Friday, July 25, 2008

The Daffodil Principle

The Daffodil Principle:
Another touching story of encouragement

Forward Credits: Anand Deshpande / Shantala Hegde (I think!)
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Author Unknown (Adapted)

Several times my daughter had telephoned to say, "Mother, you must come see the daffodils before they are over."

I wanted to go, but it was a two-hour drive. "I will come next Tuesday," I promised on her third call.

Tuesday dawned cold and rainy. When I finally walked into Carolyn's and hugged and greeted my grandchildren, I said, "Forget the daffodils! The road is invisible in the clouds and fog, and there is nothing in the world except you and these children that I want to see bad enough to drive another inch!"

My daughter smiled calmly and said, "We drive in this all the time, Mother."

"Well, you won't get me back on the road until it clears, and then I'm heading for home!" I assured her.

"I was hoping you'd take me over to the garage to pick up my car. Its just a few blocks," Carolyn said. "I'll drive."

After several minutes, I had to ask, "Where are we going? This isn't the way to the garage!"

"We're going to my garage the long way," Carolyn smiled, "by way of the daffodils."

"Carolyn," I said sternly, "please turn around."

"It's all right, Mother, I promise. You will never forgive yourself if you miss this experience."

After about twenty minutes, we turned onto a small gravel road and I saw a small church. On the far side of the church, I saw a hand lettered sign that read, "Daffodil Garden."

We got out of the car and each took a child's hand, and I followed Carolyn down the path. Then, we turned a corner of the path, and I looked up and gasped. Before us lay the most glorious sight. It looked as though someone had taken a great vat of gold and poured it down over the mountain peak and slopes. The flowers were planted in majestic, swirling patterns - great ribbons and swaths of deep orange, white, lemon yellow, salmon pink, saffron, and butter yellow.





Each different-colored variety was planted as a group so that it swirled and flowed like its own river with its own unique hue. There were five acres of flowers.

"Who has done this?" I asked Carolyn.

"It's just one woman," Carolyn answered. "She lives on the property. That's her home." Carolyn pointed to a well kept A-frame house that looked small and modest in the midst of all that glory. We walked up to the house. On the patio, we saw a poster. "Answers to the Questions I Know You Are Asking" was the headline.

The first answer was a simple one. "50,000 bulbs," it read.

The second answer was, "One at a time, by one woman. Two hands, two feet, and very little brain."

The third answer was, "Began in 1958."



There it was, The Daffodil Principle. For me, that moment was a life-changing experience. I thought of this woman whom I had never met, who, more than forty years before, had begun - one bulb at a time - to bring her vision of beauty and joy to an obscure mountaintop. Still, just planting one bulb at a time, year after year, had changed the world. This unknown woman had forever changed the world in which she lived.

She had created something of indescribable magnificence, beauty, and inspiration.

The principle her daffodil garden taught is one of the greatest principles of celebration. That is, learning to move toward our goals and desires one step at a time - often just one baby-step at a time - and learning to love the doing; learning to use the accumulation of time. When we multiply tiny pieces of time with small increments of daily effort, we too will find we can accomplish magnificent things. We can change the world.

"It makes me sad in a way," I admitted to Carolyn. "What might I have accomplished if I had thought of a wonderful goal thirty-five or forty years ago and had worked away at it 'one bulb at a time' through all those years. Just think what I might have been able to achieve!"

My daughter summed up the message of the day in her usual direct way. "Start tomorrow," she said. It's so pointless to think of the lost hours of yesterdays. The way to make learning a lesson of celebration instead of a cause for regret is to only ask, "How can I put this to use today?"

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What have you planted today?

Wednesday, July 23, 2008

"....yavaag foreign ge?" (When are you going to Foreign?)

Forward Credits: Prashanth Hegde
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The familiar sentence is arguably one of the most frequently asked questions, losing only slightly to the even more grave one "...yavaag maduve (When is ur marriage)?", to someone who unluckily happens to be in the IT Industry and in Bangalore . There was never a better conversation topic for the older generation to suck every drop of blood the poor bloke manages to save despite working as a techie.

It's a wave that everyone wants to be part of, and everyone wants to show they know. The word computer is now a house-hold name. A good relief for many topic starved aunties and uncles, but our poor techie gets stuck like a nail that's half into the wood when its head decides to painfully break lose.

The popular following that IT has gotten in recent years has been more due to the lucrative travel, than what the techie believes is due to his work. This time it is the uncles who have the upper hand in! Making a conversation, owing to some 'extra' knowledge, thanks to 'external' contacts. Aunties resign to just asking "...yenappa computer aa?" (Literally means "are u a computer?", but it is supposed to be "Are you working in the IT field?" One must be ready to field a volley of smirks and barrage of questions, if the victim answers a "no", though it would be the right answer for such a question. For if you are not part of the bandwagon, then you'd rather term yourself a foolish old crackpot and be happy with that, than get a loathe some look from the omnipresent aunty.

