Finding The Perfect IT Dulha

These days, in most of the matrimonial proposals I hear around me the bridegrooms are from the IT industry unlike the olden days when they used to be predominantly employed in banks or the government. So I was wondering how one would go about comparing two people in the IT industry especially in this period of changing beliefs, fresh thoughts and sceptical approach to conventions and traditions.

Everything written herein is intended for unadulterated fun. Any form of inconvenience or displeasure to anyone because of the content is deeply regretted. In other words, NO OFFENCE MEANT TO ANYONE.

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[Settings of a common 21st cent. upper middle class house in urban India. Mother, housewife, in her fifties. Daughter, 'Four years experienced' IT professional, entering later half of her twenties.

A not-so-costly yet luxurious looking sofa set and an LCD screen television. A manhandled Dell Inspiron laptop lying on the teapoy, along with its accessories. A few papers carelessly spread on the sofa.

Daughter, dressed in summer casuals, sitting with folded legs on the sofa clutching a cushion close to her body. Mother, dressed in cotton saree, poring over some print outs.]

Mother	I found these two cases interesting. Vicky and Bunty. Both software developers in good companies.
Daughter	What about the third guy Ronald?
	Waise... doesn’t Ronald sound like a Christian name? How did he get into that list?
Mother	Arre... His name is Rohan. Ronald is the name they’ve given him in his BPO. But I had strictly told panditji not to send any BPO CVs. Developer or even Tester phir bhi theeeek hai... (with a tone of compromise, and then sternly) But pucca NO call centre!
Daughter	Ma... I don’t want a support guy also. They have shifts and all... It’s a big pain...

Mother clearing a few papers away from the sofa. Now holding on to the two sheets in front of her and reading from them.

Mother	Vicky works in a captive unit of an American company. Permanent employee of that firm.
	He is less likely to be benched or lynched. What say?
Daughter	Yeah ma, but service me onsite chances are more na? I mean if he gets a good project, he can jump to that company and we can settle abroad right? Waise how old are they?
Mother	Bunty is five years. Vicky six and a half. But Bunty has two onsite trips already... Vicky to onsite sirf map pe dekhta raha hai! [Laughing]
Daughter	Haha... I told na. US or UK? I don’t like going to the US. I want to settle in London. But they are still in recession. That’s the problem. Projects nahi milenge.
Mother	[Looking carefully into one of those papers] Hey look, Vicky is applying for lead roles in other companies. He might become manager soon... Then it becomes a very good case to proceed. Hain na?
Daughter	Check who has jumped more number of companies? More companies, more salary and less likely to have had any strong love affair! [Laughing]
Mother	Both in their third firm... Equally good if you ask me. Kya kare?

Mother, rearranging the papers on the sofa and sipping from her glass of coke. Reality show running on the television, obviously on mute.

Daughter picking up the laptop.

Daughter	Let’s match some horoscopes ma. [Logs in to facebook]
Mother	How? I don’t have their horoscopes. And who believes in them anyway. Sab kuch to computer manipulated hai...
Daughter	This is 21st century horoscope. More accurate than your previous generation ones. Hehe...
	Let’s see... Vicky and me... See friendship... We have thirteen mutual friends... We both like Eminem, Pink Floyd, A R Rahman... We support Mumbai Indians... He likes NIIT? Must be some nerdy certifications guy... Hmmm... On the whole five out of ten... just ME.
Mother	What’s ME? And Bunty?
Daughter	That’s the annual ratings ma... It means ‘meets expectations’.
	Yeah... Here we go with Bunty. We’ve got ten mutual friends... Both like photography... Again AR Rahman... Aamir Khan... We like similar series... Both play Farmville... Hmm... Interesting. He likes cooking! Wow! Thats definite brownie points for you... And ye blog bhi karta hai? Not bad... He gets seven on ten... Exceeds expectations for sure...
	Aakhir blogger hai! He’ll survive somehow... At least he has something else also, besides me, to drain out his frustrations! Haha...
	Selected for appraisal... Chalo, isi ko pataathi hoon ab! I always hated arranged marriages!
	File dot close...

A Grandpa tale... Or Life Lesson?

The best way to come out of a writers’ block is to (re-) start off with something not so creative, yet delivering a satiating output, so that on the response to this output one can build upon. So here I am, writing about a story that I heard from my grandfather as a child. The story isn’t particularly great, but its got hell a lot of stuff for a thoughtful brain. So here it is...

There lived an old guy in some part of India in a small village (although not in any way relevant to the story, such a start helps many people identify themselves with the good old days of grandpa and grandma tales) He had a son who went to the town everyday to work. Now this old man was very old (LOL at the sentence), and he had a wish. He asked his son to bring him betel leaves while coming back from work every day.

The first day the boy brought some extra betel leaves. The man had some and stored the rest away (in a fridge? I don’t know!). The next day when his son brought fresh betel leaves, he chewed the ones he had put away the previous day and replaced them with the fresh ones. And this routine continued. The old man continued to keep the fresh leaves safe and chew the stale ones.

Probably I used to fall asleep by this point of the story, for I fail to recollect if there is anything further in it! Never mind, my interest lies only up to this part.

As a child, this story wasn’t anything fascinating. But as I grew up, there is something I found ingrained in this story that reveals itself only to its seeker.

‘The ability to discard’ is a character that we Indians, in particular, lack. To throw away anything, we think twice, thrice and endless number of times only to decide to put it away for ‘some’ use in the future (this fictional purpose shows up every time we think of discarding something but never after that!).

Open the refrigerator and you can find food older than a week or eatables that got past their expiry date craving for your attention there. The best place to look for your family heritage, especially if you are living in your ancestral house, is the attic and overhead storage units that remain neglected since the time you have ever known them. You can be certain to find an old diary or photograph or sometimes much bigger elements of your ancestry there! In cities, we live in relatively small apartments with hardly three or four rooms but still manage to misplace something or the other every day. Like my mother frequently says, “Half of one’s life is spent in searching something or the other.” LOL!

And another thing with us. We associate everything around us to religion. Flowers, food, paper. You name it and I can find something religious about it! Until very recently (to be precise, until I completed graduation) it was a sin to shred paper before discarding it. I would be disrespecting Goddess Saraswathy if I did so. Throwing away food was beyond sin! Accumulating trash over trash, in the process! Health and hygiene – gone to the dogs! Don’t worry, God will take care of it. “Humbug” I’d say, if I were allowed to have an opinion on this one. But alas! That would be another symbol of my sinful irreverence.

So coming back to the old man and his betel leaves. He was a typical Indian scared of trashing eatable stuff. If God becomes angry, he may never get betel leaves again! But the truth is that even our religions teach us not to accumulate trash- physical or mental. Discard the ones that do not serve any purpose. For only if you discard the useless can you replace them with something good, something new and useful; and only then will life and lifestyle improve.If he had thrown away the stale betel leaves on one day, he could have probably chewed fresh ones for his entire lifetime.

So, Think fresh, Eat fresh, Be fresh! Make a conscious effort to never accumulate trash, in any form!

Cheers! :)

Image Credits: federico stevanin

Orphaned Heroes

I remember the day very clearly. It was late evening on a summer day in Mumbai, and all the people in my house (and a few from the neighbourhood) were glued in front of the television. No, it was not the latest Bollywood flick or an Amitabh starrer from the olden days that was being played on TV. Instead it was an episode of HardTalk India and Karan Thapar was griling the guest, as he always does. But in the course of talks, the guest could not control their tears and starts crying like a baby on the national channel in front of millions of viewers! This very shot that was used to publicise the particular episode of Hardtalk India, had paid off and countless number of people had huddled in front of television sets across the nation from homes to showrooms to watch this interview! And the guest was not a weak hearted survivor narrating their war ordeals or a tortured wife counting her days of agony; instead it was one of India's greatest heroes who had brought uncomparable glory to the nation in an international stage. Yes, it was Kapil Dev- the only Indian cricket captain to have won us a World Cup!

Kapil Dev was bitterly wounded by the match fixing allegations raised against him that questioned his integrity, and was on national television sobbing uncontrollably. He said, " I will commit suicide rather than take a bribe.... I feel ashamed that I played cricket. "

Ten years later, another national cricket hero, the person credited to rebuilding the Indian cricket team from being just another scam-stricken, low-morale team drowned in controversies into a team of highly talented youngsters with the killing spirit to take on even the world's best team- Australia at the highest point of their success (16 consecutive test victories) and leading India to the finals of Worldcup (the only one after Kapil Dev's 1983 team) - lay at the mercy of some money driven filmstars and businessmen to play in a tournament organised in India!

And what happens? He is not picked by any of the ten different team owners, and pushed to the shame of being overlooked in favour of more than hundred other players! And to top it with a layer of sadism, the co-owner of his home team KKR Shahrukh Khan quips "No team is possible in Kolkata without Ganguly... I would love to have him as an integral part of the team".

Under such circumstances we are forced to question whether we actually know how to show true respect to our heroes? Be it war heroes, sportspersons, filmstars or for that matter anyone who strives to gain our country global recognition and honour.

Will we do the same to someone like Sachin Tendulkar who has spent even the best part of his teenage for Indian cricket, ten years from now? 'Adarsh Society' scam is a recent example of how we do not respect the sacrifices by our war heroes in the Kargil war, instead try to hijack the bare little assistance that their family members receive from the government! Many of the best faces on and off screen who have been responsible for growing Bollywood to the cash-cow that it is today, die under conditions of extreme poverty, loneliness and enormous debt. One of Bollywood's all time favourite heroine and the first Indian actress to feature on the cover of Time magazine, Parvin Babi lay dead in her house for three days and later in the mortuary awaiting claimants for the dead body! These are the plights of people revered to be heroes and celebrities at some point of time in their life.

While we know to easily churn out heroes amidst us from the autorickshaw wallahs on the street to the fellow passenger in local train to the participant in a television reality show; we barely know to respect and reciprocate the efforts of the real heroes who work hard forsaking everything dear to them, for bringing pride and prestige to fellow countrymen by achieving the impossible on a global stage and making India rise above the rest of the world.

Kapil Dev and Ganguly are not individual cases of 'orphaned heroes'. In fact they are probably the more visible ones. Several ex-servicemen and families of war martyrs, former sportspersons, entrepreneurs, scientists and artists and many more will be out there to tell us how this country and the selfish countrymen turned their backs at them when they most needed their support, and in some cases humiliated them in public for unproven offences.

The respect that they bring to the nation must be reciprocated to them, and this must be done at any cost. It is because of the contribution of these achievers- the real heroes- that today India can claim to be a growing superpower and a major challenge to the biggest of world nations!

It Happens Only In India : Weekend Live at IndiTweetMeet

´It happens only in India´ is a topic that any of us could write an entire book on! So when I thought about the topic, I felt that the best way to deal with it is through pictures. They speak way too much about what we are -

A land of mystical diversity where we challenge the biggest of discoveries with our beliefs and faith, yet trying to convince ourselves that Murphy´s Law ever exists! (Be positive!!)

A land where we are on the verge of harnessing nuclear energy while at the same time, we believe that Ganesha Idols drank milk in 1995!

A land where we have uncountable number of Gods and Godesses for every possible incident in life (not to forget the innumerable Sadhus and Godmen), while Cricket remains the religion with maximum devotees and Tendulkar the only God in it!

A land where we still believe that filmstars can do miracles and they are God´s incarnation to reinstate faith in the poor people of the country!

A land once known for its snake charmers and tigers, today used by President Obama as an aid to threaten/warn his youth about securing America´s future in the world!

Whatever they say, we go by our beliefs. We have our conventions and our convictions that drive our instincts, and these instincts tell us that every problem has more than one way to be solved (Remember Jugaad) and tomorrow is always going to be a better day than today! Cheers to the Indian Way!

Shashi Tharoor´s TED talk on India as tomorrow´s superpower. A must watch! The link.

Some pics I found from the net that I felt are uniquely Indian.



Image source: www.forwardedemails.com
The sadhu in his saffron clothing and religious attire also carries a burning cigarette and the mobile phone! The ability to set our own rules drawn from evolution is probably the biggest advantage of the Hindu religion, because there is absolutely no hard and fast rule book!

Some other pics on the website



Image source vijaykiran.com
How much ever we touch the sky, we would still believe that Lord Ganesha is the who stops all kind of ´vighna´ and it would be inauspicious to make the first flight without a Ganapathy pooja!


Image source: flickr.com
Population, the one thing that defines India today. From the compeition in entrance examinations to poverty and hunger, population is the root cause of all evils we have in our country today!

But this growing population is also our strength against world´s superpowers (as President Obama warns American students "At a time when other countries are competing with us like never before, when students around the world in Beijing, China, or Bangalore, India, are working harder than ever, and doing better than ever, your success in school is not just going to determine your success, it's going to determine America's success in the 21st century,")

Whatever we say and however we live today, India is definitely the place to be in tomorrow. And our generation will be the proud architects of this new India!

Jai Hind!
Mera Bhaarat Mahaan!

Image source: smcinvestment.wordpress.com