Thursday, May 31, 2012
जंजिरा भेट
फणसाडनंतर आम्ही जंजिराला दुपारी गेलो होतो. जंजिरा हा किल्ला खूप वर्ष आधी सिद्धीने बांधला होता.जंजिरावर जाताना आम्ही शिडाच्या बोटीने गेलो होतो. जाताना खूप वेळ लागला. बोतीतन जाताना बोट खूप हलत होती. त्यामुळे आई फार घाबरली होती. जसजशी ती बोट हलत होती. तसतशी आईला चक्कर येत होती. नंतर आम्ही बोतीतन उतरलो. आम्हाला परत यायला पाऊन ते एक तास दिलेला होता.आमच्या सोबत एक गार्डदेखील होता. त्यांनी आम्हाला दोन गोड पाण्याचे तलाव दाखवले. पण ते आत्ता पिण्याच्या लायकीचे काय तर कश्याच्याच लायकीचे उरलेले नाही. त्या किल्ल्यावर ५३० सैनिकांना राहण्यासाठी जागा होती. तसेच आंम्हाला त्या काळच्या १ मोठी , २ मध्यम , ३ सर्वात लहान अश्या तीन तोफा पाहील्या. त्यांचे मी एक -एक फोटो काढले आणि पुढे गेलो. तर तिकडे ३ मोठे तलाव होते तसेच तेथे दोन चोरवाटा पाहील्या. आणि आम्ही परत आलो. मग आम्ही प्रवेशद्वार पहिले.हे दार फक्त राजा किवा त्याचं खास सरदारांसाठीच उघडायचे . जाताना पाउण तास लागला. पण येताना ५ ते १० मिनिटांत आलो.
नंतर आम्ही परत मुंबईला जाण्यासाठी निघालो. येताना आम्हाला पोलिसांनी अडवले. ड्रायव्हरने येताना जी गोष्ट घ्यायला पाहिजे होती ती गोष्ट ड्रायव्हरने घेतलीच नव्हती. एवढे असूनही ड्रायव्हर पोलिसांना उलटून बोलत होता. नंतर पोलिसांनीच त्याच्या कानफटात दिली. आम्हाला जास्ती फाईन भरावा लागला. मग आम्ही निघालो. तोपर्यत पाऊन तास गेलेला होता. आम्ही न थांबता वडखळ नाक्याला पोचलो. आम्ही तेथे जेवलो. आणि पुढच्या प्रवासाला सुरुवात केली. आम्ही शेवटी रात्री १२ वाजता घरी पोचलो.
उन्मेष परांजपे
IPL
The IPL 5 ended with a dramatic victory for kkr.Many people say that this was the ipl with most nail biting finishes.But this was the ipl with many controversies too.Some say that even some matches were fixed while others say it was all decided before the tournament even started.Many people after reading this would say ipl is bad ,it is mere entertainment and no actual sport,it is just to make money.But its more than meets the eye.Ipl gave opportunity to many young players playing domestic cricket to share dressing rooms with greats like Sachin, Dravid, Hussey, Gilchrist,etc. It provided them exposure and fame too.Unknown players like Bisla,Rajat Bhatia ,Pujara, Ravindra Jadeja, Ashok Dinda, Mandeep Singh,etc were recognized for their explosive batting or economic bowling.Yusuf Pathan and Suresh Raina became a household name for Indians and even got a chance to play for India.But importantly ipl provided a form of cricket which is short and fun and which can be watched by all and not just cricket enthusiasts. So is it good or bad?Its for you to decide
Wednesday, May 30, 2012
शिबिराचे महत्व जाणवून ही होणारे कमी योगदान....
Hello,
मी जेव्हा शिबिरात आले तेव्हा माझ्या आधी महेश जे माझे आधीच्या ऑफिस मधले बॉस होते त्याना जाणवले होते की मला आणि मुलाना या समाजाची जास्त गरज आहे।
मी जेव्हा शिबिरात यायला चालू केले तेव्हा माझा हाच गैरसमज होता की, आज माझी मुले एकटी आहेत म्हणून त्याना हे शिबिर खुप उत्तम आहे। जेव्हा मी खुप नियमित पणे मीटिंग ला आले आणि सगळ्या गोष्टी ज्या आजी सांगायचा प्रयत्न करायच्या त्या पड़तालूंन पहिल्या तेव्हा समजले की " I stand no where in my life"
आणि मला खुप मोठे बदल करणे जरुरीचे आहे, हे बदल जरुरीचे होते माझ्या साठी आणि मुलांच्या त्या त्या वयाच्या गरजा समजुन घेण्या साठी। माझ्या वागण्यात ही असंख्य चूका होत्या ज्याचा त्रास मुलाना होतच होता।
मग मी विचार केला जे घडून गेले आहे ते तर नीट करता नाही येणार पण येणारे आयुष्य सुन्दर करायच माझ्या साठी, मुलां साठी आणि ती प्रत्येक व्यक्ति जी आमच्या आयुष्यात येणार।
आज या गोष्टी सातत्याने केल्याने आयुष्यात एक शान्तता आली आहे।
मला असे नेहमी वाटते की एखादी चुक जेव्हा शिबिरात, रोजच्या जीवनात सारखी घडते तेव्हा कुठेतरी आपली जाणीव खुप कमी पड़ते।
या आपल्या विषयावर मी आणि जयंत जेव्हा बोलत होतो तेव्हा ही गोष्ट जाणवली की, आज शिबिराचा एक भाग म्हणून वावरताना आपल्या चूका आपल्याला कळत आहेत आणि त्या सुधारयाला सम्पूर्ण वाव देखिल असतो आणि त्याचे मुख्य कारण आहे " Acceptance" नाही तर बाहेरच्या जगात कुठे कुणाला फरक पडतो आपण कसे वागतोय किवा जी व्यक्ति चुकत असते तिला भीती असते की कोणी तरी येउन आपली चुक सांगणार। मग आम्ही ठरवले की जेव्हा आपण एवढे नशीबवान आहोत तर मग ही कृत्द्न्यतेची जाणीव सतत वाढवायची आणि पुढे येउन मदत करायची आणि जिथे आम्हाला मदतीची गरज आहे तिथे समोरच्या व्यक्ति वर विश्वास ठेवून ती घ्यायची पण स्वस्थ बसून कोणी तरी काही तरी करेल याची वाट नाही पहायची तर आज जो प्रश्न दुसरयाचा आहे तर तो पुढे माझा ही होऊ शकतो याचे गाम्भीर्य लक्षात घ्यायचे।
मेघना - जयंत
मी जेव्हा शिबिरात आले तेव्हा माझ्या आधी महेश जे माझे आधीच्या ऑफिस मधले बॉस होते त्याना जाणवले होते की मला आणि मुलाना या समाजाची जास्त गरज आहे।
मी जेव्हा शिबिरात यायला चालू केले तेव्हा माझा हाच गैरसमज होता की, आज माझी मुले एकटी आहेत म्हणून त्याना हे शिबिर खुप उत्तम आहे। जेव्हा मी खुप नियमित पणे मीटिंग ला आले आणि सगळ्या गोष्टी ज्या आजी सांगायचा प्रयत्न करायच्या त्या पड़तालूंन पहिल्या तेव्हा समजले की " I stand no where in my life"
आणि मला खुप मोठे बदल करणे जरुरीचे आहे, हे बदल जरुरीचे होते माझ्या साठी आणि मुलांच्या त्या त्या वयाच्या गरजा समजुन घेण्या साठी। माझ्या वागण्यात ही असंख्य चूका होत्या ज्याचा त्रास मुलाना होतच होता।
मग मी विचार केला जे घडून गेले आहे ते तर नीट करता नाही येणार पण येणारे आयुष्य सुन्दर करायच माझ्या साठी, मुलां साठी आणि ती प्रत्येक व्यक्ति जी आमच्या आयुष्यात येणार।
आज या गोष्टी सातत्याने केल्याने आयुष्यात एक शान्तता आली आहे।
मला असे नेहमी वाटते की एखादी चुक जेव्हा शिबिरात, रोजच्या जीवनात सारखी घडते तेव्हा कुठेतरी आपली जाणीव खुप कमी पड़ते।
या आपल्या विषयावर मी आणि जयंत जेव्हा बोलत होतो तेव्हा ही गोष्ट जाणवली की, आज शिबिराचा एक भाग म्हणून वावरताना आपल्या चूका आपल्याला कळत आहेत आणि त्या सुधारयाला सम्पूर्ण वाव देखिल असतो आणि त्याचे मुख्य कारण आहे " Acceptance" नाही तर बाहेरच्या जगात कुठे कुणाला फरक पडतो आपण कसे वागतोय किवा जी व्यक्ति चुकत असते तिला भीती असते की कोणी तरी येउन आपली चुक सांगणार। मग आम्ही ठरवले की जेव्हा आपण एवढे नशीबवान आहोत तर मग ही कृत्द्न्यतेची जाणीव सतत वाढवायची आणि पुढे येउन मदत करायची आणि जिथे आम्हाला मदतीची गरज आहे तिथे समोरच्या व्यक्ति वर विश्वास ठेवून ती घ्यायची पण स्वस्थ बसून कोणी तरी काही तरी करेल याची वाट नाही पहायची तर आज जो प्रश्न दुसरयाचा आहे तर तो पुढे माझा ही होऊ शकतो याचे गाम्भीर्य लक्षात घ्यायचे।
मेघना - जयंत
Our little squirrel
Every year in the month of April we plan to visit
my native place Gokarna in Karnataka. This year’s visit was special, as there
were five puppies waiting for me. Our doggy has given birth to five puppies in
the month of March. Also there was another surprise for us. My mama had found a
small baby squirrel in the back yard. She was very young and needed care and
protection.
When
I reached Gokarna I was very excited to see beautiful puppies. I had a very
good company. I spent my day by playing with them, feeding them, and taking
care of them. They were about 1.5 months old and one by one went to their new
homes along with their new masters. But the small squirrel was with us. I use
to feed every morning milk and cream. This was her favorite food. Apart from
this she would eat any food. Her teeth were not strong enough to crack the
nuts.
One
day when my mama was cleaning her cage, she escaped from the cage. Both of us
tried a lot to catch her, but she went up above the coconut tree. Even she had
a fight with other squirrels atop the coconut trees. Suddenly she jumped and
crossed to neighbor’s compound. I was very sad; there were tears in my eyes. My
mama assured me that though the squirrel is small but she is healthy and can
stay in the open on her own. I sat in the back yard for a long time hoping she
may return to our home. Finally I left the place and came back home.
Next day in the morning I
saw someone peeping from the rooftop. Oh! It was our own tiny squirrel. I
immediately called my ajji. We kept her favorite food near the door. She did
not come down. Mama kept the same on the rooftop. She finished the milk in no
given time. I was very happy to see our little one vary safe. This continued
for couple of days. I use to keep milk and cream for her on the rooftop. One
day the squirrel quietly entered the kitchen from the window. All of us were
surprised to see her in the house. We served some food, which she ate. Also my
mama kept the cage with the door open near the window. After few moments the
squirrel jumped in to the cage on her own.
This was the most exciting moment. No body could believe this that the
squirrel has returned to her cage after three days. My ajji suggested that we
would keep the squirrel in the cage for some more days, as she will be
protected from cats, dogs, crows etc. Before the rains starts she will be
released in our back yard.
-by
Shubham & Krutika
Dear All,
Unless consciously u understand that shibir is meant not for our child or partner, but meant for your own self, things will not fall in place. Once you understand this, then only commitment towards shibir will improve in-spite our inertia. If we prioritize Shibir at higher level, most of the time, we will be able to find time, zeal and energy to contribute.
