‘Impatience is the new life’ says a TV commercial. When you think about the life around, the phrase seems to be true. We the new generation are focused, practical, and more intelligent but we are more impatient and in tolerant. We want everything lightening fast. For us there is no tomorrow. We want everything right here right now.

To an extent, I would say it is good but we are losing the charm of enjoying life while running after everything in life. There is no time to enjoy the hard work we are putting into making our future secure and better. We look down upon people who were born few years before us as they struggle to catch up with the new world and new technologies. Our patience levels are so low that we get bored with things in days or in few hours too in some cases. We buy the latest music player or mobile phone today and get bored of it after a week. Change is the buzz word. We want everything bigger and better and we cannot wait for things to happen. We all are running after everything so much so that we do not want to stop and see if there is a better option available with a little patience and little thinking.

We do not want to wait at the traffic signals; we do not want to wait in the queues. We do not even wait for our salary (hail the credit cards, we can shop now and pay later) to buy what we want. Maps are a passé; we want GPS systems in our cars, phones, (may be in our minds too in sometime). We want everything at finger tips and at our call. We want bigger homes and better cars. We want the latest gadgets and the best holidays. This impatience has made us intolerable to a great extent. Our wants are growing at a faster pace than the availability of choices. Amidst this run for life, are we forgetting to be happy? Aren’t we becoming more frustrated with life?

We want to get happiness out of the virtual world. We have forgotten the beautiful planet we live on. We do not want to stop by and see the beauty around us, we do not look at the rainbows anymore (I wonder if the kids today even know what a rainbow is), we do not like to find faces in the clouds anymore, we have forgotten how fresh breeze feels as we work in AC offices and commute in AC transport. We meet our friends on Face book. We change our jobs like our clothes. We have stopped putting efforts to solve things or to get out of situations. Anything that stops our speed has to be chucked out of life. We have started walking in and out of marriages like we walk in and out of stores. We do not want to understand and adjust. We do not want to give second chance to anything. We have forgotten that we human beings have the privilege of expressing ourselves, being creative and enjoying life. Lot of options does not mean running after or accumulating everything available to make life better. We are trying to change our lives as we change the channels on the TV.

We are always in a hurry. I don’t know if it is good or bad to have things at your call but it sure is taking away the excitement of things we used to enjoy as kids. Life is becoming a struggle between keeping our weights down and spirits up. We talk more to people on face book than to people around us. Everything and everyone is just a click away but yet we are not content. We are not happy with anything in life. We first yearn for everything and then want to run away from it. The contentment we had as kids is missing in our fast paced, impatient lives.

Once upon a time when life was simpler we had the luxury of coming home from school and heading out to play for hours. We would wait for 6 days to watch Mickey Mouse on Sunday mornings, we used to call up our friends or meet them to talk to them. There were not social networking sites but we still bonded with friends. Once upon a time when life was good we would wait for festivals like Diwali to eat special food prepared by our moms, we used to wait for summer holidays to play out whole day. Once upon a time we actually used to live life and not exist.

Today the games we play are on computers, we can watch the programmes we want on the 50+ channels available 24×7. There is no need for us to wait for special occasions to eat special sweets or food. All that is just a phone call away. Our impatience and the need to have things when we demand has changed our lives completed and today we just exist running after everything we see. Whether we need that or not does not matter. We have everything but we are not happy with anything. Has the availability of money, technology come at a cost of our happiness? Is that the cause of our impatience?

Image Credit: Alex Grech

Popularity: 42%

Last couple of weeks I have been a silent spectator watching some interesting news about our politicians and their election promises. While one promises TVs, subsidized rice, wheat etc.,the others are not falling behind – banning computers, English in schools etc. Everyone is there to outscore each other in terms of either idiotic promises or false ones which can never be met, if the party is of sane mind.

In contrast, Meera Sanyal’s campaign has caught my attention. Like many educated and urban politicians, Meera Sanyal seems to have succeeded in getting the right people in place for her campaign and it is showing results.

Look at her website – The site is updated with the latest that is happening with her campaign, her fans are getting daily updates in their mailboxes, facebook campaign is also gaining momentum. In a nutshell there seems to be lot of moving parts, which definitely is a sign of strength.

I just hope Meera Sanyal wins the South Mumbai constituency even if it is by a small margin. That would really bring a lot of cheer and hope for Mumbai, which the city always deserved.

Kudos to the team that is putting up the brave effort, selflessly. I am sure most of them are volunteers and are happy to give their time for doing the right thing, promoting the right candidate. It is very easy to go with the crowd but it takes courage to stand out from the crowd. What the volunteers are doing is nothing short of creating an independent movement of sorts and is worth applauding. Hope it pays!

My message to Mumbaikars

Think twice before you vote this time. What you have seen on 26/11 is proof enough that our current system has failed and failed miserably. What you need is a government that works and leaders that are effective, not those who sit on a pile of cash and promote their selfish interests. We, Indians, have seen the worst of politics and politicians. Time for a change. Meera is the change that you’ve been looking for. If you don’t see it now, it might be too late.

Mumbai – Vote for change. Vote for Meera!

Image Credit: Wiki

Popularity: 42%

I am on a bench,
I can’t bear the stench,
I am kept warm,
Away from all harm,
Behind me is the Manager,
Ahead is the Damager,
Between the devil and Satan,
I am on a bench!

What’s a piece of wooden or metal furniture, which mostly offers several persons seating called?

Ladies & Gentleman, unless you are living in the stone age, you would know the answer to that question and it is ‘Bench’. Even if you live in the stone age, you would have sat on it, of course you wouldn’t know its hallowed name. Anyway, what an interesting journey our ‘bench’ had – from gracing the rough and hairy bottom of early man (and woman too!) to modern day bits and butts of wannabe software engineers.

