BDay Special...

This is especially for a special person in the group: Kushal!

May this be a great start to a wonderful year ahead.. :)

Family with a difference…

India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, the Siamese triplets born in a span of 24 hours, have always fought over petty things. Britain, a foster mother to them, is quite happy to have relentlessly passed on its guardianship to the other closest relative the siblings have – The Uncle Sam. That’s globalization – Duniya Ek Sansaar, for all of us today.

The fights date back to their time of birth, when each wanted to survive on the cost of the other

in the operation to separate them. The operation was successful, with one separated out from the other two. It was truly gruesome with all the bloodshed but, the toughest part was to restore all the parts of each to full. During the operation a beauty spot, Kashmir, was separated from all the siblings and it was left to the beauty spot to decide which baby to choose. While Pakistan wanted it, the beauty spot chose India. So it was decided to be given to India and then let Kashmir itself decide, depending on different factors, to which sibling it wanted to belong. Pakistan, ever wanting the beauty spot, insisted to a part of the spot on its body to stay. It also started slowly injecting and infecting Kashmir, the part of beauty spot given to India so that neither beauty spot is able to gel with the body nor India is able enjoy the beauty of the spot.

As they grew up, the two conjoined siblings developed disputes too and got separated from each other at the age of 24, in 1971. In the gory clash, the smaller built sibling took the help of the already liberated one who readily offered thus, igniting hatred deep within the other two siblings. But, in the end Bangladesh was free and a nation was born. But, it was born as though a child born to a victim of rape. The last blow - one that the angered Pakistan could neither forget nor digest. It was now determined to get the piece of beauty spot back.

The doses of infections by Pakistan to the Indian beauty spot increased with time. Blinded by the hatred and stubborn jealousy feelings against India, it started spreading all kinds of dangerous IVs - ‘hate poison’, ‘hate in name of religion’, ‘infiltration’ – but never accepting. And as it all grew, beauty of the spot was forgotten. The only thing that remained was a craving to get back the spot! And on the other side remained an ailing sibling so engrossed to protect itself that it forgot the beauty spot was now just superficial… was there hence a part of it.

As the siblings grew into adults, India became responsible and morally stable and the envied child of the family. While, Bangladesh and Pakistan grew up on revulsion hence became the jealous ones… Meanwhile, both the elder siblings India and Pakistan, developed lethal medicines called the nuclear weapons posing a threat to oneself more than to each other.

It’s not that peace makers have not intervened. So many uncles at the United Nations tried to resolve. Even Uncle Sam tried to help. Things even started looking good between the two. Exchange of weekly Hellos and Hi’s with buses and Samjhauta expresses started. Feelings started flowing from one to another. The forces were about to be cut down when it all ended with a perjury by Pakistan. Kargil will always be remembered by both for two reasons – One, for the heroes, who laid down their lives for the nation and brotherhood and the other, for the inhumane infiltrators who died as soldiers but not accepted as theirs by their army.

With sporadic attacks here or there, Pakistan along with the separated Bangladesh, tried time and again to diminish India’s strength. Their strife to scare India to return the beauty spot still exists. It’s like three brothers fighting for a diamond ring, with the eldest demanding the diamond ring from the one younger to him and the smallest brother helping the eldest one in acquire.

Mumbai, 26 Nov’08 – A few deadly viruses entered India through water. They fired unscrupulously killing the healthy cells. This was a major blow to the integrity of India. Sick sibling cries and cries on the incident but is not deterred to prove Pakistan guilty this time. It goes to Uncle Sam for justice with dossiers and proofs. Till months the dossiers exchange hands.

One fine day Uncle Sam decides to send a secretary to India while the Sikh is out for talks with Pakistan’s representative. While she visits, talks, attends meetings Pakistan hands over a dossier to accept the virus being prepared from its stuff. In the mean time, just before the Miss leaves India the virus itself stands and reveals ‘Made in Pakistan’ label on it!! Later, Singh on behalf of India pays all due respect to the health restoring capsule called ‘Hillary’. The capsule not only promises better health but also tells Pakistan to refrain from terror means. It sparks hope for better ties between India and its uncle.

Now, it is from here to see where the relations will move. Will they move in a positive direction or will the virus have some more hidden secrets? Or will Pakistan mend its ways after a spanking from Uncle?

