Monday 30 June 2008

Monday morning Inspiration # 36

A couple of months ago, I had a unique experience of going to the Bombay circus. I was out there to buy tickets for the evening show. There was a really long queue so I opted to have a walk around and see the animals. The only advice I was given by the keepers were not to feed or disturb the animals. Walking along side the tents I was excitedly looking at the animals in their cages - camel, horse, dog, lion and a variety of parrots. In the last tent I passed there were three elephants and a calf.

I was surprised to see each of them tied with a rope(that could easily be broken by these giants) - with one end to a front leg and the other end tied to a stake in the ground. There were no cages , no chains for the mighty beasts. It seemed peculiar that the parrots commanded a cage, but the elephants didn't; perhaps there was a pecking order among animals!

Noticing an animal trainer, I approached him and asked why the elephants just stood there and made no attempt to escape? "Well" he said, "When they are very young and much smaller we use the same kind of rope to tie them. By the time the elephants grow to full size, they are conditioned to believe the ropes are unbreakable. They think that the rope can still hold them, so they have given up trying to break free"

The explanation satisfied my curiosity but I was totally astonished. The ropes were really no more than obstacle relics. A firm pull and the ropes would snap, but the elephants don't seem to care. It would seem that the animals had no desire to test their boundaries. They were prisoners of self belief.

I couldn't help but draw parllels between elephants and humans. Such self-limiting beliefs prevent us from fully realising our potential. How many of us go through life holding a belief that we cannot do something, jus' because we failed at it once earlier?

I for that matter have chose to live up to mu full potential. I will conciously fnd such self- limiting beliefs and challenge them . Better a broken rope than a withered spirit.

P.S. This MMI is modified from a story I came across in my favourite magazine "Frozen Thoughts"
Have a great week ahead!
To read other Monday morning Inspirations click here.

Saturday 28 June 2008

My travelogue

I have recently started blogging about my travel experiences at Shalini's travelogue, my travel blog. I have started with the Singapore series , my experiences in the lion city when I visited earlier this year. Do visit my travelblog and let me know your views. Hope you like it :)

Have a great weekend!

Baby blogger

Yummy Baby is a blog written by a mommy blogger who narrates incidents from her lil munchkins point of view. The Baby girl is almost a year old and mommy takes pride in telling all the things the little baby girl has been upto. Kids are always fun to be around with and its more fun to get to know how they understand the world through their innocence. This blog has been around in the blogsville for a almost one year and is one among the regularly updated blogs. So each time you check it up , the little girl will always have something to say, to keep you amused with her antics. Visit the baby's blog and bless her :)

Monday 23 June 2008

Monday morning Inspiration # 35

A cab driver taught me a million dollar lesson in customer satisfaction and expectation. Motivational speakers charge thousands of dollars to impart his kind of training to corporate executives and staff. It cost me a $12 taxi ride. I had flown into Dallas for the sole purpose of calling on a client. Time was of the essence and my plan included a quick turnaround trip from and back to the airport. A spotless cab pulled up.
The driver rushed to open the passenger door for me and made sure I was comfortably seated before he closed the door. As he got in the driver's seat, he mentioned that the neatly folded Wall Street Journal next to me for my use. He then showed me several tapes and asked me what type of music I would enjoy.
Well! I looked around for a "Candid Camera!" Wouldn't you? I could not believe the service I was receiving! I took the opportunity to say, "Obviously you take great pride in your work. You must have a story to tell." "You bet," he replied, "I used to be in Corporate America. But I got tired of thinking my best would never be good enough. I decided to find my niche in life where I could feel proud of being the best I could be.
I knew I would never be a rocket scientist, but I love driving cars, being of service and feeling like I have done a full day's work and done it well. I evaluate my personal assets and... wham! I became a cab driver.
One thing I know for sure, to be good in my business I could simply just meet the expectations of my passengers. But, to be GREAT in my business, I have to EXCEED the customer's expectations! I like both the sound and the return of being 'great' better than just getting by on 'average'" Did I tip him big time? You bet! Corporate America's loss is the traveling folk's friend! -----Lessons:
Go an Extra Mile when providing any Service to others.
The is no good or bad job. You can make any job good.
Good service always brings good return.

To read other Monday morning Inspirations click here.

