God?!!

Is there one?
You can try and explain most feelings that humans have without resorting to God as an explanation.

Music, however, does make you realize that there is something weird going on in the background - why on earth should you feel happy or sad when you hear a sequence of notes? There is some underlying beat to Nature, surely - some kind of a pulse - maybe I've become a deist!

Adios!

The Cutest Smile!

Image by acroamatic via Flickr

The usual - waiting for the gates to open as the train at the MRT station arrives, my tired legs trying their best not to buckle after a hard day at work.
Armed with skills carefully honed over a period of an year, I spot an empty seat and maneouvre smoothly through the crowd to grab it as the train fills up to capacity at the interchange.
There is barely enough room to breathe as the train stops at the next interchange and more people squeeze in.

Two little girls with their mother also manage to step in just as the train doors slide shut.
One of the girls is barely a toddler - able to form broken sentences in Mandarin. Her elder sister is also not much older - her two missing incisors testifying that. The mother is offered a seat by the passenger beside me - she takes the younger one in her arms and sits down while the elder sis stands around clutching at her mother's knees to retain her balance as the train accelerates. I offer my seat to the girl but the mother declines and tells me to stay put.

The girl starts to tell a story to her mother very animatedly and the younger one also chips in with a few ill-formed (but cute) sentences of her own. Her mother also starts to listen in very intently.

Pretty soon, one of the "buddhas" sitting in a "Priority Seat" in the row facing us decides to alight and the girl, instinctively, makes her way through the crowd to get that seat (people hesitate a little longer before deciding to sit in a Priority Seat - meant for older people, pregnant women and the physically handicapped).

Now that's bad, I decide. The story wasn't complete - as far as I could tell (as I don't know any Mandarin) - and the girl was visibly keen to tell the rest to her appreciative audience. However, the attraction of a seat on a long journey was too much.

Four stations later, the passenger on my other side gets up from his seat to alight - with the standing crowd staring like vultures at the prospect of an empty seat.

Kazzingatchhing!

My brain makes a split-second decision (something it definitely needs to practice more!) and I slide over quickly to the newly vacated seat while keeping my hand on the original one. The surprised gazes of the vultures shift to the other seat now. Hoping to God that there are enough gaps between the people standing between the two rows of seats so that I can spot the girl, I try to fend them off using all the expressions I could gather on my face in rapid succession - confusing Singaporeans slows them down!

Not only do I spot her, she spots me as well!

I make a quick hand gesture and signal her to come over.

We don't know each other, we don't even know each other's languages - but she understands! Lightning-fast as a doe, she jumps up, pushes through the myriads of pairs of legs and is beside me in less than 5 seconds. I remove my hand, she sits down and begins telling the remainder of her story to her mother with renewed Mandarin fervor.

Oh, and before she does that, she flashes the cutest toothless smile in the world to me! We were so darn successful in pulling off our little prank, pissing off a dozen adults in one go! Beats offering a seat to a grumpy, old buddha any day! :)

Adios!

Queries...

Questions I asked to myself at various points in my life:

Q. Do you want to create something or do you want to advise? Which is better?
I chose to create things. That's why I chucked an offer at a top consultancy firm and chose a better-paying job instead that allowed me to create things (not all is rosy, though). A lot of people told me that it was a bad career move - maybe it was but I still remember being asked in an interview, "What are your medium-term and long-term aims?" and my answer was as ready as ever - "In the medium term, I want to earn as much money as possible - in the long term, I want to open a game studio using that money - it is a costly business". I will be taking a long-winded route to achieve that - but that's what I wish to achieve anyway - it's not a career, it's a wish, something far more powerful (unless I get run over by a car before "long-term" arrives!)

Q. Why not a management degree?
I never wanted one. Any idiot can tell you that you don't need one to show your chops. It is just a filtering mechanism for recruiters. Tell me - if firms did not care for the word "MBA" - would you go for it? You can't love being a manager and studying management. At least, I can't. Management is best learnt on-the-job - period.

Q. Why not, then, a PhD?
Again, doing things is a priority for me. It is a very respectable degree - but it takes quite a lot of time to finish and the ability to effect a change in the world after getting the degree is subject to the same (if not worse) probabilities that would be faced by somebody who has been "on-the-field" for a similar amount of time. Again, that's my idea - conditions vary.

Q. Who has the most amount of power to bring about change?
By far, it is the technologists who have the greatest ability to bring about change - not marketers, consultants or investment-bankers. These guys are just value-adders. Creation of value can only be done by the implementor community - doctors, engineers, scientists, teachers, writers, artists etc. Sadly, for the same amount of time and intelligence, you can get paid a lot more for being a managerial-stud. And despite what the top gurus say - managerial studs make life tougher than easier - when the incentive is to be the grease between the wheels, you'd want the wheels to be rusted first - it's not a conspiracy theory - it's plain logic. However, plain logic also commands you to do a cost-benefit analysis of your life - and that, more often than not, leads to people choosing these jobs over the technical ones (if they can, that is). It is a structural defect in the employment market where the glorified incentive to have a convenient life has taken over the incentive to create value.
Thankfully, there still are people out there (and in significant numbers) who understand this and are doing the right thing. I respect them a lot for that. If you have to be a manager then be someone like a VC - help good ideas find funds (and shut up after that, of course) - that's real value-addition.

There are several other things which I have had to tackle and am still tackling - but these few points were dying to come out after recent experiences.

Adios!

The Grudge

I think that the world of finance mostly involves idiots.

In fact, the world of management involves idiots and a high quantity of them. And, no! Don't you come back at me with stories of "No, I know this guy who is such a big stud..." and all. If they hadn't been idiots while entering this field, they sure became one when they decided to accept it and "excel" at it.

It will dumb you down, it will eat away your soul. All you CAT-qualifiers and GMAT-aces - take my advice, step back and do what you really want to - don't become an investment banker, don't become a consultant nor a marketing guru - live your life instead helping others out and deriving pleasure from that, build games, learn music, study history, do something that brings a smile to someone's face. You'll probably have a more convenient life if you do accept your fate as a manager - but believe me, the day you do so - you'd have already lost your soul. The world of business sucks - it has no soul and too much sham - way too much sham!

There is a better world out there. And I sure as hell am going to find out what it is. Maybe I was part of it once - I hope to rediscover it, then.

Wheeeee!...

After a quarter-century on the planet, this is what I've learnt so far:

Not all that you wish for comes true...but, it never is the end of the world!

Adios!

There are...

...two kinds of people in this world - those who have played Half Life 2 - and those who have not.

'Nuff said!

Echo...

Crown Book Depot (estd. 1924) at Kingsway Cantt, Jabalpur always has something new to offer me whenever I go there (which is, like, almost every time I visit Jabalpur).

This time too, a book called out to me from the dark corners of the towering, dusty columns of tomes encroached by wooden racks bulging with volumes that no one had dared to buy (since 1924) - totally scared by the sheer amount of evil that lurked inside them (Nah! - it's because, in Jabalpur, no one gives a shit!). The book was The Giver by Lois Lowry.

I bought it before lunch - started it during lunch (much to the consternation of my mother) - and finished it a few minutes ago (with intermittent doses of IPL, chai and bhajiye making the day extremely sinful and worth an encore).

Really nice book with soft sci-fi , philosophy and tonnes of quotable quotes. Totally worth it - even if it all were to find these lines at the very end:

"Behind him, across vast distances of space and time, from the place he had left, he thought he heard music too. But perhaps, it was only an echo."


Adios!