Monday, 13 June 2016

Moto G4 Plus: a smartphone par excellence

Moto G4 Plus: a Smartphone par excellence

The wait is finally over and Motorola has launched its long awaited Moto G4 Plus in 2 variants. The  2GB RAM/ 16GB storage variant has been priced
at Rs 13499, and for its 3GB RAM/ 32GB model the price has been set at Rs 14999. It is available in Black and White colors. The  phone boasts of a Moto G4 Plus Smartphone Back View16 MP Moto G4 Plus Smartphone White Front ViewLaser Focus Rear Camera with phase detection auto focus (PDAF). It has the ability to capture more light in dim environment so that your pictures always come out looking good. The front "selfie" camera consists of a 5 MP Wide angle lens with display flash. The screen resolution has been increased to 1920x1080p and screen density is 401 ppi so obviously the visuals are just great.
There is a 3000 mAh battery and a Turbopower™ Charger which charges 6 hours worth of power in just 15 minutes. There is also a Fingerprint Reader for fast unlocking and it unlocks the phone no matter how you hold your finger. The screen is a 5.5 inch Full HD Display with Corning Gorilla Glass 3 and the processor is a Qualcomm Snapdragon 617 octa-core 550 Mhz  and the storage is expandable upto 128 GB in both variants.OS is 6.0.1 Marshmallow. It weighs only 155 g and its base thickness is 9.8 mm but superior product designing  gives it a sleek look. Even though it does not have a full metal body and the rear panel cover is plastic the phone does have pre-installed nano and micro SIM adapters.
Check complete specs here!
Ready a comparative review of Smartphones here!
Sound quality is pretty decent and the Fingerprint Reader is supposed to be pretty accurate and responsive according to early reviews. The gaming experience is also passable but the phone does have a tendency to overheat on continuous use especially with data intensive activities like gaming or watching live videos and the phone becomes sluggish and less responsive. Users have reported that this phone heats upto 43-45 ยบ C after browsing or downloading for about 20 min, shooting videos for approximately 5 min or playing games for about 15 min. It also heats up during charging. This could turn out to be a serious shortcoming of the Moto G4 Plus Smart Phone.
However if you want a phone with superior camera, just average battery life and a neat unbloated Android version with cool features like a responsive Fingerprint Reader and the latest OS  at an affordable price then this Motorola phone is the right choice for you.
If gaming and other multimedia are on your top priority list you should probably look elsewhere!

Thursday, 21 April 2016

If you can make your own luck there is nothing like luck at all!

Make-your-own-luck
Making your own luck is better than waiting for fate


If you can make your own luck there is nothing like luck at all!

This is an apocryphal story of 2 friends Moshe and Oram. Like any good friends there is a fair bit of competition between them and Oram always wins. Moshe always complains that Oram is lucky; he is a natural winner, has more ability and beats him at almost everything they do.
Moshe challenges his friend to beat him at a game of pure luck where winning is by pure chance and ability counts for nothing.
Oram proposes a game where there is a jar containing 100 marbles. Each player takes turns in drawing any number of marbles between 1 and ten. The player who empties the last marble from the jar wins.
He argues that it is such a random game of chance that no one can predict who will win. Moshe agrees that it is fair and they start to play.
Oram wins the 1st game and also the 2nd, 3rd, 4th and the 5th …………..
How does he do it yet again? Oram smiles mysteriously while Moshe clutches his head and mutters “ I told you I’m cursed!”

Is luck a quirk of fate?

