Thou shalt not speak English.
Thou shalt not speak to a person of the opposite sex(Oh God!!)…er… gender.
Thou shalt not wear skirts or pants or anything which our Western counterparts wear.
Thou shalt not enter a mall or a pub, especially women (else we’ll beat the crap out of you.)
These are some of the rules which a handful of wannabe “Prime Ministers of India” want us to follow. Reason? Well, they want to stop the “westernization” of India (whatever does that mean!). They want a ban on the most ridiculous things ever. You have them coming on news channels and with a very serious face, they start commenting on how they feel youngsters aren’t following the Indian culture. And how the sight of a girl and a boy walking together holding hands and speaking English (seriously!) makes them sad, because it is anti-Indian. The moral brigade will beat up innocent girls just because they were in a pub, which is supposed to be against Bharat ki Sabhyata aur Sanskriti, and the Wannabe PM Brigade will support it. According to them, that is Indian culture-bashing up young girls who are enjoying themselves.
So for a moment I give in to their ridiculous demands and say that in India a young, working, unmarried girl should not go to a pub or a mall to have fun wearing indecent clothes (that includes skirts and jeans and t-shirts), children in schools should not study or speak, English, a girl should not see, talk or go shopping in a mall with a boy, pubs should hold a notice saying “Women not allowed”. But will the revised and updated version of Indian culture raise a voice for the girl who gets raped and murdered? Will it stop the men who molest a two year old girl, who doesn’t even know what is happening with her? Where are these men and their Indian culture when innocent men, women and little helpless children are burnt, hacked and slaughtered in the name of religion? Will it do justice to innocent victims like Aarushi Talwar and Neeraj Grover? Will it ever include real issues like education, poverty, population, female foeticide etc? I doubt whether the Wannabes would even comment on these issues.
If men having such thoughts are would-be-PMs, then what is going to happen to our future? On one hand we rejoice and boast about the progress of India, and on the other, a bunch of sadistic men are trying to put everything in the reverse gear and take us back to the Middle Ages. And considering the current voting trends and statistics, they just might be successful in doing so.
Indian culture is not the load of crap which a handful of idiotic politicians make up to get their fifteen minutes of fame. The two points, which are the essence of the Indian culture, are: Secularity and Democracy. But sadly, these two factors are disappearing gradually, giving way to the fake and unreasonable form of Indian culture. Secular India should not have people fighting on religious issues every now and then. Democratic India should not have an average turn out of only 50% during the Lok Sabha elections. I mean, if the trends continue, there might be a time where only 20% Indians vote and form the government and guess who’s Mr. Prime Minister? Our dear misogynist and sadistic Wannabe PM gang leader.
The most important question right now is who the hell are these 50% Indians who are trying to wreck our future? They are no different than the rest. Most of them are educated, employed and intelligent people. But casting a vote during elections is a big waste of time for them. They would rather enjoy their day off and sleep a little extra. A few of them don’t care because they are going to move out of the country and get themselves branded as NRIs, so voting is of no use for them. And the rest of them don’t give a shit. So they are ready to let a few bunch of people decide there future because voting, according to them, is a waste of time.
What they don’t understand is that the only way we can make ourselves be heard is if we choose a government who is willing to hear us out. How long will we keep hurling shoes on ministers to make them hear us? News channels, newspapers, magazines can help by bringing to our notice certain important issue. But at the end, it is upto us to choose a future. It can either be 50% for the favour of fake rotten Wannabes or a 100% for the favour of a happy, progressive and a transparent tomorrow. And the choice is ours. Should we just sit at a coffee shop and bitch about the government and politics, without voting or should we make an attempt to change things by doing the simplest of all things—vote.
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
Thursday, May 14, 2009
Being selflessly selfish
Most of us think of volunteering for active social work or helping someone. It makes us feel good. It transcends us to a different level of happiness. We become great in our own eyes. Yet why is it short lived? The answer is we are eventually human beings. Everything that we do-social work, helping someone for free etc.-won’t give us the feeling of complete happiness until of course there is something in it for us. I am sure most people would get their weapons out and start a war with me; to them I would just say-take a moment and think about it.
I don’t say that I am a saint who goes out of her way to help each and every person she meets. I do that with a few people. And before anyone draws a conclusion that I am selfless, I should mention that after the initial happiness, sometimes, I do not feel very good about it. No, I am not Satan’s ally, neither am I a hypocrite (someone’s laughing). I am a human being. And so being selfish comes naturally to me. It rests in my genes. It flows with my blood.
