Tolerence and Immunity

The green light goes ON and I let my feet go off the clutch and step on to the accelerator to make my way pass one of the 8 lights I come across while going to office. Of course - the vehicles which were suppose to stop at the same instant when I had started moving do not care to stop and they all continue to move as if they never saw their light going amber and then red. I move ahead and at the sight my car and all the vehicles following me, moving on, the vehicles on the other side start slowing down and finally stop... still you see some shameless two wheelers or auto rickshaws dodge their way cross the red light. This happens everyday at every light I pass and gets on to my nerves.. several times I felt like getting down my car and yelling at them.. but.. haven't done it so far. Reminds me of the "Dombivali Fast" and sets me thinking as to how long and far do we keep tolerating the culture of violating traffic rules.. Its never ending...

This is me at one end of the spectrum and let me see myself on the other end..

Since my childhood days have been dropping (then my mom use to call it and now my wife calls it "throwing") my wet towel either on the bed or the sofa. From the reactions I have been seeing after I get caught "throwing"... I am sure they must be getting the same agony as I get when I see someone jumping the light.. But then they to tolerate and with grudges though pick it up and put it out for drying or into the heap of clothes to be washed.

Both these instances mark tolerance of people to indiscipline. We see ourselves on either end of the spectrum - quite often on one and less often on the other depending on how disciplined and good citizens we are. Quite often we tolerate others and are tolerated by others and at times we get beaten/beat others for their mistakes/wrong doings.

We find this happening at workplace - we tolerate unresponsivenesses of people, we tolerate lack of participation from people, we tolerate bureaucracy, we tolerate sloppy work, we tolerate ambiguity, we tolerate delays and many more things.. depending on how expressive one is, the vice is either tolerated or bashed.

It is not that we tolerate all the time.. one fights / rebels against these irregularities/deficiencies at times with varying degrees and I do that very often.. At times it offends people at times it sets spanner in the wheels and at times its treated as feedback and we see people acting on it for a change. I have found many like minded people having less or more tolerance to the system than me and making it a point to express their anguish/feedback. At times it is sarcastic and destructive with no intent to give the other person a chance to change/improve and at times it is constructive but not enough push to see the receiver change and the third category is the people who give the constructive feedback or bashing - whatever you call and see the issues getting fixed over a period of time through constant follow-ups.. a rare Gandhian category..

There is another category of people we see in the system..
Sometimes, some people in the system, having stayed in the system for long start tolerating things - they get immune to the anomalies/inefficiencies.. They not only get immune but easily dodge the system and find the least resistance path to get across - this improves the effectiveness of the individual but weakens the system. The new people who get into the system do not make their way through such system with ease.

I am not sure if all this makes sense to the readers and probably when I read this next time, going to edit it to make more sense out of it.

cheers for now, mahesh

Six Degrees of Seperation

Hard to believe that its has been mathematically proven that every person on this earth - includes the President of India, Prime Minister of India, Shahrukh Khan, Amitabh, bin laden, George Bush, Madonna, Bill Gates and Sam Palmisano etc. etc.. and btw, Raveena and Aishwarya too are not more than six hops away from knowing you and me. Its matter of finding of the right hops. check this out : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_degrees_of_separation

Well now, drifting a bit away from the math and getting a bit sentimental...

What about the neighborhood - do we know six neighbors in our society well ? I am not sure about you, but honestly speaking I barely "know" two. At the last IBM offsite I was talking to one of the colleague about how professionals in our industry get drifted from their roots and loose the social contacts and sometimes social skills/tolerance too. I reflected a while thought of some of the reasons - the continuous movement away from places where we have grown up and done our schooling/colleges was the obvious one. Beginning the teenage, until the time I moved out of Mumbai for job and then getting married I have had the best friends, hobbies and social interaction. That seems to have completely lost since I got into the job, drifted away from Mumbai and got married.
What scares me is the effect it is going to have on my future and not much about my present. At present we hardly have the time.. We are damn busy at work and with the kids and sometimes some fun. What happens when we have moved out of jobs ? The situation is scary - no hobbies, no moments to cherish and of all things NO URGENT MAILS TO CHECK !!

