Tree, tell me a story!

Someone has to keep up with Bangalore's phenomenal growth, and who to bear the brunt but the trees! For the discerning, I have not used the wrong pronoun. To me trees are more than logs of wood. If I could have been a comic character (hey, that's another idea for a post! :)) I would have chosen Dogmatix in this case. Dogmatix (Obelix's dog in the comic strip Asterix and Obelix. If ever there was humour in this world, it is this, it is this, it is this :D) loves trees, and howls his heart out in grief every time one is found cut. I feel pretty much the same grief when I see one felled/uprooted.

In Bangalore City most of the trees (still surviving, by the grace of God) are around 40-50 years old. Imagine all that they have seen in their lifetime! Imagine the stories they could tell.

Trees are old, and wise. Sit in the shade of a tree one day, and hear its Story.

P.S. The reason for the sudden spate of blogging - clearing the backlogs! :P

Come away with me

It took another day of "amazing" weather to feel like "Belonging" again. And this time it was right. I'll be leaving soon. For a new life, with new goals and new people to achieve them with. There is lots more that I am taking away with me now than I did four years ago. I am not much into Western Music, but I remember the few lines of "Come Away With Me" by Norah Jones that I had heard a couple of years ago. Today it seems the right song to sing. This is what I want to tell all the people - parents, friends, and of course my teddy bear :) Come away with me...

F.R.I.E.N.D.S.

This post is dedicated to that part of my life where I finally found what I had never believed existed, atleast for me - a deep, cemented friendship which I know, in my heart, will last lifelong. In that room in a quiet suburb with my friends, I felt at peace. At peace with the fact if I ever need a patient ear or a shoulder to cry on, one is available a phone call away, any day, any time. At peace with the fact that I'm not the only one who fights (and ultimately makes up) :P with my near and dear ones. At peace with the fact that while all of us are playing Life's games on different courts, we are bound to cross each others' at some time or the other.
Till we meet again.

Longing. And Belonging

Finally, something other than my work has made me want to blog!

I've known all day today that the weather was amazing. I couldn't resist taking a short walk outside my office building for some time, and I tell you, it's a crime to be inside! Cloudy sky, gentle breeze, air heavy with the smell of earth and the impending rain. Breathe deeply and you feel light and free, just for a moment :)

This kind of weather always makes my heart long for something, and the funny thing is, I don't know what. Considering the years that I was away from home, I thought that I longed for it - the comfort of the sofa, the cuddle of my teddy bear, or the warmth of my blanket. But today, I am at home, or as close as I can get, rather. And the beautiful weather still makes my heart ache, like as if something is missing in my life, something fulfilling. Strange..

Thoughts apart, if you're in Bangalore today, don't miss the weather for anything in the world!

BRAND

Some more wise words from my unlikely inspiration, this time, on what “brand” means:

“The saying goes, "a brand is a promise." On a personal level, I've always felt that statement was incomplete. A promise is the lowest common denominator of a brand - it's what people expect. Think of your favorite brand, whether search engine or sneaker or coffee shop or free software, and you'll know what I mean - a brand is an expectation. If you experience anything less, you're disappointed.”

I distinctly remember the time one of the candidates in my group was asked to define a brand in an interview. According to him, a brand was a set of positive (or negative) associations that were made with an entity – a product, a service, or even a person. It consists if certain qualities, some things that come to mind when that entity's name is taken. He continued to define himself as a brand, in terms of qualities and abilities, and that of an institute as well, expressing some of the ideals that it stood for. I thought it was a brilliant answer. It was only when I read the above blog that I realised that there is much more to this now-ambiguous-sounding word. And this knowledge/realisation comes with experience. I wonder, in the new world that I going to in a couple of months, how much knowledge will be realised into experience?

Round and Round

Round and Round goes the Merry-Go Round,
As the world whirrs and whirrs.
Recognise the same swivelling chairs,
The same people hunched over their screens,
As the world whirrs and whirrs.
Recognise the “lame ducks”,
The same errors on trying to execute different files,
As the world whirrs and whirrs.

Um, Did I say merry?
I can't believe that I have been driven to write something like this!!

Sometimes..

Has it ever happened to you that at one point of time you feel very strongly about something, but then later you wonder why you even bothered to think about it in the first place? The following two issues mean so less to me now that I'm not even able to word them satisfactorily.

“I am because you are”
I was asked: What comes to your mind when you hear this statement?
My answer and thought stressed on the opinion that our character and personality are significantly affected by our environment – society, our family and elders. Maybe this is because I am largely a product of my environment. I owe everything that I am to the kind of city I come from, to my parents (who took all the right decisions for me at crucial times in my life) and all the values/opinions that I have inculcated from them.

“Lame Duck”
The best way to explain this is that when you are at the last rung of the ladder whatever everyone throws at you from above falls on you. By virtue of being junior in both age, experience and consequently knowledge I am the Chosen One to execute all the dud, sure-to-end-nowhere tasks. It's frustrating because I end up wasting time and energy, only to realise (or be told) later that I should stop working on it as it is heading nowhere. Worse, I lose motivation to work. Why do the task when I know that it is going to be a lame duck?