The Last Thirteen Seconds

Times come when you are on top of the world, thinking that nothing in the world could possibly ruin it for you now. And then it happens. It is trivial, inconsequential, having to do nothing with your life. It’s just one of those things that happens; has to happen; like the ticking of the clock, the setting of the sun, the awakening of dawn. Yet, at that very moment you wish more than ever, it had not happened; for it sends a pain so deep into your heart, it turns your world up side down.

The Fall season is here and nature is at its best. Things around you look perfect. Yellow leaves against the blue sky, red leaves against the green grass, vibrantly dressed butterflies choosing their flower whimsically. With the screaming rapids in the backdrop, the leaves bid the trees adieu and glide their way to the earth with grace and dignity. The wind threatens now and then with a strong gush, shaking the trees up a bit, as if to serve as a reminder of the bareness that will dawn upon these trees come winter. A perfect symphony is in play.

You thank the heavens; consider yourself fortunate enough to be capable of such a spectacle; you have never felt more alive in your life. Which is when your eye catches a little detail. Sitting on a branch, looking anxiously around with quick nervous, movements it guards its acorn. In a flash it comes scampering down the tree onto the ground. Quick looks around again. The staring eyes spot yours. It seems disturbed by your presence, and you try giving it that reassuring look. But it doesn’t work. In a moment of hysteria, it makes a dash towards another tree across the road.

A swishing sound sticks out like a wrong note in a perfect symphony. Not a sound made by nature, but a sound made by one of man’s creation. Your eyes still fixated on the squirrel’s, you see the fear in his eyes as he stops his dash. A four-wheeled blur passes by and the world comes to a stop. There is no more music, no more harmony. Motionless it lies in the centre of the road with the acorn still guarded close to his heart; only now, he has no life to guard it with. Those were the last thirteen seconds of joy you felt in the day.

Blessed are those who can look the other way

People have dreams. They are meant too; for otherwise Freud wouldn’t be famous; and maybe he was meant to be famous. People realize their dreams. They are meant too; for otherwise they would stop dreaming. But then, there are few who go out there and do stuff to realize their dreams, there are few who let their dreams get realized themselves, and then there are few who let the ‘circumstances’ decide their dreams.

Things happen; they always will. At times, you like the way they happen, at times you don’t. But do people care about their likes these days? I can’t see them do so. If the world likes what is happening to you, it is a good thing, if it doesn’t, it is bad.

So, there are people who let things happen to them, and there are people who judge things by what the world says about them. Combine these two and you’ll find a person who has left his happiness to chance. Slim chance that he’ll be happy, for a thing has to happen, and then the world has to like it. But would they change what has happened? No. And why? Since they are scared of the world, scared of what a billion humans think, scared to look the other way. But those who have the courage to stand up, face the world and look the other way when they want to, have made their life worth living…they are the ones who are blessed.

Another Thin Line

Genius and Eccentricity…separated by a thin line; few can tell the difference, few know the truth…Optimism and delusion; yet again, torn apart by a thin line...Love and Hate…seem to be miles apart, so very detached; yet time and again one finds just a thin line between the two. Seek and you shall find infinite such thin lines. I just happened to chance over one of them.

There is Feliz, a man so satisfied with his life that he wants nothing but that things don’t change. And then there is Ambicioso, in need of a life he can say is worth living.

One has a country side home, an income to keep food enough to fill his dinner table each day and clothes enough to be able to wash them when they get dirty. Contrast this with a duplex in Madrid, an income enough to feed a hundred starving kids for as long as an average human lives and clothes enough to cover the corpse of every bull in Spain that dies after having entertained half of Spain with its last fight. That is how Ambicioso lives. Yes, he is not the one with a country home, not the one with just enough to feed his family. Yet he is the one who wants more from life. Greed? Some would call it ambition, Ambicioso for one, definitely would. You want to work at Wall Street; is that greed? More like ambition isn’t it? But then, when Ambicioso is your neighbour, your classmate who had flunked a year but is now doing better than you are, you probably think he is greedy? “He has all he wants, what more can one ask for in life?” “Why can’t he be contented with what life has to offer for him?” Aren’t these the things one says? But then, when you are an Ambicioso, you are ambitious, self-driven, a man in charge. But greedy? No way!

