Trends

Trends! I don’t know if every other city has it, but Chennai sure has. I think it started while I was in college, first year I think. Internet cafes! They ruled the roost. Anyone who had money enough to buy 3-4 computers could set up an Internet café. Prices ranged from Rs 10 an hour - those centers providing cheap machines which had keyboards where you needed to double click each key, to get the desired output – to Rs 30 (that’s the maximum I have seen or heard. Let me know if you have heard a higher price) for the high end centers like Dishnet or Satyam i-Way that offered good speeds and reliability.  Every kid created a yahoo and id and chatted with girls with foreign names – Cathy, Macy, Linda and so on – at an age when most of these names were names of actual people and not bots pretending to be girls. (If you have not recently tried chat rooms, you are in for a big surprise)

Other reasons for people flocking to these www centers was for checking on college exam results.  I still remember the Dishnet Café (It had a wonderful offer at that time – browse from 6 AM to 9 AM for just Rs 10 flat. No fine print there, trust me) where my two friends (of whom I would refer to very frequently in this post) and I parked ourselves for three hours that fine weekday morning, and getting the dreaded news of our Arrears (Me in Math, one of them in Mechanics, I think) from that PC. One Mr. Desibaba also provided good incentive for people to log on. Many a time people paid just for the privacy and not for www time. Where else could you go out with a girlfriend and have an intimate time for just Rs. 20 an hour??? I still remember the way a friend of mine was boasting about this white girlfriend of his whose fancy he had caught over Yahoo! She ditched him the day the poor fellow responded in a technologically challenged fashion when she asked him if he (meaning his PC) had bluetooth. He replied, ‘Nope! Me got fresh white ones!’ No surprises as to why she ditched him. Slowly the fad faded away.

Then came along Billiards and pool! Everyone took the cue and went gaga about shiny little colored balls rolling over smooth, green surfaces. And boy, was happy hour effective in this sport! The reason why my marks dipped in my semester exams can totally be attributed to this. At any point of time, one among the three of us would think that we have done enough group studies and that we deserve a well-deserved break. That break usually came by pooling in money and offering it to the coffers of one particular pool parlour in Triplicane that had extended happy hours playing for one ridiculously low price. I remember the most posh of them all was Billiards Point somewhere in Egmore. The name caught on and soon every place where you could play the game was known as Billiards point, much like how every washing powder was surf or every pack of asafetida was LG.

The culture of Super Selector came at the time when internet centers were booming. So the fancy caught on. Suddenly everyone had a team. Believe it or not, amongst us friends we had a team each (three teams), a team with each of us pairing with each other (that is another three teams), and one team for all the three of us combined (This is the seventh team).  And we had chits of paper in our wallets with details of all the teams written down. Anywhere and everywhere we would be tracking scores or rather, performances. It was a heart break for my friend when Lara, in my team, scored heavily against the home side, Sri Lanka. But he took revenge soon as Muralitharan was on the field. He had the last laugh when Lara had to drop off the tour due to an injury. It hurt me as much as it hurt the great southpaw. And there were unverified stories of my college mates winning watches and cameras as prizes due to the high number of points they racked up. I won, this is a verified truth as I am telling you so myself, about Rs 500 in groceries from an online retailer. That was the first time I was ever able to buy something for my home using my money. Emotional moment indeed.

Then suddenly there seemed to be a pause in all these activities. It’s been almost seven years since I have been in Chennai for two months in a row, so maybe I am missing some trends. I know that there has been a spurt of tennis courts all around.  But other than that, nothing… nothing good at least. By this I mean that I have noticed quite a bit of ‘bad’ trends going around.

Let us begin with the Engineering college seats scams. I don’t know if the modus operandi is as I am going to describe, but this is what I figured after reading quite a bit on this topic. Considering that Tamil Nadu is the engineering college capital of the country (need not necessarily mean that we produce the best engineers, but we sure produce a lot of ordinary ones, yours truly being one of them), and Bihar being one of the most backward regions, bereft of many such colleges, Bihari youth one day got up to realise that it is not as difficult to do engineering as their elders thought. They realised that the difficulty stemmed not from the rigor of the course, but from the absence of colleges in their state. Hence they began migrating down south where they knew that it was more difficult to get admission into the temple at Tirupati than it was to get into an, any, engineering college. But there is this elite group that also knew that not all Bihari’s knew about this. So they ‘engineered’ (pun intended here) these money making nexuses with local college students in Chennai. Soon was born an almost Gujjjuish money making scheme. ‘Buy’ seats worth X lakhs per seat. Go back to Bihar, promise the other students.

