Killing creativity – systematically

So, then. I decided to rant about how our education system kills the creativity of students. On Youth Ki Awaaz. Full article on the website. 🙂

Incomparable and irreplaceable

For 16 years ‘The Wall’ fortified Indian batting. Not anymore. It will be as weird as it is sad to see an Indian Test side without Rahul Dravid because he has been the corner stone of India’s Test match successes abroad over the last decade and a glowing star of a golden era of Indian cricket renaissance. His record (a staggering 24,177 international runs) speaks for his greatness. But Dravid was always more than just about the numbers and beyond just the cricket pitch.

Ever the consummate team man, perhaps no player has ever put the team before himself as much as Dravid has. Be it shuffling up and down the batting order or keeping wickets in one day cricket, Dravid has answered every call of duty with utmost sincerity and dedication. Even in retirement, he has put Indian cricket ahead of himself and spoke about the need to play the game for the right reasons.

In a world where people who make the loudest noise and throw the greatest tantrums get the most attention, Dravid showed that quiet confidence and resoluteness of purpose are what is needed to succeed. That being shrill will only bring the media to your doorstep but not produce runs on the field. That being a gentleman is not a disqualification.

At a time when Dravid was still playing under Sachin’s shadow, I remember writing passionately about what he brings to the table in the Indian cricket team. But that was just a phase in the past. Over the last 16 years, he has broken out of that shadow, carved a niche for himself and firmly established himself as one of the all-time greats of Indian cricket.

Rahul Dravid is an inspiration. For he convinced us that perseverance, determination and discipline are more important than talent. For he proved that ordinary individuals can attain extraordinary heights with these very qualities. A Brian Lara or a Sachin Tendulkar were always meant to be great batsmen. But Rahul Dravid chose to be great.

His Bradman oration in Australia last December unfurled for us his keen understanding of the game and the astuteness of his thinking. He still has much to contribute to the game as a thinker and administrator.

Here’s to my all-time favourite cricketer. There will never be another like you.

India needs incorrupt men, not an anti-corruption law

Anna Hazare has been omnipresent in the the media where there is a general consensus that corruption is a crippling problem of national importance that needs a solution. But is the proposed solution that the nation is harping on, the right one? The very mechanism of the Anna Hazare phenomenon reveals the true issues plaguing our society.

How did a man from a village in Maharashtra, in spite of being far removed from the political power vortex, become the saviour of our nation overnight? The sensationally rapid rise of Anna as a leader of the people, is a reflection of the lack of credible political leadership in our country. The rise of Team Anna as representatives of the people, is a reflection of the trust deficit that the government and the political class of this country is suffering.

The problem is not primarily with our system. Rather, it is the absence of prudent, competent and incorruptible men in the system. And no version of the Lokpal Bill will solve this crisis of lack of leadership.

Our reluctance to think beyond lucrative professional careers and engage in nation building has been one of the greatest failures of a modern India with global superpower aspirations. But why was none of this aversion on display during the anti-corruption protests? The protests were reflective of the intensity of frustration that incinerates us.

So has Anna Hazare finally cured our repugnance for nation building and achieved a genuine breakthrough? Through the pall of despair drawn up by a multitude of scams and innumerable occasions of political and bureaucratic misappropriation, this movement shines as a beacon of hope. That hope is not necessarily in the fact that a 74 year old man was able to galvanize nation-wide support for a crusade against corruption. Or that a Lokpal bill with sufficient teeth will solve the corruption conundrum of this nation. It is in the fact that our generation demonstrated the resolve to react and herald a process of transformation.

As citizens, we have been guilty of smothering our voices of protest under the excuses of trepidation, indifference and expediency for way too long. The responsibility for allowing unprincipled politicians to rule this land and lead it to the deplorable state that it is in, rests squarely on our shoulders. Holding placards and lighting candles and marching on the streets is not enough. The longer we choose to distance ourselves from the political process, the longer things will remain the way they are.

