Another test!!

See my Personality Profile

As with most of these tests - mostly true, but with some exceptions.

Broom Cricket - The Game

Last week I came across another mutation of the great game of cricket.

Venue - Living room of a friend's Apartment in Gurgaon

Equipment - A broom (aka Jhadoo) and a stress ball (those yellow balls with a smiley)

Rules of the Game - Flexible and open to innovation

Ways to get out - One pitch one hand catch / If the broomsman hits the ball on the full against the wall/cupboard/keyboard/table/shoe-rack he or she is out/ Bowled.

Runs - All safe shots off the broom that don't get you out, count for one run

Timing - 10 pm to 2 am

Break - Scotch / Rum / Whiskey / Biryani

Best Rule Innovation - A fielder is designated as Rahul Dravid and if the ball makes contact with him the same rules apply as when they hit "The Wall".

Winners - All. We played for the joy of the game and were too drunk to remember the scores!

Fun Quotient - Awesome. Five Star Rating. Safe for children of all ages.

Addendum - The Honesty Rule (the best innovation cricket has seen

If a batsman disputes an out call or wants to cheat and play again, he needs to "I honestly want another chance" upon which he can play on. The honesty rule can be used only once in an innings.

Result of an Emperical Study into the Rationale Behind Romantic Chemistry Between People

There is no rationale. |End of Study|

The perils of flying Air India

Last week I had to make a quick trip to Chennai. A quick search on the net, showed I would be lucky to get a flight ticket on Air India at a fare which is just about 3 times the bus fare to Chennai at 10-15 am.

Folks at that time, for that price if you get a deal, have no further expectations. Unfortunately, I did. My mistake.

1. You could be booked on the domestic leg of an international flight.
2. You could be stuck in the security line behind 39 [that right i counted] Haj pilgrims, most of whom are on an airplane for the first time in their lives.
3. You could be incredibly hungry and all the snack counters inside the airport could be closed
4. You could get a flight crew, where the air hostess is older than your Grandma!
5. You could get the world's worst breakfast snack on the flight
6. You could run into turbulence and feel the seats vibrate violently. And your granny Air hostess will give you a stern "Do Not Whine" look
7. You could have the worst landing when you think damn I don't wanna go like this
8. You could land up in the airport and go through a swine flu machine that shows your body temperature to have reduced to freezing levels.

Yet for all this, you could still be better off than Ryan Air [or so I am told!]

Would you be massaged by a snake?

I came across this story earlier this week. I was disgusted!! Apparently this has been going on for quite sometime around the world. The reporter in this news-piece refers to the massage as a "sensual feeling". Ain't that bestiality? Illegal in many countries?

In a way however, its only natural progression. Once men acquiesce their role in bringing massage pleasure and relief to their fellow beings, its only natural that the snakes take over, figuratively and otherwise!



So snakes as techies...who btw have the same cribs this hero in the video has!

The Values Proposition

I'm in a profession that involves managing people and their aspirations on behalf of the organization that we work for. Some people, I manage directly but the vast majority indirectly. The rigors of daily work apart, it is always a very interesting experience watching people take life decisions and the grounds on which they take them.

I've seen people use money as the barometer for measuring every situation and people associated with it. Everything from their job to marriage boils down to the monetary value. As I type this, I can hear the dhol at a wedding hall down the street and can't help but wonder, whats the deal there! I somehow thought that by the time we complete our first year at work, it is pretty much established that money is not the only thing, not even the primary thing for one's career! And I wonder at what point of time in life, do we get this realization?

Another kind of decision making, is people who use emotion as the barometer. There is lot of conviction that comes with these decisions as they are of the heart. But often times, this can be quite disastrous as they might turn a deaf ear to valid arguments of reason that could potentially avert disasters. After a while, folks around them learn how these people can be manipulated through their emotions.

There are many more styles of decision making, but their analysis is not the point of this blog. A lot of times, we see that we fluctuate between one style to another. At the top of the month, when the money is in the bank, the style is very different, from the end of the month when we are broke. It seems our entire worldview fluctuates with our bank balance. This is where I've found values make a difference. We need to have a set of values, that shape our world-view. These values should not be prisoner to our bank balance, but a more stable reflection of what we want out of life.

Let these values decide if we should live our dreams or make our dreams fit our life. Whatever, be the result, its our decision and we live with its consequences.

Social Networking Hiatus

A cursory look at my recent Facebook activity, has convinced me that I need to prove to myself that I am just fine without FB. Its a wonderful medium to stay connected with friends and family, but I need to know that i'm not addicted to it. To ensure i don't transfer my interests elsewhere during this period, im off orkut and twitter as well.

Ram took 14 yrs vanvaas and then we had diwali...Me had diwali and 10 day vanvaas from social networking. Lets see how many days I last, coz mind u a] im not a mythical God and b] unlike Ram, i can end my vanvaas in 8 seconds! [thats how long it takes to get on FB mobile!]

Just in case ur wondering, this note wud appear on my FB profile, since its linked to my blog! Today is Day 1 and its gone just fine, so far! :)

The Intellectual Whore to the Punjabi Bride

As a freelancing intellectual whore [IW] to a Punjabi friend, who is to get married shortly, I’ve been privy to the various crests and falls in the waves that is scientifically called, mood swings. The following are a few snippets of my observations, post censoring.

