Tid Bit from My Diary

Mark Twain once said that it usually takes more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech. I am not sure of the context of that statement but there is no doubt that it is a good example of oxymoron. The dictionary tells me that the rhetorical term “oxymoron” was coined by joining two contrasting Greek words meaning “sharp” (oxy) and “dull” (moron). Everyone uses such phrases in their everyday life without being an oxy or moron or anywhere in between. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, the famous German philosopher and author had famously said that “we learn from history that man never learn anything from history”. While George Bernard Shaw, the Irish dramatist and socialist had endorsed this statement is in his lifetime, I find this more relevant today with all the conflicts around then anytime else. That makes this a timeless truth. That was an example involving famous personalities and serious subject with deep meaning. But there is one such phrase that attracts us les...

O nce in a while we come across an article analyzing the characteristics or habits of successful people. Not that we always agree with the traits listed the article but I am not one of those whom the world considers being successful and moreover there is no bee line of followers behind me. I've spent plenty of time reading about successful people, which could or could not be considered to be a research.  Whilst all of them have the skills, talents, and characteristics that enable them to succeed, I haven’t been able to identify any magic trait adopting which will instantly transform me into a celebrity. Perhaps some of their qualities are more dominant and play a greater role in their successes but incidentally we all too possess these skills, talents, and characteristics within us to a certain degree. What we lack however, is the recipe to concoct and deliver a commendable success. One important fact is that successful people does not always do everything by themselves no...

If you look at what you do not have in life, you feel miserable due to the long list of have-nots, but when you look at what you have in life, you most probably have everything that you need. You may consider this to be a fallacy but this is the fact of life. Sometimes we do not make any effort to value what is around us. Imagine sitting by the window with a cup of coffee and you lift the cup, take a careless sip to realize the sugar is not enough. Too lazy to go for the sugar, you manage still somewhat enjoying the coffee. On finishing you discover sugar crystals settled at the bottom. That is how life is.... So look around, may be the sweetness is closer than you think.... 

Stephen R. Covey and the   90-10 Principle are now well known though not as much understood or rather practiced. How we react indeed makes all that difference and it is never more obvious than when you are driving during rush hours. Once I had an experience when the other driver confessed that he was an idiot and asked me what was I?   http://sumandebray.blogspot.com/2011/01/never-fight-with-idiot.html That was an eye opener that one has to refresh that 90-10 principle from time to time and that is the exact intent of this post. One day a taxi was driving in the right lane when suddenly another car reversed out of a parking space right in front of it. The taxi driver slammed on his brakes, skidded, and somehow managed to avoid the crash by just inches! The driver of the other car honked and yelled at the taxi. My taxi driver was very friendly and just smiled and waved at the guy.  How could he just do that when this guy almost ruined th...

Life, death and life after death has always been the turf of philosophers, thinkers and the religious gurus. They have always thought and put forward their theories of beginning of life in this planet. The scientist on the other hand has been been snooping into the outer space and digging out fossils to find some clues about the advent of life in our earth. Life and death are part of every day occurrences in our  life and therefore, we the lesser mortals, have not been totally immune from developing our own theories and ever ready to discuss with anyone who is willing lend their ears. The debate shall continue to rage if there was a creator for all the earthly life forms as per the watchmaker analogy or we developed ourselves as per Charles Darwin's theory. But once in a while we come to know about some incidents that unsettles all our logical ideas. There are two news of accidental deaths that caught my attention and would like to share. Are these purely coincidences, occu...

One day, a few years back  I had an strange urge to pinch on a photograph  on a construction magazine while reading an article. I wanted to expand a picture to find out more about a detail and almost did it. It would have been perfectly normal if I was reading the same article in the iPad, but unfortunately it a conventional paper version of the weekly magazine. Yesterday we wanted to read the details of an address written in in very small fonts on a bottle wrapper and this time we wished we could pinch to clarity. Pinch here describes a gesture used with two fingers used on a touch screen interface to zoom in and out. We pinch inwards to zoom in on a picture and outwards to zoom out of a picture or object. As the line between our digital and non-digital life gets blurred, can this be then considered to be a "zooming in" disorder! I am quite confident that with the dominance of touch screen steadily increasing in our lives, others are suffering from this disorder ...

I was prepared for a call at two in the morning. This was to let me know that they have landed in the Doha airport. I had planned it well and slept early. I would have little time to sleep after picking them up in the middle of the night. But my wife woke me up at 11:30 with a call from an unknown number. This was to let me know that she had lost her phone at the Dubai airport and I was not to expect any call when the plane landed in Doha.  My immediate grief was that I will no longer have the luxury of sleeping till they landed, but have to go early and wait in the arrival lounge.  The loss of the Samsung galaxy made us sad. The realization of losing those pictures of our last vacation made us sadder.  Early in the morning I went to Vodafone store and blocked the number temporarily, stopping any misuse of the phone number. We had heard and read a lot of stories of people getting back stuff from various parts of Dubai during our stay there. These were firstha...