What can you say? Is it a progressive society

It was late in night and all the big shots in Indian business gathered. Right from liquor king to king khan. When you allow these people, they will talk in length about social responsibility. Their social responsibility stop at either putting a web link in their company website, establishing aviation academy in a tribal village, or at maximum doing a lip service in their movies. They were in a big posh place and guy hitting the hammer. All were wearing fashionable dresses. Gents were in full suit and ladies :-( (I dont remember exactly they were wearing, but I believe there should be some dress). Thanks to Modi, CEO of IPL, who commercialized playing cricket. Thanks to media who gave him award for being innovative. Thanks to BCCI for brining an excellent cricket session. I know they are working really hard, squeezing their brain to bring only best cricket to Indian cricket lovers. It was great to watch movie stars, business guys, cricket players, spouses of stars/business guys/players. Each one of them involved in IPL deserve special award. But it is the cricket lover who has been cheated by these guys to make money. Read on.

Unlike 20 years back, these days cricket are played frequently. One dayers, test match and recent T20 cricket. The main strength of T20 is that it steals a lot of time but we do not know that it is stealing time. A normal cricket lover watches a match for 4 hours and these match certainly will be in memory for another 4 hours. Another 4 fours he spends in mere dreaming on how the match is going to be and seeing highlights of watched match. Totally, the "cricket fanatic" is going to waste 1.5 day of productive work. This is a case of one match. But generally these matches never come in single. There is a proverb in Tamil - "Sani ponam, thaniya poogathu". Each match except Semis and final are "sani ponam". And this is going to happen for almost 2 months in year. So for every year, on an average basis, a cricket fanatic is going to waste 3 months (I lost count and hence let us maintain the lower limit as 3 months). Also, you cannot say who is going to be the cricket fanatic.

Once they decided to go mad, they go mad to an extent which you and I cannot imagine. It catches everyone right from Vice President to Software Engineer, Homemaker to Aeroplane pilot. The cricket can make anyone idiot. It doesn't care whether he is Sonia Gandhi, Rahul Gandhi, Actor Vijay, Vijay Mallaiya, Srinivasan, Ramamoorthy, Gunasekaran, Prabhakaran, Karthi, Jopesh, Aslam, he, she, they, it, you and I. I also feel that we can official introduce betting as a part of IPL T20 so that it also helps us to earn (this is joke. dont take it seriously. i certainly feel that it may happen and tomorrow CNN-IBN will give me award for innovation. LOL)

Is it a sign of responsible society? If you are reading this, please think for a while, are you gaining anything because of T20 or does it lead to any benefits to our country. When you sum up, India loses more, IPL T20 is making Indian lazy and unproductive. Playing in casino is a gambling and IPL T20 is an organized gambling with cricket lovers as mere jokers. The "cricket fanatics" has to remember that it is energy sucker and growth ****er.

Ironically, these business leaders when they go and sit in their office they want their employees to be productive. But they forget the fact that they are the main culprits for making Indians unproductive. It is good that this time we are not going to have T20 in Indian soil. Let us say good bye to 2-month long T20, Lalit Modi, BCCI, Owners of the team and players. Let us spend sometime in thinking on how to make ourselves better and India better. If you are one of the policymaker or responsible citizen, please spread the awareness to fellow Indian. It is the people of India who make the future India and not these kinds of energy suckers. As Gerald Weinberg says, there is thin line between doing and over doing. Even a good thing done beyond a point turns out to be the negative. IPL is now overdoing cricket and let us stop it before it becomes overly non-sense.

Let Indian and India to grow.

Have a Reason to Cheer - Indian IT

It is not even over a month that Mr Obama addressed congress and made a powerful voice against outsourcing. He announced the end of tax breaks to the companies that outsource jobs to other countries. Within a month, I hope, he understood the value that outsourcing creates to US. In the recent statement, Mr Obama, rewrote his words that he was not against outsourcing low-level, low-skill jobs. Is there a reason to say this? Are there any hidden agenda? I believe yes. The emerging markets like India have become no non-sense market place for MNCs because of their consumption power. It is that consumption power that made US, the super power and it is the same consumption power that is going to make India, a super power.