Luck-doesn't-happen-by-chance
Luck doesn't happen by chance

Anything in life that we do, there are 2 outcomes, success or failure (for simplicity let’s leave out partial outcomes). If left to luck can I safely say that my chances of success or failure are 50% each?
Consider a simple example of a coin flip. My chances of coming up a head or tails are 50% since there are only 2 possible outcomes and there is no way I can influence the outcome and I depend totally on fate.
If I flip the coin I may come up heads or tails, no way to predict which. It is possible that if I flip the coin again I may come up either 2 heads or 2 tails in a row. It is possible to get 4 heads or tails in a row and strange but not impossible 10 of the same heads or tails in a row.
But statistically the probability of getting a head is about the same as a tails and if you like you can prove it by flipping a coin 100 times or even more and the probability of heads or tails will approach 50%. This is also called the law of large numbers.
Applying the same principal to the game played by Oram and Moshe, the latter should have won an equal number of times as his friend. But as you can see that’s not the case so we can concur that it is not purely a game of luck and that Oram is positively influencing the outcome.
Similarly if Oram excels at everything he does it has nothing to do with luck and everything to do with his ability, attitude and character. Otherwise Moshe would share 50% of Oram’s achievements as nature distributes all outcomes evenly over a long period of time.
The game of life has nothing to do with chance!

The 50:50 rule of luck would make winners out of us all!

 
Luck-a-combination-of-skills-preparation-and-daring
Luck doesn't distribute equally
If I played the stock markets I should make money 50% of the time because either the markets go up or they go down and I can only be wrong half the time.
This is probably the mental state of most amateur stock market traders who seek safety in numbers. But empirically it is only some key players who consistently make money in a market notorious for unpredictability and chaos. How that is possible when there is no definite science to stock market movement?

Why some people succeed in the game without rules


I am going to list some of the attributes of people who regularly come up as winners in life even though they face highly irrational and diverse situations where there is no set of rules to guide them but first I want to state that there are no natural or inborn winners and anyone can inculcate the winning habits of successful people
The decisive factor in a crunch situation is You!!!

I have just spent a better part of this post in proving to you that there is no destiny or DNA, mojo or jinx which decides who wins or not, it is something as down to earth as some highly effective habits and attitudes which are easier to integrate in our lives than to go about your life thinking you have bad karma

·       Winners play by the rules but know when to throw the rule book out
·       Winners are flexible in their approach and don’t take fixed or rigid positions which are difficult to wriggle out of
·       Winners do fail!!! But they learn from failure
·       Winners are not afraid to fail
·       Winners don’t believe success is a result of luck
·       Winners prepare for success
·       Winners don’t leave to fate anything they can do something about.
·       Winners don’t jump into battle until they have assured victory before entering battle
·       Winners don’t take risks they cannot tolerate
·       Winners factor in the most adverse outcomes and then see if they can survive it
·        Winners don’t stick to conventional methods, they are willing to think out of the box,
·       They question all premises and leave no stone unturned.
·       Winners don’t take anything for granted and don’t leave any blind spots in their thinking.
·       Winners go the extra mile. As such there is no traffic on the extra mile!!!
·       Winners don’t carry any extra baggage of pre-conceived notions.
·       Winners don’t rest on their laurels but keep learning exponentially


Psychology of luck

 
winners-do-things-differently
Fortune favors the brave
Julius Caesar for all his fabled luck was an able and daring general and when Napoleon said “ I don’t care if my generals are good I want them lucky” what he really meant was a combination of brains, daring and preparation that constitutes luck as we know it

So how does Oram do it?

 
winning-is-a-habit
Winning is a habit
As you probably guessed there is no luck involved only preparation and some good old mathematics.
No matter who goes first in drawing marbles from the jar, Oram makes sure that the number of marbles left in the jar after his turn is in a multiple of 11. This way whatever the number of marbles Moshe draws in his last turn Oram always wins!
In the beginning: 100 Marbles

Case 1: Oram draws First
Case 2: Moshe draws first
O: 1, M: 6 Remaining: 93
M: 1 O: 2 Remaining: 97
O: 5 M: 3 Remaining: 85
M: 8, O: 1 Remaining 88
O: 7 M: 10 Remaining: 67
M: 5, O: 6 Remaining 77
O: 1 M: 7 Remaining: 59
M: 4, O: 7 Remaining 66
O: 4 M: 8 Remaining: 47
M: 7, O: 4 Remaining 55
O: 3 M: 9 Remaining: 35
M: 6, O: 5 Remaining 44
O: 2 M: 5 Remaining 28
M: 9, O: 2 Remaining 33
O: 6 M: 4 Remaining 18
M: 3, O: 8 Remaining 22
O: 7 M: 2 Remaining 9
M: 2, O: 9 Remaining 11
O: 9
M: 5, O: 6 Remaining 0
Oram wins!
Oram wins!