By the way, I feel theoretically or consciously I have understood concept of Shibir from the very begining, still my contribution is not up-to the mark.
Unless consciously u understand that shibir is meant not for our child or partner, but meant for your own self, things will not fall in place. Once you understand this, then only commitment towards shibir will improve in-spite our inertia. If we prioritize Shibir at higher level, most of the time, we will be able to find time, zeal and energy to contribute.
By the way, I feel theoretically or consciously I have understood concept of Shibir from the very begining, still my contribution is not up-to the mark.
Tuesday, May 29, 2012
Guys,
As you know, we were busy this year due to Mohit's 12th and couldn't actively participate in all the activities that were arranged for us in the teenage shibir.
Throughout this year, we gradually found ourselves on a different level altogether. We implemented a plan, which, Lata Aaji had given to us for self improvement and peace of mind. Some days ago, she had presented us a book (which we already had in Marathi, but never bothered to read ). This book, named "INTUITIVE INTELLIGENCE" by Dada Gavand, contained short inspirational phrases. To add a cherry on the cake, they were accompanied by beautiful pictures which filled colours in our lives.
Every day was totally different for all four of us. The only time which we had in common was bedtime. After the stressful day we used to assemble and start discussing about the daily experiences about how our day was. For these few minutes, we were completely lost into a different world altogether. We used to read 2 or 3 phrases from this book and used to discuss on it in great detail. We all, one by one used to share our views, and what we learnt from it.These few minutes gave us excellent memories which we used to cherish for the next whole day and would be ready to combat the upco
ming tasks with a fighting spirit.
This proved to be very effective for all four of us in releiving our stress level and we could sleep peacefully by having such excellent thoughts going on in our minds.
Here's a glimpse of this wonderful book.
EVERY MORNING IS A NEW DAY
A FRESH RAY OF HOPE TO HUMANITY
IT'S A MOMENT IN TIMELESS ETERNITY
A SPARK OF OMNIPRESENT REALITY
-BY SOHAM AND MOHIT
Real or Unreal
Be it Little champs,Indian idol or even Satyamev jayate the reality of these shows has always been hidden behind the reality which you view. These so called reality shows have a lot of deals, exchange of money and purposeful melodrama in the back stage to increase the T.V ratings and TRPs . The contestants are blinded by the Glamourous prize and the Fame because of which they do not look back to take the wrong path.Often shows like Indian idol have their contestants dressed up so brightly that the audience will probably vote for him because of his looks but not for his talent. Sometimes these competetion have additional dramas like the singer while singing a love song looks at the young female judge and acts more and sings less. By this I do not mean that all are bad singers. Shows like indian idol or some dance reality shows call popular faces (mostly actors) to gain more T.V ratings and TRPs. This is a 2 way traffic as actors promote their latest films and earn quick buck. The contestants who agreed to the deal would be promoted and the real talent would be left out. Shows like satyamev jayate would have Aamir khan uncovering the dark secrets of the Indian villages which does spread awareness among us but the real stories might be modified to gain more public viewing. When you hear the victim relate the story to you people are only showed one side of the story. But is the channel doing anything to solve the problems there we dont know. But if they are showing their problems for mere
entertainment that wouldnt be right. entertainment that wouldnt be right.
गेल्या रविवारची आपली मिटींग फार चांगली झाली असं मला वाटतं. गंभीर विषय आपण पुरेशा गांिभर्याने हाताळला. दोषारोप केले नाहीत. सर्व प्रश्न संपले असाही गैरसमज करून घेतला नाही. पुढे काय करायचं याचा विचार केला.
मला आता वाटतं की याप्रमाणे चर्चा माझ्या घरी नेहमी का होत नाही? हा प्रश्न ज्यांना पडतो अथवा पडत नाही या दोघानी चर्चेत भाग घ्यावा.
मला आता वाटतं की याप्रमाणे चर्चा माझ्या घरी नेहमी का होत नाही? हा प्रश्न ज्यांना पडतो अथवा पडत नाही या दोघानी चर्चेत भाग घ्यावा.
Monday, May 28, 2012
Topic of the June for discussion
मला शिबिराचे महत्व कळले आहे. पण मी फक्त माझ्याच मुलाच्या भल्याचा विचार करत आहे असे वाटते.
याची दोन करणे असू शकतात. एकतर अशा समाजामध्ये मुल वाढण्याला किती महत्व आहे ते मी लक्षात घेतले नाही. आणि माझ्यामधली कृतज्ञतेची कमी असलेली जाणीव. त्यामुळे मी स्वताला बदलण्याचा अपुरा का होईना पण प्रामाणिक प्रयत्न केला असला तरी शिबिरासाठी माझे योगदान कमीच राहिले. याविषयी अधिक प्रयत्न करण्याचे मी ठरविले आहे.
Dear Anandmeva shibirians,
This poem took me to my childhood. Me and my brother used to play a game 'Atlas'.
From the world map we used to locate one name and the other person used to find it with some clues like which hemisphere it is in? which continent? etc...
Another thought which came into my mind is, Letty is a representative of our next generation.
She is lovingly patting the globe with her soft hands and accepting the boundries of the countries.
she showered her love towards her home in england and as a result of which the entire Europe was covered with the effect of her love.
If all our future generation whose heart is full of love put their hands together, will make a beautiful place to live in.
Archana Naik
Sunday, May 27, 2012
My experience about globe
Hello,
I was seven years old my mother got a globe for me. It
was small. I and my mother used to play one game. Mother used to tell me a name
of a continent, a country, a city or an ocean and I used to find it on the
globe. We enjoyed playing that game. Then we bought a bigger globe and I
enjoyed playing the same game even more. Initially, I just played it as a game,
but what I later realized is that I and my sister became good at memorizing
geographical details. For example name of countries, cities, rivers and various
other places. This also helped me during school exams.
Often, I was called for birthday parties of my friends, so,
as a gift, my mother always used to buy a globe for my friends. Now we don't
have a globe but we still play the game on an Atlas.
Thank you.
Vedant.
Friday, May 25, 2012
In response to Lettys world
Oh! how wonderful is Lettys world
I wish to share her joys & laughter
a world with no boundaries,
hardships & fears.
where love lasts forever
to her, all are equals
the land & sea, spread around the world
those peeping through her parted fingers
longed, her warmth & comfort
for being a part of her world
blessed is the world
innocence, clearing away the misgivings & misfortunes
for her, all is one
as she lovingly hugs
Our world.
Kiran.
Kiran.
माझ्या ग्लोब ची एक आठवण ही कविता वाचताना ....
मित्रांनो,
ही कविता वाचून सगळ्या माझ्या आणि मुलांच्या लहानपणी च्या आठवणी अगदी ताज्या झाल्या।
आम्ही जेव्हा त्या कवितेबद्दल बोललो तेव्हा सगळ्या केलेल्या मजा आणि नविन शिकलेल्या गोष्टी आठवत होत्या।
वेदांत लिहायला उत्सुक आहे म्हणून मी या मुलांची आठवण नाही तर माझ्या लहानपणी ची आठवण सांगते।
आम्ही लहान होतो तेव्हा आमच्या घरी ग्लोब नव्हता पण आमच्या शाळेत आमचे भुगोलाचे सर ग्लोब शिवाय वर्गात यायचे नाहीत। पण नेहमी आमचा खेळ असायचा तो म्हणजे भारत शोधायचा। आमचे सर आमचा एक खेळ घ्यायचे ज्यात ते दोन ग्रुप बनवायचे आणि प्रत्येक ग्रुप ला ग्लोब बघून एक प्लेस ठरवायची आणि प्लेसबद्दल ची माहीती ( कॉन्टिनेंट, शेजारचा देश इति) असे क्लू द्यायचे आणि दूसरा ग्रुप तो देश २ मिनिट मधे ग्लोब वर शोधायचा। मग आमचा ग्रुप लीडर ते पॉइंट्स वर्षाच्या शेवटी पर्यंत ठेवायचा आणि वार्षिक परिक्षे आधी आम्ही कोण जिंकले ते पहायचो।
पुढे जेव्हा ते सर नसायचे तेव्हा ही आम्ही तो खेळ ग्लोब नसतानाही आटालास वापरून चालू ठेवला।
मी जेव्हा पहिल्यांदा ग्लोब आणला होता तेव्हा मुले शाळेत होती आणि मी दोघाना हा खेळ शिकवला आणि नियमित पणे आम्ही तो खेळ चालू ठेवला आणि मुलांची तर शाळेतपण अटलास ने, आणि घरी आल्यावर ग्लोब घेउन खुप मजा करायचे आणि म्हणुनच दोघानाही भूगोल अणि इतिहास ह्या विषयाचा अभ्यास फार सोपा आणि मजेशीर वाटतो।
मेघना.
ही कविता वाचून सगळ्या माझ्या आणि मुलांच्या लहानपणी च्या आठवणी अगदी ताज्या झाल्या।
आम्ही जेव्हा त्या कवितेबद्दल बोललो तेव्हा सगळ्या केलेल्या मजा आणि नविन शिकलेल्या गोष्टी आठवत होत्या।
वेदांत लिहायला उत्सुक आहे म्हणून मी या मुलांची आठवण नाही तर माझ्या लहानपणी ची आठवण सांगते।
आम्ही लहान होतो तेव्हा आमच्या घरी ग्लोब नव्हता पण आमच्या शाळेत आमचे भुगोलाचे सर ग्लोब शिवाय वर्गात यायचे नाहीत। पण नेहमी आमचा खेळ असायचा तो म्हणजे भारत शोधायचा। आमचे सर आमचा एक खेळ घ्यायचे ज्यात ते दोन ग्रुप बनवायचे आणि प्रत्येक ग्रुप ला ग्लोब बघून एक प्लेस ठरवायची आणि प्लेसबद्दल ची माहीती ( कॉन्टिनेंट, शेजारचा देश इति) असे क्लू द्यायचे आणि दूसरा ग्रुप तो देश २ मिनिट मधे ग्लोब वर शोधायचा। मग आमचा ग्रुप लीडर ते पॉइंट्स वर्षाच्या शेवटी पर्यंत ठेवायचा आणि वार्षिक परिक्षे आधी आम्ही कोण जिंकले ते पहायचो।
पुढे जेव्हा ते सर नसायचे तेव्हा ही आम्ही तो खेळ ग्लोब नसतानाही आटालास वापरून चालू ठेवला।
मी जेव्हा पहिल्यांदा ग्लोब आणला होता तेव्हा मुले शाळेत होती आणि मी दोघाना हा खेळ शिकवला आणि नियमित पणे आम्ही तो खेळ चालू ठेवला आणि मुलांची तर शाळेतपण अटलास ने, आणि घरी आल्यावर ग्लोब घेउन खुप मजा करायचे आणि म्हणुनच दोघानाही भूगोल अणि इतिहास ह्या विषयाचा अभ्यास फार सोपा आणि मजेशीर वाटतो।
मेघना.
Repost of the first post
Dear All,
It’s a pleasure to see the high level of activity on the
blog. Let us hope that this continues. Many of us have joined the blog in past
few months so it is likely that the first post dated 19th Nov.2010, posted
by Neil regarding the purpose, and the do’s and don’ts of the blog are not read.
So I am reproducing the said post for your easy reference :
Welcome to the Chequebook!
Friday, November 19, 2010
Welcome to the online Chequebook facility of Bank Anandmewa!
Whats this?
