Little things in life!

The month of July had an enjoyable end. My wife's cousins and my brother-in-law had come and we decided to be with nature most of the time during their stay in Udaipur. One of the trips we took was to the magnificent Jain temples of Ranakpur about 80 kms from Udaipur.

Road to Ranakpur

The kings of the road

The clouds descending on the valley

Company en route

The magnificent Jain Temples of Ranakpur

During the trip we realized that simple things in life actually give us all the greatest happiness.

Being with family, spending quality time with them, away from the tentacles of technology (read connectivity, the internet and its services WTF -Wattsapp, Twitter and Facebook) and work, in the lap of Mother Nature, admiring architectural prowess of an era gone by tempered with a religious flavor made this trip memorable and surreal. 

With the batteries all recharged, its time now to welcome August with full vigor. 

Things to learn from a child!

My son is five years today. In these five years, time has really flown by and we as parents and my parents as grandparents have really enjoyed this journey, a journey of new findings and discoveries. The idiom that Child is the father of man, seems bang on as a child has so many things to re-teach us, the adults, who in the process of daily mundane activities and quest for more and more materialistic pleasures in life, seem to either forget or ignore.

The top five things to learn from a child from my own experiences are as follows:

1) Live today to the fullest- A child is oblivious to the fact that there is a tomorrow and hence tries to enjoy today to the fullest. It cherishes what it has in the present and tries to enjoy it. A paper aeroplane, on day will give him as much joy and happiness as toy one, on another.

2) Small things in life actually give happiness- Last week, my son was watching "The River Monsters" on Nat Geo and he called us to watch the same. His grandparents and myself came to watch the same but my wife who was watching her favorite soap, did not come at that time. We continued watching the "River Monsters" and wifey continued to watch her tele serial.and came a little later after her serial ended. As soon as she came, my son became excited and happy. The reason, he enjoyed the fact that all of us were watching the same programme on TV at the same time. A simple small thing that gave a lot of happiness.

3) Have empathy-  The son of our watchman got hurt while playing and was crying when we came back from an outing in which my son had a great time. The gas balloon in his hand, which he himself asked for, was a reminiscent of the joyful time we had. The decibel level of crying of the watchman's son on seeing the balloon rose as he too wanted to have the same. My son initially refused to part with his balloon but when he was told about the injury that the other baby had suffered and saw his wound, be did not blink an eyelid and gave the balloon to my watchman's injured son.     

4) Be imaginative- My son lets his imagination go wild and tries to find identifiable shapes and figure in virtually everything. His main interests seem to lie in nature's own lap. He gets great pleasure in observing passing clouds, gazing at the constellations at night and trying to follow the many birds that throng the trees. Sometimes, during the monsoons, in the rain droplets on the window pane he sees numbers, patterns that the droplets make while yielding to the gravitational forces and on other occasions he can trace the face of a bear in the sky. Imagination breeds creativity and creativity is fast becoming a scare resource in today's world of standardizations.  

5) Be inquisitive and never fear to question- My son asks a lot of questions. In his vocabulary Why and How, overpower most other words. He is learning the way of life through many innocuous questions and his buzzing mind acts as a sponge, eager to absorb things. He has an open mind and that again is a very scarce resource in the present time. He is never fearful of asking questions and solving doubts, a great thing to learn from children, as lingering doubts not only have an adverse effect on a person's confidence but also have an adverse effect on his overall productivity.

All members of Blue Caramel, whether in Udaipur, Jaipur, Jodhpur or Mumbai, lets all rewind and try to recollect the traits that all of us had when we were kids, these precious, innocent traits that overtime have got eroded due to our running the "Rat Race" for more materialistic pleasures at the cost of being a better human. 

Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow!

The month of July has a range of emotions attached for me. Love, hate, happiness and sadness this month has been a witness to all. On one hand, the birthdays of some of the people I treasure most in life like my wife, son, uncle and cousin is in this month but on the other hand, this month also gave me the most unbearable pain and sense of loss, when I lost my grandfather six years ago.

