Breakpoint

What’s eating China and Pakistan? Why do they hate us Indians? Did we, by chance, make fun of their really small wieners or is it that they aren’t getting any. It’s a bloody mystery.

Last week, when we inked a deal to promote free trading to ASEAN countries, the bloody Chinese acted like a bunch of third graders. A Chinese ‘scholar’ from a state-run ‘university’ declared in his infinite wisdom that India was a “Hindu Religious State” and that Hinduism is a “decadent religion” and that apart from annexing Arunachal Pradesh and working with countries such as Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh and Bhutan to secure the separation of Assam and Bengal from the Indian Union, should encourage Tamil separation and divide the country into 20-30 nation states. That’s not all; they have been spreading such ‘insights’ to countries which we trade with thereby trying to erode our ties with them. The cheeky bastards

During the dreadful 26/11 acts on Mumbai, Jiabao picked up his cheap Chinese-made phone to called his frat buddy (in the small wieners club) Giliani, to extend his support. While the world sympathised with us, these bastards were thinking of breaking us up. No points in guessing who was against extending sanctions on Jammat-ud-Dawa, the Chinese again. They have also been constantly upping their naval presence in the Indian Ocean and also been very cooperative to enhance the Pakistani fleet.

You know what, fuck them; I challenge the yellow bellied assholes to do as they please. We won’t take this lying down. I know one thing for sure; they are shit scared of us, otherwise they wouldn’t go for such underhanded tactics. I know, we Indians have our differences and can’t stand each other, but when it comes down to the shits we are a bloody force to reckon with.

Identity Crisis

My previous post sucked. Yes, sucked per se. After some painful reviews, I realised what I have done. I went out of character.

On the trepidation of losing my readers, I decided to understand my blog. I reread all my posts and my first thoughts were that it was a manifestation of an angry young man lashing out at the savageness of this world.

No, it was too clichéd! This ain’t the freaking 80’s! Nobody likes a freaking one-man-against-the-world plot. These are the years of the sweet-talking metro-sexual and I know for the fact that I’m not one. I still think mousse is something you eat and not for your hair. I still believe in treating women with respect and not slapping them around (strangely they seem to like it).

Maybe that’s it. The blog has an old-worldliness character to it strewn with a newfangled attitude toward issues. Its like ‘The Hindu’ and ‘DNA’ (the newspaper) coming together with soft porn and economics on the same page. Maybe that’s what my readers like.

I hope this self-diagnosis hit the sweet spot and I promise that I’ll never lose sight of the character again.

Reinventing the Wheel

“In business, you have to reinvent the wheel every day; once you stop doing that, you are finished” said an acquaintance of mine. Considering that he started from scratch and now owns 18 golf courses, there must be some truth to it.

Fundamentals in business schools are just generalisations of the real thing. An entrepreneur is required to learn, evolve and customise business processes, often learning important lessons on the way.

The above mentioned gentleman was a regular at my brother’s hotel. His insights into business were marvellous. I often used to share a bottle of wine with him, during which we would discuss a business opportunity and how to go about it, scribbling on a piece of paper while doing so. I would have to say that those pieces of paper have given me more insights in running a business than I have learnt in the past one year at Alliance.

We would also come up with a plan to do some cost cutting or utilise some resource more efficiently in our respective businesses. Something as trivial as getting a better deal on the disposable cups for the coffee machines or getting slot machines were discussed at length often scouring the yellow pages and doing phone calls, justified by saying “Every penny counts”.

Lessons lie in the rough, obscured by the annals of banality. Understanding it and implementing it requires skill and fortitude.

Coming Out of the Closet

A landmark judgement by the Delhi High Court striking down Section 377, which criminalises consensual sex between two individuals including same gender(for the perverts, goats are still a No No), was the cause for a bittersweet moment for me. It was actually like watching a kid growing into adolescence; you are happy for him growing up but sad because he would lose his innocence.

India is finally growing up, accepting certain facts of life to which it was in deep denial. Don t get me wrong, I believe gay sex is as unnatural as Michael Jackson’s face, both creeps the shit out of me, except for lesbianism (wink!).

