Thursday, December 27, 2007

Vodafone wants me to be a cricket geek

"Please.. One last chance... If it doesnt work out, I will personally call you up... " says an honest sounding female on the Vodafone customer service. It is pretty difficult to get me worked up, this was one of those difficult times :). I say "OK.. But this would be the last... The next time I call.. I would not be listening to anything but the way.. and I will make sure that this is fixed and a few people screwed even if it translates to taking a week long off from work".. and I hang up.

It was some two weeks back that I had called the Vodafone customer care to find out about something and after talking to the customer care representative, I SMSd a feedback to the Vodafone when instead of the regular reply I get back a message stating that I have been subscribed and that it will take 24 hrs for "it" to be activated. I called the customer care again to find out what "it" was and how to de-activate whatever it was, to know that it was some cricket info!!!!!!!!!

Now, I have never been a great fan of cricket (or for that matter any sport). I ask the guy to take my request to de-activate the service. Turns out that it would not be possible, the service has to be un-subscribed by the user, he tells me the process which was.. "SMS DCT CKT to 56789". I thank him and promptly send the SMS, reply "Invalid response code".... I am like... WHAT?? Even an embedded device would throw up a more meaningful message. Calling the customer care again tells me that I cannot de-activate it till it is activated. So I will have to wait till the evening. I am like OK..

Evening... "Invalid response code".... Customer Care... "Oo sorry... please SMS DCT CKT99 to 56789" OK.... "Invalid response code"... Customer Care... "Oo sorry... please SMS DCT CKT to 567889"... This was a great difference over the previous attempts.... I got back a message which went like... "Thanks... To activate Caller tunes ACT CT... For Shaer-o-Shaeri ACT SS.. For Jokes ACT JK.... blah blah blah blah... " I was like... Ok... done... By the way... What the hell makes Vodafone think that I have a lot of time to get Jokes and stuff on my phone... Anyways.... So I am having my dinner... ting-tong-ting.... SMS... I read it... Ganguly hits a six... blah blah blah... uuooo its not fixed yet.... Customer Care... by this time I am pissed... I tell the person that I am not able to de-activate it.... sir it has to be de-activated at your end... we cannot do that... please SMS CKT99 to 1111.... Obviously with no help... I had started keeping my phone mute.. everyone in the office found it funny.... I get SMS not only of the international cricket... there are SMSs of local cricket some chunnu team playing munnu team sorts... there are jokes running around the office about my phone... somebody would say... "So whats up with basketball these days..." then someone woud say... "Ask Fasih... He might be getting a few updates here and there about those" somebody else would chip in... "No... Vodafone is busy teaching him cricket... One sport at a time"

Finally I get a call from the Vodafone guys on what my problem was.... he talks to me and tells me that it would be addressed soon. I get an SMS a while later, "Issue addressed. Sorry for the inconvenience caused" I heave a breathe of relief, unmute my phone, get to my seat... ting-tong-ting... I take the phone.... Bombay rapids meet bengal tigers (or some such animals) today... This time I am totally pissed.... My ex-boss pitied me and narrated a similar torture to which all he did was to call them up and ask them how to escalate the issue. I decided to do that...

This lady takes the call... "Sir, why do you want to de-activate the serivice" I never liked cricket... Now I hate it because of Vodafone... Is that a reason enough? Or did she want something in writing too? Thinking back I might have been a bit rude... But the escalating stint really fixed it. She said I had to send.... "I am not going to do a SINGLE thing... do you get it? Just tell me how to escalate this..." That was it... She asked for a last chance... Which I grudgingly granted (Guess because I had already shouted so much...) And I have not got an SMS from them till now... except for the "Your bill dated 15-Dec-07 has been dispatched...." a while back which triggered me to write this account... :)

Thursday, December 6, 2007

Hey there Delilah

PG tells me about this song that she has been listening to lately, "Hey there Delilah". I ask my office folks if they have the song and a few others that I had been looking for since a past few days. Nobody seems to have these [Either I have an obscure taste or the office folks >:) ]. However, one of the more philanthropic types came to my seat to tell me about this site eSnips.com which she claimed has about every song that I might be interested in listening to. Soon enough I found that to be true, it really has a good collection of Hindi as well as English songs.