Sunday 22 June 2008

My week

My week was too good to say the least, I have been going for an in plant training at GRT hotels for the last one week, have another week of training to go. Me and my friend D have been going through this whole process in jus' a weeks time there was so much we could gain. Thou' the two of us are from the Information technology background, we are planning to make our career in the Hospitality Industry. So, this has been the first step towards our dream and we are certainly not disappointed. The experience we got there and the people we met has inspired us so much. Looking forward for the week ahead :)

That's me in my formal attire :)
I also happened to attend friend D's cousin's wedding reception yesterday and got a glimpse of many celebrities from the tinsel town. No, no I didn't go about clicking pics or getting autographs but jus' enjoyed the moment with friends and their family.

Happy weekend to you all! :)

Monday 16 June 2008

Celebration time :)

This is my 200th post in this blog space , it has been a wonderful blogging expereince so far and not jus' that my blog turned 1 yesterday. *claps*claps*claps* ... Well, it was jus' a coincidence that both my 200th post and the blogoversary had to come together.. Blame it on the writer'sblock I have been facing for the last one week or so. Not really, its just plain laziness. Like I had already mentioned on my 100th post I started blogging during one of the lean phases of my life and it gave me so much of morale boost and it actually helped me realise who I am.

I would like to thank all my readers and commenters for their wonderful support . If, it wasn't for them I don' think my blog would have seen its first birthday.

My special thanks to fellow bloggers Shanthini , Vasanthan, Anoop, Aarthi, Aayushi, Abhishek Khanna, Anju, Akanksha, Tulip Speaks, Baby_on_board, Bubbles of fire whisky, choconet, Chriz, Chronicles of bridget jones incarnate, Compassion unlimited, Curry egg, Drama diva, Gundumama, Heaven's garden, Karthick, Kaylee, Krithika, Lena, Melanie, Mystrey, Nirmal, Noushy, Ponnarasi Kothandaraman, Praveen, Preetilata, Puvanan, Raghavan, Sandhya, Sheetal Ambar, Shashi, Sriram, Sudhakar , Bharat and friends Dhruv, Jayashree, Navin,Isha, Aashish last but not the least my parents for all your support and good words about my blog which has helped me keep my blogging spirits high.
I didn't plan to get into blogging. I was initially hooked to Chinmayi's blog and later most of my time were spent reading her blog and other blogs. And that's when it struck upon me to start one myself. Blogging has given me more than what I could ask for friends, LOADS of knowledge and money. I'm truly delighted and looking to have many more years in the blogsville :) . Wish you all happy blogging and a great week ahead.

Monday morning Inspiration # 34

Once upon a time a very strong woodcutter asked for a job in a timber merchant, and he got it. The pay was really good and so were the work conditions. For that reason, the woodcutter was determined to do his best.

His boss gave him an axe and showed him the area where he was supposed to work.

The first day, the woodcuter brought 18 trees

"Congratulations," the boss said. "Go on that way!"

Very motivated for the boss’ words, the woodcutter try harder the next day, but he only could bring 15 trees. The third day he try even harder, but he only could bring 10 trees.Day after day he was bringing less and less trees.

"I must be losing my strength", the woodcutter thought. He went to the boss and apologized, saying that he could not understand what was going on.

"When was the last time you sharpened your axe?" the boss asked.

"Sharpen? I had no time to sharpen my axe. I have been very busy trying to cut trees..."


Author : Stephen Covey

To read other Monday morning Inspirations click here

Monday 9 June 2008

Monday morning Inspiration # 33

Jeff was the kind of guy you love to hate. He was always in a good mood and always had something positive to say. When someone would ask him how he was doing, he would reply, "If I were any better, I would be twins!"

He was a unique manager because he had several waiters who had followed him around from restaurant to restaurant. The reason the waiters followed Jeff was because of his attitude. He was a natural motivator. If an employee was having a bad day, Jeff was there telling the employee how to look on the positive side of the situation. Seeing this style really made me curious, so one day I went up to Jeff and asked him, "I don't get it! You can't be a positive person all of the time. How do you do it?"

Jeff replied, "Each morning I wake up and say to myself, Jeff, you have two choices today. You can choose to be in a good mood or you can choose to be in a bad mood.' I choose to be in a good mood. Each time something bad happens, I can choose to be a victim or I can choose to learn from it. I choose to learn from it. Every time someone comes to me complaining, I can choose to accept their complaining or I can point out the positive side of life. I choose the positive side of life."

"Yeah, right, it's not that easy," I protested.

"Yes, it is," Jeff, said. "Life is all about choices. When you cut away all the junk, every situation is a choice. You choose how you react to situations. You choose how people will affect your mood. You choose to be in a good mood or bad mood. The bottom line: It's your choice how you live life."

I reflected on what Jeff said.

Soon thereafter, I left the restaurant industry to start my own business. We lost touch, but I often thought about him when I made a choice about life instead of reacting to it.

