Category Archives: Life

2015 Week 20 Update

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Another ho-hum humdrum week! I did escape a fire drill at work by working at home and I think quite a few did the same!

Update on the position I applied for – on Tuesday I got a call fixing my phone interview with my boss on Thursday. I slightly panicked, but then got a reprieve on Wednesday saying he’ll do this after he is back in Singapore in the first week of June. Now I need to just prepare for this interview.

I think I’ve said this before – not only do I lead a boring work-home-children life, I am the sort who prefers to curl up with a good book rather than go out! What does that say about me?

On a side note, I’ve been having some real weird dreams lately! For someone who does not dream normally, I wonder what this is all about. When I google the meaning, it does seem positive – a foretelling of the future perhaps? Fingers crossed!

Have a great week folks!

The Power of Prayers

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I usually start the morning with prayers to the Lord and am trying to inculcate the same with BB & GG too!

As you probably know from my posts, I am a Hindu and am also bringing up BB & GG in the same way. I am weird in the sense, though I have rock solid belief in God, I am not a very big beliver in going to temples. I firmly believe that if you believe in God and don’t go out of your way to harm someone, then even a heartfelt two minute prayer in your heart to God will give you the same results as going to the temple. You do not need the outward manifestation of your belief to God. I posted about religion some time back, but this post is more about the power of prayers.

GaneshaLike I’ve said before, I have a very personal relationship with God and my personal God is the Lord Ganesh.

My daily routine is do a string of prayers in front of my altar at home. Hindus usually light the lamp in front of God twice a day and I do this in the morning after bath and in the evening after I am home. Once I light the lamp, I say my prayers. After this, I try to meditate for a couple of minutes and then have my conversation with him. The evening prayer is a much shorter one with a quick prayer after lighting the lamp. But I do have my conversation in the evening too, especially if the day has gone well for me, or I see his hand in something that happened during the say!

So does praying to God worth your while? My answer is an equivocal YES! Prayer is the vehicle with which you reach out to God or the higher divinity. It allows you to focus on the divine and helps a human being to become one with that one Universal Divine Being who can be called by various religions as their Gods!

Prayers also allow you to push your stress and desires on to your preferred God. This releases a lot of tensions in your lives when you move your stress to God! I remember there are days when my mind is full of things and I can’t sleep. Those days when I say a short prayer to Ganpati Bappa (Lord Ganesh) and tell him now it’s his responsibility to ensure that my problems are solved; I am able to sleep quite fast!

Do you believe in the divine and pray?

Pet Peeves

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Yesterday while going home from work, I came across this woman who was quite irritating. It was a bit of a bother for me to stop going to her and get her to stop doing what she was doing. What did she do to irritate me? Read on….

We all have some peeves which irritate the hell out of us. Urban Dictionary defines pet peeves as “an irritating experience caused by others which we cannot control”. So what are my top pet peeves? In no particular order, here are my top 5

People listening to music/watching videos in public transport without headphones
This one is inspired by the lady yesterday. What I don’t understand is why do phone manufacturers give you a pair of headphone when you purchase a phone, if not to use it? There are usually a large number of people in any public transport and to subject them to the music or video you are watching is just not done! I don’t want to listen to what you are watching, in a language I don’t understand

Bad grammar and spelling
This one is also on the top of my list of pet peeves! I really don’t like when people write sentences as if they were still using old-style brink phones of the yesteryear – you know the one where you wrote words like “dis e (this is)” etc. It’s worse when people send you emails and post on forums using this style! My fingers itch to correct it, especially when these days even primary school children carry smart phones…

I am also a big grammar nazi and get super put off when there are grammatical and spelling errors in work I see – what’s the spell check for guys?

People who cut queues
Enough said about this. Even though we live in Singapore – the land of queueing, you still get people who do not understand the concept of one. When waiting for a bus, one person will bring in 10 more friends and there goes the chance of anyone else getting on the bus!

People who don’t know the concept of personal space
Another one which happens mainly in public transport here, but which is an alien concept in India!

