You don't need a password to read a face.

Have you ever tried to percolate inside the gravey face of a laborer? The sun-burnt skin, the wrinkled forehead, the stained teeth, the anxious eyes; all tell a story.

Have you noticed the twinkle in your eyes when you come across the face of a toddler with glowing skin, puffed-up cheeks and impish eyes?

Have you thought to dwell in to the psyche of a senior citizen with a face that reflects thoughtful attire, and a sage like glance?

What feelings do you come across when you see the face of a random stranger crossing the road? The face with sparse eyelids, flared up nasal alae and hollow cheekbones.

Do you forget the face of your childhood teachers? I remember my teachers’ faces to be loving, sagacious and full of authority. Did you ever think of their rides of lives at that particular period?

Did you ever tried to peep inside the foundation coated faces of those models that bear powerful rays of artificial lights every other day? Those florid and forced smiles, sculpted nasal bridge, lustrous skin and probing eyes.

With some experience at observing people, you can easily tell what all a person has gone through by giving a penetrating glance to a face. A pleasant life shows at the exterior, without any exceptions. Cosmetic means can hide to age-related changes to some extent, but when it comes to emotive sketching, the impressions over a face are permanent.

Take out some time to feel people’s psyche by looking at their faces. No face is ordinary; every face has a story worth telling. I am sure this experience would make your thought-process attain a different trajectory; a lovable one. 

Winning hearts doesn’t require a degree.

Greet your fellow colleague with a beaming smile. Offer your listening ears when someone requires them the most.

Don’t criticize weather and/or food and/or ambience of that newly opened restaurant and/or social networking websites and/or deadlines and/or your country just for the heck of it. It doesn’t really make you smarter if you voice an opinion that is not really yours. Many times we listen to a fact so many times that we, mistakenly though, think it to be our own. We must exercise some mental gymnastics before formulating an opinion about anything trivial or significant.

Throw away surprises, pleasant ones.

Wish your folks and family their share of special days. Send flowers when someone close to you gets a promotion or when someone’s child excels in extracurricular activities. Obviously you can’t afford to forget birthdays and anniversaries; it would help if you send them hand written notes or greeting cards. Don’t leave the entire social relationship burden to facebook.

Give your children that much deserved tight hug, lavishly.

Praise the culinary skills of the person feeding your hunger.

Stand up for a cause, and make your voice count. Be the light that illumines paths of others. Be the torch-bearer.

Arrange group picnics. Arrange informative seminars in your vicinities. Arrange recreational classes in your neighborhood. Arrange medical camps for the elders and the poverty-stricken strata.

Pay for an underprivileged child’s education. Save electricity. Donate blood frequently.

Lessen the pollution. Make people realize about the ill effects of pollution by rendering practical examples. Drive with a sound head. Don’t go overboard when throwing a party. Reduce wastage of food.

Even if you picked up that unwanted sales call mistakenly when you were in the middle of your presentation, speak politely. Show your mettle. Refuse to behave standoffish.

Infuse morals in your kids. Playstations are OK, Tai-Chi is OK; but losing contact with the quintessence of our culture is not OK. Morals inculcate the strongest of cements in a child’s spine; help him get the strength.

Six Degrees of Separation.

I have always been enthralled by the theory that any 2 people in the world are 6 steps away from being known to each other; and these 6 steps mean 6 people. The world is so small then; so beautifully small. And I must bow to my friends and superiors with enviable data analytical capabilities, with strong statistical abilities and with a pivotal passion for mathematics, that we have been given this social finding that sounds so spiritual in its face value. A beggar who is forced to share the pavement with the army of stray dogs is just 6 people away from knowing Bill Gates; does that causes ripples? Is this the ecstasy of hope or of disillusion?

In 2007 study was carried out by Microsoft employees, Jure Leskovec and Eric Horvitz, who examined a chain of 30 billion conversations among 240 million people. They found the average path length among Microsoft Messenger users to be 6.6; pretty close to the theory of six degree of separation? Huh.

According to a study of 5.2 billion social media relationships in twitter, it was found that the average distance on Twitter is 4.67. On average, about 50% of people on Twitter are only four steps away from each other, while nearly everyone is five steps away.

