Kapil's Take

This is a special message for my dad!

Dad, you know how hard it is to talk about my feelings and express myself in the way I am about to. Dad, you are really a very special person. I may have never said it before, but I really appreciate everything that you have done for me and actually the whole family. Even your presence makes a huge difference.

I know we have our arguments and disagreements, but every time we have our little debate I learn something new that no book, no movie, no audio tape can ever teach. I really respect you for who you are – an honest, hard working, gentle, kind and confident in your principles and disciplined in your actions. You might find it hard to believe but after taking on reading about life and self help books and with every new book I am realizing you actually live the life that many books only talk about.

You are a true example of following your principles, a true example of honesty and simplicity and humbleness. I know I argue with you about some of your principles that I might not agree with, but there’s one thing that I can only hope to live up to and that is living your principles on a day to day basis, believing in what you do and doing what you believe to be right.

Oh and your healthy habbits of regulated eating and sleeping etc.. although may be very annoying at times haha I can see how healthy you look and I only wish I could be as disciplined as you!

Happy Birthday Dad!

As much as I love technology and especially the internet, I think we are starting to push its threshold. The internet was supposed to make life easier, and for some time it did, but now it seems more and more things are popping up and we’ve begun to push limits.

Especially starting with Web 2.0 and the online social network craze,  it almost seems we are racing against time. Everything is super fast, super connected and super “oh my God, get me out of here”.

Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, Youtube, and what not. All these networks were meant to keep us connected and get us closer, but on one end it seems that we all are getting so close we’re overlapping onto each other and invading all kinds of spaces that we can think of. And on the other hand our ‘online’ world instead of making the world smaller is becoming so huge that we don’t know who’s who and what’s where anymore.

Google just launched Google Buzz – I thought it was going to be Google Wave that was going go to be the next big thing. Another online social networking feature but this time added to Gmail. This means more networks, more feeds, more updates, more people that I don’t know adding me and trying to be my friend so that they can send me mass pokes, and walls and updates about things that I don’t care about.

Again, as I said, don’t get me wrong I love technology and I love the Internet, but it’s just getting too much. EVERYONE is on Twitter or Facebook to say the least. People want to get ‘connected’ to everyone it seems. How can people have 500 friends? How can they tweet so much? I bet if you send a friend request to a 100 most random people on Facebook, 80 of them will add you the very same day; the other 20 might add you in the following days or if not, then they don’t use their facebook account anymore.

Even I started an online social networking site called kesario.com few months back. It’s not working as well as I thought it would. I wanted to come up with solutions, and the more I spend time studying the trends the more I’m realizing that something drastic is about to happen on the Internet.

What made me think was this. Yesterday I launched the site wordsthatmatter.net for Valentine’s Day. It was a crazy idea that I had and thought it would be very interesting. Anyway, to market this site, I decided to use all these social networks. There were so many people who just kept accepting my friend requests, and following me on twitter. I opened an account specially for that site so no one really knows me, yet everyone kept adding me as a friend and following my tweets.

People on facebook and twitter are already using it to do mass marketing, and now Google Buzz. There are SO MANY of these now. Yes I know, even my site kesario.com is one of them. Sooner or later we are going to reach a threshold and the weaker ones will get eliminated (yes I know, my site is also amongst the weaker ones).

I was thinking we need a new dimension to all this – a network to manage all these networks, and there are a few out there already, but today I realized that that is only patching up the problem we are about to face. This Web 2.0 and social media/network bubble has started to reach its threshold and I predict that sooner or later it will burst.

I will write another post to say what I mean by this Web 2.0 bubble bursting because this article is getting too long and it becomes difficult with the constraint of time we have in this super fast world that we live in.

’3 Idiots’ is a movie about the education system. It was a very enlightening experience as it brought back some memories of the past. Some good ones, and some not so good ones. It made me realize that through this whole process of ‘growing up’, maturing and building my career, I had forgotten the true nature of life and the things that we do in life. It made me realize that my perception of reality had drastically altered from the time I was in high school to now, and that I needed to fuse my experiences of my past and present to have true growth by re-realizing purpose.

The movie is about a brilliant young lad and the journey of him and his friends through engineering college. The main character is fun loving, brilliant and a person who is passionate about learning. The movie teaches us that the whole purpose of a school system is to teach and nurture young minds. But schools and students have fallen into this tangle of results, grades and achievement and a popularity contest among friends which ultimately has become a meaningless phase of our lives which instead of enlightening us has become a burden of requirements. Requirement to achieve grades, requirements to be agreeable to professors, requirements of future expectations from employers, from parents, from friends and from the individual students themselves.

