Glory to ye..O' night

when the night is at its darkest, with the morning sun at bay,
my dreams do then awaken, with a million things to say

when the crimson hues of night sky, shine in all their nightly glory
my dreams do then transcend, spinning for me my story

with the break of dawn when lightness, seeps in its way through the crack
those dreams then rest in my eyes, with a hope for a way back...
Hoping to stay with me, through the blinding light of the day
hoping to not get burnt, hoping to not fade away

but while the night as dark as it may be, shows me the light within
the day light in all its brightness, shows the darkness of the world i'm in

where my dreams of the night are stories, of love and hope and light
my eyes open to a day, with mornings darker than the night

and so I wait for the night again, and to him who hears, I pray
hold on O', ye night serene, let my dreams and my hopes stay

For the greater good....

Pain, an excruciating, sickening, blindening pain was gripping his entire body. His severed leg-which now hung from his body like a dry stump was sending waves of agony through his entire body. Retired Subedar Balwant Singh was not a novice to pain. 30 years of his life as an army man, he had spent taking bullets on his chest and facing spine chilling enemy attacks. It was in fact one of such ferocious battles that had cost him his leg, which was blown off by the explosion of a land mine. Yet, now it seemed that old age had taken its toll on his ability to endure pain. Day after day, night after night he suffered and his moans filled the dingy, dungeon like room he lived in.

Aware, that his moans might wake up his son and daughter in the adjacent room, he got up to fix himself a cure. With extreme difficulty he lurched towards a small bedside table, and rummaged its drawers in the search of a painkiller. The drawer had empty strips of his regular medicines that had been exhausted a week back and were still waiting to be replaced, a few old letters which had yellowed with time but were otherwise in good condition, and an old black and white photograph of Balwant Singh with his wife and son. He feverishly rummaged through the drawer to find anything that would put him out of his agony, but couldn’t find any. Disgruntled, he turned back to his cot with a jerk. He gave out an involuntary gasp of pain with turned to a loud groan as pain shot up like flames threating to consume his entire being. He knew his groans carried to the his son’s room as well, and tried to contain himself, but the agony was too much for him to make sense of, and by the time he could stifle his moans, they had already woken up the incumbents of the adjacent room.

“What does he think he is doing, your father” an irritable female voice spoke from the room. His daughter in law apparently did not deem it necessary to keep her voice low to hide her displeasure caused by her father in law’s late night attention seeking grunts. “What is he making sounds like that for, in the middle of the night”, she went on. “Isn’t it enough that he has the entire household at his service the entire day,that he wants us to attend to him at the night too? Why is it so difficult for him to understand that unlike him, people in this household ACTUALLY work in the day. Please Deepak, go and tell him to spare us the agony. Tell him at least not to become a nuisance to our family, if he can’t make himself of any use”

Nuisance to our family..! Our family..! The words pierced Balwant Singh’s chest deeper that any bullet ever had managed to, his heart bled more profusely than any of his battle wounds ever did. As those words shot though his ears like molten lava, his thoughts ran back to the older, happier times, life before he had become a nuisance to the family.

Subedar Balwant Singh was always counted as among the bravest in the regiment. “A soldier”, he always said “lives and dies for the greater good”. And truly so, Subedar Singh had on number of occasions, defied death and brought glory to his regiment through his valour and bravado. When he lost his leg in the battle, he was bestowed with honours. He received medals and gallantry awards, amidst showers of praises. He remembered how his son basked in the glory of his father, his daughter in law boasted in front of gleaming lights of TV cameras about how privileged she felt to be married in the family of a war hero. But the glimmer of the medals faded with time, so did the euphoria of fame. As the money started drying up, the medals became like redundant accessories, and he became like an old rotting piece of furniture for his son and daughter in law.

He was jolted out of his memories by his son’s anguished voice. “What is your problem Dad?”, he spoke in a harsh tone “Don’t you realize the ordeal you are putting us through..making sounds like that in the dead of the night. People in this household work dad, we don’t have the luxury of having free time like you do all day. Atleast think of Lekha, she toils all day and gets only the night to rest. You are waking her up with all the commotion you are making. Poor woman, such a terrible headache she had all today today.”

