Jaag Gaya Re!

Sometimes, it takes a tragedy to wake us up from a slumber. For me, it was the Mumbai terror attacks of 26/11. Suddenly, I woke up to the fact that I am as much responsible for the sorry state of affairs around me as everyone else. The fact that I wasn’t actively participating in the democracy of our country meant that my right to criticize was limited to an extent. What right do I have to speak out against our leaders if I haven’t said anything in their selection? So, I paid heed to the Jaago Re! campaign and decided to update my voter ID card and do the needful before the next election came around so that I could have my say on the matters of at least my constituency if not of the country.

My first step towards this was to wake my wife up since only she could be trusted to do any useful activity remotely physical among the two of us. She browsed through the Jaago Re! website and went through all the instructions and figured out how the form needed to be filled up. Somehow, I find anything having instructions as confusing, so I was glad to follow whatever she told me to do. It did take her a while to zero in on our constituency, but the website was rather helpful and she was quite tenacious. After a slight difference of opinion with our printer, which ended with my wife giving it a kick on its rear side, we finally got our application form filled up, signed, and ready to be submitted.

Jaago Re! had specified an address in Dispensary Road for submission of the forms for our ward, so off we both went on a Saturday morning. It did take a couple of rounds up and down the road for us to finally figure out the place we were looking for. It was a typical government office - dinghy, broken furniture, noisy fans, paper all over, files piled up, and people irritated at the world outside. After being passed a couple of times from one desk to another, we finally found the right person, only for him to thrust a notice at us. He told us to go to the address mentioned in that notice. Quite helpful, but for the fact that the notice was in Kannada and didn’t have anything in either the national language, Hindi, or the international language, English. While I have nothing against regional languages, I guess there is no harm in displaying the same information in our national language as well. Coming back to us, I took the easiest way out and asked him what it said, but he chose to direct me towards the toughest way out, asking me to learn Kannada if I didn’t know what it meant. He did have a point there, and I do need to learn Kannada, but if I were to go in search of a Kannada teaching institute, I wasn’t going to vote this time around, and I didn’t want to wait, so we both gave the man sheepish grins and decided to take another walk up and down Dispensary Road, trying to find someone who could read Kannada. That walk sure did wonders to my self confidence as none of the people we asked to knew what was written.

It was at this time when we once again decided to look at the paper and found two numbers written down. Why that was written in Arabic numerals is beyond me, but I felt infinitely thankful to all the authorities for having done that. After using our combined brain power, we finally deduced that one of it would be the pincode while the other could be a phone number. I made my wife make the call but made the mistake of making her take the directions as well. That resulted in us exploring Indira Nagar in a way we’ve never done thus far. It took about an hour, 20 phone calls, and a few liters of petrol before we could finally find ourselves at this place which was facilitating voter ID card distribution. We rushed up to the counter only for another grumpy face to point us at a paper stuck above him - we were late by 10 mins! Disappointed as we were, I was quite impressed with the efficiency shown by the office in sticking to their schedule. Now that we knew the location, we decided to come the next day.

The next evening saw us presenting ourselves well in advance of the closing time. There was a small crowd in front of a lone person sitting at the counter and everyone seemed to be asking doubts at the same time to him. Since it isn’t humanly possible to answer all those queries at once, he had chosen to do the next best thing – not to answer anyone. I tried to stand back for my turn, but it never seemed to come, at which point my wife took the forms from me and jostled her way to the front and submitted them. The person tore up the end portion, scribbled something on it and asked us to return 20 days later. My wife had a look in her eye when she came back which seemed to tell me "when in Rome…."

Twenty days later, we were back at the same venue. Nothing much had changed, except probably the confusion had gotten worse, if that was ever possible. I wasn’t sure what exactly we were supposed to do, neither did a few others whom I asked to, but we found a queue and decided to join it. Almost all the people in the queue were there after a hard day’s work, and the indifferent pace of the work wasn’t helping matters with tempers flaring up every now and then. My wife herself was a bit worked up, but since I hate exertion of any kind, I decided not to get angry. After 1-1/2 hours of standing in the queue, we were finally in front of the person taking the photo and updation of details before issuing the ID card when we were told that we hadn’t got some number. As in most of such cases, I found the funnier side of it, but my wife didn’t. She even stated emphatically that she didn’t want to vote and didn’t care about the whole system. Being the reasonably successful husband that I am, I maintained silence, knowing fully well I would be able to convince her later to do otherwise.

