Risks and the accompanied rushes have always had a history with the male fraternity. Be it the jungles of the Stone Age, the wars of the later eras or the more recent economic depressions and World Wars.
Traditionally, while the male had to go out and deal with all the shit that was hitting the fan, the women (and rightly so!) were left to manage the household, the relatively less risky and highly monotonous affair.
As thousands of years went by, this behavior took root in the basic persona of every male and female. Then another kind of shit hit the fan!
Today, the overly structured “professional” environs with all the processes in place where everybody knows their jobs (and is supposed to do them) has that one vital ingredient that suits the ladies but irritates the not-so-never-supposed-to-be-gentlemen – Monotony.
What now then?
Well, I see colleagues thrilled at making 5 grands at an IPO as it keeps them occupied, I see young kids racing down the road without helmets and who hasn’t had a few drinks to break the grind.
For me, I am trying to keep myself from the first, done a lot of the second and can be found indulging in the third.
~nashe mein kaun nahin hai ye batao zara…
Wednesday, December 15, 2010
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
Sati Pratha and Karwa Chauth
Blessing bestowed upon a male in a Hindu religious ceremony…
Ayushmaanbhavah – May you live a long life.
Blessing bestowed upon a female…
Sada-suhagan-raho – May you never become a widow. Means: May you drop dead before your hubby.
Ayushmaanbhavah was never said to a female lest the blessing turns into a curse. The life of a widow in pre-20th century era (maybe even now in rural parts of India) can be summarized as:
Step 1: A bald headed life spent in the temple room worshipping Lord Krishna till accused of seducing a younger member of the clan who probably had abused her multiple times.
Step 2: Sent away to the pilgrimage in Varanasi which also happened to be a big brothel.
No wonder Sati Pratha found takers and no wonder it got abolished when the social scenarios changed. (Although I have personally come across villages where a widow has a broken down hut on the periphery of the village. The trucks parked outside add to the darkness engulfing their lives for 20 bucks or so.)
Context set, I hereby argue that Karva Chauth is nothing but an extension of the same social stigma. Scaring females to go through a day without even water (of course, some modifications have been made to suit the upwardly mobile career woman but the deal is still more or less the same) to pray for the long life of her husband.
It has been carefully camouflaged as the portrayal of love and dedication but that portrayal does not stand by the acid test of fairness and equality we so claim to believe in.
What else to say...
Oh yes, the wife hasn’t eaten all day. Gotta go and follow the process. Disagreements in beliefs take the back seat when it comes to fairness in love. Being starved tilts the decision in her favor. More importantly, it significantly reduces temper threshold! :P
Ayushmaanbhavah – May you live a long life.
Blessing bestowed upon a female…
Sada-suhagan-raho – May you never become a widow. Means: May you drop dead before your hubby.
Ayushmaanbhavah was never said to a female lest the blessing turns into a curse. The life of a widow in pre-20th century era (maybe even now in rural parts of India) can be summarized as:
Step 1: A bald headed life spent in the temple room worshipping Lord Krishna till accused of seducing a younger member of the clan who probably had abused her multiple times.
Step 2: Sent away to the pilgrimage in Varanasi which also happened to be a big brothel.
No wonder Sati Pratha found takers and no wonder it got abolished when the social scenarios changed. (Although I have personally come across villages where a widow has a broken down hut on the periphery of the village. The trucks parked outside add to the darkness engulfing their lives for 20 bucks or so.)
Context set, I hereby argue that Karva Chauth is nothing but an extension of the same social stigma. Scaring females to go through a day without even water (of course, some modifications have been made to suit the upwardly mobile career woman but the deal is still more or less the same) to pray for the long life of her husband.
It has been carefully camouflaged as the portrayal of love and dedication but that portrayal does not stand by the acid test of fairness and equality we so claim to believe in.
What else to say...
Oh yes, the wife hasn’t eaten all day. Gotta go and follow the process. Disagreements in beliefs take the back seat when it comes to fairness in love. Being starved tilts the decision in her favor. More importantly, it significantly reduces temper threshold! :P
Tuesday, August 10, 2010
God and his HR!
Lets assume God does exist and quota of prayer approval per day looks like this
1000 Easy Prayers (not missing the bus)
100 Medium Prayers (getting the call for the job interview)
10 Hard Prayers (getting the job!)
1 Impossible Prayer (a wife that doesn’t nag!)
Believers get the easy ones (retention cost).
Atheists get the miracle (conversion cost).
After all, God does love a following!
You decide!
Next time you are getting late to work, if you must must pray, ask for a hike :)
~this atheist is closer to the miracle :)
1000 Easy Prayers (not missing the bus)
100 Medium Prayers (getting the call for the job interview)
10 Hard Prayers (getting the job!)
1 Impossible Prayer (a wife that doesn’t nag!)
Believers get the easy ones (retention cost).
Atheists get the miracle (conversion cost).
After all, God does love a following!
You decide!
