A Message For Indians by Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam (Our former Prez.)

5:46 PM Posted In , , , Edit This 10 Comments »



For those who are still not aware of Dr. Kalam's message, I am posting his message here so that you all can read and change your mindset a bit. I am not talking about changing everything(whole nation) in a day. But we can change that place where we are at present.Please read this message very carefully and try to implement some things even at small stages.Its just more than a message its a humble request for your own good.

"
Why is the media here so negative?

Why are we in India so embarrassed to recognize our own strengths, our achievements? We are such a great nation. We have so many amazing success stories but we refuse acknowledge them--- Why?

We are the first in milk production.

We are number one in Remote sensing satellites.

We are the second largest producer of wheat.

We are the second largest producer of rice.

Look at Dr. Sudarshan , he has transferred the tribal village into a self-sustaining, self-driving unit.

There are millions of such achievements but our media is only obsessed in the bad news and failures and disasters.

I was in Tel Aviv once and I was reading the Israeli newspaper... It was the day after a lot of attacks and bombardments and deaths had taken place. The Hamas had struck. But the front page of the newspaper had the picture of a Jewish gentleman who in five years had transformed his desert into an orchid and a granary. It was this inspiring picture that everyone woke up to. The gory details of killings, bombardments, deaths, were inside in the newspaper, buried among other news.

In India we only read about death, sickness, terrorism, crime.

Why are we so NEGATIVE?

Another question: Why are we, as a nation so obsessed with foreign things? We want foreign T. Vs, we want foreign shirts. We want foreign
technology.

Why this obsession with everything imported. Do we not realize that self-respect comes with self-reliance?

I was in Hyderabad giving this lecture,when a 14 year old girl asked me for my autograph. I asked her what her goal in life is. She replied: I want to live in a developed India .
For her, you and I will have to build this developed India .
You must proclaim. India is not an under-developed nation; it is a highly developed nation.

Do you have 10 minutes? Allow me to come back with a vengeance.

Got 10 minutes for your country? If yes, then read; otherwise, choice is yours.

YOU say that our government is inefficient.

YOU say that our laws are too old.

YOU say that the municipality does not pick up the garbage.

YOU say that the phones don't work, the railways are a joke,

The airline is the worst in the world, mails never reach their destination.

YOU say that our country has been fed to the dogs and is the absolute pits.

YOU say, say and say. What do YOU do about it?

Take a person on his way to Singapore . Give him a name - YOURS. Give him a face - YOURS. YOU walk out of the airport and you are at your International best... In Singapore you don't throw cigarette butts on the roads or eat in the stores. YOU are as proud of their Underground links as they are. You pay $5 (approx. Rs. 60) to drive through Orchard Road (equivalent of Mahim Causeway or Pedder Road ) between 5 PM and 8 PM. YOU come back to the parking lot to punch your parking ticket if you have over stayed in a restaurant or a shopping mall irrespective of your status identity... In Singapore you don't say
anything, DO YOU?

YOU wouldn't dare to eat in public during Ramadan, in Dubai .

YOU would not dare to go out without your head covered in Jeddah .

YOU would not dare to buy an employee of the telephone exchange in London at 10 pounds ( Rs.650) a month to, 'see to it that my STD and
ISD calls are billed to someone else.'

YOU would not dare to speed beyond 55 mph (88 km/h) in Washington and then tell the traffic cop,'Jaanta hai main kaun hoon (Do you know who
I am?). I am so and so's son. Take your two bucks and get lost.'

YOU wouldn't chuck an empty coconut shell anywhere other than the garbage pail on the beaches in Australia and New Zealand .

Why don't YOU spit Paan on the streets of Tokyo ?

Why don't YOU use examination jockeys or buy fake certificates in Boston ???

We are still talking of the same YOU.

YOU who can respect and conform to a foreign system in other countries but cannot in your own.

You who will throw papers and cigarettes on
the road the moment you touch Indian ground. If you can be an involved and appreciative citizen in an alien country, why cannot you be the same here in India ?

Once in an interview, the famous Ex-municipal commissioner of Bombay , Mr. Tinaikar , had a point to make. 'Rich people's dogs are walked on
the streets to leave their affluent droppings all over the place,' he said. 'And then the same people turn around to criticize and blame the authorities for inefficiency and dirty pavements. What do they expect the officers to do? Go down with a broom every time their dog feels the pressure in his bowels? In America every dog owner has to clean up after his pet has done the job. Same in Japan . Will the Indian citizen do that here?' He's right. We go to the polls to choose a government and after that forfeit all responsibility.