The consumption is so powerful and that is how Pepsi, Coke, Colgate and many other brands are making money. Thanks to globalization. If there is a policy decision against outsourcing, the other countries where the jobs are outsourced will also make some policy decisions against these MNCs. Without outsourcing, the existence of these MNCs is Win-Lose proposition with emerging economies in losing side. I hope that the business organizations in US have understood this and this is right time for the policymakers in emerging markets to keep a watch on the developments. Also, with the current economic slowdown, MNCs will not be able to withstand any further blow. When the economy recovers, the stand on outsource will become irrelevant. Even in the current climate, the US companies wanted to push some "risks" to high value & risk taking Indian companies. So, the outsourcing helps to diversify their risks. :-)

Overall, apart from direct benefits, the outsourcing leads to a lot of flexibility and this flexibility is quite essential for all developed nations, not only to the US. So, moving forward we will see the dilution in "stop outsourcing" slogan and this will be done or can be done as a lip service.

Hearing YouTube Video in your Mobile

It has become a standard that people come minimum of 5 minutes and maximum of 15 minutes late for a 20 minutes meeting. Sometimes, even the meeting organizer comes late and ask a question "did anyone come for the meeting" forgetting the fact that he/she is the organizer. It is a punishment for being on time. Going late to these meetings is not a solution and it may not be a good idea to change people. I wanted to use the time effectively like thinking, planning and watching/hearing some useful things. Here is a way to manage your time.

These days a lot video like TED, You Tube are made available the users to download. Those videos are in a way revolutionizing the human thinking. I wanted to copy these videos and hear it during my leisure including the time I spend in meeting waiting for others. But if you look at the video format of You Tube and TED, they are primarily flv and mp4 format. These videos are relatively large in size and I cannot have more than 5-6 videos each running for 30-40 minutes. I have a Sony Ericsson and if I convert to 3gp format I can store upto 12 videos.

I came across a nice open source tool MediaCoder which transcode audio/videos. It has numerous features. It also supports both transcoding audio and as well as video. For a selected video, the user can select audio/video CODECs. There is one feature that is quite impressive. If you select the target device (Ipod, mobile, VCD player), the software automatically chooses suitable CODEs and video format. I have converted couple of videos and stored it in my mobile. It is good that I found this software and it helps me to hear inspirational stories everyday when I drive or am puntual to the meetings :-) Thanks MediaCoder

Time Management - I feel its importance

At my office, I have been nominated for a training which I believe is going to transform me if I achieve 50% of what lies before me. I have been given quite a challenging job and sometimes I feel it is quite a big challenge. Apart from the training, I personally identified some areas of improvement and if I strike a balance between both the training and personal aspiration, I am sure that it will take me to a point where I only imagined to be in. That requires a minimum of eight hours per day of work. This excluding the usual nine hours day. For the next few months, I had to stretch a lot and work hard. But it is good that I feel that I can achieve it with hard work and dedication. I can confidently say with my seven years of little experience that it can be done. However there is one trait that I would like to change.

I am poor in time management. When I like something, I tend to forget how much it is taking my time. Sometimes the things we like be there in memory leading to inefficiency and less productive at work. So, the first thing I have to do is to allocate time and manage it. For example, the initial goal of spending not more than 30 minutes surfing (orkut, linkedin, twitter stuff) will be hard to achieve. When it comes to work, the same is the case. That makes things easier to say but hard to do it. My next aspiration is to manage my time and boost my productivity. The goals I said in the first part of post will make sense only when I manage time. If not they will exist as goals and never be converted into accomplishments. Let us see what happens

Restarting my LFY Journey

As I wrote in another post, the journey in my life as a Linux for You author is most satisfying moment. I started my career as a tester and after a year, I moved to development (made to move). My initial work was primarily on Windows but once in a while, I tend to work in Solaris. As I was working in one of Network Security products, we (Enlightened Tester and myself) tend to get excited. After a while, we had a discussion with people around our cube and those days people stop by they see some technical discussion. We were discussing how to make HIPS and slowly the discussion went on to System calls and process.

