Priyanka's Scrapbook

In 2023, during the celebration of International Women's Day, I encountered the notion of " Equity " for the first time. Initially, its significance in a woman's daily life didn't strike me profoundly. However, over the past year, I've been continually reminded of its relevance on numerous occasions. Discussions around workplace Diversity and the concerted effort to elevate the presence of women in organizations, especially in leadership roles, have gained traction globally. While commendable, there's a touch of irony in this commendable endeavor. The very men who wield decision-making power in organizations, shaping policies to foster inclusivity and gender balance, often seem to leave the concept of equality at their home doorstep. As they enter their domestic realm, they discard the notion of equality as if shedding a coat, anticipating their wives to effortlessly shift from their professional roles into the responsibilities of a homemaker. It's imp...

This Covid-19 virus has turned the entire world upside down. It has broken a lot of older habits and set a lot of new normals. Towards the early days of this lockdown, I had written a blog - An Extrovert in Isolation . The early lockdown days were extremely difficult for me. That was the phase of breaking old habits. An extrovert by nature, couldn't accept the sudden change of being locked alone inside my house. I am writing this blog again after being locked at home for more than 100 days now. Most of the older habits are broken by now. A few new habits have become a part of my new normal. What seemed to have been painful 100 days back has now turned to be blissful. Here, I am sharing my story of how quarantining alone has ended up being the greatest opportunity and a huge transformation in my life.  I have been struggling for years to fix my sleep patterns. Going to bed late and waking up late had been a habit for a really long time. My struggles to change this habit had...

Being locked inside the house...all alone...for more than fifteen days now...often brings rollercoaster rides of several emotions and thoughts. A lot of extra time to ponder over my own life...my own life's choices and decisions. Sitting at home and trying to pick up a new hobby or lifestyle, a few days back I started focusing on the art of minimalism. If you are new to the concept, the minimalist lifestyle is about living with only the things you need. Minimalists are free from the desire to buy and accumulate more. Instead, they find happiness in relationships and experiences. There is an amazing blog around this -  https://www.becomingminimalist.com/5-years-of-better/ . After reading about it, watching a few youtube videos and documentaries, I started looking through everything I own at present and making a list of everything that I don't really need. I started pulling out clothes that I have not worn in months, pulling out shoes that I have not worn in years, books th...

Today is the tenth day of my social isolation. The city I am in, I have been living here for the last eleven years and never before this have I spent ten continuous days, locked up at home alone. What's the big deal you say? I am an extrovert. In case you don't know what I am talking about, you can take this test for yourself -  https://www.psychologies.co.uk/self/are-you-an-introvert-or-an-extrovert.html . I am not used to staying indoor...staying alone...staying without being able to connect with other people. For me, it is important to meet my friends, it is important to go out for movies or dinners together. My work style is going up to people's desks, sipping coffee together and discuss business or strategies. So, when we were instructed to go into isolation to keep ourselves safe from Covid-19, for me it wasn't just changing a few things in my routine...it was changing my whole lifestyle! Changing one's lifestyle is not always easy. Every #jantacurfew stor...

Movies...books...fantasies...we all want that perfect love story that we have always seen on screen, read about or have imagined. The perfect guy, the perfect girl, the perfect romance, the perfect wedding…a life full of beautiful sunrises, music, and roses.  There is nothing wrong with romanticizing about all of these. If you have them in your life, you are extremely lucky. What I feel is wrong here is that we want all of these...but we don’t want to put in any effort in building the perfect stories. We want the perfect guy in our life, but we don’t want to put the effort into improving ourselves. The perfect guy is required and expected to accept and appreciate all of our imperfections! Is that fair to expect? We live in an instant world! We seem to fall in love too soon and fall out of it even sooner.  Where are those eternal love stories? The love of Radha and Krishna that fought with the society, broke all rules...just to be in love with each other. Or for that matt...

