Steve Jobs speech

This is the "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish" address delivered by Steve Jobs in 2005 at Stanford University:

I am honoured to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first six months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned Coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example: Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards 10 years later.

Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz [Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak] and I started Apple in my parents' garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4,000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired.

How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our board of directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating. I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down — that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologise for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the Valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the world's first computer-animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure — these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumour on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you would have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumour. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.

This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope it's the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept: No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.

Diabetes - A real threat in INDIA

New figures for diabetes prevalence in India indicate that the epidemic is progressing rapidly across the nation, reaching a total of 62.4 million persons with diabetes in 2011.

Phase one results of the Indian Council of Medical Research – India Diabetes (ICMR-INDIAB) Study have provided data from three States and one Union Territory, representing nearly 18.1 per cent of the nation's population.

When extrapolated from these four units, the conclusion is 62.4 million people live with diabetes in India, and 77.2 million people are on the threshold, with pre-diabetes.

These results have been published in an article authored by R.M. Anjana et al, published in the current issue of Diabetologia.

This diabetes survey is the national level survey that has been taken nearly after 40 years since it was taken in 1970.

The first phase of the ICMR-INDIAB study covered Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra, Jharkhand and Chandigarh, with a sample size of 16,000 persons.

“The results are amazing and provide evidence for increase in prevalence of diabetes not only in urban areas but also in rural areas. The study also provides authentic new data on the total number of people with diabetes in India,” Dr. Mohan added.

The study began in late 2008 and was completed by 2010. It factored in anthropometric parameters like body weight, BMI (body mass index), height and waist circumference, and also tested fasting blood sugar, followed by blood sugar after a glucose load (known diabetics exempted), and cholesterol for all participants.

Questions were also asked about food habits, physical activity, and smoking, alcohol usage, among others.

The prevalence of diabetes in Tamil Nadu was 10.4 per cent, in Maharashtra it was 8.4 per cent, in Jharkhand, 5.3 per cent, and in terms of percentage, highest in Chandigarh at 13.6.

The prevalence of pre-diabetes (impaired fasting glucose and/or impaired glucose tolerance) was 8.3 per cent, 12.8 per cent, 8.1 per cent, and 14.6 per cent, respectively.

Projections made in the past about the total number of diabetics in the country for the future may need to be revised. For instance, in May 2004, in Diabetes Care, volume 27, Sarah Wild et al proposed that India would have 79.4 million people with diabetes in 2030.

Nineteen years ahead of that deadline, India has 62.4 million, and a further 77.2 million (potential diabetics) in the pre-diabetes stage.

According to the 2010 statistics only 50 million people were with diabetes and this count has gone 12 million in  excess in just 2 years. The number people having diabetes is increasing exponentially.

source : Hindu

The spirit of Cricket - Harsha

Sometimes, quite out of the blue, sport will throw up a tender moment, when hostility ceases and an opponent is acknowledged. Sadly these are rare, for more often you will see bowlers asking for a wicket they know they haven't earned, footballers asking for a throw-in for a ball they have kicked out, and players abusing each other in the mistaken belief that it makes them look macho.

But in Cardiff last week something else happened. Soon after the need for quick runs, and a clever ball from Graeme Swann, had ended his last innings in one-day cricket, Rahul Dravid found his hand vigorously shaken by each of the England players. Swann cut short a celebration to jog across to the man whose wicket he had just taken, fielders trooped in from the boundary rope, and Jonathan Trott provided a moment that will stay with me for a very long time.

As Dravid walked towards the pavilion, Trott wandered towards him and then took his cap off before shaking hands. With that simple gesture Trott elevated sport to another plane. He showed respect to an adversary on a field of play.

It is the best way to play sport. You try to get someone out, you try to hit him for a boundary, but you still find time to acknowledge greatness. In a series that had many memorable moments - more provided by the English than the Indians, it must be said - Trott produced another one.

