Wish They Taught This in Our School

We have grown up in the seventies and the eighties in which could easily be classified as a utopian society. Since child hood we have been hammered with only one mantra and that was Health is wealth. While there can be no argument that in today’s world health as the only wealth is not good enough. We often wish that somebody taught us these fundamental principles of life early in our lives.

Alas! The days of agriculture based economy does not exist any more for most of the urban generation. One could be as fit as a race horse but will still need other form wealth to gallop through a decent university to be worthy of picking up a job and start a family.

Today I give a sachchi advice to the young generation. It’s important to leave no stone unturned early in life to develop sound body and mind. But it is equally important to take all necessary steps early in the life to start the process of developing wealth with a firm footing. There are other aspects of health and wealth in addition to starting early that I would like everyone to focus. A few of those has been listed below for ease of reference:

• Always maintain asset diversification
• Remember to obtain assistance from subject experts
• Review portfolio regularly to keep them relevant
• Engage the services of a qualified financial & tax planner
• Invest regularly during good economy as bad economy
• Have enough risk coverage but strictly implement stop loss policy
• Have patience during tough times and market volatility
• Maintain liquidity in the portfolio, as you never know when there will be an emergency
• Stay wealthy and live peacefully

Just knowing these is not enough and one has to put this into regular practise so that it turns into a habit. In the words of Aristotle “we are what we regularly do. Excellence then is not an act but a habit.”

“I am participating in the #SachchiAdvice Contest by MaxLife in Association with BlogAdda.”

What is DCIM Anyways?

The other day I was whiling away my time while my daughter was taking her music lessons. The pictures I have posted here are not worthwhile but something one would categorize as pure time pass. Nevertheless I tried to capture the moon in a night sky with a Samsung phone camera.

One thing has intrigued me was why pictures from all cameras gets stored in a folder called DCIM. What is DCIM anyways? 

I now discovered that many many moonlit nights back DCIM, which is an acronym for Digital Camera IMages, became the default directory structure for digital cameras.

Once a memory card is inserted into any camera, the camera immediately looks for a folder by the name of ‘DCIM' folder. That is true for every camera – whether it is a DSLR, other dedicated digital camera, Android phone or an Iphone. If it doesn't find one, it creates one and similarly some desktop image-editing programs are designed to look specifically for ‘DCIM' folders on any media inserted into the PC.

The DCIM folder and its layout come from DCF, a standard created back in 2003 by JEITA, the Japan Electronics and Information Technology Industries Association.

There is more information available in the World of Internet for anyone willing to dig further.

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Investment Idea Max India Ltd – A Sachchi Advice

Image Source

Advices are available in abundance these days and given half a chance, we don’t hesitate to deliver one. An American comedian once stated that it is too bad that the only people who run the country are too busy driving a taxi cab or giving a haircut.

This makes it a bit more difficult for us to decide whom to listen to or whom not to and more importantly which one is genuine. There is no denying that we need advice to sail through our life, after all we cannot afford to make all the mistakes ourselves in one lifetime. The best strategy probably is to let other people advice but not let them decide for us. We need to be like the mythological swan that can drink the milk and leave the water behind.

But humans are strange animals. Most of them suffer from the congenital weakness that they know everything until off course when it’s too late. Only exception being the medical doctor but that too is now jiggling as people use Google first and then call for the physician.

The most difficult of all is to seek advice with our financial matters, primarily because of our suspicious nature. When we do decide to seek an advice, we check the age before considering his knowledge and expertise in that particular field.

The author of the blog Sense and Nonsense with Nirmalya Deb Roy who also happens to be my younger sibling once gave me an advice financial advice on 20 August 2010. It was about investing on Max India limited which I considered with all seriousness. I did invest around 300 thousands and it grew 3.15 times before I sold it for close to 1 million rupees. This for me was one of the Sachchi advices in life that ended as a success story worth sharing.

But it was not only recipient of this advice as he had also published the same in his blog post Investment Idea Max India Ltd. However, we cannot be certain as to how many people benefited from this or how much.  

But unfortunately he has stopped reaching out with financial advices to all through his blog and when I reasoned with him sometimes back, he reminded me of an old Irish proverb that says; don’t give cherries to pigs or advice to fools.

“I am participating in the #SachchiAdvice Contest by MaxLife in Association with BlogAdda.”