In conclusion your fate is not described by what happens to you but how you deal with what happens to you!!!

Wednesday, 20 April 2016

If life sucks make molehills out of mountains

If life sucks make molehills out of mountains

make-molehills-out-of-mountains
Add caption

There are times when it seems you are down and out and you’ve had the living daylights kicked out of you. When everything in your life seems to go off-road and you just can’t stop those suicidal thoughts.
We’ve all been there!!!
Given a choice none of us would like to feel less than ecstatic every waking moment of our life and to live happily ever after. Be it the everyday troubles, the stress, the brooding or just your garden variety depression we hate being there but even more we hate ourselves for feeling less than perfect and the harder we try the more this negative emotion feeds on itself leading further frustration and the MLS Syndrome

The My life Sucks Syndrome


my-life-sucks

From young teenagers facing growing up issues to housewives with chronic depression or the middle aged man’s mid-life crisis people seem to be caught up in a vicious cycle of mental problems. And as it generally happens failure or dejection in one sphere of life spills over into the other spheres and pretty soon you feel beleaguered, angry and irritated. I don’t know about you but 
whenever I feel trapped like this my life kind of sucks!

Being sad or pensive is in itself not so bad according to me, after all these feelings are but part of a gamut of emotions we possess to express the state of our mind. But the problem is with the intensity with which we feel these negative emotions is not always proportional to the real cause or gravity of the situation that actually triggered these feelings
a-man-in-grief-alone

Say for instance there’s this young girl who is feeling depressed and contemplating suicide due to a romantic breakup on the one hand and a mature man or woman with a horrendous situation where the husband/wife is either ill or deceased and the child has some complicated illness and he/she is penniless. Who would you empathize with? Surely the latter but can you truly argue that the young girl’s feelings are any less intense, frivolous they may be
All of us pine in grief like there is no tomorrow!!!

 

How to be yourself again?


I-am-a-winner

While I am no expert and neither do I claim to write an exhaustive treatise on this subject, I have had a fair share of ups and downs, rude knocks and bumpy rides and all I want is to share and engage. I want to start a conversation and to collate how we all deal with the side effects of living in these modern times.
What do you do when you feel the blues? Do you go see a shrink, a counselor? Or maybe you have a mentor or a friend to whom you unburden your woes. Do you read the best self help books, or do you find solace in inspirational or motivational quotes? Do you practice positive self-talk or ask thought provoking questions. Maybe you have a novel way to ride the waves of despair that you would like to share here with us.
Whatever it is that we do, and we all need to do different things because we are all wired differently, we face different situations, sometimes real sometimes imaginary and we all have an absolutely unique experience set, we do need to do something positive and proactive to get out of this self-cannibalizing abyss of depression and insecurity for the simple reason that we deserve better.

My situation is so bad nobody can do anything about it


lead-a-happy-child

There are genuinely people out there who have heart wrenching stories of personal tragedy and loss and on more occasions than once I am speechless. Sometimes this whole world seems cruel and apathetic and the despair threatens to engulf all the hope and faith that yet remains.
For all of you out there who read these words and to whom the above applies I cannot understand what you have gone through but what I do understand is that you still need to move on in life. You can wear your misfortunes like a badge of honor and you are fully justified in doing so.
But do not wait for an avenging God to reverse the scales and rid you of your pain. You are going to have to do it yourself, not all at one go but bit by bit. Letting go of the memories of pain is just the beginning.
And by the by when you find that life is not so much a burden after all and that you stop asking “Why me” you may truly be on the path to healing and 
the steep mountain on the way to redemption may actually turn out to be merely a molehill!!!
live-a-beautiful-life

Sunday, 17 April 2016

If participating is more important than winning why don’t we….

if-participating-is-more-important-than-winning
Image by http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/

If participating is more important than winning why don’t we….