All this and more - dekhenge aage – HUM LOG!

Life teaches us lots of lessons everyday...

This piece of writing, I wrote quite a time back (ard year back...) for my office magazine. Still worth to put here!

Each day a new learning experience awaits each of us… Each in a different way… helps building what we are to be! Each is an experience, a milestone in life, to be remembered and one day share with your future.

• One thing I surely have learnt from life… Make mistakes and get punished for them days together… Don't make any… and live in fear of making one each moment!
• Each mistake made does not point to a wrong person, but an imperfect being... and that is what we all are deemed to be.
  Ya…we all are afraid of making mistakes, so what is new…new is don't be afraid of making them! Commit mistakes and commit to mistakes that they will never be repeated; learn from them, rise from them.
• Sunshine is god's laughter…
  Its God's special way of smiling on you to make you realize, "breathing is not always living". Enjoy the world he created for you and try and give the world the best you have to lighten up someone else's world.
  
• On a windy day….a tree falls due to the self infected ego of not bending to power…. But the grass will flex…bend and be lurched but still rise Be the tree at times….but be flexible enough to change with change…!!
  
• Life should never be perfect…..the zeal to make everything perfect dies….!!
  
• Success is something abstract, an on-going, never achieved status of life…The moment you feel you are successful…. you lose an important war to succeed, in life So have a great imperfect day….. but a day filled with "spirit to succeed "

And in the end…Some joys are better expressed in silence as a smile holds more meaning than words.

Proxy maar diyo yaar…!! (just for laughs)

In life things don’t appear to fall in from heaven, they take quite a longer route than that. And, while on the way, the goodies or the hiccups warn their arrival in all kinds of disguises or proxies. While only a few may be able to point out, these proxies are all around us - clear indication of upcoming or ongoing events.

So let’s check out a few which we all come across knowingly; unknowingly….

1) Well dressed Colleagues at office… Lots of clean shaven, formally dressed men. Girls dressed in suits doing work… work… work…with only work on mind. Yo man! The appraisal time is around… Kaaam karlo!!!

2) Khana kaisa hai? No need to ever ask that question again... ;) One look at the lines for coupons by the vendor and you can judge where to eat… or to better walkout and just order delivery!!!

3) Another one, you reach office at 10:00 a.m… A big ‘PARKING FULL’ board awaits you. People in office before normal time!!! Aaaaahhhh... it’s project time? Gotch ya!!!… He he he… Nopes, it’s appraisal again!!! (So why did YOU reach office before 11:00 a.m weren’t you thinking the same? :D)

4) Sleepy eyes, heavy heads… This is a time when all around you can find sleepy, drousy people…umn umn num… drooling over coffee machines… meds and frequency of doctor visits suddenly sore up… Ha ha ha… This is no rainy season or the pandemic flu. This is the ‘project time’ @ office!!!

5) Working late?? “What are your plans after office”, wonderful question when asked by a hottie….but a dreadful one when asked by your PM. Whatever be the answer, you are still working late tonite!!!

6) Need a leave? A colleague who used to be out of office at 6:30 p.m. sharp…. still in office at 8:00p.m….. Nah na its not the new project, nopes nor the ld one…it’s the leaves he wants!!! Each extra hour effort put in stays directly proportionate to the holidays he is going to take. :D

7) Ok guess this one - Your PM suddenly forgets your name. Fails to acknowledge your greetings, misses your seat…walks by and doesn’t see you. An easy way to say – I have no work for me, how do I find some for you??

8) Your PM calls an urgent meeting…and opens it with the line – “We have tough times ahead”… Management policies with ‘Cuts’ are on their way!!!

9) Odd one ‘out’??!! In a dull dry boring day… one of your colleagues arrives late in office, wearing formals... Stops checks around, sits and starts working… Hmmmm…fishyyyy… verrrryyyy fishy…indicative of? Arrreee use chhod… Go grab… there openings around!!!! :P

These are quite all I could collect… keep pouring in more friends…

This is a topic inspired by a similar named post by my college junior, though he had concentrated more on proxies during good old college days! Now an IIM pass out, this guy was creative genius of sorts even in college… quite indicative of his bright future!!!

