Camaraderie

ca·ma·ra·de·rie

noun
\ˌkäm-ˈrä-d(ə-)rē, ˌkam-, ˌkä-mə-, ˌka-, -ˈra-\

Definition of CAMARADERIE

: a spirit of friendly good-fellowship

Examples of CAMARADERIE

1. There is great camaraderie among the teammates.
2. They have developed a real camaraderie after working together for so long.
3. It is about the camaraderie of troops bound for Vietnam who as their leader warns, have one another and nothing but one another when they fall into hell. —Stanley Kauffmann, New Republic, 25 Mar. 2002
4. … men on the sunny side of middle age, physical, competitive, used to the quick camaraderie of the team, be it a firefighting squad or a trading desk. —Robert Lipsyte, New York Times, 3 Feb. 2002
5. Except for occasional bursts of camaraderie, which came like thunderstorms, we were never close. —W. P. Kinsella, Shoeless Joe, 1982
6. The best of adolescence was the intense male friendships—not only because of the cozy feelings of camaraderie they afforded … but because of the opportunity they provided for uncensored talk. —Philip Roth, Reading Myself and Others, 1975

Dictionary can only define it….this is what it really means…………..

Lily is a Great Dane that has been blind since a bizarre medical condition required that she have both eyes removed. For the last 5 years, Maddison, another Great Dane, has been her sight. The two are, of course, inseparable.

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All Blacks win the World Cup

The Final Score 8 – 7 To ALL BLACKS

We dont Choke! we Strangle

The Captain
“No one can ever take this away from this group,” All Black captain Richie McCaw said. “I think the whole country should be proud of every single one of them. I’m just so proud of every single one of the guys. We couldn’t have been under any more pressure. Everyone dug as deep as they can.”

The Coach
“Marvelous. I’m so proud to be a New Zealander,” All Blacks coach Graham Henry said. “It’s something we’ve dreamed of for a while. We can rest in peace.”

The other side…

Coach

“I feel immensely sad and immensely proud at the same time,” France coach Marc Lievremont said. “People have always said and thought that the All Blacks were the greatest team of all time, but tonight I think it’s the France team that was great, and even immense. It’s tough to take, we needed a little bit more.”

Captain
“Obviously we are very, very sad about the result,” French captain and man-of-the-match Thierry Dusautoir said after the 8-7 Eden Park defeat.

Perils of Harmattan

I
The silent night, it ’s dark quiet naught,
Prolongs my pain, my wary thought
From the painful travails of yesterday,
To what maketh your heart, so bitter today.

II
Four seasons of lore ‘n suffering,
Icy mountains to melted springs,
Thou in arms I did begin to cherish
What did I do…? You let the dream perish

III
Forget not whence it first began,
From the perils of harmattan,
Cimmerian love for Narisah, my love
Tear’s baneful tryst, with shiny lambent glove

IV
Did i not buy those lips a smile?
Hath my fears made it oh so vile?
Is it aureate stone that you seek, my love?
Shame! …. I have none sunk, on a long lost cove.

V
Did I not sing with a mute fife?
Pledged thee my risible life,
Pardon my grief of your oh so grieved soul,
My heart bleeds watching the fag end of scroll.

VI
Did I not bleed enough for thee?
Does it not have enough glee?
If i am unable to give you more,
Sad…! These arid veins have a drop no more.

VII
Did i not care you with warm sway?
Was it a debt I failed to pay?
Call me a naive oaf, so little i know.
Guide me through these last drops of melting snow

VIII
Darkness glooms the sorrowful skies,
Bitter I stand with barren eyes,
Ravaged by hoards of my savvy mares nest
So Moored to ground entwined by a broken swær breast.

IX
Obdurate stone, soaked, wet, going soft
Warm it feels, maimed heart gushing oft
Mute sway of Osiris, my pard behold,
Feel no sand under my feet, stars unfold

X
Choose not I, this vain primrose path,
Curse of Hades, draped as polymath
Judge nay by soul of a captious eye
Thy wit be juree, love vouch, I don’t lie

XI
I implore my love; spat the secret of this Augean sorcery,
Thine dagger to lancinate me, from the blinds of an elder tree,
Fight was I not for you and me…though it was your cherished kin,
Why hath you speak not of hale kinship, beneath your soft mellow skin?

XII
Oh wish thou Hath spoken, my love, a rejoiced heart would smile in his hands,
But bleed on thy blade; I die a thousand times, …in this foreign land.
Grieve not my love… my last wish, in the sandy mists of Harmattan
I die in peace and still in love, at a place where it all began

I wanted to experiment writing poetry in the more classical fashion, this is my first attempt at it. I started laying down a few pre-conditions to the poem.