Dear thirteen year old me, This is you...from fifteen years in the future. I am writing to help you prepare for the things that you will need to face in the next fifteen years of your life. In the coming years, you will realize life is not going to be exactly the way you had read in your storybooks. Over the next years, you will need to make some important life decisions, regarding your future education, your career choices, etc. Not all of them are going to make your family always happy. Some of them will rather bring a lot of disappointment to the people you really care about. But don't worry...find your courage to fight for those dreams. Over the next coming years, you will lose some very important people in your life. People without whom you had never imagined your life. Those won't be easy times. But you will need to get through those phases too. You will need to take care of yourself as well as your loved ones. Be prepared! You will also be losing on most of thos...

After crossing the frozen river last year, my big plan for this year was to climb till the base of Everest. I started on that dream on the 6th of May 2019. We had reached Kathmandu 2 days back and we toured the city a little before starting our Everest journey. Kathmandu never felt like a foreign land. The food there is very similar to Indian food, the roads and buildings look similar, the language is pretty understandable and even the music seems familiar. A jam-packed, crowded small city...with a lot of beautiful monasteries, palaces, and temples worth visiting. On 6th May, we started our ride from Kathmandu to Manthali airport at around 2am. The ride was 3 hours long. Manthali was the weirdest airport I had ever witnessed. It was a very tiny airport whose check-in counter looked more like an old warehouse. Well, due to unstable weather condition, our flight to Lukla was delayed by a couple of hours. With no proper sitting arrangements, the passengers were literally sitting on the...

When I reached the base camp, I was tired after an entire day's long journey. It was a long trip from Pune to Nainital. But this was just the beginning. We were about to start the 8-day long trekking trip from the next morning. I just had the evening to unwind and get myself recharged. I took a quick shower and ran to the kitchen to get some coffee. That's when I first saw him. The poised and composed man...sitting on a rock a few feets away from the kitchen, sipping coffee. He wasn't exceptionally handsome or attractive. But there was definitely something charismatic about him. I poured myself a cup of coffee and walked up to him. This time I got a better glance at this man. He was tall...probably 6ft. From the look of it, I would guess he was in his early thirties. He had a weird calmness on his face...as if he had no worries of the world at all. His eyes sparkled with life. "Hi! I am Priyanka", I said, "Do you mind if I join you?" He smiled, told me ...

I was watching a stand-up comedy act on my laptop last night. Somewhere between his light-hearted jokes, the comedian Zakir Khan said something that struck me real hard - “We are a generation of broken heart and broken people.”  I couldn’t continue the episode. I paused the show and started thinking. This one simple statement... it's so strong and so true indeed! When I was a teenager (not too long back of course), I used to read a lot of love stories. I used to be a strong believer in love! I always thought and believed that love was a feeling... it's illogical... it's impractical... it's magical! I used to believe that this is the kind of love I deserved too….that this is the kind of love I will find someday in life!  Slowly, as I grew up...the bubbles I used to live in started bursting one by one. I had a couple of bad relationships. I got my heart broken a few times. I got advised to “GROW UP”! It took some time to understand what that even meant.  I neve...

If you are planning to be there at MozFest, one thing you can definitely not miss….is the Web Literacy space.  I will give you 5 reasons why: You can never know enough about the growing web. Whether you are just getting started on the world wide web or you are a web ninja...we promise at least one new learning for you at the Web Literacy space this year! The space decor will take you through a journey of the development of technology. Let's travel together right from the era of dot matrix printers to the today’s age of pocket printers! You will find your soul mates here! No, we are not gonna be running a matchmaking campaign...that's not what I am talking about. What I am referring to is our hangout space where like-minded people will get a chance of interacting, sharing ideas and building new things together. If at any point of time you need a break from the knowledge heavy sessions and interactions at MozFest, you are welcome to come and join us at the Web Liter...