We have all heard that winning is not as important as participating speech and the chances are that the occasion was that you had lost at something. Nobody goes up to the Winner and says stuff like this, do they now?

Whoever said winning isn't everything probably lost


Quotes about winning and losing are perhaps considered to be a mark of wisdom or maturity in our skewedly constructed society or maybe we are by nature polite and don’t want to really rub it in to the loser. You know like not kicking a man when he is down!

winning-isn't-everything


Winning is important

winning-is-important


As far as the winning is everything debate is concerned no one disagrees that winning is more preferable than losing and its only when you have lost that philosophical ramblings like “winning is not so important as participating” come into play.


Winning is not everything, it is the only thing

·         Winning makes you feel good
·         Winning increases your self-worth
·         Winning makes you appreciate the importance of hard work
·         It spurs you to greater effort
·         It motivates you
·         It tells you that  you are the best, no matter what
·         Winning turns into a habit
·         It tells you what it takes to be number one
·         Winners take all
·         To the victor the spoils
·         Winners get to write history
·         Winners control the narrative
·         Winning as a goal is worth all the struggles and pain you take to get there
·         Winners get to change the world

If we subsidize failure we will end up as a society of losers. Nature too rewards the victors and only the fittest survive in the battle of evolution. Also-rans and has-beens are relegated to extinction.

Losing is not an option


Losing-is-not-an-option
Image by http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/


Let’s face it, failure hurts. It’s not a good thing. Nobody likes to have that feeling if they can help it. The takeaway from losing is that yes, maybe you tried your best but it was not good enough to win.
I found an amusing anecdote about an exchange between 2 ex-presidents of America who had both lost re-election. One asked the other about when the pain of losing an election stops hurting anymore. The other quipped, “When it does I’ll let you know”
Platitudes such as winning is not as important as participating should be taken akin to the consolations we utter at funerals to bereaved family members of the deceased. There is no need to glorify losing

 


Failure is not a person


Some people make the case that failure is in fact victory in disguise and it holds important lessons of life. That maybe but there many winners out there who have never learnt the hard lessons that defeat purports to teach and they just keep on winning.
It is precisely because losing is such a big deal that it acts as a negative motivation to not fail and to win at any cost. Failure is not an option
However we may not always win and when we find ourselves gulping on the bitter dregs of defeat it would help to remember on such occasions that I have failed today but I am not a failure!

Failure is not a person, it is an event

Competitiveness is in our DNA

competitiveness-is-in-our-dna


Sports, debates and quizzes are just some of the competitions that offer runners-up and consolation prizes to losers.
In real life the only meal a loser gets to eat is humble pie!

And in wars there are no prizes for the second place. No one remembers who the second person to step on the moon was. Real life is a jungle and coming first matters more than anything. We cannot afford the luxury of believing that winning isn’t everything and teaching our children the same. We need to inculcate a competitive spirit in our children. Read Amy Chua’s book “The battle hymn of the Tiger Mom” in this regard

And the consolation prize for losing goes to….


winning-is-everything

If participation is more important than winning why don’t we  felicitate the following individuals, organizations and nations down the ages for their active participation in wars, conflicts and other activities irrespective of ideology or morality

So what if they lost!!!
  1.   Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany
  2.   Jefferson Davis and Robert Lee of the Confederacy
  3.   Darius III of Persia
  4. Mussolini “ El Duce”
  5. Pakistan ( As the loser of 1965, 1971 and Kargil Wars)
  6.  Usama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda
  7. The erstwhile USSR (Loser ofthe Cold War)
  8. Thomas Dewey defeats Trueman
  9.  Charles Ponzi (Ponzi Schemes)
  10.  Enron
  11. White Star Lines and “The Titanic” (Sank on its maiden voyage)

We appreciate your participation and thank you for the same. While we rue the fact that you could not win we wish you all the very best for the future and  Better Luck next time!!!