In the course of it’s journey, ‘bench’ has taken on a new meaning altogether. From a humble seating tool of the most elementary kind (read stone) , ‘bench’ now bestows pride of place to the most exalted of workers – the software engineers. It is an accepted rite of passage, a ritual to mark the transition of an human being from college kid with scraggly beard to a respected programmer with a scraggly beard! It acts as a cushioning agent, protecting it’s users from zealous deployment managers intent on separating people from their comfort zones.

It is a mother, a father, a brother, the promised land, call it what you will! It is BENCH. To be ‘benched’ means to be marked up for greater things in life. It is a dichotomy, a two faced Harvery Dent of the software world in that it is where most engineers want to be yet don’t want to be! Its patrons refuse to accept that they are ‘benched’ yet they don’t want to leave its warmth. Warmth?? Yes, it has already been warmed up by someone else before you arrived! Kursi garam rakho yaar…

Now, you – my patient readers would think I am some kind of manager in a large MNC making fun of the only place in the corporate that is not funny at all! Relax my friends, I am not a manager, much less a deployment guy.

I, friends, Romans, and countrymen, was a humble bencher until the corporate won over and put me to work. Thus ended my days of pasture where I could graze quietly and contemplate life. Also ended my lazy, hazy, and dreamy days where I could ‘cook’up inane ideas for uplifting myself- like funky skits that parody the very life I was going to live, the silly crosswords that revealed that I did not know how to spell, the endless cups of free chai and kaapi that bled the machine dry!

Gone are those glorious days of playing truant while managers frantically searched for me and zeroed in on some unsuspecting bencher. Those warm, innocent, and happy days lasted just 2 months before duty called and I rose to the occasion. Instead, what remains is a fond memory of those days and a wistful nostalgia for days gone by! Okay, enough reminiscing.

I think I am growing old…in 2008. Cut to 2009 and it’s a different world. The corporates have decided that they would make bench hotter than hell and definitely hotter than Bipasha Basu! In the name of progress they have decided to promote people quickly -from bench to chair

Yes, shorter bench leads to quicker, faster, & more work – leads to happy corporate – leads to unhappy employee. What seemed like an eternal honeymoon lasting upto 2 years in the good old days, now is a brief affair before the inevitable divorce! Vanishing clients & shrinking profit lines have prompted MNCs to move people out of bench and into chairs quicker than before. Focus is on ‘billing’,that which hits the client , and utilization , that which hits you!

In plain jargon, billing is the amount of money your company charges the client for putting you to work and utilization is the number of hours you worked on the project. So, the number of hours you worked multiplied by your per hour rate is what the company earned from your efforts. It’s not as simple as I put it but it serves our purpose. Therefore, the shorter you are on bench, the better it is for the corporate.

Typically bench period lasts upto 3 months, giving corporates the necessary time to locate projects with suitable requirements across their landscape and deploy you. Sometimes it is immediate – unfortunately, while at other times  it is longer than a Himesh Reshammiya song. The trick is to patiently hone your skills and network with higher-ups so that you get deployed quicker. The interim period could be utilized for any activity one chooses to indulge in. It could be as mundane as mugging up tech fundaes or as interesting as chatting up with bench friends in other companies, creating Facebook/Orkut profiles (I did), celebrating Birthdays, staring at your shrinking bank balance, or a gorgeous Mallika Sherawat on the sly!

Yes sirs and madams, bench is the only place where you can all the things you ever wanted to do in life but didn’t know where to do them!

Welcome to the bench…Come sit!

Image Credit: Helmet 13

Popularity: 16%

Google has launched Friend Connect to perhaps aimed at a Global Social Network. Already thousands of sites have added the widgets and are using them.

While users are using the widgets and posting their activities, currently the FriendConnect System helps update these only on Orkut and Plaxo. It doesn’t provide either an RSS or a method to post these to other sites.

Well for users like me, who love to have all their web activities to be streamed this is a show stopper. Thankfully, we have the option of creating a Mashup to address this challenge.

Mashup in the context of web is defined as: “A web application or site mixing content from multiple sources”

So let’s get started. What you need are the following:

• A Yahoo Account for use with Yahoo Pipes, a mashup creating tool
• A Plaxo Account to capture the updates from Friend Connect
• And of course registrations on FriendConnect enabled sites

Here’s how you can do this in 9 steps:

Step 1: Open the FriendConnect Setting, add Plaxo and check “Publish my activities on other sites”. Click Done. This will enable your activities to be streamed to Plaxo and be visible on Plaxo pulse.

Step 2: Log in to the Plaxo site and navigate to http://www.plaxo.com/rss. Click on “Enable” next to option “Me” as shown below. This will activate a link. Copy the URL displayed.

Step 3: Log in to Yahoo Pipes and click on “Create pipe”

This will open up a Pipe Layout.

Step 4: Select Sources->Fetch Feed and in the URL add the URL copied from Plaxo.

Step 5: Select Operators->Filter, and connect the Fetch Feed to Filter as shown in the figure.

Step 6: Now Change the Settings on Filter to “Permit” items that match “all” of the following. Under Rules add “item.title” contains Friendconnect.

Step 7: Now link Filter to Pipe Output, as shown in the figure.

Step 8: Click save and voila! you have created your Mashup!

Step 9: On the Run Screen, click on Get as RSS, copy the RSS URL

That’s it… You have your RSS of FriendConnect activities. You can use this to feed it into FriendFeed, Twitter, Facebook, Lifestream and any other tool which supports RSS import.

My preference is Twitterfeed.com feeding to Ping.fm, which updates lot of social networking sites at one go.

Get a flavor of how to get the web working for you? Welcome to Web 2.0.

Enjoy!

Popularity: 47%