One Year of Active Blogging

Though I've officially started blogging in 2007, I took a loooong sabbatical before resuming active blogging on Feb 25, 2010. Yes, its been an year that I'm putting my thoughts in black and white and it has now become a sort of my alter-ego, collection of my reminiscences, my mirror image and a perfect gateway to my views and ideas.

Earlier, I used to get wary as I didn't know who the readers were and what to write. But once I decided to make the blog a transparent medium to reflect whats going on in my mind, everything fell in place. Being a voracious follower of news and current affairs, I had (have) an opinion on every topic, but lack of platform to present my points of view and thoughts made me look for an alternative where I could express all my thoughts on every topic, be it political, religious, administrative, relationships, my own progress, setbacks, convictions, suggestions, lessons, confessions, memories, memoirs, so on and so forth. I don't consider myself to be a very good writer, but all I try is to translate my mind into words which make some sense.

Whenever I feel happy or sad or ecstatic or low, I resort to blogging. If you browse through various earlier posts, you can find that most of the writings are impulsive and direct Dil Se. I have been caustic and acerbic on few topics when I personally felt distressed due to any issue. I wrote like a child when I felt happy after my birthday surprises or vacation trips.

I know the world is too busy and there would be nobody who would patiently listen to me or care to ask me about what am doing or what am I thinking about anything. Everybody has his own life and its completely natural that we don't have a lot of time for others feelings or views. But I always felt this is a space which allows me to be myself. I feel good after writing a post. It brings in positivity and gets me out of blues, almost everytime.

An icing on the cake was the kind of response and readership I got for my writings. I'm so humbled that people appreciate my way of putting down my opinions in a rather simplistic lingo without getting elitist or catering to galleries.

6800 views from 27 countries and 38 followers after one year of blogging is hugely encouraging and it keeps me on my toes to post more articles as I know there are people who try to relate to my writings or atleast who try to keep themselves abreast with my thoughts irrespective of whether they agree with me or not.

My Inspirations: 

Undoubtedly my wife has been the biggest inspiration. She introduced me to the concept of blogging with her blogs , I was so inspired by her writing skills, that I always wanted to write like that but am sure, I don't have that poetic affluence, creative head or mellifluous flow which she possesses. The only complaint I have is that she doesn't write often and she never publishes her blog in other media to get some readership.

Sree has been a constant source of encouragement, inspiration and always been a positive influence on my blogging. Her blogging skills are par excellent. I can no way reach her readership, command on languages (she's unparelleled in putting her thoughts in English and Telugu with equal flamboyance). I always look upto her blogs http://sreeszone.blogspot.com/ and http://sreemadhanam.blogspot.com/. After Facebook, Twitter and Orkut, Sree's blogs are major sources of traffic to my blog :)

Thanks guys !!!

And Thanks everybody who has ever read my blog, and thanks to all those who ever thought my piece of work provoked some thought or emotion in you and all those who appreciated, supported, commented and encouraged me.

Love Marriage vs Arranged Marriage

Two different schools of thought and often two conflicting opinions. Whenever the debate arises as which is better, the opinions are highly polarized and often subjective. But what I believe in is that success or failure of a marriage is not dependent on the kind of marriage it is, but the attitude and decision making prowess of people involved in it. And this is the very reason we don't see only one kind of marriages being successful and all others a failure or vice versa.

There are people from older generations and few in gen X too who look at the word "Love" with contempt and this is because they associate the very word with some kind of negativity and often use love as a synonym to lust or immaturity. This school of thought vehemently advocates arranged marriage and the kind of family support and thought thats put into those kind of marriages.

I often fail to agree to that as most of the cases, arranged marriage is set based on few set parameters like looks, financial status, job security and caste. I can't think of any other factor in consideration. The whole decision in taken in a matter of a month usually. Based on that, two lives get intertwined for 6 or 7 decades after that. I don't say arranged marriages don't work. Such marriages have all the ingredients to make it a good alliance, but the basis on which they are fixed has to be expanded.

