It’s 1:48 in the morning(or late night) and here I am thinking of a very important decision to make which will decide my life for coming time…gr8 decisions of a company are made in board rooms and in my case..they are made in my bed room :-)

Hope what ever decision I take today will be a rational one…

We always ask God to give what is important to us, not what is best for us. I have learnt very recently that whatever he gives u, is the best for you.Though you may not like that initially, you will realise that it was the best thing to happen to you. Well, there’s always an other side of the coin. If you don’t know if what you got is the best for you, how can you acknowledge that? OR is it that we make ourselves force to think that it was the best to happen to us coz we already got that and there’s no way turning back, so saying something something like this that might comfort you.

Is it the time or my state of mind making rattle all this stuff…I don’t know, but come to think of it, I think I am really on the hot seat ;-)

Last year, this time I just preparing to apply for Carnegie Mellon’s Masters in Information Systems Management(MISM) course for which I had to take my GRE, TOEFL again. I gave them for the second time, the first time it was in my under graduation.

I say that once every hour on every Friday!!

I was not a Friday lover before, I used to get many such forward mails when I was in India, but didn’t care much coz I was having fun all the week along. Be it office or at home or hanging around with friends…

But after coming to Sweden, life has changed. Work takes a toll and the pressure of work at office and at HOME are too boring and monotonous to carry on. I don’t know how moms just do the same stuff all their life for us…I wonder…

But, Friday’s different..it marks the starting of a wonderful weekend and culmination of a stressful work week…

Here whats I do on a friday evening:

• Read Naruto and Bleach Manga
• Go out for dinner..
• Go out to a pub or watch a good flick at home
• watch Naruto and Bleach Anime

I will do couple of other things which I can’t write but the above ones are the a definite subset of them.

4th November 2008, it’s been exactly six months for my stay in Göteborg, Sweden and the journey till now is almost amazing. I have learnt so many new things – both professionally and personally. The leaning curve is very steep..so steep that I was afraid of tumbling down.. :)

Among the many things that I have discovered about myself, the thing which amazed even me is that I am very good at cooking. I hardly went to kitchen back in India and here I am cooking all sorts of dishes..which even my sister can’t  ;-)

Professionally, I got to learn bounds of new things: I met wonderful people who are way different than us,Indians, both at personal and professional level. I got an opportunity to work on the latest technology that my field has to offer, which in turn helped me a lot and the scope of learning was vast. I interact with people who came from different psychological, cultural and geographical backgrounds. The amalgam of experiences which I experience interacting with them is great.

Travelling out of the country for the first time, I experienced almost everything a usual first timer would experience. That includes Culture shock, Home Sickness, Jet Lag, weather change etc,. I came here in May and it was truly unbelievable to see sun shining bright even at night 10 as I come from a place where there are night and day times are constant round the year.

Personally, I can say that I have learnt the most. I had the total control over my life – what I do, when, where, how – everything. I also realized how difficult is to run a house consistently day in and day out. I understood how mothers struggle to complete their daily chores and at the same time keep family members happy. You are great MOM!!!

The only thing I repent when I look back the six months is that I did not utilize the time effectively to see new places. In India, you can go around at almost anytime of the year. But in a country like Sweden where the temperatures are so low, we can hardly do anything in winter. I just lazed off the entire Summer and it was too late for me by the time I realized my mistake. The only places I went were the Archipelago and Botaniska. But better late than never I have started seeing around the places and hopefully cover as many as possible. My next big tour is for Christmas where if everything goes well, I may get a stretch of 9 holidays. I am planning a lot for that vacation. touch wood!

One thing I really miss and being with my nephew Cherry, who was born on July 1st, 2008, a couple of months after I came here. He is already 4 months and I miss being with him dearly.. :-( But I think I will make up to it when I go back.

Happy Diwali to all of you who celebrate this wonderful and bright festival of lights.

I am celebrating this festival in the land of vikings (Sweden!) and it is first time that I took it on myself to celebrate the festival.

All these years, my only resposibility(can I say that!!) was to get as much as crackers from the market and soak them in the sun to make them more loud!!

My Mom and Sis used to prepare everythin for the puja and we waited for my Dad to come home and perform the Laxmi Puja. 

I just waited to complete the entire process and then junt pounce on the firecrackers and blast my through... :) good old days...

This time though I dod not have any opportunity to burn crackers. Since, there is no Indian Community here on Göteborg, we could not go to any community place where they celebrate the festival.

But I did celebrate this one in a more different way. Using my recently acquired cooking prowess, I prepared Dahi wada and invited my colleagues over to my place.

It was a wonderful evening. I will post the pics as soon as I upload them.