A person cannot enjoy someone else’s happiness if he/she is not happy himself/herself. That’s the basic human feeling. It happens to the very best of us. If you say you are not one of them, well either you live in denial or you are the happiest man/woman on the planet.
It is as simple as this. You are a student. Your friend too is a student. Together you study for a test. Your friend cannot understand a particular concept. So you, trying to be selfless, stop studying for your own test and help your friend understand the problem. Eventually both of you give the test and your friend scores more than you. Will you feel happy? Yes, you might, momentarily. But after the initial happiness, what do you feel? Regret-for helping out the friend or anger-for being stupid to give up your time for your friend? So where did all the happiness go? It didn’t go anywhere. It did not exist at all in the first place.
We think the selflessness and the happiness exists, but the fact is, it is a mask worn by us to show people how great we are. Only a truly happy and satisfied person will have his real face synonymous to this mask. And in humans, that’s a rare breed. For us, the most important thing is to our own selves. As long as we are happy and content, nothing in the world can deter us. But of course, we are never happy or satisfied. The world we live in does not let us be satisfied. Because the moment a person is satisfied with what he has, he is termed a loser with no aim in his life.
And the irony of the whole thing is all of us know this blatant truth. We know we will eventually regret helping a friend as there is nothing in it for us. But we still do it. We still go out of our way in doing as much charity/social work we can do. Because we all know it’s better to have a mask of a happy person than have nothing at all. Because at the end of the day, even though we feel low and depressed about our failure, we can somehow calm ourselves by taking the credit of someone else’s success.
And that makes us, human beings, the smartest of all creations, sad.
I don’t say that I am a saint who goes out of her way to help each and every person she meets. I do that with a few people. And before anyone draws a conclusion that I am selfless, I should mention that after the initial happiness, sometimes, I do not feel very good about it. No, I am not Satan’s ally, neither am I a hypocrite (someone’s laughing). I am a human being. And so being selfish comes naturally to me. It rests in my genes. It flows with my blood.
A person cannot enjoy someone else’s happiness if he/she is not happy himself/herself. That’s the basic human feeling. It happens to the very best of us. If you say you are not one of them, well either you live in denial or you are the happiest man/woman on the planet.
It is as simple as this. You are a student. Your friend too is a student. Together you study for a test. Your friend cannot understand a particular concept. So you, trying to be selfless, stop studying for your own test and help your friend understand the problem. Eventually both of you give the test and your friend scores more than you. Will you feel happy? Yes, you might, momentarily. But after the initial happiness, what do you feel? Regret-for helping out the friend or anger-for being stupid to give up your time for your friend? So where did all the happiness go? It didn’t go anywhere. It did not exist at all in the first place.
We think the selflessness and the happiness exists, but the fact is, it is a mask worn by us to show people how great we are. Only a truly happy and satisfied person will have his real face synonymous to this mask. And in humans, that’s a rare breed. For us, the most important thing is to our own selves. As long as we are happy and content, nothing in the world can deter us. But of course, we are never happy or satisfied. The world we live in does not let us be satisfied. Because the moment a person is satisfied with what he has, he is termed a loser with no aim in his life.
And the irony of the whole thing is all of us know this blatant truth. We know we will eventually regret helping a friend as there is nothing in it for us. But we still do it. We still go out of our way in doing as much charity/social work we can do. Because we all know it’s better to have a mask of a happy person than have nothing at all. Because at the end of the day, even though we feel low and depressed about our failure, we can somehow calm ourselves by taking the credit of someone else’s success.
And that makes us, human beings, the smartest of all creations, sad.
Friday, January 16, 2009
Slumdog Perception
Slumdog Millionaire rocked the Golden Globes. It has a whooping eleven nominations in the Bafta awards and is slated to finish its winning roll with an Oscar!
So now I wonder. Is perception more powerful than education? Can a child seriously learn so much by mere perception and win a million rupees? I suppose he can. When the slumdog (not yet a millionaire!) answered Benjamin Franklin to a particular question, he did not remember a book or a paragraph or the line where the answer was written. He remembered the incident years ago. As a child guide, not only did he earn the one dollar note, but also this piece of knowledge. And all this just by looking at the note!
When we look around the world, we see many things. We remember some things while some are stored at the back of our brains. These things stored at the back may or may not come into our conscious mind. Some people have a knack of analyzing things. These people even remember each and every detail about an object they’ve seen several years back. Such people have a high level of perception. The slumdog millionaire was one of them. However, not everyone is as sharp. There are people with a low sense of perception. Such people are those who cannot even remember what they saw an hour ago.
