Representing the under-represented

If you are reading this, there is a high probability that you fall in the category of substantially-represented population. This entry will talk about people who don't get to read stuff online. India, as it stands today, managed to achieve political democracy but haven't achieved her social democracy yet. Among very few nations on the globe, she managed to held 12 consecutive general elections after independence (from whites), which indicates that the political democracy has being achieved at some level. Read on to see why according to me, we failed to achieve social democracy.

We live in a country where recognition and history has always been crooked. Numerous examples: Rajiv Gandhi being recognized as a person who initiated the economic reforms as against to P V Narsimha Rao and Dr. Manmohan Singh; M K Gandhi's sagacity has being ignored or rather not recognized enough when he chose B R Ambedkar to be a part of the first cabinet as the law minister and head of drafting committee of a mammoth Indian constitution, even when Ambedkar had been very critical of Gandhi's approach towards the natives of India - Dalits and Advasis.

We live in a country where majority are fundamentalist and if they are called so, they don't like it. They will die for the ideas they believe in, which can be good or bad, but the problem lies in the part where they don't want to listen to the other story or argument. Worst thing is that they are very open to conflicts which will cause through such ideologies. I could not agree more when Nandan Nilekani says "Such 'Ideas of Conflict' is eating India from inside". We are yet to reach a point where we get over the 'Ideas of Conflict' and transform it in to the 'Ideas of Positive Social Change' and/or 'Ideas of Anticipation' and/or 'Ideas of Open Society' and/or 'Ideas of Emancipation'.

This is hurting India.

In contemporary India, Ambedkar's legacy prevails and deepens more stronger than any other leader for the very fact that the magnitude of impact his policies created is unmatched by any other policy that was ever materialized in India. He had warned India of following three things on 26th Jan, 1950. I am quoting him
"Abandon the bloody methods of revolution. There can be no justification for these unconstitutional methods. These methods are nothing but the Grammar of Anarchy and the sooner they are abandoned, the better for us" (Non-violence and follow-the-law approach!!)
"There was nothing wrong in being grateful to great men who have rendered life-long services to the country. But there are limits to gratefulness." (Treating Men as Gods, Bhakti and devotion must have limits, which sadly cannot be judged true in India.)
"Political democracy cannot last unless there lies at the base of it social democracy"

I define social democracy as a society where the whole nation surge ahead and prosper and not just a limited set of people. India has a long way to go to achieve social democracy.The main reason behind it is the under representation of vast number of socially and economically backward people in main-stream media and decision making bodies in private/public industries and other important national-level entities. Moreover, the involvement of only affluent and middle class Indians in the process of globalization have widened the gap between poor and riches of India. What good is the change unless it benefits all sections of society. We need a radical transformation of ideas-causing-conflict to ideas-creating-better-future.

I will elaborate upon what I mean by transforming from 'Ideas of Conflict' to 'Ideas of Positive Change'. Consider a extra hot topic of casteism in India. Frankly, most of the problems India has can be traced down to it. Now, many Indians (mostly from urban India) might feel that not talking about it is a solution. Many Indian (mostly people who has seen the effects of caste-conflict in real) might feel that talking about it is a step in a right direction. Well, I am not to judge what is right. All I see is the fumigation infecting good minds of India in unproductive social quarrels and we are stuck in 'Ideas of Conflicts'. I do not have a silver bullet for it's transformation to 'Ideas of Positive Change', but I definitely feel that the substantially-represented Indians must act as mediocre-visionaries for what an amazing platform has already been set in India in terms of successful political democracy. This substantially-represented Indians must come forward to represent the under-represented Indians.

The question is, can we act as visionaries, like the leaders of 1947 with different interests who came together to build the nation, to carry the burdens of poverty stricken Indians.

Why 'social service' doesn't impress me?

'Organized effort to advance human welfare' - this primal idea of social service is dented by the modernistic concept of social service where it is more or less tagged as volunteer-ship at an individual level. The rest of the blog will consider this modernistic idea when referring 'social service' than the dictionary meaning.

Well, 'social service' is definitely not a symbol of profanity but neither it can be plainly put as a divine and utter show of selflessness. According to me, whoever considers it as way to feel right about him/herself is guilty of spiritual embezzlement. One can give number of positives for what 'social service' is worth, but I can list few reasons why we should think beyond mere 'social service' in a mass movement sort of a situation.

• Social service has serious sustainability issues. Remember, it is not a policy!! It is not a stone in a mass movement!! It is not measured in terms of impact!! It is measured as righteousness on an individual's part. Essentially, it is mortal and bound to die in lieu of an individual's slack.
• Volunteer-ship usually lack passion. It lacks reasoning. It is more of an effort by an individual to feel joyous.
• "Hopefully, I will find time this weekend to help out with BLAH and BLUH...." - this is a very plebeian remark when an individual is committing for any sort of social service. I will not insult reader's intelligence to understand a passionate stakeholder's frustration who wants to get things done as professionally as any money making business will do. Thus, social service have almost become a luxury at individual's disposal affecting lives and social cause/s.
  

