Incident 1:
When I was in school, once just before the summer break, my teacher asked everyone to maintain a diary during the vacations and write everyday whatever we did. When we came back from the break, this is how my diary looked.

Yes, all the pages had the same content, just a little bit of change in timings. Okay, the truth is that my day started at 10AM and ended at 10PM with the entire day spent playing and watching cartoons. But that’s not the point I want to make here.

Incident 2:
A few years later, 2nd year of my BTech. One day a senior asked me – kal ka kya karne wale ho?
I responded with a strange look, the look didn’t mean – I don’t know, it meant – How would I know?
No, he wasn’t asking to invite me to a party, he wanted to know how would I make the most of the next day. The fact is like other batchmates, I didn’t know

Now I use Ohlife daily and the reminder mail lands in the inbox with the subject line ‘How did your day go?” And mostly my response starts with ‘Okayish day….nothing major …. ‘ and the story continues. Yes, once in a while I am really excited about this Ohlife mail, like the day we launched Moneno, but that doesn’t happen too often!

What do I/you/all-of-us do on weekends? Booze, movies, sleep, cleaning? Thats it!?!

14 years have passed this way.

Today if my ma’am asked me to write that diary it would be like:

Wakes up. Walks to office. Works/tweets/facebooks simultaneously. Have meals sometimes. Walks back home. Eat. Sometime read. Sleep.

My ohlife now often has “Nothing New” written over it. Every time i write that i am reminded of Steve Jobs’s Stanford commencement speech.

“If this was the last day of your life, would you still do what you plan to do today? And when the answer is NO for too many days……”

My problem is even bigger. I dont know what i am going to do! Yes of course work, but do i know exactly what am i gonna do?

I read a few articles, have a lot of unread articles opened in various tabs, often i have 50-70 tabs opened and because of twitter, end up increasing that unread count each passing day. And then suddenly one day the browser gives up, read crashes, and i ask myself, do i really need to restore all those tabs? What if i don’t? No, i never have an answer to that question, primarily because i don’t even remember what tabs i had opened! And because of fear of losing something important that was to be read, i always end up restoring all those tabs and the same cycle repeats.

What happens next? Of course, this entire bigger cycle repeats. And then in the daily rut of things, forget about whats actually happening in life. Whats important to note here is that:

Not that i am doing bad at my work. Not that i am doing something i don’t love, I really enjoy my work. Not that i am living someone else’s life. Not that i am not making money. Not that i am away from friends. Achieving, attaining a lot of things, i still feel i am kind of lost. Something’s wrong!

How can i sense that? My creativity has taken a beating. I get irritated and angry a lot often. I feel i am not doing enough. In the longer run my productivity decreases. And apart from all that, i often end up feeling/thinking what i’ve just written!

170 days ago since I wrote this blog post about making a career move. Not that I wasn’t working all this time, on the contrary was working so much maybe that I didn’t even have time to write the next update. Well, finally the partnership deed for my startup is signed off with Rahul Dewan and its actually his blog post earlier in the day that motivated me to write this post.

The name of the startup is ‘Niswey’, to be registered as an LLP. We really had a hard time coming with this name, partly due to our thoughts but primarily due to non availability of a .com domain name (yes, its really really tough to get a domain name of your choice these days). Before you ask me, Niswey means optimally, best in the Na’vi language, the language invented for the movie Avatar. Bizarre ? Hehe. But I am quite fancied by languages other than English or Hindi (my previous startup was named Zapylacz – meaning pollination in Polish 🙂 )

About Rahul Dewan: Rahul sir, as I call him, has been a mentor and motivator to me ever since I got in touch with him 3 years ago when I joined his company Srijan as a developer. Well, even though that engagement as an employee didn’t last long, thankfully our relation did. Reminds you of some social networking platform ? Yes, LinkedIn – Relationships Matter ! If you’ve read my blog before, you would have noticed, I’ve mentioned about him on my People Page ever since I wrote that page.

About Niswey: Niswey’s a digital marketing startup. It deals in complete online branding and marketing strategies. Includes Web Analytics, User Behavior, Heatmaps, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Marketing (Advertising), Social Media Marketing. The list is not exhaustive as once we get involved with a brand, we have a lot more to offer, yes talk to our clients for testimonials 🙂

The website is not still up, for the time being this is where we are putting things up. Hope this venture brings in much success and more importantly ‘satisfaction’ to all those who get aligned with it ! Wish us luck.

