The Week That Just Was: Perfect Work-life Balance!

 

And so it happens that this week turned out just the way I think every week should – a three-day weekend, followed by a three-day working week, followed by a three-day weekend.

The real work-life balance.

If you have read some of my earlier posts about work-life and balancing it you will know exactly what I mean. If you haven’t, hop over to those posts right after this [links served at the end of this one] .

The reason I take a helluva objection to the whole debate is, hell, why are we even talking about balancing our personal life and work life? It’s not two things. It’s life. And to live it in a certain way we envision it, we work.

And what happens slowly and silently without us even being aware of it?

Work gently eases in and seeps into every corner, takes hold of our thoughts and actions and finally like cancer consumes our whole core of existence, creating more and more room for itself and less and less room for us to live the life we envisioned for ourselves to start with.

And then we create professionals who come in and train us on finding the work-life balance. Irony of it all, is these people have chosen that as a profession. It’s suddenly their work to help us find that work-life balance.

And so they work through the night to prepare power point presentations to deliver their training.

People, we are all sheep on a hillside, hopelessly lost, refusing to see it, hating to admit it. 

The links I promised – It’s Not What You Think  and Words of Wisdom! | !modsiW fo sdroW

Words of Wisdom!|!modsiW fo sdroW

That nightmarish image of the vikki-vikki crying puffed up face of Sowkar Janaki flashes in my head. This feels like accidentally looking at a flash of welding torch when you have a throbbing headache. Or like having the giant slab of concrete they just layed over the new Flyover outside the airport drop on your head.

But the image of her – It is inevitable. It is not her fault really. More like that of K.Balachandar for twisting Life and File so unforgettably in our minds.

Indeed, if you read my previous post you will agree that we have today allowed the choice between Life and File become more and more complex.

Ok lets rewind a lil bit.

In the beginning there was Life. All we had was just that. Life.

Then we wanted it to become more meaningful. More rich. Qualitatively i mean. Not monetarily. So we had to work – and the File stepped into our lives.

Then we wanted it to become more meaningful. More rich. Monetarily. So more Files came into our lives.

Slowly, the thickness of the File increased. And gradually the number of files Increased. And soon, we were bringing Files back to our homes. And of course, the cardboard, dog-eared File took a digital rebirth and now you are dealing with GBs of Files that have virtually engulfed you. And gradually before we knew it, the File slowly and smoothly edged out the Life bit by bit.

Today the average File consumes about 90% of the weekday (see statistics) and, depending on your propensity to submit to the great temptation, and which part of the quicksand you let yourself step into, is consuming at least over 40% of your weekends.

Point being, we have allowed complete mix-up of priorities and we now have delusional points of view of both Life and File.

I’m typing this at some crazy speed, and haven’t paused to review what I have written. And before I let my fingers draw me farther and farther away from what really inspired me into writing this post and writing that headline the way I wrote it, let me put this image here first.

 

Source courtesy: This

That would really be wonderful.

This Sunday, I watched Al Gores An Inconvenient Truth. It is one mans cry to the rest of the world to wake up and see the truth and reality of where we find ourselves today.

And why do we find ourselves where we are today? I think it is precisely because we have allowed complete mix-up of priorities and we now have delusional points of view of both Life and File.

I could say that again. In fact I will.

We have allowed complete mix-up of priorities and we now have delusional points of view of both Life and File.

But one line he said haunts me. When he lost his presidential run narrowly (to that oaf), he said he wondered, “Now what? How do I spend my time on this earth?”

That is really the fundamental question we never ask ourselves. Perhaps because we think it means we have to make a difference and shake everything up and be noticed and receive a standing ovation.

If that is your line of thought, you are on the wrong lane.

It is about Your time. And how You want to spend it.

I have asked that to myself. I am waiting for an answer. It may take time. But when I can find an answer, I know I would have salvaged and reclaimed my Life from File. 

Now ask yourself.

How will you spend the rest of your time on this earth?

Boiledbeans City Turns Out Medium Rare!!!

