Lessons from the past

I want to note down some of the fundamental lessons I have learned about life lest I should forget.

1. Success is defined not by what is happening in the world around you, but by what is happening within you. It is about the goals you have set out to achieve and the ones you have achieved. When I was young, growing up in India I wanted to do the things my uncles did. I wanted to travel to America. I wanted go for an MS from  one of the best schools in the world. I wanted an MBA from one of the top 5 schools in the world. I wanted to be well read. I wanted to be physically fit. I wanted to be able to speak well. I wanted to meet interesting and exciting people. I wanted to party like there is no tomorrow, I wanted to play a lot of sports. I wanted to be able to write well. I wanted travel to different parts of the world and meet people. I wanted to buy a car. I wanted to be loved and appreciated by others. I wanted to write business plans. I wanted to be accepted into a scholarship program. I wanted to do something good for the society. I wanted to work for the best companies.

At various points in my life I have thought that each one of the above statement was beyond me. But then through some miraculous intervention, I was able to do each of the above things. It has made be both happy and gave me a deep rooted sense of belief that if I keep dreaming and working towards my dreams, they may indeed come true!

The lesson here is that I should never  stop dreaming. Even if the goals seem beyond my reach at this point in time, if they are noble and earnest, they will come true and the experience will be rewarding and cathartic.

2. Once the goals are in place, whether they are material or spiritual in nature, accomplishing them requires discipline and help. Lets talk about discipline first. If the goals were set with your heart, making sacrifices to achieve them do not even feel like making sacrifices. In fact it is a full time job and you feel no stress, only joy and satisfaction when you strive to take the steps in achieving those goals. As you move along that path, you feel as though you have enormous amount of time to set aside, you find that you have all kinds of resources at your disposal and you amaze yourself by your capabilities. I still cant believe that I was able to do the things I have done so far in my life. I still have plenty of things to do, but 10 years ago I didn’t think that Ill be where I am right now.

Lets talk about help now. I remember reading somewhere that your life is defined by the people you meet and the books that you read. In life you always need mentors. In my case, growing up, I assumed my uncle as a mentor. I wanted to have the life that he had. He too grew up in the same surrounding that I did, but he was able to break free, go for an MS from one of the best schools in the world and then an MBA from MIT 17 years ago. I am amazed that after choosing him as a mentor, 10 years ago how much my career has resembled his. Now I think it is time for another mentor to model the next 10 years after. Mentors are critical in life. Following their footsteps is how you make key decisions.

The second aspect is about the books that you read. In life you have to learn the rules of this world. You need at your disposal various aspects of religion, psychology, philosophy, general knowledge, in addition to your basic skill set to succeed. This is because no one can be a recluse and be successful at the same time. Some of the rules and laws in life are broken, but you still need to play by them to appear normal and to gain others respect. Only after you have gained your coworkers, friends, families, others respect can you be an effective person that people want to associate with. Only through being an effective person can you achieve all the things you want to. People want to be able to trust you to solve their problems. Books help you learn these rules about life. Thats why it is very important to be well read across a variety of subjects.

3. The cycle of giving. Growing up I never realized about this powerful force. Accept whatever others have to give you and be very thankful about their generosity. Do not feel guilty about it, even if you are unable to repay that person, just pass it on to someone else when you get the chance. This creates a circle of goodwill from both the giver and the receiver that is very powerful and can help you out a lot.

4. It is OK to make mistakes. After understanding the consequences and with mitigation in place I should take risks. If it was a mistake, Ill learn a lesson. If it was not, Ill gain something. Either way, if that was a well thought out risk, it is worth the risk. There should be plenty of opportunities to make amends.

5. Finally, life makes a lot more sense looking back than looking ahead. At times you dont really know why you are doing something. But if that seems right even though it  makes no sense it is better to trust your intuition and do it. A few years down the line it will make sense. I have been amazed at how various whimsical things I have done at various stages in my life have found a profound place and meaning in my story so far.

