As BAD as it gets

12am on the morning of 17th or night of 16th, whichever way you like to look at it, I decided to switch-off the light and go to bed as I was hardly able to even hold P.G.Wodehouse's Stiff Upper Lips in my hands. But 4 hrs later, I was still awake... Unfortunately all the stupid thoughts decided to enter my head the instant the room went dark. Don't know when I finally fell asleep.

Had to wake up by 7.45am as I had a call to take at 8.30am (these days we are having two Conference Calls everyday - one at 8.30am and another at 6.30pm.) Lack of sleep, low on energy and long, possibly boring presentations on the Agenda for the day made me lose all hope of having a good day. Only positive note was I planned to leave from Office quickly to meet a good, old friend.

5 min after waking up, I'm already shouting at my dad (for something really silly, obviously). Crappy start for a day. Bad omen to start the day on. And if I had had my way, I would slept again and woke up at 11am to make a fresh start to the day. But that wasn't to happen. So I took the call from home, reached office by 9.30.. only to realise that I had no mood to work. I was already looking forward to the evening. ;)

Work can't be done without laptops... lappys are useless without Internet... and Internet isn't complete without without Facebook... So I open Facebook, and the first thing I see is that some of my friends are attending a play on Saturday. I had nothing to do on Saturday, so booked myself for the play. Within the next 15 min, a couple more friends had replied on the thread and a conversation took off which also turned sour in 10 min and I made a comment about my friend (the one whom I was supposed to meet in the evening). My day continued to be bad and I was just dragging myself within the office. What a boring day! Little did I know how eventful my day was to become towards the end.

11.50am: I get a 'hate' sms from my dear friend, "If you don't want to meet me, then say it directly". I hate such threatening messages, especially when sent unprovoked. (okay, I accept, did spark the fire).

Noon to 3.30pm: Sloooow, dragging presentations with the Client. I hated him so much. Why did he have to visit our Office. Couldn't he too have just been on one of the Conference Calls as the others.

With our egos the size of Zeppelin's in the sky, especially mine being larger than an Airbus A380, by 5.30pm, the debate with my friend had reached unstable heights. And I didn't leave Office as I had originally planned.

By 7pm discussion is now on GTalk while the topic remains the same (silly, yes, but important too) when I have to am required in the call. 7.30pm I'm back but she isn't there anymore.

I go back home, have a couple of fights with my Mom and finish my dinner. All the while, checking my phone to see if she had left any reply (Around 8pm I had asked her if it was still possible to meet and discuss). No reply yet. Told you, ego... it had bloated to the size of Titanic by now. And mine was competing with Mt. Everest already. So I sat down to write my WORST (or best?) Hate-mail ever written. It was so insulting (mostly untrue and completely silly) that even I didn't read it twice. After drafting (rather randomly typing) for more than an hour, I click SEND at11.30pm exactly the time she pings me on GTalk again.

Don't know how the conversation was meant to take-off, but once she received my mail, I could feel missiles hitting my face through the screen. It seemed as if I had pressed KILL ME instead of SEND. She literally blasted me. Misunderstanding was everywhere. She didn't get the point of the mail, nor the names I called her. She thought I called her a prostitute. I didn't. I meant something more like a slut (she isn't, but I had to call her something. It's a Hate-mail, remember?).

The conversation, rather the (1482 lines of) argument continued till 2.50am on the morning of 18th (that is about 2 hrs back). Conclusion? Same as every argument, I was right and so was she. But acting like grown-ups, staying calm and pretending to be in total control of our selves, we decided that we would never speak again. And we split up like this -

me: watever makes you happy

Her: My happiness is not in hurting the other one

so let's be

me: eh ?

2:49 AM Her: I don't want to make you feel bad as those last days again

me: ok..

thnx for saying that :)

have a good night then...