And Voila! The students got their paved way into Microsoft (oh and by the way, engineering almost always means computer education, down south), the local and Bihari goons, err, students made their pocket money, rather pockets full of money, the engineering colleges got a cut, am sure the cops were not totally blind to this ripe scheme and so they got a portion of the profits..well if this is not a well-rounded business, I don’t know what is. If you thought this was bad, things get uglier than this too. How? What if there are other groups of elite youth that are competing for selling the same seats? They get into clashes, at times physical, which at times results in death of one party or the other. Some ignorant fools went to the extent of kidnapping a minister’s son. And soon realised that our cops can be pretty smart when kicked in their pillow sized butts, when they got busted within a day, courtesy, one angry minister! And these scenes happen a lot in the state. It is sad indeed.

And then there are the localites that do not have the means to do such high end scams and therefore pick someone quite not their size. Children! Suddenly every mid-20 year old on the road is swooping onto every Richie rich walking by. And suddenly it becomes alarmingly clear that the adage ‘Do not take biscuits from strangers’ is not quite being emphasized at home by parents. It is frightening how easily children are being kidnapped. With silly stories like ‘Your dad was unable to pick you up, so he asked us to do the job for him’, and ‘Will you eat this biscuit, it is a new variety and you will love it,’ giving highly profitable though short-term results, wannabe kidnappers with absolutely no prior kidnapping experience succeed in at least the first step – that of lifting the kid away and calling in for ransom. Bt the inexperience quickly shows up, as the cops are swooping in on them like guided missiles. The regularity with which these guys get caught makes you wonder whether the cops plant these people in the first place to make themselves look good. But to be fair to them, this trend is forcing them to use innovative ways of dealing with the criminals – tapping cell phones, using snipers, at times even letting the kidnappers get away with the ransom just so they could lead them to their other partners-in-crime. All heavy stuff!

One reason that it is important that we educate youth, and educate them in a way as to enable them to get jobs, is that they don’t resort to such desperate money making measures due to joblessness, which they are doing right now. But then, am sure many before me have said the same, and we have not seen much difference.

I have spoken about the trends that I noticed but I consider myself a pretty poor observer. What all did I miss that you noticed? This post is not just open to Madrasis, Othercitywallahs…bring it on!

Pick someone your own size....

Reading Ethical Vegetarianism...I have had multiple arguments about vegetarianism with many of my friends at various instances in life. Being a vegetarian not just by caste, but more importantly by choice, I have passed around many arguments and am always eager to know what more different ways of defending this noble way of dining are out there.

I am paraphrasing a very interesting point made by a great Greek philosopher....'Men are not naturally meant to be carnivorous. Many tell me they are, but I just tell them this. Try facing a wild animal without any weapons. fight it. Tear it apart with the nails of your hands and feet. Bite and eat it while it is barely but still alive. Know why? Because thats what carnivorous species are supposed to do. Does the lion use a bow to kill a human? Does a lion roast deer, add spices and condiments to mask the natural taste of the flesh and eat it?'

Might sound amusing at first, but think about it. It is very true. A sad justification indeed for those non-vegetarians out there.

Why I am writing this at 12:07 AM? This article triggered me to.

Good night and veggie dreams!

To my country, I pledge my devotion....

Jeffery Sachs once said (I didnt know that he said it, Nandan Nilekani says that he said it, in his book Imagining India) that Indian rural schools have changed a lot from the last time he had seen them, but then he wonders very seriously, if thy are adapting fast enough for the changing times and if their growth rate is justified for the pace in which the rest of the world, and even the rest of our own country, is moving...

While I didn't need a Jeffery Sachs to tell me this, it just served me a harsh reminder..that we are not sitting on piles of time. If the popular though irritating I.T jargon that something was needed 'yesterday' were to be used in this case, it would be that 'the schools needed to have upgraded last year.'

We have no time guys...every day, every month that passes by is another step closer that poor children all over the country have taken towards the inevitable state of '10th pass' or '12th pass' but without a clue of what they gained in the last 10 or 12 fruitless years. Our support is invaluable for the children to make it through. Unless there is a mini revolution of sorts by the youth that did make it through, viz. people like you and me, this country will never attain the greatness that it can.

We need to work towards the development of the nation, from wherever we are, through whatever means we can. We cannot sit and watch petty injustice send these children to doom. That is tantamount to being party to the crime. Let us stand up like true men and be counted. Let us show our brothers and sisters (For a long time, I thought this phrase was just used for providing a dramatic effect and used it very sparingly in my writings...now I really feel it. What pride Swami Vivekananda would have felt in penning down the national pledge!) that we are there for them. That we will let no cheap actions by cheap souls cause them pain. That together we are indeed a family and that despite existence of a wide variety of hassles, we will strive to give them all the support that they need.

Because, and I again borrow from Swamiji, 'In their well-being and prosperity alone, lie our happiness.'

