WEDDING SEASON!!!

There was a time I used to love wedding seasons. Wedding season meant so many weddings to attend, really pretty clothes, lots of good food and awesome wedding arrangements. I always found weddings fascinating, everything was just so pretty and nice. As a kid I loved going to the weddings, where me , my brother and my sister used to have a motto of eating or atleast tasting every kind of food there was to offer. I don't know if our tiny stomachs could accommodate so much food, but seriously!!! we tried our best.

But, my this charm with wedding is kind of getting over , or i must say its pretty much gone!!!

Well!, if you are curious, I will tell you the reason. As the saying goes, "everything is funny, until the joke is on you", same is the case with weddings. They are fascinating enough until its not your wedding or a wedding of any of your friends or relative. Some people might disagree with this thought of mine, but i guess its my blog..so i write what i like..i basically rule!!

For me, this fancy picture of weddings started to break when one of our classmates in undergrad got married, just after the college. Since, we were too young  (i.e 21), we were not so scared by then. We were already prepared for her early marriage and we always knew she would be the first one to marry amongst us. Suddenly "the free food and good clothes" scenario changed into "what to wear, how to behave and what to gift". Being the close friends of the bride, we were being noticed and hence the awkwardness began. we closely observed the intricacies of a wedding in terms of number of rituals, amount of planning and huge expenses. The picture was not bright anymore.


I guess the earlier times were better, when the social networking sites did not exist and the mere social network was the gossiping sessions of people. So the faint hope of all of your friends being unmarried or single with you , kept u alive and happy. But with the latest facebook, twitter, orkut or whatever social networking site, the gossiping aunts have gone out of work.  Now we know everything going on in a persons life by a mere click of a button.

Anyways, in my context here, I am saying this because I have been noticing lately that a lot of people are getting married. And thanks to facebook, I get know when any tom , dick or harry in my friends list is getting married. Everyday I open facebook, someone or the other is getting engaged, is getting married, or the countdown has begun  or is in a relationship. Freaky!!!!!!!!!!!!

At the age of 25, you don't find this a very fascinating thought. I mean, I still don't think I can get married in next billion years. As a matter of fact, I still don't understand why everybody is so eager to "MARRY". There is so much to life other then just "work" and "MARRIAGE". I might be sounding stupid. yes! i agree. I am pretty freaked out by the though that all my friends are getting married and sooner or later this sword would be hanging over my head.

But these daily status updates, new photos and change of marital status is enough to make one go crazy before their time. Its like they are mentally preparing you for something you don't even wanna think about. Sad but true!!! can't help it. I am happy for my friends who got married or are getting married, for its a beginning of a new life. But, given a choice I would surely wanna filter this word from any kind of status updates I receive from now on! Sometimes, obscurity is bliss!!! I'd rather be blind then see such scary thing!!! huahahahaha!!!

LAST FEW DAYS...I MET A STRANGER!!!

If "life" can be taken as a separate entity, I would title life as a 'Story writer'.Atleast mine is a pretty interesting one for me.. I am mostly surprised by my life every now and then. Being an observer, I have been always interested in understanding how things are working around me. I see how people behave and how they react to different situations in life. I find it utterly amusing to guess a person's reactions without even knowing them that well. I do this by trying to read the gestures and the body language of the person. Some people call it 'stereotyping of personalities’, some people call it ' putting in a box' and some people just call it”assumptions".

So let’s begin this story of meeting a stranger. Let’s name this Stranger Mr.X. I must confess this Mr. X was not a complete Stranger. He definitely looked familiar and his face felt like someone I have shared a part of my life once upon a time. In fact, this ‘someone’ was closest to me once. He was the first one I ‘let in’ in my shy introvert life. So of course, like all those first time memories, this someone, meant a lot to me. His imprints were fresh and kept popping up every now and then in my day-to-day life. 

This ‘someone’ made me happy and he made me sad. He showed me a different perspective of life. Sometimes he made my life red, blue, orange, green and every possible beautiful color and sometimes he made it Grey or even black. Everything was printed in my memory, deep and vivid. I don’t want to present this as some kind of love story. In fact, in this process of discovering life, I was still distant from forming a formal definition of so called word “love”. 

I never tried to fit this ‘someone’ in the various definitions of Love or friendship, I once heard from every other person I met. In fact, in my case, I try to keep my opinions based on my experiences and try not to stereotype it. 