Coming to love marriage, most of the current generation kids would prefer this as this kind of marriage provides an opportunity to know each other, like each other and decide if the rest of lives can be spent together. Again we see all kinds of examples here too. The success and failure of love marriages depends on what factors the guy and gal consider to know if they are compatible and their wisdom in analyzing the same.

Lot of youngsters mistake that liking or love can make their life happier. What they don't understand is marriage is not only about love or liking. Liking somebody and being happy with somebody are two different things. They have to understand that those they like or those they are liked by may or may not have that capability or attitude to keep their spouses happy for rest of their lives.

People who advocate love marriages have to answer themselves if they can be sure that the person of opposite sex is demonstrating his/her negative attributes too as it doesn't always happen during the courtship. The kind of compatibility issues rise only after two people start living under the roof. Once those differences in opinion start, the way the couple handles those situations is the key for successful marriage. Now this is applicable for both love or arranged marriages equally.

Liking towards one person is just one of the factors to marry that person as there are more important factors. Love can propel the marriage for may be 5 or 10 years. After that there are more factors which come into play. Security, comfort, support, understanding, humor, ability to resolve differences - from these factors, love automatically evolves which keeps the couple happy for the next half of the lifetime.

Love is something which is gradually developed after continuous interaction, mutual understanding, complementing each other's weaknesses, supplementing each other's strengths and being a shield of support for the partner against the whole world. Attraction, romance or infatuation towards each other don't die for decades if these factors are proportionately managed in the married life. Now this is a secret of a successful marriage.

Just because a guy and a gal are made to see each other for 20 minutes in presence of 20 people, neither can know if they can be a compatible couple for life. On the other hand, just because a guy and gal know, like each other and enjoy each other's company, it doesn't mean they can be happy thereafter too. Both these approaches involve judgement. So if parents are better judges if their kids can be happy with some person, arranged marriage will be magical. If kids can judge better than their parents, love marriages are good.

So it all depends on judgement of people involved and factors they consider, not the kind of marriage.

The magic lies in reaching out to each other, trying to accept each other's qualities, respecting each other and continuously working to keep the fire on for the entire life.

PS: I don't belong to any school of thought as mine was a love story which was turned into an arranged marriage. I`ll write about my views on pre-marital commitment and their implications in my next post.

Change in my Voice

Recently I watched Colin Firth's "The King's Speech" where the protagonist plays King George V1 who overcomes his stammering problem with speech therapy. The movie is reasonably good but I got so nostalgic about the concept of speech / voice therapy which I myself have undergone (though not for stammering or stuttering reasons).

My case was more peculiar which not many, who knew me after 2006, know about. Till the age of 26, I had a different voice. Yes, I mean it !

So all my relatives, childhood friends, school friends, college friends and few ex-colleagues identify me with a voice which I didn't sport anymore after 2006. Lot of them suffered from a panic attack when they spoke to me in recent years :) And when I made my new friends listen to my old voice recordings, they look at me with disbelief :)

Just like any adolescent, my voice changed at 14, but it was softer and low. Thats the voice with which I made all my classroom seminars, presentations, group discussions for admissions, cracked job interviews, presented product demonstrations to clients, closed sales deals and on personal front made friends, entered into a relationship with my girlfriend. I never missed that macho kinda loud voice as I always believed more in content and gist than the channel of communication;

In March 2006, I suffered from a bad cold and my voice became hoarse for a while, but soon returned to my  normal soft one in a week. But I realized that I could shout or talk louder in my hoarse voice during cold than in my normal voice and then tried to talk in a hoarse tone deliberately. After some more practice, I felt that the hoarse tone was a bit softened and resulted in a distinct voice which was louder and more authoritative than my other (read: normal) voice.

After that day, I had two different voices !!!! And yes, I mean it again :)

I deliberately started using my new-found voice with new people I met and they liked my voice. My family and fiancée though initially got shocked, slowly got used to my new voice and in the course of time, my voice evolved completely and didn't look affected a bit. I was amused at my own voice therapy and entertained myself by reading a same sentence in two different and distinct voices :)

I never faced lack of confidence due to my old voice, but my new voice has brought into me a huge confidence factor as the efforts which I would have put in projecting my points of view with older voice were dramatically cut down by my new voice. Though my knowledge, conviction and presentation style didn't change with the new voice, the way opposite person perceives me changed a bit.

