face is the index of the mind

uhh, what a confusion i had since childhood - is face the index of the mind (or) is it 'appearances which are deceptive', oh my god and i learnt something new - 'seeing is believing'. once in class 8, i told my classmate - "i guarantee you they could not have done this, both of them make such a beautiful pair" and after a few days i heard the girl has eloped.

a class in psychology, the professor asked me - "so what do you interpret from this picture", i always disliked those eyes of the professor. She used to keep them wide open all the time and smile at intervals, ofcourse she was psychology teacher. i passed a sarcastic comment about the picture she showed us. Later i thought she would just mark me for being so rude and i will be having a miserable time completing the course none of which happened. she appreciated the mid-term project so much and i felt bad for having gone by the face again.

Probably understanding the body language that is why is so important because you can hide emotions, also hide words but its difficult to control your body. Thus, just seeing the face and making inferences sometimes doesn't tell you the whole story - infact tells the incorrect one and hence validating it with the movements of the body can help us make better judgements about the person.

It hurts and it really does

Ma called me up that day. I had actually told her about my plans to go to my friend's sister's wedding. I gave her no choice this time, just told her that I had booked tickets for myself and would come back after 3 days. She listened to me patiently and then said she would call me after sometime. When she did, I faced the unexpectable. She gave me all the reasons why I should not be attending the wedding and at the end concluded by saying, "You have really grown-up and I thought you were still that lil motu sweet dolly of mine" and hung up the phone. I thought about the whole thing but did not feel bad.

The next day I got up a bit early than my usual time and hence was ready to leave for office 15 minutes early than the usual time. I only subscribe ET and hence at times feel the urge to read some gossips. Given the time, I thought of reading the gossip section of The Telegraph at aunt's place. As soon as I rang the bell to enter the drawing room, the aunty made a face and told me "You are too early today, if you were planning to leave early could you have not informed me a day earlier". I was shocked to hear such a thing from her and the words hurt me that day, they really did. I missed mom so much that day, she would not have done this to her daughter but never to an outsider. I realized the difference and actually understood why i love her so much. I miss you sometimes ma.

British English

Faster did I realize this, have always heard that it is the English which is followed in Britian is what we follow - my teachers could not have lied to me about that. Many thanks to my school Principal who kept on changing the English teachers and everyone said the same. My first client call in HSBC and I figure out - how different it is from how we speak. Because of all the famous US reality shows/sit-coms that we are so used to, the teachers should now teach the students that: We are trying to teach you a language which you will not learn any better at school, so go and watch 'small wonder' at home because that helps more.

The manager was talking to me about what kind of trainings that I would be interested in apart from the universal corporate training which is mandatory. I did not have to think to reply back - "Understanding the accent" but kept quiet because I knew it was not wise of me to ask for a training which could not be made available though every new joinee undergoes the same pain. May be initial pains are what are enforced upon you and you need to cross such barriers to become a FTE.

All said, hope I can convey the same thing to the analysts at the other side and they dont get frustrated with my repititions of 'pardons' and 'please can you repeat' and 'sorry i dint get you'. God!! this is tough and my school friends told me i had a flair for languages - these guys never told me the truth :P.

i cannot agree more

the same phrase conveys two different meanings and currently has become one of the popular ones. I remember, while in pilani, some words would just become the 'words of the season', we had something called as bitsian lingo and most of the words created were derivatives of existing words in the English dictionary, few interesting ones were like - 'lite-le'(simply ignore it), 'gen-mein'(just for the sake of), 'obb'(very much obvious), 'only THE'(exaggeration about anything), 'hipalna'(laughing hard without a reason), etc, etc.

Coming back to the phrase that i started off with, i get perplexed when people use it. One which means that that is the maximum that one could agree about a particular topic with the other person. The second which means that he/she cannot hear the reasons for any longer. I will report 2 incidents with the phrase.
Incident 1:
A - my GF is such an angel
B - i know
A - she is so surprising
B - i know
A - she is so witty, such a great cook..blah blah blah
B- i cannot agree any more
:)
Incident 2:
In a meeting,
the VP says "we have achieved 100% volume growth this year, our core business has grown by 70%, the acquisition was more successful than what could have thought by anybody, that is what the data presents to me. Isn't that amazing?"
the Manager replies "I can't agree any more".

Living in the present

The present the gift that makes you happy and successful at work and in life - by Spencer Johnson. A book that was given to us before we joined Mu Sigma (my previous organization). After reading i realized how the book totally reflected about some of us who think about the happenings of the past and what could we do in the future but in the whole churn of things we almost forget that we are wasting the precious NOW that could actually be productive than the past and probably make things easier for the future. Having said is easy but doing that is not so much easy or fun. Behaving in a normal way with a person whom you have disliked throughout your life is not easy. Cooking the same dish which has come out not so well in the last 5 times tests self-confidence. Standing on the same stage, singing the same song for which you were thrown tomatoes, onions, eggs and verbal sarcasm puts a check on your morale.

