26th March 2010, with lot of hopes and dreams in my eyes, blessings and wishes in my kitty, clothing and personal items in my suitcase, and a guitar on my shoulder, I left my home and took a flight to Bangalore.
The Almighty has shown me that your prayers can be answered; your struggles can have a sweet ending. Something similar happened with me. After sitting idle at my home, shattered and hopeless, I had finally got the most unexpected thing of that time, my offer letter from Infosys. My moments of despair turned into celebrations and happiness, and behind the picture were few people who stood by me when I needed them the most. Some people helped me out from nowhere... True, as I read in The Alchemist, "Everything is written and you are bound to reach your destiny". It was happening with me. I got my reporting date in Infosys Mysore as 28th March 2010.
Coming back to March 26th 2010, standing at the IGI airport, I was very excited to board my first flight, to be present at my beloved cousin's birthday, to join Infosys, to step into a new life. As the flight arrived, I took my seat and started gazing through the window, watching the aircraft getting airborne, going above the clouds. Yes, I was on cloud 9 too. As couple of hours passed, the flight touched down ground at Bangalore International Airport. Without further delay, I took a cab to reach my cousin's home. Such a great feeling it was.
March 27th 2010, was the day of celebrations and lots of shopping. It was my cousin's birthday and a day before I had to step into a new life... It was an amazing day indeed. I was all set to leave from Bangalore next day, and arrived the awaited day, March 28th 2010. I left for Mysore in the morning. With full of excitement, I reached Infosys Mysore campus. After initial formalities, I was allowed to step into the campus, where there were 14000 other trainees wearing colored straps around their necks with an ID card saying that yes, they were employed by Infosys. I soon collected my room keys and checked into the hostel. After getting into the room, I placed my luggage at appropriate place and took rest.
We assembled at the multiplex the very next day for the Induction briefing. We were made to feel that we are going to do something extraordinary. The joining formalities were being carried out and this process took a week to complete. I was now a part of March 29 LC2 CS batch. The journey of my generic training started from there and it went on smoothly. I was enjoying my every single day there. That place gave me an opportunity to learn, earn, and have fun, all at the same time. I was in a dream run. After the generic training, our stream specific training started and I was now in ESA June 10 batch. Though the batch changed, everything else remained the same.
Finally, at the end of this training, it was time for new posting locations. I desperately wanted to join in at Hyderabad STP where my best of friends were already posted. And voila, I got the location of my choice. Isn't God great?
Life at Hyderabad started with a lot of adjustments, learning, and of course fun. The Delivery environment was entirely different from training, but it proved to be the actual path of learning. I was lucky to be a part of a very nice team who always support and guide me with my work. I somehow managed to still stay in touch with all my hobbies. My weekends are dedicated to music room, badminton court, etc.
I was back at Delhi few days back on the occasion of Holi, and was leaving back for Hyderabad. The circle of life was coming into picture.
26th March, 2011, with lot of hopes and dreams in my eyes, blessings and wishes in my kitty, clothing and personal items in my suitcase, and new responsibilities on my shoulder, I left my home and took a train to Hyderabad. 27th March 2011, I wished my cousin from train itself and 28th March 2011, I joined back my office, completing one year of the journey with Infosys, which I never expected to start.
I thank every single person who was a part of this journey and supported me walking through it. I wish this journey continues and I get new things to explore on my way...
One of the fundamental law of nature, is change. The life never waits for anyone. Instead, it keeps on moving, like water running down a waterfall... So as my life has too moved a lot from the time I added my last post on my online diary...
It has been such a long time, almost an year since I updated my blog. I confess that at times I was being lazy to do so, and at times, I genuinely couldn't update it. But finally, where there is a will, there is way.
So the journey of past one year was like a turning point of my life. There were times when I used to worry about my future when I saw the chance of joining Infosys sinking in the dark. But God is great, and so is his way of giving surprises, which he does through the common man at earth. I met such men, who really did that thing which I never expected, due to which I am walking the path I was craving for. Thanks to all those men, who made this possible.
I finally joined Infosys, in the end of March'10. Something which I wasn't expecting. But there still exists someone known as GOD. So, I joined Infosys as a Systems Engineer Trainee, and went through a rigorous training schedule (rigorous for others, I actually enjoyed it a lot). I spent an amazing 4 months over there and did many things I loved to do. I found the system to be very different than what we have in schools and colleges. The standard of the training was very high. No wonder Infosys provides the best training in India. And I performed well in that :)
After the completion of training, I wanted to get posted to where there were best of my friends, Hyderabd. Even considering the future career options, it was the well suited city. So I prayed to the same entity again, the GOD, and voila, I am sitting in Hyderabad now and writing this post!!
I hope my life here will teach me many more dimensions of living and conquering the world. And now I'll update my blog regularly :)
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, it’s 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 world’s 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 returned 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 it’s 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 other’s 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.
In my earlier posts, I had told you all about the series of unfavorable events going on with me, which keeps me sulking each moment. As now I had lost the golden chance to join the top brass Infosys, and my degree postponed for another year, there is only one thought that comes to my mind; why me? Despite all the working knowledge I possess, why does a failure comes in my path? For how long will this go on? When my day will come? I tried to find its answer and I got my answer today.
