Author: Swati Sani

Boredom

I hear from so many youngsters today that they are getting bored. They get bored at home, they get bored in their new jobs, they get bored in their old jobs. They get bored. Period.

I was told by one of my professors, you never get bored if you have a craving to learn and grow. Over the years, I realised it too. There are people who blame others for their boredom, specially youngsters. They should realise if they are getting bored, the fault is not with their surroundings, the fault is within themselves.

If they feel sleepy while reading, its their own brain that shuts up to learning and wishes to sleep. Perhaps it is because they are young and think they have a lot of time, they waste it getting bored. A few years later, they will realise the folly of it all.

Aasim turned 9

Aasim turned nine today. This year the party was a day prior, on a Saturday evening and most of his classmates and friends managed to come. The kids had a blast, and on finding out that their last year’s class teacher and a friend of ours, Indrani Bagchi, was going to attend the party, they were ecstatic. Indrani no longer works as a teacher in Aasim’s school but the reception she got on reaching was overwhelming to say the least. She was a very popular teacher and loved the kids immensely, the kids loved her back just as much.
The party lasted for 5 hours and left all of us tired.

The day today was spent on the construction site and in Aasim’s words, “the place is heaven”. Later in the day while both of us watched an extremely well made movie (Yun hota to kya hota) Aasim played with his friend and evening was spent eating some mouthwatering Kebabs at Redz.

Of telling people to leave

Another first for SANIsoft – an employee was fired yesterday!! Feels bad, but I can not live with compromises – I will not tolerate anyone going against the ethics on which my organisation stands, and top it up with insubordination. People at SANIsoft are my family, and I will let no harm come to my family.

Leisure

While discussing poetry with Aasim today, I recalled and told him my all time favourite, Leisure, by W H Davies.

What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare?

No time to stand beneath the boughs,
And stare as long as sheep and cows:

No time to see, when woods we pass,
Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass:

No time to see, in broad daylight,
Streams full of stars, like skies at night:

No time to turn at Beauty’s glance,
And watch her feet, how they can dance:

No time to wait till her mouth can
Enrich that smile her eyes began?

A poor life this if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.

Nothing By Chance

Dear Swati,

I wanted to buy you a piggy bank to save money but I couldn’t get one, then I thought of a music cassette, couldn’t find an appropriate one.
Thought of Virtue of Selfishness, couldn’t find a copy. So I got this book -let me warn you, its “Nothing by chance” in this life. May be you need this book

Tarique
2/3/91.

You gave this book to me on my 23rd Birthday. On your 40th, I give it back to you. Its been a long and happy ride together, but we have an even longer ride awaiting us. Its been one hell of a ride, full of ups and downs, twists and turns; lets brace ourselves for the next lap.

May be we need this book -again.

The dot com bubble

The next dot com bubble (some call it web2.0) – is it about to burst ?

When does a bubble burst – In a very simplistic way, one can say, a business bubble bursts when common people start loosing money investing in an industry. The last dot com bubble burst when a lot of venture capitalists lost a lot of badly invested money resulting into a south facing profit graph and low stock prices.

Look at the scene as it was 15 days back, the tech stocks seemed to be climbing and on NASDAQ while today they look as if they are going to loose the footing on Nasdaq and as its reaction on Nikkei. BSE and NSE too was affected by the sluggish international markets – BSE and NSE indexes are not tech heavy indexes so, one really cant say anything about collective performance of tech scrips however, a cursory glance on todays market figures shows them dipping south.

While that was a pessimistic scenario, from a more picturesque optimistic scenario, and looking at things from a broader perspective – The stock prices rise and fall marginally all the time -the trend more or less still looks upwards.

People are still not loosing money – the profit graphs of tech companies have not started plunging yet. The investors big and small VCs and banks included, still seem to be interested in putting money albeit in good technologies and capable technologists. More and more brick and mortar business are expanding their realm of business to the net, resulting into an increased bottom lines on a comparatively smaller investment.
Now thats gives a pleasing a pretty picture.

I am no business analyst, but by simply pitting the negative against the positive, I would like to believe that this bubble will not burst, at least not in very near future, and the longer it takes for it to burst, the less harmful it will be.