To My Son

1) Read all you can, get all your degrees before 30.Have a plan of how you want to live. If you cant reach it by end of 20s your chance of reaching it at 30 or 40 are relatively difficult.Your life will be more complicated as you grow old and have family.Your time and money will not be yours anymore.But when you try to study before 30 you will get all support you can. Parents will help you with money, friends will have time to mentor you. You will not feel guilty when you pursue your dreams with total devotion as there are no other commitments to your time or money.

2) Whatever field you choose- Work to be the top player. And go there fast. Before you start building your family. Because only from top you will get a clearer direction. You can steer the world in the direction you like instead of you running behind the set directions.

3) Everything comes with practice, never give up. There is nothing called talent.Talent is just hours and hours of practice.

4) Love yourself. Respect yourself.If you don't love yourself then nobody else will. Your self-respect is your everything.There is never any success in life when self-respect is compromised. Do not let people misuse use you.Don't compromise your self-respect for friendships or love. People who really care for you will not disrespect or make you feel inferior.Walk away from such negative people.

5) Beware of the teenage- everybody makes their worst mistakes during these years that have profound impact all through their lives.As body transitions from childhood to adulthood hormones wreck havoc.Our feelings will be at peak- anger,happiness,love,excitement..all at its peak.Control it.It's plain science.CONTROL YOUR FEELINGS.They are not real.

6) You will get used to any and all adversities, even enjoy it. That's how our brain works. So discipline your self to eat right,read right,invest right, choose the right friends even if you don't like it in the beginning. You will be  rewarded immensely in the long run.

7) Start saving early and invest, Compound interest is the best friend.ALWAYS spend from your passive income.

8) Travel the world, you will learn its abundance. There is so much to learn,explore and enjoy.

9) Choose your life partner very carefully. This one decision will determine 95% of your happiness. Mine as well :-)

10) Never take life seriously, everything will pass so sit tight and enjoy the ride..

what does 'my life' mean

"My Life" - this pharase keeps me thinking long and deep. What it means to me... i still am trying hard to figure out. Just like the blind men feel the elephant and everyone give their own version of elephant, my answers vary vastly depending on what i feel at that moment.

I see myself as a wife, as a mother, as a daughter as a friend, collegue... my life is ofcourse the sum total of all these roles. When i try to contribute more to that role it takes up some of my life, some of my time. As i try hard to live 100 percent to the role i am playing at that moment i feel like i am losing out on "my life". My life then becomes a stage where i put on as all the characters and try hard to give 100 percent to every role....... thats tiring.

Then what is my life? How am i to live 100 percent to my heart's satisfaction?

My question gave me my answer- "My heart's satisfaction".

Every one of us come with a limiting life span, every day has a time limit. But to play all those roles to 100 percent within the given time is stressful unless i know where to start and where to end a role and start another smoothly.

First thing first i need to know what is really important to me. What defines me- what is closer to my heart- It does not matter how much time i play a particular role- but what really matters is how effectively i am playing that role. What difference am i making to other people's life by playing that role to my heart's satisfaction. This is what matters the most to me and to the people in my life.

what is my motive with that role? what is the effect of that role in the other person's life? Is my self happy with me?

True, i need to impress myself first.

Saw a cool poster, Its true.. motherhood and sleep seldem go together :-)

Dr. Abdul kalam - the legend who inspired our lives breathed his last yesterday[27th July]. A simple person well loved and respected in India and abroad. Left a big lesson for every one of us. From his humble beginnings to president of India. He is know not because he was successful against all odds.. but because he was a great person. A wonderful human being. A powerful influence on the Indian youth to dream big and reach for it. Until his last breath he was inspiring people to dream big. A big salute to the selfless great man of our times. It feels like a big personal loss. His life just as he described- 

Innah illah va inna ilaihi raziwoon! may you rest well sir! We salute you.
Some of his great words here-

Long live his legacy!

Life - lets give life to our lives

1. Give meaning to your life!

Who are you? Why do you do what you do every day? Each of us lives in our own way, but we do not often ask why we do one thing over another. The purpose of your actions is to nourish your own well-being, since the meaning of your life is prodigal motivation, persistence, satisfaction and success...! If you are dissatisfied with your life, perhaps it is time to renew the meaning you give to your life by asking about your values, your goals, your activities. It will be a first step - very important - towards a sustainable well-being.

2. Enjoy the moment

It is convenient to give his life goals and to nourish the senses, but do not fall into imbalance. Sometimes we are drawn into the maelstrom of life without taking time to savor the chances we have. We all want to improve our lives, and dissatisfaction is watching us at every turn. If you have a lover, a job, good meals to eat and you do not fear for your safety, you are already a part of a very small percentage of people on earth for whom life flows in excellent conditions. This awareness will help you enjoy a bit of happiness, whose life gratifies you!

3. Become a catalyst for happiness!

Figuratively, a catalyst is a person who by his mere presence causes a reaction. Why not cause a positive reaction all around you? "There is nothing wrong in preferring happiness," said Albert Camus. By focusing on the positive aspects of your life, you will radiate to the point where others will feel right at your sole contact. An experiment to try!