But the challenge was using my new voice before old pals or old voice with new people :). I didn't want to confuse myself and others and hence started talking in my new voice with old friends and colleagues too who were alarmed initially and then amused. They concentrated more on my voice than what I was intending to speak. It was fun.

Eventually I realized that I lost my old voice. I was shocked at the developments. Then I browsed through various voice therapy related books and online resources to know the reason for this phenomenon and realized that my old voice was not exactly my voice, but just a sound coming out of some unusual channel. If you got shocked by this, just imagine what I would have gone through :)

Yes, the voice which I used from the age of 14 to 26 was not my original voice. It happens with some kids that they subconsciously get shy of the adolescent developments and try to mask those to avoid peer embarrassment. Without my own knowledge, I might have done the same which resulted in a squeaky, soft and low voice. Thats the reason, that voice was blocked after the discovery of my original voice which was dormant for 12 full years :)

PS: I've been teaching since 2007

Taare Dimaag Par !

Just like the whole country and diaspora, I too liked Aamir Khan's "Taare Zameen Par". The story of a dyslexic boy and his parents' indifference towards his trouble was heart-wrenching. The appreciation the movie and the child-actor got was very well deserving. BUT....there was a certain kind of social message which kept me pondering over and over. The same message was subconsciously inserted in "3 idiots" as well.

Both these movies say that nobody should be forced to do something which they don't like and every kid or youth is entitled to pursue his / her career in their areas of interest. It sounded very idealistic and correct to most of the audiences, but I beg to disagree.

In TZP there is another scene where the protagonist slams parents for encouraging their children to stay ahead in competition. Since the child in subject was dyslexic, it was understandable, but what if the general audiences try to implement that advice ?

In my childhood, I always wanted to be a watchman (gatekeeper) as I saw they had a kind of control over who comes or goes out of the gate. After few years, I thought being a bus conductor was the coolest job. But I'm so thankful to film industry that no one made movies like TZP then; had my parents taken that message seriously, I would have been left as a gatekeeper or bus conductor now. (I don't mean any offence to those occupations as there is a kind of dignity and respect in any kind of honest job. Just that my life would have been very different that way ).

Just like Maddy's character in 3 Idiots, I was not interested in engineering. Infact I hated physics and later machine design in mechanical engineering. My parents pushed me towards technical field which I joined reluctantly. But after earning engineering degree, I entered into my favorite field (MBA - marketing) and in a way my technical background paved way to my management PG in one of the premier B schools. It has diversified my knowledge base, confidence and career horizon.

People who get influenced by filmi theories often mock at rat-race students plunge into for competitive exams and rigorous training it needs. But thats inevitable and there is a reason.

Even if 2 lakh students appear for engineering entrance in a state like AP, almost 70% of students end up in some engineering course and will have good career prospects. There is some kind of career waiting for not only brilliant, but also average or below average performers. Now can we say the same for those students who take their hobby as a career ?

If a kid wants to pursue his career in painting, cricket, singing, dancing, acting or any other talents, can he afford to be average or below average to make a living ? Can every talented or passionate cricketer play for Indian team ? Can every talented or good looking struggling actor make it to the tinsel town ? What is the success ratio ? These are some very fundamental questions that need to be answered with some minimum common sense before leaving the destiny of any kid to his / her juvenile decision making prowess.

Career security is as important if not more than passion. Those who are interested to make a living out of their passion too have to make themselves self sufficient by earning a comfortable living and then strive towards their hobbies rather than living in fool's paradise. Or else they will have to see stars all over their brain throughout the life and Taare Zameen par will end up being Taare Dimaag Par !

PS: Those who are born with a silver spoon or those who can live with basic amenities with no inclination towards worldly or material pleasures are exempted from my theory