One of the main reasons behind creating this Chequebook is to give all of us a suitable platform to express ourselves. And to have a meaningful discussion on what each one of us has to say. Children, teenagers, parents, everyone.
So all of you are welcome to share your thoughts, writings, comments, photography, opinions etc here. You can share your autobiography of Rancho, travelogue on the latest bird watching trip, your analysis on the current art exhibition on display at Jehangir, your attempt at Nature photography, your thoughts on the latest movie, the new trick you learnt in Origami or even your thoughts about relationships, emotions and life in general. Basically, anything that you would like to share with the group.
In fact, the success of this experiment depends on your active contributions.
Why here? And how does this work?
Welcome to the world of blogs (Blogger is Google's blogging website). Blogs are a very powerful platform to express yourselves on the internet. Millions of people have their own blogs and they make it a point to upload new content from time to time. You can write, upload, comment and share with a Blogger profile which can be created with the help of your gmail / Google account. If you havent ever read blogs, you really should go through a few. Blogs are way more cooler, effective and exclusive than social networking sites like Facebook. (honestly, lets face it. The whole world is on Facebook, including people you wish weren't). Blogs take you beyond the cosmetic 'Face' and let you read the entire 'Book'!
Now, this blog : www.thechequebook.blogspot.com is a close-ended private blog. Which means that it will be visible and accessible only to members of the Anandmewa family. And everyone of us will be ACTIVE CONTRIBUTORS. Which means that all of us can upload content on the blog, read all the content that is uploaded and comment on the content which has been uploaded by the others.
To do this, you first need to have an active gmail account.
Then, an invite will be sent to you on your gmail id which you need to accept.
Lastly, you need to create a blogger profile so that you can contribute.
(Dont worry. Even if this sounds complicated, it is very easy. And Google guides you properly thorough every step. Just follow their intructions. It is also very easy to navigate around on Blogger. It wont take you a lot of time to figure out how it works.)
What can I expect to find here?
Very easy: Whatever you have put in here. If you have filled it with your thoughts, perspectives, opinions, stories and love; you can expect to find provoking thoughts, new perspectives, intelligent opinions, gripping stories and lots of love. The lesser you give to the bank, the lesser we all get out of it. So, what you get out of this really depends upon you.
And lastly, just like any other bank, Bank Anandmewa may suffer from global problems too. They include the onset of sub-prime procrastination, recession of good topics for discussion, the foreclosure of rational opinions and the lack of fresh ideas. Now, it is up to ALL OF US to pull the bank out of these crises if (and when) they strike. And the only way we can do that is by pumping in more capital : more things to share.
Because what really matters in the end is that we deal with these issues in an effective way if they ever trouble us.
Because some banks are just too important to be allowed to go bankrupt.
Whats this?
One of the main reasons behind creating this Chequebook is to give all of us a suitable platform to express ourselves. And to have a meaningful discussion on what each one of us has to say. Children, teenagers, parents, everyone.
So all of you are welcome to share your thoughts, writings, comments, photography, opinions etc here. You can share your autobiography of Rancho, travelogue on the latest bird watching trip, your analysis on the current art exhibition on display at Jehangir, your attempt at Nature photography, your thoughts on the latest movie, the new trick you learnt in Origami or even your thoughts about relationships, emotions and life in general. Basically, anything that you would like to share with the group.
In fact, the success of this experiment depends on your active contributions.
Why here? And how does this work?
Welcome to the world of blogs (Blogger is Google's blogging website). Blogs are a very powerful platform to express yourselves on the internet. Millions of people have their own blogs and they make it a point to upload new content from time to time. You can write, upload, comment and share with a Blogger profile which can be created with the help of your gmail / Google account. If you havent ever read blogs, you really should go through a few. Blogs are way more cooler, effective and exclusive than social networking sites like Facebook. (honestly, lets face it. The whole world is on Facebook, including people you wish weren't). Blogs take you beyond the cosmetic 'Face' and let you read the entire 'Book'!
Now, this blog : www.thechequebook.blogspot.com is a close-ended private blog. Which means that it will be visible and accessible only to members of the Anandmewa family. And everyone of us will be ACTIVE CONTRIBUTORS. Which means that all of us can upload content on the blog, read all the content that is uploaded and comment on the content which has been uploaded by the others.
To do this, you first need to have an active gmail account.
Then, an invite will be sent to you on your gmail id which you need to accept.
Lastly, you need to create a blogger profile so that you can contribute.
(Dont worry. Even if this sounds complicated, it is very easy. And Google guides you properly thorough every step. Just follow their intructions. It is also very easy to navigate around on Blogger. It wont take you a lot of time to figure out how it works.)
What can I expect to find here?
Very easy: Whatever you have put in here. If you have filled it with your thoughts, perspectives, opinions, stories and love; you can expect to find provoking thoughts, new perspectives, intelligent opinions, gripping stories and lots of love. The lesser you give to the bank, the lesser we all get out of it. So, what you get out of this really depends upon you.
And lastly, just like any other bank, Bank Anandmewa may suffer from global problems too. They include the onset of sub-prime procrastination, recession of good topics for discussion, the foreclosure of rational opinions and the lack of fresh ideas. Now, it is up to ALL OF US to pull the bank out of these crises if (and when) they strike. And the only way we can do that is by pumping in more capital : more things to share.
Because what really matters in the end is that we deal with these issues in an effective way if they ever trouble us.
Because some banks are just too important to be allowed to go bankrupt.
My mistake in social Parenting
A few years back, Lataajji had appointed me for delivering snacks for the children who had come for the study session she had organised. Lataajji had particularly instructed me on bringing Idli- chutney only, but while preparing the order, a thought came into my mind, I thought ," I prepare sambhar pretty well, why not add it to the order? I did not bother to inform or ask Lataajji about the addition. When I reached shibir, and she realized that I had got sambhar as well, she was surprised. She did not say anything in front of the children but she made me realize my mistake in the next parent's meeting. I then realized that Lataajji had purposely ordered only Idli-chutney as it was less messy and could not fit in the time limit of the session. In the absence of the maid, she did not have a helping hand and I added to her troubles. I think I should have thought twice before taking a decision on my own and thought more of others as well.
I am really sorry for what I did and I regret it for the same.
I will think things through before acting and see to it that I never make this mistake in the future.
-Swati
Freedom and Society
Lata Aaji had told us to discuss about our society for our last Shibir.Me and Manava discussed about it and I decided to post some of the things of what I think of our society.The topic I have taken is freedom.
Our society has changed since globalization.Freedom in taking decisions in families have became easy due to small families replacing joint families.But individual freedom is something which has not been well in our society.Parents nowadays are of two types.
Type 1-These are parents who give too much freedom to their children.Most of the time this formula doesn't work.Children don't follow discipline making it tough case to handle.I have seen children ageing 12-18 having one to two thousand rupees in their wallets.This results into overspending and if the child is with bad company it can go from bad to worse.
Type 2-These parents are complete opposite of the first one.They are suspicious of their children,they make decisions for their children and even decide what their children must do and what they shouldn't.
I know mothers of some of my friends who check their mobile's call logs and messages or some who decide what their sons must do after tenth or some who even tell their children whom should they befriend and whom they shouldn't.
But its not the complete mistake of the parent.Most of the time the children never tell their parents what they want and sometimes they don't try to make their own decisions.We children must tell our parents what we want,we ourselves must make our own decisions and we must be strong enough to get out of bad company if we are in or discipline ourselves so that we as responsible teenagers can enjoy our freedom
A Corporate Chinese whisper
While I was analyzing this , I thought it was a good idea to open this post to the group to receive individual's views on this :
In a Multinational Organization, A cross functional (a team of mostly Junior Managers representing various departments) group from across the country had worked hard on few projects. This group is encouraged and mentored for future Senior positions. They achieved really outstanding results and were rewarded by the global organization. The award was supposed to be collected from the Top Boss at the Global Headquarters by one from the group on behalf of the group.
Generally whenever team award is announced, the practice of organisation is that any local employee who is visiting the global headquarters at that time will represent and receive it on behalf of the local team here. This helps to reduce the travel hassles and saves cost. This time the local Chief made an exception and said he will sponsor the visit of one of team member travel to collect the award. His main purpose was to encourage people’s work. The date of receiving award was just 15 days ahead when this decision was taken.
So the senior team members arrived at a practical approach. They realized as there were 3 top performers who could travel to receive the award, the logistics involved visa and overseas travel. Now the issue was to select one of them who possess all requirements of travel. Bottom line is do this without disappointing others. Hence the senior members assigned their confidant to speak to all three of them and understand their schedule, their status on passport and visa. The caveat was not to build expectations and refrain from sharing information about the travel and the award.
Now the confidant spoke to the first performer and inadvertently spilled the beans of the travel and award. As the first performer did not possess the passport, hence he was ruled out. However the first performer presumed that he has been selected to go for the award and started the process of tatkal passport ( emergency process of obtaining the passport). In the excitement he also shot a mail with full emotions to the top leadership thanking for his nomination
In the meantime, the confidant spoke to the second performer and understood that he has his passport and visa in place. Hence the senior team decided that the second performer will travel and collect the award. Usually a formal invite is sent to the nominee from the Global Management. The information about this person representing the group was conveyed in a confidential mail to the Global Management. In this mail they also conveyed the reason of selection. The second performer’s Manager was also marked on the mail as his team member was selected. Now this Manager in excitement forwards that mail to the second performer. When the second performer reads the mails, he is disappointed as the criteria of selection was not his ability but the passport and moreover he was not the first person chosen to receive this award. The senior leadership now have ended up discouraging both of them.
Though the second peformer went on to receive the award, he did so reluctantly.
In the end the senior management had an uphill task managing both the high performers and pacifying them. Ultimately the end goal for which this exercise started was far away from being achieved.
i will be glad to receive your thoughts on this.
Mahesh
Thursday, May 24, 2012
Dear All,
As you all would remember; for this year’s Lata Aaji’s monthly lecture for Teen Age Shibir, we have agreed to follow following procedure:
1) Every month one topic of interest to everybody would be chosen & would be mentioned on blog.
2) That topic would be discussed among us. Everybody is expected to contribute the discussions.
3) Only those who participate in this exchange of thoughts on blog are expected to attend next month’s lecture.
4) Lata Aaji in her that month’s lecture would take review of our discussions & take it forward.
For meeting to be held in June; Lata Aaji has suggested following topic:
We all understand the importance of shibir & still contribute so little towards it, acting as if it is not important. Why?
Milind
I recall something when I read the poem about Letty. Let me
share it with you!
Even my parents had brought me a globe when I was probably in
5th. I just hated Geography, they just wanted to create some kind of
interest for Geography in me. They kept it near my studying area & advised
me to just have a casual look at it when I was somewhere around.
And that helped !! I would see to it that I have a look at
it every time I was around there & that started creating interest for
Geography ( I said interest & not liking coz I never liked Geography !! I
still hate it!!)
Over a period I became fluent in all the things required at
that time (5th std) on the Globe & then after a year I felt
there was no need of the globe and kept it in the cupboard.
It remained there for many years until we shifted to a new
house last year. When I was packing my things in cupboard, I bumped on to this
Globe covered with dust. I just kept looking at that globe which took me back
to my 5th std.
I then decided to keep that globe with me henceforth. And
even today it is there in my room above the cupboard. Though its of lesser use
to me I have a look at it when I am somewhere around many a times.... just go
back to my school days.
Tuesday, May 22, 2012
Social Parenting
Sorry to all as it is too late from our side to comment on blog.
We will be in touch with you now on.
