When times change

It's been a while since I last updated my blog. Yes, I have been very busy with the arrival of my little boy "Subir". Having him feels like the best thing that I have done so far. He is almost 2.5 months old & keeps us all more than busy. I am on a sabbatical from work & hence I should find some time to post my thoughts here.
Feels good to be back though.

Smita Patil Jr.

I just watched the new movie Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na. I so wanted to check this movie out for various reasons; first & foremost for this had a cameo by Smita Patil’s son Prateik Babbar. A glimpse of this young man & you know he is her son; you don’t have to know his name for that matter! He has that grief in his eyes which was seen in hers. This young man brought back lots of sad memories about the yesteryear actress. In Maharashtrians they say a baby is fortunate if a boy looks like his mom & a girl looks like her dad. I feel sad for this boy, how can I say he is fortunate if he never ever got to see his mom or hold her hand? I mean I am sure God has better things in store for him & life will always make upto his loss, but can anything really make up for spending a childhood without his mother around? Can any kind of success make up for the trauma he must have faced as a kid/adolescent? Life can certainly be cruel at times, but still I am sure God will make upto him.

Global Turm"OIL"

Phew! Gas was $4.19/gallon this morning. Price of crude oil has doubled from $65 a barrel last summer to $135 per barrel this summer. Only if this wasn't bad enough; the cost of a barrel of gas is expected to skyrocket to $200 sometime by the end of this year. US is still one of the cheaper places (after Russia, UAE & Venezuela) to buy gas as compared to European countries & Asian moguls like Japan. Gas has crossed $10/gallon in Europe already. Petrol is still cheaper in India as compared to the rest of the world; about Rs 57 per litre because of the Government subsidies. These are simple statistics presented by Economic journals all over the world.

What do these numbers mean for the common man though? To me it means that it’s high time we start car-pooling & buy cars with high MPG. Using public transportation can help in a big way. I am sure Governments globally will think about improving public transportations in cities where it was not so developed in the past. I have developed a simple practice for myself; I club my errands around the same area & avoid frequent unnecessary trips to the mall. This situation more than anything has made me realize that gas is a perishable asset that controls global economy to a massive level. Looks like future has some shock in store for us, but we should be prepared for anything to everything. Just because some of us may be above median income level doesn’t mean we can waste gasoline as per our wish! It is our civic responsibility to use fuel efficiently. Conservation should be the mantra of the day, what say?

Confession of the day

Just some time ago, a friend of mine mentioned unitentionally that she found my blog a comparison between India & US. This struck me with more seriousness than probably what she intended. I would like to make it clear; it was never my motive to draw comparisons between India & US in my blogs! I always wrote my experiences, my opinions on life that I have experienced so far. My blogs are my personal opinions, interpretations, thoughts on changing times & societal functioning that I have seen so far. May be I have been right & wrong at times; like everybody else, but that doesn't mean I was trying to judge either cultures!

Baby "Blue"s

The news is out there! We are expecting & I am already in my 21st week of pregnancy. This is a very enthralling phase of life for me & Sanjay. Till now, it was all about us, now there is this never ending list of things to be done for our baby. BTW, it’s a Boy for us. My dad was against me finding out the sex of the baby, but I wanted to do to be prepared either ways, not that it really mattered but my curiosity took over listening to dad (once again!). There are so many things to be planned; his name, his day care, his school, maternity leave et. al. Right from coming up with a baby registry to deciding if we want to have his nursery done or not, there are so many decisions which need to be made. This reminds me of my young days, I mean we were born & raised with love but nobody ever bothered to have a nursery or selecting a theme of furniture for that matter! They say it takes a village to raise a kid, & I don’t want my son to be deprived of anything that a normal childhood boasts of.

This is going to be a huge step in life for me & Sanjay. From October onwards, we will have a permanent third resident in our home & lives forever & may be after that! Wish good luck to me my friends!!! These exclamations are witness to the fact of me being hormonal.