It is equally easy to say that the very idea of volunteering is to not act as a precursor to any social change, let aside creating a policy!!! But, my point is, would it hurt to think the impact of your time and resources before committing to any sort of social service??

Now, to be fair to the subject in the discussion, it is not 'nothing' either. It has a potential to spur as an impactful solution to hazardous social problems. One just needs to think right - providing money to a poor student against drafting a process to support many students.

That is why 'social service', as good it is, does not impress me!!

Bringing Meaning to Life (BMTL)

'Depressed' is just one of the emotions I am feeling right now. 'Lost' is another one. These days, me and a very rude (to me) friend of mine are discussing 'bringing meaning to life'. I am neither philosophical nor I understand anything that is remotely close to being profound. So, this stuff isn't going to penetrate my thick skull :D But being dumb does not give me a permit to not feel depressed or lost, so it is perfectly justifiable for me to have an unfortunate rendezvous with these highly iconic but unwanted emotions.

Following is what I perceive to be the gist of our discussion (followed by some sparkles and twinkles in my brain cells, can be called as the leftovers!) spanning over two days.

There must be gazillion instances in the history of time when 'bringing meaning to life' was discussed. The only conclusive thing I can say is that nobody but the stakeholders in the discussion cares about it!! On a brighter side, I think those people are prosperous enough to have discussed this because most of the people around us don't reach this stage but follow the endless circle of monotonous life, struggling.

Pessimistic philosopher Schopenhauer says that 'Human life must be some kind of mistake and is sufficiently proved by the simple observation that man is a compound of needs which are hard to satisfy'. Maybe he was too harsh to think that life is a mistake :P, but definitely has strong grounds to say what he did say. The question of BMTL obviously do not have a specific answer, but can be simplified(?) in many ways.

• Achieving personal goals
  
• A spiritual angle - phew! ...'Faith' is what we are talking here; there is something beyond our comprehension which is good and pure and once we get to see that, we produce meaning to our life. The coefficient of skepticism is very close to 1 in this theory :D.
  
• Doing what you like doing without caring about society we live in, or even morality for that matter (Do you like selling weeds???).
  

So, not knowing the answer makes me feel depressed and lost.

I am no Lord Buddha to conclude anything for sure, these are observations and should be treated alike.

Majid

Majid is the guy with whom I played 'goti' (marbles) when I was 11.
Majid is the guy with whom I promised to enter in the milk-selling business, because according to him - 'waha bahot paisa hai'.
Majid is the only guy with whom I was friends with when I was 11.
Majid is the guy with whom I spoke yesterday....and he confessed something that finally settled a part of my eternally restless nerves.

I was really good at 'goti', specifically a game called 'faul (to be pronounced - faaoul) goli'. In this game, each player puts equal number of marbles in a ring drawn on the ground. One is suppose to hit-and-remove these marbles out of the ring using another (shooter) marble held very peculiarly in your hand to own them (the marbles in the ring). To elaborate about the positioning of the shooter-marble in the hand, one should rest the thumb of the left hand on the ground, then hold the shooter-marble between one of the remaining fingers of the left hand and any number of fingers of the right hand, so that you can aim. phew!! It's all right if you did not understand that :D

Point is - I was good at this particular game and my dad had qualified it as an unsophisticated game (specially because his beloved elder son was disgusted with this game and no other smart or convent-going kid will play this). But I wasn't a convent-going kid anyways, so why bother!!! And where does Majid fits into the picture!! Well, we used to play 'goti' together and he used to get good pocket money for buying marbles. With my skills, I robbed him off as frequently as thrice a day and continued accumulating marbles in a plastic bag. I am thankful to my brother who quite promptly used to pull me off from the game just before my dad came home from work, that saved me from good amount of hours of mutilated listening. One bag became two, and then more. Had my dad come to know about the marble filled bags, first of all, he would have trashed the bags, followed by me getting a graceful request to leave the house (Not kidding!!) Eventually, I robbed Majid of 5000 marbles which literally made from my first 50 odd marbles. To hide those bags, I dug a hole outside my house and buried my hard earned after tax possession. I had to give away few tens of marbles to my neighbor who saw my deed, but promised to not tell anybody if I give him some of the marbles - which I agreed to, that is why I called these marbles as - hard earned after tax possession.

Ritual was to un-bury the buried every day to count my marbles, or at least number of bags. After couple of months, someone stole my bags and I went literally crazy. I felt as if my retirement funds and all savings are vanished in thin air, and I am 60 and without a life threatening disease :(. My mom tried to console me, but I did not stop crying and was telling her that its dad who found and threw them - 'I saw him happy today' ... sob...sob! I doubted my neighbor and he refused of any felony, so did Majid. I thought it is no fair to have doubted Majid for how willingly he buys new marbles and loses each one of them to me. Majid, as best he was, continued to buy and lose marbles to me :). But I never reached the 5000 mark again. I guess I had lost my goti charm and appetite!!!

