How to not get over a girl in 500 days

I recently watched this movie, 500 days of summer and well loved it. The story line is simple. Boy meets girl.Boy falls in love.Girl doesnt. What follows after this is not pretty. So as a service to mankind(literally)I thought i will just list all the things that you should not do while trying to get over someone.

1. I can get her back
"Yes, i can get her back. She was in love with me once and she can fall in love again with me. After all we shared something special. I look back and cant imagine what went so wrong that its not fixable. " This is a rookie mistake.If she has to come back, she will. But in most cases she wont, so stop fixating on this.If she says its over it is. And about not figuring out what went so horribly wrong as the sister in 500 days of summer says "Look back."

2. We can still be friends
"We were such good friends. Maybe we can be friends.And you think in brackets(Who knows what might happen)." Again bull crap.Until you stop thinking who knows what might happen you can never be friends. Break off contact for a little while.Enjoy the other things in life. enjoy the company of your friends and that book you always wanted to read.And maybe then when you are really over her you can be friends.

3. She's not her
"She's pretty , smart and intelligent and all but she's not her."This is a possible stage 3. Yes she's not. She's a different person. Also remember inspite of her being "her" it did not quite work out for you, right.

4. Throwing yourself at everyone
"if only i find someone else i will be happy, so i will work overtime to get a girlfriend". This is another possible stage 3 and no you wont.You would probably get rejected and which will lead to depression and for some weird reason you will end up calling your ex late at night further alienating her.

5.I can get her back -2
Yes this stage can come back and bite you in the ass. After both possible stages 3 (or they may happen after each other) you think its some big cosmic conspiracy for the two of you to be together. Its not. The universe doesnt care about you. Know that.

6. Is she seeing that guy?
"Why are there so many comments/likes from my girl on this guy's facebook page? Why doesnt she pick up the phone? Is she seeing that guy?" So you are cyberstalking your ex and notice irrefutable evidence that she's definitely interested in some guy. Well, probably she isor in most cases she's not. Step 1 :Stop tapping her facebook feeds. Step 2: Get a life.

7. Is she still single
"Is she still single? Yeah why? Probably she's still not over me." Sorry mate. aint so. Probably you were such a huge car crash that she's still recuperating.

8. What went wrong?
While a post-mortem is good after every stage of your project, its not so good if you do it after a breakup and specially if you ask her, what went wrong. Dont open the pandora's box. Such bile may come out that you may not be able to take it.You will probably need a stiff drink just to get sober again.

9. Blogged: How wonderful was she?
If you are a amateur blogger, you will probably write a couple of blogs romanticizing your relationship, in the hope that she might some day come across it and realize how much you truly loved her and welcome you back in her arms. Not gonna happen. There was a poet called ghanananda in the 15th century. He was in love with a courtesan named sujan who betrayed him in a way.After that every poem he wrote he mentioned her in it. I doubt he was ever able to get over her. Get the drift!!

10. I can get her back -3
So you come across old chats with her on gmail. The good chats. Then you start reminsicing and that old bugger comes back. No mate, not possible.Its been 500 days and you have been relegated to the history books. Move on dude!!

I am sure there are a lot of other things you can do- watch lots of boy meet girl movies,bring her up in every conversation you have with a totally uninterested friend, keep all the stuff she gave you and look at it whenever you are sad,Call her up every time you get drunk. And this will definitely guarantee you dont get over her. But then when you find yourself writing a blogpost at 4:30 in the morning one and half years later; dont blame me.

You have been warned!!

Forgetting eklavya (a story)

Pratistha woke up and looked at her watch. After a moment she looked at the watch again to notice the date. It was eklavya's birthday. She sighed. Eklavya was her past, a past which she had left behind. That's what she told herself. She shrugged off her lethargy, had a bath and put on her clothes.

While she was walking to her office , a guy whistled. This was exactly the kind of thing that would drive eklavya crazy, driven him into a tirade of expletives and a morning of bad mood. She also smiled to herself about her clothes, eklavya would have never let her wear this. Although he put on a "woodstock"-ish spirit, eklavya was very conservative.

She had tried to keep eklavya in her life, but he was stubborn and overly possessive. And he was a grim reminder of the choices she had made, which included him. Those choices which had changed her, the choices which had driven her to a spiral of self loathing. It was very difficult to see him without recalling the tears that she had shed at nights when sleep eluded her and crushed dreams filled her conscious state.It was impossible to see in him a reflection of what she had almost become.

A whiff of smoke hit her.It nauseated her with the memories of eklavya smoking in her room and going on and on about something. She hated cigarettes- another reminder of him and his screwed up view of the world and love. She had told him once "the closest you have ever come to loving something is a cigarette". He had smiled and told her , he feared that was true.

