It's that day of the leap year...

It's that day of the leap year,
Birthday on which do the school kids fear,

No idea why we have such a calendar,
So what if it was a year that is regular,

It's that day of the leap year,
Which you can keep aside for an extra beer,

An extra day it adds for you to earn your salary,
So does it add a day to everyone's diary,

It's that day of the leap year,
Between 2 seasons, it is neither foggy nor clear!

JogSessed

Realized that I have gotten so much attached and used to the jog-walk interval training each day After-A-Days-Work, that I find myself upset if I happen to miss it any day. Not just that, at times I even avoid catching up with friends or defer shopping for groceries just because I might happen to give the routine a miss on that evening.

This is quite a transformation from the situation about 2 months ago, when I just couldn't push myself out of the house to get moving. The secret to it has been just the courage and will power to get started, and once out of the comfort zone, it's now only about being with the flow each day...
Not just that, I know that once I take a break from this schedule, it'd be really difficult and painful to start all over again!

Ok now am a regular blogger, regular jogger, regular coder (it's my job!)... lets see what's next...

Not Sure...

Not sure what to write today,
Or may be am not in a mood to say,

In either case it has been peaceful of late,
As each passing day takes away a date,

Not sure how far in life I can run,
But I need to promise myself that I will have fun,

Fun with what I choose to do,
At the end I will just have myself to prove,

Not sure when would I attain that one dream,
But am sure it is not just a whim!

Never stand begging...

"Never stand begging for what you have the POWER to EARN!"

Came across this lovely quote today. Indeed very inspirational and apt at this moment for me...!

Often, these 1 liners help you get the required thrust to take the joystick of life back in your hands instead of waiting on 'auto' mode for things to happen to you.

Reminds me of a discussion I had with a chum sometime back when he quoted someone  - "Either make things happen, OR they will happen to YOU!"

Why don't you 'Sony Mix'?

Being a person who is quite often late to bed, I am in a constant habit of keeping the idiot box ON for company and just to avoid the 'deafening silence' of the night.
Have been getting 'Sony Mix' for company since the channel started a few months back. It used to play good Bollywood numbers right from the retros to the 90's to the recent ones.

However, of late I have noticed that they keep playing the same sequence of songs one after other each night. The extent of it has been so much that, I can now guess the next song to be played at least a few times despite having a bad memory :-)
Not sure if it's so difficult for them to play different set of numbers each day. Probably, they could even mix it up well in a random order each time, so that people like yours truly don't get too confident about their poor memory! :-)

Hearing something repeatedly is the best form of memorizing eh?

Complimentary Motivation!

I was at a wedding ceremony of one of my first cousins a couple of days back.
It's always a great feeling to meet close family members at a single place on such occasions. Otherwise, we are so busy with our lives that we hardly get to visit each one of them separately.

Coming to the point, the 2nd best part of the wedding was me getting some compliments for getting leaner :-) Yes, the jogging trails I have been leaving behind after a day's work each day for the last month or so has begun to give results.
And what could be a better proof, motivation and encouragement to continue doing it, than getting compliments from people in such social gatherings :-)

That apart, I have started feeling more energetic, more fresh, less stressed and of course started feeling leaner after I got back to this routine. Certainly, the self coined mantra and realization of 'Body vs Mind' has worked for me...

Sir, would you mind having your house demolished to make way for a maidan?

Came across this interview of a prominent politician in Maharashtra, who is known for his linguistic political agenda since the last couple of years.
In the interview, he was talking about the lack of facilities for tax-payers wherein they don't have any playground (maidan) to have an evening walk or recreate. He was quick to blame the local authorities for not leaving any space for playgrounds.

I have one question for him.
Sir, do you mind having your own house demolished to make way for a playground in Mumbai? That would not only help a select few to actually breathe some nice air when they get time out of their busy lives, but would also serve as a nice 'playground' for couples to sit and get cozy after dusk.

Howzzat Mr.Hypocrite?

The loud Indian Mixer grinder

Technology is everywhere right from DVD players to Cars to Pens. However, there is one thing that technology doesn't seem to have touched yet - the humble mixer grinder in our homes.

Every time I hear a mixer-grinder spinning its blades, I wonder why hasn't technology reached the blades and the underlying gears of this appliance. I can recollect the noise a mixer-grinder generates right since the time I could start hearing :)

When cars can lower their NVH (Noise-Vibration-Harshness) levels from what they were 2 decades ago, why can't these mixers which don't even generate 5% of that output be made less noisier?

Snobs amongst us!

I was at the Pune-Mumbai expressway petrol station @ Talegaon a few hours back.
Noticed that people did not even have courtesy to thank the guy who bends over 4 times per car, and probably a 1000 times per day, to fill air in the tires. If not the 2 words of kindness, they did not even bother to roll down the windows of the car to give a thanking smile.

Why do some people carry so much of attitude when they deal with such folks who are so very hard working and inherent part of the society? And the same folks get down on their knees when they come to the corporate world and deal with their seniors... such a shame!

If WE are not COURTEOUS towards such people, how would they get to learn mannerisms?

The dream to drive a Volvo bus :-)

I was always fascinated by luxury buses plying on intercity trips in my childhood. Most of them had neatly done paint jobs on them, fancy tail-lights, apart from BIG external rear view mirrors to keep track of the extra large body length.

More recently, with the introduction of Volvo and Mercedes buses my love and fascination for these buses has further deepened :-) And it has been so much that, during my regular Pune-Mumbai trips earlier by Shivneri, I used to prefer the seat just behind the driver to get a direct view of the road, the control stalks around the driver and the of course the way they easily maneuver these mammoth machines.
I remember having spoken to a few of those neatly dressed drivers of private Volvo buses on a couple of occasions, just in hope that I would be offered a test drive some day :-)

The dream still remains to be fulfilled... certainly one of the TO-DO items in my life!

Are fridays accident prone?

Couple of incidents on consecutive Fridays...

A couple of weeks back, as I was driving along my regular route to work, my new pair of shoes slipped from the brake-pedal and before I could recover from it, I had banged the car in front. Knowing my fault, I parked my car aside, apologized to the driver of the car in front, who had gotten down too to assess the damage. Thankfully, it was a bumper-to-bumper bang and did not cause much damage. The gentleman was reasonable too, and after hearing my part of the story about shoe slip, did not make a big fuss out of it.

The very next Friday, again I was driving along my regular route, an old gentleman in his 70's probably poked out his car from the roadside parking lot to brush the rear door of my car. This time, I played the gentleman :-), got down from my car looked at the wrinkled face of the man, opened the folded rear-view mirrors of his car and requested him to use it further on...

The first incident continues to give me goose-bumps if I think about how worse the situation could have been, had I knocked down any pedestrian due to the slip or worst still, had I not been able to stop in time to avoid a bigger vehicle coming my way at a busy junction.

These incidents just make me wonder if Fridays are really accident prone. The reason being almost everyone who works for a 5-days-a-week job, is really excited on a Friday :-)
Need to check if there have been any studies made on this...

In any case, the next Friday was pretty much incident free, else I would have published a study myself :-)