6. Enthusiasm can make up for talent! I dont consider myself to be a very technical person, but I have worked on some of the most cutting edge projects in health care IT. I have worked with physicians, scientists, software engineers, hardware engineers, clinicians, researchers and physicists to design and develop some awesome software. If you are willing to learn and ask people for help and work hard, unbelievable things are possible. You just need to know very well what your strengths and weaknesses are and how you can contribute to the team in accomplishing its goal. All kinds of people are needed when as a team you are trying to do great things.

Obama becomes President!

I do not have a vote being an Indian living in the US. But the US in electing Obama validated some of my fundamental reasons as to why I left India to come to the US. I think it is appropriate that I list them.

1. This is a country of risk takers. An untested, little known freashman senetor was chosen ahead of a well known political figure to lead the nation in the most trying times of a lifetime. Taking risks is part of the American life and risk takers are rewarded more often than not. 

2. This is a country that believes in change and hope. There is a belief that the future holds promise and always, always there is a better tomorrow. People do not accept what is.

3. This is a country that believes that everyone deserves a chance. Anyone has the opportunity to follow his or her dreams. 

4. This is a country that ensures that if you are willing and able to work hard and smart there are innumerable opportunities for you. 

5. Finally this is a country where talent will eventually be recognized. Success will definitly come to that extrodinary person. 

It is not that I think India measures any less compared to the US. We also have given opportunities to some truly deserving people and there are plenty of reasons to be proud of. But I really feel that it is time that we pass the torch onto a younger generation that dreams of hope and unity and is able to infuse energy into our people.

Fear of Permanence

I have heard plenty of people say that they are afraid of change. But are there folks out there who love change and hate permanence? I fall under the later category. To know that things will remain the way they are for the next few years scares the hell out of me. It is almost like I know what is going to happen. 

When you know what is going to happen and can predict your life for the next 2 years everything seems to be boring, stable. To know that you will have the same job, will live in the same area, will be associated with the same people day in and day out seems to be a drag.

How do people deal with that? I have already written about how to create change. You can read it here http://wantonurges.wordpress.com/2006/02/28/jumpinklings/. But my question is, what if the circumstances aren’t just right for change now. You need to wait. Anger and passion subdued by reason. 

So how do you wait, when every cell in your body is pushing you forward, ready to break free? But reality pulls you back! There are logical steps to be taken. There are plans to be designed and executed. The time has come to cast off that lethargic drag.

Words are powerful in that they lift your spirit, even if only for a moment; they goad you to act right now. Goals have to be written down. A plan has to be crafted to break the goals down into little pieces and finally, most importantly, courage has to be drawn from within to stay the course and execute those plans.

Financial Crisis

This economy is a once in a life time situation. A sub-prime mortgage crisis spiraled into a complete financial meltdown. Banks are refusing to lend each other money. A credit crunch that affects both the wall street and the main street. Tech companies will soon find themselves without enough money for day to day operations. That would result in reduced earnings and consequently in further stock drop. The DOW is trading at a 5 year low, and could get worse. International stock markets are in no better shape. Iceland is bankrupt. Home prices have dropped by record values. Ford motors is trading at $2, GM at 5$!

What a wonderful opportunity !!! Anybody in this situation should buy in a phased manner. Buy blue chip stocks, buy homes buy whatever you can get your hands on that is trading at historic low numbers.

marriage 101

Women should be built to order. Now I don’t mean like the creepy 60-year-olds who get escort service, but like a genuine young man, who wants to get married, with certain set of requirements. However, I wonder if I will have a successful marriage if I find someone who has the exact set of characteristics I am looking for. Which brings me to the interesting question. Should there be any requirements at all?

What are successful marriages based on? Compatibility? How do you figure that out? Should two people who have similar interests get married? Chemistry? If you are attracted to each other and enjoy each others company, should you get married? Communication? I threw that one in there because my mother seems to think that is the most important component.

