Main aur Deepak aksar ye baatein kiya karte hai...

CEOs in making...
I, Deepak and Ashutosh are very close friends since college time. Some 8 or 10 months ago we decided to meet every weekend to talk about ourselves, new technology, whether MBA will help us or not, can we open a company and many more questions like this… Basically we were trying to finalize a regular hang out place.
There is a place in Bangalore which is very dear to me. It’s the junction on St. Marks road near Thomson (looks like an IT company) opposite to Bishop Cotton Girls school. Now don’t try to relate the words “dear to me” and “Bishop Cotton Girls school”. Let me answer your question here as to why I liked that place? When I was searching a job in Bangalore some 3 years back, I used to sit there with one of my friend (who had joined by that time) and used to discuss when I will get a job, seeing people driving cars I used to think when God will be generous to give me a car and so on… And looks like God actually listened to my wishes… I got job and after being in job for little more that an year I bought myself sweet little car :). Now it’s almost one and a half year to that incident.



Well it was just an out of context story. But I thought I will share because this is the place where we finalized to meet on every weekend. To our good luck we found one Café Coffee Day (CCD) at Lavelle Junction near to our designated place. So generally we used to meet at that junction and after completing our first round of talks we used to walk till CCD to have coffee and snacks.





Now the interesting part is what we generally discuss there. We (myself and Deepak) used to call it CEO talks :) … We used to discuss things as if we have a big corpus of assets behind us or as if we are CEOs in making. We never think ourselves less than Pradeep Singh (my employer) and Jerry Rao (his employer):). We generally discuss launching a software company (as we are from that background :)) which specialize into testing. And we also discuss how we will approach the clients, what all benefits we can give them, who will be in board of directors etc… Fortunately or say luckily we don’t spend time thinking about the name of the company :). In between these talks or rather discussions we notice that girl sitting next to us (in CCD) is wearing nice dress. Or the girl behind him who is smoking is really nicely carved :). So then the talk used to shift from company or rather entrepreneurship to “girls”. I used to talk about some girl in my company who really looked nice yesterday. Or he used to talk about someone who went to onsite. Now finally when we get tired looking at the same girl or finished talking about almost all the girls we like, probably it’s time to ask them for bill. In between we continue ordering. Trust me CCD is an ideal place to take someone out on a date. Oh man, even venturing into a CCD kind of place is not at all a bad idea for business. They take a hell lot of time to get your ordered items. By the time you ask them bill and they will get the bill, you will forgot what all you had there. :)
Today we are again going to meet there to discuss about the presentation on “Entrepreneurship” authored by Subroto Bagchi :). It’s up to you to find out who he is in case if you don’t know him. I will try to inform you guys in case we get to see some sexy babes out there in CCD :).

Hope this time Shivendra Bhaiya will not find many bugs in the post. :)

People prefer to be Strangers :)

Who like to be stranger? I am sure we often read at-least one news paper; In that we read almost all gossips, read all possible columns which contain information about our country and sometimes outside the country. And the variety of people which we encounter in newspaper range from someone in our city who might have met with a road accident (whom we don’t know) to Manmohan Singh or Sonia Gandhi who represent India on political front. To our surprise, we are not satisfied with this and we extend our boundary to people like Barrack Obama, Britney Spears and many more… If you ask yourself about this that why you are reading about people whom you don’t know, I think you will get the same answer which I got and it is “I am a responsible citizen so I should know what is happening around me and it’s my interest ”. But I am sure we will not have answers for this?
1. Do we know who sits next to our cubicle in office?
2. Which state he/she belongs to?
3. Is that state affected with the recent flood? How are their family members?
4. Who lives next-door to us?
5. What all festivals they celebrate?
6. Have we ever shared sweets in our festivals?

