Curator of things #1

I have many addictions. And of all those, the worst is my addiction to collect. It is not just any one thing in specific. I collect a variety of things. I don’t know for sure, but maybe, many of us do but never realise how much and what all we collect.

I collect movies, trust me, I have TBs of hard disks filled with movies collected over the course of time. I collect songs, way too many and worse, i make “listen later” lists for songs! I make “read later”, “watch later”, “re-read later” lists on my phone, laptop, shopping sites and even on my office and personal emails. I take monthly backups of bookmarks so that I’ll not lose my endless list of curated content. No matter how much I try, I never see the end of my bookmark list. My list doesn’t just end with movies, music and books. It just starts there, voyaging into realms of articles about politics, history, art, home decor, cooking, baking, architecture, relationships, friends, family, culture, immigration, studies, climate, technology and whatnot.

I also collect, pictures and screenshots of content that I one day want to revisit. It even seems like my life is an attempt to collect things for a future that I might never see. Instead of living in now, I save everything for an unknown future whose arrival date I’ll never know. What a waste of life that is.

So, I want to start a cleanse. Infact I’ve already started one. My last 2 posts were a part of me revisiting my notes on my phone. Hereon, i will try to collect less and live more. The only place where I’m going to curate things is this place with my thoughts around them. I need a phone, body and mind cleanse and I’ll get it.

So, here it is, #1: Job related

Ten Things Never, Ever To Say In Your Resume
https://www-forbes-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/www.forbes.com/sites/lizryan/2017/06/02/ten-things-never-ever-to-say-in-your-resume/amp/

One good piece of advice, let your achievements talk of your qualities instead of the adjectives you would like to describe yourself.

If you go deeper into other advices on the site, “lead by example” and “trust but verify” are a few more that I came across today when I revisited the site. Here’s the link to the 2nd article.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/chrismyers/2018/10/17/how-this-millennial-came-to-realize-the-value-of-old-school-management-techniques/#5d2a567227cd

Here are my key takeaways:

• Dust up your resume preparation skills and start redoing it again.
• My resume needs to wake up from its zombie state.
• Let your achievements speak instead of heavy adjectives.
• Clear examples always lead the way.
• If there are no resume worthy achievements or qualifications, it is never late to get some. The only secret is to work hard.
• To be a leader, the best policy is to lead by example.
• You don’t have to compromise on being tough to be a cool leader.
• Always remember, trust and verify go side-by-side.

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Collections – Just let it out

The death of an IIT scholar reveals the struggle of ambitious women in India
https://qz.com/998496/the-death-of-an-iit-scholar-reveals-the-struggle-of-ambitious-women-in-india/

– Trying to fit into both worlds – modern and traditional
– What you want Vs what your parents want
– Wanting to do right by the people who gave their all to you.
– Going against your own better judgements fearing about the world.
– A battle with the brain. The liberal in you Vs the conservatism around you.
– To take or not take the leap – Worried of the consequences and the impact of those consequences on your loved ones – To choose you or the world.
– The conflicting questions like, How much is self-love and when is it called selfishness?
– Why do you need to raise a man when you married one?
– Just because someone’s your husband, why does that give them an upper hand over you. How will that person become respectable just so? And why doesn’t their actions and words count into their respectability scale?
– Why should you accept or respect someone who doesn’t value you or consider you his equal.
– Why is it not your choice to decide when to get married and if at all to get married or not.
– Why is it that it is frowned upon on a choice not to want to have kids?
– There can be ten thousand reasons – One may be grossed out of the process of making a child, birthing a child and most importantly raising a child by giving up the next 20 years of life, if not more.
– Why does almost no one realise that raising a child isn’t child’s play. That it is a damn serious thing.
– Even the best of parents like mine screwed up at times. It is so easy to screw up and when one’s not ready to take that responsibility, they shouldn’t be forced to.
– I don’t know why it is so hard for people to understand simple things like that.
– Marriage, most importantly requires giving up me time for a joint time. For a multitude of reasons, many couldn’t do that.
– The most important reason being, not being able to respect him and not being attracted to him, ensures conflict.
– Marriage is not just a culmination of families or two bodies, but it is of two minds that need to work as one without losing their individuality.
– One more aspect of it is the physical equation. What if you realise you are not sexually attracted to the man and are repulsive to the thought of having him inside you? Why does that feeling become invalid?
– And most importantly, why is divorce such a bad thing? Divorce should be normalised.
– Divorce is a good thing. Something that separates two unhappy individuals and gives them another chance at happiness in life.
– If happy women are a thing, then happily divorced women are also a thing.
– Happily divorced women should not be ostracized. They should be welcomed as individuals who stood for themselves and made a conscious decision to be happy.
– And most importantly, a women’s ambition shouldn’t be a bad thing. It should be as good or bad as a man’s ambition. That’s another minefield to touch.
– The society should stop deciding and teling how an individual should live life and just let them be.
There are enough laws and regulations on this land that can punish people for their mistakes.
The society as a collective entity should stop meddling in an individual’s personal life.