Morning time. I got up at my usual time today too, took bath and all other morning rituals. I came to my room and switched off the fan. When I sat on the floor for prayers, all those questions were going through my mind every now and then. I took the match box and started igniting the Agarbatti. While doing so, I asked all those questions to the God. I knew I’m doing so just to convince my mind. But God is great. Something clicked my mind the same time.
I started to think that it was so easy to ignite the Agarbatti when the fan was switched off. Everyone does the same so did I. what difference it made between me and the others then? I got up and switched the fan on and set it to full throttle. I came back to my place and made a decision, a decision to ignite the Agarbatti in the same condition, with the fan on. I was not sure whether I’ll be able to do it or not, but I pledged that I will try it till the matchbox gets empty. So I took the Agarbatti and the matchbox in the same hand and matchstick in the other and ignited the matchstick and brought it closer to the Agarbatti. As I was expecting, the matchstick extinguished without igniting the Agarbatti. I took another matchstick and repeated the same, got the same result, then another matchstick and then another and one after other. Bounded by my pledge, I burned almost three dozens of matchsticks without achieving my goal. But instead of giving up, I continued with it. Now there were only a limited matchsticks lying in the box. I took another matchstick and repeated what I was doing before. Nut finally, this time, after burning almost 50 matchsticks; I succeeded in igniting the Agarbatti, with the fan soaring on maximum. It made me so happy...
The God has answered to my questions through this event. It symbolized the reality of life. When the conditions are favorable, everyone will be on high, but the real victory is for those who survive in unfavorable conditions. To succeed, one should have belief in himself. We should fight the problems we face, instead of running away from them, and then the victory will be ours. The fight should go on till we achieve our goal. I might be in trouble at present, but my day will certainly come. Whatever happened today has waked me up. If you are still sleeping, then as I said in the very first line, it’s time to wake up now...
Ahh... the college is over now... And here am I sitting at my home at leisure. Don’t know what to do next. Lost all my hopes to join Infosys, maths giving me nightmares, my muscles telling me to go back to the gym, parents cursing me for not doing anything, etc... This isn’t funny. It’s something which I’m facing on a daily basis... :(
So finally I dared to pick up my aged textbook of Computer Networks and started flipping its pages in a jest. I finally settled down on the TCP/IP chapter. I just started reading it again. I was forced to do so in my class too... Lolz... But it was motivating. I could make out something out of it which relates the topic to my life... Read the technical stuff with patience. I know you hate them... Hehe...
For those, who hate IT guys and their stuffs, TCP/IP is a protocol used for transfer of data over computer networks. If it fails to work, then you will start cursing your Internet Service Provider because it is the base of Internet. I studied that TCP/IP uses a virtual channel between two communicating devices and uses sockets to make the connection. The data transfer takes place in form of packets. When a connection has to be established between the devices, the sender sends a packet to the destination device. Upon receiving that packet, the receiver responds to the sender with an acknowledgment packet informing that it received the packet. When the sender receives the acknowledgement packet, the connection is established and data transfer starts taking place. Now what if the receiver receives the data but fails to send an acknowledgment? To solve this problem, the protocol uses few algorithms to respond to this situation.
First, the sender waits for the acknowledgment for a particular period of time and still no acknowledgement is received, it retransmits the previous packet. If due to some reasons the sender still doesn’t receive any acknowledgment, it keeps on sending the packets. After a few attempts, it stops sending packets in no acknowledgment is received. Thus the connection gets closed and the data transfer stops. That’s when your Internet gets disconnected...
Now what this has to do with life? As I said earlier, I found the protocol similar to our lives. We have gone through it many times, but we never impede to give it view. We communicate with many people around us. I apply this theory to those who are close to me.
When two people want to communicate, they make a relationship. They name it as friends, love, father, mother, son, daughter, etc. When you want to express your feeling to them, you choose a socket, which is your heart. In case they are not your dear ones, you choose your brain. We then express ourselves to them. And when they respond to it, we say the relationship becomes successful. We start communicating with them using words and emotions and wait for their responses. Even if they don’t, we keep on trying. But what if the other person is not interested in listening to you? They may try to avoid or ignore you and may not respond you. Since we care about them, we keep on trying. But how many times? We do have our own limits of patience. And when the limit is reached, we give up and break our relationships with that person, like a divorce in the case of spouses.
We should make our algorithms, oops, I mean our ability to handle such situations better. We should not be too eager to see the result in just a short span of time. As one of friend messaged me, Life gives answers in 3 ways. It says yes and gives you everything. It says no and gives you something better, or it says wait, but gives you the best. Let the best be yours. Now what did that actually meant? Hehe...
We have to take decisions wisely as it depends how our relationship with that person is going to be. Whether you actually want to be with that person or not? Or the problems are coming due to communication gap? Or is there any reason? Don’t see how the person is responding to you, but try to figure it out why he or she is responding like that. And I’m sure; it’ll make things unambiguous... Try it...
Well i don't like self appreciation but...
I'm a simple guy who loves to be with family, spend hell lot of time with friends, have quality life... Who doesn't want all these things???
