Top ten things that should experience in life....

1. Stage fright
   It makes you confident.
   
   
   
   
   
2. Adventure Sports
   They make you feel alive and the make you understand the importance of each and every breath.
   
   
   
   
3. Solitude
   To awaken your inner self.
   
   
   
   
4. Life in Hostels (college, universities)
   Gives you the sense of being ordinary and crazy at the same time.
   
   
   
   
5. Live with a dog.
   They will make you realize what unconditional love is.
   
   
   
   
6. Experience the beauty of Nature
   
   
   
   
7. Listen to stories of war survivors
   It makes them happy and proud of themselves.
   
   
8. Take your parents out for a fancy dinner on your own money. Gives you the feeling of contentment.
   
   
   
   
9. Fall in love
   as much as you can, all the pain is worth it.
   
   
   
   
10. Try to bring a smile on the face of a child.
    You'll love the feeling.
    
    

There are some things I feel a person should experience in their life time. They might not be the top ten, but they are as important as anything else.
Cheers!!

Indian mothers

Once, I went home without informing them. I reached at night. They had just finished dinner. They were surprised. However, my mother had 3 Chappatis left for me. I was surprised and asked her how she knew I was coming. She simply smiled and asked me to eat. She said that he had eaten with the rest of the family and that she wasn't hungry. My stomach was growling and I ate all of it. After washing my hands I saw my mother still in kitchen. I went there. She was eating the leftover Dosa prepared for breakfast.

This image says it all!

Indian mothers are awesome. They teach us selfless love. Even if you abandon them to an old age home, they will still pray for you and won't stop loving you.

10 things that we should be informed about in life...

1. Relationships rule
   
   At the end of the day, what matters most are the people in our lives. Put them first every single day. Before work. Before the computer. Before your hobbies. Treat them like they are everything to you. Because they are.

    2. Travel expands you

         Travel makes you are more interesting, insightful, and accepting person. It expands you, enlightens you, and teaches you about the variety of people, lifestyles, and cultures. It is a pursuit well worth saving for.

    3.Risk expands you

       To make positive change in your life, you often must take risk. You must tolerate some level of uncertainty. Taking thoughtful, calculated risk strengthens your change muscle and helps you grow.

    4.Failure is good

       We try so hard to avoid failure, but failure is the real evidence that we’ve tried. If you avoid failure, you avoid taking action. Expect and accept that failure is part of the experience. Learn from it and move on.

    5.Your kids aren’t you (especially for Indian parents)

        You are the vessel to bring your children into the world and their caretakers until they can care for themselves. You can teach them, love them, and support them, but you can’t change them. They are unique individuals who must live their own lives. Let them.

   6. Friendships need care

        One of the top five regrets of the dying is that they let their friendships fade away. Friendships need time and attention. Nurture them like a prized garden. The payoff is so worth it.

    7.You aren’t always right

       We think we have the answers, know what’s right and wrong, good and bad, best for ourselves and other people. But we aren’t always right. There’s always more than one version. There are many perspectives that are valid. Keep yourself open to that truth.

    8.It will pass

     Whatever is causing you worry or pain right now won’t cause you worry and pain forever. Time heals. Things change. It will pass.

    9.Aging happens

    Our bodies age. It is a truth we can’t avoid. You can manage aging by doing the best with what you’ve got. But beyond that, do your best to let it go. Enjoying life is the best antidote to getting older.

    10. Please yourself first Because You Are Hero of your life
   
     Pleasing others for approval and acceptance might feel good in the short term, but eventually you will lose yourself and feel resentful. Please yourself first and give to others based on conscious choice, not the desire for approval. Most Important "Its your life make it large"

    Live Life King Size  !!!

Vasco da Gama: legendary explorer or overrated Person in Our history

Vasco da Gama:
The "legendary" explorer whose stepping foot in Kappad beach, Calicut, Kerala in the 16th century led to the first act of western colonization in India.

This is how he is generally known to people:

Dom Vasco da Gama, 1st Count of Vidigueira, (Portuguese pronunciation: [ˈvaʃku ðɐ ˈɣɐmɐ]) (c. 1460s – 23 December 1524) was a Portuguese explorer. He was the first European to reach India by sea, linking Europe and Asia for the first time by ocean route, as well as the Atlantic and the Indian oceans entirely and definitively, and in this way, the West and the Orient. This was accomplished on his first voyage to India (1497 - 1499).
Vasco da Gama is one of the most famous and celebrated explorers from the Age of Discovery.  As much as anyone after Henry the Navigator, he was responsible for  Portugal's success as an early colonising power. Beside the fact of the  first voyage itself, it was his astute mix of politics and war on the  other side of the world that placed Portugal in a prominent position in Indian Ocean trade.  Following da Gama's initial voyage, the Portuguese crown realized that  securing outposts on the eastern coast of Africa would prove vital to  maintaining national trade routes to the Far East.
source:Wikipedia

Sounds like a cool warm guy, who just came to explore the land, eh??
Well, that's wrong.
In 1502,  Gama and his troops were roaming the arabian sea near the calicut coast to catch and rob any ship that came their way. It caught the ship 'Meri' coming from arabia having 380 passengers,including women and children and innumerable wealth's.