Kissing and Pissing Rights...!!!

Now this blog is a little different… Different coz this topic was born while me and a friend were just chatting chatting chatting! The friend is Varun. Both of us are quite sure that we are friends who got lost in ‘Kumbh ka mela’ and have suddenly re-discovered each other!!! The losing each other story is long with a 'khusat buddha', 'prasaad ka peda', 'behti naak' and naak ponchhne ka kapda… but that’s not what the blogs abt!!

Its about the topic! OUR civic responsibilities as free citizens. We were discussing public display of affection or the PDA... While I was adamant there is a law against it, he was 'adiyal' on a stand that there is not. We talked of Shilpa-Gere incident to shore sides to operation Majnu and about social & judicial acceptance of kissing and demonstration of 'pyaar'... In the course of talk, another point was raised by Varun that as a society we accept pissing in public but not kissing... so i thought of explaining him the point of view of his opposite sex too. Read on my conclusive notes on the discussion...

There is a law against PDA and I know that there is! It was amended to exempt married couples after a couple was harassed by police one night, soon after operation Majnu. - well that was a wrong statement. PDA is not an offence but is punishable under another act of public nuisance, subjecting individuals to conviction and fine.
Now about the pissing part. Once my ideal, Dr. Kiran Bedi said that pissing is a nusiance but then u don’t see a lady/a girl sitting along roadside pissing. She added that it’s because girls from the very beginning of their lives are inculcated restraint and taught to accept. According to me, a gal who has travelled to and fro the busiest of places in NCR and seen most beautiful to the most deadly parts of Delhi, I know the pissing act is a way used by men high or low, rich or poor to show off that they are men. To assert a sense of dominance that look we are men, we have a right to everything, even roads!!! I have had personal experiences, of which you need not feel amused abt, using the pretext of nature’s call men try and scrape off all threads of dignity of girls passing by. If you try giving them bad looks, they smile wickedly, raise an eye brow, wink or mouth provoking words.
Men!!!! All kinds…such kinds that you want to pull them off and castrate there and then, when you have no one on your side. Police won’t move –‘men you see’… your friends would pass it ignoring – ‘kya panga lena yaar, udhar mat dekh; chal…’ and the enjoying fellow passers will turn their faces away as if they saw nothing…The result??? Well the result is that there are thousands of girls being teased in the country using this pissing shit.
Moreover, moving ahead and slapping is not easy Varun. You need guts...& an urge to fight down and even more than that you need a backup! Society accepts it, coz in time it has learnt to turn a back to it or is just too busy to bother. And for the roadside pissing men, well they forget the same pavement is going to home someone at night. They release and walk away, without responsibility without guilt...

Are we, Indians still stuck in the feudal ages?

It seems as though Indians have not moved on since the Queen’s men left us in 1947. Apart from divisions of religion and states, we are still quite divided on the lines of oppressed and the oppressor. We love teaching our loving kiddos - Humanity is a vital part of all religions. Do we ourselves really practice that? It’s like the old saying – British chale gaye, apni chhap chhod gaye. It’s so visible among all of us…within us and around us. Our caste system or the religion divides just act as a tool to use oppression by the haves against the termed lower and deemed to oppressed – ‘The have nots’. The most recent example being a minister slapping a Bank manager in A.P., for defying his orders to speed up proceedings for loans to SCs and STs. It has taken birth from an understanding that the people at higher posts are meant to exploit the country’s aam Janta - The same Janta that votes and forgets to ask for accountability. And of course anything added with a garnishing of the word SCs and STs sounds tasty. Nepotism or Bhai bhatija waad is one of the by-products of an urge to have an ability to exercise power over our fellow humans. And the worst is not a part of the political arena at all. Each and every Indian feels satisfied only when he can exert his will on others, else life is miserable. Every one of us would love to oppress our maids, mazdoor or drivers. Dare they defy orders, none of us would hesitate to punish and give them extra work to do with lesser wages. We would never dither from slapping our maid’s child for touching our baby’s dolls but would only say – ‘Arreee beta kuchh nahi hota, nayi aa jayegi’ when our own child loses it or worst still, breaks it.

