New York Ice breakers

Few ice breakers to kick off the next party you are in

• Biggest fashion crime committed on the streets of NYC
• Most favorite cartoon show
• Jay Leno or Letterman or Conan OBrian
• MoW (Man on Woman) or WoM (Woman on Man)
• Black, Brown or White (please don't ask me what)
• How to greet your ex? hugs with kisses or plain hello
• Buttery nipples or Slippery nipples (for the perverts, they are names of shot drinks)
• Finance or IT
• Cheers or Salud

Inspired by Fox news and NYC night life

FI and H1

The F1 visa-holding students are seriously disturbed by the existence of the H1b holders and vice-versa.

The former class thinks that the H1b visa holders are living a privileged life as they are getting paid higher salaries for working in multi-national firms without 'much serious' effort. The H1b holders on the other hand have the perception that the F1 crowd is the snooty intelligentsia who just likes to study and have fun filled sorority/ fraternity bashes (lot of booze and chicks-American Pie). Well both of the facts are half truths.

F1 students do have to work very hard to support themselves; with the small grants and scholarships its very difficult for them to live the American dream...and study and score near-perfect GPAs at the same time. They are under constant pressure to match up to the other foreign students as well as American students and ABCDs; also the mental pressure of being an immigrant is always on them...no wonder they yearn to complete their degrees and earn the coveted H1b status. They feel the pinch of money throughout their course time (if they are not sponsored by their wealthy uncles and relatives) so for them getting a H1b is almost the first step to the American dream.

On the other side, the H1b guys have a different plethora of problems; but somewhere the crisis of both these communities match. Most H1Bs make a decent salary from the corporations they are working with. However the identity issue (or the lack of it), the constant pressure to prove yourself and grow vertically up the corporate food chain, the desire to live the American dream are all the same. The hard work that they put in to the job to prove their mettle and excellence is seriously commendable.
So personally I believe, in general, F1 guys get to experience different sort of hardships than H1b holders. However, it is not right to discard the H1b holders as being privileged. What matters at the end of the day is how an individual can handle her own finances, control her support systems, adjust and adapt to friends and colleagues and peers in a foreign country...totally alone and away from the motherland and parents. And this has nothing to do with the visa types but more with the nature of independence of the person involved and her past experience of living and making it alone in this busy bad world.

Do you agree??

Crossroads II: Run for life

Crossroads I: Walk
More than a year has passed by before I could write the sequel to Part I (I actually never planned on writing the sequel)..fell-in-and-out of apparently TRUE love once during this period. Life taught precious unpleasant lessons which might have been better not experienced. Now I'm again on crossroads. And this time I'm in NYC...the big city. Here, you can bump into a mini celebrity, or go ga-ga over expensive cocktails and broadway show tickets, get dazzled by the real estate prices, or feel one with the cosmopolitan vibe of the city, meet successfull bankers and not-so-successful actors.... yet this city can often make you feel lonely if you are not well connected with the correct 'crowd'. I am hoping that some one from this crowd will give me a sense of direction at this crossroad. Hope I do not have to make another sequel.

Anonymous me

I love those anonymous comments to my musings....they remind me of the modern day essential dilemma of privacy and transparency.
We want everything that happens somewhere (in the government, in big public enterprises etc) or sometime (say facts of assasination of JFK) or someone famous (say Jennifer Aniston's new boyfriend) to be transparent yet when it comes to 'us' we value privacy more than anything.

Being an Indian and specifically a Bengali, my sense of privacy have always been vandalised by the in-borne 'para' culture............(for the uninitiated, para/chawl/potti are colloquial terms used in India for residential communities); people in the community kind of always knew what the other families were up to (which movies they watched last week, what type of fish they are cooking today etc). Thinking that now, its kind of hilariously scary that rarely there were any deep secrets between various families in a community.