In another work, researchers have shown that the average distance of 1,500 random users in Twitter is 3.435. They calculated the distance between each pair of users using all the active users in Twitter. It heralds an intellectual debate by galvanizing the thought that an unusually active person might be separated by a number less than 6 to any other person of the world. So, if you aim to make the world a close-knit family, start making the right noise, at the right time, to the right person.

The data team of Facebook data released two papers in November 2011 which document that amongst all facebook users at the time of research (they studied about 721 million users with 69 billion mutual friendships) there is an average distance of 4.74.

It means the nature wanted us all to remain accessible to each other. It is us who played the bad game and created rifts in between humans, social lives, nations etc. You must agree that six is a small number eventually; the onus on us is to break the bar of this number in the way that helps the society most. Do you find a possibility of six reducing to five or may be four in the coming years with the aggressive might of social media spectrums and easy availability of communication machines? Shouldn’t politicians or think tanks of the nations think laterally and use this information to develop a system where the underprivileged gets introduced to the person keen enough to help at that moment of time. At least in India, deserving people have to spend a lot of time in trying to get a break just because they don’t know the right person; can an algorithm be devised for the practical usages?

The world is a small space; let’s shrink it more by knowing everyone. And at the places when knowing everyone does not suffice, let’s help everyone to give the human relationship it’s real meaning back.

You can't censor my thoughts. Can you?

Why do people have to judge incessantly? Why do people have insecurities that drive them to think in egregiously biased manners? Why cant people just sit back and observe with an open mind?

Can you really imagine your posts, your pics being subjected to scrutiny before you are able to upload them? To me it sounds something bizarre to say the least, and I am sure most of the geeks out there would share an opinion like that. To deal with a small bunch of nuisance-makers, this would rather be a tough blow to the ordinary social media user.

Unpractical, flawed and undemocratic.

And I just read at one of the credible portals that Indian ministers want the scrutiny process to be done manually. So if that ever comes to see the light of the day, the honest taxpayer would be someone at highest loss. There are a lot of brighter ways to spend the national resources; invest in strengthening infrastructure, create more chances for the betterment of life-quality, make food cheaper and most widely available, check out the tentacles of corruption, fight inflation, give wings to the dreams of underprivileged and what not?

Our facebook profiles should not get unnecessarily poked; the right to express must not be compromised. More than 35 million tweets are sent by Indians per day and you want to scan those using human methods before they get posted. That typically mars the basic usability of such commendable web portal.

In the times of calamities, twitterati have used the site to provide commendable help resources in very short time. Facebook provides a working vent for all of us suffering with emotional fatigue. Now just imagine, can you really wait for your family album to get a nod from some of the authorities before you decide to share it with your close friends?

Please don’t snatch our rights of speaking and be heard to. It would not help to screen our social media content before we post them. Not only does it sound rude, it also defies some of the basic rights that we possess as humans.

My Most Awesome Moments

Successfully accomplishing some rare surgical procedure at my hospital.

Meeting free-thinkers that don’t really fit in the old-hat notion of predictable preachers.

Holding conversation with my old patients that have been my most ardent supporters.

Witnessing a patient in whom the recovery has been faster than usual norms.

When a new born is christened as Anil, just because the parents have been inspired by me.

When I explore the internet to find out unbelievable pace of advancements in surgical sciences.

Being able to stick to my schedules of the day and still extract some time to spend with my wife during the fag end of the day.

Standing in the court of Lord Krishna at Vrindavan / Eskon Temple with transcendental state of mind, and experiencing the inexpressible solace.

To savor Kachauri of Kota. Nothing beats its signature style aroma and flavor.

To be able to extend that extra help for the person who truly deserves it the most.

The moment I just wake up.

When I explore a new country, a new culture, a new horizon indeed.

When I experience déjà vu.

When I am able to learn a new trick in the dogma of internet and computers; whoever says new things are for blue-eyed boys, go get a life.

When I find a long-forgotten pal in some form of social media. Though I must say it has started happening virally with the arrival of facebook.

A Doctor and A Tweet.