Brick by Brick

The boy was an introvert, didn’t talk much, and that was the reason he had not yet spoken to the girl he wanted to get up with every day. But after much persistence from his friend, he finally dialed her number that he had possessed for a few weeks, said ‘Wrong number’ himself and replaced the receiver. But one thing led to another and eventually they got married and lived life happily ever after.

That was just the outline of a popular Tamil movie and the girl in front of me in the small, terribly quiet room lit with a solitary but powerful white bulb, was not Trisha, the beautiful actress. But she looked very pretty all the same.

People call me a very quiet boy, but today I decided to break my shackles today and talk. Just the opportunity of talking to someone as pretty as she was - perfect eye lashes contouring her eyes beautifully and a smile that would make Colgate models look for alternate jobs - were good enough reasons for me to try to send my silence away on a one-hour holiday.

It all happened so quickly. Sanket bhaiya had called me to the Borivali railway station at 9 am and said that a friend of his wanted to talk with me. Sanket is one of the people that come to the temple nowadays to teach me and my friends. He obviously took pity on me and my mother who plead people walking past us to part with some of their money so that we could buy food or clothing or treat open and potentially septic wounds. (In other words, we beg.)

Sanket plays with us and also tries to teach us things – some days English, some days things about computers, and stuff like that. I don’t know why he does that. And the strange part is, he does not even charge us money. The teachers at the government school I go to are not half as interested in teaching us as Sanket and his friends are.

Shreya was with Sanket when I met him at platform number one. He told me that she was a nice person that wanted to talk to me for some time in her 'studio.' He said she was a ‘Child Sy-ko-logist’. I did not know what it meant but I could not care less. She looked so pretty that I would go to school every day with her if she taught there.

The local train took us to her single room studio and that is where I am now. Sanket left the place, he was a theatre artist and had to practice for a play.

The room was small, you could reach from one corner to the diagonal corner in four leaps. But it was spotlessly clean (So there are places in India that don’t have paan stains on the walls). And silent. I could not hear a single honk or the clattering road of a giant JCB machine, the sounds I am used to.

'This will not take more than an hour, Muthu,' Shreya said in heavily accented Tamil. I knew instantly  that she had spent more time in Mumbai than down south and stifled a grin.

I nodded, thinking I would not mind a longer chat…

‘Sanket tells me that you don't like it much in school and are always coming back home before the classes gets over.'

….or maybe not… So this was going to be a lecture on going to school regularly?

Didn’t have a choice of answer there.

‘This is not going be a lecture on why you should be in school.’ Well, she just read my mind, my face more like it. ‘I just want to know what is stopping you from being there. But not for more than an hour.’ She looked at her watch as if mentally starting a countdown timer.

I didn’t like the way this was going, despite Ms. Super-smile here. Who wants to be told again that education is important and all the associated spiel. I reluctantly gave in. The temple was my domain, I could just run, hide behind the numerous flower shops or get into the many autos parked outside in random fashion and no one could find or catch me. But this tiny space was hers and I had to respect that.

‘Let us talk a little bit more about you first. Leave the school topic for later. I am sure you have interesting stories to tell, coming here all the way from Tamil Nadu.'

I started tentatively but before I knew it, was spilling out details of my life I had not told anyone before. Maybe it was the silence in that room that made me narrate the stories of my life. I told her how my family was caught in a debt trap back in my village and how we needed the money to get him out of our backs.

'And so, my parents decided to come here and get a job. They are convinced that there is big money to be made here.'

'That is true, Muthu. Mumbai is a place that encourages talent and innovation. There is no limit to the things you can achieve here. What do your parents do here?'

I tried hard to focus on the session, but could not resist the biscuits kept on the table. The chocolate cream was tempting. Shreya understood the want in my eye and gave the packet to me. 'Go on, take it. Don’t feel shy, it’s for you.'

'They are construction workers,’ I said splitting the two biscuits and licking the cream off one. ‘I too help them from time to time,' I said proudly. ‘We worked on many big buildings back home – the clock tower, the railway over-bridge and many more. We are working on the flyover coming up near the temple in Borivali.' I said, trying to sound important.

Not many people listened to me when I spoke and so I was excited at the attention I was getting. I then told her about my Near Death Experience.

'When I was small, mom carried me in a piece cloth tied around her back and went to work. She walked up and down long flights of stairs with me on her back and a big iron plate full of bricks on her head.'

'Some strength she had' Shreya exclaimed.

‘One day the hot sun must have hit her harder than usual; she lost balance on the seventh floor and teetered on the edge. I wondered why I suddenly was tilting. The motion stopped abruptly and I rapidly moved to the other side and I heard a man’s voice shouting out. I was too young to understand what had happened until much later my dad, in drunken rage, screamed at my mom, "I wish you had indeed fallen that day from the seventh floor along with this good for nothing fellow. I would not be in half the debt that I am in right now."

