The furniture Wars

Great Video from Stage6

What looks good in literature but not in movies?

I would start by referring to this passage out of Indian author Munshi Premchand's story डामुल का क़ैदी. The context is that a wealthy businessman (सेठ) goes to prison after confessing a crime when he could have easily avoided jail using his money. When he comes back from prison to meet his wife and son, who have been through much hardships while is away, this is what he says to his wife -
सेठजी ने श्रद्धा-भरी आँखों से देखकर कहा - भगवान् हमारे परम सुह्रद हैं। वह जो कुछ करते हैं, प्राणियों के कल्याण के लिये करते हैं। हम समझते हैं, हमारे साथ विधि ने अन्याय किया; पर यही हमारी मूर्खता है। विधि अबोध बालक नहीं है, जो अपने ही सिरजे हुए खिलौने को तोड़-फोड़ कर आनन्दित होता है। न वह हमारा शत्रु है, जो हमारा अहित करने में सुख मानता है। वह परम दयालु है, मंगल-रूप है। यही अवलम्ब था, जिसने निर्वासन-काल में मुझे सर्वनाश से बचाया। इस आधार के बिना कह नहीं सकता, मेरी नौका कहाँ कहाँ भटकती और उसका अन्त क्या होता।

A very idealistic statement, I must say, where he is preaching that he got what he deserved. This statement comes out beautifully amidst a story based on principles of honesty, truthfulness and belief in god. If the same statement came out in a movie, a soap or a magazine article, it would have looked so horribly cheesy and emotionally overdone. Why is that so?

May be everybody has respect for morals and high principles. Such principles depict what people like to see, not what they want to be. Being so idealistic seems uncool and impractical. Saying something like that could be the last statement of a healthy social life. Therefore, when you listen to such a dialogue in theater with your friends sitting besides you, you take the lead in dismissing it as boring and cheesy and put a stamp onto the stereotype the you prefer to settle in.

When you are sitting alone and reading a popular magazine and come across something like this, you will still not like it. It wouldn't seeming fitting among the Page-3 articles and political propagandas of a commercial magazine. It will seem like a cheap stunt from the magazine to push a false image of itself onto you. But, if this was in magazines, 50 years back, you might have liked it. It would have come from writers who believed in all this. In literature, it comes from the most idealistic characters and you don't feel cheated or being dealt in lies. You believe that such a person would say something like that from the bottom of his heart. You share a moment of joy with the author and appreciate the mutual liking for good characters.

Turn the page and move on in life.

Mortal Fears

Everyday I read something about a few people dying. Growing up in 21st Century, I do not even take notice of it. Never ever have been these many unnecessary fatalities. My apathy towards death scares me, often pointing to my fading compassion as I grow up. I never wanted to be one of those people who are oblivious to the pain of other people. Looking at it from another angle, I am not so insensitive to death. I am very scared of my own death!

It all started when I was very young. One of my older cousin, Puneet, had come to visit us. With his popular gags and jokes he was a hit among the kids. We were all playing in the garden on a winter afternoon. I was just rolling in the grass and was laughing at being tickled by the pointed grass poking me through my T-shirt. Suddenly an insect came flying and stung me in the arm. The pain wasn't excruciating, therefore, I decided to ignore it and be cool. A few moments later, I realized that I had developed a water bubble under my skin at the site of attack. Seemingly perturbed by this aberration on my skin, I ran to the senior most consultant in the vicinity of the garden; Puneet he was. All the other kids were sitting besides him and enjoying his anecdotes. After a thorough diagnosis, he declared that I had cancer. The news came to me like my worst fears had come true.