Unsurprisingly, the morrow saw us back once again. This time, I had absented myself from work in order to finish this task off. Having seen the efficiency of the government machinery earlier, we presented ourselves early, but I was to realize that the promptness they show in closing is seldom seen in opening. By the time the office staff trickled in an hour late or even more, the crowd had gotten rather restless. The person in front of me decided it was time to air his views and started off on how these people are supposed to be public servants and kept questioning why a particular time was mentioned while they were showing up 2 hours later to work. When he felt that the majority in the crowd might not understand Kannada, he repeated all of that in English. We decided to do a tag team there, with both of us standing in separate queues for men and women. She got to the counter before me and managed to verify our names being in the rolls and got the required numbers to help us get our cards. We stood in another queue, much smaller than the one we had escaped, and got our photos taken. Then, it was time to move on to yet another counter for us to finally get the voter ID card. Nearly a month’s drama ended in an anticlimax when we received our cards without any apparent error.

Jaago Re! is doing a a remarkable job in awakening the consciousness of the nation, but it is rather sad that the government isn’t providing them adequate support in awakening people. While we did persist with it, there are going to be people who would be discouraged by such apathy. These agencies should display more accountability and should be helping in empowering as many citizens as possible with a voter ID card so that they can have their opinion heard. I would have been happier to see some political party too helping out people, as that might only result in more votes for them. Then again, it would indeed be a bit too much to expect the public servants to be doing anything for the public.

Heather and David

I knew romance was in trouble in our office when I saw the recent purchase of our office library – a whole bunch of Mills and Boon paperbacks! Quite a few people had demanded the purchase of this famous romance brand, and I had the opportunity to see a couple of them while I was there. They were discussing a few titles, and I shamelessly eavesdropped on one authoritatively claiming how she’s already read 3-4 of them earlier and how they were just ordinary! Somehow, I had never associated Mills and Boon with anything other than the ordinary.

Now, one might wonder whether I am sounding prudish, and I think I am, a teeny-weeny bit. I read my first M&B when I was in the school, at a time when I read just about anything that had words in it. What drew me to M&B, I guess, was mostly the cover picture of the two protagonists in an ardent embrace. I remember finishing that book in about a day and feeling rather disappointed. That didn’t stop me from reading another couple more of such books, but each time, the feeling was similar. I mean, I am the kind who can get happy reading even a Louis L’amour, which shows how little I demand from the authors that I read. The difference in case of M&Bs were I couldn’t necessarily tell the difference from one book to another.

For those of us who haven’t either heard of M&Bs (must be very few) or have been rather shy to read (quite a few guys, I guess), a typical M&B would have a girl who is rather young, not the most beautiful of specimens, rather quick to temper or quite timid, from either a rich or a poor family, and a guy who is on the wrong side of 30s, rich, dashing, debonair, heavily tanned, sharp features, with a string of girl friends who are all more beautiful than the aforementioned girl. They both feel an instant connection the first time they both meet, but they both would be denying that fact to themselves. Then, at some point, they lose their self-control and end up very nearly making love to each other but would be interrupted by a metaphorical thorn or even a literal one. This would then lead to either the hero or heroine withdrawing from the scene for a while before the inevitable finally happens. This might either lead to an immediate marriage or a possibility of one but they would soon separate because the heroine would feel threatened by the past girl friends of the hero and would question whether he really does love her. The novel would finally end when they both announce to each other how they cannot live without the other and then they live happily ever after.

What I have found interesting in the M&B plots is the fact that most of the stories are set in countries rather well known for their liberal sexual mores. Despite that, almost all heroines in such novels are virgins. I mean, what is this fixation with virgins? Would love be any less if the girl had actually had a sexual relationship earlier? Or does every novel have the same symbolism of virginity standing for purity? Somehow, that purity never seems to extend to the male protagonists who would all be quite skilled at the art of lovemaking. Another funny thing is how the hero would mostly treat the heroine with near contempt for almost the entirety of the novel till he confesses in the last chapter how that was his way of trying to hide his true love. Why would one want to hide their true love? Is it not manly enough to display one’s love? Also, considering the fact that divorce rates have been rather high in the western world where most of these novels are set, I wonder about the longevity of these unions. I mean, with at least a difference of 15 years, how long would it be for the girl to start looking out for someone else? In fact, it would be interesting for one to pick up and start writing a “Twenty Years Later” on some M&B.

I do accept the fact that M&Bs are light, breezy read and is a bit like watching a Hindi movie, transporting one to a dream world where everything is so picture perfect. I myself love reading Louis L’amour or Sidney Sheldon at times when I don’t feel like exercising my brain too much. What I would love, though, would be to see a Mills and Boon featuring Heather Mills and David Boon, two people who aren’t anywhere close to fitting the bill of the leading characters of any Mills and Boon novel.

