Dear Abhishek

Dear Abhishek Sahoo,

Here's wishing you a very happy birthday. Have fun. Enjoy yourself. And as you move through the rest of the day, do reflect on the fact that this may well be a milestone in your life. A landmark and a crossroad which can take you one way or next.

You're about to graduate in a year. Soon you'll be able to find out what course the next few years of your life will take. Whichever path you choose and whatever decisions you make in life, carry some advice from me. Be Brave. Have the courage to stand up for what you believe. And never do things by half measures. Setbacks are part of normal existence. What's the fun in an unchallenged life?

And in case you falter through these years, glance back at these Ten Commandments of Living.

1. Thou shalt work hard. Effort shall see you through
2. Thou shalt keep thy eyes and ears open. Remain altert lest thou get juggernauted by competition.

3. Thou shalt respect people. There's something to learn from everyone.
4. Thou shalt have faith. In thy abilities. In the certainty that nothing bad can last forever.
5. Thou shalt work smart. I shalt say no more.
6. Thou shalt remain happy. That's the purpose of everything.
7. Thou shalt think straight. Keep it simple.
8. Thou shalt speak less. And listen more.
9. Thou shalt practice what thou hast learnt. It makes perfect.
10. Thou shalt remain responsible and steadfast to thy word.Lest the world take you less seriously.


Follow this code by the skin of thy teeth and victory shalt be yours my boy.
Happy birthday.

The politician's call, not the people's

They say people are the central theme in a democracy. I say that's all hogwash. It's a big illusion that politicians create mate. And the sooner you realize that you don't run things after all, the better for you. I mean who cares if the people really want President Kalam for a second term?
It's not your call is it? It's what the politicians say that matters. After all you elected those bunch of jokers out there( or did you? )

President Kalam was the first people's president of the country. But does that matter to Sonia Gandhi? She just needs someone who must kowtow to her every demand. In Pratibha Patil she finds the perfect cronie who will not oppose a single political move of hers. It's all a matter of convenience...why should the people come into the picture?

Democracy in India, is for the most part, a farce. The Prime Minister of the country has no real powers. A great man, who was once the stalwart of economic reforms and started the country on the road to progress must today denounce corporate pay packages to appease his narrow-minded electorate. If this is not the real death of a nation, what is?

I completely agreed with Swaminathan Aiyar when he lashed out against Dr. Manmohan Singh in his editorial page column in STOI for having discouraged corporate lifestyles, without first putting his own house in order. Who doesn't know that the real problem in this country is not in corporate governance but in political governance?

And when after ages you get a President with a backbone, that doesn't go down too well with the politicians of this country. I mean seriously dude...why do you think you get to choose? It's not Rising India or Shining India or Mera India after all.....it's Neta's India.

Prayer for the hopeless

God, Give me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I cannot accept....and the wisdom to know the difference.

Can't buy me gas

Listen to Gore

I don't think it's cool to rubbish global warming as mass-scientific-community-paranoia anymore. It's for real. This much seems obvious to all beyond doubt. Now that this question seems unimportant and not worth arguing on, we must now all move on to asking each other the next inescapable question: When are we going to do something about it?

All efforts so far to get all nations to develop a consensus on how and when to tackle the problem have failed. Why's that? Because Economics comes over Environment. The developing nations claim that if the developed nations led by the US which are the major contributors to this problem refuse to take action, then why should we? After all China and India( they say ) have a right to pollute the world while moving into the big league of the super rich.

The blame game never ends on the big stage. No one refuses to back down for fear of being mistaken as weak by domestic audiences. But what nations do not seem to realize is that they hurt their domestic populace even more by sidelining the issue of Global Warming and delaying action taken.

It seems more and more evident in the present global scenario that for absolutely anything substantial to get done, action needs to be taken at the micro level. At the so called grassroots. No longer does the real power to make things happen lie with the bureaucratic government machinery of our large, inefficient governments. It's people power. The story of people power has been made possible by technology. Cheap technology has delivered power into the hands of the common man in every nation like never before.