Happy with the discovery, I come back home and spend the next few hours in finding the songs I had been looking for since ages now. Make a playlist, all set to go... But... the playlist wont play... !!!! Googling around seemed futile after killing a lot of time.. I guessed that it was time to do some scripting :) Skip the dinner and now I have this script which downloads the songs in the playlist :) Thought it might be of some use to someone out there.

esnips-playlist-save
******************

#!/bin/sh
if [ $# -lt 3 ]
then
echo "Usage: $0 "
exit 1
fi

EMAIL="$1"
PASSWD="$2"
PLAYLIST="$3"

ESNIPS='http://www.esnips.com'
LOGIN_URL=$ESNIPS'/UserSignInAction.ns?action=signin'
PLAYLIST_ID=`echo $PLAYLIST | sed 's/.*\///g'`
PLAYLIST_URL=$ESNIPS'/plxml/'$PLAYLIST_ID


# Log in to the server.
rm -f cookies.txt
echo "Logging in to eSnips"
wget --keep-session-cookies --save-cookies cookies.txt \
--post-data "ns_EventTarget=&ns_EventArgument=&referrer=&rememberMe=off&email=$EMAIL&password=$PASSWD" \
--output-document 'junk.html' \
-q \
-p $LOGIN_URL

# Now grab the page or pages we care about.
echo "Loading the playlist"
wget --load-cookies cookies.txt \
--output-document 'playlist.xml' \
-q \
-p $PLAYLIST_URL

# Get the commands for downloading the files
mkdir -p downloads
xsltproc --nodtdattr esnips.xslt playlist.xml | grep -v "

cat esnips.xslt
**************

<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version="1.0">
<xsl:template match="/playlist/trackList">
<xsl:for-each select="track">
echo "Downloading <xsl:value-of select="title"/>";ext=`wget -O '<xsl:value-of select="title"/>' --load-cookies cookies.txt <xsl:value-of select="location"/> <xsl:text disable-output-escaping="yes"> 2>&1| grep audio | sed 's/.*audio\///;s/]//'`;mv '</xsl:text><xsl:value-of select="title"/>' downloads/'<xsl:value-of select="title"/>'.$ext
</xsl:for-each>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

I am impressed with myself... As I usually am..

Monday, December 3, 2007

Economics for dummies - Part I (Interest Rates)

Of the many articles I read trying to understand the meaning of various terms and their correlation, I found the article by Warren Buffet most illustrative and useful. What follows is an inspiration from the same.

In a world far far away are a bunch of people, living on islands. We start by looking at two of these islands, Squanderville and Thriftsville, the prime occupation of both the islands is farming and mining. Thrifts are hardworking people who believe in postponing life for later [;)] and work very hard ending up in producing more food than they need, Squanders on the other hand work just enough to eat what they produce and spend the rest of the time playing golf. Thrifts figure this out and start selling their surplus food to Squanders who are more than willing to buy it and save time to play more golf. Now the problem is that the Squanders trade in Squander-bucks which Thrifts cannot use in Thriftsville, they have to buy something in Squanderville to make use of the money. They start off by buying bonds issued by Squander-guv. Bond is a promise that the issuer will pay back the money with some interest later. Everyone is happy. Is it?

Lets look at Thrifts again. Thrifts are getting richer, they export more and import less (this is called a trade surplus). Now since they are getting richer, it means that there is more money in the market chasing the same amount of goods. This makes the commodities more expensive (as there is more demand and supply is the same), there is an inflation. The guv. figures that if this is to continue things will become too expensive and not all the people will be able to buy stuff. So what the guv. does is, it sucks out excess money from the market. There are a few ways to do it:
  • Raise the interest rates
  • Simple, aint it, people fall for it and tend to deposit more money in the banks as they are getting more returns in the form of interest

  • Sell the guv. bonds
  • This translates to buying the money

  • Increase the bank deposit ratio
  • Mandates the banks to store more money with the Central bank thereby making it more difficult for banks to lend out money.


