Tag Archives: WhatsApp

Group Sensitivity!

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Not that they have not existed since ages,

and

Not that we all are not social beings,

The way we communicate has certainly changed in this digital and especially Covid era,

Be it the video calls on apps like Zoom, Skype etc.

or

Be it the chat apps such as Whatsapp, Snapchat etc.

But the very reason am writing this post is because of an unfortunate occurrence on one of the whatsapp groups that I happen to be a part of,

Don’t know what the need was,

Cannot decipher why it was mentioned,

yet

What came out from a certain representation was sheer hatred for a particular community,

Which made me wonder,

Have we truly lost the essence of being human?

Have we given up on sensitivities of not hurting people around us?

Have we become ruthless letting our opinionated and judgmental mind to rule our persona?

If not,

Then why think and act in such a questionable manner?

Guess, we have all forgotten,

Some kind of restraint always helps and personal attacks never,

for

An eye for an eye will only make the entire world go blind!

Source for the Image: https://theconversation.com/how-whatsapp-group-admin-became-one-of-the-most-powerful-jobs-in-politics-126041

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Lap-topping the Baggage!

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The inspiration for this post, I draw from the new platforms like Facebook, Whatsapp, LinkedIn etc. which have become a place for putting across to the world, one’s accomplishments,

Be it parents posting it on behalf of their intellectual kids,

or

Be it the professionals who are awarded for their hard work.

From childhood, parents inspire or force (at times) their kid to become the best in academics/sports/anything and everything, to which a kid might have varied reaction, depending on factors like:

The state of mind kid has, at that point of time, under the influence of his/her peer group, more so.

Whatever be the reason, most feel the baggage of parents’ and society’s expectations in their growing up years,

What a pity! Considering the most beautiful days of one’s life is lost in chasing fulfilment of expectations.

Once, the kid grows up, the baggage shifts to becoming the best in whatever field of study, he/she manages to pursue,

More so because of the perceived nature of the college than his/her interest, which in any case, he/she hadn’t had the time to ponder over;

Too busy was he/she bearing the baggage!

Entering the professional world, literally puts that baggage in the form of laptop bags that most professionals seem to carry around in today’s world, having implications for one’s health,

Leave alone the mental torture one has to go through, sheerly because most don’t like the work that they happen to be doing,

And aren’t able to justify how this work is bringing about an impact to others’ lives, that being the derivative of highest level of satisfaction that one draws.

Top this with the pollution, traffic etc. in the city, and what you picture is a person, moving around with his baggage all over the city,

Not knowing why the hell is one doing so!

Money, which was more a matter of survival than accumulation, has become the basis of life for most of us, having all the negative consequences for us day-in-day-out,

Yet, we tend to stick to it, because of the fear and an inability to answer: what if we don’t have what we have?

Is there a way out?

baggage

Well, yes if you want to find a way out!

One needs to understand the difference between survival aspiration and accumulation aspiration. 

The former fits in well with the concept of maintain a good physical and mental health, allowing one to contribute to well being of others,

Whereas the second, leads to a path of disaster and chaos for oneself as well as the others.

Once that understanding is there, one wouldn’t be thinking of carrying all the baggage that one proudly carries in today’s world,

And justifies the same, labelling it as his/her ability to multitask.

The only question is whether one is prepared to change the very way one perceives things.

Are you?

Source for the Image: https://brandimpact.wordpress.com/2012/05/15/words-with-baggage/

P2P Competition!

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“You know what, my son Siddharth is doing great in his coaching classes for IIT Jee. Today, his teacher was telling me that he would surely make it to top 100″, says a parent P1 to another parent P2, who is the father of Shreya, who’s Siddharth classmate.

“Oh, is it! That’s wonderful. Shreya is somewhat lagging behind in Chemistry. I just hope she is able to catch up, am a little concerned whether she will be able to qualify the exam”, responds P2.

“You know what, you should start sending Shreya to this wonderful coaching institute in our neighbourhood, if you really want her to succeed”, P1, being a proud parent that he is, is always on look-out to offer free advise to other parents living in the same community.

“I guess, you are right! Let me enrol her in the same program as Siddharth”, conforms P2.

