Dont give in to Bacchus... Plz Don't ....

Every once in a while one comes across real life stories, happenings that shakes the soul.. they make you look at life in a different perspective .. The events might happen with occur with someone you know personally or some one you are not linked even remotely.. but the moment you look at those events happening with you or your loved ones.. they send chills down to your bones...

Recently, I came across a similar story .. it made me shake up with anger and sorrow,.. and it scared me .. and it still does as I am jotting these lines... Guys.. Gals.. Everybody ... please ... I understand that many a times our intent is not there .. but still our actions can change some body's life .. they can make them .. or break them ... A humble but hard request to everybody that lets stand up for ourselves and make sure that our actions are more deliberate and careful ... lets thik before we act ... our one moment of insanity .. can be a lifetime of pain and burden for someone ...

plz.. read this story .. and be scared.. be very scared .. and make sure that you will not let this happen to anybody on your account ...

and for the lady in the story .... All I pray is God Bless Her .. God Bless her with all the happiness of life.. and if God needs He can take a portion of my happiness and give it to this lady .. I am ready to share my happiness with her .. if it can bring even a single smile to her face ..

Once you have read this .. you will never forget the pictures.. and plz don't ... let these images be a reminder to you to be more careful about your actions ..

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This is the story of a women named Jacqueline Sabuido ... A bright, young and cheerful human being like anyone of us ..

This is her (dated: September 19, 1999)

And here are a few images from her life in happy times.. (Aren't these like images from our personal lives)....

Her birthday as a kid...With her Father ..
With her friends at party ...
In Venezuela on vacation ...
And then in Decemeber 1999... a drunk driver .. 17 year old male student rushing home after a couple of hard packs of bear with his friends ... crashed into her car .. and it destroyed her life for ever ...
She was caught in the burning ... car for 45 seconds and was badly burnt ... After the accident Jacqueline needed 40 operations .....

This is her getting treatment several months after the accident ...With her left eyelid she needs eyedrops to keep her vision ...
Now 20 years old, the boy who caused the wreck while drunk on that fateful night cannot forgive himself .. He knows he has devastated her life ....This was taken 4 years after the accident ....
The doctors are still working on Jacqueline, whose body was burnt 60% ...

Think About what you have seen here!..Whether you are a 16 - year old school student, a 21 - year old college graduate, or a 50- year old parent or even a grand parent.

DON'T LET SOMETHING LIKE THIS HAPPEN AGAIN !

End of a Dark Chapter in History

This is a news article, just a few hours after the execution of one of the egotist and idiotic leaders - Saddam Hussain, that I came across.

One can always debate on the nature of the justice done... Some might feel it is apt .. some might feel otherwise.. Personally I feel that, irrespective of the circumstances in which the punishment was pronounced, he deserved this low key death.. This current version of devil has made many a suffer and his name will be bring shame to this era ...

Like Hitler he is a dark spot on our lives and history and with his execution a dark chapter comes to an end....

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Saddam Hussein, dictator who ruled Iraq, dies at 69

By Neil MacFarquhar
Friday, December 29, 2006

The hanging death of Saddam Hussein on Saturday ended the life of one of the most brutal tyrants in recent history and negated the fiction that he himself maintained even as the gallows loomed— that he remained president of Iraq despite being toppled by the American military and that his power and his palaces would be restored to him in time.

The despot, known universally as Saddam, had oppressed Iraq for more than 30 years, unleashing devastating regional wars and reducing his once promising, oil-rich nation to a claustrophobic police state.

For decades, it had seemed that his unflinching hold on Iraq would endure, particularly after he held on to power through disastrous military adventures against first Iran and then Kuwait, where an American-led coalition routed his unexpectedly timid military in 1991.

His own conviction that he was destined by God to rule Iraq forever was such that he refused to accept that he would be overthrown in April 2003, even as American tanks penetrated the Iraqi capital of Baghdad in a war that has become a bitterly contentious, bloody occupation.

After eluding capture for eight months, Saddam became the American military's High Value Detainee No.1. But he heaped scorn on the Iraqi judge who referred to him as the "former" president after asking him to identify himself on the first day of his trial for crimes against humanity, which ultimately lead to his execution.

"I didn't say 'former president,' I said 'president,' and I have rights according to the Constitution, among them immunity from prosecution," he growled from the docket. The outburst underscored the boundless egotism and self-delusion of a man who fostered such a fierce personality cult during the decades that he ran the Middle Eastern nation that joking or criticizing him in public could bring a death sentence.

Hussein's own execution came after he lost the automatic appeal against his death sentence. The conviction stemmed from the ruthless revenge killing of 148 Shiite Muslim men and boys from the small town of Dujail just north of Baghdad, after a 1982 attack on his motorcade there. It was one of countless assassination attempts he survived. Hussein was due to face a series of trials over incidents of far greater magnitude, but Iraqi prosecutors started with Dujail because the evidence was clear-cut — including Hussein's signature on at least one execution order.

"Long live the people!" Hussein shouted, looking drained but defiant, when the chief judge, Raouf Rasheed Abdel-Rahman, read the death sentence. "Long live the nation! Down with the occupiers! Down with the spies!" The judge ordered him removed from court and he exited still yelling.

The tribunal's proceedings were condemned by some lawyers and human rights advocates as "victor's justice," not least because Iraq remained under American military occupation.

If a man's life can be boiled down to one physical mark, the wrist of Hussein's right hand was tattooed with a line of three dark blue dots, commonly given to children in rural, tribal areas. Some urbanized Iraqis removed or at least bleached theirs, but Hussein's former confidants told The Atlantic Monthly that he never disguised his.

Ultimately, underneath all the socialist rhetoric, underneath the Koranic references, the tailored suits and the invocations of Iraq's glorious history, Hussein was a village peasant trying to be a tribal leader on a grand scale. His rule was paramount, and sustaining it was his main goal behind all the talk of developing Iraq by harnessing its considerable wealth and manpower.

Mosques, airports, neighborhoods and entire cities were named after him. A military arch erected in Baghdad in 1989 was modeled on his forearms and then enlarged 40 times to hold two giant crossed swords. In school, pupils learned songs with lyrics like "Saddam, oh Saddam, you carry the nation's dawn in your eyes."

The entertainment at public events often consisted of outpourings of praise for Saddam. At the January 2003 inauguration of a recreational lake in Baghdad, poets spouted spontaneous verse and the official translators struggled to keep up with lines like, "We will stimulate ourselves by saying your name, Saddam Hussein, when we say Saddam Hussein, we stimulate ourselves."

While Hussein was in power, his statue guarded the entrance to every village, his portrait watched over each government office and he peered down from at least one wall in every home. His picture was so widespread that a joke quietly circulating among his detractors in 1988 put the country's population at 34 million — 17 million people and 17 million portraits of Saddam.

Throughout his rule, he unsettled the ranks of the Baath Party with bloody purges and packed his jails with political prisoners to defuse real or imagined plots. In one of his most brutal acts, he rained poison gas on the northern Kurdish village of Halabja in 1988, killing an estimated 5,000 of his own citizens suspected of being disloyal and wounding 10,000 more.

