Imagine...

John Lennon:

Imagine there's no heaven
It's easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today...

Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace...

You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will be as one

Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world...

You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will live as one

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Little Angels on Earth

(Repost)

Two and a half years have passed by since I was first in the campus of Ashraya and even now, when I go there every week, it seems to be a new experience. As I walked to the campus yesterday, I was wondering how quickly time moves. It was not the first time that I was in such a place but it was a very special experience to be with kids around you who are not just special but very talented as well. During the initial days, I was with a GE Volunteers team and had volunteered to teach these kids, mathematics, origami, and lots of fun-making activities. Most of the kids at Ashraya are normal from a physical point of view, but not so from the emotional point of view - I would term them para-normal! They are a bit more mature than their age, which varied between 3 to 13 years. Ashraya has a number of infant orphans as well but we were not interacting with them. This place was unlike the Helen Keller Institute at Vashi, Mumbai where was dealing with special kids with visual and hearing challenges. You need a different level of patience while interacting with these little angels.

They have a garden with swings, slides and see-saws to play with. I used to hold them in my arms and rotate fast - they enjoyed these rides and you should just see the expression on their faces. We were not supposed to take photographs, but over the years, I have taken snaps of the work done by the kids, such as in their coloring books. Last year, for Christmas, I got an idea which was quickly accepted by the other team members - we gifted them gifts which we helped them to make. Let me explain that a bit: We taught them how to make Santa Claus masks, cone caps with bells, and paper toys. Then few of them became Santa and all of them played a game where you have to sing for Santa and get your gifts! There were many sessions when we showed them animated movies - they loved Ice Age 2! They loved Winnie the Pooh so much that it took them no time to learn when I taught them how to draw and later paint, huge Winnie posters.

We have Rakum school for the blind at Indiranagar, Bangalore where I live. This is another place which I frequently visit since I have been in Bangalore. Initially, many of my visits were anonymous, and I felt good that I am able to contribute to the education of such special kids - they needed our time and understanding more than monetary contributions. As per Mr Rakum, there are many folks who contribute money, but the number of persons who contribtue their time is very less. It is a different kind of realization and an expansion of the awareness of your existence, when you are with these kids.

At Rourkela, I used to go to a place called 'Home and Hope', which was on the way to my school (Saint Paul's Rourkela). I used to observe these boys and girls, (I was of their age those days: this is around fifteen years ago) and was amazed at the patience of the caretakers in looking after mentally challenged kids. I continued interacting with these folks even after school, and during my engineering, I visited a similar school at Anushaktinagar, BARC Mumbai. I was gifted a Diwali card made by a mentally challenged 11 year old - you could find more beauty and imagination in the design than any other card you have seen and you will be perplexed when you meet the kid who created it. At 'Asha Niketan' in Koramangala, Bangalore, I met a 15 year old special boy, who asked me if I liked his drawings and would like to buy some. The bigger surprise came to me later when he shared, "I like A R Rahman's music - if you buy few of my drawings, I'll get enough money to get few more of his DVDs". I was dumbfounded to hear this and was really wondering whether he is mentally challenged or the rest of the world is - how come we ignore such talents in our day to day lives of mindless hurry.

Even after I got married, I continued my visits to Ashraya, Rakum School and the Spastics Society of Karnataka in Indiranagar, Bangalore. My significant half, Pallavi, is always with me in all such visits. It has been so many years that I have been visiting such places, and still everyday teaches me something new about life, something really novel. I have had very busy schedules in life, but I have tried not to miss these visits.

At GE India, and later at Mercedes Benz India, I organized some personal visits by volunteers who want to look beyond their problems in life and look at little angles struggling to make meaning out of their existence. We also organized a tree plantation program and 'Teach me Hindi' program for the kids. It was an emotional reconnection with their school days, for many of the volunteers. At times, we organized these events personally (not through the office) so that folks from various companies can join us - we had friends from SAP, Tesco, Yahoo India, HP India, and Infosys to name a few. For us, contributing our bit was closer to heart and meant much more than just logging hours for community service on the company portal.

Life teaches you a lot of things indirectly and it depends on our observation abilities, how much we learn from it. There is a unique humility that you develop with such events and it has a great effect on your management skills. You have a much wider outlook on life. We need to realize how fortunate we are, even in our deficiencies, and how we can still make a difference to brighten someone's smile someday. :-)

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Do-Gooder Auto Driver

Meet: An autorickshaw driver who gives free rides to the blind, pays the school fees for two poor children, donates money to an old age home and is trying to raise funds for the treatment of a sandwich vendor.Read the full story.

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Seth Godin - The bandwidth-sync correlation

Link to Article: Click here. Read on to have a cool analysis of the ways we handle information in our heads(?!). A pic from Seth's post (linked to his post):

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Sharpening some tools?!

Now this is 'also' a good way to look at things that happened in my German and Japanese language courses. My mind went through a series of experiences that we undergo as kids, but never notice. The experiences made me renew my methods of memorizing, practicing, implementing (in short, naturalizing) the process of learning something new. It also helped my brain to correlate seemingly unconnected events that helped me in the process of learning. The differences between Japanese and German are wide in terms of the way of communication, the mannerism used, the characters and pronunciations, and the business etiquette.

It was not a new experience to learn a new language in both cases, given the kind of experiences I have with languages in India. I speak with my wife (my significant half!) using Marathi and Hindi, with my parents in Oriya and English, and with friends in Bengali (Score - 3/5), Bahasa (Indonesian; am very weak in this though!), and with taxi folks using Kannada, Tamil, and/or Telugu (In Telugu, I know expletives, 'How are you' with related conversations, and 'I Love You!')!! Apart from this, at office, I have a team white-board called 'Words of the Day' which I maintain in Japanese and German - this was after an in-house inter-cultural training.

In all this, the point I want to say is that it creates a state of mind that allows encryption/decryption abilities to be honed. It helps improve your emotion-switching skills (which is really important in daily business communication) and also helps you increase your failure/success-handling abilities (think, how!?). It makes you look at fellows in a totally different way (remember, I said 'different'). My ears/eyes/hands and mind got together once more - probably, in this fast world, we really forget to sharpen our basic skills. This was the way I used a seemingly boring matter (for an adult) learning newer languages into something that will help me sharpen my learning speed.

The world is beautiful with (human) emotions. Even animals have emotions (think about babies too!). And I feel excited to know some stuff in sign-language as well (I love spending time with special kids.)

[See a wiki stuff on 'How to learn a new language' Disclaimer! - Don't think I agree to everything on that - everyone is unique in their disability in learning!! ]

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Mind and Management

There have been a number of times at which I have explained a lot about how the human mind works and how things can be handled better when we are more aware of the dynamics of the world. I am not going to really start explaining scientific theories about the relations between mind and management, but general observations around us are enough for us to realize how we are entangled by this.

If you know more about the mind, it helps. It is like, in India, if you know English better, you can be a better doctor (disclaimer - not universally true but you got the point, didn't you!?) Will get back with some more points after explaining some facts on this topic to my 'significant half'!

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Theories of Entrepreneurship

Theories of Entrepreneurship

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