Banter from the past (May to December 2014)

As people have such a low opinion of politicians world over, the election commission has decided , going forward , the voting booth officials will ink the middle finger of voters instead of the index finger. Just imagine all these celebrities , sports persons and ordinary folks, getting their pictures takes showing the inked finger after voting !! 

It was 1985 and Wednesday 8:00 pm, time for Quiz Time show on Doordarshan hosted by quiz master Siddhartha Basu. That show ushered in an GK / Quizing revolution in India, I was just in 5th std, but still highly influenced by the intellectual fervour of that show, though many questions in that quiz were way above my ability to grasp, however I distinctly remember one question , the answer to which I wrote in my very first GK diary. That question " what is called the king of acids" . Today in the day and age of internet, google, wikipedia it is difficult to appreciate the times when there were very few sources of general knowledge for an average Indian, and any information we could lay our hands or ears on , would be recoded immediately in our diaries. Incidently I still have that prized diary 28 years later. Here is a one of the pages from that diary. By the way answer to that question -- Sulphuric Acid ( And I have not googled or wikipediated it ,, remember the answer, since 1985 )

LOOSE MOTIONS से डर नहीं लगता ,साहबजी , CONSTIPATION लगता हे !!!! hahahhah

(funny take on the Dabaang dialogue, to get some laughter this dreary Tuesday)

---Original Message-----
From: Konnur, Samir (Cognizant)
Sent: Tuesday, October 13, 2009 7:21 AM
To: Konnur, Samir (Cognizant)
Subject: Back to business...

Back to business...

There was a banner outside Hollywood Bowl in LA it read "The best classroom inst a classroom, it's a stage" and these days it reminds me....well I am on the stage now...the moment of truth has arrived...and over the next year.. all the training & preparation of the past 2 years would be put to its ultimate test....

No amount of medication will remedy a patient in need of surgery,likewise no amount of superficial change will do , when we are in need of fundamental change to our lives. Similarly for me to be successful in this assignment no amount of incremental change would do, I need to take an exponential leap forward...chances of a hard-landing are all too real... Wish me luck ....

Like I did over the last few years, will take all of you along on this journey...stay aboard..

And dont be surprised if you notice a bias towards management,leadership and organization in the personal essays that I share ,, it reflects the 'changing sands of time'

As I play the story of my life, please keep sharing your stories too, I love to hear them.. For as the lyrics from the popular Hindi song" Ek pyar ka nagma" ...reads " zindagi aur kuch bhi nahi teri meri kahani hey" ...

Wish all of you the very best for every endevour in your life and let me know if I can make any positive difference...

regards,
Samir

After the success of Pro-Kabaddi league on Star Sports, organizers have decided to make one change in the contest from next year. Instead of uttering" Kabaddi -Kabaddi" each team will utter the name of their sponsors ... how about that 

(Each year, team can change what they utter based on their sponsors, or even sale the rights .. for instance in the currently league , they can do that for producer Nadiandwala,, imagine one of the teams using " Kick Kick Kick Kick " instead of Kabadi Kabadi )

What the World needs to be safe is not more NUCLEAR WEAPONS but LOVE POTIONS !

It is quite remarkable how basic human genetic instructions have survived for over a million years . When men still lived in caves, anxiety about the future, usually meant uncertainty about future food source , and therefore anxiety resulted in brain sending genetic instructions to body to start consuming more food and store extra fats , which could help it better cope up with food scarcity in future. In modern age ,although for most humans, anxiety is rarely about future food scarcity yet our genes behave exactly in the same way , signal body to consume more & start storing fats. And that results in a double whammy, on one hand anxiety leads to emotional eating and on another it begins to store additional fats. And this predicament is impossible to overcome on the basis of exercise & diet alone , since body will try to protect its body fat even further. Having dealt with anxiety for large part of my adult life, I can tell you this battle is a hard one to fight.

Our ancients in their wisdom,concocted the theory of RE-BIRTH, in order to make the inherent, unjust and unequal nature of our current existence more palatable

Suffering, while not good for the heart, does wonders for the Soul !!

Which Mahabharata character are you ??

That nameless, hapless, voiceless soldier, who died fighting on the battlefield of Kurukshetra - unsung, unheard and unknown !!

Indians are life-long cricket pundits by birth , however a strange phenomenon occurs every 4 years, when the season of FIFA World Cup arrives . astonishingly , even those Indians, who have sparsely played football in their life, become football pundits

The way I am living, by the time I retire, I will be left with little money but lots of memories 

(Father -daughter while on a evening walk immersed in a very deep conversation)
I to Sakshi " Never let success go to your head or failure to your heart "
Sakshi impromptu added " and FAST FOOD to your stomach" 

Every day bulk of humanity , without any discrimination of gender, whether urban or rural, whether in developing or developed country , face one debilitating crises at least twice a day --------------- what is the right time to sip the cup of tea just poured from the kettle ? smile emoticon Do it too soon and it will burn your lips, wait too long and tea would go cold.
.
To help humanity overcome this daily calamity , I have invented a small simple device that can be mounted on the brim of the cup , device has a timer and a protruding adjustable arm with an on-board thermostat that will just touch the surface of the tea in the cup. And based on preset time / temperature combination, this device will ring an alarm, as soon as your tea has reached your ideal consuming temperature .... Enjoy!!!!