So, I was enjoying my life, and understanding everything I was going through. I tried to understand, my friendships, my likings, my hatreds and my relations and this ‘someone’ was an integral part of almost everything around me. I was in a relationship with this ‘someone’ for a long - long time.

So, I met this Mr. X last week somewhere near the place I live. His face looked exactly the same, his built, his hair and his eyes; everything matched that ‘someone’ I once met. Like any stupid naïve girl, I was enthralled to meet this Mr.X; I started jumping with joy and blabbering about all the things in the past. I tried to relate this Mr.X to every memory I had of this ‘someone’. I thought I found my friend again and the fond memories flew all around me.

But, before I could take-in the complete joy of meeting this stranger, my happiness was put to a halt by something called “reality”. When reality spoke to me, she was very clear and vivid. She removed the beautiful glowy curtain and showed me the truth. The truth was this Mr.X was not that ‘someone’ I met. It was like two twin brothers; just that one is complete opposite of the other. 

 

Suddenly, an air of sadness filled my heart and once again my life had baffled me. It was an interesting turn in my already happy life. I saw this Mr.X and felt funny about how life makes a rather boring story, an interesting one. I saw the change that a few years can bring in a person and I tried to understand how life came to this chapter for our Dear Mr.X. 

I also remembered how as a teen we used to be so sure about ourselves, our ethics, our likes and dislikes. We felt that we know everything about ourselves and it going to remain the same forever. We try to picture our future life based on our, that perception of ‘us’. It is quite funny, if I think of it now.

So, I learnt that this Mr. X was a different person and I didn’t know him at all. But, unlike other strangers that I often meet, I was not intrigued to talk to this one. May be, it has to do something with his similar looking face to that ‘someone’ I once met. But, we did spent some time together. We did long talks, but couldn't hear anything.  I was trying hard to understand my reactions. I was trying to understand why I was so numb or why I couldn’t talk to him or why I couldn’t look him in the eyes. It was nerve-racking. 

Everything that this Mr.X did was different. I was trying hard to make this stranger comfortable, but I didn’t know how to do that. The fact, that I couldn’t do anything or didn’t know what to talk to, made me uneasy. Suddenly all the warmth, the memories and the joy was lost somewhere. 

 

But I was not sad, as I already mentioned, my life was already happy and like a good girl (yes! My life is female), it took a stranger as a stranger. It understood that strangers, come and go. They make you think and wonder and sometimes feel amused or even weird, but they surely can’t alter your present life. They are nothing but a mere No-one.

LIFE IN A FIX!

so...what do you do when your life is in a fix? . You can't take a step ahead or a step back because there are too many ramifications, apprehensions and assumptions attached to everything you do. In such situations, Do you just stand still in the moment and let it pass or do you analytically weigh the whole thing and make a decision or simply close your eyes,imagine it never happened and cover yourself with a veil of escapism.

Sometimes i think, growing up is a curse. You tend to understand things more, you can anticipate the repercussions or your actions and you tend to manage your life logically. Well of course, in whatever age we are, we always think, we are rational, logical and the most intelligent person on this earth. Like all the 'gyan ' has been given to us in inheritance.

We all make mistakes, infact, mistakes is the thing we do 90% of the time ( still thinking we are right) . We mess up our lives and other's around us, following some stupid fundas and logic we once thought were right.. i mean seriously ..wht crap! If at all, life had a ctrl+z button i would have erased some specific parts on our life. ( not all, i love my life)

This 'indecisiveness' kinda gives you an all-time uneasy feeling., especially to people who like controlling thier own lives. You feel weak, broken, and powerless. You are blank as you don't know what to do? its as if, you are walking in too much fog, you its somewhere around but you dont know where to take a turn.. coulds of confusion..huh! there are People who think that they are the sole owner of thier lives and every step they take and everything that happens in thier life should be governed by them. But, whtever, we all know that this is all bull shit!

and i think even this blog is kinda..bull shit! or may be not! its again a fix!

when i was in school, we had "Gandhi's talisman", printed on the second page of our school diary. it read soemthign like this:

" I will give you a talisman. Whenever you are in doubt, or when the self becomes too much with you, apply the following test. Recall the face of the poorest and the weakest man [woman] whom you may have seen, and ask yourself, if the step you contemplate is going to be of any use to him [her]. Will he [she] gain anything by it? Will it restore him [her] to a control over his [her] own life and destiny? In other words, will it lead to swaraj [freedom] for the hungry and spiritually starving millions?
Then you will find your doubts and your self melt away."