1. There is a spike in the number of tiffs between the couple and they could go for days without speaking to each other
2. The bride actually goes through the same feelings of loss of singledom as the groom, but is not ok if the groom expresses his sadness over the same. She feels her sacrifice is not being appreciated enough.
3. Bride would have a big fight with groom and then bitch to Intellectual Whore about losing her singledom, sometimes I suspect, using the very same words the groom has used.
4. Neither the groom nor the IW will have a clue, why she is picking fights. But that’s the Venetian trait, I guess.
5. Bride wants to watch any movie the groom identifies with during this period, just to ensure our boy doesn’t get any wrong ideas.
6. Bride has a proclivity towards increasing her alcohol consumption. This can be disastrous, if left unsupervised.
7. The biggest fear the bride has is, that her female relatives would call her fat in her wedding dress.
8. To tackle aforesaid fear, bride spends a tremendous amount of time and energy at the gym. Statutory Warning to the Groom – Watch Out for the Post-Marital Explosion!
9. No matter who you are, for your own safety, always deny that she has put on weight, when she starts her weight related crib sessions.
10. Bride would never admit it. But sub-consciously, she has been planning for this wedding her entire life. Ever since, she attended her first wedding as a little girl.
11. Bride likes the fact that the Groom would let her choose all his clothes for the wedding and its associated ceremonies. The odds of the Color of the Groom’s suit, being color-coded with the bride’s blouse and the pandal are extremely high.
12. If you want to appear to be the groom, who is contributing to the wedding arrangements, say Yes to everything she asks for. Watch for the trick question, when you’re supposed to say NO.
13. Always, let the bride pick the honeymoon spot. The groom will get what he wants. Let her choose where.
14. Weddings are an expensive affair and will leave you broke for a time, after the honeymoon.

Well for those of you who don’t know what is an IW, read this. And fortunately, for me, the wedding day would also signal the demise of my only IW relationship.

More Pics from Hampi Trip

Nothing Says Roadtrip like this pic does.


And God Surd Said Go That Way...


True Love - A Man and His Machine


Baap ka sadak hai...soyenge ispe ... tera kya jata hai?


Mudgal fort and its moat - quite literally in the middle of nowhere


Thats an overflowing Krishna river, that has taken over the road and the bridge


The rocks that make Hampi


A building in the royal zenana

 

Tungabhadra Dam by Day

 

Tungabhadra Dam by Night

Austerity Drive Impacting the Masses

One thing about Govt initiatives is that you read a lot about it in the papers and the News Network would smother you to death over it, but the reality would hit us months or years later, if it ever would.

However, the recent austerity drive announced by the Govt has been a noble exception. It has hit the aam aadmi even before he could say aam. Aam admi aka Mango Man, given my fondness for our national fruit, has been hit by this austerity drive so bad, that he has taken to his own austerity drive.

Saddled with the standard expenses of a salaried professional at this time of the year, ie Credit card bills, travel bills, tax savings etc, I have no option but to declare my own austerity drive. Damn it. My disposable income over this quarter would be less than the average autowallah. I have decided to subsist over a meagre 3k month over this quarter. This is my own little reality show - produced, directed and watched by me, starring me.

If its going to cost a fortune to keep me poor, my only supplication, is please do share that fortune with me! :-)

Yeh Dilli Hai Mere Yaar

Something really disturbing happened to me on this trip to Delhi..nostalgia. For a self-proclaimed nomad like me that is the worst feeling to have. Its the first step into the descent into staying rooted somewhere.

A few days in this city and I experienced the myriad of lives you could possibly live here.

1. The Gurgaon Yuppie - Slog it off during the week and hit the malls on Friday evening with office folks for a beer or two.

2. Work it out around CP - Meet a friend for coffee or a movie in CP and then head home

3. Work for the Govt - stay in a palatial house in Lutyens Delhi, hang out at CP or Khan market and top it off with an ice-cream at India Gate

4. Live a miser's life in University campus @ JNU/DU and have the most fun in the world while doing it.

5. Work it off in the city and head home to Dwarka on the metro, while watching all of Delhi on your way to and fro.

Perhaps Delhi is a better place to visit rather than stay? My personal experience says otherwise because when you're tired of it, just drive off into the Mountains or the Dessert, its close enough... or if you have a death wish into Uttar Pradesh!! Its closer.

The Beer Chronicles

This is the story of 3 bachelors in their late 20's and their tryst with 8 rounds of beer during a road trip.

Round 1 - Nothing

Round 2 - Burp!

Round 3 -
Krazy Kumar - "You idiots bought only 3?"
Me - "Guilty"
Krazy Kumar - "The point about beer is when you're done drinking, there should always be another 2 bottles around"
Me - "Guilty as charged, My Lord!"

Resupply

Round 4 - Boys stop on a bridge and pose for photographs and also take photos with the beer bottle and of it. Said Beer bottle is treated like a deity..

Round 5 - Boys stop on the middle of the highway and pose for photos - again, this time while sitting on the middle of the road

Round 6 -

"Maa"

Boys reminiscence about their mother and how they understand them the best. There was also almost a, "Mere paas maa hai" dialogue, almost..

Round 7 - 2 Boys talk about this awesome woman in their office, and her charms and her voice and her eyes and declare that if only she were not married with kids, she would have definitely been proposed to. Me say "Hmmmmmmmmmm...."

Round 8 - Boys congratulate each other on an awesome roadtrip!! :-))))

The Politics of Calamity

I'm sure all of us have now been inundated with news of the unprecedented floods in AP and Karnataka.

Over the last weekend I had gone on a road trip with a couple of friends. We had traveled over 1187 kms through the so-called flood ravaged areas. No doubt there had been incessant and tremendous rainfall and the dams in the region were opened causing water logging in some areas. But we felt the reports carried in the media were grossly exaggerated. We saw only one IAF helicopter, no Govt vehicles or military vehicles carrying relief material, one camp for displaced people with 20 tents and nothing out of the ordinary really. But all along the way, incessant calls/sms from friends and relatives who were seeing the news, led us to believe we would be seeing some extraordinary tragedy. I've seen, first hand, the aftermath of the tsunami. There was no such displacement of people on view here. Not even a fraction of it.

