Going on a holiday
Dear Friends,
Am going off on a longish holiday for 3-4 weeks. I'm unlikely to be blogging during this period.
Once I'm back, I'm sure that I'll be even more energized than ever, and will come up with many more useful and interesting posts.
Do check out from time to time, but certainly come back to this blog in the first week of December, 2009.
Bye for now!
Regards,
N
Female CEOs' Pay Nearly Half Of Their Male Counterparts In The
Wonder if any of you have similar figures for the Indian context.
My own (entirely baseless) suspicion is that things will be much worse in India.
Source: Got it from naukri.com - original source - Financial Express
Gender Bias or What? Female CEOs' Pay Nearly Half Of Their Male Counterparts In The US
According to a recent survey, female chief executives earned just 58% of what their male counterparts did in 2008, and their salary packages were slashed three times as much as their male peers. Corporate governance research firm, the Corporate Library said total realised compensation — which includes base salary, bonuses, perquisites, benefits, and the value realized on the exercise of options and vesting of other equity — declined by a median of 18.5% in 2008 for female CEOs. During the same time, the compensation of male CEOs fell 6.1%, the survey revealed. Top female chief executives' median base salary was $40,000 higher in comparison to that for male CEOs, but men's' discretionary bonuses were more than 3.5 times larger than those given to females, and men's perquisite payments were nearly twice the amount received by women, the survey said.
My (entirely baseless and uneducated) guess regarding the possible reasons:
Any comments?
Regards,
N
Firemen die inside a Lift
Had this not been a true life incident widely reported in the media, I'd have thought that it was perhaps an articicially created case study for Class X school children while discussing about subjects such as Fire Safety, Civic sense, etc.
God, is it not the most basic of lessons learnt by even school children that one is not supposed to take a Lift in a building which has caught a fire?
Here we have an instance where fire service personnel actually took a lift in while trying to approach the 14th floor of a building which was on fire!!
Very sincerely, I simply don't have the heart to pass any comments about the dead souls. However, their supervisors, trainers, etc. must certainly be taken to task.
Regards,
N
In a Rat Race, the winner still remains a Rat
I'm glad to forward a mail with no further additions of my own. The mail represents views that I've been espousing for a long while.
People have forgotten - at least lots of people have indeed forgotten - that they earn to live, and not the other way round.
Do recall that you need to Live!
Regards,
N
Hi Folks,
Here's a good one.
This was a speech made by Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Anna Quindlen at
the graduation ceremony of an American university where she was awarded an
Honorary PhD.
"I'm a novelist. My work is human nature. Real life is all I know. Don't
ever confuse the two, your life and your work. You will walk out of here
this afternoon with only one thing that no one else has. There will be
hundreds of people out there with your same degree: there will be thousands
of people doing what you want to do for a living. But you will be the only
person alive who has sole custody of your life. Your particular life. Your
entire life. Not just your life at a desk or your life on a bus or in a car
or at the computer. Not just the life of your mind, but the life of your
heart. Not just your bank accounts but also your soul.
People don't talk about the soul very much anymore. It's so much easier to
write a resume than to craft a spirit. But a resume is cold comfort on a
winter's night, or when you're sad, or broke, or lonely, or when you've
received your test results and they're not so good.
Here is my resume: I am a good mother to three children. I have tried never
to let my work stand in the way of being a good parent. I no longer consider
myself the centre of the universe. I show up. I listen. I try to laugh. I am
a good friend to my husband. I have tried to make marriage vows mean what
they say. I am a good friend to my friends and them to me. Without them,
there would be nothing to say to you today, because I would be a cardboard
cut out. But I call them on the phone and I meet them for lunch. I would be
rotten, at best mediocre, at my job if those other things were not true.
You cannot be really first rate at your work if your work is all you are. So
here's what I wanted to tell you today: Get a life. A real life, not a manic
pursuit of the next promotion, the bigger pay cheque, the larger house. Do
you think you'd care so very much about those things if you blew an aneurysm
one afternoon or found a lump in your breast?
Get a life in which you notice the smell of salt water pushing itself on a
breeze at the seaside, a life in which you stop and watch how a red-tailed
hawk circles over the water, or the way a baby scowls with concentration
when she tries to pick up a sweet with her thumb and first finger.
