LIFE:GOOD, BAD &UGLY

Why I love being, not in love.

nidhishgupta — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 20:05:00 +0000

Being single is not as bad as I thought it would be when I ended relationship with my girlfriend of 2 years. Its actually quite awesome. Reasons

You don’t need to be by the phone 24×7.

You don’t feel ashamed when you swear.

You can be as perverted and cheap as you want to be.

You are free to ogle at hot chics.

You can have friends.

Your telephone bills shrink to near zilch

You miraculously seem to have more money in your pockets these days.

Estranged cousin’s wedding: Episode One:The Background

nidhishgupta — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 17:39:00 +0000

Things have never been rosy between my mom and the the younger of my two buas. But the thing hit rock bottom when I was in Kenya along with my dad. It reached a stage where my mom and bua couldn’t be in the same room without heated exchange of words. The best you could expect was a namste ji with a forced smile on both their faces followed by an awkward silence.

The wedding was to take place in Pathankot, and all events including ladies sangeet and saint were to take place in Indora. The sort of place which doesn’t come up on any search results on the web and google earth says that it doesn’t exist.

It was a must for me to go for the wedding as father is not here and the mama has a very significant role to play in the nieces wedding, and if the mama is not present to perform the rites, it’s the responsibility of the son to perform them in his place.

The White Tiger

nidhishgupta — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 17:39:00 +0000

The White Tiger by Arvind Adiga is by far the piece of fiction I have read in the recent times. Its a story of how a simple village folk transforms into a ruthless murderer and then to a modern day entrepreneur.

Balram in certain ways serves as metaphor for the Delhiites .

Arvind manages to bring out the true character of Delhi. A city which has the ability to corrupt even the most innocent of people. The way balram murders his master, not because he was mistreated or demeaned in any way, but out of sheer desire to move ahead. Much like many people we all know, at least those of us who in Delhi, people who are ready to do whatever it takes to succeed.

A must read.

Contradictions

nidhishgupta — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 18:36:00 +0000

Today was one of those days when there a lot to be done, but still you don’t have anything to do. There are so many things you want to do, yet you can’t find any you can. The sort of day you want, gets over quickly, yet leaves you saddened when it does.

Contradictions, life is full of them.

All too philosophical, but look around and the world is full of them. A nation hit by the worst drought in decades, with people dying in floods. A man who invented dynamite, instituting the highest honor for promoting peace. A man traitor to one country, hero to another.

It is this nature of life which leaves me bewildered at times. Just one of those days which gets you thinking.

Government hospital: emergency ward

nidhishgupta — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 14:36:00 +0000

A week back while shifting the cooler stand downstairs id managed to injure the middle finger of my right foot. Though it didn’t hurt much to begin with, my jogging for the past few days (just two to be precise) aggravated the pain to such an extent that I came back limping from yesterdays jog.

I’d thought that i’ll visit the doctor the day after, conveniently forgetting that it’s Gandhi Jayanti.

That brings us to today.

In the morning I told my mom that I’ll be visiting the doc for a checkup, just to be reminded that it’s a public holiday today, damn!! It really hurt a great deal and I had to see the doc. Only option, go to the emergency service ward of some, hospital.

I had to go drop my mom to school as she had to take her school kids to some Gandhi mela. Since Deen Dayal Upadhaya Hospital (Govt. run) lies en route, I just went there. I was greeted in the emergency ward with people with people who had been shot in the arm, run over by a car, kid who had cracked his spine in a fall and many with less severe problems(on a relative scale)crying out loud in pain. It was an overwhelming site, comparable to scenes in Hollywood movies depicting doomsday.

After I got my “parchi” made. I described to the doc what had happened, she wrote down something on the prescription and asked me to show it to the nurse is the room next door. The nurse asked me to lie down on the bed, which from the look of it had catered to many patient with ailments much severe than mine and every one of them had left a mark on it. I guess by that time id gone into a state of Trans of sorts, or else I have never accepted to lie on the bed. She gave me a shot and asked me to go for the x-ray.

The wait outside the radiation room was no less traumatizing.

I finally got film, showed it to the doc, and i was out. Nothing serious just some muscle damage. Can begin jogging in two, three days.