When the ship surrendered, De Gama went on board and commanded the  owners and all the principal Moors to come before him, whom he ordered  to produce all their goods on pain of being thrown overboard. They  answered that they had nothing to produce, as all their goods were in  Calicut; on which De Gama ordered one of them to be bound hand and foot  and thrown into the sea. The rest were intimidated by this procedure,  and immediately delivered up every thing belonging to them, which was  very valuable; all of which was committed to the charge of Diego  Hernando Correa, the factor appointed for conducting the trade at  Cochin, by whose directions they were transported into one of the  Portuguese ships. De Gama ordered all the children belonging to the  Moors to be taken on board one of his own ships, and vowed to make them  all friars in the church of our Lady at Belem, which he afterwards did.
All the ordinary merchandize belonging to the Moors was divided  among his own men; and when all the goods were removed, he ordered  Stephen de la Gama to confine the Moors under the hatches, and to set  the ship on fire, to revenge the death of the Portuguese who were slain  in the factory at Calicut. Soon after this was done, the Moors broke  open the hatches, and quenched the fire; on which the admiral ordered  Stephen de Gama to lay them aboard. The Moors, rendered desperate by  this inhuman treatment, defended themselves to the utmost, and even  threw firebrands into our ship to set it on fire. Night coming on,  Stephen had to desist, but was ordered to watch the Moorish ship  carefully that it might not escape during the dark, and the Moors all  night long were heard calling on Mahomet to deliver them out of the  hands of the Christians. When day appeared, the admiral again ordered  Stephen de la Gama to set the ship on fire, which he did accordingly,  after forcing the Moors to retreat into the poop. Some of the Moors  leapt into the sea with hatchets in their hands, and endeavored to swim  to our boats; but all of these were slain in the water by our people,  and those that remained in the ship were all drowned, as the vessel  sunk. Of 300 Moors, of whom thirty were women, not one escaped alive;  and some of our men were hurt.
source:http://historicalleys.blogspot.i...

To add to this, he had supposedly made Christianity compulsory in Malabar, Kerala. Anyone who practiced religions other than Christianity was ordered to be even burnt alive. It's a shame that all these years have turned him into a legend, with ample help from old western historians.

Source:: Internet

Few friends, like 2 or 3 or number of friends, which is good?

 Small story:
Mr. X had two stones and Mr. Y had 200 stones. Both of them sold their stones. X got 1lakh and Y got 100rs.

Because what X had was diamonds and what Y had was brick stones.
Numbers never matter:

Best examples of actions that are moral, even uplifting, but illegal?

This is Aaron Swartz, a brilliant programmer, co-inventor of several key internet technologies, idealist, social activist... and according to the US government, criminal.



 
What was his crime? He believed that the public has a right to access publicly funded research. He thought science shouldn't be held to ransom by greedy publishing companies that contribute nothing to research. You can read his manifesto from 2008 here:

Full text of "Guerilla Open Access Manifesto"

Three years later, that manifesto would be used against him. While a research associate at Harvard University in 2011, he went to MIT and downloaded 4.8 million scientific articles from the online academic library JSTOR. Though Swartz's account was legal, such mass downloads were a violation of JSTOR's terms of service.

Swartz had previously attracted FBI suspicion back in 2009, when he used a Perl script at a Chicago library to share nearly 20 million court records that were being sold over the internet by a government agency. The records were legally free to access, so the FBI was powerless to stop him, but they didn't forget the humiliation. While biking home from MIT after his JSTOR stunt, Swartz was arrested and later charged with 4 felonies. As the New York Times reported it: "a respected Harvard researcher who also is an Internet folk hero has been arrested in Boston on charges related to computer hacking, which are based on allegations that he downloaded articles that he was entitled to get free."

Did Swartz plan to share the articles he downloaded? His manifesto was used as evidence of intent by prosecutors, but those who knew him say he planned to analyze the documents for evidence of corruption. Regardless, the only actual impact of his "crime" was that for a few days, JSTOR blocked MIT's access. JSTOR declined to prosecute Swartz, and MIT's network and facilities were readily accessible by design.

During 2011 Swartz -- already facing multiple charges of computer and wire fraud -- launched a new activist group and led victorious campaigns against SOPA and PIPA, two pieces of legislation that would have crippled internet freedom. Evidently he had not learned his lesson.

In 2012, the government increased the charges against him to 13. His legal defenders were still optimistic. When he was offered a plea bargain including a mere 6 months in prison, they refused. But by August, the case had sucked away all his money and Swartz was reduced to begging his allies for financial support.

On 9 January 2013, JSTOR announced that a large portion of its journals would now be open access. But for Swartz, it was too late. He was facing up to 35 years in prison and $1 million in fines after years of persecution by the US government. His counter-offer to government prosecutors had just been refused. With no end to the torment in sight, on 11 January Swartz hanged himself.

He was 26 years old. He paid for his crime with his life. That heinous, unforgivable crime of possibly having intended to provide public access to scientific research that was now mostly open access anyway.

Oh, sorry, this was meant to be uplifting, wasn't it? Well, when the law and moral behavior are placed in opposition, your stories are going to be about tyranny. I guess that's uplifting for tyrants.

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Some sources:

The New York Times
Aaron Swartz Wanted To Save the World. Why Couldn’t He Save Himself
Remember Aaron Swartz
Image by Sage Ross (Flickr: Boston Wiki Meetup) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (Creative Commons - Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic - CC BY-SA 2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Internet