L.I.F.E.

what's life all about , sitting today some random thoughts are coming into my mind ...what was expected from me , whether i have delivered to my potential , perhaps i have not .....so who is responsible for it ...it's only me and not someone else i would like to blame .....it's all ready three sentences and i still have no idea as to why i am writing all this crap .... to whom is it directed or whether i am venting my frustrations out by penning this ...by now everyone of you must have made it out that there is something wrong...yes surely something is ...

What started as a one off incidence has marred my life for all the years that i have started to dream about the better days that will lie ahead for me ,perhaps they will never materialize unless i start working for it .., I always tried to break the conventional mold surrounding me , never wanted to do what my peers have done , failed most of the times , perhaps each time ,even after reaching the target .some sort of extraordinary circumstances have denied me the moment where i could have basked in the glory ...but none of the others are responsible for it , it's me who is responsible for my happenings , i do take full responsibility for it.

I dreamt of being something in life (now i cannot even define this word "something")...as perplexed i am today , where there seems no light , in the open world leave aside the end of the tunnel ....i did kept running after things in life which i never achieved ...but then , what i was doing never gave me the challenge to put in all my efforts .I would not like to cram up things and then vomit them in exams ..always wanted to test my abilities to the fullest extent ...how far can i reach ...though all these resulted in failures at every stage of my life ,but i always tried to rise from them .., prove my detractors wrong even my parents were part of it ..in all these years i have realised that it's best to walk alone in life ..because no one cares where the damn you are in life ....there are other better things in life for them .I am happy that at least i played my game , never shied away from the obstacles that have marred me .

We all like to live in the safe harbor ,but then a ship never rests permanently in it ,because it is meant to sail ,bring in the revenues ,no one admires it standing still in the water ,all the beautiful canvases drawn show it sailing against the backdrop of the pale blue water. If one is happy with a routine life, the same conversations, the same kind of routine work then I have no judgments on that kind of life, all the best to you, but I haven’t met someone who’s happy living that kind of life. If you keep doing what you have been doing all your life you will keep getting what you have been getting all your life. Yet most people live their life that way, stuck in the cocoon of comfort ness and complacency. True joy only comes when you put your blood and sweat in the game and take chances, you will start to experience more failure, but the chances of success also rise, as the saying goes “Insanity is doing the same things but expecting different results”.The only failure is the failure to try, to dream and dare .The real risk is in living the risk less life, because down the life you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do rather than the things you did.

Perhaps the next 2-3 months are the most important for my life .. it's like make or break ..if i don't succeed then may be i will be lost somewhere ...never to rise again .. i shall try to fulfill my potential ,hope this time i am true to myself.

THE CHAMPS ,YES I CAN SAY THAT NOW

So finally i am back after a long sabbatical to update my blog , perhaps i did not get the time to write anything new or may be the good old writer's block had cast a spell over me ...whatever the reason ,i hope none of you would have missed my posts ....on the contrary my friends were happy that they did not have to waste their time reading ( i literally forced them to do so) and comment on my blog......

The time could not have been right to post this one ,YES we are world champions after 24 years be it 20-20 it does not matter now ...we all are all happy and proud to say that we have won the world cup .This victory is important in two aspects ,firstly the aura of the 83 winning team will diminish a bit , i have been tired to see the being interviewed before every world cup ...news channels ran after them because they were the only heroes we could recognize ( the last hockey world cup we won back was in 1975....) ,and secondly the importance of the holy trinity of the indian team would also be paid less attention ....what i say in this world cup was unprecedented ,the 6 sixes of yuvraj after the confrontation with freddie flintoff ,the fire with which they fought with aussies ,giving them back the mouthful which we have been getting from all over the years was fantastic to watch ...never even in the wildest dream i could have thought this.