Next time you are getting late to work, if you must must pray, ask for a hike :)
~this atheist is closer to the miracle :)
Sunday, June 27, 2010
Random Thoughts 2
Kalyug Kyun?
Because we do so many things exactly the way they shouldnt be done?
Office or home, the seniors/parents rather than reprimanding the insane ones, asking the saner and obedient ones to 'understand' and 'ignore' as they are intelligent enough to be able to do so.
Result 1: 20% people doing 80% of work!
Result 2: Life being unfair to especially these 20%.
Assuming a hit ratio of smartness as 20%, offices are still safer but for nuclear families with one child or two, the numbers just dont add up!
Because we do so many things exactly the way they shouldnt be done?
Office or home, the seniors/parents rather than reprimanding the insane ones, asking the saner and obedient ones to 'understand' and 'ignore' as they are intelligent enough to be able to do so.
Result 1: 20% people doing 80% of work!
Result 2: Life being unfair to especially these 20%.
Assuming a hit ratio of smartness as 20%, offices are still safer but for nuclear families with one child or two, the numbers just dont add up!
The Curse of Patience
Mumbaikars boast of being the calmer of the lot when it comes to traffic. I figured I had also become one after a while as there seems to be a limit to impatience in limitless traffic jams.
But rather than looking at Delhi as road-rageous even after superb roads and Mumbai as calmer even after the bumpy as hell roads (my back is all fucked up!), can it be the other way round?
Will roads be better if Mumbai started giving some shit to especially the BMC? Sadistic/perverse it might be, but can some nasty road rage cases create enough political momentum for smoother roads?
Note: its not about widening, its about not letting a 1m dia pothole cause a 10km jam.
Monday, June 14, 2010
Random Thoughts
FINDING PROXIES
Grenade on the right, gunfire from the left and voila, the sniper shot did me in.
I look at the killcam (shows how you were done for) and curse at the leisure with which the guy aimed and pulled the trigger.
Lesson: Don’t drink and drive.
A multi-player game score is a good proxy for what your behavior can be on the road. After all, in both cases, a split second is what matters. Rather, in the game you are at least monitoring your performance and trying to improve it.
On the road, you don’t respawn!
TWO MONTHS
And you have settled in the new house... and you are again missing your hometown.
And you have inducted yourself into the new job... and are still workless.
And you have met friends and relatives you hadn’t for long... thrice.
And you have the new connections for the phones, for the laptops and for the loo (ToI).
Two months… and the sounds again a monotone.
Grenade on the right, gunfire from the left and voila, the sniper shot did me in.
I look at the killcam (shows how you were done for) and curse at the leisure with which the guy aimed and pulled the trigger.
Lesson: Don’t drink and drive.
A multi-player game score is a good proxy for what your behavior can be on the road. After all, in both cases, a split second is what matters. Rather, in the game you are at least monitoring your performance and trying to improve it.
On the road, you don’t respawn!
TWO MONTHS
And you have settled in the new house... and you are again missing your hometown.
And you have inducted yourself into the new job... and are still workless.
And you have met friends and relatives you hadn’t for long... thrice.
And you have the new connections for the phones, for the laptops and for the loo (ToI).
Two months… and the sounds again a monotone.
Thursday, March 11, 2010
LIFE – A BITCH THAT HATES DOGMATISM
Falsely believing myself to be rational individual (ironically enough, I also know I am not), I have always used the “cause and effect” logic to explain things to myself and to a number of other people who are mostly not willing to listen!
One of them is “Not To Be Scared” as it can only make things worse. Be it the JEE or CAT aspirants who ruin their chances of getting through by panicking at the last moment thinking “what if I don’t get though?” or be it those in romantic relationships whose fear of messing the relationship (dumpophobia) leads them into getting dumped as they became too possessive for their lovers to handle.
What I have come to understand is that this phenomenon transcends logic and ventures far into something subconscious or luck or whichever might be the right way to define it. Somehow we end up getting precisely the things we did not want even when we see no logical connection on how we ended up getting them.
I will explain this with a few examples, all not mine but observed and heard while discussing the same:
1. Desire/Fear: I do not want to work in South India
Preventive Action: I ran away from Infosys in Hyderabad in two months flat.
Irony: Working for 15 months in Chennai while media discussions about Telengana mention it being more a part of North India than South!
How I got there: Delhi to Kolkata (MBA) to Mumbai (Job) to Chennai (Transfer)
Logical Connection: None that I can see!
2. Desire/Fear: I do not want my son to marry someone from UP. Also, I do not want my son to marry outside our caste (especially not non-veg eating communities)
Irony: My son married a Kayastha from UP.
Logical Connection: When has love ever been logical? :P
3. Desire/Fear: I will never marry a Scorpio. I will never marry a Tam Brahm.
Irony: Happily Married to a Scorpio Tam Brahm
Logical Connection: Again, when has love ever been logical? :P
4. Desire/Fear: Will never work in XYZ company
Irony: Moving to the same
How I got there: Got a worse job + location combo that the XYZ seems like a saner choice right now.