Several years later, I heard that Jeff did something you are never supposed to do in a restaurant business: he left the back door open one morning and was held up at gunpoint by three armed robbers.

While trying to open the safe, his hand, shaking from nervousness, slipped off the combination. The robbers panicked and shot him. Luckily, Jeff was found relatively quickly and rushed to the local trauma center.

After 18 hours of surgery and weeks of intensive care, Jeff was released from the hospital with fragments of the bullets still in his body.

I saw Jeff about six months after the accident. When I asked him how he was, he said, "If I were any better, I'd be twins. Want to see my scars?"

I declined to see his wounds, but did ask him what had gone through his mind as the robbery took place. "The first thing that went through my mind was that I should have locked the back door," Jeff replied. "Then, as I lay on the floor, I remembered that I had two choices: I could choose to live, or I could choose to die. I chose to live."

"Weren't you scared? Did you lose consciousness?" I asked.

Jeff continued, "The paramedics were great. They kept telling me I was going to be fine. But when they wheeled me into the emergency room and I saw the expressions on the faces of the doctors and nurses, I got really scared. In their eyes, I read, 'He's a dead man.' I knew I needed to take action."

"What did you do?" I asked.

"Well, there was a big, burly nurse shouting questions at me," said

Jeff. "She asked if I was allergic to anything. 'Yes,' I replied. The doctors and nurses stopped working as they waited for my reply. I took a deep breath and yelled, 'Bullets!' Over their laughter, I told them, 'I am choosing to live. Operate on me as if I am alive, not dead.'"

Jeff lived thanks to the skill of his doctors, but also because of his amazing attitude. I learned from him that every day we have the choice to live fully. Attitude, after all, is everything.

- Work like you don't need the money

- Love like it's never going to hurt

- Dance like nobody's watching

To read other Monday morning Inspirations click here

Your online shopping guide

I'm not a person who does a great deal of online shopping. As I have always had this feeling that there is something or some information missing while shopping online. We can't always be sure that all the sites are listed out while we browse for any particular category of product or is it only the sites that has paid to advertise themselves. If, it is the later we sure would be loosing a great deal of offers from other online shopping stores. But an end has come to all that with shopwiki.com.

This site is like an online shopping guide, where in you can enter the product's name or the category of goods you wanna shop for and a whole list of available online stores selling the merchandise is listed for you to choose from. If you wanna find about cosmetics, then you have a whole range of brands listed and on clicking on the brand of your choice, you have their whole range of products listed for you.Apart from that you also get tips on various types of make up techniques. Have an easy and enriching shopping experience with shopwiki.

Saturday 7 June 2008

Chennai bloggers meet :)

The much awaited Chennai bloggers meet is to be held tomorrow (8th June) at Hotel Dee Cee Manor in G.N. Chetty road, T.Nagar. It is brought to us by the Indi blogger team and Lemonade a blogger from Chennai. If you till haven't registered yourself for the meet click the link below and register yourself.
08/06/2008 at 16:00
Chennai Blogger Meet
.

The meet starts at 16:00 hours and I'm not too sure as to how long it would go on. I'm very much excited as this would be my first bloggers meet ever. Those of you who are planning to make it there, please drop in a comment so that we could meet up there. ( I'm excited!!! :) ) See you all there :)

I signed up for socialspark


SocialSpark seems to be the buzz word in blogsville. I'm sure most of you would have come across this site when blog hopping. This site here is like a platform that connects bloggers with advertisers , its a win win situation for both bloggers and advertisers. This get paid to blog ads site is brought to us by the popular IZEA , the company who owns payperpost. The basic criteria for your blog to be approved by social spark is that your blog should be atleast 90 days old and should contain more than 20 posts. Even if your blog is not approved the very first time do not worry, there are a whole lot of other ways you can follow and re-submit your blog.

SocialSpark also has an amazing customer care service called customer love who are very prompt in their service. There is an FAQ section where you can find answers to most of your queries, if you still have queries to put forth you can write to the customer love and believe me you get such a quick response from them.

This site also has some code of ethics:

100% Audit-able In-Post Disclosure - This is one thing I really like about this site. You can make your readers aware that your getting paid to write the post.

-100% Transparency - All the activities that is taking place in the site can been viewed by the public, by both members and non-members by this the the bloggers build more trust with the site.

-100% Real Opinions - Social spark encourages real opinions from its blogers, so you dont have to pretend to like things here.

-100% Search Engine Friendly- sponsored links carry the "no-follow" attribute as to not affect search engine rankings.

So what more would you want, get paid to what we do the best (blog). There is no harm checking this site out as there is nothing to loose from it.

