Are you going to participate in the International Yoga Day??
If you are, would you be doing it as to fulfill your fitness routine, your religious beliefs or out of patriotism?
If it is out of your fitness routine, are you doing it regularly or just tomorrow?
If it is not part of your regular fitness routine, why are you doing it tomorrow? Just for kicks or to keep up with the Joshis??
If you are going to do this as part of your regular fitness routine, do you normally exercise on Sundays?
If you are doing it out of your religious beliefs, what about yoga is religious?
If you are not doing it out of some weird patriotic belief that by doing this, you reinforce your patriotic duty now that the Indian Government has successfully lobbied the United Nations to make June 21, International Yoga Day, will you be engaging in this next year, when International Yoga Day will be on a boring Tuesday??
If not, is it important to you that you be part of a Government sponsored mass PT event that makes it to the Guinness Book?
If you are going to do it anyway, for a reason not mentioned above, will you still be taking part if someone called it the Indian version of North Korean calisthenics?
Finally, if all this is purely symbolic, and really nothing is going to be gained out of this entire "exercise", why are you wasting a bloody Sunday???
We have a nightly ritual in our house, where I tell a bedtime story to our 5 year old. It could be a book, something from memory, something downright from my imagination, anything. It just has to be a bed time story..
Most often, I invent a story (Have you heard when the animals from the zoo went to McDonalds'? or the one where Chhota Bheem went to Mumbai?). It's not like I am good with inventing stories, but the lights are off, so I cannot read, my memory of my childhood stories are so sparse that the story gets invented anyway, but most importantly, without the story, the child won't sleep.. So I muster whatever ingenuity I can, and basically structure grammatically sound sentences all in sequence and hope that it makes sense, all the way till she falls asleep.
Here the story that I narrate is really not important. What's important is that the child sleeps.
And sleep she must..
Now you might be wondering what all this has to do with Aamir Khan. Nothing really.
It's just that that is how I felt when I came out of the theater after spending 3 hours watching Dhoom: 3.
The story was not important, at least to the makers of the movie. What was important is that everyone be numb at the end of 3 hours, having been transfixed at one gigantic gimmick following another, so much so that everyone (well, almost everyone) believes that they had a monumentally good time, while the only people who are having a good time are those who were financially associated with the movie..
And I really shouldn't be complaining, since you pretty much know what you're getting into when you're going for a movie like this. The 300 bucks I spent, suspending my intellect, I should have spent on something more worthwhile.
Leave your brains behind at the door. That's what they all say.
The money I spent on Dhoom: 3 would really not have bothered me much, had I not seen a beautifully crafted movie yesterday called Shahid. It's a gripping, true story of the lawyer Shahid Azmi, who as a youth was trained in the terrorist camps across the border, but saw the light of day, and eventually dedicated his life trying to get falsely accused youth (mostly Muslim) who have no other means of acquittal, against a prejudiced society, and a cold hearted system. His bravery, led him to be killed and probably would never be heard of, but for this movie.
It was cold, chilling, provocative, realistically thought-provoking, and everything else that I would want in a movie.
And I didn't spend a penny on it, since I saw it on cable. Just chanced upon it at the right time - failing which I would've ended up watching some crap called Besharam (since it had Ranbir Kapoor - I have a 5 year old girl in my house, don't you know?) - and couldn't take my eyes off the TV screen.
This was a story that deserved to be told.
This was a story that deserved to be seen
This was a story that deserved the 250 crores or whatever that Dhoom-3 made..
This was a story that truly, truly deserved my 300 bucks..
Over the past year, life has been busy.. Quite busy in fact.. I never thought it would be such a hectic life, that I would not get chance to blog about something.. I made a promise to myself (kinda a new year resolution) to write every day for a 1000 words at a minimum, but that promise was a resounding failure.. About 5 posts in, I gave up.. (silly, silly me).. For about the first 4 months I started feeling very guilty about not keeping up to my promise.. I think sometime around April, I posted something again.. but did not keep up..
Months went by, and the odd acquaintance who read this blog once in a while, would remind me why I had not written for a while.. And it bothered me again..