    Lets take a look at Squanderville now, squanders are happy playing golf, they have no motive to work harder [;)] Now the guv. wants them to work more so that the country makes money. What it does is, it makes money cheap, i.e. it makes the squanders money more easily so that they can make some good use of it. The squanders realize that this is a good opportunity to make money, they borrow money from the bank and start doing business with it. On the way they create more employment, the mines which were once too expensive to explore are now worth it as they now have easy cash that can be used to dig mines. The guv. by decreasing the rates has thus stimulated the economy. However as a side effect, the squander-bucks have become cheaper. This means that to manufacture some stuff in Squanderville has become cheaper than to import it from Thriftsville. Squanderville exporters now have an economic edge over other islands. A falling currency is better for exporters and bad for importers. Well, at least that's what it looks like.

    Economics for dummies - Introduction

    I have always been fascinated with my uncle who claims ( and I totally believe it ) that over years he has squeezed the stock market to make money from it. He is a CA by profession and I once I took it for granted given his education background and I thought it best to stay away from it. However last year my company's finance advisor initiated me to investments and I have been hooked ever since.

    I guess it is because of my educational background as an engineer (who, as Scott Adams rightly points out, are infected with finding out hwo things work :)

    that I got really curious how the whole thing works. After a lot of Googling, I collected a few things, and I thought it might be of interest to someone on a similiar conquest :)

    Please note that what follows is EXTREMELY rudimentary view of the system, and from the eyes of someone who is still in the quest of the complete picture. I would be more than happy if you could spot and point out any inaccuracies.

    Sunday, December 2, 2007

    Firefox IS Out of the Box

    Computers have come a long way from the text based consoles but we are still a long way from the smart machines which would understand what we are trying to do as opposed to having to explain what exactly we want to do with it. Recently I noticed Firefox doing something really awesome, to get to a site you don't need to remember obscure names just type in what you remember about the site, Firefox will take you there!!!!!
    Well.. This is no exaggeration... try it out yourself.. To get to the Times Of India website you dont have to remember http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/, just type in times of india in the address bar, press enter.. and there you go... Now it is obvious it is doing a smart search behind the scenes and also obvious is the fact that Google is helping it out big time, turns out that it is doing a "I am feeling Lucky" on Google however, the fact that really surprised me was that if the string in the address bar is not a very good search string... For e.g. Entering "india strategy" does not take you to indiastrategy.com instead takes you to the Google search page for india strategy!!!! Now that is what I call Out of the Box thinking >:)

    What a wonderful world

    I once used to be an optimist, a hard core optimist who found a bright side to everything and a silver lining surrounding the darkest and largest of clouds... I found the world so beautiful... With time however I realized that not all is as rosy, there is a lot of pain around us... And as NB once very rightly said... ignorance is bliss and with knowledge comes the pain and the bitter truths... and as GB keeps saying that everything changes... and that the world is not as rosy as I think it is... it was almost like I had started believing that pain outshines joy when PG sent me this song... this was a song that I have practically asked everyone who knows me about... I still dont know where I heard it.. the one I heard was in Hindi... And it went like... "Socha ye dil... kaisa sundar ye jahaan..." And here is PG sending the original English song (and I owe her a BIGG treat for this)... The world is indeed beautiful...

    Sacrificing the gift

    Every now and then one hears various views about how to live, one hears about success and failures, about love and pain, of friends and foes. One of the most common beliefs is that one should know what one wants to do in life. I find that very difficult to grasp, I find it difficult to believe that we can find what we want to do in life, the way I see it is, life is like a series of events some of which effect us and some don't; our responsibility is to do the best we can of that passing moment, of the immensely large number of things that we are capable of doing every moment pick the one thing that we like to do.. Do it with all the passion and love... not as one more thing that has to be done... It is only when we find that true love can we say that we have "used" that moment and fulfilled our duty.... Recently I read this Chinese proverb somewhere "If you are not putting in your best... You are sacrificing the Gift"...

