Liberating

Those who know my daily routine would be aware that I often come back from office after at least 9 in the night; if I am lucky I am back at 8. Today, there was a day of exception. For the first time, in the past 7-8 months I have been working at my current job, I left office at 1815 hrs.
The feeling was so different - kind of liberating.
It was so good to see sun light in the evening; to see people moving around - doing their kitchen shopping at the roadside vegetable market, waiting at bus stops in numbers to get a bus back to home, coming out of offices with their lunch boxes; to see a tempo driver trying to tie a canvas cover-all over his tempo; to get stuck at one of the many traffic signals; to have so much of activity around; to feel life going on; to feel liberated.

27 % Quota Policy Stayed

Now thats something to be happy about. Though the stay is not forever, the decision still carries some weight. The SC has noted that the policy can not be devised based on a census carried more than 75 years ago. It will be very tough for the union government to come up with a good answer to that. I just hope that it does its due diligence this time and does not reply in some arbitrary way so as to force the quota in the 2007-08 year.

Another good thing is that the SC bench has observed that "Reservation cannot be permanent and appear to perpetuate backwardness". An answer to this is also required. The government must have some kind of plan in place to really make the quotas (the existing SC/ST one or the proposed OBC one) effective; and that isn't possible unless they have a roll-out plan in place. The existence of a system that monitors the effectiveness and the necessity of the quota system, on an ongoing basis, is as much necessary as the quota itself, if it is at all needed.

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Public speaking do's and don't's

Public speaking do's and don't's

by Eszter Hargittai

As Jerry Seinfeld once noted, at a funeral, most people would rather
be in the casket than giving the eulogy, since public speaking stresses
people out more than death. But giving talks doesn't have to be such a
frightening affair.

Whether you're giving a talk at your local library, updating your
colleagues on work progress, or presenting to a large group of
strangers, there are some simple steps that should help make public
speaking a better experience - for both you and your audience.

Presentation format

Before
you start planning your presentation, find out from the organizers how
much time you have and what format they envision for your talk. Will
you be part of a panel or will you be speaking alone? Will you be in a
regular session or are you the dinner speaker? Do you have 15 minutes
or an hour? Do they prefer to leave time for questions? If yes, does
that come out of the allocated time you have been quoted? It is
important to know what is expected of you so you can be well prepared
and not have to scramble last minute to readjust your talk due to
unanticipated logistics.

Audience

Get information about who will be attending your presentation. Will
the head of the company be there or just co-workers? Are all
participants experts at the topic or will there be novices present? Is
there a mixed group of people representing different backgrounds or is
everyone on the same page regarding technicalities? Depending on the
audience, you will have to spend some time giving varying degrees of
background on the material and explaining certain concepts.

Location

If you have the opportunity, take a look at the location before the
time of the talk. It will help you visualize the context of the event
and ensure that you are not caught off guard by peculiarities of the
space.

The take-away message

If someone who missed your talk were to ask an audience member in
the elevator to sum it up, what would you like that person to say?
Focus on that message. Start out with this summary statement in mind
and build your presentation around it.

Outline

Once you have an idea of your presentation's main message, spend
some time thinking about the structure of the entire talk. All of the
material you cover should contribute toward communicating your core
message effectively. Start by writing an outline of the talk including
main sections and subsections.

Strong start

The
first couple of minutes of your talk should be the most prepared and
polished. You want to get off to a good start. Those are likely to be
the most nervous moments so it is best not to leave anything to chance.
By being well prepared, you can convey your messages with confidence.
It is important to establish early on that you are prepared and are
worth people's attention.

Motivation

Spend a bit of time up front talking about the inspiration and
importance of your message. Listeners should get a bit of background on
what motivated your work or project in the first place. What may be a
fascinating topic to you may not be to the next person so don't take
for granted people's interest in the issues you are discussing. Explain
why they should pay attention and why your comments matter.