I (Mrudula) wish to share an incidence happened during residential
shibir conducted by Lata Aaji for teenagers. On one of the day I was given a
task of preparing some sheets on PC, based on which Lata Aaji was to conduct a
session. As I did not listen to Lata Aaji’s instruction carefully about
the day on which it was to be brought for children the day was missed out from
my side. Lata Aaji had to make alternate arrangement so that the session
went smoothly.
I felt very sorry for that as it happened just because I did not
listen to her instruction with full attention which caused inconvenience to
Lata Aaji.
Posted by Kedar & Mrudula Dani
Monday, May 21, 2012
Social Parenting
A post From Narendra and Rani Samant:
Hi! Naren and Rani here,
As Gargee correctly pointed out, it is over one year blog has been started and it is over 10years we have joined shibir,but still we have not yet learned to be in time whether its shibir or whether it is to write on the blog. We both are trying to overcome this particular mistake. But nevertheless we are sorry to waste Lata Aji’s precious time and also of all other Anandmewa parents and children. We are really SORRY!
One more thing which we think we should be sorry about is regarding Sanket.When he and his family were going through a very bad phase we could not help them in any way. Somehow we think that Surekha & Sudam couldn’t confide in us, was a shortcoming on our part because till that day we felt that we all were friends but as correctly said by Mahesh may be we still have to go a long way in that direction. SORRY Surekha, Sudam, and Sanket.
P.S. Last week I was in Pune for 2 days and I saw full bloomed Bahawa trees in a row. It was very eye pleasing and exiting
- Rani
How Will you Measure Your Life?...very insightful article.
Dear All,
We felt extremely compelled to share this beautiful article with all, hence please do, do read it. It's rather little long, but worth spending some time going through.
.
.
How Will You Measure Your Life?
by Clayton M. Christensen
Editor’s Note: When the members of the class of 2010 entered business school, the economy
was strong and their post-graduation ambitions could be limitless. Just a few weeks later, the
economy went into a tailspin. They’ve spent the past two years recalibrating their worldview and
their definition of success.
The students seem highly aware of how the world has changed (as the sampling of views in this
article shows). In the spring, Harvard Business School’s graduating class asked HBS professor
Clay Christensen to address them—but not on how to apply his principles and thinking to their
post-HBS careers. The students wanted to know how to apply them to their personal lives. He
shared with them a set of guidelines that have helped him find meaning in his own life. Though
Christensen’s thinking comes from his deep religious faith, we believe that these are strategies
anyone can use. And so we asked him to share them with the readers of HBR. To learn more
about Christensen’s work, visit his HBR Author Page.
Before I published The Innovator’s Dilemma, I got a call from Andrew Grove, then the
chairman of Intel. He had read one of my early papers about disruptive technology, and he
asked if I could talk to his direct reports and explain my research and what it implied for Intel.
Excited, I flew to Silicon Valley and showed up at the appointed time, only to have Grove say,
“Look, stuff has happened. We have only 10 minutes for you. Tell us what your model of
disruption means for Intel.” I said that I couldn’t—that I needed a full 30 minutes to explain the
model, because only with it as context would any comments about Intel make sense. Ten
minutes into my explanation, Grove interrupted: “Look, I’ve got your model. Just tell us what it
means for Intel.”
I insisted that I needed 10 more minutes to describe how the process of disruption had worked
its way through a very different industry, steel, so that he and his team could understand how
disruption worked. I told the story of how Nucor and other steel minimills had begun by attacking
the lowest end of the market—steel reinforcing bars, or rebar—and later moved up toward the
high end, undercutting the traditional steel mills.
When I finished the minimill story, Grove said, “OK, I get it. What it means for Intel is...,” and
then went on to articulate what would become the company’s strategy for going to the bottom of
the market to launch the Celeron processor.
I’ve thought about that a million times since. If I had been suckered into telling Andy Grove what
he should think about the microprocessor business, I’d have been killed. But instead of telling
him what to think, I taught him how to think—and then he reached what I felt was the correct
decision on his own.
That experience had a profound influence on me. When people ask what I think they should do,
I rarely answer their question directly. Instead, I run the question aloud through one of my
models. I’ll describe how the process in the model worked its way through an industry quite
different from their own. And then, more often than not, they’ll say, “OK, I get it.” And they’ll
answer their own question more insightfully than I could have.
My class at HBS is structured to help my students understand what good management theory is
and how it is built. To that backbone I attach different models or theories that help students think
about the various dimensions of a general manager’s job in stimulating innovation and growth.
In each session we look at one company through the lenses of those theories—using them to
explain how the company got into its situation and to examine what managerial actions will yield
the needed results.
On the last day of class, I ask my students to turn those theoretical lenses on themselves, to find
cogent answers to three questions: First, how can I be sure that I’ll be happy in my career?
Second, how can I be sure that my relationships with my spouse and my family become an
enduring source of happiness? Third, how can I be sure I’ll stay out of jail? Though the last
question sounds lighthearted, it’s not. Two of the 32 people in my Rhodes scholar class spent
time in jail. Jeff Skilling of Enron fame was a classmate of mine at HBS. These were good guys
—but something in their lives sent them off in the wrong direction.
The Class of 2010
“I came to business school knowing exactly what I wanted to do—and I’m leaving choosing the
exact opposite. I’ve worked in the private sector all my life, because everyone always told me
that’s where smart people are. But I’ve decided to try government and see if I can find more
meaning there.
“I used to think that industry was very safe. The recession has shown us that nothing is safe.”
Ruhana Hafiz, Harvard Business School, Class of 2010
Her Plans: To join the FBI as a special adviser (a management track position)
“You could see a shift happening at HBS. Money used to be number one in the job search.
When you make a ton of money, you want more of it. Ironic thing. You start to forget what the
drivers of happiness are and what things are really important. A lot of people on campus see
money differently now. They think, ‘What’s the minimum I need to have, and what else drives
my life?’ instead of ‘What’s the place where I can get the maximum of both?’”
Patrick Chun, Harvard Business School, Class of 2010
His Plans: To join Bain Capital
“The financial crisis helped me realize that you have to do what you really love in life. My
current vision of success is based on the impact I can have, the experiences I can gain, and
the happiness I can find personally, much more so than the pursuit of money or prestige. My
main motivations are (1) to be with my family and people I care about; (2) to do something fun,
exciting, and impactful; and (3) to pursue a long-term career in entrepreneurship, where I can
build companies that change the way the world works.”
Matt Salzberg, Harvard Business School, Class of 2010
His Plans: To work for Bessemer Venture Partners
“Because I’m returning to McKinsey, it probably seems like not all that much has changed for
me. But while I was at HBS, I decided to do the dual degree at the Kennedy School. With the
elections in 2008 and the economy looking shaky, it seemed more compelling for me to get a
better understanding of the public and nonprofit sectors. In a way, that drove my return to
McKinsey, where I’ll have the ability to explore private, public, and nonprofit sectors.
“The recession has made us step back and take stock of how lucky we are. The crisis to us is
‘Are we going to have a job by April?’ Crisis to a lot of people is ‘Are we going to stay in our
home?’”
John Coleman, Harvard Business School, Class of 2010
His Plans: To return to McKinsey & Company
As the students discuss the answers to these questions, I open my own life to them as a case
study of sorts, to illustrate how they can use the theories from our course to guide their life
decisions.
One of the theories that gives great insight on the first question—how to be sure we find
happiness in our careers—is from Frederick Herzberg, who asserts that the powerful motivator
in our lives isn’t money; it’s the opportunity to learn, grow in responsibilities, contribute to others,
and be recognized for achievements. I tell the students about a vision of sorts I had while I was
running the company I founded before becoming an academic. In my mind’s eye I saw one of
my managers leave for work one morning with a relatively strong level of self-esteem. Then I
pictured her driving home to her family 10 hours later, feeling unappreciated, frustrated,
underutilized, and demeaned. I imagined how profoundly her lowered self-esteem affected the
way she interacted with her children. The vision in my mind then fast-forwarded to another day,
when she drove home with greater self-esteem—feeling that she had learned a lot, been
recognized for achieving valuable things, and played a significant role in the success of some
important initiatives. I then imagined how positively that affected her as a spouse and a parent.
My conclusion: Management is the most noble of professions if it’s practiced well. No other
occupation offers as many ways to help others learn and grow, take responsibility and be
recognized for achievement, and contribute to the success of a team. More and more MBA
students come to school thinking that a career in business means buying, selling, and investing
in companies. That’s unfortunate. Doing deals doesn’t yield the deep rewards that come from
building up people.
I want students to leave my classroom knowing that.
Create a Strategy for Your Life
A theory that is helpful in answering the second question—How can I ensure that my
relationship with my family proves to be an enduring source of happiness?—concerns how
strategy is defined and implemented. Its primary insight is that a company’s strategy is
determined by the types of initiatives that management invests in. If a company’s resource
allocation process is not managed masterfully, what emerges from it can be very different from
what management intended. Because companies’ decision-making systems are designed to
steer investments to initiatives that offer the most tangible and immediate returns, companies
shortchange investments in initiatives that are crucial to their long-term strategies.
Over the years I’ve watched the fates of my HBS classmates from 1979 unfold; I’ve seen more
and more of them come to reunions unhappy, divorced, and alienated from their children. I can
guarantee you that not a single one of them graduated with the deliberate strategy of getting
divorced and raising children who would become estranged from them. And yet a shocking
number of them implemented that strategy. The reason? They didn’t keep the purpose of their
lives front and center as they decided how to spend their time, talents, and energy.
It’s quite startling that a significant fraction of the 900 students that HBS draws each year from
the world’s best have given little thought to the purpose of their lives. I tell the students that HBS
might be one of their last chances to reflect deeply on that question. If they think that they’ll have
more time and energy to reflect later, they’re nuts, because life only gets more demanding: You
take on a mortgage; you’re working 70 hours a week; you have a spouse and children.
For me, having a clear purpose in my life has been essential. But it was something I had to think
long and hard about before I understood it. When I was a Rhodes scholar, I was in a very
demanding academic program, trying to cram an extra year’s worth of work into my time at
Oxford. I decided to spend an hour every night reading, thinking, and praying about why God put
me on this earth. That was a very challenging commitment to keep, because every hour I spent
doing that, I wasn’t studying applied econometrics. I was conflicted about whether I could really
afford to take that time away from my studies, but I stuck with it—and ultimately figured out the
purpose of my life.
Had I instead spent that hour each day learning the latest techniques for mastering the problems
of autocorrelation in regression analysis, I would have badly misspent my life. I apply the tools of
econometrics a few times a year, but I apply my knowledge of the purpose of my life every day.
It’s the single most useful thing I’ve ever learned. I promise my students that if they take the time
to figure out their life purpose, they’ll look back on it as the most important thing they discovered
at HBS. If they don’t figure it out, they will just sail off without a rudder and get buffeted in the
very rough seas of life. Clarity about their purpose will trump knowledge of activity-based
costing, balanced scorecards, core competence, disruptive innovation, the four Ps, and the five
forces.
My purpose grew out of my religious faith, but faith isn’t the only thing that gives people
direction. For example, one of my former students decided that his purpose was to bring
honesty and economic prosperity to his country and to raise children who were as capably
committed to this cause, and to each other, as he was. His purpose is focused on family and
others—as mine is.
The choice and successful pursuit of a profession is but one tool for achieving your purpose. But
without a purpose, life can become hollow.
Allocate Your Resources
Your decisions about allocating your personal time, energy, and talent ultimately shape your
life’s strategy.
