Walking with You

Whirlpool of Thoughts

2009-07-26T02:39:00.001+05:30

It's been a whirlpool of thoughts. Not that I did warrant all these but I feel myself nerdy and lost. Just that when all the thoughts in my mind pointing to the ever increasing gap in my desire and reality. I'm at war with myself! I did piss some people because of this, but I should have kept my mouth shut. Today I realized that the best speech I ever regretted is the one I gave while I was angry. I should be more mature, think this is how you learn.

Everything that I did come across today, my brain wired that into the annoying part. Good that the day ended, and it's back to normal. :)

Sometimes you really need such days so that even ordinary days seemed to be great in contrast. So how were things with you lately? And when did you get mad with yourself?

Cheers.

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The Week That Was

2009-07-13T01:26:00.001+05:30

Did this ever happen to you?

You imagine things to go some way and then suddenly you find yourself standing at the cross road of something totally different. Then, there is a conscious alignment of your thoughts, just that the roads can't be re aligned but the direction can.

I for quite sometime in past couple of years lived like quarter miles a day vision. It's entirely fun though! Not only you don't know what to expect it helps it from doing away with the cribs too. At the end you are not sure what you want to be! And again start the next quarter mile journey with freshness. Oh! The tires need to be changed and the gas needs to be filled! That's ok for a journey.

The week had been a mixture of event. Had a great time with mom, but she kept of pushing her agenda that I should settle down and how it will help me in my future. Think every mom has a thing for their kids, and can't accept that kids too grow and may be at times out grow their thinking. But, I guess that's the norm. No complains. Well, back in work my manager gave me an hour lecture about how ones performance is not related to ones promotion in the company. Let's see what all I need to hear! Friends are doing good, did meet with lot of them this week and had a talk with some of them. I really miss my messy hostel life!

Well, hope the next week turns out to be interesting apart from the mundane stuffs. Planning to join Salsa classes but not sure if they accept without partners! Let's see.

Happy week folks, btw, I did see that this blog is also visited by folks from western India apart from Mumbai. Shall I presume their silence to be the comments of things gone by? Just a flickering thought.

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Finally I'm Hooked

2009-07-01T01:43:00.001+05:30

Been there Done that would suitable fit me if I were to re orient the clock back at least 7 years.

Did try my hand into getting past some servers and the obnoxious firewalls of networks, moved a motor by hard coding the PCB using Linux shell. And the biggest of them finally executed the elevator program during the practical examination of my C Lab, by just asking the examiner what she expects as inputs and output. Well, the last one may be some 8 years back. Was quite a net savvy person, got a gmail account thanks to a friend at mountainview where google alpha tested it to only 1000 people. Screwed my machine so many times as the worm code got so wrong, even short circuited my mother board. But in every thing I did I enjoyed and the adrenaline rush of screwing things up was immense.

Enough of bragging huh!

And it took me so long to open a facebook account. Well, people must be thinking that I just landed from the bronze age. Ok! I admit I was considerable lazy (I wish I had a better excuse), but today I opened facebook account. Not that I was not aware of the facebook buzz. Just couldn't get into it. This again added twist, I registered to facebook some couple of weeks backs through my mobile thanks to the buzz about personal user name. Just that complete forgot the ID. Add to the wound people in my contact list are already added in it. So after long hours of unsuccessful (legal) way of finding I gave up hope and created a new profile. I wish my friends will eventually migrate into this page.

Not sure if this is something a person blogs about but the only significance I find if facebook were to be a country the population would be more than 200 million strong. Well, as rest of my day went, in the office was busy helping folks in migrating to a different floor. Back home had an hour long call with a lady trying to put across her view when things went so wrong. Will, share this sometime later when I get somewhat clear picture.

Mom and dad coming tomorrow have to attend one relatives wedding after that a friend's reception. The good news it's raining and the temperature is down.

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Jun 28 2009

2009-06-28T11:42:00.001+05:30

Did this ever hit you?

You want to write but just couldn't focus on any specifics. Will it be on the daily clutters, long lost girl, life lessons, new girls or pure cribs? Well, my thoughts are running empty for the moment.

Ummm..., it's more than a decade back when I was in my high schools I met this girl. Cute dimple face with buttoned nose. Man, she was one big chatter! Ask about something, she would promise you a trip to moon and back. I met here some days back quite unexpectedly after all these years and to my worst fear she has become a doctor! OMG!

:-) wish her all the very best and think her medicines are of more use then her generous suggestions. I'm having an head ache, need to call her up and try out which works better!

Lot of things to do even it's Sunday.

I am currently reading:

1. The Winners Stand Alone - Paulo Coelho
2. When Everything Changes Change Everything - Neale D Walsch
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MJ

2009-06-27T00:04:00.001+05:30

World's first Global Superstar. MJ we will ever be missed.

I like millions of my age, literally grew up listening to his music. What is so much astounding about MJ is he let do his style of music talking and became the first Black person to have his music video aired at MTV. 13 Grammy's and rest is history.

Today I woke up with the news and man I felt very sad. Trying to get what so ever information of this tragic event. There may be debates about the nature of debt he left behind thanks to the pink papers. But, somewhere at least a part of me is still singing Billey Jane.

MJ you will be so much missed, but you united the world with your style of music.

Watching "Gone too Soon" video from his album "Dangerous". You are truly a unifying factor.

Need to check in his album sales post these events. MJ RIP, from one of your unknown fan!

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Just another Day

2009-06-26T02:16:00.001+05:30

Subtle thoughts through out the day. Had a pretty ordinary day, something that often we pass as a regular day. No more of any space cracking stuffs.

Tried catching up with old connections, but trust me I miss the hyderabad birayani. Wish I had one! Anyways, somethings got moving at office and not much of a clarity elsewhere. Need to catch up with loads of friends, becoming a troglodyte! That's scary.

Let's see what comes tomorrow. Have a good time.

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WTF

2009-06-24T01:25:00.000+05:30

The most disappointing aspect that I find is when you get a small salary which even full fills most of your needs. It weeds out your aspiration, suffocates your spirit and ultimately throws up an aversion to change. It's pity for your 20 years of education, at least there you would have studied new subjects every year.

Some people are grossly parasitic. What I see people who shamelessly bargain tends to be lucky. And what a fool I'm to intellectually rationalize. It defeats my cognition for people who should have been more mature blindly following Pigeon Hole theory. They have made a socialism out of corporates. Just to be averse to change. Is there any respect! But who cares, huh!

On the other side, people are striving to make room for everyone. Think it's time for me to decide. Else I would end up eating my aspiration. That would be too much of a shame.

Need to go for a vacation to get out of the negative energy. Singapore and Java would suit my bill. Even I had a plan for Mount Everest Base Camp, but I have then to wait out the rains. Let's see.

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Process Process Process

2009-06-23T01:05:00.000+05:30

Another day passed by. Did some work and mostly wiped others mess, cause they would not bloody work. Now I understood, while I was a kid why so many of my class mate were so good at playing musical chair. Is it genetic, people hate leaving the chair and on a curious note you can even see the butt marks embossed in it. Such a waste!

Enough of all this! I pity those who are struggling to make things better for these sloths to have a status quo. I should introduce you with another novelty, that's "Process". My foot! It's necessary only for people with IQ 150 and above. I sometimes feel so retard.

Doing a Dale Carnegie course or listening to Porter's lecture doesn't change unless you have the fire inside. They have been living a life out of it like this. Gosh! Everything has red tape involved and most of them doesn't have the balls to raise a point. Who cares when you get a 7 figure salary and we are through with recession too. I must have a wind tunnel between my ears to comprehend this.

It's one of the biggest asset to grow old with experience, it takes lot to stand your ground rather than finding a lame excuse to move your A$$. When you grow old with experience please value and respect people and never behave with anyone just because you were once subjected to it.

Like Mahatma says " An eye for an eye makes everyone blind".
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JeevanSathi on Sunday

2009-06-22T01:33:00.000+05:30

It's the start of the week. I did make a point that every Monday beginning, I would try to be happy because I still have work to do. Not that it may change the world but it's always a great learning to change the things. :)

I had a very lazy weekend barring a movie, all I did was sleep. The good part is that it gave my system all the required rest. I'm feeling fresh and happy. Will go for swimming in the evening after work. Sometimes I wonder, I have been gradually moving in the direction where I like what I do even if it means working hard. Cause all of a sudden this feeling is creeping in me, that everything we do is for a purpose. Hopefully the purpose will be reflected in times to come.

O yes, I did change my caller tune and I'm loving it! Still have a laundry list of things to do. And one little secret, my mom has started unravelling the internet, and pounced on the matrimony sites (she compiled a list of them by now). I'm amazed to see her growth in technological understanding. Had guided her how to take print screen of a picture and send it to me via gtalk to my blackberry. Man! She was happy the moment she heard that the snap has reached me. The kind of thrill you may have felt when the pea seed in the jar turned to a plant.

I was more interested in her learning curve than the picture she shared, at least for the moment.

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Movie at last

2009-06-21T02:13:00.000+05:30

It took nearly 3 months to watched a decent movie. Last time it was during my visit to Mumbai with my good friends catching up. I like the spontaneity they have. Man! There were already enough fluid in the system, and at 3 in the afternoon people planned for a movie. Did work out though!

Today watched X Men in Kolkata. There had been a fight between film producers and multiplex owners over revenue sharing for quite sometime in India. So not so good deal was available until last week, when the strikes were called off. One thing that stuck me straight in the face is the amazingly poor service in multiplex. I went at South City to watch the movie, ordered a regular cheese popcorn and requested them to serve me at the seat. It took nearly 30 mins along with my screaming to get their a$$ moving. During intermission there were at least 15 people selling different stuffs, couple of them approached us with ice cream and coffee. Even if you tend to be courteous they keep on nagging. Think the multiplex owner is trying to rob us for their loss of revenue during summers.

Man! The prices have jacked up also. I always prefer cheese popcorn while watching a movie and trust me it is on a non sharing basis. So there had been times when I went to watch movies with friends because to full fill the urge of having both. Think if this is the scene, I better buy a pop corn machine in my house. My home theatre would be a decent replacement for the nagging and the good part is we can have fluids too! To much of sin! :)

Just a fact, last month only 5 of us watched a movie in a multiplex. The hall was empty. Had a private screening feeling, yet the nag was there!

Hope things improve, and please somebody tell them to complete the total movie watching experience they are killing the basic need to have a good time out!

Too much of bling! Gold is again a good bet for many but I agree with Warren it's most over hyped option.

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Saturday

2009-06-20T17:05:00.000+05:30

It's been a decent day, considering the week that just passed. To start off with I was down with fever, then had to some hectic work to do at office, thanks to a functional assessment for a prospect. This incidentally put lot of stress into my body and most of the week my body was aching. Missed swimming entire week, so felt like a zombie.

On the downside one of my friend met with an accident of his car! But he is lucky to escape unhurt. Poor guy, the car rammed into a cow.

Well, had laid back most of the day, enjoying music and reading books. Outside the temperature is very hot and humid. Thanks to my bro for making me comfortable at 24`c.

Now may be going out, I had my eyes at a croc flip flop, need to check the budget.

See ya!

-

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Through the Prism of our thoughts

2009-06-15T02:14:00.000+05:30

Decisions becomes difficult when I try to see through them.

There has been a gradual comfort in my life thanks largely to my parents. Most of the people I see around would be content with this. And this is what is troubling me.

I do have more than couple of houses to stay in, have a car and have a decent job to take care of my finances and my "Incredible India" travels every quarter. I have great friends to catch up with and a near decent life.

This is exactly what is troubling me. I am gradually getting into a comfort zone. Which brings me to the unattainable question, am I missing the purpose? Am I being cocoon-ed in a Matrix?

When you leave one thing for something you are in a cusp. In there lies the zone of contemplation. Typical what-if-scenarious. Today when I see myself and my life in general I gradually feel I am moving away from the very fire that keeps burning. I have lost touch with so many things but surely I wrap my pretensions and the power of gab glides me through. Whom am I fooling? It's always the hand that gets burned which holds on to a burning rod. The trick is not to pass but to cast the rod into something.

Still I am searching a ready made dose of comfort. When I start something I expect to inherit my current happiness. Surely that would be like the cinderella story everyone grows up with, just that there is no more prince charming!

Well, I have stayed alone for some part of my life and that gave me a very good insight. I love myself a lot. It may not be a sign of selfishness, but surely this create a distraction. I hail from a part of the country that strongly believes (at least till yesterday) on socialism and communist principle. I have seen people all around me living in a minimalistic approach (may be perils of over three decades of minimalistic thinking). The other day I was driving and under the scotching heat of 42`c I see an bicycle riding in the middle of the road. I get my pane down and request the guy to ride on one side rather than slowing the traffic. You know what answer I got - "I am poor that's why you are telling me". Man, what does this say. I just have a word with a person twice my age riding in the middle of the roads and this is what the response!

I find a stark haves and haves not mentality. I dwell on these facets, then I realize this can happen when anyone has lost hope and belief in oneself. Every single human being wants to be important, that's hard coded in our primitive cerebral. It didn't change since the first homo sapeins to the 21st century humans. The size of brian remained same even after 10,000 years of evolution, what changed is the depth of the thoughts.

And in these very thoughts I try to see change. A decision to bring change, something to live for and may be to die with. I am blessed with the goodness of my near and dear ones. Still I want to break free, still I want to live a purpose. Just that I don't know what it is!

May be in some point of your life you will face these questions. May be your thoughts will give you a better measured response and may be if your decision works out good the by the theory of natural selection you will help us as a species evolve in a greater way.

Till that time, through the Prism of our thoughts I try to see a change!

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Started Tweeting once again

2009-06-08T02:21:00.000+05:30

This got to be eventful, I have started tweeting once again. And this is kind off very attaching this time. Got tweetberry in my phone and viola...

Very happy. Though I must admit I need to get my self organized to keep away the noise.

Folks at RIM you guys deserve a nobel prize. You got me addicted.

Have a happy week. Oh! Checkout on the right side of the page to follow my tweets.

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Sent from BlackBerry® on Airtel

Samiran Ghosh wants to keep up with you on Twitter

2009-06-06T14:50:00.001+05:30

Samiran Ghosh wants to keep up with you on Twitter

To find out more about Twitter visit http://twitter.com/i/c68ff71d746c390b18f2fb42ce568b2ad9d57292

Thanks,
— The Twitter Team

About Twitter

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Morning Rantings

2009-06-06T11:43:00.000+05:30

Yesterday night I did an overhauling of my site. The only problem I did face is the Blogs I frequent list, I have to add some other blog links too. As I use rss aggregator to read them never realized it would look so big.

Anyways, just wake up and the weather is hot and humid. Man! It took an effort to get my butt up from bed.

Well one help I may require, I couldn't locate the subscribe email link for the blog updates. Any help coming?

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Sent from BlackBerry® on Airtel

In Equal Relationship

2009-06-05T15:45:00.002+05:30

"It is tempting to fall in the trap of being critical of people who are better than you but the best way to resolve inequalities is to look at what the other person is clearly superior in and learn from it. If you then add it to your existing skills, then at some point, you will supersede the person in question.

The same inequality exists in friends and man-woman relationships. Here it gets a bit more complicated because the normal misunderstanding is that friendships and relationships are based on equality, but they are not.

How many times does one observe the stark inequality between two friends or between man-woman relationships? How do these work then?

Unequal relationships can only work when there is a compensatory benefit from one side. E.g Assume Rakesh and Prakash are friends. Rakesh is rich, Prakash is middle class. Rakesh always wines and dines Prakash in fancy places, the kind he is used to. Prakash though is more intelligent and a source of knowledge for Rakesh. He is also loyal to him even though he can be objectively critical of Rakesh. Also, Prakash makes sure that periodically he takes Rakesh out to cheaper but eclectic places with clean food which is a really different experience for Rakesh.

Krish and Nishi are married. Krish is good looking and intelligent, Nishi is a bit above average in looks and intelligence but not equal to Krish. In the beginning years of the marriage, everything is hunky dory because Nishi adulates Krish and is an avid learner. Krish enjoys being a mentor and watches her bloom. As she becomes better, she gets more respect all around and suddenly starts thinking that she is equal to Krish. She starts arguing and fighting with him which not only hurts the relationship but also her own growth.

Over a period of time, one gets used to the inequality and even the person on the wrong side of the equation starts expecting more. This lack of awareness causes trouble.

Unequal relationships work as long the equation is clear on both sides. Suppose one is a 7 and the other a 5 and they know it, its OK. The moment the 5 starts thinking that they are a 7 or the 7 starts thinking like they are a 9, there are issues. If the 7 is a benevolent 7 and the 5 treats the 7 with respect and tries to become a 7, it's a great equation.

On a controversial closing note, women always are happier if the man is more intelligent, stronger and capable than them. This does not mean that a woman is less than a man, it only means that she may like a man who is lesser than her but instinctively she looks for a man who is superior to her."

-- You may not agree or partly agree. But we still strive for Equalities!

I Still Fail to Learn

2009-06-05T00:05:00.001+05:30

Some times I come across people who fail to learn. Oh come on!

We always learn right! The learning sinks in when we are pushed to the edge.

Till that time we try to rationalize our point of view with ethics, morality, religion, hard work and sometimes the teachings of kindergarten Moral science classes. When we fail to make a headway we look outward for an answer. Some get answers from outward even some create a rational expression of self containment. Rest try to look inward for a just explanation.