Incessant media coverage, swamped with repeated imagery of flooded areas and damaged houses area creating a catastrophe bigger than what it really is. This seems like a ploy to get more relief money sanctioned by the powers to be. How much could you really muster of this tragedy by doing an aerial survey? As for the media, they seem to be more into selling their sound bytes, with visuals of people's misery edited and rerun to the tune of some sad Carnatic music [u need to watch the Vernacular channels for this innovation in news media].

In the end, the media gets their TRP and the politicians the relief money to swindle. In the midst of this sordid affair, I can only hope that the affected people, do get help in time to rebuild their lives.

A Road Trip to Nowhere

"Dude if we spend the next weekend like this we are losers", I said to God Surd.

"If we don't get out of Hyderabad it would be bad man. Anywhere but here", he replied

These words were spoken last Sunday after watching "Quick Gun Murugun" by two employees of Hyderabad's burgeoning IT industry. It gives us a lot..money, job, security, work to keep us occupied, but it takes away our individuality. In a way that is what we reclaimed this first weekend of October, if only for 3 days.



As with all things unplanned, this trip had a beginning and an end with just sheer awesomeness in between! We decided to go to Hampi in Karnataka, a distance of about 400 kms from Hyd. To and Fro shud be around 800 kms. We did nearly 1200 kms!! :-))

1. The Ride

We set off in a Maruti Swift vxi Diesel. Mileage of 20 kpl on the trip [guessing] and a top speed of 170 kmph [not guessing]!!. Needless to say that is a killer combo and not once did I feel I was in a diesel car. The more dust and grime that piled on to the car, the cooler it looked. The proud owner of this machine and its lover Krazy Kumar, had the honor of being the lead driver and driving us through an Overflowing Krishna river [true story, more on it later]. Yours truly, was the designated backup driver who managed to get behind the wheel of this beauty one dark Friday night, if u know what I mean.

2. The Terrain

All the places and districts affected by the current flood situation! Our road trip took us through some places we had planned and a lot many more places, simply coz we got lost. Thanks to a road map, Google Maps and wanderlust, we ensured we were on track to our final destination - Hampi.

We had traveled through Mahbubnagar, Devakadra, Marikal and Makhtal. After Makhtal we encountered a huge traffic jam at about 4 pm. On further probing, we saw that the Krishna river had overflown the bridge we were supposed to cross. The first truck guy at the bridge told us that he had been stuck there since 3 in the morning. We decided to take a detour and run around the Krishna river. We drove up to to Utkur, Narayanpet and got lost in Shahpur. STATUTORY WARNING: There is a road there not shown in Google Maps. We got lost there. We managed to hit Shorapur and then again reached a surging Krishna river, a little past Tintani. This time we were told that the water would recede. After watching quite a few cars get stuck in the middle of the bridge and their occupants push the car out of 3ft deep water, we decided to make our move. First gear at full throttle, some clever clutch play, shrewd calculation and a lil' bit of crazy, is what it took Krazy Kumar to get us over the river. On retrospect, we were sure it was also the darkness that helped. If we had seen the entire river in daylight, we wouldn't have had the guts to cross the river.

By this time we were beginning to get tired of the drive. Night driving, in the monsoons with bad roads and onward traffic of trucks is not easy. I switched with Kumar for a while. I couldn't see it then, but I knew we were driving through some beautiful terrain. Could just make it out with the way road was curving beautifully and the rise and fall of the slopes. On the way back, we realised it was an awesome sight indeed. We wanted to reach Hospet, the closest town to Hampi. But, the night was just never ending and the road increasingly treacherous. I remember saying we rather sleep in the car, when I saw a signboard saying 95 kms to Hospet. Just then, we saw a motel. At that moment, we would have taken anything! The place was Ikkal. God Surd was already asleep in the backseat!

The onward journey next day to Hampi was horrible. It took us 3 hours to traverse 95 kms. The roads were in pathetic condition. The roads did not have any potholes though...they were ravines. And our poor little Swift surrounded by huge trucks, put up a spirited performance. He was like a puppy amongst lions! But as Krazy Kumar would say, "Sab Maaf Hai" for that was the awesomeness of the view of the Tungabadra Dam. It was in full flight, with all the sluice gates open, even the emergency gates. What a sight!! So amazing was the sight that it got God Surd to have a full go at capturing those visual moments, with KK's SLR.

3. Hampi, at last

Our trip in Hampi itself was good, but on a different level from the road trip. Hampi, itself was a city of about 47 sq.km. which was flattened by Adil Shah after the defeat of the Vijayanagar Empire's army to the Deccan Sultanates. Its quite an irony that we have intact constructions from the Mughal era which just followed the Vijayanagar empire. One can rant about the destruction of our cultural heritage but thats too old a skeleton to dig out. It was quite fascinating to go around this city on a beautiful monsoon evening and wonder how splendid it must have been when this city was at the peak of its glory on such an evening.

The constructions, or whatever of it which is left, gives an indicator of the life of the Hindu empire of the time. Its astonishing that they would have 2000 temples in that small a city. Come to think of it same holds true for mosques and muslim empires. No wonder, people say, religion is deeply woven into the fabric of Indian society - a precious inheritance and a curse. The architecture in some of the places did make us ponder on what life would have been like in those days. The sculptures make us question the folks who worship at these temples, yet spew venom in the name of Indian culture and ban women wearing jeans to college. "Please look at what you are worshiping!" Beyond the erotic architecture, one also give it to the artisans for their creativity, of being able to carve out 5 designs out of a single carving. The things one has to do to amuse the king!

There was a lot of Muslim influence in the architecture in some of the buildings with domes and arches. Apparently, that seemed to extend even into the way of life. The King apparently had a zenana [harem] which was guarded by a contingent of Eunuchs. I've also seen photos of Abyssinian women who were on the retainership of the Nizam of Hyderabad to guard his zenana.