I have a bunch of “businesses” that compete for these resources: I’m trying to have a rewarding
relationship with my wife, raise great kids, contribute to my community, succeed in my career,
contribute to my church, and so on. And I have exactly the same problem that a corporation
does. I have a limited amount of time and energy and talent. How much do I devote to each of
these pursuits?
Allocation choices can make your life turn out to be very different from what you intended.
Sometimes that’s good: Opportunities that you never planned for emerge. But if you misinvest
your resources, the outcome can be bad. As I think about my former classmates who
inadvertently invested for lives of hollow unhappiness, I can’t help believing that their troubles
relate right back to a short-term perspective.
When people who have a high need for achievement—and that includes all Harvard Business
School graduates—have an extra half hour of time or an extra ounce of energy, they’ll
unconsciously allocate it to activities that yield the most tangible accomplishments. And our
careers provide the most concrete evidence that we’re moving forward. You ship a product,
finish a design, complete a presentation, close a sale, teach a class, publish a paper, get paid,
get promoted. In contrast, investing time and energy in your relationship with your spouse and
children typically doesn’t offer that same immediate sense of achievement. Kids misbehave
every day. It’s really not until 20 years down the road that you can put your hands on your hips
and say, “I raised a good son or a good daughter.” You can neglect your relationship with your
spouse, and on a day-to-day basis, it doesn’t seem as if things are deteriorating. People who
are driven to excel have this unconscious propensity to underinvest in their families and
overinvest in their careers—even though intimate and loving relationships with their families are
the most powerful and enduring source of happiness.
If you study the root causes of business disasters, over and over you’ll find this predisposition
toward endeavors that offer immediate gratification. If you look at personal lives through that
lens, you’ll see the same stunning and sobering pattern: people allocating fewer and fewer
resources to the things they would have once said mattered most.
Create a Culture
There’s an important model in our class called the Tools of Cooperation, which basically says
that being a visionary manager isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. It’s one thing to see into the foggy
future with acuity and chart the course corrections that the company must make. But it’s quite
another to persuade employees who might not see the changes ahead to line up and work
cooperatively to take the company in that new direction. Knowing what tools to wield to elicit the
needed cooperation is a critical managerial skill.
The theory arrays these tools along two dimensions—the extent to which members of the
organization agree on what they want from their participation in the enterprise, and the extent to
which they agree on what actions will produce the desired results. When there is little agreement
on both axes, you have to use “power tools”—coercion, threats, punishment, and so on—to
secure cooperation. Many companies start in this quadrant, which is why the founding executive
team must play such an assertive role in defining what must be done and how. If employees’
ways of working together to address those tasks succeed over and over, consensus begins to
form. MIT’s Edgar Schein has described this process as the mechanism by which a culture is
built. Ultimately, people don’t even think about whether their way of doing things yields success.
They embrace priorities and follow procedures by instinct and assumption rather than by explicit
decision—which means that they’ve created a culture. Culture, in compelling but unspoken
ways, dictates the proven, acceptable methods by which members of the group address
recurrent problems. And culture defines the priority given to different types of problems. It can
be a powerful management tool.
In using this model to address the question, How can I be sure that my family becomes an
enduring source of happiness?, my students quickly see that the simplest tools that parents can
wield to elicit cooperation from children are power tools. But there comes a point during the teen
years when power tools no longer work. At that point parents start wishing that they had begun
working with their children at a very young age to build a culture at home in which children
instinctively behave respectfully toward one another, obey their parents, and choose the right
thing to do. Families have cultures, just as companies do. Those cultures can be built
consciously or evolve inadvertently.
If you want your kids to have strong self-esteem and confidence that they can solve hard
problems, those qualities won’t magically materialize in high school. You have to design them
into your family’s culture—and you have to think about this very early on. Like employees,
children build self-esteem by doing things that are hard and learning what works.
Avoid the “Marginal Costs” Mistake
We’re taught in finance and economics that in evaluating alternative investments, we should
ignore sunk and fixed costs, and instead base decisions on the marginal costs and marginal
revenues that each alternative entails. We learn in our course that this doctrine biases
companies to leverage what they have put in place to succeed in the past, instead of guiding
them to create the capabilities they’ll need in the future. If we knew the future would be exactly
the same as the past, that approach would be fine. But if the future’s different—and it almost
always is—then it’s the wrong thing to do.
This theory addresses the third question I discuss with my students—how to live a life of integrity
(stay out of jail). Unconsciously, we often employ the marginal cost doctrine in our personal lives
when we choose between right and wrong. A voice in our head says, “Look, I know that as a
general rule, most people shouldn’t do this. But in this particular extenuating circumstance, just
this once, it’s OK.” The marginal cost of doing something wrong “just this once” always seems
alluringly low. It suckers you in, and you don’t ever look at where that path ultimately is headed
and at the full costs that the choice entails. Justification for infidelity and dishonesty in all their
manifestations lies in the marginal cost economics of “just this once.”
I’d like to share a story about how I came to understand the potential damage of “just this once”
in my own life. I played on the Oxford University varsity basketball team. We worked our tails off
and finished the season undefeated. The guys on the team were the best friends I’ve ever had
in my life. We got to the British equivalent of the NCAA tournament—and made it to the final
four. It turned out the championship game was scheduled to be played on a Sunday. I had made
a personal commitment to God at age 16 that I would never play ball on Sunday. So I went to
the coach and explained my problem. He was incredulous. My teammates were, too, because I
was the starting center. Every one of the guys on the team came to me and said, “You’ve got to
play. Can’t you break the rule just this one time?”
I’m a deeply religious man, so I went away and prayed about what I should do. I got a very clear
feeling that I shouldn’t break my commitment—so I didn’t play in the championship game.
In many ways that was a small decision—involving one of several thousand Sundays in my life.
In theory, surely I could have crossed over the line just that one time and then not done it again.
But looking back on it, resisting the temptation whose logic was “In this extenuating
circumstance, just this once, it’s OK” has proven to be one of the most important decisions of my
life. Why? My life has been one unending stream of extenuating circumstances. Had I crossed
the line that one time, I would have done it over and over in the years that followed.
The lesson I learned from this is that it’s easier to hold to your principles 100% of the time than it
is to hold to them 98% of the time. If you give in to “just this once,” based on a marginal cost
analysis, as some of my former classmates have done, you’ll regret where you end up. You’ve
got to define for yourself what you stand for and draw the line in a safe place.
Remember the Importance of Humility
I got this insight when I was asked to teach a class on humility at Harvard College. I asked all
the students to describe the most humble person they knew. One characteristic of these humble
people stood out: They had a high level of self-esteem. They knew who they were, and they felt
good about who they were. We also decided that humility was defined not by self-deprecating
behavior or attitudes but by the esteem with which you regard others. Good behavior flows
naturally from that kind of humility. For example, you would never steal from someone, because
you respect that person too much. You’d never lie to someone, either.
It’s crucial to take a sense of humility into the world. By the time you make it to a top graduate
school, almost all your learning has come from people who are smarter and more experienced
than you: parents, teachers, bosses. But once you’ve finished at Harvard Business School or
any other top academic institution, the vast majority of people you’ll interact with on a day-to-day
basis may not be smarter than you. And if your attitude is that only smarter people have
something to teach you, your learning opportunities will be very limited. But if you have a humble
eagerness to learn something from everybody, your learning opportunities will be unlimited.
Generally, you can be humble only if you feel really good about yourself—and you want to help
those around you feel really good about themselves, too. When we see people acting in an
abusive, arrogant, or demeaning manner toward others, their behavior almost always is a
symptom of their lack of self-esteem. They need to put someone else down to feel good about
themselves.
Choose the Right Yardstick
This past year I was diagnosed with cancer and faced the possibility that my life would end
sooner than I’d planned. Thankfully, it now looks as if I’ll be spared. But the experience has
given me important insight into my life.
I have a pretty clear idea of how my ideas have generated enormous revenue for companies
that have used my research; I know I’ve had a substantial impact. But as I’ve confronted this
disease, it’s been interesting to see how unimportant that impact is to me now. I’ve concluded
that the metric by which God will assess my life isn’t dollars but the individual people whose lives
I’ve touched.
I think that’s the way it will work for us all. Don’t worry about the level of individual prominence
you have achieved; worry about the individuals you have helped become better people. This is
my final recommendation: Think about the metric by which your life will be judged, and make a
resolution to live every day so that in the end, your life will be judged a success.
Thanks,
Jayant, Meghana.
We felt extremely compelled to share this beautiful article with all, hence please do, do read it. It's rather little long, but worth spending some time going through.
.
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How Will You Measure Your Life?
by Clayton M. Christensen
Editor’s Note: When the members of the class of 2010 entered business school, the economy
was strong and their post-graduation ambitions could be limitless. Just a few weeks later, the
economy went into a tailspin. They’ve spent the past two years recalibrating their worldview and
their definition of success.
The students seem highly aware of how the world has changed (as the sampling of views in this
article shows). In the spring, Harvard Business School’s graduating class asked HBS professor
Clay Christensen to address them—but not on how to apply his principles and thinking to their
post-HBS careers. The students wanted to know how to apply them to their personal lives. He
shared with them a set of guidelines that have helped him find meaning in his own life. Though
Christensen’s thinking comes from his deep religious faith, we believe that these are strategies
anyone can use. And so we asked him to share them with the readers of HBR. To learn more
about Christensen’s work, visit his HBR Author Page.
Before I published The Innovator’s Dilemma, I got a call from Andrew Grove, then the
chairman of Intel. He had read one of my early papers about disruptive technology, and he
asked if I could talk to his direct reports and explain my research and what it implied for Intel.
Excited, I flew to Silicon Valley and showed up at the appointed time, only to have Grove say,
“Look, stuff has happened. We have only 10 minutes for you. Tell us what your model of
disruption means for Intel.” I said that I couldn’t—that I needed a full 30 minutes to explain the
model, because only with it as context would any comments about Intel make sense. Ten
minutes into my explanation, Grove interrupted: “Look, I’ve got your model. Just tell us what it
means for Intel.”
I insisted that I needed 10 more minutes to describe how the process of disruption had worked
its way through a very different industry, steel, so that he and his team could understand how
disruption worked. I told the story of how Nucor and other steel minimills had begun by attacking
the lowest end of the market—steel reinforcing bars, or rebar—and later moved up toward the
high end, undercutting the traditional steel mills.
When I finished the minimill story, Grove said, “OK, I get it. What it means for Intel is...,” and
then went on to articulate what would become the company’s strategy for going to the bottom of
the market to launch the Celeron processor.
I’ve thought about that a million times since. If I had been suckered into telling Andy Grove what
he should think about the microprocessor business, I’d have been killed. But instead of telling
him what to think, I taught him how to think—and then he reached what I felt was the correct
decision on his own.
That experience had a profound influence on me. When people ask what I think they should do,
I rarely answer their question directly. Instead, I run the question aloud through one of my
models. I’ll describe how the process in the model worked its way through an industry quite
different from their own. And then, more often than not, they’ll say, “OK, I get it.” And they’ll
answer their own question more insightfully than I could have.
My class at HBS is structured to help my students understand what good management theory is
and how it is built. To that backbone I attach different models or theories that help students think
about the various dimensions of a general manager’s job in stimulating innovation and growth.
In each session we look at one company through the lenses of those theories—using them to
explain how the company got into its situation and to examine what managerial actions will yield
the needed results.
On the last day of class, I ask my students to turn those theoretical lenses on themselves, to find
cogent answers to three questions: First, how can I be sure that I’ll be happy in my career?