No one really thinks about true purpose. What drives me, what empowers me, what is my true passion in life, what can I learn and experience to have a greater value of life? These are quality questions, but instead our lives are ruled by ‘Which university is more popular? What are my friends doing? Which degree is marketable? Will I get a job? What do I need to do to get these grades? How much money will I earn with this degree?

When you truly come to think about this, you will realize that it’s not just the education system. Even after graduating and going out in the field we are always trying to answer these meaningless questions. How many people are doing what they truly love doing, what they are truly passionate about and what in their gut feels to them like their true nature? I would guess not many – whether it be art, business or their profession.

Realizing true purpose gives meaning to our lives and everything that we do. Purpose is really the life force of our existence, and without it we might as well all be dead.

If you haven’t read the title of this post, I suggest you read it, or read it again if you already have. How many of you have set targets and made new year’s resolution? I can safely say that majority of you must have at least tried twice, and almost all of you have failed!

Now, now,…I am not trying to put you down. But let’s really face the fact. Coming up with a new year’s resolution is like setting up a plan to fail. The amazing thing about new year’s resolution is that it’s a collaborative effort of mass failure, because everyone is setting goals and almost everyone is failing to follow through. Hey… I was one of them. (The key is I was)

Why then do we do it over and over and over again? I don’t quite know the answer to that haha,.. but I am an observer and all I know for sure is that its there and its very evident. I’ll tell you how I escaped this mass murder of goals(sorry for sounding too graphic). Now for those who know me, know that there is always a story behind what I say or do. So here it goes.

It was last year of high school in algebra class and my teacher, Mr. Stewart, a person who I’m sure has inspired many, told the class something that has stayed with me ever since. I don’t remember his exact words, but the idea goes like this: common sense will get you no where. It may get you through, but it won’t create change, and it won’t create progress. Uncommon sense will! If everyone does the same thing, and the same thing over and over again, nothing really big will happen, because we will experience the same things over and over again.

History has told us that it was attitude of uncommon sense, things out of the ordinary that created break throughs and created leaps in progress. I have used this way of thinking many times in my life, and this time I am sharing it. I did not set a new year’s resolution! But what I did was I¬† set my goals in November 2009. Why?

1. Because of uncommon sense and the hope of progress tied to it.
2. And another thing I learned in high school: Newtons laws of motion.
3. Building Resistance – something I realized later.

Reason 1:

Everyone sets new year’s resolutions and almost everyone fails at it. I did not want to be part of it, and I thought uncommon and decided that I will set my goals away from the time everyone sets them to pull myself away from the collective efforts of failure.

Reason 2:

I’ll try to simplify this. Imagine you’re sitting in your car and press on the gas paddle full tilt. For the first few seconds you’re struggling to get your car to full speed, but a few more seconds go and you realize that small amount of force is required for every little change in acceleration, i.e. then it becomes easier to accelerate. And the faster you are moving the harder it will be to stop!

So I started off in November, and by the time it was January I already had momentum, so the parties, food, drinks and the fun-filled holiday spirit in December did not stop me – slowed me down at most.

Also, here’s why New year’s resolution is a bad idea. You’ve already partied too hard, eaten too much and probably drank too much too and you’ve had so much fun that it becomes seriously difficult to seriously look at your goals in January. Forces are already acting against you, so you need to apply more force to have little acceleration towards your goals and slow progress dampens your spirits and sooner or later BLAAHH!! You give up!

Reason 3:

Building Resistance. If you set your goals in November, like I did, you have already gone through the parties, the fun, the food and drinks and you realize that you still have momentum¬† in January. This boosts your confidence and increases your resistance to your outside world. It’s like building muscles or getting flu shots. This is something that I realized later and oh yes it feels amazing!

So here’s why you should NOT set a new year’s resolution!

Who are Customers? Have you heard of the saying, ‘Customers are always right”? Why does this saying have a huge importance in business? Well, customers are the people who pay for the products or services that you produce or provide. It is their money that ultimately fuels the growth of any business.

Customers and businesses are really two sides of the same coin. I even dare to take it one step further. Customers really are partners in business and collaborators of success.

Leaving out customers in important decisions of business is like tossing one wheel out of your 4×4 while going up the hill. The law of nature is that what does not grow gets eliminated. Businesses must grow and customers are becoming more and more important.

I am not a master businessman(not yet) and I have no degree in business. The closest I come is having 2 courses in economics and 1 in administrative studies and I am self employed. But what I am is an observer and I am observing that businesses are moving away from shareholder’s game to a stakeholders game. Although this shift has been happening for quite a long time now, there are few businesses that have taken this game to heart and these are the ones that truly seem to be pulling away from and ahead of the rest.