Geetanjali

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high
Where knowledge is free
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments
By narrow domestic walls
Where words come out from the depth of truth
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way
Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit
Where the mind is led forward by thee
Into ever-widening thought and action
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

——– Rabindranath Tagore

Time and again, we need reminders of such timeless gems to remind us of what we need to aspire to be and how we need to move ahead in testing & troubling times.

When you hit a wall, you don’t go back. You may divert and find a way around it or hit it hard again to break it down, but you don’t go back on any of the progress you made. You stand tall in face of adversity and face it with doubled courage and determination. That my dear, is life wanting you to live it fearlessly, loving the journey all the way and no matter what, never forget what your destination is and where you want to be.

Lazy days

There is this weird happiness in being able to be lazy for the whole day when you are not forced to do one thing!

A Saturday when you had a festival holiday on the Friday and you had nothing to do but to enjoy your weekend, is a wonderful Saturday. Waking up lazily at a time you want after a good night sleep and then lazily making coffee and breakfast which by the way is upma that takes little or no effort.

Here i am, sitting in the balcony with Karan Johar’s Autobiography and my breakfast setup. With my little plants happily growing buds and the day light being messed up with these on and off drizzles with a background score of the Chaviti bhajans from the township prayer area is just a little too perfect set up for a lazy Saturday morning.

By the way, I’m reading Karan Johar’s Autobiography, “An Unsuitable Boy”. I don’t know what the title meant, but I’ve just started reading it and i must say it is good. If you are any bit emotional and any bit Indian, you’ll like it. Though I’ve read only prologue and one chapter, i can say that it is well written and well framed. You can just get the tone of a book from the first few pages itself. And ofcourse, any film makers book is interesting as it tells you things about people who are always in the limelight but have a coat of secrecy over them. I guess it is our curiosity that makes these books and movies interesting.

And in all of this, one cute thing happened which reminded me of my own childhood memories. While I was eating my breakfast and parallely reading, there is this little girl from the opposite apartment who observed me for like 5 to 10 minutes while drinking her milk, I assume. It was cute that sh stood over there observing a woman reading in her balcony. It reminded me of those childhood days of mine when we would come back from school or on a Sunday evening when my Mum would be sitting on her chair somewhere in a quiet corner of the house and reading something or anything. Infact, those quiet reading times were what inspired me to read, to fall in love with these amazing things call books. I have grown up watching people read which tells me that no matter how busy you are, you can always make time for a good book as long as your brain is free to take in. To this day, that love for books, that love for reading never left me. Infact that is the only thing I ever loved unconditionally in this entire world. Even though the time i can spare for reading is very less thesr days, i still cannot stop myself from buying books just for the sake of collecting them for the rainy day. Like today 😎😋. I just wish i made her a little bit curious about what I was doing and she takes up a book just out of curiosity. I only know her from this balcony and have seen her observing me while i was doing my quiet reading here. So, I can just wish.