1. It should have 12 quatrains, and each verse of the quatrain should be a grammatically complete ( No fragments.)
2. Should follow a specific Rhyme an AAXX or the more classical AXAX, I decided on an AAXX
3. A specific syllable rhythm. And for no apparent reason I decided a 8,8,10,10 structure. The first two lines should not have more than 8 syllables and the last two should have 10
4. Just to add complexity I decided the last two quatrains should have 16 syllables each.
5. Most Importantly I wanted to tell a story that I had in mind and the story should be complete in the 12 quatrains. (It is difficult to make people read a story longer than that on a blog)
6. Finally there should be a identifiable artistic symmetry in the text.

(I cheated on the 7th..i wanted to write in iambic pentameter but i was not able to move more than the first quatrain so I removed that precondition. I guess some concessions for a good story to move on)

This is what I have after two weeks of working on it “The Perils of Harmattan”. Hope you will like, and pls do comment it will make the effort all the more worthwhile.

The prestige of a Magician…A tribute to Steve Jobs

“Every great magic trick consists of three parts or acts. The first part is called “The Pledge”. The magician shows you something ordinary: a deck of cards, a bird or a man. He shows you this object. Perhaps he asks you to inspect it to see if it is indeed real, unaltered, normal. But of course… it probably isn’t. The second act is called “The Turn”. The magician takes the ordinary something and makes it do something extraordinary. Now you’re looking for the secret… but you won’t find it, because of course you’re not really looking. You don’t really want to know. You want to be fooled. But you wouldn’t clap yet. Because making something disappear isn’t enough; you have to bring it back. That’s why every magic trick has a third act, the hardest part, the part we call “The Prestige”

From the movie The Prestige (2006)

“No one is indispensible (in an organization)” my first boss once said, “If one goes there will be more to come, just like the passengers on the train, they come and go but the train does not stop”

But there was one who clearly defied my intellectual colleague. He was no ordinary passenger, he was the pilot of the train and when he gets down the train stops. He is one of the mythical few, who have the uncanny ability to bulldoze through all odds to get to where they want to be. We know him as Steve Jobs.A very few people in this world have the ability to evoke extreme emotions: admiration, love, worship, hate; that Steve Jobs is able to by the mere mention of his name. With a fan following which would mock a rock-star, the master crafts man in the last three decades has been a phenomenon of a rare kind. His rode a roller coaster while most of us are anxious of the merry go rounds that we call lives.

The Pledge:

His entire life was a soap opera, born to an unwed mother who gave him up for adoption, adopted by amaranthine middle class folks who never went to college but promised Steve’s biological mother to see him through a college education. But he drops from college because it was too expensive for his adopted parents who were hell bent to fulfil their promise, but stays on the campus and continues to learn. He then starts a company with a friend in a garage with a vision so clear that the first MAC was a revolution in personal computing. In a strange twist of fate, worthy of a bestseller plot, he get thrown away from the company he created by the person he recruited….what more does the audience require before the end of Act 1 of the great magician.

The Turn:

The ACT 2 starts with Jobs creating a new company Next computers, then Pixar comes into picture and both these are individual success stories. Next more so because it was bought over by Apple and that brought Steve Jobs back into the company that he created and Pixar because it is now considered to be one of the finest animation production houses in Hollywood. (It was later bought over by Disney) end of season 2

The prestige:

Act 3 was the most dramatic; the final Act….it was also the most creative and profitable phase of Apple. Over the years even though it was developing some of the finest personal computers, Apple was playing a second hand fiddle to IBM machines. It was the product of the geeks and artistic niche. But with the coming of “I revolution” : IPOD, MAC pro, MAC Air, Apple TV, ITunes, IPod touch, IPhone, IPad it was the golden phase for apple and its shareholders. Each product was a cutting edge in technology, cool, and each was a divine revelation. It changed how we listened to music; how we bought music, redefined a personal computer, integrated mainstream TV to computing, gave a new perspective to a smart phone and created a new electronics category call a tablet. Apple was no longer a toy of the geeks or the artistic misfits but these products were the gadgets of the elite and the cool dudes of the world. All these were the result of the tyranny of visionary genius call Steve Jobs. He did all this fighting cancer and in the fall of 2011 he finally said good bye.

Like the end of every great act, it has left the audience spellbound and the theater quite; still sitting in their seats the audience expects him to come back and finish the show…..and they will keep waiting.

This is a picture tribute to him from the pictures on the net from 1970’s to 2011

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