Swarajya Mag- Subscribed and Delivered!

My first subscription to a magazine in my life and it feels awesome!
It reminds me of that cliché of paperback vs kindle and it rings true.
The quality of the print here totally blew me off. I had already been enamored by the content through their website but seeing that in print made my day.
This feels like being part of a hipster alternative to the appalling mainstream media lies, and it feels great.
As I jostle my time between expanding my knowledge on current affairs, the lies that tag along with the affairs and giving MBA a shot, this quality reading, I hope should hold me on a good stead.
Perhaps this is a small step forward to gain insight into the public policy management apart from business management I deal with in everyday worklife.
Cheers to a new beginning.

Windows, a frustration

So I decided to jump on the Linux bandwagon after letting my laptop windows breathe for 2 years. As the windows OS keeps getting senile, I started looking for options, one of which was formatting, which I later took it off the table as I suspected I would eventually end up with the same frustrations as before within a short duration of the whole exercise.
So here I am, giving a shot at Linux Mint, Cinnamon.
It is so sad to see Microsoft plunge to such depths. Not branding myself a hippie here, but I so wanted an alternative to the buggy android and an over-hyped iPhone to succeed.
Alas, with the Windows 10 preview build for phones, I completely gave up all hope of MS ever prioritizing their OS over their services. Under Nadella, there has been a significant move away from hardware and OS and more on the services they offer.
The end result is a situation where Office suite works better on iPhones than it does on Windows Phones.
For now, I plan to move away from windows as a OS, still using my OneDrive. In case MS opts to resuscitate its dying OS, I might revist it later.
Goodbye Windows 10 and windows phone!
 

Blink- The art of thin slicing

Am I voyeuristic? My first response would be a big no.
 Voyeurism does not only sound creepy but definitely appears to be a wrong thing. It is barging beyond somebody's privacy walls.
 What I do, and is one of my favorite pass times during my journeys, is just observe people and try to draw conclusions on how their body language or the manner they talk over phone calls or in person, to their partners, leads to determine how their overall personality is.
 I claim to be no expert in this, but to my knowledge at least I have concluded a few telling things which have formed my opinion on few practices that people follow.
 I am currently reading this interesting book that is called Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell. The book talks about this phenomenon as thin slicing. As I understand, the thicker the slicing, the more you already know about the person.
 So thanks to the author, who is also a famous NY times columnist, we now have a new term for my time killer- thin slicing.
 The processes he explains pretty much overlap with another gem of a book that I read just halfway through- Thinking fast and slow, by Daniel Kanheman, who was awarded a Nobel prize for his research. The book talks about how we have 2 parts in out brain, of which one is intuitive and the other bases itself on hard facts- much like thin and thick slicing respectively.
 So coming back to my findings, as I am personally not big into religion as much as I believe in karma, I have always wanted to know how superior those who believe in God much more than I do are. After all religion or prayers should have a positive rub off on people, else nobody would have started preaching them for centuries.
 Although the fears of rebirth and heading to hell are big enough drivers for most people, there would have been more spiritually inclined ones who would have benefited from prayers.
 Now, most people who pray and have reds, whites, yellows in horizontal, vertical and ,3 stripes adorned, or cup caps on their heads or crosses on their chests, I noticed are the ones who bother about other people the least. Religious are the least humanitarian. There, I said it.
 It is purely on basis of unrecorded but empirical thin sliced analysis.
 These are the people, much to my amazement, pushing people to get a seat first, throwing garbage on roads, and other uncivil behaviors.
 I fail to understand the correlation between them but I suspect it is due to a lack of understanding of such a correlation on their side.
 While people can accept that there is a higher force guiding us, call it nature, luck, fate or God, theories such as butterfly effect go to show how even our smallest of actions are so meaningful in the framework we live in. By just finishing off your 5 am prayers, doesn't give you a superior sense of entitlement to pass off as an unruly pushover.
 It appears as a wordy rant without much of a conclusion, so let me get to that now.
 While an open religion such as Hinduism is a best case scenario, people need to be spiritual and not get even more religious. They need to understand doing good is being good. God is in people around and us and within us. An unselfish Do-gooder is plainly a God to someone in need. I tend to believe in this principle, which was the spine of the movie Khaleja, totally

