About getting Lucky

One valuable lesson I have learnt from my father is there is nothing called luck. Whenever I go for an exam or something important he never says the mandatory ‘best of luck’  his only two words are “do well.” Once out of  curiosity I happened to ask him why he never wished me luck. His reply was “because there is nothing like luck, if you have prepared well you will do well, nothing else can help you.”

I thought of it, he was right. It is us who ourselves can figure out our own luck, no angel can weave a magic wand over you when you aren’t prepared for an exam. I am just taking exams as an example here, there can be a lot more instances. Someone once said “Life is not easy. We all have problems-even tragedies-to deal with, and luck has nothing to do with it. Bad luck is only the superstitious excuse for those who don’t have the wit to deal with the problems of life.” How apt these words are, why blame luck for failures in life? If you were unlucky on a certain day, who is responsible? It obviously is YOU! If you failed with something, it implies that you lacked the thing, the factor in you to accomplish it. Luck had no role to play. A person didn’t get lucky if he is earning millions today, it was because he worked hard for it, right now we shouldn’t get into the wrong and right ways of doing things.

I come from a family that firmly believes in astrology, I do not contradict or question their believes or anyone who thinks similarly. What I think is feeding a black dog on every Saturday won’t change your destiny. Your destiny is what you make of it, what you do in your life and how you do it determines how lucky you will be and what your destiny will be. Luck and destiny are somehow co-related. Both are good if you have the right kind of attitude and a person himself is responsible for his luck and destiny.

On numerous accounts my brother and I have got into debates over the luck factor with our cousin. She somehow believes luck is the sole factor of success in life and has examples to contradict. I unfortunately can’t recall any right now but I will say the right kind of attitude and a little hard work are the sole ingredients of success. If you met with an accident you weren’t unlucky, it probably was because you weren’t driving properly, if you ran out of time in an exam it was because you didn’t learn how to manage time for that particular exam. I know most of you reading this will call me a fool and contradict me strongly, probably you are right in what you believe. But at the end of the day I will believe it wasn’t my bad luck if I failed it was my deeds that lead to the situation I might be in.

The Strike Strikes

So my awesome college *pun intended* had the most amazing beginning to a week. After the worst weekend spent studying Data analysis and Algorithms (DAA,  I am still not sure of the  full-form) courtesy the new college rule of having an exam every Monday everyone decided to skip the exams and strike against the new set of rules. Here is a little insight in what those rules were:

1) Exam every Monday ( The worst beginning to any week)

2) College working on Saturdays (Weekends ruined completely)

3) Uniforms (Do I need to add more?)

4) Facebook and Youtube Banned  (We got smartphones )

Its a pleasant rainy day somewhere around 10:00 AM, people are in the exam hall, most of them appearing unwillingly, they hear a mob, the mob enters the class rooms and tears all the answer sheets, this is what happens in one of the departments. Definitely a respite for the ones appearing in the exam unwillingly. The mob has already vandalized their own department, the notice boards, the window panes were smashed into pieces. After tearing the answer sheets they proceed to the third department, by 11:00 AM the entire college is enjoying the great ‘tamasha‘. Slogans are being raised against the administration, the mob is moving from one end of the campus to the other.

The on-lookers fully equipped up with their mobile phone cameras and umbrellas are enjoying every bit of it, after all they got to skip first two exams of the  year. I wonder how horrified the freshers might have been. The faculty and the professors are running around looking clueless and the admin is still not to be seen anywhere. Imagine entering a college with police deployed outside and bus windows being smashed.

I am definitely glad the exams got cancelled, and I detested every bit of these rules and vowed not to follow them and if forced to follow I decided to skip college everyday for the next two years, but tell me was the breaking and vandalizing the college property a good way to protest? I am in support of the strike, there is no way the college would have scraped the erratic rules and uniforms( the rumor was the color of our uniform was red), but the breaking things bit was too much.

The people who today broke the college window panes, will tomorrow go harm the national property, burn public buses, stone trains. In short the country’s future will be the same as present, every problem will multiply into million others. We will never find solutions to anything, this is not pessimism, it is the harsh truth, the stark reality of what we face today. Is this what our education has come to? Today’s incident in college reminded me of the Maruti Manesar plant incident. It was a harsh realization that we were pretty close to see what happened there in our own college.

Although these mobs are nothing new, other universities witness it more often especially during university elections, they are worse. But how long can we continue ruining our education,they vandalize places where we are supposed to gain something from. It is sad we have forgotten our moral values. I wish my fellow class-mates had chosen a better to protest against the new rules.

