TAGGED .....Finallly i am............

so after one year of my blogging experience , and wondering what this business of tagging is all about and what's the obsession and madness about it .Here i am finallly taggeD by Akanksha ,well she had the patience to search for the meaning of my name so i am privileged :) ....thanks a lot to her .......and now the tagging part i have to write 8 facts about me as part of the deal ..it's easy after having faced a some IIM interviews describing your strengths and weakness which they have no interest in listening and this is a good opportunity to brag about my self tooooo.

so let's begin

1.So starting with the bad points which i have lots of ......the first one is that i am a bit stubborn ....sorry bit is not the right word actually it's "overly" just ask my parents and friends you will hear wonderful stories about it.......lets not get into the details

2.I haven't told this to anybody but i have this obsession of letting people know that i am into blogging ,that's why i give the link to my blog on my gtalk status 24 hrs a day ,in hope that someone will comment on my stuff or the crap i write :) ,my friends tell me to stop cribbing about the JEE in my blog ...but emotions do come out....

3. Turning to be quite a music freak these days .downloading all the new songs whatever....discovering new artists and learned to play the guitar one thing which i always wanted to do in my life ........by now all of you have guessed that i am completely velllla now a days ......but i am loving my time

4.This i have already mentioned in my blog earlier .....that i am in love but the feeling just seems to get better with each passing day , ya i am nuts about her no prizes for guessing ,though also enjoying my time away from her ,this separation period has taught me a lot..

5.Kind of worried for my best friend these days , who is passing through a rough phase in life ..but i pray he will emerge stronger and more refined after this and i am always with himmm no matter what ......

6.I try to attract bloggers on my blog , by visiting daily to at least 10 blogs ,so that more bloggers add me to their blog rolls and i am accepted in this community ......ya its height of being desperate par i am like that only

7.Trying to make more female friends these days ,really missed the fun in the past for years buried under my books , when i tell my friends about this girl i met an all they seriously think i am going maaaad and bezzerk...and they are a bit apprehensive about my commitment .....heheh but i am lovin it........

8.Sorry i forgot to mention that inspite of all the things that have distracted me ..i do manage to study a bit actually love reading those research papers .....they are kind of a wake up tonic for me ,though most find them borring .......

So the 8 facts are over now the toughest part ,searching for 8 new bloggers that i have to tag ......i know only a few and most of them are tagged ...well you all by now have guessed that my blog is not at all popular.....still my 8 bloggers are ishavasyam,NEFTY,Standbymind,Priysha,Sharad ,Sanchit ,Arvind and Blaaaha queen ....you all need to write 8 facts about you and tag 8 more bloggers to it ...so kep the chain running and happy tagging to you all

My Namesake ...i am still searching

I was recently going through the paperback edition of "The Namesake", i had picked up at the airport ,though i never had the privilege to watch the film but perhaps the cover of the book ,depicting the photographs of the two main lead artists drew my attention towards it or you could say i was curious to read the story which the film critics had adorned in the film reviews of the leading Saturday dailies ,and now after finishing the whole book in a single day i think i had not wasted those 300 odd bucks of mine .

Somewhere i also feel connected to the central character "GOGOL" in the book ,though his father named him after nikolai gogol the russian author in a haste to get him released from the hospital ,i was registered under a name "daman" in my school records because my parents could not think of name starting with a letter "P" for four years after i was born and in a haste they stuck to my "good name" ,the name by which i am recognized today ,that's my identity ,i still wonder what would have been the feeling if i had a name starting with a "P" ,but perhaps unlike "GOGOL" it's the name i always wanted ,i made me feel different from my relatives who all had such big sikh names like my father's ,my mothers and my sister's.I felt i was unique.

I don't remember how old i was maybe in standard third... or fourth when a school teacher asked me the meaning of my name ,and frankly i had to answer to it ,my school mates out of sheer curiosity at that age wondered if i was named after the place "Daman & Diu" , and i went on great lengths to explain this was not the case .when i en quired about the origins of my names from my parents they said ,they gave me this good name because my cousin sibling ,three months older then me was named "aman", i felt as i was not important to them ,and they simply decided to give this name without even giving a thought over it .you could all understand the name aman is quite good it has a reason behind it ,it means one who brings peace and calmness but what does daman mean no one had a clue about it ,later i read in my hindi classes the sentence "gandhiji ne angrezzi samaaan ka daman kiya" means he wanted to boycott english goods ,then i wondered whom am i supposed to boycott ??? ,I cried that day and desperately wanted to change my name for once and final . My mom after a bit of fight wrote application to the principal that i wanted to change my name ,my father did make an affidavit supporting it ,when i was half way down the stairs to submit that application in the office ,some thing stopped me i don't know what was it ,perhaps i was scared i would have that big sikh name starting with "P" ,that i would loose my uniqueness among my relatives how difficult would it be tell to so many people about my name change ....after considering all these factors i decided not to change my name ..

