Anger Management Techniques

Psychologists recommend a balanced approach to anger, which both controls the emotion and allows the emotion to express itself in a healthy way. Some descriptions of actions of anger management are:

• Direct, such as not beating around the bush, making behaviour visible and conspicuous, using body language to indicate feelings clearly and honestly, anger directed at persons concerned.
• Honorable, such as making it apparent that there is some clear moral basis for the anger, being prepared to argue your case, never using manipulation or emotional blackmail, never abusing another person’s basic human rights, never unfairly hurting the weak or defenseless, taking responsibility for actions.
• Focused, such as sticking to the issue of concern, not bringing up irrelevant material.
• Persistent, such as repeating the expression of feeling in the argument over and over again, standing your ground, self defense.
• Courageous, such as taking calculated risks, enduring short term discomfort for long term gain, risking displeasure of some people some of the time, taking the lead, not showing fear of other’s anger, standing outside the crowd and owning up to differences, using self-protective skills.
• Passionate, such as using full power of the body to show intensity of feeling, being excited and motivated, acting dynamically and energetically, initiating change, showing fervent caring, being fiercely protective, enthusing others.
• Creative, such as thinking quickly, using more wit, spontaneously coming up with new ideas and new views on subjects.
• Forgiving, such as demonstrating a willingness to hear other people’s anger and grievances, showing an ability to wipe the slate clean once anger has been expressed.
• Listening, to what is being said to you. Anger creates a hostility filter, and often all you can hear is negatively toned.

A common skill used in most anger management programs is learning assertive communication techniques. Assertive communication is the appropriate use of expressing feelings and needs without offending or taking away the rights of others. It is typically started with the use of "I" statements followed by a need statement, such as "I feel hurt, when you don't call if you're running late, I need for you to call me if you are going to be late".

With regard to interpersonal anger, Dr. Eva L. Feindler^[4] recommends that people try, in the heat of an angry moment, to see if they can understand where the alleged perpetrator is coming from. Empathy is very difficult when one is angry but it can make all the difference in the world. Taking the other person's point of view can be excruciating when in the throes of anger, but with practice it can become second nature.

Buddhists, on the other hand, recommend a slightly different approach. They believe that there are several antidotes for handling anger. The chief amongst them are patience, understanding karma, equanimity and realization of emptiness (the sum of which can be achieved through daily Concentration Meditation and Insight Meditation, or Samatha and Vipassana). The main issue of anger management is that anger is regarded as an incorrect projection of the mind, so that wisdom and insight can ultimately correct the mind and eliminate anger completely.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anger_management

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Maverick launches MSM

Pune-based startup Maverick Mobile launched their latest product, Maverick Secure Mobile (MSM), at the DEMO conference earlier this week. DEMO is one of the premier conferences for new startups to launch their products. Watch their product presentation video here to see how easy-to-use and useful their product is... This kind of softwares are really needed to thwart cell phone & other electronic device thefts especially when the cell phones are increasingly becoming an important & integral part of our lives.

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Enjoy festivals without creating hassles

It's the time of the year when festivals take a centerstage across India. With all the major festivals Ganpati, Dassera, Diwali lined up there will be a lot of energy, happiness, excitement in and around us. However there are many side effects of this season as well. Let's take Ganpati & Dassera for instance. Ganpati is celebrated at a grand scale in Maharashtra & Gujrat; Dassera is celebrated the same way in West Bengal & Bihar. 

In both festivals, many idols of the Ganesha/Durga and others are created in all shapes & sizes, which are setup on a platform for public viewing and in many places a huge gate is setup which serves as entrance/exit for public. The passage from entrance to the Idols is decorated with lights and decorative rope work, or the whole passage is covered with cloth walls/ceiling leading to the idols where the main hall is created.. resembling a huge decorative tent (called Pandal). This celebration goes for ten days followed by huge idol immersion processions. The whole effort consumes a lot of money/man power/energy but sure brings happiness & satisfaction to many. But the main tangible side effect of this whole process are Dugup Roads. 

To create idol platforms & pandals, roads are dugup at many places; causing the roads to become fragile & potholes are formed fairly quickly. This inturn causes traffic nightmares to commuters and management hazard for the municipal corporations. 

Cause of this is the use of bamboos as the base to erect everything and to bamboos are supported by burying them partly in the ground. As enevitable this may look to many of us but I see a good business opportunity here which will make this whole process more infrasturcture friendly.  Instead of using bamboos as support we can use poles (made of light metal) with a tripod like base (made of heavy metal). This will and to further strenghten it; they can be linked to each other by a thin metalic mesh. on the lines of how the cots are made. Just that it's scale will be greater. 

So, the foldable and linkable structures can be manufactured and sold as ready to use pandal kits, any kind of decoration can be done on these structures. Then the tent houses will buy these products and lease it out to the mandals/samitis whever they need it. They can also be utilized to create pandals for weddings, fairs, exihibitions and many more. So, we will have easy to setup, highly reusable pandals which will over time cost less and cause less problems to administration and do no harm to roads. On the similar line platforms can be made of interlinked table like structures. I believe this will surely reduce the damage done to the roads and create a new industry providing business avenues & employement for many.