As I have written before, writing for me is somewhat of a cathartic process. I write what I feel, and more often than not, what I don't think I can say in public.. Writing has been my refuge, my comfort food, my security blanket, and everything else.. (you get the picture)..
Over the last year or so, and especially over the last few months, there have been many instances where I have had the intention to write something.. Sachin Tendulkar's retirement, for instance, was one where I had everything in my head on what I wanted to write.. The words, however, never strung together to write a constructive enough post.
And this bugged me no end..
Here was I, who loved to write, who loved to write about cricket, who loved to write about Sachin Tendulkar, and I never wrote anything when he said farewell..
Don't worry, this is not a post about SRT.. It is about me..
It has taken me the better part of a month to realize what it was that made me not do what I liked doing best..
I think, not sure, that I was afraid, that whatever I write should be so good and so constructive, that everyone should "like" what I wrote. Everyone who reads it should comment, retweet, +1, or whatever it is that people do these days.. The fear of meeting and surpassing the expectations of others was why I never ended up going beyond the first word of the post..
And that's completely against why this blog was set up in the first place..
It was set up, long years ago, to write what I felt like, good or bad, sensible or tripe.. Not to receive likes and dislikes and anything else..
So, starting today, I am disabling the auto-post capability for this blog to any social network..
A few days ago, this month, this blog completed 8 years. Statistically that’s not a long time. It’s no jubilee year, no ruby, diamond, paper, golden, platinum, whatever anniversary. But it is 8 years, and it hasn’t been easy. If you think it’s sustaining a blog for 8 years is easy, you could do one of two things –
There’s a button to the top left of the screen – NEXT BLOG. Clicking it will take you to a randomly generated blog site. Click it, and chances are you will see a blog which has not been updated for at least 6 months. Click the NEXT BLOG button on that blog. Same thing. Rinse. Repeat. You’ll see what I mean.
OR
Start one of your own. We’ll speak in 8 years. We can share notes. Hopefully by then, this blog will be in its 17th year of updating.
That said, I think over the last 8 years, a lot of changes have happened. In me, in my writing, in my likes, dislikes. It’s like I am a different person altogether. It’s not only the blog which has contributed to this change – family, parenthood, relocation, maturity (I hope) and many other things I am sure have definitely played a part – but through these 8 years, this blog with its 445 published posts (and infinite unpublished ones circling in my head), has given me company.
Or you could argue, has kept me (mostly) sane.
(In case you haven’t yet figured out, there is no purpose, moral, angst, emotion hiding behind this post. Once in a while, it’s good to reflect on where we are and what we’ve achieved, without the burden of a specific milestone celebration)
Felt like sharing. And hope to have more of this, as we go along..
1.Do not feel absolutely certain of anything.
2.Do not think it worth while to proceed by concealing evidence, for the evidence is sure to come to light.
3.Never try to discourage thinking for you are sure to succeed.
4.When you meet with opposition, even if it should be from your husband or your children, endeavour to overcome it by argument and not by authority, for a victory dependent upon authority is unreal and illusory.
5.Have no respect for the authority of others, for there are always contrary authorities to be found.
6.Do not use power to suppress opinions you think pernicious, for if you do the opinions will suppress you.
7.Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.
8.Find more pleasure in intelligent dissent that in passive agreement, for, if you value intelligence as you should, the former implies a deeper agreement than the latter.
9.Be scrupulously truthful, even if the truth is inconvenient, for it is more inconvenient when you try to conceal it.
10.Do not feel envious of the happiness of those who live in a fool’s paradise, for only a fool will think that it is happiness.
Sometime in the recent past, in the name of political correctness, targeted marketing, and never offending a potential customer, we stopped calling stupid idiots stupid, and started referring to them as bored thrill-seekers.
Right then, and right there, the world stopped becoming a better place.
Every day I see incidents which wouldn’t have happened 15 years ago, and after a lot of soul searching, the only reason I can think of, is that people stopped ridiculing idiots in public.
