Self Proclaimed Free Advisers

There exists a unique species of "Self-Proclaimed-Free-Advisers" in this world. You keep meeting different types of these species in different phases of your life! There are Education and Career SPFA, then there are Fitness SPFA, not to forget the Relationship SPFA and certainly Parenthood SPFA. These are the ones I have seen more often, I am sure there would be more. This service provided really has nothing to do with their abilities or success stories in the respective free advice topics!  But if you are born lucky (I certainly do not believe that there is such a thing!), only then you will not encounter such people! So chances are very high that you might have already met them! If not, you will meet them in the near future for sure!

After a lot of frustrations and annoyance regarding this species (Oh! Did I forget to mention that there is a huge element of "Judgments and Prejudices" when these people start talking?), I have found out a way to make it more productive for you! First thing is to just listen than try telling them other perspectives. Second - if it is going to help you in even in a little way, register that and ignore the rest. If not, well ignore all of it! Consider it as a "patience testing" exercise! It works really, I have tried it!

So the next time you come across any SPFA, here's what you can do -

1. Smile all the time while you are listening! (It costs you nothing! Now-a-days, people really smile like it's a perishable good and needs to be used only during emergency!)
2. Relate what can be helpful and register, ignore the rest! (To help you ease the latter process say this phrase in your mind - "If ignorance is bliss, you must be orgasmic!")
3. After the lecture is over, just say "Thanks for informing me this, I will definitely think about it!". And that's it. Nothing more! It is tough, but trust me, NOTHING MORE!!!
4. Find an immediate excuse to move away! 

You will feel the steam blowing off your head, once you are away from that person! The feeling of not having to see him/ her for another lecture anytime soon is so energizing!! And thus, peace of mind is restored!

Photogradzila!

"A picture is worth a thousand words!" - Napoleon Bonaparte! A beautiful phrase dated at least two centuries ago, describes a picture best even today! Back then, there were only artists who were responsible for capturing those special thousand words! The introduction of camera happened only in the 1800s. Using a camera was a rarity until the digital cameras came in the late 1900s. Even before the 'digi-cams' became popular, phones with built in cameras were introduced. And with the introduction of "Smart Phones", the entire concept of "Photography" has reached a point that requires an alteration.

Photography was once a skill mastered by only a few! They were glamorous highly paid artists pertaining to only a few fields like press or royal families coverage! These artists were only afforded by the rich class and in those times, owning a camera was a social prestige issue. Today its exactly the opposite. There is at least one self proclaimed photographer in every home! The cameras and softwares make the reasoning of "why a good picture is good" absolutely redundant. And what is more sad, is that, the drive for deep understanding of a subject before throwing lectures and theories seems to be dead!

In this way the massive use of cameras has rendered our lives with a humongous number of photos! We click and just look at them once or twice at the most. Later when our gadgets memories need to be emptied, we get rid of them on our computers. If you are one of the organized person, you will make an effort to sort them, but mostly will have forgotten the context of those photos. And if you do recall, you are definitely late in printing or uploading them! If you are not an organized person, you will simply erase them when your computer memory becomes full. All this put together, the actual life of photos today is not more than five minutes! Of course you do increase the life of a few photos by uploading them on social networking sites, but honestly, that is a different topic altogether! Lets keep it for a different post and not digress.

Photography is turning into some shallow hobby of people who can spend on expensive gadgets. Photos are becoming the means to show off rather than the means to record special memories. And photography as a subject seems to be a topic anyone can talk for days on end! Its hard to find someone accepting that they have limited or no knowledge of photography now a days. If not anyone else, I am sure the photos would definitely tell "please learn photography first" from those thousand words!