Read about the Indian independence movement on Wikipedia.

Update: The Presidential address.

There’s an article on Parikrma in The Hindu.

My favorite Parikrma poster is about atoms. Atoms are recycled in this universe, as you probably know. Potentially, we could have atoms that once belonged to Einstein or Mozart. The Parikrma volunteers believe these underserved children have the same potential as well.

P.S. Is it true that Mozart composed ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star’ when he was 5? I remember reading that on the plastic bags provided by Landmark.

We had a “Y! Bangalore Showcase 2005″ on Friday, August 5th, 2005.

It was an internal showcase where all the teams and groups have the chance to showcase their projects and interact and brainstorm ideas on how they can collaborate and use each others’ expertise.

For more than a week, our office had no walls, just posters everywhere, including the rest rooms. And there were some real corny but cool posters, like the DBA guys’ poster that said “Database Backend is the backbone and we are the lifeline” and the Multimedia Search team’s poster that said “If it’s not in our index, it does not exist.”

There were lots of contests and games going on, from quizzes to mazes of names where you had to pick out names of yahoos, to guess-the-ringtone contests. It was a whole fair going on. I spent most of the morning, explaining Buzz to a lot of people. I was finally able to go around and visit the other teams in the afternoon, and there were some real eyebrow-raising projects being showcased. Unfortunately, I can’t talk about the cool stuff or the teams (but it’s fun being in the midst of it all, and getting to tell you about it much later when the cool stuff is thrown out to public), so I’ll just let some of the photos show off the enthu that we had that day.

	Ajay boogieing
	Eat-the-chocolate-and-tag-your-partner-who-runs-next game during lunch
	Guess-the-Ringtone Game
	Philip Tellis giving Karma
	Our CEO and guest wearing the Data Drome headband and having fun with the group.
	Premshree and Gopal
	Our group, the Data Applications Group, won the grand prize! We’ll be soon going for a team outing to blow the dough.
	The Six Thinking Hats (Yeah, one’s missing)
	Our Group celebrates.
	The Yahoos
	The Yahoo! Employee Foundation India poster. I had taken that photo during our visit to Parikrma.
	“Employee Benefits” poster
	You Yahoo because we do.

On July 1st of 2004 i.e. last year, I turned from an intern to a full-time employee at Yahoo!.

Wait a minute, one whole year is already over! OMG!

Hmm.

A while ago, there was an internal discussion on why people have worked at Y! for years and years and still stick around. So, I started to think of my reasons on why I like it here…

The single biggest motivating factor for me is the smart people here. I remember reading somewhere that “Great programming is not about great pieces of code. It’s about being surrounded by smart people”. It aptly describes my experience at Y!. The amazing part is that most people I’ve met here don’t see the difference between work and fun. They just have a ball at what they do. And I always learn something interesting everyday from them.

The second reason is that there’s something exciting going on here every single day. For example, the My Web 2.0 Social Search that was announced just a few days ago, and the Maps API that was released yesterday…

There’s excitement in my work too - there are too many projects coming up at work that I have less and less time to spend on my other activities which is a bit disappointing but I guess you can’t have it all

Coming back to Buzz, for which I’ve been the sole engineer for over a year, did you know it has a related billboard at Times Square in New York City right now?

( Note: Erik has more photos )

That’s right, Buzz is what generated that data for that billboard

Contrary to the easy-going lifestyle that you might have heard, I’ve been through many all-nighters but I’m better now and never gonna do that again

As the Chinese saying goes “May you live in interesting times”. That’s true more now than ever before in this computing era. I’m just happy to be in one of the centres where many of these interesting events are taking place and get to be a part of it.

As my tagline (in my internal profile) goes : Live. Life. Work. Yahoo.

So, Jacko might leave America… he is no longer popular or admired but he’s still the King of Pop music.

So, I wrote this following so-called ode on a whim. It’s up to you to decide what to make of it…..

MJ has become a ghost of himself but now he can scream that he is not guilty. Is it scary? Bad? Maybe he’s history. Might as well be a stranger in moscow on morphine. Might be a smooth criminal singing PYT and thinking Another part of me. And he says to the tabloid junkie_s, _leave me alone. There may be no blood on the dance floor, he may not be dangerous, but he is gone too soon in the closet. Jacko, just remember the time and this time around, come together and beat it to say it doesn’t matter whether you’re black or white, it is just human nature and what people want is a thriller. Just look at the man in the mirror and ask about the way he makes you feel and tell him give in to me. In the end, just keep the faith, keep jam_ming, and _smile

The five pillars of self-discipline are:

• Acceptance
• Will power
• Hard work
• Industry
• Persistence

Pavlina is going to start a series of posts on ‘the meaning of life’ from the day after tomorrow.

Also, those 5 pillars can be remembered as “A WHIP”. It sure helped me whip myself to shape

P.S. Rules for Survival.

I had been to the library to look for a copy of Lee Iacocca’s autobiography, but all the copies had gone out. Then, I chanced upon this book called The Second coming of Steve Jobs in the same section. Honestly, how could I resist that? The timing couldn’t have been better since I was impressed after watching this year’s SteveNote.

The book was quite a revelation. There have been many “Whoa, really?!” moments when reading that book. Most of all, the book reveals how much of a maniac Steve really is (and I mean that in a nice way).

I remember watching the Toy Story movie a long time ago, but reading the history behind it was incredible. Yes, Pixar company is owned by Steve Jobs (if you didn’t know already).