Perception is not something that can be taught. Neither can someone have it overnight. Each individual has it inside him. Its upon him to use it or not. If he uses it, his brain gets used to the process and after a while his brain adapts to it automatically. A strong sense of perception automatically leads to a sharp brain.
When a little child begins his education, the usual alphabets, numbers etc., some importance should be given to develop his sense of perception. Once a child starts analyzing things, it becomes a habit and his brain automatically works that way. A person who cannot analyze things and learn from them, i.e. perceive, slowly stops noticing everything around him. And ‘not noticing and learning’ thus becomes his habit.
We can learn a lot by simply looking at the basic things happening around us. The chances of a person remembering a visual image is more than that of him remembering a paragraph. Other than learning, perception boosts the sense of imagination and creativity. And the whole process makes the brain sharp. Our brain learns to be on alert all the time. And it notices even the smallest unusual activity around.
So, awards or not, the message from Slumdog Millionaire is clear. Perception is an amazing thing. It has the power to help you win a million rupees. And you don’t need to be a slumdog for that!
So now I wonder. Is perception more powerful than education? Can a child seriously learn so much by mere perception and win a million rupees? I suppose he can. When the slumdog (not yet a millionaire!) answered Benjamin Franklin to a particular question, he did not remember a book or a paragraph or the line where the answer was written. He remembered the incident years ago. As a child guide, not only did he earn the one dollar note, but also this piece of knowledge. And all this just by looking at the note!
When we look around the world, we see many things. We remember some things while some are stored at the back of our brains. These things stored at the back may or may not come into our conscious mind. Some people have a knack of analyzing things. These people even remember each and every detail about an object they’ve seen several years back. Such people have a high level of perception. The slumdog millionaire was one of them. However, not everyone is as sharp. There are people with a low sense of perception. Such people are those who cannot even remember what they saw an hour ago.
Perception is not something that can be taught. Neither can someone have it overnight. Each individual has it inside him. Its upon him to use it or not. If he uses it, his brain gets used to the process and after a while his brain adapts to it automatically. A strong sense of perception automatically leads to a sharp brain.
When a little child begins his education, the usual alphabets, numbers etc., some importance should be given to develop his sense of perception. Once a child starts analyzing things, it becomes a habit and his brain automatically works that way. A person who cannot analyze things and learn from them, i.e. perceive, slowly stops noticing everything around him. And ‘not noticing and learning’ thus becomes his habit.
We can learn a lot by simply looking at the basic things happening around us. The chances of a person remembering a visual image is more than that of him remembering a paragraph. Other than learning, perception boosts the sense of imagination and creativity. And the whole process makes the brain sharp. Our brain learns to be on alert all the time. And it notices even the smallest unusual activity around.
So, awards or not, the message from Slumdog Millionaire is clear. Perception is an amazing thing. It has the power to help you win a million rupees. And you don’t need to be a slumdog for that!
Tuesday, June 03, 2008
News or Nonsense!
“Kabristan ka Rahasya”, “Ek Khooni Ghar”, “Naagin ka Badla”, “Khoon ka Pyasa Sadhu”…
This list might sound like a list of C-grade books available in a book-store of a railway station. However, that’s not the only place one can find these titles. These are the “Special Reports” of some of India’s leading news channels!
That’s right. Flipping through channels, we can find a variety of “news channels”, whose “news reports” revolve around stories like that of a palace where a king killed his queen because she had an affair with the minister and how her spirit still lives there waiting to kill any man who enters the palace. How ridiculous can things get!
Some channels cannot stop talking about how a film actress and her boyfriend made out. Not only this they claim that this is the biggest “news” and keep flashing the pictures of the film actress in the skimpiest outfit ever made. Other such “news” items talk about how two actresses hate each other because one of them lost weight and looked better in a movie which starred the other actress as well.
There will be “special reports” on how a sadhu or a tantrik can bring back the spirits of the dead and how he can make you talk to them or how an image of some god has appeared on the wall of someone’s house and how it’s auspicious!
Do we seriously need such “news”? We live in the twenty first century. People talk of life on other planets, the technology is advancing, new discoveries in every field are made everyday and here we are stuck with the ghost of a queen who betrayed her husband. What knowledge can we possibly gain from knowing how an actress made out with her boyfriend? But the biggest question of all, should the “news channels” actually be given the permission to term such trash “news”?
I do not think it’s required to show such “news items” just to increase a news channels’ ratings. Instead of showing such cheap, indecent and to some level superstitious reports, they can arrange for relevant talk shows, debates or maybe start off with an educational program which will help increase a viewer’s general knowledge, when there is no news available.
