Don't try to fix what's not broken !!

For the first 30 years of my life I had no problem with my ears. Never used ear buds. Never used dewax. So far so good.

Then I saw Johnson & Johnson earbuds at my local supermarket and thought hmm, I wonder why I never used them. They ought to be important for personal hygiene and I took the bait.

Sure enough, I loved using them so much that I started using them every day after taking bath, though I knew there was nothing left to clean.

Fast forward a few months and I developed an ear infection for the first time in my life. After few painful visits to Doctor, it was finally found that a piece of cotton from the earbud was left inside my ear. The general physician told me that I should never use ear buds but only dewax drops every few days. I switched to that and felt that my ears were always wet and developed ear infection once again.

Making long story short, I visited an ENT specialist who asked me why do I want to use ear buds? I replied honestly that other than hygiene, it feels just too good

His advice was NEVER to use ear buds, because our ears are designed in such a way that ear buds only pushes the wax deeper and not to use any ear drops as well as the moisture provides a fertile ground to fungus to grow. Basically, he asked me to leave my ears alone as body is fully capable of taking care of itself including keep the ear clean without any efforts from us.

I created a problem which didn't exist. Same goes with medicines. Avoid them if you can. The side effects outweighs the benefits lot of time and just trust your body to fight it out benefits. Stopping popping those vitamin pills too.

New year resolution !!!

Every time the new year is approaching, we start making a list of things that we will do next year but we all know what happens to them. Sounds like my story for every new year since I can remember.

Given the optimist I am, on 31th 2016, I didn't shy away from making another list

Weight loss made it to the top of my list for the first time. I took growth in a different direction by going from 68 kg to 88 kgs over last 5 year of corporate bliss.

As you guessed, determined as I was, I installed health apps, watched YouTube videos, bought new running gears and all the things you would do in such a scenario. The biggest of them was I will stop eating sweets. You may smile but it's bigger tougher than any other addiction (at least in my dictionary). While i am going to not eat sweet then there is no place for any junk food. I am going to purist. While I am it, why not change the life style altogether. How about sleeping at 10 p.m. and waking up at 5 a.m. every day? Say that to an Indian software engineer and see the reaction you get

Saying that this is all wishful thinking was understatement of the year. When I told this to no other soul other than my life support system, my wife, her reaction was a smile that said something like nobody got hurt by having good intentions. Go on. We will see if you remember any of it tomorrow.

Poor girl, little did she know, things were going to change.

When I started this, I promised myself that I am not going to do before and after picture o. Facebook . Quora is the closest I will come to sharing it with anyone.

Fast forward, 8 months, I was 62 kg, down from 88 kg by doing each and every thing I mentioned above. Losing 3–4 kg a week straight for 8 months.

I had to stop because changing entire wardrobe was not an expense I had planned for. Pants falling down my knees and belts running out of holes wasn't thought about earlier too. Worse, I was stopped by everyone in office to enquire about it and it was too embarrassing for a low profile guy like me to draw so much attention.

This story for me wasn't about weight loss. It was about telling myself that if I can do this, I can probably do other things on my new resolution list.

Keep dreaming. Keep believing.

Power of "Asking"

Let me tell a story

I recently went to India on a vacation and didn't realize that my Data was left ON by mistake while my SIM was on International Roaming. I turned if off immediately when I found out my blunder but only after couple of days. When i came back to Singapore, I was anticipating the horror when my Phone bill is generated.  Sure enough, S$ 453 of data usage bill was staring at me.  I cursed myself one more time for being how silly i was and promised myself never to repeat this by disabling the international roaming altogether. That's a good preventive measure for future but what about the damage now? I convinced myself that i will write this off as a one-time expense and learn from it.

Then I thought, am i first one to do this blunder ? Probably, not. Then why don't I call SingTel and tell them my sad story. I did just that. I called them and told them how stupid I was and described the accident.

Then i ASKED, "Can you do something about it? and added please !! "

I expected them to be business like and tell me that it is what it is and they did what was part of my terms and conditions.

But guess what, the girl on the other side of the line wasn't a surprised a bit (and had probably heard this many times before) and she heard me patiently and told me that she can put me on a 1 day roaming plan which was something like S$ 30 / day and reverse this amount.

Wow !! I wasn't expecting anything but here i reduced 90 % of my damage by just "ASKING"

The morale of the story for myself was that so many times in life we let go of opportunities because we just "ASSUME" that things won't change instead of "ASKING" even once. Some of the times we don't do this because we are afraid of REJECTION of being told NO and our ego is too big to handle that. I have learnt that there is nothing wrong in asking for help. There is nothing to lose by asking something and sometimes getting rejected. The benefits of asking far our-weigh the risk of not asking and missing important opportunities.