Timing

People rarely want to listen to someone for longer than the allotted
time. Few people are such amazing speakers that an audience can't get
enough of them. Do not assume you are one of those few. Wrap up your
talk on time. To achieve this goal, ask someone to give you time cues
by indicating when you have five minutes left, two minutes and when you
have run out of time. Once you get the last notice, you should stop
talking.

A common pitfall for presenters is to add unprepared introductory
remarks to their talk. The temptation of addressing previous speakers
is great, but beware. If your total alloted time is 15 minutes (a
frequent limit with many speaking engagements), adding a 3 minute intro
(not to mention longer!) will use up 20 percent of your time. However,
this is something no one ever builds into their talk. Either prepare
for this or let go of the temptation to add commentary at the last
minute.

Flexibility

Organize your talk and know it well enough to have the flexibility
to skip certain parts or expand on others depending on the
circumstances. For example, if you do add a last- minute introduction
(as per the previous point), be flexible to skip a part of the prepared
content.

Confidence and enthusiasm

You have been chosen as a speaker because you know your topic. Make
sure that you exert confidence during your presentation. Don't
apologize for what you don't have with you to present or what you do
not know. Rather, focus on what you can talk about and discuss the
material with confidence. This does not mean that you should be
arrogant or patronizing. It means that you should look comfortable
covering the material.

Be sure to enjoy your talk and show your enthusiasm about the
content. Your interest in the topic will be contagious and will likely
result in a more engaged audience.

Question-and-answer session

If there is a Q segment then be sure to keep a polite demeanor
throughout. Thank people for their questions and feel free to praise
them for good points. If you are not sure how to respond to a query
then express your appreciation for the insightful comment and note that
you will look into it.

Practice makes perfect

Practice the presentation a few times: more if you have less
experience, less if you are a more seasoned public speaker. It can be
especially helpful to give the talk to someone who is not in your field
and is not intimately familiar with the material. This is helpful in
seeing whether you have made the talk too narrowly focused or overly
technical. Such a practice session does not have to involve the entire
talk, it can consist of telling someone about your presentation outline.

Don't write out the material word-by-word and don't plan on reading
text even if you do have it all written down. Having the text written
out and parts of it memorized will constrain you. Memorize the
structure of the talk and the outline, but not every word.

Contact information

Finish by giving the audience some contact information, including an
email address and Web site when applicable. Mention that you welcome
people's feedback and they should feel free to ask you questions either
after the session or by sending you email.

Do you have any more tips for making one's next public speaking
engagement less terrifying? Let us know in the comments or at tips at
lifehacker.com.

disclaimer: this is a copy-paste from lifehacker.

all the credit goes to them / the author

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sandy gets into ITC

well, the title of the post says it all. His interview was yesterday, as was five others'.All, except one, got placed.
A couple of days ago, i was telling shukla that he's gonna get through the interview. The guy really deserved it.
And then when we got the news yesterday, i was telling shukla, yaar is bande mein kuch to hai. aise dekho to koi difference nahi hai apne aur iske beech mein, but....

Well, we look for studs in kgp, one lives 2.5 metres from me. :D

talking of job scenario, TJ's got a ppo from TI. though he is still awaiting a formal letter, but i guess its for the better. It still gives him chance to try for other companies.

I have taken a very risky decision of going for only core EC companies. Sometimes, i really get scared. But then, okhal mein sir daal hi diya hai to musal se kya darna

Neeraj has said that from 21st onwards, he will wake up early and pray for us . well Neeraj u beeter remember that and bhagwan ji, please Neeraj ki sun lena.

Steve Jobs at Stanford

This is the text of the Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005.

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I retuned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.

This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.

Thats what i am doing, looking for what i love to do. Thanks to this speech, i now understand that its not easy to find it; but keep looking , u will get it.
And the death concept is awesome, got to try it.

Also what i have realised in past few days is that even if i am not doing the thing i like, i should keep doing it for some time, at least. Only then will i know if i really like it or not.I guess thats what he means by keep looking.