He thinks it was speaker's bday yesterday and he is demanding toffee from her. 
Credit: TOI cartoon column

Game of Losing

Emails are an MBA’s best friend, when we wake up we check email, standing eating and even pooping we check them. They are our bread and butter, we are good email writer, and sometimes I wonder if MBA is all about effective email writing. And one of the most most important part of email is signatures, they are what follows

With Regards

——————

——————

——————

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They are supposed to define from whom the mail is and also identity of the writer. But amusingly if the emails are not forwarded they are longer than the body of the email. Interestingly signatures can be used to identify the anchor point of a person. The institution, organization or part of his life that defines him the most. It is most common in our professors, it has been decades since they have left IIT’s but still it finds mention in their signatures. 

On the complete opposite side, recently my cousin had a baby. She is 8 days old, still has not been christened but has the whole family after her. People like me are helping in baby shopping; my cousin has put her PhD on hold and whatever time anybody in the family gets is spent with her. She has no identity any signatures but she is looked after, cared and loved in all our capacity and beyond. 

Now, is this not what we seek all our lives “love, acceptance and recognition" from society, from our dear ones or with ourselves. And it was all there, we loved everyone and everyone loved us, however people around us we accepted them. All our desires and needs were fulfilled before us saying anything. Then what went wrong? What happened is that we grew up, we became something, we became the signature. It is the signature and the identity that has restricted us. So maybe life is not about creating identity, maybe life is a game of losing. Losing everything and becoming natural like a baby. 

With Regards

Love to Do.

My roommate is a staunch visionary, what I mean by visionary is that he requires purpose before doing any work. On the contrary, I am a highly objective person, give me task and the task shall be done. Don't talk to me about why or for what the work is being done, it has to be done. Now the conflict happened when we became roomies, for me it was a completely new dimension. Finding reason before doing things is difficult, and it is still sometimes highly confusing and frustrating. But over the year, I went over board his boat and have started thinking the purpose before doing something.

Last month, I was reading an article, it said that there are three motivational factors of doing anything, first is love, second fear and third greed. In events of our lives, we can commonly find these as the reason behind doing something. Let us take a simple task of dressing up for a party; a girl would most probably do it because she loves to dress up. Men with the fear of being laughed at dress up or with a greed of attracting the opposite sex. 

The purpose gets served in all three cases but the intention and the attitude differ in three. When we love to do something we are not looking for approval, we are in love of dressing up. Greed and fear also make you look pretty but the only thing that we look for in the party is compliment.

In Mahabharata, karna (the competitor to Arjuna) asks Krishna why he has to face defeat. Even though both had the same power and knowledge.Krishna tells him that his whole education is based on the purpose of defeating Arjuna. There is greed and fear in this education. Arjuna did it for purpose of gaining knowledge that is why he was invincible. Knowing purpose of doing thing is great and greater is doing something because you love to do it. Then you will become invincible.