Second, how can I be sure that my relationships with my spouse and my family become an
enduring source of happiness? Third, how can I be sure I’ll stay out of jail? Though the last
question sounds lighthearted, it’s not. Two of the 32 people in my Rhodes scholar class spent
time in jail. Jeff Skilling of Enron fame was a classmate of mine at HBS. These were good guys
—but something in their lives sent them off in the wrong direction.
The Class of 2010
“I came to business school knowing exactly what I wanted to do—and I’m leaving choosing the
exact opposite. I’ve worked in the private sector all my life, because everyone always told me
that’s where smart people are. But I’ve decided to try government and see if I can find more
meaning there.
“I used to think that industry was very safe. The recession has shown us that nothing is safe.”
Ruhana Hafiz, Harvard Business School, Class of 2010
Her Plans: To join the FBI as a special adviser (a management track position)
“You could see a shift happening at HBS. Money used to be number one in the job search.
When you make a ton of money, you want more of it. Ironic thing. You start to forget what the
drivers of happiness are and what things are really important. A lot of people on campus see
money differently now. They think, ‘What’s the minimum I need to have, and what else drives
my life?’ instead of ‘What’s the place where I can get the maximum of both?’”
Patrick Chun, Harvard Business School, Class of 2010
His Plans: To join Bain Capital
“The financial crisis helped me realize that you have to do what you really love in life. My
current vision of success is based on the impact I can have, the experiences I can gain, and
the happiness I can find personally, much more so than the pursuit of money or prestige. My
main motivations are (1) to be with my family and people I care about; (2) to do something fun,
exciting, and impactful; and (3) to pursue a long-term career in entrepreneurship, where I can
build companies that change the way the world works.”
Matt Salzberg, Harvard Business School, Class of 2010
His Plans: To work for Bessemer Venture Partners
“Because I’m returning to McKinsey, it probably seems like not all that much has changed for
me. But while I was at HBS, I decided to do the dual degree at the Kennedy School. With the
elections in 2008 and the economy looking shaky, it seemed more compelling for me to get a
better understanding of the public and nonprofit sectors. In a way, that drove my return to
McKinsey, where I’ll have the ability to explore private, public, and nonprofit sectors.
“The recession has made us step back and take stock of how lucky we are. The crisis to us is
‘Are we going to have a job by April?’ Crisis to a lot of people is ‘Are we going to stay in our
home?’”
John Coleman, Harvard Business School, Class of 2010
His Plans: To return to McKinsey & Company
As the students discuss the answers to these questions, I open my own life to them as a case
study of sorts, to illustrate how they can use the theories from our course to guide their life
decisions.
One of the theories that gives great insight on the first question—how to be sure we find
happiness in our careers—is from Frederick Herzberg, who asserts that the powerful motivator
in our lives isn’t money; it’s the opportunity to learn, grow in responsibilities, contribute to others,
and be recognized for achievements. I tell the students about a vision of sorts I had while I was
running the company I founded before becoming an academic. In my mind’s eye I saw one of
my managers leave for work one morning with a relatively strong level of self-esteem. Then I
pictured her driving home to her family 10 hours later, feeling unappreciated, frustrated,
underutilized, and demeaned. I imagined how profoundly her lowered self-esteem affected the
way she interacted with her children. The vision in my mind then fast-forwarded to another day,
when she drove home with greater self-esteem—feeling that she had learned a lot, been
recognized for achieving valuable things, and played a significant role in the success of some
important initiatives. I then imagined how positively that affected her as a spouse and a parent.
My conclusion: Management is the most noble of professions if it’s practiced well. No other
occupation offers as many ways to help others learn and grow, take responsibility and be
recognized for achievement, and contribute to the success of a team. More and more MBA
students come to school thinking that a career in business means buying, selling, and investing
in companies. That’s unfortunate. Doing deals doesn’t yield the deep rewards that come from
building up people.
I want students to leave my classroom knowing that.
Create a Strategy for Your Life
A theory that is helpful in answering the second question—How can I ensure that my
relationship with my family proves to be an enduring source of happiness?—concerns how
strategy is defined and implemented. Its primary insight is that a company’s strategy is
determined by the types of initiatives that management invests in. If a company’s resource
allocation process is not managed masterfully, what emerges from it can be very different from
what management intended. Because companies’ decision-making systems are designed to
steer investments to initiatives that offer the most tangible and immediate returns, companies
shortchange investments in initiatives that are crucial to their long-term strategies.
Over the years I’ve watched the fates of my HBS classmates from 1979 unfold; I’ve seen more
and more of them come to reunions unhappy, divorced, and alienated from their children. I can
guarantee you that not a single one of them graduated with the deliberate strategy of getting
divorced and raising children who would become estranged from them. And yet a shocking
number of them implemented that strategy. The reason? They didn’t keep the purpose of their
lives front and center as they decided how to spend their time, talents, and energy.
It’s quite startling that a significant fraction of the 900 students that HBS draws each year from
the world’s best have given little thought to the purpose of their lives. I tell the students that HBS
might be one of their last chances to reflect deeply on that question. If they think that they’ll have
more time and energy to reflect later, they’re nuts, because life only gets more demanding: You
take on a mortgage; you’re working 70 hours a week; you have a spouse and children.
For me, having a clear purpose in my life has been essential. But it was something I had to think
long and hard about before I understood it. When I was a Rhodes scholar, I was in a very
demanding academic program, trying to cram an extra year’s worth of work into my time at
Oxford. I decided to spend an hour every night reading, thinking, and praying about why God put
me on this earth. That was a very challenging commitment to keep, because every hour I spent
doing that, I wasn’t studying applied econometrics. I was conflicted about whether I could really
afford to take that time away from my studies, but I stuck with it—and ultimately figured out the
purpose of my life.
Had I instead spent that hour each day learning the latest techniques for mastering the problems
of autocorrelation in regression analysis, I would have badly misspent my life. I apply the tools of
econometrics a few times a year, but I apply my knowledge of the purpose of my life every day.
It’s the single most useful thing I’ve ever learned. I promise my students that if they take the time
to figure out their life purpose, they’ll look back on it as the most important thing they discovered
at HBS. If they don’t figure it out, they will just sail off without a rudder and get buffeted in the
very rough seas of life. Clarity about their purpose will trump knowledge of activity-based
costing, balanced scorecards, core competence, disruptive innovation, the four Ps, and the five
forces.
My purpose grew out of my religious faith, but faith isn’t the only thing that gives people
direction. For example, one of my former students decided that his purpose was to bring
honesty and economic prosperity to his country and to raise children who were as capably
committed to this cause, and to each other, as he was. His purpose is focused on family and
others—as mine is.
The choice and successful pursuit of a profession is but one tool for achieving your purpose. But
without a purpose, life can become hollow.
Allocate Your Resources
Your decisions about allocating your personal time, energy, and talent ultimately shape your
life’s strategy.
I have a bunch of “businesses” that compete for these resources: I’m trying to have a rewarding
relationship with my wife, raise great kids, contribute to my community, succeed in my career,
contribute to my church, and so on. And I have exactly the same problem that a corporation
does. I have a limited amount of time and energy and talent. How much do I devote to each of
these pursuits?
Allocation choices can make your life turn out to be very different from what you intended.
Sometimes that’s good: Opportunities that you never planned for emerge. But if you misinvest
your resources, the outcome can be bad. As I think about my former classmates who
inadvertently invested for lives of hollow unhappiness, I can’t help believing that their troubles
relate right back to a short-term perspective.
When people who have a high need for achievement—and that includes all Harvard Business
School graduates—have an extra half hour of time or an extra ounce of energy, they’ll
unconsciously allocate it to activities that yield the most tangible accomplishments. And our
careers provide the most concrete evidence that we’re moving forward. You ship a product,
finish a design, complete a presentation, close a sale, teach a class, publish a paper, get paid,
get promoted. In contrast, investing time and energy in your relationship with your spouse and
children typically doesn’t offer that same immediate sense of achievement. Kids misbehave
every day. It’s really not until 20 years down the road that you can put your hands on your hips
and say, “I raised a good son or a good daughter.” You can neglect your relationship with your
spouse, and on a day-to-day basis, it doesn’t seem as if things are deteriorating. People who
are driven to excel have this unconscious propensity to underinvest in their families and
overinvest in their careers—even though intimate and loving relationships with their families are
the most powerful and enduring source of happiness.
If you study the root causes of business disasters, over and over you’ll find this predisposition
toward endeavors that offer immediate gratification. If you look at personal lives through that
lens, you’ll see the same stunning and sobering pattern: people allocating fewer and fewer
resources to the things they would have once said mattered most.
Create a Culture
There’s an important model in our class called the Tools of Cooperation, which basically says
that being a visionary manager isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. It’s one thing to see into the foggy
future with acuity and chart the course corrections that the company must make. But it’s quite
another to persuade employees who might not see the changes ahead to line up and work
cooperatively to take the company in that new direction. Knowing what tools to wield to elicit the
needed cooperation is a critical managerial skill.
The theory arrays these tools along two dimensions—the extent to which members of the
organization agree on what they want from their participation in the enterprise, and the extent to
which they agree on what actions will produce the desired results. When there is little agreement
on both axes, you have to use “power tools”—coercion, threats, punishment, and so on—to
secure cooperation. Many companies start in this quadrant, which is why the founding executive
team must play such an assertive role in defining what must be done and how. If employees’
ways of working together to address those tasks succeed over and over, consensus begins to
form. MIT’s Edgar Schein has described this process as the mechanism by which a culture is
built. Ultimately, people don’t even think about whether their way of doing things yields success.
They embrace priorities and follow procedures by instinct and assumption rather than by explicit
decision—which means that they’ve created a culture. Culture, in compelling but unspoken
ways, dictates the proven, acceptable methods by which members of the group address
recurrent problems. And culture defines the priority given to different types of problems. It can
be a powerful management tool.
In using this model to address the question, How can I be sure that my family becomes an
enduring source of happiness?, my students quickly see that the simplest tools that parents can
wield to elicit cooperation from children are power tools. But there comes a point during the teen
years when power tools no longer work. At that point parents start wishing that they had begun
working with their children at a very young age to build a culture at home in which children
instinctively behave respectfully toward one another, obey their parents, and choose the right
thing to do. Families have cultures, just as companies do. Those cultures can be built
consciously or evolve inadvertently.
If you want your kids to have strong self-esteem and confidence that they can solve hard
problems, those qualities won’t magically materialize in high school. You have to design them
into your family’s culture—and you have to think about this very early on. Like employees,
children build self-esteem by doing things that are hard and learning what works.
Avoid the “Marginal Costs” Mistake
We’re taught in finance and economics that in evaluating alternative investments, we should
ignore sunk and fixed costs, and instead base decisions on the marginal costs and marginal
revenues that each alternative entails. We learn in our course that this doctrine biases
companies to leverage what they have put in place to succeed in the past, instead of guiding
them to create the capabilities they’ll need in the future. If we knew the future would be exactly
the same as the past, that approach would be fine. But if the future’s different—and it almost
always is—then it’s the wrong thing to do.
This theory addresses the third question I discuss with my students—how to live a life of integrity
(stay out of jail). Unconsciously, we often employ the marginal cost doctrine in our personal lives
when we choose between right and wrong. A voice in our head says, “Look, I know that as a
general rule, most people shouldn’t do this. But in this particular extenuating circumstance, just
this once, it’s OK.” The marginal cost of doing something wrong “just this once” always seems
alluringly low. It suckers you in, and you don’t ever look at where that path ultimately is headed
and at the full costs that the choice entails. Justification for infidelity and dishonesty in all their
manifestations lies in the marginal cost economics of “just this once.”