Rage gripped Balwant Singh’s body. His every pore was screaming in anguish, drowning all the agony he felt. No physical pain could hurt more than how his son’s words hurt him. His own flesh and blood, how could he have become so oblivious to his father’s grief? He wanted to cry out loud, shake up his son who had become so indifferent to his grief, but his voice seemed to have obstructed itself. All he could muster were a few feeble words…”I am sorry…didn’t mean to..my leg..no medicines”. “Yes Dad,” his son replied rudely “I know about your medicines. You don’t need to keep reminding me about them every waking moment. It is the end of the month. Do you think I have a money tree growing in the backyard? I earn a modest amount dad, and it’s not easy for me to keep paying for your medicines. But you get your supplies, don’t you? 1 week delay, and you start throwing tantrums like that.”

Balwant Singh couldn’t hear the rest ofwhat his son said. His mind was going into a tizzy. He wished the war had taken his ability to hear rather than the ability to walk from him, so he could be spared hearing such spite from his own son. He wanted to ask his son how his “modest earnings” allowed him lavish parties and dinners with his wife and friends every month, if his father’s medicine worth 100 rs a month were too high for him to afford. But again he couldn’t speak, his voice seemed to have drowned inside him forever.

“Here, take this”, he heard his son say again. “these are sleeping pills. Take one of these and go to sleep. So we can rest too.” He handed him the bottle and stormed out of the room muttering to himself. Balwant singh looked at the bottle and his life flashed in front of him. He remembered his old days, days of glory, where he was a man of purpose, man of honour, man who lived for the “greater good”

“For the greater good”..he thought, and the voices of his son and daughter in law ran through his head. Subedar balwant singh reduced to a nuisance, a burden in his own house. Anger gripped him as he reflected over what had become of his life. He did not wish to battle for survival, if there was no life in it. Subedar Singh could not, would not accept the life where he was looked upon as a weed, an infestation which was to be endured. He looked at the bottle in his hand and felt strangely at ease. There was no pain, no misery, no hurt. He felt more alive than he had in years. His old self glowed in his heart like a talisman. He opened the bottled and gulped the entire contents in a go. He closed his eyes, and feeling like a tired but victorious soldier, he waited for sleep to come.

The next morning, the news of Balwant Singh’s demise spread like wildfire. The TV channels saw a blockbuster story brewing, in Balwant Singh’s death. An ex- soldier, dying in the state of derision and poverty was a story sure to catch the eyeballs in the prime time. As the media people pounced on the story like hungry vultures, the ministers swarmed the scene like bees. With elections round the corner, paying tribute to a deceased soldier, in the presence of media was the best advertisement they could have hoped for themselves. As this soap opera was building up outside the house, the characters inside too were all played their part exceedingly well. The visitors came and one by one paid their homage to the deceased soul, consoling a seemingly bereaved son and his wailing wife who cried in shrill tones about having lost a father in Balwant Singh. As the CM announced as cash compensation, a cheque of 5 lakh for the family of the deceased, the son and his wife looked at each other, their faces sombre but eyes gleaming.The media persons interviewed the ministers, each of them looking at each other with satisfaction. All were happy, all were content. He had died indeed, for the greater good.

Cutting Through the Noise...

In the wake of the unpsurge of popular sentiments in the support of the mammoth and "revolutionary" movement that this whole Anna Hazare episode has come to become, there is a different kind of upsurge that I have been witnessing. Upsurge in the critisism of the people, who demand for an alternative viewpoint, a rational debate to follow this whole anti corruption opera bieng staged. I have been on the reciving end of my share of scrutiny and flak from my peers, having bieng one among those who are "UnIdian" and "Insenstive" enough to have dared to speak against the tide. Well, Normally, I wouldnt have bothered to clarify my stance. Afterall, those who are critising me are as entitled to their opinion as I am to mine. However, since Iam being bereft this benefit of doubt, I choose to write this post, not as a clarification, but as an alternate viewpoint, for people to understand, that me and the likes of me, who refuse to say the word as the world says it..are not necessarily devil's advocates..we are people..who call for rational judgement and sane debates over an issue that is being "romanticised" to a level that is has almost reached the levels of insanity. I will not draft this post as another one doing the "SWOT analysis" of the versions of the bill..there are enough already doing the rounds. I speak about the attitudes here..the attitudes being dealt to the people who are giving any thing less than their complete agreement and support to the bill.