If you are wondering whether P1 and P2 might just be an exception to the rule when it comes to parents demonstrating concerns for their kids, think again, for that’s what you tend to see in majority of parents these days.

What most kids’ routine would look like in today’s competitive world:

5:00 am Good morning

6:00 am Tutor at home, who takes care of kid’s Science and Math lessons

7:30 am Kid goes to school in an air-conditioned bus of the respective school which has curtains, and kids seem to be cut off from the world outside, few among who, spent most of the time in the bus, browsing on the internet, or watching some random video or chit chatting on Whatsapp

3:30 pm School gets over, kid sits in the same bus, comes back home, around 4:30 if he/she is lucky enough and his/her house comes first in the list of the drop-offs

5:00 pm After a quick snack of sorts, kid has some extra-curricular lesson with a relevant tutor coming to the house, be it a piano session or a tabla session, for kids need to excel in not only their studies but also other things, which gives a parent an opportunity to showcase their kid as a trophy of sorts to the who’s who of their society 

6:30 pm Kid goes to a coaching institute, where he/she is supposed to prepare for a competitive exam

8:00 pm Kid comes back to the house, totally drained out, but wait a minute, he/she needs to complete a set of assignments given either by the morning tutor or the school

9:30 pm Kid gets a chance to have his/her dinner and by the time, he/she is able to finish the same, there is no energy left whatsoever to remain awake, yet he/she, courtesy the mobile phone, spends sometime on the same, before falling asleep

family-867

And this continues for the entire year, which goes against the very fundamentals of how a kid should spent his/her wonderful childhood years.

Courtesy the quality of teachers we have in the system, the school system kills the inherent curiosity of a kid, ensuring that he/she is thrown into the rat race from the very moment, he/she is able to perceive the world in a certain manner.

Courtesy the eagerness of the parents to see their kids not lagging behind, the kid suffers tremendous stress, few of them succumbing at times to the same, few who might be lucky enough to not meet the same fate as above, end up spending the wonderful years of their life in a tizzy.

Courtesy the immediate society who are thriving on the vary act of comparison, ensures that the kid, who is so called not able to make it big, ends up going through a mental and emotional trauma, which surely leads to having repercussion in the latter half of their life.

What a waste, I would say!

Just because competing with someone has become the very basis of life, parents have a tendency to put their kid through enormous amount of stress.

Just because a parent considers it as their right to get their expectations fulfilled by their kids, they forget that the very life they have brought into this world is meant to experience and explore, rather than just meeting those man-made targets.

It’s high time that we as a society and parents begin to realise, that what we define as success, is it really the case?

And if not, then why the hell we are bent upon putting our kids through such torture.

My advice:

Calm down parents, be sensible, for this competition among yourselves would end up in being a disaster for not only your kid, but also for the society as a whole.

Source for the Image: http://www.altonschools.org/index.cfm?page=1045

Info Mind!

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With the explosion of access to information that has taken place in the recent past, and we being exposed to tiniest bit of the same every now and then via different sources,

Be it the news app that we have installed in our smart phones or

The WhatsApp groups in which people tend to share anything and everything, considering their responsibility of keeping the groups active at all times,

The fact of the matter is that there is too much of it. And the need to know more, at times, just because, you have to keep up with the group dynamics and the conversations happening there in, has become an overload of sorts.

Which at times lead to unnecessary burn out, for most of the information that we tend to be consuming is of no consequence to us, and the more the garbage you tend to take in and accumulate, the more the chances of pouring it out (garbage in garbage out (GIGO)). 

mind-filter

At the same time, the mind, instead of being an enabler for a balanced approach to life, tends to soil it with insecurities and the fear of the unknown.

Feel the need to have a filter which could somehow do the job of curing the content before it reaches your sound imagination and visualization?

Well, it might not come from planet Mars, has to be figured out within the realms of planet Earth. 

And who is going to do that? Any guesses?

None other than you, yourself!

It comes down to disciplining and conditioning your mind out of the social conditioning that it has got used to.

The only question that arises is,

Are you willing enough to pay attention to what really matters and ignore the unwanted?

Source for the Image: http://terrificdata.com/2016/09/29/you-are-uninformed-sharif-youssef/mind-filter/

 

 

Wondering_Importance!