I mean, what do you say to the thousands who flocked to Marina Beach, Chennai to witness a “live tsunami”???
Here’s what I would say if someone told me to come see a tsunami in Chennai:
ARE YOU FRIGGIN’ MAD???? EVEN RAJANI CAN’T BEAT A FRIGGIN’ TSUNAMI, YOU DUMBASS!!!! IF YOU’RE GOING ANYWHERE, YOU NEED TO RUN TOWARDS KERALA, NOT TOWARDS THE BLOODY BEACH, YOU STUPID EXCUSE FOR A HUMAN!!! YOU THINK IT’S A FRIGGIN’ IPL MATCH, YOU BLOOMING IDIOT??? THIS IS NO WHISTLE POODU MOMENT, DAMMIT, RUN FOR YOUR BLOODY LIFE!!!
And then I would have politely declined the invitation.
But, that’s beside the point.
The point is, when “Idiot does as Idiot is” (to paraphrase Forrest Gump), it is our moral duty to call them that.
And then do to them exactly what their act deserves
In public.
So the next time someone is running a red light or driving on the wrong side of the road, I say mow the bastard down
After you call him / her an idiot, of course!!!
And if you hear Aaj Tak or Times Now faking enthusiasm for something that really doesn’t matter like Bilawal Bhutto’s tweets, swear at Arnab, call him an idiot and then switch off the TV.
Considering Wikipedia calls it a “pejorative term for a group whose beliefs or practices are considered abnormal or bizarre”, I think I should start a cult.
Because, I have realized that most of my beliefs are what normal people would call bizarre, and therefore one could argue that they are also abnormal.
Here’s what followers of my cult would believe
• God exists. That much we know. In what form, shape and quantity, that we don’t know.
• We don’t plan on knowing either.
• We just need someone to put the blame on, when we don’t know the cause for something that we know happened.
• Almost everything we know about God till now, we suspect we are wrong.
• We don’t believe that humans are children of this God. We have strong reasons to believe that humans are children of other humans.
• However, we do believe all humans are equal. Not in the eyes of God, but in our eyes.
• We don’t believe in any laws which prevent humans from doing what they would like to do, as long as they don’t harm other humans. For instance, laws and processes that prevent humans from freely moving from one place to another are work of the Devil.
• In fact, we hate Visas so much, we prefer MasterCard
• That was just a figure of speech. We don’t know if there is a Devil. We’ve never seen any Devil, plus in our model, we blame God for everything good or bad, so the Devil is somewhat inconsequential.
• We believe that there are only three aspects in life which are true. Art, Science and Emotions. The rest is just noise.
• Our definition of these goes something like this:
• Science: Anything we experience that can be replicated
• Art: Anything that we experience that cannot be replicated
• Emotions: the human response we experience when faced with an instance of Art or Science
• Things like success, failure, fame, fortune, etc. don’t matter much. We’re still not sure if these are a part of science or art. We do know these affect our emotions, so we know that these are either art or science, probably both.
• Since we are a cult, we’re bound to believe that the World will come to an end. But what sets us apart, is that it doesn’t matter to us when the world comes to an end.
• We don’t know if there is a heaven or a hell. That’s a can we prefer to kick down the road. We’ll find out when the world comes to an end, or we come to an end, whichever is first.
• Based on our experience, humans really have no clue about anything. We believe we are human. Therefore, what you read above, are actually our best guesses about what we believe in.
• Whether you agree or disagree, it’s your choice. We don’t have the enthusiasm or outrage to prove to you anything.
As the older one wakes up, the younger one falls asleep...
And so passes yet another Sunday..
One where you spend the entire day running after chores, cleaning house, putting kids to bed, waking them up. If there were 30 hours to the day, you'd still be running on empty by 9.30 pm.
One where "work-life balance" means going to office!!!
Which makes me wonder, "How the hell did our parents manage all those years ago??"