I'm baffled by this philosophy. Though I must admit I did took long time to learn lot of things. It took me even more time to accept certain things which I never thought of. These made me realize three important aspects:

1. Everyone should taste loosing cause may be the fear from oneself goes away and the cliche learning out of it is there.
2. Never to react but to respond. Try it once even forcefully it will surely change your world.
3. Silence is golden. In the initial phase it is very difficult to be silent but after sometime it works.

These are easier said that done. For once I'm trying to implement.

Peace
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Why Do we Blog?

2009-05-04T00:28:00.000+05:30

For sometime now I simply couldn't write, not that I don't want to but too many things are flying past me to keep a note. These are not stuffs that would make or break life, but pretty ordained stuffs.

I did find some instances of my last post getting unintended audience in a blog of my friend. I thought how remote we have become to vent our thoughts/feelings through such public forum. We seemed to have lost those days where in we could ask friend's patience to our emotional garbage. Never mind, couple of pegs of Cognac made me all happy.

This made me think, why do we blog in the first place! Is it:

1. To keep a note on things that happen around us?
2. To let through our success, failures, aspirations and achievements?
3. To save the dieing habit of maintaining diary that too at full public glare?
4. To put across views for the sake of it?
5. To make us evaluate/feel good about how we did connect the dots in time?
6. To connect?
7. Or is it to make a humble mark of our own existence?

There sure would be many more reasons but if you ponder why we actively nourish even the thought of putting across Blogs in full public glare you may end up finding a striking similarity with the Freud's notion of "Id". Hang on, I don't intend to give a lecture on constructs of personality traits. Just an thought though.

I have been a very shy person during my school days, I did have my fare share of friends. But I was never the type who will stand first in class (unless you are gifted with seeing the merit list inverted) nor will raise the hand when a question was thrown.

But as I did go to a boarding school (incidentally a reputed one considered by many) since I was 9 or 10 years old. I love people watching. You could actually learn a lot just by watching everyone around, just that you have to stop type casting them while you watch. Prejudice is such a killer while you want to learn your life lessons.

During all these years, all I have learned simply by people watching is insurmountable. That did made me tension averse most of the times, cause I didn't find anything worth the pain. It hardly matters in the long run. But what surely matters to me is how much I have measured myself! It's a crime to fall in your own eyes! Never let that happen.

Till that day, my ego don't hurts and I live to blog to find why I blog.

Once Socrates told, that the person who can give an answer to five why's at a go is God. Let's not try to find an answer to why these happened! Cause most likely you will get colored answers else you may not them at all.

Let's not ask why! Let's ask why not?

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Confession of a wild mind - II

2009-04-24T09:11:00.000+05:30

Too many folks are reading too much into the last post! It's just an experimental writing... People have started taking special interest on the girl whom I mentioned at the post.

It's all a figment of my imagination. Try to put yourself across in a similar explained situation. Nothing more! :)

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Confession of a Wild Mind

2009-04-24T02:26:00.000+05:30

I'm damn agitated. Or is it the signs of frustration that is finally creeping in me. Each and every moment I'm trying to keep away the agony of pessimism. But may be because of all these I have become some what self centered. I have moved away from feelings of happiness, pain and agony, I couldn't relate myself with anyone, though I still connect with everyone. It's so superficial. I couldn't open up in front of anyone and keep bottling up things with me. Everyone expect me to be there with them in times of need but no one ever asks me how I'm doing and what makes me happy.

May be all these are true and somewhat related to you too. I do believe "Things that doesn't kill me makes me stronger". I have made a full mockery of myself in front a girl, she mailed me that it's not possible to keep in touch sometime back, just that I didn't check the mail. Kept on calling and got a blank response just came to know about the mail. It's not that I was deep in love of something but I liked her and still couldn't understand why we can't be friends. But I didn't ask why, cause I don't want to know.

Please don't jump into any conclusion that my state of mind is dictating the flow of writing. Today I really got agitated seeing the KKR match at IPL, it must be more tough for the boys who are playing.

I should give myself some time, as I always do, when I get agitated I get into a shell and think. Think! What?

Somethings are always left unsaid. Can you count how many times I have used the word "I" in this post. Isn't the blog about "walking with You".

Contradiction is what makes life so funny! It should be "we" rather than "I". Think we have an agreement on this.

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Signs of Recession

2009-04-16T16:46:00.000+05:30

Photograph: Eddie Keogh/Reuters

Election 2009 - Free Symbols

2009-04-16T16:31:00.001+05:30

The first Phase of Election started today! On a curious note, I went through the Election Commission of India Portal to find out the total number of Registered and Recognized/Unrecognized Parties. The total tally of political parties stood around 1000, considering that as a nation India is 1.3 Billion. So if there is any scope of new political entities spawning in some recent future, these are the free Symbols available for them. I did have my creative thoughts/tag lines on some of them. J

(LIST OF FREE SYMBOLS)

1. Almirah – Good place to Stack the goods even if promises are not delivered

2. Balloon – It’s all the about the Gas

3. Banana – No Comments, don’t want the feminists up in arms against me

4. Basket – Too much for a market Economy

5. Bat – Good things happen by Night

6. Batsman – Reserved for the crickets only

7. Battery Torch – Small in size but sure to light

8. Black Board – As they say, Finally Back in Black

9. Bread – Size and dimensions anyone

10. Brief Case – It’s Heavy

11. Brush - Imagine

12. Cake – Without The Cherry

13. Camera – Light Action

14. Candles – I’m still young

15. Carrot – Wait for the stick

16. Ceiling Fan –

17. Coat – Reid & Taylor

18. Coconut - ??

19. Comb (In all States and Union Territories except in the State of Kerala)

20. Cot (In all States and Union Territories except in the State of Kerala) – Lie down

21. Cup & Saucer

22. Diesel Pump –

23. Dolli

24. Electric Pole – Shocked!

25. Fork

26. Frock

27. Frying Pan

28. Gas Cylinder

29. Gas Stove

30. Glass Tumbler

31. Harmonium

32. Hat

33. Ice Cream

34. Iron

35. Jug

36. Kettle

37. Kite

38. Lady Purse – All shine but no Value

39. Letter Box – Remembering History

40. Maize

41. Nagara (In all States and Union Territories except in the North Eastern States of

Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland and Tripura)

42. Pressure Cooker

43. Railway Engine – Since 1887

44. Ring – Is it the suffeRING

45. Road Roller

46. Saw (In all States and Union Territories except in the State of Kerala)

47. Scissors

48. Sewing Machine

49. Shuttle – One way ticket to the moon

50. Slate

51. Spoon – Feeding hope

52. Stool

53. Table

54. Table Lamp

55. Television

56. Tent

57. Violin

58. Walking Stick

59. Whistle

How it changed

2009-04-14T16:38:00.001+05:30

Here I am sitting in my office @ night… Thinking hard about life How it changed…..
from a maverick collage life to strict professional life…...

How tiny pocket money changed to huge monthly paychecks but then why it gives less happiness….
How a few local denim jeans changed to new branded wardrobe but then why there are less people to use them
How a single plate of samosa changed to a full Pizza or burger But then why there is less hunger…..

Here I am sitting in my office @ night… Thinking hard about life How it changed…..
How a bike always in reserve changed to bike always on but then why there are less places to go on……
How a small coffee shop changed to cafe coffee day but then why its feels like shop is far away…..
How a limited prepaid card changed to postpaid package but then why there are less messages & more calls……

Here I am sitting in my office @ night… Thinking hard about life How it changed…..
How a general class journey changed to Flight journey But then why there are less vacations for enjoyment….
How a old assembled desktop changed to new branded laptop but then why there is less time to put it on……….
How a small bunch of friends changed to office mate But then why we always feel lonely n miss those college frnz.….

Here I am sitting in my office @ night… Thinking hard about life How it changed….. How it changed……..

Games We Play

2009-04-05T13:32:00.001+05:30

We all play games, some games we play is for fun while most of the games we play is to win! Is it our primitive instinct? Leftover of a near million years of evolution!

All around the animal kingdom you will notice younger beings playfully doing things... without much of fuss . These games ultimately manifest the nature of the animal while they grow up, helping them either to fight of flight. Same with humans, we are taught to socialize during our infancy years and form bond with the environment. Yet, as we add in ages we tend to do just the opposite-well most of us. We don't give a hoot about the environment and people who are less fortunate, we try to create a wall of amnesia. Fortune, may not be a good thing to be divided but surely there is no fortune greater enough to help people.

Did you ever wonder why? Is it because we as a race are progressive change believers! We know only how to take but seldom measure act of repaying with colored lenses. Or is it, we as a race can only speak a language, which makes us so prone to lieing. Did you ever hear a dog, cat or a lion lie? If wisdom of our religions are to be believed then they have a open ticket to heaven.

Just a thought I wanted to share!

Another year added

2009-04-05T03:03:00.000+05:30

My Mom called me and became nostalgic about my birth - some quarter of a century ago, as she remembers I came to the planet. She vividly remembers everything, it was told that I was relatively healthy baby at birth. My family that point of time was best described as a middle class hindu undivided family, with a little stretching of imagination of the word "middle class".
I happen to be the eldest of my generation in my family of nearly 200 relatives. My father was not present at my birth, he went to a business visit some 500 kms away. The news of my birth was celebrated by my relatives and starting from the staffs at the hospital to the cleaners of janitor were given their share of sweets.
Something else was going on at that moment in my mother's mind. The room my mom shared with another lady was also expected to give birth. As fate would decide my mom and the lady started having the labor pain on the very same day. When I was born, that lady gave birth to a beautiful girl. My mom was concerned that if I would be swapped. The moment I cried for the first grasp of air in my lung, my mom saw me and noticed that I got my eyes big like her! Isn't it amazing that in a minute of birth out of comfort from my mother's womb the realities of the world started hitting me!
It's being long now, lot of things have changed. Something remains always with me, my mom's support and the golden chain that my grandpa gave me at birth. Though I occasionally disagree with lot of people. Today I want to make a resolution at least for this year I would be polite and nice to everyone and more with people who are rude! :) let's see if somethings can be changed.

My friends called me and wished me, though I don't expect anymore! It's always easier that way. My brother called me from dubai and he called me at midnight his time! Wondering what will happen if we differ the time zone by 12 hours. :)
The only issue is that I'm running temperature, hope things improve. Well, no much update of my swimming. The entire body is aching. Hope that means something.
To everyone who read me, thank you for being with me. It's always Walking With You! :)
Sent from BlackBerry® on Airtel

In the waters!

2009-04-03T01:19:00.000+05:30

There is a big news! I have finally pulled up all my energy to learn swimming. Isn't it little strange considering so many people already adept in it. What ever be the case I did find myself to be very happy.
Before contemplating to learn swimming our group of friends imagined that one day we will be ace life savers - the Baywatch types. Searching more of strings than the wreckages. :)
When I dived in to the pool, I could reach the ground so no fear of drowning-not that I'm hydrophobic. But I couldn't float. Such a disappointment, I must admit that I was little out of mind because of the euphoria and expected to learn swimming in an hour. I tried for first 10 mins all the techniques that I did manage to google and see in television, but most of them helped me to perform some amazing water sumersaults - some of them if captured should have given Mr. Bean a run for his money. Well as always the initial euphoria died down and I came to grips with reality.

My first task was to learn breathing out inside water. It was damn tough! Never ever did I thought how difficult it would be, wish I had gills. Anyways, tried doing that for an hour with my occasional water hopping! That's enough for day 1. I presume I am on target to learn swimming very fast! What say... First consolidating the basics. :) Baywatch calling... Watching the DVDs now.

Plug in your suggestions. I'll keep you posted about my progress.

On the other side: Mark to Market rule has been modified, need to check if the model is available tomorrow. G20 meeting held but still doubtful if everyone is in the same page. And all over the world share market rose, most of them broke their 100 days DMA. My portfolio jumped 5%, cutting the losses.

One of my old friend mailed me long time back, felt good. And my company's CEO made a visit to our location and shared his input, can't say more else it will mount to violation of insider trading rule. Just kidding! Have a good time and wish the confidence is back, at least to oneself.
Sent from BlackBerry® on Airtel

What a Blackout!

2009-03-28T12:56:00.000+05:30

My blackberry was in a mess, so couldn't blog for some days. Lot of things happened during these days, though not very significant but surely placing dots in life. :)

First my BB won't connect EDGE network. Did call up operators and call centre guys. Every time I got a text book solution. One day after calling 7 times in a day I got same old reply: "please switch off your cell and switch on!". Things were getting on my nerve, called up my relationship manager at Airtel, she did help me out with fixing up with a local airtel blackberry guy and he helped me with the concern. The good news I'm back on air. Funny thing is that, I then calls from the blackberry support asking about my concern. Typical case of right hand not knowing what left hand is doing.

In work front, started working on a research report about Banking industry in China. Felt good that I still get to do what I used to do during my MBA studies. Oh! With a slight difference it costs the client $30k.

Did start chat with a lady over the Intranet messenger, she seems sensible and nice. But everyone is like that I guess- no type casting intended though. Just the may be lost the endurance! Hope things improve.

H1B is supposed to be filed on 1st, finger crossed about the draw.

Rest is all peace, was little bit missing a girl... But life moves on!

-
Sent from BlackBerry® on Airtel

Marketing Basics

2009-03-20T15:57:00.000+05:30

Marketing Concepts made easy! J

1. You see a gorgeous girl at a party. You go up to
her and say: "I am very rich.
"Marry me!" - That's Direct Marketing"

2. You're at a party with a bunch of friends and see a
gorgeous girl. One of your friends goes up to her and
pointing at you says: "He's very rich.
"Marry him." -That's Advertising"

3. You see a gorgeous girl at a party. You go up to
her and get her telephone number. The next day, you
call and say: "Hi, I'm very rich.
"Marry me - That's Telemarketing"

4. You're at a party and see gorgeous girl. You get up
and straighten your tie, you
walk up to her and pour
her a drink, you open the door (of the car)for her,
pick up her bag after she drops it, offer her ride and
then say:"By the way, I'm rich. Will you
"Marry Me?" - That's Public Relations"

5. You're at a party and see gorgeous girl. She walks
up to you and says:"You are very rich!
"Can you marry ! me?" - That's Brand Recognition"

6. You see a gorgeous girl at a party. You go up to
her and say: "I am very rich. Marry me!" She gives you
a nice hard slap on your face. -
"That's Customer Feedback"

7. You see a gorgeous girl at a party. You go up to
her and say: "I am very rich. Marry me!" And she
introduces you to her husband. - J
"That's demand and supply gap"

8. You see a gorgeous girl at a
party. You go up to
her and before you say anything, another person come
and tell her: "I'm rich. Will you marry me?" and she
goes with him -
"That's competition eating into your market share"

9. You see a gorgeous girl at a party. You go up to
her and before you say: "I'm rich, Marry me!" your
wife arrives. -
"That's restriction for entering new markets"

LIFE without a Girl Friend is cool

2009-03-17T16:27:00.000+05:30

Came across a Forward mail while busy fixing things at work! Surely had a good laugh! J

LIFE without a Girl Friend is cool

1. You can stare at any Girl....

2. You don't have to spend money on her

3. You won't get boring result in ur board papers

4. No girlfriend, no emotional blackmailing.

5. If u don't have a girlfriend, she can't dump u.

6. Having a girlfriend is hot, not having a girlfriend is automatically
cool, and every one loves to be a cool guy.

7. There can be more to life than just waiting for the bloody phone to ring.

8. You won't have to tolerate someone else defining, "right" and "wrong" for
u.

9. Girlfriend can get so possessive that you can't do anything according ur
wishes anymore.

10. You can buy gifts for mom, dad, sis or grandpa instead of a girlfriend
and have a happier family life.

11. You won't have to waste paper writing love letters. No more endless
waiting for ur date to arrive at some weird shop place.

12. You can have more friends, as u will have more time for them.

13. You wont have to see boring love stories instead of sports.

14. You wont have to tell lie to anybody and, therefore, u'll sin less.

15. You can have good night's sleep-no need to dream about her.

16. You wont have to fight over having a 'special' friend with ur folks.

17. No nonstop nonsense.

18. You wont have drown in the pool of her tears.

19. No tension.

20. You can be "urself"

21. You wont have to hide your telephone bills.....

Excerpts: Ben Bernanke's Greatest Challenge (CBC)

2009-03-17T15:10:00.000+05:30

Ben Bernanke's Greatest Challenge

Fed Chairman Discusses Recession, Financial Rescues And Recovery In Wide-Ranging 60 Minutes Interview

(CBS) Aside from the president he's the most powerful man working to save the economy, but you have never seen an interview with Ben Bernanke.

Bernanke is the chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, better known as the Fed. The words of any Fed chairman cause fortunes to rise and fall and so, by tradition, chairmen of the Fed do not do interviews - that is until now.

The Federal Reserve controls the economy by setting interest rates. But after the crash of 2008, Bernanke invoked emergency powers, and with unprecedented aggressiveness has thrown a trillion dollars at the crisis.

Ben Bernanke may be the most important Fed chairman in history. The question is, can he help lead America out of this deep recession and when?

"Mr. Chairman, I'm gonna start with a question that everyone wants me to ask: when does this end?" 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley asked Bernanke.

"It depends a lot on the financial system," he replied. "The lesson of history is that you do not get a sustained economic recovery as long as the financial system is in crisis. We've seen some progress in the financial markets, absolutely. But until we get that stabilized and working normally, we're not gonna see recovery. But we do have a plan. We're working on it. And I do think that we will get it stabilized, and we'll see the recession coming to an end probably this year. We'll see recovery beginning next year. And it will pick up steam over time."