I spoke with Majid yest after 15 years. He was mad at me for doubting his business acumen and not standing by my promise to partner him in the milk-selling business. Before hanging up, he confessed he was the one who stole HIS marbles.

A prescription for gross conventionality

Last week (or month), Michael Jackson (MJ) might have created a new world record which nobody must have taken a note of - "Person who caused highest number of upheavals in IM (instant messenger) user's status messages". I managed to capture few. Please note that I am not maligning any of the status messages in any way, they are 'strictly' copied as they are/were. (The IT criminal law hasn't reached a level where they can sue me for copying my friend's status messages...phew!!)

Messages which I think are explicitly referring to MJs demise

• "Death of Legend"
• "I lost my hero"
• "RIP MJ" (I didn't know wat RIP meant, but 4 such status messages made me push the limits to go check on it, and now I know!!... imagine how I must have read it without knowing what RIP stands for - "rip michael jackson"...I was like - man, atleast now, leave him alone!!! :D )
• "He taught me how to dance" (I didn't know MJ was a personal trainer too)

Messages which I think may or may not referr to MJs demise

• "I cried" (Okay...thats way too much of personal information!!)

And my personal favorite

• "I want to live his life" (As soon as I saw this, I pinged MJs wiki page to him/her thinking that he/she may not know how much debt he was under)

Now, the question is, why did I name the entry - "A prescription for gross conventionality". MJs death has created such a hoopla, that Iran's current political turmoil seemed lilliputian. I even started wondering if people have any idea what is going on there. To assuage my curiosity, I asked about it (Iran's situation) to 10 random people and if it is affecting any of the status messages (if not life). I got some ghastly responses and I think they were too lame to even figure here (Don't worry, none of these 10 people will read my blog!!). This exercise was disappointing and it marked the search for a title for this entry and I believe that I have come with an appropriate one - A prescription for gross conventionality!! The conventionality being what people normally do/did and gross being how they tend to ignore equally or more important facts only for reasons beyond my comprehension!!!

Entertainment will orchestrate my life in 2009

"Really...how doped you must be to think so", my mirror image who is a virtuoso said to me and he is almost always sarcastic. The response came for the comment I made about my life being shiny and no-whiny in the year 200NINE. To put things in perspective, I am describing a conversation I recently had with my mirror image who happens to not agree with anything I say. But since he has no physical existence, he is more or less completely paralysed and literally my slave..... This time around though, he decided to revolt and hamper my straight(? ... yeah you knuckleheads, don't stray - stay put!) thinking.

So....

"I think your tooth is shaking", he said. Of course he was lying, I replied, "Is this how you going to tell me how bad the decision of making 2009 a fun year was...by telling ridiculously sympathetic lies?". In my mind, I kept saying to myself that even though he is absolutely right about 2009 being so not fun year, I will make it right, there are 6 more months to go!! Damnn me, he reads my mind but I cant read his. He simply laughed "He He He...".

Looking back upon a period of 6 months: I had a lot-of-free-time filled last semester at CMU last year, thanks to 7 courses that I took in summer semester. I decided to turn this lot-of-free-time into lot-of-fun-time in the year 200NINE. In that josh, I drove the whole Maharashtra state from Pune to Chandrapur following number of GPS like instruments called humans, just to realize that in the last 3 miles of journey, I drove with the hand-brake ON...You guessed it right!!! My car's brakes failed eventually and I almost had myself killed ...well on two occasions (calls for another blog entry). But, I thought - man, this was fun!!! Thats when I knew, I knew 2009 is not going to disappoint me. My virtuoso mirror image interuppted my train of thoughts - "Well, it din't turn out that way, did it?". I gave up my fight with him and joined the glory of being betrayed by my own life, "F$#$ my life (in 09 only :D )....hell, not even remotely". So, In retrospect:

• O my F Lord, I worked for almost 16 hrs a day for almost 2.5 months
• O my F Lord, I almost wrote 14000 lines of code in these 3 months
• O my F Lord, I almost always dint drink over the weekends (then, when did i get drunk!!!! It's hurting now, for real.... :P )
• O my F Lord, I almost always dint drink over the weekdays
• O my F Lord, I used almost every penny that my behemoth employer gave me
• O my F Lord, I am still sitting in the lawn area in the concerts (raise the bar, dude!)

Good thing is, I didn't work equally hard for my employer and worked just enough for it(my employer) to think that I did a good job. So, I am going to continue not working for it.

I turned to my mirror image and said "This is going to change in next 6 months." He looked at me with substantial amount of disgust, "Sure, it will!!". The sarcasm continues....