Melodies - Part 2 : Those significant bits

To read part 1 of this post, click here

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A bit is just a ‘0’ or a ‘1’ – it is such a small piece of information in the entire computing universe filled with terabytes and petabytes of data.

It takes 16 such bits to store a value between -32768 to +32767 (65536 unique values!)

If the unique values refer to an audio source, then you get to hear 65536 unique values if you had just 16 bits with you! Let us call this unique value of sound a ‘sample’

Now, it gets interesting – from one second of audio, 44,100 such unique values are taken and 16 bits are given to each of these 44,100 samples resulting in a total of 705600 bits worth of information for just 1 second of audio. Imagine the quality of the sound when 705600 bits are used to say what the audio should sound like in that particular second.

If you have used a stereo headphone/speaker, you already know that there are left and right channels superimposed on one another to create a stereo sound. So, add a further 705600 bits to store the information on the second channel. One second of stereo sound, therefore, requires 1411200 bits! Since we know 8 bits is a byte and 1024 bytes is a kB, we can work out that one second of digital audio needs 172 kB!

A song is approximately 5 minutes or 300 seconds. So, we arrive at 51679.8 kB for every song or moving on to more common megabyte (MB) terminology, a digital audio song needs atleast 50.4 MB.

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So, with 50 MB at your disposal, you could have one full song stored on your personal computer as a data file and play it over and over again – excellent sound quality – each time every time. This format was referred to as Compact disc digital audio and eventually led to the birth of this:

       

A compact disc player was specialised computer which took only a CD-DA disc as input, read the zeroes and ones on the disc, and converted it into high quality music. A CD-R was hailed as revolutionary because of the excellent quality of music it produced. Suddenly, all well recorded and digitally re-mastered cassettes sounded pale in comparison to the crystal clear music that these CDs produced. Those with cars even wanted ACD players on it instead of just cassette stereos. People flocked to electronics stores to exchange their ‘two-in-one’s for ‘3-in-one’ or ‘4-in-one’, the third and fourth functionality being audio and video CD playing capabilities. The compact discs, which were till now being used to store computer data now started to be sold in the audio CD format pre-recorded disks like this. However, if you had bought the original audio CD, you could also make a backup of the data on your system. Even personal audio recordings could be stored on a system and recorded to a disc using a process called BURNING a CD-ROM. All you needed to have was CD- R hardware on your system, support software and of course, the blank CD-R to burn, which came initially with 650MB of storage allowing 12-13 songs. Very soon, there was space for about 18-20 songs, sometimes offering space upto 850 or 900 MB. And yes, they were a little costlier than cassettes, with CDs priced at around 100-180 per piece

 
Some of the biggest selling music on Audio CDs - inlay card comes engraved on Kasoor's CD while a glass case cover with traditional inlay card is how RHTDM was sold

Around the same time, there were changes in the Indian retail scene which led to organised retail and malls entering India. And that was when stores like ‘Planet-M’ and ‘Music world’ became popular. People liked to shop at these big outlets because they could listen to the music on the preview players before buying the albums. These outlets were usually located in city centres and it was super convenient to hang around in a airconditioned planet-m listening to music, while waiting for a friend or colleague. Popstars and celebrities liked these stores too – they could visit these places and launch their albums and promote music sales. Fans got an opportunity to meet the stars – the music worlds, and planet-Ms were roaring successes.

Continued in Part 3....click here to read part 3

PS:
Images courtesy: Google images and Wiki images. All images are copyrights of their respective owners, used here purely for illustrative purposes

Melodies - Part 1 : Taped delights

If you are of the same generation that I am, then I am sure you will know what this rectangular looking thing with two teethy holes in between is – it is an audio cassette or more commonly, just ‘tape’!

Tapes stored audio and could be played on cassette players and walkmans. Some magnetic thing in the tape stored information about what sound to play and a cassette head would read it and reproduce the sound on speakers. The sound quality was great, but it always depended on the quality of the head which was reading the magnetic tape. There would also be special cassettes called ‘head cleaners’ which would have a special coating on them to automatically clean the player’s head when they were being read. If Mohd Rafi’s voice sounded a little too low pitched and sober, you could use some alcohol with cotton to clean the dust and it would go back to being his golden voice again.