The main reason behind was that the my name made me feel separated from my roots ,roots which i never felt to be part of ,was quite embarrassed in front of all my relatives ,hated to go those social gatherings which my father took me too where most of my relatives were not even graduates,never liked their discussions on the topics which i felt were absolutely absurd and that the world had moved and still they were stuck in the dark ages ,where they talked about the importance of looks of a boy and a girl not his or her talent in academics or other fields ,I would say that in spite of following all the religious followings of my religion , i never bother to go the Sikh temple we know as the "gurudwara" ,simply because i am an atheist and i have no problems in admitting it .

It was my name which helped me to have an illusion that i am away from my religion ,though some may think it to absurd it's actually true ,till date i have not bothered to understand the meaning of my name ,i like it for the above reason and it's only five letters long . I helps me as i have to blacken only five bubbles under my name in hundreds of OMR application forms i have filled till now,contrary to my sisters ten !

Motivation .........

Last week a friend of mine had a problem she wasn't able to motivate herself to study for her entrance exams ,and she wanted to know how do I motivate myself and i jokingly said to her "I was motivated by seeing the building of my undergraduate college ",i said it in jovial moos but then i realized it was actually true .

So how does one get motivated ???? well going by my experiences you get motivated by the things you love most or the things you hate most ,but in my case it was a combination of both .some say they get motivated by seeing their peers achievement ,their brothers and relatives....,some people have told me they get motivated for money (it's quite difficult though),some get motivated by seeing the stories of the brave one's in news and newspapers ,but the one thing you get motivated is the one which you put in tour heart and soul and never achieve it.

Coming back to my so called motivation story , i was most of all motivated by the place in which spent four years of my life ,constantly dragging my body every morning to that two hour bus journey to reach a place which was like a jail or kind of torture for me ,as soon as the DTC bus crossed the noida toll bridge a sense of disappointment was engraved in my place , i started to wonder "why am i going there?" ,"what wrong did i do those 9 hours of my JEE exam?" or perhaps "was i wrong to dream of IIT sitting in my DCE exams" and i screwed up that paper what ever it was ,these thoughts constantly crossed my mind while the bus crossed the bridge over the "nala" what we all know as the yamuna river ,it was quite a culture shock seeing noida in the first place i mean leave alone the hype of a few well built sectors that place was like going to a desert where houses have been stacked upon each other like matchboxes put on top of each other ,and when i could see the red brick building of my college through the bus window ,i said to my self "the hell is about to begin" ,well it started at 9 in the morning and went on till 5 in the evening ,entering that main gate i felt some one was pushing myself ,i never wanted to cross that line and enter the college ,but still i did perhaps to see my name on the notice board ,people knew me very well because of it .Either i was on the list of short attendance ,as they loved to put my name there or on the list showing the papers i had flunked in my second semester ,whatever all the faculty knew me by these traits ,perhaps this was my identity in their mind "A Boy who is always lost in his thoughts ,day dreaming and what not",but seriously speaking that place made me learn a lesson "you have to fight it out to reach your dream" and it made me more mellow,and practical in life .All i can say that it inspired me me get out of that place and showing that i wasn't day dreaming all the time ,and i had achieved something .

Returning back from college ,as soon as the bus entered Delhi a sense of relief was there in my mind ,that i am finally back from the jail though for only to return next day ,and as soon the bus reached my stop on the ring road of Delhi a big direction sign showed "IIT" ,perhaps it was the sign that made me live through those four years ,it was the thing i loved most,my parents thought i was nut about it , it was sheer madness but they could not take away a dream that i had ,seeing the main gate of IIT Delhi ,i felt happy there have been times when i had gone inside the campus for no reasons at all just to charge myself ,to get my self motivated and to bring an a realization that i have to work damn hard to be at this place ,just to see that place i changed my journey maps ,took buses that would pass in front of it although the time of my journey increased ,i know people say IIT isn't the everything but then those who are inside them don't realize that their's avast difference between the standards offered by them and other colleges ,hope our government does something to it ,they decided to give more autonomy to private institutions so that they increased their level barring a few ones rest of all have become a place where they train you for four years so that they serve as mass recruitment centers to hire software coolies for our so called "BIG IT" companies that call themselves as product development centers but they are nothing more than a place where people fake their accents to satisfy their so called clients in US , to tweak a banking software to fit into another bank .

Motivation is one thing that comes from within it can't be taught and not be given .if you dream big and then you have to prove yourself a few sacrifices here and there can help you achieve your happiness and your dream!