Nebel

Came back from my exam today and lay down on the bed. Turned on my mp3 player, plugged it into the speakers and put on some random song. ‘Nebel’ by Rammstein. Heartsruck lover sings about whether her can remember the previous kiss she gave him, as she now lies on his lap and kisses his forehead. The song has a mystical aura to it and is so very soothing. Til Lindemann has done a good job on this one, not going full frontal like on ‘Engel’ or ‘Rosenrot’. Listen to it, it really makes you feel a mist enveloping you as you drown within yourself.

Pssst!

A small note. If you were jobless enough to be browsing through the archives of my older posts, you would have noticed a tendency towards rock music earlier on. God knows what brought this sudden shift on!

This is the end. My only friend, the end. Can you picture what the end will be? And so it goes on. Tuning into the LAN radio at our hostel and onto the classic hits channel, its a pleasurable evening as I sit down to study. Whether I really have the interest is another issue. You know, coming here to Dubai to study may not have seemed a good idea at first, but you do tend to get institutionalised after some time. Some may say this is a jailhouse, some may love living here, but the first breath of freedom you get after leaving it can be very unnerving. I may be stealing a few lines from ‘The Shawshank Redemption’, but I can only say things as they are.

Get some music on. Maybe some coconut water with a little whisky, get tipsy. Music. A clap here, a clap there, a ll’l jig once in a while, thats the way life should be. Get to your rooms, hit the pillows, have something, some milk perhaps, Harry Belafonte crooning in the background. Grab a mug o’ beer, chill. This is, after all, the end.

You know, metal/hard rock/thrash/distorto/power/speed hold for nothing when it comes to real music, the way The Doors or the Wonders have made it to be. Those infernos and distortions can’t make you feel the way the song should be felt. Maybe thats the way it is, but everything sounds the same, every rythm and every tone, when it has been drowned by the sounds of metal on metal. Music is alive. Rythms must be distinguishable in their joy and agony. Voices must be heard with all your ears. Headbanging and yelling can’t resolve anything.

I’m not saying those who still listen to megalomanic songs are highly limited or anything, but theres more out there thats to be experienced. You can get a lot more than you want if only you listen, and it doesnt even have to be careful. Just have it on in the background and you’ll know what I mean.

Reise, Reise! (Rammstein)

Auch auf den Wellen wird gefochten
Wo Fisch und Fleisch zur See geflochten
Der eine sticht die Lanz’ im Heer
Der andere wirft sie in das Meer
Ahoi
Reise, Reise Seemann Reise
Jeder tut’s auf seine Weise
Der eine stößt den Speer zum Mann
Der andere zum Fische dann
Reise, Reise Seemann Reise
Und die Wellen weinen leise
In ihrem Blute steckt ein Speer
Bluten leise in das Meer
Die Lanze muss im Fleisch ertrinken
Fisch und Mann zur Tiefe sinken
Wo die schwarze Seele
wohntist kein Licht am Horizont
Ahoi
Reise, Reise Seemann Reise
Jeder tut’s auf seine Weise
Der eine stößt den Speer zum Mann
Der andere zum Fische dann
Reise, Reise Seemann Reise
Und die Wellen weinen leise
In ihrem Blute steckt ein Speer
Bluten leise in das Meer
Reise, Reise Seemann Reise
Und die Wellen weinen leise
In ihrem Herzen steckt ein Speer
Bluten sich am Ufer leer

Rise, seamen, rise!

Of donkeys and dollars

Consider these two questions.

1. There are 3 men who go to a hotel and ask for a room. The desk-man tells them it will be $30 and they split the money three-ways, paying $10 each. When the see the room, its very grimy and compact. They get back down and shout at the desk-man, who says his sorries and agrees to repay $5. The three-men head back up, while the desk-man gives the bellboy $5 to give to them. On his way up, the bellboy decides he can’t split $5 among three, so he pockets $2 and gives them back $1 each. This leaves them with an effective pay of $9 each.

9 x 3 = 27, and the bellboy has $2, which gives us a total of $29. Where is the remaining dollar?

2. There’s a man on his deathbed who has 3 sons, amongst whom he wants to split his 17 donkeys. He decides to give the eldest 1/2, the second son 1/3rd, and the third 1/9th, of the total share. How do the sons work this out?

A Walk In The Evening

The sun is setting straight ahead
The horizon is aglow with rage
The evening ends with the moon
You think of wars that’ll be waged

Watch pebble after pebble
Fly under your feet
Are you the lord of this world?
You’re just waiting to meet

The night begins to begin
And evil and devious take a walk
With a blade in your small hands
There’s no time to talk!