It is also my dream to start a little library somewhere, possibly in the apartment complex i live to just make reading a little bit easy for people and most importantly kids. But I’m still a little bit selfish about my collection and is not yet ready to part with them and i know that the day i start giving our books i should be ready to loose them as well as not every book that goes out comes back. I know this for a fact after looking at library books being held hostage at our home for months if not years. It is not that my mum is stealing them, but it is just that she doesn’t find time to complete all of them and even if she does, she is just too lazy to return them. She returns them whenever she visits the local library but then gets back with a tonne of books again. I cannot tell you how much fine she has paid until now for those late returns! 😉🤔.

Okay, here we are at the end of my long weekend rant and the vegetable sellers are here on their usual time. We have this Saturday mini market in our Apartment Complex every week which helps me avoid going to the supermarket every now and then. So convenient. This is one of the things I love about living here.

Okay then, off i go to our vegetable market and bye bye.

A conversation from “Castle”

I swear i wasn’t going to post this today, but when i came across this conversation while watching the first season of Castle, the TV Series, i knew I had to post it here. You have to read it to find out what prompted me to take up the painful task of writing all the dialogue.
For those who aren’t familiar with the characters of Castle, Castle is the male lead and Alexis is his 15 year old teenage daughter and Martha is his Mum aka Grandmother to Alexis.

Scene : Alexis trying out different dresses for prom.
Alexis : (Sighs) what do you think?
Castle : You look beautiful.
Alexis : Dad you say that about every dress. Don’t you think that this dress makes my skin look pasty?
Castle : Sweetheart, I want you to know, No matter how you think you look, you are perfect exactly the way you are.
Alexis : You’re not helping!.
Martha comes in holding another dress.
Martha : Oh, God no. Hideous!.
Alexis : Thank you! 🙂
Martha : Here, Try this. You know what, Good colour for you. (Sighs)
Alexis goes in to try that other dress.
Castle : What are you doing?
Martha : What?
Castle : You look hideous!. Are you trying to give her body image issues?
Martha : Oh, News flash! She already has body image issues. Said in tunes with being a woman. Every woman in the world, has some part of herself that she absolutely hates. Her hands are too small, her feet is too big, her hair is too straight, too curly, her ears stick out, oh, god, her butt is too flat, nose is too big, and you know, nothing you can say would change how we feel. What men don’t understand is the right clothes, the right shoes, the right make up, just it hides the flaws we think we have and make us look beautiful to ourselves. That’s what make us look beautiful to others. 🙂
Castle : (Long pause and thought later) Used to be, all she need to feel beautiful was a pink tutu and a plastic tiara.
Martha : We spend our whole lives trying to feel that again.
Alexis comes out wearing the other dress and both of them(Dad & Gran) are in awe.

Now, tell me. Did you like the conversation? On any normal day, i would talk endlessly about the conversation and all about how i felt and how much i loved it which obviously is the reason why i badly wanted to share it here so that it doesn’t get lost somewhere in my memory line. But today, I’m not going to do any talking. I just want to feel the beauty and sweetness in the conversation and think how true Martha’s words are. I do think she is right. What do you think? Do you like the conversation especially Martha’s words at the end? How did you feel? Do let me know. 🙂 By the way, i created that cool collage. Cool or not, I had so much time at hand and lots of Castle pics on Google! 🙂