I think you will again get the same answer which I got and it is “we don’t have time to look into all this and we know our team members”. But one question which remains unanswered is “why we prefer to be stranger”. I am working in an IT company and there are some 6oo people working in it. But I hardly know 100. What about the rest 500? Where are they from?
I remember I had the same discussion with my friends like Deepak, Purshottam and Dilip who works in different companies and there also they face the same environment. If we admit true, we are often interested in knowing more about the opposite sex. Can we be friends? If she is good looking, can I ask her for a date and many more guyz question along with this…
Can we actually do anything about it? Not sure because this doesn’t depends on you only but on the people whom you are approaching.
Again the question which comes to mind is “Why to know everyone around you?”, “Will this really make any difference?” I have often heard about “vasudev kutumbakam”. Will this idea of knowing each other will make us more attached to people of different caste, creed, sex and language? I don’t know. Then will this saying of “vasudev kutumbakam” be ever true?
I don’t have the answer for so many questions but I believe that yes if we try we can make some difference. We can help people build trust around each other, share shoulders in our pain and grief, share sweets in our festival celebration. I know this is like a drop in ocean but collecting these small drops will only make ocean someday…. I am tired of this optimism of mine but I am in love with it! :)

Special Thanks to Kishore for sharing his ideas with me .... :)

My Million Dreams :)

Few days ago I was standing in my balcony (getting the feel of fresh morning air) and from there I could see some tall Eucalyptus tree in Lalbagh(Botanical Garden in Bangalore). This is the time when nature is calm and mind also tends to be in sync with the nature. But instead of having a cool and calm mind there was a low priority thought pestering me that I am 26 now. If I consider today’s situation where the average life of people is somewhere around 60, I have almost lived my first half :). I clearly remember it was a Sunday morning because I remember one article in “Times Life” about the people who attained great heights at their young age.
That article triggered a thought in my mind "why I am not there in the list". This really sounds as a foolish question but somewhere I was saying to myself that I could have been in the list if I would have pursued any of my dreams… Yes “pursuing a dream”; it sounds quite weird to some and very ambitious to others. I found out that the only difference between people who made into the article and the people who could not make is the “desire to pursue their dream”. Humans are generally gifted with a talent of risk measurement and safe playing, which sometime rather many times have stopped us to fully utilize our potentials. So what we generally do is do a hell lot of risk analysis and end up marking that dream as un-realistic one :( . And I would term this entire thought process as “rational thought process”.
I remember my old days in engineering college where I spent my four good years of my life. Whatever I am today I credit most of my success to my formative years in that college. That college, friends, lecturers and almost everything has left an indelible impression on my mind. I remember I fell in love in my 3rd year with a subject called “operating system” and I used to discuss the concepts with one of my close friend Deepak and towards the end of discussion we would often end up concluding that someday we will create our own operating system :).
I went to watch a movie in Inox (multiplex in Bangalore) with my friend. The movie displayed a group of people playing songs and I got fascinated by the way the band was playing guitar and I thought I will buy one. Very next day I went to a shop in Brigade road and bought a guitar for myself. Day after I went to a training school in Jaynagar to enrolled myself for a course. I went to classes for about 2 months; classes were only on weekends for 2 hours. After 2 months I realized that the timings are conflicting with the timings of my morning shows (which I didn’t wanted to miss because it costs only 100 rupees :)) and I felt the timing was trying to create an unwanted bindings on my independence. I concluded that the passion for anything needs to get gelled with the burning desire to learn otherwise it often ends in failure and leaves one disappointed. To my good luck, one day I was seeing the interview of Mr. Narayana Murty (Founder of Infosys Technologies) and in the interview he said he had the same passion for piano and bought himself one but could not learn. I discussed this interview with Deepak (he also had bought a guitar in the meantime :) ) and we found that we (Nishant, Deepak and Mr. Narayana Murthy) have something in common. So we concluded that someday even we will make it big like Mr. Narayana Murthy :). Sometimes I curse this optimism of mine but I am in love with this. By the way that culprit movie was “Life In Metro”.