'If your mom was carrying you on her back, you would have been a baby. How on earth do you remember something that happened when you were so small? I can’t even remember …. say, the colour of my first bicycle.’ I didn’t know colours of bicycles are things that people are supposed to remember after growing up.

'It is simple. I have a very strong memory. Did Sanket bhaiya not tell you my prowess in the Memory game?'

'Memory game? What is that?' she leaned forward onto the table, as if I had told her I knew the location of long lost buried treasure.

‘Sanket bhaiya blackmails us that unless we study, we can’t play this game. We all absolutely love this board game he brought for us. It has small squares containing pictures on one side – like cars, cartoons, men and so on - placed upside down. These squares were in pairs and we had to take turns in uncovering two squares at a time, and matching the pairs. I have never done a wrong match till now if I could help it.' My chest puffed out in pride. Now that I said it out aloud, it felt good indeed. After all, we would have played the game hundreds of times.

'That is something,’ she exclaimed, returning to her original position.

'And then there was this other instance that was quite funny. A painter that the construction company had employed asked him to write something on a board and hang it outside the building. I had a peek into the piece of paper and since it was all in English, I could not make out much but the letters got locked in my memory. Days later, this painter decided to get the job done, and called me along to help him out.'

At this point I needed a piece of paper and started looking around. Shreya fished into her handbag and gave me one along with a pen.

'The man painted T.O.I.L.E.T,’ I wrote this word on the paper, ‘on the board and hung it outside the building. I swore to him that the straight line between the O and the L should not be there. Even though he had lost the paper, he was equally adamant what he wrote was right. He said that he had painted many such boards for his previous employer, some company named Sulabh and that they had never complained once.'

I paused, waiting for the effect to sink in, and soon enough Shreya burst into laughter and I started giggling as well. Sulabh is a firm that constructs toilets around the country.

'So, how is life in Mumbai for you? Apart from the obvious problem of language, how are you managing?'

I could not bring myself to answer this question immediately. I had realised some weeks after landing here that it was going to be very difficult to get out of this place and that this is where my future was going to be made. Did I want to be hauling stones up and down stairs for the rest of my life? No. But there were many challenges and some seemed so insurmountable that it was pretty discouraging.

She got up to stretch and get some water from the cooler in the corner. ‘I came here when I was young too, and found it difficult. But slowly I started liking it!’

I smiled wryly. Her life was a lot rosier than mine is right now.

Sensing my discomfort she gave me a cue, ‘Do you want to tell me what you do daily?’

I was glad she did and picked it up. ‘I told you. When she is not in the construction site, my mother and I beg for a living outside the mandir. Not just us, many folks from all around the country. Gudlu is from Rajasthan, Suresh from Kashmir, Rayudu from Andhra, people from all over the country are there. You should come there once, it is fun.

I was not even in school till recently when Sanket bhaiya got all of us admitted in one nearby. Luckily all of us know a little bit of Hindi, so we manage there.’

‘But how did you get into the school in the middle of a year?’

‘Even I thought I will avoid it till the beginning of June, but seems like there is some scheme by the government called SSA. I don’t know what that is, but according to that, every child should be in school and so the teachers said they would admit me under that scheme.’

My mind drifted to the time I joined school. The teachers had asked me for my birth certificate which my mom was positive we did not have. My dad left for the village a week before that, and he was retained by the landlord who threatened to possess our land forcibly if he returned to Mumbai anytime soon. So he stayed behind. Sanket bhaiya went to a court nearby, spoke to some people, and got birth certificates done for me and my friends. Then I received books, pencils, even a small school bag that they said would help keep my books safely in case it rained and our huts got flooded. That was indeed a bonus and all these at no cost at all.

‘So do you like school? I know you had studied till your fourth standard in your village, but then dropped out.’

‘I attend half day and then return to the temple.’ I ignored her question, because I myself did not know the answer.

‘Why?’ she said this was precisely the moment she was waiting for.

‘Food, madam, Food.’

‘What does that mean? I am sure they serve you food at the school.’

‘And so am I sure that you won’t like to eat cold boiled egg and rice two days old every day of the week.’ I loved being sarcastic.

‘No, not really.’ She sputtered, with no other choice but to agree to me.

‘So all of us come home and stand in the line. There is a ‘Free food for beggars’ scheme instituted by the temple. 


You should see the rush there. There is not even that much crowd to see the God at times, we stand in the line, 
some bullies try to stand ahead of us bypassing the queue, we hit them with stones, they retaliate, it is all fun! If only all things in life were as adventurous as receiving lunch,’ I sighed as I remembered fondly of lunch time.