There was no TV to distract the kids, there was no microwave to quickly heat the food, no washing machine to wash and "spin-dry" the clothes, and (hell) no Pizza delivery!!! To add to that, there were shortages of everything. Money, supplies, toys, you name it. New clothes were stitched 2 sizes larger by the neighborhood tailor because ready-mades were out of our budget, and "hand-me-downs" were probably all that we wore through the day. Eating out was, at best, once a month.
It was a time, when moms worked not for a career, but because without the second income, the family faced penury. I could bore you with details of my parents slogging their backsides off, just to get us everything we wanted, but I am sure you have more details of your own.
It always makes me wonder why folks list the Ambanis and the Tendulkars and the SRKs as their role models, when there are more inspiring (and relevant) idols in their own homes.
So by now we all know that Salman Rushdie will be addressing the Jaipur Lit Fest through a video uplink which will be thoroughly vetted by censors for inappropriate mentions of banned utterances. He was going to attend in person, but he now has some threat to his life, true or otherwise, and so our man is forced to present like he is giving a job interview in a neighborhood Reliance Web World.
Death of Free Speech, I hear you say?
Well, Free Speech was never alive in the first place, but anyway, that's not the point of this post.
The organizers could very well have saved the entire embarrassment to everyone concerned, if only they had organized the festival after March 3, 2012.
Eh???
Nothing to do with any astrological misalignment, of any kind.
You see, the entire brouhaha about Salman Rushdie, has nothing to do with him, his book, his speech, or anything like that, and has everything to do with the elections in our great state of Uttar Pradesh.
You do know that the Congress is in tough battle with the Samajwadi Party (at least in their minds) for the so-called "Muslim" vote there, don't you? Outlook tells me from a few weeks ago, that most of the population would vote for whomever the village imam sahib would tell them to vote for. The Muslim vote would define the power brokers in Uttar Pradesh, a crowning moment for Rahul Gandhi to gain ascendancy into an eventual prime ministerial berth.
Put it another way, not a single participant, author, reader, fan, organizer, journalist, or Reliance Web World operator is going to vote in Uttar Pradesh come February. Do you seriously believe that, with so much at stake, by inviting the one man in this world who is associated with blasphemy against the Prophet (PBUH), a Congress chief minister would risk giving the SP so much of an advantage?
Someone I know, and respect a lot, sent me this article
I read this article, and also some of the others that have been forwarded to me from the same blog in the past. And the one recurring theme in these articles has been how the media are crooks. This is related to stuff I have been writing in the past, though with a slight difference. And I just wanted to make the situation and distinction clear.
Unfortunately, for modern India, it is the Congress that is the standard ruler. Like it or not, all political parties in modern India, are born out of an opposition to the Congress. The Jan Sangh, probably for some time defied that rule and went more on principle, but the BJP of today, is more an anti-Congress party rather than a pro-principle party. The principle that the Congress was built on - independence from the British - is so antiquated, that in a few years from now, the youngest freedom fighter for India's independence should logically be about 75 years old, and most likely has defected from the Congress already. None of the core values that any of the parties were set up for, in any case, has anything to do with the development of the country.
But they're still in power, and have been so for all except a few occasions. Let's face it, if the country really didn't want the Congress to rule, it had 15 chances in the Lok Sabha to ensure that. By my count, only on 5 occasions has it done so (Morarji '78, VP Singh '89, Deve Gowda/Gujral, Vajpayee '98, Vajpayee '99). A score of 10-5 is a score I would take that the country really likes the democratic monarchy concept. Even on the 5 times we kicked them out, 4 times out they got the largest vote percentage as a single party.
What does that tell someone?
In most of the cases, my challenge has been to sift through the media and identify articles without a hidden motive behind them. Yet, it's one thing to call media as "puppets in the hands of unseen masters", it's quite another to term them as crooks. That Rahul Gandhi is following a template set by his grandmother, (and subsequently followed by his father) is obvious. However, it's not worth getting so angry on Rahul Gandhi or even the media. They are doing what (in their opinion) is in their best interests. What hurts me more, is that the phoneyness in the entire exercise that seems so obvious to me, doesn't seem that obvious to others.
