How fitting for this news to appear just a few days after I wrote a blog appreciating Aamir Khan. My friend and fellow blogger Prathanth just shared this Times of India article with me announcing that Khan has received the Padma Bhushan, the third highest civilian award in India.
I’m so proud that the Indian government has recognized a truly deserving person who has significantly enhanced the quality of Indian cinema and addressed big social issues in the country.
Congratulations, Aamir!
This comment I submitted to the StudentBMJ, a monthly publication for medical students, was published in the October 09 issue!
I've been running a business for 19 years. When I started it off, progress was slow…most of my time was spent researching my market and learning about how things work. 10 years into the business, things started picking up, and 4 years later, it just took off. Suddenly everyone wanted to do business with us! Our turnover was great and in a matter of time, angel investors came knocking on our door. This is the story of Me, Incorporated.
Read any newspaper article about Twitter and it won’t end without touching on the topic of how many followers one has. In fact, CNN and Ashton Kutcher had a competition with the sole purpose of amassing the most number of Twitter fans. Granted every person has the desire to feel valued, popular, and liked, but does that mean we should start cutting deals to get followers?
Allow me to digress for a second. This is comparable to counting the number of friends we have on Facebook or entries in our contacts. Is the point to hit the high score or have valuable connections that you can have a give and take relationship with?
I recently had someone tweet to me, “follow me and I’ll follow you back.” I was like…what? I checked his page out because maybe he had content he thought was relevant to me, but no…this was just someone trying to get more followers, and had written a similar message to many other users. Surprisingly (or maybe not), some 50-odd people liked the idea!
Why am I shocked? Saying “follow me” makes sense because you are just promoting yourself and your feed. But offering to reciprocate as incentive is just wrong! What is the point of human interaction? To share things we value; in this case, to read a feed that means something to us. And we follow someone to satisfy exactly that need.
Accepting the deal I was offered would be gaining a material entity. I don’t care purely about my number of followers! I care about all the people who find meaning in my tweets. If people followed me (@vgupta11) and didn’t care about my content, I would be wasting my time!
My message back to this person is…write some good things, share some good links, and you’ll get followers that will stay. Won’t get ‘em by cutting deals, innit?
On that note, find me on Twitter and follow me if you like what you read. I’ll follow any feed that is valuable to me 
Vaibhav Gupta | Sent with my BlackBerry
As I look back on the past decade, I am humbled by how much has changed in my life and in the world, and how far we have come as individuals and as a people to achieve what we prioritize in our world.
Heading into the New Year, I hope we all continue our efforts towards the things we care about the most in this world and find happiness in everyday normality. I will strive to continue providing content on this page that is relevant to you; I will share ideas, links, pictures, and articles; I will share my perspective and look forward to engaging in a dialogue with you so that we can have more clarity in our minds about the puzzles of life.
Here’s to a Happy 2010!