Life doesn't necessarily need to go as per our plans. And when those big plans crash bad, things can get pretty tough to deal with. What I am writing today is nothing unique or being told for the first time. Its just my version of one of the world's most common problems of today's world...a heart-break! A recent breakup had left me pretty shattered! When we get overly attached to someone, it gets difficult to imagine a life without their presence in it...well, that's pretty normal and that's pretty human! But whats important and what differs from people to people is how they deal with such situations. For me, after I was stuck in a helpless situation, and after crossing all stages of breakup and finally reaching the "acceptance" stage, I knew I had to do something about it soon to not get into a severe state of depression. So, I tried a few things: Switch to work. I always get workaholic when I need to deal with any of life's crisi...

One evening, back in 2012, I unwillingly walked into this coffee show. Little did I know that I would meet my one true love there. I had just attended my first Mozilla event at college. I was pretty impressed by the Web Maker tool. During a casual conversation with one of the organizers, who also was my college senior, he invited me over to a MozCafe meeting happening that weekend. Well, I am not much of a nerd...well, atleast was not back then. The idea of spending a Sunday evening at a coffee shop, among a bunch of geeks didn't really excite me. Due to the lack of a better Sunday plan, I ended up going down there anyway. At a regular Coffee Day, you can find different types of people....those who are out on coffee dates, those who are catching up with friends and colleagues, those who are out for official meetings etc. But, that evening I found another group of weirdos....the ones who were super charged up and super enthusiastic about something I wasn't yet able to...

I had boarded the bus from Swargate (Pune) bus stop on 24th February, at 10pm. While boarding the bus, I had put my luggage in the lower dickey of the bus.  While deboarding at Majestic bus station (Bangalore) next morning, I realized that my luggage was missing. There were three different passengers whose luggage went missing at the same time. The bus crew apparently had no clue about the missing item. When we went to the KSRTC office to complaint against this careless behavior, KSRTC decided to not take any responsibility and put the entire blame only on the crew of the bus (3 drivers). Well, this was probably the most disappointing part of the incident. When booking a bus, I never book it because xyz driver would be driving the bus...I book it because of the brand name of KSRTC! And that very name denying to take responsibility and blaming it all on the crew was not at all acceptable. We tried lodging an official police complaint, but only to realize that there is...

Cafe Coffee Day is no more a new name for the youngsters in India. For a warm cup of coffee at an affordable price, thats where we generally go to! But more than the cup of coffee, its the atmosphere of Café Coffee Days which attracts all of us. An informal setup...good beverage and snacks...soothing music (most of the time)...complimentary wi-fi (at many outlets)...well, CCD always had a lot to offer its customers. Photo source - https://www.zomato.com/pune/cafe-coffee-day-2-koregaon-park For Siddhartha, coffee always used to be an experience to be offered...not just beans to be grown. I have had my job interview conducted at a CCD outlet. I have hosted and attended several community meetups at different CCD outlets across the country. I have even had my coffee dates at CCDs. Well, truely, a lot has happened in my life over coffee...at different CCD outlets. Once, Siddhartha himself had spent his new year's eve, serving customers at a Café Coffee Day (CCD) outlet near C...

There are those rare days in life, when you come home with a guilt in your heart...the guilt of having so much in life, but still not being content whereas, there are so many people out there, with so little and yet so happy! The last Sunday was one of those days for me. While driving down to Sarthak Seva Sangh , little did I know of what I was about to experience there. Sarthak Seva Sangh Orphanage is an initiative started by Dr. Anil Kudia to help make a difference to the lives of unfortunate street children. Some of these children are motherless and orphans and some are newborn babies who are absolutely directionless.The place currently hosts around 60 children. As a part of Mozilla's and Mile's initiative, we were to go there and teach basics of computer and internet to the kids. When we reached there, we were welcomed by the manager of the place (sorry for not remembering his name). He took us around the entire place, showing us the current infrastructure as well as e...