We don’t need no education

This morning, a colleague of mine who basically hails from Peru told me how most of the educated people in the states are; “foreigners”. In US it isn’t like in India; whether you are interested or not, you got to go to college or PG for that matter. To think of it, there are so many reasons why American society didn’t care for higher or education for that matter. Going back like 15 years or so, you could easily find a good hourly job after high school in a manufacturing facility or any local Government office which would help you make your ends meet. Insurance, gas, food was cheap & people didn’t always plan for retirement as they knew they could bank on their social security benefits. If people were talented, they worked their way up & got promotions. So today, I have some of these old school bosses who are at a higher position because of the years of experience they had. Families were bigger & with 4 or 5 siblings around, parents didn’t push kids to get college education if they were not getting scholarships. In any case, one could live a comfortable life without college education.
Well, this trend seems to be changing now. Now with the economic globalization, growing competition, sinking automotive market (which was a primary employer for most high school grads) & ever soaring cost of living, it has become absolutely impossible to make your ends meet without having college education which helps one make more money. Social security benefits all of a sudden seem to be finite & by the time our generation is ready to retire we may not get any SS check at all. This economic crisis is leading to some positive social changes though. In Indian society how educated you or your kids are linked to your social status, within no time we are going to witness this social change in US as well. So if Pink Floyd were to go back in time, they would never write “we don’t need no education”.

Analyze This, That & Them

Stocks have been soaring up & down as they please leaving all of us in turmoil. Hey, I am no Economist, but where is the world economy heading? Automotive manufacturing is going through the toughest times ever. Once it was a pride & joy to work, drive & live the Ford way. Today, Ford stock got listed as low as $6! This is grave, also an insult to one of the biggest manufacturer of the world. May be all this has a deeper meaning & things will get better. After all, it’s not always as bad as I think it is. Norms have changed socially & politically across the world & generations have got smaller. May be our generation has witnessed one of the most important transitions of the world in terms of globalization & industrialization.

Lee Iacoca published his new book, “ Where have the good leaders gone?” or something on similar lines. It is so true for the political scenario across the world right now. Americans are still not in a mental state to accept Hillary (female candidate) or Obama (Colored candidate) as their leader. Of course there is this vacuum where there is no hope to have another Gandhiji or Martin Luther King or Nelson Mandela. I think on so many fronts; Indian politics may be corrupt, unstable, primitive but is lot ahead socially than American system. Even us Indians think far progressively than my American colleagues who could not digest the fact that I kept my maiden name after I got married. We accepted our leader in Indira Gandhi in 1960s & yes they have not had a Jhansi ki Rani yet for the record!

Roots

As a teenager, I always tried to make sense out of Alex Haley’s book “Roots” which my dad passed on to me for killing time on one summer vacation. My age & lack of experience prevented me from understanding the crux of Haley’s experience. I mean what’s the point of going through the entire heck to discover where your forefathers belong? I also noted it as a kid that my dad harnessed immense importance to his “Roots” or the place where our family actually belonged to in Madhya Pradesh. My only visit to our ancestral small town in MP was as a reluctant teenager & the only reason I visited the place was to make my dad happy. For me, my roots have always been in Nagpur. Place where I was born, grew up, made friends & spent the most valuable period of my life. No matter where I go in India or abroad, my heart calls only this place home. The more I traveled, the more I realized that as my life traces most of its attributes to my family; which again traces roots to MP, Nagpur, My mom’s side, My grandma’s side. So “Me” actually is a maze of all these places with whom I had this subtle connection that I was not aware of consciously. This is a theory, which applies to us all, & now Alex Haley’s hard work makes sense completely.

Holy Cow!

Just came back from my much awaited India trip, had a whale of a time. Just read in Shekhar Kapur’s blog; “ Abuse is the order of day in India”!! He is the man when it comes to composed literature so as to speak of!

My experience; yeah he is right again. No, I am not getting into this NRI veil & trying to criticize everything about India. I am trying to analyze facts here. College Registrar still gives a hard time to students for getting their transcripts signed, bathrooms in trains are still not clean, there are still very few public restrooms in decent sized cities like Nagpur for ex., people still catch jaundice & malaria due to polluted water, so many people still believe in inequality & cast system, intercaste marriages are still a taboo, child labor seems to be getting worse, law & order is still unheard of, female infanticide is still prevalent, & the list goes on.

Yes, India is shining in some few cities & in the living rooms of the educated! How about the underprivileged though? Do they not have the right to a safe, healthy, happy life?

BRB

With a clear heart & tired mind; I admit I missed blogging! Lack of time or bad time management kept me from writing my chronicles.

Coming year will hopefully be more productive!