This verdict has changed everything, the truth that homosexuality is no more a closet truth and the sheer number of people involved puts a new perspective to an otherwise naive and innocent India. On the other hand, I am proud of India being mature enough to take such a decision. I view this as a step towards becoming a country that values freedom and faces truth than deny it.

I just hope the fanatics, that this country is so famous for, grew half a brain and join the programme.

Adieu to MJ

MJ passed away. I mourn for him. Like all great artists, he is more remembered for his scandals than his achievements. A misunderstood soul, he always tried to come to grips with his life by outrageous acts.

In his life time he has achieved unprecedented worldwide fame and recognition, every kid in the 80’s knew who he was. I remember jumping on the bed to his tunes, the Van Halen solos that he interlaced with his high energy performances, just brilliant.

I will remember him along with the greats Jimi Hendrix, Freddie Mercury, Jim Morrison, Cliff Burton, Elvis Presley, Kurt Cobain, Tom Fogerty and others.

I mourn for him.

Beauty

I hate painting beautiful pictures with words, because the beauty we conceive is not true, it ceases to be true when we alter life to make it so.  I revel in the intricacies of life, the innate gestures we take for granted and the ones that spawn out of innocence. So to me, a child smiling at the prospect of getting a candy has more beauty than a well toned model with features that even god didn’t have a hand in making them.

Naturally so, I was a little perplexed on the issue of later stage abortions (for the naive few, its aborting the child after 20 weeks of conception; the foetus is almost formed and is declared alive by US law).  It’s appalling, I know, killing a child because it’s not formed properly. Are the stereotypes of babies propagated by media the benchmark in deciding how yours should be? If everybody looked like that where would individualism figure in our list of priorities? Several disabled people live happy lives, sure, they may be ridiculed in society and be looked upon in pity all their lives, but does that give anybody the right to kill, who are we to decide? I am starting to sound like a fear monger selling a dystopia to the inexorable public.

Then I heard the plight of a couple, their story put a different perspective on the topic. They have been trying to conceive for years and when they finally did they were elated, painted the kids room, bought everything they could get their hands on, did everything prescribed in every pre-natal care book. Unfortunately, after 22 weeks, a scan revealed that the baby’s brain was filling up with fluids and he would be born without any brain function. They were distraught, they took as many second opinions as possible but they all concurred. So they had an abortion. Are they justified in doing so? Did they in doing so, reduce the agony that the child would have lived through and also the parents agony?

Like all debates, we can never conclude on anything, we just compromise between the two and hope that our conscience figures out what’s right.

Paying the Penance for Ignorance

As my friend is in the other room, shredding bad guys to death on ‘Death Space’, I pulled up my laptop as a means to end my boredom. The restlessness you experience when there is nothing to do is pure agony. I unequivocally realise what I need is a girlfriend.

Now you can see how bored I am.

Well, I didn’t start this blog to publish my personal life and you can thank god that I am not going to change that.

Ignorance; we come across it every day. My English teacher used to harp away “Don’t betray your ignorance” all the time. I never stopped to figure out what she meant to say. See, now that’s ignorance.

Ignorance, I believe, is intertwined with ego and stupidity because for ignorance to propagate through society the propagators should be egoistic or plain stupid or both. We would think ignorance is rare among us and we are all epitomes of fine thought. Wrong! Ignorance is the lack of knowledge or understanding. Knowledge, we have, but understanding, that is a tad bit difficult to come by.

The elections are just shoring up. So far, we Indians have put up a poor show of just over 50% turnout. So the question arises, how ignorant and nonchalant are we on who should run our country? How many of us really understand the intricacies of our democracy? Let’s hope we don’t have to pay the price for that.

Then there are the environmentalists, they scream murder at SUVs from their puny electric cars, knowing little that the CO2 expelled to produce the batteries and the electricity to charge them are more than the SUV does in its lifetime. The dams we create for renewable energy are done so by inundating flood plains rich in flora and fauna, probably even forcing some species to extinction. Wind turbines kill more migratory birds than humans ever did directly. Hydrogen power slated to be the future for only emitting water vapour would seem a good idea, but with increased water content in the air, it could probably change climatic patterns and bring in disastrous storms.

There are millions of examples where ignorance or a blithe unconcern in understanding the system has led to peril.

So when was the last time you did something without ignorance?