First things first...the reason I endorse Arundhati Roy's article here..is not because I hero worship her. Yes, she does command huge amount of respects from me. But respecting someone does not mean blindly following their ideologies and viewpoints. I am as critical of her ideologies as her most stauch critics would be, wen they seem worthy of critism. The same sentiment holds true when I speak of Mr. Hazare as well. I have been a follower of this Magsasay Award winner activist for a long time. Having read about his work at the ground levels, and his success at Ralegan Siddhi..the orginal battleground he has been wokking at..he draws my admiration and respect. I admire him in the way he has unified the country and mobilized the mass over an infestation that is rotting our roots.



Having said tht, I refuse to join my friends and my countrymen in the mega sized, media orchestrated stage show that this "movemnt" has now gone on to become. As an initial supporter of the movement, I have been vociferous in my critism of how the government has acted in tackling this whole episode. From the lollypop they handed to the people..in the name of the "govt's version" of the bill..to the Stallin like attidute in their tolerance of the protest..the goverment no doubt has emerged the villains in this episode. The aroused disconcert and sentimets of the masses againt this is justified, and infact appreciated.



However, this movement has now reached a stage, where these "sentiments" threaten to override our power of rational thinking. where the romanticism threathens to supercede logic. In drafting a law, that holds a power to revloutionaize the constitutional setup, is it justified to let the heart rule the mind..? Is it justified to close ourself to alternate ideas that challenge a popular yet by no means a perfect version of the bill that is being pushed forward. People fighting for the cause call themselves the torch bearers and guards of proleteralian democracy, but in refusing to allow dissent aren’t they themselves underming the democratic setup they so vehementaly claim to guard? Fine, These alternate viewpoints maybe erroneous, but how, without any debate and reasoning can they they assume that their own version, their own viewpoint deserves to be followed? And if they say, they are open to debates and talks, challenging their views ..what reason propels them to tag and dismiss every dissent and every crictic an anti national? In placing themselves and their opnion above all voices of dissent, they are bieng as presuptive as the system they claim to be fighting againt.



Is supporting the viewpoint the crowd supports the proof that I and the likes of me will have to give to prove our Indianness ? Well, that being the case I’d rather take the flak and get ousted from the good books of people, than curb my better sense and speak the “general mind”. Cause the general mind refuses to think anymore..it choses to go with the flow. If u want to change and revolutionalize the system, It requires more than just a show of heart and solidarity..it requires a show of deliberation and reasoned thinking as well. Yes, the motivated masses have done well in coercing the govt to rethink its strategies and attitudes. But in our complete refusal to hear any voices of dissent..even those coming from amngst us , we are ourselves underming and tampering with the pillars our system stands on. We are getting carried away in the media fuelled fury and agitation, which the media keep adding fire to ..as melodrama means eyeballs and eyeballs means TRPs. If defying such absurdities earns me a tag of cynic Id gladly take that. Staying a cynic with a realization of reason and reality is better than becoming a romanticist who places his hope blindly in a pied piper, to be led to a magical land of no despair. If anything, at least a cynic drowns on his own terms.

silent sojourns :)

Lying on your berth, with your curtains drawn, with only the views outside your window and your thoughts for company. A little something that struck me while on a jouney like such, while enroute to my hometown.... :)

My window is misty with little droplets of water, and the moon is shining at me through them..travelling with me, my companion in this silent jouney. My curtains are drawn and Im in my own little space..lit by the duffused rays of the moonlight, split in dazzling colours. Its the most enthralling view of the night Iv ever experienced, one that can inspire poetry. As the train gathers pace, we leave behind the vegetation cover and enter civilization , into the industrial terrain. Suddenly the serenity of the moonlit sky is broken by the blinding lights of the halogens from the factories. The acrid stench of the chemicals and rotting waste hits my nostrils and I know I am back to the world the way it is, as opposed to the way it was meant to be. I know..I am back to being human.

