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When Destiny Sends Its Helpers

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Keep running. The right people find you on the way. At different stages of life, you’re confronted with different challenges. And each time you cross a hurdle, you feel that familiar sense of accomplishment. It’s tempting to attribute that success to your own skill, tenacity, and willpower — to pat yourself on the back and feel proud of how you handled it. But when you zoom out and look at the moments where you somehow managed to trump the odds, a quieter realization sets in: It’s never just you. There is always an unseen army that shows up at the right time. It was 2005. I had decided to pursue my Master’s in the US. I picked a few schools in the Midwest where the expenses were manageable, and that’s how the University of Missouri–Rolla entered the picture. But funding was still a massive question mark. I hadn’t secured any assistantship, and we didn’t have the means to pay out of pocket. We went from bank to bank, hoping for an education loan. Each manager aske...
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Daalara Daalara...

Well, the economy is in pits. Every bank is sitting on the edge, and in an unenviable position waiting to spiral downwards. The problem is, it seems to be happening with alarming ease. Yes, the economy is in doldrums, to say the least. Well, that means, the Indian rupee should be gaining on the dollar right. But, contrary to that, there seems to be a reverse effect. The rupee is weakening by the day, and having fallen in the bracket of an NRI (you can use whichever acronym to suit your needs - Non Returning Indian, as in Swades, or Non Reliable Indian (as in monsoon wedding) doesn't make a difference to me, for me it is Never Rewarded Indian ), there is always that selfish glint in my eye to see the dollar strengthening. So, the common perception among the folks is, Oh, don't keep anything in the bank. Send everything back to India. This is the best period for you to take advantage of the dollar exchange. After all, you never know how long it is going to last. The do...
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Sh(t)ock brouhahahaha!

My friends can vouch for this, and will agree wholeheartedly. Well, I was never a person with a great amount of intelligence. Translate that to the financial world, and you can put a big cipher in front of my name. I find brilliant ways to land myself into all sorts of mess, and somehow, gasping for breath, would claw my way back, before realizing the futility of the whole exercise. At the end of the day, there should be lessons learned. If not, the mind keeps taunting you with, I told you! Why did you have to get into all this? It has happened in the past, it happens now, and I can tell you in no uncertain terms, I am just waiting for the future! As soon as entered the corporate world, I was lured into the world of stock market. This certainly has to be the way to make money. What can a software engineer fresh from college earn anyway? There has to be other alternate ways of making money. So, trusting my financial "intelligence" that was embedded in me right from bi...
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A "weightless" proposition

Right from time immemorial, read right from birth , I have never had it in me to give importance to fitness. I was never one of them to go around flexing muscles, by doing those pull ups and push ups, that added an aura of invincibility to your personality. Moreover, in India, I always thought it was difficult to devout time to such meaningless activities. Obviously, it is hard to imagine paying a few hundred bucks, going to the nearest gym, and spend about an hour or two in solitary confinement. That, for a person like me is totally unimaginable. Half the time was spent in travelling and the other half, chatting with friends and eating tonnes of junk food by the wayside. At one point, I felt I needed no physical activities, since I felt that spending time bowling and fielding cricket balls, more than served my purpose. Later did I realize that even in cricket, people like Ranatunga and Warne existed with disproportionate assets. In spite of all this, when somebody out of the b...
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Word of mouth

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It is no surprise that word of mouth plays a major factor in the success of a product. Be it movies, restaurants, shopping malls, brand names, music, theme parks or be it anything, word of mouth surfaces and resurfaces time and again, putting the final zing thing in a person's mind. OK, let me go for it or No, the reviews are bad, let us forget the whole thing! Our minds are embedded with set ideas, obtained from different sources that we are absolutely tuned to what we should expect. Over-expectations can sometimes be a real dampener. You expect a lot of things from something, and, even if it is above average, you get the feeling of being let down. The reverse mechanism, don't hear from anybody's mouth , can sometimes work out to a terrific advantage. You know nothing about something, and when, finally, you get the taste of that something , it leaves you with an exhilarating feeling. Now, I should go around telling something about this . So, the bottom line is, ove...
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Maami, the match maker!!!

In what can be termed as the most orthodox form of arranging a marriage, the match making process is tied to fate rather than love.  Though the conservative image of India is changing, arranged marriages still form the most popular way of tying the knot.  Speculation and analysis fills the household as soon as people realize that there is a boy or girl of marriageable age.  The mega event begins not just a day or two before the marriage, but months, sometimes years in advance, so that the best proposal is sealed.  In this duration, magically, every elder in the house will remember you, and each time, you are encountered with, Ennada (What's up?), as if their sole aim in life is to extract a blush from you.  You are hardly the type to care about such things. Anyway, Karthik Chandramouli ( remember the protagonist of the Boston video mimicking Rajini ) and I came up with a gist of the conversation that would take place between two tamil maamis.  I have to...
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Life changing moments, really?

Our lives are governed by a random set of fleeting moments that, with the passage of time, it is rather easy to realize which of those are going to assume significance. It is the way we play these moments that propel our way forward, for good or bad. These moments, when viewing in retrospect, define whether we have moved well in time. Of course, whatever happens, we move ahead in time, but the way we move forward rests exclusively on these testing times. As I bring back these nostalgic moments in life, moving back and forth, with a chain of events that has transformed me considerably in the last so many years, I am not sure whether I could have altered my life by taking a different course of action. Looking back, it is easy to say which are the right decisions, and which of those, if I had gone with the other choice, could have got me in a much better position. I say, one or the other, because all important decisions are taken from one of the two choices that we are presented with...
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The moving equation

It certainly has been a moving time for everyone in the family.  As I made my way from Boston to Kansas, my brother graduated with a Bachelor's degree in Engineering, and found a job in one of the numerous IT companies in India right now, getting placed in Madras .  Like him, a lot of my friends have their brothers shifting away from their respective homes to wherever the placement calls.  A couple of my cousins too are going out to other destinations to excel in their careers.  So, certainly a moving time for all. For me, relocation from Boston to Kansas has certainly not been a huge task.  In fact, it has been quite easy, considering the fact that the cost of living in Boston is much much higher than the mid west states in US.  Not that Overland Park is too economical, but at least, compared to Boston, here, it is easy to cut costs on quite a few things.  Just to give you a comparison, a 2 bed room flat in Boston (in the suburbs) costs about 1500$...
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