But the question I am playing with is: maybe, any marriage can work if the two people involved are committed to it. So there really isn’t any “right person”. There are plenty of “right persons”. And then, you make a conscious decision that you are going to give it everything you have to make it work.

So what I am saying is that, maybe eharmony.com, shaadi.com and match making aunts are really not doing anything useful. All that matters is that you are ready and you find someone who is also ready and agree that you want to stay married and will do everything to make it work.

That probably explains why arraigned marriages have been working in India for eons. Due to societal taboos associated with a broken marriage(divorce), people opt to stay married even when they are not happy. So I come to the conclusion that to stay married, all you need are two committed people, with whatever motives to stay married.

Now going back to the original question as to what good are requirements and preconditions going into a marriage, when they are immaterial anyway? Maybe it feels like you are doing the right thing if you have preconditions, maybe from a psychological point of view, you feel better when you get someone who you were looking for. But in reality, that has no impact on the success or failure of a marriage.

I suppose the preconditions and requirements are for the snobish Indian families. I suppose it is nice and heart warming for families to talk about “like us” alliances. I suppose its a matter of honor and self rightousnes for societies to be able to pat themselves on the back when their sons and daughters have led lives confined to the boundries of what is considered acceptable.

Values, Mistakes and You

Have you ever questioned who you are? Your fundamental values and principles. Why you make mistakes and what is the relationship between mistakes and values. The past few days I had reasons to question who I have become and analyze myself.

What are values and principles?

They are what you believe in. They are the core of an individual. Things like “I will not steal.” “I will not hurt someone”. “I will respect another human being.” These values may be passed on to you by your parents, teachers and other elders. Sometimes you think and read good books and realize certain qualities in people that you would like to incorporate into your self. So you start believing in these one lines, and they become your  fundamental values. Finally they are inextricably tied to your character. When you talk about someone’s character, you are essentially talking about the set of values that person holds.

What good are values?

Life puts you in situations where you are under stress. Sometimes you might have just lost a job or a loved one. Sometimes you are frustrated with life, sometimes you have wanted something so badly for a long time but couldn’t get it.

Life also throws important decisions at you. Who should you marry? How should you raise your kids? How should you behave with others. At these decision points the only way you can make a decision is by relying on your values. You look at your principles. They are the rules that you define to help you make decisions.

So values are important because when you are in a situation that you have never been in before, you rely on them to help you make decisions. That is why having good values is so important. They help you make the right decisions when you are under stress and when you have to make important ones.

What about mistakes?

Now there are two kinds of mistakes. Say you misspelled a word. That’s a mistake you made because you didn’t know and it probably had very little consequence.

The kind of mistakes I want to talk about are the ones that claw at the core of your being. The ones that you knew you shouldn’t make. The ones where you stepped outside the boundary defined by your values.

Why were those mistakes made? Maybe you forgot about your values. Maybe you let yourself slip. Maybe you gave yourself less credit than you should have. You forgot to realize that you have the power to stick to your values. You knew them, but thought that you were weaker than that. One of the things I believe in is that only a weak person makes mistakes. Well even someone strong can be weak at times.

What to do about the mistakes?

What do you do about something that you did that was totally out of character? I hope you understand the import of those words. Out of character means that you did something that you normally would not do. If the consequences were significant, how do you make sure you don’t do something out of character again? The answer is that you have to constantly keep reminding yourself what your principles are. Furthermore you need to make sure you don’t put yourself in situations where you are weak. Because that is when you are most likely to step beyond your boundaries.

How to make friends

Obviously I am not going to write about all the methods because that would take a book and I don’t have time to write a book. But what I intend to do with this article is to write about how to make friends with people of a different culture. I find that a lot of people when they step outside their culture have trouble making friends with people of a different culture. The reason for this is that suddenly you are not sure of what is considered OK and what is not considered OK. You are not sure if you might offend the other person. You are not sure if they think that you are a dork and that you came from an alien country where girls generally do not even wear bikinis(in the sense that they are overdressed for a place like the beach)! You don’t understand the customs and you don’t understand the sports that are popular in the new place. That is when having a conversation with a person of a different culture becomes most difficult.

