Power of negative thinking

I was waiting for a craftsman to show up. This type of craftsmen are notorious to break their words and discard the appointments. They dont meet; puzzling thing is .. why dont they deny service instead of making false promises. Even if they start, they seem to drag the work and borrow more time. Had this experience four or five times with this particular workmen, also heard from others. They are branded for this attitude.

Anyway, here I am waiting for one of them. The time starts to slip. I could either tune up some positive thinking or negative thoughts. I choose to think negative. I thought the chap wont turn up. Odd things happened inside me. A lighter sense of being, with less tension and pressure developed. Turning off the expectations reduced the stress level. It was good at that time.

To keep up his clan's tradition, he didnt turn up. That didnt affect me as the negative aurora insulated me from the harsh externals.

Modern life

Delhi was chilling by the Sunday early morning fog. Grandma was shiveringly waiting at the bus stop. A skoda car skid through the wet road and stopped in front of her. Grandma was glad her grandson, Aditya, came on time to pick her. She had quite a good amount of luggage from the far off village, mainly eatables for Aditya's family. Also as this is her first trip to the metro, she had equipped herself with enough clothing to sustain winter climate.

Aditya and the car gave a warm welcome to the guest and they were on their way to home. Aditya's home is a mini villa tucked in a quite corner of the city. Few minutes of distance from the buzzing main road gives them enough silence amidst the crowd. An architect designed compact house with all essential features and tipping towards luxury.

Aditya's wife Sinu received them well. Thou married for 5 months, she had interacted with Aditya's relatives over phone and jelled nicely with them. Sinu took grandma to guest room and showed her the house. Breakfast was ready in short while and they were enjoying the day.

Grandma was quite comfortable in two day stay and got to know much about the new member of her family. One thing started bothering grandma in her visit. The bedroom. She happen to notice that Aditya and Sinu happen to come out of different rooms in the morning. Aren't they sleeping together?!! This was a shock and worried if there is a drift between the newly married couple.

Thou an experienced women, grandma was hesitant to raise the matter to the city girl. She was afraid of the repercussion of a straight talk. However she couldn't take the matter lightly. Things were bothering and clouding in her mind.

As she was helping Sinu in the kitchen (when Adi was not around), slowly grandma brought up her doubt. She politely asked without being nosey, to find why they sleep in separate bedroom. Sinu burst out a spontaneous laugh upon hearing grandma's disturbing question. She controlled her laughter and answered to puzzled grandma, "No ma, there is no friction between us; except that I need a bed lamp while sleeping and Adi want pitch dark room, he cant sleep with light. So, when we feel really sleepy, he goes to the other room!". Grandma responded with a relief, embarrassingly smile.

Stocks for the long run

When we think about stock market, immediate images that comes to our mind are ups and down of daily graph, quick money, double in short etc ... also the sad face after the bear attack. Herd mindset rules while chasing the brands and over priced items. The events are perceived more as a random act and hence reducing the trading to that of gambling.

Rare are those try to deduct some sense out of the rush. Observing the money flow and the trend. Those are the ones looking into the fundamentals and the technicals, choosing a method for their own style. They do invest wisely and be peaceful.

The book "Stocks for the long run" is for a person looking for ways to have a smooth sail through the market. The language is very simple for anyone to understand the concepts. Lots of sample data, historical facts, well researched ideas are presented throughout. Author Jeremy J Siegel puts forward many case studies of rise and fall of companies, market crashes, predictions etc.

Ever wondered how the stock exchanges list the companies and categorizes them? This is explained in a nice manner. Also there are methods for filtering out good companies. Those methods are explained along with comparison. The book touches upon other investing tools and checks the historical returns derived from them. Thou major discussion of the book happens at the American financial backdrop, there is a chapter devoted for Indian and Chinese markets and how we will be influencing the world economy.

Would recommend this book to anyone interested in making money through trading.
Btw, by 'long run', the author hints 15 to 20 years :-)

film network

Here is a recipe for social networking website for film fans. The core site is a canvas board where users can drop an item. Item could be a movie, actor, director, musician etc. These items may be interconnected to each other. For eg, an actor connected to movies he acted. From the same movie, there may be connections to director and so forth. The items may have properties, like when the movie was released, dob of the actor etc. Also, item could point to a wiki page for users to update and post their comments.

The end result would be a one big mess of complex connected graph. The beauty of this structure is that the data is generated by the users from scratch. Moderators could help in trimming the data and avoid duplication.

Tags on language or imdb style of genre could help in quick search.

Subjective queries like movies by particular actor+ actress, or Chinese romantic movies of 80s could be attempted.