4. Israeli Tourists and Tourism

Apparently, Hampi is another place in India which is flooded by Israelis tourists that restaurants also have an Israeli section in their menu. This is the second place I've seen such a concentration of ISraelis after Dharamkot near McLeodGanj. The food in and around Hampi is nothing to write home about. But the place in one, which you can get over with in 3 hours, like us or spend 3 full days also. There are motorcyles and cycles that you can hire for to enjoy a more relaxed but energy sapping day of looking around this dead city. Would highly recommend this trip during the monsoons. The place is just divine. You need open space to really watch the beauty of sheets of rain come down on the country side - the green hills, the multi-hued boulders and the brown earth. Just takes back to a whole different time.

5. Psychology, Relativity and Knock Out Beer

We decided to head back to our lodge in Ikkal for the night. We knew the road was bad, in fact the worst stretch we had encountered on the trip. But we wanted to do in anyways. These guys told about their experiences in a grueling experiential training camp and how they were wanting to taste that high again. Perhaps this was a way to do that.. I don't know. I was game though! And amazingly enough,none of our apprehensions materialized. The road was not as bad as we thought it would be. During night driving, you are able to see and focus only on the road ahead of you and not on the craters around you. It is a psychological thing. During the day, we were looking at the huge traffic jams and all the obstacles that everyone on the road was facing. It amplified our own difficulties on the road. But at night, the focus was only on our problems and our road ahead.

Or as the God Surd said, maybe the road was bad on the other side!

Having got to our hotel back on time, we hit the nearest dhabha to celebrate our trip and have a night snack. That turned into dinner and drinks. Drinks for the day was KNOCK OUT beer. Beer has always been an acquired taste for me, a labored one at that. But this was the first time, I genuinely enjoyed beer. It was a fab revelation! Like the icing on top of the cake, that was a great trip! More about Knock Out in the Beer Chronicles!

6. The Road Back

Usually the return journey in a road trip, is the low point of the trip. But in this one, we were just stretching awesome to its limit! In school I used to read about how big armies got slaughtered in retreat by their enemies, because they lost their way, and used to think how stupid they must be. Well, I can tell you one thing, the roads in the light of day and in the dark of the night can look totally different. Well, we got lost again!! :-) But such was our luck, that we stumbled onto a detour a really smooth detour and reached Mudgal quicker than expected. At Mudgal, we were surprised to see the Mudgal fort. We had no inkling such a structure could exist in a place like this when we passed it in the night. But lo and behold here was a fort, with a proper moat!! We went on further ahead, getting lost again at Gurumatkal. But the road and the view was so awesome that we ditched our plans to join NH7 at Mahbubnagar and pressed ahead, fueled by beer and mirchi bhajjis with double mirchi,

By this time, the beer had hit home, our destination much closer than what we had anticipated and our fun quotient unbelievable! By the time we hit NH7, Krazy Kumar decided to end this on a high and stretched the car to touch 175 kmph. That is something on a Swift. But it sums up the trip - fun, eccentric, on the edge but ultimately memorable! :-) Here's to many more! Cheers!!

Roman Polanski deserves to go to jail

Period.

Some of the words spoken in his defense.

"surprising because Roman for the last 12, 15 years has lived in Switzerland, he has a home, he travels there, he works there".

"Switzerland let a guest walk into a nasty trap. We should be ashamed,"

"not only a grotesque farce of justice, but also an immense cultural scandal"

Huh? Having a home in Switzerland is no reason for a convicted rapist not to get arrested. Swiss treatment of guests is legendary. The world knows what they did with the Nazis. "Grotesque farce of justice" statement comes from the French Culture Minister. What f***ing culture?

These instances make the Europeans look real bad and kind of vindicate George Bush's intolerance of all things French.

Yes Roman Polanski has gone through some terrible things in life, losing his mother to a Nazi concentration camp and his wife and unborn child being brutally murdered. But that's not reason for a man to run away from the charges he has been accused of. These charges are grave indeed, and no passage of time nor Oscar statuettes would dissolve the depravity of child rape.

Dilbert and powerpoint presentations

Milestones, or the lack of it..

My last blog had elicited a lot of reactions over fb,sms and mail, most of which seem to affirm that I'm not the only one!! ... hallelujah.

I have been thinking over the past 2 days, what is it that I have got to show for my life, since I got out of college? I don't see how I have let my professional life affect my personal life, not in a positive way anyway!

To be fair, I have some awesome memories of the stuff done in the last two years. But what I was wondering these past two days, was what do I have to show for it? My own assessment is that i live a very minimalistic existence. (I can shift out of my current abode in 1 hr flat). The problem is there are no milestones to show for the life i have lived. But then, such is the existence of a nomad isn't it? There are no monuments to celebrate the path he has tread.

Unless you build a pyramid or a Taj Mahal, nobody will give a shit about you, 400 yrs from now. So why bother? :-)

PS: With this post, 2009 is my most prolific blogging year. Thats one milestone! Thank you, employer for transferring me to Hyderabad!

Confessions of a Procrastinator

I'm a serial procrastinator, of the worst kind.

Its easy to rationalize it, by saying who isn't and move on with life. But that is what I have been doing. This moment of candor would be brief and it too would pass. I have two options here, do some of the things I'm procrastinating or blog about it. I choose the latter. There needs to be a record of this, so i shame myself into action in the future, hopefully.
Here are the list of things I've been putting off -

1. Fixing the fans in my house. First one fan conked off in my bedroom, 5 months back. I moved to the other bedroom, rather than get the fan fixed. Now this fan started making funny noises 4 weeks back , but I didn't do anything about it. And 1 hour back this too conked off. Now this is my status - 1 Apartment no Fan.

2. I was supposed to get an air-conditioner remember? And I was supposed to call him Chunni...Not done, the fun purchase nor the baptism.

