​ગુલાબની જેમ  સદા ખીલતા રહો,
ને દિલ ખોલી ને  રોજ હસતા રહો.

પામો તમે બધી ખુશી જીવનમાં,
હર પળ આંનદ થી માણતા રહો.

રોજ મળવું તો શક્ય નથી,
ક્યારેક આમ  યાદ કરતા રહો.

સમય જતા થતા ક્યાં વાર લાગે છે?
ક્યારેક ઘડી ને બે ઘડી રોકતા રહો.

લાગણીઓ થી પર હોય છે પ્રેમ,
જે છે પોતાના એને સદા પામતા રહો.

ક્ષિતિજ ને ક્યાં સીમા હોય છે?
મન મૂકી ને બધે વિસ્તરતા રહો.

હવે ક્યાં પહેલાની જેમ તારા વિચારોમાં  રહેવાય છે?
જો શોધવા નીકળું તો ખુદમાં જ ખોવાઈ જવાય છે.

કેવો રાચતો હતો કલાકો ના કલાક તારી યાદોમાં,
હવે તો જાત ને પણ ક્યાં સમય આપી શકાય છે?

અનેક લાગણીઓ ઉભરાતી’તી આ હૃદય સાગરમાં,
ઓટ તો નથી આવી, પણ ભરતીઓ સમાઇ જાય છે.

નહોતી આવડતી છતાં  તારા વિશે લખ્યા કરતો’તો,
ને આજે આવડે છે તો ક્યાં ગઝલમાં ગૂંથી શકાય છે?

મિત્રો સઘળા મજા લેતા મારી, રોજ વાતો કરીને તારી,
ભૂતકાળ ને માત્ર સંસ્મરણોમાં જ તાજો કરી શકાય છે.

ને ક્યારેક આમ વહેલી સવારે આવી જાય યાદ તારી,
તો હરેશ થી ક્યાં બધી લાગણીઓ ને છુપાવી શકાય છે?

One thing of mankind that does not change is, its ability to dream. Every person has its own dream and I am not an exception. Like everyone of us, I keep dreaming. In fact I dare to dream big. I have constantly seen many of my dreams gettig realized. It is wonderful feeling to see our own dreams come true.

Many of my dreams actually become  a part of my daily thought process. To dream is a process of transitioning your self from one state to another state of mind. The transition is  never been so easy. Many times I get lost in between two states of mind or the dream itself gets lost. When the desire to achieve dream is not strong enough to compell you to do something, you really don’t take any serious action to achieve it. More often, I dreamt but I did not have clear path to achieve the dream. My own thinking and limitations could not let me move forward and that generated lots of stress for me throught my life. I had to suffer or compromise as I was mentally not prepared or did not have proper plan and passion to go for it. My thought process has got matured over a period of time and now I am able to make an honest efforts to retrospect my ownself and take positive out of it and  learnig together. 

My view towards life has got changed. In fact I always kept short term dreams. I never had any big plan or sincere dreams beyond the age 35. The one reason for this could be I wanted to achieve more in my early age. The life is not as short to dream as I used to think. Actually, it is now only I have started feeling that there is much more left in my life. The life going forward is going to be my second inning in where I am going to sculpture  my own future. I don’t have any big dream set for now, however I could see many doors open for me. I just need to choose any of these door. I am going to make it happen. I feel very good at this very moment and I want to take many positives from this good feeling. 

Happy teachers’ day sir. We miss you and there is nothing in this world which can fill the blank space left by you in our heart !!

Ghanshyamsinh Zala, Urfe Zala Saheb.. This was the name which used to bring discipline among 242 primary school students before 20 years in a small and second last village of Ahmadabad district -Vinzuwada.

My young fellow villagers may not know much about him, however my class mates, my seniors and people of Vinzuwada, would never forget this name. He was beloved teacher of all of us. He was strict, however kind hearted person who loved his duty and lived the life for others. I am grateful that I got an opportunity to study under him for 7th standard. He inspired many students to do his best. He was innovative, creative and great motivator. He used to take lecturer of English for student of all classes when English was non mandatory subject in Primary education. He was the first one to teach ABCD  to many of my village people. He was very specific about health and exercise. I remember many students like me hated Saturday because that was the day where he used to make sure that every students from 5th, 6th and 7th standard participate in Excercise periods (PT sessions) and sweat.