Coming back to the victory we must have realised by now that it's a team game .perhaps now our obsession with numbers and centuries will die and we would all think that it does not matter whether a tendulkar or a ganguly hits a ton .....i would be happy if sachin scores 90's and we win, beacuse winning in not everything it's the only thing ....and mr vengsarkar would also take back his words of saying that we do not have enough talent , how can we find talent when we just give few opportunities to the new players?? , and this has proved none is above the game we can still continue and win without sachin ,dravid and ganguly....perhaps our nation is desperate with sticking to it's old heroes ...why does australia pay less importance to them because they find new heroes every year who win ,unless and until we can back our passion of cricket with results we will never find new heroes.

Looking ahead this victory does signal to the holy trinity to hang up their boots atleast in the 50 over game and give chance to youngsters ....the difference in level of fielding in england and south africa was colossal ....and we dont need to be carried away so much with this win ....i would not like to wait another 24 years for a victorious moment now .....the 20-20 game doesn't test teh temperament of a batsman which a test match would , so we have still a long way to blood youngsters in test cricket....but for now the nation is rejoicing........CHAK DE INDIA!!!!

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!

EXPECTATIONS !!is there a end i wonder

So here i am back after i puked out all my frustrations in my previous post,and got an honest opinion from many of my class mates about it ,though i never expected it seriously but at least i was able to put forward my opinions in front of my "so called" and true friends ,had a lot of arguments with a few people ,but it helped me to clear my stand in front of them ,what i truly feel about them .i could no longer live a life of being a hypocrite being sweet in front of them and lambasting them on their backs........anyways enough about the sad things there's some good news to give

It's result season and IIT JEE results are out (i know all of my readers had enough of it ),but there's a slight change in the script this time ,i did not give the exam (yee being 23 it would be shameful) but my sis did give it and she cleared it ,yesss yessss finally she was able to achieve a good rank in her first attempt ,that i could not in my three attempts ,and i was more happy than her for obvious reasons ,but then a feeling of guilt did strike me ,why the hell i was realizing my dream through her ,what right did i have to virtually force her to give JEE when she was more interested in pursuing a career in medicine ,it all boils down to the word EXPECTATION.

I did promise myself that i would never be like the whole world ,trying to follow the herd in her case ,as i did in my case , i would try to be rational but ultimately i did follow the flock in a blind manner .perhaps it's to do with the experiences i had in my life that are to be blamed ,in my school days in class XI an XII my mom expected me to be in iit ,pursuing my bachelors a dream which i never fulfill (though i hope a masters and doctorate from IIT will some what cover up for it).coming to a wider point of view ,there have been instances when people have landed up at the wrong place because they had to fulfill someone's expectations and ultimately they ruined there life for good, what i have realized in a short span of time is that the more you achieve more the expectations of people rise and its pretty hard to fulfill them .it's like climbing a ladder where one reaches at the top and suddenly asks himself "why the hell i am here??",we all decide to be in iit's iim's because the picture is rosy ,media hypes them and we try to prove that we are the best ,its about what others thing about ourselves ,we need to build an aura of invincibility around ourselves but soon many of us realize it wasn't the the smartest move we ever made ,for instance studying computer science is not all about making those beautiful power point presentations or that flashy graphics.

It's because of these expectations from others that we change our lifestyle,our thinking and what not,perhaps the best thing is to follow one's heart and not one's mind beacuse heart is correct in 99 out of 100 cases in life .if you aren't happy with what you are doing ,no amount of money can make you think that you are happy (i know many will argue that money is everything in life ,but surely it isn't) ,if you believe you can fulfill your dream then go for it ,even if one fails the experiences will make him a better person in life ,for instance i did prepare for JEE in my college first year and now i am bearing the fruits as that preparation helped me to improve my analytical skills immensely,so don't always try to fulfill expectations of the whole world ,because more than ninety nine percent of individuals aren't as intelligent as you are.

AND finally i did dump away my JEE admit cards of three years and those counseling letters from IIT after five years after my sis's JEE result because a dream is fulfilled (ohhh wait i again started to realize my dream through her ,kya karoooon i am like another human being )

I CAN'T HELP IT!!!!!!!!!! though changes are for good , I AM TRYYYYYYYIIING .......