Gather Ye Rosebuds While Ye May

Gather Ye Rosebuds While Ye May
(To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time)
By Robert Herrick

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,
Old Time is still a-flying:And this same flower that smiles today
To-morrow will be dying.
.
The glorious lamp of Heaven, the sun,
The higher he's a-getting,
The sooner will his race be run.
And nearer he's to setting.
.
That age is best which is the first,
When youth and blood are warmer;
But being spent, the worse, and worst
Times still succeed the former.
.
Then be not coy, but use your time,
And while ye may, go marry:
For having lost but once your prime,
You may for ever tarry.

Outliving

You know some words suddenly keep expressing themselves in myriad ways, both implicitly and explicitly. At this juncture, the term outliving has suddenly started to speak to me.
I consider this true in three major discussions.
Sachin, Apple Inc and relationships.
When my bro-in-law, who prides himself as a Steve Jobs fan, was fanatically trying to get me agree that Apple isn't done yet, I was wondering if I can explain to him with an analogy. Its the same story with Sachin's fanboys. Both cannot agree that their God/faith/religion, whatever you might want to refer it to, is finished.
I do agree, Apple is much better placed that Tendulkar and it being a firm and hence practically an unlimited life time so to speak, it will certainly bounce back or the probability at least is higher.
Apple is coming out with a cheaper I phone as we speak and it might turn its fortunes. Even if it does, this isn't the Apple that we knew of.
Jobs' firm was unique. It catered to a niche segment of the market. The fundamental difference between Jobs and Gates' firms, to put it very blatantly at the risk of a flawed understanding is between quality and quantity.
Jobs' vision was to create a dent in this universe and I think Gates was pretty happy with creating a ubiquity of his brand more than a niche. He wanted quantity, he wanted numbers, he wanted more PC users than Mac users, simply put.

Coming to relationships and specifically those which outlive their life expectancy, when do you know that it is dead? Do you resuscitate it, keep it on a life support and hope it gets back on track, or just be a mute spectator and watch it struggle till its last breath? And in the end, do you just say, life or death of it, was the deserving winner of the bout?
But then, even the best of relationships do go through a comatose don't they? To do or not to do might be the most common cliché anyone would come across. I'd say, Life is a cliché if that's your vantage point.

PS: I have taken the life support out for now. I shall mutely watch the bout. May resolve win over death.

Flustered..

Currently reading a blog on Zen habits. Trying to pick up all the good things mentioned. Minimalism, sticking to habits, writing everyday-even if that means a sentence a day, rising early, staying fit and also something on how savouring food helps us eat less.
With all due credit to the habits, I'd say all these habits mentioned aren't something we have hear d for the first time.
But then that's the beauty of our lives. We punish our mind, body, soul, push them into a corner and torment them till they finally give up or if strong retort.

Why? Why do we make such earnest efforts to go against ourselves.
My life would include smoking, relationship woes as the most predominant occurrences in the physical and mental spheres.

I have no answers, though I honestly seek one.

Unwired

I am always wired. I can picture it as a press conference where I'm facing a swarm of people and I'm dying to get my views across. Worse comes next. Assume that right next to you, your friend is also holding one such meet. Another beside him. And so on. Few of you will overhear and interject you- they are obviously closer to you, physically in this context and metaphorically otherwise.
In this mash up of opinions, comments, likes, check ins, tweets, retweets, what is the end result? How much have you filtered, digested and gained out of this whole exercise?
Sure, this is supposedly social networking. And yes, I wish to be a recluse now.
I intend to get off the dias, do away with the mike set, shut my ears off others' views and stay in my own world.
Is that as scary as it sounds? I'm heading to find out.
Hoping one serene morning walk through the woods in solitude kind of an experience.

PS - It triggered with a Zen post about lesser networking and the very same day, observing how my colleague couldn't talk to me without taking her gaze off her phone.