Theme Reveal- #BlogchatterA2Z

 Now is the time to reveal the theme for A2Z Blogchatter challenge.

Although I always wished, but never took part in this kind of challenge. Thanks to #BlogchatterA2Z Challenge 2021, I am rolling my sleeves and taking this challenge.

I will blog 26 times in April. No, this is not an April fool’s joke. This is my attempt to develop a new niche. It was in my mind for some time but couldn’t give it a shape and form.

Seeing this opportunity, I thought this is the best time to do it, and so here in this challenge I am going to write about AtoZ tips to Grow your Business.

In this challenge, I will blog every day in April except Sundays, and the post title will start with the defined letter.

The dynamic and ever-evolving demands of consumers are changing the way of doing a business. Technology, Covid and WFH have changed the business landscape. New business or small business owners always need to be on their toes to fulfill customer demands and provide them with a unique experience. These tips will be helpful and refreshing for such business owners.

Who should look out for these upcoming posts?

1) People who have small-size businesses.

2) People who have start-ups or plan to have one.

3) Professionals or employees, as some tips will be helpful for their professional growth.

4) People who are looking for side-hustle. Some posts will be helpful for them as well.

Please share your feedbacks, and Hang on here. 

A day without internet

 

Here I am writing about the topic which is hard to imagine and daunting to follow. This differs from your travel in mountains. Remembering those travel days, you cannot say, “I have done that”.

This should be like a day at your home, without an internet.

Thinking about it, I realized that preparation is a must for this day. Let us have a look.

·       The very first thing is the change in WhatsApp status the night before- “I am treating myself with a day without internet. Spare me today” 

·       My day starts at 6am. During the usual business in the loo, I browse something or the other. Watching Sadhguru video on Facebook is one of the common things along with checking stuff like- who contacted me, sent me dms, whatsapped me. But on this day, I have to sit in silence and brood with nothing to do in the loo. Maybe I would keep some paperback already for this day. 

·       My next activity is online yoga. Ok, so this is manageable, I can do it myself. With the practice of some years, I can do this at least for a day without peeking at online videos.

·       And then what about office-This is a straightforward decision, it has to be a weekend. 

·       No internet on the weekend means, I cannot watch Netflix, Prime, cannot go out- “Oh, I can’t travel without Google maps” Yes that’s true, I don’t remember routes, and suffer with this do-not-remember-route-syndrome. But I can read like usual days. Only thing would be to purchase paperbacks or download kindle well before the day.

·       Ok, I can spend 2-3 hours talking to long-lost friends, but some of them are only connected on Facebook...my goodness, I don’t even have their numbers. Checked it now and found some numbers so not 2-3 hours, but manageable.

·       Next could be grocery shopping at a nearby store. Yes, that is cool.

·       Ok, I can watch a movie on a cable T.V, if I get lucky.

·       I can stretch my yoga time a bit, can sit silently, and meditate for some extra time.

·       Blogging for the entire month looks to be a good idea, or writing for my next book...ok, only a page not more than that. Yeah, I often suffer from writer’s block.

Up till here it is about managing daily stuff, now let us look at it with a different perspective-

So this is my time, and I know am absolutely going to love it. I am an introvert- you know, spending time with myself and loved ones without caring about the judgmental eyes of social media is going to be great.

In my free time, I will stand in my balcony, listen to those tiny tots playing in the courtyard, or maybe try to identify the trees around. The flowers I never paid attention to, or the sweeper who cleans that ground every day- I will talk to him. I don’t really know who lives around my place, there are so many people who walk daily, maybe I will talk to few welcoming people. I will talk at length to my mother and not just a 4-5 minute conversation.

Cooking myself would also be good. Let me think, oh. But the online recipes will not be there. So that brings me down to two options- go to a nearby restaurant or prepare a simple meal at home.

 

Writing all this, I understood how dependent I am on internet. It doesn’t let you remember or achieve perfection in many such things. This easy availability of information has made our brains empty and dumb. Nobody needs to remember any process, nobody needs to store papers, documents or maps. All of this hard work that our fathers had done has gone away, giving room in our brain for other interesting things, but only if we realize it. Today the educated is one who knows how to use a search engine efficiently. 

