Managing Conflicts

If you have lived enough in this earth then it is no surprise to have felt that your ideas, your needs etc are direct opposite to that of the other person. There can be numerous conflicts that you may encounter with people, difficult situation you are put into etc. This post is not aimed at highlighting conflict resolution tactics and techniques but just stating that the problem exist somewhere and have a discussion about it.

The main common reason behind conflicts in life is perhaps miscommunication. Lack of cohesive ideas and thoughts favor conflicts.

The first thing that may come to your mind when someone asks you to come up with a solution to resolve conflict is to work out a compromise. But is it really the Holy Grail in our endeavor to resolve conflicts. Perhaps in the longer term, it may not prove to be one. It may not prove satisfactory to both parties at conflict.

If ever people were good at reading minds, then they could have effectively put themselves in other person’s shoes and tried to weigh the situation with regards to all the conflicting possibilities.

Wordle For this Site

Comic Strips!

You cannot miss this one – Mad Dog Mary
Another Good One – Mad Dog Mary
Worth Taking A Peek – End Of Ace

Twitter – Twittering the Tweets!

Twitter allows us to quickly exchanges messages with our friends from the web, IM clients, phone or from other applications via its API. The Twitter application vertically scaled itself from zero to millions of clicks per seconds in a matter of few months and consequently had to suffer from the scaling problems owing to its Ruby on Rails implementation. However, the scalability was eventually achieved by extensive caching which seems to the popular solution for all the ROR high traffic web sites.

In one way, for me Twitter is a subset of facebook providing a specific functionality in the simplest manner. Coincidentally, my facebook question to my friends is same as what Twitter is all about – ‘What are you doing now?’ People do complain and question twitter’s business value by saying that in general why should they be interested in what others are doing unless of course if you want to follow somebody special who is voyeuristic enough to deserve that degree of attention. Maybe the real usage of twitter is still unclear and the associated business model needs to find a concrete direction. How about holding a business meeting by means of twittering which means that I can be gambling in Vegas casino’s and attending a business meeting simultaneously – now that is what we call food for thought. Time will only tell whether Twitter in its present form has the capability to replace IM’s, be a unique social networking tool or may be give blogging softwares a tough time or a new dimension. If not, then can it be a starting point to achieve all that.

Just for the record, I got my first follower today and it is none other than Paulo Coelho himself, now that does add to my interest in this piece of software.

The Zahir – A Story Of Obsession

Zahir , a story of love, obsession, loss, anxiety and myriad of emotions by Paulo Coelho, is written in an autobiographical style though it’s a piece of fiction. Zahir is the story of a famous author whose wife suddenly disappears and then begins the journey of author to discover his wife and in the process he rediscovers himself. So, essentially Zahir is a journey about visualizing the unexplored area within oneself.
I am not quite sure whether I did understand Alchemist when I gobbled it years ago, perhaps I should skim over it intensely again to really understand it. Like any other Paulo’s thought provoking writing, it is not easy to fully understand rather embrace the depth of his writing unless you have been through the same emotion yourself. This is precisely the main reason why there is so much criticism of his writing and his books are termed as being overrated and he himself being self-indulgent. I think I understood most part of Zahir though not completely, there are just so many emotions involved in it; it is even hard to put it in writing. But some of the lessons that he puts across are – It’s ok to be in love with multiple people at the same time, following our dreams by recognizing the signs of universe; life should be lived like an empty vessel, always there to be refilled; some of the apparent rules of society are simply archaic; love is the most important of anything and everything and most importantly opposite of love is not hatred, opposite of life is not death; opposite of art is not ugliness but it is Indifference.