Life Never Gave a Choice ……………………………

• Was born in this Holy city in India to lovely parents – but life gave no choice
• Grew up and was hurled to school with a time table to all my activities – but life gave no choice
• Had to change schools because parents relocated – but life gave no choice
• Subjects & stream to be studied were decided by elders, when it was going to affect only my future – but life gave no choice
• Finished my degree and had to start working, although did not want to – but life gave no choice
• Professionally did well and grew fast, but it wasn’t the way I wanted my life to shape up – but life gave no choice
• Earn good money, friends say am successful, never wanted to get into this rat race – but life gave no choice
• Want to spend time with loved ones, they think otherwise – but life gave no choice
• My wish list is growing but am not able to pamper myself because of so called socio responsibilities – but life gave no choice
  
  Do I look like complaining life …………………………..no no not at all, Life gave me more than I deserved and has always been kind to show the right direction and yes am celebrating life………..join me .

Well on the hindsight life always gave me an option at every node but could not make use of it, probably wasn’t strong enough to go the unconventional way.

Rolling phases………..

Life is like a daily soap with lots of twists and turns, comes in different episodes or phases. There are phases when one feeling or thought or habit or style prevails over the other, incidents and people in our life are the major cause for these phase changes. All of us go through various phases in life, cherish some and don’t want to remember a few but no one is immune to these. The irony of life is that you can’t plan it, as you want, it always surprises you. These surprises come in various sizes and types and are not always pleasant but we are left with no choice but to accept them.

I consider myself lucky as life has been kind to greet me mostly with pleasant surprises. These surprises have come in life in different forms, some times incidents which have changed my attitude for life for good, new friends, old friends coming back, finding true love ………

One of my closest friends whom I know from nearly 9 years now but hadn’t seen for past 4 years came back in my life all of a sudden. We graduated together and know each other inside out. All these last four years we hardly spoke and seldom wrote to each other, owing mainly to our laziness than busy schedules, but our relation was exactly the same as it was in college when we met. We shared the same place this time and must admit had great time together. Now we were on our own earning good money unlike our college days when budget used to be the main issue for almost everything we planned. We just broke free, boozed whenever we wanted to and felt like, irrespective of time and occasion, doped, fagged, pub hoped all night, went jogging as late as 23 00 hours, cooked food in wine, vodka and what not, watched movies back to back, wandered on bike for hours, well in short did everything we wanted to with no limits. It felt so light those days despite of the fact that we both had our share of work and family related problems to address.

As saying goes, life is like a wheel the part which is up has to come down, this phase in our life also ended. We went our different ways but life was again kind on us and the new phase which came in was silver lining, our dreams were being fulfilled. Thanks GOD for being kind on us.
Lets see what’s next life has in offing………………….

Loved Ones.............

Loved Ones

The person you love most? Is a question you will come across in the scrap books and believe me it is either the easiest or the toughest to answer.

Well said or unsaid most people love themselves more than anyone else. When you love someone you tend to surrender yourself completely to that person. You think about that person almost every moment and relate everything around you to that person (Bryan Adams has put the emotions perfectly in his creation " I Think about you "). You see someone wearing a good outfit and the first thing you imagine is your love in that attire, appreciate the thought and your love’s look in that dress and criticize the person actually wearing it for ill-fitting. You plan your life keeping your love in mind, right from your job to vacation to investments to everything under the roof.

To be in love is a great feeling, you feel ecstatic when you are with your loved one. A smile, a caring touch, a hug, a phone call just about anything lifts your spirit up, you feel on the top of the world raring to go for anything, feels like you got everything you ever wanted. Rational, logical thinking does not work when you are taking decisions concerned to your loved ones. You fight with them but one word or a moment is enough to patch up. The thought of loss of your loved one send jitters through your body, you would do anything to safe guard them.

All this is true but does the person you love know that you give them such importance in your life. The problem arises when you love a person who does not have the ability or does not want to love anyone more than themselves. You sacrifice for them but they do not realize nor appreciate because they cannot think beyond themselves.

The root of all problems in any kind of relationship is expectancy. One tends to feel down and dejected when you don’t get what you expect. Relationships are no different especially the intimate relationships. You expect the person to reciprocate in some form or the other to your love but when this does not happen you feel like a looser. This is when the rift in any relationship begins.

This the worst phase one can experience, the feeling of rejection is something no one can take easily especially from someone you loved so much is even harder to digest. Life looks so difficult, suddenly you fell all alone in this world with no motive, no aim in your life. Some people get carried away and sometime harm themselves, spoil there carriers but these are the times when you got to stand tall and rethink if in the first place the person you loved so much was worth all that attention.