Even at the end, he showed no remorse. When four Iraqi politicians visited him after his capture in December 2003, they asked about his more brutal acts. He called the Halabja attack Iran's handiwork; said that Kuwait was rightfully part of Iraq and that the mass graves were filled with thieves who fled the battlefields, according to Adnan Pachachi, a former Iraqi foreign minister. Hussein declared that he had been "just but firm" because Iraqis needed a tough ruler, Pachachi said.

It was a favorite theme, one even espoused in a novel attributed to Hussein called "Zabibah and the King."

At one point, the king asks the comely Zabibah whether the people needed strict measures from their leader. "Yes, Your Majesty," Zabibah replies. "The people need strict measures so that they can feel protected by this strictness."

Aside from his secret police, the main factor that preserved his power was his practice of filling the government's upper ranks with members of his extended clan, regardless of their qualifications. Their Corleone-like feuds became the stuff of gory public soap operas. Saddam once sentenced his eldest son, Uday, to be executed after he beat Hussein's food taster to death in front of many horrified party guests, but later rescinded the order. The husbands of his two eldest daughters, whom he had promoted to important military positions, were gunned down after they defected and then inexplicably return to Iraq.

Continual wars sapped Iraq's wealth and decimated its people. In 1980, Hussein dragged his country into a disastrous attempt to overthrow the new Islamic government in neighboring Iran. By the time the war ended in stalemate in 1988, more than 200,000 Iraqis were dead and hundreds of thousands more wounded. Iran suffered a similar toll. Iraq's staggering war debt, pegged around $70 billion, soon had wealthy Arab neighbors demanding repayment. Enraged, he invaded Kuwait in August 1990, only to be expelled by an American-led coalition in the Persian Gulf war seven months later.

Yet in the language of his Orwellian government, Hussein never suffered a setback. After the gulf war ended with the deaths of an estimated 150,000 Iraqis, he called "The Mother of All Battles" his biggest victory and maintained that Iraq had actually repulsed an attack by "America and its criminal gang." "Iraq has punched a hole in the myth of American superiority and rubbed the nose of the United States in the dust," Hussein said.

His defeat in Kuwait, followed by more than a decade of tense confrontations with the West over his alleged weapons programs, ultimately led to his overthrow. The extended bloodbath that followed the invasion, with the monthly death toll of Iraqi civilians estimated roughly at 3,000 by the end of 2006, made some nostalgic for even the oppressive days of Hussein, when public security was not an issue. His repressive ways were credited with keeping the fractious population of 26 million — including 20 percent Sunni Muslims, who dominated; 55 percent Shiite Muslims; 20 percent Kurds plus several tiny minorities including Christians — from shattering along ethnic lines.

Saddam Hussein was born on April 28, 1937, in a mud hut on stilts near the banks of the Tigris River near the village of Tikrit, 100 miles northwest of Baghdad. He was raised by a clan of landless peasants, his father apparently deserting his mother before his birth. (Government accounts said the father died.) "His birth was not a joyful occasion, and no roses or aromatic plants bedecked his cradle," his official biographer, Amir Iskander, wrote in "Saddam Hussein, the Fighter, the Thinker and the Man," published in 1981.

Hussein told his biographer that he did not miss his father growing up in an extended clan. But persistent stories suggest that Saddam's stepfather delighted in humiliating the boy and forced him to tend sheep. Eventually he ran away to live with relatives who would let him go to school.
Hussein's first role in the rough world of Iraqi politics came in 1959, at age 22, when the Baath Party assigned him and nine others to assassinate Abdul Karim Kassem, the despotic general ruling Iraq. Violence was a quick way for a young man who grew up fatherless in an impoverished village to get ahead; bloodshed became the major theme of his life.

During the failed assassination, Hussein suffered a bullet wound to the leg. The official version portrayed him as a hero who dug the bullet out with a penknife, while the other version suggests that the plot failed because he opened fire prematurely.

He sought asylum in Egypt, where President Gamal Abdel Nasser nurtured the region's revolutionary movements. Hussein recalled studying law and ignoring Cairo's attractions. Others remember differently.

"He was what we call a troublemaker," said Hussein Abdel Meguid, the owner of the Andiana cafe that Hussein frequented, recalling years later in an interview with The New York Times that the Iraqi once turned a brawl into a knife fight.

Soon after returning to Iraq, Hussein married his first cousin and the daughter of his political mentor, Sajida Khairallah Tulfah, on May 5, 1963. The couple had five children including two sons, Uday and Qusay, and three daughters, Raghad, Rana and Hala. He had mistresses, including prominent Iraqi women, but never flaunted them.

His wife, three daughters and roughly a dozen grandchildren survive him. Uday and Qusay, along with Qusay's teenage son, Mustapha, died in July 2003 during a gun battle with American forces in a villa in the northern city of Mosul. Denounced by an informant, they had been the two most wanted men in Iraq after their father.

The first years of Saddam Hussein's marriage coincided with political tumult in Iraq, with at least six coups or attempted revolts erupting between the assassination of King Faisal II in 1958 and the July 1968 putsch that brought the Baath Party to power.

Hussein's main role while still in his early 30s was organizing the party's militia, which became the seed of the dreaded security apparatus. By November 1969, he had eliminated rivals and dissidents to the extent that President Hassan al-Bakr appointed him vice president and deputy chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council, as the cabinet was known. Saddam remained head of the intelligence and internal security agencies, in effect controlling Iraq.

The Arab Baath Socialist Party, whose name means "renaissance" in Arabic, had been formed in the 1930s to push a secular, socialist creed as the ideal path to achieving Arab unity. But that dogma proved a sinister excuse for the imprisonment, exile or execution of all potential rivals.

No other Arab despot matched the savagery of Hussein as he went about bending all state institutions to his whim. His opening act, in January 1969, was hanging around 17 so-called spies for Israel, up to 13 of them Jews, in a downtown Baghdad square. Hundreds of arrests and executions followed as the civilian wing of the Baath Party gradually eclipsed the Iraqi military and the era of coups ended.

Hussein staged perhaps his most macabre purge in 1979, when at age 42 he consolidated his hold on Iraq. Having pushed aside President Bakr, Saddam called a gathering of several hundred top Baathists.

One senior official stepped forward to confess to having been part of a widespread plot to allow a Syrian takeover. After guards dragged the man away, Hussein took to the podium, weeping at first as he began reading a list of dozens implicated. Guards dragged away each of the accused. Hussein paused from reading occasionally to light his cigar, while the room erupted in almost hysterical chanting demanding death to traitors. The entire dark spectacle, designed to leave no doubt as to who controlled Iraq, was filmed and copies distributed around the country.

Firing squads made of cabinet members and other top officials initially gunned down 21 men, including five ministers. Iraq's state radio said the officials executed their colleagues while "cheering for the long life of the Party, the Revolution and the Leader, President, Struggler, Saddam Hussein."

Hussein invariably ensured that those around him were complicit in his bloody acts, which he masqueraded as patriotism, making certain that there would be no guiltless figure to rally opposition.

In an authoritative account of Hussein's regime called "The Republic of Fear," the self-exiled Iraqi architect Kenaan Makiya (writing under the pseudonym Samir al-Khalil) estimated that at least 500 people died in the purge that consolidated Saddam's power.