Some interesting passages:

About Steve’s attitude:

Steve’s executives knew that there were only two ways to deal with him: either submit entirely to his will or have the intelligence and courage to survive his brutal confrontations. “Steve tests you, challengs you, frightens you,” explains Todd Rulon-Miller, who worked closely with Steve for six years. “He uses this as a tactic to get to the truth. Behind the profanity, it’s his way of asking: ‘Do you believe what you’re saying?’ If you wither or blather, you’re lost. I thought those were character-building moments for me.”

Love for his creation:

His perfectionism raged. He was obsessed with minute details that no one else in the computer business was even slightly concerned about. Even the hidden electronic guts of the Next computer - the “motherboard” - had to have a clever, visually appealing design. “Who’s ever going to see the inside?” one of the Next designers asked. “I will,” Steve said.

Double dating with BillG:

Heidi, who was single and had a crush on Steve, realized that she could exploit his fascination with Bill Gates as a way of drawing Steve into accompanying her on social occasions. At the time, Bill was in a long-distance romance with one of Heidi’s closest friends, Ann Winblad, a brilliant self-made software entrepreneur who had sold her startup company for $15 million. When Bill was in town, the foursome - Bill and Ann, Steve and Heidi - would meet in the city and go out for what Ann thought of as “double dates.”

The right people:

Steve was fanatical about hiring the best people. He said that they would interview one hundred people for every one whom they finally chose. And he would fill positions with people who were massively overqualified. The example that everyone talked about was a reputedly brilliant guy named Alex, a young hipster who had made it to the middle ranks at Apple. He had an undergraduate degree from Harvard. He was an art collector. His colleagues found him fascinating. He came to Next. Maybe he would become a marketing executive? A project manager? Steve made him the receptionist. The offer was something of an insult, but he took the job just to get in the door.

Apple of his eye:

His Pixar shares remained the sole source of Steve’s wealth. By turning down the board’s repeated offers of large blocks of Apple stock, Steve Jobs forfeited a paper profit of upward of $1 billion. He still worked at Apple for $1 a year, saying that he only took that dollar so his family would qualify for the company’s health plan. his old friends said that Steve was intent on making a statement, showing that he was saving Apple because of love, not money.

They’re actually many more passages that I liked, but I think I’ll stop here.

If you’re even remotely interested in Apple/Steve Jobs or simply have an iPod, then this book is definitely worth a read. It’ll make you appreciate your Macs and iPods that much more

I was reading Eugene’s explanation about “small c” and “big C” creativity as used by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.

To some degree, we all are creative in the small-c way, doing things that enrich our own lives but do not receive recognition from the outside world. Big-c creativity is different — it produces ideas that “push our species ahead”.

Big-C creativity is rare. Defining it is impossible, because every definition seems to over- or underconstrain something essential to creativity from our own experience. But Csikszentmihalyi asserted that society values Creativity for its ability to transform people and cultures, and that it drives creative people to “pursue to completion” the creative act.

He goes on to mention ten characteristics of personalities of creative individuals (some surprising points) and finally ends with a question that I ponder often : “If the world is changed by a rather small number of contributors, where does that leave the rest of us?”

This is one of those questions that we could probably never answer, but I still wonder what role each individual plays in this world. When we think “individuals”, we think of people who have changed other people and the world in a profound way (whether positive or negative) such as Mahatma Gandhi or Hitler, but what about those we never hear of? What is their “role”? To consume? Or to just be?

Coming back to creativity, why is it so difficult to define it? What makes one person more “creative” than the other?

My view is that it comes down to “thinking differently” and “making things happen”. It is this combination that is potent. Leave out one of these factors, and that potent is lost.

If you believe Paul Graham when he says that hiring is obsolete, then you should read the ten commandments for entrepreneurs by Alan Morgan.

It just reinforces the fact that everybody’s a salesman.

Update : Paul Graham’s full essay is online now

Last weekend, I had been on a pilgrimage with my family to Rameswaram. I have heard that Rameswaram is supposedly the biggest temple in India, although I haven’t been able to confirm that. The highlight of the pilgrimage was that we had to take bath in, or rather poured a bucket of, water from each of 22 wells in the temple. The other highlight was the Meenakshi temple in Madurai which has 1011 statues.

Rameswaram is an island and is connected to the mainland through the Pamban bridge which is a structure of beauty.

According to the Ramayana, Rama and his followers built a bridge (sethu) from Rameswaram to Sri Lanka using stones, crossed the ocean and then he rescued his wife Sita from the demon king Ravana, Lord of Sri Lanka. On his successful return to Rameswaram, a lingam was installed and Rama worshipped Lord Shiva to absolve himself of the crime of killing Ravana. This lingam is one of the reasons why Rameswaram is considered a holy place for Hindu devotees.

In the long journey between Madurai and Rameswaram, I wrote a poem (if I can call it that):

Life is about breaking out… Breaking from the routine Breaking out from what is expected Breaking out from your own expectations Who knows where life’s journey leads to But maybe it doesn’t matter As long as you make your choices And have no regrets.

Life is about freedom… Freedom to choose Freedom to live the life you dream of Freedom to help your friends Freedom to keep your family happy Freedom to have a philosophy Freedom to live by your rules.

Life is like music… Every song has its appeal So do opportunities Every tune has its rhythm So does our family Every lyrics has its meaning So do our values Every album has its genre Such as our nation Every beat has a pulse Such as each day Every song has a beginning and an end Life is like that What matters is how you feel when the song is ending