Monday, June 30, 2008

Spain 1 Germany 0

Another chapter in the Euro Cup championship came to an end this morning with a superb goal by Torres at the 33rd minute of the game (I loved it as Torres is playing for my favourite team Liverpool). Looked like Germany was outplayed by the Spaniards and the game was getting a bit out of hand and I felt the refree was not in total control of the game.

Michael Ballack being the captain, had been the main culprit and I am suprised that he got away with only a yellow card. Nothing was going right for the German team even though I was hoping until the last second for them to score the equalizer but my dreams were shattered.

To me without England in the tournament was a damper and I just couldn't come to terms of watching the rest of the team even though at one stage I was pinning my hopes on Holland but they too dissapointed me.

So looks like all good things must come to an end and so did Euro 2008, and I loved the scenic cities where the game was played and the atmosphere on the stadiums looked electrifying. My hats off to the organisers for a great show.

Friday, June 27, 2008

What it takes for a blog to be a hit?

I wonder sometimes why some blogs are popular and some are not. What it really takes for a blog to be a hit, for the other bloggers to keep coming back for more. Some just cruise along your blogs silently, they don't even want to say anything like they are on a stealth mode (yahoo messenger) but then again there are some who would always make it a point to make their presence felt by saying a few kind words. Sometimes harsh words would be a welcome sign too.

Getting ideas or churning out blogs is not an easy task as you have to keep the readers in mind and what you say should have some value (do you agree with me) or it should be able to connect with them. I personally like to read about blogs which focus on the simple mundane day to day activity but with a little touch of humour thrown in. It's like looking at your life situation but at the same time being detached from it because you have infused some humour in it and maybe laugh at yourself in the process.

And I would also like critics who would say it like it is and maybe stimulate the mind for a debate but I don't seem to find that from my visitors. A debate is what I like and if my opinion is wrong then I should be told so. I could be barking at the wrong tree so to speak but what I write is always centred on me and my emotional thoughts. I am sure you would have felt the same feeling that I am having regarding your blogs too.

So if you have an answer to my question, please feel free to let me know so that I can improve myself.

Tuesday, June 24, 2008

My years in India

I always wanted to write a piece on my stay in India and on what I felt being here from October 2002 until now on my official work of running my company’s office in Hyderabad. What have I learned here over the years which has enriched my life or which made me into a monk (like the Monk who sold his Ferrari)? You decide!

1. Read a lot of books on philosophy

2. Learned to be patient

3. Look at life in a holistic way

4. Learned humility

5. Learned to cook like chef out of desperation

6. Learned to hold my drinks, not like an alcoholic

7. Learned to forgive

8. Learned to be alone

9. Learned to share

10. Travelling and meeting new people

Reading has always been my passion and what better place can I do that when I am alone most of the time in Hyderabad. Books on philosophy had my mind working overtime and also the landmark course that I did had helped me to look at things in a different light. I know I can’t change others but I surely can change myself and my perception about others.

Learning to be patient is a virtue that you will imbibe once you are in India with its age old wisdom and the pace where thing go by. Over here when someone says “2 minutes” it really never will be a 2 minute, it might be 20 minutes or 2 hours. So stay cool as ‘2 minutes” is really an expression without any time frame attached to it. And I know when I give someone an appointment; I have to wait for ages. Even the church here never starts on time, I remember the pastor was making an announcement asking the parishioners to be in the church by 9.00 a.m. and not to start from their homes at 9.00 a.m. and eventually lead to the service starting at 9.15 a.m., in Hyderabad, and even God has to wait.

I remember I was waiting in the office of the number one person in this state and I am sitting there in his office waiting for his P.A for fixing my appointment for my company director to see him, after 2 hours I called him (the P.A), just to find out that he has left the office and had to go through the whole waiting game at another venue the following day. So patience is what I learned and I can sit like a statue for hours with just staring at the walls.

Being humble and forgiving is another trait that I was forced to pick up. Thanks to our partners whom I sacked and they fixed me up after that. And it was revenge I guess served as a cold dish. I came out of it shaken but not stirred and that got me looking at life and freedom at a different angle (Don’t ask me what they did, as I have forgiven them, but God hasn’t I pray so).

