Yet another sexy new possibility – Theater!

It was Aashish who called me up at 10 in the morning yesterday saying that their troupe is short of 1 guy for their play – “The Death of a Salesman”. He asked if I was interested, I immediately said YES. I went gave an audition and I got selected.

I had done a couple of plays in my school. I was the best actor in the Hindi play and I forgot my dialog in the English play!

I have to be truly extraordinary to make it to the rehearsals though. Been heavily out integrity in terms of work. I have at least 20 items in my to do list, stuff that I should have done by now but haven’t.

In fact, I was about to inform Aashish of my inability to participate because I had a lot of other work to be done. But when I thought for it a little more, I realized that what I was thinking was – ‘I am not good enough to manage all these things together‘. I dropped the conversation and said ‘hell, I am‘.

I have invented a sexy new possibility of replacing all the ORs of my life with ANDs. That is, I usually say, I can either do this OR do that. What I have taken on is, to do this AND that. All you need to have, to do this , is -

• Integrity (honoring your word),
• Existence Mechanism (Reminders in phone and daily/weekly/monthly planning),
• Relationships (ability to make powerful requests) and
• Powerful Communication.

Thats all it takes.

–

Wow! I had always imagined doing theater in Bangalore. That is happening!

Art is happening.

Dance is next!

Ah what Fun!

5th May 00.20 AM – I am lying upside down on my bed, my head sunk in my pillow immersed in thoughts of my goals and why am I so far from them. (Essentially full of bull).

5th May 00.21 AM – Call from uncle! (I can never imagine my uncle to be awake at that hour!) He says something that summarizes to – ‘Amit I have met with a small accident. There is Aunty and a friend with me. Nobody is hurt. I need help. Aap aa Jaao.’ (Now it was great of uncle to have considered to remember me at a time of need. I am sure I would have been the last person to come on his mind had I not had a heart to heart chat the day before. That chat deserves another post. But I guess I wont write it cause – the bottom line of the conversation was my uncle making me realize how much an ‘Irresponsible bloody fool‘ I am! Both of us loved the conversation and I learned a lot about my uncle’s perception of me, it got us closer.)

… coming back to the melodrama

So I thank God for rescuing me from the dungeons of dark meaningless imagination and head off for Madiwalla, where my uncle had met with his fate.

I reach there and find uncle busy on the phone talking to a sleepy fellow after another. Even I called a few helplines and only the “Just Dial” fellow sounded awake. Our job was simple. Ensure Aunty and all reach home safely. Get the vehicle towed to a safe location. Preferably get an authorized Maruti dealer to take it to their workshop. Come back home and sleep.

What had happened was: My uncle hit a big stone that was lying innocently at a place where it should not be lying. Uncle didn’t see it and !#???^%!! Collision. The right tire meets the angels and so does the tie rod. A bent tie rod simply means that the vehicle can’t move.

Uncle’s friend drops aunty and others in his car, while uncle and I try to find out a tow. I ask Aashish and he searches his CityFind and gives me a couple of useful numbers. He even reminds me of his competitor – Just Dial’s number. After talking to about half a dozen service center numbers, uncle gave up. No one provided 24 hour service it seems. We wanted to tow the vehicle a few meters ahead, so that the vehicle can be off the road. The towing service people ask for 1500/- bucks. We say – ‘balls to you’ (not literally though). Some helpful Autowallah suggests that a service center at Bannerghetta Road might be open. So we decide to check it out. Instead of 1 we find 2. But both had no one but the security guard in the premises. We look at the watch. 2:40 AM it says. We come back to the car, reason that ‘we have put stones at a distance from the car to prevent people from banging it from behind + its right under a street light + it won’t be disturbing anyone so early in the morning ++ and chose to go back home at Banaswadi. We resolved to come back by 7.

Next morning… we come and are relieved to see that the car is just the same as we had left it the previous night. Some kind soul had put a lot more stones with small tree branches behind the car to prevent someone from hitting it. Just as we were appreciating the deed, we reached the back of the car and find it completely smashed. Some LMV had hit the car from behind. No wonder he put so many stones in place!

Uncle looks worried for 5 second and then gets completely normal and decides to go a Maruti Authorized Dealer. We reach some place at Bannerghetta Road and the manager there advices us to get an FIR launched. We spend an hour+ finding the police station. We reach the police station and the folks there refuse to take the complaint. Now we come back to the site of vehicle.

Wow! the the car had blocked the whole traffic! People had removed the stones and some irritated fellow picked up one of the stones and hit the windshield. So now we had 3 accidents. A broken tie-rod, a crashed backside and a broken windshield.

There was an amazing adventure with cops and how we finally managed to get the whole thing towed away. But its an old story now and I am short of time to write about it. In a gist, 4 different cops blasted us at 4 different times for obstructing the traffic. My uncle is a general manager of a big govt company. He was extraordinary in taking the bullshit! Hats off! Then the cops heroically stopped a traffic, pulled people out of the buses and lorries and asked them to lift the car and move it to a better place! … After a long tiring day dealing with the insurance and other stuff, we finally got free by around 3 o clock. Uncle treated me to some yum noodles at Taipan!