2:50 AM Her: have a good night

me: bye

Her: bye anil

I was tired (carrying that Everest-sized ego now hurt me) and laid down to sleep. As I looked back at the evening, the first thought that struck me was "WHAT THE FUCK !!!". And as I went through the mail and the conversation again, the same thought struck me over and over again until my head start aching. And by 3.30am my head became clear(er) and my ego had reduced to the size of an Amoeba. But the damage done was still the size of that largest crater (wherever it is, I think Australia. But that's not the point here.)

Immediately I messaged her on the phone praying that she hadn't slept yet. She hadn't. Obviously. Feeling foolish like me maybe. No, she still happened to be in the shoes of the grown-up. So after texting for another hour, and still sticking to our ends of the conclusion of the argument we parted ways the second time (again never to meet again, ofcourse).

I tried sleeping. Obviously I couldn't because I'm here writing this post now. Actually within 10 min after laying down my throat started hurting. Maybe this was why I was having a hard time swallowing the consequences of my actions. I just couldn't do sleep. I had to write about this.

And now its 5.50am. I feel back at IIT, except that I didn't have to wake up at 8.30am to take a call back then. I'm definitely not going to work after waking up.

I'm going to try that mind-effect, whatever it's called. You concentrate with your mind and whatever you want happens. Magic, but not quite. So I'm going to concentrate my mind on my throat just so much that my voice gets distorted, but I don't get a tumour.

Adios, baby!

F.R.I.E.N.D.S. (continued)

The original post was written on Aug 2nd. A couple of excerpts from it:

"In all my life, I have never felt as lonely as I felt April to June when I changed my priorities and placed Work before Life. It didn't take long for my company to tell me it was a bad choice."

"And since July, I have been more in the Party mood. So, I have met a lot of new people but am yet to see how many would become my close friends."

They became VERY GOOD friends. So much so that I'm almost living at their home sometimes. I feel as if it's one big family... I feel back at IIT :) My life is now spelt as N-GAL and from the past 3-weeks, you can also add D (Deloitte) to it... that's right, I'm trying to work hard again.

I have got some exceptional friends-

One has got the World's Most Laidback Attitude. Never a concern about anything and way too optimistic (even if pushed down from a 5000m high cliff, he would be optimistic to survive). One fine morning he realised he didn't enjoy his work anymore and quit his job. He does nothing now, yet he is not troubled. He is happy and enjoying.

Another is so good that she would take whatever comes along her life with a smile. Absolutely no complaints/cribbing and no bitching either - even to her boy friend (and that's the problem he has with her - she never complains. He is like me too - sadly human.)

Yet another decided that these silly jobs weren't for him, so completely drowned himself into Research work. So much so that sometimes he says he feels lonely, but the love for his work again drags him out of it.

And now the climax, I saved her for the end.

SRK is her first love and Chemistry her second. She is totally into studies (teaching or studying), done some brilliant work already and impressed her Prof. so much that he would do anything to NOT lose her. Beside all this, she manages to watch every single SRK movie 50-times (including the deleted scenes), follow F1 and support Ferrari, watch Roger Federer break world records, anchor shows in her Univ. And apart from all this, she finds free time (but how?) to catch up with all her friends.

So when I look at myself in light of such AMAZING FRIENDS, I begin to fade away. And I think,

" God, I'm just SO human. "

Don't we bother about our friends?

I just came back from a party, and while checking my mails found a mail saying someone left a comment on one of my older posts. The post was about my friends and the comment left was "everybody wants a friend, nobody bothers to be one..." I know I'm no Rajdeep Sardesai that people I have never met follow my blog as well. My guess is I must be knowing this Mr./Ms. Anonymous pretty well (although there has been an instance before when I got a comment from a complete stranger) and this comment could well be a personal remark against me...

Anyway, when I read the comment... my first reaction to it was "Yeah, so true... We all know we shouldn't be like this, yet this is exactly how we are"... and next thought was "Not really".