Beer and Buddies; Books and Brew

These are the four b’s that a human being needs to live with, if I were stranded on an island either of these two combinations I wouldn’t miss anything. They help you survive anywhere and everywhere. Friends, your partners in crime, rescuers in crisis, misguides, philosophers when not in senses are the people whose company you will cherish all your lives.

You can act silly with them, pull their legs, offend them, pretend you hate them and get away with all this, although not without getting it back. They are the ones who laugh at your lamest jokes. I didn’t have good friends until I got to college, it was in college I met the people I now call friends for life. College is the perfect place to bump into like-minded crazy insane people. It is only in science opposite poles attract, when it comes to people it is the other way round.

There is nothing like having a good conversation over beer with your best buddies. That is how you stay high on life. Together they will help you survive any calamity. The two come to your rescue in the worst of situations. Last weekend we celebrated two great creations together, it was the friendship day and the world beer day. There you go, they even compliment each other this way, isn’t that just perfect? Beer is better with friends and  friends better with some beer not a lot though. I hope you did enjoy your weekend with the tow and didn’t let it go a waste.

The second combination books and brew is perfect for the times when you want to spend time on your own. A captivating book and a strong cup of coffee are enough to keep you entertained for a long time. The best sleepless nights are spent in the company of books and coffee.  It is the best way to have some peaceful, lonely and quiet time. The coffee keeps the sleep at bay when you are reading an exceptionally good book and you don’t want to fall asleep while at it.

With either the buddy and beer or books and brew combination one can forget the world around, things around seem to be simpler and more fun. So folks cheers, celebrate the companionship of these for eternity. Brew your life in a high way.

Found love in a Hopeless place?

This is my century post, 1ooth post. I thought of making it a celebration and happy post and was looking forward to write it since I had completed 95. Now I am doing exactly the opposite that s because I realized writing 100 posts is no big feat, I wrote 100 posts in two years  and a month which is approximately seven hundred and fifty  days. Now tell me does that sound good?

I started blogging because it helped me vent out what I felt at that point of time, eventually I began enjoying writing. But since then I am not sure if I have made any progress with my writing. I haven’t achieved much and this is not satisfying. Most of the stories I come up with are trashed, even I can’t bring myself to read those for the second time, let alone the readers . In last two years there have been atleast 5 times when I had the writers block. I dread it, not having anything to write is the most awful thing that can happen to a writer.

I love writing, but I am not sure if I will ever be a good writer. Therefore the title, did I find love in a hopeless place? Yeah I am forced to use the lyrics of Rihanna’s most crappy song. I think of writing a fictional novel and have lost the count of story lines I thought of and dumped. After the in-numerous tries I just have one idea now that I think will be good. This time I believe I won’t give it a second thought and just begin writing, letting it take its own course.

There are times when a write-up you think is good doesn’t get the kind of feedback you thought it will. That let’s you down, its disheartening. Anyways now I promise myself to discontinue disappointing myself. Seeing the past nineteen years of my life I guess this is the only place and thing I can do  about.  And hoping the next 100 doesn’t take another 750 days to come.

It aint cul 2 typ lyk ths

Bad grammar and spellings simply disgust me. Its erratic when someone uses sentences like ‘I lowe mah lyf, its awsm’ or something like ‘imma so sick 2day cnt go 2 sleep.’ It is just too irritating to come across such status updates. For two reasons, first no one is interested in your life’s exact details and second the spellings used.

I blame it to the SMS language, it has completely ruined English, the charm of the language is lost with such sentences and words being used. I am ashamed to admit the fact I was a part of the grammar ruining league sometime back. My facebook status in 2009 read ‘hppy nu yr’ and my texts were something like ‘ths tym I wil b mre srious.’ Doesn’t a ‘happy new year’ sound a better wish and isn’t it more conventional? Using this language is just sad and disheartening. Why does it become so difficult to type a full proper meaningful sentence? I don’t remember why I used it but I guess I thought it was cool. Which it definitely isn’t, it is just lame and wannabe.

I know a lot of people who do type like this, if its a very close friend I irritate the hell out of them until they correct it. I remember making fun of one of my friend’s boyfriend, he would always spell you as ewwww. Ewww for me is an expression of disgust. How can you even use ewww for you? If ewww get what I mean. In this the number of w’s can vary depending on the mood, if ‘ewwwwwwww’ are happy ‘ewwwwwww’ will have more w’s if not then less w’s. If you are thinking of thanking me you’d rather not say thankewwww, I will just throw a dictionary at your face instead of acknowledging ‘ewww’. I know don’t all these ‘ewww’s’ look irritating. Anyways it always gave us a good laugh and now we have a lot of ewww jokes.