So much for now!

My bike got towed away!!!

Ya so I come out of National Market (read the post below), and discover that my Bajaj Discover is not where I parked it! I ask the parking fellow and he said that It was parked on the road and has been towed away! I think “Wow, what next”. Now I had recently given my bike for servicing and had forgotten my papers home. I couldn’t go and get my bike without the Registration Certificate!

Now under normal circumstances I would have said “WTF man, why did this have to happen now???”. But something is happening to me these days and I was surprised to realize that I said this to my self – “Awesome man, I get to go home in a bus from Majestic in after 3 years!” I was genuinely excited at the possibility!!! They talk about “Glass half full or half empty” right, I was realizing this.

Good things happen to happy people and I get a Volvo standing just for me.

I reach home and remember that I had not been able to find my home key in the morning so I had slammed the door tightly putting a sock in the chaukhat to keep the door from opening. I give a clearing* to find my home key and woosh I find it. I had spent an hour to find it in the morning. Next I realize that I have lost my bike’s papers. I search my home for 5 mins but no avail. But some how I am still not panicking. So I give a clearing of finding them. I search for another 2 mins and an impossible thought comes to my mind. I go downstairs and ask my landlady if she has seen my bike’s papers. OMG, she says yes! I had dropped them somewhere sometime?!? But it was a profound manifestation of the distinction called clearing.

I ask my best friend Braj to take me to the Bus-stop and we discuss Numerology, Moh Maya, Life’s purpose, Clearing, Friends and IPL en-route.

Then I get my bike and we both come back separately.

It was a great day! I had a breakthrough in seeing the bright side of things in tough circumstances. You know, as Spencer Johnson puts it in “The Present” – “Seeing what is Right right now”.

* What is clearing?

Clearing is a pure thought in which we imagine something and look for it to happen and it happens. These kind of things are tough to understand for some people. But thats ok. Clearing is basically a distinction I got as a Landmark SELP coach.

Had Sandwich at Open Coffee Club meet @ Core Objects Bangalore!

I reached an hour late for the OCC meet that happened today at the Core Objects cafeteria. But I guess that I didn’t miss much because many were late and I reached within 10 – 15 mins of when the interesting conversations started. The theme was “Co-Founder”. Make everything you wanna make of the word and discuss.

It was fun as usual. Prateek of Muziboo, Ram of Kasenna, Rahul, Harsha of adventure and Amarinder of Core Objects shared their startup experiences. Abhishek spoke a bit about Venture Capital and I had a big chat with Ram about Seed Funding and Market Research.

I got some interesting insights.

• Co-Founders are not necessarily the best of pals.
• Chemistry and wavelength may go for a toss if you are not open to ideas.
• Bootstrap it baby. But if you have the money, its best to do it fulltime.
• This girl, I don’t know her name said that if you are < 25, you’ve got a friggin good chance to succeed. I think this statistic was pointed out by Marc Andreesen Zuckerberg.

I had the opportunity to speak to more than half of the 20+ people who were there. And I had a few interesting conversations. At one point of time during the discussions Vaibhav asked, “Who is searching for a co-founder?”. I raised my hand. I am in fact looking at implementing one of my ideas that I recently brainstormed with Saurabh at BCB6. I also met Deepan who is making educative games and stuff. Though what he is doing and what I intend to do are completely different. But the motivations are similar. I shared my ideas with him in significant depth. Spoke of the market and money. He is full time into his own venture, yet I offered him to club his ideas with mine and start off together. He said he was interested and took my number. Lets see if he calls up!

I had a whole big adventure after OCC, but that calls for another post later!

Oh and I completely forgot about the sandwich, but let it be!

Had Fun giving a talk on Algorithms!

Wow I had a blast today!

I went to my college CMRIT to give a talk on Algorithms to the 2nd year students there. The HOD, Mrs Padmaveni, greeted me and introduced me to the kids. The interested thing was, none of the students knew that there is a guest lecture thats about to happen. So they were not really prepared for it. I had gone with the intention of giving them a few puzzles and asking them to solve some TopCoder like problems that I had made. However the projector took a lot of time to get prepared and I could only throw on some puzzles to them.

We spoke about DFS, BFS, Rat in a Maze, how web crawlers work (the BFS application of the same) etc. They were quite excited to see the Sudoku code in action, but I felt it would be a bouncer for them. So we ended up discussing something simpler like Minesweeper . Not just discussing, I encouraged them to think the program out. I assisted with the coding part. Within 45 minutes, our Minesweeper backend was done. In 1 hours time, the game was fully playable (without a GUI though).

For many of the students it was an absolute bouncer! But I hope they did feel encouraged to take on programming . Some (say 20%) actually understood the whole thing. Which is good. Then there were about 20% who felt they can do better with bunking the class and they walked out.