GOOD FOR NOTHING----Haven't i heard it before

There have been a series of posts which i have written during the wee hours of the morning ,to take out my my anger and frustration,but ultimately i deleted them because i thought it will not be "politically correct" to express my views in this manner,as it will be considered as a timid act ,an action which will show that i am afraid to come out in open and speak in front of everyone ,but whatever everyone else says i am going ahead with this post .

Last week when i saw a documentary of lance Armstrong on TV ,there was an advertisement which answered his critics who have lambasted him over the years over the dope allegations ,that ad had just one answer to the question "What am i on???" and the response was "I am on my bike" ,and it was a fitting reply to his critics ,well i have heard some pretty good one liners against me "you re good for nothing" ,"you take life as a joke" ,"tumhara kuch nahi ho sakta " and the list can go on an on...........................................................,these are the challenges i have faced over a short span of my life .

Life is a constant struggle for as long as we keep battling forces that can be overcome with enough effort and resolve. But when you are brought down to your knees and kept there by a giant invisible hand that is simply impossible to throw off, you can finally give up. I keep imagining being beaten by Fate so roundly that I can then guiltlessly give up the Sisyphean struggle I go through all day, all week, all year. Every time I face a problem that looks as though it might just be too big for me, I come across a new one that makes the first one pale in comparison. But the day I allow myself to finally, absolutely give up on life, the future will cease to matter,so why not better fight them and prove that I AM GOOD.

Here i would like to mention a special note of thanks to my Under graduate college ,which frustrated me so much that it ultimately inspired me to achieve big ,and put a lid on mouth of people who had lambasted me disgraced me over the years ,one of the instance which i still remember was a teacher (i wouldn't like to take the name and spoil my blog) telling me after hearing my GATE score and rank

"It's no Big deal clearing GATE"

Yeaaaah sure it isn't a big deal getting a percentile in the top 99 ,it isn't a big deal undersatnding the complexity of algorithms,learning about P vs NP itssss too easy for him ,bcoz his so called favorite students never even had the courage to sit for the exam let alone clear it .........is some one listening???

Then i was told that i was mad about JEE (i gave it twice in my college) because i wanted a thappa or a mark ,but IIT's are much beyond a simple thappa in the life ,here you learn teachers don't shy away from teaching complexities of algorithms and not teaching how to dream in class ,you get to study the mathematics behind the graphic algorithms and not flying a bird ,drawing a tree (i guess there are enough graphic designers for this stuffff)

How can i forget about the so called future wanna be facchas preparing for cat ,and showing off to the world that they are preparing for it (some of them started from the first year itself) with goal IIMA , i wasn't against them but then you dont have to take your books in the lecture classes and show that you are preparing for cat (it is ridiculous) ,so coming to the cat story one needs to understand that only speaking english in a foreign accent does not make you a good manager ,there's DI and MATHS that you need to crack and you have to work for it ,it's no styyloooo lingo that will help here and there were certain individuals which i genuinely though would make it to the IIM's ,but as the fate decided i made it ,though i gave the boot to IIMK ,because i could afford to do soooo

I would not say that i haven't committed mistakes in life ,my flunking the second semester ,will still haunt me in my life , because i made my parents cry ,left myself disappointed but what i wanted to convey is that one should never judge a book by it's cover because unless and until you see what's inside it ,you would never come to know the true contents inside it ,so please stop forming opinions about individuals ,lambasting them ,disgracing them because there are comebacks in life ,and why always follow conventional ways to success when there are alternative ones and i am of the opinion that "when people say you can't do it,it's because they are not able to do it" so follow your heart and finally show that "WE ARE GOOOD FOR SOMETHING".

There have been a lot of individuals which have hurt me by their comments ,and many which became my friends after having achieved something in life (you are able to distinguish between true and fake friends in this scenario),told me my life is doomed an what not but in the end i am having the last laugh and not they ,and that's what is important.