A Naked Opinion

Freedommmm

2011-06-09T11:13:00.001+05:30

When I went home, it was 8:30 at night.

To my surprise, my kid was in bed. I asked my mum, “is she asleep?”

Before my mom answers, she sprang from her bed and said “Dad, I have a surprise for you”

In no time she held my hand and led me to the library room and said “my aunt bought this for me” showing a pair of beautiful white birds.

The cage was knitted in thin rod making a shape of a house. The birds were like jumping here and there fluttering the wings as there were no much space left. Little bit of water was kept in a wide lid of a bottle. The cage was placed on a newspaper. Her idea was to save the floor from bird shit.

I saw some bird food placed on a silver plate. But it was all over the cage. In fact, all over my house. I can sense it with my bare foot.

She asked me “Prag (her cousin) also got one. How is it?”

I reluctantly said “it’s OK”

I never like raising pets at home. It’s not like I am averse towards that helpless creatures. I value freedom very much in my life. I didn’t like the idea of caging or tying to keep it away from its natural habitats.

A while later, I said “I think there is little space in the cage. Why can’t we leave it free in the sky”.

She looked at me like an alien and slowly moved inbetween myself and the cage. From that moment she never let me near the cage.

All my persuasion went waste and I started putting that aside and concentrating on other aspects of life.

After a week, when I went home, I saw the cage open wide and no birds were in that. Her cousin’s cage was also empty.

I asked her what happened. Her aunt, (cousin’s mother) said them that, she would lock them up in a room for ten days and if they can happily survive, they can retain the birds. She also explained that it would be sad to cage birds with such beautiful wings.

Since they were kids, they took that in good spirit and with big heart, gave freedom to them. Freeedommmmmm.

The next day, her cousin said that the dog eat her birds.

I said “it cant be. Are you sure?”

“If you want come with me, I will show you the remaining feathers”

I said “I don’t want to see it”

Moral of the story

2011-04-22T18:53:00.001+05:30

A head monk of a zen temple went to meet an enlightened zen monk and said,

"we used to have hundreds of monks searching for wisdom in our temple. But now a days I don't know why but the numbers drastically decreased and it came down to an abrupt seven. I am so sad. I don't know what to do"

"Son, don't worry about the numbers because one of your seven members is an enlightened person"

Some how satisfied with his answer he went back to the temple and conveyed this message to all the six other members.

From the next day on wards, the way they treat each others changed. Every one was thinking the other might be an enlightened monk. This automatically added respect and love to what ever they do to each other. Slowly bliss started flowing every where in the temple that ultimately attracted people.

The temple became popular more than what it used to be.

This story stayed in my mind for months together now.

We say, judging people and acting according to it is very important in life. The way you treat others certainly have an influence on their reciprocal reaction. when you judge people, you are prejudiced and compel the opponent to act in a certain way. when we have an open mind and treat with love, at least others try to justify our trust. I think this works for many an occasion.

Tag

2011-03-05T11:12:00.000+05:30

This is my 100th Post. yeah, I became a veteran blogger. heyyyy.

sometimes I like doing tags. you don't have to think a lot. you can fill your blog easily and you can pose like a sincere blogger.

Especially when you are dry with ideas, tags help you to keep your blog alive. Thanks Shilpa for tagging me.

A. Make a list of 5 things that are in reach.

1. ant hexabromocyclododecane (HBCDD);

2. plasticizers bis(2-ethylhexyl)

3. phthalate (DEHP),

4. benzyl butyl phthalate (BBP), and

5. dibutyl phthalate (DBP)

Dont scratch your head. these are the chemicals banned in imported garments by REACH law in Europe. See, how I always think about business. This world hails this attitude. ain't they? But I dont. will write a post on this. (heyy, I got a topic now)

B. What is your favourite holiday?

Holidays are my favorite.

C. What is your fashion style?

Up to you guys to decide. let me know if you can.

D. What's your occupation?

My head is occupied with 60% activities to make money, 30% thinking about life and its true meaning, 10% entertainment. (I am sick of saying just 'business'. I think 'occupation' means what you are occupied with. I am not occupied with just making money)

E. What do you hear right now?
Alarm from my mind. "shouldn't I be doing something Worthy?".

F. Who was the last person you hugged?
My kid, my wife who else? :( (oh sorry, the smiley should have been the other way around)

G. What random song just popped in your head now?
Man in the mirror.

H. What did you do today?
this is morning. so cant answer much. (and it answers much indeed)

I. What was the last text message you received?
A message that some bloody fool added me to 'way to sms' I hate receiving advt in sms..

J. What websites do you always visit when you go online?
FB, cricinfo, blogs.

K. What is your next big planned purchase?
I dont plan for purchasing.

L. If you could afford to go anywhere in the world, where would you go?
anywhere.

M. Where do you see yourself in 5 years?
I think this is the stupidest question I could ever face in any interview. first of all you cant assure your future as most of the happenings are out of our hands. all that you can do is to act sensibly to given scenarios in present day.

N. Where's your tattoo/Where would you like a tattoo?
I dont like tattoos. this is one of the biggest turn offs.

O. What are you doing this weekend?
flying.

P. If you could play any musical instrument, which one would you play?
I can play virtually any musical instruments. but keeping the rhythm can never be guaranteed.

Q. What's the one thing you need the most now?

Why should I answer. will you give it? :)

R. Are you a creeper?

Nops.

S. What is your dream job?
I dont believe in dream jobs. any job can get boring over time.

T. What's the last good movie you saw?
Myna, Matrix (yes again)

alright. I finished the tag. now I tag all of you who read this boring stuff. but it is not compulsory.

Good bye. have fun.

Love Marriage

2011-01-26T21:29:00.004+05:30

இந்த பூமியை புதுப்பித்துக் கொண்டே இருக்கும் விஷயங்கள் இரண்டு தான்.
ஒன்று உழைப்பு, மற்றொன்று காதல்.
உழைப்பு மட்டும் இல்லை என்றால் இந்த பூமி தோன்றிய பொழுதில் இருந்து தோற்றத்திலேயே இருந்திருக்கும்.
காதல் மட்டும் இல்லை என்றால் ஆதாம்-ஏவாளுக்கு பிறகு மனிதத் தொடர்ச்சியே இல்லாமல் போயிருக்கும்

(Translation: work and love are the two factors that keep renewing this world. if there was no work, there wouldn't have been any development. If there was no love there wouldn't be any living things apart from Adam and Eve.)

My cousin's above face book status prompted me to write this post.

DONT GO AWAY PRESUMING HIGH DOSE OF DRYNESS IN THE POST. THOUGH IT IS TRUE, I HAVE AN ENTERTAINMENT FOR YOU AT THE END.

Though I like to make this world a better place for our fellow beings, I really don't bother for the prolonged existence of this world as it is creator's headache.

What impressed me most in this status message was the closeness he came to understanding nature.

If we watch carefully, nature wants us to lead our life in a certain way. Nature wants this world to ever evolve. So it created interest between male and female. I guess that is what we call as love.

Nature created hunger, prompting us to work. Then we created egos, jealousy and greed making it easy for nature.

Though I understood that nature wants us to lead our life in a certain way, I really don't know if I have to obey nature or rebel against it. That is the biggest question I face now. Now a days, I really don't bother to rebel against anything or anyone. Probably that is what made me an atheist, agnostic and what ever 'eist' I am now. I appreciate this. yeah, self appreciation. I dont care.

One thing that I cant stand in our culture is, its enmity to love marriage. For me, love is neither divine nor untouchable. Its just natural. Absolutely natural. As I said above, nature wants a male to love a female. It will happen to every one as like hunger, because it is programmed such a way. where as marriage is societal. Our society created marriage for various reasons that I have already discussed in two other topics, here and here.

Probably, this society should have setup arranged marriage as a system to save people who would not be able to find their mates for various reasons. I strongly believe there would be someone who likes a person if not all. so this reason doesn't seem to be convincing for suppressing a very natural behavior called love.

saying this, I am not going to assure you all sunshines and rainbows when we get love marriage. Managing a girl is an art which I havn't mastered yet. it takes a lot of sacrifice, compromise and understanding to make a successful relationship irrespective of it arising from love marriage or arranged marriage. And also one have to seriously think on managing this society after that. All I want to say is that, I just didn't like the idea of suppressing a very natural behavior of love by installing a system called arranged marriage.

After reading such a boring and tiny opinion, you can enjoy watching this. A stress reliever. But dont look for me after watching this, instead look for him.

After a long time, I finished it very short. Am happy. very happy. I am sure you too. Bye.

A letter to atheist

2011-01-14T11:16:00.000+05:30

Dear Atheist,

I am writing this letter not to prove that you are in the wrong side. I was a theist for many years, and then I became an atheist for a while. I was converted as an agnostic until a short while ago and now I am slowly transcending towards pantheism I guess. As I keep changeing my self, I don’t think I have any moral rights to claim my views are always right.

Then why am I writing this letter?

I want you to think and analyze if you have comfortably struck in one place forgetting the growth. That’s all.

I respect atheists more than theists for the very reason that they have courage to question the supposed to be most powerful being in this universe. After taking that great first step, I see many atheists get struck there. I don’t know if that is because they like the rebellion image that they created being an atheist or they really don’t have place to move from there or they strongly believe there is nothing more than that of what they see now?

In my childhood, I blindly followed elders when they go to temples. When I attain an age to question a little bit, they said, “If you defame God, he will blind your eyes”. At that age, I can’t imagine living without sight, so I patiently stopped questioning.

After a while, when they saw lack of interest in me for prayer, they said, “If you pray God, you will get good marks. He is more powerful and he can give whatever you want”. That kind of inspired me. I started making too many requests. When I questioned why some of my requests went unanswered, they said “you wouldn’t have prayed whole heartedly”. They also said, “This is only for your good”.

If god knows what is good and he gives that to me, then why should I pray? They intervened immediately, “Don’t speak rubbish”. When I grew up, I developed courage to check why some/most of my requests are unanswered by God. I understood that, this universe had its own set of rules in making and running this life and that will not change for whatever reason. Even if I shed tears in blood, that will not change. From that moment I stopped going to temple and became an atheist. Poverty and natural calamities and all added value fr my stance then.

But that ‘own set of rules’ kept pondering in my head. For whatever reason, I couldn’t understand the source for this universe, motive for life and innumerable complexities in human mind. Earth, stars, space, people, planets, sun, moon,..... where has it come from? Most importantly why has it come for? What are we trying to prove with this life? These questions kept baffling me. For me, Life seems like a book without few of the front and last pages. These questions made me an agnostic.

Though my questions were answered by none so far, can I broadly conclude that these are the acts of nature? I guess my atheist friends will agree with this. If nature does this, then can we collectively call the nature as God? See, now I am transcending towards pantheism. But any ways, whoever the God is, I am not going to knock his door with petitions or recommendations to help my existence. If anything has to happen in this world, it has to happen through me and only me. What ever happened and happens to me, that is because of me and only me. For that extent I am clear.

Youths don’t have to enter politics!!!!

2010-12-25T16:24:00.001+05:30

Seeing the topic please don’t think I am a guy who belongs to that group who say politics is drainage and we need to keep away from it. I don’t say politics is drainage, its indeed the most vital system for any country to flourish. Then what is my point? Please read further.

Now days we see corruption reaching new peaks every day. Corruption in lakhs is gone and now it is in lakhs of crores. One side we see one lakh and seventy thousand crores scandal, other side we see our dignity spoiled in international arena. We also see a government servant mounting gold piles.

Seeing these we comfortably point out politicians as the root cause. But I don’t see it that way. Our leaders are as good as our own self. They don’t jump straight from skies. They are just one of us. 90% of us are corrupt, lethargic, undisciplined and irresponsible. How can you expect one of us (elected) to be 100% perfect guy?

I see an auto driver is corrupt to get more money than he is destined. I see my neighbours not bothering to litter the streets to keep his home clean. I see my fellow motorists on road without bothering the rules just to make himself ahead of others. Then how can you expect one of the above to be a great politician.

We can say these are small mistakes that can be easily forgiven. But I don’t see it that way. I think everyone is doing corruption to the extent they can. A politician has the chance to excel. That’s all. I believe the basic problem is the attitude of our people.

With a mind full of corruption and irregularity, how can you expect them to choose a wise person? You can see back the history. Kamaraj and Gandhi have suffered defeat in the hands of our people. With this condition how can you expect me to encourage good youth to enter politics?

If I am allowed, I will suggest youth to do something to first bring discipline to our people, rather than entering politics. If this is done, then our people would be fit enough to choose better persons. I believe this may automatically take us to a time where we dont have to starve for good leaders.

If there are 100 rotten apples in a bag and if one have to pick one, isn’t it irrational to blame the person for picking a rotten one? First we need to take steps to change the rotten apples. Then we will have better chance of getting the right ones.

CELEBRATIONS

2010-12-13T22:06:00.000+05:30

Once upon a time, (oh no, I am not that old), a little while ago, when I was a kid, I think at the age of around 10, one fine day, I was very bubbly wearing red shirt and blue pant marched head held high towards my school bus stop.

I was waiting for that day for quite some time. The count down started about two months back. I made all arrangements right before 15 days (wow I was professional even then). A day before I finished all my home works, arranged my books properly in my school bag and kept it well prepared. On that morning, I sensed a little discomfort in my stomach like a pain. It bothered me too much as I want it to be a perfect day. As per my dad’s advice I drank little bit of water and did some strange exercises. And actually it did worked fine and I felt alright.

Enough of all the build-ups, it was my birthday. When I was reaching bus stop 10 minutes before the first trip, I just remembered that I forgot my brand new pencil box. I rushed back home and took it, but alas, when I came back, the bus was just leaving. I waved the conductor to stop the bus but he just ignored my request and asked me to catch the second trip which will take me to school minutes before the prayer bell.

Tears came out of my eyes. I cried hard I guess. I never thought why I cried then. But now I know the reason. I want to be in school early to meet my friends who already present there.

I know I would be the cynosure as it was my D day. The teachers, friends, staffs, parents and neighbours would wish me and treat me special. Everyone would identify that I am a birthday boy and will try to be nice with me. I would feel like a celebrity. I didn’t want to miss even a bit of that undue attention. This gives pride to me. It feeds my EGO and so I become Very happy.

But now I am all grownup. I don’t celebrate birthdays at all. My then behaviour looks childish now. But do you think we are out of feeding our EGOS? I don’t think so. Why do you think Tatas and Ambanis are behind money even now after accumulating tons more than their basic luxurious survival. Why do you think they are carving for more power when they can manage their life better even without that?

I believe we haven’t yet come out of feeding our egos. It only took a different shape with age.

sex - the taboo

2010-10-29T20:54:00.002+05:30

Hello pals. Nice to meet you here after a long gap.

All these time I was very busy making this world a better place. So I couldn’t blog. (Keeping away from blog may make this world a better place for atleast a few people who follow this blog I guess.)

Well jokes apart (seriously), this time I am back with a most sweet topic ‘sex’.

This is the one everyone likes but pretends otherwise or atleast hide that fact. But that’s not my point here.

Right from my childhood I have seen ‘sex’ as an untouchable taboo. By nature, a girl is attracted to a boy and viz. Then why has it been kept as a taboo by this society?

Atleast now I got the guts to question it. I just made a small analysis on why that has been kept as a taboo by this society.

When we read the history of evolution of mankind, it has evolved in most uncultured way as per our current standard. If we like it or not, the fact is that, sex was present in between male and female irrespective of any blood relationship. If I have to give an example of a familiar face, I can point out Cleopatra. Yes, she married her own brother.

In those days, where sex was free between anyone, they would have faced two problems.

The strongest men dominated in selection of a company leaving weakest with fever choice or no choice.
Every one feared death and so they want to leave behind something in their representation. What could have fulfilled that other than a son or a daughter. But in the free sex scenario, they can not be rest assured about that.

Because of the above issues, to make it fair for everyone, the then think tank would have sorted out a plan called ‘marriage’, where a person is allowed only one spouse. This way, they can sort out both the above mentioned issues.

Now, if someone doesn’t come under this system and prefer to stay unmarried throughout his life, then he/she has the potential to spoil the society. He can come in and create chaos among the already settled system. That is why even now people don’t encourage those who stay unmarried. They force them to get married.

I think this is how this taboo thing should have started.

Well, this is only my assumption and not necessarily true. This is just my attempt to find out what could have been the reason for keeping the most natural act ‘sex’ as a taboo. there could be more valid reasons for this setup which I might not have touched. and also, most importantly, you need to note that I am not judgmental on what is right and what is wrong. this is just an attempt to find out a reason for this setup. If you have better reasons, I would like to see it in comments page.

Next (my first Tamil poem in blog)

2010-08-20T17:54:00.005+05:30

அடுத்து ....

பேர் வாங்கிய கல்லூரியில்
பெரும்படிப்பு படிச்சாச்சு
வேற்று நாட்டு பட்டப்படிப்பில்
விற்பன்னன் ஆயாச்சு

வெயிலுக்கு பயமில்லை
குளிர்பெட்டி எனக்கிருக்கு
ஒயிலான காருண்டு
உடம்புக்கும் பாரமில்லை

ஓரளவு பணமிருக்கு
தருத்தனமும் எனக்கில்லை
ஊரெல்லாம் குறைசொல்லா
குடும்பமும் எனக்குண்டு

எதிர்கால வாழ்க்கையிலும்
சந்தேகம் வந்ததில்லை
புதிர்போடும் வாழ்க்கை தான்
புண்ணாக்கும் சிந்தனையை

வேகமெடுத்த வாழ்வெல்லாம்

வேங்கை போல இருந்தாலும்

நிக்கதான தெரியல

வெக்கம் விட்டு சொல்லுறேன்

ஓட்டை பானை மனசிலே

ஒழுகறது நிக்கலை

எத்தணை தான் போட்டாலும்

நிறைஞ்சது போல தெரியலை

நிழலை பிடிக்கும் விளையாட்டை

நிப்பாட்ட தெரியலை

நிறைய பேரு ஓடும்போது

நிற்பதற்கும் அஞ்சுறேன்

ஓட்டபந்தய வாழ்க்கையாம்
ஒழுங்கை ஓட வேனுன்னான்
ஓடி நானும் பார்த்துட்டன்
முடிவு கண்ணுக்கு தெரியலை

வந்ததுமே தேவை இல்லை

விட்டு விட துடிக்கிறேன்

துப்பு கெட்ட மனசு என்று

திருந்துமென்று தவிக்கிறேன்

EVE TEASING

2010-06-05T09:39:00.000+05:30

This is a 55 fiction. Those who dont know what is a 55 fiction, please click here.

