There is something about Single in the City.

Every Sunday , with abated breath I wait and wait eagerly curious to read what's on the menu of "Single in the City" , a weekly article occupying the not so obscure corner of Hindustan Times , yet managing to win over millions of readers and flooring a few , myself included . The person conceiving the idea calls herself Sushmita Bose . She seems to be a darling to one and all for reasons beyond gender bias that we males are inherited with. Although the articles talk of mundane , dour yet enticing occurrences, the perspective that it has of a hallucinating pretty lady adds to the zing. It makes one delve into the insights of fairer sex , whose aura of incomprehensibility still persists.

The articles are rash , daring at times , atrociously light and refreshing and on occasions more than a few denigrating the modesty of womanhood , a stuff that all grown ups long yet are deprived of. It has elements of Aphrodisiac, amorous tales narrated to keep the readers hooked (at least the lady has succeeded with both hands up on this front). Besides the pretty damsel playing with the hearts of so many readers with concocted tales is the yielding of all male idiots before the might of pen, myself excluded. Yet i cannot let myself to be left out in the lurch . So willingly I have jumped into the fray and been bugged not bogged.
I must confess it's all in the name. The damsel's name and the maternal linkage to a state notorious for sloppiness yet celebrated for the prolific lineage of beauties ranging from sensual Suchitra Sen to the sensational Sushmita , adds elements of sensuousness though far removed from the Debonair flair. The lady herself seems to of the opinion that what sells should be flaunted. Articles on very intimate womanly things are on her menu. Exactly for this purpose do I regularly find mention of alone in the city vulnerable to a stalker , a sensual discussion of the Bra , quite to the amusement of women readers, a lively concoction on office boss accosting the lady , and the lady willingly offering herself as a quid pro quo , the pestering guiding on the part of parents keeping a tab on their credulous daughter preventing her from going astray in an unsafe city such as Delhi. This is not the end . What makes her so distinct and special is the mocking and hilarious use of expressions , that colloquial English the articles are aw ashed with.
But this fan following has come at the cost of Upala Sen , who seems to be playing second fiddle to the lady. I hope I could bail her out of the readership crisis. But Alas ! For that bitch Single in The City, even I am smitten.

The Great Political Felony.

The political dust has settled . The year of lull is marked by great political naivete . Madam for whom till recently the world was a playground , has beguiled the electorates to an extent where they are will boomerang. An idea that from the very outset had dubious longevity is imminent to cease.
You cannot be a scabbard for differing , antagonistic , repulsive and divergent ideas , which if not sooner then later will cross each other. The concept of the support of Upper Castes to Dalit outfit as a Social Engineering is an apocryphal . If you actually look behind the curtains , read between the lines , the fallacy comes to the fore.
This UP election , the voting percentage was a dismal 45%. And it is widely acknowledged that affluence diminishes political / franchisee obligations. With advent of prosperity and the forward castes garnering the major chunk of benefits , it is very likely that they majorly constituted the somnolent electorates. So the voters that seated Behenji at the Hot Coveted Lucknow Gaddi , belonged to her own clan only.

Scrap... Shit ........

A time comes when one finally takes a plunge and tastes the forbidden fruit. A moment of intense passion engulfs , subserviences and puppets you to the pangs of ecstacy. These are the moments where an inherent desire , longings long suppressed unleash emotions of immeasurable unprecedented scale. Yet one lets himself be swayed by them. For ignorance is a bliss and the fear of known , delimits the unknown.
Something very similar occurred to me by virtue of my misfortune , that has maimed me and myself despite the herculean efforts to overpower , all that remains is another attempt concocted to the endless tale of failure to live in vanity.
I am sozzled up , I am inebriated , I have been decimated , I have been plummeted to abysmal troughs yet the pains never awashes hope . It is rightly said or rather hoped , a moment of reckoning can take in its fold years of agony , miseries . It is this ecstatic moment , the feel and the ambivalence that keeps me afoot and belligerent. Man is pugnacious , and I no exception. However there needs to be limits set , milestones identified and alternate plans erected for you never know when you may be bereft of perseverence.
I learnt my lessons the hard way though at every point a chimera me learning from the repentances of others , obliterated any possibility of me also going the Satan's lane . Alas the misconception realized , what awaits is a battle of survival . How not all is lost . There finally seems to be a glimmer of shine , maybe the one where the apocalypse is to strike you. But pessimism is a word of the cowards , not of idiots , unreasonable who sanguinely cling to hope , faith .
In life as in business , one must keep all his options open . Though this by extension does not apply to matrimony where infidelity and polygamy are still a taboo. Opportunities are all about jumping at appropriate time . What can identify an opportune time , the answer cannot be more lucid than this. Why you stop believing that no opportunity awaits you.

This is the text of the Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005.

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.

This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.