Destiny’s Child

Well , If your expecting to read  about pop music then you could stop here. There are always defining moments in your life, which makes you wonder What's the purpose of it ? School life is where you don't know much , also you couldn't care less. College life is where you start to know something, but you’re not sure about what things to care about. Then there is  the perfect age is somewhere between old enough to know better and young enough not to care .  I think its the 2-3 year time period  in your job after college, where you earn enough to make a living on your own , but also could support your parents , you are a force to be reckoned with, as in your opinions matter.  Looking back at those three years after college , I thought I will use this post to look at three interesting stories that helped learn along the course.

One thing that I realized early on is that, its ok to fail , its ok to make mistakes. Its possible to succeed without failing at times, the question is could you excel at new things without failing? When I first moved into development , one of my first code change had caused a build break ( or in more plain terms a compilation error ) bringing the Release engineering and Quality engineering (QE) work grinding to a halt. What made matters worse , that the change that went in wasn’t requested by QE or Product management; It’s  just that I decided to take a few initiatives that would make life of every one easier in debugging problems , by making changes in diagnostics code. For the next few days , I knew how it felt to be famous for all the wrong reasons. A colleague did say to me People who have done build breaks went onto achieve big things like becoming Development Managers ( I didn't miss the irony ) to cheer me up. I did eventually fix the issue ( which turned out to be source code version control issue rather than anything in code ) . Moving along one month into release cycle, everybody could see the benefits of the change in helping RCA issues at QE and Customer environments later on. I couldn’t help feeling more vindicated for pushing in the change. This resulted in more freedom to make changes/features coming along my way. Moral of the story , Don’t wait for things to happen , make them happen .The actual failure really is not taking the risk to move to the next level due to the fear of failing and tolerating mediocrity.

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Faces Of Recession

"A banker is a fellow who lends you his umbrella when the sun is shining, but wants it back the minute it begins to rain..!! "

- Mark Twain

I am no Paul Krugman or Amartya Sen to talk about economics. The only economics paper that I have ever read was for my Management paper in my 7th semester, that too at the eleventh hour before the exams. Nevertheless, I decided to dig deep into causes of this recession (you start looking at things seriously, only when the impact zone is nearer to you). For starters US economy has officially started shrinking, 0.5% for this quarter. What amazes me is the failure of Big Corporations in US you name it Goldman Sachs, Lehmann brothers, Merrill lynch, AIG Insurance, Citi Group, Bear Sterns, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. These are A-list corporations that attract the best management talent in the world from Ivy League, Wharton and IIM’s in India. Just to give an idea, there only 10 countries in the world whose Gross Domestic Product is larger than their combined losses (Thank God, India is one of them). So the mistakes that have been done are not only big, but it’s also done by pretty smart people ( Now , they don't look so smart, after posting losses of billlions of dollars, do they??? ).

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Yes, We Can..!!!

Well, for the most this week when ever I had managed to get my hands on the newspaper or watched TV, one man has been all over the news i.e., Barack Hussein Obama. I could not lay more emphasis on his name than this (Forget about the fact his name rhymes with Osama, there were even jokes linking him to Osama). Four years ago, no body could have dreamt that a man with a Muslim middle name, who is black with a Kenyan father who had spent his childhood in Indonesia, could be posted to the most powerful job in the world. Obama has many firsts to his name; the first black man to get presidential ticket nomination from any party in the US, the first black man to be elected has the president of US. The roots of his success were laid four decades ago. If it were not for a fifteen-year-old school girl, Claudette Colvin who refused to get down from the bus for a white man, Martin Luther King would not have launched the civil disobedience moment against discrimination against blacks. If Martin Luther hadn’t delivered the famous “I have a dream “ speech which made , then the President Lyndon Johnson sign the Civil Rights Act which outlawed the racial segregation, Obama would not have been able to run for the US Presidency. The Neo Conservatives always define a typical American to be a white educated Christian with a catholic background. By electing a black president Americans, have shattered their own myth. This is very relevant to India, where I find so many people have an obsession to look white. Especially those face cream ads in TV where a dark skinned woman always looses and the white colored woman is always looked upon as a winner. I consider those ads racially demeaning that try to create an inferiority complex among women. What’s even worse is people falling for those Ads, buying these products. I guess things like this happen only in India.

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Oil on the Boil

It was a cold night that day, after chatting for more than two hours at Barista(a Coffee Place) I and my friend separated bidding farewell to each other. On my return trip to home, the fuel in my bike went to into reserve fuel, So I just headed for a near by Fuel station. To my dismay, the Fuel station seemed to have only premium petrol. Out of no choice, I filled premium petrol on that day went to home. But the incident spurred me into thinking why there is a shortage of petrol and the oil prices being so high.To start of off, oil was pretty cheap compared to the prices it is selling now. In 1998 price of oil was around 35$ a barrel ( A barrel is roughly equal to 159 litres). Today world's most profitable company is Exxon Mobil, an US oil major with yearly turn over of 40billion dollars, thanks 140$ a barrel , oil price.

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