It has been a while

It has been a while since I blogged.
Although had several spurts of good bloggable thoughts, incidents and maments.. did not capture them and yet again sitting late night on a Sunday with none of those topics which could have been good writes..
Today I was at the Shilpa Society's General body meeting. Maann... It was a major political drama with heated arguments and debates.. It looked like a parliament session, probably worst than that.. I pitied the managing comittee's members who were trying to maintain the calm and decorum, but a couple of culprits kept scratching the surfaces. Overall it was an interesting affair...

Drenched in the blog rain

It was a long day today sitting at home and watching my little one play, eat, sleep and leak - she has caught a viral fever and we were locked down all the day doing the baby sitting at home. But this turned out to be a good day for my new hobby - blogging. Discovred some new tips, tricks and also peeped into several other blogs - some recommended, some I met accidently and some I navigated through the ones I read.
While doing the part-time duty of watching the little one, I was busy reading writing and decorating/formatting my blog space. This turned out to be something like watching a cricket match all day... switch on to see where the match is heading to.. watch the score and then get back to work. Every time she use sleep or start playing alone, i use to get on to my gear (blogspot.com).. The split of my blogs into (a) heap dumps and (b) brain storms was as a result of the learnings today..
I realised in the process that pepole write amazing stuff and a lot of people manage to read it. I wounder how much time they must be spending writing, decorating and commenting on. Dont these bloggers have work to do OR dont they have kids.. probably not -
Certainly this is addictive and as addictive as writing / reading and checking emails. I find blogging to be a better addiction than emails. It forces me to think, reflect and write.. something meaningful (hopefully).. I am seeing mysself quit one and start another..

learning curves

I just ran through Kiran's blogs and saw him writing his travelouges and mainstream blogs in different spaces. This was a learning for me and here I am writing my first blog with tecno-business-management-work related blog in the new space called "Memory Dumps"

categorising, classifying, organising.. I love doing so.. and here I am doing it with my blogs.

cheers, Mahesh

Tikona : Getting Lost

http://www.geocities.com/ranjit_mulye/treks/tikona.html?200723
Was browsing through this site and reminded me of my ventures to tung-tikona and peth
the author here talks of getting lost and we had exactly the same experience at both the places. In fact at the Peth fort we underestimated the "complexity" of finding the right path and started ascending late in the evening - 4:00pm with some of my watumull colleagues (Santosh, Kimpal) and while half the way to top got lost. It started getting pretty dark and some of us got literally scared and distressed with the thought that we will have to spend the night amidst of the forest. We started calling villagers and pleading for help - in fact Santosh actually offered money and insisted they come right at the spot where he was.. "dont you want the money.. come and pick me up from right where i am".. :-)). We finally got through with the help of the villager late at night and then laughed a lot in the morning at the silly incident and when we got to know how simple the route to the fort was

Indiscipline

There have been a whole bunch of thoughts going across my mind since the last time I blogged. Such fantastic topics which I recognised as good topics to blog on but never managed to capture them. It was a sheer lack of personal discipline and it is an indicator of I not being able to manage time effectively. The "Monk" book talks about this and several other things... I mean about time management and personal disciple, emotional fortitude etc. etc..
wounder what will make me get out of this - for sure the books have not, am yet to discover what works for me..

Gadgets, Usability and features

Most of the features on the modern gadgets must be going unused and I guess the famous 80-20 rule must be true in this case - 80% of the users use 20% of the gadget features.. :-)

Usability and confessoins of a dumb Windows user

It was an interesting struggle for past 15 minutes for me to figure out how do i set my editor setting to "put off" the automatic conversion of my content to Hindi as I type. First and formost, I could not figure out how it was automatically set to convert what I type to Hindi (devnagari script). As a semi technical personI like to understand the features and debug a particular issue to resolve and learn the tool/product and I make it a point to do it whenever I get the time to do so. But its good to do so as a hobby than do the compulsive debugging like the instance I exprerienced a few minutes ago. Why ? Well if you do not have enough technical or tool learning aptitude you may get put off and not want to use the tool again.