Another one of these SMS words I abhor is ‘cum’,yeah you can cringe, what does one even mean by ‘I’m cuming 2 ur place’? I’d suggest first get a dictionary and then ‘come’ to my place. And if you are cuming, you should stay at your place. I sound disgusting, don’t I? Can’t help it, all the people who use such words are even more so. Just imagine what can be the consequence of a sentence like ‘I’m cuming in 5′. The list is huge I won’t go on and on making it hard for ewww to read erratic words.

So next time we talk over text messages, don’t use such spellings, although I don’t judge people, but I might end up judging you and it won’t be anything good. Ewww shld stay awy frm me incase ewww can’t stp et.

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Monster vs Me

How would a kid who doesn’t like math react if you told him he no longer has to do it? I bet he will be ecstatic and dance the night away. That’s what I feel like doing right now after my fourth semester result.

In engineering you have math upto the fourth semester and its the hardest and most irrelevant subject. Basic math is fine and required in the core subjects, but some of it is just not essential and we are taught that for no reason. So after nineteen years of being in the battle ground with the monster, I finally won, emerging gloriously after the war. The last two years were the toughest, that’s when the monster had learnt to breathe fire. Night after night in exam months I tried to devise ways to tame the monster. And finally to my disbelief the feeble efforts paid off. I scored a pretty decent score in math for the last time and I’m glad I no longer have to do it.

I’m not a very keen engineer, I enjoy nothing in it except web-designing and the only subjects I liked in two years were data communications and operating systems. Also system programming to some extend but that was for some funny reasons I’m not disclosing here. All these subjects were in 4th semester. That would mean the former three were a complete waste. But I never detested any subject more than math. It came back every semester to haunt me and screw me up. Its a good feeling to know I no longer have to pick up a math book for, let’s say eternity. Yep, that sounds awesome.

I finally nailed it, still hard to digest the fact. All I can say is, math-game over. Let’s not face each other again, because now you know who the fire-breathing monster is. *evil grin*

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Letting go

Letting go- How do I define these two words? They are easier said than done. In our lives we might have to let go a lot of things, people, desires and dreams. The hardest part of anything we do is letting go, when these words cross paths with you, you know its time to forget everything, you know its the end. Its always better that we never end up being on the letting go end.

These thoughts may sound pensive, but life isn’t all hunky dory, we do come across situations when all hope is lost and there is no way we can elucidate, the only  solution we have is-letting go. Most of us are clueless when we have to let go something, when we have to stop being the part of something, someone, a dream or whatever it is.

I am not sure how you let go something, everyone probably has their own ways of doing that. I luckily never needed to do the letting go bit in my life. I have got what I want and am sure in future too I  will get what I want. You might think I am an over-confident, over-achieving soul patronizing people. Its absolutely not true, I nearly have no achievement to my credit when it comes to bigger things in life and I am not over-confident either. Its just I learnt to believe in myself, believe in what I do, believe in people around me. I learnt to see success in small things, find achievement in every little thing I do. That probably formed bigger steps and the letting go end never came.

Letting go has two aspects to it forgiving and forgetting. If you learn the rules of two f’s life becomes easy. The forgetting happens when you want to disassociate yourself from some past happening that didn’t  leave you happy and the forgiving is something we all should learn, not everyone around us is perfect. We are prone to mistakes and repeating those mistakes, its not easy to forgive someone or even yourself for a mistake. But we need to do that, not forgiving just makes us resentful and sulky.

The moment the two f’s come easily to us we learn to let go things. I don’t say you have to let go every single thing its always better to avoid a situation that might lead you to let go. When despair engulfs you and you have no solution, absolutely no solution that is when you take the harsh decision. I hope you never really have to put yourself through this.

 

Thanks for reading, if  you made it the end.

This isn’t my cup of tea.

I can’t bargain, not at all, not with the auto-wallah, the rickshaw wallah neither while I am street shopping. I am not good at it but does it matter? I am scorned upon due to this fact, people treat me like I am an invalid when it comes to bargaining. How can one bargain? I am never going to figure out the answer to that one question.

I always end up paying double the amount of money when I am traveling alone. When I am not alone, my friends  bully the poor auto-wallah to slash the prices till he agrees. I am just a mere spectator when these deals are discussed, standing like a child awestruck with the bargaining skills of the friends. Unfortunately we don’t have meter autos in Chandigarh.

When it comes to shopping, specially street shopping I either buy it or just let it be, bargaining is not just my cup of tea. I love shopping, like anyone else from planet Venus but I didn’t acquire the requisite skills for shopping. I definitely can’t bargain and I have an entire collection of clothes that I never saw again after purchasing. Those are signs of a bad shopper.

The best bargaining I ever did was with a traffic cop on the new year’s eve. He caught me for skipping a signal, I pleaded, begged, made innocent puppy faces and after half an hour of all that he let me go. It felt glorious, I was ecstatic. I saved my driving a license and 300 bucks. Apart from that I have never really bargained.