My First Selfie on a VR tour

Virtual Reality or VR is not a new phenomenon.  During 1950s, Morton Heilig described an “Experience Theatre” that effectively engages all the human senses drawing the viewer into a on-screen activity. This vision was subsequently transformed into reality and a prototype called “Sensorama” was built and patented in 1962. When a stereoscopic bike ride scene of a movie was viewed in this, one would also have the hair blowing and complete with sound, smell et al.
Sensorama pre-dated digital computing and is a mechanical device but still considered the forerunner of today’s VR and Morton L. Heilig has been referred by many authors as the father of Virtual Reality.

VR has come a long way since then, riding piggyback on the gaming industry. This is also being extensively used to train the armed forces by simulating war front like situation,training commercial air plane pilots, simulating parachute jumping and the likes.

It has been making inroads into the life of common person through virtual museum or 3D imagery of popular architectural destination or archaeological sites. However, we are yet to witness virtual travel coming through at a commercial scale. I have a dream .... I want this to impact the life of all; the lazy, the crazy and everyone in between.

When that time comes the unable, disabled and differently-able person will become equally fortunate to experience joy of visiting popular, exclusive and exotic destinations from the comfort of the living room. That journey would be as real as physical travelling and not just talking to a fellow traveller along the way. It will effectively encompass all the other senses too.

I would want to feel the cold metal of the stainless steel hand rail standing on the edge, subconsciously trying to recognize the perfume the person standing next to me is wearing while I see the yacht on Thames getting smaller as we rise up on the capsule of the gigantic London Eye.

We hope to see this technology invade our lives sooner than later through our television screens, pads, tabs, smart phones and their apps. I am waiting for the moment when I will be taking my first selfie on a VR tour deep inside the Amazon or deep in the space.

Destiny? Think About It!

Story # 1

Ramdin was a poor man living in the village with his wife and children. He was not a god fearing person but loved his God. He prayed Lord Vishnu two times every day and remembered him every moment. But he was so poor that he could hardly make his ends meet.

Narod muni, the highest disciple of Vishnu was perplexed by this situation and could not understand why someone who was so devoted to his lord has to suffer so much. Where is his mercy!

Narod went up to lord Vishnu and begged, do something for this devotee of yours. He doesn’t deserve this suffering. The lord smiled and the land got the best weather in centuries. The crop yielded an unusually productive harvest while the trees were full of fruits. But poor Ramdin gained nothing out of it as he did not own any. 

Next time when they were together on the daily tour, Narod muni raised his concern about Ramdin. Lord said, “I gave the best harvest ever. What else can I do? If it’s not in his luck, its beyond me!”

“Prabhu look at the father and son going to the forest to collect wood to sell. They haven’t eaten anything since yesterday but still he prayed before he left his home. Please give him something directly this time.”

Lord said “since you are insisting, I shall try that as well.” 100 feet ahead of them in the jungle track, he dropped a bag of money and jewels.”

20 feet before they reached the bag, Ramdin told playfully to his son, “Let’s see who can walk the farthest with his eyes shut.”

When they opened their eyes, the bag full of wealth was far behind them.

Story # 2

Yamraj, one fine day came to Banshilal and announced: "Hey dude, your time in this world is now up. You have to come out with me."

Banshilal: "But I’m not ready!”

Yamraj:  "Well, that’s your problem. Your name is the first on my list and stop wasting my time."

Banshilal:"Okay, let me have one last cup of coffee before I leave. Please give me company for my last drink in this world."

Yamraj:"All right... "

Banshilal laced his coffee with sleeping pills. Yamraj fell into a deep sleep as soon as he drank it. Banshilal removed his name from top of the list and put at the bottom!

Yamraj had such a peaceful sleep after a very long time and was very pleased. He sat up and said: "Because you have been so nice to me, I will start my job from the bottom of the list. You will have some more time."

Moral:

Whatever written in your destiny shall never change.

Do we really have to believe this?

Woman Power

The people of India have solemnly resolved through the constitution, to secure to all its citizens equality of status and of opportunity. There had been all the good intentions when this was formulated but once this were put to practice, it faltered. The closest we achieved is “equality among equals” and that too is limited within specific sections of our society.

Now to put things into Indian perspective, it’s not a secret that we are a vast country with thousands of years of heritage. It is also the confluence of matriarchal and patriarchal society with numerous cultures constantly adopting and lending values to one another. What we have today is diversity in unity and vice versa. In lay man’s term we can make a politically correct statement about Indians and surprisingly even the opposite of that statement will also be true. One good example is the statement “women are not safe in Indian roads” or “women do not have freedom in the Indian society”.