Well of course!I modified it and removed the poverty, swaraj and weakest man.. and blah blah blah from it to "peeople i know and i care for". This basically teaches you to be selflessness. hmm..i am again confused if this is to be followed anymore or not. Selflessness, self scarifice and etc, things like this can lead to un happiness and pain if you are not handling them well and kinda registering everything u r sacrificing.. So i tend to stay away from such greatness.. In my view, everything is alright if you are not hurting anyone else around you.

This is my version of talisman that i now follow. Whenever in doubt and despair , i try not to hurt anybody and let the moment pass. Letting go of things sometimes help! stop thinking about yourself( don't take a step forward) , do not sacrifice your life for someone ( don't take a step back) , just stay in the moment ( face it!) and loose your control over your life ( let go!), let things happen their own way ( let it pass) , then you will feel that everything does happen right in the end weather you are poking your nose in the making of it or not.

After all, life is good anyways and one should avoid messing it up with thier stupid logical thinking!!

my student worker job!

Jul 28, '08 7:59 PM for everyone

I am currently a grad student of electrical engineering in University of Southern California. Grad student means i am a boring, geek and non essential part of the university. The same way that we use to treat our Mtech students in undergrad. I wouldn't agree to the boring and non essential part, but certainly to the geeky part.

Here, you just can't afford to be non-geeky, unless you want to ruin your life or..ofcourse if you are a multi-tasking champion. My university has the reputation of most expensive universitiy with most number of international students intake. Well if you come here.you would see that..international here means "Indian" or perhaps "chinese". Atleast I can say that about the engineering school.

Along with the hectic study-life here, one has to earn his living himself,mostly,through their student worker jobs.these jobs can pay you from a small $8 to $20. Ofcourse $8 means you earn $640 a month after sloggin 80 hrs in a month. and this money in LA is just barely sufficient to pay your rent or bills.

My student worker job started from working in "trojan Grounds",this was the starbucks of our university. I used to make coffee and shakes for university people. In a way it was a fun job.The managers were cool, there were no timing restriction and my co-workers were just amazing. It was a whole new experience for me. I used to love talking to people coming in the cafe. I used to love giving free coffee to my friends and their friends and everybody else who had a remote connection to me.

As a student worker you don't hold much of a responsibility in a job.Neither do people expect a lot from you. The only thing they expect is punctuality and a little bit of a professionalism.
Professionalism here does matter a lot. But i agree is very different from the picture of "professionalism in US" i had in india...Bosses are bosses but they don't boss much...every co-worker is treated nicely. i like that part...and in Trojan grounds i was kind of happy...

But "trojan grounds" is closed in summer and they don't hire student workers for summer. Sad but true! I had to look for a new job for the summer as I was auditing the web-tech course and couldn't go to india. I soon found a job in the USC housing office where i was a customer service representative. The used to pay me $ 8.25 ( yeeeeeee...a hike) and i was suppose to answer the queries of people regarding thier housing assignements and etc.

This job had too many timing restictions, plus i hated doing filing.. cumon! it was like a polished peon who had to run errands, flie stuff, paste labels and aprt from these, answer phones. :) The only thing i learnt from this was how we pester the customer service people by shouting at them and calling them worthless. he he...yaaa it feels wierd to be on the other side of the phone..

Now, I earn a $11 per hour as the web developer in Department of public safety. This job is cool. My boss is super cool. and plus i am Rich.. haha atleast not bankrupt all the time!...
i get $800 a month, which is sufficient to pay my 500 dollar rent and still live lavishly...Also, My boss here is the most ideal boss you can ever have. He is nice, funny, creative, flexible and caring. What else can one ask for?

One good thing that happened to me through this job is that i have started working freelance with my friend. We design websites for people who can't really afford the big companies and yet wants a nice website for their work. IT keeps me happy as we have some xtra cash flowing in and i can keep my creative side alive by designing nice interfaces for these websites.

After all! My student worker job did pay back! Its sometimes nice to be a small non existent but yet important part of your firm. So, when a stupid HR asks me about what kind of work i like, I can honestly answer her that " No work is big or small, work is work and it needs to be done!".

Time!

The best part about the old times is that they are "old"..and thats what make you remember them with such fondness...

Now when i sit in front of my office computer, browsing through the old pictures i find my self stuck in a mire. I am stuck by this sudden nostalgia, that i thought would never come to me..But,No matter you like it or not, you still have to accept it!
That is life..Take it or leave it!

Surprisingly, I have had a great time in college..it was one hell of an experience with in numerous ups and down or rather i should say Highs n Lows...

