Benefit of doubt

This doubt has helped me while the others have tormented with their mere existence. And it’s such a simple thing to implement too. Think of it, when you are not sure about someone or something, just think positive about it. Be a little generous and pass on that benefit to the other person. More so because it is saving you from living without a  torture. For example, a friend of mine told me that when she was working for a popularly known ‘Sadist’ manager within the company, she reminded herself that the manager might have been bad to others because they never created their opinions were biased as they heard things from people. That kind of an attitude worked in her favour. The Manager did not become friendly to her. The manager was kind of a person who would get the best of projects for the team and always be in light before the senior management. She learnt a lot while being in her team.

I too implement this discipline in my day to day life. Whenever I find a relative too odd to talk to and someone with a totally different bent of mind (I do get annoyed at the beginning), but I give them the benefit of doubt. I tell myself, ‘I’m totally doubtful whether what I have felt is right. He/She perhaps is a different person at the bottom of the heart’ and the relatives have turned out to be manageable in almost all of the cases.

What do you do when you find a bossy husband or a dominating friend or a cranky room-mate? Can you change them? We most of the times can’t and the best we can do is giving them the benefit of doubt. If its a bossy husband, be happy that you do not have to care about many things in life. If it is a dominating friend, think that she would be taking responsibility of all the jobs that you jointly do. In a few years time, they are bound to realize or you will feel adapted. In either of the two cases, the situation is win-win. After all, we are selfish enough to keep ourselves happy, so what’s the harm in having this doubt? Do you think we can do something better?

Why I like being a Minimalist?

Mum always liked procuring things. When we got the second sofa set, she could not discard the first one. Daddy bought her the second refrigerator and she looked for places in the house where she could keep the old one. Our house was full of goods and there was literally no place to idly roam around. Everyday dusting the house took her more than 2 hours. I asked her if things would be simpler if she had less things to take care of inside the house. She agreed that I was right but she would find happiness when guests would compare the two sofa sets and tell her which was prettier.

I have nothing against them who buy things more than necessary, who have things ready for 4 generations to use (assumption being the cutlery in fashion today would be the one two centuries later), who think of those 100 occasions where they might have a gathering of 5 or 20 or 50 people and how can they be best prepared for those occasions (most of which might never happen), who wish to flaunt with those 2 dozen dinner sets explaining others where they bought each from and how do they maintain them, I really have nothing against these guys but I don’t like that extra work which comes to me not because I like it but because it helps me show off my wealth. Not doing that extra work gives me ample of time to focus on my hobbies, to spend time with my family, to travel, to be at ease and not worry about the 10^th Closet in the house or the 3^rd dining table.

I wish if Minimalism could become the next fad and people stop indulging themselves in things they don’t like or are pursuing them just for the sake of show-off or maintain a status in the society. As the world is approaching towards a knitted knowledge industry, I think how much one knows will be of higher value than those goods which depreciate over time.

A small confab

I met this Dutch couple on my flight back from NYC. The lady who was sitting next to me asked if it was my first trip to the United States and I said ‘yes’. She asked me the next obvious question what was I there for. And I said ‘To see another country, meet and talk to new people, someone like you for example and importantly to meet my Superpartner’. Over years, if I have not learnt the art of asking right questions, I have at least learnt to ask back the questions they ask me and that solves two problems – one, they do not feel offended that I was not interested in them by not asking anything and two, the other person doesn’t find me rude because they asked me the same questions. To make sure they not get irritated or think plainly that I copied them, I ask the questions after a while or sometimes twist them a bit so that they appear as new questions altogether. Now it was my turn now to start the conversation and I pretty much asked her this ‘You must have visited US many a times’ and she said ‘O no… this is our second time.’ and before me asking the second question, she said ‘We had gone there to celebrate our 50th anniversary. Both me and my husband are musicians and we had wanted to spend some good time in the same country we were there many years ago’. Now, she left me in a tricky situation, I had only asked one question, which meant that I was supposed to ask one more to even out our situation and her long answer to the first question meant she wanted to talk more, maybe not with me, but ‘just talk’ in general. So, after thinking for a little while, I asked if her children were in Frankfurt (the flight was from NYC to Frankfurt). She replied saying ‘We will be taking a connecting flight to Denmark and we don’t have children. We are united by our love for Music and we wish to learn more and more Music and compose’ (this is when I realized they were Dutch). I liked her answer a lot and that made me write this post. Wish our dictionaries just didn’t give us the conventional answers when we looked for words like ‘children’ (son or daughter of any age). Wish they also said things like ‘beings/things you wish to give your heart and soul to’. Yes, I’m also looking for Philosophies as answers. In the internet age, is that asking for too much?