In fact this stops nowhere. Dilliwalas would love to oppress the UP bhaiyas, Mumbaikars would love to squeeze out more from Bihari babus…The big town techies and industrialists first try to evade tax and later make tamasha on having to share the infrastructure growth with migrants from other states. Where is “humara Bharat ek hai” spirit? In fact where is the Humara Bharat?? Its all in our blood, splattered everywhere. We employ people with bare minimums for work expecting them to be our slaves, forgetting all human rights non-sense we have ever read. Excuse me?!! It’s all about the Africans or the tortured workers in mills. And then cry over we being suppressed by our MNC heads on similar grounds. We may not falter in any of our attempts to single out ourselves as the better ones from the masses but if someone else tries and keeps us a part of the masses, we make a hue and cry over it and call him/her discriminating against us. What bloody chauvinists!!! Despite being born Indians, been brought up as Indians - we all have a British tendency alive in us i.e. to discriminate on the basis of power.

Many of us are karma yogis on the wrong side of understanding. We are on a chase of a wild goose with power of dreams, thinking if we have money we’ll have it all. We’ll be able to buy it all and thus control it all. And to us power means never to bow down in front of anyone, not to be enslaved by anyone else ever again. In the course we forget what harm we are causing to the nation we pledged to build. We march ahead stamping a lot of goodwill and blessings we could have got by just being good. Becoming what we fear from, overlooking the fact that every animal in the food chain is important and rise or fall of population in any one of them would have consequence on the whole environment and eventually survival of many at large.

A moment of thought...

No, I have never been a great fan of MJ. In fact I have not even been a fan. To me his has always been a name of a King, the ‘King of the Formidables’; a ruler who defied all the rules; a name that I kept hearing time and again, for good and bad. For me his was an aura that had daunted many around me… my cousins, friends, everyone could be seen doing the ‘moonwalk’ and his trademark - aaauuuu! But then even If I was not a contribution to his massive sales, I have heard so much about him to quite know him about all.

And today as I hold the newspaper with news of his shocking death, I feel guilty and heartbroken. Guilty, ya guilt - to have not given him his due in his life, to have missed an opportunity to live and enjoy an era with the King himself, to not have heard him a lot more. Today as I sit in front of MTv I can watch all his numbers with a liking undying and I make it a point to watch them too, to pay him all my regards, in his death. But these are just a few of my first ‘long stayed’ reactions which after days of his death have seen all upheavals. As if the report of his death was not enough, his autopsy reports now and then have been disturbing and heart rendering. Needle marks on all parts of his body are like stones of loneliness and criticism he was embraced with in life. The media has been dissecting each and every aspect of his life and death, and surprisingly it has been lot politer this time. Everyone has been focusing a lot on his comeback shows from 13th while the same people would have ripped him off for not performing if he would have failed on stage. No one seems to accept him the way he was, everyone talks of changing him to their advantage. Today I, as we all should, realize & am ashamed of the fact that the media had made controversies even over his most joyful acts of love! I don’t see anything wrong in MJ showing the new born ‘Prince’ to the world Happiness of being a father, a king with his little one. We all loved and respected the same gesture in The Lion King where Mufasa showed his cub Simba from the cliff to the herd.

It is so disturbing that me, a stranger to MJ, prays secretly night and day to have MJ alive - hale and hearty, hidden away from the world watching all the pain, the agony each of his fan is going through and the shock that the world went through, losing the very best. I wish to just once hug him and show how much everyone around loves him, even the controversial him and even the ‘not on stage for a while’ him. He was like a blessing, there with us till he was; a torch ready to spread light whenever you need; the ailing at heart aptly chosen as the immensely intense singer of “Heal of the world”.

And his story is no new. In India itself we have seen a lot of actors die similarly - lonely and in vain. It’s a due that we all forget to pay to our loved ones. It’s a lack of a real close relation that drives stars to a supernova engulfing all they achieved. It’s up to us and because of us. We killed MJ as we have been killing talent since years in states of despair. And Oh yes, here too it definitely does not matter if the person is White or Black!

It’s a moment in each day I go through; I’ll miss the name reverberating all around me. I’ll miss any opportunity to ever feel his presence around the world, I ll miss the Thriller of his comebacks. He taught me in death to love him, yes I’ll miss him for the majestic presence. Yes, It’s a moment that I proclaim to myself that...Yes, I am his fan!