The purpose of life is to live a life of purpose…………………….

There are innumerous times in my life when I have wondered what the true purpose of my life is. What is it that I’m heading towards? What am I going to accomplish in my life? Where is life taking me? Little did I know that every human on earth has similar questions. Everybody is in search of his/her own answers for these questions. It struck me hard today when I heard this statement from a young social entrepreneur – “The purpose of life is to live a life of purpose”

Till today I was walking towards something, striving hard for something not knowing what that “something” is! Majority of the people I have met are like me. Is it that people don’t have dreams? No! It is that their dreams have been brutally killed by everyone around them when the dreams were just born. Many people do not dare to dream big today for the fear of what the society will think about them or that it will not come true tomorrow. I was one of them……….. But TODAY, I feel like I’m born again because my dreams have taken life again! And this time, nobody can dare kill it. “The question is not who is going let me, the question is who is going to stop me?!”

It seemed like a normal day when I got up this morning thinking that I’ll be going to college and finish few meetings for the day as usual. But what it turned out to be, now it seems like I’ve lived thousands of lives in this one day! This might seem like an exaggeration, but the feeling can only be felt, not explained. I did not imagine that I would be going to one of the posh areas of Bangalore with an elite club of social entrepreneurs to celebrate a new level achieved by my cousin working with us. We just enter a Van Heusen showroom and The Personality Mr. Sujit Lalwani (We’re blessed to be working with him! Thank God) just selects a shirt and gifts it to my cousin! This was the first time I saw a man just picking what he likes without checking its price tag and gifting it to someone in his team! Touched by the lifestyle.

We then get into the black Hyundai Verna self-earned by this 23 yr old individual and head towards airport road. To my ultimate surprise of my life, WOW, we enter THE LEELA PALACE! Every inch of that place speaks of richness and class. Every single pillar there says what the status of the place is. And we, the future big shots sit there and visualize our dreams. I was taught in school and in my childhood “Do not build castles in the air”, “Stop day dreaming”, “Don’t count your chickens before they hatch” etc., etc. In one shot, all these words became meaningless today! We went on and on and on discussing about our dreams and visions. If just the ‘feeling’ of the dream was so good today, I cannot imagine how it would feel to accomplish that dream. I just learnt “FEEL”, realize, visualize, express, believe, share and respect your dreams and CONTINUOUSLY work towards them, no power in this universe can stop you from achieving them! It does not matter where you start, but it matters where you reach.

I learnt how to give life to every single dream of mine and my parents and every single person around me and how to put efforts to turn them to reality. This is not even the beginning! “One life! Live it fully”

Please add life to this post by leaving comments if this piece of article has given atleast a molecule of oxygen to your dreams :)

Learnt Forever, I Shall Forget Never…!!

God gives us so many opportunities to learn something new every day. I’m glad to have got a very good opportunity in the form of internship at Microsoft, that too away from Bangalore, to learn lots and lots. Some lessons very deep, some I already knew but never applied, some totally new and some out of the blue! I’m listing down all that I could come up with in the past one and a half month.

-> Just go out of your way to explore!

This was the first time I was staying away from family and home for such a long period of time. Initially was really excited. I clearly refused my parents from coming along with me till Hyderabad. Everything went so smooth for two weeks in this new place. Soon after that I started facing many challenges regarding health, food, climate, self-confidence, loneliness and so on… Didn’t know I was so resistant to change. Things went worse, I went crazy! All I wanted to do was to go back home!! But now I thank God for not letting that happen. Slowly some things changed… Situations were almost the same as before. But it was my mindset, my attitude, my perception that changed. I became stronger and much more confident of facing anything that came my way. Started loving myself more! And now, I’m no more hesitant of exploring any other place… Things do fall into place after a while, believe it or not.

-> Make mistakes when you can still afford to!

The best part was that, this was still my internship, couldn’t get fired or something in any way! So could make as many mistakes as I wished because failures are the best teachers. It’s never too late to make mistakes and learn, but of course, the cost you need to pay for it increases with time. So be very quick! I’ve got this all new confidence in me to jump into the corporate pool and learn to swim with the experts because I anyway have a life jacket. This is not just the case with me. Each and every person gets such a chance in life. All you need to do is recognize it!

-> Strengthen your strengths even more and weaken your weaknesses!

I learnt this, the technical way during my project, but can be applied everywhere in life. I knew my programming skills and concepts were very good but wasn’t strong in few operating system concepts. Coincidentally the project required a lot of programming to do which helped me go deeper into C++ and easily learnt new languages like C#, XML and ASP.net. And there came a day when I had to implement few things which I was weak at. Ended up learning them also, and after all, wasn’t as tough as I’d assumed. So it is indeed easy to strengthen your strengths and reduce your weaknesses once you’ve recognized them.

-> Sharpen your axe more often than you think is necessary!

It so happened that we had only one programming language in the syllabus of 3^rd year, that also with very less number of programs. (Needless to mention the reason for it being out beautiful education system!) Hence I didn’t get a chance to put my skills into practice. During my project it took a very long time for me get back into the groove. I learnt that I need to keep practicing something I’m good at, something that’s my passion.

There were many more small realizations and lessons which are etched in my brain now and forever. This duration of just one a half month has brought a lot of changes in me. This will be a memorable time for me in my future for sure.

This post cannot end without taking the names of people who were in one or the other way responsible for the circumstances, realizations and for me writing this article. I thank my parents the most, then my mentor Adarshji, my best friend Sandhya, my sweet little cousin Meghashree and a sister-like room-mate Madhuri akka.

Do pour in your valuable comments :)