As you shout above the whole din
The others won’t listen to you
And when you break the silence
They say there’s no time to

Each to his own they stand
Taking on victory in their strides
A teaching is done when you fall
And you learn when you leap to new heights

They don’t care and will never do
But you have to be there to listen
A scapegoat is all that’s required
And such is the history of men

The victorious script tales
And you have to learn them
There’s always an internal motive
And you’ve to sing their name!

But changes will never cease to be
And tonight will see a new dawn
You quicken to a small sprint
As you wait to sing unto them a new song

The corner of the street is here
And you wait until she arrives
With those annoying but rich men
As you wait to pick their lives

Melancholic tunes you hum
And you tip the beggar a penny
Your hands begin to sweat
There’s nothing in it for the money!

Years of torment and torture
Tearing your freedom away
Stripped naked for everyone to see
You will want to make them pay

Concentrated on the anger and blood
You thumb the serrated edge
Pick your next steps carefully
For you may fall off the edge

The door is locked as you try it
But what is wood as an obstacle?
Break the window, shatter and open
Tear away at your shackles

Megalomania conquers you
For God cannot deny mercy
They will always shriek for it
When you unleash your fury

And God help us!

In the state of Massachusetts, US of A, answering in the affirmitive to being an atheist could land you in prison for a year and a $300 fine!
Excerpt: “Whoever wilfully blasphemes the holy name of God by denying, cursing or contumeliously reproaching God, his creation, government or final judging of the world, or by cursing or contumeliously reproaching Jesus Christ or the Holy Ghost, or by cursing or contumeliously reproaching or exposing to contempt and ridicule, the holy word of God contained in the holy scriptures shall be punished by imprisonment in jail for not more than one year or by a fine of not more than three hundred dollars, and may also be bound to good behavior.”
I wonder how such obscure laws are passed and how come they’re never repealed. Its enough with people living in their fantasy worlds, but why the enforcement?!