She crosses my home exactly at 8 AM.

Atleast twice a week I see these four fellows following her. While walking, they touch her or dash her from behind. Fearing aftermath, I never tried to intervene but am clearly irritated.

Today, they crossed the limit. Thankfully one traveller took a stone and all dogs vanished.

Hope you all enjoyed it.

Story of This guy and That guy

2010-04-21T14:57:00.001+05:30

This guy is doing his own business for quite some time now. Since it is a startup business, he went through lots of tough time and that hard experience aided him in shaping his personality to some extent.

Because he faced lots of ''you should have done that before...'' scenarios in his business, he became very proactive and wants to do all work with proper planning, analyzing all pros and cons, projecting results blah blah right from the beginning. He is a perfectionist too. At least he thinks himself that way.

That guy is taking care of his family business in a big scale than this guy.

This guy, while preparing his plan for a foreign trip to meet his clients (yeah, he is dealing with export business), discussed it with that guy (just as an information. Not to show off as this guy is all grownup now to hate those who just show off.)

While discussing, this guy described all striking truths about western countries in a more interesting way as he lived there for quite some time. This created a slight interest in that guy and he enquired about the possibility of accompanying him.

Sensing a potential chance of avoiding lone travel, this guy narrated further truths about western country in such a way that he got convinced to find a justification for this empty travel. Eventually that guy got a justification. He will accompany him to gain a first hand marketing experience. No one was there in his house to question if this guy is a Philip Kotler.

As I said early, since this guy is a very proactive guy, he wants to finish off all the works well in advance. He requested for an invitation letter (which is needed for visa) from his client 45 days in advance. After receiving the invitation letter he checked for every detail and sent for few corrections. After seeing the corrected invitation letter, the visa agent said he needs the letter in their local language. So this guy, sent the letter back to his client and got it translated in local language. All these things were done in a flash of time.

This guy finalized all his thirteen appointments, booked hotels, internal flights in 4 different countries for 20 days and main flight before one and a half months. Since it was well in advance, he got every booking at least 25% cheaper than last minute bookings. He was damn proud of being so proactive. He even said few of his friends on how he saved money for being proactive.

The visa process would take 3 working days, but he submitted documents for visa, 21 days in advance (It’s not a joke, he is really proactive). After three days, he got a message from Delhi, that the consulate is closed and he has to deal it there in Mumbai. This guy wasn’t all shaken as he got plenty of time. He resubmitted it in Mumbai the next week.

He is not only proactive but also shrewd. So he followed it up with the agent after three working days. He said ''it didnt come''. this guys asked ''why?''. he said, this is how it works. This telephone activity was continuing for almost daily and some time even more than that.

While accidentally flipping through the invitation letters, this guy found out that there was a big mistake in the dates. Instead of 19, the lady who prepared the letter mistyped it as 9. This proactive guy only checked the English version of the letter. Since it is in foreign language and it was only a translation, this guy didn’t check that. He immediately called the agent and found out that he can do nothing about it now. This means he would only get visa for 10 days against 20 days. But the agent said, they will always give visa for atleast three months.

Because of the closure of consulate in Delhi, the Mumbai office became over crowded and he got the visa only two days before departure of his flight. Curiously he flipped through the pages and found only 10 days visa.

He cancelled the tickets immediately and rescheduled all the appointments for 10 days doubling the work. He re scheduled his flight and hotel bookings too in a space of three days. He will never give up you know.

Now he got another problem, he got an appointment by morning of his last day of stay. But all the flights were at before noon. After browsing through various websites, he finally found one flight that starts on evening 7:00 PM.

While booking that ticket, he got another problem. The flight is going through another country where he has to change flight. The lady who was booking the flight said he might need a visa for transiting country. So it is risky to book that ticket.

This guy is very tough, he called the airways and confirmed that he don’t need a visa. He was not convinced. He called the immigration office of the transit country airport and confirmed that he don’t need a visa for a short transit.

He called the lady and asked her to proceed booking that ticket.

This guy and that guy, happily boarded the flight as planned (second time). If they have to say about all those that happened in Europe, it would be too big that I need to leave an interval here for you to have some samosa and tea. So let us keep it short that all went well and they were very happy.

On the final day, this proactive guy wanted to go to the airport three and half hours before as he always insists to be like that even for local train in India (well it is half an hour for train in India).

While boarding, the airlines, refused boarding pass to them on the ground that they didnt have visa for transit country. This guy explained them on his pre confirmation with immigration and he himself called immigration officers. But to his surprise, they said they can’t allow them and they don’t have any records for their early confirmation. Since that was out of office hours, they coudnt contact local airlines office from where they got another confirmation.

The next straight flight was only the next day but they had visa only untill this day. They went up to the immigration officials of that country and got permission to stay that night.

To book another ticket they need nearly 2000 Euros, but these guys happily spent all the money and had only 700 Euros between them. Since it is mid night in India, they couldn’t do anything there.

This guy, called his friend in UK and asked him to book ticket online from his card and email tickets. Because of some site error, he couldn’t book ticket after trying for around couple of hours. This guy didn’t give up. He asked him to send some money through ‘western union money transfer’ so that he can collect ticket at the counter in airport. He was hurrying as there were only four tickets left.

Because of some system problem it took so much time that he could get the money only at the stroke of closure of the airport counter.

Now they were in a blissful state. They don’t have visa and return ticket in a phareen country. Great.

The next day, as early as 4:30 AM, in the ass freezing chilly weather, they went to airport and grabbed that damn ticket.

And there were nothing interesting after that as they landed safely in Indian soil.

From this experience, this guy learnt that, though it is important to be proactive and to plan ahead, it’s only your skill to counter the innumerable surprises that the life keeps throwing at us, will lead the way out.

Hope that guy will also agree.

hmmm society

2010-04-07T10:52:00.001+05:30

Recently I heard lots of people speaking much about the society. As a collective representation of human kind, I have concern and interest over it, but certainly am not thinking it as God or awestruck with it for many reasons that I am going to explain here.

Successful people are fewer in number in comparison with failed people. This society hails the successful ones to a greater extent possible while snubbing the failed ones. If ten persons participate in a race, there is room for only one to win. Then why snub those nine?. Aren’t they human? Don’t they have right to lead a peaceful life here? Why can’t this society accept them? Snubbing and ill-treating them shows only animal instinct.

Besides ignoring majority of failed individuals, it wants me to fall in a tasteless routine. It wants me to get a good job or business or a post with lots of power, get married, give birth to children and die in old age with lots of emptiness in my mind.

This society believes that a person is happy only when he follows the above. Do you think the people who have lots of power and money is happy? I don’t think so. I have been privileged to watch people with power and money from close quarters.

In my opinion they can only make others believe that they are happy. But in reality, their life too is a mixture of happiness and sorrows just like every other being in this world. The only difference is, they have luxury. Again that luxury brings in lots of diseases. It’s all well balanced. Besides, they are the ones who have the biggest fear of ''falling from great heights''.

And so, I am wondering if this society sets us up with false objective in life which have a nice chance of deceiving us all with its results. We need to be careful.

Sex and the Cynics

2010-02-07T20:12:00.000+05:30

Some time back, the hot news was that ND Tiwary, playing with three different beauties each day. I heard a lot about it from all quarters. All quarters includes both the sexes and all ages right from 16 to 70.

Everyone teased him lavishly for his lovely taste at his early eighties. Few giggled about having three different girls at various times of a day. The medias, kept on telecasting the poor quality sex tape 24x7. Finally the government ousted him by forcing him for resignation.

I feel, all the giggling and teasings are only the out ward expressions of emotions resulted from their age old hidden desires which they were unable to perform because of social taboos. I could spot the loathe in their eyes on how could a eighty three year old man could do that they cant.

I woudnt even call them as critics, rather I would call them cynics.

In my opinion, we didn’t give enough importance to those important points that should have been focused. Instead we discussed criticized and punished a personal choice without knowing that it is ill mannered to comment on a person’s intimacy.

While marrying, we promise the spouse that we would live only with him or her. Our children treats us a hero when they growup and it is our moral responsibility to lead by example. Here ND Tiwary broke these promises.

But that is their family issue which should be sorted out personally within themselves. We don’t have any business to ruin their privacy. And it is disgustingly ill mannered, in my opinion.

Instead, I believe the following should have been our focus points.

1. He used public money for his pleasures and he bent the government rules to issue contracts. That’s a mistake. We should question that.
2. He feigned clear image to get the support from people. We can call him hypocrite for this.

Instead of penalizing and accusing him for the act of sex, we should question and take action for the above points. We should also make sure these are not repeated by any in future. If we do this, I believe we would have a better and cultured environment around us.

My pursuit of happiness

2010-02-01T14:10:00.002+05:30

It is long time since I updated my blog. I decided to spare sometime today after Shilpa Sharma has reminded me in FB.

This post is going to be highly philosophical and I believe it would be boring to those who hasn’t been struck in the loop of life. (Eventually you can’t avoid it any way). But those who have already struck in the grim and cruel tooth of life,…. well I don’t know what you all will feel about this post. But am sure you would find something here.

Am eagerly waiting for your comments. I don’t know why my comments count has gone down. May be because that I became more irregular now a days and don’t comment in anyoneelse’s blog. However I would like you all to leave your opinion here despite my irregularity as I would like to know your point of view.

The old truth in life is that, ‘All that we chase in life is just happiness’. Not money, not fame, not power. We just believe that we get eternal happiness out of all the modes that we chase throughout life. But the irony is that the fact is otherwise.

When I was a kid, I thought I would achieve this eternal happiness once I enter the college, later it got extended to a glance by a beautiful girl, then a perfect job, then a business and now money. And I am most certain that it will go to ‘more money’, power etc in future. For me it seems like I am chasing my own shadow.

During my school days, the game I play when I am alone was to chase my own shadow. When I stand facing my back to the sun, I think I can catch my shadow by just moving two steps up. But whenever I move two steps, it goes further above. I could never catch my shadow throughout my schools days.

I think I am playing the same game now but with a different format. Instead of shadow, am searching happiness. Whenever I feel I would be happy after achieving this, all of a sudden, it shows another thing to chase. How sad.

I believe, in our life, we always long for something for most part of the life and then look for another if in case we achieve that very thing that we were waiting for a long time. I am not at all satisfied with this. I want to be in a state of eternal bliss? I am not ashamed of saying so, as it is my right to be happy.

Some say, I need to pray to God to be in the state of bliss. But my limited experiences so far guarantee that God is too disabled to help me with any materialistic aspects in life. I also somehow understood that materials that come from outside cannot give me the eternal bliss that I am longing for as most of external happenings are out of our control.

I believe freedom is one of the aspects that will help you achieve the wisdom that can guide you in pursuit of happiness. The little freedom that I could squeeze in spite of the societal and familial knots, helped me to place myself in this current mindset. I don’t know if I have to go further? Am I too afraid of losing all the benefits that I derive from this societal setup? May be yes. But will this help me finding my eternal happiness? Does it worth taking that daring step?

I need to tune my mind accordingly that I am in that perfect state of mind even under the most unfortunate situations. How is this possible? I don’t know. This is the only question I have now in my mind. Can anyone help?

He

2010-01-10T08:58:00.000+05:30

If I ask him to refrain from something, he is finding ways to justify doing it. If I ask him to do something, he is feigning as if there are more important work than this. He is becoming adamant and cunning. I coudnt handle him. Oops, I forgot to introduce him. He is, my mind.

This is a 55 fiction.

I met God

2009-12-26T14:34:00.006+05:30

Two instances where I wouldn't like to be in are, when my wife calls me for a shopping or when she along with my mom calls me for a temple visit.

Generally, I neither get emotional to see the idol during deepaaradhana nor awestruck with the ornamentation and beautification of the idol with food items and various stuffs.

But this time, all of a sudden a Gandhian inside me woke up when my mom called for a temple visit. She gets extremely happy when ever I agree for the visit. If not for God, why shouldn't I go to temple to make her happy? This time, I also determined not ask any questions or disobey her instructions as I wanted to make her happy to the fullest extent possible.

We three of us (My wife, my kid and my mom) started in a car where three others joined us in the way. That three includes another kid as old as my kid. Initially they both didn't get well with each other, but when the moment we landed in the temple they became thickest friends.

When we entered the temple, my mom asked me to pour milk to a serpent statue. I was waiting in the queue as there was already a couple of guys pouring milk. He didn't come down until he emptied 8 pockets of milk. Hope he was looking for a heavy favor from God. When my turn came, I climbed on the wall to find a very bad smell because of poor cleaning of all the milk. I poured a little milk from the bottle and returned it back to my mom. Surprisingly she didn't say anything for returning the milk. I was expecting her to instruct me to empty the can. (Later I understood that she kept the remaining as 'prasad'). When i was climbing down, she wanted me to empty a pocket of kumkum as well on the serpent. Well I did it too without any hesitation and so she became very happy.

We entered the main temple. We were led by a priest whom my mom hired on our arrival. He got some money from my mom, I don't know how much. I am sure it should be around 300 bucks. He asked for all of our names and effectively suffixed with 'namatheshya'. After that, we all went inside. He said we were all extremely lucky to be on the exact time for a special abishek. After a while, because of heavy crowd inside, I relinquished my place to another ardent theist (at least he would be happy see his God from a better place) and took up the job of watching the kids.

It was quite fine until all of a sudden, they started running in full speed. I didn't know why, probably a running race. I too ran behind them as there were protruding pillars all around the temple and they were whisking away dangerously close to it. I could catch one, but the other fled away. I was in a pretty bad situation. If I leave this kid and follow her, the first one would start running. If I stop there I might lose the other one. To my relief another companion came to my rescue to follow the fled one.

On the way back to the temple, she started making 'uahhh' noice. Ohh, NO…. NO…. but yes, she vomited. Because of excessive running, her throat went dry and she vomited all over inside the temple. I informed my mother that we need to find a way to clean this. But she was very busy praying and said there were cleaners inside the temple and they will take care of it or she wanted me to wait for some time until that pooja got over as she can come out in the middle. A priest was there as well, but he didn't care a damn as he was busy explaining the innocent pilgrims that the money they paid in advance doesn't include coconut, banana and they have to pay another 30 bucks extra.

I was much worried. People were bare foot inside the temple and the last thing I want was someone stepping over it. To my relief, finally I saw the cleaning lady. She was a lean lady with dark complexion. If I have to go with the standard of beauty set by the current world, (I mean white skin, flashing eyes, flowing hairs and silky skin) I would have to term her unattractive as she didnt have any of these. In that village, I think she would only be getting a very minimal salary which wouldn't be sufficient enough to her for all the three food breaks. She should be around her mid forties. I told her that our kid vomited and could she clean it. She asked where and I showed her the spot.

She cleaned the mess with bucket full of water and broom stick. As a relieved man, I gave her a ten rupee note in a more polite way. She refused to take that. She said, she only did her job and that too, to clean the mess of a kid would only be a help for me.

Corrupted by the opportunistic corporate world, I awkwardly, tried again to offer her the money. She refused it with single word and vanished somewhere in no time.

This incident kept lingering in my mind for a very long time. I was wondering what nature was trying to teach me through this. But this indeed gave me a nice feeling. All of a sudden the lady went very high in my mind and looked beautiful and divine.
I felt the experience of 'bonding' which I think is essential in life. I believe those are the people who link the world and save it from self destruction.

Cant this be called as love?

I don't say 'love is God as I can't compare a thing with another one which I don't know really. I simply call, 'Love is great'. But if you insist on 'Love is God' then, yeah, I met God. (at least I should do justice to the topic here :).

Lessons from an entrepreneur - part II

2009-12-20T11:35:00.002+05:30

What do you think is the most needed to be an entrepreneur?

Why cant you close your eyes and think for a while until you list out at least five items.

I am sure 99% of you wouldn't have mentioned what I have in mind as I am confident that you are not as cranky as me.

I decided to prolong the suspense a little further and so I will start with a small story (very small indeed) to give you a small hint on what I have in mind.

Once a helicopter asked a rocket, "how can you travel that fast as I cant even reach half your speed.

Rocket said "If only you have fire on your back, you would know"

The answer I have in my mind is 'humiliation' or 'insult'.

For a person to be a successful entrepreneur, you need to have the fire. The fire can be effectively replaced by drive. since business is a long process, you tend to loose interest in the middle. you will be more prone to laziness. That small pause is enough to get you out of business as business is a down moving ladder. If you stop climbing up, you will go down.

Only a drive can keep you motivated. In my opinion, nothing better than a humiliation or insult can be an effective drive. The urge to prove someone that they are wrong in their judgment black and white is a most motivating drive I would say. Speaking in business statements rather than words to such persons and watch their reactions would motivate you even to work throughout night.

In the final part of 'Rocky' movie, Stallone will meet a girl in a bar. By that time he would have been a popular boxer. The girl is no stranger to him as he met her years ago when he was just a poor fellow. By that time she would have humiliated him.

Recognising him, she will ask if he remembers her.

He will say 'yes'

She will ask 'how'

He will say 'great insults lasts longer'

How true?

I wanted to kiss her

2009-12-12T11:58:00.003+05:30

After loads of serious stuff, i decided to write a lighter one. (or else I know my blog buddies may eat me alive for all the confusions that I did to them over a period).

Though I suck in this genre (55 fiction), i believe this one would be alright. (at least I believe so). Please leave your feedback.

I WANTED TO KISS HER

I saw her in bus stop. She was damn beautiful. In her polished apple cheeks, I saw reflection of early morning sun in-between her shiny hairs. The road was almost empty. I couldn’t control myself. I wanted to kiss her. When I moved forward, bus arrived. She took her schoolbag to join her nursery friends.

I LIKED.....

Recently I read a post by Amit singh - Religion; my thoughts. Its a profound one. I always like his style of touching high topics in a more humble tone. I would recommend this.

The Mask

2009-12-07T12:30:00.006+05:30

After a long gap, I am back. Honestly I won’t say, I am extremely busy that I cant even find little time to write a post. Though it became quite busy nowadays, I did have some free time, but the problem is that I wasn’t in a right frame of mind to think.

Nevertheless, I am back now.

To give an introduction, this post may contain high philosophical stuff. I think you all know that this is a decent way of saying that I am going to bore you down to the core.