4. Become your best friend(s)!

Sometimes, some stressful memories and twisted conclusions make us a good person in a bad company. We condemn, we affirm our faults, we let our fears run our lives. Instead of focusing on your weaknesses, you can better recognize your strengths and qualities. This attitude will help you make peace with yourself.

5. Stop brooding!

It is recognized that our thoughts greatly influence our mood and level of well-being. The thoughts and negative emotions attract negative emotions, thoughts and positive emotions attract positive emotions. Thus, in each situation, you can always choose the more positive dimensions. Life does not turn so bad after all!

6. Do not entertain your suffering today from yesterday!

The anxiety and negative thoughts does not relieve us of our sorrows of tomorrow: they withdraw our today’s strengths and pleasures! Living by staying focused on your past prevents you from moving forward. Because if your past is no guarantee of your present, your present, it is the guarantor of your future! You can practice to accept your grudges, your difficult experiences, your conflicts, your grief. In doing so, you turn the bitterness in satisfaction! The ability to accept relieve you from chains you attached yourself to your feet.

7. Be empathetic!

"Great opportunities to help others do occasionally occur, but small opportunities surround us every day," said author Sally Koch. Empathy is the ability to put ourselves in the shoes of others to become aware of their statements and their emotions. Empathy is the natural enemy of egocentricity, a disease that eats away at our society. Instead, therefore, defend your interests and point of view first and put yourself in the shoes of others. Understand that your friend is worried that she did not give you expression that you can possibly avoid a painful conflict. Without you deny yourself, think about what other people live. You sow the seeds that will help make our world a better place to live.

my favourite inspirational quotes

People often say that motivation doesn’t last. Well, neither does bathing.  That’s why we recommend it daily. –Zig Ziglar

:-) on that note here is a small dose of motivation that will sure boost your morale. Have a nice day! 