As I simply put it, you got to love good souls, always try to have them around you. These souls could be your relatives, friends, anybody.. they would never let you down and be right there when you want them. Hence it becomes very important to judge people before investing your time and effort whether they are you relatives (whom you did not choose) or acquaintances (whom you meet by chance) and never loose good souls you come across. Most importantly I would reiterate and stress that never expect anything from anyone and you will always be happy.

Such is the power of love that even while writing this article I am thinking about my love, what impact is it going to make on her and……………………

Good souls are scarce and scarcity is always in demand so better being in demand than abundance.

Do we have a PURPOSE in life?

Almighty created all of us and am sure he is smart enough not to do all this hard work with out a purpose in mind. We also believe and want to lead our precious life with some purpose or motive to achieve something. If all this is true shouldn’t our first and foremost duty or act be to understand or purpose of life.

In today’s fast and materialistic world, stop somebody and ask whats that you are running for, whats your aim in life, whats the purpose of your existence and mostly the answer you will get is a long pause………….. and then answer like more money, better job, faster car, a bigger living place and so on. But do they actually want all these or they have never introspected enough to understand oneself. Why should somebody like Warren Buffet after spending his entire life making Billions decide to give away most part of his fortune back to the society, back to the people who need it most?

There has to be something more than just amassing wealth, after all as the saying truly puts is “We have come empty handed and will go empty handed”. But having said that is there anything wrong in being materialistic ?????. Even a saint asks for alms and donations but is he being materialistic the answer comes zap NO he is doing to fund his charity programme. It is more important to understand what exactly we want and what is going to give us peace of mind and satisfaction and then run towards it. To understand this we will have to keep pur EGO aside and then think. The rat race to own a bigger house, a faster car, a fatter paycheck, more influential friends will never end and the start point of this race is our EGO ( to satisfy our ever growing ego ).

Well after having spend your time going through all this English that I have written you would have rightly concluded that I myself am confused and am still working hard to Find out PURPOSE of my existence. ….

Time to move on from the LALA style of working -

The Indian blue-chip companies have grown leaps n bounds conquering the western frontiers either through the acquisition route, the famous TATA Steel take over of Anglo Dutch giant Corus, or fighting it out on the foreign lands like Ranbaxy in US, but today the focus is on the SME segment, whether it is the IT companies like SAP & Cisco or the pure service providers, all want the share of this large but unstructured market in India. With market being so buoyant most of these SME’s are at the verge of major expansion and break into the big league. Global tie-ups, geographical expansion, acquisitions are all on these SME’s cards to take that quantum leap.

The major impediment in achieving these goals fast and successfully is the quality Human resource and policies. These companies are usually a family runs business ad hence lack the professional touch which is critical in today’s global market. Usually the companies in this segment depend on a set of loyal employees who have been with them for a long time. The decision making lies with the promoter with inputs from these so called old war horses.

Attrition rates in such companies is comparatively higher which is understandable as the growth potential seem limited and the company always seem to be in favour of these old pillars. Generally these senior employees who form the core team are reluctant to induct in the juniors in decision making teams even if they deserve to be and can add value. With the SMEs going in for expansion they will have to rework there HR policies and make the working culture more conducive for idea generation and contribution. The open office culture helps a lot making each one feel important and responsible. Hierarchy is a must but the flatter the better would be my take. The decision can be taken faster and everyone is inmidst of action instead of all decision making being done by set of people without even taking any views from other stake holders.

Market growing at great pace, the technology and resources availability being ample there is no stopping to these companies. Quality human resource (which in fact chalks down your strategy and policies) will be the differentiator and the key to growth.

Wise investment reqd. - IT set up

BRIC is the playground for most of the global players as they know that the growth lies here. Most of the companies want to tap the SMB segment here which is far fetched till date and holds lot of potential. As the area under operations in these countries is vast the IT infrastructure required is huge and plays a very important role. Also all these companies need to be connected to there parents in the West. A country like India will probably have at least 25-30 (should be more) cities with more than a million population, which can give you fair idea of the geography to be covered. An IT infrastructure reqd for this kind of set up will call for huge investment, and hence affects the bottom line. The data services, voice and video are reqd. we have to be smart here and go in for unified solution.

Integrating the voice, data and video solutions helps reduce the cost as we use the same basic infrastructure for all three services. All the vendors in this space realize that the world will move towards this approach and hence are coming up with wonderful solutions. Cisco as usual has a whole gamut of products for instance there ISR routers integrate all these three services along with Security and various other features. Nortel is not way behind offering L3 switches with these functionalities.

We have seen how IT has made tremendous change in how companies operate and in the coming days we are going to rely more and more on IT for our day to day operation to Strategic decision making.