Sharing is what I like to do here, be it materialistic things or knowledge. I know for sure that the more you give, the more you would gain (being selfish eh). It’s a never ending process. They also say that to be in an enlightened state, we should share with others what we know.

The last item on the list is travelling, I love to travel in India and try out all the different varieties of food that is available for the palate. I would pick Chennai as my favourite destination for breakfast and banana leaf food. I love Mumbai for some very exotic variety of food followed by New Delhi. Ahmedabad in Gujarat is the worst place that I can think off, for the food and the place being a dry state, meaning no beers to quench your thirst after a hard days travelling and getting your stuff from the permit room like some hard core alcoholic.

And finally it is Hyderabad, for the chaotic traffic, laid back attitude and fiery hot spicy food which I don’t think you can find anywhere in India, maybe Warangal should take the title for pungent chillies. Warangal incidentally happened to a place where I did my Engineering at the Regional Engineering College (during my student days). I remember how I used to wash my chicken pieces in the curry with hot water and still find it hot.

©sukku2008

Sunday, June 22, 2008

How happy are you?

Being happy depends not so much on external circumstances as on your inner life, says Tony Wilkinson

Are you the happiest person you know? Not necessarily the luckiest, richest, or most successful, just the happiest?
If not, why not? Most people will reel off their current worries — the job, the kids, the car, the price of fish. I don’t mean to sweep these aside: problems need to be solved, if you can, or waited out until they disappear. But as far as living happily is concerned you have to face a crucial fact. If you can only live happily after all your problems are solved, you are never going to live happily, because when today’s problems are gone and forgotten, others will take their place. So either living happily is just impossible, or you have to do it in spite of your problems.
Being happy depends not so much on external circumstances as on your inner life. This means all your thoughts, perceptions, beliefs, emotions, desires, dreams — your entire mental and emotional scene. Happiness is about how you react inwardly to events, what you think and believe, how you feel, how problems affect you. It may sound obvious, but like many obvious things it’s something that is often forgotten when it matters most. We focus almost exclusively on our external lives, on getting and spending and having fun, and then wonder why we are not happy. But it’s when our inner lives are tranquil that we are happiest and we call this inner peace.
So how is inner peace to be achieved? Is it a question of religion, perhaps, or yoga? These can certainly help but only if they have a positive effect on your inner life. The difficulty is that inner life is based on patterns and habits — some you were born with, most you have acquired. You don’t choose, occasion by occasion, how you respond inside when something happens. This happens and you feel angry; that happens you feel sad; you pass the patisserie and you feel hungry; you hear a tune or smell a certain scent and it reminds you of a particular time or person? Things produce a response without you thinking about it or choosing how you feel, and they don’t necessarily leave you with inner peace. So the trick is to break the pattern. You can’t completely avoid problems, but you can change how you react to them by acquiring new
habits that provoke peaceful inner responses. Training your inner life into different habits requires learning skills of thinking, feeling, and managing your beliefs and desires. These are very like the virtues many religions and philosophies advocate, but if you think of them as skills rather than virtues, you benefit from an important and liberating shift. Instead of “I must become a better person” you can think “I would live more happily if i worked on my skills”, so the change in attitude becomes a choice, not a duty. And to these remedial skills i’ve added an extra set of enjoyment skills, otherwise getting happier could turn out a very depressing affair.
This process is not something you can do overnight, it’s a whole new way of life, but the reward is what we all want most — happiness. There are five main skills you need to cultivate.

Mindfulness: Borrowed from Buddhism, this involves developing your ability to focus your thoughts in the
present. The problem most of us have with thought is having too much of it — the worrying and nonstop mental chattering our minds are prone to. Mindfulness is a key inner skill because, as it gets stronger, it lets you focus on your own inner life and catch your habits in the act. Once you can see how you are ruled by them, the change you are seeking often happens of its own accord.

