Quote of the Day
>> Friday, February 19, 2010
| “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” | |
Changing Perspectives
>> Thursday, February 18, 2010
It was a summer afternoon in the city of Delhi. My patience was tested to an extent where I could not any further believe that there is a force who listens when needed. Sitting in the bus I was just waiting to reach my home and cry , cursing the unfortunate time when I was brought into this world. My existence and Life appeared a big burden over me. This was a consequence of long term frustration. I told myself there was no positive force in this world and it’s a give and take hell we live in. As I was convincing myself that this was the only truth of being on this planet of life, a young girl entered the bus. She was wearing black spects , the ones which blind wear. It was absolutely not to disguise anyone as she also held firmly her white stick, her only support to life. She sat beside me and click opened a watch, touched the arms of the watch and enthusiastically told me that she'll reach just in time to take her exam.
There and at that moment life asked many questions to me and answered all the questions I had been putting in all these times of test. Life taught me a lesson and I cried a lot. The reason of course being very different. It was an expression of guilt and remorse towards how I had been looking at life.
I realised it is my duty and responsibility to spread the lesson and this is the way I opt to tell the lesson.
How many times did you pass through a beggar and dared to hug him than to close the windows of your car?
How many times have you visited an asylum or an orphanage and tried to realise what actually life has bestowed upon you?
How many times have you ,rather than cursing the life, happily accepted the challenge?
How many times have you realised what life has given to you than what it has snatched away from you?
Be honest to yourself while answering these questions and you set on the road of optimism and life all together will appear to you a best gift .Live life by not seeing that you have remained less successful than your friends but you have achieved much more than many ,that your destiny had been better than many. Life's rule is simple, the way you look at it , it reciprocates in the same manner. Choice is all yours what you want to make out of your life.
Who Is Really Alive?
>> Sunday, February 14, 2010
Almost every morning, an year before, I used to see the cremation ground on my way to college. And everyday I spent a good sight over it. Sometimes I would even see a man performing the last rites of a corpse. Just opposite to the ground was one of the God's houses, a Gurudwara. A strange feeling used to equip me, inexplicable something would rush through my veins but I had no words at my disposal to explain that to my mind. May be it was a question or a realisation of the mortality of life and yet the piety with which it has to be led. The shining morning sun and its rays seemed to say something to me, the rays would shine in my eyes as if saying a fresh warm note. Those few moments everyday were more puzzling than any other time .There was life and death, the creator and the rising sun all captured in one moment. But everyone else seemed oblivious to all this. Everyone was rushing for the day, for one thing or other, not a breath to spare .Were they too blind to realise the message encaptured in those moments?
As I would walk a distance I would see an old woman , with dreadlocks, painful eyes and a disturbing air to her , playing with a doll. On my way back I would often come across a blind man carefully searching his path ahead.
Did any of these have any meaning to them? Was there a message? Or as everyone I was suppose to be as oblivious as them? Was my purpose too was to disregard their pain and queue myself for just my dreams and just my goals? Or all of us have become too selfish to realise our real purpose to life? What was that troubled me? .
Till date I have no clear answer to these questions but I have a realization and I’ll make sure that I do not turn a blind eye to that realization -The realisation of the futility of life, the realisation of the need to help, the realisation of being unselfish. Everyday I was reminded of how short a life is, how much it has to give and how much we have in us to impart to this world before we leave. To make world a better place is the goal of every soul. I have this realisation.
Through AID I want to contribute to the society in every possible manner I can, with whatever I have at my disposal. I hope the first step proves beneficial.
The ethics of Idiocy
>> Wednesday, January 27, 2010
It was quite refreshing to see how ‘excellence’ was given priority over ‘success’ in 3 Idiots. Until now we have been seeing a good number of movies about morality and success, of which the most recent example was Rocket Singh. In the period of recovery from economic recession, the film adds a necessary caveat on how to do business. The film moved beyond the dichotomy of good businessmen and bad businessmen by shifting the focus from the actors to the systems. It brought ethics into the core of economics in a powerful way.
However going back to the issue of excellence and success, and without challenging the core idea that excellence should precede success, I was wondering what would have happened if we could change the order of the ‘idiots’. Put Aamir Khan’s character in Sharman Joshi’s shoes without changing their class background. In other words, what is the role of material contexts in defining what success and excellence could mean? What would be the ways to achieve them? Moreover, where would the morality and ethics of success figure in the discourses of class backgrounds and how?
And this is where I feel like making a preposterous statement that although I loved watching 3 Idiots for its great entertainment value and for a meaningful message for discarding not only rote learning but also for chasing up genuine interests, I am not sure if the movie depicted poverty in its varied aspects. I am not arguing for political correctness in the depiction; I am arguing for the sensitivity towards it. Why was it necessary to depict the scenes of Aamir and Madhavan’s visit to Joshi’s house in black n white background in the backdrop of laughter-evoking musical piece? The whole scene of that encounter – between a superfluous rich-background – (Aamir) and a middle class – guy (Madhavan) on the one hand and Joshi’s gloomed house with plasters peeling off the walls evoked laughter than anything else. It represented the mimicry of poverty. Not even the irony was left, if at all poverty has got irony!