The only thing I knew about cancer was that it had no cure and any body who had cancer in a TV serial would die and say bye to that soap. I moved away from Puneet and went inside quietly. Amidst all this action and jokes, nobody noticed my sad lifeless walk in the drawing room. I just sat onto the cushion and started crying. I had dreamed of doing so many things. I hadn't yet fired an air gun and I was about to die. This seemed like very unfair to me. Silent tears made way through my eyes and wet my lips with salty water. There was no sobbing. It was just a disciplined queue of tears waiting inside and walking out calmly when their turn came. It was uncharacteristic of me to not make a big deal about the cause of my tears. Crying was my trump card. I had always used tears as my last defense to resolve crisis. But today, I was defenseless. Today, tears weren't there to solve anything, they were there to express a newly found feeling, sadness. This was a new feeling and what bad luck that it came in form of news of my approaching mortality. Dad was walking out through drawing room when he saw me sitting quietly, making a mess of myself. When I told him that I am going to die of cancer because of the water bubble on my arm, he was both amused and relieved. He told me that they had been joking with me and I was to live a long and glorious life. He then called in Puneet and scolded him for his sad joke which was not so funny now. All the kids outside were laughing at me. The water bubble was burst open in the local clinic a few days later, but my mortal fears were not.

At the age of nine, this was the first time when I had appreciated life and not cribbed about the fact that other kids at the school were getting jam in their lunch box while I was just getting bread and pickle.

I was always a very safe child. Never fought with anybody. Always rode the cycle very slow and never took shortcuts. I was very "uncool". Kept away from dogs and didn't even curse god in my mind, after all he might just be listening to my thoughts at this very moment. Why mess up with the strongman.

I was in Ahmadabad in May 2001 to appear for an exam. This was only 4 months after a death-hungry earthquake had engulfed a large part of civilization and life in the region. The aftermath of this tragedy shook me from inside and brought another of my fears to the fore. A few months later, I was living on 1st floor in Ganga Hostel, IIT. One fine evening, an earthquake shook the coastal city, I lived in. I ran down as soon as I realized what was happening. A lot of other people followed the suit, but I did not return inside the building with them even with calm restored. I was still waiting downstairs for an official message about likelihood of another shaker. Just about then, somebody came and announced on the mike that more earthquakes are expected and everybody is instructed to go to Sangam ground to to seek safety. I dashed to Sangam. A match was going on over there. One of my classmates who had come there to support one of the teams asked me why the hell was I there, after all I didn't support either of the teams. I did not want to confess my fears to him so just avoided him by moving to some place else. I returned to hostel only when I found out that the announcement was a prank played by one of supporters of the teams in Sangam to get more audience. Later the Dean released a public statement saying that Chennai wasn't on the fault zone, so we may go back and sleep peacefully. I still couldn't. I forced my roommate to let me sleep near the door. I had a planned an escape route via the tree close to the door in event of an unlikely earthquake. Sleep avoided me all night. This was not the end of my nightmare. Even now, very often, I wake up in sleep feeling a quake, waking everybody beside me. Moments later, I am put to sleep again after being forced to believe that it was the dog moving under the bed. If computer games were never my type, Quake sure is my last choice game.

I believe all of us have some mortal fears. I feel quite light after the confession of my fears. If you say you do not have mortal fears than you are not brave enough. Not brave enough to face them.

Good night
Wishing you all a safe world.

PS: Anybody got the connect between the photo in the beginning and the post?

Music is for everyone

It is always believed that music is not well understood by a lot of people. The taste for music is used by a lot of people as a pretense, to be seen as cool. These are bad people. But there are ignorant imbeciles as well. These are the ones who have a habit of breaking into a ruthless cacophony. There are people who have a very bad memory of lyrics and make a mockery of songs without an malicious intention. Wide range of capabilities exist in producing, reproducing and digesting music.

I have always belonged to the bad-in-all-respects category. I can't produce harmonious sounds, nor can I remember lyrics. Sometimes I believe it is something you are born with. Once in my third year of undergrad, I grabbed a keyboard from my ex-roommate Munna. My friend, Sid, used to live besides me. He was both gifted and trained. So, I asked Sid to teach me keyboard. He started by teaching me about the SEVEN Notes. The key was to be able to distinguish between them. I was not able to do that even after a few sessions. Sid gave up and said - "Its not your fault. If you can not feel the difference between notes, you will never create music." I took his word as god's will and humbly admitted my limitations to myself. Then on, I never tried to learn music. But, that hasn't deterred me from listening to a wide variety of music. I was and am pretty ease to please. I could even enjoy my next door guy singing. I realized that I was bad at lyrics. But, on the other hand, my taste for music was such that it ignored lyrics a lot of times. I could listen to songs from any language and feel happy, feel sad, feel something. There are a lot of songs that stir me up.

