Thursday, February 03, 2005

HBR , Office politics and Spelling Bee

A long entry ( very unlikely of me ) to compensate for the many days of absence ..


For the past three days I was immersed in the spectacular world of magazines mostly biz .. ( HBR , Economists et al ) . And i found this issue of the Harvard Business Review to be good .. actually fantastic !.. I usually donot read HBR. It talked about office politics and personal management and how to cope with change and a few advices from the top . And there was a work sheet on keeping your priorities and setting time, money and energy to your commitments ! ...wonderful .


Today morning I watched this documentary called Spellbound ( the story on 8 self driven kids in the 1999 National Spelling bee contest ) The documentary is excellently made with excellant background score ! .
1. Sometimes wonder if their parents are pushing them a little too much .. Else i think that these are really talented kids who by now are in some top notch Ivy Leagues or doing their majors in Microbiology or Economics or Nanotechnology .

2. Another particularly interesting thing is the percentage of Indian kids who make it to the finals every year !! ( India as in Asian Indian. The ones with the dots on their forehead ... not the feather :-) ) The 1999 spelling bee champion ( in this documentary is an Indian .. sorry for the plot-spoil .. but there are many indians in the finals ;-) ) First generation Indians in America are particularly known for their hard work and determination ! ( out of the last 6 years .. 3 spelling bee champions are of Indian origin )

3. Kids become scared of loosing . They tend to develop anxiety and fear towards loosing . Their parents fail to understand that loosing is a part of life ... Listen to this ...
" Akshay, an eighth-grader who attends Mountain Ridge Middle School in Colorado Springs fainted during Round 6. But the boy quickly stood up and correctly spelled "alopecoid," which means like a fox. Akshay received a standing ovation from the audience ! " ( from the 2003 Annual Spelling bee contest )


Quote de jour !

"We tend to forget that happiness doesn't come as a result of getting
something we don't have, but rather of recognizing and appreciating what we do have."
– Frederick Koenig

This was sent to me by one of my colleagues I sometimes wonder how much it holds true . When I sent this quote to one of my other friends, she told me it was not happiness it was contentment that Koenig really wanted to say .. ( a day after that .. after "hours of contemplation" she said that probably it really IS Happiness !

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"Florentino is so in love with Fermina that he eats gardenias and drinks cologne so that he can know her taste. He becomes drunk on the cologne, and his mother finds him the next morning, in a puddle of his vomit, in a cove of the bay where drowning victims are known to wash ashore" - Love in the time of Cholera