    Lets not sacrifice the gift...

    Saturday, November 3, 2007

    And miles to go before I sleep


    The D-Day was finally approaching, it was almost a year back when I was amazed at NB running for 4.5 km on a treadmill and I could see myself running a km with a great difficulty. It was then that I decided that I would also do a 5km stretch in half an hour. It was a matter of months that I could reach it and another couple of weeks that I realized that I should do something more, a marathon seemed like the thing that was challenging enough.

    Here comes Vodafone Delhi Half Marathon, just a week after the month of Ramzan. It looked very unfair for people fasting during the month, it would be difficult to keep up with the training schedules. But I had been waiting for this since almost half a year now and couldn't just let it go. I was in a good shape, my best timings had peaked at 11kms in 57 mins just a week before Ramzan. My practice schedules were now shifted to the evening, start at 6:40 PM, right after the breakfast at 6:20 PM after a few dates (which by the way, I realized a great source of instant energy) and evening prayers.

    Last 12 days of Ramzan, I went home in Kolkata, this was again not helping in my schedules as I could not run much back at home. I come back to Noida on Monday and decide to come up to speed as soon as I physically could. The very Monday I come back I do a 12 km in a dismal 1 hr 20 mins. As impatience would have it, I forgot all the basic rules of running, dont exceed 10% of your previous week's total; Take one day rests between two long runs; In the haste, I decided to run everyday till the coming week, and the following week run only on Monday as the Sunday following was the D-Day. This turned out to be expensive decision, the last run up to the Marathon, I sprained my ankle!!

    On Friday we had an office party in which I danced a bit (too much, should I add!) . My dance form basically involves a lot of jumping. With the sprain in my ankle only a little noticeable, by Saturday morning I was limping. Someone advised a crepe bandage and someone else advised a complete rest. Saturday evening it the pain was a little better than the morning. I had to go get the running bib and the timing chip on the Saturday evening. The timing chip, by the way, is an extremely cool use of technology. For a security deposit of a 1000 bucks you get a small RFID
    chip which you tie on your foot while running. There are strips on the running track that not only make sure that you have actually crossed the milestone but also track your timings at various points in the race which are later presented to you in the form of a timing certificate. The chip is also used to identify your race photographs which you can buy later(The race-photography itself is pretty interesting, there are cameras around these timing strips, they take your pics as you pass by them and an image identification is done on the basis of your bib-no and timing chip). Anyways, I had to reach Ansal's Plaza in Delhi to collect the timing chip (which by the way was a full-fledged expo, complete with live entertainment to stalls of Sports and health-food companies); On the way back, as luck would have it, the bike slipped on a polished floor!! The speed was slow and the I had a helmet on, but the fall was enough to slightly injure my right knee!!!


    View Larger Map
    Less than 12 hrs for the event to start, there was no turning back. At 6:00 next morning, a banana, a few dates a liter of water and a broad smile on the face, I start for Delhi. The race started from the Gate 1 of Nehru park with a lot of commotion. There were elite runners, people who are famous for running and record holders; Celebrity runners, mostly movie stars, models like Milind Soman (He actually ran the complete race, at least I crossed him at 8-10 km mark), Sports-Stars like Rahul Dravid, Actress like Priyanka Chopra (who I dont think ran at all) and even Villians like Gulshan Grover added to the fun; Politicos Shivraj Patil, Sheila Dikshit (who also flagged off the run), Suresh Kalmadi, Navin Jindal; And obviously the super star... Me..

    We march.

    For our lands, for our families, for our freedom.

    We march.

    For honor's sake, for duty's sake, for glory's sake, we march.

    We march.


    The run was really fun, the first 5 km was relaxed, without a stop and without water overtaking as many as I could. There were residents waiting on the roads to cheer us up which brought up the energy levels. With every group of people cheering and hooting I ran at my top speed for a km at a stretch. There were water/glucose supplies all along the way. Most volunteers really looked eager to help. After the fifth km mark when I took my first water bottle, I noticed the volunteer offering water was really happy when I grabbed the bottle from his hand.. shouted a thanks to him he shouted back a real loud "Keep it up" to me... Interesting how we all work...