‘Oops, am sure it is fun,’ she said blandly. I wondered why she did not share the same excitement. ‘So you return to school after lunch?’

‘No didi. How can I miss the evening snacks? Only a fool would.’

‘So they have a ‘Free snacks for beggars’ scheme too?’

I giggled, she did have some sense of humor.

‘I wish they did. This time it is the devotees. They come in these big cars, pray to God, and serve us with tasty laddoos, jalebis, and what not. Some ladies come in these bright sarees, get out of huge cars remove their chappals on the road, and pray from the road itself. Then their servants would hold a tray full of sweetmeats and walk behind them while they distribute the sweets to us. They get part of their ticket to heaven made and we get our taste buds tingled. Can there be a better deal?’

‘But who said their tickets to heaven are made when they feed children like that?’’ She could not be serious with that question.

‘Come on didi. Is it not obvious? Feeding someone is doing good. And that will surely take one to heaven.’

Her eyes were telling me that I didn’t know what I was talking about. ‘Ok, I beg to differ, but continue.’

‘What is more to tell? That is it. The day ends, and then night falls. Whatever we have left of rice and dal, we prepare in our huts, eat, and sleep.’

‘But don’t you have tuitions nowadays?’

‘Oh yes. How can I forget. Sanket bhaiya and his friends come to the mandir every other day and teach us some things. English, Computers, Counting and stuff like that. They even make three-year old Mangu do some work by giving him some drawing sheets. The poor guy is all lost and scribbles something on the paper’

I then told Shreya about all the things that happen when Sanket comes over. He had initially met me playing marbles on the road and convinced me into sitting with him for a while. Slowly he gathered the other kids too. But we were not interested in studying. What would we do with English anyway? We already knew things in English. “Hello”… “How are you”.. “What ijj your name” … Are there much more things in English to know about that would matter?

Then started the memory game sessions. Initially we wondered how interesting a game where one would not need to run, hit, scratch, fling things at each other be. But once we saw that it was pretty challenging, we all got hooked onto it. Like I said, no one could beat me in the game. Anshul, the resident bully loses so badly at the game and simply refuses to understand that he is all brawn and no brain. The only way I can get back at him for making fun of my cleft is by defeating him time and again at this game.

‘You know what? This cleft of mine is in a way good’

‘Really? How?’

‘Just like wearing dark glasses masks where your eyes are looking at, having this cleft, it is hard to figure out if I am making faces at anyone.’

She laughed out. ‘You really think so?’

‘Tell me if I am making a face at you now or not.’ I threw a face contortion at her.

She mulled over it a bit.  ‘I think you are.’

Damn, she found out. It didn’t work as well as I thought it did.

‘No, see, I told you. This is what I keep doing to Anshul when he takes a dig at me. Poor fellow does not even realize. Even if you keep the right pair of tiles facing up on the board, he would not identify them. Even if you told him! He is that dumb.’

‘I am sure he won’t. Sounds like all brawn and no brain, like you say. And how about your mother? Is she ok with you going to school?’

‘No,’ I replied. That was an easy question. How can she be? Me being around meant being fed properly. We needed as much food as we could get and from any quarters. Sanket bhaiya had asked mom the same question many times and she has never managed to say No, by herself. Probably out of guilt, but she put the blame on me saying ‘Ask him if he wants to study. If he does not, then what’s the point?’ she used to say. And I would always respond to Sanket bhaiya with a blank stare. So he could not really enforce her to ensure that I stay in school.

‘That’s wrong. If he is trying to help you, then you should co-operate. You do not want to be a resident beggar outside the mandir, do you?’

I sensed a small degree of anger in her voice.

‘Do you know your alphabets well?’ Boy, she was on a roll, but this time she asked the wrong question.

‘I can write and read the alphabets, and I am the first to answer questions in my class,’ I answered in an equal tone.

‘Want to see? I can even read what is written on…say this piece of paper here.’ I turned the newspaper that was facing her towards me, praying that simple words were printed. In the next couple of minutes, I was sure I made her forget what English she knew. Still she smiled.

But that is not what surprised me. Was I really able to recognize and put together so many words and sentences? Was I finally learning something?

‘Did that make sense?’ I asked her hesitatingly.

She ruffled my hair. ‘Make sense? It was impressive’ That smile again. Take cover, Colgate models.

I have had some pretty (and) rich people talk to me at the temple telling me to ‘be a good boy’ and to ‘study instead of being here.’ But an uncle told me something that impacted me a lot. When he knew that I had helped my parents in constructing buildings before, he told me that everything in life was like constructing something. 