Now this was one part of the story. Sharing with you some beautiful stories who are trying to live hard in the present knowing very much what it would be leading to. I asked a friend of mine 'Why are you staying in this relationship when you knew there was no future?. It is too early and I m sure you can come out of it easily if you try' (its always easy to say :)). She hit me back saying 'I can't be spoiling this wonderful time of my life thinking about what the future might look like though i know probably 90% of what it would be like'.

The other day I asked another friend 'Why are you drinking and smoking so hard - don't you see the cover. It says 'smoking kills', 'tobacco is carcinogenic'. All of the above, you are draining that lifesaver oxygen out of your brain' for which he replied 'I have seen N number of tobacco chewers and none of them have shown symptoms of oral tumors. Stop seeing ET's last pages and dont believe in the stupid statistics'. He was living in the present and there was no way I could undermine him. I felt there was some truth in what he said. An aunt nearby underwent a major tongue operation to get her tumor treated. She was a staunch vegetarian and had spent all her life eating healthy and exercising regularly.

May be thinking about the frightening incidents of the past, make us unhappy in the present and hamper our future. Adieu to people who can live completely in the present and eat their slices of the cake which present offers.

The silver anniversary

It was ma-baba's 25th anniversary last week and me and sis ware so proud to be a part of their happiness. Afterall, they had grown 25 years together and when i say 'grown', i really mean it because those days, they used to get married at such an early stage that they actually grew in height after marriage :). In the Bangalore office, a year-old married woman used to tell me that she and her husband were getting bored with each other. I did not understand it in the first place. My perception was always that people got bored with materialistic things and not with living people but whatever she told me, I take that for their true feelings. No wonder then that reality shows like '' are becoming popular and people are finding more use out of them.

In a world where there is so much freedom of expression, why should people then sway their partners, cheat with them and then fall themselves into depression. Rather they can confront them staright away. With good number of jobs available these days, women are no longer dependent on men to take care of themselves or their children. Why do we need more sleeping pills today than yesterday, why is depression becoming such a popular word today, why are we less happy when we have more luxuries than people in the yester-years? I look for an answer but cannot find any.

The feeling called 'Guilty'

I felt like listening to songs really loud yesterday but did not do thinking what would the other girls in my room think of me. They would perhaps think that i have still not grown up. Today morning, I wanted to say the aunt that I am missing mum's cold coffee so much and if you could please make one for me but did not open my mouth thinking what would she think about me - a girl who is always over demanding and is just not adjustable in a family environment. It happens with me everyday, sometimes everyhour. Initially I did not realize that this was something that i was doing more often. Yesterday I was talking to D and thats a statement she has told me many times but i felt the impact only yesterday - she told me that she was not like me who would do things for others and think about them so much before doing a thing. Apparently, her sister was not happy with her because she did not go and see her stage performance. Had i been in that stage, I would have simply went and sat among the audience even if i had 0% knowledge or interest in the art form.

Trying to recollect some childhood stories on the same lines. Once when in Class 7, the teacher asked us if we had completed our quarterly holiday homework. Nobody raised their hands because no one did and I too did not raise it feeling all my class except me would be punished. We stood the whole day outside the class.

This incident is when I was in class eleven. I was quite tall and as per the sports teacher's standard I should have stood 5th from the last. There was a highly boisterous gang in the class and one of the girls from the same gang came up to me and told that i need to stand 10th (that was her place). Her boyfriend was among the taller ones and she wished to stand next to him even during the prayer assemblies.

I never spoke in English because the other children would think I was showing off. I read and wrote tamil(which i later admired) only because I could not have disappointed my tamil teacher. I would sing badly at times intentionally to give company to others.

But it never happened the other way round. I was so poor at games ( mostly out of fear) and others would take advantage of me. Mom used to buy stuff for me and my cousin together and I would always ask her to pick up first. She would never even give me a choice. I had limited toys when I was young - ma's freind's son used to come to home and destroy all of them and i never said a word. Sometimes when we went to their house, he would not even allow me to touch his toys.

All of this and many many more if i recall. Its not that i feel bad about any of it but sometimes i feel that i have been a very scared person throughout my life. As Osho says, "A wise person never repents for the decisions he has made" and I dont do either but sometimes I should also try and do things which I feel like doing, take decisions at the impulse of the second and say things staright out of heart.