Hussein's titles reflected his status as an absolute ruler modeled after one of his heroes, Josef Stalin of the former Soviet Union. They included President of the Republic, Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces, Field Marshal and Prime Minister. In addition, the state-owned news media referred to him repeatedly as the Struggler, the Standard Bearer, the Knight of the Arab Nation and the Sword of the Arabs.

Hussein saw his first opportunity for Iraq to dominate the region in the turmoil that swept neighboring Iran immediately after its 1979 Islamic revolution. In September 1980, Hussein believed that by invading Iran he could both seize a disputed waterway along the border and inspire Iranians of Arab origin to revolt against their Persian rulers. Instead, they resisted fanatically. Hussein never acknowledged making a gross miscalculation; rather, he vilified the Iranian Arabs as traitors to the Arab cause.

Iraq fared badly in the war, not least because Hussein interfered in the battle plans despite a complete lack of military training, even issuing orders based on dreams. When strategies urged by Hussein failed, he often accused the commanders of betrayal, cowardice and incompetence and had them executed.

Hussein adored the macho trappings of the armed forces, appointing himself Field Marshal and dressing his ministers in olive-green fatigues. If he was a poor military strategist, he was fortunate in his first choice of enemy. The fear that an Islamic revolution would spread to an oil producer with estimated reserves second only to Saudi Arabia tipped the United States and its allies toward Baghdad and they provided weapons, technology and, most important, secret satellite images of Iran's military positions and intercepted communications.

The war lasted for eight years until Iran accepted a cease-fire in July 1988, with both sides terrorizing each other's civilian populations by rocketing major cities. But the March 1988 mustard gas attack on the Iraqi village of Halabja by its own government was perhaps the most gruesome incident.

Hussein waged war while promising the Iraqi people that he would not diminish their standard of living, investing in massive development that markedly improved daily life. Rural villages were electrified and linked by modern highways. Iraq boasted some of the best universities and hospitals in the Arab world — all free. Its painters, musicians and other artists, many benefiting from generous government subsidies, were also the most accomplished in the region. Hussein had his own development methods — anyone who avoided mandatory adult literacy classes in rural areas faced three years in jail.

Official corruption was unknown in Iraq in the 1980s, and religious worship somewhat free. Hussein occasionally took populist measures to underscore the importance of the public welfare. Once, for example, he decided that his ministers were too fat and he demanded that they diet, publishing their real weights and their target weights in the news media. Hussein's own weight could fluctuate from chubby to relatively trim, although well tailored suits hid his paunch. Around six feet tall, he was stocky and sported a trademark moustache.

In keeping with a ruler who used violence to achieve and sustain power, Hussein's most widespread investments were in his military. He ended the Iran-Iraq war with one million men under arms.

By then Iraq had embarked on extensive projects to acquire a homegrown arsenal of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. Iraq had also become a regional power, and Hussein expected to dominate the Arab world much as his hero Nasser held sway through the 1960s. In March 1990, he threatened to "burn half of Israel" if it ever acted against Iraq, even though the Israeli Air Force had humiliated the Iraqi leader by destroying his country's nuclear research center at Osirik in June 1981.

Hussein's next target was another neighbor, Kuwait, which Iraq had long considered part of Iraq and coveted for its deep-water port. On Aug. 2, 1990, his army swiftly occupied the tiny, immensely wealthy emirate, provoking an international crisis. Hussein declared the country Iraq's 19th province, installing a puppet government. Saudi Arabia and other conservative Arab states were shaken and outraged, while the United States and other Western countries feared for the oil fields ringing the Persian Gulf. The United Nations imposed a trade embargo and economic sanctions.

The United States and eventually 33 other nations deployed forces to the region and warned of a wider war if Hussein did not withdraw. As the crisis wore on, Hussein held onto Kuwait despite repeated threats from the United States, which dominated the military coalition by dispatching some 500,000 American soldiers.

While Uday and other senior Iraqis set about plundering Kuwait, Hussein portrayed the invasion as the start of an Islamic holy war to liberate Jerusalem. He declared that the "throne dwarfs" of the gulf must be overthrown so their wealth could fund the Arab cause. To lend himself the veneer of a religious crusader, he added the words "Allah-u akbar," or "God is great," to the Iraqi flag, said to be modeled from his own handwriting.
His public aims resonated among many Arabs in Jordan, Yemen and elsewhere, particularly because the brutality of Hussein's government had never been detailed by the state-controlled media of other Arab states. In addition, Hussein's Scud missiles crashing into Tel Aviv, however ineffective, created a stir in the Arab world.

Washington and its coalition allies hoped that the war would bring Hussein's downfall. Even before the war ended, President George H. W. Bush encouraged the Iraqi people to overthrow him, but there was no coherent plan. The ground offensive against Iraq ended after 100 hours, partly out of concern that American troops not occupy an Arab capital, partly because Arab allies feared the disintegration of Iraq and partly because a "100-hour war" made a good sound bite. Dick Cheney, then secretary of defense, warned that sending American forces to Baghdad would get them stuck in a "quagmire."

This decision enabled much of the elite Republican Guard to escape with minimal losses. The first Bush administration did little to support Shiite and Kurdish uprisings that erupted immediately after the war, which Saddam crushed with tanks and helicopter gunships.

For the next decade, Hussein repeatedly brought Iraq to the brink of renewed warfare by refusing United Nations weapons inspectors the unfettered access required to catalogue and destroy Iraq's arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, as specified in the cease-fire agreement.
The United Nations maintained strict economic sanctions against Iraq until 1996, when some oil exports were allowed to pay for food, medicine and war reparations. The sanctions, devastating to Iraqis, proved a boon to Hussein and his subordinates. The Government Accountability Office in the United States Congress estimated that the Iraqi leader siphoned at least $10 billion from the program by making oil trades off the books and demanding kickbacks.

Still, in an effort to end sanctions, Baghdad over the years offered at least five "full, final and complete" weapons disclosures, which the United Nations dismissed as incomplete. Some of the most extensive revelations emerged after the astonishing August 1995 defection of Saddam's two sons-in-law and his two eldest daughters to Jordan. The Iraqi government was apparently worried that Lt. Gen. Hussein Kamel al-Majid, the minister in charge of weapons development, would disclose all that he knew. Six months later, Gen. Kamel Majid and his brother abruptly declared they had accepted amnesty and returned. Within days, Hussein's daughters divorced them and they died in a violent shootout.

Hussein dyed his hair black and refused to wear his reading glasses in public, according to interviews with exiles published in The Atlantic Monthly in March 2002. Since a slipped disc caused him to limp slightly, he was never filmed walking more than a few steps. Each of his 20 palaces was kept fully staffed, with meals prepared daily as if he were in residence to disguise his whereabouts. Delicacies like imported lobster were first dispatched to nuclear scientists to be tested for radiation and poison.

His wine of choice was Portuguese, Mateus Rose, but he never drank in public to maintain the conceit that he was a strict Muslim. He even had genealogists draw a family tree that linked him to Fatima, the daughter of the Prophet Muhammad.

He kept an immaculate desk, with reports from all the ministries neatly stacked. He usually read only the executive summaries, but would occasionally dig deeper and always complained that he was being deceived. He often was, with even his son Qusay telling military commanders to lie if Hussein thought something had been accomplished that was not.

