Monday, August 27, 2007

Acutely Obtuse #1

Test if u r human!!

A HIP with some difference and innovativeness. Moreover having numerous applications and also with an inbuilt noble cause:
any guesses...............its MSR Asirra
Take the test urself and read more about it here

Now something which is'nt that obtuse
Microsoft which has always been opposed to Open source having a open source page and with a radicle shift in strategy (well business wise - a smart move).


Friday, June 22, 2007

Sound of NUMBERS

Sometimes it becomes interesting to co-relate things with one another, however how much differing they might be. It’s driven by the simplicity of things and each others uniqueness.

Well the same also applies to music and numbers. I may sound weird but its true and it can be done, rather has been done!!! Surprised

I’m not talking of phi – the Divine number and the relationships but it's more than that.

Its about representing the musical notes by Numbers.

Everything starting from clefs to notes-rests and their relationships can be represented by a number…mind you its not at random but has more thoughts behind it.

I have tried composing music for the golden number up to 149 significant digits

File properties: File size: 2kb, Format: midi, Composed using: MusiNum,
Instruments used: Grand Piano, Electric guitar & Acoustic guitar

Listen to Phi here

If u r wondering why am I writing on such stuff, actually it was an Inspiration of sorts!!


Monday, June 11, 2007

# The Valentine Code #

Some months back while browsing the net, I came across a program. A C code titled

"Twelve Days of Christmas" and this obfuscated-encrypted program really fascinated me. I had never seen such a cryptic code before ever; and I bet a look of its output will leave u spellbound. The programmer must have been a genius. The reverse engineering task is much more challenging and involves use of pretty printing and path profiling technology.

Inspired by the above program I have formulated a code quite similar to it, except here it “talks off” The Seven days to the Valentine’s Day. So let’s give a name to it something as……:

The Valentine Week”

Here’s the code:

//Click on the image for clarity!!
Seriously compile and run it using a TurboC/TurboC3 compiler and SURPRISE yourself.

Well I know there r a lot of HOT happenings nowadays…as Sherlyn’s record breaking feat or some city in Rajasthan recording 48.9 deg C but still try to spend some time on it.

# Here is a snapshot of the OUTPUT!!

Sunday, May 6, 2007

Obscur’o’Phobia!!

I'm extremely sorry for that hilarious title…..but it’s my desperate attempt to make this blog somewhat interesting :) .

Many things are coming to my mind as I write this …as:

What will I write?

Why am I writing this as whole?

How will I perform...Bla bla

Then suddenly something comes out of blue; and whispers in my ear all the answers of the questions whose origin is still UNKNOWN!!

‘It’s mixed feelings here as I leave the institute and classroom studies, out as a budding Engineer (which’s itself an irony; as some call “Farzi”). It seems just tomorrow when I took admission along the lines of my parent’s wish. Now as it’s all over I can say without any doubts the wholesome experience was tough but totally enjoyable.

I will miss u all Guys!!

All well that’s ends well….it was Ok up to that extent but then suddenly there is a feeling as now we were going to a totally different phase in our life... The Independent Phase, the challenges about to come. How will I hold the sail against a strong wind? Then I realize it’s the case with all of my peers and these four years have been nothing short of challenges. So is Life, with all its dark shades…need I explain more!!

The answer to the second question is rather a bit strange. The whole Blog thing creeped up suddenly during a controversy (the well known OBC Quota debate) and then it took me some days to understand what really it is. But that’s History now…Presently I just wanted to do something different and…

So is the outcome.

Buzzzzzzzzzz …certain disturbance and the third answer is not properly audible’

Therefore I leave it to you all to post in comments, so that I can get the answer of my last question. I am eagerly waiting for your replies.

If u feel this way, u may be having this “disease” see the symptoms here [:)]

Read more about Fear of unknown, in this nice essay by Arthur M. Young (1983) here

Friday, April 13, 2007

ICA vs NNMF...An Overview

Many a times u must have heared the term "BLIND" while describing a convolution problem or speech / beam synthesis. The above methods deal with this problem; for starters these two are statistical and mathematical techniques, having numerous applications...actually u will be just amazed to know some of these.