Ambition to some, greed to others. Couldn’t be a thinner line separating the two.

A look at Feliz, and some will say he lacks the motivation, the drive that so many of us have. Ask Feliz and he might say he is happier than the Wall Street executives drawing salaries so heavy that it becomes difficult for them to spend. He considers himself to be above materialistic gains. He’d rather be where he is. That’s what he wants. That is his ambition, and that is why he can call himself ‘accomplished’. Another thin line differentiating two opposites? Looks like.

People do cross over these thin lines, and so far away that it is easy to see on which side they are. But before we start branding people on either side of the line, it is important to think for a moment and see how close one is to the line. If one is not very far away, then you probably don’t know on which side of the line one is.

Loving what I hated

How often does one start preferring, or even wanting things one couldn’t bear to stand? Maybe often, maybe rarely; I don’t know. But never did I think that there will come a time when I’ll want to wait for what seems like eternity stuck between four-wheeled contraptions that are supposed to get you to places faster, want to be frozen in what looks like a strange yoga ‘asana’ with humans (biologically at least) around you all squeezed into a compartment of a local train, want to travel through two hours of back-breaking bumps. That was Mumbai for me; that was Mumbai for most of us. But don’t get me wrong. For me, there is no city like Mumbai, there probably will never be. Mumbai will be loved till the end of days; but one would not really look forward to that 8:58 am local train, to a drive through one of Mumbai’s busiest road or through a road that has more craters than our moon.

Times change. But in the three months that I was away from the city, Mumbai didn’t, I did. Three months without having to set foot in a local train meant three months without having people too close for comfort, people not stepping on your foot. And I thought I would love that. Initially I did. Then I started missing the discomfort. So much so that I couldn’t live without it. It was almost as if I were addicted to it. Stuck in traffic is not the state you would want to be in. Three months without having to inhale the by-products of man’s inventions, three months without having to wait for the red light should have made me happy. But was I happy? Quite the opposite. Smooth roads is every Mumbaikar’s dream. Being able to travel at 80 without having to worry about the sophisticated springs at the bottom of your car. It was mine too. But not anymore. Somehow I started loving the bumps on the road, started loving the damage done to my back.

The reason? I don’t know. Maybe nobody does. Maybe psychologists do. But for now, ‘I am loving it’.

Down there...where it matters

It is no secret that for any society to blossom, for any economy to do well, all sections of the society need to do well. This, as a fact, is accepted by almost all. Yet, most fail to see the importance of this very fact and are blinded by the ‘super-development’ of just a few. One cannot keep adding storeys to a building without strengthening its foundation. Change or development (positive change) in this case, has to flow from the bottom to the top. Especially for a society like India’s to change, grassroots activity doesn’t seem to be just one of the sources for India’s renaissance; it possibly is the only source.

And this is mainly owing to the diversity that a culture like India’s possesses. The diversity brings in diverse needs which can best be understood at the grassroots level. Sitting in air-conditioned offices on the thirteenth floor of a building in Nariman Point is going to give us little understanding of the depths and nuances of the needs that people in a village a few hundred kilometres away might have. It is possible though, but difficult. No one could understand the place better than the people who have experienced that place, maybe even for their entire lifetime. Its these people, who, with their depth of understanding, have in their minds solutions to make their life better. A constraint on the resources available with them is what binds them down. And by resources, I do not just mean money. Knowledge resources play a very significant role as well. In this age of globalization, it is important that we pass on the benefits of a shrinking world at the grassroots level as well. They need information too. They need to be empowered too. With the ideas they have and with the resources that others can provide them, changing lives for the better becomes so much easier.