He was particularly phobic about germs. Even top generals summoned to meet him were often ordered to strip to their underwear and their clothes were then washed, ironed and X-rayed before they could get dressed to meet him. They had to wash their hands in disinfectant.
Hussein's American jailers reported that he tried to maintain those precautions, using baby wipes to clean meal trays, his table and utensils before eating.

Rarely traveling abroad, and surrounded by often uneducated cousins, Hussein had a limited worldview. He once reacted with wonder when an American reporter told him that the United States had no law against insulting the president. Former officials painted him as a vain, paranoid loner who no longer believed he was a normal person and considered compromise a sign of weakness.

Saad al-Bazzaz, an Iraqi writer and editor, said that Hussein, having risen so far beyond the village and cheated death so often, believed that God anointed him.

Bazzaz told The Atlantic that even Hussein's speeches echoed Koranic texts. "In the Koran, Allah says, 'If you thank me, I will give you more,' " Bazzaz said. "In the early '90s, Saddam was on TV, presenting awards to military officers, and he said, 'If you thank me, I will give you more.' "

Iraq under Hussein had a stifled quality. Imprisonment, torture, mutilation and execution were frequent occurrences, at least for those who chose to dabble in anything vaguely political. Simple information like the weather report was classified. There was no freedom of expression — even foreign newspapers were banned — and no freedom to travel. Contact with foreigners was proscribed.

There were widespread reports that Hussein himself periodically carried out the torture or even execution of those he felt had crossed him. In the summer of 1982, for example, Riyadh Ibrahim Hussein, the health minister, suggested during a cabinet meeting that Hussein step down to ease the negotiation of a cease-fire with Iran. Hussein recommended that the two retire to another room to discuss the proposal. When they did, a shot rang out. Hussein returned to the cabinet meeting alone, although in later interviews he denied killing anyone. The minister's widow was sent his dismembered corpse.

Right after the gulf war, Hussein had 42 merchants executed for profiteering, their bodies hung on telephone poles with signs reading "Greedy Merchant" around their necks. Leaders of the Shiite Muslim religious community were a particular target for summary executions, a 1998 United Nations human rights report noted.

On the other hand, Hussein ordered mosques constructed around Baghdad on a scale not seen since it was the medieval capital of the Muslim caliphate. Perhaps the most striking was the Mother of All Battles mosque completed in 2001, the 10th anniversary of the gulf war. The minarets resembled Scud missiles, and the mosque held a Koran written with Hussein's own blood, the president having donated 28 liters over more than two years.

Evidence from inside Iraq after the invasion confirmed what United Nations weapons inspectors anticipated beforehand — that Hussein abandoned the attempt to develop nuclear, biological and chemical weapons after his 1991 defeat. Orders from Hussein to destroy vestiges of the program, interpreted before the 2003 invasion as an attempt to hide their development, turned out to be an effort to comply with the ban.

The fatal controversy over whether Iraq was still developing unconventional weapons stemmed in part from Hussein's desire to convince different audiences of different things, a postwar study by the Defense Department concluded. He wanted the West to believe that he had abandoned the program, which he had. Yet he also wanted to instill fear in enemies like Iran and Israel, plus maintain the esteem of Arabs, by claiming that he possessed the weapons.

Some Bush administration critics argued that the accusations over unconventional weapons were a smoke screen, that government hawks were determined to topple Hussein as a way of reasserting American power. Richard Clarke, a former national security adviser to three presidents, described in his 2004 book "Against All Enemies" the scene in the White House in the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks against the United States, with President Bush and other senior officials trying to link Hussein directly to Al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden's organization. No such link was ever established.

Just before the invasion, Hussein, cigar in hand, appeared on television almost nightly, belittling American forces to small groups of Republican Guard commanders. He also admonished that the battlefields should be throughout Iraq, wherever there were people, even while secretly planning to protect only Baghdad.

His main concern was preserving his government, which the United States military discovered in interviews with his top aides after they were captured. Some of the unclassified results were published in a 2006 article in Foreign Affairs titled "Saddam's Delusions: The View From the Inside."

By 2003, Iraq's military was anemic, weakened by sanctions and constant changes in command, not to mention the fact that Hussein, suspicious of coup attempts, barred any rigorous maneuvers and repeatedly created new popular militias. Commanders also constantly lied to him about their state of preparedness. The United States report quoted Hussein's personal interpreter as saying that the president thought that his "superior" forces would put up a "heroic resistance and inflict such enormous losses on the Americans that they would stop their advance."

Hussein cited both Vietnam and the hasty American withdrawal from Somalia in 1994 as evidence that Americans could not stomach casualties, and he did not take the threat of regime change seriously. He so believed his own publicity about his success in fighting the first gulf war that he used it as a blueprint for the second. Hence, his main worry during the invasion was to avoid repeating the Shiite and Kurdish internal rebellion of 1991. He did not blow up the bridges over the Tigris and Euphrates to slow the American advance, for example, out of concern that he would need to rush troops south to quell any uprising. Nor did he order the oilfields ignited, as he had in Kuwait, thinking he would need the revenue in the postwar period.

"Even with U.S. tanks crossing the Iraqi border, an internal revolt remained Saddam's biggest fear," Tariq Aziz, the former deputy prime minister, told the American investigators.

The war plan as described in the 2006 book "Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq" states that while Republican Guard troops were supposed to seal off the approaches to Baghdad, only the Special Republican Guard was permitted inside the capital, again as insurance against a coup. Military commanders needed permission for any large troop movements, and the collapse came so quickly that Hussein was still issuing orders to units that had ceased to exist.

One of his last sightings was on April 9, the same day that American soldiers pulled down his statue in a Baghdad square. He appeared outside a mosque in one neighborhood, addressing a crowd from the back of a truck, with the film broadcast later on Abu Dhabi television. "I am fighting alongside you in the same trenches," he said.

He then disappeared, apparently using up to 30 hiding places and the aid of loyal tribesmen to escape capture despite a $25 million reward. He often traveled as he had during the first gulf war, in a battered orange and white Baghdad taxi. He issued periodic messages encouraging the insurgency.

In a letter dated April 28 that was faxed to Al Quds al Arabi, an Arabic newspaper published in London, Hussein blamed traitors for his ouster and urged Iraqis to rebel. "There are no priorities greater than expelling the infidel, criminal, cowardly occupier," he wrote.

In December 2003, his location was divulged by a clan member captured in a raid on a Baghdad house. Less than 11 hours later, 600 American soldiers and Special Operations forces supported by tanks, artillery and Apache helicopter gunships surrounded two farmhouses near the banks of the Tigris in Al Dwar, a village about nine miles southeast of Tikrit, the tribal seat. The soldiers — no Iraqis were involved — found nothing on the first sweep. But on the second, more intensive search, underneath a trap door apparently made of Styrofoam, Hussein was discovered lying flat at the bottom of an eight-foot hole.

His first words when he emerged, nervous and disoriented, were, "I am Saddam Hussein, president of Iraq, and I am willing to negotiate" in halting English. A special operations soldier there shot back "President Bush sends his regards," the military said later. The main indication that the filthy, dilapidated concrete hut close by had been used by the former Iraqi president was a battered green metal suitcase holding $750,000 in neatly bundled bills.

