First Time

I have lately realized that for anything in life, the first experience cannot be matched by any other experience. One of the bands I love has a song on this context. SADE – Never As Good As First Time. Recently when my thoughts were lingering on this topic this song was playing and I was able to relate to the lyrics.
After that I have been pondering over this for sometime now, and I am able to recollect a few first times etched into my memory. They are fresh on my mind and I feel they happened just sometime back, some of the memorable first times are
My first personal failure
My first college fight
My first win in a sport
My first crush
My first date
My first Kiss
My first attempt at expressing my love
My first Day at work
My first Pay check
I can make a huge list of other smaller first times like being hit, sky diving, skiing, roller coasters etc etc.
Now coming to the basic question of why is that the first experiences over-shadows all the remaining instance of the same activity. Why is that we give so much importance to something when we are doing/performing for the first time? Why do first impressions contribute so much to our perception of things?
There are a lot of firsts in life. The reason that we remember these ‘firsts’ is because they are important to us. After the first time, we have crossed over into new territory. The second time won’t be like the first time it is no more the land of unknowns!
First Time

Blue Jeans

This is an ode to my Jeans. I have reached a point where I will be forced to stop wearing my Jeans whenever I feel like it. I will be pressurized to take up formal clothing by my career needs. But Fri-Sun will always be Jeans days;>)
I love myself when I am in my blue jeans. I feel like the rebel I am, free spirited not bounded to anything. It does not matter how, where, when I use it. I can sit on anything anywhere, everywhere. I don’t feel constrained like in a formal pant. Jeans is not just a pant it is an entire character which one wears. For me it’s like the Mask (Jim Carey – MASK) the only difference, it’s on my legs! It’s like that shield on those super humans – Superman / He-Man etc.
Its makes me feel I am still ME – the non-conformist of the society. The only color I like in Jeans is the original Blue from Levi’s, to a certain extent even the stone black is good. All the remaining colors do not stand for Jeans; they actually dilute the essence of Jeans according to me.
I cannot believe that I was not wearing Jeans till I joined college. I was in my Engineering days when I started wearing one. The first one I bought was obviously an original Blue Jeans. I can still remember the day when I went shopping for it with my friend (late) Prakash. It was not that I was not audacious; it was just that after I got my first Jeans I started to flaunt I am an individualist.
For the uninformed lot, Jeans has its origin in India. The earliest known version of Jeans is the Dungaree – a thick cotton cloth from the 16th Century India. The current version of Jeans is basically from France and not from USA like most of us think.
Jeans

Security

I would love to get the secure feeling of walking alone with my dog back when I was a child, or sleeping at night after listening to one of my Mom’s mix ‘n match stories. These days I cherish the feeling of playing some good music on and driving with my gal as the navigator. It is more or less like my life; I am driving with directions and help from my gal.
Security has always been a loaded word. Webster’s defines it as “freedom from fear, anxiety, danger, and doubt.” It is within Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs, and in my case it is achieved in a different order. So no matter how you slice it, security comes down to fundamental sense of well-being or safety.
Few days back my well wishers gave the same reason “Security” to dissuade me from resigning from the company I have been with for past 5+ years. The point I am not able to understand is how working in a big company gives security? Security is not the point of concern for me as of now. I need to focus on the aspects of self actualization. I want to have the peak experiences in my career like in everything I do. To do this I need to expose myself to newer opportunities-challenges. I hope the decision of shifting companies will open doors to the path I want to take rather than being just a window to the path!
Security

Superiority

When do feelings of superiority arise to make us happy? When we are conscious of differences between what we believe is "ours" and what we believe is "theirs". But seriously I feel instead of the Nazis harboring the feeling of being superior it is we Indians who must have felt that. We are far more superior as a race intellectually and physically than any of our counterparts in the world. I clearly agree we are not the best when each point is taken individually but we are the best blend – concoctions that are available in nature. The recipe for success!
Now why am I talking of this. Few days back I was trying to correlate two things, worldwide lust to Hollywood actress Angelina Joile and Indian population attraction to the dusky actress Bipasha Basu. The only similarity both have is both have brown skin and not the fair complexion of the other popular kittens in the world.
The word Aryan which is used to describe the superior race is again an Indian word by origin. Its history starts with the ancient Indo-Iranians, Indo-European people who inhabited parts of what are now Iran, Afghanistan, and India. Their tribal self-designation was a word reconstructed as *arya– or *ārya–. It’s a Sanskrit derivation (For that matter it’s a well know fact that Sanskrit is the most superior language) *ārya which refers to the upper crust of ancient Indian society.
Now let me give my cent to the debate on superiority :-
Physically superiority: Indians have all the traits of the most superior physical traits. It’s a well know fact that it is always the superior trait – gene that gets percolated from our ancestors. We have black eyes, black hair, darker skin (used to be Black but that has evolved into brown over the ages – I am talking more about the Dravidian Indian).
Intellectual superiority: Indians have proved beyond doubt that we have the most brilliant people in all walks of life. I am not rejecting the fact that there are intellectually brighter populations like the Israeli, Russian. But given the fact that Indian population is huge it can eat up on any competition. The recent developments of Indians taking over the silicon valley, getting the best research jobs all over the world, taking over crucial and big companies (Mittal-Arcelor) is just a pre-cursor to things if we start digging on this topic.
It’s the basic Darwin theory -survival of the fittest. The inevitable outcome would be Indians or at least a variant becoming the largest population in the world (with the amount of Indians migrating all over the world). Knowing the great appetite of Indians to procreate it is not a very far sighted goal.
Aryan