2009 – the year that was

As another year comes to an end trying to inscribe the good memories and farewell the not-so-good ones it gave along the way, I wanted to sit back and ponder upon what really happened in a 365 year journey(well almost). And as I started to gather some thoughts from my poor memory, I realized that this was not just an year, it was an experience that I would never forget in my life; for I learnt some of the most important lessons in life…

Work, pain, joy
My new years, unlike others’, are generally not so enthusiastic; but this was different. I was going to my first job (well Internship technically)! After 23 years, I would be landing in a company! The very thought of it filled my New Year day with all the enthu and zeal. Yeah, I did my internship at Motorola India Research Labs, Bangalore. It was at this place that I had my first experiences of a ‘real corporate world’. “They say you never forget your first job”. Well after hearing this in one of my favorite TV series, I thought it doesn’t sound so real. But, this job remains to be my ever lasting memory. Ofcourse it was not all roses; I had to learn something totally out of my knowledge, had to work with some very annoying devices, had to code in C (I used to loathe working in it earlier); but like they say, the more you run away from something, the more of it you get. 6 months of all the effort was made an ease, thanks to my mentor and the team. I also witnessed a harsh reality of professional life – job termination, how companies ruthlessly fire people in the name of cost cutting.

Life outside college
Almost every time I met some senior at college, they used to say that life is good as long as you are in the safe hands of college (and hostel tooJ). We thought – heck, we’ll have money, no assignments and tests and a whole lot of freedom. But little did we realize that those assignments were far better to tackle than the outside world, accepting the fact in a hard way; as always, life teaches you in a hard way! Some of my woes were solved since I stayed at my cousin’s place but that made way for a different problem – commutation. With 6 buses a day to change and 4 hrs to spend in transit, that was one helluva ride. But in a way that taught me to be more attentive and punctual.

Joy, fate and luck
It was all good until the completion of internship. We had a great reason to celebrate as we would be getting our M.Tech degree after 2 years of hardwork. But the bigger reason to worry about was our job. Thanks to the economic recession, we saw the worst campus placement ever in the history of our college. It was something we never expected. Despite of all the brand name and degree, we had to remain jobless for a very long time. It was during this time that I experienced my first ‘joblessness’. Everywhere I went, people were cursing the IT industry and offering free and completely unsolicited advices to join banks, power plants, what not. Damn! Some of the brightest minds had to struggle a lot to end in a job, let alone a ‘decent-pay’ job. After four months of waiting I finally got into a company. Those four months made me realize the single most important factor in success – luck. You just have to give in to it.

Even now it’s not so rosy life for some of my friends, but we all have started to accept the hard realities of life. Bill Gates once mentioned ‘Life is not fair. Get used to it’. And this year has taught me the same in more ways than one…

Minimizing dependency

There is a design pattern that we learnt recently which says exactly the same. Yeah it is of course in the realm of objects and classes, here I am trying to convey the same in the more complex domain of we human beings…I don’t understand why certain principles and rules that fit with other objects(physical) just don’t get along well with humans…this also assures me that we are special J. Enough of beating around the bush, come to the point!!!...right? Yup, gotcha! So what I was saying is that we need to minimize our dependencies in our lives. I know this is a pretty bold statement to make and even harder to follow in real life, but hey, we all can give it a try right?

Philosophers always say that our life, as a human, is very intricate web of objects, people, emotions, thoughts with ‘dependency’ among these being a very important gel that binds them together. Now though it makes our life simple in most aspects (e.g. being dependent on nature for sustenance), it so happens that sometimes, we end up wasting a whole lot of time and effort depending on other things (esp. people) to happen. One very simple case is a situation in which you depend on some other person to help you out and due to some reason, he doesn’t stand up to his word or he delays things. In this case, in all the possibility you could have saved all that time waiting for that person by working on things yourself.

But sometimes, you can’t even avoid such situations. You just have to wait and wait until things turn up and you get your work done. Most of the times, we blame it on our fate and ill-luck and unfortunately we don’t have much control over them. Some situations though can be handled by us. The only mantra that I observed to make this work is to work out things ourselves, if we can do that; and do them as early as possible. I know there are hardly any situations where you can do this, but there are such ones for certain and it is upto our attention to notice such cases and save our ‘precious’ time. After all, time is money ;)

For now, I am dwelling on the Design Patterns…

Expecting to not expect

Yeah, you read it right…never expect anything. Be it from work, people or even life. Now you might think this guy is being a real pessimist, but hold on…I assure you that by the time you reach the end of this post, you will realize what I am trying to convey and some of you might even agree with my words. Coming back to what I was saying, yeah, never expect anything…good or bad. The reason why I am saying this again and again is that lately I have realized that our expectations might not turn out to be ‘real’ in the ‘real’ world. And most of the times, we are left with grief and endless thoughts about what went wrong…where did it go wrong…etc…etc.

Back in my school days, we had a lesson that conveyed the same meaning, in an amusing way, albeit with a positive spirit. The author had, through some his real-life experiences, conveyed a very simple mantra for a happy living… “Always expect the contrary of what you really want in your life to happen”. I don’t remember how happy it made the life of others, but I surely got some good scoldings from my parents for talking ‘negative’ things. But now I realized that better don’t expect anything at all…for your own good J. And by the way, this is what even our Gita says J … ‘the cause of all sadness is your interest in things (or rather, expectations on things, life, luck, people)’

Sometimes its so annoying that what we expect not to happen does let alone something good…I guess fate has its own way of teaching the same principle. I myself have gone through so many of themL. Out of my experiences, I have realized that its not right for us to expect something. Do something because you like to do it…don’t expect the result; love somebody because you love him/her…don’t expect any reciprocation. Instead, I think its good to have confidence in what we do and hope for the best.

After all this long lecture on expectations, I still feel how difficult it is for us to not ‘expect’ something. So am I expecting anything(or nothing?)…well, I am one like you J

P.S: Thanks to my friend for his caption which stirred my thoughts to write this post.