Have you ever heard of the word ‘Mamaharam’. Probably you wouldn’t as it is not an English word. Even Tamil people wouldn’t have heard it as it is seldom used. ‘Mamaharam’ means our idea of how others think about our self.

In recent past, I was observing my own self on if I am portraying my true self to the outside world. The result is a big NO. I wear too many masks to hide my true self. Sometimes the mask is so permanent that makes me to forget my true identity.

If you wonder what these mask means, for example if you have to get a work done in a government office, say a bank. When you were conversing with the manager, most likely he will crack a poor joke with high dose of sarcasm and also you would never fail to notice how well they utilize the long government procedures to the advantage of their laziness. Along with these, the pace at which the work moves at that office will make you feel to kick him right along with the chair that he was sitting. But you cant. Here you will wear a smiley mask.

Similarly, we use masks to hide our selfishness, arrogance, psychic feeling and lust.

'Mamaharam' plays a good role in introducing new masks to us. If we feel some one is thinking good about our self, we don’t want to spoil that image. Immediately we wear a mask that will best suit that image. We do it quite often. Don’t we?

I agree, if only there is no such masks, the world will be one hell of a place. But I feel covering a wound is not good enough. We need to find some way to heal it.

In some way the world compels all of us to wear a mask. Because everyone wears a mask and tease those who haven’t done this tradition. The whole society is like this.

Unless we stop wearing masks, we are not going any further in self exploration that I think is the key to find out the secret of life.

If we need to come out of these masks, either we should stop doing actions clandestine or we should develop courage to face this world. Probably if we reduce the dependency level with this society, we can gain that courage.

I know these are easy said than done. So far I developed courage in informing you that I havnt moved a step forward to shed away the ‘n’ number of masks that I am wearing now. But I believe, writing this article may propel me to take evasive action in uncovering my true identity.

If you are reading this line, then probably you are courageous person to bear all my boredom. So I decided to award you with “Iron Heart” (ethaiyum thangum idayam).

I LIKED:

Among those blogs I read recently, I am most impressed with this post.

'Jihad' by Vipul

This post is very profound, well thought and forward thinking. A must read. I like people with unbiased ideas as such.

The mask and the prejudice

2009-11-15T15:21:00.005+05:30

Though I am online for most of my presence in office, nowadays I found it hard to spare some time to blog. But this didn’t restrict me from finding few topics to share. Here I present you with two such topics which is completely unrelated. After finishing this, I plan to watch the movie ‘2012’ in Tamil as we don’t have it screened in English in our town. Yeah I am going to enjoy all the funny dialogues like ‘Athukku kovam vandhuruchu pola irukku, oodunga oodunga – Courtesy Jurassic park’

The prejudice:

When I went home for lunch in a day of the last week, my mother said we need to visit one of our family friends as their son got narrowly escaped from an accident. I know the guy’s father very well. He is lively and a very friendly person to speak with. I like him a lot as he is a result oriented person but the only difference we have is in ‘faith’. Yes, he is a hard core theist who practices all poojas, vasthu, numerology, namalogy and etc where as I take a total opposite stance to that.

When I entered his home, I found the son sitting with a sad face. I could see the seat belt mark on his chest and surprised that he used seat belt. I asked him what happened. Before he say anything his mother intervened and said all the story involved with the accident.

One fine early morning of a holiday, her son along with three other friends started in a small car from Chennai towards a destination which is still unknown. Her son was sitting in the front seat adjacent to the friend who was driving the car. One of the guys sitting back was sleeping. All these three friends took a picture of him and making fun.

The car was in full speed in the four track road. When they tried overtaking a lorry, they found a wet spot in the middle of the road. To avoid it, driver applied break, the car slipped and dashed with the lorry in high acceleration. For a moment they didn’t realize what happened. The first to recover was the driver friend and her son as they had only minimal injuries. The front part of the car was totally damaged. Immediately they looked back to check their friends and found them unconscious with blood bleeding from their head.

With the help of local people they called an ambulance and went to the hospital.

The doctor checked and said one of the person is already dead and the other is very serious.

They realized fatality of the accident and informed their parents immediately.

After all the scanning and x rays, her son is quite safe now. But he is not yet recovered from the shock of losing his friend. I can clearly see this from his face. I didn’t speak much to him as I don’t want to irritate him with all those advices and questions which everyone do by default.

His father joined us and said he visited the expired friend’s home to mourn. Hearing this news, it seems his mother went inside the temple and prayed that nothing should have happened to her son. She pleaded God that she would even accept her son sans a hand or leg but all that she want was to have him back alive. But eventually that prayer went in vein. I felt very sad for all the pain they are going through now.

After half an hour of discussion on their feelings and son’s behaviors, the father finished saying that in the end all the poojas that he did so far had given its benefit. It saved their son.

I was wondering, if the prayers he did, gave its benefit by saving their son, then what happened to the prayers that the expired friend’s mother did?

If he say, the reason for his prayer got answered was because that he did all the pooja’s as per the rule listed in Vedas, then is God so narcissistic and cruel, giving importance to modes of prayer rather than the feeling of a heart?

I think, in life, we can change a few things with our efforts, where as we need to accept the rest which are out of our hands. Those things that we need to accept includes death. Some people believe, we can get the help of God to overcome those things that have to be accepted. With the fear of losing the support of god in future endeavors like this, they try to justify God for what ever happened without questioning anything to know the real truth.

The Mask:

Sicne I am totally exhausted now, I plan to write the topic ‘Mask’ in my next post. Please bear with my laziness.

But please don’t be as lazy as me to vote for the poll that I created in the right side panel. I love your feedbacks.

I LIKED:

This is the column where I present you with the posts from other blogs that I like a lot.

A Monologue for a beautician by GB

I like this post because it reflects the beautiful attitude of forward thinking women. Hope you would like it.

If I were a baby again

2009-11-07T14:56:00.006+05:30

This post has been published by me as a part of the Blog-a-Ton 4; the fourth edition of the online marathon of Bloggers; where we decide and we write. To be part of the next edition, visit and start following Blog-a-Ton.

If I were a baby again, I would go to Vipul mamu and ask him to change the topic with flashing innocence in my eyes which every baby has by default. (I very well know that, he will give me a candy and say he can’t, quoting all democracy and stuff). What else I could do as I am totally blank in this topic.

When I try to remember my childhood days, I could remember very few incidents starting from my fourth year. I think you would call a 4 year, a boy and not a baby. I really don’t remember what I did when I was a baby. And whatever I wish now, even if it comes true, I will not remember. I am wondering, then what is the use of being a baby again?

Alright enough of my logical stuffs, let me try something now.

I believe my mind and desires are like bottomless vessel. How much ever you put in, it wouldn’t be enough. When I was a kid, I remember fighting my mum for taking half trousers as I want to wear full pants and pose like a man. When I was in school, I want to go to college soon and enjoy all the freedom (hey we can bunk classes). When I was in college, I want to finish and earn soon (we need to share the burden of the family and become financially independent).

Now I want to go back to my college and school. I want to be a kid and baby also. What a nasty and inconsistent mind I have. It is so notorious, senseless and adamant that it cannot enjoy whatever is in my hand, instead it wants whatever is in other’s hands knowing the fact that I cannot take it.

Once my mind asked for Biriyani as it likes it a lot. When I fed it, it was very happy and said “I am a connoisseur of biriyani. This particular hotel biriyani is the only professional biriyani and it makes me happy”. When my family was out for a week, I fed it with Biriyani all the week. On the fifth day, it said with a grim face, “can’t you think of anything more than biriyani?”. Oh God, When my mind will realize that happiness isn’t in the materials of this world and it is within itself.

After a brief thought, I think I don’t want to be a baby again. Right from childhood, nature presented me with innumerable choices. When I made the right choice, I went ahead few steps. When I made the wrong one, I learned life. I don’t have any regrets so far. I have learnt my lessons very well. I have done all I intended to do. (though a little slow). I think, I will do all I dreamt of now, in Future.

I believe, being a baby again is a trick played by my mind to loop me to my past. I don’t want to fall for it.

Note: After deviating so much from the topic, I think I may have to buy 'Chetan Bhagat' from the stands.

The fellow Blog-a-Tonics who took part in this Blog-a-Ton and links to their respective posts can be checked here. To be part of the next edition, visit and start following Blog-a-Ton.

STORY AND LESSONS OF AN ENTREPRENEUR

2009-11-01T16:22:00.004+05:30

After completing MBA from top 20 business school, I was happily placed in a then top 5 media company ‘P’. The initial enthusiasm and bubbly attitude was well received by our GM and was getting the extra attention that would make anyone happy.

That was exactly the reason for bootlickers and chumchas to target me. When days gone by, somehow I coudnt digest the fact that mere talent wasn’t enough to grow up in the corporate ladder.

Concentrated politics made me to resign the job backed up by the belief that top 20 business school image would fetch me a decent job in better environment.

But alas, the reality was quite contrary as I resigned my job exactly at the time of Sep 11 attack and job market was very poor and kept me jobless for a period of four months.

I decided to go to Mumbai in hunt for a job. (That was the time I experienced transgender behaviors and it was one of the popular posts here). I could hardly manage any jobs other than door to door selling which I didn’t like because I hate irritating people at wrong time.
So I decided to go back to higher studies in UK which gave me ample opportunities to mingle with multicultural people and learn the modern steps of business.

When I finished my studies there, I was 26 and I don’t want to go back to job world as I would be far behind my peers.

With the help of our university’s entrepreneurship center, I started my company ‘F’ with high hopes.

And that’s how I became an entrepreneur.

Though I was aspiring to be an entrepreneur right from my schoolhood, had I been consitantly in the job market, I doubt to have achieved that dream if not situation compelled me like this.

The initial days were very disappointing as I started this business without any basics. I did all the possible errors and I was in such a pity state that I wasn’t even able to judge why my potential customers turned their face against me.

After four years of struggling, now the business seems to be back in track. I could smell some profits. Yeeahhh.

More than profit, it’s the recognition of talent is more intoxicating. I thoroughly enjoy it.

Coming to the main part of the post, I would like to present here, couple of valuable lessons I learnt as I can see lots of MBA’s and aspiring entrepreneurs in this blogosphere.

I would definitely don’t want to term it as an advice as I hate advices. I believe advice never give freedom and make people dumb. I would like to use an alternate word ‘suggestion’. I like this word as it gives freedom to think. And also I can never assert whatever I said here is correct as I keep changing my stances often.

OK lets start the lessons.

Lesson number 1:

A mother of a successful business man went to her husband and said “Our son is now 10 years and growing older day by day. I want you to start teaching business lessons right from now so that he would be a seasoned business man in future”

Dad said “alright. Call him”

Son came with a little hesitation because of his dad’s unusual assertiveness.

Dad carried him and placed him on the top of a cupboard.

“Common son, jump from there”

“Dad, its too high and I may get myself injured if I jump from here”

“Don’t worry son, I am here to catch you. Common, jump”

Son jumped. Dad didn’t catch him. He fell flat in the floor. It was painful.

Dad said “ first lesson in business. Do not trust anyone, even if it’s your dad”

I learned this lesson in a way giving lump sum as price. Everyone in business world is after money. No one will help you if they have to make a loss. Unless the terms of business is mutually beneficial, we are certain to make loss at one point of time. Secondly, unless we have a clear system to track down the results of an individual, he will cheat us even if he is a Buddha.

Lesson number two starts here.

Unless we learn to say 'NO' to our clients, we would end up making wrong terms which would eventually push you in deep shit.

All right, anyone of you please send this piece of experience to Harvard business school. If they invite me for a guest lecture, I will throw you all a lavish party.

I think this is my first post other than social causes. I don’t know how readers would like it. So please spare some time to leave your feedback here. Your time will be respected.

DEATH

2009-10-25T11:35:00.003+05:30

I would like to narrate you one of the unforgettable incidents in my life.

In my sophomore days, sixteen of our hostel mates planned a one day picnic to Kalpakkam. We chose Kalpakkam because couple of my friends live there and actually they were the one who invited us.

We got up early in the morning (it was very unusual in college days) got ready and boarded the ‘Saroja’ kind of van and headed towards Kalpakkam as early as 6:30 AM. As usual the journey was filled with pranks and teasings of college youth.

Once we reached Kalpakkam, without wasting much time we headed towards the beach.

Eight of the sixteen decided to go on a voyage in Catamaran. The catamaran was taking its full night’s rest at the beach sand with the luxury of waves lullaby. (I am sometimes poetic you know) It looked like a simple boat with a motor at its back. A long iron rod with a fan at the end was attached to the motor and it was designed in such a way that they can keep the fan up towards the sky until it reach a safe distance inside the sea.

While two guys were pushing the catamaran, one of my friends just pushed me down in the sand. Before falling down I heard the 'whirl' of the fan near my right ear. Yeah. I missed it by a whisker.

Well, it didn’t affect me much, we said 'tata' and gave a oohhhho send off to our 8 sailors and was waiting on the sand for our chance.

It would take atleast one hour for them to return and so I suggested for a swim in the sea. Four rejected and they were happy to converse with the fisherman on the enchanting trip to the sea. The other four, including me decided to have a dip at the sea.

Hundai mandayan (Etymology: he started balding and his fore head looks like Hyundai bonnet), Gundan (no etymology required), myself and Santa were the ones who decided to go.

The feeling of being amidst the waves was like flying and we thoroughly enjoyed it. All of a sudden, it seems I fell deep into a pit and I started drowning. I am not a very skillful swimmer though I am confident of saving myself. I made the movement to come up the water, but the big waves immediately covered me leaving a few seconds up the surface. I could hardly breathe.

I decided to call for help. I said ‘kapath…’ a wave covered me. I was down again. When I came back up again, Hundai said “dai machi chumma thana pannara” (means aren’t you just feigning). I was like fuming amidst the disaster. Gundan gave me his hand and he came in and started struggling. So was Santa. After a few minutes of vigorous attempt to save my life, all my energy depleted. I thought I am going to experience death.

All of a sudden, I got a strong arm lifting me up from the water. I saw the fishermen with my friends forming human chain from the shore to help us. One good thing Hyundai did was to call the help of fishermen. Had he given hand to me, we four would have been only in photos with Kumkum and garland in our home.

Immediately after reaching the shore, some said,” it happened twice and will happen one more time to complete the sentimental three”. Some others said, “it’s a no moon day and that’s why the waves are at peak”. It didn’t bother me much. I still love being in water.

But this incident made me to realize that my life is very vulnerable and I can encounter death any time in life. Untill this incident I never thought myself with death.

People say it is inauspicious to pronounce the word ‘Death’. But I think, if we pronounce it or not, we cannot avoid death. We see so many people dying, we attend innumerable condolences, but have you ever realized that we would also experience death one day?

It can be by an accident today or tomorrow or anyother day. Or we may dye out of old age. We are certain to experience that death one day in our life. We can’t escape.

How will it be. Will it pain? I don’t know what I was before my birth? Will death be like prebirth period, the nothingness?. Or will it be like a dreamless permanent sleep. Somehow my mind is not accepting that I will come out of my body and watch all those cry sitting in a corner like a bunch of smoke.

Whatever it is, I value death because it thought me the nature of nature. Theists can replace the second ‘nature’ with ‘God’. As I already said in my previous posts, the nature follows certain rules and it cannot be changed with all our begging and trading that we do with God. Death teaches us this point in a very hard way. Do you think any amount of money or the best doctor or the best preacher, can bring back a dead man alive?

PS: I am sorry guys. I coudnt blog or leave a comment in my fellow bloggers’ for the past couple of weeks. I was busy proving this world that I am brilliant. The world thinks you are brilliant only when you earn money. If you don’t earn money, then they will call you a dumb fella. Understand this fact and shut up. Or else this world will call you a non pragmatic person.

PPS: I actually thought of writing a completely different genre here. But will do it in my next post.

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GUEST POST

As I am little ambiguous about death, I requested two of my fellow bloggers who think far better than me, to write a poem and a writeup as a guest blogger here. They were very generous and gave a beautiful poem and a wonderful writeup. Enjoy it. Thanks a lot pals.
Here I present it.

Death (Poem by Vipul Grover)

As an unbearable pain suddenly engulfed him
He just felt an unusual surge of eternal peace
The moments he had lived, flashed, exciting and grim
While the people around mourned like buzzing bees.
As those weary eyes closed for that last one time
He smiled for his perpetual voyage begins.

Death (A writeup by Amit Singh)

What is Death? Death is the layout on which we paint our life. And I feel when we start seeing our life with integration of death; life would look more beautiful and more alive. Like the Day and the night, the summer and the winter, the tide and the ebb, matter and antimatter...Death and Life also define each other and or part of same energy but with opposite polarity. The Concept of God, Religion and spirituality; all these are somehow based deeply on our Mortality. A life without Death would be a sentence without any termination...Real meaning of life is more pronounced by the limitation carved by death around our life. Love, beauty and compassion; all these divine attributes are somehow sprouted from the seed of Death. I would love to quote one of my favourite quotes, quoted by Steve Jobs....

“Almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”

Hope you all enjoyed it. I don’t know when I will find time again to blog. Hope it would be on next Sunday. See you then.

My War - 55 fiction

2009-10-18T19:02:00.004+05:30

This post has been selected as 'Tangy tuesday pick' by Blogadda on 20 oct 09. click on the image to view the results page.

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“Amidst my regular dinner, I heard a big bang. My ears went deaf. I rushed home to warn my kids. They were shivering”.

“Three days now, we didn’t go out. We’re starving. Will this war prolong?

“Oh God, save our life and let us have peace soon”.
Prayed the elderly crow in nest. Its Diwali.

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This is 55 fiction story. If you don't know what it is, read it here.

Hey Guys, this is my first real attempt on 55 fiction. let me know your honest comments.

ANNOUNCEMENT:

Finally, I decided to penalize Vipul for consistently calling me a married man in FB comments section. Yes he need to write a 50 words poem in my blog as a guest blogger. (my blog doesn't have any poems as I don't know to write).

The topic is 'DEATH'.

@ Vipul: If you are taking this, you can email it to bharathionline@gmail.com

Tags - More secrets disclosed

2009-10-15T10:09:00.002+05:30

Shankar tagged me for these 2 tags. Seems to be very interesting.

TAG #01 : Innocent… or Guilty?

RULE 1- You can only say Guilty or Innocent. (I broke this rule here as i felt single word answer will only make the readers boring)

RULE 2- Copy and paste this into your notes , delete my answers, type in your answers and tag to your friends to answer this.