Rally For Sanity

While watching Deepika and Sonam Kapoor gossip about Ranbeer last Sunday on Koffee with karan, I suddenly was hit by a realization that whiling away my time in mundane things was making me intellectually drained. So to build up on my general knowledge I decided to check upon what is the news for the day, and switched onto the news channels. The first one I checked flashed breaking news and so I stopped by to check, only to find out that all the conundrum was being caused by a guy who had decided to do a Dharmendra and had climbed up a TV tower to call for his girlfriend. Breaking news…?? I wondered. Alright, I need some real news, I thought, and so I flipped the channels to stop on another one which had a heated debate going on about whether Rakhi Sawant should get the prime time slot, or should she be relegated to after 11. Bewildered at the dearth of news on these news channels, I decided to check the international networks in my quest for information, and so, I flipped to CNN. “Peering into the royal purse” was the headline, and what Her majesty carried in her purse, was what the panellists were arguing upon. Utterly disappointed, my urge to build upon my IQ went down the drain, and I flipped back to the only thing that I thought made sense on TV that night, Koffee wid karan, and was compelled to write this piece as my clarion cry for rationality.
24 hour news media, as we know it, has become known for its breaking news and developing stories. The 24 hours news cycle is built on one particular thing, generating viewership, but how to get stories to generate that? There is not much you can talk about for 24 hours, so how to keep the viewers, the TRPs and consequentially the advertising revenues coming? Well, the news media seem to have found a formula for that. They elevate the passion of everything that happens, mundane and irrelevant, to make it a “Breaking News”. As time speeds up in our text-and-Twitter culture, news is perpetually pressured to come out fresh, and nothing sticks out fresher than breaking sensationalism. Consequentially, as these breaking news and the developing stories flood the news network, the media is reduced to becoming a circus with everything exaggerated and packaged in flashy content.
The essence of the issue here lies in the fact that 24 hours news networks have lost all sense of proportionality. There is no proportion to how much coverage they give to any of the pieces they carry. The Kala Bandar case gets the same coverage space as the massacre in Dantewada does. As a result you begin to lose the lexicon, the essence of urgent stories and breaking news. The real stories then have to become louder to cut through the noise. Which is a shame really, because this is how media loses its purpose. The media should be a platform which serves to articulate and bring into focus, the intangible feeling of the common man whose voice is idealist but impotent. Instead, it today is serving to provide fodder to satirists who write hour long pieces gimmicking the fools errand that media has gone on to become.
For those who argue that media does debate upon real political issues as well, I have a question. Does a political debate only center around left and right wing, and dynamics of political alliances and disjoints?? We see news networks speculating about which party will win which constituency. But we hardly catch any stories voicing the issues and the troubles of the people in those constituencies. Things go beyond left and right for media to cover. Unfortunately, the media has become too polarised to see that. Instead of being ones with a point of view, they are fast becoming partisans of some of the political parties. The news media should represent a more balanced center, where journalists analyze the facts. But expecting analytical, independent, and objective reporting from the media today is fast becoming like living in Utopia.
So as the news channels sit and brood over the right concoction of sensation, sleaze and news to show, I sit and remember the good old DD days, where the sari clad news anchors were there to abreast the world with the latest, and not just to increase the glam quotient on TV, which seems to be the sole motive of the Reid and Tailor clad news anchors today. Ours is a nation of rallies, so what’s needed perhaps is a rally for rationality this time. A rally, which urges for the restoration of sanity in the media today. For it is as Jon Stewart puts it “The press can hold its magnifying glass up to our problems, bringing them into focus, illuminating issues here to for unseen. Or they can use that magnifying glass to light ants on fire, and then, perhaps, host a week of shows on the sudden unexpected dangerous flaming ant epidemic. If we amplify everything, we hear nothing.”