He was a great sports man and some of the games that he made famous among us were Cricket, Langdi, KhoKho and Kabaddi.

He is one of the most respected teacher in my village. Everybody liked him, irrespective of cast and economy class. I remember his last day as a teacher in our village. There was a special farewell function arranged by our village people. Almost everyone in that function was crying. I could see tears and feeling of gratitude in everyone’s eye there.

There is one more teacher, Bhavanbhai Patel. These two teachers together brought many fundamental changes in our school. I would not be wrong if I say the years from 1990 to 1997 was the golden period of my village where this duo made their best efforts and as a result our school was the one of the best school of Viramgam Taluka. They planted many trees in schools and lead cleaning campaigns. They  taught us the lesson of  patriotism and made us to take pledge to take care of public properties. They were true Gurus and loved their duty beyond school hours.

I am yet to find the reason why the God likes good people so much and call them to heaven so early. GD Zala sir met an accident before few years when he was going for training organized for teachers by government. It was fatal accident and he died on the spot. That was one of the saddest day of my life.

He was the one who helped me to pay fee for MScIT. He never asked for that money. I felt blessed and special whenever I met him. He had a big heart and his eternal love and blessing will always remain with me.

Thank you sir for everything.

I sometime allow myself to be emotional and write down whatever thoughts come into my mind.  Here are few lines which I wrote five years back when I had a discussion with one of my friend about attachment. I happened to read it today and thought of posting it…

The attachment is  not  about caring for someone, it is all about how you feel about that person. Let that person be your friend, brother, sister, mom,dad , husband or wife.
Sometimes in life we care for the person, but we are not attached. For example, wife caring for  her mother-in-law or taking care about people who are strangers to us.
It is the feeling about the person that makes us attached to them. Caring can be the result of it.

As long as our feelings are good and we are aware about the responsibility of our feelings, I don’t think there is a need to worry.

The best thing that we could do as a human being for ourselves is  not to put someone or ourselves in problem because of something that we feel is right for us and which is completely unethical for others.

So, life is all about taking care of our feelings honestly and responsibly so that it would  not cause any kind of trouble for anyone involved.

Yes, and there comes a time in life when we are supposed to not to show our feelings despite of however strong the feeling is. We as a human being have to respect and obey the need of time.

The true feelings are not that we show to others that how we feel about them, It is always about how good our feelings are for them and what all positive changes it can bring into their life. It is always about well being of the person we care most. 🙂

We all have grown up reading or listening the husband-wife jokes and there would always be one joke where husband forgets  wife’s birth day and he gets special unwanted treatment in return . Those all jokes were good to hear and brought smile on the thousands of faces. I really enjoyed those jokes until it happened with me today on 24th March.

I have a habit of remembering important days of my life. I do remember the birth date of most of my friends and I don’t need to set reminder for it.  In fact, I wish my friends one day in advance to make sure that I am the first one to wish them. I never thought that I would ever forget to wish my wife on her birth day. But it did  happen. I forgot to wish my wife on 24th of March. I am in CA, USA for business work so I am 12:30 hours behind from India. So when I called her at 11:20 am PST on 24th morning it was 11:50 PM IST in India. We started conversion as usual. However I could feel the change in voice. After having routine discussion for 2-3 minutes, she simply told that today was her birth day and I got shocked. I asked first question to myself, how can I forget this ? I became speechless. I tried to convince my self that I am in USA so I might have forgotten or I would have surely remember before PST day end. But my mind was not convinced. 12:30 hours should not have made difference for me as I wish in advance to my friends so I would have wished her on 23rd night. I did not have much to say her except the one and only one best word in any relation “Sorry”. I wished her Happy Birth Day.  She accepted  it gracefully. <3

I was thinking that I would have celebrated it in grand way had I been in India. But, at very next moment I started doubting that I could have forgotten it, even if I were in India. You can’t blame a place to hide your mistake.

I looked around in office. Shared my sorrow with my friends here. All told that “forgetting wife’s birth day is an unforgivable crime. It reminded me of country Samoa where it is indeed a legal crime to forget wife’s birth day.

My software engineer’s brain came to rescue. It accepted the situation as a high priority production bug and started looking for a quick fix in production. I tried to send some gifts through online but all online cake shops were not taking order at night which can be delivered in next day morning. The true software engineers never quit and they keep finding solution until the bug is fixed.  I looked around in office and I found following beautiful arrangement for someone’s birth day in office. (I am at client place and I don’t know all people here except my project colleagues).