There are a billion people on the earth who fall into my category - good listeners alone people (GLAPs). We are the people who make music timeless. Music was created for expression. Not everybody can express it, but most of us can read the expression. If it was only for the ones who could express, I believe music would have become so limited and prone to death. IT wouldn't have survived till eternity. I raise a toast to all the GLAPs on the planet.

This is one of my favorites:

English - Language Bridge or Language Divide?

English - Language Bridge or Language Divide?
The question that has been troubling Indian intelligentsia for quite some while.

Why couldn't we have a national language like China which has even more people and a greater area?

Why is English, or the popular modified local version Indish, the language to communicate across the various Indian states?

Why couldn't we use some indigenous language like Hindi or Sanskrit if we wanted a common language?


Padam Shree Javed Akhtar was answering these questions in a public gathering at IIT Madras in January 2003. He said - "In this dynamic world where knowledge and science is the primary form of wealth, a language has to be flexible and dynamic to be able to survive. A language has to keep adding new words to describe the new inventions, discoveries and ideas. It should be expanding so as to be capable of describing ongoing research. Hindi or other Indian languages are not doing that. Thus, English has become our language of academic discourse. Young Indians will find English more suited for their future lives as it will help them to describe their times. Hindi will not have enough expression to match the things of future."

It is not that Indians and Chinese have to learn English to be able to communicate with the west. If India and China decide to force the world to start using their language, they might be able to do so after some time, by virtue of sheer force of their numbers and growing stature. But their languages are slow evolving and they depend on English a lot of times to move forward in describing new ideas. Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese and a lot of other languages are far ahead of Hindi in this regard, but still there is a long way to catch up with English.

In the few days that I have been in UK, I have often come across the compliment that you learn languages pretty fast from people of various nationalities. I thought may be it comes naturally to us Indians. Most of us are at least bilinguals.

Yesterday, I was talking to this British friend of mine, Ball Williams (Will). He was curious that "why was English (Indish) the common language in India?". My answer was in taking a parallel to the European situation. Most Indian languages like Tamil, Telugu, Marathi are spoken by a population spread over an area bigger than most European nations and spoken by more people than most European languages. Read this to know better. The common language across Europe is English and so is it in India. Quite naturally so. The first time when a diverse Indian plethora was united in a formation that resembles the current concept of Indian nation, it was due to the Imperial forces (Raj). It was the first time that people from all over the India felt the need to learn a common langauge to communicate with a central government. Raj gave us our "first common language" and hence, Indish is our common language. It will be quite futile to expect Hindi to do the same job. If we wanted that, the Hindi Rulers should have done what the Raj did before them, they should have united the country. Language evolves by ease of use, not by an measure of patriotic and cultural coolness. Will was quite impressed by the statistics that we ourselves ignore so very often. I never thought about these statistics until he asked me this obvious question. It is very easy for North Indians to feel frustrated when they can't use their Hindi to communicate in south. The same north Indian wouldn't feel the frustration while talking to a Spanish guy with a broken English. The frustration that we so often find justified and take for granted, is letting a regional indignation creep into our otherwise unprejudiced and secular minds. Its feet stands on a soil of blatant ignorance of largely telling statistics staring into our face.

Okay, lets say English is not that bad. After all Urdu also came from the influence of Invaders and we have accepted it so warmly. Why not make India a one language nation and kill the regional divide? "Why not do it like China?"- as the popular Indian herd mentallity statement goes these days. In China, when Mao Tse-tung rose to power, he brought about the Cultural Revolution. He made Mandarin (Chinese) the compulsory common language. So he killed two birds with one stone - regional divide and regional diversity. With democracy, at least our regional diversity has survived. That is something that we are very proud of. IITs get a very diverse population with no special effort. Even the much revered IVY schools like Harvard and Columbia make an conscious effort to get diversity, even at the cost of merit at times. Respect for diversity is a tradition in India. This is the most important tradition that we have to preserve, more than the arranged marriages and saarees.