Get a life in which you are not alone. Find people you love, and who love
you. And remember that love is not leisure, it is work. Pick up the phone.
Send an email. Write a letter. Get a life in which you are generous. And
realize that life is the best thing ever, and that you have no business
taking it for granted. Care so deeply about its goodness that you want to
spread it around. Take money you would have spent on beer and give it to
charity. Work in a soup kitchen. Be a big brother or sister. All of you want
to do well. But if you do not do good too, then doing well will never be
enough.
It is so easy to waste our lives, our days, our hours, and our minutes. It
is so easy to take for granted the colour of our kids' eyes, the way the
melody in a symphony rises and falls and disappears and rises again. It is
so easy to exist instead of to live.
I learned to live many years ago. I learned to love the journey, not the
destination. I learned that it is not a dress rehearsal, and that today is
the only guarantee you get. I learned to look at all the good in the world
and try to give some of it back because I believed in it, completely and
utterly. And I tried to do that, in part, by telling others what I had
learned. By telling them this: Consider the lilies of the field. Look at the
fuzz on a baby's ear. Read in the back yard with the sun on your face.
Learn to be happy. And think of life as a terminal illness, because if you
do, you will live it with joy and passion as it ought to be lived".
Regards,
Antony Varghese
Regards,
N
Do take a look at Baydark.com
This is an interesting link:
Can't say that I agree with these views - Wonder the extent to which a black background is pleasing to the eye!
Regards,
N
Supposed Security Breach by Rahul Gandhi
TV screens have been splashing the news about the "Surprise visit" to UP by Mr. Rahul Gandhi. Apparently, Ms. Mayawati has objections to this "Security Breach" as the state government was not duly informed in advance about the same. And, the Congress spokespersons claim that all this "cribbing" by Ms. Mayawati is nothing but an expression of her insecurity over Rahul's growing popularity.
Disclaimer: I'm no fan of Ms. Mayawati. In fact, a bit to the contrary!!!
Nevertheless, we should have the courage of conviction to call a spade a spade.
A simple question:
The entire Congress folks (duly accompanied by all our shrill news channels) would have shouted from the rooftops about the lack of security in UP. And the need to throw out the "incompetent" Ms. Mayawati's government and impose President's rule!!!
Hypocrisy, thou art well-represented by the Indian Political Class!!!
Regards,
N
Junk Mail
Many of us keep receiving junk mails from time to time.
I recently received one - talking about Bill Gates sharing his wealth.
Since I got it from a friend who is quite IT Savvy and one whom I rely on for my PC related queries, I chose to forward the mail to a good number of my own friends.
And got this link from one of my other friends:
Apparently, this world does have a few individuals who have the time and inclination to create such hoaxes as the ones mentioned above. Unfortunately, most of us (you and I included, of course) don't have the luxury of time on our hands.
Hence, take care - Do a Google / Yahoo / Bing Search before forwarding any "too-good-to-be-true" mails to any of your friens. If something sounds and looks too good to be true, it probably is not!
Regards,
N
Swine Flu - Live Danger or Great Scam???
Read this link to get a different perspective:
Regards,
N
Another cool con job
Indeed, another cool con job:
With no comments to add!!!
Regards,N
Here's a rare chain letter that I did enjoy reading.
Pass it on! Or, perhaps, you ought not to!
I really wonder what ought to be done about this particular message!!!
Regards,
N
THIS IS A TRUE STORY. READ TO BELIEVE.
On September 20, 2006, a young girl received a Chain Message on her facebook wall from a friend. The message said that if she did not pass it on to 25 other friends, she would have bad luck for the next 10 years. It also said that her boyfriend would dump her, she would fail all of her classes, she would get bad karma, she would never have a good love life, and, worst of all, she would definitely be murdered in her bed by the Chain Message Killer that very night. Unfortunately, this poor girl, for an unknown reason, thought that she was above the Chain Message God, and not only did she never send the message on to her friends, she DELETED THE MESSAGE OFF HER WALL. Gasp. That same night, she slept in her bed. Nothing happened to her. The End.