Sponsored by SocialSpark

My things to do for the holidays..

Until my holidays started I jus' had this notion where in I can just laze around all the while, sleep, eat, meet friends and on the whole become one big time lazy goose. But things are not that way anymore. Its almost a week since my vacation started and here I am having a whole lot of things to catch up with..

These are the things I have planned to do in my vacation

1. Clean my room
2. Meet up with my school friends
3. Attend the Chennai bloggers meet,get to know a few fellow bloggers (I'm excited!)
4. Start with my internship
5. Learn a new language
6. Try out some new restaurants that have come up recently
7. Catch up with all the good movies thats been released and also download the list of movies which I have always wanted to see.
8. start with my travel blog and start posting regularly in my other blogs as well.
9. Finish reading the books that i shopped in the last few months
10. Shop for clothes for my next semester
11. Go for an eye check-up ( ya, I did this today)
12. Get in touch with a few of my school pals.
13. Watch lots of Travel and Living
14. Plan for a short trip somewhere to close by destination with my family
15. Prepare for CAT/GMAT
16. Prepare for business quiz contests.

That's my plan for the vacation. At the end of my vacation I ll post on how many tasks I was able to complete. Have a great weekend friends :)

Yet another blog..

Im here again to introduce you all to another blog which I came across Nishas world of interests. The author of this blog is a young mum to the one year old baby Alisha. This blog talks about celebrity gossips, recipes, baby and health info, some interesting information thats been happening in the author s life and also about baby Alisha. This blog has been in the blogsville for over a year. My first thought on entering this blog was .. OMG! so many links I ve got to check out. Yup, there are so many blogs that have been linked to which you might wanna check out during your blog hopping sessons. The author has recently joined social spark, one of the advertising sites that help bloggers make some money. So, those of you who have some queries regarding that can also find your answers in her blog. Happy blogging!

Wednesday 4 June 2008

Yipee.. Its Holidays!!

Yup, I'm back and now its an all new me.. No exams, no worries, no books to cry with for that matter I hardly stay at home.. To be specific my holidays started over the weekend and should I call it the writer's block or my laziness that put me away form my blog except for my Monday morning Inspiration . But now there are so many incidents that happened in the last couple of hours that made me write this post and bring me back to ful fledgged blogging (yup, I mean a new post every few hrs.. thats wat I call ful fledgged :) ).

It is during these lazy times when I spend most of my time orkutting and stay away from my blog thou' I have stuffs to write .. I get a mail from Sudarshan Srinivasan. He is the guy who started Twillight takeout, the restaurant about which I have blogged about here. He had went through my review and I was all the more happy to see that he has took all the efforts to mail me about my work.. To top it all he offered to send me some free food as well(He sure seems to be a nice person :) ). Well me being the good girl I am will opt to pay for my meal and will surely review about the food as well in my In and around Chennai blog :). Will let you guys know once I put the post up there. And another reason for me to quickly make this post is my cousin Sriram who has re-started blogging and thinks my blog has inspired him to do so *Happily grinning* (Now, how can I be without not posting anythin in my blog . So, thats another reason I'm here..)

And about my holidays, I have a one month long vacation which I'm totally excited about after my rigourous semester filled with exams , assignments, attendance to maintain et all.. Got whole lot of plans for my vacation will make it my next post.. Me planning to watch a lot of good movies in these hols too.. So, if you guys would like to suggest some movie to me do please drop in a comment. Have a great week ahead and to those of you enjoying your holidays.. Happy holdays!

Monday 2 June 2008

Monday morning Inspiration # 32

Long ago in a small, far away village, there was place known as the House of 1000 Mirrors. A small, happy little dog learned of this place and decided to visit. When he arrived, he bounced happily up the stairs to the doorway of the house. He looked through the doorway with his ears lifted high and his tail wagging as fast as it could. To his great surprise, he found himself staring at 1000 other happy little dogs with their tails wagging just as fast as his. He smiled a great smile, and was answered with 1000 great smiles just as warm and friendly. As he left the House, he thought to himself, "This is a wonderful place. I will come back and visit it often."

In this same village, another little dog, who was not quite as happy as the first one, decided to visit the house. He slowly climbed the stairs and hung his head low as he looked into the door. When he saw the 1000 unfriendly looking dogs staring back at him, he growled at them and was horrified to see 1000 little dogs growling back at him. As he left, he thought to himself, "That is a horrible place, and I will never go back there again."

All the faces in the world are mirrors.

Be happy and I'm sure your surrounding will be filled with all positive and happy things :)

To read other Monday morning Inspirations click here.