L. Paul Bremer III, the head of the occupation authority, made the first official announcement. "Ladies and gentlemen," he said, "we got him." The Iraqi journalists at the heavily guarded Baghdad news conference leapt up, applauded and cheered.

Hussein, sporting a bushy salt-and-pepper beard, was first shown on television undergoing a medical exam for head lice. The pictures electrified and shocked Iraqis and the larger Arab world, with some cheering and some appalled to see a captive Arab leader put on undignified display.
He was imprisoned at Camp Cropper, near the international airport some 10 miles from Baghdad, on the grounds of a former palace complex that the United States military turned into a prison for senior members of the government. The prison consisted of three rows of single-story buildings surrounded by a double ring of razor wire.

Hussein was kept in solitary confinement — letters and care packages including cigars sent via the Red Cross from his wife and daughters living in Qatar or Jordan were his main contact with the outside world. He lived in a relatively spartan cell consisting of a bed, a toilet, a chair, a towel, some books — including a slightly singed Koran with a bullet hole in it, which he said he found in some rubble —and a prayer rug.

Some of his former American guards, interviewed for a July 2005 story in GQ magazine, said he acted in a fatherly way, offering advice on finding a good wife — "neither too smart nor too dumb, not too old nor too young" — and invited them to hang out in one of his palaces after he was restored to power. He claimed that President Bush always had known he had no unconventional weapons. His favorite snack was Doritos corn chips, his guards said.

Hussein was combative throughout his trial, using it as a platform to encourage the insurgents. The proceedings frequently seemed to slide toward chaos, with the star defendant and the judges shouting at each other. The trial, held in one of the grandiose buildings erected not far from Hussein's former presidential palace, proved something of a security nightmare, with three defense lawyers assassinated.

At one point, something he said prompted guffaws from a spectator in an overhead gallery. Hussein turned and pointed a finger, saying, "The lion does not care about a monkey laughing at him from a tree."

Hussein often tried to draw parallels between himself and the famous leaders of Mesopotamia, the earliest civilization in the region, as well as Saladin, the 12th-century Kurdish Muslim military commander who expelled the crusaders from Jerusalem.

What preoccupied him, he said, was what people would be thinking about him in 500 years. To the horror of historic preservationists, he had the ancient walls of the former capital city of Babylon completely reconstructed using tens of thousands of newly fired bricks. An archaeologist had shown him bricks stamped with the name of Nebuchadnezzar II in 605 B.C.
After the reconstruction, the small Arabic script on thousands of bricks read, "In the reign of the victorious Saddam Hussein, the president of the Republic, may God keep him, the guardian of the great Iraq and the renovator of its renaissance and the builder of its great civilization, the rebuilding of the great city of Babylon was done."

The Shanghai Taxi Driver's MBA Lecture

All the MBAs of the world.. this is awesome... .. have patience and read it carefully .. am sure you will love it ... This is so so coolll.....

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I needed to go from Xujiahui to the airport, so I hurriedly concluded a meeting and I was looking for a taxi in front of the Meiluo building. A taxi driver saw me and very professionally came in a straight line and stopped right in front of me. Thus followed the story that astonished me greatly as if I had attended a lively MBA course. In order to faithfully preserve the intent of the taxi driver, I have tried to reproduce his original words according to my memory.

"Where do you want to go? Good, the airport. At Xujiahui, I loved to get business in front of the Meiluo building. Over here, I only work two places: Meiluo building and Junyao building. Did you know? Before I picked you up, I circled around Meiluo building twice before I saw you! People who come out of office building are definitely not going to some place nearby ...."

"Oh? You have a method!" I agreed.

"A taxi driver must also have scientific methods," he said. I was surprised and I got curious: "What scientific methods?"

"I have to know statistics. I have made detailed calculations. Let me tell you. I operate the car 17 hours a day, and my hourly cost is 34.5 RMB ...."

"How did you arrive at that?" I asked

"You calculate. I have to pay 380 RMB to the company each day for the car. The gas is about 210 RMB. I work 17 hours per day. On an hourly basis, the fixed cost is the 22 RMB that I give to the taxi company and an average of 12.5 RMB per hour in gasoline expenses. Isn't that 34.5 RMB?" I was a bit surprised. I have taken taxis for ten years, but this is the first time that a taxi driver has calculated the costs this way. Previously, the taxi drivers all tell me that the cost per kilometre was 0.3 RMB in addition to the total company fee.

"Costs should not be calculated on a per-kilometre basis. It should be calculated on an hourly basis. You see, each meter has a 'review' function through which you can see the details of the day. I have done a data analysis. The average time gap between customers is seven minutes. If I started counting the costs when someone gets in, it is 10 RMB for about 10 minutes. That means each 10 RMB customer takes 17 minutes of time, which costs 9.8 RMB (=34.5 x 17 / 60). This is not making money! If we say that customers who want to go to Pudong, Hangzhou or Qingpu are like meals, then a 10 RMB customer is not even a bite of food. You can only say that this is just a sprinkle of MSG."

Great! This driver did not sound like a taxi driver. He seemed more like an accountant. "So what you do then?" I was even more interested and I continued my questioning. It looked like I was going to learn something new on the way to the airport.

"You must not let the customer lead you all over the place. You decide what you want to do based upon the location, time and customer." I was very surprised, but this sounded significant. "Someone said that the taxi driving is a profession that depends on luck. I don't think so. You have to stand in the position of the customer and consider things from the customer's perspective. " This sounded very professional, and very much like many business management teachers who say "put yourself in others' shoes."

"Let me give you an example. You are at the entrance to a hospital. There is someone holding some medicine and there is someone else holding a wash basin. Which person will you pick up?" I thought about it and I said that I didn't know.

"You take the one with the wash basin. If you have a minor complaint that you want to be examined and to get some medicine, you don't usually go to a faraway hospital. Anyone who is carrying a wash basin has just been discharged from the hospital. When people enter the hospital, some of them die. Today, someone on the second floor dies. Tomorrow, someone on the third floor dies. Those who make it out of the hospital usually have a feeling of having been given a second life and they recognize the meaning of life again -- health is the most important thing. So on that day, that person told me, "Go ... go to Qingpu." He did not even blink. Would you say that he wanted to take a taxi to People's Plaza to transfer to the Qingpu line subway? Absolutely not!"

I began to admire him.

"Let me give you another example. That day at People's Plaza, three people were waving at me. One was a young woman who had just finished shopping and was holding some small bags. Another was a young couple who were out for a stroll. The third one was a man who wore a silk shirt and a down jacket and holding a notebook computer bag. I spent three seconds looking at each person and I stopped in front of the man without hesitation. When the man got in, he said: 'Yannan Elevated Highway. South North Elevated Highway ....' Before even finishing, he could not help but ask, 'Why did you stop in front of me without hesitating? There were two people in front. They wanted to get on as well. I was too embarrassed to fight with them.' I replied, 'It is around noon and just a dozen or so minutes before one o'clock. That young woman must have slipped out at noon to buy something and I guess that her company must be nearby. That couple are tourists because they are not holding anything and they are not going to travel far. You are going out on business. You are holding a notebook computer bag, so I can tell that this is business. If you are going out at this time, I guess that it would not be too close.' The man said, 'You are right. I'm going to Baoshan.'"

