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.

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.

This writing is not about whether it was justified to send RDB for Oscars and not LRMB, not about whether international audience can relate more with Gandhi and not with Bhagat Singh but it is about comparing the relative merit of contrasting messages that these two movies put forward.Is the message that the stylized RDB puts forward really the message that can help our society to get rid of corruption and move forward towards the path of progress or is it the LRMB’s message that can help our ever-deteriorating society towards positive development. RDB, synchronization between the past and the contemporary, is no doubt a more hard-hitting movie than LRMB as it revolves around the role that the youth of the country can play in the future but is the message that it sends across the right message. It might be something that youth of today can relate with but is it the right way of tackling some of the common issues of our society or is the Gandhi wadi better way of tackling it. Is it too difficult to follow Gandhi-wadi these days and too easy to act like what RDB youth’s did. No doubt they sacrificed their life to set an example for the other people or for youth to put some serious thought for the society but is it the right message that’s sent across. Everything boils down to the fact that whether you feel Bhagat Singh ideology was correct or was it Gandhi’s. If we look at our history…is there any reasoning behind why ideas of  Gandhiji is glorified and not Bhagat Singh ‘s. It might be too difficult to adopt Gandhi wadi these days but isn’t this what our conscience tells us to do. Isn’t it relatively easier to follow the path of Bhagat Singh or what bunch of youth’s in RDB did. No doubt they laid their lives to set an example for their countrymen but was it right way of doing it and the example that they set was it justified enough. It’s a natural human instinct to fight with each other or to adopt violence method but doesn’t it require larger than life qualities to adopt the non-violence or the right way of achieving things. Is it too late for us to follow what path Gandhiji has set for us or is it something out of fashion to follow it .

What are the characteristics of an effective leader? The term Leader has a very wide ranging scope. It’s not something very generic but may vary from the perspective one views it or in which context it is seen. I sometimes wonder are leaders born, I mean is someone born to be a leader or over a period of time one imbibes somethings which turns the person into a leader. That poses an interesting question – is there a generic profile of a leader or is it more of situational based? In the famous World-cup soccer game this year, favorites France lost the cup because of a vicious headbutt by none other than their captain. It was one incidence of a highly irresponsible behavior that too by none other than their captain. As the saying goes – With great powers comes the great responsibility. Leadership has a strong correlation with power – the power to guide others. So when one assumes an imminent position, one should have that responsibility as the powerful person’s action doesn’t generally reflect their actions but it is viewed as action of their followers or the community they lead.
Further, are there any metrics that can help us to measure the effectiveness of leadership? Is it just the extent of influence that the leader has over it’s clout that determines the effectiveness or does the effectiveness determination should also include comparing against some desired goals or aim.
There would be many qualities that a leader should possess but I believe vision is the more important. Seeing things before others can see or being able to see invisible things is an important trait of a successful leader. Of course, there might be many more attributes that makes one a leader but I guess vision is what turns a leader into a successful one. The successful leader with vision should have the capability of turning his vision into reality by making sub-ordinates not only work with sincerity and dedication but they should be ready to make sacrifices to achieve the lofty-vision of the leader. I strongly feel that these qualities that turns a person into a leader or renders vision to one’s leadership is not something that you can learn in a closed room B-school course. This is something that you can learn from your day to day life. Finally to sum up, it would be appropriate to mention the saying of famous 21st century Brazilian writer of The Alchemist: A Fable about following dreams fame, Paulo Coelho – “A Philosophy of life: I’m an adventurer, looking for treasure”.

Have you ever tried Googling your name. Well, it might be considered as the height of Randomness but sometimes I do that when I have nothing else to do. Check out this Link to really understand the power of Googling. http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05064/464905.stm
We can even find how often we are being Googled. Isn’t that interesting?  All we have to do is to buy a Google AdWords advertisement against our name so that if anyone searches against our name, our Ad will be displayed. We can get the Statistics of our Ad placement from Google so as to get the exact count. Today I put my name in the Fun box(Google), and I was amazed to find eight entries for me out of first ten. In the past, I use to find entries against my name just because I share my name with somebody else well-known. I don’t know the reason for this transition but it seems that may be after this blog which is a official Google’s product, I can find myself on the searchable items.

P.S. – - Have you ever wondered which is the most popular searchable person on the Google, it’s none other than Paris Hilton. This is not what I feel but is the result of some survey done somewhere by someone(now…does that sound too Vague??).