Asked someone to marry you? Innocent. (never. Though I liked some)
Ever kissed someone of the same sex? Innocent. (No way)
Danced on a table in a bar? Innocent. (danced on table but not in the bar)
Ever told a lie? Guilty.
Had feelings for someone whom you can’t have back? Guilty.
Kissed a picture? Innocent. (real would be more entertaining ;-)
Slept in until 5 PM? Innocent (I dont know why, even if I go to bed early morning I get up at max eight) but I go to bed again after breakfast)
Fallen asleep at work/school? Innocent (I need very comfortable place to sleep)
Held a snake? Guilty (Dont think I am bravest. In one snake show, in no time the guy put a snake around my neck. Off course I acted as if I am not afraid).
Been suspended from school? Innocent.
Worked at a fast food restaurant? Innocent.
Stolen from a store? Innocent (I cant stand humiliation).
Been fired from a job? Innocent. (But I fired my organisation couple of times hahaha)
Done something you regret? (Guilty. some times. but I dont want to repeat it)
Laughed until something you were drinking came out your nose? Innocent.
Caught a snowflake on your tongue? Innocent.(errr,.. kiddish question)
Kissed in the rain? Innocent . (wow. what a romantic question)
Sat on a roof top? Guilty.(I also travelled on a roof of a train once)
Kissed someone you shouldn’t? Innocent
Sang in the shower? Guilty. (I sing in every place where others cant hear me. I also sing when I drive alone in a two whealer. its not because that my singing capability is poor but because I dont want to give my precious voice for free. I will think about it if AR Rehman pays me)
Been pushed into a pool with all your clothes on? Innocent.
Shaved your head? Guilty. (I tried it once in UK with automatic shaving machine)
Had a boxing membership? Innocent. (But yeah I wish to, to punch all those who piss me off)
Made a girlfriend cry? Guilty
Been in a band? Innocent. (wonly in rubber band)
Shot a gun? Guilty (Diwali is coming. what a stupid question)
Donated Blood? Guilty.
Eaten alligator meat? You would be surprised if I say yes. but so do I
Eaten cheesecake? Guilty. (what a contrary question to the previous one. very girly)
Still love someone you shouldn’t? Innocent.
Have/had a tattoo? Innocent. (I dont know why but I hate tattoos and piercings. getting older eh?)
Liked someone, but will never tell who? Guilty.
Been too honest? Guilty. (most of the times except some times. I pray God that the sometimes stay some times and not most of the times. yeah I can write confusing statements)
Ruined a surprise? Innocent. (I am a tough guy. I keep secrets)
Ate in a restaurant and got really bloated that you couldn’t walk afterwards?Guilty ( if the meal is good, I do that. especially when it is Biriyani. I am a connoisseur of Biriyani)
Erased someone in your friends list? Guilty. (I do this many times. but I want to stop this)
Dressed in a woman’s clothes (if you’re a guy) or man’s clothes (if you’re a girl)? Guilty (While making a women garment (We export knitted garments) I need to wear it to check the fitting as I dont find any girl fitting that size at that moment. But guys I didnt use coconut shells :-)
Joined a pageant? Innocent.
Been told that you’re handsome or beautiful by someone who totally meant what they said? Guilty.
Had communication with your ex? Innocent.
Got totally drunk on the night before exam? Innocent.
Got totally angry that you cried so hard? Innocent.

Guilty for 17/42

TAG #02 : How DUMB are you?
The more [x]’ s the “dumber” you are.

[] Gum has fallen out of your mouth when you were talking (But I swallowed it once)
[] Gum has fallen out of your mouth when you were NOT talking
[] You have ran into a glass/screen door
[x] You have jumped out of a moving vehicle
[x] You have thought of something funny while walking by yourself
[] Laughed, then watched people give you weird looks
[x] You have run into a tree/bush.
[] You know that it IS possible to lick your elbow
[x] You have tried to lick your elbow… a few times
[x] You never knew that the Alphabet and Twinkle Twinkle Little star have the same rhythm.
[x] You just tried to sing them.

So far: 6

[] You have tripped on your shoelace and fallen.
[] You have choked on your own spit .
[] You have seen the Matrix and still don’t get it. (I love that movie. do you guys know the entire movie is based on Indian philosophy. escpecially the climax of first part)
[] You’ve never seen the Matrix.
[] You type only with two fingers.
[] You have accidentally caught something on fire
[] You tried to drink out of a straw, but it went into your nose/eyes.
[x] You have caught yourself drooling. (Once I did it with a stunning beauty who asked for a lift inside the college. I wasnt drooling, I made a decent chat but I fell by her beauty and the way she conducted herself)
[] You have fallen asleep in class and fell outta your chair

[] Sometimes you just stop thinking (most of the time I wont think about anything)
[] You are telling a story and forget what you were talking about
[] People often shake their heads and walk away from you
[] You are often told to use your “inside voice”.
[] You use your fingers to do simple math
[] You have eaten a bug
[] You are taking this test when you should be doing something more important
[] You have put your clothes on backwards or inside out, and didn’t realize it
[x] You’ve looked all over for something and realized it was in your hand. (Once I searched for a mobile phone while speaking on it. how funny. but I will not agree if you call me dumb for doing this)
[] You have ran around naked in your house.

So far: 8

[] You repost bulletins because you are scared that what they say will happen to you if you don’t.
[] You break a lot of things.
[x] Your friends know not to use big words around you.
[] You tilt your head when you’re confused
[] You have fallen out of your chair before
[] When you’re lying in bed, you try to find pictures in the texture of the ceiling or wall
[] The word “ummmmm” is used many times a day.

TOTAL: 9

Even I am (9/37)*100 = 24.32% DUMB !

I normally dont tag anyone but since this is a very interesting one, I want to tag the following pals. I would be happy if they take it. If they feel too embarrased to take it, they can leave it. No problem. But I would miss to know some interesting facts.

I tag Vipul, Vishnu, Shilpa, Shruti, Sathish, Aditya, Guria, Sid, Suga, Dr. Chandraseker and all those who read this. (I am sure my fellow bloggers are very kindenough to let me go without backlinking their name. I am little lazy you know)

And finally, thanks for Shankar for helping me increase my post count with out much thinking.

randomz

2009-10-10T15:23:00.003+05:30

I wasn’t blogging that frequently for quite some time but that didn’t restrict me to collect points to blog. Here are few thoughts that I collected over a period of time.

Some time back I saw a picture of a women body builder and I instantly perceived that this is a result of women trying to match men in every department they can. I am quite against it. I believe men and women are equals but not same. They both have complementary qualities to lead life and I feel it’s insane for one to try becoming another. I think we should learn to respect the complementary qualities of each other.

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A month back, on the way to drop our Spanish buyer in the airport after a successful meeting, we were speaking on various aspects that he came across in India.

He asked me one question which made me little ashamed and took more time to think. This isn’t about traffic or garbage on road or even the population.

He said “When I was dining in a Delhi restaurant, I was conversing with the waiter in English as I don’t know the language. But I noticed few local people who knew Hindi also were conversing in English. Why is this?”

He asked this question in a very innocent way.

After a little while of thinking, I answered “In India, only educated people speak English and to gain respect over this advantage, they speak in English”

But I honestly feel when our people will start believing English is a language and not knowledge.

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Today I can see the white pumpkins all over the road as the after math of Ayutha pooja (I don’t know what it is called in north. Guyz please enlighten me). The red kumkum that was put inside the pumpkin, after being crushed by vehicles, made an illusion that it was someone else’s blood. Who knows it might actually be some one else’s blood who’s vehicle was slipped by it as it did for me 10 years back in Chennai.

With all the little good deeds I did throughout my life, I pronounce that the curse of those people, who fell by it, goes to the person who did this stupid act. Just kidding. I don’t know when these people will understand that, since because this is a religious ceremony they can’t take it as granted to trouble fellow people.

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Recently I read a post (it was an old post though) in Vishnu’s about crying, which was in response to my post. I want to record my feelings on that. When we are overwhelmed by a feeling, we cry. To put it simple, what ever the feeling, if it get intense, we cry. Let it be sadness or happiness or any other feeling for that matter. The most common thing we cry for is sadness which I dont like either. But if we haven’t cried for other feelings, then we haven’t experienced anything intense. If we haven’t experienced anything intense, then we haven’t experienced anything in full. Isn’t that sad?

"If your tears hasn’t wet your cheeks, then you haven’t lived your life" I didn’t say this. It seems it is found in Bhagawat gita.

Note: Thanks a lot to Soin and Shruti for voting for me in Blog a ton. I thank all those who left their wonderful comments too.

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I LIKED:

This is a small colum that I decided to add to my posts when ever necessary. Here I am going to recommend few of the posts that impressed me to great extent.

1. 'The last number dialed' by Vipul ji:

I liked this post not only for the nice suspense he built till end but also for the beautiful message he gave. enjoy this post guyz.

2. 'The Great divide' by Mani Padma in Ginger Chai:

This is indeed one of the best 55 fictions I read so far. I enjoyed it thoroughly.

The Indian dream

2009-10-03T19:52:00.007+05:30

This post was selected as 'Tangy Tuesday Picks' by Blogadda on 6th oct 09. please click on the image to visit the results page.

This post has been published by me as a part of the Blog-a-Ton 3; the third edition of the online marathon of Bloggers; where we decide and we write. To be part of the next edition, visit and start following Blog-a-Ton.

Five years back my then colleague in Edinburgh (UK) asked me

“If you can give something from your country, what would you give to us (UK)"

Though I don’t remember what I blabbered at the moment, it did provoke me to think a lot.

I didn’t want to defend my country fakely. I shed all my prejudices and started thinking unbiased, on what could we give it to them.

They are far ahead than us in infrastructure and usage of technology. Their people are far more cultured than us. Individual freedom is at peak there and they nurture it with good manners. Their political setup is far less corrupt than ours. Their people do their job perfectly where as we let them mock at us expanding Indian Standard Time (IST) as Indian Stretched Time.

What do we have then?

Five years back this question led me to an idea of what we should do to come out of all the mess that we are now and lead life respectfully as they do. I am going to write the same ideas that I collected in mind then, without much change. Thanks to Blog a ton for giving me this already thought out topic.

Starting from traffic, government offices, politicians, corrupt officials to cleanliness, I can give innumerable sarcastic instances to prove how we lack behind in comparison to western countries. I used to do this in my previous posts. As I am all grownup and mature now, I am not going to do that here. Instead I would like to concentrate on results and future activities rather than cynicism.

I will not accuse that politicians or corrupt officials are the reason for our current state now. I don’t believe that these people could change.

Then what would bring a change to this nation?

I would like to explain this with one of my experiences.

Few months back, the ruling party leader visited my place. The chumchas dug holes all over the road to erupt cutouts with their lovely smiling face at the foot of the leader to give a grand welcome. I was thinking how a ruling party can damage public property. The following month the opposite party leader visited and same thing happened as all chumchas are alike irrespective of their parties. I got irritated and felt if people in power, whose responsibility is to protect public property can do this, then who can save our country. A week later, in the next street one of our fellow people got a function at his home. He dug hole right in the middle of the road to erupt shamiyana.

I feel politicians and corrupt officials are not born straight from sky. They indeed originate within us. They reflect the culture and practices of our entire nation. When we are pointing fingers at corrupt politicians, can we tell that our common people are free of guilt?

An auto rickshaw driver likes to earn that extra bit of money unethically. We don’t mind litter the space when we are out of our home. We never obey signals when there is no policeman. We never do our job to perfection. Isn’t this same mindset reflected in corrupt politicians and officials. If there are ten goats in a herd and if we elect one goat, I don't think we can expect it to roar like a lion.

If at all there should come a change, I feel it should come from our people. Not politician. Not officials.

I want my people to become more responsible. If they do a job, whether it is rocket technology or sweeping the street, I want them to do it whole hearted with all their skills. If they have to vote, I want them to vote analyzing the pros and cons of a candidate rather than party fanaticism. I want them to respect other person’s freedom and treat them with respect and love. I want them to understand selfishness isn’t the sign of brilliance.

If these things happen, I strongly believe rest of the things will fall in place.

Yes. My dream is to bring my people out of all these ignorance that they have in the fields above mentioned. This is the very objective of this blog. All your support till now made me believe that I could do much more than just writing. Will let you know when this shapes up well.

Image courtesy: http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_oUc6WpOAwto/SQ0tcdNRTDI/AAAAAAAABqA/SQvdUNLOLl8/s200/pushing+rock.jpg

The fellow Blog-a-Tonics who took part in this Blog-a-Ton and links to their respective posts can be checked here. To be part of the next edition, visit and start following Blog-a-Ton.

Announcements

2009-09-23T10:52:00.002+05:30

First of all thanks a lot to all of my blogger buddies who commented on my previous posts "MY OPINION ON PUNCHES" and "MY OPINION ON PUNCHES PART II". It was a nice learning experience. Thanks again pals.

I would like to thank BLOGADDA for awarding with 'Tangy Tuesday pick' for my second instalment as well ("MY OPINION ON PUNCHES PART II")

I felt very honoured when they tweeted my link separately. Thanks a million to Blogadda team.

Since its getting little busy now, I think I might have to take a break from my blog for atleast a couple of weeks from now. But I would promise all your comments will be answered.

However in the mean time, if I develop an ever urging topic, I dont mind braking my word.

In case I miss any of your posts, please forgive me and leave a comment in my latest post. I will sure read it and leave a comment.

Adios.

My opinion on punches part II

2009-09-19T19:48:00.006+05:30

This post is selected as 'Tangy Tuesday pick' by Blogadda on 22 sep 09. Click on the image to go to the results page.

Hello all.

Note: if you are a new visitor I would suggest you to read my previous post click here to read it) to have a better understanding.

First of all, thanks a lot for your wonderful comments in the previous post.

May be you can take this as a disclaimer. “what ever I write here are just my opinions that are prone to change as I don’t believe in strong constant stances. I used to be a theist for most part of my life. I was an atheist for a short while and now I am an agnostic. I don’t know who I will be tomorrow. People call me inconsistent with my views but I don’t mind them calling so, as I believe consistency is a big hindrance for growth.

Who is God?

To understand this, first I would like you all to shed your pretences and prejudices entrusted by all our elders. I hope you will allow me to say even elder err sometimes.

Secondly I would suggest you to leave away the fear followed by the trust that a super power God can take us out of all the distress that we developed in life.

Right, now we are in a perfect frame of mind to understand who is God.

Now come out of your home and look at this mammoth nature, universe, stars and behind that. Did you notice that this world has everything for all the living things form birth to death. If you keenly observe you can notice that every action creates impression in mind which affect ones charater. (To explain this, ‘someone can steal something without knowing to anyone. But they can’t do so without knowing to themselves’). This makes me believe that there is something powerful that have done this.

Somehow I can’t believe there is someone with Eyes, nose, mouth and smiley face with four hands have done this. Or I can’t believe that someone sitting up in the skies with clay, giving life to all the dolls that he make.

Is God the creator of Nature? Or nature itself?

As far as my current opinion, I am sure he is not going to change individual lives as he gave full freedom to mankind to choose their destiny. I honestly can’t think more than this. But I have this long urging doubt, why have he/she created this life. What he/she wants us to do? I would be thankful if anyone give a convincing reply for this long standing doubt.

Violence and nonviolence:

Coming back to the second point of violence. We should not confuse enforcing law with self improvement. I can understand that utopian society is not pragmatic and I am well aware that laws should be created keeping this fact in mind. But at the same time, the rulers should not only think and act on just an incident, comfortably forgetting the cause for it.

If there is a headache, I wouldn’t suggest eating a tablet, instead I would ask you to find the correct reason for it and rectify it.

Every coup, rebellion or violence would be preceded by undue domination. In addition to penalizing the people who are responsible for Mumbai terror attack, I want them to probe into why these terrorists were ready to sacrifice even their lives for this mission, and eventually take actions to rectify the root cause.

And finally a real life example from the life of Mahathma Gandhi for those who believe non violence will not get any results.

As usual once Gandhi was travelling in the third class compartment of a train. The person who was sitting near Gandhi was frequently spitting inside the compartment making the place a mess.

Gandhi asked him to spit it out citing the above reason, but he didn’t give ear to that. So, when next time he spat inside, Gandhi took a paper and cleaned it by himself. He did this for three times and after that he apologized and started spitting out side.

If we were a coward, we would have kept quiet at that moment. If we were a violent person, we would have given a slap on his face and asked him to spit outside. But then, we wouldn’t have won his heart and there was a high possibility that he would repeat that mistake again in our absence. But being a non violent, Gandhi won his heart and I strongly believe he wouldn’t have repeated that mistake again in his life. I call this as a complete success.

After reading my post, I know few may disagree with me. But I will not insist on you to accept whatever I said here but I would definitely suggest you to have an open mind with this topic and always try to think one step ahead than what we think now. Hope no one would have any problem in adapting this suggestion :-)

Note: Reading all these, please dont think I am a second Gandhi living in this era. I am only a non violance supporter. I havent yet matured to be a nonviolent practitioner. Hope will and wish to be one in future.

Unless I answer all your brilliant comments individually, my heart will say I insulted my fellow bloggers. So, find my reply to each of your previous comments below.

@ Lakshmi rajan: I am really glad that you have the same view as mine. I appreciate it. I am glad again.

@ Indian Pandit: I am glad that you accepted my positive criticism though you don’t agree. I hope I answered your comment in my post above written. Btw. Do you know, in Bhagawat Gita, Krishna says “come out of duals Arjun” That duals includes Good and Bad. Yes Good too.

@ Vipul: Thanks a lot pal. I learned a bit from you too.

@ BK Chawla: I hope I answered your comment in the second part of my post. Thanks for the comment pal.

@ Shankar: I am happy to see that you accept my point of view. I pity your friend and I hope the standard of thinking of our people would improve soon. And I believe Shruti would call me crazy and mad too :-)

@ Harry: thanks for your comment pal. Hope you find a reply in the post. Btw, did you see my awards post to pick your award?

@ Guria: You asked which certain laws?

I would like to answer this question with a story which I like a lot.

Long time ago, in a village a person was very much depressed with the death of his father. He somehow wanted to bring him back.

His friend suggested “ A person called Buddha is in our village now. You can go to him. He is a great sage and he can bring back your father’s life”.

Our fellow ran to Buddha and asked him to bring back his father’s life.

Buddha said “no problem. Tomorrow, take a pot, fill it half with black stone and rest with butter and bring it to the lake. I will bring your father back.”

