There's something inside me, something that's always watching what I'm doing, something that's always telling me what's right and what's wrong. And from quite a few days now, that something has been talking to me.

IT asks me: "Are you sure you're doing what you should be doing?"

As crazy as this question may seem, it's difficult to answer. This is not about trivial things, like having one too many drinks. It's about the biggest things. It's about LIFE. This one question daunts me. Haunts me. I've never done anything else but software, so how do I know if there's something else that I can do or should be doing? The fact of the matter is, I don't have a clear answer. And that really means, that the answer is "NO".

The movie "Swadesh", it packs a punch. The movie carries a social message. That message was not "you should do this" or "you should do that". That message was simply "There is a Mohan Bhargav in each one of us". The underlying emphasis was on the courage to "do"! To do what?

How many of us even dream? And how many of us acknowledge our dreams? And how many of us have the courage to be able to break out of life's daily rigour to live our dreams? And how many of us actually "do"? This is what I meant by "do". To dream. To inspire others to dream. To live your dreams. To write your own destiny.

Life is beckoning. To explore. To search. To dream. To realise. To fulfill. And after all, there is only one life, and I don't want to live through it just to live through it.

Today, I feel like the little shepherd in Spain from the book "The Alchemist". I know there's a treasure waiting to be discovered by me. I know it's across the Mediteranian sea, burried deep in the sands around the Pyramids of Egypt. I know that the path to the Pyramids is long and treacherous. I know that every step forward takes me further away from my current peaceful existence. I know that every step forward takes me closer to the treasure. I know that there could be no treasure after all, and that I could have to return to being a shepherd.

Above all, I know that if I don't sell my sheep and cross the sea now, I never will.

Cheers
Mayur Poddar

The timestamp with the weblogs is now aligned with IST. Only the newer posts will have the IST times, posts before this are in GMT.

Cheers
Mayur Poddar

Ok. I'm sitting at home with Krishna. It's 11.45pm. So I'm telling him about a friend who's getting me a 250GB external USB2.0 hard drive. And what do I think of? Can I plug one of these 250GBs directly to an audio amp? Geez. So Krishna san says - "you want a 250GB iPod?" - ain't that cool. So this is what I'm going to be looking around for now. A 250GB iPod.

Cheers
Mayur Poddar

Work-Life balance. It's typical of me to be like the United Nations - find a win-win solution. This time around, there's too many parties involved. The most important needs of all the parties doesn't allow a win-win - I'm trying, but I'm not confident. Looks like someone will loose out.

Cheers
Mayur Poddar

Super job. Now the timestamp with every entry is GMT time. Only 5 hours 30 mins away!

So far I had been writing the page by hand. Last weekend I managed to give it a better look. Today I did 2 things.

a) Wrote a file-manager script. The default file manager provided by the hosting service is rather difficult to use. So I wrote my own. The single script will list files, allow deletion, creating sub-directory, dos2unix, zip, unzip, upload.

b) Wrote another script to give me a web interface to add my web logs - instead of me having to manually modify the page in a text editor!!! The script automatically adds the timestamp to the top of the web log, but the server being somewhere in USA, it gets a negative offset of 12 hours 30 mins.

Use the "Write to me" link and tell me how this page looks now.

Cheers
Mayur Poddar

I've been totally busy these past days. With Mohan's reception and the gang. Though it got tiring at times, it turned out to be a very enjoyable week. I can say that I've now made so many more friends. And I just like that. Once I get permission from Mohan, I'll put up some of the pictures from his reception.

For now, I've added 3 albums. One is of pictures from Chikmanglur - all of us had gone to this cool resort Texwoods - in Chikmanglur for a 3 day weekend trip. This was in January 2005, just before I left for Japan. Another album has some of my favorite pictures - family, naturals, and some exotic fancy pictures. And the last one is a collection of pictures of .... me!

And yes, I've decided to explore other opportunities at work front. This doesn't come as a sudden decision - I've been thinking about this for quite some time now. More on this once things materialize.

Cheers,
Mayur Poddar