Compassion: Most religions rightly stress compassion. As well as
being a virtue in its own right it is a practical skill that counteracts negative emotions like anger and hatred, which are terrible wreckers of happiness. Try it the next time someone annoys you: put yourself in their place and ask yourself what they might they be thinking or feeling to behave like that. Even bad people, let alone people who just mildly annoy you, often have a warped or mistaken view of the world which makes them do what they do. Wars are started and atrocities committed, for example, because someone decides that this is what their God wants. It doesn’t mean they should get away with their actions, in fact it may be necessary to take strong action to defend yourself.

Story skills: These are very useful for problems with your inner belief system, as they let you stand back and explore alternative versions of reality. Beliefs have great power over your life because a belief is something you take as fact. Start to think of your beliefs as stories, and it is easier to accept that other things might be true as well, or even instead. Even true stories only select the little bit of reality we are focusing on at the moment: no one story is the whole truth about any situation. From a different point of view we would see a different story, sometimes a whole different world. This is not about make believe, it’s about reframing situations to look at them from a different perspective.

Letting-go techniques: These are particularly helpful when we are unhappy not getting what we want. Generally, we are encouraged to keep wanting and to think that more will make us happier, whether it’s clothes or cars or even love. But wanting is a treadmill: as long as you have unsatisfied wants and desires you won’t be at peace, so to be happy you either have to satisfy all your desires, or let go of some of them. Letting-go skills also include forgiveness, which helps hugely if one of the things you think you want is revenge.

Enjoyment skills: This last group includes skills such as patience, humour and, especially, gratitude. You don’t have to be grateful to someone, it’s enough to cultivate gratitude for things. Our minds naturally scan the environment for dangers and resources, a useful mechanism when we were hunter-gatherers. But it can make us unnecessarily pessimistic — focusing on the 10% we lack rather than the 90% we have. Cultivating enjoyment skills will help redress the balance.
Acquiring all these skills takes time and effort. The important thing is to practise them until they operate without you thinking about them. Your practice routine will be very individual, because everyone needs to prioritise different skills depending on the specific issues that are holding them back from being happy, but keep the skills in mind and you will constantly find new ways to try them out.

This article is extracted from Sunday Times Hyderabad edition dated 22.06.2008 and I would like to share it with you. I hope you enjoy reading it as I surely did.

Thursday, June 19, 2008

Is there real love?

Is there such a thing as real love in this world? Unconditional love? Is it something of a myth? Why do we attach expectations to love as love itself is unconditional. Can we have a relationship with the opposite sex without expecting anything in return? Why we as humans always expect something in return otherwise we feel that we are losing out in the bargain.

Is love a bargain then?

Why do you trade your love for something in return? Can we just not love our neighbours or another human being for the sake of love?

I know how it is as I have got myself into trouble a couple of times and sometimes I wonder 'Is there real love?"

Back and running

This is my continuation of my saga with my computer. I got it back in shape after screwing it up. I did the inevitable and restored it back to factory settings. On 17th evening I bought an external HDD of 160 GB by Western Digital and backed up all my files. And at nearly 2 a.m. on 18th, I pressed the Recovery Manager, which comes with the HP laptop and voila! it was back as new. One of the reasons that I wanted to do it was my system was getting slower and I know over the past year I had been storing a lot of junk, downloading and deleting free softwares.

I find that the storage space in system restore is inadequate and I am trying to increase it as I read it somewhere, it's always better to have a bigger storage capacity so that you can undo based on the older images. My advice to the vista users would be as I mentioned in my previous post, is "don't touch system registry" and you will end as what I did, spend a whole day getting the system running back to how you liked it. And I had problems installing MS office but after cleaning the disc with a little soap water, I was able to install it ( a trick I learned after reading somewhere in the net).

Now I have changed my mind in switching over to a Mac as I see I have gained back the speed and it's pretty easy restoring it back to what it was.

I think I have a problem with my DVDRW device, maybe a loose connection or it has to be replaced but thank God that I had my extended warranty for another two years left and when I get back home to Kuala Lumpur, I can get it replaced F.O.C.

Now you might be wandering why go through the hassle, but given a choice I would like to spend my evenings and nights with my laptop, maybe it is an addiction. If ever you have a problem, feel free to ask me as I am an experienced hand in this now.