A few good years in college can leave you with a "lifetime high" that you cherish forever and wish to have it again and again...This is a time when you understand yourself better, you get an insight of the real world and you get to learn so many things that you couldn't manage to learn in the 12 years of your schooling. The number of emotions you face and the kinds of people you meet makes you look at the world beyond books and carrier.. which by all means is usually the soul objectives of our lives in school...

Well! the things one experience in college and the effect of those things on a individual, also varies from people to people..for some the college years are the golden ones but for some its just the opposite. For them its a time that they would erase from their memories if given a chance at all!! I think these people are the ones who fell short of coping up right with the changes happening around them or didn't put enough thought into it...

Its actually not their fault!

Now, I understand the meaning of being "young" and the meaning of this term relating to my college days..and i think may be i was an infant till the 12 years of my schooling...because all I see and remember now is what I learnt in college..the philosophies I made, the situations I encountered and the ways i learnt to fight those situations, interactions i made with people around me, all the things remind me of how I was carved into what I am today...

I can easily say, I love my college days...and certainly I don't want them again...
may be I can't handle a complete personality change again and again...I love it this way!

AM I GOOD AT TREKKING??

Well i was intrigued to answer this question by one of my chaiwala group ( a small group in USC that meets on Wednesdays for a chat over a cup of tea). When i was telling the group about my recent trip to Yosemite and how dissapointed was I with all the people in my group( because they were scared to complete the trail), One female in the group asked me if i was very experienced or good in hiking and all. Well! I paused for a second and thought in my mind, what really should be the answer to this question. With subtle humbleness and pride i said "oh yes! I have gone on some good treks back in India and here in California". She smiled and the discussion ended. But the thought kept on running through my mind," Was I really good in trekking?".

Despite of being on so many treks, I still had a doubt about this question. The reason for this doubt can be my feeling of always falling short for something or the other on every trek. Sometimes its the equipment, amount of food, too much weight, improper clothes and etc.The list continues.

My first trek was a day hike in Dalhousie where i went on one of my IEEE trips in First year of my undergrad. It was a nice uphill and well laid trail. As I was walking with a large group so the feeling of adventure didn't strike me on most part of the trek except when we had to jump a barbed wire on a slippery hill ( a slip from there would have landed us...may be dead..or whatever!). I remember Raghav Sehgal having a hard time crossing it as he feared that he had more chances of slipping as he was heavier then others.. It was so much fun to watch him..(and he will probably kill me if he sees this!)

The second trip was to Nainital, where our dear seniors didn't let us trek as they were so afraid..or us messing up. I remember me getting really pissed at them, but doing nothing as they were " the senoirs"..but yes! we did hike a bit till the top of the mountain to a place called snowpoint ( one can see the whole nainital from there). I remember that morning I was trying to persuade one of our senoirs "Ankur" who was leading the hike. Gathering all my courage and overcoming my introvertism,I asked him if i could please go to the trek with him and he asked me if i had good shoes. I jumped with thrill and said" yes! i have new ones and showed him how friction won't be a problem. He agreed to take me with him and yes of course! i was jumping with thrill..

In all these things, I strongly remember that i loved hiking more than looking at stupid historic monuments. It was thrilling and challenging and thankfully i never had to pursuade my friends to do it as they were all always ready for all the challenging trips that we went to later on.

Our first serious trek was a 9 km trek from chandrataal (4300 meters in the Himalayas)to kunzumpass (4551 m). It was a guided tour and all the equippment was provided by the guy we hired to take us to chandrataal and kunzum pass thereafter. He gave us camp, sleeping bags, transportation and food but still surving that night in chandratal was a real task of our lives. Our guide had by mistake got lesser number of sleeping bags then we actually were, so for all of us it was difficult to pass that one night as it was ...freaking cold!!!!. At 4 in the morning, i had a feeling i would die of cold or something especially coz i had not enough warm clothes and in the thrill of reaching there (without... a thought) I had put my feet in the cold waters of chandrataal lake, making them terribly cold. After we got through that night somehow, we were greeted with swesome breakfast, but the next day , still, was no relief, as we had to go on trekking from chandrataal to kunzumpass with an ascend of 600mts. The trek has very thin air which made it extremely difficult to breathe. We weren't carrying any luggage or backpacks..but i am thankful we didn't. With a lot of short halts we managed to finish the trek somehow.

You must be wondering, why we put ourselves to such misery. The reason is simple, the places we saw after every difficult trek were so amazingly beautiful that it can keep up the spritis of even a dying man!