Some of the other side effects, 

a)  Water pollution - We already have efforts to make green idols & ban on PoP. Also can encourage people to have metallic idols and reuse them every year, which is already an accepted practice.

b) Sound pollution - We have decibel limits in place and the deadline which no body seems to follow. One way is to play the songs but don't have speakers. Instead the music is streamed using A2DP over bluetooth (which give wireless high quality stereo music). Now the visitors can simply have to put on an A2DP enabled headset and they will enjoy and no one will get disturbed. But this doesn't seem to be very adaptable as of now.

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Indian delicacies categorized by states

This quite a comprehensive list of delicacies accurately categorized by the states where they are locally made and are readily available. Special thing to notice is the delcacies actually blend with neighbour states. As in UP, Bihar & Jharkhand you will generally get all the dishes mentioned special to those places and that's natural.

I have stayed in Bihar & Maharashtra and so my local favorite dishes are Litti (Bihar), Pittha (Jharkhand) & Modak (Maharashtra). This classification is based on the picture above.

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Google Chrome - A much needed boost to cloud computing?

Google is going to launch Chrome, a whole new web browser, today at 11 am PDT. Looking at the concept and features the browser has to offer, there is no doubt that this will set off a revolution in browser design and trigger a new set of innovation to make the browsers even more powerful.

Somehow it makes me think that the trigger behind this browser was the of idea of having web based OS and cloud computing. Now that the browser will behave like a host to applications (like an OS) .. going forward surely we can do away with desktop OS and use everything over internet.

I found the following features of Chrome as the most exciting ones.

1) Multiprocessing instead of multithreading - Making each tab independent & secure and yet have them in a group, like best of both worlds.
2) Chrome Task manager - Now we will be able to spot the culprit webpage / plugin hogging up memory/bandwidth and can handle them without affecting other browsing sessions.
3) Phishing / Malware protection - It automatically updates the list of Phishing & Malware sites frequently and warns us when we land on them. It also notifies the Malware site owners about the breach as additional measure.
4) Incognito - Secure session from which nothing will be logged / saved as part of history
5) New Java script VM - The whole new java script virtual machine which makes java script more organized and efficient.

Most important of it all, these innovations are open source for everyone to use and extend, some are also provided as API for others to use it to enhance their features. I was even impressed with the promotional comic strips.. nice way of spreading the word without boring much.

I am impressed with the thought and design behind Chrome. I just hope the browser lives upto the expectation.

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Let's give a DAM

I was reading an op-ed article "Damming the Deluge" published today in Indian Express by Nikhilesh Jha, who is a joint secretary CSIR. After reading the article I couldn't agree more with Nikhilesh. I, being from Bihar, very well know how much devastation is done by floods every year to whole nothern region of Bihar and thanks to the ignorance by Central & State goverments, it has become a part of life for people in low lying areas. As soon as monsoon looms, they look for relocating as flooding is as expected as a monsoon shower.

I always thought that only if we could control the Koshi water by building dams, we could easily solve the problem of power & irrigation for Bihar. I wondered why it was not looked into, because if I could think of it then I am sure there are many others who can & who have thought about it. This article gives insight on this issue and clearly shows that the dam built for Koshi can turn Koshi from a bane to boon for Bihar. To conclude I will just quote Nikhilesh here.

The Barahkshetra dam, the Chatra barrage and the Kosi-Mechi link will not only control the danger of recurrent floods, they will also bring in much needed prosperity to Nepal and plains of east Bihar through irrigation and hydro-power supply.

Let the present devastation catalyse the decision to undertake the projects which have been deferred for decades, especially because there is a potential to turn the state around in one go. The sympathy factor stemming from human tragedy and the backlash generated against Nepal can be leveraged to expedite these projects.

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Wedding Woes

No this is not the usual cribbing on how-wedding-spoils-a-person's-life. I am talking about the woes arising out of the great Indian wedding. I recently attended a wedding and it was as always a great experience, lots of colors, happiness, so many people and as many rituals. I just love Indian weddings.

But the question which troubled me was why the hell an Indian wedding is not complete. What I mean is, after you get married you still have to go to court / registrar and get your marriage registered and only after getting a certificate, you can prove you are married, especially to the officials where you need to prove it. Most troubles are faced by women, as they generally has to tussle with virtually all the govt offices to get their name changed. Then I thought to myself may be registration is important to have a proper record of and to be able to validate a marriage. Because in Indian weddings traditionally we invite the whole society as witness and may be then it is difficult to convert it into paper work.

Then another question shot up, If registration is indeed important and almost everyone is going to be married, then why not make it easy to register a marriage. This will be in best interest of everyone in the country. So, how to make it convenient to register a marriage. I believe the answer is change the approach. Instead of having offices where people will go and register their marriage, which creates chaos at offices and too much complications for everyone involved, just reach out to people in a way which doesn't require much hassle and efforts.

Simple and yet effective solution could be, give some basic training and legal authority to the priests on whom we put the whole faith for our successful marriages anyway. This will have many benefits.
1) Widespread & established network: As we have priests in possibly every corner of country they make a very strong network and increase our reach.

2) Convenience to everyone: All they have to do is carry a registration form to the wedding, and with all the rituals take out 10 minutes to fill up the form with all the details. There can be as many witnesses as one wants and the registration can become on the spot. So, least hassle for everyone.

3) Induce competition to make it viable: As soon as some of the priests will start this practice they will boast of providing legal registration of marriages and that will encourage others to follow suite or they will loose business.

And then I believe our great Indian wedding will become complete. I know many will not agree to my point of view but I believe changing times require change of approach and this looks like the best way to me.

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