The above techniques r used to reveal hidden factors that underly sets of random variables, signals, data etc.

Lets make them more interesting by first citing the application of these:

APPLICATIONS:

  • Power system: We can suppress the effect of harmonics in the power system, by separating the harmonics from the sinusoidal current.
  • Telecommunication: We can suppress the interference in the spread spectrum communication. It’s also used for Array processing, i.e. in Blind beamforming applications. Also in airports when the radar receives signals from more than 1 planes this methods can be used to separate the interfering signals from the antenna "look ahead" signal space.
  • Speech processing: In cock-tail party problems, from the mixture of speech signals we can separate the speech signal of the individuals
  • Finance / Econometrics It is a tempting alternative to try this techniques on financial data. There are many situations in that application domain in which parallel time series are available, such as currency exchange rates or daily returns of stocks, that may have some common underlying factors
  • Bio-Medical science:The EEG (electroencephalogram) data consists of mixture of different components of brain activity. These can reveal interesting information on brain activity by giving access to its independent components. It can be also used for MEG data,recovering the faint child heart beat when he is still in mothers womb
  • Digital image processing: Like other applications, from the mixture of digital images the individual component can be separated. ICA and NNMF also finds application in feature extraction techniques.
ICA (Independent Component Analysis)

This is a method 2 separate two or more statistically independent ( covariance=0) signals from there mixtures. The mixtures should be linear(however its also possible to separate nonlinear mixtures), having no time lag and the mixing variables should be independent of the signals.
It uses the property "Nonguassianity for independence" While the measures of nongaussianity are Kurtosis, Negentropy (superior to previous one).

NNMF (Nonnegative Matrix Factorization)

As the name specifies this method is used to factorize a matrix into 2 factors(matrices) with the constraint that all three matrices must be non-negetive, i.e., all elements must be equal to or greater than zero.

The whole process involves images of the matrix and optimizing the residue to obtain the best result.


Comparision:

INDEPENDENT COMPONENT ANALYSIS



NON-NEGATIVE MATRIX FACTORIZATION

  • FASTER, especially with FastICA technique, which is achieved by imposing nonlinearities in the data

  • ACCURACY, not that accurate as that can be achieved by NNMF.


  • ASSUMPTIONS, one important assumption in ICA technique is that the signals should be statistically independent. Hence it is difficult to use this tech. for reverberation suppression.


  • SLOWER as compared to previous method. As the iteration steps involve numerous images and residues.

  • More accurate, and higher degrees of accuracy can be achieved

  • No such assumption is necessary. So this can be very beneficial when accuracy is the main criterion sacrificing speed of computation


However as most of the signals in real world are Gaussian and independent in nature (it may sound contrasting but its true) ICA technique cannot be neglected. So it all depends on the application we were using them and speed-accuracy trade-off.

Wednesday, April 11, 2007

Some Awareness...about Hindu Genocide

Foundation Against Continuing Terrorism

You can now view the comprehensive FACT exhibit (on the ongoing Kashmiri Hindu Genocide) online at:

http://www.factusa.org/totalexhibit/exhibition.asp

There are a total of 31 Boards that make up this exhibit.


For the press release on Houston, see: http://www.factusa. org/PressRelease 082205.pdf

In 2007, FACT is similarly coming up with ASRU (Tears), a comprehensive exhibit on the Hindus of Bangladesh . If you would like to help or need more details, please send an email to: contact@factusa. org