 

I WhatsUpped these beautiful birthday balloons  to my wife. She did like it and acknowledged it with love next day morning her time . The quick fix did work as usual.  🙂

Every production fixes require RCA and as I am doing an RCA (Root Cause Analysis) of issue at 2:00 am , I found the reasons if not excuses behind my failure to wish.  It had been 8 plus weeks that I have been working for a project without a full day break. Sometimes it requires to work 18-20 hours a day.  Some project priorities let you forget some personal priorities. I think this is the life that almost every software engineer have lived at least once in their lifetime. It is all about balancing out the equation  of  new feature enhancements and  number of regression bugs in on going project. Both don’t go together. One has to win, other has to wait to win.

My wife is well aware of the fact that she is married to a software engineer and she has accepted it as a part of life. I am thankful to her for all her support. I wish I could say her that the most import project for me is my family. I may not be able to spend much time on this project for sometime, however it is always of top priority. And a software engineer knows what it takes for a project to Go Live and he does it so often without a fail.

 

 

 

 

 

As I am waiting to onboard the flight to Los Angeles from Doha, Qatar, I had time to look back at my life and analyse my success and failures. 

One of the prominent reason for my failure was, I treated failure as a failure. I had a fear of failure for  every initiatives or important tasks I took on. This resulted a defensive approach in my actions. I wanted to be first in SSC exam. I started reading everything for a study subject because I had a fear of missing a single answer for a given chapter in exam. It lead me to the unplanned, overburden and unrealistic approach. There were many other situations in my computer study where a little more effort and fearless approach could have resulted in great success.  

I met with an accident in 2002 while riding a pillion in Bajaj scooter. I stopped driving two wheelers. This created a fear within me over a period of time and made me believe that driving is not easy. I developed  a fear of driving four wheelers and at some point of time in my life I felt that why these people are not making all cars as Auto Transmitting or gearless  which are very easy to drive. 

Everytime I wrote a piece of code, I had a fear that it might break in production. I became very defensive in my coding . The good part of it was, it made me quality developer. The downside was it made me a slow developer. It started taking time for me to come up with POC, learning new technologies and adopting it. 

I had fear of speaking in English, being a part of onsite client call, people laughing on me and many more. This restricted my inner ability. The fear of failure stopped me from taking big and bold steps. I could not utilize my all talent and most of my time went in unproductive thinking.  

Then I realized, I need to change my approach. I started treating my failure as  learning which helped me to overcome the frustation and negative feeling. 

Now I don’t care of failures. I just try my best. I know, whether I succeed or not, I am going  to learn always. I am fearless , I am a learner.

It is few hours before I meet to my daughter Aadhya. It’s been 10 days since I last met her. The fact is that she is waiting for me.  I am super excited to meet her. 🙂 <3 .

Gauri ( my wife ) who is currently at my brother-in-law’s home, says that Aadhya keeps remembering me and wants to meet her dad. I don’t know how best I would be able to explain to my 25 month old daughter that,  there comes a time in life where you are left with few choices and only thing you can do about is – Wait .  I know she misses me a lot as her mom’s time is now divided between her and Mivaan.

She does not understand yet that, Mivaan is part of family and it is important for her mom to take care of both.  I promised my wife three weeks of dedicated time with her  and Aadhya on the occasion of arrival of new baby in family. However, I could not do that. Breaking promises is not the part of my everyday life. My wife would not complain for it as she understands the nature of the job of software engineer. I am not sure, how much my daughter would understand. I lied her when I departed from her saying I would be back soon with toys and some snacks. She is so innocent that she believed that Papa would come back after sometime. But I knew it would not be possible for me to meet her soon. I had a feeling of uneasiness when I said bye to her. I remember those innocent and curious eyes, waving hands and sad smiley face saying Ta Ta.

She was crying in bed when I met her last time on 26th morning. When I called her by her name, she jumped from bed and stopped crying. I lifted her in my hands and cuddled her. Her smiling face, shining eyes and her sweet gestures brought tears of joy into my eyes. I was speechless . Those are the moments which bring  meaning and value to our life.

I have just came from office. I had to take sleep before I start driving for Baroda. I want to look fresh when I meet her. This is going to be my first official date. I want to make it memorable. It is an amazing feeling.