This evening, when I left from work, I was a little disturbed. The last few days had not been very happy ones. The turbulence in life had made me depressed...left me lonely! It was drizzling. The honking of vehicles and happy cheers of people, returning home, made me feel uneasy. I wasn't exactly looking forward to going home. I knew no one was waiting for my back at my empty room. I just kept walking, ignoring the noise all around. Even the slight drops of rain felt irritating today. Too many thoughts were running in my mind. Betrayals, disappointments, heartbreaks...too many unpleasant thoughts were hitting my brain like waves of tsunami.The more I was trying to push them off, they more powerfully they were hitting me back. Photo credit - http://assets.nydailynews.com In between this mental struggle, when every breathe felt like a heavy sigh of distress, someone called me from behind - "Ajao. Mai tumko drop kar deti hoon." (Come, let me drop you home). I t...

This is my attempt at bringing all details of the Fedora 22 Release Party , out live ...right from the Pune Red Hat office. 10.55am - We have started our day today with a quick round of introductions...its always fun to know people! We, the Fedorians....[Photo Credit - Suprith Gangawar] 11.05am - What is new in the Workstation for Fedora 22 and future, by Praveen Kumar. Praveen is taking us through the Fedora workstation and the new features of Workstation for Fedora 22. Praveen Kumar talks about the new features of Fedora 22 Workstation Praveen is also introducing the participants to Boxes and how Boxes has made it easy for users to work on multiple VMs now. Quick updates on Fedora 23: Alpha freeze has been done last week. On the feature side, for the Workstation, biggest change will be the container based application approach. Developer assistant - a tool which will help a developer setup the entire development environment very easily and get started...

Though the process of installing Sublime Text 3 on Fedora 21 is not difficult at all, the articles available online doesn't have the correct steps most of the time. Since I had to waste a decent amount of time to find the right script and install Sublime 3 on my machine, I thought I would document the steps, saving someone else's time. The steps for installing Sublime Text 3 on Fedora 21 are: Step 1:  [1] For Linux x64: wget -O install-sublime.sh https://gist.github.com/xtranophilist/5932634/raw/sublime-text-3-x64.sh && sudo sh install-sublime.sh; rm -rf install-sublime.sh [2] For Linux x32: wget -O install-sublime.sh https://gist.github.com/xtranophilist/5932634/raw/sublime-text-3-x32.sh && sudo sh install-sublime.sh; rm -rf install-sublime.sh The content of these scripts can be found here : https://gist.github.com/xtranophilist/5932634 Step 2: su -c "sh install-sublime-text.sh"

On the occasion of International Women's Day, the WoMoz (Women in Mozilla) community from Pune had decided to celebrate Womanhood and technology by paying tribute to to all the women, who are working towards making a difference in the world of Open Source technology. As per our planning, we, the organizers did gather at Symbiosis Institute of Computer Studies and Research by 9.30am. It took us less than 20 minutes to arrange the room and put up a few posters around the campus, which could give our participants, the feel of event. The event was scheduled to begin at 10am. While planning the event, we had made a few mistakes (which I have listed at the end of the post) due to which we had a really low crowd turnout. After an hour of waiting, when we were almost about to call the event off and re-schedule it, did we have our guest speaker, Manjusha Joshi walk in. It was she who motivated us to continue with the event, even if we had way less number of participants than expected....

Since my very early days of Open Source contribution, that goes back to my early days of college life, Red Hat had been my dream organization! The reasons behind this was probably many. During those initial days of my Open Source journey, I had been inspired by many Open source advocates and most of them were Red Hat employees. Also, many of the events that I had attended during my early college days used to be held at the Pune Red Hat office. Well, as long as I had this dream of getting the appointment letter from Red Hat, life was exciting....but somehow I never thought how would I react once I had it!  On Monday, when I walked into this office building, I was just as scared as a child, when he (or she) is going to school for the first time. Things then happened one after the other...each one more exciting than the previous one! New people, new space, new desk, new laptop, new monitor, new desk phone...and finally introduction to some new work. Wait, did I flaunt about th...