Back to Blogging!

It has been a long time since I have done any serious blogging in these pages. I have many excuses. I have been busy. In personal life sandwiched between taking care of my father and our two boys. In professional life sandwiched between my new passion of managing exciting products in Supplier Information Management (SIM) and serving the professional supply management community.

I have been taking care of both my parents for over 25 year. My mother passed away after prolonged illness in February 2008. During the last few years of her life, my father was also shouldering considerable burden of taking care of her as she was getting increasingly weaker and bed bound. I miss my mom more now than when she was suffering from her incurable disease. While she was alive, the very fact that she was around was comforting even though she was very much dependent on others due to her illness for most of my life (since I was about 2 year old).

Within a few months of mother’s death my father was diagnosed of having Parkinson’s disease. This was a major shocker. We were so focused on mom’s well being that we probably neglected his health. He also ignored the symptoms of Parkinson’s. I am fortunate that I was able to take some time off from work and clear my head. I also took a mini vacation with him and visited Indiana. He really wanted to visit India but settled for Indiana and visited my aunt's family.

During my travels, I started reading "Always Looking up: The Adventures of an Incurable Optimist" by Michael J. Fox. It is a book based on acclaimed actor’s personal experience with Parkinson's disease. It gave me a better appreciation about life and also what my father may be going through. Recently, Atlantic Magazine published a son’s tragic story of coping with father’s Parkinson’s disease. It touched me particularly hard as I struggle with my dad’s rapidly declining health due to the same disease. “Letting Go of My Father”, The Atlantic Magazine, April 2010. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/04/letting-go-of-my-father/8001

I hereby make a personal resolution about bringing more balance into my personal and professional life. While doing so, I hope to blog more often in the coming days.

Why This Blog?

Welcome to the inaugural post of Aloke Bhandia's blog.

I have been an active reader of and contributor to various blogs over the years. I have thought about starting my own blog for a while. Finally, this is my humble beginning. Ideas pop up as we go through life, both professional and personal. I will make an effort to record my thoughts in these pages. Due to my years of dabbling in various enterprise software, invariably there will be ideas around enterprise software business processes. Lately, I have been intrigued by the prospects of applying Supply Chain and Lean Manufacturing concepts to Human Capital Management, and hope to elaborate more in subsequent posts. Other areas of professional interest include building multi-company data cooperative for benchmarking and decision support, integrated strategic sourcing workflow, applying artificial intelligence techniques to classify large volumes of data (such as search results, transactional data, etc.). We are also building http://www.supplyknowledge.com/ as a portal for supplier management knowledge repository, training, and procurement outsourcing services. There may be frequent musings on the trials and tribulations of launching such a large community website and a transaction portal.

Since we are raising two wonderful boys, occasionally, I may also stumble into parenting topics. Particularly, this summer, while boys are immersed in advanced Middle School and High Mathematics (so that they can skip ahead to the next level of math in the coming school year), I am having a lot of fun interacting with them, even though sometimes it becomes a true test of my patience.

I welcome comments from visitors of this blog.