The day was boring and she wasnt able to concentrate, she felt irritated and angry. She went home and ate her dinner in silence. She opened her laptop and started listening to songs. A ghazal started playing - "aaj jaane ki zid na karo". It brought back another memory of eklavya.

It was late and she wanted to go home, but eklavya had insisted she stay. Having work to do she had wanted to leave, when eklavya quietly went and put this song on his room-mate's computer. She smiled and whispered to herself - "Happy birthday , eklavya". Then she shed a tear.

Photo by zara

Oh darling , yeh hai India

This picture was taken by me in one of the industrial hubs of hyderabad. We are a nation of contradictions. Where multinational campuses exist, there also maybe buffaloes. We just learn to live with it. Also notice how the buffaloes are in a queue and not blocking the entire road. Cool rite?

Apparent Google wave invite dupe scheme

So after i recieved my google wave invite i just happened to search the tag #googlewave on twitter to see what other people were saying about google wave. Surprisingly a major number of tweets went something like this :
"Just requested my Google Wave Invite! Get yours at http://www.google.com-wave.info - #googlewave #googlewaveinvite" Have a look at the image

Now this looked surprisingly fishy so i went to the site http://www.google.com-wave.info/ and found that apparently you give your twitter username and your gmail id to these people and then tweet the above mentioned tweet and you get your invite.
I dont know about you guys but this looks like a huge scam to me.
If this is indeed a scam and you were scammed a googlewave account is not a fashion statement. Most people dont have a clue of how they will be using google wave even after getting an invite. Wait till google comes up with a wider audience with more of your friends/family on it and then get on the wave.
Till then stop coming up on my #googlewave search please.

to you, from me

photo by :Kr.b

it seems a lifetime ago since you were with me. a lot has changed since then. you. me. the world around us. with some letters you painted the memories of yesteryears in such a way that i dont quite recognise them any more. I was in denial for a long time, i was a car wreck. i still am. I have morphed into a stranger. People dont change, their intrepretations of yesterday and themselves change. the happiest days of my life are now my most tragic days. i know you would say, that siddharth you were always this way.Perhaps thats true. perhaps like i dont know you,you dont know me. You were the only girl i said i love you to. it may not have meant anything to you but now, today at this moment it means everything to me.

So i wrote this for you.only for you. i love you and at this moment i dont deserve to say this to you but its true. You were my scarlett, my dominique ,my dagny taggart and my jenny.and you always will be. I hope that you are able to love again soon and able to forget the dreadful chapter in your life story that i was. i wouldnt wish it on anyone.

I knew you would want me to get over you and get on with my life. I am trying. Thanks to my friends today i have hope in my life. i am able to dream again. but i still think of you whenever i listen to coming back to life, whenever i am happy or whenever i am sad. Whenever i feel lonely, whenever i talk to dipen. whenever i watch a lot like love( i know, i know you hated the movie :-))

Maybe some day you'll be able to smile when you think of me and i will be able to stop crying when i think of you. For my sake i hope both of these days arrive soon.

Google SideWiki - What do you think ??

I am not a google fanboy, (well i work in microsoft, so that makes sense) but cant help saying that they come out with interesting products. The latest in line is the Google SideWiki . It comes with the google toolbar and is basically a sidebar which allows you to post comments about the site. The comments that you make are connected to your google account and so there are no anonymous comments. Plus the comments that you make are also sorted according to relevance so that the topmost comments make sense. It works with IE and Firefox currently and also allows you to share your sidewiki exploits via Facebook and twitter.Pretty cool right ?

However this has managed to irk some people. The content is owned by google and not by the website. So you cant modify what will appear to be a part of your site and google will effectively change the appearance of your site. It also can eat away at the monetization models of some sites. Plus the potential of having derogatory/inflammatory comments on sensitive topics is also something people are concerned about. Leading the charge is Jeff Jarvis the author of What will Google do ?

I think its a pretty interesting development. It takes a step further to socialize the web ,however i think the concerns of people like Jeff jarvis need to be answered. Well what do you think ?? Do you think Google's moving away from its "Do no evil" motto ? Or are you excited by this latest goolgle exploit ?? Let me know for sure.

Your ideas are your new resume

A lot of people at my office ask me what's twitter ? And what's the big deal. Most of the times i have given them the usual microblogging definition, but most of them were not convinced. And also i wanted to convey why i am so interested in tweeting and the whole social media thing. Then suddenly it struck me its a way for me to share and come across ideas. That is why i am so excited about this. I love thinking aloud something on twitter and then have a great discussion with my tweeps. I come across new things, terms and perspectives.

Which brings be to the point i am writing this blog, Your ideas : How you polish them , present them and whom you discuss them with is your new resume. It may not be mainstream right now, but i have seen instances of this happening. A good presence on the web in terms of blogs, forum discussions etc allow potential employers to get a peek into your thought process and depth of knowledge. Which ideas you tweet or blog about and how you conduct yourself on the websphere while may not be always enough to land you a job but it will definitely get people interested and imagine the width of the audience - potentially the entire web.