"Are those people wearing pyjamas in front of supermarkets or subway stations going to travel far? Are they going to the airport? The airport is not going to let them enter."

That makes sense! I was liking this more and more.

"Many drivers complain that business is tough and the price of gas has gone up. They are trying to pin the cause down on other people. If you keep pinning the cause on other people, you will never get any better. You must look at yourself to see where the problem is." This sounds very familiar. It seems like "If you cannot change the world, then you should change yourself" or perhaps a pirated copy of Steven Corey's "Circles of Influence and Concern."
"One time, on Nandan Road, someone flagged me down and wanted to go to Tianlin. Later on, someone else flagged me down on Nandan Road and he also wanted to go to Tianlin. So I asked, 'How come all you people who come out on Nandan Road want to go to Tianlin?' He said, 'There is a public bus depot at Nandan Road. We all take the public bus from Pudong to there, and then we take the taxi to Tianlin. So I understood. For example, you look at the road that we just passed. There are no offices, no hotels, nothing. Just a public bus station. Those people who flag down taxis there are mostly people who just got off the public bus, and they look for the shortest road for a taxi. People who flag down taxis here will usually ride not more than 15 RMB."

"Therefore, I say that the attitude determines everything!" I have heard dozens of company CEOs say that, but this was the first time that I heard a taxi driver say that.

"We need to use scientific methods and statistics to conduct business. Those people who wait at the subway exits every day for business will never make money. How are you going to provide for your wife and kids at 500 RMB a month? This is murder? This is slowly murdering your whole family. You must arm yourself with knowledge. You have to learn knowledge to become a smart person. A smart person learns knowledge in order to become a very smart person. A very smart person learns knowledge in order to become a genius."

"One time, a person wanted a taxi in order to get to the train station. I asked him how he wanted to go. He told me how to get there. I said that was slow. I said to get on the elevated highway and go this other way. He said that it was a longer way. I said, 'No problem. You have experience because you go that way frequently. It costs you 50 RMB. If you go my way, I will turn off the meter when it reaches 50 RMB. You can just pay me 50 RMB. Anything more is mine. If you go your way, it will take 50 minutes. If I go my way, it will take 25 minutes.' So in the end, we went my way. We travelled an additional four kilometres but 25 minutes quicker. I accepted only 50 RMB. The customer was very delighted for saving about 10 RMB. This extra four kilometres cost me just over 1 RMB in gas. So I have swapped 1 RMB for 25 extra minutes of my time. As I just said, my hourly cost is 34.5 RMB. It was quite worthwhile for me!"

"In a public taxi company, an ordinary driver takes three to four thousand RMB home per month. The good driver can get around five thousand. The top driver can get seven thousand RMB. Out of the 20,000 drivers, there are about two to three who can make more than 8,000 RMB a month. I am one of those two or three. Furthermore, it is very stable without too much fluctuation. "

Great! By this point, I admired this taxi driver more and more.

"I often say that I am a happy driver. Some people say, 'That's because you earn a lot of money. Of course, you must be happy.' I tell them, 'You are wrong. This is because I have a happy and active mind, and that is why I make a lot of money.'"

What a wonderful way to put it!

"You have to appreciate the beauty that your work brings. Stuck in a traffic jam at People's Plaza, many drivers complain, 'Oh, there's a traffic jam again! What rotten luck!' You must not be like that. You should try to experience the beauty of the city. There are many pretty girls passing by. There are many tall modern buildings; although you cannot afford them, you can still enjoy them with an appreciative look. While driving to the airport, you can look at the greenery on both sides. In the winter, it is white. How beautiful! Look at the meter -- it is more than 100 RMB. That is even more beautiful! Each job has its own beauty. We need to learn how to experience that beauty in our work."

"Ten years ago, I was a general instructor at Johnson's. Eight years ago, I had been the department manager for three different departments. I quit because there was no point in making three or five thousand a month. I decided to become a taxi driver. I want to be a happy driver. Ha ha ha ...."

When we arrived at the airport, I gave him my business card and said, "Are you interested in coming this Friday to my office and explain to the Microsoft workers about how you operate your taxi? You can treat it as if your meter is running at 60 kilometres per hour. I will pay you for the time that you talk to us. Give me a call." Then I began to write down his lively MBA lecture on the airplane.

Driftwood - Lyrics

Everything is open
Nothing is set in stone
Rivers turn to ocean
Oceans tide you home
Home is where your heart is
But your heart had to roam
Drifting over bridges
Never to return
Watching bridges burn
Youre driftwood floating underwater
Breaking into pieces pieces pieces
Just driftwood hollow and of no use
Waterfalls will find you bind you grind you
Nobody is an island
Everyone has to go
Pillars turn to butter
Butterflying low
Low is where your heart is
But your heart has to grow
Drifting under bridges
Never with the flow
And you really didnt think it would happen
But it really is the end of the line
So Im sorry that you turned to driftwood
But youve been drifting for a long long time
Everywhere theres trouble
Nowheres safe to go
Pushes turn to shovels
Shovelling the snow
Frozen you have chosen
The path you wish to go
Drifting now forever
And forever more
Until you reach your shore
Youre driftwood floating underwater
Breaking into pieces p ieces pieces
Just driftwood hollow and of no use
Waterfalls will find you bind you grind you
And you really didnt think it would happen
But it really is the end of the line
So Im sorry that you turned to driftwood
But youve been drifting for a long long time
Youve been drifting for a long long time
Youve been drifting for a long long
Drifting for a long long time

--- Thanx Ragi for Introducing me to this beautiful song

Karma Yoga as Strategy

A beautiful article I stumbled upon recently....

A MANAGEMENT scholar once remarked that there are as many definitions of strategy as there are writers on the subject. Today, according to Henry Mintzberg, as many as ten major schools of strategy exist. These schools approach strategy from diverse, and sometimes conflicting, perspectives. However, two basic elements permeate all these schools of thought.

The first sees strategy as the `fit' between an organisation and its environment. The second views strategy as goal-directed action. These two notions came close to being challenged in the 1970s, with the advent and development of the "descriptive" approach. Henry Mintzberg, one of its chief protagonists, pointed out that strategies get formed — they cannot be formulated in advance.

Given the impossibility of predicting outcomes, only some elements of an intended strategy get realised, while most fall by the roadside, unrealised. Again, realised strategy includes a component that consists of unintended outcomes — the emergent strategy. According to Mintzberg, strategy involves synthesis and calls for the exercise of judgement and creativity. It cannot be reduced to the analytical task of planning or programming.

Having challenged mainstream thinking in this fashion, scholars who viewed strategy `emergent' did not carry forward their arguments to their logical conclusion.

If strategies are emergent, what use are goals? Quinn sought to answer this riddle by postulating that managers need to be goal-directed, but to reach these goals, they should adopt the approach of logical incrementalism, recasting both the goals and actions in small steps till the appropriate configuration of strategy, structure systems and other organisational attributes they have to achieve become clear.

