Dehradun

Mom and I had planned to go to Dehradun for the weekend. She has decided to buy a house there... and she needed me as a joint applicant for the loan application.

So Friday night, after I came home from Office, she and I packed our bags and took off. The plan was to take the train and reach there by morning. But the train had a waiting of 130. This is the season of kanwarias. Roads in July-August are dotted with thousands of water-carrying, orange-clad kanwarias, devotees of Shiva.






We decided to take one of the private buses. We reached the ISBT and found an agent who was selling the tickets. So we bought 2 for Dehradun and went to board the bus. On reaching there, when we asked to be seated, we suddenly discovered that everybody else had been assigned seat numbers and we had not been. And now suddenly there was no seat in the bus for us also. I harrowed with the bus conductor and with the ticket counter shop they had. Soon it appears that they had actually sold tickets to 6-7 extra people. So I wrangled with them for a good 10 mins.

They tried getting another bus but since it was the kanwaria season so all the buses were directed towards Haridwar and there wasn’t any bus available for Dehradun. So they offered to pay back the money. I was relieved that at least we were not duped by a crook. The bus to Haridwar had a few seats left and we decided to take that one. Dehradun is about an hour’s drive from Haridwar and they tell me that there is a good bus service also from Haridwar to Dehradun.

The bus ride was a nice one and I had a chance to observe closely the mannerisms of kanwarias. Not a very elegant impression, however these guys know how to have fun. They sang and dance till wee hours of the night and we had a hard time trying to sleep. Mom was a bit tired and wanted to sleep but wasn’t able to. However I took my chance to doze off whenever I could.

After a rickety ride, we reached Haridwar and took a Marshal to Dehradun. Beware of these guys as they will smell your naivety and overcharge you at every step. We reached Dehradun around 7 in the morning and were treated to some very refreshing weather.







This trip has left quite a few impressions and I will be writing about them...

I turned 26 yesterday.

The entire morning was filled with birthday wish calls.

Had a small party with my extended family. Nothing special… Just some cake and dinner. Was really hot in the evening and so had a little hard time, otherwise had a lot of fun.

My brother gave me the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mein_Kampf by Adolf Hitler. I will read it in the next few days. He commented that 30% of the people who read it turn Nazi.

Anyways it will provide good insight into the mind of a great leader (whose motives are no doubt in question, but a great leader nevertheless).

Think before you Speak

I am gonna post a list of the feedback I received at the Induction later

I thought I will start working on my delta's and try and improve on them.

One of the delta's was "Think before you Speak"

Well... by nature, I like to keep making funny comments which are fairly well received. However the thing with funny is that different perople have different humour sensivities and what might be funny to one person may be irritating to another and outright offensive to some.

I did some research on Google. Most of the links were bad but I found some which had mentioned the Impact of not "Thinking before Speaking"

• http://www.teenadviceonline.org/articles/hurtfulwords.html


• http://peek.thezeroboss.com/archives/004918.html


• http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=657145


• http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/007080.php

One humorous situation also came up.

• http://www.3till7.net/2006/05/28/think-before-you-speak/

Then I found this

• http://www.43things.com/things/view/32520

43things.com is basically a site where people list things they wish to do or have done and they share their experiences in trying to achieve these goals.

One commendable quote from one of the users :

If you just take 5 seconds to think before reacting or speaking, you can save yourself a lot of headaches. Too many people act right away on gut instinct, which is not always smart. You can come off as immature, whiny, selfish, or just plain ignorant, if you just immediately speak or act without thinking about the way you sound or the consequences of what you’re doing and saying (immediately and later on) or even if what you’re saying or doing makes any sense or if you’re just reacting to react. If you would just take 5 seconds to breathe and remember that you’re a civilized human being and not an animal scrapping around in the dirt, you’ll elevate yourself and that’ll be noticed by others who’ll seek to emulate that kind of behavior for themselves. And you’ll eventually learn it as a habit, and remove a lot of stress from your life, and you’ll learn how to talk to and gingerly persuade people to be kinder and nicer to you. You’ll find more peace around you. You’ll make the world a better place.

Makes ya happy. Do it.

I think I have work to do

The Top 10 Top 10 lists

There are so many top 10 lists out there that I needed a top 10 for myself.

1. Top 10 Strangest Lego Creations
   Talk about imagination. This one just shook me from my seat.
   http://www.techeblog.com/index.php/tech-gadget/top-10-strangest-lego-creations
   


2. Top 10 Free Email Services
   If you are looking for a free email service, you can be picky. I didn’t know about half of them…
   http://email.about.com/cs/freeemailreviews/tp/free_email.htm
   


3. Bill Gates' Legacy: Microsoft's Top 10 Flops
   Gates will be remembered as a visionary and PC industry leader. But even Microsoft's Chairman hasn't been right in all of his bets.
   http://www.microsoft-watch.com/article2/0,2180,1977870,00.asp
   


4. Top 10 Deadliest Animals
   Creatures that scare the socks off everybody
   http://www.livescience.com/animalworld/top10_deadliestanimals.html
   


