Happy New Year 2009

My public Wish list after a year when Santa brought pink slips is more on a defensive side. Anyway here are the top 4

Put some sense into Terrorists.
Defeat of all regionalist forces in general election
Let the markets stabilize and let there be more jobs
Get another Mahatma for our country

And private wish list has more which is out of this blog’s context.

Anyway friends my wishes for a prosperous New Year 2009

Let this New Year bring you wisdom
Let you be hale and healthy all through
May this New Year bring you happiness
May you see your dreams come true
Let 2009 get you all hidden treasures

Thought of the blog: “Not all treasure is silver and gold” Capt Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean

Feeling Vs decision

... Love is therefore a "decision". Not just a feeling. You can "make" love ...

I got a forwarded mail long time back which had this comment. And I got this again sometime last week. And even before I had got these mails I was firm believer of this philosophy. I should call it really unromantic but true :). Epics, history, poets, writers, movies and everyone like to call it a spontaneous felling.

In the same line, I also logically have a problem with love at first sight. I think love at first sight happens when you already have made a sketch of your partner in mind and you see someone who fits the bill. So in this case the decision to love was mostly taken earlier itself. At times this is so much in the unconscious mind that one does not realize the decision taken.

I feel that I have a congenital knack for giving out-of-place examples or comparisons. Continuing with that tread, first thing that came to my mind when I saw this line was my bike :). I had a bike. It was not fast, had poor pickup, it was not sporty, it was not good looking, it was too common and was popularly described as old men’s bike in college. And I was not too excited when my dad bought it for me. But once I had it I decided to love it. Soon I loved this thing much more than I expected and religiously fought any friend who called it a junk :) and any day I could state 101 good points about it.

Blogs and Recession

Recession and its effect on blogs have been on my mind for some time now. I use google reader extensively and most of the blogs are updated on weekdays or atleast updated more frequently on weekdays. Same is the case about reading blog. Even in my blog which has a very limited and select reader group (I know almost all the readers personally :D) most visits to the blog are on weekdays. Curious to know details about this I googled a bit on this. Most of professional statistics too point this (as here).

Maximum number of blog readers read blogs from office. Also many bloggers pen their blog or atleast post them from office. We may be motivated to think that with no job we have more time and this will convert to more hits on blogs. But because of office blog reading, with recession for sure the readership of the blogs should go down.

But before this low there will also be a high period when many people are on bench (reserve work force). With not much work to do these people will read blogs, increasing the hits. Bloggers on bench will write more blogs. This period may also increase the time spend on the site and revisits to older posts. This is the calm before the storm.

This thought may also motivate you to think about the reasons for increased number of posts on my Blog too. :D

Toss and Decide

Quite early in my life I started tossing a coin to decide. The earliest I remember is tossing a coin to decide if I should eat my packed lunch or throw it away as early as 3rd standard.

But at certain juncture of time someone slightly changed the way I made decision after the toss. I really don’t remember if I read this somewhere or was it word of mouth. But since then toss was a slightly more serious affair

The theory was that you could do a toss when you could not decide between two options by weighing the pros and cons. The starting steps are as usual, fix one option each on head and tail. Toss the coin and you will have your decision. Now for the slight change part…
* If at knowing the result of the toss. You say “oh shit”, or there is slight pinch in the heart. Do the opposite of what the toss said
* If the result brings a smile on your face or you feel some relief, go with the toss
* If neither of the two above happened then certainly you should let the toss decide and go with it.

And then there are more serious things where not time taken to decide but the decision itself is more critical. For this there is an extension called “devils advocate”. Here you go with decision you have got in the above process. Fight for it, reason for it and live it for a week. At the end of one week you could again do analysis on how you feel about the decision and then pick the final one. And of-course this option has the side effect of being called mad if you end up changing your decision at the end of the week.

But probably the most important part is that once the decision is made there is no looking back “fight to death to make the decision a success”

pic source: here