Seconds count but do you make them count?

365 Days in a year

24 Hours in a day

60 Minutes in an hour

60 Seconds in a minute

8760 hours in a year

5,25,600 minutes in a year and

3,153,6000 seconds in a year!

Life may churn out millions of seconds into your life but one thing it never releases into your life is “second chances.” We wish that life came fitted with that fancy “Undo” button… unfortunately it does not…we need to sweat our way to undo our follies of the past, some take hours, some take days, others take months and yet others do take years. Things are never undone in life with just few clicks or few quick swipes like our smart gadgets.

The trick is to make every second count!

Seconds… as long as you make them count have the power to make a difference in your own life and in others…regardless of whether you make an effort to make them count or not to count, they are going to count…

Heraclitus says “You cannot step into the same river twice” and so true it is, a second that has passed by has passed by, I will never be able to relive a second that has passed by…I would like to cherish every second of my life and I have started making significant changes to my life to achieve this end and how about you?

But a lot could be done in a second to make or break others and in the process do the same to ourselves.

It just takes a second to compliment someone…just try right away looking at the mirror or your smart phone cam saying, “you look beautiful”, “that was a good job”, “liked your coffee”, “a nice shirt”.

It just takes a second to utter a consoling word…

It just takes a second to hug your child that comes running to you with its arms flung open as enter your home after a tiring day or for some after a tiring week…

Making every second count, for some it means attracting more money each second, for others becoming more popular. There could be nothing wrong with these goals as long as no damage is caused to the others and as long as you know that your freedom ends where your nose ends, as long as you never barge into others’ space to usurp your “more money” and your “more popularity”.

We have heard several times, time is a great healer, time is a great master and one more thing that we need to know about time is that it is absolutely “unbiased”… 60 seconds is 60 seconds for everyone!

Every second counts. You would never be able to step back to relive a second that has just passed by!

Lately, the increasing awareness for me is that I make my seconds count when I spend more quality time with my family – my wife and my kid and when I am actually cherishing the moment that I am living and not being in 9 am and longing for 5 pm.

We find it hilarious Do you?

This video was taken in 2009 and I happened to bump onto it after five years, it used to be one of our favourite videos of Aadith. He knew how to amuse himself ... :)



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India Needs Innovation To Fight Illiteracy - Varanasi Boat School A Laudable Start

The Challenge Of Illiteracy And Its Impact On India

As Indians, we would like to project or see our country as a developed nation but in the World Map painfully though we are categorized under “developing nation.” For how long will be considered a developing nation? Probably until we weed out all the underlying causes and one among them being high rate of illiteracy. Statistics have that India has the largest illiterate adult population in the world. Around 37% of the India’s adult population does not know to read or write. If you want to compare how other nations are doing, you could try this link https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/fields/print_2103.html.

With such a high rate of illiteracy, we could barely lug ourselves to the finishing line in the rat race. The immediate temptation here is to switch to “blaming” mode and start blaming the government, politicians, the political systems in the country and the list is unending. We have tried this all along and it does not seem to take us anywhere. Probably, we should try to amuse ourselves with a different question and ask, “How do we deal with it?” which could lead us somewhere. This is not to mean that there aren’t any welfare programs from the government or that no one is working on this issue. We know for ourselves that hundreds of national as well as international NGOs are already at it traveling the paths that are less travelled even just as you are reading this, they are making progress but not effective enough to make a noticeable difference. We need more hands, fresh thinking and new strategies. Innovation could be the ‘lifeline’ that we are looking for, which could breathe a new lease of life into the nation when it comes to fighting illiteracy and thereby poverty.

Varanasi’s Unique Boat School That Keeps The Children Off The Streets Of Varanasi

Varanasi’s boat school is an intriguingly innovative idea and the best part is that it did not stop being an interesting idea. Already hundreds of children have benefited through this journey of doing right! The Varanasi boat school was started by the NGO Guria and the key person to lead this project was Ajeet Singh.

The Magical Transformation That Will Give The Children An Enhanced Learning Environment

While the school is still operational, it is certainly in need of a magical transformation to provide ideal learning environment to the children. The idea of Varanasi boat school is not to institutionalize this project but to increase the awareness among the locals on the importance of education. What this project has done is, if the kids won’t come to the school then bring the school to the kids! This school has prepared many children to get admission into regular schools.

Your Contribution And Support Can Give The Children Of The Ganga The Learning Environment That They Deserve

Varanasi boat school is certainly in need of support and with better funding, they could extend scholarship to the children, renovate the boat school and better equip it to make it an interesting place for the children. You too can do your part to Do Right! Visit http://www.doright.in for the whole story and to lend a helping hand.

We Welcome Roxy New Addition To Our Family

We Welcome ROXY, New Addition to Our Family

You are not going to belive if I tell you the story how ROXY came to us. Fara today went to collect her two-wheeler which she had given for servicing yesterday. She did not know how to take it when the service station told her that they found a squirrel's nest in the two-wheeler with two young ones in the hooter space!!!!!

One of the servicemen had taken it home and asked whether we would like to have them so that he can get it back. Fara had asked him to bring them both which she thought he did but when she came to the boutique and checked, only Roxy was there, probably he too couldn't resist this cute little creature and kept one for himself. Happy that we got Roxy, we let the other one go. Just as I am typing this Roxy is snuggling comfortably in my shirt pocket after having a good fill.

I am unable to upload the video here for some reason, check out Roxy's video in Facebook.

Top Three Question To Be Asked While Selecting Your Life Partner

Is Marriage A Tight Rope Walk For You?

What Are The Top Three Questions That You Should Ask While Selecting Your Life Partner?

Post your responses in the comments section.

When Things Go Wrong Should Love Go Too?

When Things Go Wrong Should Love Go Too?