Ashoke Chandra Mitter
 (My Grandpa's last photo)

My grandfather was a unique mix of serenity, aggression, religiousness, practicality, knowledge as well as stubbornness. He was fiercely proud of his roots and in spite of gaining name and fame in his chosen field, he never let it get into his head and always remained humble in life, contented but egged on by his values and principles, he had in life.

It is from him that I have been able to evolve certain ground rules for myself, taking into considerations things that happened yesterday and are happening today, so that I can have a tomorrow that has lesser number of regrets. His rules are :

1) Indulge in life but never overindulge- 
Grandfather was 87 years when he died but he still relished his malt as well as his food like he did in his younger days. He was fond of the good things in life and could never resist the chance to explore new eateries that came up in my hometown Udaipur or his own hometown of Kolkata, till the very end. But he never over indulge in anything, food, wine or for that matter in any aspect of life and that is a mantra to emulate.

2) Be disciplined and determined- 
Grandfather led a very disciplined but vivid lifestyle. A typical day of his retired life would start with morning walk and include a round of gardening (his passion), a heavy breakfast (he believed in the idea of having his breakfast like a king), getting to know about the current happenings through newspapers and news channels, 2 hours of prayers in isolation, playing with his grandchildren, socializing, consulting on issues of mining and geology, his areas of specialization and acting as the patron of community we lived in and last but not the least, religiously documenting whatever happened everyday in a diary that he kept for nearly decades of his life and he still had more energy at the end of the day, than most of us, the youngsters.

3) Today is better than two tomorrows- 
He hated procrastination. He always believed in getting things done instead of delaying them for the future. He tried to put forth the value of time to us and followed the idiom Time is Money.

       

The greatest distance!

Yesterday as I was enjoying the creations of Bach and Beethoven in a Sunday leisure mood, I inadvertently wondered about great distances probably prompted by the occasional appearance of the moon, in an otherwise overcast sky. I recollected Marco Polo's journey onto China, Vasco da Gama's foray into India and Columbus's discovery of America. Great distances these explorers traveled to garner fame for eternity. So, which is the greatest distance?

Roald Amundsen's trip to South Pole, Yuri Gagarin's space odyssey, Neil Armstrong's large step for Humanity, Thor Heyerdhal's Kon tiki expedition or even Phileas Fogg's of Jules Verne's classic Around the World in Eighty Days, who has traversed the greatest distance??

In my opinion, none, it is us all who traverse the greatest distances each day as we continue with our journey of life. Ponder carefully with what I am going to state now-

The Greatest Distance is between Today and Yesterday!   

It is a distance that is so large that we cannot traverse (at least not in the present stage of scientific prowess, where Time Machine is still HG Wells blockbuster).

But frankly speaking, since we cannot bring back yesterday, so let us divert all our energies onto our today, so that tomorrow when we look at yesterday (today's present), we don't have any qualms about our actions or inactions. 

The Half Yearly Review!

So, today is the last day of the first half of 2013. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly have taken place in the first half of 2013 both within the Blue Caramel universe as well out of it.

In Blue Caramel offices at Udaipur, Jaipur, Jodhpur as well as Mumbai, there has been nothing much to write home about but newer projects have been envisaged and executed in these last 6 months. The tie-ups with Udaipur Dopahar, Chetak Shopping and the progress of the travel handbook were some "Goods" from the first half of 2013.

In the wake of natural disasters such as the Uttarakhand Monsoon Mayhem, unearthing of more scams, the falling Indian rupee, the economy in the doldrums, the Indian cricket team being crowned the ICC Champion Trophy champion in its last edition, was probably the sole bright spot in the first 6 months of 2013.

The second half of 2013 promises much action with the unfolding of the ambitious WEB 2.0 by MyDestination.com. The launch of the monthly events of Udaipur Dopahar, the full launch of the travel handbook and taking our tie-up with Chetak Shopping to a completely new level in on the anvil.