Out of curiosity, I started to dig to know what is a process and ended up creating one. Of course, those days (and even today) the only option is to have Linux as it is open and you get lot of material in Internet. I had VMWare workstation and installed Linux. Within few days, I was able to manage my virtual machine well and my after office hours encounters were in Linux with this VMWare workstation. I also started to learn about basics of POSIX Threads.

In the same timeframe, my project leader R.K. Raja wrote a series of articles in Linux for You and this motivated me to write. I thought that writing in the magazine will be difficult. While that is true to some extent, the people working at LFY deal with people in a gentle way with lot of care. I remember my interactions with all of them but the interactions with Samartha Vashishtha needs a special mention. He is a great worker and know the strengths of people. He respects people and understands other's difficulties. He replies to email very fast (sometimes even before you hit the send button) and makes the article very beautiful. With the support of LFY and the readers, by 2007 I completed around 20 articles in 3 years and wrote articles on Linux, Linux Internals, Network Security and Java. Not only my technical knowledge grew, my writing skills and hard working attitude also improved.

But, it is very sad that I lost touch and now find it difficult to catch up. I am looking forward to contribute more articles that add values to the readers. Let us see, how it goes.

Going beyond Science, Loving everything as ART

Sometime back, one my friends, Rajkumar forwarded me a link on recent economic slowdown. The author, himself an MBA from a world’s most renowned B-School, talked length and breadth about the school and powerful alumni who created the mess. I neither going to defend nor go completely against those statements. It is good that people are now realizing that “greediness” is root cause of many of the problems we see today. As Tony Robbins (refer his TED talk), any education or learning has two forms. First, the basic form of education is learning something as a science. For example, by studying atomic physics one can know and become an expert in nuclear fusion and fission reactions. They came to know the ways of making a nuclear reaction to produce massive power. However, the science does not teach or bother to teach about how to apply the education. It is up to the student to use it for a noble cause or he may choose to use it for the destructive purpose. The system’s thinker, Gerald Weinberg also says the same (forgetting the second order effects) in his book “An Introduction to General System Thinking”.

This is where the second aspect of education comes into picture. It is so difficult and almost impossible for a teacher to teach anything as an Art. Even an art (like drawing or acting or music) cannot be taught as an Art. Do not misunderstand me. The schools that teach art (like music), they do teach music as science but not as art. If you join a violin class, the guru (the master) teaches you how to place your finger and put the bow on the strings. But did he teach how to play the violin as if you are playing it for your soul. My point is that the learning anything as an art cannot be taught. The student has to immerse during education at school and go beyond that. The people at work have to immerse in work. The immersion will not be successful until the person draws inspiration from someone and also does not look up to someone for moral support or next step. When you feel, emote internally, live with the subject gracefully and for sure you will start to see the subject in art form. Then, so many things sparkles out of you like “How can I do more to my subject, how can I contribute and take it to next level for human/world/universe prosperity”. Like OSHO says, whatever you do becomes creative.

These days, taking education or doing work as science is necessity but taking education or doing work as Art is choice.

Imparting Experience to our students community

Being in IT industry, I am also one of the guys who feel that the students who graduate and comes out have known many theoretical concepts and some practical stuff at an abstract level. I feel, like others that they could more towards building skills at the college itself. While they read about software engineering and working at office, mere reading alone will not be sufficient. They need to experience it by doing projects and engaging in activities that would give them "experiential knowledge".

