Sonnet - Last Night

Last night – was cold, lyrical and lost,

Not true to modern scheme of dull;

Where a pint of Elegiac quietness costs,

And no cradles paused for lullaby’s lull.

Then how, seduced was nature’s pulse!

That every soul in winter’s hide,

Drunk, from folds of drowsy petals,

Restless, like some lonely bride.

Stood, waited for its turn to touch,

To lit in pyre of midnight chill,

What not brought in ease, and such

Fire returns, for Poet’s fill.

And those who slept in peace and quiet,

Day returned, as forever will.

Keeping Things Organized

We all wish to keep one personal contact list and one personal calendar, alongside our emails and carry them where ever we go. It has become confusing and many of us are not doing it the best way. I am always in lookout for complete synchronization Nirvana. As long as you are willing to spend, there are many option (still confusing though), but what about free services?

For emails, I have been using Gmail since few years now and partially shifted to Windows live. Why? The simple answer is Outlook. One who has used outlook will surely understand its enterprising qualities. Sure Gmail can be configured in outlook too  but Microsoft still had a weapon in its arsenal. One of the best things that Microsoft came out for average email user was Microsoft outlook connector. Now outlook can be easily integrated with your live email account. There was never a feeling of this surety when using other email services with outlook.

Now your personal contacts can be kept synchronized with your Live email account. Not only this, your calendar can be synchronized with live account too. This is managed automatically by the connector. And most of us are already used to keep our mobile phones synchronized with outlook. So it completes a one way circle and puts us in a very comfortable situation.

Mobile phone (Contacts, Calendar) à Outlook on your Computer (Contacts, Calendar) à  Live Email Account (Contacts, Calendar)

Now if you change any item either in your mobile phone or your outlook or while logged in your email the change will be reflected in all three places when next synchronization happens. Chances are you will not even notice. You can download Microsoft Live connector here:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=9a2279b1-df0a-46e1-aa93-7d4870871ecf&displaylang=en

This method lacks a third system where mobile phone can directly sync with your online account/server. But if that was so easy everyone could enjoy true productivity tools that are starting point of corporate communication platform.

There is something we can still do, if you wish it to be that way. For that you need to have an Funambol account. There is another common language that speaks among our devices. Its known as SyncML. Funambol is one of many SyncML service providers. Most phones come in with built in SyncML settings. Once you have an account on Funambol, their website will guide you to integrate your phone with its settings. Now you can directly Sync your Calendar and contacts with your phone wirelessly (known as OTA or over-the-air) with Funambol account. First part finished.

Synchronizing phone with outlook is also easy enough. Now you need to put your outlook in touch with your Funambol account to complete the circle. Unlike other SyncML providers, Funambol makes this very easy. All you have to do is download their outlook plug-in and you are done! It automatically becomes part of the menu.

Now your three presences can talk to each other. You can never loose your contacts or calendar….and modify them anywhere without bothering. Funambol personal can be reached here:

http://my.funambol.com/

It also advertises a SyncML based push email solution. I have not tested it personally. You can, if you like it. Most of the Nokia users can now easily enjoy Blackberry type push email solution developed by Nokia and christened Nokia Email. Its very quick and works like a charm.

For others looking forward to using push email without spending a dime should give Cortado Mail a try. It provides free push mail but with a hurting limit of 20 MB per mailbox. I advice, forwarding mails from your primary email id to your Cortado address and configuring Cortado mail on your phone. Check, reply and delete. At least serves as a makeshift purpose.

You can find these details on my Blog as well. Thanks and regards. 

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Office 2010

Office 2010 is so sleek and imaginative. Not much seems to have changed on outer shell, but subtle changes (all in the right direction), signals towards a proper aesthetic integration with the new operating system – Windows 7.

 

Microsoft must have had clear and distant vision about its aero theme while constructing Vista. Instead of expanding its effects, with windows 7 we see an expansion of whole idea itself. It has been used to enhance the ‘cool’ factor. Instead of a spearhead marketing campaign it is now something that must be taken granted for. With windows 7 we will see it being utilized by all flagship Microsoft products. Interestingly it was not the case during Vista, when software like Outlook 2007 and Money Suite ditched the favour.

Brotherhood of Sorrow

You know what is the biggest problem in a man’s life? His knowledge (or lack of) where he stands in larger scheme of things! While a biologist will get off with a description of a creature so handsomely descended from a bunch of apes in wild savannah,  a learned  physicist will dismiss him just as a bunch of atoms, but frankly, what makes us? Perhaps those who could describe us best are ourselves…and our description of ourselves is not only non-elegant but also largely variable.

And then the large clock of this universe ticks so ominously in the background. Whatever came, passed away.  Even the rocks fade away through winds of time.

 

Some will see an inextinguishable sense of beauty in the thoughts, while others will drown in utter pessimism.  The fact is that we all together could not find a common expression for the inevitable truth of a mortal human. Death in animal kingdom is an everyday phenomenon. Life is consumed into other lives. There is no concept of soul or eyes to shed tears. Life was meant to perform at breakneck pace….a mechanism of universal order. No animal was interested in questioning the sense (or nonsense) behind it, why few survived and other not. Everything was hidden inside blueprints of evolution, a small map tucked inside deepest building blocks of  physical bodies.