Logical Connection: Nil
I shall stop at 4 for now.
Conclusion: Life’s a bitch that hates dogmatism!
So, be open to whatever shit is thrown at you.
Smile! It could have been worse! It can get worse! It WILL get worse if you keep on fretting about it!
P.S. – Dogmatism might not be the exact word but I loved the sound of it while calling life a bitch J
Monday, March 8, 2010
Differentiate to Integrate
Lets try a mathematical approach to Unity
We were all doled out the “Unity in Diversity” crap when in school. Okay, on a personal level we might be caste/region/religion-agnostic but on the whole we all tend to take the “proud of being a XYZ” a bit too far (come on, Jats are awesome, aren’t they :D).
Now on top of all the Marathi-manoos, telengana, hindu-muslim, gujjar-meena disputes, we will have to deal with the Men-Women debate too. Like we men were ever winning anyways!
A difficult, rather impossible, solution to the bloody crisis can be:
1. RESERVATION FOR ALL! (Differentiate)
Split the damn thing as much as you can. Base it on sex, religion, region and economic status (even “intellectuals” will toe the line then). Add more if conditions if you wish! The more the merrier (remember the X approaching 0 :D)
For e.g., 2% reservation for a Hindu Male Brahmin from UP with annual family income of less than INR 20,000.
The more diverse a background the parents come from, the more reservation the kids get.
For e.g., a Hindu Male from Karnataka (1.5%) married a Hindu female from Bengal (2.2%). The male kid gets in total ~3.7% reservation. So after a family has maximized the Hindu option, they will start marrying into Muslims and so on and so forth.
100 years down the lane, those who care about reservation will get the best reservation for their kids but will be too mixed up to create a fundamentalist danger. And those who don’t care about all this, they will mix nevertheless.
Monday, January 11, 2010
Will I hate Me?
If I were to write a story about 5 completely different strangers meeting up on a train arguing about anything under the sun and thereby mapping out their personalities, I could very well do the same by writing about myself at the different stages of life I have been through these 27 odd years of my life. I can blame the society and its tangled web or I can blame myself for just going with the flow but the truth remains that I have changed. I am not the immensely naïve schoolboy or the insanely reckless college student anymore. What baffles me is that I curse the parents of the 17 year olds who zoom past on their bikes when I myself started smashing up my dad’s scooter at 12!
We change and we get used to our changed selves, so much so that we ridicule our past personas. Nothing wrong with that and in fact, this being the human behavior proves all those fundas that we should do what our hearts tells us lest we regret it while on our deathbeds wrong. We by that time would have changed so much so as to accept our “present” selves to die peacefully thinking “who doesn’t have regrets” or “I did ok” with regrets if any pertaining to what more we wanted to do. It’s human nature to move on...
Having said that, there is one thing I feel is much more important: What do we want to turn into?
If we accept that we will have no or little regrets at the end of the day, does it mean we should just let things be and flow with the flow or do whatever we want to? No, the decision to make here is whether we want to turn into someone whom our present self will hate or not. After all, your future hating your present means your present will hate your future. The feeling is mutual to say the least. The reckless biker who lived for today would definitely hate the risk-averse driver who always wears a seatbelt. And this risk-averse driver will definitely hate the professional who works 6 days a week and doesn’t have enough time for his family.
The older we get, the more trapped we become. It hardly is that our nature becomes rigid; it’s just that our constraints forbid us the flexibility to undo. And then we get used to it all...
Step ahead with caution!
P.S. - This is written for someone and by someone who doesn’t generally regrets his decisions and sulk at “what could have been”. For the full of regret suckers, nothing can ever be done. And yet again, they are used to it :)
We change and we get used to our changed selves, so much so that we ridicule our past personas. Nothing wrong with that and in fact, this being the human behavior proves all those fundas that we should do what our hearts tells us lest we regret it while on our deathbeds wrong. We by that time would have changed so much so as to accept our “present” selves to die peacefully thinking “who doesn’t have regrets” or “I did ok” with regrets if any pertaining to what more we wanted to do. It’s human nature to move on...
Having said that, there is one thing I feel is much more important: What do we want to turn into?
If we accept that we will have no or little regrets at the end of the day, does it mean we should just let things be and flow with the flow or do whatever we want to? No, the decision to make here is whether we want to turn into someone whom our present self will hate or not. After all, your future hating your present means your present will hate your future. The feeling is mutual to say the least. The reckless biker who lived for today would definitely hate the risk-averse driver who always wears a seatbelt. And this risk-averse driver will definitely hate the professional who works 6 days a week and doesn’t have enough time for his family.
The older we get, the more trapped we become. It hardly is that our nature becomes rigid; it’s just that our constraints forbid us the flexibility to undo. And then we get used to it all...
Step ahead with caution!
P.S. - This is written for someone and by someone who doesn’t generally regrets his decisions and sulk at “what could have been”. For the full of regret suckers, nothing can ever be done. And yet again, they are used to it :)
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