No matter in how much pain you are suffering from, there is always other people suffering a hell lot more than you are.

uneventful life : regaining fitness

nidhishgupta — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 13:55:00 +0000

It’s been over week since I’ve written. Though I sit down to write almost every day. But whatever I end up writing about, is either too boring to read (even for me!!) or it just repeats what I’ve already written about in the previous posts. That got me thinking “why can’t I talk about something I haven’t written about”. The answer wasn’t very tough to find.

I haven’t been doing much.

So how do I fix it? I’m still working at that. But yes I have made an interesting decision. I want to run for the Delhi half marathon. The last time I took part in it, some two years back, it turned out to be a terrible experience. It took me the entire day to walk the entire stretch, yes walking, taking breaks every five minutes!! I took an oath that day to return to the marathon next year, fighting fit. But I gave last year’s marathon a skip and I’m no fitter today, than I was on that day.

Yesterday came my first attempt in regaining fitness. I took a jog from my place to the college and back, a good eight kilometers. When you are in a car, places seem to be much closer than they really are. Though I did manage to do the entire stretch jogging and walking, I came back home, huffing and puffing with five blisters under my feet. Though it’s been a whole good day my calf muscles still ache as I write this post, I still plan to do five kilometers today (walking only).

Hopefully no more blisters today!

The hunt begins

nidhishgupta — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 14:44:00 +0000

Since no company has visited our campus yet & my friends in the IIT’s and DCE’S are raking in some serious moolah. I decided to put my resume on NAUKRI.

The first interview call I got was from ICICI prudential offering 1.75lac per anuum.I was like hmmmmm……..four years of gand maraoing and 1.74!! not bad. I did talk to my sister a few minutes back, who clearly told me to mail them back and ask them to take the offer back and ‘shove it up’ their own arse.

There are a few R&D jobs from never heard of obscure companies, which I haven’t replied back to. I try keep myself positive thinking it’s just been three days….aur mera number ayega!!!

The day Google fails..

nidhishgupta — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 17:05:00 +0000

The mere thought that this may happen seems absurd.” Google how can they fail” would be the most obvious expression.

Please don’t get me wrong, I love Google and would certainly feel handicapped if asked not to use it. I have no reason to believe that it’s going to fail in the foreseeable future. I hope that day never comes. But companies have their own ways of finding troubles. Who would have thought about Sub Prime mortgage crises six, seven years back?

A few days back it was the anniversary of the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, CNN and BBC were running reports how the world was brought back from brink of financial catastrophe. How the US government pumped billions of dollars into Freddie Mack and Fannie Mae just because they were too big to fail.

That was the financial market, those were the financial institutions controlling large mortgages in one country ( though the biggest economy in the world but still, one country). What would happen if a company like Google, a company which almost rule’s the web was to fail. The way it’s growing on the World Wide Web, it’s already impossible for me to think of internet without Google. I bet it’s the same for many others like me. No Google search, no Gmail, no blogger, no orkut, you tube……

Happiness

nidhishgupta — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 13:27:00 +0000

There are days when those days when you don’t need a reason to be happy. Today was one of those. Of course my exams finished today, but that’s hardly any reason to be happy especially when they don’t go particularly well.

I came home after giving the test, switched on the music system, put it on full blast, woke my mom up and we danced on and on and on…till we heard our maid ringing the bell profusely (she’d apparently been ringing the bell for ten minutes or so). The funny part is I barely ever dance, and the only time I’ve seen my mom dance was the day before sister’s wedding (on the mehndi night).

You don’t always need a reason to be happy. Happiness doesn’t need an external stimulus. Today is the day I realized, that you can be happy when you want to be.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

nidhishgupta — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 15:21:00 +0000

Steve Jobs Stanford CommencementSpeech, June 12, 2005

“I am honoured to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal.

Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots. I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt verystrongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was allset for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl.

So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: “We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said: “Of course.”

My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life.

So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled intoby following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on.

Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all cameback to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography.

If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later. Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.

So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something – your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss. I was lucky. I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation – the Macintosh – a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired.

How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let theprevious generation of entrepreneurs down – that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley.

But something slowly began to dawn on me – I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over. I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world.

In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together. I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from

Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it.Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers.

Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life,

would I want to do what I am about to do today?”

And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything; all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the

morning, and it clearly showed a tumour on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order,which is doctor’s code for prepare to die.

It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I’m fine now.This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope it’s the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept.

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life.

It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow

already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary. When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalogue, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch.

This was in the late 1960′s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalogue, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid- 1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always

wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.”