Asked if he thinks the recession is going to end this year, Bernanke said, "In the sense that this decline will begin to moderate and we'll begin to see leveling off. We won't be back to full employment. But we will see, I hope, the end of these declines that have been so strong in a last couple of quarters."

"But you wouldn't say at this point that we're out of the woods?" Pelley asked.

"No," Bernanke replied. "I think the key issue is the banking system and the financial system."

"Unemployment, as we sit here, is about 8.1 percent. I wonder, do you expect double digit unemployment?" Pelley asked.

"Well, it's hard to forecast exactly where we're going. Unemployment is rising. Job losses are still very severe. And no doubt, the unemployment rate's gonna go higher than it is. But I think, again, that if we do succeed in stabilizing the financial system, that we'll begin to see a slower pace of decline, and eventually, a stabilization that will set the basis for a recovery," Bernanke said.

"You seem to be saying that we're not heading into a new American Depression?" Pelley asked.

"I think we've averted that risk. I think we've gotten past that and now the problem is to get the thing working properly again," the chairman said.

Bernanke, age 55, has been chairman of the Federal Reserve Board since 2006. He had previously served as a Fed governor, then chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisers, before being appointed as Fed chairman by President George W. Bush.

For this interview, he opened up the Fed headquarters, rarely seen by the public. It's a monumental building along the National Mall. Construction started in 1935 in the depths of the Great Depression.

"You know Mr. Chairman I think the Federal Reserve, for most people, is a mystery," Pelley remarked.

"Well, it's an institution that people don't hear so much about but it's a very important one. It manages monetary policy for the country. It's one of the main tools we have for stabilizing our economy and keeping prices stable," Bernanke said.

Asked when it was founded, Bernanke told Pelley, "The Fed was created by Congress in 1913. And its original purpose was to deal with financial panics, which is what we're doing right now."

Bernanke's crisis started in 2007 with the mortgage meltdown; lenders began to fail. Bernanke cut interest rates repeatedly. In 2008, the Fed stopped the collapse of Bear Stearns by arranging a sale to another firm.

But then came the end of Wall Street as we knew it. Mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were seized by the government. On Sept. 14, Merrill Lynch was sold in distress. The next day, the 158-year-old investment bank Lehman Brothers failed

"You didn't rescue Lehman Brothers. It set off a worldwide panic when it went bankrupt. And I wonder, looking back, whether you think that was a mistake," Pelley asked.

"There were many people who said, 'Let 'em fail.' You know, 'It's not a problem. The markets will take care of it.' And I think I knew better than that. And Lehman proved that you cannot let a large internationally active firm fail in the middle of a financial crisis. Now was it a mistake? It wasn't a mistake for the following reason: we didn't have the option, we didn't have the tools. All the Federal Reserve can do is make loans against collateral," Bernanke replied.

(CBS) The day after Lehman, Bernanke's Fed did something astounding: it loaned $85 billion to a company that wasn't a bank at all - American International Group (AIG), the global insurance giant that was also involved in backing risky mortgage investments. Bernanke says, unlike Lehman, the Fed could make the loans based on good collateral in AIG's portfolio.

"There have now been four rescues of AIG, $160 billion. Why is that necessary?" Pelley asked.

"Let me just first say that of all the events and all of the things we've done in the last 18 months, the single one that makes me the angriest, that gives me the most angst, is the intervention with AIG. Here was a company that made all kinds of unconscionable bets. Then, when those bets went wrong, we had a situation where the failure of that company would have brought down the financial system," Bernanke said.

"You say it makes you angry?" Pelley asked.

"It makes me angry. I slammed the phone more than a few times on discussing AIG. I understand why the American people are angry. It's absolutely unfair that taxpayer dollars are going to prop up a company that made these terrible bets, that was operating out of the sight of regulators, but which we have no choice but the stabilize, or else risk enormous impact, not just in the financial system, but on the whole U.S. economy," Bernanke explained.

By September, Bernanke and then-Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson went to Capitol Hill to urge a massive bailout of the banking system, which lawmakers soon passed.

Asked how close of a call it was, Bernanke said, "It was very close. It was very close. The Congress passed the bill that gave Treasury the right to put capital into the banks in the first week of October. And it was in the second week of October that the crisis reached its peak. If we had not had those powers, we could have had a much, much worse outcome. So it was a very dangerous situation."

"Was anyone on Capitol Hill skeptical? Did they push back at all, you know, 'Mr. Chairman, it's probably not quite that bad'?" Pelley asked.

"Well, I do remember one conversation I had where I was addressing a caucus of congressmen. And a congressman said to me, 'Mr. Chairman, you know, I'm talking to bankers in my town. I'm talking to shopkeepers in my town. And they say things are normal. Nothing's going on. We don't see any problem.' And I turned to him and I said, 'You will,'" Bernanke recalled.

That second week of October, the Dow fell 18 percent - its worst week in history. At that point, $8 trillion had been lost.

In the crisis, Bernanke had freedom to act immediately - he doesn't need permission from Congress or the president. While they debated on Capitol Hill, Bernanke cut interest rates nearly to zero; then he used Depression-era emergency powers to launch a dozen rescue programs of his own. There was support for money market funds, mortgages, short term lending to small business, and support for auto loans, student loans and small business loans - commitments of a trillion dollars, doubling the size of the Fed's balance sheet.

Asked if it's tax money the Fed is spending, Bernanke said, "It's not tax money. The banks have accounts with the Fed, much the same way that you have an account in a commercial bank. So, to lend to a bank, we simply use the computer to mark up the size of the account that they have with the Fed. It's much more akin to printing money than it is to borrowing."

"You've been printing money?" Pelley asked.

"Well, effectively," Bernanke said. "And we need to do that, because our economy is very weak and inflation is very low. When the economy begins to recover, that will be the time that we need to unwind those programs, raise interest rates, reduce the money supply, and make sure that we have a recovery that does not involve inflation."

(CBS) He's not kidding about printing money: the Fed issues U.S. currency, which is why it says "Federal Reserve Note" on all the bills in your wallet. The Treasury Department's Bureau of Engraving and Printing is just a few blocks from Bernanke's office. It prints the money at the Fed's request.

The Fed's mandate from Congress is to put enough money i the system for maximum employment, but not so much that it sets off inflation.

The Fed actually pays for itself and returns billions in profits to the Treasury.

In a sense, Bernanke has been preparing for this emergency his whole professional life. He got a PhD in economics from MIT. He chaired the economics department at Princeton, where his specialty was the Great Depression.

He's among many economists who now believe it was the Federal Reserve itself that helped turn a recession in 1929 into a global calamity.

"They made two mistakes, basically. One was they let the money supply contract very sharply. Prices fell. Deflation. So monetary policy was, in fact, very contractionary. Very tight during that period. And then the second mistake they made was they let the banks fail. They didn't make any strong effort to prevent the failure of thousands of banks. And that failure had terrible effects on credit and on the ability of the economy to right itself," Bernanke explained.

Bernanke told 60 Minutes we were close to a second Depression and he is determined to not let the major banks fail on his watch.

"One of the things that I think many people watching this interview don't understand, is why there are multiple bailouts, four bailouts of AIG, three bailouts of Citigroup. There is a sense that this is a band-aid approach, that we're not getting to the root of the problem," Pelley remarked.

"Well, part of the issue is that, you know, the economy has gotten a good bit worse. You know, the first part of the crisis was subprime and other assets that were toxic. Now, we're in a second phase, which is that the economy is very weak," he said. "So the economy's weakness has meant that some of the initial attempts to stabilize the banks haven't been enough, and we've had to do more."

"You know, Mr. Chairman, there are so many people outside this building, across this country, who say, 'To hell with them. They made bad bets. The wages of failure on Wall Street should be failure,'" Pelley remarked.

"Let me give you an analogy, if I might," Bernanke said. "If you have a neighbor, who smokes in bed. And he's a risk to everybody. If suppose he sets fire to his house, and you might say to yourself, you know, 'I'm not gonna call the fire department. Let his house burn down. It's fine with me.' But then, of course, but what if your house is made of wood? And it's right next door to his house? What if the whole town is made of wood? Well, I think we'd all agree that the right thing to do is put out that fire first, and then say, 'What punishment is appropriate? How should we change the fire code? What needs to be done to make sure this doesn't happen in the future? How can we fire proof our houses?' That's where we are now. We have a fire going on."

Bernanke told Pelley that "fire" is still burning.

Asked if all the big banks the Fed regulates are solvent, Bernanke said, "I believe they are, yes. But we are doing a stress test right now, where we're looking at what the positions of the banks are under a tougher economic scenario than the one that we currently expect. And what we plan to do is to say how much capital would each bank need to be well capitalized. Not just solvent, but well capitalized, even in these more adverse scenarios."

"Are you committing in this interview, that you are not going to let any of these banks fail? That no matter what their balance sheet actually looks like, they are not gonna fail?" Pelley asked.

"They are not gonna fail," Bernanke said. "But what we can do, should it be necessary, is try to wind it down in a safe way."

In other words, Bernanke thinks government should stabilize failed financial companies and take them apart slowly. "So, for example, in the case of AIG, we've prevented a bankruptcy, because of the chaos that would create. But we're also demanding that AIG divest itself, sell off its subsidiaries, and use the proceeds to pay back the government," he said.

"What are the dangers now? What keeps you up at night?" Pelley asked.

"I think the biggest risk is that, you know, we don't have the political will. We don't have the commitment to solve this problem, and that we let it just continue. In which case, you know, we can't count on recovery," Bernanke said.

The Fed estimates the wealth of American families fell 18 percent in 2008, the worst since the Great Depression.

(CBS) Ben Bernanke is doing things with the Federal Reserve that have never been done before. It may be because he's not a creature of Washington or Wall Street.

He grew up, middle class, the smartest kid in a town now falling on hard times. He told Pelley, because the Fed is so powerful, it should be more open.

Bernanke meets with his six fellow governors of the Federal Reserve - all of them appointed by the president of the United States - at the Fed's headquarters. Bernanke also chairs the Federal Open Market Committee, which decides interest rates.

Those meetings, which take place inside the Fed’s boardroom in Washington, are secret. Asked why, Bernanke took Pelley inside the boardroom and explained, "If we held those things with a TV camera on us it would create lots of volatility and problems in the market. But I should say that, you know, we've come a long way. In 1994, when the Fed made a policy decision to change interest rates, wouldn't even announce that we made a change. But now, after every meeting, we put out a statement, say what we did, explain what we did, why we're doing it. And three weeks later, we put out minutes to describe everything that happened in the meeting. So we're becoming much more transparent."

"When I called and proposed this interview about a year ago, your representative laughed out loud. And said, 'The Fed chairman never does an interview.' Why are you doing this?" Pelley asked.

"Well, it's an extraordinary time. It's an extraordinary time. This is a chance for me, I think, to talk to America directly," Bernanke said.

It's also a chance for America to understand where he comes from.

Ben Shalom Bernanke grew up in one of the few Jewish families in Dillon, S.C., today a town of 6,000 people.

His grandfather, Jonas, immigrated from Eastern Europe, landed at Ellis Island, and came to Dillon to start a drug store.

"Our family came here in 1941. My grandfather, Jonas Bernanke bought this building, made it to the JB Drugs, after his initials," Bernanke told Pelley.

Later, his father and uncle took over the store which has since become a restaurant.

"We're sitting on this corner where your family's store was. And I see it's Main Street. People feel like guys like you are tuned into what happens on Wall Street and you forget places like this," Pelley remarked.

"I come from Main Street. That's my background," Bernanke said. "I've never been on Wall Street. And I care about Wall Street for one reason and one reason only because what happens on Wall Street matters to Main Street. And if we don't have stabilization in the financial markets, if we don't take the steps necessary to make sure that credit is flowing again, then my father couldn't get a loan to build his new store."

Bernanke and Pelley went to the old neighborhood the Bernankes left years ago. A recent owner couldn't quite make the mortgage, so the economy literally hit home.

"When you first heard that your childhood home had gone into foreclosure, what did you think?" Pelley asked.

"Well, I was sorry to hear it. But, you know, in a way, I wasn't surprised. Dillon has taken, you know, a pretty big hit in the economic downturn. Unemployment rate's about 14 percent. And there have been a good number of foreclosures and plant closings and those things I think about that," Bernanke said.

Numbers were always Bernanke's thing: he taught himself calculus and got an SAT score of 1590 out of 1600. A friend talked him into aiming high for college.

"I came home from school one day and there was a phone call for me. And I picked up the phone. They said, 'This is the Harvard Admissions Department. We'd like to let you know that you're accepted in the freshman class.' And I said, 'Come on, who is this really?' But my parents had their doubts about my leaving and going too far from home," Bernanke recalled.

"No! Wait a minute. Your parents weren't thrilled that you were going to Harvard?" Pelley asked.

"My mother was definitely against it. First of all, she said, you know, 'You don't have the clothes. You won't be able to dress properly for Harvard. And it's a long way from here. How you gonna come home on holidays and so on.' So, my parents ate into their savings to let me go, which I'm always grateful for."

(CBS) Bernanke helped pay for college working construction and working at "South of the Border" - the future chairman of the Fed wore a poncho and waited tables.

Asked what he learned about work, Bernanke said, "Work is hard, that in order to feed your family and to give your kids opportunities you, it's not an easy thing."

Back in the marble confines of the Federal Reserve, Bernanke told Pelley he understands that many Americans are afraid.

"I've been kicking around the country. I spoke to a woman in Ohio, who took her son out of college, because she got laid off. I spoke to a woman in Nevada, who has an advanced stage of cancer. And she was told by her county hospital that they couldn't treat her because a hole had been blown in the state budget. What do you say to those people?" Pelley asked.

"Well, I got into economics, because I wanted to make things better for the average person. When I see a job loss number, 650,000, like we saw last month, I know that's not just a number. That's 650,000 lives that have been disrupted. Families that have had to move or take children out of school. Houses that may be in danger of foreclosure. I know something about what people are going through," Bernanke said.

And that makes it all the more outrageous when he hears of financial firms handing out perks and bonuses after they've taken bailout money. "The era of this high living, this is over now. And that they need to be responsible and use the money constructively," he said.

"And you would say what to those bankers right now in this interview?" Pelley asked.

"I'd say that their job right now is to find a way to make loans to creditworthy borrowers, to get their banks back on the path of making good loans, safe loans, and to have a reasonable sense of humility based on, you know, what's happened in the last 18 months," he replied.

We asked Bernanke what it's been like at the office the last 18 months, with his staff working 80 hour weeks.

"I noticed when we were in your office. You have a couch in there. You [have] been sleeping on that couch?" Pelley asked.

"Once in a while," Bernanke said. "And sometimes, it goes through the weekend. Sometimes it goes overnight."

The Federal Reserve is the life blood of the banking system. Its 12 regional banks are clearing houses for commercial banks.

One of the vaults associated with the Reserve Bank is in New York. Robots carry cash in the vault that's as big as a football field and four stories high. Each pallet, loaded with $100 bills, is worth $64 million. The Fed has 22,000 employees. It clears your checks and your ATM withdrawals. And it provides economic forecasts.

But one of its most important responsibilities is regulating the nation's biggest banks, to be the watchdog.

"You're supposed to keep them out of trouble. So, how did all this happen?" Pelley asked.

"Well, a lot of mistakes got made. No question about it. But, you know, this was a much bigger thing than any single firm or any single individual," Bernanke replied. "Over the last dozen years or so, enormous amounts of savings have flowed into the United States, and some other industrial countries. That savings has come from China and East Asia. It's come from oil producers. And hundreds of billions of dollars, it has come into our financial system. And, you know, that would be great if we took that money and invested it wisely, and got a high return. But instead, our financial system didn't do a good job. We had a regulatory system that was like a sandcastle on the beach. When you had little small waves just lapping up against the sand castle, everything looked good. But when you had a big breaker come in, suddenly the system wasn't strong enough to deal with it."

(CBS) "Does the Federal Reserve bear any responsibility for missing what was happening to the banks, as it was happening?" Pelley asked.

"Well, like other regulators, we probably could have done more. We've already done a lot of - put a lot of effort into reviewing our practices. And reviewing the bank's practices. We are trying to strengthen our regulation at every point that we can. So, I don't want to deny that we certainly could have done a better job, and others could have done a better job," Bernanke conceded.

Now President Obama and the Congress have a fiscal stimulus plan of nearly $800 billion. There's that separate bailout for financial firms - at least $700 billion. And plans are developing for a way that would take on the bad debt of crippled institutions.

"There was a panic in 1907. So the Fed was created to prevent that from ever happening again. And then we got the Great Depression. And now we have this. How do we prevent this from occurring another time?" Pelley asked.

"Well, tougher regulation of large firms. It includes having a set of laws that allows us to wind down. A large, internationally active firm, without the adverse impacts on the markets that a disorderly bankruptcy would have. It includes possibly having a systemic regulator. A regulator that has some responsibility to look at the system as a whole," Bernanke said.

"Your response has been to do what the Fed didn't do in 1929, and that is pour money into the system. But there's an argument made today that that's not what the problem is. The problem isn't that there's too little money in the system. The problem is there's too much fear in the system. That with these companies being propped up by the government, no one on Wall Street can tell who's solvent and who's not. And therefore, business does not move," Pelley pointed out.

"Well, I absolutely agree that confidence is key," Bernanke said. "People don't know what's happening. And they're afraid. And they're not sure what, you know, whether or not the system is gonna recover. So, how do you get confidence, that's the question. And I think the way to get confidence is to show progress."