Which could also mean that it is my interpretation that is wrong. If I am the only one seeing this facade, then maybe it isn't a facade, and what Rahul Gandhi (and his caravan) are doing is really what people like. The king, the benevolent ruler, showers goodies on the "praja" and they are happy with their lives, and the king is free to do as he pleases.. He is the King, after all!!!
Maybe people do like this kind of mollycoddling, after all.. Could it be that people expect Government to be
like a benevolent king? Their mental image of the leader of a country, seems more like a "kind" ruler, rather than one of us. Stories of leadership told to us are Lord Rama, Vikramaditya, Shivaji, Tipu Sultan, Akbar etc. - all kings with no known oppostion, or even a known history of tolerating dissent (probably Akbar, but even then there is no history of anyone surviving a dissenting opinion with him). We don't have a history of the knowing the truth. What we have had, consistently through history has been a set of smoke and mirrors which we assume as "Rajdharma".. You look at Anna Hazare's movement for example, and all you will see are cases where the expectation from his group has been following this Rajdharma.. He has no qualms thrashing drunks, and forced sterilization if you have more than 2 kids, where the final word is that of a one man prosecutor, judge and jury.
On other fronts, I would be very interested to see how the "Maryada Purushottam" would have responded to breaking news that he sent his wife into exile.
Which begs the question, why is it that they do this? Are they evil people, who have pure evil on their minds?
Or could it be that they're doing this, for no other reason, than it is bloody effective..
What is it about a blank piece of paper (or MS-Word, actually) that makes me forget my thoughts?
This morning, I had this great thought, almost Buddha like, which made perfect sense, and I made a mental note to write about it. The mental note is there, but the note seems blank. Like the piece of paper you leave in your shirt pocket and it comes out of the washing machine. It’s there, and you know what was on there, but the details escape you. It could have been your friend’s number, or maybe the bank account you need to transfer money to, or the medicine you had to pick up on your way home.
Like I have always been thinking as to how a perfect blog post would be something on how we pay attention to too many things, but very little attention to detail. Details are something like the plague in the medieval times, where we avoid them whenever we can, and someone infected with this affliction is an accursed individual who either should be avoided or needs to be taken to the neighborhood tantric. Also, how we keep confusing ourselves between informative data and an alternate reality where anecdotes rule. How rising above the noise, is impossible when there is a choir of anecdotal trash playing in your head
I don’t know why, but the details escape me.
Another fabulous one still in my head, (always, “still in my head” never on the blog) is how all I am exposed to from everyone around is a gigantic marketing campaign about a gazillion times larger than what Shah Rukh Khan came up with for Ra.One, and how everything about what I see on TV, seems made up, with the single purpose of some valuable goods in my possession (money, votes, TRPs) being handed over to someone else, with nothing really valuable in exchange.
I think I even had a title for that: “Your lips move, but I can’t hear what you’re saying”!!!
Or maybe it was a title for something else.
I was going to write a stinging post about how the Bharat Ratna for Sachin Tendulkar would be a bad idea. I don’t have data to prove why it would be a bad idea, but it seems like a bad idea, so it ought to be a bad idea.
Or how the year 2011 was weird because we had autocracies toppled in favor of democracies, and democracies hung in to inaction, calling for some autocratic leadership.
And how, at the end, we all may not get what we deserve, but we definitely deserve what we get. Just depends on how long you define the time horizon
Or how, we’re all doomed because Mamata Banerjee’s mother died last week, thereby robbing mankind of the one person who knew how to handle her tantrums. Or how I have this great idea about Manmohan Singh’s secret diary (well, that’s not so bad, I think I could write that in a jiffy, it will be a simple copy of whatever Soniaji says)
Similarly, there was one where I wanted to write about one of my favorite teachers in school, Mrs. R. Kulkarni teaching me a nasty lesson on how I should not accuse people of anything, if I have not personally seen them do it, and how that is the only thought that keeps coming to my head when I read Facebook posts on my wall, which tell me that Rahul Gandhi and his foreigner friends gang-raped a party worker’s daughter in 2009.