 
Some of the most listened to melodies of the yester-years

The information about the playback singers, the composers and the lyricists could not be fit inside the magnetic tape and hence, all commercial music cassettes came with something called an ‘inlay card’. The design of these cards were such that, you could stack up the cassette cases on each other and still get the album names of all the cassettes, just like books in a library! If you visited homes of music lovers, there would be a shelf in the living room next to the TV and hifi cassette players with 2-4 big speakers where they would proudly show off their collections! Hailing from the middle class homes which could not afford to buy all album titles, some of us would take ‘khaali’ cassette to their houses, ask them to record (atleast the top hits) on our blank cassettes and get back home to play it on our economy two-in-one players and enjoy it for hours together! Sometimes the haughty rich guy would refuse to record all songs of the cassette citing trivial reasons and the receiver had to be content with whatever was given.

The biggest drawback of these cassettes was that of reuse. If you kept the cassette write enabled, there could be a chance of some moron taking your cassette to get it copied and wiping it off “by mistake”. And if you made it write-protected, you could not reuse it in times of urgent need. And making a copy from a copy would decrease sound quality so badly that you would start hating the very song which you so keenly copied in the first place. If you ever participated in a group dance competition while at school in the 90s, then I am sure you would have made copy cassette for practice and used the main one only during the final performance, sometimes perhaps missing a step on the stage because the copied one did not contain that level of detail as the original :)

Movies like ‘Hum Aapke Hain Kaun’ were such superhits, but they always presented a dilemma to audio buyers like us. In a time where buying a cassette would get you songs from two movies, who would want to buy a cassette with over 15 songs from the same movie? There were too many songs and some were skipped in the movie theaters for want of time (and added back later). And if you did decide to go for only select songs, there was a chance you missed the best song from the other movie on side B, thus leaving you some difficult choices to make. When A R Rahman’s super hit tamil movie ‘Kaadhalan’ got released, I remember having visited so many cassette shops around my house to see if a combination was available such that I got all the songs of the movie and an optional second movie. I was overjoyed when I found that ‘Akash Lahari’ (music company like saregama hmv, venus, t-series, tips, etc) had released this combination:

Yes – two of A R Rahman’s biggest hits of that time in just one cassette- Kaadalan and Roja – with all the songs of the movie! This would become our favourite cassette for almost a year and more, we losing count of the number of times we played it. By the time we bought a new speaker set and a cassette player in our house in the late 90s, we had purchased almost all hit albums that A R Rahman had churned out from his Panchathan record inn studios at Madras – Rangeela, Hindustani, Kadal desam, Dil Se, etc and played one after the other almost every day. Even we had some sort of a collection now – with mom having bought many of Mohd. Rafi songs, some old and new Kannada songs from reputed singers and hit movies, Kishore Kumar’s collections and many more. We had started to buy music without looking for deals but instead focusing on the quality of songs, even if it was only a single movie album. I still consider ‘Taal – a beat of passion’ coming from the house of TIPS music house, one of my best buys of all times. A R Rahman’s passionate music with voices as diverse as Asha Bhonsle, Hariharan, Sukhwinder Singh, Alka Yagnik, etc and a very big 8-fold inlay card with lyrics of the songs was total treat to the music lovers. Add it to Aishwarya Rai's pictures on all pages for visual appeal - that was Rs. 55/ well spent on audio!

