Mea Culpa

Free India is Sixty-one. It's been an Odyssey of sorts - a long and eventful journey for a nation that is truly unique in its identity. That identity too has undergone a transition. We have moved on from being a land that was the spiritual watershed of the world to one that is on the brink of modernity - we're both proud of our past and secure of the present. We have great hopes for the future and a passion to prove ourselves on that stage of the world. But as much as we might want to take heart from the fact that we have moved forward by leaps and bounds in a number of areas since 1947, there are just too many departments where we have shamed ourselves. No. I will not go into a detailed autopsy of the nation's failures. What I will do is fix blame. And I am convinced that the blame lies squarely with one person. Me. India isn't what it should be today because of me, because of my inaction as a citizen. I have failed. And so has every other human being who resides in this country, smug in her air of self-righteousness. The real culprits are those that sit in the comfort of their homes and complain about everything that is not what it should be. We're all wimps. Resigned to our lives of unhappiness and dissatisfaction in a nation where we see only problems and no solutions. The roads aren't the way they should be? Well so what're you doing about it? Have you filed an RTI petition to find out what went wrong? The quality of public health is dismal? Have you done anything to ensure that things change? Well if I haven't, then I also lose my right to complain. Democracy, my friends, is a two-way street. Your duty is not limited to voting once in five years. If you want all the services that you expect from a functional democracy you have to be active enough to ensure that you get them. It is the bare minimum expected from a citizen. The obvious question that comes into mind here is: How can I, a single helpless soul make any difference to a whole system that's composed of countless people and has a lot of inertia going for it? It's simple really. Do your bit and encourage others to do the same. That's the essential nature of a democracy isn't it? The whole thing works on the assumption that everyone will do their bit and that all of it will add up to something larger than the sum of its parts. James Surowiecki calls it 'The Wisdom of Crowds'. As part of a crowd of a billion plus people, all you have to do is make sure you do the bare minimum expected from you. If everyone does the same, there's simply no way the will of the people won't prevail.

Capitalist Coffee

I have nothing against coffee. Or against capitalism for that matter(well most of it anyway). But I can't stand the way the two combine to represent that which is not right in our lives and times. Truth be told I like my coffee. I just don't like the way it's been commercialized into something way cooler than it really is. Coffee is coffee. When you start charging us fortunes for obscure variants of the same darn beans, you're overdoing it. These days people sell coffee as if it's part of a whole new lifestyle. Dude! What kind of loser do you think your customer is? We have better things going on in our lives than your stupid 'thiswillblowyourmind'ccinos.

I especially hate it when you go around telling me that this or that brand of coffee is a specialty that you've imported specially for me from half way around the world. Now hold on a minute. Either of two scenarios is possible here. Either you're lying, in which case eat shit and die. Or you're suggesting that you shipped something as trite as coffee over thousands of miles just to sell it to eager dimwits who'll roll their eyeballs and lap up your pseudo-special cup of capitalist coffee. In which case don't bother selling your stuff to me. I ain't buying. Literally.

And it's not just coffee. These days everyone from everywhere in the world wants to sell us everything. There are guys who want to sell us three McMeals a day. And unfortunately for a few of us, they manage to stay in business. What most of us fail to understand here is that we're being sold a lifestyle which is not only unhealthy, but also unsustainable. For all of capitalism's great boons, this is something which is simply not acceptable. You can't try to get the whole world to eat your way simply because you can sell it cheap by leveraging your huge industrial supply chains. It'll screw up the planet. If you think about it, you're suggesting that food which is consumed at Point A be produced and shipped over from Point B, on the other side of the globe, just because someone's figured out a way to do the whole thing profitably. There's something so inherently wrong about this that in the long run, it could challenge a whole lot more than just our health.

To be continued...

How do I make a difference?

A couple of days ago I was having this discussion with my friends. After a hard day's work(especially on days when you've been rubbed the wronged way in most of your interactions with other humans), these discussions tend to border on both the insanely idealistic and the depressingly cynical. And the 'tone' of the discussion usually fluctuates randomly from one side of the aforesaid thin line to the other. So, anyway, this discussion was about what we should do with our lives. As young kids straight out of college we still have some dreaminess left in us - the part that wasn't drowned out in the drab practicality of the so-called 'real' world. So you see, we're still in it to make a difference. How we're going to get anywhere close to achieving that, I have no idea. And it's probably because we felt that maintaining the status quo won't get us anywhere close to being able to make a difference, that we had this discussion in the first place.

So how does one make a difference? And to dissect this godforsaken question even further, who or what do you intend to make a difference to in the first place? To society? To your sense of duty towards yourself? I don't really know the answer to this question or any others which we may have posed to each other and to ourselves during the course of that discussion. But what I do know is that the discussion kept going back to a well-known speech by a certain Mr Steve Jobs. That impassioned speech by Mr Jobs to the graduating class at Stanford exhorted his audience to 'find what you truly love'. I guess that's what it boils down to at the end of the day. If you're trying to make a difference, you're going to find it really difficult unless you love making a difference with whatever it is you're doing.

The nature of these discussions never allows one to draw a definite conclusion about the conclusions from the discussion. You just feel better because you had the discussion. That's a great reward, per se. So it was with this one too. We never reached a consensus on what it is we should do to make a difference, but we did remind ourselves to continue to keep looking for such pursuits.