Twitter is something that always astonishes me. If facebook is akin to a coffee house, twitter is no less than a parliament. The joy is boundless the moment you come across 140 characters typed by someone you hold immense respect for. You get to know the real thing, no media manoeuvrings, no added floss or deprived gloss. You don’t have to gain the permission to get a glance over anybody’s view, except for the random souls who believe in ironies – being on twitter and keeping your tweets protected. There aren’t a lot of doctors that use twitter regularly; I have came across a lot of profiles that belong to the health care fraternity, but to my dismay, either the profiles were made in the quest to keep pace with the advancing social media engineering where the user had made little efforts to keep and stay updated, or the profiles were fake identities, created by marketing czars to advertise about the newest kid in the town of wonder diets.

If you want to be on twitter and make the most of it, you have to keep on tweeting. Tweeting is expressing your thoughts, ideas and observations in 140 characters or less at a time. The more you tweet, the more buzz you create and more credible your online presence becomes. Twitter is a practical and powerful tool as it gives you the power to express your thought and send it to any chosen user in a moment of time. You can retweet to spread the thoughts expressed by any other user as well; your timeline (the synagogue of facebook wall) gives you a compact view of all the tweets posted by people you choose to follow. Like a tweet? Now you have plenty of options; retweet it or put in a reply or type your views and send it to your choice of end listeners. However, things don’t work on auto-pilot mode all the time; you have the power to plan the delivery of your tweets but you have to browse every now and then to know about the twitter trends. What is a twitter trend? A twitter trend is a word or phrase that is been most talked about in the world of twitter. There are different twitter trends for various geographical locations and are hugely inspire by the events happening in various places. Did I hear someone say twitter is the public spittoon? It is indeed a myopic view. Twitter opens countless minds in front of you; the more you read, the more you learn.

A Designer Brain For The World

1. Start a new hobby every 3 months.
2. Join a fitness club.
3. Adopt a child.
4. Devote some time for prayers daily.
5. Don’t forget to wish birthdays and anniversaries.
6. Learn to cook.
7. Read a book.
8. Smile more often.
9. Complement your colleagues.
10. Watch sunrise.
11. Drive with ease and patience.
12. Donate in charity.
13. Take out some time for self-organization.
14. Get your finances structured.
15. Learn to play a musical instrument.
16. Take care of your parents.
17. Write a blog. Regularly.
18. Post your facebook status often.
19. Avoid stimulants.
20. Dream big and start with a detailed plan.
21. Don’t mix personal and professional life.
22. Think of the ways to contribute towards society.
23. Don’t keep grudges.
24. Give your spouse pleasant surprises.
25. Pay taxes on time.
26. Don’t join too much social networking sites. Join the selected ones and remain active on them.
27. Don’t keep too many expectations from anything.
28. Purchase Greeting Card and Post it.
29. Write letters to your friends and family.
30. Carry a photograph of your family when traveling.
31. Let your calmness dominate over outbursts of anger.
32. Read biographies.
33. Watch cartoons.
34. Savor fruits.
35. Love animals.

My Supply Of Red-Bull

I love to do the activities that I have enlisted below after a lot of mind-work.

1) Performing surgeries. Nothing can match the thrill & satisfaction that I derive from performing surgeries. The moment I see an OT (Operation Theatre), my catecholamines go berserk.

2) Kneeling down to Lord Krishna in awe-inspiring admiration. I visit Vrindavan every week and on exceptions, I make it a point to visit a Lord Krishna shrine in the vicinity. The poised trance effuses a lot of canalized energy, which is the ignition fuel of my soul’s journey in the ordinary lanes of life.

3) To listen to songs. I love to feel the melodies and it really relaxes a lot. My all time favorite being, ‘Raah mein unse mulakat ho gayi’ from Vijaypath (A Bollywood Film)

4) To call my friends and have a light time together. I am sure few things can beat the thrill of meeting old folks and have a dream time together.

5) Watching old photographs and taking a stroll in the orbit of preserved memories. I am sure all of us love to do this.

6) Learning new internet and web related applications. I know the difference between Blogger and Tumblr. Want more?

7) Watching a film or a cricket match (whatever is readily available)

8) Cooking a dish. It’s in my blood. My father had a florid flair for cooking and I got the dominant genes.

9) Checking facebook updates of my folks. Who dislikes facebook anyways? (And if anyone dislikes, who cares for him anyways?)

10) Organizing myself and my work place. This is something which comes in high priority (though has been mentioned at the bottom of the list); I believe organizing helps you in discovering the facets of your life and yourself that you were unaware of. It’s like finding your occult power and feeling its potential impact. Its like kinetic meditation.