The assembly elections in states like Rajasthan seem to be the big news from the political arena, upheavals withstanding, that will dominate the second half of the year.

The second phase of 2013, in a nut shell, promises much more than what the first half has delivered, which actually has been quite a forgetful phase for all of us.   

The Champions-Top 5 Failure to Success Stories!

In a movie of the Indian superstar Shah Rukh Khan, "Baazigar" the main protagonist states that the person who wins after being defeated is actually the Champion. The cases in which people have been successful at the very first attempt, have been very few and far between. More often than none, people have been unsuccessful and gaining experience out of the 'unsuccess', have become success stories themselves.
Following is a list of 5 unsuccessful stories that transformed into grand successes-

1) Walt Disney- As a child I was more often than none on a diet of Walt Disney cartoons & animation movies and hence it was a real shocker for me to find out that not only Walt Disney was fired from his job citing that he lacked imagination, his first venture also went bankrupt. He persisted in what he believed and was able to create the empire that Walt Disney is today.

2) Albert Einstein- This genius was thought to be mentally handicapped by his teachers as he could not speak till he was four years and was hardly able to read till he was seven. That Einstein's brain has been preserved to study the reason for his immense intellect is a testimony to the scientific acumen of the man.

3) JK Rowling- Divorced, raising a single child, fired from her job as a secretary, not really the perfect recipe for the making of the Harry Potter blockbuster series. But Rowling was not only able to stem the tide but also take into her stride, the many rejections that her Harry Potter script faced at the hands of the many publishing houses where she went.

4) Mamata Banerjee- This diminutive first woman chief minister of the east Indian state of West Bengal was termed as a mad woman, rabble rouser with nuisance value by her many political opponents. She literally rose from the ashes to become one of the most powerful politicians in India today.

5) Team India- The Indian cricket team lost all their matches when they visited England, last year. This included a drubbing in a 4 match test series as well as losses in the ODI and T20 matches. This time, the Indian cricket team went to England with a vengeance. They did not loose a single match during the tour and the successful campaign culminated into India being crowned the Champions of the ICC Champions Trophy involving 8 cricketing nations. Mahendra Singh Dhoni, whose head the critics wanted before the start of the tour, has emerged stronger after this impressive performance. In fact, MSD became the first captain in the world to have won all types of International championships- T20, World Cup and now Champions Trophy besides leading team India to the number one position among the test playing nations.

What all members of Blue Caramel need to understand is that problems and failures are momentary and continuous. But beyond each failure, there lies the sweet taste of success for which we have to persevere. Thus Failure is the mother of Success!    
   

Nature's fury-Kedarnath, Rudraprayag and the destruction of the hills

In a previous post, I had written about nature's fury. A premonition or just a coincidence, the first two weeks of June has been witness to large scale destruction in the hills of Uttarakhand state of North India due to cloud bursts and resulting flash floods. Thousands of people were affected and property worth crores were destroyed in the wake of Mother Nature's ire.

The most affected places have been the Hindu pilgrimage centres of Rudraprayag and Kedarnath. Coincidentally, Rudra, as per ancient Hindu texts, is famed to be the Lord of Storms and the storm and early monsoon rains that lashed these places not only destroyed these places and affected its inhabitants but also cause panic, misery and fatalities among the lacs of devotees who had thronged these places.

Nearly, two weeks after the disaster struck, it is again the same menace that has been dogging the country for long. The politicians are squabbling to get maximum credit during this crisis as thousands still remain unaccounted for, presumably buried under the debris or washed away by the waters or even still waiting for help to arrive. The administration is on crutches and the unscrupulous businessmen, be it road side food/water vendors or high flying aviation companies, charging their pound of flesh from the people affected by the deluge.

The only people who seem to be actually carrying on their duty selflessly during this, are the personnel from the Indian armed forces. These people have been tirelessly carrying out rescue sorties, braving inhospitable weather and terrain in search of survivors and providing relief to them. As always, these silent warriors have again given their countrymen reasons to feel proud, in these distressing times.