Friday, 15 April 2016

Don’t believe when they tell you the 101 things money can t buy

things-money-cant-buy


Don’t believe when they tell you  the 101 things  money can t buy


Remember what Al Pacino said in the Godfather “Contempt of wealth is just a conspiracy of the rich to keep the poor out”. Similarly what money can t buy lists abound consisting of things money can t buy. Money can t buy you class, friendship, time, etc and there is also a multitude of things money can t buy quotes.
What I’m going to do is dissect a list of things money can t buy and see if there  actually is something that money cannot buy then maybe at least Rent it like the proverbial Afghans

You cannot buy an Afghan but you may rent one!

My purpose is not to belittle all the wonderful things in life that are free but to ensure that all those who have the money should utilize it wisely and to improve the quality of their lives instead of

Buying things they don’t need with money they don’t have to impress people they don’t like

So here we go


Money and Happiness


money-cant-buy-happiness


Whoever said money can t buy happiness clearly didn’t know where to shop. We have all read studies which suggests shopping keeps depressive blues away


Money can t buy time

True but you can always delegate. With unlimited money at your disposal you can have minions take care of the most menial of tasks which leaves you free to enjoy life unfettered.


money-cant-buy-you-time


After all time is relative!


Manners & Sophistication

Well not right away but with some effort and taking some classes (you guessed it spending some money) you could look presentable enough to be mistaken as suave and charming. Besides sitting on tonnes of money you won t need to get into bitter struggles for your bare necessities and can afford to loosen up on that mean streak. Also hob-nob with the right company and some of that etiquette might rub off on you.


A soft bed but not sleep

It is possible to stay awake all night on a fluffy pillow but then again if you have no worries, no debts and no obligations to fulfill you won t need to toss and turn all night in an agitated state of mind

 

Robust health

If in spite of having all the wealth in the world you do not take steps to get into good shape you will only  have yourself to blame if your  enjoyment of the fruits of your labor are cut short by untimely death. Exercise regularly, go for regular check-ups, have a balanced diet and leverage your wealth to improve the quality of your mental and physical existence.

Money is what money can buy!


Other sundry things money can t buy





            Loyalty:  Sure money can t buy you loyalty because you can get that for free. Be good to people, do some good work and spread some of that wealth around in a genuine sort of way.
           Respect: I haven’t seen money get humiliated yet in a long time. Again it is a function of your personality and having money never hurt anybody’s chances to gain some respect.
money-cant-buy-you-respect

  Education & Knowledge: Invest some time and again Money and there is no age bar to learning. The trick is to not to fake it but to go for the real thing. Having money is such a wonderful thing isn't it? 
    Wisdom: Maybe not! But there again do you really need the wisdom to philosophize and ponder that “Money can t buy you anything”. Appreciate what you have! This thought alone carries the wisdom of agesmoney-cant-make-you-wise

         Well-adjusted kids: This is mentioned by Frank Sonnenberg on a list of 50 things money can t buy. Well I got news for you lack of money won t buy you that either
        A loving and caring family:  To be fair a lot of families go dysfunctional when they are rolling in wealth. However it need not be. Investing your time and money on your loved ones is resources well spent. Also they take their cue from you as the one who is well-heeled in the family. While not necessarily bribing them with your money you can give them the care and concern they crave as you are freed of more mundane occupations like trying to provide the basic necessities of life.
mone-cant-buy-you-loving-family


Rounding up


There is nothing that money can t buy that death can t take away

Thoughts of your own mortality should never be far from your mind. You have a limited time on this earth and how you spend it does matter. If Fortuna has been kind to you then be appreciative and use it to build the life you always dreamed of, do not make excuses.
On the other hand if you find yourself with limited means do not wallow in self pity, go out there and make all the money you need to turn your life around, you don’t want to twiddle your thumbs thinking about all the things that money can t buy.

WarrenBuffet has the last laugh when he says “Money is not everything but make sure you have a lot of it before you talk such nonsense!”