Although there were improvements to the quality of recording on cassettes with digital technology, it still largely depended on the tape recorders head to reproduce the exact quality of the recording. And then there was this bigger problem of cassettes - even with people not looking for multiple movies in an album, the chances of buying an entire album just with one hit song in the movie was totally useless like in the case of this movie:

one hit song movie

The movie ‘One two ka four’ for example – only hit song in this movie was the ‘khamoshiyan ghungunane lagi’ sung by Lata Mangeshkar and Sonu Nigam. I went and actually bought this movie cassette paying Rs 60/ - a huge amount those days, only because of the Rahman factor and just hoped that I would like the other songs of the movie just by listening to it over and over again! And even to this day, I do not :) Atleast I should have combined it with some other movie songs of those days like ‘Virasat’ or ‘Sapnay’ (both of which have some nice songs). And then, there was English pop/movie music too, which came at a huge premium - the Vengaboyz album was priced at Rs. 100/ - totally on a different scale as compared to the Rs. 30/ cassettes of Kannada movies. All said, the audio world of the 80s 90s was totally dominated by these tapes, with lots of scope for improvements on all fronts....

Continued in Part 2.... To read, please click here

PS:
Images courtesy: Google images and Wiki images. All images are copyrights of their respective owners, used here purely for illustrative purposes

That Dark (k)night

"There’s a storm coming Mr. Wayne!.... because when it hits you’re all going to wonder how you ever thought you could live so large and leave very little for the rest of us!"

Selina Kyle kept building up the plot for the dark knight to rise again. Ultra and I were in the multiplex and enjoying every minute of the most awesome finale to a trilogy ever made. Little did we know of the mini crisis which we would face ourselves later that night…

We had gone to watch the evening show at Arch mall’s multiplex on a Sunday evening which is only 6 kms from our home. Our parents had gone to our native place Karkala to attend a wedding. The movie would get over by 9:30 PM in the worst case, we just needed to have dinner after that and go home. Plus, we had our own car to drive back. We had been outside home during later hours in the night and driven our car in the wee hours of the morning. Nothing in the current situation seemed that bad. What could possibly go wrong? What was different?

Well, the difference was that we were now staying in a rented house. 'Akshaya', our dear home for the 25+ years of our lives was now undergoing a renovation and we had to stay in a rented place nearby till Akshaya2.0 was ready. We had chosen a place near to our old home. It was on the main road to Nagarbhavi and in front of a temple. The traffic and the temple noises would never end for most part of the day. It seemed a little small as compared to the big house which we had earlier. There were problems in the electrical connections. However, it was still a manageable place for a one year stay and it was only 2 minute walk from our old home. We just overlooked all the inconveniences and decided to stay there.

But the real problem was not in the physical details of the house, but the softer aspects involved. The owner lived on the second floor of the house and ran a shop on the ground floor. And we were sandwiched on the first floor. He was a rough person, seemed to be ill-mannered, and had a reputation for getting irritated soon. He kept two dogs to guard the place. One was a white pomerian (the white knight) which made all the noise and barked each time we walked past the gate. The other was some sort of a greyhound (the dark knight) which seemed very dangerous. Thankfully, they kept both the dogs on leash and the darker one below the stairs so that we did not have to walk past it. We still fail to understand the need for dogs when he himself was enough for the task (no pun intended). They also had a cat which they kept on leash near the terrace door. It kept crying whole day asking for release from that messy place. The parking spot was always occupied by the inventory of the shop and was barely enough for our two wheelers. And the car had to be kept on the street on the way to Akshaya as there was no other spot for it.

And then came the human aspect of it. In our own house, we were like free birds – no one could question us for anything we did. We had a huge terrace where Ultra and I played football/cricket, sometimes very late in the night – most of the times the sport used to end with us fighting on who won the game :) We had parking for our vehicles and could park it the way we wanted. We had a neem tree near the gate, a coconut tree in the front yard, and could keep small pots wherever we liked. We had lots of open space and storage space – we even kept stuff like our childhood toys, kindergarten school books and what not! We could go out and come in at any time of the day/night. We could talk, scream or laugh to our heart’s content for any silly reason. We had scribbled all over the walls while growing up – no one dared to question our authority anytime. We could cook/eat anything we wanted – be it plants / pulses, eggs or those delicacies from the sea which we love so much ;)