I’d like to share a story about how I came to understand the potential damage of “just this once”
in my own life. I played on the Oxford University varsity basketball team. We worked our tails off
and finished the season undefeated. The guys on the team were the best friends I’ve ever had
in my life. We got to the British equivalent of the NCAA tournament—and made it to the final
four. It turned out the championship game was scheduled to be played on a Sunday. I had made
a personal commitment to God at age 16 that I would never play ball on Sunday. So I went to
the coach and explained my problem. He was incredulous. My teammates were, too, because I
was the starting center. Every one of the guys on the team came to me and said, “You’ve got to
play. Can’t you break the rule just this one time?”
I’m a deeply religious man, so I went away and prayed about what I should do. I got a very clear
feeling that I shouldn’t break my commitment—so I didn’t play in the championship game.
In many ways that was a small decision—involving one of several thousand Sundays in my life.
In theory, surely I could have crossed over the line just that one time and then not done it again.
But looking back on it, resisting the temptation whose logic was “In this extenuating
circumstance, just this once, it’s OK” has proven to be one of the most important decisions of my
life. Why? My life has been one unending stream of extenuating circumstances. Had I crossed
the line that one time, I would have done it over and over in the years that followed.
The lesson I learned from this is that it’s easier to hold to your principles 100% of the time than it
is to hold to them 98% of the time. If you give in to “just this once,” based on a marginal cost
analysis, as some of my former classmates have done, you’ll regret where you end up. You’ve
got to define for yourself what you stand for and draw the line in a safe place.
Remember the Importance of Humility
I got this insight when I was asked to teach a class on humility at Harvard College. I asked all
the students to describe the most humble person they knew. One characteristic of these humble
people stood out: They had a high level of self-esteem. They knew who they were, and they felt
good about who they were. We also decided that humility was defined not by self-deprecating
behavior or attitudes but by the esteem with which you regard others. Good behavior flows
naturally from that kind of humility. For example, you would never steal from someone, because
you respect that person too much. You’d never lie to someone, either.
It’s crucial to take a sense of humility into the world. By the time you make it to a top graduate
school, almost all your learning has come from people who are smarter and more experienced
than you: parents, teachers, bosses. But once you’ve finished at Harvard Business School or
any other top academic institution, the vast majority of people you’ll interact with on a day-to-day
basis may not be smarter than you. And if your attitude is that only smarter people have
something to teach you, your learning opportunities will be very limited. But if you have a humble
eagerness to learn something from everybody, your learning opportunities will be unlimited.
Generally, you can be humble only if you feel really good about yourself—and you want to help
those around you feel really good about themselves, too. When we see people acting in an
abusive, arrogant, or demeaning manner toward others, their behavior almost always is a
symptom of their lack of self-esteem. They need to put someone else down to feel good about
themselves.
Choose the Right Yardstick
This past year I was diagnosed with cancer and faced the possibility that my life would end
sooner than I’d planned. Thankfully, it now looks as if I’ll be spared. But the experience has
given me important insight into my life.
I have a pretty clear idea of how my ideas have generated enormous revenue for companies
that have used my research; I know I’ve had a substantial impact. But as I’ve confronted this
disease, it’s been interesting to see how unimportant that impact is to me now. I’ve concluded
that the metric by which God will assess my life isn’t dollars but the individual people whose lives
I’ve touched.
I think that’s the way it will work for us all. Don’t worry about the level of individual prominence
you have achieved; worry about the individuals you have helped become better people. This is
my final recommendation: Think about the metric by which your life will be judged, and make a
resolution to live every day so that in the end, your life will be judged a success.
Thanks,
Jayant, Meghana.
HANDMADE FLOWERS FROM GARBAGE
शेवग्याच्या शेंगांच्या (Drum-sticks)सालींपासून ही फुले बनवली आहेत. (थोडासा रंग दिल्यास खूप दिवस छान राहतात ; कारण साली सुकल्यावर त्यांचा मूळ रंग फिक्का होतो . )
ईडली -सांबराचा बेत असेल त्या दिवशी ही फुले नक्की करता येतील.
t
NEGATIVE ATTITUDE
As we had discussed yesterday
about the topic attitude, I was just thinking that in what ways we show
attitude?
First of all what is attitude?
An attitude can be defined as a
positive or negative evaluation of people, objects, event, activities, ideas,
or just about anything in your environment.
The Consequences of Negative
Attitude
Negative attitude shortens your
life. The more often we become angry, upset or frustrated, the fewer days we
will have left to live. I know this is extreme, but that’s how it is. We are
shortening our life every time we let negative emotions overtake us.
Drama queen: This is the most
common type. Their emotions range from anger to self-pity and every small
incident can be turned into the storm. We seem to like the fact that they can
change how others feel and be the centers of attention.
Such people are needy and
insecure, they crave for constant reassurance. They strive for attention and
approval. If they don’t receive what they want, they begin acting in childish
ways. They may start crying, throwing things around or trying to get on others’
nerves.
That eventually backfires on
them. Once that happens, drama queens become scared and surprised by the
reaction they caused. This way drama queens try to make others feel guilty and
cruel.
This kind of behavior is the
result of neediness and low self-esteem.
Bye for now.
Aradhya Naik
My new innings in life
All My Dears
. Let me take this opportunity to share a good news with you.
With active support & encouragement from Vaishali and Radha , I have quit my active & hectic corporate life (30th April 2012 was my last day)to pursue my passion : to train people to be healthy and calm.
It has given immense sense of satisfaction to pursue what I had been doing for the past 11 years as a hobby. It gave me a purpose of life .Not only will I be available for people to assist them for their stress management, it would also have a positive impact on my health too.(which has been a cause of concern for me and my family and friends for a long time)
Let me share one small incident which happened in the last fortnight. One counsellor in a private hospital came to know about my passion and she requested me to join for a discussion to support drug rehab patients. In course of the discussion, we decided to test some of the techniques with the drug rehabilation patients themselves. The patients (drug addicts)came from different strata of soceity as well as from different religions with various causes leading them to the addiction. These people become very violent during the course of de-addiction and they needed some support during these testing times.
I was given 15-20 minutes to interact with them
After the 15 odd minutes of interactions, each and every participant came and thanked me for the session (including the counsellors )
Their reaction gave me a sense of joy and satisfaction and helped me to reconfirm that i had taken the decision for the right cause
I also experienced that though I had gone to assist them and teach them some techniques, I too learned a lot from them. they gave me more than I could give them
I am excited with this new dimension in my life as there are good opportunities to experience the intearcations with various people. it will also give me enough time to pursue my other hobbies (singing, listening to music..) . though the financial returns may not be as high as the corporate world, but it will be enough to live comfortably without changing our current lifestyle
Thank you and I am sure that your good wishes and encouragement is always with me
lots of Love
Sandeep Yederi
. Let me take this opportunity to share a good news with you.
With active support & encouragement from Vaishali and Radha , I have quit my active & hectic corporate life (30th April 2012 was my last day)to pursue my passion : to train people to be healthy and calm.
It has given immense sense of satisfaction to pursue what I had been doing for the past 11 years as a hobby. It gave me a purpose of life .Not only will I be available for people to assist them for their stress management, it would also have a positive impact on my health too.(which has been a cause of concern for me and my family and friends for a long time)
Let me share one small incident which happened in the last fortnight. One counsellor in a private hospital came to know about my passion and she requested me to join for a discussion to support drug rehab patients. In course of the discussion, we decided to test some of the techniques with the drug rehabilation patients themselves. The patients (drug addicts)came from different strata of soceity as well as from different religions with various causes leading them to the addiction. These people become very violent during the course of de-addiction and they needed some support during these testing times.
I was given 15-20 minutes to interact with them
After the 15 odd minutes of interactions, each and every participant came and thanked me for the session (including the counsellors )
Their reaction gave me a sense of joy and satisfaction and helped me to reconfirm that i had taken the decision for the right cause
I also experienced that though I had gone to assist them and teach them some techniques, I too learned a lot from them. they gave me more than I could give them
I am excited with this new dimension in my life as there are good opportunities to experience the intearcations with various people. it will also give me enough time to pursue my other hobbies (singing, listening to music..) . though the financial returns may not be as high as the corporate world, but it will be enough to live comfortably without changing our current lifestyle
Thank you and I am sure that your good wishes and encouragement is always with me
lots of Love
Sandeep Yederi
Sunday, May 20, 2012
Something about Pench.
As according to me most of you must be aware that we (soham,aradhya,unmesh and me) are going to Pench tiger reserve on 23 May, let me tell you something about it.
Pench lies on the foot hills of Satpura hills on the boundary of Madhya pradesh and Maharastra. It marks its place as an important tiger reserve in India by having a dense population of prey. Not only tigers and leopards but it has a remarkable population of birds and other mamals too. It is named after the river pench which cuts the forest from north and south and becomes a drinking ground for mamals. This 758 sq. m forest is a moist deciduous forest and homes a variety of flora and fauna.
When I was asked if I wanted to visit it, yes was the only possible answer I could have given. With every breath the moment is getting closer to feel the wilderness and with every hour passing the undying enigma of pench gets stronger.
Keeping my fingers crossed I hope I have a wonderful experience to share with you.
Where I erred in social parenting: There are 2 instances which I would like to mention here:
1. There was a tie and dye session which was organized. I was one of the co-ordinators. Four different colours were diluted in water in 4 small buckets and white kerchiefs had to be dipped in them to give them a colourful effect. I realized only at the end of the session that a lot of colour was wasted since whatever was left of the mixtures had to be disposed off. As against this, I remember that Shantala had managed a similar exercise much more efficiently and without generating any waste by dabbing different colours on wet handkerchiefs and twisting them to give an amazing tie and dye effect. Thanks, Shantala, for contributing to my learning.
Vaishali Yederi
Letty's Globe by Charles Tennyson Turner
When Letty had scarce pass’d her third glad year,
And her young artless words began to flow,
One day we gave the child a colour’d sphere
Of the wide earth, that she might mark and know,
By tint and outline, all its sea and land.
She patted all the world; old empires peep’d
Between her baby fingers; her soft hand
Was welcome at all frontiers. How she leap’d,
And laugh’d and prattled in her world-wide bliss;
But when we turn’d her sweet unlearnèd eye
On our own isle, she raised a joyous cry—
‘Oh! yes, I see it, Letty’s home is there!’
And while she hid all England with a kiss,
Bright over Europe fell her golden hair.
And her young artless words began to flow,
One day we gave the child a colour’d sphere
Of the wide earth, that she might mark and know,
By tint and outline, all its sea and land.
She patted all the world; old empires peep’d
Between her baby fingers; her soft hand
Was welcome at all frontiers. How she leap’d,
And laugh’d and prattled in her world-wide bliss;
But when we turn’d her sweet unlearnèd eye
On our own isle, she raised a joyous cry—
‘Oh! yes, I see it, Letty’s home is there!’
And while she hid all England with a kiss,
Bright over Europe fell her golden hair.
posted on behalf of Lata Aaji
Saturday, May 19, 2012
मित्रानो,
मला एक सुंदर अनुभव सगळ्यांबरोबर सांगावासा वाटतोय.
मी जेव्हापासून बेकरिचा कोर्से शिकलेय तेव्हापासून मनात इच्छा होती कि जो
आनंद मला मिळतोय, घरात वाढदिवस असल्यावर स्वतःच्या हाताने केक बनवायचा
आणि तो हि अगदीच बाहेरच्या केक सारखा, हा आनंद सगळ्यांना मिळावा म्हणून
मी हे बेकरीचे व्ह्र्कशोप करायचे ठरवले.