Hope you all are doing great. Happy Friday and good bye for now. 🙂

Love
Sahasra

Awesome Finds – 1

I was actually not sure on what to post today. I had a variety of things in my mind but no time to convert them into a real post. I had lots to do at office and couldn’t concentrate on creating a post. But one thing i do without fail is to read. Even when i was really busy working, when some thought suddenly pops in my brain, i think of it, research about it and then read extensively about it. And this whole thing may take a few minutes or can even span into hours. It all depends on how busy i was the moment that thought appeared. When i am really busy like today, i spare it a few minutes, do some quick research and save bookmarks or files for future or further reading and on free days, i read and read and read all day until my boss yells at me. And today, was the busy day and in between all the office work which seems to have no end, there pops the idea of sharing about all those amazing things that i come across in all those searches. That would be a really interesting thing to tell and i always find something or the other.
So, here’s the thing, “Awesome Finds”. This takes you through one or many of the things i found that day or any time recent. I hope you all find them equally interesting and not get bored by the geeky stuff. 🙂

Today’s first find is,
http://www.gatesnotes.com/, the blog of Bill Gates.
I think you all need no further explanation about who this man is and what’s so special about him. If you really don’t know, he is this co-founder of microsoft, one of the super rich men on the planet, entrepreneur and a philanthropist. I really suggest you go for wiki‘s introduction rather that very poor description i gave.
Earlier today, i never knew that Bill Gates has a blog and even today, i was surprised to know that he really contributes to it but not some associate or a PR Team on his behalf. I still have my doubts, but i think one should trust the man when he states so on his own site for the entire world to see 🙂 The article that led me to the blog is the Annual Letter. No, you cannot stop by just glancing at it. You have to read it completely. You will start to realise what great people really think of when they have loads of money to spare(Yepp, i think people like Bill Gates are great. Just look at what he had achieved with that brain. I don’t think i will ever do so much in this life time). I already know about the foundation and its work but i am just amazed at the facts and his vision or plans for the future. Do you know that it is just not Polio that India managed to wipe out in this decade but there’s another disease called Guinea Worm, a painfully cruel disease. There are many such amazing things that annual report tells you. One more thing that caught my eye is the amazing reports and graphs plotted on the huge data. They just catch the eye in an instant and would make you want to see what all that graph is about. Don’t panic. 🙂 This is the report designer in me talking. I can never stop admiring a good report or graph or a dashboard. I know how much hard work it takes to get that large datasets into wonderful reports. You see, your first job always stays in some corner of the mind. Okay, enough about reporting and now if i go back to the site, it seems as if he really writes it. I read a couple of posts and they sound genuine. The posts have the chill a genuine heart felt post gives. May be, the fact that one of the world’s richest man is writing those made me think so. But that is what i look for in any blog. I need that connect to the heart. One such moment and i click follow on wordpress. No wonder i liked this blog and i am sure many of us would. One line that i came across and really liked is a quote from Melinda Gates as stated by Bill, “Let your heart break. It will change what you do with your optimism.”  🙂 Also, don’t you think Bill Gates has a kind face? My colleague just doesn’t agree. Anyways, all i did is a sneak peak of the site and no serious reading. I hope you all like the blog as much as i liked it. 

One more site that i came across today is,
http://www.history.com/, the History channel website.
I am sure many of you must have seen this channel while surfing TV. I know, many of us wouldn’t give it a serious thought unless something interesting catches the eye. But me being the history buff i am, love reading and watching History. The channel site on the exterior looks just like any other TV channel site. But if you look into it properly, you would find a treasure of information. I knew about the channel and many of its shows before but never happened to check out the site. I stumbled across the site accidentally while looking for something related to American Civil War. Now, don’t ask me why was i searching for that on a busy day like this. I have no answer, that’s my brain and it is worse than a stray. I have absolutely no control over it. Coming back, the site has a variety of features on it which is more than enough for buffs like me to feed on. I just didn’t have enough time for it today and it was obviously bookmarked for future reads. There is a blog over there as well and it is also interesting. And again, i just hope you find it equally interesting and not boring.

Okay, i think that is more than enough for a blog post and i wish you all have/had/having a great day. 🙂 3 More days and the blogathon is over. Am i doing a little happy dance? Yes, i am 🙂 Good bye people.

Love
Sahasra