I have always wondered why we don’t believe a word of what our boss says, but every random word on our FB wall is gospel. The world would have been a better place, if everyone was in Mrs. Kulkarni’s class.
But I digress.
My personal forgotten favorite, is the one where I wanted to rant about Facebook making me more eager to please other people so that they “like” everything I say, write, link, paste, upload and whatever else that it is that we do on Facebook. I also wanted to ramble on about how Facebook really contains very little actual information (status updates, photos, maybe messages), and a whole bunch of tripe masquerading as information. A glorified web aggregator – where people insist on putting on my “wall” junk, in the hope that I will further like it and comment and nothing else. I mean, do people get paid to do so much time pass?? Where can I apply?? – and all that..
But, as I said before, the details escape me.
So, if you think blogging is easy, it ain’t so. You can’t just conjure up an 800 word post with ideas and little else.
Over the last few days, my window to the world has been the Times of India. Kinda like life was, when I was a few years older than Annika. That's how it used to be. Regardless of what the 9 pm news said, life was what was written in the TOI. The rules of the English language were based on what was written in the TOI
But that was then. This is now.
Now is when winners of the "prestigious" TOI Social Impact Award get considered for the Padma awards, no matter that the award is in its inaugural year.
Now is when the Times Insight group, writes 10th standard essays on the petrol price in India being the 3rd highest by purchasing power parity, that grace the front page of the Sunday edition, while comparing the prices of gasoline in India today, with those in January 2011 for the rest of the world..
Now is when the Times of India leads a so-called ACT - Against Corruption Together to support the Anna Hazare campaign, but conveniently leaves out any mention of any dissenting voice.. (Could it have something to do with this development, I wonder.. but that's for another day.. )
Now is when the Times sells its masthead and its front page to anyone and everyone who will pay them top dollar.
Now is also when the Bennett Coleman & Co. Ltd. Wikipedia page, reads the following disclaimer:
This article is written like an advertisement. Please help rewrite this article from a neutral point of view.
Now is when, accused of found guilty of misleading readers through paid articles that look like actual articles through Medianet and Private Treaties, the CEO of BCCL has this to say:
Even if you make an advertisement, and put a circle around it, how is that important? Why is it important that it should be made clear to the reader?
At this point, does it matter what the TOI prints on a daily basis? Maybe they could just print receipts for their patrons in their daily tripe..
It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction. A person who lies is thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it. When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.
- It DOES NOT get any easier the second time around. Even if you do have some idea of what you're in for.
- For some reason, everyone around you is more excited. You're just glad all went well.
- You're busy counting down days for him to start sleeping all night, also known as a race with no known finish line.
- Somewhere deep inside, both parents want a girl and a boy. So that they can dress them up in pinks and teach them a lefty cover drive like Brian Lara.
- Somewhere deep inside, neither parent cares which of the kids dresses in pinks and which one plays the cover drive, as long as they're healthy.
- A man who has witnessed first hand his wife giving birth should really have no more fears in life. Not even year end job reviews.
Nations are, for want of a better phrase, primarily created
for identifying revenue payments.
This piece of land here pays India
its taxes and that part over there pays it China,
and there over the mountain, is Pakistan,
though India believes that
the people there should be paying them and not the guys in Pakistan… Or
something like it.
There’s nothing relevant as such about land boundaries outside
of this. Culture, language, religion etc. are all conveniences created by us to
further symbolize the common revenue generation module.
And if you look at it, at some levels our behavior is
reflecting this irrelevance of nations and the leaders of these nations.
In almost every country, across the board, the common sentiment
is that life has never been worse. Yet almost every country, is at a standard
of living that is better than ever before in recorded history.
You might think that the earth is unable to handle the 7
billion, that it houses (or will house around this time next year). But that’s
not quite right. The earth is quite able to handle 10 billion people.
It’s just the world as we know it today will be unable to
handle 10 billion.
In a global world supposedly brought together by technology,
nations as we know them, are becoming irrelevant. If we can work out a common revenue
generation model for the world, most of the problems in this world could be
solved.
And it's not like it isn't happening. It has already started.
Take a minute to think back on your life.