    At the 6th km I felt the pain both in my knee and the ankle, I was thinking of slowing down a bit when I saw this very old guy, probably in his late 60s or early 70s going steady. I decided to slow down when he slows down. We ran together for the next 2 kms. Without a stop, and without any more water... and then I had to slow down after the 8th km for the old guy was really not planning on reducing speed leave alone stopping or taking water !!!

    It was around this time that the first runner (foreigner) had started coming back from the other end. We all clapped... Then a bunch of more guys (foreigners)... We were like... Where are our guys? Then we see a group of Indians... We all cheered very loudly for them.... and I got my new dose of energy to run for another 2 kms till I saw the old man again... Running comfortably at the same old speed >:) Amazing...


    We had finished half the distance... I met Kuldip (my mentor in the last company) on the way... and we ran together till the end... I took more breaks as my ankle would complain every now and then and so would the knee... But overall it was not bad.. I could cross the finishing line at 490th position in the Open Male Category finishing the race in 2:04:12 hrs. A very long wait for the certificate and an extreme pang of sudden hunger and an absolutely unsupportive ankle and knee (I shouldn't be blaming them... At least they carried me through the race >:)) were not really pleasant but the joy of crossing the finishing line made up for it all.....

    And though I still have miles to go before I can sleep... But for that day... I came with the medal around my neck I came back home.... and slept the whole day long...

    Race day photographs till I order them

    Saturday, September 1, 2007

    On watching movies

    Yesternight I was trying to watch this movie when I realised that the subtitle is way out of sync. I tried to use VLC's Subtitles advanced setting but turns out that it is unable to sync it. I tried hunting for a few more subtitles track but after finding two of them I realised that both of them were identical, I am sure that there would be many souls out there who dont have easy net access or there are many movies with not many different subtitles track. Being a geek that I am, at 1:00 in the night I decided it is time to do something permanent :) and I came up with this script that syncs up the subtitles track for me. It takes 4 inputs, a time (T1) towards the start of the movie and the corresponding time (t1) in the subtitles file [If you didnt know, subtitles file can be edited (.srt)] when the same dialog is being played and two similiar times towards the end of the movie.

    Run the script like this:
    awk -f lipsync.awk Subtitles.srt > ModifiedSubtitles.srt

    Play the movie with the new file.

    The script: [Save it as lipsync.awk]
    # --------------------------------------- Start of lipsync.awk
    #
    # Author: Fasihullah Askiri
    #
    # Movie: ----T1---------------------------------------T2---
    # File: --t1---------------------------------t2--
    #
    # T1 - T2
    # -------
    # t1 - t2
    #

    BEGIN {
    T1 = 745
    t1 = 721

    T2 = 7530
    t2 = 7227

    scale = (T1 - T2) / (t1 - t2)
    delaySec = T2 - t2 * scale
    # print "Scale: " scale
    # print "DelaySec: " delaySec
    }

    { processed = 0 }

    function formatTime (timeInSecs)
    {
    hr = int (timeInSecs/3600)
    min = int (timeInSecs/60) - hr * 60
    sec = int (timeInSecs) - min * 60 - hr * 3600
    msecs = int (1000 * (timeInSecs - int (timeInSecs)))
    return hr ":" min ":" sec "," msecs
    }

    function getTimeInSecs (str)
    {
    split (str, time, ":")
    split (time [3], timeLast, ",")
    return time [1] * 3600 + time [2] * 60 + timeLast [1] + timeLast [2] / 1000
    }

    / --> / {
    newStartTime = formatTime(getTimeInSecs($1) * scale + delaySec)
    newEndTime = formatTime(getTimeInSecs($3) * scale + delaySec)
    print newStartTime, $2, newEndTime
    processed = 1
    }