Writing this is giving me ideas I was unaware at the beginning. At this point of time, I feel like a slave to the internet. I cannot go out, cannot make wonderful dishes, do not have phone numbers of my long-lost friends, cannot attend yoga class, cannot buy books without internet. My physical interaction with people is reducing day by day and that would slowly make me and all of us less emotional and less empathetic towards people.

 Opting to write about this is proving good as at the end, I realize my dependency on internet. Time has now come to plan this day.

At least, I would prepare myself from that potential future-cyberattack to my online accounts that could keep my access away for days, and not just a single day.

And at the end, it would be good to see the life from a perspective different from the life dependent on internet. 

 

Letter to a young kid in India

 

I am a thirty-three-year-old happily married man in Silicon Valley, CA who came from a tier three city in India. I work for a tier three company in the Bay area where FAANGM are the first tier companies in the Software industry. FAANGM means Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Microsoft. Though I had an offer from a tier one company but my urge to work in a Climate Change software domain prompted me to join an Energy software company.

Recently I saw the Republic Day parade of India. And I cherish this day with my thirteen dollars Indian national flag, which I bought from my first salary back in 2014 in the United States. 

The reason I bought it was to satisfy my yearning for my beloved nation. It is ironic how you crave for your land only when you are away from her. Lovers and close relatives have also reported similar experiences. Oh, I forgot to tell you I re-watched Rang De Basanti on the 26th of January this year. And remembered Bhagat Singh, who once wrote “Lovers, Lunatics and poets are made of the same stuff.”

And the second reason I bought the flag is because for immigrants the new place generally pays enough to keep you on the hook for a lifetime but never enough to fly them back to their homeland. Seldom I foster how the old pirates could plunder the rich nation, go home and retire.

But this year it saddened me to see another parade of poor protesters in the old streets of New Delhi. These front runners who are called pawns in Chess happen to be farmers this time. And every season is different because these pawns come from particular states. Like last year Citizenship bill protest was led by UP and Bihar, the protest for the agrarian crisis by Maharashtra in 2018. And sometimes it is against a movie such as Padmavati led by Rajasthan. As if this is a festival for the neighbouring states of Delhi, as transporting pawns from far-flung states of India is not viable for leaders. For example, from Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Kerala and many such boiling states. Boiling states prefer to fly their civilian army to a different nation rather than to the Indian capital. 

For me, the insult to the injury was those brand new green bandanas woven as a shroud by these poor farmers. Anyhow, the event was conducted in Punjabi language. Well, first of all, what if someone from non-Punjabi state wanted to join the movement against the corporate central Government of India? And what if they have no direct access to the hidden motives of Khalistani leaders who live across the border or in Canada.

And next week I saw a rift over land between Maharashtra CM Uddhav Thackarey and Karnataka Deputy CM Laxman Savadi to make Mumbai a union territory. 

And then there was a Twitter trend by the so-called bhakts (although Bhakti is a pure word and defined as “state of mind where the devotees surrender himself or herself unquestioningly to God.” by Wikipedia) trolling BJP leaders and missing #IndraGandhi for her treatment of Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale but probably the architects of this scuffle are smart and operate from the comfort and let the farmers flock in the Delhi cold. This is hysterical to me as Indra did not handle the situation right anyway. And is killing our fellow countrymen a solution for Bhakts now? 

While all this is happening on the roads, the country is up for sale inside the closed doors of Parliament and corporate offices. And the present government is a master of concentrating power at the center which seemed in the right spirit in the first term but perhaps now we have had the overdose. Perhaps Gandhiji was right when he said “The future of India lies in its villages”. But in the present context partnership between organizations and budding celebrities (Rahul Gandhi eats mushroom biryani at Village Cooking Youtube channel) have created a dream world around themselves. Industries and monopolies (for example Jio) have proven wonders for one family, trustees or board. Thanks to Mukesh Ambani for attracting at least 10 billion dollars of FDI last year. This has led him to be the richest man with 70 billion dollars in this nation of 1.4 billion people. 

But what about the millions of billion they would make in exchange for consumer's private data. But who cares for those GB of data when the physical world around us is on fire. But perhaps one should never forget the Panchatantra story of 2 cats & a monkey.