This is what has also happened to my desire to use the Linux clent on my thinkpad.
For years I have had a dual boot sysem and 99.9% of time I have booted Windows. Out of hte rest of 0.01 times I booted Linux, 0.005 was because I forgot to chenge the default boot. Well I know that there is an option to reset the initial parameter to change the dual boot option using what they call grub, but never had the time and patience to learn it, change it and use it.. and this applied to many features on linux. I wish these inhibitions to adopting linux are eliminated someday and I boot Linux for the rest of my career and never have to boot the Windws OS.

At the IBM Thinkpad repair center

For an IT professional and particularly a manager like me a thinkpad crash can be a nightmare.. I was about to get into one this morning, but luckily the nightmare was shortlived... 2 hrs.. :-)

I went to the thinkpad (laptop) repair center this morning and found a great analogy with we taking our kids to a doctor.... One of the technicians there took the control of laptop and asked me to wait.. Doctors do that as well... Diagnosed the case and told me about the problem. In my case the laptop did not need any spare replacement (medication) but a bios reset did the job. She told me to oberve the laptop for a day and call her back if the problem repeats.. does this not sound very similar to we taking our kid / ourself to doctor. while I was waiting outside in the lounge, this analogy striked to me and I started working back on what should the Thinkpad center learn from Doctor's Dispensery/Clinic and vice versa... for eg: it would have been great if the TP center had magzines/newspapers - like they have in dispenseries/clinics.. :-)
bye and over 'n' out for now.

the world environment day..

The morning newspaper did a couple of columns about "World Environment Day" and "global warming". I keep tracing these articles in general as I have concern and interest about these topics. As an after thought I just thought about creating a list of things that one can do in every day life to keep reducing ones baggage and wrong doing in the direction... quite a few are simple and straight forward ones..


save electricity, battery and energy

• no brainer - switch off lights / music / fans / ac when not needed. Do it and encourage kids/others around to follow.
• switch off the car engine while waiting at the signals.
• service your car regularly and get a emission check done..
• walk when possible or use public transport / car pools can make a lots of difference.
• when you have to go upstairs on floors not too high - say 2nd floor.. and have option of stairs vs elevator.. use stairs particularly when you are going to be only one in the elevator.
• use natural lights for reading/illumination when possible
• Avoid using electric bulbs made of filaments, instead use CFL tubelights.. Its proven that they save electricity and are more economical than bulbs.

Save water

• fix the leaking taps otherwise place an empty bucket under the drip and use the accumalated water.
• do not leave the tap running while washing face/teeth etc.. while you are actually not consuming the water.
• water evaporates during the daytime hence water the plans in the evening.

Save Paper

• Avoid prining - if you print ensure you use papers on both sides.
• Re-use the consumed / wasted printouts from the unused side

Hate Plastic

• Carry used plastic bags - prferably cloth bags to retail and grocery stores

Save / Re-use to the extent you can

• In general use, re-use, repair and use whatever you can in your everyday life. There is a good reason to do so - by not consuming the new product (which you have'nt bought to replace the old) you save your money and need to manufacture a new product and ship it to the locaiton near to you.. it saves the energy and fuel and so on. A very noble thought and difficult to follow but worth considering..

In summary there are many things you could do and they may sound very little/small but if many of us start getting aware and adopt some of these it can make a lots of difference.

orkutting

Its fun orkutting, finding old friends and acquaintances online. Since I began exploring on orkut, I use to wounder if it achieves anything other than just spotting friends and adding them on to your friends list... Well yes, its beyond spotting friends. People watch you - since february '07 : 4 months - 222 people viewed my profile. Is'nt that interesting. you are getting known to others.. You get to watch some of your friends and acquintances. Most communities I have joined do not really help find information or network. One in 100 reads your posts on community and responds.. Its addictive, watching scraps is more addictive than emails..

Email addiction.. I know its addictive and like most other addictions, as an addict I am hating to get out of it.. although I know it can help me in several ways.. thats probably going to be my next post.."my experiments of getting rid of email addiction"..

This is my first stupid post.. my first blog in the www space.
Like the "Hello World" program... :-)). Its going to be a useless and empty.