What's happening?

I am finally able to express the mish-mash of emotions that I have been going through since last Thursday - it's what you feel when someone tries to pull the ground from under your feet. 

First you're increduous: "what the hell is happening?" Then you try to resist: "Stop! Let me be!" Then you're scared: "This is not going to stop, is it?" Then you panic: "What am I going to stand on now?"

Am I ready for this? Do I want to be ready for this? Leave student life forever? Become a "responsible adult"? :P

Institutionalization

I first heard this term as a part of a team for Cactus Flower, the annual campus magazine in Pilani. The thought was that after four years in a protected and as-close-to-ideal environment as Pilani, one feels lost, a sense of rootlessness when one has to leave it for the Big Bad World. Somehow it didn't happen to me then. 

But now it has. In a different place. At a different time.

Imagine being in the most vibrant city in India, and that too in a killer location (stretch your hand and you can touch the mall, the cinema, the beach and umpteen good restaurants of all budgets and cuisines). Over the past year the mind and stomach have attuned to being within the hallowed portals of our residence before the evil hour of 11pm. Now, either over alacrity at the prospect of us leaving in less than a month or in a desperate attempt to assert that they are human after all, the powers that be have graciously allowed a 30 minute extension. Oh! 

(Cup mouth with hands as the eyes sting with tears. Hug those at the left and the right. Recover just in time to flash a perfect smile with perfect, white gleaming teeth. Mouth "Thank you, thank you" a number of times. Look dazed and poised at the same time.)

Right.

Now that it has been dispensed with, what do I do with these extra 30 minutes? What do people do between 11pm and 11.30pm in Mumbai, the commercial capital, the fashion capital, the city that never sleeps? I have not thought about it in over one and a half years. And suddenly, I feel like I am standing in front of this whirlpool and it is sucking me in. 

P.S. One movie that comes to mind is Shawshank Redemption. Not very encouraging but it would have to do :P

Who am I?

An article I read in mint prompted me to write this post.

The author expresses an inability to defend why the notions of "Indian Culture" as espoused by Sri Ram Sene and Shiv Sena are wrong or misguided. She feels that if we, the common (wo)man, as a polity define Indian culture through a set of qualities or adjectives then that will make us more equipped to deal with such "fundamentalist" behaviour. Predictably enough, "Indian culture" does not have a universal definition, and any attempt to create one will stymie its natural evolutionary process and in a perverse way, serve the fundamentalists' cause.

I must confess that the article prompted me to ask myself how connected I felt I was to Indian culture. My immediate reaction was that a person whose upbringing and background were more traditional than mine has more authority on the topic. But then, I am not any lesser an Indian than the next person. I might think in English and have my "roots" in a city that no longer knows what it stands for but what the heck, I wouldn't feel so at home anywhere else. 

We are the moderate majority, but we are also the fringe elements. Educated and qualified, we would rather spend our lives earning money and moving up on the income strata than making the country a better place to live in. As champions of the private enterprise, we consider the public sector and the government as a necessary evil. It's been this way for generations now. We are very happy in the cocoons of our lives, going to work, coming back to family, planning for the next big holiday or the next house or car. Who wants to tell a bunch of hooligans what Indian culture means to us? We have better things to do. 

Don't Quit

When things go wrong, as they sometimes will,
when the road you’re trudging seems all uphill,
When the funds are low and the debts are high,
And you want to smile, but you have to sigh,
When care is pressing you down a bit,
Rest, if you must, but do not quit.

Life is queer with its twists and turns,
As every one of us sometimes learns,
And many a failure turns about,
When he might have won had he stuck it out;
Don’t give up though the pace seems slow—
You may succeed with another blow.

Often the goal is nearer than,
It seems to a faint and faltering man,
Often the struggler has given up,
When he might have captured the victor’s cup,
And he learned too late when the night slipped down,
How close he was to the golden crown.

Success is failure turned inside out—
The silver tint of the clouds of doubt,
And you never can tell how close you are,
It may be near when it seems so far,
So stick to the fight when you’re hardest hit—
It’s when things seem worst that you must not quit.

Don't know who wrote it. Quoted from: http://www.collegegrad.com/jobsearch/Graduation-and-Still-No-Job/Dont-Quit/

A good home or a good road?

At first glance, the answer to the question seems obvious: Would you rather have a nice big house or a smooth pothole-free road? The house, of course!

What with the economic downturn, private sector jobs are drying up. The Indian Governemnt, on the other hand, doesn't seem to be in the least bothered about this development, atleast as far as recruitment is concerned. 