Asked if he's seeing any progress, Bernanke said, "I think all of our efforts, so far, have produced results. We're buying about $500 billion in mortgages, in package and securities by the G.S.E.s, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. And that seems to have brought down mortgage rates significantly. It allows people to refinance. To get out of high rate mortgages. We are seeing progress in the money market mutual funds, and in the business lending area. And I think as those green shoots begin to appear in different markets and as some confidence begins to come back that will begin the positive dynamic that brings our economy back."

"Do you see green shoots?" Pelley asked.

"I do. I do see green shoots. And not everywhere, but certainly in some of the markets that we've been functioning in. And we've seen some improvement in the banks, as well," Bernanke said.

Asked what the first signs of recovery will be, Bernanke told Pelley, "Well, I think that one sign would be that a large bank is successful in raising private equity. Right now, all the private money is sitting on the sidelines saying, 'We don't know what these banks are worth. We don't know that they're stable.' And they're not willing to put their money into the banks."

"If you had a message for the American People in this interview, what would it be?" Pelley asked.

"Scott, I'd say three things. I'd say, first of all, that the Federal Reserve is here, and is gonna do everything possible to support this recovery. The second thing I would say is that we have to understand, though, that recovery is not gonna happen until the financial markets and the banks are stabilized. And we do have a plan, we have a program for that. But it's gonna take some patience," Bernanke said.

"But the third and final thing I'd just like to say to the American People is that I have every confidence that this economy will recover, and recover in a strong and sustained way. The American people are among the most productive in the world. We have the best technologies. We have great universities. We have entrepreneurs. I just have every confidence that as we get through this crisis, that our economy will begin to grow again, and it will remain the most powerful and dynamic economy in the world."

Some good news has started to trickle in

2009-03-17T15:08:00.001+05:30

India back on FDI radar, beats recession blues

At a time when the world economy is facing the worst credit freeze in several decades, India attracted USD 2.7-billion FDI in January, up 58.8 per cent from a year ago, and remained a favourite destination for cross-border investments.

"January numbers are very good...it is an indication of the confidence that the rest of the world has in India," Secretary in the Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion Ajay Shankar said.

The foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows for the April-January period aggregated to USD 23.8 billion and is expected to cross the last year's target of USD 25 billion this fiscal.

Though the government had set a target of USD 35-billion FDI for 2008-09, it looked rather ambitious in the wake of the global downturn.

Up to September this fiscal, the monthly inflows were in excess of USD 2 billion. However, the following three months saw a sharp dip in the overseas investments.

The January figures bring a renewed hope that India is back on the radar of global investors.

CPI(M) Election Manifesto - 2009

2009-03-17T01:30:00.000+05:30

Thought to include an article I read about the manifesto of a communist party based out of India.
--------

By Surojit Gupta Surojit Gupta Mon Mar 16, 5:59 am ET

Reuters: Communist Party of India (Marxist) supporters hold their party flags during a public rally in Kolkata

NEW DELHI (Reuters) The Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI-M), Indias most influential hard-left party, called on Monday ahead of a general election for state control of the financial sector and restrictions on foreign investment to overcome an economic slowdown.

CPI-M held the balance of power for most of the tenure of the Congress Party-led government before withdrawing its support last year, and has often played a role in shaping coalition government policies.

In its manifesto for the April/May general election, released on Monday, the CPI(M) also proposed a complete halt to privatisation of profitable state firms, a ban on foreign investment in the retail sector, and guidelines to prevent entry of foreign firms into some of Indias domestic markets.

The main battle in the April 16-May 13 election will be between a coalition led by the left-of-centre Congress Party and an alliance led by the Hindu-nationalist Bharat Janata Party, traditionally more pro-business.

"The CPI(M) will work for the creating of a non-Congress, non-BJP government, which will strengthen democracy, ensure equitable economic development and social justice," the party said in the document.

After years of blocking economic reforms, the CPI(M) and smaller leftist parties withdrew their support for the government to protest against a civilian nuclear deal with the United States. The deal gives India access to nuclear fuel and technology on international markets.

The party has since said it wants to be part of a "Third Front" alternative of smaller parties to the main national alliances.

The CPI(M) said it wanted to review the nuclear deal with the United States to remove "harmful" clauses. It says the accord damages Indias ability to have independent security, making the country reliant on Washington.

The communists may struggle to retain the same number of seats in this election amid problems in some of its heartlands, such as West Bengal.

But it could still muster enough seats to hold the balance of power, political analysts say.

The manifesto had little impact on Indian markets, with traders saying that the CPI(M) does not have the same clout as in previous years. Indian 30-share BSE stock index was up 1.7 percent in late afternoon trade.

Its leaders believe an economic slowdown in India sparked by the global financial crisis could see a backlash against foreign firms and lead voters to support more regulation of the financial sector.

In the manifesto, the CPI(M) said it would also stop joint military exercises with the United States, a country of that it has traditionally been suspicious.

(Additional reporting by Krittivas Mukherjee)
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News I Read Today

2009-03-17T01:22:00.000+05:30

Today Fed Chair Bernanke says the risk for further troubles in the credit market as "exceptionally low" while at the Press Club Wednesday.

Where as AIG today disclosed names of conterparties who got some of the bail out money thanks to its (in)famous CDS trade, with Societe Generale getting almost $4.1 billion. Though the disclosure was forced by Congress, on the flip side AIG the largest insurer paid $163 million as extra bonus to executives for doing their job well. It doesn't matter even you are on life support you can surely enjoy the wine!

This is what is called self-imposed-market regulation. I'm getting Green.

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Devil is in details

2009-03-16T19:12:00.001+05:30

“The moment you leverage the tool for client then we can use it to optimize the client relation. Work in a co-sourcing model i.e. give and take model among different vendors. Identify the key persons who are involved, models view has to come from the current application team and the moment you do that you have a better feel of the architecture. This is what I’m assuming. Identify the start point, end point, how much bandwidth required – it’s basically planning the execution and driving the execution. That’s how I’m thinking right now. How do you think about the practical purposes? How we package the solution is important. How shall we come to know about all the application is important? Identify the “next to the vision” operation. Instead of starting from the scratch you are starting those applications that we are currently working. Going forward this will help identifying how the collaboration will work. This will come from the visionary level not from the team. When you are sharing this information for that engagement, they will have a good insight about what you are going to do. The only difference is level of understanding. We need to have an executive buy mind.”

This is how my day begun. By 15:30 I was confident that we are not taking in relation to the stock market but to grab a pie of business in this down-time. By now I have at least 5 different strategies for approaching this problem the only problem is the amount of confusion it is there in my head. Given the lack of confidence in the main street, imagine doing a BD chase with so much option/confusion. In the hindsight, it remembers me when I was sitting for my Programming Lab some 8 years back; I was to code a program in 8085 architecture. After executing successfully the code I was literally grilled by the interviewer in all “what if scenarios” – incidentally she didn’t like my logic and couldn’t comprehend the end objective can be met with difference in path.

If I have not confused you enough, let me get to the matter. In times of crisis of this nature can’t we do the simple things in a simple manner? Clarity of thought is important we should always keep a tab of the bigger picture before getting into too much of Glocalization. The simple rule of thumb would be let’s own what we do and lets be accountable. This will create confidence which will reflect in us and the main street.

Till that time comes I wish Amen!

Who will Rate this

2009-03-16T19:07:00.001+05:30

[This one I published some couple of months back in my company’s intranet, thought to upload it here]

We have chronic dissidence. Not with the world but with ourselves.

The current financial stress world over is again magnified with words like, biggest fall in recorded history, Dow loosing in a single day more than the GDP of India, World in recession, Re-living the ‘30s et al. These are the first things that glares when one open the newspaper in the morning. This news almost creates nausea as it was a forte of pink papers now migrated to the whites.

On a quite stroll of nearby market in Kolkata I’m surprised to see that the person selling vegetables sitting in street is still selling vegetables, the milkman still comes in the morning. What am I thinking! Am I expecting them to talk in terms of futures & options or will they sell Nasdaq futures tomorrow. Then why is it we market the stress of financial downturn as if it’s Armageddon.

Oh come on! I know it’s quite easy to comprehend that the market players should be part of the market not in speculation. Imagine our poor vegetable seller asking you to deposit money for price of cabbage that s/he will deliver month end and charged a differential rate on it. Will you buy the deal? What is the difference between a person gambling in Las Vegas and the broker doing a reverse swap on inflation-interest of an economy? The answer is the second person is wearing a tie.

We have invented too many products to satisfy our appetite. God must be wondering it’s safe to be in heaven rather than to see what amount of re-packaging is done in this world (that will in effect mean we have to wait some more time to have any other re-incarnation). To regulate it we have created agencies which publish the rating of those products judging by the “fundamentals”. The interesting fact is all the ratings are nothing but a mere advisory and the agencies are not in any ways responsible for their god-sent-gift of ranking product. To complete the circle most of the compliance/regulatory laws require following the rating and having risk-mitigation exposure on that. I wish I could advice on something like this and get away with a fat pay check and zero downside – true Nirvana.

Before we reach the Buddha in ourselves, we will persists to have the chronic dissidence about thinking of everything is counterbalanced force in things we create and marketing sediments & rocks as a potential ingredient of oil. Just that we need patience for 10 million years. May be oil will be AAA+ commodity then.

Dirty Drawing Anyone?

2009-03-16T19:00:00.000+05:30

Interesting forward mail that I received thought to share with you!

Just another Sunday

2009-03-16T00:55:00.000+05:30

Spent the entire day trying to organise myself... As we are having nation election round the corner and particularly being from a state where communists ruled for more than 3 decades it throws up some interesting debate. Excerpts of some heated debated thanks to the flurry of local news channel:

Mamata Banerjee speaking at the election campaign kick off: "The ruling government need to have land at any cost and will snatch it from poor, tell them to go to the moon like Rakesh Roshan"

My comment: Incidentally it should be the Rakesh Sharma rather than Rakesh Roshan famed father of a bollywood hero! :)

Congress leader (forgot the name): "Dr. Manmohan Singh deliberately slowed down the GDP in this year to protect the country from recession created by the west"

My comment: Thank God he is not in a miles radius from finance ministry!

The ruling MP from my area used a train in full media galore to commute and even played football match. The contesting MP from my area made a mockery of things by suitable penning down a song for this and singing all along.

My comment: It always pays to be in a good mood! :)

Looks like things are going to be interesting in coming days. But I promise to blog from the voting queue in a months time.

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Watching Surviving Everest

2009-03-15T02:40:00.000+05:30

Today evening I along with mom and dad was watching the Nat Geo documentary-"Surviving Everest". It's a great piece where the sons of Tenzing Norgey and Edmund Hillary try reaching the Summit a good 40 years after humans first reached there. I was amazed to note that it took more time for mankind to reach Everest than to go to space!

Well, three things came out, my mom was sad watching sherpas as young as 12 years old carrying 25 kilos weight for a day and climbing the base camp (5333 meters). My dad was consumed with the different tribes in Nepal who are good at mountaineering as well as giving a thorough prescription of the socio-cultural divide that exists and the religious belief along the mountain. I was glued to the human endeavour of reaching Everest.

The purpose of "Surviving Everest" has three connotations for three people, is this how we are groomed or is it our intrinsic nature that makes us so individualistic? Someone may say, It's all in stars!

Whatever be the case one should attempt Everest in a life time. Altitude is such a leveller. Oops! Was it Time?

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In times of Need

2009-03-15T02:26:00.000+05:30

It's been quite some time since the last time I scribbled. Almost 2 years! Lot of things have changed, the impulsive feeling of being into studies has slowly eroded. But one thing that stuck me, I should write about what ever I see around and try to figure. This is a post to welcome you once again and to officially proclaim I'm out of hibernation... Let's get rolling!
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What does a woman want?

2007-04-21T00:12:00.000+05:30

Everything happens for the first time.

Let me tell you a story that somehow personifies what women wants. Don't expect any magic or a potion that somehow you will engulf and be that Oh-So-Charming womanizer. It's a story that I heard over a mug of beer and somehow stayed with me even when the alcohol drained away from my blood.

Once upon a time when the world was ruled by the iron fist of a knight, there came a legend called king Arthur. In a battle king Arthur was defeated and was captured by King Solomon's army. The rule of the land was, a defeated king is as good as a dead wish. Before putting king Arthur to gallows, King Solomon gave him a choice; “Answer me one question correctly and if you can answer that I'll set you free give you back your kingdom”. King Arthur asked him the question that will eventually decide the fate of his people. King Solomon said, “ What does a woman want?” That's a pretty simply stuff for a person who is a King.

King Arthur said, “A woman wants money ,a woman wants to be proud of her man,a woman wants to feel successful”. King Solomon told king Arthur “I'll give you a year and then come back with the answer”. King Arthur went back to his kingdom to find a simple answer, an answer that foxes the very soul-mind-brain of a man even in the age of abundance. King Arthur gathered the noblest men and put forward the same question only to face confused looks and even more fuddled answer. As time went by, king Arthur became restless for the answer that eludes everyone. He came across a elderly lady with a hump in her back. Everyone around said if anyone could answer this, it will be her. King Arthur went to the elderly lady and asked “What women want?”. The lady replied, I'll answer you provided you marry me with the most eligible bachelor of the kingdom. The most eligible bachelor turned out to be king Arthur best friend. The King decided that, its better to die that to ruin the life of his friend. After much coaxing, the king finally agreed to give his the answer in return for his friend's hand. The elderly lady answered, “What a woman want is to take control of her life”. The elderly lady got married to King Arthur's friend. At the wedding night when his friend came for bed, he saw a beautiful princess waiting for her in bed, the old crooked lady was no where to be seen. The princess said to him, “Because you have been honest with me I'll give you two options; either you see me old at night and as a princess in the morning or as a princess at night and an old lady during day time.”

Had you been there what would have been your choice?

King Arthur's friend answered, “As you too have been true with me, I want you to decide what time you want to be a princess and what time you want to be an old lady”. The princess was so charmed by his reply and his honesty she stayed as a princess. Taking a cue from the story if we try to fit in our lives, somehow somewhere we all utter the words “I wish...” Every melodrama of the day is a matter of rejoice for tomorrow. Even when you are honest with someone and start building up expectations... nature has a crude way of grounding. We are only left with one question, “Why why and only why...” Socrates once said, “A person who can answer five whys at a go is God.” Over the period of time we forget that the only thing constant in life is “change”, all of a sudden the love flies off and we are only left with a mortal greed of gaining back that person. Do we ever ponder at what cost? Do we ever think that everything is not meant to happen. Aha!! I know the thoughts visiting your mind “If we have to lie on the laps of destiny then why try for anything”. My dear friend ask me how it feels, where it pains. But never clapper-claw anyone just because she was like that. I know its tough, in front of mirror when you stand alone you should always be able to look at your own eyes and be proud of that. How many of us can do that. You may be gulled, try a genuine effort to smile and say “ It's Ok”. Good things always happen to good people, is a thing better said than done. Like ways, marriages are made in heaven so are lightning and thunderstorm. Have faith in yourself so that someday you can smile over it rather than cry over something that you tried so hard but you couldn't make it.

Everything happens for the first time.
Everything happens for the last time also.

Stay foolish.
Stay hungry.

Happy New Year

2006-12-31T17:02:00.000+05:30

Every time I ponder over doing something the unrelenting laziness cantors the moment. When I try to doze off, a sense of spryness engulfs the mind. Is this vegetative state we define as mind-in-action or is it an ordinate illusion from the reality. Talking about reality it very much depends upon what we want to feel and little about what others want us to perceive.

Let’s not blabber any more into the everlasting canopy of neo-reality. Let me take you through a thought of mine that intrigued me since the time I was playing with the likes of a bunch of kids whom I so effortlessly called friends. How many times we hear the same old clichéd question posed to us? Though over the stretch of time with growing number of candles in our birthday cake and apparently incrementing the age-cycle we loose the overall perspective of the answer. Answers that in childhood every kid gave with a smile, what do you want to become when you grow up? Gosh! Do we still remember the answer that used to make our neighbors envy the lucidity of our sweetness or is it that we have out grown ourselves so much that pondering over such primitive issues tickles the funny bone in our body. Either ways, it is fascinating to muse over such questions. Some call it expectation others name it facing-the-reality.

The prism of thought can be best reflected when there is light. So, when this New Year starts may be just before realizing the canopy of “resolution”, ask yourself what once you have answered so gleefully and what you are today.

What do you want to become when you grow up? Happy New Year.

Don't Break

2006-09-22T01:01:00.000+05:30

Have u ever seen bamboo trees bend under pressure from the wind? Then u must have noticed them return gracefully to their upright or original position after the wind had died down. When I think about the bamboo tree's ability to bounce back or return to it's original position, the word resilience comes to mind. When used in reference to a person this word means the ability to readily recover from shock, depression or any other situation that stretches the limits of a person's emotions.

Have you ever felt like you are about to snap Have you ever felt like you are at your breaking point Thankfully, you have survived the experience to live to talk about it. During the experience you probably felt a mix of emotions that threatened your health. You felt emotionally drained, mentally exhausted and you most likely endured unpleasant physical symptoms. Life is a mixture of good times and bad times, happy moments and unhappy moments. The next time you are experiencing one of those bad times or unhappy moments that take you close to your breaking point bend but don't break. Try your best not to let the situation get the best of you.