Ultimately everyone is playing their part. The workers are playing their part, the businessmen are playing theirs and customers are playing their part. The world is becoming smaller and smaller by the minute. A product or service is no longer made or provided by one party or even one part of the world. Collaboration is in a big part the soul of progress in our world today. What’s really making it happen is technology – the Internet to be very specific and to be even more specific – Web 2.0!

If the parties involved in providing products and services are working together, then why not take things a little further. Why not let the customers or the end users play a big role in  it as well. Because ultimately this work, whether it be some product or a service, is for the customers. Make customers your partners in business and collaborators of your success!

It just seems to me that people have forgotten what a public library is for. Library is a place where people get some quiet time so that they can read peaceful, but there was a time when you could even meditate in a library, and now is a time where even reading has become difficult. Over the course of 4 years I saw the library at my university grow in size, people and in noise. Two years after graduation I am sitting in this public library and it seems to be getting worse. Even the librarians do not seem to care.

I can do my work here with easy – I don’t have any problem. But what bugs me is that there was a time when people were scared to sneeze as that sneeze would echo through the library and now a sneeze probably won’t even be heard. It just seems that people have forgotten what the real purpose of a library was.

I have an Iphone and simply love it. I also use thunderbird as my default mail client and the lightning plugin as my calendar and I’m on a mac. I searched the Internet for clues to sync the iphone and lightning. Every site and every forum that I came across gave me all these weird solutions like syncing lightning with Google calendar and then sync that with ICal finally syncing that with your Iphone using Itunes.

I decided to go with a different approach. Remember what the wise ones said, “The shortest distance between two points is a straight line.” I just thought of going with a simple solution:

1. Export Calendar from Thunderbird.
2. Import it in ICal
3. Sync with Iphone Using Itunes.

And IT WORKED! Why do people go off looking for complicated, round about ways of doing things?

And for windows,¬† the same should work too. Except you’d be using Outlook instead of ICal. I haven’t tried it. If anyone who has can post a comment here.

Someone asked me what is your vision for yourself or for your company. Surprisingly, I answered the question right away, and when I thought back at what I had said, I realised it was absolutely true. This is the exact thing that drives me day in day out. I just never consciously thought about formulating my vision for what I was doing. But now that I know, it just creates juice in my life. Well, what did I really say? Here it is:

I want to build and work with a company that is the driving force of technology. My vision is not only to deliver the best using current technology but evolve to being the company that is a major player in shaping the way we interact, communicate and do business that enhances not only wealth but also the quality of every aspect of people’s lives.

So, yet another apocalypse movie, yet another end of days. Is it just me or does everyone think that everyone is obsessed about the impending doom, the end of the existence of the human species etc…
I’ll just mention few of the recent ones: “Deep Impact‚” ‚ÄúArmageddon‚Äù, ‚ÄúThe Core‚Äù, ‚ÄúDay After Tomorrow‚Äù. There are so many more, old and new that if I were to write them all I’d be listing at least 50 movies. Then there are those movies that have elements of the apocalypse, even though the whole movie maybe really based on something else.

This obsession is not only recent. Stories and prophecies of the end of days are in every region, every ancient civilization and almost every ancient scriptures. Do I believe in any of them? Well, we’re overdue for an ice age, and the reversal of the magnetic poles, the earth could be hit by a giant astroid, or we could just blow each other up, and if none of this happens then our star, the sun will eventually explode and die out consuming every planet in the solar system. But not to worry, we still have a few billions years left for that.

As far 2012 being the end of the world as we know it ‚Äì I highly doubt it, but that is not to say that something major won’t be happening.
Check out what will be happening in 2012.

Hello everyone,

It’s been a long time since I posted something on my blog. I had been out from it all, battling my fall arch nemesis, the flu..haha. It’s been two weeks that the coughing has kept me locked inside the house and away from the phone so I haven’t been even able to talk to anyone, including clients and friends.

But kaps is back in business. Got some exciting projects ahead of me. Updates to Kesario.com have been at a stand still. The future of kesario.com really rests in the coming few weeks.

So what will today’s big quote be? All I have to say is that people who have failed must have given up at some point. So if you have a dream, you better protect it, because those who cannot do something will tell you, you can’t do it (friends and family included).

History has told us that persistence and perseverance has always paid off, so folks, just when you think that everything is going against you, know that the better, brighter future is just around the corner. The night will always be darkest before dawn, but know that dawn is coming! So when you feel you are at your darkest moments, start celebrating and KNOW that dawn is coming!