Honestly...We don't like your spam.
What one can "Take" from Hotel Rooms
Ahem! So, we can take quite a bit for our homes from hotels where we stay from time to time:
Regards
,N
Cribbing about our Politicians, etc.
Often, I keep hearing a whole lot of so-called upwardly mobile, educated, professionally qualified youth of India cribbing about politicians, communal elements, pseudo secular parties, quasi-secessionists, regional chauvinists, communist dinosaurs, corruption, delayed judicial system, cops, intrusive media, etc. Virtually they seem to be cribbing about every aspect of democracy.
I must admit that there are times when I've been tempted to crib in a similar vein.
However, I must urge each of those "cribbing youth" to take a look at the video clip available in this link:
It shows scenes from the Tiananmen Square, China. And the spine-chilling scenes makes me delighted that we, in India, have a thriving democracy.
Regards,
N
Chocolate Powered Car
So, you thought that petrol & diesel is increasingly costly!
Try chocolate as an alternative
Regards,
N
Perspective
Came across this brilliant piece by Subroto Bagchi of Mindtree, entitled "The Fallen Tomato Cart":
A person known to me had responded as under:
"Since this guy Subroto Bagchi must have stopped his car and spoken to the tomato seller to get his story, I hope he gave the seller Rs.100 at an interest of 2.75 paise for the day. Rs.100 would not have constituted a big amount or risk for him sitting in his car and he need not have suffered so much angst over the incident."
My take on a practical note - Yes, we do overemphasise OUR risks, and downplay that of the rest of the world.
On a macro note - Go back to the Gita - Try to practice "Stitha Pragnya" (I hope that the English spelling does justice to the original Sanskrit word) - The nearest translation that comes to my mind is "Equanimity".
Regards,
N
Ant & the Grasshopper
This one is not new, but has a good lesson!
MODERN VERSION
The ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter. The grasshopper thinks the ant's a fool and laughs & dances & plays the summer away. Come winter, the shivering grasshopper calls a press conference and demands to know why the ant should be allowed to be warm and well fed while others are cold and starving.
NDTV, BBC, CNN show up to provide pictures of the shivering grasshopper next to a video of the ant in his comfortable home with a table filled with food. The World is stunned by the sharp contrast. How can this be that this poor grasshopper is allowed to suffer so?
Arundhati Roy stages a demonstration in front of the ant's house.
Medha Patkar goes on a fast along with other grasshoppers demanding that grasshoppers be relocated to warmer climates during winter.
Amnesty International and Koffi Annan criticize the Indian Government for not upholding the fundamental rights of the grasshopper. The Internet is flooded with online petitions seeking support to the grasshopper (many promising Heaven and Everlasting Peace for prompt support as against the wrath of God for non-compliance).
Opposition MP's stage a walkout
Left parties call for "Bharat Bandh" in
Lalu Prasad allocates one free coach to Grasshoppers on all Indian Railway Trains, aptly named as the 'Grasshopper Rath'.
Finally, the Judicial Committee drafts the Prevention of Terrorism Against Grasshoppers Act [POTAGA]", with effect from the beginning of the winter.
Arjun Singh makes Special Reservation for Grass Hopper in educational Insititutions & in Govt Services.
The ant is fined for failing to comply with POTAGA and, having nothing left to pay his retroactive taxes, his home is confiscated by the Government and handed over to the grasshopper in a ceremony covered by NDTV.
Arundhati Roy calls it "a triumph of justice". Lalu calls it 'Socialistic Justice'.
CPM calls it the 'revolutionary resurgence of the downtrodden'.
Koffi Annan invites the grasshopper to address the UN General Assembly.
Many years later...The ant has since migrated to the
As a result of losing lot of hard working ants and feeding the grasshoppers
Regards,
N
Twin Escapede - Part II !
Apparently, a twin enabled his twin brother to escape from jail way back in 2004! Got this one from a friend.
Read on:
Regards,
N
Saved from execution because of a Twin!
Here's a real life story of a guy who escaped the death penalty because of the fact that he had an identical twin, and the cops didn't know which one was the real culprit.
My queries:
Regards,
N
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