Looks like I know good number of Sagittarians.

The title says it all, immediately following Pranathi's birthday tomorrow i.e. December 1st is our Naani's birthday. I've just planned some surprize for her. Am sending across a bouquet of white and yellow flowers to her door with a simple riddle inside, that I hope she will crack, if not alone at least with all the help from aunty and uncle. Hey naani, I'm just kidding I know you are good at riddles. Now this gorgeous lady must be turning 19 or 20, pretty fast than she even could imagine. Life's short get the best out of it. Wishing you all the very best for your future.

Jaya

Btw for the inquisitive ones the riddle goes like this...
"You know me by your Mom
Cracking my name needs little charm
Put all the letters 1,1,1,1,3,4,8,10,14,18 and 25 in the correct form
And you would know who I am."

Jayachandra's Blog

Happy Birthday Pran!

Time goes on. Children today are adolescents tomorrow. Adolescents today are senior citizens tomorrow. That innocent kinder-garten 'budingu' some two years ago is turning 23 yrs old today (30th November). And she already had her share of abroad work experience. She attended a 2 week critical training in Finland and just returned. I wish my best buddy Pranathi all the best in ALL her future endeavours, whatever may they be. Enjoy the D-day to the max extent babe! I wish I was with you on your birthday. Situations just didn't permit me. Sorry about that buddy.

A lost battle.

I fought a one sided battle, as in there is no second side to fight the battle. It sure should sound queer. But this is how it goes. I took certain resolutions to myself that I'd prove myself before I make a major decision pertaining to my life. As a metric of proof I chose CAT exam. I created a illusory complex that whoever wins in this battle would be the one dictating the important terms pertaining to that major life decision. There is nobody out there who are trying to impose their will if I loose. The ball is always kept in my court only. I knew its just me in the battle. But still I saw it as a test to my own capabilities. To see if I was worth making that choice. Blame it on my abilities, level of maturity and/or God's will, I somehow couldn't make it in CAT-05. And obliging my conscience I should accept that I lost in this single side battle too. Having accepted the defeat, its good that I 'close the shop, stay away and remain silent'

Is that a collapse?

Now, its all over. CAT-2005 was given. The first impression out of the exam hall is that I WILL clear all the cut-offs and should be only ready to start appearing for GDs and PIs. I was happy.Thanked God for the miracle that it appeared so to me then. Had a sumptous lunch at my fav restaurant. Returned home and relaxed for a while, attended a marriage party in exultation. The calendar day changed, its 21st November now. Got dressed up pretty nice, came to office in elated mood. Discussed with a colleague how he did his CAT, having heard the rumoured cut-offs I felt even more confident that I'm IN. But later when I opened the IMS explanatory answers key and matched with my answers I did realize I fared decent in DI and English, but went for an unfortunate run in PS. I was toooo low than the sectional cut-off mark. "Damn it", was the spike response in that immediate moment. It seemed like a collapse. Collapse of several hopes I had for my professional life and more so for the hopes I had for my personal life. But was it really so???
When I sit back and try to analyse unbiasedly what is it that is awaiting as my Destiny, I noticed some interesting findings. First of all, I'm not 'enough' mature. I'm not mature enough to set my foot in an IIM. On the more subtle side I'm not mature enough to assume what my personal life in future should be. One other thing about the way I pursued this CAT prep is... though it ought to be a goal in itself I always viewed it as a sub-goal to achieve a different goal. And my experience now revealed that, unless you pursue any goal in its sovereign sense, you just can't achieve it. If you do work **to IMPRESS your boss with your excellent work** as the primary goal, you would never be as successful at work as when you do it with the true intention **to make your work 'excellent'** as the primary goal. This is the subtle understanding of life dynamics that I couldn't seep into my mind until today.
Clearly I learnt a lesson in fact more than one.
. "Focus on what is the more important at the hour".
. As you continue to follow above lesson, what waits your reach is what you get and understand that rest is all something you couldn't wish to have.

Shirdi Sai Baba

I was of late going through a book by E. Bharadwaja about the life of baba. Based on what I could understand out of the experiences mentioned in that book, I want to share with you something. Shirdi Sai Baba is a soul with immense power. Having heard of mythological Gods (Vishnu, Siva, Krishna etc.) powers, generally a lay person needn’t understand or may even underestimate the power of Sai, but believe me in the contest of present day world he has so much control on the way things happen in this world. But he doesn’t shower grace just like that, he makes a judicious pick. Enter Shirdi with extreme faith. Faith need not be attending into the temple without shoes, taking prasadam, drinking teertham. They all are religious rituals, but faith is far above than just these. If you have faith, all the rituals happen as if automatically. Sai doesn’t happen to care much for the rituals, but tests people in their faith. Treat all religions and regions people alike. It’s a great chance that one gets in life to enter Shirdi. The ashes from the sacred dhuni is an extremely precious ‘prasadam’, forget not to get some of it when you visit Dwarakamai. Once again I repeat ‘Have immense faith in Sai when you go to Shirdi’ and you would get to experience His miracles.

Heights of amateurism...

I wanted to resort to the good old grevocab page of sidie, best buddy, Santhosh Narayana. I sometime back checked his current ufl site and by a redirection from there, or may be directly from there I downloaded the zip package of his grevocab site. Now I desperately want to get back to those grevocab tools, and so I decided to set up the whole thing on my local tomcat. After dumping the exploded contents in ROOT folder and accessing the index.shtml I realised that the links/buttons aren't actually functioning because I don't have PHP on my webserver. Then a whole half day I explored to set PHP up and that too on Tomcat. But I wasn't fully successfully, rather I wasn't even partially successfully. And just before I was about to shun the idea that there is no way I can have the gre vocab tools site for my use, I visited santhosh's web site on good old 200 website to see how it looks and good God, it still has the grevocab tools page up and running. Now I feel what I did the whole of yesterday afternoon is sheer futile bull-shit. This basic research I should have done a lot earlier, isn't it? Anyways R&D can never be waste, I came to know a few facts of PHP set up on Windows. I guess it would only help me sometime in future positively.