Work/Life

Does your work define your life or does your life define your work?


A single question, when broken into two, can help the right answer to just pop in front of your eyes. Let us split the above question into two parts.

• Does your work define your life? Or
• Does your life define your work?

In my answer, I believe my life guides my work. I don't live to work, but I work to live my life.

So often I see people just hammer away the entire day at work, hardly giving a moment of thought about their life. There are so many things that can be done apart from work. Even a person with limited interests can dedicate a reasonable amount of time to anything other than work.

Fast paced life is one culprit. Everybody is on the move for long term, short term or ephemeral interests. A lot many poems have been written describing the inattentive humans passing by Nature's everyday miracles. Maybe it will take a sudden change or a calamity for such people to pause, take a look and wonder only to realize that they had taken so much for granted.

I had received a forward in email that said that work is only a way to sustain life. To finance the many wonderful things that can be done in life. Multi national companies a greater greed to minimize costs maximize earnings has led to some lovely innovations in the fields of human resource management.

Companies invest in avenues to keep the employee at work as long as possible. Recreations, Fitness, Food are only few of the perks provided on campus to keep the employees tied in for longer times. Even people are to blame; they find the company's fast internet better than the slow connection at home or none at all. The Air conditioning is always on!! Why go home??

It is about time people begin to realize that Work is what we do for others, live is what we do for ourselves. Life is short, do what is lively!!

By the way what type are you? Living to Work or Working to Live?

Breaking it into two questions... Select one and put in comments

• Living to Work? Or
• Working to Live?

THE Long Weekend

Long weekends are the most fun-filled for the earnest. This long weekend began with 17th March, Saturday and spanned upto 19th march, Monday - being the Telugu New Year Ugadi. Wish you all a happy Ugadi. I was earnest in trying to squeeze out as much fun from this weekend as I could and I started planning very early. Booked tickets for a movie on Saturday. Took quite some communication with friends, to gather 9 souls for the movie. 24 emails, a dozen phone calls and a few smses.

I slept late on Friday late around 4:00 a.m. Woke up early at on Saturday 8:30 a.m. to watch the qualifying of the Formula 1 in Australia. Had a wonderful time watching the start of a new season of racing, considering I did not watch even a single race last year. After I finished, I went voting for the MLC Graduate Constituency. That was a cool thing to do, exercising the Franchise.

After I came back got online and talked to some friends. During the day, my parents realized something and decided that Biryani was in order. My mom rolled out a smashing tasty Biryani in a short time!! It was a tasty treat. With my stomach full; I went shopping for a pair of trousers (long overdue). Already had in mind what I wanted to buy and got it quickly and got going for the movie.

BOY!! What a movie!!!

I shall not delve into the story much. I'd like to describe it in some words.

Simply Stupendous, Bulging Biceps, Clean Cuts, Courageous Comrades, Vicious Wives, Sparkling Blood, Twisting Oracles, Ugly Hunchbacks, Swinging Swords, Smashing Shields and many other things to watch out for.

Things I have never seen in any other movie:

• So many fit and good looking human bodies
• Such stylish spilling of blood
• Such a tall villain yet so less clothed :P
• An old movie look throughout (tint or sepia)
• A totally modern soundtrack
• Wonderfully and imaginatively mutated humans
• And a lot other things that need to be seen

Short Summary of movie: An intense small scale struggle by 300 men out to die for a cause greater than their own lives that provided the impetus to a Larger War to confront a King who thinks he is God.

Once we were done with the movie we went to Anu's place to watch the first cricket match for India in this edition of the World Cup. We were totally charged up!! By the time we reached the house, India were already 2 wickets down and in the dumps. Nothing much went well after that. We were egging on India to score over 200 but sadly without much support it wasn't possible.

Hunger called and we ordered food from the restaurant and had stomach fills of Biryani and Cool drinks. After that the people present surprised me with this..

click the image for Larger version

Then we had nothing better to do, cricket was boring, so we got down to playing a few games. Amazing fun ensued with known and unknown games.

The following being some of them:

• Pictionary
• Red Hands
• Taboo
• Thumsup
• Puzzles
• Stories
• Magic tricks
• and many other fun games

Amazingly funny and full time pass. We carried on till the time the game was coming to a close, then after India lost, we started cursing every other cricketer in Indian team, like a good fan of course, and then switched off the TV. And what ensued later was a mix of gibberish between people low on sleep. We discussed various topics. Major among them being this.

click the image for Larger version

HAHA... Genetics and all apart we had great fun. Some more than others - Deep and Adi having to answer the doorbell early in the morning, and Deep switching off alarms. I got only three hours of sleep. Woke up to the news that even Pakistan had lost its match to Ireland, BIG surprise that!!!

First thing we did after waking up in the morning was to watch the Formula 1 Race. Formula 1 Races are most exciting at the start but we woke late so caught up with 43 laps of pure brilliance of Kimi Raikonnen and others. Some exhilarating accidents over the course of the race and a few Dosas (thin pan cakes) by Anu's mom did great to us.

With stomachs full, we went to check out the previous night’s pictures and videos. While we were at the computer, we even popped in a movie. One which we already had watched so skipped through to the most interesting parts and enjoyed full time. Well, all were sleepy but had long distances to get back home and in a Very HOT Sun too. Before leaving Anu’s Place I took some pics. They came out great. Visit my Flickr Page to take a look.