Just like you placed one solitary brick after another, poured cement, painted, and then completed the structure, one had to be patient, place one small step after another, and pave the road to success. And of course you step back from time to time and feel good what you have achieved so far – be it completion of the foundation, or the first floor and so on. I wondered if by grasping at least some elements of what Sanket bhaiya taught me, if I have placed a few bricks in constructing for myself a good education.

‘I think it’s time for us to leave,’ Shreya interrupted my thoughts. ‘We can continue with another session later on, but I think you are a very smart kid,’ she said and for the first time in my life, someone had praised me. And I knew there was some truth to it.

We journeyed back to Borivali where Sanket was waiting for us at the platform. I felt sad seeing her go. She had been nice to me, and I hoped that she would come to teach at the mandir too.

Sanket bhaiya,’ I said on the way back to the temple for our evening session. I could not resist, I just knew it was the right thing to do. ‘Can you talk to my mother today?’

He seemed only mildly surprised like he was already half expecting this.

‘About what?’ I was sure he knew the answer.

‘About keeping me in school? I want to study properly and finish college one day.’

The world seemed a nicer place, I felt strong, confident, and raring to go, ready to place the other bricks, and finish my own construction. I would tell the other boys too this.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

There were multiple reasons for me to write this piece. I was deeply impacted by the lives of migrant children in Mumbai, with whom I have worked with for some time. The names of the characters in this story, are fictitious though they actually are the names of some of my friends that have done work like this in Dream India and out of as well.

Some of the main points I hope this piece highlighted were...

• ·         The plight of migrant child laborers
• ·         About insensitive people encouraging begging by giving alms misconstrued as good deeds that will buy them Rajdhani express tickets to heaven
• ·      About the role of youth volunteers in helping millions of such children across the country, thereby contributing to nation building
• ·         Government schemes like SSA

·Last but not the least, my own experimentation with writing for my own pleasure and at the same time, delivering a message to the masses with my experience in social work.

Attached picture is of the actual kids I have worked with in Kandivali, in the construction site of the flyover, opposite a mandir.

The power of a book, the power of dreams

Just this other day, I was talking to a friend about the book Imagining India. Both of us had equal experience with the book, we had both read about 80 pages (he is my namesake too by the way). Sometime this year, in the long 30 hour cross Atlantic journeys that I have planned, I will finish it.

We discussed the pros and the cons of the book, he felt that it was written for a Western audience, I probably am not very perceptive and am also too easily gullible to any thought stream coming from any book. So I loved every page of it. I have read many books on post Independent years in India and how we struggled with our many cows and humans and how one Mrs Gandhi did a coup on her own government and stuff like that. There wer books written by famous and not so famous Western and at times desi authors depicting the nation as one big chaotic place and how if one was open-minded, he or she would experience the ultimate miscellany in culture, food, languages, sport (as long as it is cricket and criket alone), and Bollywood. I was a big fan of these books till one morning I realised that they are all so similar - they carry pictures of Goddess Durga with her thousand heads or of kids playing gully cricket or of Elephants on the road giving 'dokku' to people. But this new book that I read gave perspective on how India changed herself economically over the years to emerge from the dark economic ruins it was confined to due to overtly social policies to the brighter side of the world.

Elephant giving 'dokku'

I am a sucker for gossip or masala news of any kind and this book provided me with lots...sample the following...

• Ramayan and Mahabharath were actually launched in India for a reason: Post Independent India identified itself as one for a brief period. Slowly as the effects of unity of Independence wore off, the incumbent government found the need to unite the people on some aspect, and thats when it hit upon this idea, the idea that made people from Kashmir to Kanyakumari tune into DD every Sunday morning and watch  arrows meeting each  other in mid air, one flaming, the other dousing it with instant rain thereby symbolising victory (in that round at least... there are usually five to six such rounds before the eventual victor is decided)  for the launcher of that arrow. Televising these two bottomless epics seemed like the best thing to happen to DD (before the advent of Junoon, would you say?).



The VHP tribe

• The author describes how India could have easily sat on the bus that travelled to free market land and how that would have given us a headstart on the progress that many Asian economies made sooner than we did. Instead we tried to appease every community possible whenever they raised a question on the basis of Language, Caste, and what not. When we were fighting over whether Hindi should be a first language or not (there are some people down south that were pretty seriously voting against it), Singapore put an end to whether it should adopt Tamil or Malay or Mandarin, and imposed English as the first language.  This country, the most globalised in the world, saw its English patronage grow in leaps and bounds soon after this decision was taken. We are still wondering in 2010 if Ayodhya should belong to Ram or Allah, when long back in China a certain ruler, faced with a similar headache, dispelled all arguments by building a park in that space and declaring it free of religion.
• India had a golden opportunity back in the 60s and 70s that it failed to capitalise on. But now when we have the youngest population in the world and when China's population has just crossed over the peak  and will soon have more dependents than independents, we are again going to be thrust into a scenario of demographics, one that we could either construe as an opportunity and ride the success wave or by being lethargic and apathetic, miss the proverbial bus again, this time more dangerously so than the last and mire ourselves in deeper trouble.