Its not that I have not tried at all, I do try but to no avail. I have this uncanny incapability of bargaining. What’s funnier is when people around me tell me its not a good thing. Does it really matter if I can bargain or not? Won’t change the world for me. So people around me stop pestering me about it.

Things I learnt from blogging

I was apprehensive to write a blog but now I am glad I decided to write for following reasons:

1) Ever since I started blogging, I began seeing things differently, every situation has become like a story that can be told. I look at everything more deeply, look for the funny, profound, silly, meaningful angle of every moment in life. It has helped me see the beauty of life, realize how good it is. A trip with friends, a holiday with family, a day in the class are all now stories that can be told.

2) Blogging has forced me to think longer and harder about all the thoughts that race through my brain. If I want to clearly communicate something to other people then I have to clarify it for myself first.

3) It gives me sense of achievement, every new comment I get, the visitors graph that going up gets me high. I love getting appreciated for my blog (who doesn’t?). There is a feeling of accomplishing something  after every single post that is published.

4) It has brought me closer to a lot of people, build a network in the blogging fraternity, know people, their thoughts, express myself. It has helped me have an opinion on a lot of things. It has introduced me to a lot of other new blogs. I can actually sit all day long reading and commenting on blogs.

5) With every post I get to know my shortcomings as a writer, I learn how to add elements to stories, how to make them interesting. I have learnt a lot but have even more to learn. Although I love being appreciated but I always appreciate criticism too. Criticism improves my writing style.

6) It helps me express myself better, tell the world what I think. I am kind of person who doesn’t speak much and can express myself better with my writing and that’s exactly where blogging helps me- to express myself. It has taught me how to communicate with people around me.

 

 

I might have started without a reason but now I have more than one reason to continue, a blogger forever.  Everyone has a story within, that needs to be told. I started telling mine. Did you?

 

When I grow up

*this is a sarcastic post, written just for fun, I don’t intend to be what I mention in the post. Enjoy reading.*

When I was a kid, I dreamt of being an aeronautical engineer, not knowing what it exactly meant. I just wanted to be an aeronautical engineer because Kalpana Chawla amazed me. I was a around 7 or 8 when the Colombia crashed, I decided to be the next Kalpana Chawla. Sigh! That dream is now never coming true, here I am on my way to be one of those million computer engineers, who could be doing anything but engineering. My hopes came crashing down. So now that I am nineteen I have thought what to do when I grow up, grow up as in when I am thirty and should be successful.

Since engineering isn’t my forte, and I am one of the fools who realized when it was too late. I don’t see myself working in a software company. I now think of being an entrepreneur, since my dad isn’t a millionaire he can’t gift me an industry on my 21st birthday. So after my graduation, I will go for post graduation and once I save up enough money after getting a job, I will open my own chain of cafes and then expand to a posh restaurant, where the morons driving Jaguars and Audis end up spending 20k on a meal.

I’d be one of those girl bosses the co-workers dread working with, when I enter the office, the cafe, they’d throw a warning to each other “the bitch is here, get back to work.” I will fire the guy talking on the phone, yeah I will be the pure evil witch like Sandra Bullock in The Proposal. I will be that hot aunty in her thirties envied by everyone, who wears only Guess, Prada, Versace clothes Gucci sunglasses,the six inch Jimmy Choo stilettos, tag heur watches and Ralph Lauren bags. And dare you call me an aunty. Oh and I forgot using Victoria secret make-up products, or do they have any better brands? I will start practicing the six inches stilettos and make-up right away, don’t want to end up falling while my manager are warning each other, and instead of saying the bitch is here, they will discuss my fall and make fun of the bandage on my forehead or broken teeth. How horrid will the broken teeth look!

The rest of the aunties will want to wear what I am wearing, they will ask who designed my party dress and I will shamelessly reveal that a top-notch bollywood fashion designers created it exclusively for a price that can’t be disclosed. The page 3 will be ruled by me and the gossip about the hottest bollywood star I am dating. I will snap at the media and ask them to get their facts right when they ask me about it.

As I hit forty I will definitely get a nose job to look better and get rid of the scar on my nose which I find very cool. When I start getting all wrinkly, I will get a botox, and laugh shrilly when someone asks the secret of my young looks. Life will be good, spent at parties drinking vintage wine from 1869. Also I will adopt a fake accent to look cooler.

Perfect, that’s what my future is going to be like. I am so looking forward to it, somebody please get me a job soon that helps me save up the money for my first cafe or if you are kind enough give the resources to open my first cafe. I will be nice and let you be my chief manager.

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