A giant step for the Mankind ...

The feeling that we deserve more than what we get!!!

Many a times I feel .."Oh my God! I certainly deserve better than what I got!". Do you guys also feel the same way at times?? May be when you are frustrated ... isn't it?? Now don't lie. Tell me you do! Anyways...the point is all of us try to get more out of our lives ..and some of us really work hard and smart to give life more so that life can give us back more.... And then you compare yourself to someone who you think got more than he/she deserved... :) huh ! What a feeling it is! You did a quality job putting in all your efforts but someone else took the credit ....These are very small things ...which in the long run do not matter much. What matters is that your mind is restless because you are not stretching it to its limits (?) and it tells you that life is passing you by — whizzing by real fast ? May be yes! May be No? I certainly deserve much better than this, is the constant refrain in your head.

When we think like that, are we deluding ourselves that circumstances are holding us back from the greatness we deserve and aspire for? Is it abnormal or is it the way the rest of the world thinks too? Why do we think at times that had we been with no direct relations, no societies to be face-to-face with, no one to ask a question on why we are doing what we are doing, we could have achieved more. A picture of yourself being larger than life. Quite a few people actually did exactly that and became great! Does anybody anywhere believe “This is it! This is the life I want and this is exactly where I want to be at this point in time!” Why do we all get the feeling we are in the wrong place at the wrong time?

We feel this all our professional life and feel it even more when one fine morning, we retire from work. With mental faculties that are sharper than ever, we wonder why the office suddenly doesn’t need us anymore.

So many of us feeling caught in our circumstances, rue the situation and seek to change it or may be compromise and start living with it. Is that good or bad? It can be argued both ways. A permanent state of dissatisfaction can only lead to misery and frustration, and so should be avoided. On the other hand, complete satisfaction with a situation leads to complacence and a lack of drive to achieve bigger and better!

Quite often, circumstances may be beyond our power, but we can certainly change the way we respond to them. All you need to do is step away and take a good, hard look. What is it that you really want to do with life? What is it that you hope to achieve? You can either focus on your limitations and lead a defeatist life, or resolve to turn your adversity into an opportunity and make the best of a given situation. Well! Well! Well! But even if we do, do we really take actions even when we exactly know what we need to do to get the most from our lives? Probably, we don't, may be because of lethargy or plain want of will-power! Someone may say is there an end to wanting? If you achieve what you want today, you will want something else tomorrow. There can be no peace from wanting and needing. The only peace can come from acceptance.

But acceptance sounds somewhat defeatist, unless taken in well-measured doses. We should have the wisdom and capability of figuring out what we need to accept and what needs to be challenged and overcome. The idea is not to quit dreaming and planning. Because it’s from those dreams that we evolve. The idea is simply to make sure we live life to our full potential.

For as someone said, it isn’t dying that we need to be afraid of, but of an unlived life...a life which we could have lived much better to our fullest potential ...to let the world know who we were and who we could have been!

Innovations in the early morning hours!

This is early Saturday morning and I was woken up by a phone call from India. Had to sit up and do some Google for a sample piece of code that allows to connect and transfer files from Windows machine to a UNIX machine and vice-versa. Though I have written many similar programs on a Windows box in VB6 as well as VB.Net and C# 2.0, they were all simple programs to interact with TCP/IP based servers and clients. I was not sure if this one would be different, so thought I'll give Google a chance too :D.

It came up with quite a few links but interestingly it is not supposed to be any different than whatever code I have written in the past. Still could not make up my mind to write some sample code again so early in the morning... that too on a weekend! Oh, c'mon man. give me a break!

So decided to forward the links with some sample codes.
I have started to like Google ! :). I remember, in my starting days as a programmer, we were a bunch of excited thunderbolts (Yes, all of them were thunderbolts) working @ NSDL thinking we can program any damn thing in no time. And frankly speaking WE DID!. But the code we wrote might not have been the best quality code, I guess. We wrote a full fledged PAN and TAN systems for Government of India. The architecture of the system still brings smile on my face.
We were supposed to develop a windows service. So far none of us (including our seniors and module leaders) had written a windows service. With no access to Google at that time, my module leader decided I'll have to write a program that will continue in an infinite do ...while loop. With proper CPU usage and proper handling of all possible cases, I wrote it. Frankly speaking, we were just two people at one point of time working on the system: Me and Amol Patil. Everyone who knows Amol can easily guess that it was Amol's idea :D. haha ! We got a huge client appreciation for developing the application (so called Windows service) which used to keep an eye on the changed files in multiple Windows directories on local machine and process them. We achieved processing as good a number as 14000 files a day initially which obviously went up as the aplications started cooming during early March (Tax filing time in April :)). And believe me or not, that was a huge number for NSDL and Government of India :D.
A few days later I did stumble upon a way, on local MSDN help, to implement Windows service. Though, it seemed to me to have been written in Arabic, still I managed to write my first Windows service with no infinite do ...while loop at 4 AM in the morning. :D. That was an amazing experience. I felt elated and so happy. It felt like I was the best programmer in the world :D, only to get an enlightening comment from my colleague & friend (Shaji) to stop working on desktop development projects since the world is going web.
My bragging came to an end the very same day only to bring up a new full featured intranet website the following morning! Voila! Watch this stupid guy. That again was in the early morning hours! I kept myself awake throughout the previous night to bring up my first website and I aptly named it as Victory. hehe :). Shaji brought me into the web-world! I really thank him to this day :D. Otherwise I would have remained a kid doing a lot of desktop development. Thanks Shaji. and thanks Amol.

I begin to think, all my innovations have happened in the early morning hour. Before this really gets into my head, I better go to sleep again!