Everything changed once we decided to move out from there. We had to discard lots of old stuff because the rented place didn’t have space to keep all of it. There was only one entry door to the house and only two main windows for ventilation – which made us feel that we were in some padded cell or something. There was no place to even keep the holy tulsi plant, let alone other pots. The first floor house was sheltered in between the owner’s house on the second floor and his shop on the ground floor and we felt we were under constant surveillance. Since he sat at the shop all day and had nothing much to do, our in-time, out-time, materials movement, lifestyle were all monitored by him as well as his family. On top of it, the owner’s mindset was of the traditional ‘Vatara’ of the 90’s, something which translates to ‘landlord is king’. Whenever we walked past the shop, he had some orders for us – ranging from how to park our two wheelers to where we should place the plants to how we should be talking inside the house. And since he was a strict vegetarian, cooking even vegetarian items with garam masala flavor was not allowed; let alone the occasional egg/seafood which we wanted to. Even ordering pizzas and taking it past the two dogs into the house made it seem a complicated task. The saddest part of all was that the gates were locked by 10 PM. In cases where all of us went out for dinner and came back after 10, we had to call up the owner and ask him to let us in. It felt too suffocating!

Back to our current situation, it was totally gripping to the watch the creativity of Nolan unfold on the screen blended with the musical genius of Hans Zimmer. However, the clock kept ticking even as that happened. Just last evening, we had been to the bus stand to drop mom and dad and returned home at 1045 PM. We had to call the owner and ask him to let us in. We did not want to be doing that again tonight as well. We didn't know what it was that made us bite our nails – the thrilling finish to the batman saga or the hunger pangs which set in us :) There would be no food at home and we had to eat out whatever we decided to eat. And in no way, we would leave the theatre in middle of the movie, though we both had watched it once before already. I had to put up with one cancelled movie show and the very first row seats at the digitally enhanced 4k sound of the Urvashi cinemas to catch it on the first weekend of its release. And Ultra being a hardcore Nolan fan had been to Hyderabad just to watch the movie on an imax screen. He went by the Garib Rath express during monsoons. It may be recalled here that the YPR-SC Garib Rath express is the same famous train which Ultra and Maama once barely managed to board on an adventurous monsoon evening. You can read the full story here and here!

It was finally 9:40 PM when we got out of the movie hall. The dog owner would lock the gates anytime after 10 and we had exactly 20 minutes to either have/pack dinner and go home. And we could not get any non-vegetarian food even if we decided to pack it. As we walked hurriedly towards the parking lot deciding what to do, the only outlet we could see in front of our eyes was the ground floor KFC! Life was so unfair and the call from the outlet was irresistible! ‘The only thing fair in an unfair world was chance’ we told ourselves and we decided to act – we two! We decided to take the chance. Ultra ran towards the parking lot to get the car out, while I ran into the KFC counter to order two zinger burgers and large chicken popcorn. We still had not figured out how to take it inside the house hiding it from the watchful eyes of the knights. For now, the priority seemed to be getting the food ready and getting back home. Within 5 minutes, I was out of the outlet with the food – thanks to the superfast service by KFC. As soon as I got into the car, Ultra suggested his master plan for the night – that we both would take turns to drive and finish off the food at the same time. That way we would get down at home without any non-veg, even if we were late. I wasted no time! We were passing through the dark and quiet Bangalore University roads and Ultra could not control laughing hearing me munching the zinger with the usual ‘chabad chabad’ noise. It was all done in 5 minutes and we stopped the car at the university gates to exchange places. I drove slowly now, as Ultra had to finish the burger and we both had to finish the popcorn in the next 3 kms. Ultra was already on it. But by the time he was done, we were just 200 metres away from the house and the dogs waited for us...

Plans changed instantly – Ultra decided that he will go into the house and stay there till I parked the car two streets away. That way, he would be there inside to open the lock and allow me in, even if the owner locked the gates. We still hadn’t figured out what to do with the chicken popcorn, but we knew for sure that we would not waste it or throw it away just because of the dogs. He got down from the main road itself and ran into the house, while I took a longer route to drive to the parking spot in order to buy more time, thinking of what to do – I decided to buy some bread and soft drinks from the nearby bakery to use as a disguise, just in case. Ultra would give me the signal if things looked out of control.