In a society where survival in itself is a challenge and the competition is cut-throat, nourishing our altruistic self has been an insurmountable task for the majority. The motivation for people to take up political and social activism is attenuated because while such activism hardly pays, if at all, it does not absolve them of the responsibility of putting food on the table. There is a need to realign and re-brand politics as a profession. Not only should it get the respect that other professions command in our society, it must also be a realistic and sustainable career.

It is necessary for us to find the fortitude and resourcefulness to enter the system itself, because only so much can be done from outside it. The defining moment in any revolution that will turn the fortunes of this nation would be when we choose to not just be mere remonstrating spectators but the protagonists of the political theatre. In the sheer numbers of youngsters who gathered across the nation and their willingness to overcome the restraining factors that distance them from activism, lie an undercurrent of possibility – of a revolution in this country, provided the right circumstances and a worthy leader.

A nation begets the leadership that it deserves. Our leaders are corrupt, but are we doing any better? Are we erring, even as youngsters, in our limited circles of influence, every time we cheat in exams or download pirated movies and music or merely choose to remain apathetic? Before we don the warpaint, hold aloft the tricolour and line up on the streets in protest, let us spare a moment. And look inwards. It is time to aspire to lead.

The Technological Help

The following article was posted on the website Kochivibe.com

The rain pelted down against the windshield, almost completely blurring my vision. Damn, those wiper blades had to be changed. I turned to my left and looked at the man sitting in the passenger seat of my dilapidated Maruti 800.

“Binny, any idea how to get there?”

My question was more out of a general lack of a sense of direction than penetrating vision. The rain was only just playing the sidekick to the villain of my ignorance of Cochin city routes.

I could almost see and hear Binny’s brain churning and turning over in an attempt to produce a comprehensible answer to my relatively dumb question. It was natural for me to expect an answer to fall out of his mouth, but a GPS-enabled mobile appeared out of his shirt pocket instead. Apparently, he was no better informed than I was.

Greed is a bad thing, a very bad thing (but more on that later). GPS was now somehow convincing us that not only could we navigate through the rain to our destination without any prior knowledge of the route, but also land there much quicker than by adopting the conventional one.

Which meant, Binny immediately turned into my co-driver; saddled with the task of navigating me through obscure Cochin roads. He had Google Maps and a Nokia smartphone for help, of course. Who was I to doubt names like Google, Nokia and Binny?

GPS told us exactly which road to use. The map revealed the terrain over which we would travel. Everything was going according to plan until we came face to face with a bridge that had to be transcended, when, err, a problem arose. I was now faced with the daunting challenge of driving my car across a two feet wide bridge (meant for pedestrians and the daring bikers). I chickened out (no, I am not proud of it). The map had somehow left out the inconsequential detailof the width of the bridge.

To cut the long story short, we turned the short route long and eventually reached our destination. But not before a great deal of time, energy and petrol had been needlessly spent. That is what the greed to accept technological help to make things simpler got us.

Which got me thinking. How dependent are we on technology now and how desirable is that trend? We cannot write a grammatically correct essay devoid of spelling errors without the help of Microsoft Word Spellcheck. We cannot recollect a single phone number without looking into our mobile contact lists. We cannot remember our old friends without logging onto Facebook. We cannot engage in a discourse of history without researching it on Wikipedia first.

So, the next time you choose to not doubt names like Microsoft, Facebook and Wikipedia, think again!

PS: Just in case you were wondering, I did run a Spellcheck on this article before posting it.

Read the full article on Kochivibe.com

The colour question

Before I embark on a discourse on colours, I want all of you to answer a couple of questions. What do you call the two colours whose different variations you can see in the following two images?

Image 1

Image 2

If your answer was Pink to Image 1 and Brown to Image 2, then you are with me. If your answer was anything else, please stop reading right now, because you just don’t qualify to participate in the ensuing discussion on colours. 😛

And now for the final and most important question.