Recently, a new school of thought based on the theory of complexity challenged the concept of fit, so central to strategic management. This school has advanced an alternative view of strategy in which "co-evolution" replaces the notion of "organisation-environment fit".

In the complexity-based view, organisation-environment relationships are viewed as inter-organisational networks. Organisations co-evolve with other organisations and entities external to them, driven more by their internal forces of "self-organisation" than by the external forces of environmental selection.

While this co-evolution takes an organisation far from equilibrium, the latter stays within a bounded region in parameter space, called the "strange attractor". These strange attractors are emergent and cannot be predicted in advance. The only constant, then, according to this school of thought, is change. Organisations survive and thrive by being in a state termed the edge of chaos — a state of constant flux bordering on the chaotic, but not chaotic. What differentiates this state from a chaotic state of random changes is the fact that the parameters of the organisation, while constantly changing, remain confined to "strange attractors".

Two things are clear from the tenets of complexity theory. First, the task of strategy is not to structure the organisation to achieve the best fit with the environment. The task, instead, is to maintain it at the edge of chaos by ensuring resource modularity and experimenting with ever-new configurations of organisational resources. Second, since outcomes are unpredictable, long-term goal setting would be futile. This calls for repudiating the view of strategy as goal-directed action.

While contemporary strategic management thought has transcended "fit" and equilibrium because of complexity theory, it is yet to go the whole way and repudiate strategy as goal-directed action. Many protagonists of the complexity theory still adhere to goals and predictable outcomes. Thus, while some are concerned with predicting the shape of strange attractors in advance, others are engaged in empirically finding out linkages between the "edge of chaos state" and profits.

The objective is to somehow arrive at new prescriptions for enhancing goal-attainment. This hesitation to go beyond goal-directed action perhaps stems from the Occidental mindset. One realised this while interacting with an American Jesuit, also an ethics consultant to MNCs. When talking about the Karma theory even the man of religion could not help interjecting, "If goals are not important, what are?" If strategy is not goal-directed, it is not difficult to see that complexity theory is taking strategic management towards a "Karmic" strategy paradigm — strategy as selfless action, as action without regard to its outcome.

Karma Yoga is not only the performance of actions without expectation of reward, but is, in addition, the performance of actions according to the yuga dharma. What is the yuga dharma that can guide organisational actions? Complexity theory points to seeking and achieving ever-new resource combinations as this dharma.

The reader familiar with Schumpeter would readily recognise that this is exactly what entrepreneurship is all about — combining factors of production in new ways. And, by definition, that which is new is not old or previously conceived.

Complexity theory calls for businesses to adopt entrepreneurship than the accumulation of profits as their dharma. Even Karl Marx was not averse to recognising this "revolutionary" side of capitalism, while opposing its other side of greed and aggrandisement.

Just as Vivekananda exhorted the western world to "go back to Christ" years ago, "Go back to being entrepreneurs" is what complexity theory seems to be telling the capitalist world now.

Ironically enough, rewards seek out the karma yogi whose actions are not driven by the expected fruits of his actions. It can be shown that the same is true of the business world. A re-look at corporate success stories would establish this fact.

A detailed examination of the history of Sony would reveal that the secret of its success was not — as Gary Hamel and Prahalad would have us believe — the core competence it deliberately built over years, but its devotion to creating new products as a goal in itself. In today's hyper-competitive environment, expecting businesses to repudiate profits and focus on entrepreneurship instead may sound like expecting a man-eater to turn vegetarian. But the rewards await the vegetarian tigers, not the man-eaters.

Heard Somewhere

"Abstaining from sex for few days Doesnt help you Qualify as a Virgin "

Good Quotes...

When I was a child of seven years old, my friends, on a holiday, filled my pocket with coppers. I went directly to a shop where they sold toys for children; and, being charmed with the sound of a whistle, that I met by the way in the hands of another boy, I voluntarily offered and gave all my money for one. I then came home, and went whistling all over the house, much pleased with my whistle, but disturbing all the family. My brothers, and sisters, and cousins, understanding the bargain I had made, told me I had given four times as much for it as it was worth; put me in mind what good things I might have bought with the rest of the money; and laughed at me so much for my folly, that I cried with vexation; and the reflection gave me more chagrin than the whistle gave me pleasure. This however was afterwards of use to me, the impression continuing on my mind; so that often, when I was tempted to buy some unnecessary thing, I said to myself, Don't give too much for the whistle; and I saved my money. -- Benjamin Franklin, letter to Madame Brillon, November 10, 1779
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There never was a good war or a bad peace. -- Benjamin Franklin, letter to Josiah Quincy, September 11, 1783
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In practice all men are atheists; they deny their faith by their actions. -- Ludwig Feuerbach, source unknown
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If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them. -- Henry David Thoreau, Walden
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There are times when one would like to hang the whole human race, and finish the farce. -- Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court
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A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. -- Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan
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Don't Quit

This is one of the most relevant and motivating poems I have come across...

When things go wrongs, As they sometimes will,
When the road you're trudging seems so uphill,
When the funds are low and debts are high,
And you want to Smile but have to Sigh,
When care is pressing ou downa a bit,
Rest, if you must, but don't you quit.

Life is Queer with its twists and turns,
As everyone of us sometimes learns.
And many a failure turns about,
When he might have won if he'd stuck it out,
Don't give up though the pace seems slow,
You might succeed with Another Blow.

Often the struggler has given up,
When he might have captured the victor's cup
And he learned too late, when the night slipped down,
How close he was to the Golden Crown.

Success is failure turned inside out,
The silver tint of clouds of doubt,
And you never can tell how close you are,
It may be near when it seems afar,
So stick to the fight when you're hardest hit,
It's when things seem worst that you mustn't quit.

---Anonymous

Aphoristic Blindness

You and I stand here, togather yet alone
Waiting for someone or something
Disjoint emotions confuse our heads
And we question the moral worth of others??

Its an imperfect world
Bloated by corrupt thought processes
Value Judgements rule our eyes
Can we condone the infidelities of life??

We ride the horses of dreams
Driven by our volitions
Lust defines our actions
And we enjoy the death of our wisdom??

A meaningful birth
Moulded by the warmth of the world
Blinded by our imtemprate rage
Can we realize the beauty of our being??

-- Vinny (07.10.06)

The Lords - Notes on Vision

Some of my favourite lines by the Lizard King:

In the womb we are blind cave fish
---------------------------------------------
When play dies it becomes the Game.
When sex dies it becomes Climax.

All games contain the idea of death.
---------------------------------------------

The voyeur, the peeper, the Peeping Tom, is a dark comedian.
He is repulsive in his dark anonymity, in his secret invasion.
He is pitifully alone.
But, strangely, he is able through this same silence and concealment
to make unknowing partner of anyone within his eye's range.
This is his threat and power.

There are no glass houses.
The shades are drawn and "real" life begins.
Some activities are impossible in the open.
And the secret events are the voyeur's game.
He seeks them out with his myriad army of eyes -
like the child's notion of a Deity who sees all.
"Everything?" asks the child.
"Yes, everything", the answer, and
the child is left to cope with the devine intrusion.

The voyeur is masturbator, the mirror is the badge,
the window his prey.

---------------------------------------------------------------

Destroy roofs, walls, see in all the rooms at once.