He ran to his home, did the same and met Buddha at lake. Buddha asked him to come around the lake nine times. He did the same and asked for life.

Buddha said “you can’t have it that easy. Take a stick, go into the water and break the pot with one strike within water. If you do so, the black stone will float, butter will sink and your father will come alive.”

He went in, with all the strength he broke the pot. But alas, the black stone sank and butter floated up.

Very dejected, he said to Buddha, “Swami, you deceived me. How in earth will a black stone will float and butter will sink?”

Buddha said “excellent, if you know this much, why can’t you understand a dead man can’t come alive”

This story is to say that the world is run by certain laws and we can’t break it. Only thing we can do is to understand that and adapt to it.

Thanks a lot for your long comment. And I hope I answered your rest in the post. @ Anu: thanks friend. I am happy that you liked it.

@ Sid: Yeah you are right. People think I am an oxymoron. Being an atheist or agnostic, they naturally expect me to be an extreme violent. But unfortunately am an extreme nonviolent (supporter). Rare bread eh? Hope I answered rest of your point in this post.

@ Pra: thanks for your comment. Thanks for agreeing partly with me. Hope I answered you in the post. Btw, do you know Karma is one of the way for self realization?

@ evanescentthoughts: I believe I reflected your comment in this post too :-)

@ Vishnu: I love matrix series. Especially the first one. How beautifully they incorporated Indian philosophy into an action movie. Great. Btw. Thanks for your info on Jefferson.

@ Amit: Good point on Sweden pal. Thanks for a wonderful comment.

@ Sathish: Hope I answered your comment in my post. Thanks for your honest comment.

@ Bliss: I don’t disagree on your first point. I am glad that you liked point two too. Thanks for informing on my template. This is best viewed in Mozilla Firefox. IF ANYONE FELLS THE SAME WAY AS BLISS, PLEASE LET ME KNOW.

@ Shruti: I appreciate your honest confession. I wish your ideas grow day by day in this topic. Hope I answered your second part in the post. Don’t worry about the length of your comment as I can see the time you invested in writing it and am thankful to that.

@ Suga: You got an excellent state of mind. In addition to respecting others point of view, if you also ready to accept other's if they are right, it would be great.

My opinion on punches

2009-09-17T13:39:00.005+05:30

This post was selected as 'spicy saturday picks' by Blogadda on 19 Sep 2009. Please click on the image to see the results page.

My blogger friend Indian Pandit is a very thinking person and his thoughts will always be straight and strong. So naturally I like to read all his posts. Recently he published a post on “Opposite punches – First instalment” and it was very nice as usual. Though I appreciate his courage in questioning the quotes of great personalities, I differ with his points to great extent. I started typing this reply in his comments section, but since this looked like a long reply, I decided to make it as a post allowing all of my blogger buddies to read and leave a comment here.

Mr. Jefferson’s Quote:
“Question with boldness even the existence of a god; because if there be one he must approve of the homage of reason more than that of blindfolded fear.”

Indian Pandit's reply to Mr. Jefferson:
Mr.Jefferson, how about questioning "with boldness" the paternity of your father? Do you think he would have approved this "homage of reason" more than that of blindfolded belief? You delivered this "sermon" on August 10, 1787. Obviously there was no way by which you could have determined your biological father except your mother's word. Again, my question is, on what basis did you trust your mother's word. How did she proved to you that the person you called father is actually your biological father? Also, how do you know your mother is actually your biological mother?

The answer to this question is : TRUST & BELIEF!
Same is with God.So guys,have trust in His existence and have faith in Him.
There is no room for questioning Him.
Just like you don't question your mother and father.
What needs to be questioned is Religion until you find the answer!
Or better still, try and form your own philosophies regarding God.
That's a "homage of reason".

My opinion:

I don’t know who Mr. Jefferson is, but I see a lot of sense in what ever he said. Even Swami Vivekananda said similar words once “I would prefer an atheist than a blind theist”

Gandhi said “What ever the message you have, it should be given with love, or else the message and messenger both will be rejected”. Here, by touching a very sentimental issue of parental paternity I believe my friend IP left chance for many to get offended.

But nevertheless I will answer his point. Why people are reluctant in probing their true parental identity?

They don’t want to create chaos to a smoothly run family in that unlikely event of getting unwanted result. Or they are reluctant in facing the truth if found negative. I don’t know what does this have in relation to belief in God? Please explain IP.

I believe, asking question is a sign of maturity. Unless we ask questions in life, we can not move forward. Every development, whether it is mental or material, moved forward only because we questioned. Sidhardha became Buddha only because he questioned. Even swami Vivekananda was an atheist before he joined Ramakrishna. Only thing we should keep in mind is to be unbiased with the answers we get and move forward.

My friend IP said we need to have “trust and belief in God”.

But why should I have trust and belief in God?

Is that to please the God to give some favors over my fellow people?

I strongly believe this world is run with certain laws which no one can change it. If at all, all the prayers had power, there wouldn’t be anyone dyeing. I have seen a friend praying whole hearted to save her husband who was in death bed. I can bet she prayed with all intensity as her husband means a lot to her. But still death was inevitable. That is what is the beauty of nature. Nature doesn’t have exceptions or lend ears to recommendations. So I don’t want to believe in god to get this never existent favor.

Or may be diplomatically we can say ‘we need to thank God for giving a lovely life’. For this, first of all I need to love life. When I am in bliss with each and every moment of this life, I can thank God for giving this wonderful world. But as like more common beings, I face troubles and happiness together. When I am troubled, I am sad. When I am happy, I enjoy it. So I need to wait to thank God until I treat every incident with balance.

But by seeing the thirst for freedom in all living things, the well organized happenings in life, the cause and effect of Karma, I am interested in understanding God. Still I don’t want to believe, but I definitely want to understand. Once I understood, I will start believe. But before that, though I dont believe, I woudnt say there is no God.

If my friend IP say that he is an enlightened person and experienced God himself and that is the reason why he is asking everyone to believe in God, then I will be very happy for him. But if not, I could remember famous words of Jagi, “Unless you realize it by yourself, it would only look like one blind person explaining another blind about the beauty of sunrise”.

Gandhi’s statement:
"An Eye For An Eye Makes The Whole World Blind"

IP’s reply to Gandhi,
My enemy comes and takes out my one eye.
It hurts. It bleeds. I suffer. My family suffers.
Now i can see only with one eye.
But i say: "An Eye For An Eye Makes The Whole World Blind"
He comes back and takes out my other eye.
It hurts.It bleeds. I suffer.My family suffers.
My enemy says:"The world can see, but you cant, you are blind!!!"

Therefore..........

"Forgive and Forget" does not work with evil!!!!!

My opinion on this:

First of all, what is evil?

One person’s evil is another person’s virtue.

If you take Mumbai bomb blast, for us it is evil. But for those who did it, it is a virtue. Every one see evil and virtues with their own perspective. So if every one wants to take an eye of their evil, we can only see the world as a shelter of a blind community. If you think deep, the cause of terrorism arised only because of this faith. They were hurt by some incident. They want to recenge their pain which resulted in terrorism. I dont know if love will make the whole world glowing, but I am sure taking an eye for an eye will make whole world blind.

Secondly, violence is an instant reaction. Any reaction which is instant will lack sense. Violence comes because of fear. Fear leads to hatred. And hatred is one of the root cause for all the suffering.

Hope IP would take this as a constructive criticism. I dont reiterate what ever said here is the only truth in this universe. So, I welcome differences.

You can read my part II of this post here (click here)

Blog a ton, tag and awards

2009-09-11T19:16:00.014+05:30

Blog a ton:

Blog a ton is over now.

Blog a ton should have given enormous amount of happiness to couple of guys who won the contest. (congrats pals)

For those who haven’t , it should have done something great to their budding Ego (especially me)which was growing because of increasing number of followers and positive comments.

But still, on both the blog a tons, the person whom I voted has won. (I would never learn. Will I?)

Apart from this I believe blog a ton made all of us broad minded by making us accept and understand ‘voting for some one else is not a crime’ as they can only vote for one person. And also they are judging only a post in their own perspective. I also believe all our blogging buddies would understand not to link friendship with votes.

Kudos to Vipul for running this.

TAG:

Shankar and Shruti tagged me for the brands I use in a day.

I have seen all of your tags with all the colourful brand logo pics which I may not do because of nothing other than laziness.

Lets start from my head. Yeah I do wear a helmet occasionally. I forgot the brand of it. It is lying in the next room. But I don’t bother to take a look at it because of the same above said laziness. (I don’t know why, but I am very lazy today. See, I didn’t even link the name of the winners in the second sentence of this post.)
Furthur down, comes my eyes. I do wear a sunglass while driving, when it is very sunny. I have two pairs. One is a RAY BAN. I got the second pair in a platform shop in Spain. I didn’t remember the brand (will it have a brand name?). It s down in the car and again I am lazy to climb down and up.
Then comes my mouth and there is nothing interesting. I used to smoke (I tasted almost all the brands right from bedi to cigar). But now I quit :-(
Then comes the neck, I never wear jewellary at any part of my body. So I cant name any brand here.
Then my pocket, I used to have my Nokia cellphone. Its just nokia. Don’t ask me the number. I don’t know. Its not worth remembering the number. Its complicated. (and yeah, currency don’t have a brand. Its universal)
I have a pen which says it is from tdctrade.com. sure it’s a complement. I used to carry costly pens before, but not now. Or else one of my friends will have the same pen in his pocket next day and will say is this the pen custom made for you? when I ask if this is my pen.
Regarding shirts, I use right from LP, VH to street brands. And I forgot to mention that I love to wear one of our Belgium customer’s t-shirts. They are awesome.
I am not going further down. Its censored.
Then comes my legs. I use plenty of shoes like Nike, Reebok, Metro, Next, Puma, Adidas. Yes I am a shoe fetish.
Yeah I use bike (Hero Honda CBZ) for short travel and car (skoda) or Bus (is that Ashok Leyland?) for long travel.

I think this is more than enough for this tag. I am not going to tag anyone as I don’t want to give any one the pain of loading images for every point they write. But however if any one feel like doing it, they can offcourse take it.

AWARDS:

I recently got few awards from my blogger buddies which I would like to give it back. I dont want to give inappropriate awards and so i searched for some in the web. so, I might not own some of the awards that I give here.

Zombie chicken award:

INFO ABOUT THIS AWARD: The blogger who receives this award believes in the Tao of the zombie chicken – excellence, grace and persistence in all situations, even in the midst of a zombie apocalypse. These amazing bloggers regularly produce content so remarkable that their readers would brave a raving pack of zombie chickens just to be able to read their inspiring words.

This was given by Vipul. It seems that I need to face the wrath of zombie chicken if I don’t give it to five other bloggers. Vipul already faced the wrath of zombies by giving it to only one. I decided to join Vipul.

This award goes to Amit singh

Superior scribber award:

This was given by Shruti.

I decided to give this award to Lakshmirajan. (dont bother about the rules if it irritates you)

Rules:

Each Superior Scribbler must in turn pass The Award on to 5 most-deserving Blogging Friends.
Each Superior Scribbler must link to the author & the name of the blog from whom he/she has received The Award.
Each Superior Scribbler must display The Award on his/her blog, and link to site which explains The Award
Each Blogger who wins The Superior Scribbler Award must visit this post and add his/her name to the Mr. Linky List.
Each Superior Scribbler must post these rules on his/her blog.

Intellectual blogger award:

Vipul
Indian Pandit
Pawan

Golden pen award:

Shruti
Suga

Butterfly award:

Sathish
Raji
Shilpa

Witty Blogger award:

Sid
Hary

Thoughtful blogger award:

Vishnu
Rane
Pra

Honest blogger award:

Shankar

Thats all for now pals.

Teachers: Aaj Kal

2009-09-05T16:45:00.004+05:30

This post has been published by me on the occasion of the Teachers' Day as a part of the Blog-a-Ton 2; the second edition of the online marathon of Bloggers; where we decide and we write. To be part of the next edition, visit and start following Blog-a-Ton.

Thanks to few of our blogger buddies who translated ‘Teachers: Aaj Kal’ as ‘Teachers: now and then’ relieving me from the pain of looking for some Hindi speaking friends.

I think, if I have to speak about teachers, I should speak about the education first, as the message comes before the messenger. And also for some reason, I am not able to see Education and teachers separately, as I feel both are part and parcel of a system.

Secondly I desperately wanted to speak about future too, as I always wanted to write on how I like our education to be. When I googled for the meaning of ‘Kal’ I got a result that it means yesterday and also tomorrow, allowing me to write about future comfortably. However, there is a possibility that I may not get the votes to win because of slight irrelevancy to the topic but I really don’t want to worry about it, as I feel spreading this view across is more important than the votes.

However I will try my best to keep it as relevant as possible for an obvious reason, to win this contest. In the process, please excuse me if it resembles like the cow and coconut tree story as I explained in my previous post CREAM AND SCUM OF BLOGGING.

I am not going to bore you down with the definition of education as what other renowned personalities said, instead let us take it in a more practical way. Simply speaking, Education is a tool which helps a person to achieve aspects which would keep him happy and fulfilled throughout his life. But now, when MONEY FETISHES started ruling, they imbibed, money is the only thing that can keep a man happy and altered the definition as ‘Education is the best way to earn money’ which I honestly didn’t like.

I believe mind plays a major role in facing this world and advancing to other stages in life. Human beings are complex compared to animals. Dealing with human being is even more complex activity as every person has different experience and belief in attaining a common objective. Unless a person is mentally strong and empathic, he cannot move forward in life without friction. As we don’t have any system in our education to enhance the power of mind now, I would like to add that to the curriculum in future.

If mind can play major role in life, the quality of person who shapes the mind should have more supreme qualities. But when we speak about teachers in high esteem remembering sarvapalli Radhakrishnan and all now, in reality I don’t think this is treated as a noble profession. If we take a practical example of our own selves, I don’t think many would aim for teaching as a profession. Even in this post I wouldn’t say that everyone should aim for a job in teaching. It’s their will and wish to choose their profession but my point is to prove that this profession is charmless now. I think unless they improve the quality of training and comparatively poor salaries in this IT ridden world, I don’t think they can reestablish the lost charm of teaching. And also government should stop believing that age will bring wisdom but concentrate and recognize real talents. After all, people should start improving their quality rather than waiting to get aged.

Most of our education system teaches whatever is there in book and tests only the memory power of a student. I believe this wouldn’t do any good to a student unless they check the application capability of what he thus learned. In future when a person chooses his path in 11th standard, more emphasis should be given to the practical aspect of the field. For example if he chooses commerce group, he should spend at least half of the time in companies. Teachers should be the ones, who have absolute practical knowledge in that field as a person who doesn’t know to run a business can’t teach business.

Generally if we learn a new thing in life it is fun. Being education is all about learning, why we treat it as pain. Unless we were given reasons for the lessons we learn in school it won’t create interest. Before starting a maths lesson, I would like my teacher to explain on how it is going to benefit me in life. This not only creates interest but also eliminate some unwanted topics in syllabus.

If you look at our country, when we step out of our home we start facing rude, unfriendly behaviors right from fellow companion to politicians, police, rikshaw drivers etc. I would suggest teaching ethical, behavioral and psychological lessons in the syllabus right from childhood to make this country a pleasant place to live in future.

A gentleman, who was a great scholar wanted to cross a river. After finalizing the fare with the boat man, they both got in to a boat and started the journey.
To clear the unwanted silence, the gentleman asked the boatman “Do you know Confucius?”
The boatman replied “No sir”
Gentleman said “Then a quarter of your life is waste. Do you at least know Buddha?”
The boatman said “No sir, I haven’t even heard about the name”
Gentleman replied “Then a half of your life is waste”
Since the boatman wasn’t up to his standard, the gentleman kept quiet. After a while, the water level started increasing, the boat was waving heavily showing the signs of flood.
The boatman asked “Sir do you know swimming?”
He said “No”
“Then sir, whole of your life is waste” saying this, the boat man jumped into water and swam away.

The moral of the story is that, education should have everything that a man needs in life rather than the few theories which would never help a person in any way other than increasing the Ego.

Though I have good respect to my ex teachers in school and college, I still feel the best teacher in this world now and then is ‘nature’. And I strongly believe that unless I observe and learn from it, I won’t move an inch forward in life.

The fellow Blog-a-Tonics who took part in this Blog-a-Ton are Vipul, Rajalakshmi, Dhiman, Ranee[1], [2], [3] , Avada, Indian Pundit, Sojo, Aneet, Pramathesh, Aativas, Sid, Pra, Ajinkya, Lakshmi, Govind, Shilpa, Shankar, Mytuppence, Azad, Pawan, Pankaja, Saimanohar, Guria, Shruti, Vishnu and Nasrajan. Click on their respective names to read their posts on Teachers : Aaj Kal. To be part of the next edition, visit and start following Blog-a-Ton.

Kandasamy

2009-09-02T11:12:00.003+05:30

First thing I would like to say is that this post isn’t all about the review of the recently released Tamil movie ‘Kandasamy’, so non Tamil people all over the world can read this :-)

Day before yesterday I saw this movie ‘Kandasamy’ with my friends after lying to my wife that I am visiting my friend’s on an important issue (she doesn’t read my blogs. I can’t see any movie second time for Gods shake and I am wondering how I can escape if she asks me to take her again. Any suggestions?)

A particular dialogue in the movie made me to write this post for which I need to give a very brief description. This is a Robin Hood kind of movie (I haven’t seen even a single Robin Hood movie yet but I comfortably use this cliché whenever possible).

At one part the hero will say, “lots of business men deposited their illegally earned money in foreign banks. If we can cease that money, every family in India will get a lakh rupee. Only because they have more money, they spend it in wrong ways. If they have limited money, will they give one lakh a day to persuade a collage girl to have sex or will they hire an actress for thirty lakhs for a dance? So let us take it from them and give it to the needy”

This seems to be very emotional and gives justification to hero image that he is helping others. Not only has the superhero in this movie but also many of us believe money is the only solution for misery. But for me it’s not about the money but it’s about the way we earn money. The super hero feels the villain is doing all the wrong things only because he has abundance of money. I agree, but I feel the person who gets the money freely, will also do the same thing in due course. Pls read the short story below to get a better understanding.