It is of course difficult to fathom how changes as small and isolated as this could change the entire nation. In singularity, they cannot. But when the entire nation is one that encourages ideas to flow from the bottom, encourages those ideas to develop and provides tools for those ideas to materialize, the change made will be significant, significant enough to be called a renaissance.

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Inspired by a class on Indian Social and Political Environment

You still don't get it, do you?

I won't press on it too much. A lot has been said, a lot will be, a lot should be.

Piracy is a crime and most of us know it. There are people who accept it, and still do it. Against that I have nothing to say. The prevalence of piracy doesn't astonish me. But what did was the ignorance some claim. Its really funny when when you have a graduate with the finest of technological education behind him telling you that screening a clip from the latest Bollywood flick (not for profit of course) is not a crime. Accept it. Why the feigned ignorance? You believe you are not suppressing the poor, not physically harming anything living; you possibly believe the anti-piracy law is absurd. But at least accept that it exists.

We'd rather be a society of people who know that piracy is wrong and yet indulge than be a society of people who know about it, show denial and then indulge.

Difference of Cultures?

It’s almost funny how different cultures have glaringly different views on and reactions to certain things. In the end, we are all human beings, Homo sapiens, having the same genetic makeup. Individual thought may and should differ, but the environment under which a child is nurtured had such a deep rooted effect that the thought and beliefs of the group of people around him shadowed his own philosophy. With the globe shrinking as it has in the past few years, this phenomenon has seen a decline, for now the environment is not just the group of people around him, but also ones thousand miles away, ones he reads about in newspapers and books, ones he knows about through television, ones he can closely understand with the help of the internet. So one is exposed to a plethora of views, and can form his own based on his judgement.

However, there are still times when the immediate environment you are in has a direct impact on the way you see things. And when the environment changes, views change. That’s what happened with me yesterday, and I believe that’s what will happen with a few hundred others who are in the same boat as I.

If I had to write a three page report on the inefficiencies of the Mohenjo Daro excavations or the improbability of shifting to solar power in a big way, all I would do is open a search engine, search the near infinite cyber repository and unearth a dozen papers dealing with the issue. The report is done; well, almost. What follows is a series of simple copy and paste. Have I acknowledged the names of people whose work I have so expediently used? Hmm…do I need to? Two days ago my answer would have been ‘No’ to both the questions. Have I done wrong? No again. The reason I feel that way is simple. All my life, I have lifted stuff from the internet, from newspaper articles, books, research papers without having bothered to mention the references. Do I claim that the compilation of words is mine? No. But then do I explicitly state that they are not? No. Sounds like plagiarism? At first sight maybe not, but think deeper and you’ll say ‘Hell Yes!’ But this was accepted. Friends did it. Seniors did it. Everyone around did it. It was not as if we were publishing a research paper; so we saw no harm.

The environment changed. So did my views. A friend at a place many wish to be, (who has been there done that), saw me where he was a year ago. As he sat reliving his journey over the past year, he had an interesting story to tell.

A two thousand word report he submits as part of course work has a hundred words of facts. Facts well known and those that take no genius to state. He knows how significant it is to acknowledge his source, so he does. He sees no problem with his report. Has he claimed that the facts he stated are his discovery? No. Has he stated they are someone else’s? Yes. Sounds like plagiarism? Hell No! But he still gets called. He has picked stuff up verbatim…and has forgotten to put those words in quotes. Sounds serious? Not really. But is it? But at the place he is, it is. Should it be that way? Debateable.

None of us (or should I say very few) would pick up a bar of chocolate and slip it into our pockets in a super market, even if we know that the security cameras are not watching. But most of us (or should I say all) slip a line or two of another persons work into our own without even thinking twice. What we know but don’t realize is that there is no difference. Both amount to theft. Books talk about the gravity of intellectual theft, so do we. But when it comes to those few lines we’d like to see in our report, we forget all that talk. Here, one cannot afford to; in life, one should not.