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You get up, more often than not, you check your phone these days to see how many Whatsapp messages you might have received, or how many likes on your pic which you uploaded last night on Fb you have got, get happy seeing the likes or get depressed seeing no likes ;).

Reality strikes and you are made aware of the meeting that you have early morning, you start to rush around, trying to get ready asap, and grabbing a sandwich or so in your hand, you leave your house.

Sit in your car/cab, cursing the traffic which is bound to make you get late for the all important meeting which was supposed to get you a raise/promotion or whatever you value most in your professional life.

You reach the meeting, a little startled and unprepared, though you end up performing well, considering the hard work that you might have put in the night before, and only then are you able to bring your BP down to so called normal levels.

Assignment after assignment you try to somehow deal with all the frustration of sitting in the office day-in-day-out, until you are brought back to the horrible traffic in your car/cab, which at times takes an hour or so more for you to reach the place we all refer to as our home.

2-whyitsimport

Probably, the above is a reflection of the very life 90-95% of the folks are leading today.

Somehow, all the things that were inherently important, be it good health, fresh food, time spent with family, healthy conversation at work place, the famous Nike tagline of doing what you love, feeling joyful and happy when you accomplish a wonderful feat have gone into a background,

Being overtaken and haunted by the thought of how much I made this month, whether my bank balance increased by a certain X amount, whether I was able to buy my favorite car this quarter, what if I don’t buy my dream house in the next one year, what if my boss gives promotion to my enemy no. 1 in office, what if my wife doesn’t get that all important diamond ring from me which I promised to her like a year before.

As a consequence, you end up feeling tired, restless at the things you are trying to match the pace with on a daily basis, and more importantly begin to get affected by diseases or conditions, courtesy the degradation in your immune system, considering the kind of thought process and physical activity that you might have pushed yourself into in the past decade or so.

Don’t you think, it’s high time, you start to give importance to what really matters when it comes to leading a fulfilling life?

Don’t you think, it’s high time, you start to take it easy and give yourself the much needed relief from the fast pace of day-night match you seem to be playing with your life?

If not now, then when, if not today, then there might not be any tomorrow,

So stop wondering about how you might be able to become the who’s who, and start to wonder what if you couldn’t become the who and act accordingly! 🙂

Source for the Image: https://phys.org/news/2017-09-important-physics-gender-bias.html

Does being Apped means losing Humanity?

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Evolution is inevitable, but have you ever wondered that we would evolve so much so as to have our entire lives and generation apped.

Ya, that’s the buzz word. Possibly anything that you can think of at the moment has been put as a service/product which can be accessed through an app. It was only yesterday that I came to know, that an app exists for funeral services as well for those who are not able to make it in time for the last riots of their loved ones.

Can you believe it? An app for a funeral service? Ironically, on one hand, where it is extraordinarily funny because of our socialization process, the way we all have been brought up in India, on the other, being apped means lot of convenience.

It means the time that earlier you might have so called wasted, can now be utilized for more productive work, though I still believe the entire concept can be questioned.

We are spending more than 70% of our time, either on our laptops or our mobile phones. Our real life conversations have gone down.

images

If I were to picture a typical ITied family, you would see the husband and wife doing something on their respective IT platforms and the kid, who might have just been introduced to the likes, would be trying to add friends on Whatsapp or Fb.

What we earlier referred to as the family time has now got transformed into IT time. Father doesn’t seem to have time to spend with his kids, wife or parents. The wife, especially if she is a house-wife seemed to have found some abode in the arms of the virtual. The kids love the alley of the technology that they seem to be racing into.

The only ones who are left out in this entire ITionization or Appionization or whatever you might want to refer to as are the parents of the grownups or the generation that gave birth to the so called successful techies.

I know, some of us, would want to argue, that IT has helped us remain connected with our parents. At least we have an option to either do a skype or video calling sitting somewhere in US.

I just wonder, when we were young, and when we needed our parents’ attention the most, be it being fed when we were hungry or be it when we craved for their attention when we were hurt, if our parents were to come and tell us that they were appified, I bet we wouldn’t have liked it.

It’s our time, it’s our physical presence, it’s us providing the much wanted emotional support and attention, that our parents need the most, when they become old.

