World as I perceived

Presendential candidates biography videos by the dailyshow

Rama Gundapaneni — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 01:16:32 GMT

I am a big fan of Jon Stewart's the daily show on comedy central. He is so funny and thought provoking. I was following his show during republican and democratic national convention weeks. Following two parody biography videos have caught my attention. I am posting them below, see you if you like them.

Barack Obama - He completes us

John McCain - Reformed Maverick

Rama Gundapaneni

Note: I should mention that I have no political affiliations. If I have offened anybody by posting these videos, it is not my intention. Since they were out there I am just bringing them to your notice.

Searching for our common voice

Rama Gundapaneni — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 22:37:58 GMT

I was talking to my friend the other day. He was asking me what is the "Future Generation" that I was talking about in my other blog. He told me I was too vague and he was curious about how I would plan to reach the future generation of the world, as they have too many books to read why would even care to come to website that is one among millions out there.

My answer to that is, "No". I am not referring to all the young men and women in the world. I don't want to bite off more than I can chew. My goal is to build and mobilize the close community that I have built around myself, the aspirant and motivated young people that I have met and will be meeting.

In this context, let me clarify why and what I want to do.

I come from a small town in India. I am fortunate to have caring parents who have lived everyday of their life to provide me the opportunity to achieve higher goals leading towards having a better life than them. I would like to believe I have not let them down. Yet I have constant feeling that I have underachieved at the crucial stages of my career. I feel I have not fulfilled my potential. My idol, Jayaprakash Narayan, has put it brilliantly,

"There are two great sins, one is unfulfilled potential and the other is avoidable suffering. These two are in abundance in India and this makes me angry"

I feel sad when I meet people who can't recognize their potential and who don't know how to fulfill their potential. As a child I always wanted to achieve something yet I have confusion about the choices available. I have spent weeks and months lazily not knowing what I wanted in life. Now I know but sadly I needed that information at that time.

I have lived with that vagueness about things at large. As a boy, I felt a void in my community about the things that I wanted to learn and need in the way I could relate. As a man, I have always felt a compulsive need to engage in a conversation with the youth in my community. I wanted to know their fears and anxieties and see if I can help them in any way. Basically, I want to have a dialogue with everyone in the community.

Practically it is not possible as I can't do this alone. I need to involve other grown-ups in the community. The idea of website came when I felt web medium is ideally suited for this purpose.
Having answered the why, let me give you idea of what I want to do.

I want to present achievements, failures faced by people in our community (myself, my friends and whoever is willing) and the things we have learned from our failures. If somebody is at the cross roads of their life, it could help them. If somebody doesn't realize their potential, our thoughts and ideas may tap into their community esteem, "If my neighbor can do that so can I". It is easy for them to relate as we are one among them. The bar for achievement in our community as a whole would thus be raised.

The idea of this conversation is not to tell kids what they should do rather instill the ability to rationalize before doing things they need to do. It is not for them to have our perspective of life rather to form their own and challenge ours when they conflict. This process will lead to a better perspective for all.

I know you could be still cynical. Believe me when I say this, most of the inspiring and motivating things are heard from a friend or a relative. Let me recount my own example. There is this brilliant professor, Randy Pausch who was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer was asked to give a last lecture. He talked brilliantly about achieving dreams. It has inspired me after hearing it. It has more than seven million hits in the youtube yet I was not aware of it until yesterday when my friend, Srinivas, told me.

Randy Pausch Last Lecture: Achieving Your Childhood Dreams

My belief is that young kids in our community need to hear such stories.

My road is empty now and I am looking on. Hope you all will join me.

Rama Gundapaneni

Edited by: Dr. Srinivas Ramakrishnan

Seed of thought - start of a project

Rama Gundapaneni — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 20:20:12 GMT

Note: I had this information in the home page. I decided to move to the blog believing length of this article doesn't seem right on the home page. The content is moved verbatim from homepage - Idea is to explain why I wanted to start a website.

We have put up this website to let our family, friends and well wishers know what is going on in our life. There is another compelling reason to start this web site, that is to reach out an another targeted set of people - guess who!

In all humbleness, they are none other but - The Future Generation. We would like to pass on our life experience as it is happening. This may appear trivial, redundant and irrelevant to a matured mind. But if it can give any young mind a different perspective of looking at things then consider our mission is accomplished.

There is also a selfish motive behind this. We observed that when we think through and write about all things that matter we will unearth hidden side of our personality that we ourselves does not know. If we can do that and tell you what you have not thought before, so you all will.

The idea of website started when we felt we need a forum to facilitate that information exchange - what better forum then ubiquitous web medium. CMS (Content Management System) software and Web 2.0 ideas made this task that much more easier (Please google it if you don't know what they mean). We will try to update our website as much as we can. Please stop by whenever you have time and leave us the feedback as much as you can. We need that.

We have used two open source projects in ASP.Net to power this website. Thanks to Subtext (blogging software) and My Web Pagers Starter Kit (MWPSK). We are customizing the code and if we come up with generic features that everyone may like, we would love to contribute to the open source community.

This site is currently hosted on godaddy.com. If you want to setup your website and don't know how to proceed then please visit the following blog.

(We will write it pretty soon, please bear with us)

Hope you will find our site interesting. Please do check out our blogs

Greetings from

Natasha and Ramu

Why I chose "Ramu World"

Rama Gundapaneni — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 01:48:41 GMT

Update: My home page is up and running. Blogs are redirected from the home page now

First let me tell you that I am very happy to finally get my blog up and running. This has been a dream for a while. Glad I finally found time to do it. My idea is to have full blown web site with blogging as the main feature. My home page will be redirecting to blog page until I get my home page content ready.

Coming to the point, my contention is that we don't strictly associate the word "world" with either the Earth or the Universe. Because they define physical attributes rather than life in it. When we say world, its almost always is physical space along with life that occupies it.

Think about it, world is always subjective to life/people that inhabit it. Water world, western world, different world and so on. In the same vein, the world means different to every person that live on this earth. Every person perceives that world with their knowledge, scope and exploring instincts. We build a concept of "world with people" as we have experienced it. We constantly refine that concept. So in that sense, at present time we have over six billion worlds in existence built in as many brains (I hope got current population right).

My intention of this website is to share the world as I have understood and have been refining. I know no other world that is not in my conscience. But I am inclined to broaden the horizons of my world in every facet of it (technical, cultural, political, fun, play and everything thing that is fascinating), I hope this website fulfills that ambition.

For you to help me in this quest, I am presenting you my world, the Ramu World.

Rama Gundapaneni