What is my color?

I was a little ball of heat
who came out of a bang…
And as I cooled
the life in me began.

They called it a cell
which first grew on me…
It took a lot of shapes called organisms
who fed on me happily.
They came out at the last…
and one among them is reading this now.

You were intelligent
who studied me in and out.
Civilizations, monuments, emotions,
weren't you wonderful!!!
decorating me beautiful.

Now you have lost your innocence
and soaked into greed…
You started to plunder me
and even your own breed.

I was once called ‘Blue’ planet,
but will be soon turning to red;
with all the wars you are fighting
and the blood you bleed.

log kya kahenge (What will people tell?)

Recently I happen to see a video in facebook

THE VIDEO

The above video highlights the lack of freedom that young Indian men experience and emphasizing that even men are equally curbed like women. If we happen to understand the video, we would also find the reason for this situation. Yes, it is the ‘Samaaj’ (Society). We have heard the hue and cries of many parents, ‘log kya kahenge’ (What will people tell?), ‘mein kaise logon ko mooh dikhaun’ (How will I show my face?)
Why is it so that these questions form the base of the arguments for the parents when their interests and their children’s interest do not match? What makes the parents take up this attitude while involving in decision making (of matters related to education, career, marriage, etc) with their children? The answer that I can come up with is – people (parents in this case) do not know how much importance has to be given for public perception. The fear/worry of public perception has breached into our lives. As the fear grows, it nourishes our Public life more and more by taking away from our Individual life. Fair enough, we must have a public life as we are social animals. We need the society as it plays a role in our survival and betterment of life in terms of providing us food, facilities, suggestions, help, information, human interaction. But to what extent they must interfere in our lives? At what cost should we lean towards our public life instead of our Individual life?

Tiny drops make an ocean, and not vice versa.
We must understand that we as individuals make up the society. It is true that when elements get together they tend to influence upon each other to form a compound which has different characteristics than that of its constituents. But it doesn’t mean the elements tend to change their nature after becoming a part of the compound. A Hydrogen atom still remains Hydrogen in a compound of water. If this is nature, we must also similarly maintain our core (Individual life) even though we are a part of a society. The following can be taken as a comparison.
In a compound formation, elements exchange electrons, similarly while joining a group we exchange few characteristics.

Electron --> Public Life --> The thing that bonds us with other people, and makes the society
Nucleus --> Individual Life --> Our own wishes, dreams, individuality that this is unique to each one of us.

But we are becoming an exception to the above phenomenon. We have started to exchange/share/change our nucleus with the compound and trying to change ourselves to other elements. Things like Peer pressure, honor killings, showoffs, forcing kids to do things; comparing people are all the outcomes of the exception. This fear is in the form of social status with our elders, and peer pressure among the current generation. If its child’s education, marriage, career path among the elders; it is relationships, possession of things, mannerism, tastes that gets affected among the youth.

What I feel is while running after things to satisfy our public life (satisfying teachers, parents, spouses, bosses, friends, trying to get accepted in peer groups,etc) one forgets his own self. And this is the reason why people after years, look back and say ‘Is this what I wanted??!!!’
What can be done to avoid this question? One must time and again connect with our Individual self, passion, wishes. We must also decide who is important to us. And even after we choose, we should decide what they say whether it is important to us or not.

As said by my friend, ‘once we start ignoring unwarranted advices they will stop coming; only when we honor them or react to them they are inflicted upon us’. So we must know when to stop the influences coming from our public life. If we can’t we will start taking into consideration others perception for trivial things in our life and eventually end up doing nothing, living a boring life.
I can sum it up by quoting lyrics from a Rajnikanth starrer movie Baba. In a song, the lines go like this

‘pattum padamale, thottum thodamale, thaamarai ilai thanner pol nee, otti ottamal iru’

Translation: like a water on lotus leaves stay in touch but do not mix up...

Will this happen???

So what is the above graph????

On the Y is the no. of Religions/Caste and in the X is the Ratio of No. of intercaste marriages to No. of Same Caste Marriages. What this graph is trying to explain is as the no. of intercaste marriages increases and becomes the greater than the count of same caste marriages there will be a decrease in the no. of religion, tending to a single religion.

To explain in simple terms consider the following example,
Male Female Religion
A B Christianity
C D Islam
E F Hinduism
G H Jainism

Assume intercaste marriage occurs and the male get converted to the religion of the female partner (to avoid Chauvinism) with the child also inheriting the mother's religion. Also, say they produce only 1 child and we get 2 male and 2 female children as shown below.

So A & D --> I (m) Islam
C & F --> J (m) Hinduism
E & H --> H (f) Jainism
G & B --> K (f) Christianity

Taking the intercaste marriages to the next level (i.e. with the children) we have

I & H --> L(f) Jainism
J & K --> M(m) Christianity

going on

L & M --> N Jainism

This convergence can be extended to N no. of population and at one point there will be a convergence towards one religion and hope that is Love...