‘The dogs know… be careful and come home safe’ was what Ultra’s text read when I was parking the car. What did they know? How could they know? He did not even have any packet with him. All he had done was to have the zinger few minutes ago. Were the dogs that sensitive to know that? Or was Ultra playing a prank with me? I did not know. All I knew was that I had to be even more careful as I actually had the packet with me now. I would definitely take Ultra to task once I got home for sending such ambiguous message, and I would definitely get a bigger share of food anyway :) But first, I had to tackle the dogs! I walked as fast as my legs could carry me, mind thinking of situations, and heart beat increasing all the while. It was already 10:15 PM when I reached the gate. And surprisingly, the lights were still on at the portico. I opened the gate, and the white dog started barking immediately and I froze for a second. I already had the packet in the left hand which was far away from the dog. So, I gathered all courage that I can and went towards the stairs. That was when I saw it – the dark knight!... the more dangerous of the two dogs. It had come out of its sleeping place and was very close to the steps which I had to take. I had never seen this dog so closely before and today, it looked even more dangerous, ready to pounce on me. But the only saving grace was that it was still kept on leash. I gathered all the courage that I could muster and ran towards the steps, while the dog kept watching me all the time. After some tense, frightening moments, I was finally running up the stairs and managed to reach the first floor door, banging on it so that Ultra would let me in.

We finally savored the "prized" chicken popcorn along with fanta sitting in the house later that night. While munching the delicious fried chicken pieces, I kept thinking – managing to eat chicken popcorn had never been such an adventure before. It was just one adventurous night in that dungeon, but it symbolized something more – of all the dark times we had to undergo staying in that house. We had to struggle even for the smallest of things. It was a bad experience, but we managed to learn a lot about people and their behavior during that time. And since we were in it together, the bond between the family members grew tighter. And thankfully, we have now moved past those dark days. We managed to get into an awesome place in an apartment just in time for Dasara and Diwali season, and the happy days were back again. Especially, the festive season back home after two years, was really good in the new apartment, which almost feels like our own house these days. It is so close to everything – Oie’s place, Gunda’s place, my old school, and it feels so comfortable with all facilities – open spaces, basement parking, freedom to walk in/out anytime, big terrace to chit chat and hang out with friends and what not. Adding to it is the joy and anticipation involved in waiting and watching the new ‘Akshaya’ unfolding every day. We can now look back at those adventures in the dark house and laugh about it. But at the same time, prepare for whatever life has in store for us. And as is always the case, when it is with Ultra, life will continue to be a roller coaster ride of adventures!:)

Replaceable?

“You have so much knowledge about the work we do. No one can take your place here!”

“Sweetheart, you are one of the most wonderful people I have ever met in my life. I can never live without you!”

“You are one of the main pillars in the team. We cannot survive without you!”

“Sachin is irreplaceable in Indian cricket. He cannot be dropped from the side”

At some point or the other in our life, most of us have been at the receiving end of one or many of these statements. What would these lines make us feel? Do we feel proud that we have been able to establish so much credibility in things we do? Do we feel good that someone has placed so much trust in us and cannot do without us in their personal or professional lives? Do we feel scared that we might not be able to live up to these expectations? Do we feel so complacent that we have now become irreplaceable and hence can start taking things for granted? It could be one or many of these or even more, but one thing is for sure – it feels good to hear such statements whenever they come by (except the fourth one of course!). It also set me thinking about some of the bigger things that come with these statements – the themes and the philosophy associated with them!

The year gone by has been very pivotal for me. It began with so many things to look forward to – culmination of a professional course, a new job, moving to a new place (not city of course), happy times with family and closed ones, wedding ceremonies to look forward to and all that. Lots of things have turned the way I expected and have made me really happy. Some things have not gone the way as expected or have been extremely disappointing by the manner in which they turned out – but there were nice experiences and learnings I could take from them. At the end of the year, as I sit back and review all that happened, there seems to be one theme which I can associate to the year. If 2010 revolved around change management and 2011 revolved around skill management, then the main theme of 2012 seemed to be replaceability. Not only in my life, but even when i look at the events of the year, there seems to be the overwhelming theme of replaceability associated with it.