Image 3

What is the colour of the building in the background?

If your answer is anything other than Brown, I will have to kindly request you to leave this blog once again. Please get your eyes checked. 😛

And now to the main point of discussion of this blog post. Image 3 is a snap of a building on the streets of Jaipur, where I was on a visit a few weeks back. In fact, all buildings in a certain section of Jaipur are required, by the law of the land, to be painted in the same colour. Yes, Jaipur, the Pink City. Now I guess you have got the drift of the post. If you haven’t, please get your brain checked. 😛

So, why is Jaipur called the Pink City when the colour of its buildings is anything but that. Have a look at a few more snaps from Jaipur that I manged to get on my visit.

 

History says that Jaipur was painted ‘Pink’ in preparation of a visit to the city by a British royalty who favoured that particular shade in the colour palette. But then what went so horribly wrong? I can only think of the following possible explanations:

1. The British Royalty in question was colour blind and actually liked the brown colour which he thought was pink.

2. The painters commissioned to paint the buildings were colour blind and fumbled up.

3. I am colour blind (which means everything is actually alright and this post is irrelevant). But then I have already asked all people who didn’t concur with me to quit reading this post, haven’t I? 😉

4. Any unfortunate combination of the above three.

What do you guys think? 😛

The Must-Read

Time: Evening (my not-working-very-well watch does not allow me to be more specific than this)

Day: Does not matter

Location: Reliance Time Out, Oberon Mall

I was aimlessly wandering down the aisle of books, contemplating on my MAD life and lack of a life in general, when the virtue of turning benevolent and presenting my friends with a few gifts hit me. So, from the shelves of the wondrous book shop financed by Ambani Jr, I picked out a few books for my MAD friends – each of them a personal must-read for its respective recipient.

Here goes the list:

Shahnaz: 1001 Simple Tricks to Turn Up on Time for Meetings

Nikki: It is OK to Stop Talking Once in a While

Nadheem: The Dangers of Ganging-up With a Friend and Cracking Senseless Jokes to Upset Your Boss

Nidhi: Why is the QWERTY Keypad Called the QWERTY Keypad?

Binny: How to Get a 9 to 5 Lob, Lose Your Flexibility and Generally Screw Up Your Life

Gautam: A Potbelly Does Not Mean You Can’t Do a Cartwheel

Sumesh: How To Send SMSes To People Daily Without Annoying Them

Sumesh (I somehow managed to find two for him): 50 Ways To Fall In Love

Poorni: Why Do Men Get Irritated When Women Take Ages To Put Their Makeup On?

Meera:  Dealing With People Who Mistake You for a School-girl

Justin: How NOT to be the Next Sumesh

Anu: Ways to Improve Your Converstion Skills Beyond ‘I don’t know’, ‘Interesting’ and ‘OK’

A man has to learn to truly love himself before he can learn to love others. Or some sh!t like that. How could I leave my own poor soul out after having enriched the lives of all my friends? So, I decided to gift myself with a book too:  All the Wonderful Things in Life Other Than Food

I was about to leave, when I found another one, and remembering this, I decided that it would be in my own interest to shell out a few more bucks to get this: Dummies Guide to Driving a Car

By then, I had run out of cash (ideas). So guys, this is all I can afford for the time being. Happy reading! 😀

Running MAD

No, I am not talking about my affair with my sanity, or its loss thereof. For the uninitiated (MAD is making its first appearance on my blog), Make A Difference is an NGO.

MAD works with underprivileged children to provide them with quality education. Twice every week, MAD volunteers go to the street shelters, remand homes, orphanages or poor homes where our kids live and teach them English and Computers.

Cambridge University Press is our knowledge partner and we use their syllabus to teach the kids.

More on MAD on our website (http://makeadiff.in/) and our blog (http://makeadiff.in/blog/).