Where on one hand, it’s good to learn new things, keep oneself updated with what’s happening, on the other hand, we should try not to become so ITied or apped, where we tend to lose the very essence and foundation of humanity and love.

Source for Image: https://twitter.com/appstore

Connecto: The New Kid on the Block

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I woke up this morning with a strange feeling of being wired up. No matter where I go, I tend to be surrounded by wires and signals running all over my being. Yes, you can call it by what ever name you want, be it the internet revolution or the IT revolution, the fact is that we all are living in a Matrix (taking the liberty of borrowing this word from the famous movie), wherein we can be tracked every moment where we are going, what we are doing, what intentions we might have and what behavior might be expected of us.

Whether it be walking on the road with our mobiles in our pockets or whether it be browsing the internet, we are being tracked for every movement we tend to make, be it the mouse on which we move our fingers or be it the smart phone which we might be using for browsing the internet or sending a message to our friends on whatsapp. 

If you are feeling that your lives have been intruded, well to certain extent yes. But as you might be aware that there are always two sides of a coin, one which you feel happy about and the other which you don’t really take great pride in, so is this very aspect of making our lives go digital.

Without going into the cons, as cons are in itself defined to be such by the impact that they are making and by the very nature of usage of the pros, let me try to focus on the pros of the same.

One thing is for sure, that our lives have become simpler. If you have any sort of doubt regarding this, let me cite a couple of examples which might leave you on the pro side of things.

Imagine the kind of hassle one had to go through while paying, say an electricity or a phone bill. How much effort was required when it came to booking a train ticket! How wonderful it is that we can now book a cab or a taxi using the wonderful facility of a phone or internet!

On part of the consumers, so far so good. Let me now talk about how this has altered the way businesses are being run and what impact it is having on the sales or generation of leads and ultimately the ROI, which indeed becomes the bottom line and can be a key determinant when it comes to existence or non-existence of an entity.

How wonderful would it be for an e-commerce company if they can have a software product or a tool wherein they can gauge how much time a customer is spending on a web page or a particular page and they in turn can pop-up customized message based on the intent and understanding of the need of the customer! For instance, a girl might be looking to buy a top (say) and then suddenly a pop-up message like, “hey, we have the most fashionable tops at lowest of prices, please click here.” or say, something like, “Do you need assistance in buying a top, please click here.”Connecto Blog

Won’t you feel wanted and catered to by this virtual sales person? And this indeed can go a long when it comes to acquiring and retaining a customer from the point of view of an e-commerce company.

This, I have cited for an e-commerce company in particular but can be made applicable to any other company, whether it be a broker looking to acquire leads, or be it a travel company like makemytrip.com which is on a constant endeavor to satisfy the customers’ thirst for choosing the best possible travel deals which fits in perfectly well with their budget.

And one such product/tool that does exactly what I have stated above is Connecto (http://www.connecto.io/). It can be called no less than a revolution in this world of digital marketing, wherein it can help the businesses understand their customers’ intent and buying behavior and in turn enables them to engage their customers in a more focused and customized manner, which ultimately shows up in increased sales and increased ROI (defined by the sales achieved per $ of money invested in digital marketing).

The wonderful thing about using this product is that you don’t really have to spend money like you would have spent, say on any social networking platform like the facebook or linkedin and even better is the ROI that you get by using the features offered by this product/tool.

My take on the product is:

“If you are an e-Commerce company looking to increase your sales and customer base; if you are an NGO, trying to reach out to your investors or people in general;

if you are a property broker looking to generate more leads;

if you are a travel site looking to engage your customers in a better manner in order to increase your conversion rate;

if you are a blogger who wants to interact with your clientele which in this case happens to be the readers; or

if you are any person with any kind of presence on the internet in terms of having a website; you got to grab this opportunity of using this wonderful product which comes with an initial free trial period and then depending on the impact it is having on your businesses, you can decide to upgrade it or not. 

You just need to visit http://www.connecto.io/ and sign up for a call back and then the efficient customer service that these people have, will get in touch with you and will help you better your prospects of minting money. With excellent service, coupled with a team of programmers from  IIT Delhi, this seems to be the best bet when it comes to real time data analytics and constant and meaningful engagement with customers on a real time basis.

Source for Image: http://www.connecto.io/