I have started following this schedule to able to do one hundred pushups in a single go. I am in the week 2 of the schedule and going good. I find it interesting as he states that we will be able to achieve the target in 6 weeks.

Check out the site

Saw this video on youtube. Simply loved it. The thing I most liked about this video is that it tells us the present position of Earth in a very subtle and understandable manner.

He should also have included how many people from the community of 100 will strive to give something back to the society. That will be very less I guess. Everyone I know wants do social service to an extent but most of them are content in just saying that rather than showing that in action.

Happy Dussehra to all the readers.

I have a tradition in my family to go to all my relatives’ homes and greet them on this festival no matter how far they are!! (but in the same city, of course :-P )

This time it was a double treat.. it was my cousin’s birthday as well..Happy Birthday bro..

Ever wondered if there are any tourist places in your home town that YOU haven’t seen yet? Well I realized that yesterday.

One of my Managers, whose a Swedes, is going to India tomorrow for a Conference. And what’s more? he’s going to Hyderabad – my home town(may be city...).

So, as a true Hyderabadi, it was my tacit responsibility to suggest him some tourist places for which Hyderabad was famous for. He has only one evening to tour..so this made my job a bit tough coz I had to give him only a couple of places which are close enough to his place of stay (Novotel) as he cannot move along the entire breadth of the Hyderabad in one evening given the mind boggling traffic we have there.

I decided to give him a couple of famous cultural places those he could find only in my city. The entire process had one important by-product. It made me ralise that out of the most sought after tourist places, I hardly visited couple of them. For instance: I did not see Salar-Jung Museum till now. Same is the case with Taramati Baradari, Falaknuma Palace, climbing Char Minar,Chow Mohalla Complex to name a few..I visited Golkonda a few months before I arrived in Sweden, thanks to my Chennai friend who asked me to show that when he visited Hyderabad.

How many of us have visited all the famous tourist places in our own Home Town? We go to as many places as we can, even some not-so-important places when we go visit new places, then why do we neglect our own city? Well, I don’t say that every one is like that but, most of the people I know are.

People take their home towns for granted. So they don’t think about them in that perspective. Any thing which is perennial and is all yours doesn’t has that lustre. That’s true in every sense. Rather than lazing in home watching the idiot box which airs some traumatic soaps or listless reality shows, we can go visit some good places in our city or at least our neighbourhood.

I have decided that when I go back to India and Hyderabad, I am gonna cover all the remaining places that didn’t previously.

I came here 4 months back but never had time to go to any temples. In fact I don’t know if there are any near by. But I knew there was iskcon temple in Gothenburg which is a part of Govindas Restaurant here.

I went there once with couple of my colleagues for having a bite…though we got a polite answer from them to try some other time as the restaurant was closing already. But I got to know that they are celebrating the Janmashtami Celebrations on Aug 24th the Sunday. Being away from home for past 4 months I did not get time to feel myself closer to God as there is no hint of GOD in our Apartment. I have two beautiful nude paintings of women in my bedroom. Now I can’t expect to have some religious portrait in a business apartment.

I just wanted to see how westerners celebrate our Indian festivals, but I was in a pleasant surprise. I celebrations were performed very austerity and I felt near to Godly peace there even midst a huge gathering.

There were bhajans started by the time we reached there (Were we expecting Indian Punctuality??) Then we were told the story of Lord Krsna’s birth in more modernised way :)

Meanwhile people who just came in were offering their presents to the birthday boy(Lord Krsna) it was kinda different when people celebrate even Gods birthday just normally as we do…it didn’t strike to me anytime in India.

After the story, there was the Abhishekam for the Lord and everyone was offered a chance to offer their obeisance. All the time during the Abhishekam, we recited the Ubiquitous Hare Krsna Hare Krsna Krsna Krsna Hare Hare, Hare Rama Hare Rama, Rama Rama Hare Hare and some more Sanskrit bhajans.

After the Abhishekam, We all sang and danced along singing some songs of Lord.

After that we had kind of a dinner which had some nice Indian dishes and Juices.

It was a different experience in a good way. I plan to go there as often as possible during my short stay in this beautiful city of Gothenburg.

pic is from Iskcon temple,Govindas restaurant, Gothenburg

Happy Vinayaka Chavathi (Ganesh Chaturthi) to one all.

We all pray to Lord Ganesha before starting anything NEW.

This festival marks the augment of all the remaining festivals of this year.

We celebrate this festival collectively in our uncle’s place.

pch.. i missed this one…two years back i was in my initial company training in Coimbatore

It is the festival of wisdom and prosperity. What I see every year is that we keep our books and textbooks beside the Lord and pray for the xamz.

We should not see the moon today in the night sky.