Children Driven Education

Watched this video about how children can learn by their own if given the right resources. Its about an experiment Professor Sugata Mitra did on children in some parts of Delhi, where he put a computer with high speed internet in a "hole in a wall" (thats the name of the experiment) and the amazing results that he saw. He saw that if left on their own, children do learn stuff by themselves. All we needed to do was provide them resources and a little motivation. He carried this experiment further on children in other parts of India and also in Italy to see the same results.

Link is here : Child driven Education

Really inspirational and must watch, specially in this phase where there is so much going around related to the corruption in the Common Wealth Games, Delhi 2010.

A section of unpaved dirt road after a long stretch of paved/smooth road with a few trees on its side. And sign boards through out the road.. Let me remember what they read.. On the paved road it read something like Stage 1/Stage 2 accomplished and on the unpaved road it read - FUTURE WORK and bullets of tasks... Wait a min.. What is going on here, what strange land am I in..

Also I have memories of Saurabh and us talking about his slides that he has to finish and submit to his Professor the next day. The context being that he had to send some presentation slides related to the progress in his research work to his professor. To give further details and for people who do not know, Saurabh (my husband) can give awesome presentations. His slides are very well made and intuitive.

And I guess that's what I was trying to do in my dream, match up to his standard and come up with an intuitive slide for his future work :P Yes folks to make it really clear, it was my dream where I was imagining an slide showing an unpaved/paved road to signify the progress made and future work yet to be done.

Kinda scary to dream about these things but I guess marrying a geek is rubbing on me. I am falling under the influence of the geeks :D So to say my conversations have changed for the usual gibberish to words like I am at the peak at the frequency wave, I am just coming down (in simple terms, I have already reached my maximum tolerance level, now I getting used to it :) ). Another example being the food is a delta hot/spicy (wee bit hot). Side Effects of marrying a geek I guess :)

On those lines, I am enclosing a picture of Saurabh's birthday cake this year. I think its apt to mention about it in this blog as you will see why. Its a geeky cake :)

Perfect Work Day...

So.. what is your perfect working day....
- A day with less work where you can relax a bit, watch highlights of the FIFA cup.. maybe

That does sound good :) Well I will let you wonder thinking what activities would make your day perfect while I will go ahead stating my tale.

Got up in the morning, rushed to the office, attended meetings.. worked a while... attended meetings... had lunch.. attended more meetings, was all going fine until the meetings started showing their effect :) Feeling drowsy in the office around 3 pm is the worst feeling you can have when you can see the pile of work in front of you :P Trust me, I fought till my best and finally succumbed to the SLEEP monster. So influenced by the monster, I decided to take an early off and leave for home around 4 pm. I thought I will take a quick nap and get to work again at home.

Happily although feeling a bit tired and sleepy I boarded the company shuttle. The rest of the day was going to be perfect... relaxing..... I would have taken a short nap... then gotten back to work, it seemed sooo well planned UNTIL I reached home and tried to get some sleep. Suddenly I could feel myself far away from the nap. Irritated, I decided to read the book, I had started reading a while ago - THE KITE RUNNER. Maybe an even more philosophical book would have been a better choice, the book was too engaging for the purpose :) I was still far away from my sweet sleep.

What went wrong..
What was keeping me awake all this time ????
Was I hungry - nope, owing to my old habit during reading books, I had consumed gigantic amount of food items.
Was I upset about something - ahhaaa, yes but what was it... I could sense that I was in the right direction in my analysis.
Was it the guilt... Bingo..... Yes, so I had been feeling guilty for running away early from the office/skipping my gym/trying to take a break off from my usual tiring day.

So, what is my actual perfect day. I guess its not where I take it easy. Its the day when, I get up early, work and finish off all the tasks at work, gym till my muscles ache, come home, cook (not eat out) and then drop on the bed, dead tired, feeling satisfied of have done everything right :)

Got engaged :)

In my last post I had written that 2008 was an eventful year, 2009 being the same till now :) I suppose every year can be classified as being eventful, just depends on how you perceive it. I shifted to and joined an IT company in California in the month of march, have always been fascinated by this state be its awesome weather, scenic drives or plethora of IT companies. I always imagined working for one of these companies, wearing a badge with my name tag and a photo which you always feel could have come out to be better :) Am really near to that step and that has been my engagement with work... but that's not it, also got "engaged" recently on the 16th of May to Saurabh Chandorkar. The ceremony took place in the bay area. I have my own memories of the engagement which I want to share with all.