So, this summer, I am planning to conduct series of workshops (Saturdays and Sundays) on some with specific areas. I am also going to take this idea to some of my friends and get their inputs. Meanwhile, if you are student and willing to get this kind of learning, I encourage you to contact me via email. As of now, the idea is at an abstract level. Based on the response, we will do something solidly.

You can contact me via my email (grabyourfreedom@gmail.com)

Couple of Workshops Next Month

The next month (Apr 2009), I have signed up for couple of workshops on open source/Linux. The first workshop is to the students of Vellore Institute of Technology and I will be speaking to them on Linux Process Management, POSIX Threads and Linux Scheduler. It has been a while since I read on these areas. I have started to refresh and testing my memory power. I m quite happy with my memory power. I am able to come out with presentation slides without refering to famous Robert Love and Cesati books. Of course, I will be refering these books after completing my presentation to validate/verify the content. I would say, even preparing the presentation slides for Linux presentation itself is fulfilling. This event will be on 4-Apr-2009. Some well known dignitaries of Indian OSS community are speaking as well.

The next workshop is still conceptual stage and I am discussing with ILUC, Chennai co-ordinator Mr Bharathi Subramanian. I proposed a talk on SNORT and he came up with a brilliant idea on conduting a full day workshop on SNORT. I am going to team up with my friend and colleague S. Badhrinath. Badhri and myself have already started to have set up ready for a basic workshop on SNORT. We just downloaded SNORT source code and some attack tools. We are yet to start the preparation of presentation slides. Still, we have time for this event. This is likely to happen on 25-Apr.

Since there is a holiday season coming up, I am planning to conduct few full day workshops for students in Software Engineering, Linux, Networking, Network Security in Chennai. Let me see how far I m doing this.

Speaking Experience in OSI Tech Days 2009

Chennai is slowly picking up in Open Source initiatives and lot of events such as FossConf has started to happen consistently. There are lot of open source enthusiasts, evangelists and contributors in Chennai and other parts of Tamilnadu. In that sense, it is good to see OSI Tech Days in Chennai. My association with Open Source started about 5 years back and I was primarily involved myself in writing articles for Linux for You on Linux, Network Security and Java. In a way, Linux for You is one of the reasons why I feel connected with Open Source during my initial days. I still remember my first conference appearance in LinuxAsia speaking on "SNORT". There is no wonder why I feel special about LinuxAsia a.k.a OSI Tech Days. This year, we got an opportunity to do a workshop on Open Source Java Developers Tools. We, a team of five (Suren, Veeru, Karthik, Ramakrishnan and myself) registered for the workshop. It was a great feeling and it gave satisfaction to speak to the students/professionals. In general, I could sense that the "Open Source" was catching up everyone in Tamilnadu. Here are some of the highlights of our workshop.

We used "full Linux" (big experiment) for all the demos and presentation and I feel that Linux (Ubuntu) is equally good when it comes usability. But in performance, it is far better than Windows. The first session was on "JUnit" by Suren. He covered end-to-end on unit testing, JUnit basics with simple yet mind blowing example. Then I took my presentation on "Code Coverage". I covered basics and why we need coverage. We also asked few participants to try out the tools to make their understanding better and to convey that these tools are much easier to use. The third session was on "Findbugs" byVeeru. As usual, this gentleman was so involved in his presentation and it was great to hear some of the best practices in Java coding. The final presentation is on "Profiling" by Techie Karthik. Again, this guy proved that he is tall in concepts too. Overall, I had wonderful experience in sitting with these experts for the second time and hear their perspectives on these tools and also from the participants.

Towards the end, we met few students and answered their queries on their projects, jobs and current economic downturn. We were able to give them some geniune hope and I think, the suggestions were well received. Overall, OSI Tech Days, like other open source conference appearance gave a sense of satisfaction. We totally enjoyed the day fully with lot of fun at the conference. Here is the some of the moments clicked with the help of Kathik's DigiCam.

