Your present is decided by your future

Sounds impossible? It did to me, when I first heard about it. I was at this "Team building" workshop at one of the Pune farms, more than "team building" it was more about the emotional quotient (EQ) I believe, about inter-personal relationships at work, how to identify a team member's positive points etc. etc.

One of the things our trainer said was "How you are in the present, or your state of mind is defined by your future"... I tried to argue with him about how the person you are in the present is a result of your past experiences, your experiences make you, and you are a product of the past therefore.. It took me a sort of a "role play" to really understand what he meant..
He told me - "Imagine yourself on a Monday morning at office, you see a huge backlog of e-mails in front of you that need to be acted upon, you see your calendar for the entire week filled up with meetings that you don't quite like to attend!.. How would you be feeling on that Monday morning".. Well - I guess, the expressions on my face gave way, and he laughed, said - "See, I know how you would be feeling.. How you feel on that Monday morning is not decided by the great weekend you have had, but by what you see yourself doing in the near future!".. He said, contrast this scenario with this one - "It is Thursday evening, the same office, same number of e-mails, but now you know that you are going off for a three-day break with your family to Singapore... How do you feel on that Thursday evening".... I don't think I need to tell you how I would feel in that situation...

What is different in the two cases - "Not the past, not the present - but the future".. And my state of mind, how I felt about my present was totally decided by what I saw myself doing in the future...

After hearing this - I was so sold out on this idea.. I had never thought about my present that way. I never thought my future will be affecting me in my day-to-day present, but now that I think about it - it so very much does.. If you still do not get it - think about that Friday evening when you return home with a song on your lips, think about the time when you are anticipating the salary at the end of the month with the bonus for the year, and then think about the Monday morning blues you get almost on every other Monday..

Well - now the point is, this is a different thought - but how does it really help? How you want this thought to help you, is really upto you. For me, in some sense, it was liberating - liberating to realize that my present is not bound by the shackles of my past, that what I am and what I want to be in my present is really decided by my future... And the best thing about future is that you don't really know much about it, and in one way or the other, future is in your hands.. Put two and two together, and it seems now that your Present is really in your hands.. You decide how you are and what you want to be on any given day.

The trainer said another thing that has remained in my head - You want the freedom to choose your life, use that freedom, take your own decisions, but remember that the freedom always comes with a responsibility. Be responsible for who you are and who you want to be, and be free to choose your own path!

A page in the Housewife's Diary

Called up my parents in the morning
Made tea for the two of us - taking some tips from my husband on how to make tea!
Logged on to my laptop, with the intention of finishing off some work, and did everything but work... Well - that everything was as follows:
- Checked out the recipe of Sevai Kheer - and made Sevai Kheer (it is in the refrigerator right now, and well it has turned out quite well I think - awaiting verdict from my husband of course)
- Logged onto orkut and did the most important task of scrapping and responding to people's messages (Well you see - keeping in touch with the new and old relatives is an important activity)
- Browsed through our wedding photos for the 100th time in the last 1 month, and uploaded them on picasa
- The singing bug bit me again, only resulting in a few songs getting recorded in my voice!
- Tried to get back to work, but hey - I had to put these events down in my blog, so here I am.

Now I am waiting for my dear husband to come back, but you see, the typical housewife that I am not, I am going to seriously work for the next half an hour after finishing up with this blog! :)

Cheers to married life, and ain't I loving it? :)

How?

One thought that came to my mind today while I was in the car, on the way to a function I was supposed to attend... Btw, long car drives do that to me - give me a chance to have these random thoughts.. Anyway, the thought was - "Let me not ask the typical "W" questions that I keep asking myself in all the situations - the standard "Why", "What", "When", "Where"... Let me ask myself "How"..

That is about it really - If we keep asking ourselves "How", most of the things will work I guess.. Ask "How do I make this work", instead of asking "Why did this happen", or "When is this going to end" or "What should I do now"... And the thing I realized is that I actually approach all the small daily problems in my professional life that way.. If the build is breaking or the code is not working or if I have to come up with some design, I ask myself and my team "How do we make it work?" And it works beautifully, gives me the correct results, puts me in the right direction, and the line of thought.... However, the sad thing is that I somehow don't tend to apply this logic in my personal life... I stop being logical about situations, I keep asking myself "Why me" or "When" or "What now", too many times, and these questions really do not seem to take me anywhere..

The gist really seems to be to ask "How do I make it work", let us not discuss why something cannot be done or cannot happen... Let us discuss and focus on how the hell it will happen... And surprisingly, it seems to me like the most obvious solution, something that was there in front of my eyes all the time but I had not noticed, something that I was applying in parts of my life quite successfully without realizing its true potential... Now that I have, there are already a couple of things I see that have to work out, with the right question in my head now, I just think they will..

On a cleaning drive

Once in a while I get these bouts of cleanliness... There are days when I notice the cobwebs in the corners of the rooms, the fan blades that need cleaning up, my wardrobe that seems to be in dire need of rearrangement and setting up or the sofa that needs vacuuming. Well - not that we don't clean the house regularly, we do.. But there are these days when I just feel like taking it upon myself, days when I cannot sit still and have to take the plunge and do a major revamp or rearrangement of things around the place...Today was one such day..

At the end of it, I have a pile of clothes that needs to be dry-cleaned, a set of clothes that I have decided to give away to our bai, a pair of dresses that need some altering to do (long pending task actually!).. I have a much cleaner wardrobe, much emptier actually (aha... time to go shopping?), with clothes categorized as per their types.. (this is the organizer in me trying to sort out things, despite of knowing that it will not work for a long time, and the optimist in me that keeps trying).. Apart from that, I have gotten rid of a few things in my room, I want to do a major revamp really, lets see how that goes....

