Rising Up to The Occasion

Life is a marathon, and we keep running it either relentlessly or reluctantly. We just cannot say no to this race, as it is about life, and we don't have any other choice, but to run it!

To make our life a lovely one, we work so hard that we do anything that is, or seems to be, within our reach. Isn't it? But, while chasing our dreams, do we ponder on the moments that really change our life? Yes, I am talking about those decision-making moments that change our lives, forever!

For example, we study for one full semester, but what decides, or, perhaps, justifies, our efforts is the outcome of those three hours of the strenuous, end-sem exam! True? No, I am not judging whether the system is right or wrong! I am hinting at the challenges of rising up to the occasion. Think.

No matter how well you practice the art of pitching, hitting, and running during net-practice sessions, your success counts only when you pitch, hit, and run well on the day when it counts!

So, keep preparing, but do perform to produce results, when it is required, otherwise what is the point in preparing at all? Got it! I know you did! Liar! :-)

Love Thyself

It is not at all bad to be selfish, but we should just take care that we do not harm anyone by being selfish. Does it sound counter-intuitive? It doesn’t. You need to think, and devise your own means for doing so. It is not so hard.

We should love ourselves. Only then we can love others. Give thyself undivided attention, and talk to your inner-self. Just do whatever makes you extremely comfortable with thyself. It teaches you a lot. It will tell you what it wants, and what it needs.

How can we do so? Pamper thyself! Treat thyself like a king! Date thyself! Talk to thyself! Know thyself! Love thyself! The rest will fall in place!

And, never even try to please everyone! Even God could not do so!

Jesus! I have my semester exam after just 5 weeks, have to study more than 600 pages, and, here, I am busy loving myself! I think I should get back to studies! It is high time I do so. After all, I have a reputation to maintain! This blogging business is so, so addictive! But, above all, I am just a mere human being, so I need to talk. What else is a better way of talking your heart out than this blogging thing? At least, it doesn’t scream at you!

The "Chore"

At dawn, the Sun rises up through the horizon
Hope gets ready for its toil
Mind and soul promise to help hope win
A jigsaw puzzle takes its toll
Heart fights through all the day’s odds
Spirit says never say die; the day is about to end
At dusk, the Sun sets down through the horizon
The day seems decently conquered
The Stars and the Moon comfort the day’s pain
Hope consoles for the unknown
The night seeps through the dark
Only to begin the cycle again!

Metamorphosis

I have been noticing a big change in myself. With time and experiences, I feel more content. It seems I am learning what I should be learning. I feel I am growing day by day. Sometime back, I wrote a poem! And, here, I am going to share it with you. But, before I start off with that, I must tell you about my favorite poem, since my school days. It has been "If" by Rudyard Kipling. I don't remember any other poem, except for "If." It has taught me more than hundreds of valuable lessons, since then.

So, I pay my heartfelt tribute to "If" by Rudyard Kipling by dedicating this poem to "If." I feel that all the best things in life are for free, for example, the Earth, air, water, fire, the Sun, the Moon, the Stars, etc. It's a different story that we human beings have started monetizing some of these free elements, for example, the Earth, and water. You never know, one unfortunate day, we might be taxed for breathing as well!

Anyway, my thoughts, including my poem(s), will always be for free. That's precisely the reason that I have not authorized Google to put any ads on my blog page, except for a link that endorses a social cause and news links that I find handy for myself. I just love reading news -- positive news!

So, you guys, if you like, or want, to reuse my thoughts, including my poem(s), please feel free to reproduce them. I don't intend to copyright them! Obviously, they are not worth copyrighting! If any of my works is successfully reused, I would consider my efforts to have met their destiny. No, I don't even like to hear a Thank-You note. But, if you still want to, then, perhaps, you can thank me in your heart. I am not used to of more than this, for sure.

The mind sees no boundary
The eyes dream of me
The ears listen to me very patiently
The nose rests my pride
The lips pronounce me the fighter
The tongue unleashes extreme motivation
The chin keeps me up to the sky
The heart beats with my thoughts
The hands catch me whenever I fall
The stomach digests my craziness
The steps match my endeavors
The One knows my worth
The One lives off my dreams
The One is I and will always be I!

Profound Words

Words, perhaps, are the strongest weapon that we human beings possess. We should take extreme care when we are unleashing them. They might haunt us, forever, for our lifetime, and, moreover, they might put the deepest scar right in the bottom of our hearts. But, on the other side, we must take extreme care in not to infuriate someone to the tipping point, wherein, someone spits the venom right in your face.

Getting the right words for the right occasion is again a daunting task. But, we must strive to practice the art of getting it right – consistently, and that’s too perfectly. Try to even mean your “a”, “an”, and “the.” Practice makes a man perfect. And, striving for perfection is a virtue, and is not a bane! Don’t ever let the insurmountable challenge pull you down! Strive for it, and keep raising your own bar! Trust me, the juice will worth the squeeze!