What should be the vision of a leader?

It has been a while after starting my journey towards leadership. There has been a lot of turbulence and inner chattering happen inside me. A lot of questions been raised, some of them are answered and some of them are left unanswered, some of them are thoughtful and some of them are thoughtless. One such question that came to my mind was “What should be the vision of a leader?” While businesses and organizations can set vision against revenue targets, customer satisfaction, growth and many fancy B-School jargons, the leadership is never thought in school. The leadership has to be an experiential learning. Either you need to have a real environment or simulated environment where you are able to create and nurture your leadership skills. Like human evolution, the leadership qualities have to evolve within you. I would like to present you one such experience and a thought that struck me during my travel. Here it goes.

Leadership is not a position, not a power, not even a feeling. Leadership is being. Why we say that Mahatma Gandhi as a leader, why we say that Martin Luther King or Nelson Mandela as a leader. Did they do all the possible best things to their men? Did they ever been given any power or position when they had been called as leader? No. But, why they have been called as leaders.

If they were slave, they never wanted to die as slaves and more importantly, they never wanted their men to be slaves and they never imagined that their future generations in slavery. They did not know how to achieve it but yet they wanted the freedom to get their share of air and their share of prosperity. When we look at the great leaders, they never fixed their eyes on the leadership pedestal but on their people, how to elevate them. They truly want to elevate them. They wanted to take their people to a place where they have been never before. Once they attained it, they never said that they were responsible for the freedom. They understood that sum of the parts is lesser than whole. And that is leadership. When you apply this to business or organization, the managers or leaders should think like this – “I want to create an organization where the people, everyday move to a new place where they have been never before.” If the leaders are able to think in such simplistic way, the answers for all the problems will be answered by the system/organization that the leader has created.

Another fulfilling moment in my life

During last September, I happen to visit Paavai Engineering College at Salem, Tamilnadu for a guest lecture on Linux. It is quite a while after that and couple of weeks before, I got an invitation through my colleague Vinoth to speak students of IT department at Sona College of Technology, Selam, Tamilnadu on Open Source and how they can learn with the help of Open Source. My friend and colleague, Sundar also been invited to speak about "How to handle change", the change from college to company.

We (Sundar, Vinoth and myself) started from Chennai on Friday night and reached Salem Saturday early morning. Vinoth's family (Parents and his brother) gave a very warm welcome. After relaxing a bit after the journey, we reached the college around 8.30 am and met HoD of IT department. We discussed and understood his expectation from us and he insisted to have an informal and interactive session. It didn't surprise us as we prepared our lectures that way and I was more than happy because I do not know to speak formally.

At 9.30am, we started the proceedings with a warm welcome by the students and staff of IT department. I started to speak about Open Source. I planned my session for about 2 hours but wrapped by session within 30-45 minutes as I sensed that the students needed much awareness on taking some areas interest and specialize in a particular area rather than focus too much on Open Source. I feel that Open Source is of much use to the students only when they specialize in a particular area. For example, one needs to know the basics of Networking and Network Security before downloading or using SNORT intrusion detection system. While anyone can download it and do ".configure; make; make install", a lot of theoretical and systematic learning is required to make their learning meaningful. With this in mind, I thought that I would give the floor to Sundar who needed to speak on "change and how to respond to it". It would give me sometime to think about what we should do. Apart from that, I thought Sundar's talk would give students enough courage to speak up and participate. It happened exactly the same way.

Around 10.15am, Sundar talked about change and it was well received and I believe he spoke for more than an hour. Then we left for a break for 15 minutes. The students were impressive on keeping up the punctuality and they were back to their seats exactly after 15 minutes. I was inspired by it. Next, we asked the students to pick an area (Networking, Network Security, Operating System, Database, Embedded) and form groups. Asked them to write down what they already knew and what they would like to know and how they would achieve it.