How I learnt about brewing?

 

I know what are you thinking. I know what would your reaction be after reading this paragraph. I know you must be thinking where has she learnt about brewing. I’m going to talk about a fairly simple kind of brewing in this post – the coffee brewing. Not exactly how coffee beans (Arabica, Robusta and many others) are dried and powdered or converted into other form, instead I’m going to talk about these special coffee brewing machines. The vending machines – yes. The stimulants that help us come out of our Monday morning blues/hangovers/dizziness and boredom at times.

We have a coffee brewing machine here in the US office. There are a dozen of flavoured coffees placed alongside, my first time I saw these many varieties. I took a little more than 2 minutes to decipher the names and picking up one took another few seconds. There were varieties like the French roasts, French Vanilla roasts, Breakfast blend, Sumatran blends, some decaffeinated and others not. The machine required me to press on the ‘Open’ button foremost. After I pressed it, a thing opened up on which we could place the coffee pod I had picked up. After experimenting for nearly 2 weeks, I figured out that the basic one suits me the best, of course I’m talking about ‘Breakfast blend’. So, you open a coffee pouch to pick up the pod and place it on the opened up ‘container’ thingy of the machine. I then was required to press one out of the three available options – Mild, Medium or Bold. As an average human being, who tries testing the mediocre things, I pressed on the ‘Medium’ button, thinking I would move to ‘Mild’ or ‘Bold’ depending on the strength of the one I’m trying. The sign on the machine now changed to ‘Brewing’ and drops of brown colored liquid started pouring into the cup I had placed inside the machine. I stared at the machine till my cup was full and the machine said ‘Ready’.

I have tried different kinds of coffee in India too (This post is when I’m working from the NYC office). There are options of choosing your own spices. I like the South Indian filter coffee the most, with milk and little sugar, the smell of that coffee attracts me from a distance and what an amazing combination is a Butter Dosa with strong filter coffee. Here it goes,

Experiment

Format painter

Its a great tool for those who wish to have a consistent formatting in their reports – items ranging from colours to fonts to number formats. Look at the following picture as an example.

I have specific colours decided for this particular part of the excel. Now if I have to apply similar formatting to the other tables in the tab, I’m going to use ‘Format painter’. I’m also not going to click on Format Painter every other time, I will double click on it and apply on all the tables I wish to. The formatted sheet looks somewhat like this:

Hit ‘Format Painter’ once you are done with formatting or just click on ‘Esc’ key and you are done. Now, isn’t this cool.

Excel: Showing percentages in Column charts

MS Office has provided us with a lot of options to create graphs - Bar/Column charts, Pie charts, Line charts and Area charts are just to name a few. Each one is important at different times, to show different things. For example, to show the different categories of spends in a month and know the amount spent on each one, the best one (as we would think) would be a column-chart:-

But what the chart doesn’t do is show how much more or how much less was spent on one category than the other. The following chart does both the jobs:

It gives the value and the percentage split as well. As you see, everything about the expenses last month is answered. You can make a judgmental call from here. Chart formatting is what comes in handy for cases like these. We have enormous number of options for showing the things we want  in a particular way – colours/labels/size/borders/etc.

For some exercise, I had wanted to show the percentage distribution in a bar chart a few weeks back. Lets take this data for example:

I had wanted to show the change in distribution of categories over months. And this is all that I could get to using the direct chart making techniques available in Excel.

But this did not give me the percentage distribution of the different categories at a monthly level. I modified the datasheet the following way (making sure the user doesn’t get to see it by re-colouring the font white).

And here is the chart with the information we want to convey:

Take care!