Nandan states seemingly irrefutable facts to back all these up. Sounded exciting to me. Think about it, humans have shaped  cars, software, monuments and spacecraft, but none of these would be as complex as shaping a country, a new generation. The latter assumes importance of a phenomenal magnitude, something that can alter the course of history irrevocably for good or for bad. In our case, this opportunity has the potential to vastly change the face of the world, and how it looks at the brown man, his skills and capabilities.

So my friend and I kind of agreed on all these but with a pinch of krystal.
Sounds fabulous, very interesting, but how deep down the pit are we in now and if any amount of efforts at all would even come close to solving the deep-rooted problems that we have - poverty, illiteracy, population? That was something to ponder upon, we both fell silent, not wanting to be the first to say something negative. 

I guess a lot more people would have had confidence if the situation had not been so bad, if we had gotten at least the basic things right, but not many want to climb the tallest mountain.
After all, who knows if we all actually get seven lives, and even if we do, what is the surety that this is not the seventh. If it is, it is game set and match for us after this! So, the thought of giving up on a good life chasing this elusive holy grail is frightening indeed.

Krishnan

Yet there are people, and there are stories of valour, of courage, of sacrifice. There are these stories and these, and these too.
We should support such efforts, in any way we can. From signing online petitions to oppose the way in which the CWG is being organised to conducting skype sessions to impart knowledge through distance learning, to spending an hour every week in orphanages to becoming into one of the above stories yourself - there are millions of ways in which we can help, offer our invaluable support to these brave warriors, the ones that chose to climb the mountain that we find unsurmountable. Only we should do it truthfully. Not out of guilt or out of a sense of obligation, but out of a positive attitude that our actions are bringing about a change.

'Payir' Senthil

Nandan has proved yet again, at least to me, the power of a good book. You can do zero action, but write one inspiring book in your lifetime and you would have sent a million thoughts scrambling in order to rearrange ones priorities. Wings of Fire
was case in point #1, to an extent The Great Indian Dream, 
and then surely, Imagining India.

Together we can, together we should!

'Investing' in the rat race

India is a budding nation, all right. Compared to some of the Western oldies we are but a child, in terms of of our age (we only recently turned 63), but at the same time we need to agree that we have an advantage. In that, we dont have to re-invent the wheel, and can take cues from developed nations, on different subjects.

We are one of the foremost economies in the world right now, and only getting better by the day. Talks are more about when India would economically overtake the USA and not IF. But despite all our wealth and despite all the education, we the privileged people in our society - software engineers, doctors, pilots and who not - fail to play a role in public welfare. Rather, many of our actions easily can be classified as so greedy and selfish, that they leave in their wake, an army of people that want to imitate us, thereby just creating a very bad cascading effect.

Think of it. The one strata of society that has risen from laymen to princes in a trice, is the breed called  'Software engineer.' Now, people belonging to this group came into a lot of money overnight, went abroad frequently and with such ease that such a glamorous profession was unheard of in the annals of the Indian labour industry (maybe barring the film industry). 

Now, as a group, this lot of people had two choices - Be down to earth, spend sensibly, save the money and invest wisely for the future. And if possible, even spread the wealth around a bit. And the other choice - unfortunately also the chosen one by many of us - is to spend ostentatiously and with scant respect for the greenback. (I probably should be calling it differently, but considering that this trend mostly started with inflow of dollars, greenback is technically not wrong). While I am not a detractor of spending and living a comfortable life, when these become the sole ideals of one's life and when people spend all their time on researching on new ways to earn more, it creates a dangerous trend. One of greed, one where it becomes a dog eat dog world and power struggles and peer pressure strangles everyone.

Across our country, services are being charged more than what they are worth. Be it trips in an auto that used to cost Rs 15 but now cost Rs 30, or be it that apartment complex that should cost Rs 30 lakhs (considering old fashioned factors in determining house prices) but now touch half a crore, this trend is because of us that are ready to shell out more just because we have enough, regardless of whether it is justified or not. We do it only because we CAN.

If you thought this was bad enough, then there is the aspect of land hoarding. Many of my friends bought multiple pieces of land or a few houses spread all over the country, wherever they could lay their hands on, through friends, relatives, even brokers. They usually made tons of money in these deals, returns that were very very lucrative. I was kicking myself for not cashing in earlier and wondered why my money making skills were so poor. But in hindsight, I am thankful to have not done that. 