 

Then a creature walked among them – standing tall, hanging his head high, using its fingers to hold, scanning the surface of tall African grasses, it was the time when earth stood on brink of a cosmic metamorphosis. Looking back, it would had been  something painfully slow – like a message bottle  floating across oceans. The change had begun. Yet humans found their irony in something animals learned to accept millennia back.

Tribes were formed to protect and care. Wounded were taken care of, dead were mourned, funerals were ritualized, villages were born. A single thought – “to be together” – guided us during times whose last marks have been dutifully eroded by time. Perhaps it was a time of true adventure, every mile had new challenges, horizons appeared closer as landscapes changed beyond every valley or slope.  This new feeling, was something around which humans have ever since weaved their concept of pure love and true brotherhood. And yet they could not conquer fate….when time came, it ate away the souls of their beloved.  Perhaps we are united because of a common grief…..we are, truly, the brotherhood of sorrow…

Twitter

This generation has brought so many buzzwords with it. There are so many ways in which we all like to talk to each other that everyday something new comes up. But very few shape up to be the phenomenon that is “Twitter”. Yes guys, I am on twitter now…..here is my tweet link:

http://www.twitter.com/ vikram_sr

See you there!

Absence…or no absence

How do people find time to update blogs daily? What drives them to write on a public notebook? Do they have perfect jobs…..come home early, spend time with children, pets and computers…or maybe endless source of income so that writing business is all for pleasure.

See, with how much reluctance I posted the above paragraph? Words falling into each other, like a crumbling tower of a child’s alphabet blocks. There is so much worthwhile to be written….but where are the serious readers, the attentive audience, the thinking humans? We love that fact that we are now connected through a world wide web, we love to chat instantly, but where is the revolution which is promised with this communication blast? Are we overfed technology? How much sense we make lately? In fact how come this sudden explosion of ‘being in touch’ made our words smaller? Our sentences shorter? Lolz……

Aren’t we still frogs of the well, while the well got a whole lot bigger! Prisoners of stilted evolution….At a moment there are only few controlling the true power of this phenomenon. Evidently, these are the people who will decide our future.

Coming back soon....

Sorry for the misssing action. I will be coming back to my blog, very soon.


----Vikram Singh----
My Blog-> http://life-opera.blogspot.com/

Poem I

During the bitter sweet nights, of moon and mint,
Besides shapeshifting dunes of timeless sands,
baptized by careless flames of her silk and breath,
That night, on Altar, I was sacrificed.

As the last flutter, before the bird is seized,
feathers ceded to fuming agony of her crown;
with blood poured into golden caskets of fate mongers,
the body of the outcast dragged to the shores.

Beyond sullen mountains and grizzling clouds,
sight of the my Lord glide upon the carcass.
leaving it adrift, on the great pilgrimage,
dissolved in absolution, lost in ravages of time .

The Choice that ever was.....

Yesterday I missed. Better not make a habit out of it.

The day started as usually, albeit a little chore sprang up out of nowhere. It consumed nothing more than 20 minutes but landed me pre-maturely in front of my office in face of a locked door. I have seen this spectacle at least five times now, and I do not really look forward to it.

How much human soul is battleground for inner struggles. I have learned that most of our work area is constructed with in benign boundaries of society and civilization. To learn is not essentially to follow. The Colosseum of life, is it? Men fighting like gladiators while spectators hoot or clap waiting somewhere with a hidden inevitable perception that they have their own armours to follow. Few who would remain standing, few who be raised to dust. But is is not a time to wait and marvel. It is the time to move and follow. It has been taught the only way to exist.

But sometimes there is a greater battle going on inside the flesh and sweat. Unavoidable, sustained, relentless. Where every spectator is masked but hides the same face. There is only one gladiator. How man times we rise and fall in front of our own eyes. How many times the pain is same even when we are the sole witness of the victim, that is us. How important it is? Can its philosophical implication lifted above the great battle of existence? Or is it not the fundamental battle for existence?

A lonely man is a huge battlefield. Everyone is a hero in his own right. He may not have bled or sweat in the field but has fought even bigger battles to stay away from the fields. We are all eternal fighters. We need not be heroes for the others of our kind. We need to be heroes for ourselves. Staunch your knees and stand to face the gales.
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There are many thoughts that go through my mind like an arrow slithers through linen. They are quick, they pass by. There are things to be done. More important than anything faced before. Then comes the harrowing thought that this may not pass. The past chases me. It will all come to a similar end. To have the choice on the way we could die, does not make things easier. But it may come as a boon to someone who is being slaughtered, and gets a choice of heart attack. It makes things easier to accept. Likewise, choices in life does not alter our fate, they just make things little more acceptable. It is how we choose to live life; live life we have to. It is to make us believe that it was us who chose that path so whatever befalls. While fate behaves like an overgrown lion, not letting us know that he had ways to make us tread the same path if ever we had chosen otherwise. We all will still thinking the same- our decision.

This is not discouraging. To face our fate should not be discouraging. Its like a man meets his Lord. Its a pilgrimage leading to the final showdown. And it about the flowers we plucked on the way together.
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I am standing before a giant abandoned mausoleum.Desecrated. We have condemned our masters. We have constructed our own edifices. We have made ourselves what we started out with. We ended up in this purgatory. We achieved.

It is time to stand front against our worst fears. Because it will come silently and swiftly. But it will come. We cannot cheat our destiny.