The view about gaining technical knowledge is not through lectures and trainings. The lectures and trainings will give only awareness. During my session, i thought I should give that awareness and motivate the students to work consistently and specialize in their area of interests. I insisted upon having good theoretical knowledge and expand the gained theoretical knowledge with the help of Open Source Software. A long term goal would be contributing to some Open Source Products and at the same time achieving the purpose of joining an Engineering/Technology course.

We had this session for about 90 minutes and then 15 minutes Q/A session. Few students were around there for another 15-20 minutes to get their questions clarified. We could see some sparks in student's mind. Overall, I had another fulfilling day at Sona College of Technology. It was also quite a learning experience for me and yet again the students showed me so many good qualities that are needed for human beings such as mutual respect and trust. Also, I would like to emphasize and inspired by the humbleness, modesty and professionalism of HoD of Department of IT and hospitality of Mr. Iyyanar, NSS Co-ordinator of the college.

Real Hero - Inspirational Story

The leadership starts with self. The leadership is belief. You cannot preach something which you do not believe and if you believe something, you have to be what you preach. While this applies to anything under the sun, these days the authentic leadership is a rare. While many people talk about ethics, integrity and professionalism, their ideologies get diluted as and when they see "some" benefits. The benefits might be money, market share or customer satisfaction. But, only very few have a strong belief in their core values and take this planet to next level. Those are people who set vision, strive hard and work relentlessly without getting fatigue and finally achieve it are true leaders. They do it not because they find it challenging but because they have belief in their thoughts and core values. Here is one such story

This morning I happen to see one such incident. It is very unusual for me to see some news TV channels in the morning but today I happen to see a small news item about an young man (around 65 to 70 years young) who has silently taken the farmers of Sourastra to next level. Sourastra is a region in Gujarat, India where the land is very dry. The region receives insufficient rainfall. Everyt ime, the farmers struggle to cultivate their lands due to water scarcity.

But this young man, started an initiative individually and made a champign aroung the region. He issued notices and took classes to the farmers to dig wells. You might be wondering what is the great the deal in digging the wells. He asked the farmers to dig wells to store water. The idea is to store rain water and use it when there is no rain. He made pipelines and directed all the rain water to any of these wells. The water that is stored in the well is used later when there is no rain. This gave a remarkable results to the farmers of Sourastra and their water problem is solved to some extent.

The leadership is a skill, core value, knowledge, belief and above all, it is the ability to bring in the transformation and lighten happiness and prosperity in the lives of your people. That is what Mahatma did, that is what Martin Luther King did, that is what Buddha did, that is what Krishna did. The leadership is not a blame game or power game. It is serving to the people and equipping them to realize their dreams. The leadership is not a position to achieve your dream and your prosperity. The leadership is taking mankind or trying to take mankind to next level of human evolution.

Interesting Lesson that I learned Playing Chess

I felt that I was not thinking properly and many of my thoughts has maximum of a year's horizon. I analyzed a bit and found out that many of my short term goals are bit successful but I noticed that I failed to interconnect short term achievements. This is mostly due to my reactive nature and I quite naturally fall in love with any technical/interesting thing I learn. The more I try to avoid or overtake that the more it overtakes me. I had no other option other than surrendering to my curiosity. With some of my relatives, I have a bad reputation on quite often switching between many things. I have so many things and so many things as highest priorities. I tend to react to developments and since the developments are very frequent, all my time goes away in context switching rather than doing actual things. It was the time, when I thought "Anyways, that is my nature and I cannot help it." But an interesting turnaround happened and here it goes.