Jab hum winner honge

Saw the raw youthful talent that India had been brewing in the green room but was showcased in the T20 cricket series. I liked the fact that we no longer are confined to not being demonstrative when we are mad or feel crazy or wrecked. Yeah rite cricket was gentlemen’s game, but we have changed the norms. Dhoni has locks longer than anybody ever had in Indian cricket; Yuvraj yells & screams as he likes but what matters the most is they play to win, they play to rule. They may not be able to recreate the same mania again or may do better than what they just did, point here is they made India realize that we can dream to be the winners! Lets hope our boys Inshallah keep winning & recreating the same fervor in future!!

Again, getting back to the youth, Indian Idol found quite some talented faces too. All the participants were in the 17-24 age group. They certainly made me feel old. They all represented smaller towns and came from middle class families with no filmy backgrounds at all. What surprised me was at 18 they knew what they wanted from life; boy I wish I was that mature when I was 18! The best thing about these reality shows is that they have found winners among common people. No longer you have to belong to Bombay to make it big in Bollywod or know the big shot people. Today, if you are talented, yes you can make it big.

This is real India, where talent is rewarded, recognized & valued. Yes these are the changing times where being middle class is fashionable, where your kid no more has to be an engineer or doctor, where life seems a lot more promising than it ever was!

How true!

"A foolish faith in authority is the greatest enemy of truth"

- Albert Einstein

My Folks

Ever since we are born, do we not start differentiating between who’s ours & who’s not? As a kid, we know who is family & who is not. Then our world broadens, we go to School & College. After a while, we know who are “our” friends, family friends etc. To me, this differentiation is not bad; infact it lets me know the circumference of my loyalty circle. That’s another thing, you are either loyal to your people or you are not. There are no two ways about it; there’s nothing that can be taught about loyalty. Over the period of time, however I have realized that these folks; my folks, don’t have a face! Yeah they are faceless, but come with utter soul. As I grew older, I noticed my folks don’t have a skin color or nationality or religion either! At the end of the day, all I remember is that I care for my people & they care for me. We have had lunches together, stuck through tough times & are ready to challenge the tougher! We don’t come from any kind of powerhouses, but this whole idea of us standing together is our biggest strength. We laugh on the same jokes, like or hate the same movies & food. My point is not to sound like some pseudo secularist, but to actually realize how we get attached to people just because our frequencies match or we think alike. Life can be this simple if we want to keep it this way. Why is everybody fighting over religion, color of skin & geographical boundaries then?

Disclaimer: An ammendment to my previous thought, it's GOOD if we like anybody, importantly, it's OK if we don't like anybody and vice versa!

Yun toh saare sukh hai barse…….

On my way to work, I was listening to the Swades song yeh jo des hai tera & the lyrics go like,

Yun toh saare sukh hai barse,
Par door tu hai apne ghar se…..

O my God, can’t explain how nostalgic I got! Down the heart I knew the truth quotient of these words. No matter how much I try to justify it otherwise, I can’t deny how homesick I felt when I saw the Gulmohor tree & the chai wala with his 6 cup holder stand in some desi movie. They say you can have a home away from home, but who are we kidding; can we really?
Some decisions in life are taken weighing the practical gains over emotional, but why is it that the later almost inevitably takes over the former after the goal is achieved?

With a heavy heart.....

http://www.shekharkapur.com/blog/archives/2007/07/partition_of_in.htm

A must read from the Shekhar Kapur collection. I have known a family friend of ours in Nagpur who came to India from Lahore after partition & had similar heart wrenching stories. At times I guess, life gets too complicated to judge the right & the wrong. No amount of regret can bring back the lost glory though!

Thought for the day

I read somewhere again,” Unexamined life is not worth living”. I think it is right. But I think it’s also important to know when to stop examining life. Just accept every day as it comes, just that raw moment & try to enjoy it. No philosophy, no viewpoints. Today I wish I was one of those people who live life for that raw moment!

My new muse

Very few of my hobbies have been constructive so far in life. However, cooking has always been one of them! I am going to keep http://triedandtastedrecipes.blogspot.com/ this blog updated with the recipes I use & also got a few of my friends who are very good cooks involved. My point was to have a centralized place where all of the delicious recipes were readily available to everybody. I hope this turns out to be a helpful venture!

Shantaram

‘The worst thing about corruption as a system of governance is that it works so well’.