Thus, we should let the masses to choose their language and wait until a common language evolves with growing education and literacy. We still have a good reason to preserve Hindi and other regional languages. Our regional languages are much more qualified to describe our lives, the Kachoris, the dosas, the ishq, the mohabbat, the sati, the harijans, the kudiyan..... List is long. They are much more apt when describing the Indian emotions. So, the hindi fundamentalist who are advocating abolishing English from our education have a more costructive job left to them than obstructing scientific education. They have to fight hard to spread the beauty of Hindi Literature. I am sad that most of my Indian batchmates can't read Hindi books. Lets preserve our languages. Let us youth work for preservation when we become fathers and mothers. The opportunity is in our hands - Carpe diem.

Jai Hind.

Creative Students

Please click on the images below, enlarge and read them. These are scanned copies of essays written by two cute (wierd) kids. God bless these kids for the numerous times I have had a hearty laugh reading their essays. Do read the teacher's comments also.

1. Looking outside my window - Describe sigths, sounds and activities

2. What would I like to see in my aged parents/grandparents

Wandering thoughts

There are a few uncorrelated thoughts that keep running in my mind. Here I present a few of them:

Translated literature in India -
Once in my "Literature in Translation" class, Cubba said that Translated Indian Literature is actually "Socially relevant, necessarily serious literature in translation". His statement was not very well supported then, but it is indeed true in my opinion. Most Indian transalators belong to the group of "so-called" intellectuals and they indeed consider it to be their moral responsibility to contribute to social revolution, social change, social awareness, social blah blah .... all that just by transalating serious socially relevant literature. They thought that this is the call of the hour. Not too wrong for 1920, I guess. Pre-independence and till a little later, most of Indian intellectuals were fighting for social causes. People like Gandhi, Raja Rammohan Roy, etc. used to write essays on such issues. Lot of good regional language writers also were writing on social relevant issue(Bashir...). Due to this, the western anthropologists converted their study of Indian society into accounts of social oppression and backwardness. Anthropology became the study of brown men's religion by white man as against its dictionary definition.

But times have changed. Social revolution is still a priority in India, but I guess the urge is not as strong as it was then. The economic growth has triggered the social change. Demographies are changing rapidly and so are customs and tradition. Indian Culture is much more than the catalysts that brought about the current socio-economic distribution where there are glaring gaps. Thus our culture cannot be held responsible for the state of the poor, dalits and minorities. The ones responsible for that are our rulers. We can concentrate on the positive aspects of our culture. Our folklore has much more to give then stories of dalits oppressed by brahamins. Its time we realize that our folklore has a sea of humour and feel-good stories. Ever heard a grim story from your grandparents? Whatever they narrate will mostly make you laugh until you fall off the bed. Plus there are these beautiful local couplets and poetry that is soon going to be lost if we do not record them. These funny poems always have a morale, humour and rhyme. The day we realize this, probably we will see some of good Indian humour being translated. For beginners who want to translate I can give a few pointers - pick up any stuff from Hari Shankar Parsai, Makhan Lal Chaturvedi and many more. You would really want to translate it once you read it. Also look for the Urdu humour in India. It is great. Ever get your hands on the book - "Shrestya Hasya Kathayein" compiled by......i can't remember.'

Men have a birth right to humour -
In a world where women are steeling the baton from men everywhere, it can observed that most of legendary humourist still are men. You didn't see a single lady in Laughter Challenge or a Mahila Hasya Kaviyatri. It is all dominated by men. It is not so because women do not have a taste for humour. They do. But men have had the privilege to speak for centuries and it will take still some time for the human-female to walk into this window. They have always learned to keep stuff to themselves, especially, the one like humour, that asks for attention. Women have mostly been shy of attention(once again I am talking about the average, no offense to the extroverts). Plus a large part of humour also comes from vulgar language or double meaning phrases. Women have kept themselves away from this. With the women revolution happening both these factors are soon dissolving and I guess soon we will see the women on stage as much as men. Beware Sunil Pal.

Reservoir Dogs-2 (WE don't want any more Lollipop)

After reading enormous amount of material in newspapers, listening to discussions in hostel... all on the reservation controversy, I write another blog on the same. First of all I congratulate Shri Shri Shri Arjun Singhji as he has succeeded in getting all the publicity that he would have wished for. I guess publicity was his aim (Social welfare was not his target we all know) and he achieved it.