A measure of hope will take you through the unpleasant ordeal. With hope for a better tomorrow or a better situation, things may not be as bad as they seem to be. The unpleasant ordeal may be easier to deal with if the end result is worth having. If the going gets tough and you are at your breaking point, show resilience. Like the bamboo tree, bend, but don't break!

Many Needs, One Life!

2006-09-07T08:32:00.000+05:30

Humans have 9 lives.

I am smitten by the notion why on earth cats only have nine lives. It beats my contingence to reflect that the “Age of humans” is limited only with a timid life span. But digging deep into the nuances of a single and may be simple life opens the astounding sense of reality. It’s more that the usual Food, Clothes, Shelter and may be Sex that fall on the grades of humans. Some say needs some say wants; I say it’s the expression of life.

Problems due to missing 'basics' in people’s lives tend to develop over time, and so can be easily missed. Then, when the problem arises - be it anxiety, depression, addiction or some other nasty - they can't for the life of them fathom out why! It's therefore a great idea to know what your own garden needs in order to grow well, so when you see something starting to wither, you can check your list and apply the necessary nutrients.

1.The need to give and receive attention.

2. Taking heed of the mind body connection.

3. The need for purpose, goals and meaning.

4.A sense of community and making a contribution.

5. The need for challenge and creativity.

6. The need for intimacy.

7. The need to feel a sense of control.

8. The need for a sense of status.

9. The need for a sense safety and security.

It may seem that a life that meets all of these needs would be intolerably busy. But of course, one activity can meet many needs. Charity work for example, could be said to fulfill 1, 3, 4 and 5, and could contribute to 6 and 7. Walking with a friend as a pastime might go towards 1, 2, 3, 5 and 6. Generally, what this suggests, and what has been borne out by recent research, is that a more complex life is a healthier one. Then if one area of life fails or is taken away from you, your basic needs are maintained, at least in part, by those that survive.

So the message is... If your progress through life has gone a bit awry for you or a friend, check if there is petrol in the car, and that the battery is charged before going to a mechanic to have the engine taken apart!

F.I.G.H.T

2006-07-28T16:19:00.000+05:30

Fight! Punch! Kick!
Don't bleed. Don’t' cry. Don't repent.

Since the time we are born till the time we pass away we fight with ourselves assuming that we are fighting for ourselves. These fights make us grow the world around us and eventually we shrink to that very point where we started all these fights. Life is a zero sum game. For instance, a newborn child fights for survival away from the comfort of mothers' womb with itself to accommodate itself towards the realities of the world. With the passage of time we fight with ourselves to bridge the gap between our aspirations and realities. While we mature we fight with ourselves to the extent of compromises we are ready to make. When we eventually have families we again start fighting with our aspiration and realities about what we want our kids to do. Then on later ages we fight with ourselves in accepting the realities. At the end we fight to link ourselves away from the earthly pleasure to the eternal truth that whenever there is a beginning there is an end, leaving behind a life full of struggle, a sojourn.

Just that in this fight with us we don't bleed, cry or repent only grow into different stages of life and leave behind the past as heap of experiences for others to fight.

Resurrection of a Prince

2006-07-25T00:34:00.000+05:30

Nothing beats the survival instinct. Nothing can be scarier when the only thing left is to count the seconds; hoping it turns to minutes, wishing the minutes passes into hours and hours into days.

The ordeal started innocuously. In a country where the senses of civic authorities are a debated topic, instances like a boy drowning in a open man-hole, an old man falling into an open pit or an old lady washed away due to poor drainage system are a matter of routine news. Then, what made the news of a 6-year-old village boy from Kurukshetra falling in an uncovered pit 52 ft deep with a diameter of just 18” different?

He refused to die.

Even after staying in the claustrophobic darkness for 50 hours when millions of 6 year olds are lying in the comfort of the near ones playing in the greenery of this world exploring their innocence. He refused to die. When his friends were playing with toys and making merry. He was playing with fate and an almost assured oblivion. It all started when a 6-year-old boy named Prince from a village located in Kurukshetra in Northern India was playing with his friends inadvertently fell into an open pit dug up by the civic authorities. The time was 6 o’clock in the evening. Sitting at the nadir, 52 ft below the ground in total darkness without water food or any social help. The 6-year-old boy whose birthday is just couple of days away is hoping for a miracle or was he too young to understand the dimensions of miracles. Destiny never plays an open-ended game.

Help came in the form of efforts by the villagers after nearly 6 hours, they tried to put a rope and a bag down at the bottom so that the child can be rescued. Nothing worked out. Prince was left in his own fate. Next morning the news spread to the local authorities. The police tried its best but to no avail. A good 24 hours had passed. He was still sitting in the darkness waiting someone somehow to help him. Without food-water and a feeling of desperation the waiting continued.

He still refused to die.

The army was called in along with the doctors. The news of this boy has become headlines in all major news channels across India. People started pouring in. Psychologists, Ex-Fireman started giving the technical analysis of the case in hand. The nation was again gripped with agony. A 6-year-old boy has roused the emotions of a nation of 1.3 billion people. The doctors arranged for an oxygen supply in the pit through a pipe. A plan of action was taken. The armed forces started Operation Prince. With the guidance of 16 Engineering Corps based in Ambala, the army moved in. A well was to be dug 7 ft away from the pit, which will connect the pit through a tunnel. A CCTV camera along with a light bulb was sent in the pit. The first picture of the boy sitting in the pit was displayed. Millions of people across India were assured that the boy is alive. The tedious job of digging a well was undergoing. It was almost 30 hours. The 6-year-old boy looked at the camera with fear. The first words were “Papa, please save me!” he started crying in fear. The gate of resilience was breaking. The country ached in agony. People from all over the nation along with different places of the world started calling various news channels to pass on their prayers. The chord of 6-year-old boy touched million hearts. Food along with water and glucose was sent in to the boy. At 3 am in the morning he was sent in with chocolates. The first communication between the father and that boy took place during that time. The tide was turning. Deep sense of insecurity was somehow patched. Food was sent in. As food is universal to living species it draws so many of living organisms. Insects also came in to have a share beneath the normal grasp of humans. Millions watched in distress the 6-year-old small boy trying to get the better of a small insect. Trying to trash it by throwing moulds of sand. Even living in 21st century the resonances of the prehistoric means are so pronounced. The army kept on digging another hole. Things were going perfectly just to be interrupted by rains. There was panic everywhere. People were running not for their cover but to arrange cover for the pit so that the 6-year-old doesn’t get affected anymore. The nation skipped a beat.

Next morning things settled down for the better. When India woke up in Sunday, the only news that dotted was the fate of the little boy, the struggle of the 6-year-old. Politicians flocked in. The Prime Minister made a statement. More equipments alongwith specialists were called in. Today is Prince’s birthday. Just that he is lying 52 ft down from the surface.

He refused to die.

Morning rolled into afternoon and afternoon rolled into evening. The army completed digging the well; they were now making the tunnel. The nation was praying in Temples, Mosques, Churches, and Gurudwaras. News of prayers irrespective of age from the length and breadth of the country was coming in. It was almost 50 hours. The picture of a hand of an army man reaching the hand of Prince was euphoric to millions of people glued to the news.

He has done it. He has done it!!

A 6-year-old boy beat death with his resolve to just stay alive. In a world that is dotted by so many complexities, a small boy from a near anonymous village with only hope and resolve and may be prayers of millions just caused a miracle.

Seriously nothing beats the survival instinct.

Reserved Yet Vacant

2006-05-30T17:52:00.000+05:30

I'm temporarily taking off the article that I've writen regarding the debate about Reservation in education. The reason is that initially i planned a two part article but eventually i decided to merge both the articles. So i'll be updating this post in next few days time.

To all those who visit my blog, please go through the earlier posts and leave your comments.

Thanks for your support for running this blogsite.

A Change That Is YOU

2006-04-15T02:06:00.000+05:30

The smell is intoxicating me; my eyes are getting heavy and my thoughts gone for a toss. Hold on, I’m not tipsy; neither I’ve come out of an election procession, just that I have just finished a soap opera from the house of Balaji Production. Had Alfred Nobel been sitting in the couch and watching the ever going soap operas that the cable dish out, he might actually used his invention bombing the likes of these saas-baahu serials. What amazes me most is the amount of fan following these serials generate? To refresh the mind of the avid viewers as well as those of you who are quite alien of these facet of our culture I would like to give you my take on these.

Don’t know how to start; actually it was out of curiosity that I have started watching these serials. The expensive costumes, the highly dramatize acting, the matrix like fighting and the trio of “Anger-Jealousy-Tear” exactly in that sequence, coupled with three times slow-motion of a scene makes our industry a genre apart. Even though the story line ends up being in predictive lines, the writers are smart enough to create new dimensions and that too in matter of days even at times minutes. On a last count a very famous serial was having at least 7 directors shooting at the same time but with different plots. I thought we all should learn the art of multitasking from them, Is Bill listening? There is as if a mathematical relationship between the name and the starting letter. Each Balaji Production has to start with the letter “K”, with each serial having an extra “a” or “e” or “I” in their nomenclature. Surly some people make it a point to show that they are good in alphabets too!

The story line hardly matters rather than the name should be numerologically perfect. This lead to my next part of the post which about a story that I have heard while I was a kid from my grandpa. He used to tell me that it is based on his friend’s life.

He is Mukul, a very ordinary boy staying in a very ordinary village in East India under British India. Born exactly 100 years back when the best a man could buy is the dream for independence. He was not a very good student, neither was he excellent in anything. As I’ve said, a very ordinary boy. But one thing that stood out is his tenacity. Mukul was then in class VIII, pretty heavy for his small head. The books hardly made any sense, rather the likes of Mangal Pandey was his hero. Oho! I forgot to tell you about his family. Mukul was the youngest child of the family. He had one elder sister who eventually expired when she was just 12 years because of bleeding while giving birth to a still-born child. Mukul was 6 years old then, a year later his mother expired. The world collapsed for him. There is only his Baba left to support him. Mukul was in class VIII; he had a passion for football. He left the school to join the local coaching club. He used to come everyday in the morning at 7 am and practiced till 5 pm taking couple of hours of break for lunch. His Baba always aspired that his Mukul will one day bring pride to the village by becoming a good player. Everyday Mukul used to come for the practice along with his father, who used to sit at the bench wearing the black glasses under the mango tree. With every passing day Mukul tried to improve his play, but he was never taken into the first 11 of any match. He kept on trying for 3 years. In these three years he used to come in the morning for practice and his father would silently sit in the bench. But in these three years he never got a chance to play. At times his coach used to tell Mukul that he is not good enough than the rest of the boys. But he never gave up. One day he went to his coach and urged him, “Please sir, let me play in today’s match”. His coach replied,” today is final match and I can’t take chance”. Mukul was adamant; he went on insisting that his coach should take him in the first 11. After a great deal of conciliation the Coach agreed, but told Mukul that he will play only for first 20 mins. That 20 minutes changed the complexion of the match, Mukul scored 3 goals in first 20 minutes, his coach didn’t replace him and at the end of the match Mukul scored 8 goals setting a record. The victory was euphoric, the entire village was proud of Mukul. His fathers dream came true. “Mukul… Mukul, where is your Baba” Coach asked. “Sir, the man who used to sit in that bench watching me practice from 7 in the morning to 5 in the evening was blind. He was my Baba. He had faith in me that I’d one day make everyone proud by playing. Sir, he expired in the morning and today I played so that he can see me playing a match from the skies above”.

Believe and self-conviction can change lives. It is for you to understand how capable you are.

INDIA - A Reality Check

2006-03-23T02:04:00.000+05:30

It is human to speculate on the future of giants, elevating them to godly manifestations. It is human to take the giant’s workshop as an economic behemoth, divorced from reality. But with a burgeoning population of 1.065 billion, the world simply could not help but to note India’s ascendancy to an ‘economic superpower’ status. On the face it, statistics, for the most part, justified optimism. India’s GDP stands at a hefty US$600.6 billion (or US$3078 billion, adjusted for purchasing power parity) averaging a staggering 6.2% economic growth rate (1993-2003). At the end of the 2005-2006’s first quarter, India reports an 8.1% growth rate, not bad for an economy that stagnated at the ‘Hindu rate of growth’ – a 3.5% average annual growth rate – just decades ago. With apologies to Marx, the railroad analogy works well for the optimists describing ‘Shinning India’ – efficient, quick and zooming into the First World circles. But like its railways, India’s economic behemoth would crush hundreds of marginalised Indians along its track to global competitiveness.

To be sure, India has the tailwind advantages. Relative to the world average, it has a massive population, the second largest after China and a hefty 482.2 million labour force to deploy. Its state-of-the-art lycées, the likes of India Institute of Technology (IIT), yields the much needed engineers and entrepreneurs to run its technological parks and enterprises. Skilled labour is relatively cheap, prompting influx of multinationals, from General Electrics to American Express. Its Silicone Valley and call centres are much publicised, both as an Asian Wirtschaftswunder and as the economic behemoth it is, devouring American and European jobs.

With such glowing testimony, it is really no surprise that India’s economic engineers love to think of India as thrusting into the future through the wonders of Information Technology (I.T.) from its quaint slum-ridden legacies. India’s service sector constitutes 51% of India’s GDP Its wager on massive high end IT intensive industries – from call centres and transcription of medical records to Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) – are reaping the economy a healthy growth rates. Yet, behind the munificence of India’s Silicone Valley and the hubris of their legendary call centres lies the often neglected story of India’s displaced thousands.

In all fairness, an 8.1% growth is no less an Herculean effort – India now sets its aim for an annual 10% growth rate. But, economic growth rates are merely success stories of capital and profit not that of labour. The story of India should rest on its productive structures but rather on its people, their lives and their living standards. In no breadth of political philosophy was it ever to pursue economic functions for its own sake, above its social functions. India-optimists tend to confuse a vibrant economy as an ends in itself. From 11.6% unemployment to a gaping budget deficit, flaws within the economy are growing more evident by the day.

Back-office India

It is grave misnomer to describe India as ‘the world’s back-office’, at least not in the same sense or breadth of 19th century Britain as ‘the world’s workshop’. For all the talk of India’s ‘large-scale service-sector’ growth engines, ironically, its service sectors only account for a mere 23% of its labour force, of which only 770,000 (just under 0.165% of India’s labour force) employed in India’s prided IT-enabled service sector. Elsewhere, India’s staggering growth excludes a growing ‘unorganised service sector’ in with limited income mobility.

Here, the issue of income mobility is of little surprise. Its has a 61.3% adult literacy with secondary and tertiary education enrolment standing at 53% and 11%, respectively, all of which are below the world's average. Even technological saturation is unremarkable, indeed decrepit. At the most basic level of communication, the effect of technology is unremarkable. Just 4.6% of Indians are covered by telephone lines – hand phone subscription accounts for just 2.5% of its population. Indeed, with just 0.7 computers for every hundred people, a mere 0.4% internet penetration – lagging behind China (2%), Malaysia (11% and South Korea (58%) – and 0.02% Broadband penetration, the general backwardness of technological saturation is nothing short of a scandal for India's I.T. intensive sector.

Of computers and hand phones, Internet and palmtops, from India’s façade of modernity, it can be too easy to be fooled into imagining a socially liberal India. Particularly among the more rural parts, tradition still exhibits its pervasive influence in contemporary Indian society. Preference for males, due to matters of dowry and whatnots, rears its ugly head in illegal foeticide and in more extreme cases, infanticide. This somewhat account for the ‘male heavy’ gender ratio at 105 males to every 100 females, being worse in the more traditional villages and towns. Indeed, incidences of domestic violence are still high with some incidences of bridal murder in the event of dowry default and, perhaps more pathologically, ‘honour killing’. Sadly, like all other vicious circles, this can be self-perpetuating. The gap between male and female literacy (71.2% vs. 50.8%) would condemn women to a continuous line of immobility and discrimination.

Poor India

India’s consumer boom embraced at most 15% of India’s population. Poverty in India, on the other hand, grasps an estimated 25% of Indians. While official figures point to a declining poverty level, this can be deceptive. In his ‘Poverty and Inequality in India: Getting closer to the truth’, India economist, Abhijit Singh estimates 364 million or 35% living in absolute poverty. “Half of Indian children are clinically undernourished and almost 40% of all Indian adults suffer chronic energy deficiency”.

The story of poverty in India may indeed be that of unique circumstances. Where in most countries, the persistence of poverty is primarily a case of powerful elites requiring it for the sake of personal enrichment and as a means of gaining political clout, there is a more insidious motive in the Indian experience – to reinforce religious norm and the caste system. Such claims are often consistent with the worse incidences of poverty typically affecting the 150 million Dalit under-castes and 70 million tribal villagers.

The success of the Indian technocratic elite amidst a background of poverty is not so much a case of real fiscal mismanagement than the case of priorities gone wrong within multiple levels of the administration. For the large part of it, the State is largely at fault for India’s regional imbalances. Successions of the central administration by shades of neo-liberalism, from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to the Indian National Congress (INC), often betray the hopes of the marginalised Indians. Indeed in true Indian outsourcing fashion, tasks for poverty alleviation to rural development were often left to the market forces – or what is now dubbed ‘New Market’. Not surprisingly, market forces are poor servants to the impoverished. In the case of Mumbai, India’s largest city at a population 17.4 million, its largely unskilled workforce saw its textile mills giving way to ITES parks (IT-Enabled Services), throwing a large chunk of its workforce to unemployment and bare-subsistence desolation.