The year started with rumors, gossips and folklore about the world ending. What if the world really ended this year? How would all the damage start? Would it just go off on one day and replaced by zilch the next day? Or would it come slowly – one calamity after the other? Would we be replaced by some better people or life forms after that? Would it all start over again? After the kali yuga ends, shouldn’t the cycle start all over again with satya, tretaa, dwapara and kali lined up in cyclic order? All these made of interesting conversations and movie scripts. But I guess, we do not have much control on how things pan out at that level and as commoners, all we could do about these rumors is to wait and see how it unfolds. And of course, make plans for the Christmas and the new-year vacations :)

When we graduated from engineering, the most happening social networking site was orkut. If you dint have an orkut account or know what leaving a scrap or writing a testimonial meant, you would not have qualified to be called an engineer. And then there was a photo sharing site called flickr, where people shared photos in high resolution. Rediffmail was the mail account people wanted because it provided 1 GB of storage. MSN was the site that people opened for news/gossips. Yahoo messenger was used for chats and blogger was the site to post events and articles.... Today, all these have replaced by just two big names – fb and twitter! Personally as well, the number of posts on maama’s adda have also taken a beating because facebook enables microblogging and instant sharing which allows me to share easily and enables a wider reach. But that does not mean facebook itself can be complacent that it is irreplaceable. Tomorrow, something else might put facebook totally out of business and we dont even know what it is today!

Same is the case with gadgets. It is hard to believe that just a decade ago, we used to have so many different handy gadgets to make our life easy - a watch to look at the time, an alarm clock to wake us up in the morning, a calendar to plan holidays, a diary to write down contact addresses and phone numbers, a calculator to do quick 2+2 calculations, video games to play tetris, and what not. I don't even have to tell you the one device which has replaced all of these today. And with so many millions of transistors being added to the microchip every month, we dont know how many more gadgets this one ubiquotous thing will replace eventually!

After this, there was the talk on replacing the almighty Himself. Didn’t they build a huge hadron collider or something to create a replacement for GOD? I also heard that there was indeed some breakthroughs in their research in the form a Higgs Boson particle. Maybe they thought that since the world is ending anyway, it was necessary to have an alternate GOD ready to create a backup for the world so that this new god could create a new world and the people who created GOD could then claim copyright of all the thing that ever existed in the world! Thank God (old), I have written this post before their new God has taken control :) :)

Although the above paragraphs were written with pun in mind, I feel they somehow just reinforce the theme of replaceability which I have experienced for most part of the year. It just goes on to show that even though we do fear changes, we are always anticipating and preparing for them. Maybe it is the evolutionary instinct which makes us do so. If you are not able to adapt to changes, you will not survive. So, it is good to have an alternate plan ready. Students plan to work while at college. Employees plan to study while at work. Management plans for attrition when team seems to be good. Girls and boys in committed relationships plan for a backup in case things do not work out. Workers plan for retirement even while they are at prime earning age. People plan for replacements to their mobile phones, cars, etc all the time. ‘Exchange offers’ are ubiquitous these days. In fact, there are a lot of companies, especially the insurance and storage service providers which are doing business today only because people anticipate change and prepare for alternate options.

The gist of management theory is about managing risk and having alternate plans to achieve targets. In the industry, a substantial amount of money is invested in having backup servers in place so that they can handle the load in case the primary servers go off. Alternate resources, both human and machines, are always considered good to have to make sure there are no hindrances to plans. In infrastructure, service routes and detours while building roads is a primary requirement. All the new buildings designed will have alternate entry/exit paths for contingencies. New phones always come with an offer which promises an additional alternate storage space on the cloud just in case of crashes/thefts. In short, backups and alternates have become so much ingrained in lives that there is no way you cannot do without having them.

