DreamingAway

"You can travel for the whole day with this 30 Rs. ticket. Can't you?" - The person sat next to me asked when someone got 30 Rs. ticket from the conductor. I was bit surprised. I didn't expect him to have this knowledge. He is 76 (he told me later) with very lean energyless body. He continued and went on for another 35 minutes. He almost told me about his life journey, from age 10 to where he was going on that day. This is very common with elderly people. They have gathered a lot to talk. There was a mention about his willingness to die without passing time in the hospital. Before getting down at Vijayanagar he thanked me for listening to him patiently which even their family members don't do. I just smiled as that is not at all a new thing to me. I haven't felt that busy to ignore these people. And of course, I am very comfortable at listening, especially when someone talks about his own past. Though at times I feel sad, I don't really complaint. No one c...

I went for a short trip to Wayanad, Kerala with my colleagues and this post is just a looking back. I heard from one of my friends that Wayanad means "Vayal" "Nadu". I had no problem in understanding this (land of paddy fields) as it sounds the same in my own language, Tamil. The journey towards Wayanad started around 8.30 AM from Calicut. In fact, it is Wayanad district, located on the Western Ghats and we were travelling towards a place called Kalpetta. It looked like a town and I guess the place is dominated by Muslims. It was interesting to watch the road and the streets that connects it to the near by houses. The road is laid higher than the street level and just after half a kilo meter it is the reverse of it. Perhaps, you could imagine the structure as a graph where the zigzag line moves on the z-axis having its base on the x-y plane. The pattern repeats for a long distance and I wonder how beautiful it would have been had they not built houses there. I was e...

I am sure you experienced the fun with Twitter, I mean, it is down when you login! What Hitler would do.... Checkout this hilarious video Kovil Pillai P.

I am sure this one of your favourite song too. Kovil Pillai P.

Source: Email forward A man sat at a metro station in Washington DC and started to play the violin; it was a cold January morning. He played six Bach pieces for about 45 minutes. During that time, since it was rush hour, it was calculated that thousand of people went through the station, most of them on their way to work. Three minutes went by and a middle aged man noticed there was musician playing. He slowed his pace and stopped for a few seconds and then hurried up to meet his schedule. A minute later, the violinist received his first dollar tip: a woman threw the money in the till and without stopping continued to walk. A few minutes later, someone leaned against the wall to listen to him, but the man looked at his watch and started to walk again. Clearly he was late for work. The one who paid the most attention was a 3 year old boy. His mother tagged him along, hurried but the kid stopped to look at the violinist. Finally the mother pushed hard and the child continued to walk tur...

Taken from Seth's blog I don't like popcorn. But today, walking by a bowl of it, I took some. Most people do. The thing about popcorn is that it is a low investment, low risk snack. You can eat it if you're not hungry. You can successfully have a tiny portion. You are virtually certain that it will taste very much like your last popcorn snack. There are products that are as easy to sample as popcorn. And making your product more popcorn-like is a great idea. At the same time, it's interesting to note that very few people make a lot of money from popcorn. For a product this ubiquitous, it's surprisingly unsuccessful. Coke and Nike and Marlboro are a lot more powerful than Jiffy Pop. So, the second lesson is that you want to make the sampling popcorn-like, but the commitment to be far bigger than it is for popcorn. Easy trial and consistent quality can lead to low commitment, not a great combination. How do we make this more like popcorn? How do we make it less like ...

Kovil Pillai P.