A man found a cocoon of a butterfly. One day a small opening appeared; he sat and watched the butterfly. For several hours it was struggling to force its body through that little hole.
Seeing the pain of the butterfly, the man decided to help the butterfly, so he took a pair of scissors and snipped off the remaining bit of the cocoon. The butterfly then emerged easily. But it had a swollen body and small, shriveled wings.
The butterfly spent the rest of its life crawling around with a swollen body and shriveled wings. It never was able to fly.
What the man in his kindness and haste did not understand was that the restricting cocoon and the struggle required for the butterfly. To get through the tiny opening were nature's way of forcing fluid from the body of the butterfly into its wings, so that it would be ready for flight once it achieved its freedom from the cocoon.

I believe money and respect are the two things that each and every person should earn by themselves. Nature wants us to search for food (money) to give us the lessons of life, hidden underneath every difficulty we face in that process. If anything is given free the beneficiary not only looses the valuable experiences but also fails to understand the worth and misuses it. For this matter I am also against transfer of assets that spoils a generation as like the butterfly. Instead of giving money free, the super hero (in the movie) or the government (in reality) should create a better environment where everyone can earn money. By better environment I mean a place where they eliminate the situation of rich becoming richer, poor becoming poorer and give chance to even new comers, have strict laws to remove dishonest practices in business, have training and education to learn the best method to do business etc. By this way we can naturally accumulate wealth without spoiling the wisdom or else I think we can only produce so many money fetishes as I explained in my other post MONEY FETISH – A CHARACTER TO WATCH.

And here comes my short review for those die hard movie fans :-)

The romance between Shreya and Vikram was good. I enjoyed it.
The rerecording was awful as like some bee went into my ears. The songs were just OK.
The movie looked very rich. The Mexican shots were nice.
Vadivelu comedy made me frown and it didn’t really jell well with the story line. And I felt the songs and the comedy were the speed breakers). The movie is very long and little slow.
I liked the dirty dance by the villain for the last song. Very funny.
After the super hero was arrested, no autorikshaw guys, conductor, slum lady and old person was there to comment about this in TV in local language (Arasialvathingalla vuda antha pulla ennah thappu senjiruchu sir) as like in Shankar’s film. Thank God I was sick of these sort of scenes.
At last tamil film industry understood a hero cant fly and gave reasons. I appreciate this. Accept my garlands director sir.
In short, you wont look for me if I say, 'you can watch it once'.

Khan, Kalam, Terrorism

2009-08-29T19:17:00.003+05:30

I should have written this post a while ago but my laziness and lack of time made me to write it now allowing me to comfortably use the cliché ‘better late than never’.

When I saw the news that Sharuk Khan was detained in American airport for security check, I felt the media attention given was more than necessary. It was like someone was mistakenly shot dead by American officials.

I don’t want to go into very detail on the issue as every kith and kin in India were aware of the happenings because of 24x7 telecast of this tape in all news channels. We will keep it short here, Sharuk said he was checked because of his name and they said his name popped up for a random security check and they did only their duty.

In this era of back stabbing, we can’t even let go an invited guest without security check. How can we expect them to leave an actor whose reputation as a community in India has been seriously damaged by rape charges, deer hunting charges, illegal weapon purchase and drug addiction, to go free without checking.

And also I don’t understand why he can’t bare this check for one time which ‘n’ number of common people goes through every day. Even if he is a Mother Teresa, there is nothing wrong in going through security check. I can agree this kind of fuss when there is abusive behavior or harsh handling which clearly didn’t happen.

Asians did the September 11 attack and America has high threat from Osama even now. So I think we can accept the extra bit of attention that they give to Asians for the reason that the unlikely event of a terrorist escaping may harm thousands of people. Won’t we do that here? Aren’t we looking at all Pakistani people as terrorists?

I don’t know why people can’t understand safety check is only for the benefit of our self and people around us and it need not to be used as a tool to assert their superiority.

A while ago, similar incident happened involving APJ Abdul Kalam. As per our government procedures, the airlines authorities, shouldn’t have checked Kalam as they already got a circular from govt of India that they should not check certain people marked by them as VIPs. Though I respect Kalam a lot, I would vouch for removing such laws after seeing the names of people who were marked as VIPs. I prefer making security checks common to everyone including American VIPs as Law doesn’t discriminate at least on paper.

If you leave an ex president of India unchecked, then that would be a wrong example for some African (and similar) countries where some of the president themselves are terrorists, to ask for the same procedure. Didn’t we have incidents involving our MPs who tried to take some people illegally into America? I think we should let away Kalam and see this incident in a more unbiased way.

Note:
1. Reading this dont think I am a pro American. I am actually not.
2. I forgot to note that my previous post was my 50th one. Do you think it is an incident to celebrate? I don’t know but I am happy to blog. It gives me immense satisfaction.

Image courtesy: http://www.extramirchi.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/shah-rukh-khan-smoking2.jpg

The choices I would like to make

2009-08-25T19:39:00.002+05:30

After years of keen observation on life, I understood my future was not written before I took shape in my mum’s womb, instead it is determined by my decision on the innumerable choices that nature presented in front of me. Every choice displayed had an undisclosed path to take me to some set future. The beauty of life is that one is absolutely free to choose any option as long as he/she is ready to face the aftermath. Even this moment presents us with ‘n’ number of choices. You can either chose honest path or dishonest path. Criminal path or otherwise. Etc.

Well, I stop it here as my intention is not to bore you with dry philosophical stuff. Instead, I would like to share with you the choices that I would like to make in my life. This may be relatively interesting I suppose.

I am not politically correct person or a fake modest person to ignore the importance of money. I am so adamant in saying that, money is the one which sets most of the problems right. But I am verywell aware that there is also life after money. The hunt for money itself is a huge activity which teaches lots of points on our life. I only want to treat earning money as a tool to understand life and to fulfill my honest needs but I am sure I don’t want to get intoxicated by it.

I visited a handful of western countries and I even had a chance to settle in one of them but I chose not to do that because of my own reasons. If my friend’s house is neat and clean compared to my home, I cant choose to stay there, instead I would like to clean my home. My country is dirty and low compared to many of the western countries and so I want to contribute my bit to clean it now. I believe all the misery this country faces is because of the ignorance of our people. I want to start a non political organization to make people politically eligible, to educate them on culture, confidence, freedom and how to think on their own etc. I am even ready to spend most of my earnings to improve the mental standard of our people which is at the moment filled with ignorance and selfishness. Hope this dream would come true someday.

Recently I notice few strange observations within me. Whenever I complain of something about someone, I feel I have the same complaint within me. When I say some one is adamant, I feel I am adamant too. Recently I complained a person that she is adamant and always wants others to adjust to her character. I advised her to change this attitude. Later on the rebel (yeah, the same rebel who peeked in my WHAT IS LOVE post :-)) inside me said aren’t you doing the same with her pal’. I started feeling all the happiness and sadness has something to do with our mind inside. So I would like to choose to allot some time to explore and give some exercise to my mind. I don’t know how much yoga and meditation can help, but decided to take it up. I also decided to give some exercise to my body which is relatively slower than my mind.

I wanted to learn the art of loving people, with all their differences.

I want to treat insult as like just another incident.

If I feel like crying I should be able to cry without any ego as I am a man.

I want to have my policies of honesty and straightforwardness unaffected by the pressures of money that my peers and other money fetishes insist on me.

So far I understood that we cannot avoid problems in life. Now I want to know how I could handle these problems in such a way that it doesn’t bother me.

I want to be flexible enough to accept new ideologies that help me learning the life better. (Remember the Zen story in my PERCEPTION post).

I believe family and friends are the set up created to understand the meaning of loving people. I want to use this opportunity to learn that art.

I want to understand and pay respect to those ailing elders who wants none other than a visit. I want to do this atleast once a week.

I don’t want to do anything to impress anyone. Be it a high post official or powerful politician or filthy rich money fetish or a beautiful girl, I want my behavior to be very natural.

I dont mind questioning even if it concerns God (which made me an agnostic). I want to keep it this way.

I understood its only me who prompts others to behave in a particular way with me. And also I know its only me who is going to take or reject the effects of what is said to me. I want to understand this and alter my mind such a way that I am unaffected by external environment.

Finally I will give a small story to wake you up reading such a long philosophical crap.

Once a lady in a small village got pregnant illegally. Fearing the wrath of her family against her clandestine lover, in front of all the villagers, she pointed out a good zen monk in that village as the culprit. He was a very nice monk with all the good name until then. After hearing this from the lady, almost all the villagers hated and insulted him.

The father of that lady took the baby to him and said, “you are the culprit and you have to take care of him”

The monk said. “is it? Alright” with a smiling face.

A year passed, pushed by guilt, the lady revealed the truth that the zen monk had nothing to do with the child. Learning this, the father and villagers ran to the monk and fell on his feet begging pardon saying all the truth.

The monk said, “Is this. Alright” with a smiling face.

I want to be like that monk. Unaffected by the highs and lows.

Now the choice infront of me is, I can either spend my energy to do all this or spend my time lazying around. My future is in my hand now as usual.

Image courtesy: http://www.evolvingtimes.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/choices-for-deliberate-creators.jpg

8 Marvels - About me!! (Tag)

2009-08-24T16:21:00.005+05:30

Shruti tagged me with this 8 marvels about me tag. Let me see how it goes.

8 TV SHOWS I LOVE TO WATCH

Generally I hate TV shows. Unnatural over reactive serial actors, reality shows that urge the participants to act awkwardly, trying to 'act smart' contestants and kala master absolutely gives me a headache. I would strongly recommend to penalize the entire team of Aaditya TV who indulge in the weird behaviour disturbing people like lunatics.
Though I like few rare shows, I dont see it continuously for reasons that I dont know. May be laziness or lack of time or both.

I dont think this would reach the count eight. lemme try.

>>News (I watch when something interesting happens. Or I flip channel in a couple of minutes after reading the running lines)

>>Any thing about Lion, tiger and snakes in geographic or discovery.

>>Any comedy scenes

>>Interesting shows like amazing videos

>>I do watch if there is some good song in any channel

>>I generally like to watch movies. (But now I prefer watching it in DVDs because of increasing number of advt. spending twice the time of the movie to watch it isnt a wise idea i think.

>>I watch cricket (and little bit of football because of my European friends)

>>See I told you I cant complete 8 points.

8 FAVORITE PLACES TO EAT

>>Venu Biriyani hotel Coimbatore

>>Saravana Bhavan (Chennai)

>> Ponnuswamy (chennai)

>>Velan (Tiruppur)

>>Turkish Pizza shop located outside my then Edinburgh house (The cheese and chips hmmmm mouth watering)

>>Infront of TV

>>With friends

>>In dining hall

>>You actually need to appreciate my creativity in filling up the last three :-)

8 THINGS THAT HAPPENED YESTERDAY

Oops. I forgot most of my yesterday. is that a disease? I will try my best neverhteless.

>>Attended my friend's wedding in Rajapalayam. (last) Happiest day in his life :-)

>>Crossed atleast 15 cities and town to reach my place. (I gotta write like this. or else I cant fill 8 points)

>>Had a nice discussion about life with one of my close relative cum friend whom I met after a long time.

>>For one full day I didnt get any phone calls from my office or suppliers. (Thanks to Ganesh Chaturti)

>>Met my college friends after a long time to find out all in round shape.

>>Was worrying for the fact that I am not finding time to write my next post.

>>Got nice feeling when I fell to the bed as I was extreamly tired driving 500 Kms in one and a half days.

>>I coudnt enjoy onion dosa as my stomach was already full with heavy lunch.

8 THINGS I LOOK FORWARD TO

>>My plan of life that you will come to know in my next post.

>>to get wiser

>>to get more and more orders from my clients.

>>to write atleast one good post which fulfills all my expectations.

>>To meet a completely enlightened person.

>>To complete my next post atleast tomorrow.

>>To spend some quality time with my kid and wife

>>Read the second point as third to count 8 (please)

8 THINGS I LOVE ABOUT WINTER

>>Beautiful girls drawing Kolam infront of house amidst the light spread whiteness of snow

>>My birth day

>>The extra 5 minutes sleep after pressing snooze inside the blanket

>>Sweat free full day.

>>Happy two wheeler journey because of lack of sun

>>The god songs from the nearby temple and the sakara pongal (It brings me the memory of my childhood days)

>>Long, extra hot warm water bath

I genuinely completed this one I guess.

8 THINGS ON MY WISH LIST

I feel '8 things I am looking farward to' and this one is quite similar. So please accept my ditto.

8 THINGS AM PASSIONATE ABOUT

>>Blog (At the moment)

>>My thirst for knowlege

>>My philosophical books and CDs

>>My business

>>My family

>>My friends

>>Speaking with intellectual people on topics like politics and philosphy.

>>I should have written 'Philosophical CD's as another point to reach 8.

8 WORDS OR PHRASES I USE OFTEN

>>Shit

>>Fuck

>>Damn it

>>Enna koduma sir ithu (tamil)

>>oops

>>Excellent

>>Fundastic

>>Super

8 THINGS LEARNT FROM PAST

>>No one can lead respectful life without performing his own duties .

>>There is no perfect person in this world

>>My mind will never get satisfied by getting what ever I want

>>There is nothing called ideal match

>>the objective of life is 'learning'

>>Mind plays major role in happiness and sadness

>>Life is mystery

>>Dont expect anything from anyone and you will be happy

8 PLACES I WOULD LOVE TO GO OR VISIT OR SEE

>>South Africa

>>Japan

>>USA

>>Maldives

>>Antartica (Yeah I m sure)

>>Any where. A long trip in a luxury cruise

>>Heaven (yes again)

>>Hell (Why not. I wanna see it, if it is there)

8 THINGS I CURRENTLY NEED OR WANT

>>Money (you can find why I said this in my next post)

>>A cigerette (But unfortunately I quit smoking)

>>Peace

>>Pollution free atmosphere

>>A nice long holiday

>>Earbud

>>A nice beautiful secretary (I know my wife would object)

>>I am happy that my needs are limited. I only asked for seven

Finally I finished this. Normally I don't tag anyone in particular, but now I would like to tag few of our new visitors to this blog. Arindam Dey, Shilpa, Sumit, Pooja, Rane, Mr. R, suga, Nandhini, Vipul, (Hope he would be very excited doing this tag. I saw his comment in Shankar's :-)

What is love?

2009-08-17T20:06:00.007+05:30

I was very bubbly and cracking jokes with my buddies on my trip to Munnar, until I heard this particular song ‘en veetu thotathil’ from film ‘Gentleman’. It took away all my enthusiasm but filled with a mysterious feeling which ignited butterflies in my stomach. It took me to a new world of imagination that filled with heart wrecking joy. I know why. It reminded me of my school days. I remembered the precious couple of hours when I got time to speak to her which contained no worthy topics. I remembered the nights that filled with the memories of the talking sessions. I could remember my successful chase of my moped with her car for a desperate attempt to get a glimpse and acknowledging smile. I know this is kind of weird behaviors that I followed then, but those behaviors gave immense pleasures those days that even abundance of money could not give today. The environment was so strong that even a song from that era has the power to give similar feelings. Will you call this feeling love?

Before a couple of days to my trip to Kodai, I was spending a full two days with my kid Nakshathira. She was completely with me that even to go to toilet I need to use my imagination to find excuses. She was sitting there in my office opposite to me for the whole day playing with my rubber bands and clips. I played with her ‘ringa ringa roses’, I participated in a running race where I ran slowly to let her win. (Occasionally I also won as I want her to understand reality). I kept her on my shoulder to let her have a nice glimpse of the procession going on the street. When I was in Kodai, my wife called and said she couldn’t handle her. She was true. I could hear her loud cry in the background. She snatched the phone from her mom and said amidst the cry that she needs me there now. And not a minute late. Is the feeling that I got after the phone call is love?

I remember the way my mother took care of me when I was sick for a while inspite of her rheumatoid arthritis painful fingers. The pride she shows in her eyes even for the smallest achievements her son gets. And all the sacrifice that she made so far for the betterment of her son. I don’t have to spend more words to explain a mothers affection as it is well understood. Is this love?

In a programme, under a hypothetical situation, I was supposed to write a letter to my beloved one from my death bed. For some reasons I chose to write to my father. And I cried while writing that letter. Yes, I cried after a long long time. I din’t know why. Is this feeling Love?

One of my good friends said he saw his old close associate in Madurai a while ago. He was married to a widow whom he loved and because of that he was chased away from home. He was leading a wonderful and luxury life before marriage and now he was suffering even for survival. My friend said, ‘Why didn’t he ask me for help'. He was even ready to offer some big money to get him a nice future. I became little sentimental after hearing this. Is this feeling love?

Few years back, myself and my friend developed an altercation with a bus driver for driving recklessly on the road. Unfortunately they developed a gang of twenty against us two. The situation became so intense that the argument will turn into a fight. From nowhere a gentle man of 45 years came from the crowd and said “don’t go beyond argument. What wrong that those guys said” and got us away from the site. I haven’t seen him before. I didn’t know why he supported us and rescued out of that mess. Is this called love?

I remembered all those nasty things I told to my wife. I don’t think anyone would take those ego shattering words so easily. If it was a friend I am sure he would have bid goodbye early. But she is with me all the time. Is this called love?

How can we call the affection that we show to our beloved ones as love? Isn’t that feeling comes because of the possessiveness and selfishness that they are ours? In other words, don’t we show that affection because we treat them as MY relatives? Isn’t that MY factor comes before love? So how can we call that as love? Love should accompany with no expectations and so the love shown by the stranger is the true one.

Once I finished writing this, the rebel inside me said, “Shut up. For once keep away from your maniac analysis. Whoever did whatever to keep anyone happy is love. Love is beyond analysis. Whoever spends time analyzing will never find time to love. Stop analyzing and start loving”

I believe for once the rebel inside me is right.

Note:

With all your encouragements and support, finally my illution that my writing has improved, may turn true. Yes. the previous post 'DOGS TOO DISCRIMINATE' got selected for BlogAdda's 'Spicy saturday pick' again on Aug 15. Thanks pals.

Image Courtesy: http://www.smashingapps.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/02/love-wallpaper.jpg

Dogs too discriminate

2009-08-13T12:50:00.006+05:30

This post is selected as 'Spicy saturday pick' by Blogadda on 15 Aug 09. click on the image to view the results page.