The case of Mumbai is just one among the many cases of the pervasive urban bias in India’s development. While, constituting the larger part of Indian employment (60%), the case of infrastructural and structural development in India’s agricultural is scarce. Such negligence can be particularly costly. For want of agricultural infrastructures – irrigations, transports to open markets and modern agricultural tools – literally wagers the livelihood of India’s largest employment sector, to the mercy of monsoons and middleperson. But these physical deficiencies are just one facet to the general inadequacy. Illiteracy, poor land laws – including Land Ceiling Acts – and lack of microfinance force farmers to fragmented land parcels while preventing benefits from scale economies. This is simply a case of priorities gone wrong; the state chasing after growth sector, ignoring the employment sector.

In tribal and Dalit populated parts, state negligence in providing basic infrastructures, from education to health facilities, can be particularly appalling, adding yet another hurdle towards income mobility. The state of Bihar, for one, has a per capita income of merely $94 against the national per capita of $560. Basic amenities, such as electricity, could be a luxury in the less developed parts of India. At times, even water access is scarce luxury – only 86% of the populace have access to improved water source. 80.4% of India faces severe water stress – consumption of water exceeding 40% of available water.

Given Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s ‘no rollbacks of the New Market’, the shifting political balance – between the BJP to the INC – merely thrusts the helm of neo-liberalism into the hands of more effective ministers. At the micro level however, state ‘effectiveness’ is pretty much in the eyes of its beholders. Corruption is rife within its public office, stymieing public services from education to health. Transparency International (TI) ranks India 88th in terms of corruption (1 being the least corrupt, 158 being the least). Cases of police involved in serious crimes, such as kidnapping for ransom, are not uncommon. TI estimates US$4,833 billion loss from petty corruption alone.

The Indian Inflation

On one hand, gaps in the Indian social model may lie in the very monstrosity of its population. With a 1.066 billion strong population by 2003 and growing at an average 1.55% from 2000-2005, experts project a 1.563 billion population by 2050, surpassing even that of China’s. To be sure, a large population can be a boon in itself. In context, however, the case of India is far more dubious. India’s population boom and regional imbalance is a recipe for polarisation and desertion of rural landscapes. Already, population concentration in Mumbai (17.4 million), Delhi (14.1 million), Calcutta (13.8 million), Chennai (6.7 million), Bangalore (6.1 million), are doing little to the general welfare of its inhabitants, instead creating severe water stress, massive unemployment and welfare degradation – a case of too many people chasing too few resources.

Let them eat cake!

India has a neat piece of economic machinery going on, in any case. True, even in the strictest economic sense, its sophisticated machinery leaves still leaves much to be desired. It has a 22% debt service ratio, a whooping 11.6% unemployment and a foreign debt as large as 22% of its GDP to contend with, asides from wrestiling with issues of regional imbalances. Abysmal infrastructures – even in favoured port cities and urban centres – from congested ports to poor transportation do little to improve India’s competitive edge. Even the very factor underplaying India’s service sector ‘successes’ – a relative low wage – is working against itself; top graduates from India’s famous lycées are migrating abroad in droves, for want of greener pastures. Somehow, however, India’s economy is hobbling forward, imperfections and all. But in the case where the economy and society is really better off with the service sector boom, is it really too much for the privileged beneficiaries to share a bite of their cake with the marginalised millions?

Too Busy to Mail

2006-03-11T22:52:00.000+05:30

"Do you ever realize that you never take the initiative to write to me?" emailed my second cousin. It was only then that I came to grips with the reality of this modern convenience called email.

In the days of yore – that is, less than 10 years ago – we used to write letters. I can remember my grandmother writing letters to her sister. She used to sit and write laboriously in Bangla because she wrote only on rare occasions and her control over the involuntary jerks of her hand was not perfect. She used to write long letters filled with affection and emotion, and ended by loudly proclaiming her lingering doubts of whether the hour's labour would be proportionately rewarded by the unreliable postal system. It never failed to amuse me to watch her write so passionately, and like all grandsons I used to tease her.

On one of those occasions, annoyed by my teasing, my grandmother considered it appropriate to enlighten me of the more illiterate ways of living, which to this day are prevalent in rural places. She narrated the tale of a friend who was not as fortunate as her to have enjoyed schooling, which, then, used to be a luxury for girls. Her friend, according to her, would visit her not very often. But when she did visit, my grandmother knew that she had come for a letter to be written. They both would sit and gossip, and invariably she would ask Grandma if she could spare a few moments to write to her eldest brother who was on his death-bed or her once-a-neighbour who had been blessed with a new grand-daughter.

Two generations. Indeed it is a gap too big to bridge considering all the technological advancements that have been transformed from luxuries to necessities in life. Yet, it is not uncommon to see in Bollywood movies a mother asking the postman with unabashed enthusiasm to read the letter that her long-lost doctor-son has written from the city. No, I am not writing this to address the issue of illiteracy, which is far more serious than the topic at hand, and is being attended to in haste and in indifference by supposedly responsible organizations.

If my opening sentence did not make it clear, I proclaim now, I am writing this to make you write to your second cousin who thinks you don't think of her unless her email knocks at your inbox.

The past generation used to – and still does – take a lot of effort to write letters or make their friends write for them, and to read or make postmen read for them. Why, many a youth would agree that they get excited when they see their fathers handing over covers saying, "Beta, you've got a letter." I also have many a friend sitting before the computer moaning, "Nobody writes to me these days."

Why then do we not show the same enthusiasm in taking the initiative to write? I will leave that question for you to think over and analyze, for lack of time is not a satisfactory answer.

Anyway, times have changed. Now the keyboard replaces the pen, and email has made letters redundant. Still, has the situation changed?

Last week, when we struck upon the topic of emails, my friend confessed that he only replies and never once writes afresh. I nodded. I truly understood and empathized with him for I had developed that habit too. If email had died between the two of us, the only other decent means of communication would be the telephone. But then on the phone you have no control over the length and content of the discussion, leave alone the propriety in terms of time, location, and actions of your friend.

Even now I am baffled by the speed, accuracy, and efficiency of the email, not to mention the disuse of sticky and relatively expensive stamps. No more leaky pens, no more blotches on paper, no more licking covers, no more accumulating stamps, no more walking to the post office in the rain. Just the click of a button and you can rest assured that your message has gone to the right person unless you get an instantaneous reply from the daemon. What more can you ask for, other than voicemail, which already exists!

Such comfort and luxury. But to what end? There are still many like me who are lazy to the bone. Of late, my laziness had gone to the extent of just reading emails and even procrastinating writing replies. But one day I resolved. I resolved to at least reply to the emails as and when I read them. And I have kept up my resolution. That is, unless some overenthusiastic friend replies to my replies with such haste that it is annoying to keep writing to the same person over and over again on the same day.

One day I should also resolve to start 'composing' emails instead of merely 'replying'.

Consider the number of emails in your inbox and the number of persons who have emailed you. Pick your top ten buddies from them. Remember that all of these friends would treasure a short personal email that originates from you in a way incomparable to a 'thanks-for-reminding-me-of-you' reply. Now, would you wait for the next email from them so that you can press the 'reply' button and write? Or would you rather press the 'compose' button right now and start typing away?

To My Valentine

2006-02-14T01:01:00.000+05:30

"Kabhi to ki hogi suraj ne chand
se mohabbat
Tabhi to chand mein daag hai,
Mumkin hai ki chand ne ki
hogi bewafai
Tabhi to suraj mein aag hai."

Most of the times in this world very small and inordinate thing give the spark to the mundane-ness of life. I was in standard 11, when it all started. I was doing my studies from JPBS School – an all boy’s school. The libido of adolescence and the fun of being part of the Gen-X were so thrilling. I went to another college fresher party (Obviously uninvited officially but still could manage a pass from some CONTACTS). We had been part of lots of fun, each member were tagged and given a number. Then came the special moment, we were being sited opposite the girls. The rule of the game was that the anchor will call out numbers at random, one from the boys’ gallery and another from the girls’ gallery. Then the candidates will be asked to perform something based on a draw. I was wearing number 5, astrologically perfect according to the numerologists as I was born on the same date. The game progressed and I gradually became very conscious of the “what if!” factor. When things had to go wrong they will always go wrong. I heard the announcement: “Number 5 and Number 3”.

I skipped a bit, I raised my hand for clarification but to my horror it was my number which was called. Why should I be scared! This is my moment of Glory… Come-on Sam, pump yourself. But the mere thought of trespassing in an alien college was enough to give butterflies in my tummy.

As if the surprises kept on coming, some days are just like that. I was told to perform a ball dance with number 3. “Who the hell is number 3”? I kept gazing in the direction of the girls’ row. I saw a girl wearing a blue kurti with properly made hairs and beautiful eyes (just that I’m sharing this with you don’t tell it to anyone, she has the best and most kissable lips that I have ever seen) rose.

Voila! It’s just my day. All of a sudden I could feel the devil and the angel inside me singing the same tune. “It’s your day Sam.”

She was very apprehensive. The noises and the cheers and the Oh-So-Obvious looks are filling up the room. She is just 2 feet away from me. I was lost. Her eyes kept me distracting, my brain was running riot and it seemed that someone has pulled the cell out of a clock. A couple of footsteps and we are in arms distance.

The noise receded and the titanic tune started filling the air. I looked sidewise only to find people putting their thumb up, in a sign to boost my ego. I was apprehensive of one thing that I don’t belong to that college and I’m a trespasser. I came close to the girl and whispered at her ears, “I’m not from this college, so please don’t mind and please try to understand my situation”.

I don’t know whether that was foolish enough or brave enough on my part. Just that I was honest and I value that. I hold her waist, just before dancing she told me “Hey Mr.5 thanks for telling me the truth, actually I’m also not from this college, just a trespasser”.

Thanks for trespassing Number 3. Love you and happy Valentines Day from Number 5.

F.E.A.R F.A.C.T.O.R

2006-01-02T07:27:00.000+05:30

Man has searched for his soul, since he has been man. So much confusion to explain something immortal, through mortal eyes. Something nonphysical, through physical thoughts. Conjecture and hypothesis, from the learned and the not. Where does it exist? Can we measure it?

Such folly. Love is your answer, and a simple one at that.

When we fear, do we not-fear death? Fear pain? Fear ridicule? Fear aloneness? But when we love, A TRUE PURE LOVE- do we fear death do we fear pain do we fear ridicule do we fear being alone This is when these mortal, physical beings briefly touch their own soul. Only through pure undiluted love, completely free of fear. Then, and only then, can we see with clear eyes, the answers for which we have so desperately searched.

Fear drives us from love, goads us into complacency, it destroys, it creates a distance between humanity, fear is mortality. Love is comfort, it does not recognize time, it has no bias, and it never started, and will never end. We do not have to create love, for it has always been there, only remove fear, for it is man made. Then we can see our soul without any fear.

2005-12-26T21:33:00.000+05:30

Wishing all readers and contributors of this blog a very happy new year. Its been a pleasure Walking with you and i hope the new year will affirm this relation. God bless you.

2005-12-23T03:28:00.000+05:30

Sex In Democracy II

Just tie their balls with a string and make a circus out if it. Where names like Prathibha, Snigdha, Megha et al. comes in line of a same tune, one feels ashamed. Ashamed of our identity, ashamed of our society and ashamed of ourselves. These are not the sporadic events that fill the page of newspaper. They are the hues of our system, our democracy and most importantly our identity as humans. In a country which boasts of a billion of population, a workforce that will eventually take over the world and more importantly when we are doing all sorts of tricks to show off the culture and heritage of this great nation. I still look in disdain.

In this great country when we talk about double-digit growth and reaching the ultimate sanctum of United Nation Security Council, somewhere we still find a girl being molested, a beggar still begging for his life, a girl child is still being aborted. Humans are so wretched. This is circle of life. A circle of life, in boarder perspective. The white feet have changed to brown ones but it still tramples the normal human being. It still creates fences not only in the real world but also dugs dip into the psycho of an individual.

Just a month ago there was news. Obviously every news is reported with an intention. To seek justice. And the Goddess of justice still has her eyes covered. And as long as the eyes of the perpetrator are open, felony is bound to happen. Let me come back to the story when a poor girl was raped in Mumbai, the financial capital of India. Hardly big deal, some may point out when we have a rape every 36 minutes in a country where does the names like Prathibha, Snigdha, Megha stand out. But this news is amazing not in terms of the coverage but in terms of the audacity of a person who is bestowed to protect the basic civil rite. A constable on a morning walk in the beach happens to find his prey. Just that the prey was a 16-year-old girl and was struggling hard to meet her end. Just that the ends met her. There was a huge cry all over the nation. The cop was suspended and internal enquiry was set up. About a fortnight later the girl was forced to take back the complaint and the constable was released and still goes out on a morning work. The libido of an animal always gets along its prey.

Couple of weeks back when a call center girl was raped and then murdered by the cab driver of her company everyone shuddered. The instances are countless and at the end of each year these names are pinned in the register of the police department. Names are marked by numbers and numbers keeps stacking in files.

We talk of giving exemplary punishment; we talk of making an instance so that the crimes can be deterred. At the end we eventually end up mocking the entire system. It’s contemptuous to the fabric of democracy, which can’t guarantee the basic right of human freedom. Forget about freedom of expression.

Its high time that we realize severity of punishment should be revisited with the notion of consistency of punishment. A person who is jailed for 14 years and then hanged might make us proud of the system. But even he had his mother and father crying in front of temple to save him. Human life is precious. And severity of punishment is not an instance to anything its just the consistency of it. Lets not revisit the barbaric ways of ending life. Lets talk of ways towards freedom. Freedom from the clutches of the system.

If at all we have to go to barbaric ways then just tie their balls with a string and make a circus out if it.

2005-11-19T02:05:00.000+05:30

SEX in Democracy - I

The premise of premarital sex is not a just a substantiation of the west mindedness. It’s not something that has epitomized the 21^st century. In fact it’s a conjunct of mind over matter, the libidos that drive a species called Homo sapiens. So, when one gushes through the issue of premarital sex, I look in disdain.

While checking with the dates we forget the most obvious part of it, checking the year. In a democracy the voice of opposition is the fundamental pillar. As Mahatma once said, “ Freedom is not worth having if it does not connote freedom to err”. We live every day with our values and beliefs, and if we are challenged we cry out. We take cover of society, cover of caste, cover of religion of the things that we find hard to digest. At the end of the day the moral stick is based on the norm of bully ness. We all live in an imperfect system, just that it is imperfect it is still running. So what if an actress or may be a star tennis player talks about what we call taboo. We have the answer, they should not have expressed their views and we are shocked and outraged. Going by Freud’s term every person is unique in his or her own respect. Are we too week as an individual? Are we too scared to be swayed with what some celebrities say? Rather the issue should be based on what we believe in. Its always is easy to shout at the neighbor rather than keeping ones own house in order. I’m not going to the merit of the discussion, what I intend to say is we obviously have every rite to show our disapproval on what we perceive offensive. But we must understand that in a democracy everyone has a view. Even a guy who scuffs at the Chief minister and leaves the portfolio is made the CM after 9 years that too in a state where since 25 years communism has survived. Its truly amazing to be in a country called India.

2005-11-19T00:58:00.000+05:30

Wilfred Owen's Contempt for War

Torture and Misery in the Name of Freedom

By HAROLD PINTER

The following remarks were adapted during Mr. Pinter's acceptance speech on winning the Wilfred Owen Award earlier this year.

The great poet Wilfred Owen articulated the tragedy, the horror--and indeed the pity--of war in a way no other poet has. Yet we have learnt nothing. Nearly 100 years after his death the world has become more savage, more brutal, more pitiless.

But the "free world" we are told, as embodied in the United States and Great Britain, is different to the rest of the world since our actions are dictated and sanctioned by a moral authority and a moral passion condoned by someone called God. Some people may find this difficult to comprehend but Osama Bin Laden finds it easy.

What would Wilfred Owen make of the invasion of Iraq? A bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of International Law. An arbitrary military action inspired by a series of lies upon lies and gross manipulation of the media and therefore of the public. An act intended to consolidate American military and economic control of the Middle East masquerading--as a last resort (all other justifications having failed to justify themselves)--as liberation. A formidable assertion of military force responsible for the death and mutilation of thousands upon thousands of innocent people.

An independent and totally objective account of the Iraqi civilian dead in the medical magazine The Lancet estimates that the figure approaches 100,000. But neither the US or the UK bother to count the Iraqi dead. As General Tommy Franks of US Central Command memorably said: "We don't do body counts".

We have brought torture, cluster bombs, depleted uranium, innumerable acts of random murder, misery and degradation to the Iraqi people and call it " bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle East". But, as we all know, we have not been welcomed with the predicted flowers. What we have unleashed is a ferocious and unremitting resistance, mayhem and chaos.

You may say at this point: what about the Iraqi elections? Well, President Bush himself answered this question when he said: "We cannot accept that there can be free democratic elections in a country under foreign military occupation". I had to read that statement twice before I realised that he was talking about Lebanon and Syria.

What do Bush and Blair actually see when they look at themselves in the mirror?

I believe Wilfred Owen would share our contempt, our revulsion, our nausea and our shame at both the language and the actions of the American and British governments.

Harold Pinter recently won the 2005 Nobel Prize for Literature.

2005-10-22T00:23:00.000+05:30

Sweet October

As the traffic light turned red, two auto rickshaws pulled up next to each other. And sitting in one of them, I could only see a pair of hands holding a bouquet of red roses in the other auto. They were the sort of hands that unleashed a desire to discover the face. But their delicate geography offered clues to the owner's history.