‘If fate didn’t make you laugh, you didn’t get the joke!’

‘Without love, India would be impossible’.

‘There is no act of faith more beautiful than the generosity of the very poor’.

‘Poverty & Pride are devoted blood bothers, until one, always & inevitably, kills the other’.

‘Justice is not only the way we punish those who do wrong, it is also the way we try to save them’.

‘Every act of suffering, no matter how small or agonizingly great, is a test of love in some way. Most of the times, suffering is also a test of our love to God’.

‘One of the ironies of courage & the reason why we prize it so highly, is that we find it easier to be brave for someone else than we do for ourselves alone’.

‘Cruelty is a kind of cowardice. Cruel laughter is the way cowards cry when they are not alone, and causing pain is how they grieve’.

‘Pity is one part of love that asks for nothing in return and, because of that, every act of pity is a kind of prayer’.

Just completed reading “Shantaram” & these are a few of the quotes from the book. What I fail to understand is that how can someone having so much insight on life, fall for crime, drugs & depression? How can people stray from being right when they very much know they are being wrong? This guy had a highly philosophical approach toward life; I guess that’s the reason he found India as his home. I also learnt that we should be thankful, because for no contribution of ours, we were never exposed to the life of poverty & slums in India. It can be argued if a criminal deserves this kinda glorification or not, but just the fact that he doesn’t justify his crime or is just out there with it, makes it a lot more easy to understand him & his situation. Inshallah, his sequel to “Shantaram”, “God Willing” will be a big hit too!

Middle Wanabe turned into more than blah!

Today, would like to extend a strong applause to everybody who came from middle class families. So many dreams, sacrifices our parents, grandparents have had for us, so that our generation could be a step ahead of where they were. In my view, we all have been survivors! Survivors who stood by each other when; cash was low & aspirations bigger, absence of muscle led head strong determination, smaller dreams led by bigger ideas! These middle class families have produced stalwarts like Lata Mangeshkar, Sachin Tendulkar, APJ Kalam, Manmohan Singh, Gandhiji, ShakRukh Khan, Narayan Murthy, just to name a few from every walk of life. We have seen it all, the long lines for school admissions, the tensions to get through engineering/medical, & then to make it big in the corporate world. Communism was the thing of 50/60s, rock n roll of 70s & being middle class has been fashionable ever since I guess. Today, in Asia (India, China, Japan), Europe, US middle class forms a society, which is most influential in contributing toward economics, academics, entertainment or technology. Do the limited resources & lack of complacency fueled by a strong desire to make it bigger with every generation help the middle class achieve their dream? Most inspiring is when we see people like Narayan Murthy promote a modest life style when he can afford any luxury known.

I don’t say it is a handicap to be born with a silver spoon in mouth, it might be an entirely enticing life out there which I am not aware of & don’t miss it either. Yeah, glamour is a whole new concept as well, but it’s so damn glamorous to don success without being glamorous!
However, although trying not to sound pompous, although our nose in air, feet are firmly grounded on the earth!

F for Fan

Wikepedia claims, the word “fan” is an abbreviation of “fanatic”, however I think the concept of being a fan always arises from heart. No matter who you are, rich, poor, educated, unprivileged, you are always a fan. You always worship somebody, look upto to somebody else & unknowingly become a fan. I personally feel a “fan” is a softer side of a “fanatic”. Fans maketh celebrities who they are, fans more than often bring them down. Fans get hurt & they hurt people by being the worst critics. Fans are the ones who spent sleepless nights so that they don’t miss tendulkar batting, they are the ones who abandon Azar for some other reasons. Fans get this sheer happiness when their idols perform, are heart broken when their idols let them down. Once Arati & I were discussing this artists being judged by people thing, and I said “I am glad I am not an artist, that way atleast I am in safe hands!” & how true it is!!
In this side of the world, there is a term “ groupie” which one will understand better if you have watched the movie “Almost Famous”. A groupie is a female fan club who hang out with the rock band. Every band, Beatles, Eagles, RollingStone to name a few has had their groupies. It’s like these rockers are incomplete without their groupies. These females worship these rockers at times for attention; free gifts or at times they might be plain crazy fans! They often end up being hurt, hooked to drugs & rejected by society. Why would somebody love some one to the extent that it will hurt?
All said & done, I guess what stands true is, “once a fan, always a fan!”