But in this hot mess the pawn (Kisan) never realizes that there are eight of you of the same color on the Chess board and you may choose a different path and scrap this arena between Kings and Queens of politics. By the way I wanted to run a quick survey of how many of these foot soldiers (Jawan) used the Jio network connection to communicate and Whatsapp to organize the movement. While you fight in this symbolic Chess game, Artificial Intelligence is nailing the Chinese game of Go. And the rest of the world is shaped by Communism. And the slavery of Communism would be worst of what we experienced in thousands of years.

However one can count thousands of such mob protests demonstrating rage but can someone guess the real reasons of those instigators. Fact is Indian diversity should never fall to the lows of division policies. Divisions since the age of Janpads were exploited by Britishers in the early days of East India Company. In my opinion in the last 5000 years of Hindustan we could have been one only under the Bhakti movement. But today no cash cow likes that much of spirituality, not even the religions, organizations or parties. And thus spiritual and philosophical stature of ancient India is yet to be achieved by any modern country not even by the present day India. Now it is upon us the young generation to take the baton forward!

I am just another Indian away from his mother India and concerned about the state of affairs back in my country.

For someone like us who are trapped by modern education and the labor market, worry for Indian future keeps us awake. After seven years of being away from the nation and convinced through the classic books of wisdom the appreciation for our ancient civilization has been affirmed. But then we need to unite to stand the new challenges of our chaotic world.

I do not find respite in my NRI community as I meet only two kinds of Indians in this land of opportunities. First kind is a Bhakt of money. Second kind never wanted to clean their hometown in the first place. Both consciousness find solace in the comfort of the rich shining world. They want to forget their miserable past proving that they have made it. I call them both the rich and poor Ostriches respectively. Ostriches devote generations to fulfill the big American dreams. Mostly they have no left over loved ones and no reason to return back to India.

So if you ask me what you should do to make this country proud, I would laugh in the mirror. But then I would take a deep breath and say to you: “let’s keep the conversation going!”.

The cycle of an immigrant completes when he returns home. So this letter is my attempt to pay back home. And now unofficially some of us provide focus groups sessions to young Indian kids. So if you feel we can help you or anyone you know please contact Chetan Maheshwari or me.

[ Akhand Bharat is an age old dream. But the truth is that at 72 years of age Indian Republic has become old and needs some new energy. If you feel the same please join hands in the act of constructive and peaceful nation building with us. Thank You! ]

Subscribe to this blog.

Follow on instagram.

Three Women Authors who inspired me

On Women's Day, I would like to talk about the three women authors who inspired me through their books

Rhonda Byrne

I still remember my eyes wandering through the narrow-cramped bookshelves at that bookstall. My savior during the college days, it was on the edge of the railway station road. Picked this book The Secret, thinking it to be a fiction, never seen it nor heard about it but just by gut feeling that this could be good. The blurb mentioned people like Leonardo da Vinci, Aristotle talking about some secret and I thought let us try this. Little did I know that my first non-fiction book would change my thoughts forever.

Such an effect of Law of Attraction on me that I used to try it on traffic lights to never get a red signal.

Mellowed down by external pressures in my gloomy days, I silently before the sleep used to open it randomly and would read it..

Ayn Rand

Sometimes I feel that writing about Ayn Rand’s books is a hard task. A few words can not cover the magnanimity of philosophies described in this fiction masterpiece -The Fountainhead.

The Fountainhead changed my thought process on various social aspects. Written a long time ago, the concepts, philosophies still hold good for this generation. Howard Roark will always be one of my favorite characters.

The Fountainhead is one such fiction book that I look forward to reading again.

Rujuta Diwekar

I used to compliment obese people for quite some time in my life, and my journey from “I used to be a fat guy (main pehle kabhi mota hua kerta tha)” to  “That guy who worked hard on his health” is solely because of Rujuta Diwekar. 

Her book Don’t Lose your mind Lose your weight  changed my thought process completely and helped me see the life, food, daily routines in a new light. Her approach to have sustainability in the routines, sticking to the old-home traditions, struck me hard and convinced me enough to follow it rigorously. 

Today, my daily eating routines are largely governed and controlled by her guidelines.