A diamond ring clinging possessively to one of the fingers meant they were reasonably rich hands. And those flamboyant roses further testified that. Those hands were born to enjoy the comforts of an air-conditioned car. What were they doing in a rundown three-wheeler getting mauled by the city's savage heat?

With every passing second, a yearning to see the owner of those tender, touch-me-not hands grew inside me like a giant bubble. The woman's concealed face was teasing and tormenting him. I would have liked the driver to steer the vehicle a little ahead. But that wasn't possible.

The auto was inches behind an Opel Astra. In desperation, I even wanted to get down, walk a few paces and steal a shameless glance or two in between. But I couldn't. I also considered asking the driver, positioned at a far more vantage point, if he could tell him how the passenger sitting in the other auto looked like.

But I was aware that wouldn't be of much help either. I knew that every narrative between two individuals was marked by an absence, a void no word could ever fill. By this time, the bubble was almost choking me. I felt at war with myself.

In the past, I had always stayed clear from every crooked line for the tried and tested path of the predictable. And, had always stifled every reckless urge and allowed moments with infinite possibilities slip away like water running through fingers.

With only 10 seconds left before the light turned green, I could hear a chorus of violent voices inside commanding me to seize the moment. It was now or never. So I got down, walked to the flanking auto, looked inside and said, "Excuse me, do you have the time?"

2005-08-18T19:03:00.000+05:30

Azaadii

As India rushes to celebrate yet another Independence Day,people across the country will tell you that they are not free.Because independence for them has ceased to mean freedom.The country, Imrana will tell you in Muzaffarnagar, will be freewhen maulvis brandishing the Qur'an will not tear away a helplessmother of five from her husband and children just because her father-in-law raped her. The country will be free, Sharmila will tell youin Manipur, when women won't have to strip naked to protest theviolation of their bodies and minds by jawans who are supposed toprotect them.There will be freedom, Gladys Staines will tell you in Baripada,when rampaging mobs will not burn missionaries along with theirlittle sons.Most of all, there will be freedom when people in khaki won't rapegirls in police chowkis in Mumbai and exploit tribal women inRanchi.There will be flag-hoisting in schools and government offices andhousing colonies this year. Toffees will be distributed and babus,plump with bribes, will unfurl the Tricolour. But Imrana will not bethere, nor will Sharmila. And there won't be Ramnath Behara, whosold his three-year-old daughter in Bolangir for Rs 1,500.It is these people and their fates that the country, the governmentand the powers-that-be have to mull during freedom day festivities.Independence should make sense to such people, who now watch otherscelebrate freedom. The meek, it seems, are light years away frominheriting the earth. We can brag about the spiffy malls, smoothflyovers, the growing middle class and its rising buying power, butthe blinding light of modern India keeps in the shade realities thatare as primitive as they are barbaric. Horrific bits of news that weread every morning can dull the gloss of any billboard ranting aboutIndia's shining march to peace, progress and prosperity.It is shameful when, in the 21st century, a village gathers in theinteriors of Uttar Pradesh to hang a girl who dared to marry someoneoutside her caste, or when entire towns are full of men withoutwives because all girls have been killed in the womb. Or when peoplewho have been beaten, raped, abused and threatened, need to bribethe local police inspector just to lodge an FIR. Out freedom ishollow if a pregnant Dalit woman, unable to move in time to give wayfor a politician's convoy in Bihar, is beaten to death.Freedom, by extension, should mean justice. Then why can't we pinthe blame, 20 years after, for the massacre of innocent Sikhs in thecountry's capital. Amazingly, enforcers of justice don't know whomto blame. Not that the murders happened surreptitiously. They tookplace in broad daylight, orchestrated by people who were known."To be free", said Nelson Mandela, "is not merely to cast off one'schains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedomof others". That, sadly, is yet to happen. Going by his definitionof freedom, half of India is not free and the other half doesn'tgive two hoots about it. Otherwise, there would have been anationwide furore when an entire state remained cut-off for 49 daysdue to a blockade by students who wanted a separate homeland. Thecountry would have been shocked every time a woman was killed forbeing a 'witch', every time a Dalit was abused and every time achild was sold.There won't be freedom, either, as long as 400 million of thecountry's one billion people are below the poverty line and 40% ofthe population can't read and write.There are, of course, no British boots to trample over brown faces,but there are boots everywhere — brown feet in boots quashing brownpeople. Real independence will come when among the crowd thatsprints to the town square for the flag-hoisting there is the happyface of Imrana, laughing with her children. When Behara, instead ofselling his little girl, carries her in his arms; when Sharmila, whohas been fasting for years in protest against the excesses ofsecurity forces in Manipur, says she no more feels an alien in thecountry she was born. Then, all of us can clap as the flag fluttersin the wind.

2005-08-18T18:55:00.000+05:30

ANNE FRANK - The Diary Of A Young Girl

“I hope I shall be able to confide in you completely, as I have never been able to do in anyone before, and I hope that you will be a great support and comfort to me.”
-Anne Frank

Background:

Anne Frank was born on June 12, 1929 in Frankfurt, Germany. She was the second daughter of Otto and Edith Frank, who were German Jews. Anne's parents come from respected German families. Otto, Anne's father had been officers in the German Army during World War I. Anne and her older sister Margot had friends of many nationalities. Their parents have taught them to respect and tolerate others. Adolph Hitler's Nazi party came to power in Germany in 1933. Hitler begins his campaign against the Jews and the Frank family starts to fear for their future in Germany. In the summer of 1933, Otto Frank leaves Frankfurt for Amsterdam, in the Netherlands, to set up a new business called the Dutch Opekta Company. Less than a year later, Edith, Margot, and Anne join Otto in Amsterdam. By the mid-1930s the Franks settle into a normal routine in their apartment at 37 Merwedeplein; the girls attend school; the family takes vacations at the beach; and their circle of Jewish and non-Jewish friends grows. In 1938 Otto expands his business, going into partnership with a merchant, Hermann van Pels, also a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany. Unfortunately, the Frank's belief that Amsterdam is a safe haven from Nazism is shattered when, in May 1940, the Germans invade the Netherlands, and the Franks are once again forced to live under Nazi rule.

Book Summary:

Discovered in the attic, which she spent the last years of her life, Anne Frank’s remarkable diary has since become a classic – a powerful reminder of the horrors of war and an eloquent testament to the human spirit. The epigraph of this book is in Anne's handwriting and claims that she hopes she will be able to confide "completely" in her diary, and that it shall be a great comfort to her.
The first entry of the diary is on June 12, Anne's thirteenth birthday. She tells the story of how she woke early and then had to contain herself until seven a.m. to wake her parents and open her presents. She claims that the diary, one of those presents, is "possibly the nicest of all." She relates her list of presents, adding that she is "thoroughly spoiled," and then goes off to school with her friend Lies. On Sunday she has a birthday party with her school friends. Her mother always asks who she is going to marry, and she has managed to dissuade her from the boy she really likes, Peter Wessel.

On Saturday, June 20, Anne divulges that she wants her diary to be a friend to her - unlike her other friends, someone she can completely confide to. She will call her diary "Kitty" and address it like a friend. She tells Kitty the history of her family: her parents' marriage, her 1929 birth in Frankfurt, and then, "as we are Jewish," their 1933 emigration to Holland. After 1940, Hitler conquered Holland and brought anti-Jewish measures there.

The next entry, also on June 20, begins with the signature greeting of "Dear Kitty." Anne says that she has taken a liking to ping-pong; she and her friends often play and then go get ice cream at the nearest shop that allows Jews. At this point, Anne lets the diary know that she has plenty of boy friends, whom offer to escort her home from school and almost always fall in love with her. She tries to ignore them when they do. In the boiling heat, Anne wishes she didn't have to walk everywhere--but alas, Jews are not allowed to ride trams. The only place they are allowed is the ferry, which the ferryman let them ride as soon as they asked. Harry Goldberg, a sixteen-year-old boy she met at her friend Eva’s house, approaches her. He "can tell all kinds of amusing stories," says Anne, and soon the two are seeing each other regularly. Although Harry has a girl friend, Fanny, a "very soft, dull creature," he is smitten with Anne. Although his grandparents, with whom he lives, think Anne is too young for him, he stops going out with Fanny and makes himself available to Anne. When she asks how, he claims, "Love finds a way."

The first line for Anne's entry of July 8 lets us know that something crucial has happened: "Years seem to have passed between Sunday and now." At three o'clock on Sunday afternoon, she was reading on the verandah, waiting for Harry to come visit her. When the doorbell rings, she barely notices it. Her sister Margot comes to her, very excited, and says that the SS has sent up a call notice for Mr. Frank. Anne is instantly frightened--a call-up notice means "concentration camps and lonely cells."

The doorbell rings again - Harry. Margot warns her sister not to go downstairs, but Anne needs no such warning. Mrs. Frank and Mr. Van Daan go downstairs and talk to Harry, then close the door and do not allow anyone else in. In the privacy of their bedroom, Margot tells Anne that the call-up notice was for her, not for Mr. Frank. Anne is horrified that the SS would call a sixteen-year-old girl alone. With questions swirling in her head, she begins packing "the craziest things" into a school satchel in preparation to go into hiding. At five o'clock Mr. Frank arrives, and the speed of the preparations picks up. They leave the next morning, wearing layers and layers of clothes.

They walk to their hiding place in the rain, and Mr. Frank explains that they were to go into hiding on July 16 anyway, but had to speed up their relocation because of the call-up. Anne describes their hiding place, the rooms on top of Mr. Frank's office building, and adds a drawing. When they arrived, Margot and Mrs. Frank were too miserable and depressed to do anything - it was up to Mr. Frank and Anne to clean up the living area and unpack all the boxes. She is impressed with the "Secret Annex," calling it "an ideal hiding place."

A month later, Anne reports that little has been going on for her to report. The Van Daans arrived on July 13. They had planned to come one day later, but the Germans called up so decided it was wise to leave one day earlier rather than one day late. Their son, Peter, is almost sixteen, "soft, shy, gawky," in Anne's estimation.

Not all is well and good between the Franks and the Van Daans. They quarrel over things big and small. The matriarchs of the family have differences over plates and sheets; Anne cannot get along with Mr. Van Daan at all. Peter Van Daan had a fight with his parents when he snatched a book that he was not allowed to read "on the subject of women."

The last entry of the month is a veritable ode to the pleasures of hot baths and modern plumbing - both of which the Franks and the Van Daans have been forced to live without in hiding. All of them have been forced to go to great lengths to bathe in privacy and, when the plumber was at work, use the toilet.

Anne opens her entry for October 1 by saying that she was terrified when the doorbell rang - she thought it was the Gestapo. It was not, but there are other fears. One of the employees, an older Jewish chemist, knows the building very well and they are always afraid that he might take a notion to look in the annexe. News of the German concentration camps filters down to them, along with other atrocious German misdeeds. "Nice people, the Germans!" huffs Anne. "To think that I was once one of them too!"

On the night of October 20, all the residents have a scare. A carpenter comes to fill the fire extinguishers and is hammering on the landing opposite their cupboard door entrance. They settle down and try to be quiet as soon as they hear him, but then he starts to knock on their door. Everyone goes white as he begins pushing at the door to the secret annexe. Then they hear the voice of Mr. Koophius, one of their protectors. He asks them to let them in, and they do immediately. On Monday, at the end of October, Anne is worried about her father. He falls ill and they cannot call a doctor for him, and if he coughs he might give them away. She also notes that she is becoming more "grownup"--her mother allows her to read a book that mentions prostitution, and she learns about periods.

On November 7, Anne reports at length a quarrel that happened between herself and her family. Her parents took Margot's side when Margot and Anne fought over a book, and Anne writes tearfully that she feels the pain of her father's judgment all the more because her mother's love is not what Anne wishes it would be.

Chanukah and St. Nicholas Day are just one day apart, so the residents of the annex have two small celebrations. For Chanukah, they give each other a few small gifts and then, due to a shortage, light the candles for only ten minutes. St. Nicholas Day is more festive; at night, all the residents go downstairs and discover a large basket covered with a mask of Black Peter and filled with presents.

Still, all of that seems further away than what is going on in the annex. Anne's father is expecting the invasion at any moment. Churchill is recovering in England; Gandhi is fasting in India. Meanwhile, the owner of the building has sold it without telling Koophius and Kraler - when new owners come by to look at the building, Koophius has to pretend he has forgotten the key to the annexe. This brings new fears for the residents.

Anne's birthday comes again; the festivities are greatly subdued in comparison to last year. Nonetheless, she is happy, she is "spoiled" with sweets and her father writes her a poem in German, which Margot translates into Dutch.

There is a real burglary on July 16 1943 - the thieves take cash and sugar ration coupons. The bombing continues - Anne says, "Whole streets lie in ruins." Meanwhile the bombing and destruction continues, setting everyone's nerves on edge.

Anne gets the flu. She tries all sorts of cures and is embarrassed when Dussel lies on her "naked chest" and listens to her heart. The household receives nice Christmas presents from their protectors, but Anne feels jealous of them because they can go outside and still enjoy many things she cannot. She feels "a great longing to have lots of fun myself for once." Morale, she adds, is "rotten" as the war is at a standstill.

Outside, the war continues. A plane crash near their building surprises and frightens everyone. On March 29, Anne writes that an exiled Dutch government minister has announced that after the war they ought to make a collection of diaries and letters. Anne is excited at the thought and believes that it would be interesting if she wrote a novel about the secret annex Anne despairs about the war, wondering what the point of it all is. She thinks, "the little man is just as guilty" as the big politicians and businessmen, because "otherwise the peoples of the world would have risen in revolt a long time ago!" Despite her despair, she is confident that the invasion is coming soon Anne tells her diary her parents' biographies. Both Mr. and Mrs. Frank came from rich families and tell grand stories about wealth and privilege. "One could certainly not call us rich now," Anne says, "but all my hopes are pinned on after the war." She then writes again about her desire to be a famous writer and mentions that she wants to publish a book called "The Secret Annex"; she expects her diary to be of great help to her in this regard.

Their vegetable man is arrested for hiding Jews in his attic, another blow. Fresh fears bloom among the residents. Anne wonders if it would not have been better for all of them to have not gone into hiding, "if we were all dead now and not going through this misery."

The invasion goes along well, even though for three weeks the troops have been operating in heavy rains. July 15 is another important entry; Anne goes in-depth about herself and what she believes. She says, that it's "really a wonder that I haven't dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and so impossible to carry out." She keeps them, she says, "because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart."

The war continues to turn in the Allies' favor. On July 21, Anne writes that an attempt has been made on Hitler's life by a German general. In her last entry, on August 1, Anne talks again about how there are "two Annes," the public Anne and the private Anne. She wonders what she could be like "if... there weren't any other people living in the world."

Afterwards

Anne Frank’s diary ends here. It is a work utterly complete in itself, and its eloquence requires no further comment. At approximately 10 am, August 4, 1944, the Frank family's greatest fear comes true. A Nazi policeman and several Dutch collaborators appear at 263 Prinsengracht, having received an anonymous phone call informing them that Jews are hiding there. The police head straight for the bookcase that leads to the Secret Annex. The residents are taken from the house, forced into a covered truck, taken to the Central Office for Jewish Emigration, and then sent to Weteringschans Prison. On August 8, 1944, after a brief stay in Weteringschans Prison, the residents of the Secret Annex are moved to Westerbork transit camp. They remain there for nearly a month, until, on September 3, they are transported to the Auschwitz death camp in Poland. It is the last Auschwitz-bound transport to leave Westerbork. In October 1944, Anne and Margot are transported from Auschwitz to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany. Anne and Margot, already weakened from living in the concentration camps, become ill with typhus. The camp is liberated by allied troops in 1945, one month after the death of Anne Frank.

Review / Analysis

Anne's diary was written during the years 1942-1944. These years were the toughest times of World War II in Europe. In the beginning part of her diary, we meet Anne before her ordeal. The picture we get is of a typical thirteen-year-old: intelligent in some ways childish in others. If she had been allowed to continue living outside and going to school, interacting with others, or if the war had not targeted Jews, she would have continued to be a charming, if faceless young girl. The Nazi invasion of Holland changed the very essence of this somewhat faceless girl. The diary of Anne Frank epitomizes the unrelenting human zeal and dreams. The book is in its entirety a collection of the diary that had been discovered from the “secret annexe”. The growing up of Anne Frank as a young girl to her days in the annexure, symbolizes the passion of humanity. She had dreams and though faced with difficult circumstances she never gave them up. The diary is a recollection of the vivid impressions of her experiences during this period, by turns thoughtful, moving and amusing, her accounts offer a fascinating commentary on human courage and frailty and a compelling self-portrait of a sensitive and spirited young girl whose promise was tragically cut short.

It’s utterly impossible for me to build my life on a foundation of chaos, suffering and death. I see the world being slowly transformed into a wilderness, I hear the approaching thunder that, one day, will destroy us too, and I feel the suffering of millions. And yet, when I look up at the sky, I somehow feel that everything will change for the better, that this cruelty too shall end, that peace and tranquility will return once more" – Anne Frank, July 15, 1944

2005-08-12T18:24:00.000+05:30

BABA AMTE

"Every once in a blue moon, is born a person, who has the clarity of vision, and the greatness of deed, to make us all recognize the dizzying heights the human spirit can really achieve, Baba Amte is one of those people."- Neesha Mirchandani

BABA AMTE

Murlidhar Devdas Amte was born on December 26, 1914 in Hinganghat, Wardha district in Maharashtra, state of India. As the eldest son of a wealthy Brahmin landowner, Murlidhar had an idyllic childhood. Murlidhar was amongst the affluent and lucky few of those days and hence received a wholesome education. He found himself born into a family where the father’s conservative notions about social class and status were strictly enforced. By the time he was fourteen, Murlidhar owned his own gun and hunted boar and deer. He developed a special interest in cinema, wrote reviews for the film magazine The Picture Goer and even corresponded with Greta Garbo and Norma Shearer. When he was old enough to drive, Murlidhar was given a Singer sports car with cushions covered with panther skin! But even then, Amte did not appreciate the restrictions that prevented him from playing with the 'low-caste' servants' children.