Sustenance of success

The Organization of Sustenance
We shall begin this debate by asking ourselves how each one of us sights success. As you may already be aware, each person has a particular set of goals, goals which drive that person as well as mark his journey’s progress. Failures being the stepping stones to success, we begin in our respective quests. And, finally, one fine day, you’ve won! You have reached that destination that has propelled you all these days. But, what now? What more do you think is required of you now? What more is required of you now that whatever you had worked for has been accompolished? Sadly, but more importantly, here comes the tougher part of it all: the sustenance of success. The ‘point’ of attainment we can call GOOD; now, you have to seek for BETTER and GREAT. The primary task in taking oneself from good to great is to create a culture wherein people have a tremendous opportunity to be heard, and, thus, for the truth to be heard. Henceforth, you must:
Move with questions and NOT answers.
Engage in debating and NOT coercion.Conduct autopsies.You must see every piece of information as ‘information that cannot be ignored’.
Henceforth, you must meet every obstacle head-on. The way to success is completely and thoroughly different from the way to maintain your success. On the way to that ‘point’ of attainment (which, henceforth, I shall refer to as Point A), you may have deployed such tactics as ‘focusing on the task at hand’ or somethink else likewise. Hereon, you will be among people who have breached the barrier at Point A and now seek to go further. There is, however, one important thing that we must note before we proceed: going from GOOD to GREAT is NOT to be taken up as improvisation on your first success. Great is your most ultimate goal of all, but at the same time, not another Point A. It is the sustenance of practices that brought you to A, it is the habit of winning, it is your rooting at Point A.
Note 1: ‘Great’ is a measure of how-long you stay at ‘Good’
Now, as an introuction, we shall borrow ideas from the Hedgehog Concept (Jim Collins, From Good to Great). The Hedge Concept basically instructs oneself if he or she has three things, and if so, how to improvise on them. As regards the ‘if not’, we shall deal with that after this. These three things are: do you…
have whatever you had been passionate about?have it in you to be the best in the world in whatever you are doing?have the ability to drive your own engine?
The first question. You will, of course, notice that it is, in fact, Point A.The second question. That must either be God-given, genetically endowed, or born (at some point of time).The third question. This question is inter-related with the second, and therefore follows with it.
To be the best at whatever you do, you must stick to what you know and let your abilities decide what you can do, not your egos. To better exemplify this, Wells Fargo, the banking corporation, once received $290 million from Warren Buffet, even when it was operating like a mediocre, localized bank. This set off its executives, Dick Cooley and Carl Reichardt, on a journey of self-examination, an answer to which would tell them why Mr. Buffet had invested in Wells Fargo after all. They asked themselves these things: what can we potentially do better then any other company, and what can we NOT do better than any other company? And if we can’t be the best at it, then why are we doing it at all? This led to Fargo pulling all the plugs on its international operations and focused on what it could do best: running a bank like a business and just focusing on the western United States. At this point, we must note that the Hedgehog concept is NOT a goal to be the best, but an understanding of what you can be the best at. This distinction is absolutely crucial because, the HC is only a saddle upon which we sit to move towards the habit of winning. If you have come to Point A without understanding or knowing what it was all about, the sustenance of success will be extremely painstaking. You can be accounted as Great in a particular field only if you are already held to be Good in that, same field. The HC helps you identify this.
Note 2: Growth is not a Hedgehog Concept.
If your central objective is not what you are best at, then that central objective cannot be analysed as an HC, nor can it be productively sustained after Point A.
Next, when it comes to the debate, we shall move over to the child of the HC. Here, we discuss the kind of interaction which will produce the right results, as regards that with other people.Ask questions.Debate them.Make final decions regarding their respective answers.Analyse them.Question your own analysis.Debate on why you had made such decisions.
Get a final answer as to what those questions were addressed to, why you were seeking a solution, and why you had selected a few solutions out of a set of many. At this point of time, one thing you can not blame is the surroundings in which you have been placed or the strategies you have deployed because they are no longer the factors which will hinder you now. From Point A to Point B (the habit), you have to focus on yourself. Said Viktor E. Frankl: “Freedom is only part of the story and half the truth… That is why I recommend that the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast be supplanted be a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast.” (Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning). Now, you must be self-disciplined, thereby truncating the need for management education on your part, ergo more concentration on the task at hand. If the same were to be said for an organization, it must employ self-disciplined who didn’t need to be managed, and then managed the system, not the people. Your journey from A to B must be a build-up through disciplined people, a transition into disciplined thought, proceeded by a breakthrough in disciplined thought, ensuring a climb in disciplined action.
We shall undertake a small excercise now. Picture a huge, heavy flywheel – a massive metal diskmounted horizontally on an axle, 30 feet in diameter, 2 feet thick and weighing around 5,000 kg. Now imagine that your task is to get the flywheel rotating on the axle as fast and as long as possible. Pushing with great effort, you begin to inch the disk around the pole. You move a second rotation, third, fourth…, a hundredth. Then, at some point – a breakthrough! The momentum of the wheel, now practically spinning, now begins to work for you. You are pushing no harder than the first rotation than the first rotation, but it now begins to spin faster and faster. Now, suppose someone came along and asked you, “What was the one big push that made this thing go so fast?” What would your answer be? The first? The second? The hundredth? No! It was all of them put together in an overall accumulation, consisting of multiple efforts put in the same direction.
Let us now come to what is known as the Doom Loop. The Doom Loop is the very reverse of the HC. While the HC aids you in understanding your strengths, and then building momentum on it, the Doom Loop is a representation of the path that will get you in trouble, i.e., from good to bad to worse. Basically, it concernsDisappointing resultsRection WITHOUT understandingDeploying new strategiesMomentum haltedMore disappointing results
While I might have said above that you cannot blame strategies in your failures, I did not say that strategies must be absent. These strategies must fall in line with your Hedgehog Concept – they must coincide with your goals, your passions, and your engines. In the above case, in the DL, deploying a new strategy that does not coincide with your interests as much as your previous one did, will bring the great flywheel of progress to a halt. What you are now trying to do is you are stopping the flywheel all of a sudden, and then trying to rotate it the other way.
Note 3: It is your work in life that is the ultimate engine. Work towards, and not away,
fr

om it.
When we come to the point where ‘every piece information is information that cannot be ignored’, I would like to introduce a small concept here: the Six Degrees of Separation (Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point). The basic moral of this law is that most people on the planet can connect to each other in a series of close to six steps. This means that, say, you know of a land dealer in New York but have no way of contacting. So, you mail your cousins in the USA, asking them to pass on this letter through their friends, and they through theirs and so on. As of a research concucted by Stanley Milgram in the late 1960s, the length of this chain will be close to 6. What we have to infer from this inference is that you are closely interconnected with the outside world – neither can you neglect information, nor can you blame downfalls on your part on the lack of information. Business is basically getting people to opt for you out of a mass of other such ‘you’s. This interconnectedness puts you in a position of control because you will now be able to derive on the experiences of your contacts. Let’s say you you grew up in the city of Chennai, and now are 50 years of age. Say, at some point of time you were a reporter for some newspaper, and then moved on to word in a consultancy firm, then shifting to being a realtor, and so on. When, one fine day, you are in a spot of bother and need some help concerning the solicitation of a small deal with a smaller firm, your term as consultant will now provide you with ideas and plans that can be of good use. Having your feet in as many worlds (and not careers) as possible will only serve to enhance your career.

