad world
streets of philadelphia - bruce springsteen
philadelphia by neil young

long ago i had seen the youtube video of the streets of philadelphia, i dont have access to youtube, and the pictures haunt me.
and its bad that i havent seen philadelphia either.

the need to be sad and calm and be let alone.

wassup?

wassup with all these people making sales?

wassup with all these people going to US ?

wassup with esellerate, and reg now n cnet?

wassup with amazon?

wassup with all these guys who think it is all right?

wassup with barrack obama n mccain?

wassup with these people going head over heels for gmat?

wassup with 9.4 / 10 or 3.97 / 4? ( i mean what the hell is that all about???!!!)

wassup with people not inviting me to parties?

wassup with those carcasses hanging in shops?

wassup with these auto walas?

wassup with reading books and listening to music and love, and writing blogs and talking and wanting and knowing that its all gonna be alright?

i am in the office and my back tingles with a little pain. the long weekend has definitely refreshed me, yet at the same time i feel sad. i thought a lot and the thinking, like most of my endeavours was not to a certain end. it was as puposeless as it ever was. and i wasted time and lied and worried. and oh dear god, so much time wasted walking down the kutchcha roads, riding buses, watching umpteenth time the episodes of the "friend"ly sitcom. i figured so many hours and days of the 24 years of my life have passed pondering, listening to music, singing to myself, thinking, looking and seeing into some unknown. and i wonder if there is some romance to such purposeless meanderings. sure, what i know for sure is that i am like that only. and i do see some beauty if not much else. do i learn? on some levels yes, on some others no. some time ago i was sad doing what i did, now i am not, doing the same old love.
on friday i had lunch at jeevi's place. we had pretty engrossing discussions about what goes on in our respective companies. we touched on so many matters about the way work goes on, and that people stop learning, and the ones who taught us have been so .... and the ones around us are so..... and we ought to be so.....
then we talked much more and then there wasn't much to talk.
then i saw the dark knight again.
the next day i bought books from blossoms. (the shop is way better than its website) i cannot begin talking about the shop. but it has made life so much better and richer and livable in bangalore.
i was wondering, what if we make a cumulative sum of all the homeworks that we have done in our life. yes, the school homework, starting from kindergarten. a small task that someone (supposedly) older and wiser than us asked us to do. and ask ourselves, if i did all those homeworks with twice as honesty and completeness of PURPOSE, we would be different people. again lets go back to a moment. there was a moment when we were fresh, and we didnt have these webs in our minds. the next moment our approach to doing work changed. someone asked us to do something and the way we agreed to it, the way we did it, and how much of it we did changed completely.

but it has to be said, dark knight could have been more enunciated. it irks me that it is twisted in terms of evidences, the reasons for particular turns of events, particularly of course in the second half.
and now i m sad.
there always is some factor, some piece of the puzzle that is missing. there isnt ever a PERFECT movie.
but kudos to nolan brothers who have managed to put such moral complexity on screen that also has the popcorn entertainment value. the visuals are the most lucrative asset of this film. add to that the uneasy position of the hero. not enough can be said about the villain, so i wont start again, but that is the reason why the movie needs to be watched again and again.

the dark joker

"Why so serious son?" is ringing in my ears still.
will the real heath ledger please stand up? now everybody knows heath ledger, unfortunately , though.
you are haunting my head.
the nolan brothers must have read thomas harris and of course much more because they have put The Joker right up there with Hannibal Lecter and Francis Dolarhyde.
Harvey Dent and Batman are left stunned by the joker. he has brought out the other side in them. very much like will graham harvey dent falls prey to the devil inside him. the joker takes menacing pleasure in tinkering with them. he doesnt plan, he just does things. "you are the schemers - and look where your schemes got you. i just do things and show people like you how pathetic their attempts at controlling things are.i am an agent of chaos. and chaos is fair."

the batman legend, the gadgets, the technology, the aura of evil and the icing on the cake - the joker.
this joker is a completely different animal. totally blew my mind. and its my stomachful of satisfaction that nolan brothers could identify that joker and made a part of the batman movie. superb job.
i ll write more when i have time.

If you know it or not...... doesnt make a difference.

Jaane tu, yaa jaane na.
it was a very real and intelligent movie. not mushy mushy n emotional at all as i had suspected. after seeing the film i realized that there really hadnt been much depicted about what people felt as opposed to what people did and behaved and affected lives of others. that is very real and true and someone needed to put that on film. much part of the film is comedy. and it works! its a heady mix of old and new actors. comedy relies in calculated amounts on the oldies - ratna pathak, naseeruddin shah (cool couple in film as wel as in real life) and paresh rawal, while the group of youngsters is funny and cute. good choice of young actors. they look like people next door. very real and they speak without pretense. though lack of finish shows a little bit in the dancing but thats okay, they smile very sweetly.
the good thing is its not a one sided affair. the diro abbas tyrewala who has also written the dialogues and lyrics doesnt focus on a same concept in all the scenes. there are sub plots which are very independent and interesting yet connected with the main theme (guy-girl - good friends - care for each other - never know if its love until .....) its amazing to see that each and every character has a story ..... so a very intelligently written story by abbas.
the film doesnt sound loud in the sense it doesnt boast of being too much in love with the story it is trying to tell. its not intense in its depiction of love or friendship or how sweet n cute these group of young people are. the story and the turn of events speak louder than the characters or the music....... the music! how many times has it happened that a r rahman's music was too good while the movie bombed? i think thats happened a lot. here a r rahman does the work only when he requires to. pappu cant dance, nazrein milana, Kahin To Hogi Woh, are hummable yet arent exceptional. the jazz drums wala song Tu Bole, Main Boloon sets such an amazing tone to the film that its nostalgic. Aditi doesnt need words to describe.
i looooooved the movie. can see it again. wont need any company.
still havent seen the room in hebbal. the new office feels good. the changes now smell exciting as oppsed to the dismal. still too many loose ends to tie. need courage for that.