    !processed {
    print $0
    }

    # --------------------------------------- End of lipsync.awk



    I assume that you have a unix based system or a cygwin on your windoze or at least a running version of awk on windoze

    Hope it helps

    Monday, August 20, 2007

    My love

    The first computer I worked on was a VT100 terminal attached to a central server in the sacred server room which we could only look at from outside. We had a slot of not more than an hour to work on it. This was at my campus 7 years back. Computers really have changed a lot, and so have the interfaces and the softwares that we interact with. But a few things will never change at least for me. Top of the list I guess is Vi. I am a Vi fan. Three years of working in the industry and four years at the campus, I found Vi incredibly powerful and easy.

    Some time back NB was talking about this cool dood friend of his who used to do everything imaginable in Emacs; right from writing, debugging source code to checking his mails. He said he had done a plugin which could rip out the attachment off a multi-part mail and save it to a directory which he could go look into. Emacs I believe has a lot of popularity and fan following so I thought I would give it a shot. For a month I "tried" religiously to use emacs for editing it is a good editor, but it does not beat Vi. It might be my love for Vi which hides the goodness of Emacs ;) but the fact remains that to do Emacs you really have to press a bit too many keys. One of my favourite "shortcuts" was "CTRL-x a i g" inverse-add-global-abrev [Ok Ok.... It is a pretty fancy feature... If you want to use it you have sacrifice a little bit... On the plus side you will get more flexible fingers >:)] Anyways, after a month I gave up... I am back to Vi now...

    Wednesday, August 1, 2007

    Stone Age Debugging

    How do you debug a reasonably complex system without tools like a debugger, core dumps or even a console access!!! I am talking about a system with no printf's, no gdb, no persistent filesystem to dump a core on crash.

    I work on an embedded system, TI C62x DSPs on an Motorola MPC board. Few weeks back I was debugging a problem that caused the DSPs to crash every 18-20 hours. We dont have JTag to peek into the DSPs, all we have is a shared memory based debugging mechanism in which DSPs keep updating a location with the code trace and in case of a problem with the DSP, it jumps to HALT and the Controller detects it with a heartbeat mechanism after which it tries to access this shared memory via the DSP's HPI, gets the data, and dumps it to a file.

    However, the problem we have is, if the DSP crashes, i.e. if it DOES NOT do a halt instead badly screws up and reboots, the Controller goes for a toss eventually causing the whole system to reset; which is where the problem starts.

    First 3 days I tried to fix the MPC reset. On a little digging, the MPC reset was found to be due to the following sequence of events:
    - DSP has a problem
    - DSP resets
    - MPC misses a heartbeat from the ailing DSP
    - MPC tries to read the shared memory for the logs [Thinking that DSP has halted]
    - The DSP handles are no more valid as it is reset
    - MPC crashes, bringing down the whole system

    Day1:
    Aim: DSP resets by jumping to c_int00, override the ISR to loop infinitely [or HALT]

    Approach:
    • Find address of c_int00 from map file
    • When DSP is loaded, overwrite the address with JMP HLT code [RTFM for asm or write while (1), compile, check asm]
    Result: Day wasted, DSP still resets, looks like the code I wrote was wrong [no way for me to figure out] or the screwup is worse than I thought

    Day2:
    Aim: MPC crashes because it is trying to read using an invalid handle, get a new handle before reading

    Approach: On DSP failure
    • Close the DSPs
    • Get new handle
    • DONT download the code to the DSP
    • Open HPI
    • Read from the shared location
    Result: I get something, but it looks like it is corrupted, but MPC does not crash at least. But still nowhere.

    Day3:

    Aim: Look for the rootcause, DSP is resetting probably because there is a stack overflow, arrest that

    Approach: In the main task that runs every 20 msecs, check if the stack usage is going beyond 80 %, if so, HALT

    Result: None, half the day wasted

    Aim: There is a buffer overflow, arrest that

    Approach: Put a "gaurd band" near all major buffers, every 20 msecs cycle, check if there is something being written to it. i.e. lets say there is buffer char caImportantBuffer [100];
    Modifiy that to: char caImportantBuffer [100 + GAURD_BAND];
    memset (caImportantBuffer + 100, 0x1234, GAURD_BAND);

    Every 20 msecs, check if the last GAURD_BAND bytes have changed, if they have, HALT.