After that trek i wished for going on a unguided trek. A guided one felt so lame and boring to sound... [:P].

This was kinda fulfilled on my ladhak trip where we trekked from spituk to stok la and we did almost everything on our own. We hired a guide again , but this time it was a single person as compared to a group or company in earlier case. This guide was a weird fellow and well acquinted with the area so he helped us with the way. Yes! back then I had yet on switched over to reading maps. But the trek was fun! we hiked long ditances in conditions like thin air, extreme sunlight , too much fog, no laid up trails, to many mosquitos ( eeeehhhh...) and etc. We did make mistake like not carrying a daypack to carry our little food and water for trek , so we had to coax our guide take out water from the luggage ( which he had packed firmly) .Our careless guide had lost a few rods of our camp beacuse of which our camp became distorted and we had to spend a night sturgulling with rain falling over our sleeping bags and into our tent. All these things at the height of 4600mts was a little difficult to handle. But we made through the whole trek with a good sense of accomplishment. Again, the place was unbelievable breathtaking!

The another task was to learn how to walk with our backpacks. Its easy to walk without carrying any luggage, but in real life ( :P) ...yes in real life..when you don't hire a guide everytime you go on a trek you have carry your food, camp clothes and other equipment with you, trekking with so much stuff to carry forces you to be wise with choosing everything you put in you backpack. It is a big challenge unless you do some reading or ask the already experienced hikers for tips to pack your backpack. Unfortunately , I learnt the hard way. After every trek I made, there were things I learnt. So literally, I finally learnt a lot of things after a zillion number of screw ups!

The treks in california started with a day hike from my house to griffet observatory ( 10 miles one way) . It happened because...on fine day..my friend decided to go on a long walk... :D

Well on a serious note! the first trek was a trek in grand canyon. This was the " Bright Angeles trail" and it lead us to the " indian garden campgroud" which was 1.5 miles from the plateau point. It was a 5 miles downhill trek and consisted of part of the way in snow, part of it in ice and mud and the rest of it rugged with stones and etc. So really..it was a package deal! We camped there overnight, and cooked the delicious ready to eat meals form MTR. We even had enough time to grab a drink of brandy to keep us warm. :) ( or alternatively in happy state). One of the mistakes on this trip was to not carry enough flash lights followed by a second mistake of avoiding weather casts and ignoring importance of starting early to hike up the hill. We had to pay for these mistakes by getting stuck in the snowstorm (because we avoided the weather cast) with only two torch lights for a group of 7 people ( the way was not visible coz of the storm..and uphill is risky) and walking in the dark ( as we started late)..Does it sound to you like ..we were on a suicide mission...? . Apparently...we were! The last mistake was to not carry enough water. So Literally, we were stuck in the storm, with no water or food, only two torch lights and tons of load in our backpacks. hi hi hi..yaaa it really was an experience. But i learnt tremendously in this short trip.

My last trip was to Yosemite. I wanted to trek from the valley to the Half Dome, but had to come back as my friends couldn't keep up with the extremet conditions they were put too.. may be they were looking for more luxury then i offered them ( which was none.. :P). I then missed my old group I had back in India.. :( . (Will post a pic of Half dome once i have conquored it :( )

I Still have a long way ahead of me..i still need to learn a lot of things before i call myself a professional hiker, but so far I am holding on good! I yes! with proud I can say that" I am an experienced Hiker" may be of a different sort.. :D

Life worth living!!!

i am not usually in practise of pasting forwards or speeches on my blog but this one is worth pasting.

This is the text of the Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005.

I am honored 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 6 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, its 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 ten 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 Ð I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz 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 4000 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 apologize 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 Ð 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 worlds 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 retuned 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 Ð 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 tumor 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'd 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 tumor. 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 its 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 other's 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 1960's, 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.

As i walked down the road, i had a look at those quite and hollow eyes. Eyes thinking something deep,
Eyes that has gone through ages,
Eyes that has seen many times,good and bad..

Looking deep into emptyness in the world,
and looking still and unblinked..
looking for a ray of hope..
may be..
or may be the slow decay of mankind.
and his slow departure in to the darkness of this universe..
a place where he always belonged.
Those hollow expressionless eyes..
constantly looking into Time..
may be...
or may be waiting for someone to read them..
read them..
and know the pain
and know the pain and suffering it has gone through..
and the happiness it had once gone through
and the phase it is now going through..

Gazing constanly at this hollow world.
those quite,expresionless holloweyes..