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February 12, 2017

Diary - the Mirror without glass - 2


This diary in transition to adolescence ...




“The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another; and his humblest hour is when he compares the volume as it is with what he vowed to make it”- James Mathew Barrie



and yeah thats what we all do when we hit that age inst it ... we choose difficult things hahhahahhahahahahahah :-) 

Even now I get a good laugh on my naivety ... but like the quotes... keep up the spirit good man !!! 


This is the diary after I began working .. in 1994 .. and with that the type of things I began to capture changed .. having an interest in Marketing, Business, History, Economics , Literature .. meant most of my post 20 diaries were hybrid mix of everything ..




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This is when I shifted my career and interest from old economy to new economy .. went thru a year long tranformation and absorbed as much information as I could from where else but the internet .. Boolean alegebra ... which forms the basis of several search engine rules including Google ...

TBL and the start of the WWW... I have written atleast 4-5 full scape books worth on this stuff as I was trying to gain proficiency on this bold new world of the WWW




Diary - the Mirror without glass - 1

Diary -- is a way you talk back to yourself without any dimension of time .. they are Time Machines ..Everyone who writes a diary wait for someone to come in their life who would want to read it.


Revisiting the pages of my diaries to whom I have been talking since childhood and still talk in form of updates, notes and blogs !! With the debate between God & Science heating up,, felt like sharing these simple but profoundly meaningful words by W . H Carruth !! (This diary entry is roughly 24 years old)






Since the advent of the personal computers and internet ,, the concept of writing have become quite outdated ... I had preserved diaries that I wrote .....some of them as a kid some as a teenager and some as a working adult .. and somewhere around 14 years back discontinued that practice ..
                                                                                                                          Things that never die -----priceless Poetry by Charles Dickens ... every time reading this makes me chuckle , did that 20 years ago when I copied this poem and do that till this day .. even when I posted this picture ..

My very first diary -- must be around 4th Standard -- 1987 ish time ... .. that time Siddharth Basu's Quiz Time on Sunday evening - Doordarshan was an craze .. and the whole nation was in the grip of a quizzing mania ... I am sure many other children maintained similar collection too


So I began .. writing whatever information I could get my hands on -- Inventors, capitals, discoveries, currencies and all that usual clutter of GK .... remember there was no internet ,, :-(




and now you know why I do not really put any pressure on Sakshi to improve her handwriting.. how can I hahahahahahah

Celebrating 22 years of an incredible voyage ...

While celebrating my 22nd work anniversary ,one episode comes to my mind, it was around August in 1995, I had settled in my role as service supervisor at Voltas in Ahmedabad and needed to travel to our manufacturing plant for some urgent meeting to discuss recurring failure in the compressor of our refrigerators. Voltas manufacturing plant was located near a small town of Warora , literally in middle of nowhere, the nearest large town was Nagpur about 107 km / 65 miles away. While I reached Warora through Nagpur , on return journey , I decided to take a chance by catching one of the few long distance trains that make an halt at Warora, The Navjeevan express, which runs twice a week from Chennai all the way to Ahmedabad. The train’s scheduled arrival time in Warora is after mid-night , however as I still needed to find local transport from the plant to the train station , which I was told would be difficult ,after dark so by 6 pm , I packed my one lone suitcase, which also doubled as a briefcase. ( Those days before laptops become common place, everyone had a suitcase or a briefcase, nowadays everyone carries a backpack :-) ). A local bus dropped me at the Warora station around 6:45 pm. I bought the train ticket to Ahmedabad and a long wait for the train awaited me.


Since I had no reservation , I was also mentally preparing myself for the long haul , long haul in terms of traveling in an unreserved coach meant traveling without a seat and potentially without access to food, water or toilet for extended periods of time. And even without any delay, the travel time from Warora to Ahmedabad was 15 hours and Navjeevan express was notorious for being perennially late.


Warora those days was a dusty little town with very few amenities. There were no restaurants around , but thankfully there were a few food hawkers . Since it was unlikely that I would get access to a decent toilet for the next 18 hours I thought of eating something light not to burden my stomach; And something light for a person from Gujarat means only one thing – Bhel ;-). So I had a Bhel and probably a chat for dinner at that stall and strolled back into the eerily empty Warora train station. In the 1990’s people actually read from a book instead of a device :-) , but my mind was too overworked so I could not read the book I was carrying. By the time it was 9 pm , the entire town had gone dark and except for the station manager the station was deserted.
And it was still at least 4 hours for my train to arrive, so I decided to catch a nap on one of the stone benches on the station. Unfortunately while Warora does not count for much in terms of passenger traffic but the train line that runs through the station is one of the busiest for freight, because of the coal mines of Chandrapur located nearby. So every 30 minutes of so , a wagon train carrying coal , would pass through the station , on its way to various coal fired power plants across the country. And every time I heard the train approaching with its thundering roar, I would wake up , thinking it was my train. Station master noticed my trepidation and offered to wake me up before my train arrived. That way I would not have to wake up every time a train passed by. I took his offer and tried to get some deeper sleep, but the anxiety of missing the train was too great, but not to disappoint the station master, I ended up acting as if I was having a deep sleep . hahahhaa
Finally Navjeevan express arrived with all the huffing & puffing of a diesel locomotive and called in at the Worora station around 1:30 am. Each long distance train has usually 2 unreserved coaches , and I scrambled to get in one of them. From the odour inside the coach , I could easily vouch that the train had already been enroute for 12 + hours. Luckily I secured a small space on the upper wooden berth in the compartment. After a short halt, the train gave a joyous whistle ( at least it sounded joyous to me :-) as I was finally on the way home) and pulled out of the station, . The motion of the train with the junk street side food I had eaten the previous evening made for a deadly cocktail and soon I felt the bug in my stomach. For the next 15 hours I sat in that one place trying to make as little motion as possible so as to not antagonize my stomach any further. Finally that ordeal ended next day and it took me another day to recover from the bug.
And even today every time I feel upset waiting for a bus or having to take the middle seat on a flight or overcrowding in a train, I remind myself of that journey from Warora.