Just to sell their channel or make it “the most viewed” channel, people go to any extent. On one hand, they’ll condemn a particular act strongly like how they condemned the dancers or cheerleaders in a recent cricket tournament. On the other hand, they won’t stop showing them off. There will be an hour long “special reports” on those very cheerleaders and how colourful and “sensual” cricket has become due to them.
News is something that keeps us informed as to what goes on in our city, in our country and around the world. It is meant to keep us updated and aware. But, just for the sake of filling up slots where these news channels do not have a good story, I don’t think they should stoop to such levels where they are terming the most irrelevant nonsense as news.
Tuesday, May 06, 2008
Save Mankind?
Surrounded by the blistering, hot sand, a man stood, barefooted, in the desert, the sun burning his skin, his eyes thirsty to see a human form. Sometimes he ran in the hot sand, sometimes he beseechingly called out to unknown people, with all the strength inside his lungs, to come to him, and when his strengths wore out, he fell flat on the hot blanket of sand,in a semi-conscious state, till his strengths returned. Days and months and years had passed and now his hopes were shattering, giving way to a dreadful truth. His search for a mere sight of a human form, other than himself was finally drawing to a dark, horrid conclusion. He was the only one left. There was no other human being in the world. Mankind was on the verge of extinction, and he was the last survivor…
It might sound like a plot from an up-coming Sci-Fi movie; however take a brief moment to imagine a situation like this in real life. What if this were true?
Some of us may feel it’s ridiculous, others may think that a situation like this will arrive long after our generation has passed and that when the time comes the future generations will find out a solution, why should we worry? Only a few people would understand the depth of the situation. They very well know that this might not be that far off.
With the invention of various nuclear and biological weapons, it might not be a big surprise if the situation of mankind on the brink of being extinct is just a war away. Almost every nation today has successfully tested nuclear weapons. And the situation around the globe is so tense that people get enraged and start fighting over issues ranging from racial discrimination to religion to land abuse and what not. The political leaders of most countries do not look beyond their own profits. And in the future if these leaders gain from going on war, they will not hesitate. Biological weapons too have their destruction quotient. Anthrax, poisonous “death” gases, etc have a deathly impact on humans and may result in mass killings.
Apart from weapons and wars, we have the global warming situation dangling over our heads. Again for some people, it’s yet another term which will not be threat to them. Such people feel that how will their control on using electrical appliances and other equipments, which are hazardous to the environment, help curb global warming. According to them, they are just a drop in the big ocean. Even if they do something, it will not make change for the whole world. So they end up doing nothing. What they do not know is that most of the people in the world think the same thing. They are well aware of the situation; however they do not take any precautionary measures and continue to do with what they’ve always done.
Even though, the thought of an extinct human race is ludicrous, it can happen sooner than any of us can ever imagine. We still have time to make a difference. There are still things which we can do, which might postpone the threat of nuclear-wars and global warming, and give us a chance to obtain a permanent solution to this. But the biggest question is: Will the internal hatred among humans let us survive the test of times?
It might sound like a plot from an up-coming Sci-Fi movie; however take a brief moment to imagine a situation like this in real life. What if this were true?
Some of us may feel it’s ridiculous, others may think that a situation like this will arrive long after our generation has passed and that when the time comes the future generations will find out a solution, why should we worry? Only a few people would understand the depth of the situation. They very well know that this might not be that far off.
With the invention of various nuclear and biological weapons, it might not be a big surprise if the situation of mankind on the brink of being extinct is just a war away. Almost every nation today has successfully tested nuclear weapons. And the situation around the globe is so tense that people get enraged and start fighting over issues ranging from racial discrimination to religion to land abuse and what not. The political leaders of most countries do not look beyond their own profits. And in the future if these leaders gain from going on war, they will not hesitate. Biological weapons too have their destruction quotient. Anthrax, poisonous “death” gases, etc have a deathly impact on humans and may result in mass killings.
Apart from weapons and wars, we have the global warming situation dangling over our heads. Again for some people, it’s yet another term which will not be threat to them. Such people feel that how will their control on using electrical appliances and other equipments, which are hazardous to the environment, help curb global warming. According to them, they are just a drop in the big ocean. Even if they do something, it will not make change for the whole world. So they end up doing nothing. What they do not know is that most of the people in the world think the same thing. They are well aware of the situation; however they do not take any precautionary measures and continue to do with what they’ve always done.
Even though, the thought of an extinct human race is ludicrous, it can happen sooner than any of us can ever imagine. We still have time to make a difference. There are still things which we can do, which might postpone the threat of nuclear-wars and global warming, and give us a chance to obtain a permanent solution to this. But the biggest question is: Will the internal hatred among humans let us survive the test of times?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)