I presume - correct me if I am wrong here because I am not an expert in this subject but just thinking with common sense - that in doing this, we only jack up land prices all around us. True we earn some dough in the bargain, but if that poor police constable wants to buy a piece of land for his family, I think we would be helping him do that by controlling our hoarding tendencies. 

I could not resist but give this example. TATA launched a  low cost housing project called Shubh Griha in Mumbai. It was obvious that the project was aimed at people that could not afford tens of lakhs of rupees for a house, but had the dream of living in comfort and in a new house. A friend of mine was suggesting to buy property there for 'investment' purposes as the value is bound to spike up in a few years. Now, does that not defeat the purpose of those houses? Agreed, TATA did not mean to be an angel in building those houses, they are probably still ging to land in the hands of people who are out to make money, but since when did the thing that everyone wanted to do become the right thing? 

Do I sound like a communist? You economists and market analysts out there would know better. But unless someone gives me a convincing argument on why my presumptions above are wrong, I think controlling our greed for the sake of overall societal growth is very important. We should invest in that beautiful house, but stick to just one and not go for one each on the names of each of the household members, for the sake of 'investment.' We must buy that beautiful car, but stick to one or as many as truly necessary, and not go for one each for each of the kids for the sake of  maintaining societal 'status'. Once we as a society begin to think this way, and become sensitive to the layman's dreams and ambitions, we would all grow together as one. And that, my dear friends, is my vision of 'India Shining'.

Imagining India

"I believe that the most important driver for growth lies in expanding access to resources and opportunity. People everywhere, regardless of their income levels, should have access to health facilities, clean water, bsaic infrastructure, jobs an capital, a reliable social security system and good schools where their children can be educated in the English language."

In such simple terms, Nandan Nilekani explains - in his book Imagining India - what India needs in order to progress and do so in the rapid pace that it can and should. Access to resources and opportunity! I visited this beautiful place called Melghat, way back in 2005, along with two of my good friends. It was one unforgettable trip that was purely inspired by the famous journalist P.Sainath and his articles in The Hindu, on how malnutrition and related deaths were a regular annual feature  in the Amravati district. The sights that we saw in this region still haunt my memory. Villages were pitch black in the evening, as there was no electricity. Not a power cut mind you, there were no Electric lines at all! So people lived by hurricane lamps. The only beautiful image of the following morning was the ethereal sunrise and the sounds of birds chirping happily and the water pump being cranked by women. The adult men folk were busy smoking beedis and the young menfolk were clearing cow dung from the front of their houses.

But as the day progresses, we witnessed defunct classrooms, solar light posts with the panels missing (apparently they were stolen, some of them by the villagers themselves), hospitals that looked like war zones with even very basic amenities missing. The ideas were there. Solar power, mobile hospitals, balwadis to take care of the young ones while the parents went out in search of work and so on. But the implementation was such that women crushed crocin tablets that doctors visiting once a fortnight in mobile hospital vehicles provided, made a paste out of it with water, and applied it to open wounds of children. The implementation was such that the last anyone ever saw a teacher in the school was a month ago. So with basic things hogging one's mind, like how to sell the produce and make enough money to sustain the family to the extent of even saving the kids from dying, where will thoughts leaning toward entrepreneurship  and growth flower? With people spending time in walking 20 kms to the nearby town to sell their produce (buses from the town dont ply to this region during monsoons), where is the time to do something constructive and improve self?

Take the case of more developed regions, abroad or even in parts of India, where all these basic ncessities are taken care of. The only things people need think of is how to improve on the profits, how to provide more to the family, how to enroll children in that cricket academy. The lady worries more about how well her art and craft work would be appreciated in her women's club and less about whether to take her chotu to the hospital for his burning fever or if she should just wait for it to subside on its own and use the money for the night's dinner.

We need to have more of the former kind of situations and less of the latter, if we are to come any point close to justifying our potential as a great nation.

Just some points to ponder on a hot and sultry Saturday afternoon...

Bhopal Protest...

The Bhopal Gas Tragedy judgement is a Sham and a Shame. This movement of people has decided to gather at 11 am SHARP on this Sunday, 13th June, in front the building that most prominently represents the government in their city or town, wherever in the world they are. All the people across the world, who are angry at this decision, are going to gather together at this one common moment, and sing the National Anthem of their country. There is going to be no sloganeering, no speeches and no banners. No one is going to direct you to start singing. We have to set our watches and start singing our National Anthem at 11 am sharp.

This is a movement for people like me who are angry but do not know how to express their anger.  So come out. Tell the world that we cannot be taken for a ride and will not be made fools of. That we do not accept the justice that was given in Bhopal.  In Pune, the venue is Shivajinagar courts. In Mumbai the venue is Mantralaya. 

PLS SPREAD THE WORD. Contact me to join a Dream India group in Mumbai for this...