Don't stop loving me (crap)

Don't stop loving me, loving me
for it is that I need the most
the absence of which is making me
turn into a ghost

Was moving on a hazy road
choking in my deadload
brought into ICU with this trauma
and there I saw you, oh what drama

Now my IV's running on your kisses
which wont last long say those nurses
Now don't you show any hesitation
which gives me high palpitation

Boost up your estrogen
baby I need you, my oxygen
don't you stop loving me
I am turning back into a ghost.

Rajkot: An ugly rehab

Life demands at sometime that a common man must move out from his home, work and stay elsewhere. This is what I am just doing fulfilling the demand, serving my time at Rajkot. Yes, prisoner I am stuck in this place unable to relocate elsewhere due to the absence of favorable employee policy at the organization where I work. Thus I was forced to stick around in Rajkot and I naturally started observing the city (it is just a town for me). Rajkot is supposed to be a developing urban city, but the people as such are not catching up at the rate.

The people here are mostly entrepreneurial and around 90% run their own business. They don’t want to be defined by any rules of employment in think. This characteristic is also displayed in their outside behaviour. They do not wear helmets and their road sense is bad aggravated with the lack of traffic signals. PAAN shops are sprawled everywhere around the city, assisting people to color the roads red. Newcomers must be careful while walking in roads, as they might be shot with a discharge of paan. Next to paan shops, come the milk booths/diaries which contribute to the swarming population of flies. One can never feel lonely here, as these flies will keep company wherever we go. This may be a small problem compared to the big cattle population out here. The cows perform the role of medians out in the road, regulating traffic and even proving to be lord Yama’s ride rather than Lord Shiva (few girls got killed due to accident with cow). One can see the roads of Rajkot as a battlefield of landmines (from cows) and blood (paan). Even malls are not left out. They are also painted red here and there.

Gujarat being a dry state, it’s difficult to obtain liquor and also non-veg are not available so easily. So on the whole here I am living in a rehab, finding aaloo in every dish with oil floating and served the same day after day and waiting for my parole. Hope some other company bails me out from here….

THE LIFE RAILWAY CORPORATION

People say life is a journey. I would prefer to say life is a train journey. Because I nauseate in buses and air travels are so short and I don’t like them. So I say God operates this great railway network and has allocated his children various divisions. So the kids line up and the take their zones.

The girl kid says “papa, I will take the plains and coastal zone, will make people’s life happy and beautiful” and she treats them like her Barbie dolls.
Whereas the mischievous son says “Pop, gimme the mountainous terrain, I will take people through a ride of their life time” and he takes these trains through (wooo, choock, choock ) through corners, rocks and gutters and thus some people have this struggling difficult hard life.

As the population grew God wasn’t able to manage his family run business by only employing his family. So he hires these angles, demons and other non-earthlings (Martians may be) and goes public as the Life Corporation. As year on year this corporation has developed into a mature company (may be) with its input to output ratio steadily increasing but a slower rate than the past years or whatever the appropriate unit of time with which we should measure the life of this organization.
The network has various zones divided like well off, filthy rich, damn poor, just making ends meet and so on. Each zones has numerous stations where people board (are born), switch trains (life takes lot of turns), and get down finally (die). So who decides when to board, whats the route/zone to travel and where to jump off? There is various level of decision making in the network, from the God making strategic decision of altering the network, bringing in new zones, adding more trains like

“hmmm… zones are less, lets divide them more, more my son Miserious take the new zone BPL, you my girl Optiona take this minority zone CEOs”.

And the God’s children maintaining their zones, improving their features and maintaining stations; the angels and demons maintaining their respective stations and operating the trains.

You could imagine two demons chatting

The darky bombshell TsuNaomi says “oh boy, last week was tough, had to jump with my train into sea from the bridge”,
“man, you atleast had fun in the water, last week I was all over with debris and mud”, replied Quaky.

There are also other demons like Hearty the attacky, Cancerious, the big Eights who deal with passengers person to person. So they deal with passenger like below

“Am sorry passenger you have crossed two stations past your destination point, Mr. Hearty the attacky will now throw you off the train now”

The Big Eights says, “Oops, I did a mistake. I made a passenger disembark two stations before his destination”
“don’t worry mate, I will make some other passenger in my list get down two stations after”, said Cancerious.

Each passenger gets many freebies and goodies in a random manner that comes allocated with their ticket which this network calls FATE. So someone might have a Jaguar written in their fate, whereas someone might get a rusty Cadillac tagged with their fate. The ticket also has various statuses like ‘Son’, ‘daughter’, ‘father’, ‘wife’, ‘mistress’, ‘poor husband’, ‘grandpa’, ‘pretty old sick grandpa’ assigned to it and keeps constantly changing.

Customer satisfaction about this network is a widely distributed ranging from “bloody hell good”, “I love my life” to “f**king bad”, “life s**ks”. But this network still maintains a monopoly which no one has ever thought about and people are forced to use this network somehow or the other.