Normalize Reservation: Do not compromise on quality
Yesterday I was talking to my friend Debo about this issue and he said that reservation has to be brought in allowable limits. Moves to bring about social welfare and equality should not discourage meritocracy. The IITs and IIMs should be allowed to decide the percentage relaxation in marks that the reservation category get. Amongst the ones who achieve it, we give admits to as many as alloted by a quota which is definitely not a freaking 50%. This takes care of a scenario where general category cut-off is 50/100 and reservation category cut-off is 20/100. The doctors who get into med-schools with these 20/100 with the aid of reservation are no better than my grandma in medicine.

Gap at bottom: Currently, reservation is a necessity to bring social equality because backward classes do not have access to good schooling and thus can not get into professional colleges on grounds of performance alone. What they really need is good schooling. The government should harness its resources and fight hard to provide them with quality primary and secondary education. By not doing so they have created a gap at bottom. By not fighting for lower caste school going kids, they have created a huge gap in knowledge and capabilities of lower and upper castes kids. Reservation is just a way to cover up for their lack of efforts in this regard by compromising on meritocracy.

Stories of our revolution: Stories of Indian lollipops
Very often we have got our acts of revolution wrong. The policy makers have often found incentives (like reservation) to bring about changes which do not address the root cause of the problem instead aggravate it. Thus those incentives are no more than giving lollipops to sick kids to keep them quite; they need medicine. Examples follow:
When we actually needed to aid our farmers with proper infrastructure of electricity and water, we gave them subsidies which created deficit prone budgets. We called it the green revolution. It was a revolution only in a few places where the agricultural infrastructure was good, not the ones with subsidies. We realized this only when the World Bank became stiff on us. Subsidies on fertilizer can not be substitutes of water and electricity. The government is indirectly responsible for the deaths of the numerous farmers who committed suicides due to various reasons.

When we needed to eradicate the "License Raj" so that our traders and entrepreneurs feel encouraged to grow, struggle and still survive in market, we opted to protect them from global firms. In the process we made them incompetent. Look at the fate of numerous PSUs that got enough corporate protection. Only PSUs that faced competition did well. We were always scared that our firms will never be able to sustain competion from MNCs. With the current growth and advance of Indian firms everywhere we can assume that Indian businessmen are no less competitive. Instead, we should have let them go out and let others come in (in short liberalize and globalise), so that they could learn to sustain competition. Eliminating competition is no way to guarantee learning and growth, struggle in tough conditions is.

There are many examples of similar apathy of policy makers towards grievous problems. The comman thread running is - irrespective of the government, leader and coalition formations, our politicians have always tried to look for lollipops instead of real solutions.

Reservation - The lollipop for backward classes.
Reservation is one way of dividing people. I explain. If you have ever been to a college, you would realize how much discomfort the talk of reservation can bring to a heterogeneous group. The way reservation is implemented right now, the backward classes gaining admission are not particularly as proud of their achievement. Due to the way it is implemented right now, a lot of stupid general category entrants regard themselves as superior when they actually aren't. Had the backward classes been given equal opportunities for schooling and then be allowed to enter colleges through the same tests as general category, they would have been equals. Reservation has not brought equal status to backward classes. They are rudely classified as the incompetent among the qualified. Root cause of misery of backward classes is a big question in India. Their population is large and the human resource in them in still untapped. Constructive moves to uplift their social and economic status have to be taken. All reservation does is to give them a false promise meanwhile bring down the only credible intitutions India has like IITs and IIMs.

We are looking for people who can give us medcines, not lollipos. Any volunteers?

We don't like the Villains, but what do the villains like?

I was wondering about how much we hate some people. Like I hate these religious fundamentalists in India (RSS, VHP...). I hate Dawood and lot of other people.

Among the hundreds of people we don't like, there are a few proclaimed as public villains. Dislike towards them is not due to personal agenda, but because they are the filth of the society and are publically despised.

Writers and movie-makers capitalise on this hatred of ours and make movies where the hero beats up the villain. We clap with every blow that the villain gets because we model him as the one who needs a thrashing. We start patronising the on-screen heroes in real life. In short - Common man wants a filmstar's company because he has beaten up the bad guy.