As a rule therefore, what must be done, must be entrusted to the masses, not the leaders. There are exceptions like Al Gore who have the gut to talk about the real issues in spite of ignorant domestic masses rooting for fuel-guzzling SUV's and powerful industrial lobbies hollering for the status quo to escape spending a few bucks. But the average politician is out to score brownie points with those who have so brazenly rubbished the Global Warming theory.

Geekiness

Work and Play

Long ago I read an excerpt from Mark Twain's book, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. It was titled 'Whitewashing the Fence'. From what I remember of this narrative, the protagonist, Tom Sawyer is given the task of whitewashing his fence. To make matters worse, as Tom sits down to do the needful, his friends come traipsing along, having all sorts of fun.

What follows in the story is an amazing dispay of Tom's socio-emotional dexterity. He convinces his friends that whitewashing the fence is 'play'. Even more play than what they were doing. They are manipulated by him, without their knowledge, into whitewashing the fence and thinking that it's 'play'.

The lesson the reader is to take home from this episode is the looseness of the definition of 'Work' and 'Play'. There's a really thin line that divides the two. One that exists only in the minds of people. When we talk about loving what we do, we probably mean that when you fudge that line dividing work and play you invariably do better.

Work is by compulsion. Play is by volition. When we decide to do something because we genuinely get the inner urge to do it, we tend to do it better. But work is after all what we consider mundane and tiring.

So how do you mix work and play? How do you take something boring and make it deliciously interesting and fun? I guess it can only be achieved by taking control of that elusive, ever-distracted entity called the mind.

Mediocrity

I always believe that what is rampant in the world in any realm is what exists betweent the black and the white. When it comes to competence this fuzziness is best described by mediocrity. What you'll see in the world around you in great abundance is not excellence or gross ineptitude, it's mediocrity.

For those who choose to be perfect, excellence is a way of life. And for the dull-witted, idiocy is the norm. It's the mediocres who are stuck in the middle of nowhere, deciding to leave a stamp of mediocrity on every piece of their works. It's like a handicap. A disability of habit.

We probably don't realize it but the world is driven by the top 1-2%. And it's also pulled down by the bottom 1-2%. The rest contribute to global warming.

I know for a fact that mediocrity is the worst kind of disease. Most of us suffer from it in one form or another. And while there still are people who can remain committed to excellence in some walks of their lives, they are only mediocre at others.

So what's the cure? Gas people as Hitler did and raise the overall excellence level of humanity? Probably not. After all we have moral and ethical constraints. And then there's that odd piece of shit called reality. Which screams loudly into all our ears reminding us how we are all mediocre but arrogant.

The prism of the mind

All of us think differently. There are no two individuals on this planet who think alike in every respect. At least that's what identity is said to be about. So what constitutes identity? When we speak of an identity that stems from the mind we must understand that this is something that's completely different in the sense that it's transient. We have constantly changing thoughts and beliefs and hence our mental identities are as ephemeral as our ever-mutating cerebrations.

What we think changes everything. The way the mind processes information about the world influences our lives more than anything else. Every individual's mind is like aunique prism. One that takes thoughts, feelings, events, information and virtually everything else and processes it for making sense of it all. But 'sense' is variously defined for everyone. That's because we see things differently.

To broadly categorize schools of thought( believe me a broad categorization is blsaphemy...a meek understatement for something so profound)....there are those who think positive and those who think negative. The proverbial optimists and the doomsday cult. And there are the multifarious shades of grey between the black and the white.

To those who think positive, life has a definite pattern.....everything follows a rule....a rule that nothing goes wrong...usually that is. And for their negative thinking counterparts with a negative psychic prism...nothing can go right....not even occasionally.

The prism of the mind does amazing things to all of us. It holds us prisoner of our own thought process. What becomes a set pattern in the mind becomes very difficult to change. It may seem remarkable then that the world is many different places at the same time simply because we see it so differently. Through the prism of the human mind, reality is suddenly a variable. But the view is great.Right?