Man it was an awesome experience. I realize that I absolutely love teaching. I would love to provide them everything that I couldn’t get when I was in their place.

All in all a great experience.

A sexy new possibility.

Here comes another bullet post. I’ll finish writing this within 7 minutes.

A whole new possibility came to my mind today when I was thinking of my Ma’am. (Mrs Kamal Baduni. My teacher from APS Dagshai who is just like a mother to me). I anyways think of her a few times every week! But this time I thought of going and staying with her. I was thinking about going home and thought it would be so wonderful if I could stay with her also!

Thinking of the same a wonderful new possibility came to my mind. How about traveling the country staying with my friends and family all the time! Sounds great doesn’t it? There are a few hitches though. 1 its not practical. Not the travel part of it but the money part of it. If I am not earning then the experience will be more painful than fun for me.

So the next imp question is – “How do I earn money while consistently being on the move?”. Well there are many ways.

• I can become a blogger. This blog + my yet to be started tech blog + my handwriting analysis website can fetch me sufficient money.
• Also I can conduct – Handwriting Analysis workshops and do some live analysis in malls for fun. This way I can earn money.

The next problem is Computer! I don’t have a laptop yet and I would need one. Anyways I have kept “Buying a laptop and a sexy cell phone” in this years targets. I just have to focus on buying it soon enough.

So how much money should I earn every month such that I can easily go and have fun? I guess 40k a month will be sufficient.

Buttttt… What about my entrepreneural dreams? Well, this is a tough question. I’ll need some time to work it out.

But the possibility is wonderful!

Aha.. I have taken 11 minutes already. Its gonna take me another minute to put the tags and publish. But good I am improving on writing bullet posts!

Cleaning Public Toilets!!! :)

Wow! I never imagined I would ever do this.

I went for production assisting in Tanaya’s SELP today (Landmark Education). Mr Iyer was my senior in the production team. So I go there and he tells me that the toilets are stinking and asks if we could do something about it. Now I know that the ILP (Introduction Leaders Program) participants do clean toilets and everything themselves. At landmark we create something called a space. A space in which everything is charged with positivity. Including the toilets! No joking, I have seen professors and doctors cleaning them! But I was clear that I am not doing ILP. So when Iyer uncle suggested that I clean them, I exclaimed in my mind (???). Now I clean my loo myself and have no inhibitions to the cleaning side of it. But somehow I was expecting Mr Iyer to make it sound more dramatic . All he did was got the stuff (anti-infectant and other cleaning stuff) and handed them to me!

Then I started my job. Started with cleaning the mirrors because I was not mentally ready yet! The place was stinking real bad actually and there were no naphthalene balls to be found. So I start with Harpic and a toilet brush and clean the stuff. Now came the mopping of the floor turn. I don’t know if the pipe was leaking or someone was playing a game of “My pee farthest” but there were substantial traces of some random dude’s piss on the floor beside the urinal. And it was my job to clean that! I am making it sound very melodramatic but in reality I didn’t feel disgusted . Yeah so coming back to the melodrama. To add on to my misery, the mopping broom was lost. So I had to mop it – the wretched place with my hand. And here comes the bomb. I liked doing it. I didn’t think it was gross. I didn’t think “whose piss am I wiping”. I just felt like, there are people to serve; its my duty that they have a good space and I don’t want their toilet to stink. I would go on to the extent of saying that I enjoyed the experience. It was like a privilege.

But then again, if anyone came inside, I’d throw down cloth and start looking at the mirror!!! And then there were dirty footprints all over the floor again, so I’d mop it again and then another guy came. This time it was my friend Nikhil. So after he was done I asked him to stand out and not let anyone in for the next few minutes.

Later on in the day, I observed the stink again or maybe it was Iyer uncle who told me about it. And there I go again into the war-zone. This time again I moped and someone came and I stopped then he dirtied it, and then I mopped and then someone else came and I stopped and the floor got dirtied again. And there was no Nikhil around to ask people to wait outside! So finally I got present to “why do I need to goddamn stop when someone just barges in”. I am not ashamed of it.

When I was just about to finish. I asked the only man standing in front of the mirror. “Is it stinking?”. He smiles and says no. He was an IL (Introduction Leader – An advance curriculum grad who takes public introductions to the Landmark Forum). He said “Good job Amit”. I smiled and said “My Pleasure”. He then said something about you needing to have a heart to do production or something. I wasn’t paying much attention. I was glad that I actually meant the -”My Pleasure” part of the conversation. I was glad that I got an opportunity to serve people in such a unique way.

DISCLAIMER: Landmark production assisting has got a lot of other things beside cleaning toilets too. Cleaning toilets is maybe only 7% of the job! In fact, as pointed out by Venkat in the first comment, cleaning toilets is NOT a part of assisting at all. (I think Mr Iyer doesn’t know about this either. It was a very unique experience none the less.) But none of the remaining things were as interesting as this. Maybe I’ll write a bit about assisting in some other post some other day.