Tuesday, April 10, 2007

DEVELOPED INDIA By. APJ Abdul Kalam.,The President of India


The President of India “I have three visions for India.
In 3000 years of our history, people from all over the world have come and invaded us, captured our lands, conquered our minds. From Alexander onwards. The Greeks, the Turks, the Moguls, the Portuguese, the British, the French, the Dutch, all of them came and looted us, took over what was ours. Yet we have not done this to any other nation. We have not conquered anyone. We have not grabbed their land, their culture, their history and tried to enforce our way of life on them.
Why? Because we respect the freedom of others. That is why my first vision is that of FREEDOM. I believe that India got its first vision of this in 1857, when we started the war of independence. It is this freedom that we must protect and nurture and build on. If we are not free, no one will respect us.
My second vision for India is DEVELOPMENT. For fifty years we have been a developing nation. It is time we see ourselves as a developed nation. We are among top 5 nations of the world in terms of GDP. We have 10 percent growth rate in most areas. Our poverty levels are falling. Our achievements are being globally recognized today. Yet we lack the self-confidence to see ourselves as a developed nation, self- reliant and self-assured. Isn’t this incorrect?
I have a THIRD vision. India must stand up to the world. Because I believe that, unless India stands up to the world, no one will respect us. Only strength respects strength. We must be strong not only as a military power but also as an economic power. Both must go hand-in-hand. My good fortune was to have worked with three great minds. Dr. Vikram Sarabhai of the Dept. of space, Professor Satish Dhawan, who succeeded him and Dr.Brahm Prakash, father of nuclear material. I was lucky to have worked with all three of them closelyand consider this the great opportunity of my life.
I see four milestones in my career:
Twenty years I spent in ISRO. I was given the opportunity to be the project
director for India’s first satellite launch vehicle, SLV3. The one that launched Rohini. These years played a very important role in my life of Scientist.
After my ISRO years, I joined DRDO and got a chance to be the part of India’s
guided missile program. It was my second bliss when Agni met its mission requirements in 1994.
The Dept. of Atomic Energy and DRDO had this tremendous partnership in the recent nuclear tests, on May 11 and 13. This was the third bliss.
The joy of participating with my team in these nuclear tests and proving to the
world that India can make it, that we are no longer a developing nation but one of them. It made me feel very proud as an Indian. The fact that we have now developed for Agni a re-entry structure, for which we have developed this new material. A Very light material called carbon-carbon. One day an orthopedic surgeon from Nizam Institute of Medical Sciences visited my laboratory. He lifted the material and found it so light that he took me to his hospital and showed me his patients. There were these little girls and boys with heavy metallic calipers weighing over three Kg. each, dragging their feet around. He said to me: Please remove the pain of my patients. In three weeks, we made these Floor reaction Orthosis 300-gram Calipers and took them to the orthopedic center. The children didn’t believe their eyes. From dragging around a three kg. Load on their legs, they could now move around! Their parents had tears in their eyes. That was my fourth bliss!
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 to 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 land 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 TVs, 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 - OURS. 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 comeback 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 sala 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 to women, 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 neighbors, 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.

Thank you

Abdul Kalam

Another inspirational piece. Read and forward in place of jokes and junk mails!!



Monday, April 9, 2007

An inspiring Speech By Subroto Bagchi, Chief Operating Officer, MindTree Consulting


















"I was the last child of a small-time government servant, in a family of five brothers. My earliest memory of my father is as that of a District Employment Officer in Koraput, Orissa.


It was and remains as back of Beyond as you can imagine. There was no electricity; no primary school nearby and water did not flow out of a tap. As a result, I did not go to school until the age of eight; I was home-schooled.

My father used to get transferred every year. The family belongings fit into the back of a jeep - so the family moved from place to place and, without any trouble, my mother would set up an establishment and get us going. Raised by a widow who had come as a refugee from the then East Bengal, she was a matriculate when she married my Father.

My parents set the foundation of my life and the value system which makes me what I am today and largely defines what success means to me today.

As District Employment Officer, my father was given a jeep by the government. There was no garage in the Office, so the jeep was parked in our house. My father refused to use it to commute to the office. He told us that the jeep is an expensive resource given by the government - he reiterated to us that it was not 'his jeep' but the government's jeep. Insisting that he would use it only to tour the interiors, he would walk to his office on normal days. He also made sure that we never sat in the government jeep -we could sit in it only when it was stationary.

That was our early childhood lesson in governance - a lesson that corporate Managers learn the hard way, some never do.

The driver of the jeep was treated with respect due to any other member of my Father’s office. As small children, we were taught not to call him by his name. We had to use the suffix 'dada' whenever we were to refer to him in public or private. When I grew up to own a car and a driver by the name of Raju was appointed - I repeated the lesson to my two small daughters. They have, as a result, grown up to call Raju, 'Raju Uncle', very different from many of their friends who refer to their family drivers as ‘my driver’. When I hear that term from a school- or college-going person, I cringe.