Afterall, every single name I mentioned on that post meant something for me. They are all friends for life and each one of them would be special, forever. Just because their schedules changed, their priorities changed or because their life took a different path doesn't mean they aren't friends anymore. Just because I don't talk to them every single minute, just because I don't try to include them in every plan of mine, just because I don't give them daily status updates doesn't mean I don't bother to be friends with them anymore. Or does it?

Besides I realised that too many closest friends at the same time never works out. We also have to change our priorities with changing circumstances.

This post is a reply to my Mr./Ms. Anonymous friend of mine. Hopefully he/she would read this.

A Wednesday

Traffic in India is bad.. and Hyderabad definitely takes the top spot for rash driving. Driving in Hyderabad is really difficult. AND if you have ever tried to drive here, you must definitely have been warned, "be careful.. some people drive very fast and go bang into others on the road".

The warning came true in my life, just this Wednesday - my first in close to an year and half. Except that, I was the one going fast as crazy. But not my mistake, it was 9am, an empty flyover - i was easily doing 70. This guy, let's say Tughlaq (apparently going to a gym in the other side of the city at 9am on a weekday) on an Activa was driving on the rightmost end of the road at 30 maybe and suddenly decided to come left after I blew the horn. There was another bike on my left and a collision was inevitable. He couldn't control his rear tyre slipping, fell down, blocking my way and I fell too. (I'm guessing he pressed both brakes hard thinking it would save him from falling.) End result, both of us were pretty badly hurt - him more than me actually.

I have always believed that "Speed doesn't kill, insanity does". While going that fast might sound insane to a few, it wasn't actually. Going slow on the right side of an empty road is insane according to me. But there was my mistake too. While I do that speed almost everyday on that road, on Wednesday my mind wasn't there. I was riding, kind of, sub-consciously and didn't notice his moments until too late.

I had my helmet, jacket, shoes on though. So, even though I had a much worser fall than him, I was relatively less injured. I have got bandages on my left ankle, left knee and both wrists, and lots of minor scratches on both legs. Obviously, no more bike or car atleast for another week. But him, he didn't wear his helmet and got hurt on the face and jaws, apart from the hands and legs.

Moral of the story -

1. "Wear your helmet - Always."

2. "Don't go too fast. One idiot on the road who doesn't follow the same traffic rules as you, and your life could change in a second."

3. "If you think someone is right next to you or might even collide with you, then try to go faster. Don't even think of braking."

Science behind "Being Lucky"

Read the article, "Be Lucky - it's an easy skill to learn" by Richard Wiseman, a psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire. I'm also copying the entire article on this post because it makes for a good, interesting read and worth maintaining an extra (digital) copy.

And tell me after reading this article, did the author mean Lucky people are Optimistic or Pessimistic, the same question I asked long ago too.

----------------------------------------------------

A decade ago, I set out to investigate luck. I wanted to examine the impact on people's lives of chance opportunities, lucky breaks and being in the right place at the right time. After many experiments, I believe that I now understand why some people are luckier than others and that it is possible to become luckier.

To launch my study, I placed advertisements in national newspapers and magazines, asking for people who felt consistently lucky or unlucky to contact me. Over the years, 400 extraordinary men and women volunteered for my research from all walks of life: the youngest is an 18-year-old student, the oldest an 84-year-old retired accountant.

Jessica, a 42-year-old forensic scientist, is typical of the lucky group. As she explained: "I have my dream job, two wonderful children and a great guy whom I love very much. It's amazing; when I look back at my life, I realise I have been lucky in just about every area."

In contrast, Carolyn, a 34-year-old care assistant, is typical of the unlucky group. She is accident-prone. In one week, she twisted her ankle in a pothole, injured her back in another fall and reversed her car into a tree during a driving lesson. She was also unlucky in love and felt she was always in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Over the years, I interviewed these volunteers, asked them to complete diaries, questionnaires and intelligence tests, and invited them to participate in experiments. The findings have revealed that although unlucky people have almost no insight into the real causes of their good and bad luck, their thoughts and behaviour are responsible for much of their fortune.