Deep tagged along with me and we reached my place and saw some serials and had a tasty lunch. We also had ice-cream and Deep took a small nap. I had a nice shower later and my tiredness was gone. Sleep was long overdue and I crashed into bed at midnight.

Was woken up by my dad momentarily who announced that BOB WOOLMER PASSED AWAY. Pakistani coach, found dead in his hotel. I went back to sleep building a conspiracy theory of a Fan killing BOB for Pakistan's defeat and the World Cup being suspended entirely. But when I woke up I realized it was a medical death.

Now, I lazed around a bit and spent some time before I could sit down again to watch India's second match, which I am doing currently - watching the Bermudans miss n no. of deliveries without knicking them. And the Match started, and so did this blog. I got pissed off when India lost an early wicket, but then watching the Indians bat and post their first ever 400+ total and set a world record got me to finish this blog.

It has been a great long weekend, with a Solar Eclipse which I slept through. Such moments make me think how important friends are, how important spending time with them is. And I am grateful to Allah for having blessed me with this time among such fun and great guys and gals.

I'd like to thank Adi, Aks, Anu, CD, Prassi, Simi and others for these lovely things. Have fun youuuuu.

iFamine

Company Profile: Apppel Inc is a large software company that specializes in selling products online. It has been humungously successful in its business model and have accumulated revenues like never before. Apppel went ahead and entered new arenas applying the same business model to sell various things from iCars (downloaded in installments) to iHouses - a direct result of buying an iComputer and downloading the house around it. Apppel has also ventured out and created a country call Apppel. It is a highly prosperous country which is evergreen (thanks to a green wallpaper drive initiated by the Prime Minister.)

New Product: Apppel is coming out with a new product and we have Apppel's spokesperson Mr. Pod Le Mac with us to introduce and discuss further.

iReporter: Mr. Pod Le Mac, What is this product all about?
Mr. Pod Le Mac: The product will be called iFamine and can be downloaded via internet at 99 cents an hour to your house's device management system that communicates all the details to the refrigerator, telephone, air conditioning, so when iFamine is downloaded, the fridge will gobble up all stuff and become empty automatically and leaves nothing for inhabitants. The air conditioner will stop functioning, if you select a hot iFamine and will get super cooled if you select a polar iFamine. The telephone will not allow to dial grocery or pizza delivery numbers and so on an so forth.

iReporter: Why would people pay for this?
Mr. Pod Le Mac: To experience the life of faminists, who are totally apart from feminists. Every country will have its own type of famine like a genre, so u can choose different flavors of famines by country/region like Middle-East famine or Deccan India famine so on and so forth

iReporter: Faminist is a word?
Mr. Pod Le Mac: A faminist would be one who simulates and expereinces a particular region famine and program it into iFamine product line.

iReporter: How will you sell the product?
Mr. Pod Le Mac: Apppel will have a site which lists regions so u can search for a region the region is also categorized as hard, medium and easy, so u can select and there are communities based on famine type, exchanging experiences and reporting bugs like a particular famine doesn't react as hard on a certain race as it reacts on another downtrodden race so it is labeled racist and is blacklisted and so on like that

iReporter: I don’t think this product will work out..
Mr. Pod Le Mac: There is a discount only to Apppel Country citizens. Other will have to pay $1.99. The extra $1 charges are as a rental charge for using Apppel proprietary devices to replicate famines.

iReporter: stop please!!
Mr. Pod Le Mac: Because Apppel country people are using, it will become a fashion and others will die to imitate

iReporter: Dear audience, we stop this interview here, please feel free to put in your comments on our comments section. I am unable to take it any longer…

This is a fun post. all images are copyrights of their respective owners. if you are unable to take it please move on.

There are times

There are times you want to have mails in your inbox

and there are times when you want to have mails from someone in your inbox

and then there are times when u want someone to have visited your orkut profile

and there are times when u want to be offline

and there are times when u have nothing better to do than pester friends with "there are times...." messages on blogs

its one of those times i am in right now, where i am feeling all of the above.











What is your "there are times..." ? Would be great fun if you can write up some "there are times.." right here in the comments.

Humor (Humour)

Some people have a very low threshold of humor. You say something partly funny, they burst out laughing as if you cracked the joke of the year.They will laugh at whatever small thing you say.

I have come across such people. Mostly they are from the fairer sex. But, have seen some men also breaking my beliefs.

There is always another side to the coin. Some people never or hardly laugh at all. If you want to test a joke, it should be these people. If you can get a smile onto their lips, even a hint of it, rest assured your joke will be a hit.

I personally think that i belong to the not-so-easily-tickled group. That doesn't mean that I don't crack stupid jokes. It only means that i don't laugh at most of my jokes :)

So it would be great if you can tell me, which group you belong to, or is there a new group you want to include yourself in?

Till the next blog, keep laughing. If you have any difficulty, read the joke below:

A man went to his mate's fancy dress party with nothing but a girl on his back.
"So what the hell are you supposed to be?" the host asked.
"I'm a snail," the man replied.
"What a load of crap!" the host spat. "How can you be a snail when all you've got is that girl on your back?"
"That's not a girl, mate," the bloke replied, "that's Michelle."

My Imagini

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