5. Top 10 Celebrity Entrepreneurs
   Magic Johnson, Sean Combs, Oprah Winfrey they are all in there.
   http://www.inc.com/slideshow_INC/slideviewer.cgi?list=celebrityentrepreneurs
   
   
6. The Top Ten US Killer Tornadoes
   The United States gets about 1000 recorded tornadoes every year. Today, only a few are killers, but that has not always been so. About 200 US tornadoes have killed 18 or more people. Devastating.
   http://www.tornadoproject.com/toptens/toptens.htm
   


7. Crabby's Top 10 spam-fighting tips
   If you have an e-mail address, it's just about impossible for you to eliminate spam completely. However, there are steps you can take to reduce that pesky, unsolicited commercial e-mail. Here are Crabby's 10 favorite methods for hitting spam where it hurts. http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/assistance/HA010701261033.aspx
   


8. Top 10 Strangest Computer Setups
   Which ones are your favorites?
   http://www.techeblog.com/index.php/tech-gadget/top-10-strangest-computer-setups
   


9. Top 10 Ways to Destroy Earth
   Destroying the Earth is harder than you may have been led to believe.
   http://www.livescience.com/technology/destroy_earth_mp.html
   


10. Top Ten Tips on how to Save on Legal Fees
    When it becomes clear that your marriage is over, and no amount of pretense or counseling can fix what is broken... you'll add one more worry to your ample list of stresses - the high cost of divorce!
    http://www.divorcenet.com/states/nationwide/how_to_save_on_legal_fees
    
    
    

Others worth the mention :

• Top 10 Mistakes in Web Design :
  The ten most egregious offenses against users. Web design disasters and HTML horrors are legion, though many usability atrocities are less common than they used to be. This one comes up top on Google.
  http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9605.html
  


• Top 10 Places to Find Free Images For Your Blogs
  If you're not a camera buff or you simply wish to use other people's images in your blog, then you might want to look in to free stock photography sites and services.
  http://weblogs.about.com/od/writingandcontent/tp/FreeStockPhotos.htm
  


• Science's 10 Most Beautiful Physics Experiments
  Nominated by physicists, the most beautiful experiment of all time. 10 winners of polling and accompanied by short explanations with computer animations.
  http://physics.nad.ru/Physics/English/top_ref.htm
  
  

And Finally

• www.tenmojo.com
  Largest collection of top 10 ten lists on the world wide web.
  http://www.tenmojo.com
  

Induction

Oh my God they make you sit in a classroom for 2 weeks !!!

Come on !!! I am a programmer !!!

This whole week went through like lightning. Sapient has this fantastic induction program in which they tell you a lot about Sapient and its people and core values.

The first day was all about Logistics like transportation, documentation and stuff.. Pretty much standard boring stuff… And a little tight in terms of time.

Then all through the week we went through a series of presentations by... fantastic speakers... from people really high up... like the MD of a big business unit... the manager of another function... The really noticeable feature of all of them was the way they held their audiences attention. Some of them were dominating, some were really soft spoken... and if was anybody else the crowd would have just started dozing off...

The crowd was about 50 strong with 2 batches of experienced and trainees...

I have not come across such a cross section of really intelligent people. People on whom you can depend on and would like to lead and be lead by the same people... The fact that such a concentration of high IQ brains would have made the life of the induction assistance team hell but they too are sooo good that we had a great fun time... A lot of this credit goes to the lead facilitator Divya whose energy and enthusiasm has already made my decision to shift to Sapient a good one.

In the past I have had a hard time finding topic for this blog but I swear I could have written a blog entry for each hour these five days...

The team… We named it Team Salvo

I had the hardest time remembering all the names of my batch mates.

Debleena, Amit, Rachit, Sumit, Naveen, Rachna (Very Soft spoken), Suman, Suhail, Nitin, Prashant and all the others whose names I can’t remember. I will always remember them and hope we continue in our friendship.

We had an individual feedback round yesterday and I got I guess the maximum feedback both positive and negative… Sohail called me a future CEO in the making... I have to start working on that now…

The End - The Beginning

They are giving me a farewell today...

Even though tommorow is my official last working day but for some reason they have decided to do it today.

New Job

I have been looking for a change for quite some time. Now that’s difficult because I am very picky.

I finally got an offer from a really good company. It wasn’t easy but was definitely worth the wait. The “wasn’t easy” part will be good conversation material when I am in a mood to brag. I put in my papers roughly 2 weeks back and have to stay here for 2 more.

I am anxious to join the new job. The new organization is a huge company with over 30000 people in it. I would have considered myself lucky to get an associate level job but they gave me a senior team manager post and that’s one level up from my current profile.

So basically now I am an official guest here. I am giving trainings and handover to my colleagues. A typical day begins with login and checking my mails and forwarding them to the colleagues for action. Then a game of Table Tennis. Then back to the system and reading all the junk mails… Today I am also writing this blog entry. Then I go for lunch and play some more TT. Then some meetings if any and more TT and then back home.

The team has planned a weeklong party for my farewell and I will let you form your own inferences from this.