1. Life isn’t about getting and having, it’s about giving and being. –Kevin Kruse
2. Whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve. –Napoleon Hill
3. Strive not to be a success, but rather to be of value. –Albert Einstein
4. Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.  –Robert Frost
5. I attribute my success to this: I never gave or took any excuse. –Florence Nightingale
6. You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take. –Wayne Gretzky
7. I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed. –Michael Jordan
8. The most difficult thing is the decision to act, the rest is merely tenacity. –Amelia Earhart
9. Every strike brings me closer to the next home run. –Babe Ruth
10. Definiteness of purpose is the starting point of all achievement. –W. Clement Stone
11. The past is a ghost, the future a dream. All we ever have is now. –Bill Cosby
12. Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans. –John Lennon
13. We become what we think about. –Earl Nightingale
14. Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do, so throw off the bowlines, sail away from safe harbor, catch the trade winds in your sails.  Explore, Dream, Discover. –Mark Twain
15. Life is 10% what happens to me and 90% of how I react to it. –Charles Swindoll
16. The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any. –Alice Walker
17. The mind is everything. What you think you become.  –Buddha
18. The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now. –Chinese Proverb
19. An unexamined life is not worth living. –Socrates
20. Eighty percent of success is showing up. –Woody Allen
21. Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. –Steve Jobs
22. Winning isn’t everything, but wanting to win is. –Vince Lombardi
23. I am not a product of my circumstances. I am a product of my decisions. –Stephen Covey
24. Every child is an artist.  The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up. –Pablo Picasso
25. You can never cross the ocean until you have the courage to lose sight of the shore. –Christopher Columbus
26. I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel. –Maya Angelou
27. Either you run the day, or the day runs you. –Jim Rohn
28. Whether you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re right. –Henry Ford
29. The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why. –Mark Twain
30. Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it.  Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. –Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
31. The best revenge is massive success. –Frank Sinatra
32. People often say that motivation doesn’t last. Well, neither does bathing.  That’s why we recommend it daily. –Zig Ziglar
33. Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage. –Anais Nin
34. If you hear a voice within you say “you cannot paint,” then by all means paint and that voice will be silenced. –Vincent Van Gogh
35. There is only one way to avoid criticism: do nothing, say nothing, and be nothing. –Aristotle
36. Ask and it will be given to you; search, and you will find; knock and the door will be opened for you. –Jesus
37. The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be. –Ralph Waldo Emerson
38. Go confidently in the direction of your dreams.  Live the life you have imagined. –Henry David Thoreau
39. When I stand before God at the end of my life, I would hope that I would not have a single bit of talent left and could say, I used everything you gave me. –Erma Bombeck
40. Few things can help an individual more than to place responsibility on him, and to let him know that you trust him.  –Booker T. Washington
41. Certain things catch your eye, but pursue only those that capture the heart. – Ancient Indian Proverb
42. Believe you can and you’re halfway there. –Theodore Roosevelt
43. Everything you’ve ever wanted is on the other side of fear. –George Addair
44. We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light. –Plato
45. Teach thy tongue to say, “I do not know,” and thous shalt progress. –Maimonides
46. Start where you are. Use what you have.  Do what you can. –Arthur Ashe
47. When I was 5 years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life.  When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up.  I wrote down ‘happy’.  They told me I didn’t understand the assignment, and I told them they didn’t understand life. –John Lennon
48. Fall seven times and stand up eight. –Japanese Proverb
49. When one door of happiness closes, another opens, but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one that has been opened for us. –Helen Keller
50. Everything has beauty, but not everyone can see. –Confucius
51. How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world. –Anne Frank
52. When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be. –Lao Tzu
53. Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away. –Maya Angelou
54. Happiness is not something readymade.  It comes from your own actions. –Dalai Lama
55. If you’re offered a seat on a rocket ship, don’t ask what seat! Just get on. –Sheryl Sandberg
56. First, have a definite, clear practical ideal; a goal, an objective. Second, have the necessary means to achieve your ends; wisdom, money, materials, and methods. Third, adjust all your means to that end. –Aristotle
57. If the wind will not serve, take to the oars. –Latin Proverb
58. You can’t fall if you don’t climb.  But there’s no joy in living your whole life on the ground. –Unknown
59. We must believe that we are gifted for something, and that this thing, at whatever cost, must be attained. –Marie Curie
60. Too many of us are not living our dreams because we are living our fears. –Les Brown
61. Challenges are what make life interesting and overcoming them is what makes life meaningful. –Joshua J. Marine
62. If you want to lift yourself up, lift up someone else. –Booker T. Washington
63. I have been impressed with the urgency of doing. Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Being willing is not enough; we must do. –Leonardo da Vinci
64. Limitations live only in our minds.  But if we use our imaginations, our possibilities become limitless. –Jamie Paolinetti
65. You take your life in your own hands, and what happens? A terrible thing, no one to blame. –Erica Jong
66. What’s money? A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and goes to bed at night and in between does what he wants to do. –Bob Dylan
67. I didn’t fail the test. I just found 100 ways to do it wrong. –Benjamin Franklin
68. In order to succeed, your desire for success should be greater than your fear of failure. –Bill Cosby
69. A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new. – Albert Einstein
70. The person who says it cannot be done should not interrupt the person who is doing it. –Chinese Proverb
71. There are no traffic jams along the extra mile. –Roger Staubach
72. It is never too late to be what you might have been. –George Eliot
73. You become what you believe. –Oprah Winfrey
74. I would rather die of passion than of boredom. –Vincent van Gogh
75. A truly rich man is one whose children run into his arms when his hands are empty. –Unknown
76. It is not what you do for your children, but what you have taught them to do for themselves, that will make them successful human beings.  –Ann Landers
77. If you want your children to turn out well, spend twice as much time with them, and half as much money. –Abigail Van Buren
78. Build your own dreams, or someone else will hire you to build theirs. –Farrah Gray
79. The battles that count aren’t the ones for gold medals. The struggles within yourself–the invisible battles inside all of us–that’s where it’s at. –Jesse Owens
80. Education costs money.  But then so does ignorance. –Sir Claus Moser
81. I have learned over the years that when one’s mind is made up, this diminishes fear. –Rosa Parks
82. It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop. –Confucius
83. If you look at what you have in life, you’ll always have more. If you look at what you don’t have in life, you’ll never have enough. –Oprah Winfrey
84. Remember that not getting what you want is sometimes a wonderful stroke of luck. –Dalai Lama
85. You can’t use up creativity.  The more you use, the more you have. –Maya Angelou
86. Dream big and dare to fail. –Norman Vaughan
87. Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter. –Martin Luther King Jr.
88. Do what you can, where you are, with what you have. –Teddy Roosevelt
89. If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always gotten. –Tony Robbins
90. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning. –Gloria Steinem
91. It’s your place in the world; it’s your life. Go on and do all you can with it, and make it the life you want to live. –Mae Jemison
92. You may be disappointed if you fail, but you are doomed if you don’t try. –Beverly Sills
93. Remember no one can make you feel inferior without your consent. –Eleanor Roosevelt
94. Life is what we make it, always has been, always will be. –Grandma Moses
95. The question isn’t who is going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me. –Ayn Rand
96. When everything seems to be going against you, remember that the airplane takes off against the wind, not with it. –Henry Ford
97. It’s not the years in your life that count. It’s the life in your years. –Abraham Lincoln
98. Change your thoughts and you change your world. –Norman Vincent Peale
99. Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing. –Benjamin Franklin
100. Nothing is impossible, the word itself says, “I’m possible!” –Audrey Hepburn
101. The only way to do great work is to love what you do. –Steve Jobs
102. If you can dream it, you can achieve it. –Zig Ziglar

well, experimenting a little bit with life.

had always lived "full of life" - loud and bold... for a change tonning down. May be its the age ;-)

Cleared off lots of stuff, people,prejudices,words and memories - required and not required.
Keeping absolutely minimal/basic.

It feels very different. But i am seeing a serenity of no measures.
I thought i will regret... but no,

Ofcourse i miss a lot of people and comforts
but i now see myself better, i found a new person called myself
who was always waiting for my time but never received attention

To be surrounded by stuff and friends and tasks and feeling all important is good
but zenning it all also feels good

My people will always find a way to me and so is my destiny..
Emptied my cup & in no hurry to ever fill it up