Yesterday, being Sunday, I browsed Internet and my Linux (Ubuntu). While browsing through Ubuntu, fortunately I happen to click "GNU Chess". When I saw the chessboard, I remembered the days (probably, I should be studying 5th class or much younger) when I used to play chess with Kittu anna (Kittu anna is more like my brother and less like my neighbor). He used to win almost all the games (9 out of 10 games). But let me tell you one thing, when Kittu anna played chess with me, he never used to think that I was much younger (may be 20 yrs younger). It was the war between his brain and my brain. He never wanted to fail. While I take around few seconds to make next move, he would take few minutes. But all his moves would be clearly thought out. I had an great opportunity in my life (much early) to know and understand how important was thinking. Somehow, I missed to etch in my brain during my childhood. It is good that I learned it now. :-)

Having these thoughts in my mind and with warm heart about my childhood, I started a new game. Believe me, the game was finished in 2 minutes. Within that 2 minutes, both the computer and myself had made close to 50 moves. I forgot the fact that I was playing with computer. Without much practice and skill, I thought I was on par with the computer. While I did not think it exactly, but my moves were like that. I forgot the fact that one needed to play chess by thinking. I was thinking about my next move without thinking how my next move would affect my tenth move.

After playing more than 20 times and losing all the games, I felt that there is a basic problem in me that I should fix. The fix is simple to say, powerful to have and hard to achieve. The fix is "thinking" or "applying common sense". I am happy to discover that I do not practice "common sense". So, the last weekend, I had an important learning in my life. Let me update you how I progress in resolving my weakness.

It is absolute coincidence that tomorrow Jerald Weinberg will be coming to my home. Hold on. I have ordered the book titled "An Introduction to General System Thinking" by Jerry and it is on the way. I am hoping that it will improve my thinking capability and you can expect a lot of post of written about each page of that book.

Why I tagged under "Business and Leadership"? Because, the thinking has great deal to play in Business and Leadership which is the place I aspire to be in.

Productivity Loss - Keep a Watch

I am not quite happy with the way I read in my college. I managed to get first class with distinction without much of studying. When I reflect back today, I feel that I wasted a lot of time during my college. I was an average student until class ten and suddenly become above average in my higher secondary education. I spent lot of time in mathematics and spent many sleepless nights in working out the problems. Even in Chemistry and Physics, I preferred solving problems than theory. The two years in higher secondary passed like anything and I literally felt that those days vanished just like that. Yes, I was in the peak on my productivity. I never read something for the sake of exam and interestingly I never thought that I would get into Engineering colleges because of so many reasons.

I am grateful to my mathematics teacher Mr T. Velmurugan who inspired me. He is a person of hard work and he never delivered anything less than the best to me. Unlike other teachers, he used to solve unsolved problems (not the ones that is already solved in model sections). He had a sound voice and reaches till the last bench. I should say that my interest towards mathematics doubled after interacting with him. This is cornerstone to my career because it is this interest made to the person who I am today. If at all if I have some problem solving skills, the most of it should go to TV Master (that how we call him). He is the man of productivity.

But when I joined the college, I should say that it was a different environment and I never found anyone as engaging as my mathematics master or at least some one who creates interest. With some josh, I tried to secure college third in first semester but my performance and productivity was vanishing. Since I was away from home, I always found an easy reason not to work hard as there was no one to point out that I am doing something wrong. But again, due to my interest in mathematics, I engaged myself in doing some C, data structure programs, assembly programming and finally wrote DOS device driver too. That helped me to secure a place in HCL selection list during my campus interview. Now, I have 6.5 yrs of experience and again I have fixed feelings. I feel that I could have done more.

This is a general feeling that everyone gets as everyone's career is mix of ups and downs. If I look at my career right from my school days, I felt happy and satisfied when I was performing at peak without wasting time. Not only I felt happy but also felt that I was progressing in life. Along with performing at peak, when you make that daily improvement and spend a productive day, the feeling that blossoms is truly different and it propels us towards excellence. So, my learning about productivity and reflecting back helped me to see productivity not as short term factor but also as a long term elixir.

So, it is highly important that we make every second count by constantly watching where and how we are spending most important "TIME" factor. Ultimately, when we fail, we say "it is time". That is true, it is how we spent the "TIME".