I have not spend good amount of time with little one. He is not as lucky as Aadhya was. I want to ensure him that he would get his share of time from me. I have yet not done any conversation with him except simple Hi, Hello. I want to talk to him, want to know more about him and let him know his dad closely.

I would not tell to my wife, but I miss her too. She takes care of me when I come late from office. She comes and wakes me up when I am late. There are so many small things that she takes care of. I don’t have to worry about getting ready to go to office. She would take care of everything. Most important thing, she takes care of my family. I don’t have to worry about my family members when she is here. It is because of her, I am able to focus on my work.

Today, I am going to meet all threes. The wait would be over in few hours.  So excited, so happy. !!

 

 

 

I started my journey back to India today morning. I am writing this article from Jet Blue flight number 488, at 35000 feet up above the sea level and during the journey from Los Angeles to Boston.

I had to come to USA for important assignment of one of our strategic client. It was not an easy decision for me to come to USA for 8 weeks as I had some personal priorities at home, my health was not in a great state. I was a bit tired before I started my journey to USA on the very early morning of 2nd of July. I wanted to spend some good amount of time with my daughter as she started walking and speaking few words.

We often have to balance the personal and professional priorities in our life as both are important.

I arrived to Irvine, CA on 2nd of July PST evening to USA. I was lucky to get one day leave on 3rd due to long week end in USA for Independence day celebration.

My work schedule in USA is different than what I have in India.
a. I used to get up between 6:30 am to 7:30 am in morning. Take a call with team for the status update and preparation for meeting with client at 9:00 am.
b. I used to reach to office between 8:20 am to 9:00 am. The entire day used to be very productive and efficient as being on client place I needed to be very focused on day to day tasks and deliverables.
c. I used to leave the office between 5:00 pm to 6:30 pm.
d. My second shift used to start around 9:00 pm PST as Indian team starts working from 9:30 am IST.
e. I used to go to bed between 1:00 am to 2:00 am.
d. I did not get good sleep during the week days. The software engineer is required to sleep for at least 7 hours a day for his brain to work efficiently.

My schedule in India is totally different than what it is in USA.
a. I get up at between 9:00 am to 11:00 am in Morning. I would always has some tasks to take care when I get up. So my day starts with fire fighting mode.
b. I try to reach office as early as possible and usually I reach office in between 12:00 pm to 2:00 pm.
c. My Team members greets me with smile when they sometime find me in office around 10:00 am. Some people do say that Hareshbhai , are you still in office and have not gone home yet ?
d. Reaching home after 12:00 am is a routine and not exception. If someday I reach home by 9:00 pm I get a surprise welcome from family members and I get good answer from my wife that I have not prepared dinner for you yet. 🙂
e. In short, if I have to summarize my work-life balance in one sentence then – “It is completely mess”.

I am a software engineer  by profession and I always try to put my learning from my profession to my life and vice-versa. While I was in USA I got some free time between 6:30 pm to 8:30 pm PST. I used this time very wisely during this visit. I reviewed the life that I have lived so far. I am 32 year old now and I believe I have lived 50-60 % of my life. I looked back, analyzed my life starting from 1997. The year 1997 is important as it was the time when I started thinking about my life, what I wanted to be in life and how I wanted to live the life. I have done pretty well from both personal as well as professional aspects during this span of 18 years. However, when I review it, I do see that there were few things and choices which I would have done in better way. There is always some big force in anyone’s life that drives their life and people are what they are because of that driving force. One of the driving force for me was to do the different and best which nobody has done before. I set some very high standards for myself. I could have been better to myself in terms of expectations from my own self. I feel like I was always under the pressure of doing my best in everything I do. I did not compare myself with others but with my self only. One of the side effect of comparing yourself with your own to be model requires you to put lots of your time in thinking which is not always productive. I laugh when I look at some of my expectations or wishes which I set for myself. Here is the list :
1. Being richer than Bill Gates so I can spend money on philanthropy and remove the poverty from the world.
2. Being a most talented software programmer who would invent something new which world has never seen and it would have very big positive impact on the way human being lives life.
3. Being a Prime Minister of India by 2027 and establishing good governance model and removing the corruption from country.
4. Helping all my friends and family members who are in need.
5. Making sure that each person on this earth does not have to struggle for basic needs of life such as Roti, Kapda Aur Makan ( Food, Cloths, House) and everyone has enough money to live decent if not great life. For example, father has money to look after their children’s need such as toys, books, education, marriage and health. Free quality medical facilities to all.
6. Establishing only one religion called “Humanity” in the entire world where people see god within another human being irrespective of their so called born-identity religion. Making a world a place where everybody has respect for everyone considering them one of the form of our almighty, omniscient, omnipresent god.