Flashback.......... going back to March-April, I moved to California and my transition became really smooth as Saurabh was already here. I received a veerrryyyy warm farewell by my friends back in Arizona. Had that nostalgic feeling as well as the excitement of moving to a new place, joining a new job and being near Saurabh. Started working by march end and soon it was time for the engagement preparations. Working in the day and visiting places in regards to the engagment ceremony in the evening had become our daily schedule. After meeting soooo many people and watching tonness of samples of other people's wedding, engagement videos :) we managed to finalize on the hall, decorator etc etc. Organizing was never more fun before :)

And yes.. then came THE DAY. The ceremony went just well except that the priest made it feel as if it was a religious gathering with plugging in I guess almost all the rituals he knew :) It felt great as both our families, friends, few relatives were there :) It felt great that all my most important people were present with me at that occasion. It felt great to be standing with the person I really trust and want to be spend rest of my life with :) I don't really believe in the concept of a new beginning, but yes definitely a new dimension is added to my life and am happy about it :)

On this note I end the blog, for more details regarding the ceremony do contact me and also if you have to arrange a ceremony or anything in the bay area :) trust me the organizing has honed my event management skills and information database :P

Signing off for now, take care people :)

New Year Resolutions

Another year to gooo.... 2008 for me has been a pretty eventful year considering one of the reasons being that I graduated :) (finallyyyy) with my Master's degree and couple of others too :) . New year, couple of years ago would mean family time, interesting TV shows having hyper energetic celeb performances , sometimes gifts and YES..... RESOLUTIONS :) . I would have these resolution sessions with friends, cousins and we would come up with ways how to make our lives better or other people's lives miserable ;) . Our resolution list ranged from something really trivial like saying "Bless you" when someone sneezes :) to major career plans and not to forget, those resolutions from last year's list which we failed to achieve :P . It used to be a fairly long "To achieve" list .

Things have changed now. Everyone has got busy with their lives, not " indifferent " just busy and its the same for me. So here I am on the New Year eve thinking about the year as it just passed by and realizing that now I don't really wait for occassions for making formal resolutions. Also that my resolutions have transitioned from things like getting a job/admission in a college to giving my best shot always, learning, being content :) Not that I don't care anymore about the results like getting a job etc but just that I would rather focus on the way and I am sure they will follow. And..... I don't really watch those TV shows anymore :)

So guys with this year coming to an end I wish everyone a great year ahead... Have fun.... Keep rocking and get your resolutions set and done :)

Behaviour Formula

No one is completely black or white, we all have gray shades, but where does this gray shade really exist ?? I tend to see mostly either the whites or the blacks. Here, friends don't confuse my color description with good or bad. Good and bad to some extent is pretty relative :) What I really mean here is that there is always a fine distinction between lot of things , the gray band is just too thin at times.. For example there is such a fine line in being assertive or rude, between arrogance or being independent, being practical or having expectations .. on and on and on....

How badly I wish to act in the most efficient way by keeping myself and people really close to me happy. But in many situations I end up being defeated in either one of the two goals. These are the situations where I tend to cross these fine lines of distinction.

Soooooo..... the million dollar question being how do I decide how to act ??

After lot of thinking I could come up with one primitive formula with the following variables - the other person, situation and your priorities. What I mean is that for any such situation

Assess the importance of the person, you need not really show your assertiveness when it comes to important personal relations .

Decide how important the situation is for you and the person involved. If some insignificant situation(according to me) is of utmost importance to someone really close I would not hesistate in considering doing it.

Third your priorities/attitude in life, because you cannot be happy compromising all your life.

It would have been much more simpler if these were binary conditions but to make our lives worse they tend to have probabilistic values. Still seems to be a good approximate solution. Have not done much testing on it but hope it will work :) Situation feedback will be taken care of. Am receptive to addition/deletion of variables so solutions with better computational complexity and efficient results are always welcome.

P. S : Don't worry , I am not doing much research work these days :) Have fun !!!

Sentimental Choices....

Recently I sent an online gift to a friend in India on her birthday. Having heard stories of gifts not reaching at all or reaching late(pretty early for the next birthday :) though) if you had some luck I was pretty much skeptical of sending the gift. But deciding to show my optimism here too I sent her a cute soft toy(at least looked cute on the web site). Then also called her up twice to confirm about the gift. Its something she said that set me thinking. Her frank and honest words that it was not necessary to send a gift which I had not actually seen(Quality Issues) made me bit unhappy. Her valuable assessment of the gift to be not more than 500 Rs made me even more uneasy as I had spent much more than that . Vowing to be more practical in such issues I hid my discontent and continued the conversation cheerfully.

After our usual long chit chat at the end when she said " Despite of all facts, the toy did bring an IMMEDIATE SMILE to my face " , it put an end to all the disappointment.Practicality is good but going that EXTRA MILE does pay :)

We do need to make choices sometimes -- Practicality / SMILE you can bring on someone's face...

What would you choose ?? I had rather go for the second option :)