We sit back wanting to be pampered and expect the government to do everything for us whilst our contribution is totally negative. We expect the government to clean up but we are not going to stop chucking garbage all over the place nor are we going to stop to pick a up a stray piece of paper and throw it in the bin.

We expect the railways to provide clean bathrooms but we are not going to learn the proper use of bathrooms.

We want Indian Airlines and Air India to provide the best of food and toiletries but we are not going to stop pilfering at the least opportunity.
This applies even to the staff who is known not to pass on the service to the public. When it comes to burning social issues like those related towomen, dowry, girl child! and others, we make loud drawing
room protestations and continue to do the reverse at home. Our excuse?

'It's the whole system which has to change, how will it matter if I alone forego my sons' rights to a dowry.' So who's going to change the system? What does a system consist of ? Very conveniently for us it consists of our neighbours, other households, other cities, other communities and the government. But definitely not me and YOU.
When it comes to us actually making a positive contribution to the system we lock ourselves along with our families into a safe cocoon and look into the distance at countries far away and wait for a
Mr.Clean to come along & work miracles for us with a majestic sweep of his hand or we leave the country and run away. Like lazy cowards hounded by our fears we run to America to bask in their glory and praise their system. When New York becomes insecure we run to England. When England experiences unemployment, we take the next flight out to the Gulf. When the Gulf is war struck, we demand to be rescued and brought home by the Indian government. Everybody is out to abuse and
rape the country. Nobody thinks of feeding the system. Our conscience is mortgaged to money.

Dear Indians, The article is highly thought inductive, calls for a great deal of introspection and pricks one's conscience too.... I am
echoing J. F. Kennedy 's words to his fellow Americans to relate to Indians.....

'ASK WHAT WE CAN DO FOR INDIA
AND DO WHAT HAS TO BE DONE TO MAKE INDIA
WHAT AMERICA AND OTHER WESTERN COUNTRIES ARE TODAY'

Lets do what India needs from us.

Forward this mail to each Indian for a change instead of sending Jokes or junk mails.

Thank you,

Dr. Abdul Kalaam"

I am only expecting you to atleast think on this !! Please
Thanks

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Steve Jobs' Convocation Speech (Stanford)

7:51 PM Edit This 2 Comments »


I'm honored to be with you today for your commencement from one of the finest
universities in the world. Truth be told, I never graduated from college, and 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 six 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 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've got an unexpected baby boy; Do you want him?" They said, "Of course." My
biological mother found out later 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 go to college. This was the start in my life.
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 okay. 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 far more 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 five cent deposits to buy food with, and I would
walk the seven 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 that 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 10 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
because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the
confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the wellworn path, and
that will make all the difference.

My second story is about love and loss.
I was lucky I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz¹ 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 two billion dollar company with over 4000
employees. We'd 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. And 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, and I retuned 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. Sometime life
sometimes life's going to hit 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 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 and --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 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've 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 and 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 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, thankfully, 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's 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's 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 others' 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
Catalogue, 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 60s, 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, 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 mid1970s, 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've always wished that for myself. And now, as you
graduate to begin a new, I wish that for you.
Stay Hungry.
Stay Foolish.
Thank you all very much.

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Pleasing Everyone! (not possible)

3:01 PM Edit This 3 Comments »

One day a man was going to market with his son and his ass. they met a couple on the way.
"Why walk when you have an ass to ride?" called out the husband, "seat the boy on the ass."

"I would like that," said the boy, "help me up father."

And the father did that willingly.
Soon they met another couple. "How shameful of you!" cried the woman, "let your father ride, won't he be tired?"

So, the boy got down and the father rode the ass. Again they marched on.
"poor boy", said the next person they met, "why should the lazy father ride while his son is walking?"
So, the boy got onto the ass too. As they went on, they met some travellers. Hearing this, the father and the son got down. Now they decided to carry the ass on their shoulders. As they did so, the travellers broke into laughter.

The laughter frightened the ass. It broke free and galloped away.
 ********************************************
MORAL OF THE STORY IS:
You can not please everyone
-Hitesh
********************************************




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