Things changed over time, and people have become conscious of privacy so much that they are up against online search engines for storing apparently innocuous data. And people now don't bother to know anything about the neighbors, whether in condos in a high rise or sprawling single home communities. We all now have suddenly become hi-strung on the privacy topic as the government and federal agencies are collecting more information about each of us than we could possibly imagine. One way or other, our privacy rights are getting compromised everytime we do a transaction with any agencies on or off the web.

We can label this para feeling as tribal in one way where people were closely tied together for various reasons. The melting-pot culture of metro cities delineated the tribal principles over time. This change in trajectory in human cohesivenes definitely would be a good topic for anthropological research. More highways, more airlines, more social networking websites, more viral marketing appears to me as means to get back to that old primal tribal being. So why atleast NOT post anonymous comments to my blog entries?

I would love to know all of you. Peace.

Isn't It Ironic?

I always wondered, how much trust my parents have in each other that they have a stable relationship of more than 35 years now.....and then I wonder, how much trust worthy can I be for my partner.

Particularly in USA, the word Trust between partners assume a dimension of mammoth proportions as kids, teens (specially of broken parents) are getting alarmingly used to break-ups and move-ons so early on in life.....before you are 14 you have 3 and 1/2 breakups (half for the one you are breaking up with currently)...consequently trust in later life becomes a serious challenge ...

Most of the times, my unambiguous, undivided trust have been trampled by my partner; My partner negotiated my trust for easiness of life, traded my trust by inflicting immense insults and all these in the name of religion, culture, skin color or family background. And I had to find consolation in the fact that the trust-bridge collapsed long before the traffic started on it (well it happened now, thats better than happening later).
Yet I want to find someone again whom I can trust. Isn't it ironic?!

Title inspired by Alanis Morissette's hit single Ironic

Questions They Ask To Decide

You have already read about the Questions to Ask Before You Decide ...now once you are ready prepare for the questions they will ask for them to decide...some samples are given for the prep..

• What are you most proud/ashamed of in your career?
• What would your team say about you as a leader/colleague?
• In what kind of working environment do you experience the most success?
• How would you handle an angry boss and flippant client?
• If you had the chance to go back and change something that you did in your current (or past) job, what would you do differently and why?
• What do you do to bring balance into your life?
• What is your greatest strength, and your greatest weakness, on the job?
• How much do you know of 'our' company and work we do? Do you have any questions/comments around our operations?

Plain updates

Just plain updates ...trying to do a lot of things to keep my mind from wandering...

Attended the awesome jazz and blues fest at Red Bank, NJ over the weekend..
Trying to get my arms around PMI courses..
Listening a whole lot to the likes of Carly Simon (you can find her top hit here)..
Had a get together of few people last week --self cooked (+ stuff by a good friend) food with good wine from down-under and NZ..
watched a couple of good films including 'Sex, Lies and Videotape', and 'Parzania'
life is good being single ...(well thats a consolation when the mind wanders)..

Take It Easy--everyone says that

Are you happy? or lets say are you doing good with your life? Whom do you confide your deepest fears? Who do you share your ecstatic wins? Whom do you like to be in next 5 years? Who do you love?Do you want know about unconditional love? Do you believe in compromises and adjustments? Do you believe in priorities?What do you want to have, if anything were possible? Do you have someone you would say everything to? Are you mad? What are your thoughts on this?
Simple questions....tough answers...

Life Management Institute

Wish there was a place called the "Life Management Institute" akin to the more popular PMI or Project Management Institute.
Wish LMI have had principles and standards that could be learned, imbibed and practiced to put together a great project called life; the output would have been a 'happy successful life'.
Wish LMI documented proven methodologies to 'execute' and 'monitor and control' different phases of the project life...so that all the risk elements in the form of sudden emotional crisis, loneliness, mental blockades, adhoc adrenaline rushes could be prevented, mitigated or at the least lessened. Wish LMI came with statistical tools, mathematical models and predictive comparison analysis to solve all the puzzles about making 'right selection' in terms of various inputs to the project life.

Verse

Her eyes
bright with hope
Her smile
ooze perennial confidence
Her hair
shadows the moonlight
Her gaze
across the horizon
Her lips
silent in thoughts

She broke my heart...