A couple of years ago, in Johannesburg, when, too, he had been recalled to limited-overs cricket, Dravid spoke to me about why he plays cricket and how he measures success. Beyond everything else, he said, beyond numbers and wins, you see if you have respect in your dressing room. And in that of your opponent. Dravid has always had both, and in Cardiff it was there for us to see. We became spectators to a bond that exists even between opponents. If it was a movie, there would have been a soundtrack playing.

And then in Hyderabad I saw another. It didn't quite tug at the heart like the Dravid moment did, but it showed why there is another way to play the sport. Batting for the Kolkata Knight Riders, Jacques Kallis lofted a ball to midwicket, where the fielder stumbled in an attempt to take the catch. You couldn't tell straightaway if the catch had been taken, but even as the umpire asked for a replay, Kallis asked the fielder if the catch was clean, and when he heard "Yes", he walked off. It wasn't the first time he had trusted an opponent with his wicket, and as the replay came up I found myself wishing the catch was indeed clean. For there is no sadder sight than to see trust asked for and the request spurned.

In an ideal world everyone will play the game like Kallis did, life will become easier for the umpires, and youngsters making their way into sport will realise that using abuse and cheating is a rather lowly form of existence. But the desire to win tests not only your skill but your approach, and I greatly fear that Kallis will walk alone. The romantics will suggest a way out, will call for making an example of people who claim a catch when they haven't held it, but romantics tend to write books. Honesty and sport have long been estranged.

But commitment and success haven't. Australia showed it in Sri Lanka, where they battled hard and overcame the conditions and their opponents. A team seemingly in decline returned to their DNA and, though without the match-winners of yore, played tough, combative cricket.

And Somerset showed it in the early rounds of the Champions League. Like with Australia, they were defined by who they didn't have rather than who they did, but they showed what spirit and resilience can achieve. A third-choice wicketkeeper was Man of the Match, a little-known legspinner turned in a fine spell, and a batsman who wasn't threatening higher honours played a match-winning innings.

It doesn't always happen but it was a week that showcased the nice side of cricket.

Good article regarding Memories of Coimbatore

He was soft-spoken, lean and dressed in a veshti. Big or small, he would respond to all kinds of questions raised by students. When I was a kid, it was G.D. Naidu who planted the seed of engineering in me. I grew up attending the many Science exhibitions he held. His exhibitions always had interesting objects. There was a coffee-vending machine in one of them. All you had to do was insert a coin into the machine and you would get a cup of coffee! I was fascinated by it and asked him how it worked. He explained how levers operated inside to mix the decoction, sugar, milk and water. A shaving blade invented by him, an automatic ticket dispenser, illustrations on the harmful effects of cigarette smoke…G.D. Naidu's exhibitions were visited by students all over the city.

We lived in R.S. Puram. The area was full of karuvelam trees. It was during World War II. Refugees from Greece were sheltered in hostels in the Forest College campus. Everyday, they would walk all the way to the South end of D.B. Road to buy fruit and vegetables — there were no shops in between. Shopkeepers would take the exact amount and return the rest if the Greeks unintentionally gave them excess cash. People were honest and full of integrity.

Sometimes, we played football with the Greeks. We also taught them gilli danda, popular with boys back then. Football matches were played at Irwin Stadium in Coronation Park (now VOC Park). Since most of us travelled by foot, we would go home really late if there was a match happening in the evening. It was Diwan Bahadur C.S. Rathna Sabapathy Mudaliyar, the municipality chairman, who installed street-lamps in D.B. Road and brought drinking water from Siruvani to Coimbatore. Diwan Bahadur Road (D.B. Road) and Rathna Sabapathy Puram (R.S. Puram) were named after him.

We would watch movies in Swamy Hall on Variety Hall Road. A tharai ticket there cost one anna. For two annas, you got to sit on a bench. The chair ticket was four annas. There used to be a restaurant on a lane off Avanashi Road with a board saying ‘Man paandathil seidha divyamaana saappadu', for two annas.

The lakes in the city were pristine. People would bathe in their waters. When I was a little boy, I remember watching the shooting of the film ‘Sivakavi' on Valankulam Road. M.K. Thyagaraja Bhagavathar who played the hero had to push a man into the lake for the scene!

Those days, college students and teachers were more like friends. During my tenure as the principal of PSG College of Technology, I watched movies and played basketball with students in the evenings. Once, teachers and students manually installed a basketball pole in college. We also designed and constructed an automatic score board.

Deepavali was celebrated in the college grounds, crackers and all. But, when in class, we were very strict.

We had once invited Kavignar Kannadasan for a function of the Thamizh Mandram in college. Though he came late, he spoke for an hour to an audience of students delirious with excitement. In 1975, we installed the first computer centre in our college. The TDC 312, a huge machine, processed results for Madras University. Why, it even did the payroll for many companies, including LIC!

As a principal, I often did the rounds of college. On one such evening, I noticed a group of students playing cards in the hostel. “Look, it's the princi da!” whispered one of them who had seen me coming. By the time another student replied, “It can't be him da, he's probably asleep by now,” I was right behind them!

In 1954, I came across a young clerk in our college's canteen. A.V. Varadharajan was a bright kid with good marks in school. G.R.Damodaran offered him a seat in the college. We didn't know back then that one day, he would grow up to be an industrialist of repute. That he would be instrumental in the construction of the CODISSIA Trade Fair Complex in the city.

Source : Hindu

Indian Ecomony to face tough task this time - article

  India weathered the 2008 crisis well, but there are fears that this time round the country is not even ready for a crisis of much lesser magnitude, let alone a full-blown debt default in Europe or a possible US recession.Weak finances, persistently high inflation and policy inertia have considerably weakened the government's position today.


  "This time our basics are weak. A domestic meltdown is expected and our resilience won't be as much as last time". Growth estimates are down to 7.2% in the current year, not far from 6.8% the country managed in crisis-ridden 2008-09, and every other indicator is pointing downwards.

   Contrast that with 9.3% growth on the eve of the crisis when India could do no wrong. "This time we may be on weaker foundations," chief economic advisor Kaushik Basu told Washington Post last week. Just before the crisis in 2008, the repo rate, the key rate in the economy, was 9%, which was cut quickly to stimulate demand and investments.


   This time round the best the Reserve Bank can do is to halt the rate increases because despite high borrowing costs consumption demand remains strong and any policy reversal risks inflation going out of hand.


   For the same reason, the government is in no position to risk a fiscal stimulus as it will stoke demand and raise inflation. The year 2007-08 began with a fiscal deficit of less than 3% of GDP. This strong fiscal position had allowed the government to announce a Rs 75,000-crore farm debt waiver and meet the generous Sixth Pay Commission award.


   Both of these, together with rapidly scaling up rural jobs scheme, held up demand when the financial crisis unraveled.

   Subsequently, the government was also able to cut taxes and announce other measures to stimulate demand. Although, in the current year, the fiscal deficit is budgeted at 4.7% of GDP, most experts expect the government to breach it by a good margin, with some estimates going as high as 5.5%. In such a situation, a fiscal stimulus is almost ruled out.


   "The ability to respond (globally) is very limited this time around," said Samiran Chakraborty, chief economist, Standard Chartered. "The fiscal space in India is also comparatively more constrained." Although the foreign exchange reserves are in excess of $300 billion, the balance of payments situation is weaker and the country could find it difficult to weather an export slump similar to the one in 2008, when growth turned negative for 13 straight months.


   The current account deficit is likely at over 2.7% of GDP, much higher than 1.3% in 2007-08, and foreign direct investments are not as forthcoming. The C Rangarajan-headed Prime Minister's Economic Advisory Council expects only $14 billion in inflows in the current year. 


  Even without the crisis, things were not looking good for Indian economy. It has got much worse, though difficult to say how much. "The overall impact of the global uncertainty is difficult to predict as of now," said Pronab Sen, principal advisor to the Planning Commission.

Source : Etimes