Changes

i have tried hard not sound like i m complaining.
on the monday, two weeks ago, my bosses, g and h call our team for a meeting.
"is it good news?"
"of course its good news"

i will never forget how their faces seemed. g had a mischievous smile. and he was pacing a bit swiftly. h was not letting any expression slip out much from her face. i think she was thinking a lot and was making calculated communication.

from july g and h are going to be the premium partners of our company. my bosses are leaving the company and forming their own company. they will be doing pretty much the same job, selling the same software but that just wont be done being in the same company.
the location of my company office is going to change from infantry road to hebbal. i am looking for place to live near hebbal. i was got this place near infantry rd in may. no i cannot commute from viveknagar to hebbal. i answered this question far too many times in my head.

on 3rd july i came to know that my dad had urinary tract infection and is admitted in hospital. he had fever and low bp. diabetes and a heart attack 7 years ago dictated caution. i went home over the weekend. i lost my mobile phone.

a from my team has left the company. s was taken into their company by G n H. from august new associated directors shall be in place. new teams. anything is possible.

the sunday before yesterday was very memorable, jeevi n rekha madam came to meet me at my place. i showed them my little "casa de nike" (yeah i borrowed that from joey, die hard friends fans shall recall).
we had lunch at "grameen" rural ambience, north indian food. really good food. authentic. then the proverbial "shopping" followed, which was a first for me. then on, my first salary has been thoroughly drenched, exhausted, squeezed, sucked, squashed out of all the crevices and pores of my pockets. rekha madam and jeevi gifted me a t shirt!!! (then i bought two for myself). the place is the Forum mall in kormangala.
i think i live in the epicentre of the axis of shopping, eating and money spending. from viveknagar (where lies my 1 room kitchen) garuda mall, forum mall, bangalore central, hyderbadi biryani, blossoms book house, higgin bothams, oasis mall, empire hotel and other places that i havent visited yet are equidistant and 10 minutes ride from my place.
anyway, we saw sarkar raj which we shouldnt have.
i am a patient man, very very patient man. and i have two ladies to certify that. while they are talking hard on the colours and quality of cloth in westside i was patiently observing what they were doing; and on other times i was on the lookout for birds. and the other times i captured the ladies on the camera.

last sunday i watched indiana jones

the week before that, 21,

the week before that, Prince Caspian,

the week before that, Iron Man,

this week i will read High Fidelity by Nick Hornby instead of going to "Sex & the City"

A month ago, my agent showed me some really horrible places to live in on a saturday. on monday morning he calls me in office hours to tell me that he has found a "beautiful" place to live in. i took it. thats the place i m living in now. i love it as a matter of fact, it really is good.

but thats the game they play, they will show the ugly ones first. i got the picture that there really isnt a good place easily to be found. i got desperate.

maybe i m stretching it a bit too much, maybe i ll sound too old for my age ......

a regular middle class father of a girl will get ugly ones first for her, so that she doesnt have much liberty to be choosy. "Handsome young men are difficult to come by.......... or what is it?"

and here's a bad one, the one after seeing the first guy "How can my dad think that i m worth a man this ugly...?"

I now live near K R Puram Bus stand. The bus stand does not exist.
Every time i am waiting for the bus i am under the threat of being run over by the bus, mini bus, truck, mini truck, autorickshaw, motorcyclists, vegetable vendors and many more high speed heavy machines which are running. the road disappears into the dust and people like me are standing at the side only to be shooed by these big guys. for the fear of being run over we run helter skelter.
there is no place safe which is meant for people to stand and wait for the bus, a place where any vehicle cannot go. apart from the fact that buses come to this place there is no other sign which indicates that this place is a bus stand.
but why am i complaining? life is good now. but as always i complain and doubt.
have been religiously reading black swan when i get a seat in the bus and the bus is stuck in the notorious bangalore traffic. this book is life changing. many ideas corroborated with what i had learnt in landmark education. Corroboration! Now that is something to learn about from this book! check it out to understand what i mean.

i just now remembered the movie swades. the memory of good movies is super. the music of ar rahman makes me feel the cool breeze, bright sunshine, green landscapes. authentic movies come by rarely. what i dont understand is that why does every movie need to have the hero fall in love with a beautiful woman. even the best and well made movies with a powerful message as in the movie swades, has the hero falling in love. cant they consider the possibilty that the movie has no love story. the message of entrepreneurship and love of the motherland should have overshadowed the love story. because the message deserves undivided attention from the filmmakers to make the impact on the audience.

Update: lets talk about realism. swades is an awesome movie. but if it talks of the real situation of our country its not realistic on the human front. mohan and gita are two strong personalities. why is it that they will surely fall in love? in real life shit happens. the finest of the young people never get along. the best of the entrepreneurs, managers, life saving doctors, benevolent evangelists, are gonna have shitty personal lives and broken relationships. i watched too much dr. house a month ago and while watching i got this feeling "life is unfair and genuinely impartial. and that is usual"
or maybe i m not so much concerned about swades, its just my current state of mind.

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I have understood that there is a world of difference between doing business successfully and doing a profitable business. creating value for your customers is not every business's ball game. earning money, amassing wealth has nothing to do with creating value.
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two of my friends have started blogging. i m not permitted to disclose one url, the other one is this. welcome moi3.