The work around that is to work at it. The starting point of-course is to ask for help. Do not be embarrassed to do that. Most people, you will be surprised to find, will go out of their way to help if you ask them. Put yourself in that position, when someone asks you for help, doesn’t that make you feel good? Doesn’t that make you wanna help the person out. That is what I found out when I came to America. I find a lot of things happening around me that I am not used to. The culture is different and really set off from what it is in India. Especially if you are coming from a small town instead of Delhi, Bombay or Bangalore. I grew up in a small town and I can see the difference in culture and attitude. For example where I grew up women don’t drink. A woman who drinks is considered to be of bad nature. Whereas here most women drink and that is alright. The can drink and still be great people!

So how do you evaluate people? Well you ask, you tell them that you are from a different place and ask them what is the norm here. Tell them about how it is in your culture, what are the customs what are the traditions and the prejudices. That is a good point to start. They will then tell you what their customs are and what is OK and what is not OK. You learn more about the culture that way and that becomes an easy way to adjust. I am not saying that you need to imbibe the new culture, but you are at a remarkable point where you can take in the best of both worlds!

Another way to make friends is to go for socials, football games, basketball games and other stuff that is considered part of the tradition here. That way you get to have fun and at the same time you get lots of stuff to talk about.

How do you not offend a person… be respectful. Keep all your biases back in your home country and keep an open mind. Remind yourself that you are the alien and you have come to learn about and be part of a totally different experience. Before making statements like “nice girls don’t have guys as roommates”, the better statement would be “In India girls who have guys as roommates are looked down upon, but I see that here that is perfectly normal”. When you establish that you are inquiring based on cultural differences people are more open to explain where the fine line between “normal” and “weird” lie.

That applies vice-versa too. If you are an American and you end up visiting an Indian be really really respectful. If it is important for you to make a good impression dress really conservatively when visiting older people, do not and I really mean do not call people twice your age by their first name.

Don’t worry in not knowing where the fine line lies. Let them know in advance that you are new to this and you are here to learn and you are respectful. If that is done, the hosts tend to be more forgiving and tell you when you say/do something that is slightly inappropriate.

Cheers! I encourage all my readers to try and get as much inter cultural exposure as possible. It makes you into a better person.

The intergalactic squid and the mutant mouse

The strangest thing happened to me a few days back. I was leading a very normal life on the east cost of America. I woke up one morning and went to my university to attend classes as would every other student on every other day. The morning hour went off routinely, nothing unexpected there. When at 3 O clock I was faced with a situation I have never faced before. I was looking at an intergalactic squid! I have never seen an intergalactic squid before in my life. I have never even heard of one! To make matters worse, this one was all wrong. Everything about the squid was flipped! I immediately called my friend who came with me to look at the squid. Even she was shocked to see the damn thing.

She said “What the heck is that”

me “I have no idea, I am seeing it for the first time.”

she “What are you going to do with it”

me “I don’t know!!! But I need to do something and something really fast”

We kept on staring at it for a while not knowing what to do. Though my friend was next to me I knew that this was my mess and I need to solve it by myself. I have a philosophy when I encounter things that I have never seen before. The idea is to pretend that it is not there and move on.

That’s what I did. So I told her. “This is weird, lets move on and not look at this thing anymore”

Double Whammy!!! The next thing I see is a mutant mouse. It got a weird problem of not moving as it should. Some protein in the poor thing has been knocked out either by an evil scientist or by some quirk of fate.

My friend goes

“I feel for you, but do you have a plan to handle these things”

I told her I have no idea but then I better keep them there for a while and get back to them in a while. Saying that we left the house.