As part of a generation that looked down upon PSU jobs as stodgy file-pushing and intellectually insulting (as compared to the better-paying and challenging private sector jobs), this development raises uncomfortable questions. With campus placements round the corner, three magic words are being bandied around - Sixth Pay Commission: the manna from heaven, the bright spot that makes it look less of a compromise than it actually is, and the plaintive reason for accepting a job in a PSU. (The real reason is: there isn't any other, baby!)

Now, all that money for the hike has to come from somewhere, right? And it doesn't require a genius to see that the governement is not richer this year than last year. Neither will it dare to touch the "Social Sector" budget - yup, the same one for which the CAG has mentioned that the governement has not used upto Rs.33000 crore of funds from international agencies for social development. So that leaves us with the next biggest: the Infrastructure Fund. 

Stop constructing that flyover and let's re-lay this road next year instead of this year. We are the Government. We care for you, the aam aadmi. See how we are paying you more?

I strongly feel that the Pay Commission revision should be made performance-based. The PSU can be measured on a number of parameters: increase in revenue, customer/client feedback, employee satisfaction etc. The appraisal process can be conducted by an independent party and the pay hike will depend on the individual performance. I'm sure my solution is far from paractical and is riddled with problems, but what with the brightest minds joining PSUs today, some might actually end up staying and becoming much-needed change agents.

Hail PSUs! 

Slumdog Millionaire

My first reaction on hearing that this movie has been nominated for 9? 10? Oscars was: "Oh."
Something like what you would say when you looked at the clear sky in the morning but heard the steady drizzle grow into a thundering downpour by 4 in the afternoon. In this case a typical reaction would be to stare out the window at the rain for around 5 minutes and then get back to
whatever it is you were doing. That is precisely what I did.

I don't think it shows India in a bad light or glamourizes poverty. In fact it is a very realistic potrayal of a set of people who have to constantly watch their backs and for whom surviving each day is the biggest challenge.

I also don't think an Indian director could have done justice to this story. Not because Indian directors are not good enough (as is mostly assumed) but because as an Indian, having grown up seeing luxury and poverty across the road from each other, his view would be biased. The view portrayed in the movie looked real because it was objective. It is the view you get when you see it for what it is, without any "baggage". If an Indian was to make a movie on the American life/way of living I'm sure he would do a great job.

I also didn't see what was there for it to merit all those Oscar nominations. I guess that is because we are used to watching Indian movies that are high on drama and emotion. It is well-made, no doubt, but not too different from the mainstream movies in terms of masala.

Sometimes I am tempted to spout a theory about a conspiracy to get the world to talk about India. First Arvind Adiga's "White Tiger" and then this. Remember the theory of how countries which the cosmetics giants view as potential markets win the beauty pageants? I can imagine a similar exercise being conducted to identify how India is different from the rest of the world: so you list all the "Points of Differentiation" and then you see which one can give us competitive advantage. No prizes for guessing what topped this list: poverty and the grit of the people condemned to live with it.

But then this would be a self-destructing hypothesis right? More attention => more business => more development => get richer => eliminate poverty => left with no point of differentiation
As a last word, so long as we are benefiting from it (economically) as a country, I have no objections at all.

Laughing stock

The best example for a foot-in-the-mouth syndrome is the Indian politician.

• When a journalist is shot while travelling in her car at 2am in Delhi, Chief Minister Shiela Dixit says that she should have been more careful and not been out alone at such an ungodly hour.
  
• When incidents of women call centre employees being abducted and raped when being picked up by "their company taxis" late in the night surface, the Karnataka government banned women from working in establishments after 8pm, a rule which was thankfully revoked later.
• Maharashtra Home Minister R R Patil calls the latest terror attacks in Mumbai, which are by far the most lethal, a "small incident which is bound to happen in big cities like Mumbai"

While these misplaced comments might be amusing, they also throw up some disturbing indications about our political leadership (or the lack of it). Sychophancy and bureaucratic procedures are the rule of the day. Indeed, when keeping your post depends on which politician's leg you massage rather than actual "work", no politician expects to be voted back in office for doing his duty with sincerity and conviction for the welfare of the citizens when the real path to power lies in the hands of his superior.
We in India are tuned to apathy when there is anything to do with politics. Who wants to get into that muck? is the common question. There is so much filth in the government system that even 100 years of cleaning will not rid it of its filth. Might as well drop that and go clean the Ganges instead.