There is a very important human aspect which comes into play when we talk of backups. While machines and non-living entities are so cold and emotionless to all these ‘main’/’backup’ nomenclature, it becomes an entirely different case when dealing with people. The end-user of gmail would not even know if his mailbox got switched from a main server to a backup server on the google’s server farm. But if his manager at office was replaced by a new person, things would get so different. People have feelings and become really sensitive to changes around them. How would someone feel if the very person he was training in office for a certain skill replaced him and put him out of the job? How would workers in an industry feel if one fine day, a machine replaced them and they were asked to retire? How would it feel if someone who was a best friend till not so long ago starts ignoring you/acts very indifferent when you are around? How would you feel if your beloved for years started going out with someone who was just a friend and said that things between you two dint seem to work out anymore? These are really tough moments. Everyone would have dealt with such moments at some point or other. Some chose to take it in their stride and move on. Some might seek comfort in other temporary pleasures like alcohol/drugs/ bounce back relationships, etc. But, in some extreme cases, people get so depressed and never come back from it. It is really a tough job with replacements and backups when humans are involved, and a lot of high paying jobs today require you to possess the skill of effective communication while handling such tough situations.

So, is there a best way to replace people? Can we handle replacements when people are involved effectively at all? Well, it turns out that there are good options there as well. It is not considered fair when people are dumped unceremoniously. The onus lies in making the communication so effective that the other person feels so valued even when being replaced. Some sort of a golden handshake where everyone walks out from the deal winning. The voluntary retirement scheme in few organizations was one such example. The workers who wanted to be replaced were given handsome payouts such that they felt rewarded for their efforts. The organizations felt happy because they got rid of extra manpower and could now invest the money into buying new age machines or younger workforce. It was a win win situation for all. Even relationships lasting years together could end amicably sometimes. If one of them always wanted money/career and the other wanted care and attention, and if they managed to find it, people could part ways in a manner where there would be no hard feelings. There is this new term being used in the industry termed as ‘positive attrition’ where employees and the employers end terms on a good note. Employees go off to study in reputed institutes while employers get their brand built in such institutes thus creating a win-win situation. All in all, in any deal where the people are treated with respect and feel valued and cared, replacement becomes easy.

On the personal front, this year has been one of continuous change. We moved to a rented place for the first time in life because our old house had to be replaced by a new one. I have stayed in atleast 3-4 rented places in this year alone and the experiences have been a mixed bag – one of them really bitter, one totally awesome and others somewhere in between. Then, there have been experiences at work place where targets and priorities get replaced by new ones so dynamically that adapting to them becomes a challenge. As always, new people have come into life replacing some of the old and very special ones. There have been some people who were just acquaintances or casually walked into my life, but I have realized that they are as important to me as anyone else right now. The important replacement was that of goals. For almost six to seven years now, there was a specific purpose and goal which I pursued. And when that fell apart, lots of things changed. I wandered aimlessly for few days before it struck me that it was all part of some bigger picture which would become clear in a few days. And the most important realization that has dawned upon me is that no matter what happens, certain things or relationships in life are irreplaceable. The memories/lessons which people give are irreplaceable. One main thing that cannot be replaced is the ideology and the principles which we stand for. It is one thing which defines our character and identity and we cannot afford to lose it. I now know the people who are the most valuable in my life. They were always there when I needed them, are with me now, and will hopefully continue to be so. It makes absolute sense to hold on to them no matter what happens. I feel really happy when I know that there are so many of such close people in my life. Through this year-end post, I just want to thank (you) all for always being there!

At the brink of yet another year being replaced, there is one thing which we must all realize. It is the fact that change is the only constant in life and no matter how bad the changes seem at first, things will always turn out good in the end! There will always be experiences from which we can learn from. The replacements which come might not be welcomed at first, but eventually we will realize that there was a reason that the old one had to go and make way for the new – be it the old home, old worker, old machine, or even Sachin/Dravid/Vajapayee. Even if the world did end sometime soon, it would be only because it had gotten so bad that a better world was needed to replace it. As far as possible, try not to compare the old and new because each one had a specific purpose. Drawing parallels and lamenting about past would only make us weaker. So, let us continue to celebrate the journey of changes in life and learnings it gives us. Wishing you all a very happy new year 2013!