When I got back, I wasn’t dreaming, the intergalactic squid and the mutant mouse were still there on my table in the form of two questions for the mid terms. This was my first experience with a take home term paper in America. I figure that to make a test a take home they have to make it as far out and as complicated as possible. To test the students understanding of the subject while providing him/her with all the information in the world in the form of the Internet and other books, requires the utmost creative ability. That was the origin of the intergalactic squid and the mutant mouse. They originated in the neural membranes of a professor trying to design a take home test.

After five days I did figure out what was wrong with that intergalactic squid and what was wrong with that poor mouse. But I have to admit it was a fun five days of analyzing. I really like the model of take home tests. They make you think. I believe take home tests reflect the way in which life really is. You generally have access to all the information in the world. You only have to infer and apply that information. My recommendation hence is to make most tests take home!! That also does away with rote memorization.

Indianization of America

I had to write this. I went for what is known as Fuqua Friday. Today at Fuqua there was an event which was all about internationals. The event included food from different parts of world and various events displaying multinational talents. That is when it hit me. India is popular here. Very very popular. There are quite a few Indians as well, but that still does not explain the popularity of India. Americans love Indian food. “Curry Chicken” as they call it, is probably the most famous of them all. Then of course the very popular chicken preparation which has a number. For some reason “65″ is a difficult number to remember.

 I felt alienated and at home all at the same time. Bollywood dances were happening on stage, awesome Bhangra, the song “churalia..”, and an Indian fashion show. Everyone loved it. Phenomenal when you think about how people from the rest of the world can tap their feet to an alien music sequence. I couldn’t believe it when I saw the people next to me(Chinese, Mexicans, Korean, Americans, Europeans, Latin Americans, and many more nationalities)sway to the beatof Bhangra.

That’s when I got a chance to feel what it is to enjoy dance and music from different parts of the world. Following the Hindustani music and dance performances there was a Mexican song. Well it was actually a Spanish song sung by a Mexican. Accompanied by the “spanish guitar”. You can actually find rhythem and melody when you hear something absolutely different. Music really has no language I guess. The weirdest performance was by a bunch of half naked Japanese guys dancing to Japanese rock music. (:0

I realize the importance of the culture quotient. Some cultures are totally different from yours. What is normal to them, which seems like noise to us, is indeed normal to them. In Japan people might dance to rock music. In Mexico people sing with lots of passion and action. The song seems to come from somewhere deep down the throat. Words are shouted out. In china on the other hand it’s very soft. I know these might be erroneous generalizations based on one show, but still you can make out marked cultural traits. 

I also found people in so many traditional dresses the Korean hanbok, JJapanese kimono, Indian lehengas, sarees, salwars, sherwanis, Chinese Cheongsam, and so on.  I found mostly asians in traditional dresses over there.

Back to the main topic of discussion. India and Indian stuff is popular here. Just like hamburgers and hot dogs have made it into India, doshas, nan and chicken curry are here. Just like Indians like American food, Americans like Indian food. In India rock and pop music is enjoyed by lots of folks. In America bhangra and carnatic music is popular.

Paradigm shift

Slightly on the philosophical note: In life you need to constantly redefine who you are and what you believe in. There were times when I used to think that you have to find a set of values and principles and live by that. If you constantly change your values, I thought people might think that there is something wrong with you. But now I realized that the above belief holds good only if you intend to restrict yourself to your own familiar universe. If on the other hand, you step into a universe where everything that you found normal is different then you have to change your beliefs and values.

For example, I have been taught, conditioned by my mother, father and other older people to look to the right, then to the left and again to the right, make sure there are no vehicles and then cross the road. This was in India and I held on to that belief for 24 years. It worked and I never got hit by a car.

However after coming here and trying out the above rule while crossing the road and nearly getting hit I realized that there was something wrong with what I was doing. I realized over here everything is flipped. I gotta look to the left, then to the right, again to the left, make sure there are no vehicles and then cross the road!! Paradigm shift. If I had held on to what I have been taught then I would have been well ”run over”

Though this a trivial example, it does highlight the fact that you have to have the ability to discard what you have been taught and are familiar with to embrace the uncomfortable and the unknown.