Lifeline of mumbai...

The city of dreams is what mumbai is..where lives are made and destroyed...

from filmstars who don't know what there bank balance is to those who don't even have a bank account..all are able to survive in the city that is said to neversleep...

even though the lifeline of the city,"mumbai local" takes a break of around 3 to 4 hours a day...the rickshaws are the ones which never go to sleep..24X7is the service they provide..

i don't know the official count of the numbers but there are enough in number that you never have to wait for more than 5 minutessearching for one..

Don't know how many of you have chatted with the rickshawalas while travelling in them.. i travel alone a lot and hence chat with them once in a while forspending time..the topic could vary from traffic in mumbai to politics in UP.... to your surprise the rickshaw puller seems to have all the latest updates aboutpolitics... is the Literacy and unemployment to be blamed for that..

The number of colleges have gone up by leaps and bounds but at the same the educationprovided are not able to match the skill set required by today's industries...you would never realise but the person in the driver's seat might be a graduate with a B.A. degree...

the dearth of jobs in India or the hunger to earn that extra bit might have given him the will power to overwork...after all its just not about survival allthe time.. it could be about going that extra mile to provide few extra bucks to his family..

Well coming back to my session... It was around 9 in the night when a colleague dropped me at Juhu chowk..the day was busy at office and i was tired todeath...i took a rickshaw to way back to my college...I was too lazy to say anything..was just dropping with my head down..half asleep.

Suddenly heard a voice.."why are you so serious?"..
the first reaction was whether I was still in the car or dreaming in the rickshaw!! those words were inEnglish.. but I realised they were coming from the rickshaw puller(RP)..
Me : " Office mein kaam jayda tha".
RP : "where are you working?"
Me : "working for a consultancy"
RP : "where are you from?"
Me : "mein delhi se hoon"..

By now I was thinking.. is this not happening the other way around.. shouldn't I be the one talking in English and he in Hindi.. After all I am an MBA now...but the rickshaw puller was talking in almost fluent English..

did a complete background check on me...Now it was my turn..On questioning about his education and work.. came to know that he was a B.Com in Eco and has also done courses in House keeping..
The rickshaw was owned by him.. in the morning he works for a software company as a data entry operator and at night pulls rickshaw for 4 hours.. in the morning the rickshaw is pulled by another guy who gives him some money to use the rickshaw..

The total money he makes is close to 30,000 a month... It was really surprising to see a guy slogging so much but then I realised the person is just going an extra mile to provide his family the happiness and things which may be his parents were not able to give him.. that is human nature.
We all tend to do that. We need our family to get every benefit in life that we were not able to.Continuing the chat I asked him about his job profile.
He told me fluently in English, "My boss is very happy with my performance as i have always delivered ontime.In his absence I am responsible for taking care of the business."

His will power and interest in the work has got him promotions and now his manager is getting him trained in communication skills and planning to move him to a call centre where he'll be getting better opportunities...

This was a bit surprising to me since the boss was taking so much of interest in the career growth ofthe person..Haven't seen many superiors like those but then wasn't that the reason I joined my firm.
By now I was convinced that the will power of an individual combined with his interest can get him to places where he wants to go.
Even though his education may not give him the opportunity but it is up to the individual to make or break his life. Its all about finding the right way out of those thousands available..

The blog is not structured properly. Guess there are too many thoughts in my mind which I am trying to put in here.

No Status Message...

after putting thoughts on what to write... i figured out why not to write on the most interesting lines which affects us daily... the "status messages"..the one thing which most of us depend on and check for the updates on each friend's message...they have became a prt of life..a fashion statement i can say...the more interesting your status message is..the more involved..knowledgable..the more happening you are..gone are the days where just "Available".. "Busy" were the buzz words..

coorect me if i am wrong..gtalk..the chat messenger which revolutionised the chatting arena was the first to introduce the customised status.. though yahoo had the similar feature but i guess if u today tell someone that you still use that old yahoo messsenger..the first reaction would be.."you still use that!!!thats history my friend...."

now coming back to status messages....

well there are so many interesting messages you can find people use..

from simple ones "New Number- XXXX"

to the riddles.."Empty landscape bleached by a tired sun...."

The messages could be to serve different purposes...

a. Broadcast a personal update... my blog address..new number..current location

b. Broadcast a public information.... this one varies from informing the world about the college fest to ask people to fill in a survey... a news telecast abt the college...
to vacancies available(saw it recently..for the benefit of ppl.. "Vacancy in Cyberstar - Singapore, Sales Dept. Interested candidates ping back at rahul.gugalya@gmail.com... ")

c. take out their frustration.. "assign away to glory"... "i hate distributors".."zindagi roz humari class leti hai"... the most interesting one i saw was "Egg jams"..it took hours for me to figure out that it was for "exams" n not a new recipe involving eggs and jam....

d.communicate a message to someone.. these messages are the most used ones.. one-liners directed to an individual..so that the message is passed across...these are ma favs n have used these at times...n believe me they work...."the tulip is with me.."..."donkey is back.." u can find loads of them... but apart from reaching the right person..the entire friend list of yours won't miss it and u would spend the day answering those quries...

e.A quote..thats what you will find on most of them..dunno is that to tell others that u too read and are aware of famous quotes...or is it to inspire the world with the message... here it varies from one liners...personal fav.."life is not always good, but i am..." to paras..."With insomnia, nothing is real. Everything is far away. Everything is a copy of a copy of a copy"... i wonder if they serve the purpose of motivating!!!! Individual's creativity is also involved with self created quotes here...

f.this breed of messages is more like a prank or a statement made by a friend... i had once suffered loads coz of this..the entire rejectz gang has put a message saying "AJ is getting married soon"... there were queries from people whom i haven't spoken more than twice in campus... it was a chaos..

well it was holiday today n i was getting bored of the process charts i have been busy with for last 10 days...so another attempt for a blog... lets see how it turns out to be..

let me know if i have missed on any other category of status messages or any interesting status message you have come across... ending with a favourite.... "No status mesage.."

The first one....

Its not important to highlight the fact that blogging has become the craze around the globe...
If you are not blogging then you aren't part of the most important phenomena of 'shrinking world'....

I was contemplating the idea of starting to blog over quite some time now..though its a late entry bu i guess it won''t be the last ones...so here i am..sitting on this busy Sunday night starting my blog...

its going to be a holiday tomorrow so thought of spending my time in starting something..The biggest confusion on my mind is.. what to do with this blog!!!!

I just can't figure out what to do with this blog...People blog to review movies... give gyan on areas of interest.. sharing there experiences.. improving their vocabulary skills (mine are not good though)..let people know that they are part of the growing community... share there ideas...take your frustration out(a fellow blogger told me)...the list can go on and on...I just need help in identifying what to do with mine....may be I would figure it out sooner or later....but to start with I hope to get few topics to write on....

Adieus