To me, the lesson was significant - you treat small people with more respect than how you treat big people. It is more important to respect your subordinates than your superiors.

Our day used to start with the family huddling around my Mother's chulha – an earthen fire place she would build at each place of posting where she would cook for the family. There was no gas, nor electrical stoves. The morning routine started with tea. As the brew was served, Father would ask us to read aloud the editorial page of The Statesman's 'muffosil' edition - delivered one day late. We did not understand much of what we were reading.

But the ritual was meant for us to know that the world was larger than Koraput district and the English I speak today, despite having studied in an Oriya medium school, has to do with that routine. After reading the newspaper aloud, we were told to fold it neatly.

Father taught us a simple lesson. He used to say, "You should leave your newspaper and your toilet, the way you expect to find it".

That lesson was about showing consideration to others. Business begins and
ends with that simple precept.

Being small children, we were always enamoured with advertisements in the newspaper for transistor radios - we did not have one. We saw other people having radios in their homes and each time there was an advertisement of Philips, Murphy or Bush radios, we would ask Father when we could get one.

Each time, my Father would reply that we did not need one because he already had five radios - alluding to his five sons. We also did not have a house of our own and would occasionally ask Father as to when, like others, we would live in our own house. He would give a similar reply, "We do not need a house of our own. I already own five houses". His replies did not gladden our hearts in that instant.

Nonetheless, we learnt that it is important not to measure personal success and sense of well being through material possessions.

Government houses seldom came with fences. Mother and I collected twigs and built a small fence. After lunch, my Mother would never sleep. She would take her kitchen utensils and with those she and I would dig the rocky, white ant infested surrounding. We planted flowering bushes. The white ants destroyed them. My mother brought ash from her chulha and mixed it in the earth and we planted the seedlings all over again. This time, they bloomed.

At that time, my father’s transfer order came. A few neighbors told my mother why she was taking so much pain to beautify a government house, why she was planting seeds that would only benefit the next occupant. My mother replied that it did not matter to her that she would not see the flowers in full bloom.

She said, "I have to create a bloom in a desert and whenever I am given a new place, I must leave it more beautiful than what I had inherited".

That was my first lesson in success. It is not about what you create for yourself, it is what you leave behind that defines success.

My mother began developing a cataract in her eyes when I was very small. At that time, the eldest among my brothers got a teaching job at the University in Bhubaneswar and had to prepare for the civil services examination. So, it was decided that my Mother would move to cook for him and, as her appendage, I had to move too. For the first time in my life, I saw electricity in Homes and water coming out of a tap. It was around 1965 and the country was going to war with Pakistan. My mother was having problems reading and in any case, being Bengali, she did not know the Oriya script.

So, in addition to my daily chores, my job was to read her the local newspaper – end to end. That created in me a sense of connectedness with a larger world. I began taking interest in many different things. While reading out news about the war, I felt that I was fighting the war myself.

She and I discussed the daily news and built a bond with the larger universe.

In it, we became part of a larger reality. Till date, I measure my success in terms of that sense of larger connectedness.

Meanwhile, the war raged and India was fighting on both fronts. Lal Bahadur Shastri, the then Prime Minster, coined the term "Jai Jawan, Jai Kishan" and galvanized the nation in to patriotic fervor. Other than reading out the newspaper to my mother, I had no clue about how I could be part of the action. So, after reading her the newspaper, every day I would land up near the University’s water tank, which served the community. I would spend hours under it, imagining that there could be spies who would come to poison the water and I had to watch for them. I would daydream about catching one and how the next day, I would be featured in the newspaper. Unfortunately for me, the spies at war ignored the sleepy town of Bhubaneswar and I never got a chance to catch one in action. Yet, that act unlocked my imagination.

Imagination is everything. If we can imagine a future, we can create it, if we can create that future, others will live in it. That is the essence of success.

Over the next few years, my mother's eyesight dimmed but in me she created a larger vision, a vision with which I continue to see the world and, I sense, through my eyes, she was seeing too. As the next few years unfolded, her vision deteriorated and she was operated for cataract. I remember when she returned after her operation and she saw my face clearly for the first time, she was astonished. She said, "Oh my God, I did not know you were so fair". I remain mighty pleased with that adulation even till date.