If you are that part of humanity which suffer this daily crises you can pre-book this device for free, just like this post and provide an encouraging comment !! And any suggestions to name this device are welcome !

Judge a man not by the answers he gives but by the questions he asks !

Love brings spiritual Upliftment to our Souls !

In 2010, during my annual pilgrimage to Shirdi with Gaurang & Sajid, we used to frequently visit a chai shop near the lodge we were put up in. I used to admire that chai wala, a portly fellow in his 50's with an ever present glow of contentment on his face. He had kept a small goat as pet, tied next to his shop, who he lovingly fed nice green grass to graze. Such a picture of tranquility I thought can only occur in Shirdi. One day out of curiosity I inquired about his unusual pet , as I was very touched by his care for that goat. His answer shook me , that goat was to be offered as a sacrifice to a local deity on an auspicious day in a few weeks time, and he was feeding her to fatten her before being slaughtered. Till date I am unable to draw a morale from this experience, but always reflect how differently I felt about that portly happy content man , after he disclosed his sinister motive.

When good times come they come sparingly but when bad times come, they came aplenty !!

We do not have a permanent seat in the Security Council at the UN, We are not part of the G7, we are not even a developed country but hey we are the only nation in the world to have an ocean named after us... can you beat that !!! hahhahaha this is called talking oneself into being happy

The only thing one should achieve in life is to LIVE it !

Tarak Mehta ka Ulta Chasma becomes one of the first serials in the history of television where instead of advertisement being shown during the serial, the serial is shown in between the advertisements

Friend suffering from constipation inquired for any cure. I suggested " Try Vicks, whenever I have a blocked nose, applying Vicks Vaporub, always opens it " 


One small vacation for man and a giant problem of WAIST LINE 


World is run by smart people, not wise people !

Thank God, charities working on such issues as world hunger ( 3 billion people eat less than recommended daily nutrition intake), poverty reduction( 2 billion live on less than 1 dollar a day), illiteracy ( 2.5 billion), inequality ( 1.5 billion), war refugees ( conflict in Syria alone has caused 2 million homeless ) , women & child rights ( millions), child trafficking & exploitation ( millions), female infanticide,global warming, deforestation, water shortages, etc, were not clever enough at viral messaging, otherwise we would all be soaking ourselves in ice cold water everyday for rest of our lives.

Disclaimer: My intention is not to disrespect anyone taking the ice bucket challenge and it is really a worthy cause , so thanks to all your effort the 5600 people that suffer from this diseases in US each year will now be taken good care of. Thank you

Don't be sad about missing someone, be happy that you have someone worth missing in your life !

Achievements don't captivate me, but struggles and stories of individuals irrespective of their achievements do !!

Strange times continue -- recently I visited our family house in Baroda where I grew up and stayed during all my previous holidays while in town. .. from the time we shifted to this house as a 13 year old to the time when as a 19 year old I left Baroda to work in Mumbai for Voltas, from there on my relationship with this house has grown very complex. As I have only visited this house on holidays and yet the house has grown in its emotional stature as the ebb & tide of life has taken its toll. This time when I visited I found this pearl of wisdom, that I had pasted on my cupboard in 8th standard and somehow even 25 years later this sounds as relevant today as it did then "Be Happy that's way to be wise"

In the balance sheet of my life I am experience rich but asset poor !

We live in the society where there is a abundance of 'love songs' but acute scarcity of real love

For people suffering from constipation , how about a vacuumized commode !! 

I to Sakshi " Andhra Pradesh has now been divided into 2 states and Hyderabad will be the joint capital of those 2 states for 10 years " Sakshi " Dad,, so does that mean they have put up a Berlin Wall cutting the Hyderabad city into 2 halves " :-)  smile emoticon

Just loved the way Sakshi was able to connect the recent news on the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall to Hyderabad being the joint capital of 2 states

25 years ago an historic event occurred, an event that changed the very foundations of the prevailing world order. It was the watershed moment that truly changed the course of history forever. - that event was the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the ensuing end of the cold war. My own reflection of this epoch moment are watching the news clips on ' The World This Week', obviously I was too young to comprehend the monumental magnitude of that historic event. This was still the time of pen friends and my brother had a pen friend in Hanover, West Germany and I still have some hazy and may be even inaccurate memories that his pen friend had included a few fragments of the Berlin Wall in the envelope along with the letter. That was the closest I had got to history. Berlin celebrates 25 years since the fall of the Wall , but it is truly time of immense reflection for all of humanity

End of the cold war and the subsequent policy of glasnost / perestroika implemented by then premier Mikhail Gorbachev resulted in the break up the USSR , meant India could not rely on Soviet support to rescue it from the near bankruptcy faced by the Indian state at the start of 90s, with no other recourse, prime minister - Narshima Roa / then finance minister Manmohan Singh had to open up the Indian economy for FDI , ending our isolation from the global economy, with FDI came in MNC's with MNC's came white collar jobs and overseas travel and today each one of us is benefiting immensely from those winds of change that begun 25 years ago with the fall of the Berlin Wall

Of all the things I value as a parent the most treasured is the ability to make my child laugh !!