Little lessons

So I have been thinking of linking up to this blog party for a while now and finally came around to doing it.  

When I think of 'Little things Thursday' the first idea that pops to my head is to share the little nuggets of wisdom I have gathered in my internship .Oh btw I intern at this Tax Law firm. Don't worry I won't bore you with tax...too much :P

1) No field is boring if you have the passion for it.

me when high on life.

...........Says the girl who loved History in school <3

 It is not always love at first sight with all the subjects.It is in fact hate at first sight with some, in the face of horrifying technicalities. But a love borne out of understanding will always be more meaningful than mere infatuation. I guess this rule applies for almost all matters in our lives. 

When Randall in This is us said he was really passionate about weather commodities I laughed. Surely people did such professions only for the dough? But being surrounded by people who live eat and breathe for Input Tax Credit and SEZs and WCO ruling and Exemption Notifications I realize every field is lovely in its own way..

2) You just gotta hang in there

................says the person who has quit more things than she likes to admit. 

When the going gets tough , the tough gets going is the kind of lame proverb which ignites me to quit things.Honestly, I just love to just  get rid of it all the nonsense and snuggle up on my bed most days. However , after facing a week of amazing highs and horrible lows and still floating around I feel enriched. Things are never as bad as we imagine it to be . So face your situations head on no matter what. At best you get what you want. At worst you get stronger from the experience. Why do we quit things again? Oh right because we are scared of what will happen. Just be scared throughout . Next time you will get used to it! 

3) Input Tax Credit 

.............Since I promised some tax :P 

Input tax is the tax you pay on the raw materials and preparatory stuff you put in to make your final good. If the government taxed a person for the Egg and the omelette he sells , he would go broke. So they have this system where you can get credit (like store credit) for the inputs you paid and cut it on from the amount you have to pay finally to the government.  

And in India under the new tax regime of GST they have reduced the rates of taxes to restaurants but they have also removed this ITC system for them. So that is why the costs might change only a little.

4) I type in a very systematic , organised way nowadays. 

Bold , underline and very justified ;)

Ta ta! you're free to share your big lil lesson of the week in the comments section! :)

An electrifying experience

I’m sharing my first internship experience for the #MyInternTheory activity at BlogAdda in association with Intern Theory.

It has been a long time since I wrote anything of substance in this space and I have myself to blame for not updating you’ll about the progress in my law life. Even when I do write , I hardly write on the central things of my life. So I’m dedicating this post to this barely mentioned aspect of my life.

MY FIRST INTERNSHIP 

Sometimes , it is very easy for some people to get disillusioned very easily. When you are studying a weirdly structured 5 year law course , it is very very easy to forget that you are indeed ‘studying’ to become a ‘lawyer’.  

In my college , the semester in itself is a chilling carnival of laziness ( at least to ones like me) – what with only 3 hours of actual lectures a day and stuff-  Hence , it is the internship / holiday time when we make hay in sunshine. After blowing off the first semester holidays on grounds of ignorance and lethargy , I was forced to do some productive activity in the summer of 2014. Even for me, 8 weeks was too long a time to do nothing.

Ok. Since, there is a small chance that some future law aspirants might read this  I’m gonna go stepwise and elucidate briefly on the details of the wonderful journey that was my summer internship.

Where did I apply?

Citizen Consumer and Civic action Group ( CAG) , Chennai. It is a NGO working on consumer , environmental and other civic issues like electricity which impacts all the citizens.

How did I apply?

I came to know of the NGO through my mother’s acquaintance and decided to give it a shot by sending my resume to recruiting head. She is a very friendly person, who immediately gave me guidance.

How long did it last?

This great learning curve lasted for a period of 6 weeks. I compensated for the holidays I took with another week :P

Working hours – 9:30 AM to 5:30 PM

What did I exactly do in a consumer & civic action forum?

This content is very exciting and varied. So I’m gonna make this the body of my post!

I was of the notion that CAG will involve consumer cases only and I didn’t even know what that meant exactly.

Clad in Formal white linen shirt and black pants , sweating due to the normal Chennai heat and not a very normal sense of apprehension , I approached the office. My ‘boss’ saroja ma’am immediately put me at ease with her friendliness and professional approach.

My 1st day of internship.

My very first task was to read the entire Consumer protection act , which is a pretty heavy law book. I think the purpose of the activity is to get an understanding of what consumer law is and moreover learning to be or at least acting unfazed in the face of gigantic books.

My very first Consumer complaint was on medical negligence suit charged on a doctor and I had to draft the formal complaint letter requesting the opposing part to co operate with us on settling the dispute. I drafted responses for few more such cases making ma’am note that my luck favored medical negligence. All the exposure to grey’s anatomy and house did come in handy :P

According to me, the most crucial thing I learnt in my CAG internship was about electricity. Tamil Nadu being very vulnerable in this sector and eccentric in its supply and distribution has made every consumer worried and somewhat conversant with its issues.

For starters I feel every resident of Tamil Nadu must know that the Tamil Nadu Electricity Board or the TNEB like we like to call it is actually divided into the TANTRANSCO and the TANGEDCO ,former for transmission and the latter for generation and distribution. The TNERC – electricity regulatory commission is the law making body though.

When tara ma'am first found me :P

All this sounded like pig latin to me until tara ma’am walked in. She is the head of the place and visits us weekly. I was a bit sluggish after the lunch break on my first week and I was scared stiff when she actually invited me to sit in on the TNERC meeting. This was the first meeting I ever attended and I was quite happy to just observe it. However, they wanted my views on the topic and even asked me to make a draft on the regulations to be amended or something like that. I was simply awestruck at the jargon in the beginning.