Where you are today, is probably not where you were 10 years ago.
Where you are today, is almost definitely not where you will be 10 years from now.
If money knows no national boundaries, why should we?
John Lennon was probably 50 years ahead of his time..
The genesis of this idea comes from my friend Mohd. Haris, who calls his thoughts "erratic, random and sometimes stupid". But his idea of listing down things that people do in the full knowledge that they are wrong in doing so, yet do so with full approval from their conscience gave me an entrepreneurial idea.
It may not ethical, but hey, neither is the one the old man is fasting for. So here goes:
As mentioned, I as an individual, do things that I know are wrong, yet do them. I am in good mental and (mostly) physical health when I do so. For the sake of this example, let's just say, I know that I ought to not tweak my expense accounts, but you know, an odd fuel bill isn't so bad.. But now that I am protesting against corruption of the others, I must do something to show that I am not a bloody hypocrite. So what do I do?
That's where this new entrepreneurial venture comes in. Let's call it Paisa.com for sake of argument.
What is Paisa.com, you ask? Well, it is a customized portal which helps you to speculate on your own intentions. The intention has to be noble, (I shall not cheat in exams / I shall not tweak on my expense reports / I shall not cheat on my wife/girlfriend, whatever). So I go to this portal, and say for the next 1 year (or 2 months or decade or whatever), I shall not do whatever it is that I know I am not supposed to do.
Still with me? Seems doable? I think so, but probably not practical. People will come in and pledge whatever the hell they want to pledge.
That's where Paisa.com's USP lies. The pledge stands valid, only if I am willing to put some money down in an escrow account for the duration of the pledge. It will have rates like you have at the temple for pooja, Cheat on taxes = 20% on taxable income, Cheat on girlfriend = 1 lakh, something.. But something substantial.
Once I've pledged it, comes the second catch. I have to provide phones and email ids of 10 friends who will be told that this is what you're planning to do. Unless they validate that you are truly capable of paying up, the pledge doesn't come through. Once they validate me, they will be told that should they ever catch me doing whatever it is that I am betting that I will not do, if they report me to Paisa.com, they will get the entire money, post due diligence based on current savings rates. They are free to forward to anyone they like to add more sets of watchful eyes on me.
Should I successfully avoid getting caught over the duration of the pledge, I get the escrow money plus interest.
Benefits:
- Acts like a fixed deposit of sorts
- Acts like a deterrant. I know I can tweak my expense reports, but if I were to get caught, I might end up losing 1 lakh..
- Makes me a bit more honest.
- Friends watch over me, but have a financial incentive in ensuring that if I am doing wrong, I will get caught. If I don't get caught, no harm no foul.
Liabilities:
- Suddenly, har ek friend zaroori nahi hota hai :)
- Is it ethical?
- Can you think of anything else?
What do you think? Will work? Should I fast for this??
Thank you for your photos, SMSes and Facebook messages. As you said, there is indeed a widespread fervour and nervous enthusiasm that this time we will be able to get a realistic change. There are people from my office, young and and old, who are actively participating in this movement, and Mr. Hazare is truly championing a movement that is bound to bring about change. Needless to say, if we didn’t have corruption, we’d be a better place to live.
However, I must be true to myself and admit to you that this movement is not one that I would like to be associated with. Not that it is not arguing for the right thing - I am not the person to judge that. People believe that someone is taking advantage of them, and they have every right to protest. However, deep inside this protest smacks of usual human hypocrisy.
In the last five and some years that we have been back in India, I must admit, I have paid bribes. I have paid bribes to public prosecutors, to police inspectors, sub-inspectors and havaldars, to traffic policemen and RTO bureaucrats. In each of these cases however, the bribe paid was to help me (or someone I know) get out of something that could be perceived as wrong on our part. In these 5 years, I have not had a single instance where someone has asked me for a bribe when I am in the right. Even the bribes we give when we need something that is our right, at some level it is to help us jump the queue. That someone asks for a bribe, is one thing, in which I am complicit too. In light of this, who am I to protest against corruption, when it has helped me achieve my ultimate end?