 - By Antony Innocent

After a long intriguing week it is Sunday and thankfully so. And it is 7 O’ clock in the morning. For a man that talks so much about the importance of spending time with the family and about the importance of balancing work and fun, are you wondering what I am doing in front of the laptop, at 7 am on a Sunday morning? My son is still in bed, enjoying his Sunday morning sleep, my wife and I woke up at 6 am. Are you wondering again why 6 am on a Sunday morning? Today, it was a bit late actually; we wake up at 5 am daily including Sundays so that we get more out of the day, more out of our life and more of each other’s company. I will have another post soon on our ‘5 am coffees’ and on why we started doing this. Anyway, after that beautiful Shawarma my wife made last night, the heavy dinner made us indulge in another hour’s sleep this morning. We had our coffee, did a bit of gardening and she is getting the breakfast ready and I stole a few minutes in between to put my thoughts down… we have planned to go fishing this afternoon to a stream close to our house. Fishing is a newfound interest after our trip to Wayanad this summer (2013). We tried our hands in fishing two weeks ago with the angling rods that I made at home, enjoyed relatively good success, despite being fresh hands we caught around six Tilapias. We are going to try it again this afternoon.

Things were not as romantic as you are visualizing in your minds when we entered home last night after a long day. The blocked plumbing line, which has been giving us warning signals for the past two days, gave up totally and it was not anything that you will desire when you enter home after a long tiring day and that too on a Saturday evening.

Life is for sure flavoured with several “what more can go wrong” kinds of days as if someone up there decides what kind of toppings he would like to have for that day, coming to our counter and ordering,

“today I will have a flat tyre”,

“today I will have blocked plumbing line”

“today it will be missing car keys”

“today I am in mood for some good fun so I will have a flat tyre, blocked plumbing line and missing car keys”

But remember that these are just the toppings and not life itself!

I am sure that each one of you reading this has seen many such toppings that spice up your life!!! No one is spared of these special toppings and I can get instantly a thousand people to amen me on this.

Even for couples that are in good bonding, it is not the same when things go wrong. This is when things flare up; angry words are exchanged and of course thoughtlessly, may be without any intention to hurt the other person and without actually meaning what we say. The question is ‘should love go too when things go wrong’, I do not mean to say here that just because a few angry words are exchanged, love and affection disappear. I am more concerned about what happens after the incident, when we come back to ourselves. Like I said, the ‘thing that went wrong’ is just the topping and it is not life itself. So, after the event:

Do I add ‘one’ to the score of wrong things thinking that 'let it happen one more time, then that will be the end' kind of thoughts…

Or does my mind race back and forth the event distressed that I could have hurt the other person and try to make it up to that person at the first chance that I get?

Something that I found helpful is to jump into the scene without really investigating whose fault it is. Rather than nitpicking, rolling up the sleeves and getting the collar dirtied a bit  resolves the issue faster and it surely does improve the bonding . A blocked plumbing line which can lead to sleepless nights though not for all but at least for those ‘anxious minds’, is actually a minor glitch which can of course be worked out and the same applies to every other glitch that we come across. However, what is important is whether we are there supporting each other even through these, “(silly) what more can go wrong” kind of days.

As all of us have such days and that they have undermining effects on our relationship, it is an important area that we should focus on when we are trying to enrich our relationship. Let us not pretend that such things do not exist in our relationship because if you leave them unattended, it will explode at a time that you least expect them. 

Sorting Out The Differences In Love and Relationship

Sorting Out The Differences in Love & Relationship

- By Antony Innocent

Love and relationship do not demand people without differences... it simply asks us that we learn not just to live with these differences but that we grow to like these differences. 

In husband - wife relationship, there are four possible situations:

Husband and wife,

-         share no common interests.

-         have equal area of common interests.

-         have common interests but the overall area of common interests is less than the differences.

-         share common interests and area of the common interests is greater than the area differences.

If you want your relationship to be enriched, you need to be continually working on increasing the common grounds. Both parties (husband and wife), have to work towards increasing the common area that they have with the other person. It is possible for all of us to do this because we were not born with the set of interests that we hold today and you cannot be really sure whether you will hold the same interests the next year, the next month or tomorrow. Interests can change; there is nothing wrong in changing our areas of interest and that being the case, it is always possible for us to start liking the things the other person likes without having to give up our own likes in most situations. I do admit that there could be situations where there are diametrically opposing interests, which I do not evade, whereby to pursue one person’s interests or dreams a bit of sacrifice from the other person is required. Here, I am taking my cover under “most situations”. I will however, talk about the place of “little sacrifices” in husband – wife relationship in one of the forthcoming posts.

Nevertheless, problems popup if you ask, “Why should I work towards covering more grounds on the opposite side? Such a question only indicates that you do not have any idea of enhancing your relationship but some other agenda in mind. This simply means that you really do not want your relationship to ‘work’ and that will strip you of the ‘right to complain’ that your husband or your wife does not understand you or does not show any interest in what you do or in what you say. 

Another advantage of covering more ground is that you don’t have to give up your personal aspirations and dreams just because your husband does not like or because your wife does not support you, any longer. How can they not support or like it when it becomes their interest too? Yes, that is what happens when both of you keep extending your grounds on the opposite side. A time will come whereby there is no opposite side because both people’s interest merge; here both people share equal common interests. Yes, of course, it is easier said than done, but it is not impossible. What do you have to lose? You can only gain by this approach including your ‘love’. Why do I say this?

Let me explain, by starting to like the things that your husband or your wife likes if you think that you are making great sacrifices… YOU ARE NOT! You will only be making life even better for yourself because, you get to have more things that you like in your life. You will start doing more number of things that you like in life. Don’t you think it will pep up your life with additional dose of happiness when you have more things that you like in life? Give it a thought...