As far as my humble understanding goes all women and why single out women, everyone wants to be treated specially. There is not debate about it and that is not the point of this discussion either.

 

We cannot undermine the fact that some of us can do certain things better than others and this is due to hereditary, social upbringing, genome issues or some other reason that I am not aware of. Again there are some activities that used to be a male or female domain for reasons there were unarguably valid half a century back but not any longer owing to industrial revolution and other technological developments, while perception of our society remained  unchanged. One good example is that of a warrior who had to be big and mighty then but today anyone with a gun is equally capable of defending the nation while our perception remained that women cannot handle it. The perception is built as our children still indoctrinated to with age old concepts with gender centric toys with the girls getting kitchen sets while boys get a machine gun.

Whether we want to give it or not, today’s women take their share of dominance in the society and equally participate in all good and bad things that a man does. We have seen women reaching the pinnacle in all possible direction from being a corporate CEO to visiting the outer space. When the pictures of institutions like ISRO flashes on our television screens after a successful mission, we see men and women sitting side by side giving us the thumps up.

The Indian society is nowhere near where it should be as we witness regularly how the mighty and the shrewd take advantage of weak and vulnerable.  While men own lion share of injustice and cruelty against women, violence by women against women in all possible forms are not rare.

Coming back to the prime motion of if today’s women want to be treated equally, my understanding is that they want to be treated differently equally and as differently equally they look at men the folks in their personal life. This is because each one of us is unique by our own rights because of our internal constitution excluding those for the sake of this argument who has been oppressed by the society as a whole or own family in particular.

In this respect I would refer a speech, I once heard by Mrs. Indira Gandhi, by far the most powerful woman India has seen in the recent history. She was addressing a large audience about creating opportunities for people and their ability of availing those. She gave an example of setting up a well-resourced library in a town with equal access rights to every individual. But more educated the person is, more gain shall he make from this project while the illiterate will lose out completely. Giving advantage similar to golf handicap ranking will not be sustainable in the long term.

While the environment could be made conducive for equality, all people, men and women alike will have to take their own step forward to develop themselves to make equality for all a reality. Otherwise it will remain a relative term tangled in linguistic complexities such as equality among the equals etc.

• “I’m blogging for the India Today Woman Summit 2015 #WomenPower activity at BlogAdda.”

We are like this only!

A Mumphaliwala (person selling roasted peanuts) used to go around the neighbourhood in my childhood selling roasted peanuts in cones made of old newspapers along with a minuscule pack of salt. He had to shell out a few extra packs of salt as freebies to keep his consumer content coming back.

Someone enlightened me quite early that “Maximum Retail Price” was the highest price at which that product could be sold and the aim should be bring it down from there. But the customer was not the king when I was a kid and the shopkeeper charged the MRP. I am talking of the seventies when availability was limited choices did not exist and Bajaj Cheetak scooter used to have 15 years waiting.

But haggling and bargaining was the order of the day for everything that did not have MRP printed on it. The common man had a sense of victory being able to knock down the asking price. The victory lap would however be short-lived with the neighbours announcement that his second cousin has brought the same stuff for 8 rupees less.

But today the customer is the king and one can easily cut a deal even while buying a refrigerators or a television set. Kolkata they say is the most (in) famous when it comes to this skill, where a street vendor like the phuchkawala (panipoorie seller) is not spared by a well versed Kolkata shopper. He cannot escape without giving that free dry poorie, locally known as churmur at the end of each session.

But his is not about Kolkata, this is us from Kashmir to Kanyakumari. We, the Indians, love to haggle and take immense pride in what we do. We all know a uncle or aunt or a neighbour who has earned the honour of being the best negotiator in this respect.

If you thought this is limited to street vendors and the shopkeepers, my friend, you are grossly mistaken! Leading architectural practices, I have witnessed, bear the brunt of this extraordinary “little extra” phenomena. In the nineties, we were working on design for high rises on Barakhamba road and other places around Lutyens Delhi.

While preparing designs for those multi-storey towers, the firm also had to provide some services as extras. Trust me, I am serious! It was an extension to his farmhouse or an additional floor to her bungalow or something similar.

We used to wonder if the surgeons faced similar situation whereby a patient says “I shall have my heart operated, but you have to operate my knee cap for free!” 

But, we are like this only!