Loud phone conversations in public
Aah! Lets all hear about your boss or back-stabbing friend while on the way somewhere! If you need to have a conversation while in public, please do try and tone it down? Actually sometimes, its quite fun actually. You get to hear gossip about someone you don’t know and the journey becomes fun, especially when you don’t have a good book in your hands….

What’s your pet peeve?

2015 Week 19 Update

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This is most likely to be a 90% work post! The week was the usual home-work-home week…

I went ahead and applied for the position that I wrote about last week, even though the chances I don’t get it is higher than I get it!

I did speak to both my ex-boss and current boss about this – my ex-boss was actually excited about this, but again, the position advertised is slightly more senior to what I am doing. But I feel, I have given out signals here – either here or elsewhere, but in 2015, I am hoping for a career breakthrough!

Another thing I want to write about – though not a rant, I want to put this here, so I remember…

There was this senior person I was working for R, whom I was helping a few months back. Now she continued to take my help and I helped her as I was interested in that field – I thought this was the best way to get some knowledge and experience in the field. She completed 100 days at work and had a review with the regional chairperson and I helped her put the deck together. Around this time, my current boss came on board and one day she mentioned that she had spoken to him about me – about what a great job I was doing, what an asset I am to the department and so on. I didn’t ask her to do that and if she did it but didn’t tell me, I would not know and I am ok with this. After her review with the chairperson, she came by to thank me and also mentioned that she told the chairperson that I helped her and what I great job I was doing. There were other regional leaders on the review, along with her boss and this has been told in front of everyone. Then the chairperson said to tell all this to my current boss and she laughed and said she already did that.

Now last week, when I pitched my candidature to my boss, I mentioned this – when I mentioned that everyone whom I work with always give me great reviews – and I mentioned R saying that she has spoken to him about me. My boss had this real blank look on his face and it looked like R has not spoken to him at all! I felt a bit funny and we laughed it saying maybe she will do that in the near future.

Now I am wondering why R did this? I didn’t go and ask her for the endorsement, but if she didn’t do that, why tell me she did it? I was going to ask her to be a referee for me when I start going for interviews as she is local, but now I may have to rethink this.

Ok, not-rant over! Have a great Monday and an awesome week…

Beat the heat…..the Singapore way….

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Most days the one consistent conversation you are bound to have these days in Singapore is about the weather! We are currently obsessed with it – it’s too hot, everyone says all the time.

The late Mr. Lee Kwan Yew, Singapore’s first Prime Minister post-independence once famously declared air-conditioning to be the greatest invention of the 20th century.
Temperatures consistently hover around the mid-thirties (in Celsius, or around the nineties in Fahrenheit) with high humidity and it’s no wonder that people staying in this sunny island feel the heat….

This is probably how hell feels like, I thought this morning on the way to work. Waking up, drenched in sweat, in spite of sleeping in an air-conditioned room, the moment you come out from a bath, you are drenched with sweat. Getting to work is a pointless exercise as by the time you reach your air-conditioned office, all the time and effort you took to get ready to come to work has come to naught!

With most places in Singapore being air-conditioned, when you actually go to the great outdoors aka the non-air-conditioned spaces, the heat really hits you and completely saps your energy. Without this, you are more likely than to wilt in the heat instead of actually doing any work.

I dream of a time when the whole of Singapore is covered by a temperature controlled dome and we live in an ideal climate! Far-fetched perhaps, but knowing Singapore, this may not be something of out a sci-fi movie, but a reality decades down the line.

In researching for this post, I asked GG & BB earlier this morning if they felt the heat in school. For the sake of perspective, they study in non-air-conditioned classrooms and have around 30 minutes of recess daily (more if they stay back in school after lunch, in which case recess including lunch time will be around 75 minutes) and another 30 minutes of PE in school daily. Both BB & GG were actually quite nonchalant about the heat and said it didn’t bother them one bit while they were in school. Is this the resilience of the young where they seem impervious to heat? Or maybe it’s just me getting old…..