Within weeks of getting her sight back, she developed a corneal ulcer and, overnight, became blind in both eyes. That was 1969. She died in 2002. In all those 32 years of living with blindness, she never complained about her fate even once. Curious to know what she saw with blind eyes, I asked her once if she sees darkness. She replied, "No, I do not see darkness. I only see light even with my eyes closed". Until she was eighty years of age, she did her morning yoga everyday, swept her own room and washed her own clothes.

To me, success is about the sense of independence; it is about not seeing the world but seeing the light.

Over the many intervening years, I grew up, studied, joined the industry and began to carve my life's own journey. I began my life as a clerk in a government office, went on to become a Management Trainee with the DCM group and eventually found my life's calling with the IT industry when fourth generation computers came to India in 1981. Life took me places – I worked with outstanding people, challenging assignments and traveled all over the, world.

In 1992, while I was posted in the US, I learnt that my father, living a retired life with my eldest brother, had suffered a third degree burn injury and was admitted in the Safderjung Hospital in Delhi. I flewback to attend to him - he remained for a few days in critical stage, bandaged from neck to toe. The Safderjung Hospital is a cockroach infested, dirty, inhuman place. The overworked, under-resourced sisters in the burn ward are both victims and perpetrators of dehumanized life at its worst.

One morning, while attending to my Father, I realized that the blood bottle was empty and fearing that air would go into his vein, I asked the tending nurse to change it. She bluntly told me to do it myself. In that horrible theater of death, I was in pain and frustration and anger. Finally when she relented and came, my Father opened his eyes and murmured to her, "Why have you not gone home yet?" Here was a man on his deathbed but more concerned about the overworked nurse than his own state. I was stunned at his stoic self.

There I learnt that there is no limit to how concerned you can be for another human being and what the limit of inclusion is you can create.

My father died the next day.

He was a man whose success was defined by his principles, his frugality, his universalism and his sense of inclusion. Above all, he taught me that success is your ability to rise above your discomfort, whatever may be your current state. You can, if you want, raise your consciousness above your immediate surroundings. Success is not about building material comforts - the transistor that he never could buy or the house that he never owned.

His success was about the legacy he left, the memetic continuity of his ideals that grew beyond the smallness of an ill-paid, unrecognized government servant's world.

My father was a fervent believer in the British Raj. He sincerely doubted the capability of the post-independence Indian political parties to govern the country. To him, the lowering of the Union Jack was a sad event. My Mother was the exact opposite. When Subhash Bose quit the Indian National Congress and came to Dacca, my mother, then a schoolgirl, garlanded him. She learnt to spin khadi and joined an underground movement that trained her in using daggers and swords. Consequently, our household saw diversity in the political outlook of the two. On major issues concerning the world, the Old Man and the Old Lady had differing opinions.

In them, we learnt the power of disagreements, of dialogue and the essence of living with diversity in thinking. Success is not about the ability to create a definitive dogmatic end state; it is about the unfolding of thought processes, of dialogue and continuum.

Two years back, at the age of eighty-two, Mother had a paralytic stroke and was lying in a government hospital in Bhubaneswar. I flew down from the US where I was serving my second stint, to see her. I spent two weeks with her in the hospital as she remained in a paralytic state. She was neither getting better nor moving on. Eventually I had to return to work. While leaving her behind, I kissed her face. In that paralytic state and a garbled voice, she said, "Why are you kissing me, go kiss the world." Her river was nearing its journey, at the confluence of life and death, this woman who came to India as a refugee, raised by a widowed Mother, no more educated than high school, married to an anonymous government servant whose last salary was Rupees Three Hundred, robbed of her eyesight by fate and crowned by adversity - was telling me to go and kiss the world!

Success to me is about Vision. It is the ability to rise above the immediacy of pain. It is about imagination. It is about sensitivity to small people. It is about building inclusion. It is about connectedness to a larger world existence. It is about personal tenacity. It is about giving back more to life than you take out of it. It is about creating extra-ordinary success with ordinary lives.

Thank you very much; I wish you good luck and Godspeed. Go, kiss the world."


Now i found this speech 2 be very inspirational
, how did u find it
Do comment!!