Take the case of chance opportunities. Lucky people consistently encounter such opportunities, whereas unlucky people do not. I carried out a simple experiment to discover whether this was due to differences in their ability to spot such opportunities.

I gave both lucky and unlucky people a newspaper, and asked them to look through it and tell me how many photographs were inside. On average, the unlucky people took about two minutes to count the photographs, whereas the lucky people took just seconds. Why? Because the second page of the newspaper contained the message: "Stop counting. There are 43 photographs in this newspaper." This message took up half of the page and was written in type that was more than 2in high. It was staring everyone straight in the face, but the unlucky people tended to miss it and the lucky people tended to spot it.

For fun, I placed a second large message halfway through the newspaper: "Stop counting. Tell the experimenter you have seen this and win £250." Again, the unlucky people missed the opportunity because they were still too busy looking for photographs.

Personality tests revealed that unlucky people are generally much more tense than lucky people, and research has shown that anxiety disrupts people's ability to notice the unexpected. In one experiment, people were asked to watch a moving dot in the centre of a computer screen. Without warning, large dots would occasionally be flashed at the edges of the screen. Nearly all participants noticed these large dots.

The experiment was then repeated with a second group of people, who were offered a large financial reward for accurately watching the centre dot, creating more anxiety. They became focused on the centre dot and more than a third of them missed the large dots when they appeared on the screen. The harder they looked, the less they saw.

And so it is with luck - unlucky people miss chance opportunities because they are too focused on looking for something else. They go to parties intent on finding their perfect partner and so miss opportunities to make good friends. They look through newspapers determined to find certain types of job advertisements and as a result miss other types of jobs. Lucky people are more relaxed and open, and therefore see what is there rather than just what they are looking for.

My research revealed that lucky people generate good fortune via four basic principles. They are skilled at creating and noticing chance opportunities, make lucky decisions by listening to their intuition, create self-fulfilling prophesies via positive expectations, and adopt a resilient attitude that transforms bad luck into good.

I wondered whether these four principles could be used to increase the amount of good luck that people encounter in their lives. To find out, I created a "luck school" - a simple experiment that examined whether people's luck can be enhanced by getting them to think and behave like a lucky person.

I asked a group of lucky and unlucky volunteers to spend a month carrying out exercises designed to help them think and behave like a lucky person. These exercises helped them spot chance opportunities, listen to their intuition, expect to be lucky, and be more resilient to bad luck.

One month later, the volunteers returned and described what had happened. The results were dramatic: 80 per cent of people were now happier, more satisfied with their lives and, perhaps most important of all, luckier. While lucky people became luckier, the unlucky had become lucky. Take Carolyn, whom I introduced at the start of this article. After graduating from "luck school", she has passed her driving test after three years of trying, was no longer accident-prone and became more confident.

In the wake of these studies, I think there are three easy techniques that can help to maximise good fortune:

• Unlucky people often fail to follow their intuition when making a choice, whereas lucky people tend to respect hunches. Lucky people are interested in how they both think and feel about the various options, rather than simply looking at the rational side of the situation. I think this helps them because gut feelings act as an alarm bell - a reason to consider a decision carefully.

• Unlucky people tend to be creatures of routine. They tend to take the same route to and from work and talk to the same types of people at parties. In contrast, many lucky people try to introduce variety into their lives. For example, one person described how he thought of a colour before arriving at a party and then introduced himself to people wearing that colour. This kind of behaviour boosts the likelihood of chance opportunities by introducing variety.

• Lucky people tend to see the positive side of their ill fortune. They imagine how things could have been worse. In one interview, a lucky volunteer arrived with his leg in a plaster cast and described how he had fallen down a flight of stairs. I asked him whether he still felt lucky and he cheerfully explained that he felt luckier than before. As he pointed out, he could have broken his neck.