3. I was supposed to get furniture too. Forget furniture, haven't even got a chair yet.

4. I was supposed to get a gas connection and do some cooking myself. No movement there either.

5. I was supposed to replace my mobile phone. Research into a worthy replacement, is the excuse for this delay.

6. I also dream of having a car. The closest I've gotten is pick up an edition of Auto India at the departmental store. I'm yet to even do a test drive of a car. I rationalize that by saying that I don't need a car, which is true.

7. I haven't framed a poster, which I got made 4 months back.



8. I haven't watched Maqbool.

I'm hopeless.

Peace be with you

When I saw these scenes I deeply felt the meaning of the words - optimism, peace, happiness, beauty and success. I wonder if such views affect others too.

Field Report on Chennai Trip

1. The city has changed quite a bit. There are more flyovers, better looking roundabouts with random statues, Hyundai Accent cop patrol cars,(i know its been a while, but im yet to get used to it), much better bus services than most cities in india and yet the traffic situation has only worsened!!

2. The airport still sucks.

3. Glad to report that I've improved on my negotiating skills. I've been training on this and having live coaching sessions with Chennai auto drivers. I believe the trick is to have a thick skin and give it to them as good as u get it. [never let them know where u exactly live, always stop 2-3 houses away]

4. The weather is as muggy as ever.

5. They have a new joke at the Satyam cineplex. Its a running gag played on all visitors. They call it their security screening.

6. Saw Kaminey and Hangover at Satyam, both were very good movies. I missed watching Quick Gun Murugan in Chennai.. :-(

7. Mother and Sister have been indulging in dirty butter chicken politics at home. Mom cooks biryani and sis cooks butter chicken and I'm the judge as to which was better. Lot of insinuations and insidious planting of false information happening to sway my decision. Im thinking I should declare a mistrial and asked them to start over :-))

8. Saw the biggest black boxer running on the main road off Chintamani in Anna Nagar. Mad cap canine narrowly missed an accident, and was terrified so bad that he sprinted away in the other direction to cause another accident there!

9. My search for a new viable mobile device, has not broken any new boundaries, with each phone having its own distinct disadvantages. Guess its time to go back to the old routine of choose one and hope its the ONE!

Happy Independence Day

62nd anniversary of our independence and then the sacrifices that my countrymen have made to ensure that we continue to be free. Its the triumph of an idea! India is just that, an idea - "An idea whose time has come" [to quote Dr.M, PM]. In this country, I've been to places, beautiful places, met people, wonderful people, have had experiences, exhilarating experiences and have been afforded opportunities, exhilarating opportunities, all because of the fact that I am an Indian.

We are a country that is huge and could have easily been divided into 30 or more separate countries, just on the basis of language, caste or religion alone. Every day there are opportunistic people who would like to break it up on just these lines, just to seize their pound of flesh. The State has to be preserved and protected against such forces.

If these forces had succeeded, my life would have been totally different. I would have been an illegal alien in the city where I was born. I would have been educated in foreign languages. Would have required a visa to complete my higher education. Would have needed a work permit to do the job i currently do. Would have been in love with foreigners. Would have had to surrender my passport at the concierge of the guest house i currently am put up in. I'm not even going to broach the discrimination and daily indignities I would have to put up with during my daily life. Not that its not there today, but it could have been much more vulgar and exacerbated.

I'm grateful for the freedoms that I have. I recollect staring at the road in Hyd a few days back and wondering, how would I feel if we had a few white men coming down on horses and if I had to move to the side of the road in obeisance. I shuddered with indignation. It was just a moment. But I thought, we rather have our burra sahibs than them gora sahibs.

I am grateful for the freedoms I have. But I wonder if all our countrymen have the same freedoms. I wonder what this lady in the clip thinks of our independence. Does she feel free? - Jai Hind.

I Love Bangalore

I have not traveled as much in my life as I would have liked to. But from this limited exposure, I've always found Bangalore to be the most humorous city. No other city has tickled my funnybone as much as this city of "Gardens". Bangalore's funniness is indeed Oscar-class. The main reason I say that is because, its a city that is funny without even trying to be funny.

This is a city which has been built on the free market reforms of the 1990's. No other city in India has seen so much change or seen as much wealth pour in as has Bangalore due to the opening up of the Indian economy. So one would expect that they would be open to innovation and competition right? Wrong.
These gentlemen would rather imitate the struthio camelus than see the world change around them. Now where is the humor in this, you might ask.



The biggest superstar/megastar of this city, ladies and gentlemen, is Puneet Rajkumar. And this is a still from his latest movie, posters of which are splashed all over Bangalore. This is what gets me all cracked up en route to office. He bears a very uncanny resemblance to Jack Sparrow no? sorry Captain Jack Sparrow. Now you know why them firangs are assaulting Indians in Australia and strip searching them in the American airports. No Shahrukh, it wasn't because your name was Khan. They thought you were this dude!!

And now for the real screamer - the Kannada movie industry is called Sandalwood! Hollywood, Bollywood, Kollywood, Lollywood and now Sandalwood :-))

I would also love to tell you about how in the city of Vijay Mallya, the local Hard Rock Cafe closes earliest amongst all its 140 sister franchisees around the world, allegedly. But that ain't comedy. Its the tragedy of Bangalore [along with it new name]

Last Words - The Beatles

"I thank you on behalf of all the group and hope we passed the audition" - John Lennon

Last words spoken by the Beatles after their last concert together.

Bangalored

For good or bad, whether I like it or not, my professional life revolves a lot around Bangalore. The company that I currently work for is headquartered here. Consequently, I get summoned at short notice here. I have previously blogged about this. But there are added dimensions to this - like the bus journey. A very uncomfortable 12 hr bus journey, that just about took me to the brink of spinal injury. And once I land in Bangalore, haggling with the auto guys, while balancing a full bladder!! I always rated the auto-drivers in Chennai as the scum of the earth. Their Bengaluru counterparts are fast catching up!