It apparently is easy to say, but, without a doubt, is hard to practice. That is why there is a beautiful saying, “To err is human, and to forgive is divine.” So true! Isn’t it?

Ridiculous Crusade

Isn’t life a ridiculous crusade? Yes, it is! Yes, because, as we all know, in the end, it is life that subverts itself to death. Always, death has its final laugh!

We know we will lose, eventually – no matter what we do! Still we fight for our life, knowing the final outcome beforehand! Yes, this doesn’t mean that we should just give it up! A mighty heart always fights, with zero-level ego, and chin up to the sky.

The beauty of life lies in the way it unfolds itself. You just do not know what is coming next! You think you can take life head-on! Perhaps, you can! And, you must! Ridicule it when you have your say, so that you do not have any regrets when it takes you down! Ridiculous crusade! Indeed!

Globalization In Its Own Spirit

I was going through my International Business Strategy book by my IBS Prof Charles Schell – who is a Canadian, is teaching at a British business school, Manchester Business School, comes down to the MBS Dubai campus to teach about businesses that are being carried out all over the world to a class of students that are from 14 different nations, and that are mostly managers managing companies from different parts of the world – and I hit an anecdote that is worth sharing in order to explain globalization in its own spirit.

“In this interdependent global economy, an American might drive to work in a car designed in Germany that was assembled in Mexico by DaimlerChrysler from components made in the US and Japan that were fabricated from Korean steel and Malaysian rubber. She may have filled the car with gasoline at a British Petroleum (BP) service station owned by a British multinational company. The gasoline could have been made from oil pumped out of a well off the coast of Africa by a French oil company that transported it to the US in a ship owned by a Greek shipping line. While driving to work, the American might talk to her stockbroker on a Nokia cell phone that was designed in Finland and assembled in Texas using chip sets produced in Taiwan that were designed by Indian engineers working for Texas Instruments, a US chip giant, at its Bangalore office. She could tell the stockbroker to purchase shares in Deutsche Telekom, a German telecommunications firm that was transformed from a former state-owned monopoly into a global company by an energetic Israeli CEO. She may turn on the car radio, which was made in Malaysia by a Japanese firm, to hear a popular hip-hop song composed by a Swede and sung by a group of Danes in English who signed a record contract with a French music company to promote their record in America. The driver might pull into a drive-through coffee stall run by a Korean immigrant and order a “single-tall-non-fat” latte” and chocolate-covered biscotti. The coffee beans come from Brazil and the chocolate from Peru, while the biscotti was made locally using an old-Italian recipe. After the song ends, a news announcer might inform the American listener that anti-globalization protests at a meeting of heads of state in Davos, Switzerland, have turned violent. One protester has been killed. The announcer then returns to the next item, a story about how fear of interest rate hikes in the US has sent Japan’s Nikkei stock market index down to new lows for the year.”

This is the world we live in. Does this make you uncomfortable? Get used to it – the more, the better!

Know Your Questions Well

It is a human tendency that we seek for guidance to success. So, we throw many questions to others. Typically, we ask: What did you do to succeed? What is the best way to do it? What is the right way of doing it? And, stuff like that!! Don't we do so?

Trust me, the right way of seeking guidance is to ask NOT the above-mentioned types of questions, but questions like these: What should I avoid doing? What are the wrong ways of doing this? What made you to fail? And, stuff like that!! Do you get the point?

The point is very simple, and is very logical too!! Success HIDES a lot of short-comings!! People who succeed may not be the right people to guide you, simply because:

1) Their ways of doing things might not suit you at all, and might cause you disaster!!

2) They might have got lucky!! Who knows!! Flukes work!! Don't they?

3) There could be N number of other ways of getting something right!!

4) You might not have a flare for it!

5) You might have your own ways of doing the same thing!

And, sometimes, success tells you not to repeat it, because you just got lucky!! So, don't be surprised, if I ask you not to do stuff that, somehow, I managed to pull it off myself!!

So, the conclusion is that you should know: When to ask what? When not to ask? Who to ask? Who you should not ask to? How to ask? How you should not ask? What not to ask? Got it!! You better! :-)

Never Say Die

We face plethora of challenges every now and then in our lives. And, we tend to ignore some, while trying to tackle some. We fail at some, and we succeed at some. Is this enough? Is it the max that we can do? Certainly, no.

When God gives us challenges, He knows that we have the abilities to over come them as well, without doubt. It's we who succumb to the sheer anxieties that may come along with those challenges, leading us to lose at some of the challenges, without even putting a courageous fight. Contrarily, we usually win, where we hold on to our nerves!