One thing that this cleaning drive does to me is rejuvenate me in some sense, makes me feel good, clean, clear... As if after this, I am all set (reset rather) to start (restart) once again! Ready to mess up once again :) And well, that freedom and the scope to mess up makes me feel better, much better :)

In the end as always, it is a toast to a new beginning, a new round of messing up and a new wait before I feel compelled to take the plunge once again.

Shelfari bookshelf

See an addition to my blog? :) It is my Shelfari book shelf.. I am kind of impressed with the idea of Shelfari, the book shelf you can fill up for yourself (and it looks cool!), the way you can share what you are reading currently, what is your wish list, what you plan to read, your favourites.. and get to see what your friends have been reading.. I would say, this is one neat use of social networking... I am already looking forward to reading some new books that I came across on my friend's shelves and filling up my book shelf some more! :)

I am back on Cartoon Network!

I sometimes feel I have grown old, I hear myself using words like "when I was small, this was not the case" or "when I was a kid, there was no cable, only one Doordarshan channel", "when I was in school, we never used mobile phones", "we never knew what Toblerone is", and the list just continues... Well, it is kind of alarming to hear myself say all of that very often, but the truth remains that things were really different back then, from what they are today.

I believe I belong to that generation which has seen India change, their own city change in enormous measures in front of their eyes.. We have experienced the globalization as it is frequently referred to, the change the opening up of Indian market brought about.. We remember how it was like to have only one Doordarshan channel to entertain us, eagerly waiting for that weekend movies and the cartoons on Sunday.... We appreciate the presence of mobile phones, the Internet connectivity, the advent and growth of the malls and the Multiplexes, the widening of the roads, the fly-overs, the awesome Pune-Mumbai Expressway.

It feels great to be a part of this positive change, the growth, and know that we have seen the more innocent world of the past.. Thankfully, somewhere, that innocence and those memories of the past will always remain with us - only to help us understand and appreciate this world of today much more, a privilege that the kids of today will perhaps not enjoy.

My niece is going to take all the above things as something which ought to be present by default, she will never be able to look at all of this progress the way I do, or my friends or my brother does.. And yet I know, she will perhaps be writing a similar blog (or whatever the blogs are called in 2028) 25 years down the line, looking back at her childhood days... Whatever be her points, the commonness will of course be the "change" she sees, and hopefully it will be only positive..

Well - anyway, I kind of digressed from the subject of this post - Believe it or not, all of the above text and thoughts were triggered by the "Tom and Jerry" show that I have started watching with my niece these days... I had forgotten how loveable they are, and how fresh those characters still are in my mind.. With time, the cartoon topics have changed, we have a Tom and a Jerry going inside the computer these days, or getting trapped inside a Jurassic Park - but what remains unchanged is the sheer treat it is to your mind, a healthy laughter treat.. So yeah, things change, but may be, all things don't!

Heroes happen here..

I had a brief conversation with a Senior VP in my company over something... One of the things he said was "We make people spend way too much time doing heroics that are not important... Heroes should be left with enough time to do heroisms... And not get burnt out doing unnecessary heroics.."

At that point of time - I came up with an explanation behind the unnecessary "heroic" activity that the person had to perform... But really - are we creating heroes out of nobody? Are we so used to having a hero in the movies and in the novels that come what may, we start looking for and tend to create some such figure everywhere around us - be it at home or at the workplace.. I sometimes think it is one of the ways of feeling secure, or one of the ways for the managers to offload their work to these so-called heroes (or heroines) in their team..

There are always smarter people amongst your smart team membrs - and no doubt these people come forth, they get the focus, they get the accolades - and of course - they are the people who get the responsibilities and the extra work too! What Spiderman says is right - "With power comes responsibility.."

It pays to be a hero, but at the same time, you also pay at times to be recognized as one.. It is up to us (up to the heroes and the heroines) though to choose when to show the heroism and when not to.. In the process - as my Senior VP pointed out - don't get burnt out, and fatigued by the small time heroics and lose the end goal..

Choose the heroisms - and Be assured of being chosen as the Hero every time..

San Francisco visit

I have been in San Francisco for the last 4 days, a visit after exactly 3 years. I will be leaving tomorrow to Toledo, but this short visit has nonetheless been quite eventful.

Cuisines I have tried out in the last few days: Mediterranean (Falafal – this one was pending for a real long time, now atlast I have tasted it), Thai, Mexican (Had Nachos this time and quite liked it), Chinese (had been to Lucky Creation, apparently one of the best Veg. Chinese restaurants in China Town, SF. A trivia btw, China Town in SF is the largest China Town outside Asia) and yes Indian too (had been to a South Indian hotel "Saravana" for breakfast. And must say, the food was as good as what we get back in India. Interestingly, the waiter was taking orders on a PDA!)

SF decided to show me its worst weather – what with rains and thunderstorms on Friday and Saturday. I was almost swaying while walking down to the office and had to hold onto a pole literally to stop myself from getting pushed by the wind. Managed to visit two of my friends in Sunnyvale though bad weather pretty much confined us to indoor activities. Ended up watching the movie "Kite Runner" in the AMC theatre. Oh yes, and went for a short walk to Farmer's market – a sophisticated version of "mandai" actually. The best part of that walk was the "free", "sample" pieces of cakes, breads and fruits kept outside the shops, which we of course tried out, quite shamelessly :)

Did not get to visit the real "touristy" places out here, but all in all, it has been a nice short trip (just the way I prefer). Btw, make a note of http://transit.511.org/, useful to plan out your trip within the city using the various commuting options you have here.