It took me a week to realize that I was working on the Tamil Nadu Electricity act and that the TNERC was proposing some amendments to the existing distribution code and that every consumer and interested party could send in their reservations and comments after notice of the intention to amend and the actual draft amendments are announced.

We talk about transparency but do we really pay interest when something is being shown and is asked to be done by us? I think not.

The amendments were on the power provided to water supply or motor pumpsets for agricultural consumers and being a city bred girl who has never visited a village properly , it was quite difficult for me to envisage the impacts the amendment could actually create on the farmers.

I learnt to compare distribution codes of Karnataka and Andhra which are quite elaborate on this topic and also ones of Gujarat and Punjab.

This entirely different task assigned to me, which seemed tougher than mandarin Chinese in the beginning, made me believe that I could learn things which I thought I was most incapable to learn.

I also got the chance to edit a bit of EmpowerTN , a journal on electricity and take minutes of TEGI – the Tamil Nadu Electricity Governance Initiative , a wonderful conference discussing all aspects of electricity problems in India today by several experts and organizations.

After TEGI/ with my co intern / last day :( 

While the consumer complaints I drafted was expected and the Ecommerce research I undertook on 20 Indian e-commerce companies ( Flipkart ,amazon , snapdeal included) using 58 criterions of consumer policy was more exhaustive but easier to comprehend and relate for me ;

 Electricity really brought me to life – it involved a lot of technical looking codes , scared me to death , I even failed to put proper work on some occasions! I’ve read many quotes which say stuff like do what scare you the most and didn’t think much of it. But once you are forced to do the unexpected , step outside that comfort zone – win or lose , you gain experience. Experience which makes you bold enough to try again and not make the same mistake twice.

And that is what I thank CAG for.

 For letting me play with electricity.

Thank you

Samyuktha Semi Jayaprakash

Let's make Wishes outta Airplanes ~

 If there was  ever a magazine on making mind-castles like the milk-woman , I would star in its cover with a huge pot of milk! If only there was a machine that would translate thought into action – I would use it to make more blog posts. Such lameness .. Much wow. I am too idealistic to live in this 21^st century.

I wanna chill in the 14^th century with all the renaissance men of Rome. A world where thinking was a legit job. But then I would have to be a man to express my thoughts and lets face it .Sexistly speaking , a man’s mind is too boring. I wanna be a woman of the 21^st century chilling in the summer of England  living amidst  an intellectual atmosphere of 14^th century with my iPad and selfie manufacturing cell phones.  *fake sighs dramatically*

What has Pune done to me? :/

If you didn't get the obvious hint already. This gonna be a disjointed rambling with a risky disregard for grammar and love for randomness.” Oh no , not again!” you might scream. But you see , I hardly post stuff in this space and Yajur yaja Jayaprakash – the creature claiming to be my sibling – is blogging and the remote possibility that he will become more popular than me, urges me to write. However , the aforementioned urge is not passionate or intrinsically motivating enough for me to explore new dimensions of my writing.

It is the holidays after all!

is the middle of my middle name like chandler would say xD

Hardly feels like one though. That’s what happens when you have college for only 3 hours – you get used to laziness,in even more than usual amounts. Also , the fact that I have a cool internship in citizen consumer and civil action group makes it a working holiday. Trust me , medical negligence is awesome fun , still the heart pines for endless sleep and jobless mediocrity.

A kid used to doing nothing all the time finds it difficult to cope in a world where she is perceived to be productive and busy and IS in fact productive and busy.

Talking about perceptions , sociology has ruined life for me. All of us do everything for social approval. Just open Facebook! People  doing the craziest shizz to get a few likes. (y) When I share a link of this post , there will be 10-20 guys who would reply that they liked my post -_- Read it or leave it , children. Appreciate my work , read it , give me feedback Don’t like it.

And then there are those who are affected by selfitis – the disease of taking too many selfies. Seriously , I don’t know what is so great about selfies , being an addict myself. I think human beings just want to keep falling for something , keep getting addicted , over involved in anything and everything and then crash and burn.

I know we’re all gonna die someday. Maybe tomorrow , may be day after tomorrow or maybe 76 years after that. Point is , I have lost the point while quoting statistics.

even marx likes selfies

Actually the point really is that we’re all moving in a reckless pace.Not talking about athleticism here ( you see i'm a cbse physical education topper but i have never ran in my life - even when a dog chased me )Reading inferno by Dan Brown gives you only the demographic dimension of that. Technologically , culturally, politically , economically , socially ,  we’re just motoring along in a freakish pace. It is not ‘progress’ necessarily. There is so much generation gap between all ages ,that it scares.My grandparents and even my parents seem to be from the paleolithic era to me and I AM ancient to the creature claiming to my sibling! :O

The pace scares me.

And excites me.

We get to see so many changes in a span of few years. Writing history is surely gonna be a monumental task for the future generations .

CRY CRYCRY

Chuck all the philosophy. Have you watched grey’s anatomy? It has captured my heart like a boyfriend never will. In a span of a decade the characters in that hospital have died in a bus accident , shooting ,helicopter crash , car accident , power outage , broken LVAT wires etc. Setting aside the fact that it is heavy exaggerated , we must realize that viewers need THAT much drama to keep them hooked.

Attention spans are worse than poor. Maybe that is why I am jumping topics like the kid who jumps trains in subway surfers. Why do we get bored so easily? :O

I’ll surely die of boredom ( and religion) in 14^th century Rome. I need the adrenaline rush of 21^st century.  Maybe the future will be a mix of all the factors I keep dreaming of.

#wishfulthinking 

and wait. Lemme take a selfie ^_^