There would be many movies one could possibly think of to juxtapose this sort of representation, but I am here reminded of a Sai Paranjape’s movie called Disha. Made in the 1980s (most probably 1984) the movie has multiple thematic repertoire. While one could read urban-rural connectivity in that others could possibly turn to women issues. The thing which I liked the most in that movie was the variegated trajectories of poverty, which do not burden the viewers with their acuteness but neither caricature the differential response generation. Om Puri is the madman of the village who out of frustration of being poor (and lack of water in the village) had been digging a well for almost sixteen years. His sense of impoverishment made him enterprising because at last he succeeded in getting water. The characters of Raghubir Yadav and Nana Patekar deal with their worlds by migrating to Bombay. However they again followed different trajectories – while Yadav who was keen to migrate chose to come back once water arrived in the village (his heart lay in the rurality?) Patekar, who was coerced by his immediate needs to migrate, decided to stay there, because his wife, again because of poverty, was forced to work in the local bidi factory where she ended up in liaison with the manager. Every character was, so to say, poor; they shared the same material conditions, but every character showed distinct traits in dealing with their immediate conditions.
This is the turf where 3 Idiots failed to score a point – the universalisation of the message of excellence over success was too monochromatic. To be fair, the narrative did try to complicate this by making Aamir’s childhood a surrogate to richness – a domestic help in a rich family. Also, he left the college empty handed without that affluence and without the worldly tag of being the topper of the prestigious college. Yet, in no way it convinces, at least me, why a character like Joshi’s should not aspire to just succeed. More importantly, and ironically the social constrictions and differential economic backgrounds were almost flattened. The chest-hair ridden belan of Joshi’s mother will at best be remembered as a good joke in the movie in the same way as the other guy will be who always put a price-tag to objects that also represented human emotions.
Quote of the Day - 16th Jan 2010
>> Saturday, January 16, 2010
"And in the end, it's not the years in your life that count. It's the life in your years."
 Abraham Lincoln quotes (American 16th US president (1861-65), who brought about the emancipation of the slaves. 1809-1865) |
Make Poverty History
>> Friday, January 1, 2010
A few weeks back while travelling in a train in the UK, I found myself sitting in front of a seemingly learned white gentleman who was deeply engrossed in reading through a folder that might have contained essays by his students (assuming that he is in teaching profession). The nature of those papers did not intrigue me; what did intrigue me was a band on his wrist: Make Poverty History. No, it was not for the first time that I had seen this band. I was aware of its existence as much as of the poverty itself. The global call to wear the white band, if I am not wrong, was in 2005 when millions in the UK alone displayed the band-istic solidarity. And I must admit that for the first few seconds or may be for a minute or two, I was completely mesmerized, in fact, I was in awe of this gentleman, whose impeccable deep-in-thought reading posture meticulously matched by his golden rim glasses transposed the meaning of the words scribbled on the band to a completely different level: to a philosophical nexus of capitalism and corporatism of our modern world that not only produces but also makes poverty somehow acceptable. And simultaneously it also reinforced the idea that some people feel and believe that it can be eradicated. These thoughts empowered me. I felt that I am part of his world, the world that conveys deep meanings through simplest of the simple mediums. I felt that I do want to march ahead, with hands in hands, and wrists in wrists, to bulldoze the ramparts of ‘business of high politics’ and ‘politics of high business’ where poverty is both produced and caricatured. Well, if you’re now awe-struck at the twist of this phrase, I will let you know a little secret: these are not mine; I borrowed them from Gregory David Roberts’s Shantaram, a book which also talks about poverty and philosophy – a philosophy wherein every object or idea is in transition to achieve a higher plane of resolution and the poverty which is not shameful of its existence. It is the poverty which is aware of its limitation and resilient of its strength, which both performs and mimics itself at the margins of the society and yet provides crucial linkages to the mechanisms of the society that is pretty much mainstream. It is the poverty which is residing within the web of the poorers and yet which is tied to the strings of power and prestige, money and charity that influences or rather constitutes it from outside. While in the train I was not encountered by these thoughts although I had read the Shantaram months ago. What also kept me preoccupied in my banal devilish thinking was not the belief in emancipation (that was momentary, as emancipation, very akin to desire, itself is. Echoes of limitations of Buddhism?) But the idea fiddling in my mind was that if Poverty becomes History then we all will be rich. If this sounds like a mistaken generalization, then, I further qualified my thought: may be not rich but richer. Still this relativism, I argued in my mind, would mean that we need another band: Make Lesser Rich More Richer, or, Less is More and many more, some interesting and some uninteresting one-liners, kept swimming in my head until I naively realized that the few hundreds amongst those millions on the streets of the UK must have bought their shirts or trousers from the Primark whose in-house and off-shore manufacturing must have involved a few hundred of Bangladeshi children working 16 hours a day and wishing to get richer.
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