WORLD MARKETS - DARWIN DID PROVE HIS POINT

In a world where a harsh, unforgiving environment creates scarce resources and fierce competition between its inhabitants, minute changes can mean the difference between dominance and death. Amidst the chaos, former behemoths find themselves hurtling toward extinction, while scrappy underdogs get the opportunity to reach new heights. Thus we can say that the notion of "survival of the fittest" as given by Darwin is not only something attributable to the development of species, but, in a more contemporary sense, to world markets as well. In the world market, which is faced with fierce competition, it’s a fight for survival. The capitalist structure of economies world wide leave no space for inefficiency. The markets are widely consumer driven and the aware and demanding consumer today has no qualms in switching loyalties if his demands are not being met with. As a result, over the years we have seen various new players establish their footing in the world markets, owing to their competence, while a lot of big players have had to crash out of the markets simply because in this race for survival, they weren’t left fit enough to run. If we observe the market behavior in general, we find striking facts that hold the Darwinian Theory right in the light of the world markets. We can draw amazing similarities between the theories propagated by Darwin and the functioning of the markets. The former propagates that mutations and recombinations provide a variety in the population of organisms in which the lesser are ruthlessly culled by the process of natural selection and only those that are fit to survive are rewarded by Mother Nature. The latter follows the same rule where individuals come up with a variety of ideas and implement them in the markets where only those which are fit to survive are retained and rewarded while the others are punished ruthlessly.
This rat race in the markets is all the more conspicuous now as we are in the midst of the financial mayhem tormenting the world’s economies. Now, the cycle of natural selection is more prominent than ever. Those who weren’t at the top of things are gone or going. In the past, governmental regulations in various countries created barriers that protected regional and national firms from the more efficient and competitive adversaries that operate in more capital efficient and less regulated environments, where capital is allocated to the most productive parts of the economy. This is increasingly changing today. Today, the concept of altruism or protection of the weaker does not find a place in the markets, or more appropriately “cannot” find a place in the markets because in a poor economy, only the strong survive.
If we objectively make an overview of the performances in various industries over the world, we will find that the story has been the same everywhere. The downslide in economy world wide has led to a slump in the performance of various sectors. From manufacturing to retail and everywhere in between, the economy is taking a toll on businesses. But as they say “there are always two ways to handle change. You can rail and fight against it, or you can embrace it and use it to position yourself ahead of the competition”. If we observe the performances objectively, giving attention to the individual players as well, we will find that in majority of the sectors there have been players which have outplayed the others and emerged as profit making entities even when the world around them was crumbling. These players have been the ones that are proactive about incorporating new technology, new equipment and new processes into their operations and have thus risen above their competition .To illustrate the point, let us have a look at the performance of the automobile industry in India. While the performance of the industry as a whole has been dismal, with a huge loss of 20% sales, one player by the name of HONDA actually managed to register a growth of 15% in sales. Confounding, aint it..?? Well we’d like to call it competence. Honda consistently worked upon their core competence, technology, and have efficiently converted technology into deliverable value and become among the top auto sellers of the world in even the dismal market conditions. Today when even burgers are costlier than last year, Honda has not only managed to increase its sales, it has also emerged as the frontrunner in the race for survival in these lowly market conditions.
As we mull over the success of certain key players in the market, we cannot ignore the major players that have crashed out of this race for survival. Major organizations like Lehman brothers have filed for bankrupts while the others like Woolworths have had to pack their bags and close trade, leaving behind legacy of many years. So why wasn’t the legacy and expertise of almost a century behind them, not able to bail them out of the crisis? The answer is simple. It is the Darwinian theory of natural selection at work. It is said that nothing is permanent except change. This is definitely holding true in case of the corporate world. The market dynamics are fast changing and the newer and efficient firms are taking over the older and not so efficient firms.
Critics often find it hubristic to presume that Darwinism is even remotely related to the way markets function. They insist that today’s markets and economy are like the breed “Maltese terrier” ruling the world. These lapdogs have retained the cunning features and apparent innocence that actually make us dependent on their whims while they themselves just pose as fashion accessories in the hands of their masters. They insist that just like in this case, the evolutionary process in the corporate world too has been selective of the cunning and seemingly unfit people. They believe that the new law of evolution in the corporate world has been “survival of the unfittest”. The fact that massive bailouts were provided by the American government to some of the firms on the verge of bankruptcy while leaving behind the others to bite the dust , in a way served to reinstate the idea in the minds of these critics.
But, what these critics do forget is that, neither evolution nor Darwin ever promised anything like perfection. Evolution is not about creating perfect or optimal creatures, which would require forethought, but only about the fact that the genes of creatures with modest advantages ("fittest" among those that happen currently to be alive) tend to spread throughout the population. This seemingly subtle difference between "fittest among the choices that happen to be lying around" and "fittest imaginable” makes all the difference in the world. In the same way elections are not won by the best of the candidates but by those who are able to win them, the markets too reward not those who make the best and the cheapest products but those who are best at making money and giving value to the customer. You can have the best technology available with you; it is of no use if you cannot use it to give the customer what he wants. Just like in evolution, business processes too are context driven. In evolution, the question is not weather, say, scales are better than wings, but what is better for the organism. If a sparrow was born with scales instead of wings they would have been redundant for it. Similarly in businesses, the decisions that are made are purely context driven as to what process will suit in the business in the given set of conditions. And when it comes to survival of the most cunning we can only say that in capitalist economies and fiercely competitive markets around the world, altruism does not find a place. In the markets that are facing almost a perfect competition, businesses have to compete fiercely for a limited market space; it is inevitable that cunningness and tact should creep in strategy making. That it is ethical or not is a different question altogether but the fact is that in a market where all players are cunning, the theory of natural selection will rule again and the one who applies his cunning in the best manner will be the fittest to rule. It’s just like they say “Natural selection, as it has operated in human history, favors not only the clever but the murderous.”
Summing it all up, one can only say that no other theory fits more aptly in the model of function the world markets have adopted. In the long run only those businesses sustain themselves which provide value, efficiency and satisfaction to the customer. As we have seen over the years, it is not about the big players or smaller ones, it is always about the better ones, just like the old saying goes “The most successful people don't necessarily have the best of everything, they just make the best of everything that comes along their way.”