Then once into the auto, I face the bloody Blore weather - mild enough to make me feel cold but not cold enough for a jacket [yes delhi winters have changed my thick skin]. With all this trying to get to the company guest house is another challenge, its like a treasure hunt, if im not booked into our well known office campuses. I try to get ready in a jiffy and invariably reach office 30 mins late [traffic]. This follows dirty looks from colleagues, which invariably includes bosses. Then start the review and the questions - stuff which are in my KRA's but somehow I seem to end up doing all but that work. Then comes the dreaded hour, lunch time. Lousy canteens they have in our Blore offices, except for one. I make up excuses to avoid lunch, from too much work to im on a diet. [All plausible excuses but somehow ppl never believe me!].

Then siesta time, try to do some work, at the same time trying to fix a cab to take me back to the bus station! No matter how hard i have tried, i have mostly failed in this. Bangalore has lousy EasyCab / Meeru taxi service. On the odd occasion like this time, when i need to extend my stay, i end up holed up in the guest house over the weekend. With all my friends ditching me, due to their own busy schedules, I end up saddled with ppts, xl sheets and Ndtv going on and on about rakhi sawant's swayamvar.
[Guess rationality skips men too on a mass scale, sometimes].

Well all ye Americans, this is what happens to the people to whom some of your jobs go to. And ya, i suspect my salary cud be less than your unemployment benefits... So stop bitching about us..and let us bitch about ourselves.

The Legality of Homosexuality

Most of America is riled up by this and most of India is indifferent to it! And apparently the Govt of India is very confused by it!

So what do I think about it?

1. Do you approve of homosexuality? - Its not for me to approve. Its an individual choice of human beings.

2. If today you were to have a family, what would my reaction be if my son declares he is gay? - I would be very baffled but have no choice but to accept it. But would be even more worried as to how he would charter his life going forward. I'm not sure how prejudiced society is about this and how it would affect him.

3. Do you think gays are weirdos? - No. They are normal people. Have a sexual preference I do not agree with. There was a time when I did think they were weirdos. But I did get to know a gay person, during my hostel days. His conduct and attitude changed my world-view towards gay people and,I suspect, also those of a lot of friends of mine.

4. Do you think homosexuality should be decriminalised? - I dunno.

5. Why not? You seemed to have a pretty liberal viewpoint in Q's 1-3? - Bottomline is if homosexuality is made legal, it would open up the avenue of a gay dude hitting on me. That really does creep me out. And worst part is that legally it would be ok for him to do that. The very thought gives me the creeps. So while I'm ok homosexuality being legal I want no part to play in it.

6. Duh, you realise how lousy that statement was? - Yeah. But welcome to the real world. If the majority, has the power over someone's fate, it would exercise it in its favour, no matter how minuscule the logic or flimsy the argument. Why do you think racism has lasted so long?

7. But history would judge you as a bigot. You're ok with that? - Who do you think writes history?

8. Dude we are getting sidetracked. There has to be a way out. You clearly are not a homophobe, yet you are unwittingly aligning yourself to them. What's the compromise?
- Hmmm, well if all gay people promise not to hit on straight people, then homosexuality can be legalised.

9. What??! - Yes they should give God Promise.

Steve Jobs and Inspirational Speeches

This is a speech given by Steve Jobs that has been doing the rounds and has passed me by for 4 years, before enlightening me today. I read it at the busiest part of my day, and was deeply moved by this speech. It meant a lot to me and in some ways liberated me, if only for a day.

'You've got to find what you love,' Jobs says
This is the text of the Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005.
I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.
The first story is about connecting the dots.
I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?
It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.
And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.
It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:
Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.
None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.
Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
My second story is about love and loss.
I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.
I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.
I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.
During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.
I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.
My third story is about death.
When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.
Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.
I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.
This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.
Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.
Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.
Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.
Thank you all very much.