However, this is not the corruption which bothers me.
This morning, as I was on my way to work, I approached a traffic light at Mobo chowk. As I approached it, the light turned red, so I slowed down. However, before I reached the junction, along came a gleaming, golden Honda City cutting across me. It was coming from the cross street, however given that their signal was red, decided to take the free left turn, then take the U-Turn (to come to my way), and then take the free left turn available to us. Since the divider wasn’t quite the biggest, it pretty much amounted to a straight road for him. However I reached there before him. And I stopped my car since I was to wait for the red light.
I was definitely in the right of way. I was well within my rights to stop for the right turn. But my action was deliberate. I didn’t want this suit wearing, goggle totting gentleman to take advantage of this loophole, while I was doing what is right. But this gentleman didn’t quite see it that way. He thought I was being a smart Alec. Swearing at me, my mother, my sisters, and everyone else, he went from behind my car, and carried on, while all the way making me aware of my incestuous relationships with all my female relatives.
It sounds funny, but it’s not.
Corruption, is not only monetary. Corruption is (as I read from the Webster Dictionary website) "an impairment of integrity, virtue or moral principle". The monetary portion is, if anything, the most easily retrievable impairment. And on this count, I must say that it is not just the politicians, government machinery or the bureaucrats who are corrupt. This morning, on my way to work, I encountered at least 3 instances where someone failed this so-called corruption test. Whether it is people riding on the wrong side of the road, breaking a traffic light or even for that matter not wearing a helmet / seat belt, we do it not because it is right, but in the full knowledge that it is wrong yet there is minimal chance of getting caught. And it’s not just traffic sense (or lack of it) that I am talking about. Whether it is the shopkeeper who prefers the cash transaction to the 2% service tax he would have to pay for debit card transactions, or the buyer who prefers to get the stocked item for this “discounted” price, each one of us has at some level actively participated in cheating the rest of our country. We seat our kids on bikes and break traffic lights with impunity. To us, and to our kids, this has become acceptable behavior. Differentiation between right and wrong, has become primarily a one-way street, where everything done by us is automatically considered right.
We may complain, protest, demand against our elected representatives, but at the end of the day, the people we have elected are our mirror image. What they’re doing is, in my opinion, no way different from what I would do if placed in that position. We can blame the system, or we can admit that it us, you and me, who has created the system. We have created this system, because at some level we do condone this corruption. We condone it because we have, at some point or the other done the exact same thing that we’re now taking the moral high road against. Hazare’s protest is showing “civil society” a mirror, and supposedly intelligent, somewhat educated, people are demanding we change the mirror. Expecting highest levels of morality and “unimpeachable” integrity from our leaders, while demonstrating the exact opposite at every single opportunity is what we have come to.
As regards Hazare’s behavior personally, there’s something left to personal judgement. I was not around during Mahatma Gandhi’s time, and so cannot comment on whether he is Gandhian in the true sense. But something seems wrong, when he says that if you’re not agreeing to his demands, you’re not doing the right thing for the country. Gandhi succeeded in his protest, because his protest was simple. He told the British government, that they have no right to rule simply because they do not represent the people. And to prove his point, he simply followed the rules set by them.
As regards the Jan Lokpal bill, again I am probably not the best judge of that. Maybe it is the best thing since we discovered freedom from the British. But something tells me that it won’t quite be the solution we’re hoping for. Not because of its merits or demerits, but rather because it will create one piece of legislation, and that’s it. As a society we are used to proceeding with anything and everything that meets our ultimate objective, and legislations and rules and ethics that come in our way are mere occupational hazards.
What I write is boring, and I may be arguing without merit. It certainly doesn’t sound sexy enough to hit the front pages of the TOI - a newspaper which seems to have no hesitation in selling its front page and masthead to the highest paying advertiser. Maybe my protest against the protest is misguided and on the wrong side of history.
But that’s what is on my mind, and I will be damned if I don’t say so.
And to top Anna Hazare’s million Bollywood Twitter friends, I have some support from Hollywood:
