IN MY TIME....

Maybe this may come across as a bit juvenile but I nevertheless feel the need to write about it. My generation , the 20 something crowd were born at a particularly wrong period of time. We were born at the brink of the IT explosion and the end of an era where basic needs were difficult to come by. We did not experience the Indira Gandhi emergency , nor any weird superstitious beliefs and customs followed by our parents in their generation.We experienced say a bit of both the worlds , a time when telephone connections took literally years to come by and the cell phone explosion. The evolution of the desk top to the lap top. We've seen it all. From waiting for our relatives settled abroad to get us 'foreign gifts' to just hopping to the nearest shopping mall and getting any foreign brand of our choice. The awe which a 'foreign returned' held about 10 years ago is now laughable. Our parents and those of that generation are also seeing these transitions but see it with different eyes. They do not feel the urge or the necessity to adapt to them. 'We have gone through all this.' they say patronizingly , 'been there and done that'. Try explaining them the coolness of a smart phone and the possibilities which an android phone opens up to you and they stare at you blankly. "Nokia phones are the best' they say stoutly , looking fondly at their million year old basic nokia phones with the exasperatingly hard key buttons. Now the real question is , are we a soft generation? Have we really had things coming easy for us? I agree that most of us have not seen the struggle of the basic ‘roti , kapda aur makaan’ but can our struggles and battles be compared to theirs? ‘Your cousin is earning Rs 30,000 per month and wears new shirts everyday’ my grandmother tells me with a wide eyed look. I look at her and sigh. Earning a living is really not one of our struggles today. A graduate an engineering , commerce or an arts graduate in their mid 20s will be earning a decent pay packet( I am not including our medicos and denticos , we all know that earning starts quite late for them considering their never ending studies.) The struggle for us is to keep up with the competition , to not disappear in a sea of faceless graduates but to stand out amongst them. To be different(however cliché that sounds) , for being different amongst our peers is not a possibility but a must for us. How else will we attract the thousands of companies and other establishments to pick us instead of our peers. While our parents discuss about the escalating prices of rice and groan at the time when 1kg of rice was Re 1 , we happily go about splashing Rs 1000 per movie or any other outing (this includes travel , food , ticket prices , etc.) Do we have a choice? We choose to live any cheaper , we practically will have a non existant social life. WE have to keep pace with everything happening around us, cannot afford to sit back and dwell. WE see some of our classmates losing their lives due to drunken driving , committing suicides for the silliest of reasons and living recklessly without a care for their lives. They last in our minds for 2 days and we move on. WE have no choice, cannot really dwell on them. Share it with your parents and they say ‘how silly , imagine committing suicide for something like that.’ Sure these kids did not die of any heart attack or any other bodily dysfunction but don’t they merit the same compassion which some 50 something somebody gets when they die? For God’s sake our lives are just starting. We live in an era when a tweet can make you famous and a facebook comment can get you arrested. We are connected to 500 virtual friends on facebook and chat with 20 odd people on whatsapp and YET feel lonesome at times. So the real question is Are we a soft generation? My answer is NO. We are bloody tough !! Yeah ok we do not struggle for roti kapda and makaan(though I do not know so much about makaan considering the ever escalating real estate prices.) But we have every day battles. Our foes are not some unknown faces in some cabin in the office but our peers , even our so called friends. We walk out of our houses everyday fully aware of the fact that there can be a blast at any time in any place in OUR city and we can be ripped to shreds. We come home late at night fully aware of the thousands of potential rapists lurking on the streets , in the buses even your auto rickshaw driver. We endure the daily struggles of being a woman by being scanned up and down on the streets. We have learnt to live with it , ignore it. We have no choice but to be adaptable because that’s what we have been doing since we were born. WE are the generation which can thrive successfully in both Bagalkot and Bangkok , in Surat and in San Francisco. WE can cope with whatever life brings on to us head on because we have been trained that way through our environment. WE do not give up and do not let go , as that was never an option for us. And last but not the least WE are the only generation which has seen the best and worst of both the worlds !!!!!

THE KALEIDOSCOPE

often in our lives we come across a phase/phases which we cant identify leave alone solve it. I'm not talking about a particular situation here but a phase which can last anything from a couple of days to a few weeks or sometimes even stretching to months. During this time all you're drive , you're focus or whatever it is which keeps you going is wiped out and you're left with a garbled assortment of petty conversations , inconsequential comments from other people and a cocktail of extremely unimportant things mixed with you're lack of drive on what IS important leaving you in a complete mess !! The result , you start cribbing like a LOT , become so snappy that you put off people who are actually being  nice to you and have zero tolerance towards anything unpleasant . You become broody , impatient , moody so much so that you start disliking you're own attitude which trust me only worsens the condition. It's a lot like PMS except that you're PMSing for a really long time !!! you're life becomes a kaleidoscope , a mixture of everything , the filter in you're brain stops working and you're left to stare helplessly at a jumbled up mixture of things which you cant make sense off . The worst part about this phase is that the little soothing voice in you're head which keeps calming you down and maturely gives you a level headed solution suddenly becomes dormant so you're brain becomes a volcano ready to explode at the slightest provocation and starts screaming and cursing everytime anything out of the ordinary occurs.You want to run away but you don't know where , so you contain yourself and bottle everything up , you know that if you confide into anyone you'll sound like a raving psychopath so you crush it deep within you and keep smiling primly at everyone as though nothing is wrong.So what is the solution ? buy yourself a self help book? maybe it'll help you to an extent but you'll still be left in the dark. Confide into friends?parents? maybe even counsellers? no , all they'll give you is advice but that's just what they'll be able to do and that's the last thing you want because you're intelligent enough to have deduced and even try implementing the so called advice long before you've confided into them. It's easier said than done . The best solution according to me is give it some time , try not to keep thinking and keep you're brain beautifully blank with a conscious effort. That'll get rid of the noisy buzzing in you're brain which is strong enough to give you a headache ! Try making a pattern of the jumbled up mixture in you're life , you'll find a solution because even a kaleidoscope has a pattern . And even if you cant make any sense or pattern of whats going on , just hang in there because a very great man once said 'this too shall pass' , in no time you'll snap out of this phase and you'll even wonder how you got into it in the first place. And then at that time when you look back to where you are now don't regret or feel ashamed of yourself , because after all we are human and life isn't perfect and rosy always  you're boat is rocking at the moment  it'll stabilize by itself ,  at that time you can look back and pat yourself by saying , 'boy I got through that , I can get through anything' :-)

STRONGER

It was just over a year ago when I would be cribbing over the most inane things , like my mum's cooking ; too less salt , too much asfoetida and so on.I would pick up fights over the most silliest things probably to vent out my frustration and maybe in the process have hurt the people I love the most without really meaning to.In every sense of the word I now realize that I must have been a spoilt brat.More selfish and less understanding.The thing with living with oneself and when you're alone is that you learn to deal with all those emotions , happiness , sadness , frustration , anxiety , fear , restlessness , boredom on my own. Over the 3 months that I've been living on my own I may probably not have changed much but have learnt a lot of things. The first and foremost is to stop complaining. Bad food , cockroaches in my room , doing every tiny thing on you're own which you took for granted when you were at home , all these things I know at the end of the day will just remain how they are no matter much I go on about it , the one and only solution is to deal with it. Because you have no choice , and it's not being a martyr or anything like I realized , its just that you concentrate on more important and pressing issues of you're life. A few months ago I would feel miserable if I had a fight with anybody in college , anybody would comment nastily on my appearance(which I have realized that people would not leave a single opportunity in doing so , call it joblessness or idle mind is devil's workshop !).Now if anything of this sort happens I brush it off and do not remember it the next moment , probably even feel sorry for the poor soul whose brain is keeping so much track on how I look instead of concentrating in whatever they are supposed to be doing.Given that with this hectic schedule that I'm leading that I've never led in my life , I have stopped thinking of others lives being so entrapped in my own.I am reading 'The Prison Diary' by Jeffery Archer at the moment and try putting myself in his shoes.Here I am a 61 year old successful novelist who has published bestsellers and is rolling in millions of pounds is suddenly convicted unjustly to a harsh sentence of 4 years in one of Britain's most strictest prisons.1 year ago if you'd asked me to put myself in his shoes I'd say that I'd definitely be in chronic depression even sometimes ranging to suicidal.But just look at what this guy did , maintaining a detailed manuscript of everything happening in his prison life he not only turned his worst experience into something which he enjoyed i.e writing but also came to terms with every disgusting thing which happened during that period of his life , like facing the pathetic prison food and how he dealt with it during his term. The lesson you take from such things is that sometimes when you feel that all that is happening around you is like the fates conspiring against you , you look ahead and see that one goal or dream which you set out to accomplish. That'll be the driving force which is so strong that it will immediately overpower every negative emotion you've ever had.Then with this as a talisman you can face anything , live in the harshest of the circumstances , deal with the lousiest of the people with the ease you make you're 2 min maggi :).You also realize that the people who stand with you in these circumstances will be with you throughout you're life and the rest are just a passing phase.

WE ARE RESILIENT BY CHOICE NOT BY FORCE !

If you remember Naseeruddin Shah made a similar remark in the movie 'A Wednesday' , the only difference in the sentence being 'we are resilient by force not by choice. After the terror attacks in Mumbai everybody was raving about the way Mumbai was back to it's feet the next day . Some though asked downheartedly 'did we have a choice?' I ask them what is wrong with being resilient by choice? sure it's a tragedy and of course it was unexpected but then so is life . We cant expect life to stand still for a day , a week even a month to moan over what we've lost.It'll move on and it is up to us to pick up those broken pieces and start over again . We who are so interested in aping the westerners and their lifestyle should learn from our oriental cousins The Japanese . In the stark midst of this catastrophe and a tragedy of this magnitude what stands out is the brilliant stoicism exhibited by them , their helpful and brotherly nature towards one another should make our heads hang in shame . How many of us can say that if in the midst of the earthquake if we have 2 bottles of water we'd give one to our neighbour who doesn't have any?being the typical Indians we are , we'd probably stock up the other bottle for future use ! After the Mumbai attack we raved against the Pakistanis , all the peace talks came to a stand still and what we're left with after 2 years of the Mumbai attacks is a never ending ongoing trial of Kasab . The Americans declared war against Afganisthan , sent a few soldiers of theirs to the country to kill and to be killed , captured Saddam Hussain and are still looking for Osama while eying all the Muslim nations suspiciously . The poor Japanese cannot point out any fingers their culprit after all being nature , they grieve for their lost ones at the same time trying to set right a situation which is going beyond their control and YET they do not ask for help from any other countries and maintain the same courtesy which we are so acquainted with when it comes to the Japanese , putting in all their energy , force to rebuild the nation they love . My Point being the Japanese have lost on such a large scale(more than 20,000 dead) one can't possibly imagine but you see them functioning as one unit with no blame game , knowing what their priority is whereas we know our priority is to make our nation a safe nation free from terror attacks and yeah resistant to disasters as well but heck we can't even control a city struck with heavy rainfall be it Mumbai or Bangalore ! Isn't it high time we stop trying to imitate The Americans by playing bully or do our all famous blame game and concentrate on strenghthening our internal defences against both Terror as well as Nature ??

DESIDERATA - MAX EHRMANN

Go placidly amid the noise and haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence. As far as possible without surrender be on good terms with all persons. Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others, even the dull and the ignorant; they to...o have their story. Avoid loud and aggressive persons, they are vexations to the spirit. If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain and bitter; for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself. Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans. Keep interested in your own career, however humble; it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time. Exercise caution in your business affairs; for the world is full of trickery. But let this not blind you to what virtue there is; many persons strive for high ideals; and everywhere life is full of heroism. Be yourself. Especially, do not feign affection. Neither be cynical about love; for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment it is as perennial as the grass. Take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth. Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune. But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings. Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness. Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here. And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should. Therefore be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be, and whatever your labors and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life keep peace with your soul. With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be cheerful. Strive to be happy.

THE CITY WHICH IS STILL NOT HOME

Bangalore - A city which I looked forward to more than anything , I still remember the excitement , the expectations within me when I was looking forward to shift to this city . I remember thinking , 'How lucky am I , when everybody is sooo envious of me , I'm the lucky girl getting to go to the swinging city of Bangalore !!''What fun it'll be , my city , my culture , all my relatives being here , I sure will have a fantastic time out there'
Sadly things haven't worked out exactly to what I had expected them to , some people may argue that the grass looks greener on the other side , man must adjust to his surroundings and blah blah blah... this city has taken more than it has given , if it's given it has given disappointment , a lack lustre environment , horrendous service amongst just a few things . How wrong was I to expect things , to expect from the people out here to be warm or receiving , maybe I was so used to it out there in Pune , that I can still feel the void of that familiar warmth and courteousness ! How wrong was I to expect anything from relatives , so what if they are your blood relatives , that needn't make them family !! They are as much strangers as any person on the road , without extending as much as a millimetre of their hand during any crisis ! I take from this city , experiences which make me wiser , so in a twisted way this city has been responsible for my growth , I have seen whatever's to be seen and more during the 6 years of my life out here . Probably the only thing which I'm grateful to in this city , is that I've found some great friends whom I treasure like crazy ! I'm probably just waiting to get out of here with the first available opportunity and blur or blank out the period of my stay here . I carry only my experiences and memories of my cherished friends as I move on(which I WILL do eventually) to a newer and better life !

BARBECUED NATION !

surprised by the title? But I think it is apt , we , a nation capable of being the greatest superpower because of our tremendous potential are time and again being pulled down . Reason - recession? na we have survived that ! it's our internal issues which are our biggest weaknesses . Take for instance the 2 issues which are on everybody's minds of late . The Ayodhya verdict and the CWG scandal . I'll start with the Ayodhya issue , why are we so afraid of each other is the primary thing going on in my mind? we fear riots , we fear communal violence and yet we know that by and large all of us want peace . Are we so afraid of the few extremists who are just waiting to pounce on even a minor scandal so as to grab a few eye balls? Aren't we capable of suppressing them?? We the educated middle class supposedly the largest in the world can't quieten a few miscreants whose sole aim is to remain in the limelight by being the so called flag bearers of their religious community? why are we so fearful of each other? our muslim and our hindu brothers and sisters? We do not step out of the house because we are in a so called sensitive area afraid that at the slightest provocation a riot will break out . why isn't anybody reassuring us that it is safe to carry on with our day to day activities and they'll ensure that no communal violence breaks out . We a secular nation can't convince ourselves that we are a safe country , how in the world do we convince other countries?? Why do we feel infuriated when other countries are hesitant to send their players or important people out here due to lack of security? we deserve it , we have given them an impression that we are highly a unstable , and an unsafe nation !!!
Coming to the CWG scandal . We laugh at it , we mock it , we sigh and say that corruption is part and parcel of the Indian bureaucracy but do we realize that the CWG scandal is not just a public mockery of the bureaucracy but of us as well . We distance ourselves away from it but we cannot deny that after all it's our country's reputation which is at stake and we are all Indians . Everything about the commonwealth games and the organising committee was shady and fishy but nobody bothered until 3 months before the games were to start . 'the preparations are incomplete!' , 'the accommodations and everything are far below the world standards!!' then started the blame game , with each pointing their finger to the other and invoking ludicrous responses !! How typical and classic of the Indian mentality !!! Do you wonder now why the world sniggers at us ?? It's not the internal problems alone , we just love making a public tamasha of ourselves !!!
The Ayodhya verdict will pass , things will resume , the commonwealth games will be over and Mr Kalmadi will probably be charged for corruption which I'm so sure he'll wriggle out of , the babugiri will continue and people will move on but the ultimate loser in all this is our country . She remains tainted and ridiculed because her biggest enemies are within her !!