The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination
June 5, 2008

J.K. Rowling, author of the best-selling Harry Potter book series, delivers her Commencement Address, “The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination,” at the Annual Meeting of the Harvard Alumni Association.
President Faust, members of the Harvard Corporation and the Board of Overseers, members of the faculty, proud parents, and, above all, graduates.
The first thing I would like to say is ‘thank you.’ Not only has Harvard given me an extraordinary honour, but the weeks of fear and nausea I have endured at the thought of giving this commencement address have made me lose weight. A win-win situation! Now all I have to do is take deep breaths, squint at the red banners and convince myself that I am at the world’s largest Gryffindor reunion.
Delivering a commencement address is a great responsibility; or so I thought until I cast my mind back to my own graduation. The commencement speaker that day was the distinguished British philosopher Baroness Mary Warnock. Reflecting on her speech has helped me enormously in writing this one, because it turns out that I can’t remember a single word she said. This liberating discovery enables me to proceed without any fear that I might inadvertently influence you to abandon promising careers in business, the law or politics for the giddy delights of becoming a gay wizard.
You see? If all you remember in years to come is the ‘gay wizard’ joke, I’ve come out ahead of Baroness Mary Warnock. Achievable goals: the first step to self improvement.
Actually, I have wracked my mind and heart for what I ought to say to you today. I have asked myself what I wish I had known at my own graduation, and what important lessons I have learned in the 21 years that have expired between that day and this.
I have come up with two answers. On this wonderful day when we are gathered together to celebrate your academic success, I have decided to talk to you about the benefits of failure. And as you stand on the threshold of what is sometimes called ‘real life’, I want to extol the crucial importance of imagination.
These may seem quixotic or paradoxical choices, but please bear with me.
Looking back at the 21-year-old that I was at graduation, is a slightly uncomfortable experience for the 42-year-old that she has become. Half my lifetime ago, I was striking an uneasy balance between the ambition I had for myself, and what those closest to me expected of me.
I was convinced that the only thing I wanted to do, ever, was to write novels. However, my parents, both of whom came from impoverished backgrounds and neither of whom had been to college, took the view that my overactive imagination was an amusing personal quirk that would never pay a mortgage, or secure a pension. I know that the irony strikes with the force of a cartoon anvil, now.
So they hoped that I would take a vocational degree; I wanted to study English Literature. A compromise was reached that in retrospect satisfied nobody, and I went up to study Modern Languages. Hardly had my parents’ car rounded the corner at the end of the road than I ditched German and scuttled off down the Classics corridor.
I cannot remember telling my parents that I was studying Classics; they might well have found out for the first time on graduation day. Of all the subjects on this planet, I think they would have been hard put to name one less useful than Greek mythology when it came to securing the keys to an executive bathroom.
I would like to make it clear, in parenthesis, that I do not blame my parents for their point of view. There is an expiry date on blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction; the moment you are old enough to take the wheel, responsibility lies with you. What is more, I cannot criticise my parents for hoping that I would never experience poverty. They had been poor themselves, and I have since been poor, and I quite agree with them that it is not an ennobling experience. Poverty entails fear, and stress, and sometimes depression; it means a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts, that is indeed something on which to pride yourself, but poverty itself is romanticised only by fools.
What I feared most for myself at your age was not poverty, but failure.
At your age, in spite of a distinct lack of motivation at university, where I had spent far too long in the coffee bar writing stories, and far too little time at lectures, I had a knack for passing examinations, and that, for years, had been the measure of success in my life and that of my peers.
I am not dull enough to suppose that because you are young, gifted and well-educated, you have never known hardship or heartbreak. Talent and intelligence never yet inoculated anyone against the caprice of the Fates, and I do not for a moment suppose that everyone here has enjoyed an existence of unruffled privilege and contentment.
However, the fact that you are graduating from Harvard suggests that you are not very well-acquainted with failure. You might be driven by a fear of failure quite as much as a desire for success. Indeed, your conception of failure might not be too far from the average person’s idea of success, so high have you already flown.
Ultimately, we all have to decide for ourselves what constitutes failure, but the world is quite eager to give you a set of criteria if you let it. So I think it fair to say that by any conventional measure, a mere seven years after my graduation day, I had failed on an epic scale. An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless. The fears that my parents had had for me, and that I had had for myself, had both come to pass, and by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew.
Now, I am not going to stand here and tell you that failure is fun. That period of my life was a dark one, and I had no idea that there was going to be what the press has since represented as a kind of fairy tale resolution. I had no idea then how far the tunnel extended, and for a long time, any light at the end of it was a hope rather than a reality.
So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.
You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you fail by default.
Failure gave me an inner security that I had never attained by passing examinations. Failure taught me things about myself that I could have learned no other way. I discovered that I had a strong will, and more discipline than I had suspected; I also found out that I had friends whose value was truly above the price of rubies.
The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are, ever after, secure in your ability to survive. You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity. Such knowledge is a true gift, for all that it is painfully won, and it has been worth more than any qualification I ever earned.
So given a Time Turner, I would tell my 21-year-old self that personal happiness lies in knowing that life is not a check-list of acquisition or achievement. Your qualifications, your CV, are not your life, though you will meet many people of my age and older who confuse the two. Life is difficult, and complicated, and beyond anyone’s total control, and the humility to know that will enable you to survive its vicissitudes.
Now you might think that I chose my second theme, the importance of imagination, because of the part it played in rebuilding my life, but that is not wholly so. Though I personally will defend the value of bedtime stories to my last gasp, I have learned to value imagination in a much broader sense. Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathise with humans whose experiences we have never shared.
One of the greatest formative experiences of my life preceded Harry Potter, though it informed much of what I subsequently wrote in those books. This revelation came in the form of one of my earliest day jobs. Though I was sloping off to write stories during my lunch hours, I paid the rent in my early 20s by working at the African research department at Amnesty International’s headquarters in London.
There in my little office I read hastily scribbled letters smuggled out of totalitarian regimes by men and women who were risking imprisonment to inform the outside world of what was happening to them. I saw photographs of those who had disappeared without trace, sent to Amnesty by their desperate families and friends. I read the testimony of torture victims and saw pictures of their injuries. I opened handwritten, eye-witness accounts of summary trials and executions, of kidnappings and rapes.
Many of my co-workers were ex-political prisoners, people who had been displaced from their homes, or fled into exile, because they had the temerity to speak against their governments. Visitors to our offices included those who had come to give information, or to try and find out what had happened to those they had left behind.
I shall never forget the African torture victim, a young man no older than I was at the time, who had become mentally ill after all he had endured in his homeland. He trembled uncontrollably as he spoke into a video camera about the brutality inflicted upon him. He was a foot taller than I was, and seemed as fragile as a child. I was given the job of escorting him back to the Underground Station afterwards, and this man whose life had been shattered by cruelty took my hand with exquisite courtesy, and wished me future happiness.
And as long as I live I shall remember walking along an empty corridor and suddenly hearing, from behind a closed door, a scream of pain and horror such as I have never heard since. The door opened, and the researcher poked out her head and told me to run and make a hot drink for the young man sitting with her. She had just had to give him the news that in retaliation for his own outspokenness against his country’s regime, his mother had been seized and executed.
Every day of my working week in my early 20s I was reminded how incredibly fortunate I was, to live in a country with a democratically elected government, where legal representation and a public trial were the rights of everyone.
Every day, I saw more evidence about the evils humankind will inflict on their fellow humans, to gain or maintain power. I began to have nightmares, literal nightmares, about some of the things I saw, heard, and read.
And yet I also learned more about human goodness at Amnesty International than I had ever known before.
Amnesty mobilises thousands of people who have never been tortured or imprisoned for their beliefs to act on behalf of those who have. The power of human empathy, leading to collective action, saves lives, and frees prisoners. Ordinary people, whose personal well-being and security are assured, join together in huge numbers to save people they do not know, and will never meet. My small participation in that process was one of the most humbling and inspiring experiences of my life.
Unlike any other creature on this planet, humans can learn and understand, without having experienced. They can think themselves into other people’s places.
Of course, this is a power, like my brand of fictional magic, that is morally neutral. One might use such an ability to manipulate, or control, just as much as to understand or sympathise.
And many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are. They can refuse to hear screams or to peer inside cages; they can close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them personally; they can refuse to know.
I might be tempted to envy people who can live that way, except that I do not think they have any fewer nightmares than I do. Choosing to live in narrow spaces leads to a form of mental agoraphobia, and that brings its own terrors. I think the wilfully unimaginative see more monsters. They are often more afraid.
What is more, those who choose not to empathise enable real monsters. For without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves, we collude with it, through our own apathy.
One of the many things I learned at the end of that Classics corridor down which I ventured at the age of 18, in search of something I could not then define, was this, written by the Greek author Plutarch: What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality.
That is an astonishing statement and yet proven a thousand times every day of our lives. It expresses, in part, our inescapable connection with the outside world, the fact that we touch other people’s lives simply by existing.
But how much more are you, Harvard graduates of 2008, likely to touch other people’s lives? Your intelligence, your capacity for hard work, the education you have earned and received, give you unique status, and unique responsibilities. Even your nationality sets you apart. The great majority of you belong to the world’s only remaining superpower. The way you vote, the way you live, the way you protest, the pressure you bring to bear on your government, has an impact way beyond your borders. That is your privilege, and your burden.
If you choose to use your status and influence to raise your voice on behalf of those who have no voice; if you choose to identify not only with the powerful, but with the powerless; if you retain the ability to imagine yourself into the lives of those who do not have your advantages, then it will not only be your proud families who celebrate your existence, but thousands and millions of people whose reality you have helped change. We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.
I am nearly finished. I have one last hope for you, which is something that I already had at 21. The friends with whom I sat on graduation day have been my friends for life. They are my children’s godparents, the people to whom I’ve been able to turn in times of trouble, people who have been kind enough not to sue me when I took their names for Death Eaters. At our graduation we were bound by enormous affection, by our shared experience of a time that could never come again, and, of course, by the knowledge that we held certain photographic evidence that would be exceptionally valuable if any of us ran for Prime Minister.
So today, I wish you nothing better than similar friendships. And tomorrow, I hope that even if you remember not a single word of mine, you remember those of Seneca, another of those old Romans I met when I fled down the Classics corridor, in retreat from career ladders, in search of ancient wisdom:
As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.
I wish you all very good lives.
Thank you very much.