From the air we trapped gods, with the gods’
omniscient gaze, but without their power to be
inside minds and cities as they fly above.

----------------------------------------------------------------

The Lords & The New Creatures

Throughout high school, and likely even earlier, Jim Morrison kept notebooks of quotes he had heard, notes, and stray thoughts. Over time, these notebooks also started to include at first aphorisms, fragments of poems, and ultimately entire poems in various stages of development.

It is well known that Jim was an avid reader, studying numerous genre aside from his schoolwork. His tastes were extremely eclectic, running from the “Great Books”, to westerns, surrealist, symbolist, beat and romantic poetry, philosophy, art history and criticism, mythology, metaphysics and trashy dime store novels - all of which would later provide a wealth of metaphor for his own work. He loved to learn perhaps more than anything else, and it has been said of Jim that he didn't just learn things, rather he merged with them.

During his days at UCLA film school, he continued to fill notebook after notebook. These would become the basis for his first published work, entitled The Lords: Notes on Vision. Later he would describe this work as “a thesis on film aesthetics”.

But the ideas expressed in this work go far beyond the scope of film alone; they are a commentary on the very fabric of social structure. Jim’s vision of a society of sheep, conditioned by fear, and controlled by the “Lords” is a dynamic which is even more easily seen at work in society today than it was during his time. Between the Lords and the Sheep were the individuals - those who were possessed of a personal conviction greater than their fear - the conviction to live in the integrity of their own being, no matter the cost. This truly describes the way Jim Morrison lived, and his personal cost was great indeed. It is an important element of his legacy, and the underlying cause of his torment by the Establishment, who knew exactly what Jim was talking about when he screamed “You’re all a bunch of fucking slaves” in Miami.

Jim would later say of The Lords: Notes on Vision :

“What that book is a lot about is the powerlessness that people have in the face of reality,” Jim said. “They have no real control over events or their own lives. Something is controlling them. The closest they ever get is the television set.”

Fear the Lords who are secret among us
The Lords are w/in us
Born of sloth & cowardice


The Lords & The New Creatures is Published


In the aftermath of the Miami incident, the largest tour the Doors had ever scheduled was canceled show by show, making a travesty of the band’s reputation and finances, but ironically leaving Jim free to at last pursue other interests. He set up his film production company, HWY Productions, and at the suggestion of his new friend, Beat poet Michael McClure, he self-published two limited edition volumes of poetry, The Lords: Notes on Vision followed by The New Creatures. It was in the following year that Simon and Schuster would publish the two volumes in one edition.

While The Lords is a collection of many interesting insights and aphorisms, it is The New Creatures which reveals Jim Morrison’s first fledgling poetic works.

There is no doubt that Jim's first love and perhaps his greatest gift was language, and his poetry exemplifies this gift in a startling, succinct and truly courageous honesty. His insights into the nature of the human experience, and his prophetic vision of the future are astounding. His maturity as both a critical thinker and a poet was developed to an incredible degree for a young man in his early twenties. His vision was absolutely exquisite. If possible, his work is even more relevant now than at the time it was first published.

Lord Krishna Vs. Corporate Organizations

Dear Readers,

I am an MBA working with the strategy group of a company with nearly BUSD 10 turnover. This introduction I feel was necessary to communicate to you that I am very much a part of the world and situation I am about to discuss now.

Karma - to put it simply is the concept of self - realization. It is based on the logic of taking actions without looking at the outcome. The advantages of following this logic can be many. But the biggest advantage as I see it is that as you have no fear of loss or no distraction of the vision of victory you therefore give your sincere and best effort to the cause at hand.

But this advantage is what has prompted me to jot down my thoughts. In the corporate world, that I belong to, everything is result oriented. Every activity that you undertake, every initiative that you implement, every project that you execute is based on results. Even our own performance in the organizations has to be result oriented (Read KRAs / KPAs) and not task oriented.

Let me elaborate a bit more. All the stakeholders right from the Equity investors, lenders, Management, employees, Suppliers, business partners, stock markets, competitors and even the consumers look at the bottomline and topline of the organization. Would you invest or buy shares in an organization running into losses??? Lets look at a more specific example. In Mergers & Acquisitions the heart (disounting synergies and core competencies) lies in Valuation. No matter what route you take DCF or Multiples you look at the future results (read Cash flows) of the target company. Would you acquire a company with negative future cash flows?? Or Still better. Would you acquire a company without even looking at future results??? Wouldn't it be insane to do anything like that. Won't any company who adopts such kind of measure is sure to end up being takenover by someone who believes in taking actions with an eye for results.
Now, Just try and imagine that you are an investor who is ready to invest your entire life's savings in an organization and you have come across an Organization with a Management Philosophy like - "We are in the business of achieving Moksha. Our aim is to ONLY implement / execute our actions to the best of our abilities and sincereity. Increase in sales, profts and return to investors are not the things that can deviate us from our aim ". What will you do?? - 1) invest, or 2) run away as far as possible, 3) send your CV to the HR Dept. .

Lets move on from organizations to individuals. In this time, of PEs/ VCs/ IBs etc, where the remunerations are making and breaking the records within the sameday, can you imagine yourself or anyone for that matter going for an interview and accepting the job offer without asking or negotiating for the CTC or without ckecing out the job content. In this case, both the CTC or the job profile are the results you look at. Your action over here is taking the interview and the result is getting the job with the right job profile and with the right package.

I can go on and on about this. But the point still remains - Karma they say takes you on to the road to Moksha (or Liberation). But for Karma you need to take actions without looking at the results. But no Corporate entity (individual or Organization) has the liberty and the right to take actions without focussing on the results (Remember - The aim of an organization is to maiximize the returns to its various stakeholders). So, what does that mean - The Concepts of Karma / Moksha are fundamentally against the concept of the Corporate world???? And, can there ever be a merger (no acquisitions over here) of the Corporate World Philosophy to Lord Krishna's Philosophy??

I invite your comments on this.

The Struggle of love..

Am struggling to bathe in the raindrops
Falling on my soul…
I see you in the weeping clouds…
I see you in the rain …
Though, the tears of GOD…. Has given me a reason to smile
But … Am not happy .. Am Sad….

Am struggling to live our memories
Running through my heart …
I see you in my eyes ...
I see you in my soul …
Though, your memory … Has given me a reason to smile
But … Am not happy .. Am Sad….

Am struggling to steal you from the heavens
Hiding you inside …
I see you in MY Truth …
I see you in HIS lies…
Though, our child in my arms ... Has given me a reason to smile
But … Am not happy .. Am Sad….

Am struggling to understand this marriage of love and pain
Deciding the fate of our lives …
I see God’s Love …
I see Devil’s Ploy…
Though, The love that I have received ...Has given me a reason to smile
But … Am not happy .. Am Sad….

Am struggling to wake you from your sleep
Brought on to you from the skies …
I see you MY Angel …
I see you MY Wife…
Though, the hope of meeting you on the other side ...Has given me a reason to smile
But … Am not happy .. Am Sad….

Am struggling NOT to question the ways of My Lord
Running my life ….
I see HIS victory…
I see HIS loss….
How can I be happy? .. How can I smile??
When all your love.. brings only.. agony, pain & cries...

--- Vinny (28.09.06)