clash of the titans..at the australian open..

When I set down to watch the finals of the men’s single between Nadal and Federer at the Australian open , I expected it to be a cracker of a match… and that is exactly what it turned out to be..With aces and winners streaming out of both the rackets..the aus open final was indeed a delight to watch..

Federer..I have to admit..is the one of my main reasons to follow tennis..the elegence and the panache with which he plays his shots is a sight to watch. and that is exactly what was on display that night. His agility and charisma exuded from the shots he played..but..sadly that wasn’t going to be enough..becuase he was dealin with an indestructible force by the name of Rafael Nadal…

What an incredible player nadal is..I mean..here was a man who was supposed to be tired after the 5 hr marathon in his semifinal. and yet he was all over the court in the 4 hr final..what a bundle of limitless energy..a true champion in all sense

While I completely admire nadal..I staunchly support federer… and my heart goes out for him..for missin his 14th grand slam..yet again..a feat tht has been eluding him for quite some time now..I guess he lost his plot in the final set of the match..which I thought was quite anti climactic as he had won the previous set quite emphatically by 6-3..I feel his annihilation at Rolland garros and deafeat at wimbledeon by the hands of the same opponent is playin on his psyche and till the time he finds a cure for tht..a win against Nadal might be a difficult feat for him. But that is not to take anything away fom the 22 year old Spaniard..who is emerging as a one of the greats of the game..I think it would be an honour for federer that someone of the caliber of nadal should step into his shoes..and carry the legacy of the game forward..just like federer became the torchbearer of the game after the era of Sampras..