My First Dilbert Strip Blogged

Not my personal opinion of sales folks, but pretty close.

Dilbert and My Mind

If my blog is titled, "Enter My Mind", then you should know that Dilbert is never far from it, as I explore the quirks of corporate life. Never does a day pass, without me reflecting on ironies of some random situation at work and how would a Dilbert strip look on the same. So now, have added a Dilbert Widget to the right panel of the blog. So u can read either my random posts or the more funnier Dilbert strips on my blog! [*sigh* the things we do to increase blog traffic!!]

Messers Ahuja and Dhoni

The past few days have seen the entire country's news media frothing about the exploits [or the lack of it] of these two gentlemen. But surprisingly, Dhoni is being held guilty for lack of exploits.

I will deal with the exploits of Mr. Ahuja first. Rape. Mid-level Bollywood actor, married to a woman he has known and loved for 15 yrs and who has an infant daughter with her, accused of raping an 17/18 yr old maid, who has been in his employment for 45 days. He allegedly found a time window between 3 to 5 pm on that unfortunate day to commit this dastardly act. Story said this way, Mrs Ahuja is right, it smacks of a frame-up. Only one small minor flaw i see in this theory, what has Mr. Ahuja done in his life to make him important enough for a frame-up? Salman, Shahrukh, Aamir framed - i can understand...Mr. Ahuja? Maybe Emraan Hashmi too could be worthy candidate...but Mr. Ahuja?? I honestly don't know. The case could be true for the only reason that it sounds unlikely. Anyways time will tell.

This entire drama reminded me of some psychological theory which i learnt in college, the name of which i am not able to recollect. It basically says that if a person is genetically/ psychologically programmed to be a struggler, that is the area he is most comfortable in life. So even if he does become successful, he wud somehow screw up, to ensure he goes back to that struggling phase, where he has been most comfortable. Same goes for winners and losers. Our Mr. Ahuja goes into the struggler category i guess, if the story we hear is true.

Now for Mr. Dhoni. I'm much more at ease with this case. The last 9 years of Indian cricket has seen a metamorphisis never seen in the history of the game in our country. For almost the entire 20th century our collective cricket community, was busy incubating a Jurassic park-era egg, save for a brief period during 1983. The change which Sourav Ganguly brought, has been ably taken forward by Dhoni. Dravid and Kumble ensured that the flame didn't ebb away. Ganguly, for all his foibles, did resurrect Indian cricket from the ashes of the match-fixing scandal. And Dhoni, instilled in our Men in Blue a swagger that only winners possessed. Maybe the below lines explain his current predicament

The following is a quote from the movie, Patton.

For over a thousand years...Roman conquerors returning from the wars...enjoyed the honor of a triumph,a tumultuous parade. In the procession came trumpeters and musicians and strange animals... ...from the conquered territories...together with carts laden with treasure and captured armaments. The conqueror rode in a triumphal chariot...the dazed prisoners walking in chains before him. Sometimes, his children,robed in white...stood with him in the chariot,or rode the trace horses. A slave stood behind the conqueror...holding a golden crown...and whispering in his ear, a warning... that all glory...is fleeting.





Hubris, however, spares none. Not even the greatest of them. A dear friend of mine, once counselled me "Keep Your Eyes on the Prize". That is an advice, i hold as a guiding light in great times and bad. Perhaps, Messers. Dhoni and Ahuja should too.