Saturday, June 14, 2008

Screwing up my computer

I did the unthinkable and cleaned my registry of Windows Vista Home Premium O.S. There was a lot of conflicts in the system and what did I do? I saved the files that were in conflict on my hard drive and then pressed the clean button. And after that I did defrag with a free software called defragger which I had downloaded. It freed up a lot of space and maybe screwed the system up in the process which was already screwed earlier by CCleaner.

The following morning when I wanted to play my audio CD, the system couldn't read it. Hey what did I do? I screwed up my system and I also lost my auto play on the process and God know's what else I have deleted. My word of advice is "DON'T MESS AROUND WITH THE REGISTRY" and what I did was I reinstalled back the registry files that I had in my hard drive and the computer can read my Audio CD but my auto play is still out.

When I tried to do a system restore, I had problem as the last restore point was after the deletion. Now I guess I have to reset my system back to company settings or as when I purchased it. The problem is that I am in Hyderabad and I left my external hard drive at home in Kuala Lumpur.

Not that the system is not working per se, but I somehow have this urge to put back all the drives or other stuff that I have deleted. Isn't there anyway that I can do that without losing all my data? Let me know, please.

I spend the whole of last evening until midnight trying to search on-line for help but it was of no avail. I will be going back home by the end of this month and then maybe I can back up all my stuff and use the recovery disc which I had created after running my system for the first time to reinstall my windows vista.

I hope I don't do any crazy stuff until then and be satisfied with the damage that I have caused. So my advice to you again is, if you are using CCleaner, be very careful and don't touch that registry unless you are an IT geek.

Tuesday, June 10, 2008

Where are we heading?

It looks very scary with prices of essential commodities going up and our salaries seem to have stagnated over the years. With the recent hike of petrol price in Malaysia by 41%, I guess everything has gone up or gone less if there is no hike in cost. Comparatively our petrol price is still lower than the other countries in the region but that is not a consolation. Because at the end of the day, our savings have gone smaller and I still can't figure out why is the cost of oil going up? Is it that the supply can't meet the demands of China and India or is it something that we don't know.

Why haven't we found an alternative source of fuel, we have discovered everything that is possible under the sun. Are we waiting for the depletion of oil from the Arab nations and then come out with the discoveries. To me something doesn't seem right here.

With the ever increasing population, do you think that the demand for petroleum would decrease? Look at the number of cars that are hitting the roads every day. Why can't we have an efficient public transport system so that the public would not depend on cars?

Look at the weather across the globe and you would know where we are heading. All this is brought about by our destruction of the forest and indiscriminate use of non-biodegradable plastics. Is this what we call development?

Look at the killings that is going on across the globe and we are waging wars in the name of democracy and religion. The list goes on and on and on. There is no respite to the happenings across the globe.

©sukku2008

Tuesday, June 3, 2008

Gizmo bug

Yes I got myself a new camera today, I already have a Konica Minolta 5 MP but I felt that I should upgrade to 10 MP, saw one this morning and out of impulse I had to buy it. Anyway I gave my old camera (which is 2 years old) to my youngest son.

I don't know why I melt like an ice-cream when I am with gadgets and the other day I was thinking of getting a new laptop by apple, switch from Window's to Mac, but I just couldn't do it. My laptop is only less then a year and the current model that I have is by HP Pavilion Entertainment PC, still good but I feel like I should change to an apple. Too great a temptation and if I get a good buyer for my laptop in Hyderabad, then maybe I would change to an apple by the end of this month.

I changed my Atom Exec mobile to HTC Touch 2 months back and I have no regrets about that. I even changed my Ipod classic to Ipod mini of 8 GB. I gave my classic to my eldest son and looks like there is no end in giving and buying too. I guess life is too short to be stingy.

Do you feel the same way regarding your electronic gizmos?

Sunday, June 1, 2008

It's nice to be at home

It's nice to be at home for this short holiday and I just can't wait to wind up and really be back home for good. I find that there is no place like home especially if you are with your family. Being at home I find that my brains have gone dead and there is nothing that I can blog at the moment, maybe it would take some time for me to get to my routine here, and before I could settle down into my comfort zone, next Sunday, I am flying back to Hyderabad. That would be my last 3 weeks in Hyderabad.

Not much of blog this one.