Fast forward to the 40 second marker for the actual interview.

Of course, since it was meant to be only a segment in the 30 minute program, the entire half an hour long interview could not be included, but was used as a build-up for the story.

Next goal – Me on CNN Business!

Last week, on my way back from work, I witnessed two young women feeding birds right outside the homeless shelter, with the desolate watching them hopelessly, unable to digest the mockery. The pigeons were being fed fresh crackers as every other human, even the ones in their cars, just watched the girls frolic around, unaware of their surroundings. It was possibly the happiest moment in one of their lives, too, as could be concluded from her cheery laughter and exclamations.

Were they just suffering from disconnection with reality?

He will continue to live for a long time. Maybe even more so than the average human.

I am sure you have already watched his lecture online, and read the other hundreds of articles about him, but I just want to say what these other articles/critiques fail to mention. What Randy did was not anything complex; he did not prophesize something deeply philosophical, nor did he even remotely aim at radically changing values.

Instead, through his lecture and the subsequent book, Randy actually trivialized what most leaders teach. It isn’t about working hard or making sacrifices. It’s about just doing what you enjoy, and keeping your dreams and hopes alive during the journey. Randy taught the distraught youth that it is easy and possible to get what you want. You don’t have to do anything more than just want something, really bad. There is no point in making sacrifices.

What made the ‘Last Lecture’ a phenomenon wasn’t the depth of this person’s message, rather the simplicity of it. Here was a man who admits to failing at almost everything his first time around, but never gives up hope. Almost all of us associate ourselves with these kind of experiences in life. Failure is just fate’s way of making sure that it doesn’t favor someone who doesn’t deserve it.

I read his book before I watched the lecture of his video, and it makes me sad yet happy every time I recall the video. I am happy that I still have time to pursue my goals.

Rest in peace, Randy. You compressed more than a century’s worth of wonderful experiences and achievements into a life smaller than 50 years.

See you tomorrow.

The point of this post is to mull over how age and experience really play a role in how you look at these things. For example, I saw this site today. It belongs to a passionate 18 year old open source software developer who is most probably a college student. From a technical standpoint, he is definitely more than qualified to do the jobs of some very experienced people I have met. He is on the cutting edge of his technical spectrum, so to speak. When I was growing up and in college, I was like that, too. I used to work on websites as a hobby, write interesting C programs in my summers, and just generally mess around with a lot of software code. With the rise of the Internet, though, it has become all too easy, and sometimes expected of you, to showcase your passion and talent for the rest of the world. This is an example of the raised threshold/baseline I mentioned earlier. So, is the kid exceptional? In comparison to some other peers in college, sure, but being on the cutting edge and passionate is expected from you. When you are grown up, this is how you look at it.

When you’re 18 years old, you just want to do things because they’re fun, and not because you realize that being passionate is ultimately going to help your overall perception of your future career. Youngsters these days have this wonderful opportunity to be taken seriously, to be able to start open source projects that have the potential to be used by a lot of people, to be able to contribute in the same vein as other more experienced people, thanks to the Internet. So, for someone like me, while it was considered exceptional to just be passionate about programming languages or writing hobby programs, I think the bar has been raised quite a bit in the last two decades.

So, do you compete with these youngsters? Feel threatened? No.

These are just signs that the technology landscape is changing so quickly, and that is very good. What we could do, though, is align our passion with theirs and create synergies that would ultimately advance future technologies.

I love my job.

Even on yelp.com, I regularly see events at Indian restuarants/movies, and seldom even a cooking class.

I, personally, just love Indian food, and even though I don’t cook, I eat it at least once every two days. No other cuisine offers such a deep and varied assortment of flavors in a meal.

इतना अासान होगा कभी सोचा न था!

- सौरभ