That is why i was quite impressed by brazencareerist.com .Not only they focus on the traditional way of marketing yourself, they also encourage you to share ideas through your blogs and friendfeed. And its available to everyone. People can read your ideas and then comment about it. Finally a site i guess which combines your professional and social networking perfectly. The interface is also not as drab as linked-in (no disrespect intended) . And it will definitely appeal much more to today's 20-somethings.

Anyways, so back to my point, your ideas are your new and improved resume. Get them out, refine them and let them do the talking for you. So that's whats so amazing about twitter , getting your idea out in precisely 140 characters to potentially the entire world and thats why i tweet, my friend .

Why do i need a college degree ?

After 4 years of college and nearly one and half years of working, i havent yet found out how what i learnt in college was useful to me in my professional life. Everything i learnt in my college i easily could have learnt from the right book or from the millions of how to tutorials available on the internet. Most of my friends work on technologies that weren't on our college curriculum ,which was probably last updated in 2001. I guess this is the case with most colleges. Take any field, what is is that a college degree gives you which you couldnt have learned on your own. Its more probable now than say 15-20 years ago, what with the amount of knowledge that i available to us. All you need is a laptop and a broadband connection.


Critics to this idea may point out to my total disregard for teachers. My counterpoint to this is that i believe hands on training is much better than pure pedantism. Also with the web we have easy access to people with the same ideas and interests. Facebook groups and tweeps could replace your traditional classmates.

Then specially in India comes the question of jobs. Why will a company hire someone without a college degree. What i suggest is nothing new, introduce an internship program and give your intern/apprentice sufficient time. He will be as useful to you as any college graduate you hire after six months and also you will have a chance to correct a mistake if you hired the wrong person.

I still understand the reason for degrees in something like medicine, you cant directly intern at an hospital after a self reading of Grey's anatomy but does the same hold true for a computer programmer or even in the field of management.

Do you think i am wrong or you agree with my ideas. Do let me know.

How do social networking sites make money ??

I was quite stumped when someone asked me this question and of course the first answer that came to my head was advertising, but i wasnt quite convinced with my own answer. So i did a little digging around. And i was quite surprised with what i found.

Most of these sites (twitter,facebook) dont even have a decent revenue model. In fact Twitter hired their first business development employee just last December. And there is even a competition on for twitter's business model. Most of these startups follow the model about generating a huge critical mass(read user base) and then worry about making money. So where do they get the money for cost of operations?? Well these are the major sources of revenue for these startups. Well here's the answer

1. VC Money : Well yeah venture capitalist money is the major source of money for all these startups.

2. Advertising : Well the usual suspect is also another major source of income. Google's horse for all courses Adwords is used in Orkut and facebook also primarily depends on ads.

3. A giant doing a deal with you : Case in point Facebook.

Well that covers the most conventional ways of raising money for these sites.

Now the problem is its not working. The more number of users is translating into more operating costs and not more revenue because of the cost of holding all that data and setting up servers in countries outside U.S. and most of these increasing number of users come from Asia and South America where online advertising is not that hot and hence not generating that much revenue. Everyone from facebook to myspace to twitter is looking for that killer revenue model.

Well a problem equals an opportunity. Maybe there's another adsense/adword lurking around the corner.

By the way, this is what i know. Let me know if there are more sources of revenues for the social networking sites.

P.S.: Another question that had baffled me was How do ipl franchisees make money. Here's how.

Choices

Life is about choices, isnt it. And when you think of it like that, life somehow seems so simple. You make the right choices(ofcourse who is stupid enough to make wrong chocies or so you think) and wham! your life's awesome. Except its not really that simple. I was watching this movie yesterday night, Lions and Lambs and a collge professor tells his student that the worst part about adulthood is you dont know when it starts, And by the time you realize that you are an adult and responsible for your choicesyou are already 4-5 bad choices in it. And that got me thinking(pardon me if you think i am using the word too many times) about my life and adulthood. About how non chalantly and without thinkingtoo much far into the future i have made some decisions and lived to regret them.The funny or the not so funny part about this was that i always thought, if anything goes wrong i will be able to fix it or correct itand i always chose the thing that first came into my mind, i never thought about an alternative to those choices,never evaluated them because i always thought if anything goes wrong i will fix it. What i have come to realize since then is that some choices are for life and that sometimes you never really get a second chance and you have to live your entire life regretting the decisions that you made.I have made a hell lot of wrong ones. And what those decisions eventually did was they tinged the memories of my best moments with a bitter aftertaste which always remind me how i screwed them up.But hopefully they also left me wiser . I just wish there were one thing i could change, cos that would change everything but well life is unforgiving in this regard and we have to live the choices that we made.