Yesterday morning I was waiting outside my house for my relative to pick me up for a family function. While I was walking to and fro the porch impatiently for my 45 minutes late relative, I was surprised by a person who started his job as early as 6:30 in the morning. He was carrying a long jute bag on his right shoulder to collect waste papers, empty bottles and used plastic etc., wearing a green and white combo dirty Lungi (dhothy) which was folded and tied to ease his pace of walking. On top, he was wearing a shirt which was very dirty that I couldn’t identify the original colour and it was torn on various places. He was walking in bare foot. I also saw a dog that is living in our street for a while now without a particular master, chasing him, maintaining a decent distance. When the distance got reduced, the man stopped walking, bent down and feigned picking up a stone. Now the dog went two steps back and stopped there but still was barking. He continued his work and left the scene. Next came a well dressed person whom I think is trying to catch a bus for his work. He was walking very fast wearing a blue striped well ironed shirt tucked in a khaki pant with shining black shoe. This dog, which was resting a bit after a tiring short session with our previous visitor, lifted his head and looked at the man and he went to his original position letting him go without any hassle. I was wondering do dogs discriminate?

When I saw this incident I was thinking on the status of all discriminations that we have. By discrimination I mean the partial behavior that we show to a category of people for some specific reasons. Though we can see more traces still left, I think we took enough measures and overcome fair amount off discriminations in the area of, cast, religion, gender etc. But I feel there are more hidden discriminations that we practice in our day today life which I thought of sharing with you.

Have you ever seen the fairness cream advertisements? They say white is beautiful and black is unwanted. Don’t you think that is result of the colour discrimination that we carried from all these decades?

If someone seems to getting closer with our beloved ones, we instantly start developing loathe towards them. Isn’t this discrimination based on prejudice?

Have you ever noticed the difference in the way people deal with their subordinates and superiors. Can we call this as discrimination based on status? I don’t mean the defenses that people use to avoid others taking advantage of their position. I mean hearty partiality that they show.

Will you allow me to boldly call patriotism a discrimination against origin of people? We can agree patriotism as long as it unites people and boosts them to work as a team. But when it is used to develop hatred towards other country men I can’t agree this. I would prefer humanity over patriotism. Can we call this as discrimination based on origin?

We can see this sort of behavior even among friends and relatives. The society discriminates criminals and transgender. We call our long forefathers, barbarians and not cultured or civilized because they indulged in slavery, legal racism, cruel punishments and war etc. If you see the above details I think we are far from calling ourselves civilized and cultured, unless we leave away all the discriminations that we have in our bottom of the heart.

I think discrimination exists because of the fear that we would lose something that we don’t deserve. I am no saint to say all the ways of overcoming such fear. I am no liar to say I overcame this by forgiving all those who have done nasty things to me. I do have my own hatreds and anger. I discriminate people based on honesty and religion. Yes, I hate dishonest people. I hate money fetish people as I mentioned in my previous post. I hate separatists based on religion or cast or race.

I am not here to decide what is right discrimination or wrong discrimination. Whether it is right or wrong, these discriminations only gave me pain. By hating people I only gained peace less mindset. Either I should destroy my enemies or I should accept them. Destroying is completely out of question as if I start doing that then I have to do this for my whole life. I am only left with the second option, accepting them. But alas, I don’t know how to love them with all their flaws. That’s my next assignment and hope I would learn fast.

Image courtesy: http://vivirlatino.com/i/2007/09/discrimination.jpg

Money fetish - A character to watch

2009-08-08T17:38:00.011+05:30

Pre Note:
Since this may be a serious post I would like to add a 55-fiction story at the end of this post to make you all happy :-).

I would like to introduce you to a new character whom I recently named as Money fetish. Probably many of you should have encountered such characters in your life but for those who haven’t, I have given a few tips on how to identify them. Please bear with me for a little bit of sarcasm which I couldn’t help holding back because of all the atrocities that I have watched in all my life.

They see everyone and everything as money. If you go in front of them, they convert your self in to the amount of money that you can bring to them.

If you don’t follow them in their evaluation technique, they will call you as mad, impractical and inefficient.

If they catch you speaking on ethics and social service, they see you as an aborigine came travelled in time machine and tell you that you don’t fit this current world.

They have extreme pride about the money they posses and use it in whatever the way possible to get their work done. They don’t mind saluting the same person they stamped the day before and they will do this without even a small guilt.

Even if they find money in drainage they won’t hesitate taking this and they would be extremely proud defending this act.

Being like this will only fetch them non reliable people around, but without knowing this, they will call whole world isn’t reliable.

They call all those who have less money than them as inept, forgetting the fact that there are more people who are richer than them to call them inept.

Since because they earned some money, they think they are efficient enough to speak on any topic on earth starting from communism to strategies followed in cricket.

If you find majority of the above traits in a single person, then you can call him/ her as money fetish. They are mainly found in business. But in the last decades they entered politics too. When social workers and leaders were there in politics, India flourished but when the moment these money fetishes entered politics,…. What to say. You all know the current state.

I believe hospitals are divine profession and only people with high dignity and service mind should do this. But these fetishes entered this area in the recent decades along with politics.

They don’t care about the first aid required for a dying patient. They will be busy judging the emotional attachment of their blood relations and their wealth to calculate how much money they can loot from them.

Let us assume a situation that they are right, in being self centered. They accumulate best wealth, a beautiful bungalow, the most luxury car and cash every where. But what will they do if rest of this country is poor. What will they do if it stinks when they come out of their bungalow. Where will they drive their luxury car when the roads are poor. Whom will they converse when the rest of the country men pursue below standard life.

Only people who are totally obsessed with money can be like this. Only those who faced the strong humiliation from their own kind in young age will behave like this. So, when you encounter someone like this, don’t ever treat them as a successful person. Don’t show fake respect in front of them. Don’t appreciate them in front of anybody and don’t recognize them as a dignified person in the society. Those adulation are the food for their fetishism and it will eat that, grow fast and spoil this society in great pace. At least let us kill it by starvation. Just treat them as a normal human being with a little sympathy. After all they are mental patients. That is the reason why I call them as money fetish. Isn’t fetishism a mental problem to address?

55-fiction:
As per my promise early, I am giving this 55-fiction here. When I was reading Vipul’s post today, I thought my intended comment has the stuff of a 55-fiction, within. And that was the inspiration to create this though I don’t know if that satisfied my thought.

"This is Saturday, 9 in the morning. Will be a busy day for me. Should start work immediately. I looked at my blog roll. Sipul has updated his blog. Oh God. His posts will be long. Will make me think and take more time. I saw his post now. Thank God it is a 55-fiction."

Post Note:

55 fiction is a very short story which does not have more than 55 words. In the morning I read about all the rules of it with the help of Mr. R's comment on Vipul's post. I don’t know if I satisfied all the rules. I really don’t mind it as long as you enjoy it.
I am glad and thankful for the fact that the previous post “Why Marriage” has been selected as one of the “spicy Saturday picks” by Blog Adda on 8th Aug 2009. This wouldn't have been possible without your support. Thanks a lot pals.

Image courtesy: http://www.synthtopia.com/content/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/greed.jpg

Why Marriage?

2009-08-05T21:23:00.004+05:30

This post has been selected as 'spicy saturday pick' by Blogadda on 8th Aug 09. click on the image to view the results page.

The society considers me evil whenever I ask reasons for whatever I have been asked to do. My mum calls me atheist when I ask why I should pray god when I understood asking favors from God is business. Similarly my religionist friends or money fanatic gentlemen calls me arrogant and impractical for my views on religion and money respectively. (I intend to write a separate post on money fanatics soon). But somehow I can’t stop questioning every aspect as I feel empty and awkward doing anything without knowing the reason.

Once upon a time in UK, when I was tiredly coming back from my most loathed night shift part time job, I got a phone call from my mom to inform me that she had mailed a photo of a girl whom she intended to get married to me. And she insisted that she will not go ahead with marriage until I say OK. What do you think I could comment on this unknown girl? I saw the picture and she was indeed beautiful. I asked my mom to get her phone number. I know it would be stupid for a near stranger to ask a girl if she likes me. So I asked her if she was interested in this marriage whole heartedly. I thought I made a gentle move and was proud of myself for framing a question like that. But it was a different story altogether when I came to know later that this poor girl didn’t even remember what I asked her for the first time.

Couple of days later, I was roaming on the greenly university lawn. I didn’t yet confirm my consent to my mother. Normally in winter season, the lawn would be totally empty and free from those half naked chicks sunbathing. I mean then it was perfectly ideal place for ideating and rightly I was thinking why I should get married. What should be the reasons behind it?

My young mind said ‘it is a license by the society to have sex’.

My materialistic mind said that ‘I need a near age companion to get over the toughest parts of life like sickness and lean patches’.

My philosophical mind said that ‘This would help me learn more about a fellow passenger of life and by this you can understand life better’.

My spiritualistic mind said that ‘understanding and unifying with one should be the starting point to realize the oneness theory’.

My diplomatic and desired mind said that ‘the reason would be a mixture of all these and urged me to confirm my consent at once’.

And ultimately that was what I did.

A few years of marriage indeed helped me learn a fair bit of all the above. I understood every person in this world is brought up in various environments and so the views can never be unanimous. Unless we learn to love a person with all the differences, we cannot lead a peaceful life. This indeed suits the society (I mean the people around you) as well. The key is not about bearing the pain or escaping from bad moments, its about accepting the flaws. Being so diplomatic you cannot assume that I am a wonderful husband as I am yet to master this art.

What do you guys think could be the reasons for marriage. I intend to prompt couple of my UK friends to comment as they may have a different opinion.

Image courtesy: http://www.soundoflife.net/wp-content/uploads/2007/10/marriage-quotes.jpg

TAG TIME

2009-08-05T10:01:00.014+05:30

MY NAME STARTS WITH 'B' TAG:

I was tagged by my first blog friend Shankar.

Tag Rules: It’s harder than it looks!(Mind It). Copy to your own note, erase my answers, enter yours, and tag your friends. Use the first letter of your name to answer each of the following questions. They have to be real… nothing made up! If the person before you had the same first initial, you must use different answers. You cannot use any word twice and you can’t use your name for the boy/girl name question. Have Fun!!

And those of you who have names starting with “S”… should not write the same answer which i wrote…

1. What is your name: Bharathi

2. A four Letter Word: boon

3. A boy’s Name: Buhdha (I read a lot and love him. If atall I can be like someone, i want to be like him)

4. A girl’s Name: Bhavani (I just got this name. may be brindha, bavatharini, babitha. Is that there are more girl names in B or my wife is right?)

5. An occupation: barber

6. A colour: Black (I like this colour)

7. Something you wear: bermudas (our hostel uniform)

8. A food: Biriyani (yeah I love it. to be precise 'mutton biriyani')

9. Something found in the bathroom: Brush

10. A place: Brussels ( I met one of my beautiful buyers here)

11. A reason for being late: blah blah (what else I could write. we all give wierd answer 'late ayiruchu' always.

12. Something you shout: bum (lazy)

13. A movie title: Brave heart

14. Something you drink: Boost (I cant write beer here. dont ask me why. I cant answer either)

15. A musical group: Beetles

16. An animal: Buffalo (guys I once rided on its back for fun :-))

17. A Street name: brad street (Dont ask me where it is. I donno. I think I heard this st somewhere)

18. A type of car: Bolero (argh I cant remember the maruthi name)

19. A song title: Bad, Baba

20. A verb: Bring

I am tagging @ Shankar: You tagged everyone I know. so ditto.

Image Courtesy: Google

JHATPAT TAG

Shilpa tagged me again and please find answer below.

1. Grab the book nearest to you, turn on page 18 and find line 4.

'Casual garments company, shed 42 teckic sidco' Dont get confused. The only book now on my table is a visiting card folder and that is what I found on the said page :-)

2. Stretch your left arm out as far as you can & catch air?

I got a handfull of tiruppur cotton micro dust.

3. What is the last thing you watched on TV?

Cant remember. don't watch TV that frequent. should be some news or comedy.

4. Without looking, guess what time it is?

8:30 pm

5. Now look at the clock, what is the actual time?

8:37 pm

6. With the exception of the computer, what can you hear?

Fan's rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

7. When did you last step outside? What were you doing?

I went out to watch cinema "Nadodigal" quite nice though I found some flaws being a critic or cynic.

8. Before you started this Q&As, what did you look at?

My blog

9. What are you wearing?

Shirt, jeans

10. When did you last laugh?

In the movie for a comedy scene

11. What is on the walls of the room you are in?

My dreams :-). Its everywhere for a matter of fact.

12. Seen anything weird lately?

My memory is too short. cant remember any. may be this is quite wierd isnt it for a young man. (Guyz pls agree. 31 isnt old)

13. What do you think of this quiz?

Its fun

14. What is the last film you saw?

Nadodigal

15. If you became a multimillionaire overnight, what would you buy?

I dont think money can buy what I want.

16. Tell me something about you that I dunno!

I believe in love at first sight. (though I am mature enough not to fall in love now)

17. If you could change one thing about the world, regardless of guilt or politics, what would you do?

I want everyone to be happy always.

18. Do you like to Dance?

Yeah. if you have guts to watch :-)

19. Imagine your first child is a girl, what do you call her?

I dont have to imagine. my first kid is a girl and we call her Nakshathira.

20. Imagine your first child is a boy, what do you call her?

I would have called him Yogi.

21. Would you ever consider living abroad?

Not completely. may be couple of months here and there.

22. What do you want GOD to say to you when you reach the pearly gates?

And now I can handover my duties sir.

As usual i dont tag any one in particular. i tag everyone who likes this tag.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Nandhini tagged me now. Any one needs help translating may ask :-) click on the image to read.

Hey I have been tagged by Suga (the five things tag) and Shilpa and Shruti (Life in numbers tag)

FIVE THINGS TAG:

I Rule, You Rule, We Rule
The idea is, to list five items in each category and not necessarily in order of liking. You can always add or subtract categories according to your will. Then tag five lovely people to be the next ones to take this quiz.

Favorite Words:

Enigma - Everything I see in life is a mystery including me. The moment when I feel I uncovered it, another mystery rolls out. Sometimes interesting but sometimes annoying.

Rebel - I don't mind rebel against anything and anybody if the cause is right. (do you think this is an over statement? may be. But you can treat this as my wish)

Naked - I mean truth. truth should come naked. it should not have any pretences and biases even if it concerns your loved ones.

Fear - yeah I am fearful. Not about cockroaches or rowdies or anything like that but about life. I am not ashamed of saying this because it is truth. But I am trying to come of out of it. I will let you know if I come out of it along with the method I used.

Run - Oh boy. don't stop. Runnnnnnnnnnn. You have lot to do.

Favorite characters (Fiction) :

* DiCaprio in Blood diamond. I like his innocence.

* Brad pit in Troy. I liked the way he rebel against his king.

* Brad pit in Fight club. Excellent. what a flamboyant man he was.

* Clint Eastwood in Good bad and ugly. The careless face he carry through out the movie will be adoring.

* Russel in Gladiator. I portrayed well on how a captive high class man will behave.

Words They Must Ban :

All the words spoken in rude tone should be banned.

Favorite One Liners :

* An eye for an eye will only make the whole world blind.

* A calm sea does not make a skilled sailor.

* A computer beat me at chess once. But, it was no match for me at kick boxing.

* A friend is someone who has the same enemies you have.

* After hearing two eyewitness accounts of the same accident, you begin to wonder about history.

And five creative chosen ones are :)

I generally don't tag anyone in particular. If you like this then treat yourself as tagged.

MY LIFE IN NUMBERS TAG:

Shilpa and Shruti tagged me for this one and here is the answer.

1 - The number of wives I have :-( (I don't worry about the symbol. my wife doesn't read this)

2 - My birth date.

3 - Three places i lived. (Tiruppur, Chennai, Edinburgh)

4 - The number of hours(Appx) I spend on blog every day. (oh god I want to restrict it to an hour every night)

5 - Time that I (wish to) get up in the morning.

6- Six countries I visited other than India. (UK, Germany, Denmark, Spain, Italy, Belgium)

7- Isn't this an ideal number for No of wives. One a day of the week? (I told you already my wife doesn't read this)

8- I got a license with out doing this.

9- The number of clients that we are contacting now.

10 - I have spent more time scratching my head. So dont you think I deserve a concession of not answering this point.

As usual I tag every one who like this.

The Cream and Scum Of Blogging

2009-08-01T16:23:00.005+05:30

This post has been published by me as a part of the Blog-a-Ton 1, the first edition of the online marathon of Bloggers; where we decide and we write. To be part of the next edition, visit and start following Blog-a-Ton.

I am not a natural writer who can write amazing posts in no time on whatever topic given; instead it takes 4 days to a week for me to find some time and a topic to write. (In spite of doing this, I can’t avoid some useless posts.)

I voted for ‘my blogging experiences’ as I already had a post written ready for that but unfortunately I lost the contest in a narrow margin I guess. I tried writing in this new topic ‘cream and scum of blogging’ but how much ever hard I thought, I could only end up with a write-up with all points lined up and numbered resembling a eleventh grade economics assignment “pros and cons of democracy or something”.

I remember a story where a school teacher would announce her little students that there would be a test next day to write an essay either on 'coconut tree' or 'cow' but they should prepare for both the topics. Our hero, a little boy would only read on coconut tree and spend rest of his time playing. But alas the topic in the test would be cow. He thought for a while and wrote “There lived a cow. It was white and tied to a coconut tree. The coconut tree will be tall and will have long leaves” and started writing all that he read about coconut tree. That is what I decided to do now :-)

When I decided to record the valid discussion that I had with intellectual people around me, I asked my IT pro friend on how to do that. He suggested blogging. When I entered blogging, I din’t know anything. I slowly started exploring. I was shouting (inside my mind offcourse) "Hey this thing not only has facility to record our thoughts but also allows the viewers to comment and share their line of ideas". Only in the last three days I understood the power of comments as I was bombarded with comments on my recent post (not for praising me but a healthy debate).

Then I started exploring the blogosphere where I met my first friend (versatile and good narrator) Shankar, (Sharp thinker, good narrator and creative) Vipul, (Bold and precise) Nicky, (writing guru) brownie, (perfectly unbiased) Nita, (Spiritual mind disturber) Anukriti along with my new friends (flamboyant) survivor, (passionate and energetic) Shilpa, (honest and casual) Nandhini, Suga and Raje. The points I mentioned inside the bracket are the ones that I learned from them.

Learning from them, the quality of my writing started picking up (I guess so. Don’t disappoint me guys by saying not :-)). I started my blog with politics then went to society and now I am in philosophy. I am eager to know on what new label with which I would bore you people next.