I came back from Bangalore on 21st night. As you can see, it has taken me over a week to make that black dog post. This time it wasn’t because I was lazy or didn’t have anything to say. And it would have changed nothing if the Black Dog had run across the Tarmac a coupla days earlier. No.

There’s a real reason.

Microsoft Windows Vista.

Vista is slow. That’s like saying the Sun rises in the East. Water is a liquid. Or Bill Gates is rich.

A laptop with four times the processing speed as my old desktop running XP, takes three times longer to do a simple operation.

I wanted to transfer a few mp3 files to the vista laptop. I inserted the pen drive. Selected the folder, pointed at the destination folder. And selected paste.

That was on Wednesday at around 8 pm.

I have had dinner, breakfast, lunch and two shaves and the operation is now 90% complete. Ah never mind. I want to devote a whole post on Vista. To make sure I write that before your grand children steal the little time you spend on this blog, I decided I should use an XP machine.

Anyway I was talking about Bangalore and my trip.

When I landed at Bangalore, I noticed nothing much has changed. It was the same small airport I remember from the first time I had walked through when I was in school. Take my word, that was a long time ago. 

But this time, when I stepped out I was in for a rude shock. My head spun and for a moment I felt like running back into the airport from the little entrance meant for dogs. That there was absolute chaos just at the exit is an understatement. After a few minutes of being amidst the state of affairs just outside the airport, the concept of chaos that you and I have in mind seems rather like sipping a nice cocktail on a Hawaiian beach and watching the sun set.

I have no idea how they get that same small airport to deal with what, about 10 times the traffic that existed back when I first walked through that airport? Whats more, today they even allow dogs to hold DogPathe private parties on the Tarmac – sometimes KF crashes into the parties but that’s another matter.

For the rest of my stay in Bangalore, I went through significant mental trauma trying to digest the transformation that had occurred in the city.

The most obvious difference between the Bangalore I knew when I going through my mission “To B.E.”  and what it is now – and I can’t resist it –  is much like  Windows XP and Vista.

What took 5 minutes now takes about 2 hours.

There was more greenery, there were nice houses sitting on generous plots, you could move around the city quickly, both the weather and the people were pleasant and cool, but now there is too much dust, lesser greenery, plots and nicely built houses have become ugly tall apartment buildings – and the people have become impatient, edgy and less friendly.

But it was a good to be in the city again. 

Ah good old Bangalore!

Stray Plane Hits Dog….

Vijay Mallya must have thought the Black Dog would help his whiskey business soar. But he certainly wouldn’t have thought that it could also stop a Kingfisher aircraft from taking off.

You surely have read the story about the KF airline hitting a dog on the Bangalore runway. If not, click here, here or here for the report.

After reading many googled news reports on this incident, I decided there must be one dedicated to the Dogs point of view. For, except this one by The Telegraph, not one report I’ve seen mentions what happened to the poor unsuspecting dog!

SPCA, where are you? Does your concern for animals only sputter on when you see someone treating an animal badly? Or do you show concern over animals even when there is no major incident? Why didn’t one of you worry about what might happen to the dog or birds or animals if they got on the runway? Have you never heard about stray dogs wandering into the airport? Do you know they use air guns to shoot stray birds (maybe even animals, I don’t know) in the runway? Oh you heard that? But you had a flight at 4pm to catch you say?

Imagine walking peacefully on a nice night, enjoying the cool breeze. You hear some rumbling and lazily turn to see the source of the sound. A massive, heavy piece of machinery is thundering directly at you at speeds you can’t comprehend. And you simply have no time to react. All you can do is gape at the juggernaut and allow it to come and pound you into pulp in less than half a second.

What a shock it would have been to the dog!

The headlines must read, Stray Airplane Kills dog. I sat down and drafted a sort of news article that might tell the dogs point of view. So here is a JustPathe version of how the news would be in a Doggie magazine, (for the doggie, by the doggie, to the doggy). Click to view full image.

We were perhaps better off as barbaric cavemen, because we had a sense of fear of Nature and other species and more importantly, we had this awareness that we are a merely one species among 1.6 million other species sharing this earth.

For all its alleged Silicon Valley of India status, Bangalore airport has only become more an more inept. More on that in a follow up post….