IT has such a popular following here, most do not know what they are following, but just drift along to be 'seen'. Our aunty gets into her form, and asks our techie, "you computer, my son also computer" ...our techie, just out of a ctrl-alt-tab-enter, has no idea how to respond to this inhuman portrayal, by the aunty, of her son. He just smiles and says "wonderful aunty, which company?" and is hardly inte! rested in what he hears. The aunty carries on.. " nun maga sapoo"...the indianised MNC becomes "sapoo" from SAP, while our techie replies back, "I work for GE"..aunty is a bit concerned on hearing that, and blurts out "is it a good company? Didn't u get in infosys?"...techie is at his wits end to explain. "Aunty, we are FORTUNE 1"; aunty is in no mood to understand. Aunty's techie son is blushing ear to ear.

While the general social understanding of an IT company hovers between Infosys and Wipro, some good souls give respect to "Vorakal" too. So aunties are generally happy if one is from any of these companies. The other companies will only mean a detailed interrogation about the techie's academic credentials, past criminal record, if any, and a sure minus point as a prospective groom.

It is the conversation between aunties that is the most funny and amazingly astonishing. Recently one of my cousins went onsite, and I being the scape goat, who still 'had' to be in India , was the butt of all discussions.

aunty1 : " foreign ge yaavaga ivnu hogodu ?" (When is he going onsite?)
aunty2 : "gothilla, innenu swalpa divsdalley hogthaaneno" (He might go in some days!)
aunty1 : "hmmm...they say only brilliants(sic) are sent onsite"
aunty2 : "that's true !"

I was being murdered inch by inch, neat and clean. My reputation in tatters!

This is even bearable, but get this, if a techie manages to stumble on an onsite travel but is cancelled on that last millisecond, then his future i! s doomed, for aunties will have a field day disecting him and nailing him for not working well at the office. I have been most unfortunate in this case, so much so that if i had got a call to abort the travel 2 seconds later than what i got, i might have had to jump off the plane mid-air.

Aunties started flowing in from early evening that day, some trying to stay oblivious of the situation, some trying hard to keep a straight face, and a few more giving their own versions of my story, which by the way i never told anyone!...well one aunty even had the nerve to ask me "did you have a fight with your manager?"..well i was kind enough to say "no aunty, project got scrapped ", only to realize that the aunty had no idea what a project meant, and instead pressed me to agree that i had indeed done some mistake...finally she let me go when i blurted out "my manager had a fight with the airlines"....well that was enough for me to roll over on the floor and laugh at her, despite the 'humiliation' of not going onsite.

Uncles are not far off, and are ever more eager to learn 'computers'. One uncle was particularly curious to know as to why we guys were paid for playing computer games !...apparantely he was of this view after he had seen his 9 year old son only playing games on his newly bought comp. I knew better than to explain, so i told him that it was because if we won, the company would get money. uncle's spirits rose, and in all probability he would have gone home and pestered his innocent 9 year old son to teach him to play games in the hopes of joining a IT company in future!

Uncles are a little more "knowledgeable" though. One uncle came to me one day, when i made the suicidal mistake of attending a social gathering full of aunties and uncles, and asked me as to which company i worked for, and I answered him hoping he would stop there. however , uncle had no such intention and carried on " yaav language ?"...though stunned, i rep! lied back "c sharp uncle" ..uncle's face glowed and then he said " nun maga Java , c# bidhoithanthey!" (My son works on JAVA, C sharp has long fallen from grace) ..In most uncles' view, languages are like company shares, the value of which keeps fluctuating on an hourly basis.

Though salary is something of a sensitive issue, uncles don't give didly-squat about that and continue questioning the techie on the same. I was ripped apart when i told my uncle that my gross was 25L, to which my uncle in suspended euphoria exclaimed that his son earned 2.5 lakh per month at onsite. Having no room to argue, i kept mum, when my uncle went off again "why dont u ask your manager for a raise".... I told him i would consider his advise and ask, though my manager was bit of a
dragon, unlike my uncle's son's manger, who was a saint just short of a halo!

Even more weird is the funny way in which people take those mails managers send to tec! hies and their team, as to the good work being done. one of my cousins who recently joined my company got such a mail from his manager, and he thought it was a good idea to take a print out and show it to his father, a folly he still regrets to this day. My uncle not only read the copy, but made a hundred photocopies and distributed it as pamplets to his near and dear ones. My dad got one too, and i had to field some intense questioning at home, since i had not managed to get one such letter even once! I had even gone to the extent of thinking about printing one on my own just to escape the 'humiliation'.

while it's often funny to listen to the weird misconceptions people have about IT, it gets irritating if it goes too far. It would be a boring place without the aunties and the uncles, but it would be a wonderful place, if they knew better than to draw conclusions about one's work, of which they know so less about!