And only after writing this did I realise how jobless I was!

Labia-pinna wars!

What do people have to talk about? Chit, chit, chat, chat and then chit, chit again! God, listening is tough, and when you do get the complement of being a good listener, Mazel Tov! Why do people have to talk so much? What if I’m not interested in what they’re saying? And, you’ll find, my friends circle is pretty small for this reason. Head’s full of clay or what, leaking your thought processes and trains into the outside world? You go down to have a nice post-dinner walk, and someone shows up jogging with the (cliche?) MP3 player tagged to the forearm. Chat, chat, chit, chit, chat, chat. Hey! Run!

But, of course, there’s always the other half that wants being talked to! Isolation can kill. Smal 40 sq. ft. rooms with one single window that looks straight onto Burj Dubai, and not a speck of life in the vicinity. Double-gilded doors for fire-proofing reasons shuts out pretty much everything else. Well, there’s always VV, the neighbour, with his loud music and everything, but that’s rare. Guy sleeps close to 15 hrs a day. Well, chuck it. The point is, there needs to be a balance between how much can be spoken about and how much can be gifted with a pair of ears to be listened to. Too much is too bad. People should be able to realise when the listener begins to get distracted and then come to a nice and polite halt. Of course, there are those who don’t even respond to what you’re saying, and even if its within the ‘limit’. AR, for example. He’s in my batch here, and tunrs into a gargoyle when you say something funny. Not even a speck of white to show. Really bums you off.

Lost for words

Exactly. Lost for words. All of a sudden, I’m actually feeling upbeat today. I’m not saying I am a naturally suicidal person or anything, but I always have to worry about something or the other, even the tiniest of things. For example, I left this Cross pen (yeah!) with another guy and somehow managed to track him down after a few days and there it was. The coupla days in between I was going mad about this little pen, and when I found out he still had it, I stopped caring about it. Guess I don’t have anything to worry about today. Speakers in my room going BOOM BOOM, listening to ‘Los’ (Rammstein), enjoying the guitar, thinking about anything at random… this is Life!

All this makes me sound sad, doesn’t it? Teenage loner has no one to talk to, pours everything out on his sad little blog, can’t write a sentence with a single slang. Well, writing doesn’t always give you the right impression about a person. Like, for example, the pitot tube. It gives you the point velocity of a fluid being sucked through a pipe into a blower, based on which you can figure out the velocity profile. But you’ll have to take readings at many points on that axis within the pipe to give you the total picture. I’m sounding sad again, ain’t I? Teenage loner has no one to talk to, pours everything out on his sad little blog, can’t write a sentence without a single slang, and doesn’t even have enough creativity to make up a new sentence with the same meaning!

Anyhow (lol!), I managed to complete my electrical sciences paper without using a calculator – I left it in my room. I had to sit in the hall and figure out what 1/4*pi was, but amazingly, it took me just 20 minutes(!). Well, I hadn’t completed the portions the previous night and I needed something to fill the paper up with. God given man, everything! And, somehow, only during my semester exams am I hearing about new TV shows, unions, breakups, the lot. Complete distractions strewn over the place; you just have to take your pick! Was just watching ‘The Big Bang Theory’… nice show, though I’m beginning to find a pattern with most TV sitcoms nowadays. FRIENDS had 3 men and 3 women, all close ‘friends’, and the general ideas was to move the story along a central theme – like a breakup, a union, a sacking, the lot. And there’s always one guy who acts as the ‘scene stealer’. So also with HIMYM (Barney Stinson), TBBT (Raj/Howie/Sheldon) and That 70s Show (that weird dude from God-knows-where).

And hey! Academic City (that’s where we are) got its own bus service, kinda like connecting all the places that lie in The-Middle-Of-Nowhere with those in The-Middle-Of-Somewhere, in this case Dubai. Nice thing. Staying connected is important. In some cases, staying connected is important so freaky people can keep a freaky track of you (yes, me), but otherwise, cool! The other day, we (me, VS, MS and MJ) walked a frikking 6 kms from Zayed Univ. to our campus, and that was distance to the nearest bus-stop. Had nothing to do, couldn’t even talk, so damn tired. I, however (as usual), counted the number of steps it took to travel those 6 kms – 4848! Jobless, right??!

Los!