When I think back comparing my pre and post bloging era, I would admit this blog has given me some peace by identifying and showing some rare forward thinking and enlightened gentries as I was totally pissed off by surrounded materialistic, selfish money fetish people who think every one other than who doesnt resemble them are lunatics.

In spite of all the changes that I made by learning from my peers the only rule I kept unchanged is to write without any perception, pretence and bias. Blogging this way helps me keeping myself balanced, unbiased and open minded.

By writing some unbiased views, I have an exaggerated feeling that I am doing my little bit to this society as every human being is entitled to do. This gives immense pleasure and satisfaction.

But the problem is that the time I spend on business is reduced which is a worrying factor. I cant eat blog you know. I need to work.

And secondly I think the blogging installed some weird behavior in me. If I publish a post, with in next couple of minutes I reload the page to see if there is any comment. (If at all the reload button on my blog have a life time, it would have been dead by now). Whenever I speak with a first time foreign return, he used to link every point in our discussion to his experience in foreign soil. (When I was in UK, I used to pay 20 Pounds to get a haircut etc) Similarly, whenever I converse with someone, I started linking my blog. (Exactly pal, I indeed mentioned this in my blog while writing…. Blah blah)
Hope you would take the last couple of paragraphs as scum and rest of them as cream. I guess I did pretty good work to alter my already done ‘Blogging experience’ post to fit in here.

The fellow Blog-a-Tonics who took part in this Blog-a-Ton are Arjuna, Saimanohar, Dhiman, Vipul Grover, Avdi, Daisy Blue, Sid 'Ravan' Kabe, Shankar, Shilpa Garg, Ranee, Ranee again and Pawan.Click on their respective names to read their posts on The Cream and Scum of Blogging.To be part of the next edition of this online marathon, visit and start following Blog-a-Ton.

Sticking to basics

2009-08-01T12:39:00.001+05:30

One of our family friends is diagnosed to have a rare disease called amyloidosis. (Don’t worry; this isn’t a post on medicineJ) As there is no medicine available for that in allopathy, he was suggested to meet a nice ayurvedic doctor in Chennai, to be precise Thiruvanmiur. He wanted me to accompany him as he believed I would effectively converse with the doctor. I accepted the offer though it is a pure illusion.

The flight journey was quite tiresome for him because of the disease. We indeed asked wheel chair assistance in both the airports. Immediately after landing in Chennai airport, I was looking for a taxi to take him to the clinic. On the way out of airport, on the corridor I saw a counter which has a taxi picture on the display. That was the picture of an old ambassador car painted in black and yellow with the meter in front, on the bonnet. The last time I saw that was in Rajni Kanth movie Padikkathavan. (Ohh that was a fiat though) I was under an impression that these taxis would only be available in pictures until the driver opened the booty of one such taxi and holding it painfully (it didn’t have a lock) until I pushed my luggage in. Till the destination, I was enjoying all the noise from the car sans engine.

The doctor was running his clinic in an apartment in the ground floor of a three storey building. The session with the doctor was not promising but encouraging. Coming out of the clinic I needed to get the call taxi again. With the help of my Chennai friend I phoned the taxi who said it will take at least 10 minutes to reach there. I don’t know the translation of ‘at least 10 minutes’ but decided to wait promptly reminding him for every 5 minutes. While waiting outside the apartment, I saw a white Maruthi swift, painfully squeezing in-between diagonally placed two cars to get a parking spot desperately. After few times of reverse and front he managed to park it perfectly. I only saw him when he got out of the car. He was a tall lean guy wearing dull orange colour t-shirt and a faded jeans. A single looped shoulder bag was hanging on his right shoulder and his sunglass was rested in the neck of the t-shirt. He had long hairs with medium complexion. As soon as he took few steps out of the car, someone clapped from his behind and called “Hello, Hello” in a little rough tone. Our gentle man stopped immediately and looked at him. He was short, little fat and was frontal bald.

“is this your car” he asked with the same rough tone.

Our gentle man got offended by his tone and replied “why do you want to know that?”

“You can’t park your car here” still persisted with rough tone.

“why shouldn’t I? is this your place?”

“If you park your car here then I can’t take my car” now surprisingly the rough tone was missing.

“Now, you are right. The tone in which you spoke early wasn’t friendly. Yeah now I will take my car. No problem. You need to watch your tone while conversing. You can’t intimidate anyone with your tone. No one likes that” said our gentle man. From the way he spoke, I guessed he should be living in any one of the western countries for quite a while.

Our little man didn’t speak anything after that.

He immediately took his car and went away to park it elsewhere.

Watching this, my family friend said, “He is speaking so diplomatic and also he is wise enough to watch and react to the tonal variations but why didn’t he know one should not park in front of the gate. (Yeah I forgot to say. He indeed parked his car in front of the gate). Isn’t that basic common sense?”

That is a valid question I guess. Before learning etiquettes and manners, I think we should learn the basics to support that.

While leaving, I heard the short man blasting the door man for letting someone park in front of the gate. Probably to satisfy his damaged ego.

Lessons from a dead body

2009-07-27T20:42:00.004+05:30

Some time back we got a message on the phone that one of my distant relatives died. I attended the funeral along with my parents. I usually like to observe a lot in a funeral as it is quite peculiar place and people behave differently.

That was a small village and when I entered the funeral house there were hardly any people as we were the first to receive the message and people just started coming. I could see the last death vehicle was under construction. I watched it with keen interest as I might have to travel in that one day. The making is simple. They placed two pieces of one vertically cut bamboo in either sides. They filled in the middle space by placing small sticks in the form ofl ‘x’ touching both the vertically placed bamboos. They tied it very hard with jute thread. Then to make it flat, they spread tightly knit coconut leaves on it. That’s it. The last vehicle was ready.

When the time this was over, I could see my dad chatting with a gang of five to six people. The son and the grandson of the lady died were busy receiving the mourners and making arrangements for clearing the body.

Now they brought out the body and I had a glimpse of the full body. She should be around her early eighties and her body shrunk so badly that anyone can lift it easily with their both hands as like they lift a child while sleeping. A one rupee coin was placed on her fore head and her two toes were tied together.

Around six people, after making lots of chaos, lifted the body and placed it on the final vehicle where a single person would have done that as the body was so small. Everyone were trying to prove that they were helping and made that place so clumsy. Someone wanted to place a pillow under the head and another arguing it isnt necessary.

Finally they lifted the body and the procession was very short as the grave yard was only 200 meters away. I went along and stood in a place where I can have a nice view to observe everything. They placed the body near the recently dug pit and started doing all the rituals. Again there arouse a small pandemonium as few people had other opinions on the way rituals were followed. Finally the person with high sounding voice won the game and every one followed as per his advice. I saw the first part of sand fell over the face. It was quite strange to see sand falling on face without victim reacting to it.

Now again I saw my dad along with the same people more or less occupying same places. But now the grandson also joined the discussion. I can hear them discussing on various topics ranging from search of a servant maid, discussion on the character of the current MLA and his prospect of getting chance to contest in forthcoming elections, marriage prospects of another participant of the forum etc.

After a while my mum came out of the home. She was with the ladies sitting inside home and we were waiting outside shamiyana. We decided to leave now and the grand son and son bid adieu with a smiling face.

In the same week I got another message from my mum that one of our close family friends expired in the hospital on accident. He was a middle aged man having two kids one boy and a girl. My father and my mother were totally shocked. They said he was such a nice gentle man and he helped our family in innumerable occasions.

We immediately rushed to his home. There were already big crowd and I heard the cry from quite a distance. I can see gangs of people with sad faces discussing about th mode of death in low voices. I joined one of our common family friends. They were feeling so sad and the guy started telling how good his character was. The lady mentioned that he was almost like their family member and he was the one who used to stand in front in all their family functions whether it is good or bad. She felt sad that there was no one to fill his place now. I too said that he was such a nice man to be with and I would miss a friend like him.

I had a very brief glimpse of the body which was wrapped in hospital cloth. Someone should have called the electric cremation and I can see their van arriving at the spot. Seeing this, his wife rushed out with her children. People just held her strong to prevent her falling on the body. The kids were quite young and the guy was studying his 12^th standard and the girl just finished her under graduation. Now I can hear a loud cry though I could not see their faces as the entire crowd was around them. She was saying that he let her alone and how would she settle her son and how she would get her daughter married. God should have been kind enough to let him at least until he perform all those duties. Someone tried consoling her.

Amidst her massive cry, they lifted the body till the van. In no time few people climbed the van and it disappeared.

After returning home, I had time to think a little on that.

Why people took the death of the elderly lady very light?

Why the situation was so serious in the funeral of the middle aged person?

Is that because that the elderly lady was not of any use to them, the family were so cool?

Is that because they miss all the benefits they get from middle aged man, they cried so much?

Is this world so materialistic and selfish?

Oh God. Sometimes the lessons from life are so cruel.

Image courtesy: http://davidderrick.files.wordpress.com/2007/07/lord-byron-on-his-death-bed.jpg

Will it create controversy?

2009-07-20T22:07:00.015+05:30

I don’t know how, but sometimes I develop an uncanny ability to rub the wrong side of both the parties who support and differ on a topic. I think I may do that now by writing this one.

I would request all of you to read this post with out any perception as I said in my previous post. (Whoever hasn’t read my previous post, can read here. Those who read the post also try reading it as I updated it a little bit) And yeah, I promise I will read your comments without any perception and ready to change my views if any one can give a convincing reply.

I am an agnostic, so I am not going to use words like God’s will or satanic etc. I just love, observe and hail nature for its massiveness, appearance and system. If you can keenly observe the nature, you can understand that it runs its show not by threatening or advising but by motivating people. I believe nature wants every one of us to learn about life. An inactive person can not learn anything and so it created hunger and ego. The nature wants the life flourishing and so it created attraction between genders, desire, fear of death (they want to leave some kind of their representation in this world after death), fear of life (there should be some one to take care of them in their old age) and sexual satisfaction. Their anatomy is created to complement this.

So here I would like to express my opinion that I dont have enough ground to believe that homo sexuality is natural.

But at the same time, I feel being not natural is not a crime to punish. They don’t harm anyone physically or mentally. So I fully agree with the verdict of the court.

The society don’t have to ill-treat them either because discrimination in any form is inhuman.

Since they don’t hurt anyone and since every human being in this world is free to make their choice in life, we don’t have to disturb them either.

I just dont want to do all the above under the cover that this act is natural.

If you read again the first couple of lines from this post, you would understand how true I say :-)

I dont know how my blog visitors and friends would react to this. But I decided to express my honest opinion on this or else I woudnt do justice to the topic of my blog.

I would like you all to read the second paragraph again before writing your comments. (I should try everything to make myself safe you know. I’m just kidding).

Yeah I am ready now.

FIRE.

Image courtesy:http://learningfolder.net/images/controversy.jpg

Perception – A hindrance I would say

2009-07-18T18:01:00.013+05:30

During the little time left after my vain efforts to change most of the things that went opposite of my expectations, I used to think what is the objective of life. Seeing me start like this, please don’t run away thinking that I am going to write boring crap calling it as philosophy. Though I am going to do exactly the same; I have a beautiful small story in-between to cheer you up.

Some feel, finishing studies in first class, making yourself eligible for an wonderful IT job to teleport you straight to some company in silicon valley, marrying a beautiful girl of your interest couple of years later, getting kids and watching them grow is the best life and that should be the objective. Some others want to become a successful business man or politician with all the powers and money intact would be the best life and that should be one’s objective. But I have seen many people who achieved that and still not content. I was shocked to see one of the powerful, wealthy and famous persons attempting suicide. This incident happened to be my eye opener.

After four and half years of thinking and three years of reading many books on it, and almost a decade of observing various kind of people in this world, I understood that I don’t know the objective of life. May be I can say that learning would be my current objective. I indeed value this discovery much more as this is the one which installed open-mindedness in me. Once I got this open-mindedness, my learning curve went steep up and the feeling that I am growing gives me immense pleasure, though I haven’t reached my destination.

I feel the major obstacle for learning is perception. We all have our own opinion on various aspects of life. If we approach any thing with a perception, we stand less chance of knowing its true self. We can understand peception in a better way if we relate it to human relations than topics and subjects. If you have a good perception on some one, you will convince your self even if he/she do something wrong and this is quite opposite if you have bad peception on him/her. Now its time to unearth the beautiful small story.

Once a Buddhist monk visited a Zen monk at his residence. Being curious, the Buddhist monk asked the Zen monk to teach him on ‘way of Zen’.

The Zen monk smiled quietly and asked “why can’t we have some tea before we start”

“By all means” replied the Buddhist monk.

A humble disciple brought a long plate having couple of empty tea cups and a jar full of Tea.

The Zen monk took the responsibility of serving and poured tea in the cup, but he didn’t stop even after the cup was full.

The Buddhist monk got impatient and said “stop pouring!!”

Zen monk asked “why?”

“The cup is already full. What ever you pour more will only go waste”

“ Exactly” said the Zen monk. “Your mind is already full with Buddhism and what ever I say on Zen will only go waste”.

Similarly, my short lesson says that unless we shed away our perception, we can not see reality. If we don’t see reality, we may not grow.

Note1:

Apart from boring you with my so called philosophy, I am sorry for not keeping this post short. Even I hate reading loooong posts.

Note 2:

I know this template sucks. But I messedup with my previous one. I have to hangarround with this one untill I find some time to work out a new one.

Image courtesy: http://sanjuancollege.edu/lib/images/philosophy_brain.jpg

My first award - 'Blog of the day'

2009-07-17T09:24:00.005+05:30

When I was checking the updates of all the blogs that I follow, I was surprised to see 'A Naked Opinion' has got 'Blog of the day' award. Later on I also received an official message from Bill Austin to confirm the same.

Perhaps I should say this is my sixth award as I treat every person who decided to follow my blog has given me an award. (I can see five guests in my Follower's box. Can any one follow without me knowing it? Tech experts, please clarify). I take this opportunity to thank everyone who recognised this blog.

In my opinion, every person is liable to do some thing to make this world a better place. I created this blog as a tool to accomplish this. I believe, these sorts of awards would bring traffic and help me doing my duty to this society in a more effective way.

My experience with transgenders

2009-07-10T12:19:00.006+05:30

After my college days, I was happily placed in one of the then top 5 IT companies through campus interview. Propelled by unbearable politics, I resigned my job within four months to find myself in a lengthy jobless period as it was September eleven attack time. Myself and my best friend decided to use this chance to travel to Mumbai and stay with my old school friend to hunt for a job.

I was very happy and looking forward for that moment as it was the longest train journey in my life and it was my first time to Mumbai. Before boarding the train, with the usual youth self, we promptly checked the reservation chart for any beautiful girl names around our age. I cant remember if we found any but we were enjoying every moment of it.

When a very informative co passenger informed me that we crossed Maharashtra border, it didn’t mean anything for me. Couple of minutes after the train left the first or second station in Maharashtra, I heard a little bit of unusual noise from the first part of the compartment. I looked at that direction only to find nearly 15 transgender people clapping hands and asking something in Hindi. I have to admit that I don’t know Hindi more than ‘ak gauv may ak kishan rahuthatha’. But I don’t have to know Hindi to comprehend what was happening there.

These transgender people were asking money from the passengers. When they refuse to give money or when they offer less money than their expectation, they embarrassed the passengers by touching their cheeks, partly undressing, sitting on their laps etc.

The first person refused to give money and enjoyed all these rituals. The second person gave ten rupees and got little bit of abuse. No one escaped their teasing and abuses except a person who handed over 50 rupees. What do you think I did? I took my wallet immediately to take fifty rupees and kept it ready in my front pocket. I really didnt’t want to give any money as I wasnt aware of my requirement in Mumbai. But I was more than definite not to let them anywhere near my intimate zone. They were just one row before me. I was waiting like a kid who would handover the paisa given by his mom to the temple elephant. Nothing note worthy happened. They got the money from my hands and moved on to my very informative co passenger who refused to give any money. I enjoyed all the rituals done to him. But you know, he escaped with out giving any money at all.

I saw similar incident through out Mumbai in my one month long tenure there. This is almost like a theft. Instead of threatening to take your life as other thieves do, they threaten to damage your self respect. I was very furious loosing my money in this way. I remember blaming even the government and police people for not taking any action for this. Even in Tirupur, where I live now, one transgender person entered my friend’s office in a complex and threatened to create chaos if he doesn’t give money.

Though these activities of transgender people seem to be uncultured and disgusting, I got other ideas when I thought deep in to this issue with empathy.

I have never seen anyone employ a transgender. Even their parents get rid of them once they come to know their identity. No one in the society, right from street youths to elderly people, recognise them as human being. I have never seen a movie depicting them with respect other than Manirathnam’s Bombay. Every one treats them as an animal to make fun off. When I was speaking to one my intellectual friends, he said ‘neglection is more serious than death sentence’. How will we feel when we are neglected by our own parents? They are facing neglection from the whole society. I think this sense of neglection and hunger put together made them as what they are now. At the time when court recognised the homo sexuals, I wish the society would recognise transgender people. When we can treat a blind as handicapped and help crossing a road, why can’t we recognise them? Aren’t they handicapped?

Image courtesy: http://www.shaarique.com/miss-koovagam/.

The fact that I don’t even want to miss comments in her blog could be a best expressed review for this blog. Beautiful language, natural humour, forward thinking and interesting narration are the high points of this blog. (for some reason she made it as a private blog recently. I don't know how to ask for an invitation to view her blog. Anyone please advise)

Ballat by Shankar:

The best aspect of this blog is its versatility. He speaks about philosophy, movie reviews, personal tours, love, technology and everything under the sky. He will keep you busy by tagging you here and there making you to contribute some way or other.

Bitch on by Nicky:

If you are a Conservative male, you would be shocked reading her blog. She never hesitates to touch any topic right from PMS (if you don’t know what PMS mean, read her blog) to beautifully justifying her laziness in washing her inners. I like her open mindedness and child like braveness (It’s indeed a compliment).

Reflections of an empathic libertarian by Vipul

He steals topic from my mind and often presents it in a more creative and better manner than I could think. He is again unbiased, witty (sometimes) and touches high quality topics. The high point about his blog is his narration style which would keep you away from boredom. He bestowed a wonderful title ‘empathic libertarian’ on me stating that I think like him. Considering the high quality of his blog, I treat this as a very good complement.

6. My memoirs of mesmerizing memories by Anukriti:

I read a few posts of her and utterly impressed by the presence of inner self which happens to be my most favourite topic. I cant exactly put it down in words but I think this is not the usual kind of blog.