What kind of movies do these villains of real life likes? I think even Dawood Ibrahim watches bollywood movies where the villains are beaten up. I know that these Mumbai Dons patronise film-stars and like their company. Why do these bad guys want their company. They cannot have the same reasons as of the common man stated above. What goes on in their mind? Did the "Chambal ke Daku" also like Ramlila depicting the win of good against evil? I have read something about Verrappan making a risky move of going to a cinema hall once to see a movie. He got trapped by police inside but still managed to escape. Real life villains do like movies.

A thousand such questions but no answer. Will have to meet one of these guys to clear my doubts. These bad guys really are wierd people. You can't reason their acts.

Reservoir Dogs

I never saw the movie Reservoir Dogs as it has too much action (I can only guess as I never saw it). But I am about to see a equally action filled movie with quiet similar name in India. The photo given above is of a college student who self-immolated himself in protest of implementation of the Mandal Commission's report in 1990. The report had triggered wide-spread violence and riots and saw months of academic activity diluted into the prolonged agitation.

This blog is concerning the central govt.'s proposed legilation which would give another 27 percent reservation to OBCs(Other Backward Classes) in central govt. administered universities. The total reserved quota in IITs would rise to as high as 49 freaking percentage.

Question no. 1 to be raised is - why more reservation?
The probable answer is that the really deprived sections are never able to avail the advantages of reservation. Good news is that our scholarly Arjun Singhji realised that if the current quota is not enough to support the poor then increase the quota. What the hell? Where's his brain?

Ones campaigning for increased reservation quotas have often quoted - "Since it is difficult to classify the really needy people who need reservation, and since the benefits are not reaching the really deprived ones currently; increasing quotas is the only way to help them." Plain enough, you increase the room for reservation and it will be able to accommodate the real needy.

Somebody has to realise what is happeneing to reservation scene these days. Being a beauracrat's son, I have seen officers coming from reserved cateogaries, becoming IAS, IPS. These officers are rich enough to get coaching for their kids who are the ones who end up using reservation quota. There is real pressure on a few reservation cateogary kids, the ones with IAS fathers, to perform well. Given that they have all the money that the general catrogary (supposedly) have and added to that they have the reservation advantage, their fathers expect them to do well. Poor in the reservation cateogary only have reservation, no money for cocahing. Poor in general cateogary-----hmmm... God help them.

Looking into the roots of reservation we should see how the picking for cateogaries goes. The socially and economically backward classes of medival times were rewarded for the ages of toil and domination in terms of reservation. The UPPER castes (not today's, i mean upper castes of medival times) were punished for ill-treating these lads, no reservation for you all, now eat your lolipop.

The social scenario has completely changed and I don't know how many will call the enormous number of IAS and IPS from reservation cateogary as oppressed. Also that the upper caste of medival times are no less in any misery. In present India, you would have to be a buddha in one life to be lucky enough to be born in reserved cateogary house with money in the next life. There are plenty of poor in reserved catogary but they will never be able to push the rich in the reserved cateogary to get into the reservation room.

But the above system of picking the needy ones for reservation is absolutely stupid. If we can identify the poor by having TAX limits and we can have tax slabs, why not so in reservation? Why not have a need base allocation of advantage. Why should the sons CATEOGARY IAS keep becoming IAS as if it is their patriarchial blessing? The poor in cateogary won't get anything even if we reserve the whole 100%. Increasing reservation quota means that even the dumbest sons of reservation cateogary IAS fathers will get to IITs and IIMs with a little cocahing. The logic is definitely missing in this whole act.

NKC(National knowledge commission) convener, Mr. Mehta, is opposed to this move. He has opposed reservation going all the upto the proposed 49% in IITs and IIMs. Read from the links given below:
http://www.indianexpress.com/story/1910.html
Some miss Jayanthi from Delhi University has opposed his agitation. Once again logic is amiss here. She is from DU and is one of the cotributors to its majestic downfall. Read the link below.
http://www.indianexpress.com/story/1968.html
She is advising how IITs and IIMs should be run! Is she nuts? When did humans start learning toilet habits from dogs who pee in garden? When should people from IITs be taught by DU people on how to manage their affairs?

Final Verdict: Reservation should not happen on caste lines as that is trying to improve a social scenario that does not exist any more. Reservation should happen on a need base established on a credible income surveys. The data could be shared with IT department, they need it desperately.

Somebody do something or a Reservoir Dogs-II will be shot soon on Indian roads.