Every challenge is worth taking head-on, irrespective of how unsurmountable it may appear. And, this sheer ability sets us apart from the lesser mortals. People who take challenges head-on, irrespective of their outcomes, are "kings" of this world, others are "pawns."

Yes, it's true that when the game is over, the "king" and the "pawn" go in the same box, but what differs is the way they get into the box!

The "Venom" Is Yet To Be Spit Out

The toughest question that remains unattended, even after the G-20 Summit, is that how the US banks are going to handle their most "toxic" assets that run into trillions of dollars -- just to be indicative of the severity, the top ten US banks had toxic assets of close to USD 3.6 trillion at the end of 2008.

By "toxic" assets, it is implied that those assets were extremely over-priced at the time when they were taken on the balance-sheets, and, today, they don't make any sense to anyone, not even to the US government, which might eventually have to buy them -- obviously, at a much reduced price and with the help of the recently modified accounting principles, so that the losses to the banks could be made less severe than the currently apparent ones -- in order to save the banks from again trembling after spitting the "venom" out.

But, the trillion-dollar questions are: When will the banks spit the "venom" out? Or, will they ever do so? Or, if they don't, then how will the US government make them do so? And, if this does happen, then what would be the implications for the economy at large?

I guess the easiest way to handle it is to dodge the question for as long as possible, because two massive, successive blows on the nose, can knock anyone out!!

Dare To Stand-out

God has made us all unique. Every human being has something that is not there in the rest of us. Still, we imitate, or try to imitate, others to make ourselves look like one in the herd that we value the most. Why do we do this? Is it so hard to maintain our own identity? Is it necessary to become a commodity? I don’t think so!

Humans tend to live in a group. It’s a natural instinct; I guess; and, undoubtedly it is even safer. And, I think that is the precise reason we don’t believe in standing out of the crowd. Don't be surprised if in coming years, a big majority of middle-class-and-above people all over the world have quite similar lifestyles. Consequently, we would land up “commoditizing” ourselves to be a part of our “beloved” crowd, which would then span on a global scale. Thanks to the global media, which are bringing us closer for good as well as for bad reasons. To some extent, this commoditization would definitely result good results, but, at the cost of our diversity, or, perhaps, at the cost of our uniqueness.

From a business perspective and for businesses worldwide, the more commoditized people will become, the easier it would be for businesses to sell their products and services at reduced transaction costs, which would be effected because of standardized processes that would cater to the needs and wants of all of us, at once. The sheer volume and automation would bring production costs down. And, it’s a no-brainer to guess what challenges businesses would face, if people become more of themselves.

That’s just one of the precise reasons why super-high-end brands do flourish and charge obscene amount of money for their products and services, and run-of-the-mill products and services give discounts round the year, to maximize their volume of sales, because doing so brings the production costs lower per unit, resulting in higher economic profit per unit. You see, getting commoditized is like losing your uniqueness. Did I talk any rocket science? Obviously not! So, do you agree? You must not completely, otherwise you would be me!! And, I prefer to be unique. :-)

The Outcomes of the G20 Summit

The G20 Summit, on the 2nd of April, 2009, in London, was largely successful – because of the better than expected outcomes. The world leaders agreed on the large means of reviving the global economy. But, there could certainly have been better results out of the grand meeting. I guess; it was very hard to generate more fruitful, conducive, enforceable decisions because of the lack of the clear picture of the end-to-end implications of the global, spiral downturn.

The fruitful outcomes, as they appear, of the meeting were:
1) A pledge of USD 1.1 Trillion to tackle global crisis through the International Monetary Fund (IMF), focusing to bail out developing countries. After all, developing countries are where the developed countries’ cost-centers, manufacturing hubs, cheap resources, and greenfield markets are.

2) An agreement on stimulating world trade, and regulating financial firms more stringently, with a strict focus on Hedge Funds – which willfully play with stocks on plethora of stock exchanges worldwide -- and Rating Agencies – which whimsically provide AAA ratings to sick financial instruments.

3) A crackdown on tax havens, as there are countries that provide large tax holidays to their companies to gain a cost-based, unfair competitive-edge against competitors on the global and regional markets.

4) New global rules to govern the pay and bonuses of bankers.

5) A clear-cut intent to restrict growing protectionism, and trade barriers.

The issue that the US wanted others to agree upon, but, somehow, couldn’t was that Europe, specifically France and Germany, should enact greater fiscal stimuli than they had already enacted.

The issue that Europe wanted others to agree upon, but, somehow, couldn’t was that there should be a global regulation of the financial markets – the issue was restricted specifically by the US.

Overall, the meeting was successful in addressing the concerns of emerging economies, and was a showcase of the power of emerging economies. Moreover, it gave a re-birth to the International Monetary Fund (IMF).