    Result: ONE bug found, but the problem still remains. Big achievement, but miles to go before I sleep


    To be continued......

    On getting drunk

    Ok... To set the expectations right.... I dont drink... A teetotaler.... NEVER have I touched daaru (That is what I call everything.... From Desi tharra to Breezers (Fondly referred to as Juice) to Tequila Shots) in my life and never do I intend to.... that said..... I do get drunk..... by induction.... Initially everyone (including me) thought that I was trying to act drunk in a drunk company and later I realized that I totally enjoy the drunk parties... as much as anyone drunk dead would.. Comes in pretty handy.... You can get all the high that a drunk would get and you would not do anything silly that you may regret later...

    So today in our office party today we were all drunk and we talked about all sort of things... from Marriages... to College Blues...

    One of the more interesting topics that we talked about was about arranged vs. love marriages and that every guy tries at least once to find love but not every time does one get love... or people take "Mature decisions" not to go with what the heart tells them... the question was... will you be a loser if you take such a decision.... maybe yes or maybe not.... Before we could find out we realized the high came down... nerves were being touched.... so instead of finding answer to that we instead discussed the more interesting topic about not looking for love.... just flings instead... And back to being happy.....

    But I being not drunk drunk... was forced to think of the more important question.... how many times do we let go off the more important things... the more painful things... how many times do we put aside a more meaningful question.... turning ourselves away from what we know matters to something that makes no difference... just avoiding... running away.... from life..... Living.....

    Saturday, July 28, 2007

    Miles to go before I sleep

    It is almost a year now that I started going to the gym... I started maybe just because I found it new... but with time I realized that I simply like running... And then I see NB [The geek sitting Next to me] running 4.5 km one day.... back then I could hardly run 1.5 km... I decided to run 5 km without stopping... at the best speed I could....

    It took months before I reached anywhere close.... People came and people left.... I continued... NB got married..... No more working out for him.... And finally...... last Friday... I ran 6km... in 28 mins.... Coming to think of it... it is not a great feat or anything that I should be very proud of... But for me somehow it symbolizes doing what I once thought was impossible.....

    Time and again I am reminded of Mr. Sur... My maths/chemistry teacher in Class X who once said that I should get a 99% in Maths..... A man can do what a man has done... is how he put it....

    Running a marathon is all I dream of now..... Miles to go before I sleep.... And many promises to keep... and miles to go before I sleep.....

    Monday, July 9, 2007

    Living a moment

    Today I was talking with an office colleague, when this topic came up:
    If you were given a choice right now, to go back in the past, without the knowledge that you have lived it once and without any knowledge of anything that has happened, would you take it?

    Now, there are points to note about this. Had it been with the knowledge of the fact that you know you have lived this and what you are going to see the next day, it is a naïveté idea. You could go buy shares of google, you could do Hotmail before Sabir did and many more such things. However, knowing that you wont have the knowledge makes it a much different and difficult choice to make.

    While we were talking, our MD comes into the conversation, and we ask him the same question, in almost a split second he gives an answer: "I will....". Knowing that he doesnt have the knowledge of the life he lived... Now we were surprised... His logic.... simple... and yet profound.... "Being where I am... at this age... I am thrilled to know that I get to make a journey again... so what if I take the same path... reach the same place where I am today... or take a different path... and be a beggar on the streets.... its the journey... that I find worth the risk... "

    I guess age changes the perspective....

    As for me... I wouldnt take it.... not now... and not in my foreseeable future... unless I am allowed to retain not the knowledge or the information... but just the wisdom that we gain by living through different experiences... the wisdom that might help me to make choices different from what I did then.... And I think I would take it even if it came for a hefty price.... And even as I say this... his words come back to me... maybe it really doesnt matter... maybe to take the journey again is really worth the risk....