Sometimes..

Has it ever happened to you that at one point of time you feel very strongly about something, but then later you wonder why you even bothered to think about it in the first place? The following two issues mean so less to me now that I'm not even able to word them satisfactorily.

“I am because you are”
I was asked: What comes to your mind when you hear this statement?
My answer and thought stressed on the opinion that our character and personality are significantly affected by our environment – society, our family and elders. Maybe this is because I am largely a product of my environment. I owe everything that I am to the kind of city I come from, to my parents (who took all the right decisions for me at crucial times in my life) and all the values/opinions that I have inculcated from them.

“Lame Duck”
The best way to explain this is that when you are at the last rung of the ladder whatever everyone throws at you from above falls on you. By virtue of being junior in both age, experience and consequently knowledge I am the Chosen One to execute all the dud, sure-to-end-nowhere tasks. It's frustrating because I end up wasting time and energy, only to realise (or be told) later that I should stop working on it as it is heading nowhere. Worse, I lose motivation to work. Why do the task when I know that it is going to be a lame duck?

Big Bully

Who? Doordarshan

Why? Because they are use legislations and laws to make up for their inefficiency

What? Passed a legislation so that Nimbus (the company that runs Neo Sports Channel currently has rights to telecast all cricket matches in India till 2010) will be forced to share live telecast feed with Doordarshan for all the matches that it airs without encryption. This not only means loss of valuable revenue within India, but the lack of encryption also makes the telecast vulnerable to usage by other channels outside India.

Or take the presidents of IOA (Indian Olympic Federation) and the All-India Football Federation. The current presidents have been holding their posts for more than 15 years each. Yet, India is ranked 132 among 137 countries that play football. And we can count the number of medals India has won in Olymics in the past 15-odd years on our fingers. One wonders – do these officials ever feel accountable, if not to the country or their job, then atleast to themselves? All they have done during their tenure is to amass a disproportionate amount of wealth, and abuse their power. In my opinion, the recent Bill on reservation in educational institutions was also an effort to this end – abuse of power. The politician in question was probably thinking that this would be the sure shot way of coming back in the limelight. After all, how many of us even knew he existed before the Reservation furore?

I wholeheartedly agree with the Supreme Court judge who said “Everyone wants to loot this country. The only solution is to hang some corrupt persons from the lampost”. I would think that when it comes to politics, rather than people getting corrupted by the power in it, it is the corrupted who get attracted to the power.

Disillusionment.

What did i say..

"I've always likened mails with the people who sent them. They always come out exactly how a person talks somehow. But it is different with you. I guess it might be cause we've known each other better. The problem might arise somehow when one of us starts liking one part better over the other.
On second thoughts it might be that the mails don't inherently have a stamp of their writers but that personality is added by the reader. It acquires the quality the reader identifies with the sender, maybe the one quality he/she likes the most. In that case yours enthuses warmness in me. :) "

What did I say about the power of words?

Smell the flowers

It took an offhand invitation to a friend for a get-together (followed by a predictable refusal to join) for me to realise that I've been too involved in my life (and in myself) to stop and smell the flowers. There are so many other things that I should do to make my life complete. Being too busy to think about it is just an excuse. I spend my weekends being (and feeling) incredibly lazy, as if to make up for all the 'hard work' that I did all week. I want to spend those couple of days catching up with everyone I haven't kept in touch with, but at the same time I want to spend them at home. If I could just walk out of office right now, with the whole day at my disposal, this is what I would do:
1. Drop in at my Music teacher's house. She has moulded my singing to what it is today, and I haven't met her in ages.
2. Walk down those narrow roads that I grew up in, the roads I took to school, to my grandparents' place years ago and to all those classes.
3. Surprise that friend by landing up at her office, and we can spend lunch catching up with each other.
4. Sometimes, just being with somebody is enough; what you do together is inconsequential
5. Get hold of a good novel to read (and definitely finish reading it!)
6. Get myself a new phone, I've been trying to decide on the model for months
7. Sing my heart out, and do all the other things that are such an integral part of my life :)
8. Parks, lawns, or any open green area for that matter is hard to come by in this concrete jungle. If I ever come across such an area I would walk barefoot on the grass, lie down on the lawns and let nature's therapeutic effects wash over me.