As someone responsible for ensuring the smooth functioning of one of the MAD chapters, let me take you through some self-explanatory images which will tell you what needs to be done to keep a MAD chapter running.

Spread the Net

VP Human Resources scans the nearby colleges and corporates for potential MAD volunteers and organizes recruitment sessions twice a year. Those souls who sign on are retained through incentive schemes and handed over to the VP Operations for safe-keeping and disciplining. 😛

Crack the Whip

The Book-keeper feeds the VP Operations with information on the defaulting MADdies, who are then brought to task with the help of the Centre Heads. VP Operations cannot stand classes not going according to schedule; it has been ingrained into his system.

Blow the Trumpet

VP Public Relations lets the whole world in on all the MAD news. Every MAD event is covered by reporters, real-time updates are made available to MAD volunteers and the general public are kept in the loop through our blog and newsletters.

Teach the Teachers

VP Training ensures that all our volunteers undergo teacher training by a professional teacher trainer. A set of mentors (experienced volunteers) are assigned to guide the new volunteers. The Centre Heads once again help out the VP in ensuring compliance.

Rake-in the Moolah

No organisation can run without money. VP Fundraising has the unenviable task of begging (we don’t borrow or steal) friends, relatives and volunteers for FOMs* and POC**s. POCs connect us with corporates whose employees contribute to our cause.

*FOM: Friend of MAD  **POC: Point of Contact

Show the Way

Education is incomplete without motivation, personality development, career guidance and mentoring. VP Placements holds camps and other events for the kids to increase their exposure and provide them a direction in life.

That is MAD in a nutshell. Interested in being a part of the movement to care, support and educate? Register with us and turn MAD!

“We want a few MAD people now. See where the sane ones have landed us!” George Bernard Shaw

Disease: ignorance; Symptom: state of perpetual bliss

Sometimes you do things just for the sake of doing it. And that is not always such a bad thing. It has been so long since an update has appeared on this blog, that all my avid readers (including me, there would be a total of about one) have surely given up. So, I have finally decided to write something – writing for writing’s sake!

We choose to ignore so many things in our daily life; consciously or unconsciously, willingly or unwillingly, happily or grudgingly.

So what if that man just dumped garbage on the street and you are upset by it? It is more convenient to ignore it than to pick up a brawl with him over the issue, isn’t it? Every issue that can be forgotten is forgotten and every confrontation that can be avoided is avoided.

Maybe the world’s stock of petroleum will run out over the next five decades. But why bother to lose sleep over something that might happen only after we are dead and buried? The temperature of the earth is going up and along with it, the sea-levels are rising too! So? Isn’t it more comforting to just think about which sandwich to order in the restaurant and which daily soap to watch tonight? The world is seeing unsustainable development. Unsustain.. err, what?

I wonder why we choose ignorance. Surely, it is more agreeable that way. We find it easier to keep the uncomfortable truth aside in an attempt to achieve, yes, the proverbial bliss.

There is a leaning towards ignorance in everything we choose to do. From religion – the much used and often abused opium for the masses – to the food we have (remember all the aerated drinks that we have, conveniently disremembering what it could do to us?). It is almost as if we are in a quest for a perpetual state of ignorance. We are ready to believe anything that makes us comfortable, happy.

So are we even contemplating on philosophical issues like the meaning of life? Or the origin of the universe? We perhaps don’t need to, because we have already been doped with ready-made answers and told not to ever try and get ourselves out of our reverie.

No, I never intended this post to be judgmental. In fact, I did not even intend this post to be even remotely solemn. But then, like most other posts on this blog, I have ended up being philosophical and spiteful of my pet issue – religion. Ironic? Inevitable? Expected?

But then, I digress. There is school of thought that suggests that ignorance is not as undesirable as we might think. That perhaps it is, and should be the way to approach life. I must admit that there is truth to that argument. So then, do we want to live in a world of delusions or harsh realities? The choice is between bliss and misery.

