Please vote for this blog
I waited a long time, debating whether to do this, but here goes…
This blog has been nominated in the Indibloggies in two categories – best entertainment blog and best designed blog. If you enjoy reading this blog and agree, please do take a moment to vote for Tatvam and Tatvam Productions.
You can vote here – Indibloggies Vote Form
#8, Best Entertainment Indiblog
#14, Best Designed Indiblog
And if you are going there, why not vote for my personal blog, Almost As Good As Chocolate in #16, Best Personal Indiblog? 
Oh, voting closes in 2 days.
Thank very much!
Happy Deepavalli
This Deepavalli was very mellow. Barely felt like Deepavalli.
Life has been crazy. Probably the most hectic I’ve ever seen and that’s saying a lot after the insanity of 2001 – 2003. Every day I want to blog but it’s a choice between 15 minutes to blog or 15 minutes to sleep. Sleep wins every time.
Except today!
But that’s because the plan is to make this short. And to just say that I’ll be back with more soon.
Hope everyone has a safe Deepavalli!
Defining success
What does every person on earth want? To be happy. But how people define happiness and therefore how they define success is partly the reason that so few people are, in fact, happy.
We are conditioned to accept the definition of success that society puts out there. And because our acceptance is so unquestioning, it seriously affects how we make decisions. How long do people stay in jobs that don’t make them happy but meet society’s criteria of success? Society’s criteria become personal criteria and then it gets much harder to extricate yourself.
I was so there. I had a box – a set of definitions I subscribed to that were universally accepted. And because so much of how I defined myself was tied to my job, the decision to quit and the process of adjustment afterwords was hard.
Alain de Botton has an interesting talk on this topic -
It gets better with time, but it’s still not easy. I consciously put blinkers on to exclude outside opinions when I think about my definition and how I am doing against it.
Would love to hear how do you define success…
Quality
A group I’m involved with was embroiled in a debate. One side contended that passion was the most important factor in a blog post – do you care enough? Do you bleed onto the page? The other side maintained that passion without quality is just… drivel.
Forget blogs for a second – let’s consider work. Can you get away with delivering a sub-par, error-filled deliverable at work if you offer that it was done with passion? Work is not the same as blogging? Really? Why – are blogs your fun/amateur activity? If you think so, read John August’s piece on professionalism. And remember in this Google world, everything lives forever. And your name is on it.
What do I think? Quality is absolute. Evaluated on an absolute basis and absolutely required. In this instance, a Hugh MacLeod cartoon says it best…
Life
This is one of my favorite pictures. From our trip to Iceland in 2007.
It’s a metaphor for life, really.
[Updated - if the picture loads fuzzy, please hit reload. It is not out of focus, but sometimes renders soft - not sure why.]
I also blog at
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Design