"There is a certain callousness in families like mine." Baba says. "They put up strong barriers so as not to see the misery in the world outside and I rebelled against it."
Laxmibai, his mother was the only one who dared to question such rigidities of traditions in the Amte household. From early childhood, the boy was a puzzle to his father, a stern and distant man and a dutiful government official, for Murlidhar was consistently and congenitally irreverent. As a schoolboy in a red blazer, he was often seen with a can of worms and a fishing rod, a good Brahmin was not supposed to take life. At 14 he slipped away from home to learn hunting from the Madia Gonds, the tribes deep in the Gadchiroli forests. Endowed with traits of curiosity and questioning, of rebelling against rigid, meaningless norms, Murlidhar appeared distinct from the rest of the brood. Unfortunately even when Murlidhar was young, as a result of some domestic conflict, which much exceeded her endurance limit, Laxmibai felt prey to acute psychosis. Her mental illness, however, never mitigated the son’s admiration for the mother.

“She was an uneducated artist and did go mad. But she helped me keep myself sane in an insane world” recalls Baba.
During the college holidays, Baba traveled all over India. He visited Shantiniketan, initially attracted by Rabindranath Tagore's music and poetry. Shantiniketan, located amid lush natural beauty, was a microcosm of Tagore's ideal world - here was a community united in joy, work and love. Baba came away deeply touched and somehow altered for life. Closer to home, at Sewagram (Gandhiji's ashram) near Wardha, Baba was equally fascinated with Gandhi's relationship with God. Through Gandhi, Baba saw that:

God is that indefinable something, which we all feel but which, we do not know. To me, God is truth and love, God is ethics and morality, and God is fearlessness. God is the source of light and life, and yet He is above and beyond all these. God is conscience.
Simultaneously, he was deeply impressed by what he saw as Gandhi's scientific attitude to life. For Bapu's ideals were never some personal fetish but the rational basis for finding solutions to the problems of life. He felt closer to the worldview of John Ruskin and Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin, which emphasized the empowerment of the community with greater freedom from the state.

When Baba was in high school, his father retired from government service and moved house to Dharampeth – a posh area of a larger town Nagpur. There he joined the Morris and Hislop College. After gaining a B.A. degree, he studied at a government law school, graduating with a law degree in 1936. He would have preferred to have studied medicine but yielded to his father’s wishes and entered legal profession. Amte built up a lucrative practice as an advocate in Warora. On weekends, he looked into affairs at the family's farm of 450 acres, at Goraja near Warora. A restless, dissatisfied, disturbed mind in search for raison d’etre of life roused in him a wanderlust. At times he often wandered into the nearby jungles and villages.

“That microscopic look at the village life taught me to hear the heartbeat of reality”, he recalls.
He was appalled by the poverty, hunger, disease and deprivation that he witnessed all around. Learning of the plight of the downtrodden he also gained an overwhelming sense of potentialities latent in the most humble and afflicted human being. This faith in humanity has been one of the main springs of life and one of the principle reason for his success in bringing out the best in patients, workers, outcast and even those rejected by their own people. By now Murlidhar Amte has become a recognized lawyer, on weekends; he looked into affairs at the family's farm of 450 acres, at Goraja near Warora. Soon he was organizing farmers' cooperatives and was eventually elected vice-president of the Warora municipality. But the money, prestige and comfort were not making Baba happy. Instead, he became restless. This surely could not be the purpose of life, he thought. At times, his legal practice forced him even to be dishonest. This bothered him still more. He discovered that many clients expected him to lie for them:
A client would admit that he had committed rape and I was expected to obtain an acquittal. Worse still, when I succeeded, I was expected to attend the celebration party.

So Baba set about changing what he could. Harijans (also known as untouchables) on his family's lands had always walked a long distance to collect water because the village well was forbidden to them. Baba defied the bitter opposition of the upper-caste villagers and opened up the well to all people. During the Quit India movement, in 1942, he organized lawyers to take up the defense of the jailed leaders and he was thrown into prison. Soon Baba lost all interest in the law practice. More and more he admired the 'richness of heart of the poor people' and despised 'the poverty of heart of the rich'. It was the 'common man', he decided, who was really uncommon. Perhaps, one-way of ensuring a full life was to become one with the poor and oppressed. Baba let his hair and fingernails grow and spread the word that he had taken a vow of celibacy.
While attending the wedding of a distant relative, Baba met Indu Ghuleshastri. She belonged to a conservative Brahmin family of Sanskrit scholars. Her innocence and humane heart won his admiration and love. Having successfully made himself seem ineligible, Baba now had to work hard to persuade Indu's parents that he was indeed a suitable groom. Eventually, Baba and Indu were married in December 1946, and together they launched on an arduous joint adventure. In marrying Baba, Indu, who was re-christened sadhana, knew that she was marrying a man who lived an unconventional life and did not adhere to the codes of conduct practiced by the Brahmin caste. On their wedding day Baba renounced his property and gave up his legal practice.

In doing this he left behind his family, virtually forfeiting all claims on their support and his large inheritance. The couple began by setting up a shram ashram near Warora. About the same time, Sane Guruji was leading a campaign for Harijans to gain entry into the temple of Vithobha at Pandharpur. A few months after Murlidhar and Indu's wedding, in 1947, Sane Guruji began a fast-unto-death at Pandharpur and succeeded in gaining temple entry for the Harijans. Sane Guruji's example gave a deeper meaning to compassion in Baba's life. For the rest of his life, Baba carried in his heart this verse of Sane Guruji:
Through my tears I shall reach my ideal;in my tears rests the power to crush steel and stone.My tears are my God.Never deprive me of my tearsLet my eyelids never get dry.

Soon there was a poor Brahmin family that knew something about agriculture, one shoemaker, one umbrella repairer and some Harijan families at Baba and Indu's shram ashram. Together this unusual community cultivated a small patch of land and shared a common kitchen. Baba and his wife were now considered outcastes themselves. So Indu could not count on her mother's help, when she was due to deliver her first child. Nor could she expect her mother to come and share a house with 'low-castes'.Meanwhile Baba's involvement in various organizations deepened. Now, he was vice-chairman of the Warora municipality and chairman of the scavengers union. For nine months he worked as a scavenger, carrying baskets filled with excreta on his head.
The turning point in his life came one rainy evening, as Baba headed home. A huddled figure lay on the roadside. At first it seemed like a bundle of rags. But then he noticed some movement. Baba looked closer and recoiled instantly. Lying before him was a man in the last stages of leprosy. The dying man had no fingers. Maggots crawled over his naked body. Horrified by this sight, terrified of infection, Baba ran home. But he could not run away from the self-loathing, which began to hound him. How could he have left a lonely forsaken man to lie there in the rain? So he forced himself to return and feed the man. He also put up a bamboo shed to protect him against the rain. That man, Tulshiram, died in Baba's care and irrevocably changed young Amte's life. Baba had always thought of himself as being fearless and daring. The encounter with Tulshiram shattered this self-image. For the next six months Baba lived with the unrelenting agony of this crisis. There seemed to be only one answer, one lone way of overcoming this problem. He must live and work with leprosy patients:
"That is why I took up leprosy work. Not to help anyone, but to overcome that fear in my life. That it worked out good for others was a by-product. But the fact is I did it to overcome fear."
Thus Baba, and Sadhana, set out on the path that is now history. He began by reading intensively about leprosy and offering his services at the Warora leprosy clinic. Soon, he was running his own clinic. In 1949, he went to the Calcutta School of Tropical Medicine to learn more about leprosy. By the time Baba returned home the discovery of diamino-diphenyl-sulphone had made leprosy curable. With this wonder drug in hand, Baba began treating leprosy patients in sixty villages around Warora. Soon there were eleven weekly clinics within a radius of about fifty kilometers from Warora, with a total of about 4,000 patients. But stemming the disease did not make the afflicted whole again. And receiving charity is not particularly conducive to enhancing self-respect. Amte was fully aware that merely arresting the progress of the disease was not enough. Leprosy not only harms the body but also inflicts deep wounds on the mind. It destroys the personality. Traditionally, leprosy patients are excluded from society and even from their own family. With their face disfigured, crippled hands and feet, they are shunned by all. Even if the disease is arrested, and they are no longer infectious, it makes little difference. The stigma and the fear of society make it impossible for them to live as productive members. Thus self-respect is destroyed and this hurts more than losing fingers or toes.
In 1951, the government gave Baba some barren land for his leprosy project. The land was rocky, covered with scrubs and infested with scorpions and snakes. In June 1951, with a lame cow and a dog, and fourteen rupees, accompanied by his wife, Sadhana Tai and two infant sons, Vikas and Prakash, and a handful of patients, they called this place Anandwan the Forest of Joy. Baba worked and the leprosy patients worked shoulder to shoulder with him. Self-trained and self-taught, they converted rocky barren land into lush green fields. Life in the early days was very hard. They were extremely short of money. Somehow they survived. So they started growing not only vegetables but also prepared fields for growing millets, bajri and jowar (grains). Within three years, the Amte family and a community of sixty patients had dug six wells and cleared enough land to have a substantial harvest of grains and vegetables. Gradually, the scale and facilities of Anandwan grew. Once the leprosy-affected persons were fit enough to leave the hospital they ceased to be 'patients'. They became working members of the community, busy in the fields or workshops where a variety of products were being manufactured. This made Anandwan a virtually self-sufficient 'village'. Most of the erstwhile patients, having learnt a skill, returned to the world outside, self-reliant and capable of earning their own living. Eventually they added at Anandwan a College of Agriculture, a primary school for blind children, a school for deaf and dumb children and an orphanage. These multi-dimensional efforts won Anandwan a string of national and international awards, which brought it both fame and funds.
Baba lay motionless on the cot staring hard at the ceiling, his jaw tightly clenched. He felt as though he were lying in a coffin, awaiting burial. On one end of the bed was a contraption that kept his spine in traction for twelve hours every day. Murlidhar Devdas 'Baba' Amte was only fifty. The doctors diagnosed the agonizing pain in his back as a case of severe cervical spondylosis, which was causing a progressive degeneration of the spine. In 1971, friends collected money and sent Baba to London for a major operation on his spine. This kept him in bed for much of 1971 and 1972. His agony was compounded by the need for another operation, performed in Mumbai some years later. These operations allowed Baba to live but left him with a permanent handicap. He would never be able to sit again. He could either lie down or stand, but only for limited periods.
Baba Amte's success in building Anandwan had a two-fold impact on his mind. It increased his desire to lead India's suffering millions to a resolute effort at self-development and it strengthened his conviction that this could be done by rousing the impoverished masses to a creative awareness.
Baba now asked himself: 'If we could build up a happy community under the most difficult circumstances, why cannot healthy people do the same under much more favorable circumstances? Why can the youth of India not do the same?' For all the vehemence with which he posed this question, Baba somehow remained free of bitterness. Closely observing developments in Russia and China, Baba concluded that a true revolution would make people aware of their own capabilities. It would propel them to practical action:
I believe that political awareness without constructive work is impotent, and that constructive work without political awareness is equally sterile. If you must put a label to what guides my action, it would be 'creative humanism'.
He began by focusing his attention on a plan for a Workers' University. He envisioned students studying for a degree and simultaneously undergoing training for learning some practical skill. This plan gained support from the Planning Commission and thus 2,000 acres of barren land at Somnath, about a hundred kilometers south of Anandwan, was given to Baba for starting this work. In this case, however, there was vigorous opposition by the local people. Eventually, much of the land had to be relinquished and the plan for a Workers' University was abandoned. The remaining land at Somnath was developed as a center for annual youth camps. It became the starting point for a wide range of social and political activists who went on to identify with different political activists ideological streams from the Gandhian to the Marxist-Leninist. When Baba reached his 'late youth', many of these activists, then middle-aged themselves would enliven his world by their endeavors in different fields. The work at Somnath also led, in the mid-80s, to the Bharat Jodo Abhiyan. This campaign took Baba and teams of young people on a cross-country journey to appeal for communal harmony and peaceful solutions to regional disputes.

Hemalkasa was the place that truly shaped the politics of Baba's 'late youth'. It was also his most daring act of velour, defying his physical pain. In 1973, barely a year after he had undergone surgery for his back problem, Baba pitched a tent at Hemalkasa, a place deep in the forests about 350 kilometers south of Nagpur. In 1974, Baba and Tai's younger son, Prakash, graduated from medical college and came to work in Hemalkasa. Soon Prakash and his wife Mandakini, who had been a fellow-student, decided to settle there permanently. Like the senior Amtes, this couple faced many years of struggle with severe hardships, shortages of food, medicine and susceptibility to many diseases.Gradually, the hardships decreased and a community of workers came together based on a shared bond with the local people, the wild animals and the abundant fauna and flora. This community includes Renuka, whom Baba and Tai had adopted as an infant, and her husband Vilas Manohar.
“The time has come to leave Anandwan, the place where I entered into the world of joy, and the place that symbolizes the very meaning of my existence. I am leaving to live along the Narmada ... to attain a peace that all mankind desires. The struggle for a New India is taking place in the Narmada valley. Today the Narmada valley has become the arena for a new imagination and creativity, for a society in which there must be sufficiency for all before there is superfluity for some.”
On March 1990 the sun was setting in a bright orange splash over the river waters below, as Baba's van reached the center of the bridge. Suddenly the tractors swerved sideways and came to a halt, blocking the road. The NBA now informed the accompanying policemen that they intended to block this bridge, and thus the Mumbai-Agra highway, till their demand for a review of the Sardar Sarovar Project was heard. For the next thirty hours hundreds of people from different parts of the Narmada valley made the bridge their home. The specially fitted van, which had earlier carried Baba to the corners of India on the Knit India March, now became the nerve center of this protest action. Before him, on the barren sandy slope, was a two-room cement and brick structure-which the local villagers had constructed for him. For a flash, time seemed to melt away. He seemed to be back at the beginning when he had first stood staring at the scrubland near Warora. Baba retreated into his van, away from the anguish of this inhospitable site. Already he missed Anandwan, his home for forty years. Then, slowly the river, Rewa Maiya, began to work her magic on him. Baba's involvement with the issue of mega-dams had been growing through the 1980s. In the summer of 1988 the Anandwan community hosted a meeting of over a hundred environmental activists from all over India on this issue. The 'Assertion of Collective Will Against Big Dams', also called the 'Anandwan Declaration', became a landmark in the emerging movement against big dams. Accompanied by Tai and helpers from his old home Baba planted carefully selected trees and bushes all around the two-room house. Soon a makeshift shed was added on the east side of the house, expanding the space to accommodate the inevitable stream of guests. But in the first year Baba was often on the road as activities of the NBA reached a peak.
“Consider the honeybee. Its treasure is nectar, obtained even from the chilly plant. It is not at the cost of the flower. In fact, its act of extracting honey contributes to the progress of the flowers. You need not learn from Kahlil Gibran, Marx or Gorbachev, not even from Gandhiji. Choose instead to learn your lesson from the honey bees as your silent partners: they will show you how to develop without destroying."
-Baba Amte on community Living.
For a man who once speeded in fancy cars, wrote film reviews for The Picture Goer, corresponded with Hollywood icons like Greta Garbo and Norma Shearer, Baba Amte has come a long, long way since that rainy night in Warora. The sight of Tulshiram, a maggot-eaten leper, changed his life forever. In June 1951, with a lame cow and a dog, and fourteen rupees, accompanied by his wife, Sadhana Tai and two infant sons, Vikas and Prakash, and a handful of patients, they moved to this place Anandwan the Forest of Joy. Baba's legacy has lived on through the tireless work of his two amazing sons and their wives, who in their own ways have contributed significantly to furthering Baba's vision. Dr. Vikas Amte runs Maharogi Sewa Samiti and coordinates operations between Anandwan and satellite projects; his wife Dr. Bharati Amte runs a hospital at Anandwan and his brother Dr. Prakash Amte and his wife Dr. Manda Amte run the school and hospital at Hemalkasa.
Due to his health, Baba has returned from the Narmada valley to his home in Anandwan but he continues to serve as a source of inspiration to others in the anti-big dam movement, not only in the Narmada valley, but also around the world.
The books give a story of a person who is very much real and exist among us. It is easy to ignore and forget some truly great men because they do not court publicity. They are too absorbed in their service to attract attention with media. Many of them still become icon with their selfless service in the life of living societies. Baba Amte is one of them.
"The new leadership in India is taking shape quietly, without any drum beating through the newspapers. ... Various centers, the centers of energy and strength in the life of society are gaining tremendous momentum. May be, the surging new generation of today appears to have lost it’s bearing, to have lost its soul. But it is absolutely certain that one day it will have its own leader and prophet.... I am absolutely confident that the phoenix of a new leadership is rising from the ashes of all its failure. Soon the world will witness the lightning hidden in its beak and the storm hidden in its wings."- Baba Amte

"I sought my soul, my soul I could not see,I sought my God, my God elude me,I sought my brother, and I found all the three." - Anonymous