मला खूप उत्तम प्रतिसाद हि मिळाला आई आणि मुलांचा.
आम्ही सगळे मे 8 ला आमच्या कडे भेटलो आणि एकूण 25 ते 30 जण मिळून खूप चं
छान वेळ घालवला. यामधे मुलांना बेसिक चोकोलेट केक शिकवला आणि सगळ्यांनी
तो अतिशय सुंदर पणे केला, एकूण मुलांची expertise खूप जास्त दिसत होती.
आमची पूर्ण एक बेडरूम केक्स नि भरली होती कारण फ्रीझ मध्ये सगळे केक मावत
नसल्याने AC लाऊन आम्ही केक्स ठेवले होते आणि ते जवळ जवळ 15 ते 20 केक्स
होते.
आम्ही नंतर ब्रेंड बनवला आणि सगळ्या आईना वजन कमी करण्यासाठी एक घरघुती
उपाय सापडला,
कारण ब्रेंड बनवताना पुश उप्स मारल्यासारखे सगळे वजन ब्रेंड च्या कणिक
वरघालून तो हाताने मळायचा असतो
अगदी 10 मिनिटे आणि पंखा हि बंद करावा लागतो.
अनिरुद्ध ने तर सगळे पाहून हसत बोलला "ब्रेंड खाऊन नाही तर बनवताना नक्की
आमच्या कॅलोरीएस कमी होणार ".
दुपारी सगळ्यांनी छान पणे स्वरूपा मावशीने आणलेला पुलाव, धनश्री मावशीचा
ढोकळा, प्राची मावशीचे गुलाबजाम, आंबे खाल्ले.
सगळ्या आया बाकी गोष्टी सांभाळत होत्या म्हणून मला चांगले पणे शिकवणे
सोपे गेले. संध्याकाळी मग सगळ्यांनी स्वतः बनवलेला पिझ्झा आणि केक
खाल्ला आणि आमचा दिवस संपला.
या सगळ्यात अजून एक छान गोष्ट घडली ती म्हणजे समृद्धीचा मिळालेला प्रतिसाद.
जेव्हा मी पहिल्यांदा शिबिरात बेकरीच्या गोष्टी आणायला चालू केल्या
तेव्हा समृद्धीचे बाबा आवर्जून बोलले कि, समृद्धीला बेकिंग ची फार आवड
आहे आणि मी ते लक्षात ठेवून तिला केक च्या रेसिपेस पाठवल्या आणि तिने
त्या सगळ्या करून पहिल्या आणि मला फोन करून सांगितले हि.
जेव्हा मला आदल्या दिवशी,आयांची लिस्ट बनवताना कळले कि समृद्धीचे नाव यात
नाही आहे तर मी त्यांना फोन केला आणि फक्त आदल्या रात्री माझा पत्ता
समजून घेऊन त्यांनी समृद्धीला वेळेवर पाठवले ही. अनिरुद्ध
ला हि खूप आवड आहे जेवण बनवायची हे मला भाग्यश्री ने सांगितले होते,ती
येऊशकली नाही पण अनिरुद्ध नक्की आला आणि बाकी मुलांबरोबर खाली खेळायला न
जाता पूर्ण वेळ कित्चेन मध्ये सगळे काही पहात होता.
सर्वेश ने कागदाची फुले बनवून आणली तर ईश्वरी ने ती फुले ठेवायला रंगीत
फ्लोवेर् पॉट बनवला, दिव्याने सुंदर फोटो फ्रेम बनवली तर समृद्धीने
सुंदर चोकोलेट चा गिफ्ट बोकस बनवला.
हे सगळे फोटो मी खाली लावले आहेत.
ईशा महात्मे, स्वानंदी, सिमरन, आराध्य, उन्मेष परांजपे, विरज, आर्या या
सगळ्या मुलांच्या येण्याने आणि एवढ्या छान पणे केक शिकून तो बनवण्याने
माझे हे व्ह्र्कशोप सार्थक झाल्या सारखे वाटले,
आणि या सगळ्यात सर्वात मोठा मुलगा होता तो म्हणजे "आदित्य", तो दरवेळेस
कित्चेन मध्ये येऊन प्रत्येक गोष्ट निट लक्ष देऊन पहात होता आणि मधुरा
ला सूचना देत होता कि आपण हे सगळे करू या. आम्ही सगळ्यांनी बाकी मुलांची
आणि आयांची आठवण काढली आणि त्यांना हि तो आनंद मिळावा म्हणून आज लिहित
आहे.
नंतर सर्वेश, ईश्वरी आणि विरज आमच्याकडे राहिले आणि आम्ही खूप मजा केली.
रात्री तर मी आणि जयंत त्यांच्या गप्पा एकतच राहिलो जेव्हा ते समदुखी
भाऊ आणि त्यांना त्रास देणाऱ्या बाबा च्या लाडक्या बहिणी यावर चर्चा करत
होते आणि त्यांचे अनुभव ऐकून खूप हसलो हि कारण सगळच मजेशीर होते. त्यात
ते सगळे भाऊ हसत हे पण सांगत होते कि या बहिणी सगळे काही मोठे मोठे करून
सांगतात आणि मग शेवट आम्हाला हि घरात्ल्यांकडून मोठे मोठे चा मिळते.
आम्हा सगळ्यांसाठी खूप सुंदर अनुभव या सगळ्यांनी दिला आणि त्या सुंदर
आठवणी आता आमच्या कडे आता नेहमी राहतील।
वेदांत, महेक & मेघना, जयंत.
मला एक सुंदर अनुभव सगळ्यांबरोबर सांगावासा वाटतोय.
मी जेव्हापासून बेकरिचा कोर्से शिकलेय तेव्हापासून मनात इच्छा होती कि जो
आनंद मला मिळतोय, घरात वाढदिवस असल्यावर स्वतःच्या हाताने केक बनवायचा
आणि तो हि अगदीच बाहेरच्या केक सारखा, हा आनंद सगळ्यांना मिळावा म्हणून
मी हे बेकरीचे व्ह्र्कशोप करायचे ठरवले.
मला खूप उत्तम प्रतिसाद हि मिळाला आई आणि मुलांचा.
आम्ही सगळे मे 8 ला आमच्या कडे भेटलो आणि एकूण 25 ते 30 जण मिळून खूप चं
छान वेळ घालवला. यामधे मुलांना बेसिक चोकोलेट केक शिकवला आणि सगळ्यांनी
तो अतिशय सुंदर पणे केला, एकूण मुलांची expertise खूप जास्त दिसत होती.
आमची पूर्ण एक बेडरूम केक्स नि भरली होती कारण फ्रीझ मध्ये सगळे केक मावत
नसल्याने AC लाऊन आम्ही केक्स ठेवले होते आणि ते जवळ जवळ 15 ते 20 केक्स
होते.
आम्ही नंतर ब्रेंड बनवला आणि सगळ्या आईना वजन कमी करण्यासाठी एक घरघुती
उपाय सापडला,
कारण ब्रेंड बनवताना पुश उप्स मारल्यासारखे सगळे वजन ब्रेंड च्या कणिक
वरघालून तो हाताने मळायचा असतो
अगदी 10 मिनिटे आणि पंखा हि बंद करावा लागतो.
अनिरुद्ध ने तर सगळे पाहून हसत बोलला "ब्रेंड खाऊन नाही तर बनवताना नक्की
आमच्या कॅलोरीएस कमी होणार ".
दुपारी सगळ्यांनी छान पणे स्वरूपा मावशीने आणलेला पुलाव, धनश्री मावशीचा
ढोकळा, प्राची मावशीचे गुलाबजाम, आंबे खाल्ले.
सगळ्या आया बाकी गोष्टी सांभाळत होत्या म्हणून मला चांगले पणे शिकवणे
सोपे गेले. संध्याकाळी मग सगळ्यांनी स्वतः बनवलेला पिझ्झा आणि केक
खाल्ला आणि आमचा दिवस संपला.
या सगळ्यात अजून एक छान गोष्ट घडली ती म्हणजे समृद्धीचा मिळालेला प्रतिसाद.
जेव्हा मी पहिल्यांदा शिबिरात बेकरीच्या गोष्टी आणायला चालू केल्या
तेव्हा समृद्धीचे बाबा आवर्जून बोलले कि, समृद्धीला बेकिंग ची फार आवड
आहे आणि मी ते लक्षात ठेवून तिला केक च्या रेसिपेस पाठवल्या आणि तिने
त्या सगळ्या करून पहिल्या आणि मला फोन करून सांगितले हि.
जेव्हा मला आदल्या दिवशी,आयांची लिस्ट बनवताना कळले कि समृद्धीचे नाव यात
नाही आहे तर मी त्यांना फोन केला आणि फक्त आदल्या रात्री माझा पत्ता
समजून घेऊन त्यांनी समृद्धीला वेळेवर पाठवले ही. अनिरुद्ध
ला हि खूप आवड आहे जेवण बनवायची हे मला भाग्यश्री ने सांगितले होते,ती
येऊशकली नाही पण अनिरुद्ध नक्की आला आणि बाकी मुलांबरोबर खाली खेळायला न
जाता पूर्ण वेळ कित्चेन मध्ये सगळे काही पहात होता.
सर्वेश ने कागदाची फुले बनवून आणली तर ईश्वरी ने ती फुले ठेवायला रंगीत
फ्लोवेर् पॉट बनवला, दिव्याने सुंदर फोटो फ्रेम बनवली तर समृद्धीने
सुंदर चोकोलेट चा गिफ्ट बोकस बनवला.
हे सगळे फोटो मी खाली लावले आहेत.
ईशा महात्मे, स्वानंदी, सिमरन, आराध्य, उन्मेष परांजपे, विरज, आर्या या
सगळ्या मुलांच्या येण्याने आणि एवढ्या छान पणे केक शिकून तो बनवण्याने
माझे हे व्ह्र्कशोप सार्थक झाल्या सारखे वाटले,
आणि या सगळ्यात सर्वात मोठा मुलगा होता तो म्हणजे "आदित्य", तो दरवेळेस
कित्चेन मध्ये येऊन प्रत्येक गोष्ट निट लक्ष देऊन पहात होता आणि मधुरा
ला सूचना देत होता कि आपण हे सगळे करू या. आम्ही सगळ्यांनी बाकी मुलांची
आणि आयांची आठवण काढली आणि त्यांना हि तो आनंद मिळावा म्हणून आज लिहित
आहे.
नंतर सर्वेश, ईश्वरी आणि विरज आमच्याकडे राहिले आणि आम्ही खूप मजा केली.
रात्री तर मी आणि जयंत त्यांच्या गप्पा एकतच राहिलो जेव्हा ते समदुखी
भाऊ आणि त्यांना त्रास देणाऱ्या बाबा च्या लाडक्या बहिणी यावर चर्चा करत
होते आणि त्यांचे अनुभव ऐकून खूप हसलो हि कारण सगळच मजेशीर होते. त्यात
ते सगळे भाऊ हसत हे पण सांगत होते कि या बहिणी सगळे काही मोठे मोठे करून
सांगतात आणि मग शेवट आम्हाला हि घरात्ल्यांकडून मोठे मोठे चा मिळते.
आम्हा सगळ्यांसाठी खूप सुंदर अनुभव या सगळ्यांनी दिला आणि त्या सुंदर
आठवणी आता आमच्या कडे आता नेहमी राहतील।
वेदांत, महेक & मेघना, जयंत.
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