A Very Happy New Year

I always wondered why do we celebrate a New Year. Strongest association I have with a new year is that I would keep wrongly writing the year part of the date for sometime. Apart from this the zillion number of times I would repeat wish you happy new year. It feels nice that we have some reason to gift a wish and smile to each other as we tend to make good mornings formal and serious very quickly even at any place. In the bigger scheme of things I don't know how a year matters but as human beings we tend to make any kind of measure seriously and a year seems to be an important one.

Last year at ISB, I wasn't very happy with my performance, despite my diversity, dean's list, success in the most-participated-at-ISB-competition, I wasn't shortlisted by any of the consulting companies but then I have learnt my lesson in life that your plan and God's plan need not be the same and if your plan fails, God's plan will prevail - nice and easy way to excuse oneself of any sort of failure. After all human beings are supposed to be thinkers to make sense (awkward phrase).

2009 promises to be a year of different kind. Mankind screwed itself in a big way and created a catastrophe of a different kind. Will the collective intelligence succeed in coming up a with a text book solution and be able to implement it as meticulously; would be noble-prize or other-great-prize winning intellectuals be able to predict how the future would like; would be growth again or will it be sustainability or will it be the Green agenda. Lots of questions but no answers, in fact I don't think even the most powerful man can predict what route humanity is going to take in 2009.

We can take respite in one thing atleast. 2009 cannot be as bad as we are expecting it to be. Take my own case, my firm has been awarded the first ever license to build and operate a transmission line on the first day of the year and the project is going to take off even while three other project bids are under process. For me it's going to be year completely different from 2008. 2008 despite bringing me the most success in terms of money and fame has been a disappointing one from learning perspective but 2009 is already promising.

My reading has picked up and I'm reading a wide variety of books. I am reading Snowball, Stories by Sudha Murthy, some nice Telugu literature, apart from all the random readings. I have just started Snowball and I don't know why but I see lots of similarities between this book and Godfather (by Mario Puzo). Let's see how I would feel as I move further.

2009 is a year of challenge - it's going to test each and everyone of us on how we are going to take it up and handle it. Just keep the phrase "This too shall pass" in mind if you ever get bogged down