There are many other such wishes or expectation that I had. There is nothing wrong with that. Such expectations make you good human being.

As I am thinking and writing this now, I have spent 50% of important years of my life. I assume that I would live good life up to the age of 55-60 years if nothing unexpected happens. I have limited time and with my own personal responsibilities I would have to make the choice of what I can do and what I need to focus. Any of my wishes that I described above is going to take life time and even If I am extremely positive about what all I can do, I would end up creating only base and all these wishes would require continuous efforts event after I die.

So, the review comments I got from myself are :

1. I don’t need to worry about my wishes. It is good to have and I don’t have to let it die. Things would happen if not now then later. It does not require me to be there. It is good if I can do. It is better if someone else does. The end result will matter most than who has done it.
2. Live a good managed life. We have only one life. There is no point in dying of heart attack when you have 50 crore in your bank accounts and two children having age below 10 years and a beautiful wife living the life of widow in her early forty. You only need good amount of money which is required for your family’s daily and future needs.
3. Don’t focus more on being a super rich. One thing I have learnt in my life is, we spend more when we earn more. The status quo and all are just a state of mind. I used to had lunch in 20 rs and still had satisfaction of having eaten good food. I also had dinner and lunch in 5-7 star hotels of the world and even after paying 30-50 times more money on food, you are not guaranteed to get the satisfaction. The only satisfaction we get with spending more money on food is , the state of mind that says you, I had a costly lunch or dinner today. You feel good when your friends says WOW. But in reality those WOWs don’t matter much.
4. The race to have some standard life never ends. Even Bill Gates and Ambani also feel that they need better house than their current billion rupees palaces. Sadly, there is no end to it. You need to sleep for 7 hours a day in decent bed and you don’t know during your sleep that whether you are in billion dollar house or in one of the room of 2-3 BHK house. You need to spend good time with your kid. The fact is, place does not matter at all for your kid.
5. Save some money for your needs. Plan better for future of your family members and uncertainty of life.
6. Spend good time with family. Even if bill gates give me his all money, I can not buy the my daughter’s days which I have missed this year. Life is as simple as that. A time gone is gone. You can not buy same time again. You try to procure some time for future and miss the present time.
7. I looked at the life style of world’s most successful CEOs. They always have working vacation. They can spend few days in year with their family on some beautiful and costly ice-land however they are not lucky enough to spend good time with their family every day.
8. I need to spend some time with my dad. That is the wonderful gift I can give to him. He has always loved having long discussion with me and has dedicated his most precious years of his life for me. Making him feel better and taking his care would give me more satisfaction than a big thank you email from the any of CEO of fortune 500 companies. My mother like all mothers of the world, was having beautiful heart and she dedicated her entire life for family without any complain about the work she did. The saddest part of life was, she was diagnosed with cancer in a same week when I joined Microsoft and shed died month later. It is practically meaningless to be in world’s best company and you were not able to spend much time with your mom on her last days of life. I wanted her to bring to Hyderabad and have better peaceful life. But you can’t do much against god’s wish. I don’t want to have same regret for any other family member. My father is my real hero and I want take care of him. It is useless to be a CEO of world’s best company in life and you are still not able to spend time with your dad in a way he wants.

9. Stop the race against time. We have only one life and we have to bring it a meaning. There is no fun watching people from heaven remembering you for the innovation that you did. But it is painful when you see tears in your dad’s, brother’s, sisters’, friends, daughter’s or wife’s eye.

10. The great things comes with great cost. I need to do small but meaningful things. Need to make my life better and creating a ripple effect of it so other people can have better life.

The most important lesson so far in my life that I have learnt is from my last 60 days. I realized the value of life. I had an opportunity to review my own life. My mind is calm since last few days.. No stressful thoughts overtaking smile from my present moments. I think I have started learning how to live a life. It is a new journey. The part two of my life has just started. I have good respect for myself as I have always stood with me in all the decisions that I have taken. I have some strong feeling in corner of my heart that when I decide to do something by heart, I make it happen and that may be the reason why I love myself most.