There is a special travel pass of this network called ETERNITY which is only given to the employees of this network and has left many passengers stranded in search of it.

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“Sashi Tharoor was the pioneer in the twitter wars. The first twitter war started in the year 2009/10 with Tharoor and Modi leading the front… “, this may be very well a chapter about Indian Social Networking in the subject Internet History. I think we are almost done with the classical or stone age in the world of Internet. Man is learning to speak in the internet; he is learning to communicate, form societies and groups, trying to show his likes and dislikes. Tweets are for minute by minute update, facebook for hourly, blogs for his daily journal entry. The invention of social networking has sparked a virtual fire around the world.

The Stone Age man rubbed stones together and created fire. Our internet man exchanged few tweets and created controversies. What does this mean to us? We have started using internet more than as a medium of entertainment to medium of everything except physical (hope research is being carried out there too). He is turning more inwards, into his computer/laptop/mobile. The wheel of information has started to roll. Hour by hour, minute by minute, second by second bytes of information circle around through various websites. You get up and find your toothbrush being chewed by your dog, you update your status first not thinking of buying another brush or washing the existing one and using it. We are still exploring what we can do with this internet, as the pre age man would have tried with the wheel and the fire.

We are also forming communities, castes, groups in the net world. A whole lot new social structure is being created through specific websites for specific purposes. Hackers, developers, leechers, seeders, bloggers, downloaders, gamers, blah blah, it goes on. From cooking to sex, from fitness to movies, barter to trading all social human activities are brought into internet. Television might soon become a thing of the past. Youtubes and metcafes will broadcasts TV sops and sports, ads will run through all around the sites giving people relief of the ad breaks but reducing the viewing screen. Parents will poke their children in fb to call them for breakfast/dinner. Relatives will save money on gifts and sweets for ex. “Ranganathan and Family sent a Home theatre to Prem & Aruna through giftyrelatives”… and the reply would be “Prem & Aruna received the gift with thanks and send a box of chocolates through chochychochy.com”.

After the movement of tectonic plates and the setting up of earth’s crust, we are laying the fibre optics like grated cheese on pizza and setting up the movement of internet which is going to redefine the world. And mind you, we are going to get excess lazy with the excess cheese. But mind you, this cheese is going to hold people together. Internet a very much needed fat.

Oops

I woke up little dizzy,
cuz yesterday night I got boozy…
started to walk around hazy,
and yo!!! Ma mama talked to sissy…

Looked up the mirror in the bathroom,
and saw my face was blown up like zoom…
Started performing lavation,
with a free soap solution…
Cold shower needles prickled all over
as I over came the hangover…

I wanted to know what happened,
as I couldn’t remember the party’s end…
So turned on the net to have a look,
if there are any updates in facebook…
But I gave a big yell and told the f word
as I forgot the f**kin password (oops…)

oye machar

never had one before,
never will have again…
for she was one who shared my smiles and pain

Sometimes sad,
Other times mad,
Used to be a bubbly…

Talking all nights,
Having few fights
There grew a bond from strength to strength…

Is she a friend,
Or is she my mother,
Who seem to bother for she can be my daughter…

Those small dinners,
And those downloaded movies.
Now I seem to miss her dearly,
Who told to me join early…

never had one before,
never will have again
for she was one who shared my smiles and pain…

(gettin too senti eww...)

The Indian Perception of Education

A line which has inspired me from my childhood...
"... true purpose of education is to train the mind to think .." - Albert Einstein

I wanted this to be a formal essay. Organized points, structured with coherence and all that... which our teachers expect in lengthy question & answers ... but now I realised that I was also blinded by the rules which were taught to us... this is what we were trained to become. Followers of rules, established procedures, methods.
This what is the Indian perception of education. We are taught rules, procedures, methods about everything. Boundaries are drawn. "You can only do this", "this is how it must be done", "dont do like that", "this is not in the rules"...may be this made to be think a lot for all these days to write a structured post. Like prose, like a comprehension, like an essay.

But in this post I am coming out of it. The post is going to about few arguments, few thoughts which will not be sequential nor structured. So here we go

1. Education is only for getting a job. At home you are still a kid. No matter you are from IIT or IIM you have to get approval from the elders. You might have comprehended the quantum physics or black scholes model but still you need to ask permissions for simple things.

2. Status of women and men : You might read in social science , moral science and others texts , that men and women are equal. At home still there is a difference, partial treatment, girl child is a burden. This is still prevalent among educated parents.

3. Parents want their children to get educated... but themselves???

4. Take any civics or social sciences book - "India is a secular state". But do we really follow it? Why dont we encourage inter-caste marriage? Kids learn this, give exams and get good marks - Parents are happy. Kids learn this, get married - Parents and unhappy. As long it is theory we are happy. Put into practice we complain...

Education is perceived as a ladder to financial freedom. Study more, get good job, earn a lot, live comfortably. But does it free ourselves from the constraints imposed by age old traditions, false belief, caste and gender inequality?

Let us educate ourselves and our children not only to become qualified but civilized too...