When I packed my bags from Ghaziabad everyone put up the same question in front of me, “When are you coming back?” When I came home around a month back I was almost sure that I would be doing nothing in these two months time. With a dial up connection I was sure that I would be away from the world of spiders, I am talking about the World Wide Web or the internet as most people would call it. I knew it would be difficult to survive, because for a person who is so addicted to net that he changes his life cycle and lives it according to US standards, staying away from net for three complete months was going to be a huge in fact a Herculean task. I always knew that was impossible. The first day I was here, evening I was out at the café, no not the coffee one but the obvious one. Anyways, within a few days I thought that was it and with the help of my sister persuaded my father to shell out 1500 bucks and that too for just a month. My father spends money quite carefully, he simply said if that’s what you really need, then have it. I knew that it was not the ultimate requirement but to survive at home ….. just couldn’t help it too. I went to the sify distributor and came back happily that the next morning I would be back to normal business; little did I know that the coming month was going to be the biggest nightmare of my life.
Two people came to my house, one, the marketing guy and the second whom I assumed to be the technical person. The tech person took out an RJ45 connector from his bad put the wire in it and quite quickly I got the sign reading “Local Area Connection is now connected”. I was glad that this happened so quickly. Then as soon as the, so called technical person, sat on the computer chair and took the mouse in his hand I knew he was having even less knowledge than the girls of my college(not to hurt anyone’s sentiments if by chance you happen to be an RKGIT girl). Within a minute I asked him to move out and let me handle the system. I asked “what do want to do now?, you want to make a new connection ?” “Yes“, he said. And as soon as I opened the “make new connection wizard”, he had a question mark on his face. I knew this was no to be done. Then I came across a paper he was holding and when I saw that, I knew what was to be done. I opened the lan settings and entered the ip address and the dns settings. I said “yahi karna tha na?” happily he said, “haan haan”. Then he gave me a cd to install the sify broadband client. No problems with that. Then he said now you can connect. I connected to the internet but the internet explorer said, “Check your proxy settings” and then without asking him I put in the lan settings which he gave me and then retried. Same answer surprised me. I asked him why that was though I knew that it would be of no use, he said “Aap bhaiya ko call karlo”. He called him and fiddled with his bhaiya for 2 minutes before I took over the phone and told him what I had done and asked him that what port should I use for the proxy server, at first even he was baffled but then he showed great character and proudly said, “aap settings me jakar restore defaults kar dijiye”. Even he knows nothing, I understood in a flash. I tried to use the “direct connection to the internet” and thankfully for me it worked. Without saying anything more I hung up the phone, paid him the requisite amount and said goodbye to him as I was already late for a party, my placement party for my school friends. Hardly realized that this was the worst I made from my father’s money. Before leaving I even took his bhaiya’s number in case I have some problem. Giving me the number he said in a very confident manner, “waise aapko koi dikkat aaegi nahi”.

Later I returned that night and logged in, happily checked my mails, scraps and then went to bed. In the meanwhile I even clicked on to the gtalk icon but it didn’t respond and I said “forget it” and turned my system off.
The next couple of days I saw some operations malfunctioning but I never took it seriously until one day my system refused to start. I knew something was serious and that most probably it’s virus. Tried some ways but couldn’t help it. I tried everything but in the end was left with no other option than formatting my system, thus losing all my data…..really a great blow. Anyways I called the “bhaiya” and told him my misery citing the reason as his network for all the mess. He disagreed saying his network was perfectly fine and that my system was infected. No point in discussing with such people I reconnected and within some hours I found the virus again. That was it. I went to his shop and shouted about his problem. To my surprise he simply denied it again. Then I thought it was of no use, came back, installed Linux and thought that it might work. As expected, it didn’t work. I went to his shop again. This time the bhaiya was not there, a calm, cool looking black person was standing and said in a voice as if he was the owner of the shop, “bhaiya nahi hai kya kaam hai bolo”. Well, I said, can you tell me how to run the net on Linux? “kya”, “net chalana hai ? to ye kholo”, opened in a browser the page where the sify software download was available and pointed me to the line mentioning the client for windows. I said, “maine ye wala kiya hai”, pointing to the Linux client and the response he gave me was not shocking as I had expected this. He proudly said to me, “humne yaha dhai sau (250) connection diye hain, aajtak kisiko is wale ki zarurat nahi padi, aap anokhe ho kya?”. I said “aajtak kisine Linux use nahi kari hogi” , “liee-niks, ye kya hai, main yaha ka network sambhalta hu, sabka kaam is pehle wale se chal jata hai aapka bhi isise chalega”. Next moment I knew that it would my fault if I talked to him any further, so I opted for waiting for the owner, the bhaiya or the distributor. I put up the same question in front of him and as expected even he didn’t know it. But what he did was gave me assurance that he will find out and let me know soon. Its been 3 weeks since then but I haven’t fond the answer. Some people claiming to be sify technical team even had this question fired from me only to give me the same answer, “we’ll find out and let you know soon sir”.
The next problem I faced was within a couple of days only. My system started showing the network cable unplugged. I called him again and he sent his network engineer. First he tried to look for some problem in the system but when he couldn’t find any then he understood it was the connector that was troubling me. Within a few minutes he replaced it and we tried to connect. Then when I tried to connect it asked me to do install an anti virus. That was it. On asking he told me that his bhaiya had accepted that there was virus on his network and now he’s put an anti virus check for each system. My point was proved.

Since then there have been one problem which continues to haunt me apart from a single instance when I tried to login and the client gave the message, “you are already logged in”. Baring that instance, whenever I not online its because of the single problem that my system can’t connect to the gateway server. Too embarrassing, as the ping screen that shows “Request timed out” creates a desire in me to thrash the distributor, the bhaiya as whenever almost 90% of the times when that problem arose, his mobile is switched off and his shop closed. After 8 pm there’s no way I can contact him and more often than not that’s when the problem arises. Sometimes I’ve even tried to call the sify local customer care but they can’t help it either. The reason for the problem is the local network which is loaded with viruses.

All this makes me feel pity on the condition of the technical knowledge of these people. No one knows a single thing and claim that they are network engineers of technical team members. I think the Jagriti technical team which comprised mostly of second year students had more knowledge than these idiots. Forget the people who are using it because they even might not know the fact that the government of India has made it clear that a service can be called a broadband service only if they supply a speed of 256 k bps or more. While the connection I am using is being used by most people here and I guess none might know this clause. But they claim to be using BROADBAND service and are quite happy about it.

Its 15 today and my connection expires on 18. With the great services my distributor has provided I am in no mood to extend his worthy services for another month and spend half of the time abusing him rather than using the net. As far as the bhaiya and his network team is concerned, I had only I thing to say to them after which they could only keep their faces hanging down. I proudly said, “Pehli bar kisi engineer se tumhara pala pada hai”

originally posted here