Dear teenage me

Creative exercises on  private online communities is a good way of unwinding in spare time. Any day better than playing Candy crush saga on Facebook and sending those irritating invites to all and sundry.

Creative exercises provides for absorbing engagement that results in voicing opinions and ideas on the brands that interests you thereby providing a collaborative platform with manufacturers

Here I am reproducing a recent activity in the forum

The exercise as provided by the moderator is as follows 

 Dear teenage me,

Howdya doin buddy, keep rocking. I am writing to you from 2014, 26 years older and wiser so listen carefully because it’s a ‘time capsule me’ with a once in a life opportunity coming back to give you some change course corrections tips . So here are your new coordinates

 
• Don’t take your goals so seriously and push yourself that hard. You know what ? these are simply goal posts and they keep changing as you move on. Unfortunately you think they are fixed and sacrosanct. Believe me its not , a time comes when you are just in front of the goal post and you just turn the other way since it doesn’t excite you any more. 

• Know thyself well, be acutely aware of your strengths & weaknesses. Only then real progress can happen. God has gifted with you many strengths but the odd weakness can undermine it in many ways. Just being aware is a good starting point towards working on it, sooner the better and you will figure out how to tackle it

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• You are working towards a happy satisfied life and you think a good job and lots of money will get you there. You know what, after changing several jobs and earning some money along the way I can tell you there is no correlation between happiness-income relationship nor life satisfaction-income relationship. Your happiness come from your emotional well being (your daily life experience in so far as how much of  joy, stress, anger or affection you felt) and your  10,00,000 pay packet makes no difference to it. 

• Remember you want a happy contended life and there is no silver bullet for all your problems while getting to it. Don’t run after money, keep your friends and near and dear ones close to you, work for job that can give you hope instead of stress, stay closer to your work (you will not be happy with the long commute) and give back more than you take.

So long ya, bye for now as my time travel coupon is being completely used up.

The A to Z of Budget 2014

The finance Minister made a 2.5 Hour long budget speech yesterday, here is my snapshot version listing the A to Z of it

A - AIIMS in every state
B - Bank recapitalization (Rs 11,200 Crore corpus)

C - City smart (100 new smart cities)
D - Digital India
E - Entrepreneur creation (10,000-crore start-up fund)
F - FDI hike in Insurance
G - GST roll out firmed
H - Hygene (promise sanitation to every household by 2017)
I - IIT & IIMS (new ones)
J - Jobs creation push
K - Kisan Vikas Patra (rekindled)
L -  Lifeline to MSME’s (new clusters & credit lines)
M - Merging of Aadhar and the National Population Registry
N - New scheme icons (Deendayal Upadhyaya and Shyama Prasad Mookerjee)
O - opening up defense sector

P - PPP Mantra ( for executing new projects )

Q - Quest for fiscal prudence (4.1%)

R - reigniting Real estate Business

S - Skilling  India
T - Tax breaks  across Income categories
U -  Uptime on Electricity supply
V - Vodafone smile please  (no retrospective tax)
W - Water conservation drive
X – X factor (long term structural changes embedded)
Y – Yo-Yo effect on Sensex
Z – ZZZzz  on  ruffling opposition feathers

More Berlin walls will crumble

So how updated are you on the current tech jargons? If you are as of today morning you would probably know phrases like ‘Internet of everything’ and ‘ Ubiquity of Online access’.

The second one essentially means that every soul on this planet is now staring at some form of screen with a potential access to the internet. And if Project Loon is to be believed, the quantum leap to get the ‘world wide’ really ‘webbed’ is also near. And another tipping point is said to arrive sometime in 2014 when according to the UN International Telecommunication Union, mobile subscriptions will top the world’s population.

A small portion of this population is currently reaping the ‘online’ dividend i.e, have access to internet. However the ‘potential’ of growth here is what is driving companies mad and they are trying to outdo each other in getting there first. Apart from the now familiar mobile eCommerce (consumer transaction) or mobile social media (social networking) what will be mind boggling is the amount of data that will just come out of user created information and somebody will come up with the trick to decode it.

Will all these lead to another ‘BIG BANG’? Many new possibilities will be thrown up. New disruptive business models will be the norm when it happens. More interesting is too see how it impacts ability to work collaboratively on a globe scale. Many more Berlin walls (mostly unseen) will fall and drive the world faster to ‘flatter’ mode.

Why my vote goes to Modi this time.

Before we dive in, let me lay my cards on the table - I'm usually perched on the electoral fence, observing the political melee from a safe, non-committal distance. But this time around, I find myself swinging, somewhat surprisingly, towards the BJP, and here's why.

The Congress party's hangover lingers like a bad aftertaste, and it's high time we reach for the political aspirin. Their second term was akin to a self-inflicted wound by the electorate, a disaster movie where we all knew the ending but bought tickets anyway. It's about time we put Congress in the political deep freeze, and from the looks of it, they're already halfway to a frosty political coma.

Reflecting on the past five years in Delhi, it's been nothing short of a puppet show. The twist? The puppet was an honest, intellectual Prime Minister with the assertiveness of a library mouse. He was like the quintessential good boy from a convent school who, by some bizarre twist of fate, found himself herding a class of unruly, vernacular-spewing brats.

What we're craving is a leader with a capital 'L' - someone who can steer the ship without asking the sea for permission. The business sentiment in our country is as deflated as our current PM's sotto voce. We need a centrifugal force in our national politics, a force robust enough to keep the economic wheels churning and to whip the unruly allies into line.

Enter the AAP, the proverbial bull in a china shop. But one can't help but wonder if this bull was sneakily sedated and nudged into the BJP's porcelain store by the Congress, just for kicks. Trust the Congress to play a game of political Jenga with the country's future.

Opting for a 'third front' now would be like assembling a band of discordant musicians, each brandishing a different instrument, to play at a funeral. Their cacophony would be the crudest punchline to the somber joke that Congress seems to be leading with a torch.

The BJP's propaganda machine has been churning faster than a Mumbai local in rush hour, glorifying Modi's Gujarat model. But as Swami Iyer points out in his recent ET article, running the central government is a whole new ball game - Modi's potential Achilles' heel.

So, here's where my vote is going - to build a robust national party with a leader who doesn't need a megaphone to be heard. The mission? To clean up the Congress's mess post-haste. At this juncture, Modi stands out as the best bet, the political equivalent of a cleanup hitter in the bottom of the ninth. Let's see if he can knock it out of the park.