It’s all in our hands

Destiny, fate, luck – often considered to be the most influential factors that shape the course of our lives.  When things go wrong, it must have been fate. When you don’t achieve what you would really like to, it must be that you are not destined for it. And luck, of course! There is no success or achievement without it.

How cliched, ordinary and pathetic is this kind of thought process? Unfortunately, this is what we have all become accustomed to. We are repeatedly told how nothing is under our control, that there is an overpowering, omnipotent force that wrests all control with itself. That we will only do things that we are meant to do.

If everything is already meant to be, then what is our role? Are we mere actors playing out pre-written scripts of a supernatural force? I find that concept demeaning to humanity itself. I am sure we are not just the actors. We are the writers and the directors too – of our destiny, of our future.

The fact is, we give God too much credit and hold him responsible for more than he actually is. It is time we learnt to accept responsibility instead of apportioning blame on our poor Gods. And it is also time that we started working towards what we need to achieve instead of sitting back and waiting for our destiny to guide us.

While it is undeniable that certain events in our lives are well outside our control, I would rather believe that it is my karma influencing it indirectly. But this might still not explain people being lucky/unlucky (read being born rich/poor) by birth. That, I believe is the result of defective social evolution triggered my self-centered concerns. (But both these are topics for another post altogether.)

I happened to stumble onto this video on YouTube. No amount of adjectives can describe the video, it simply has to be watched.  It says a few things about common beliefs and how people have proved them wrong over the years.

There is nothing in this world that is meant to be. We mould it the way we want to. Nothing and no one is responsible for what happens in our lives except we ourselves.

As the youth, we have the power to re-imagine and reshape this world.  So, what are we waiting for? Like the tagline says, it is time to take flight. Because it is all in our hands!

To vote or not to vote

That is the question! And most youngsters in this country have been answering in the negative. At least the statistics on the percentage of youngsters who cast their votes, say so.

Bollywood has been trying to convince the youngsters to vote, but I am not sure if it will work.

The majority of us probably think that it is useless to vote for any of the @%$%#$ politicians who are contesting. Of the rest, I guess some are too lazy to stand in long queues in the summer heat to cast their vote, some just don’t care and the others don’t know what an election is.

The ‘question’ in question was one that I pondered over as well before I cast my first vote for the last Kerala Assembly Elections. After thinking long and hard, I realized that not voting was not even an option. It is true that most of the candidates in the fray are not worthy of representing the people of their constituency. But that does not mean that we choose to avoid our fundamental right and duty, because by voting we are keeping our end of the bargain; doing what we are supposed to do as responsible citizens.

It is not as if we have no choice while casting our vote. We could vote for an independent candidate who we think could do some good for our constituency. Or vote to keep certain ideologies/parties out of power (choose the lesser devil in a sense). If even that does not work, we could choose to cast a “NO VOTE”.

Casting a “NO VOTE” (Section 49-O)

Section 49-O of the Conduct of Election Rules, 1961 gives the option to an elector to register a NO VOTE. Following is the official extract from CER 1961:

49-O. Elector deciding not to vote.-If an elector, after his electoral roll number has been duly entered in the register of voters in Form-17A and has put his signature or thumb impression thereon as required under sub-rule (1) of rule 49L, decided not to record his vote, a remark to this effect shall be made against the said entry in Form 17A by the presiding officer and the signature or thumb impression of the elector shall be obtained against such remark.

This can also be seen as a way to register a “protest vote”, if an elector doesn’t like any of the candidates. However, the only practical utility of exercising the right of NO VOTE is that it allows one to ensure that his / her vote is not misused by anybody else. Under no circumstances is a re-polling ordered, irrespective of how small or large the number of NO VOTES is.

Source: Jaago Re! campaign website

We might not be able to stop a candidate from being elected, but we can still protest. Let us all do at least that as the first step towards changing the way our system works. Like the Jaago Re! campaign slogan goes – Jaago, aur Jagaao!