Educated Illiterates

Yesterday, I read about an absolutely inhuman act. A person, who wasn’t ready to have kids and was unhappy about his wife getting pregnant, picked up his 4-day-old girl and threw her into a 30-foot well, killing the infant. No, we aren’t talking about any ignorant villager from a remote part of the country but about a software engineer who was working in Bangalore who visited his wife at her home in Chennai. One would expect a person who has become a software engineer to have a certain level of knowledge, but it is increasingly being displayed that while we are indeed getting more and more educated, there is hardly any increase in knowledge.

The newspaper report mentioned how this particular person didn’t want to have a kid early in the marriage. If that was the case, he should have had the knowledge on how to prevent pregnancy. That isn’t a very difficult knowledge to glean since there are multitude of products advertised across various media which helps prevent pregnancy. Wouldn’t it have been much better to resort to any of those than this dastardly step? Having gotten pregnant, the wife was reluctant to undergo abortion. If he was so frustrated with the whole situation, he could have divorced her. Of course, it is not the perfect solution, but it is a far better solution than what he thought up. Now, he will have plenty of time to ruminate on the “could have beens” while languishing in the jail.

The literacy rates in the country is definitely on the up. While there are still quite a big chunk who don’t even know to write their name, more and more people are understanding the value of education and trying to obtain it at some level. The dropout rates might be high, but children are indeed enrolling in classes. In fact, it remains a middle-class dream to see their children study hard to become engineers or doctors. Number of students who take up the common entrance tests for these courses only keep going up every year.

Such an increase in educational courses should actually be translating into increased knowledge across the country, but sadly that is not so. We still remain quite insular in our outlook, characterized even today by the way we clean our premises wherein we brush everything from our doorstep to our neighbour’s. We are yet to think about our fellowmen even as we think of how to improve things for ourselves. I see my colleagues not taking enough care to close the tap in the restrooms or littering their workstation at office. When I pointed it out earlier, they’d either give me a “don’t care” look, tell me the same outright, or give an embarrassed smile, but they go back to doing it. So, nowadays, I have stopped telling them, but I do try to close that running tap or help find litter its final destination. This is the same while we drive when all we want to do is to get to our destination at the earliest, even if it inconveniences every other person on the road. We just aren’t willing to give way. When we think about “us,” that “us” should also include the nameless faces around each one of us along with our friends and family.

It is whose responsibility to teach tomorrow’s generation on how to live? While we associate schools and colleges to learning, we should note that children tend to learn from everyone and everything around them. They grow up seeing each one of us and learning from all of us. Each time we fall short on our social responsibility, we have contributed towards our children’s ignorance. In our enthusiasm to see our children become doctors and engineers and what not, let us not forget to make them human beings.

I'm An Angry Man

Nowadays, I’m an angry man.

Morning papers blare out loud,
How we cannot respect our womenfolk,
I wonder what’s this coming to,
As I order my wife to prepare in time,
Breakfast and lunch, and iron my clothes.

Nowadays, I’m an angry man.

I see people blaring their horns,
Cutting lanes all the time,
Asking why all couldn’t follow rules,
Helping reduce the chaos,
I cut across with a few furious honks.

Nowadays, I’m an angry man.

Why doesn’t the Center do something,
Or the local authorities at least,
Leaders we have are useless, I say,
Thinking only of their own selves,
One reason why I never vote.

Nowadays, I’m an angry man.

I am outraged at what’s happening,
At what this country is coming to,
Who will take lead and make a change,
I look at others and they look at me
Questions are many, answers none?

Nowadays, I’m an angry man.

Gandhian Artifacts - Mind Over Matter

Last time we had a frenzy surrounding Mahatma Gandhi was when the movie “Lage Raho Munnabhai” released a few years ago. In the movie, Munnabhai, a local hoodlum changes tack from “goondagiri” or “Gandhigiri” to win his personal battles. He resorted to methods of non-violence, peace, and love as he overcame one hurdle after another in his life. The movie made such an impact on the public that we saw similar methods of protest in various parts of the country. “Lage Raho Munnabhai” became a big hit, and “Gandhigiri” became cool.

Now, we have a different kind of frenzy surrounding the Father of the Nation. This time, though, it isn’t anything to do with “Gandhigiri.” A person came across some artifacts belonging to the Mahatma and saw green, without realizing that it might possibly from the olive branch around it. Anyway, this person decided to put them up for auction. That started all the problems. All of a sudden, people remembered the Mahatma as something more than a face that appears in the currency notes or a dusty photo adorning the government offices. Newspapers ran it in the front pages, talk shows found something new to debate on, and it was almost as if the country’s pride was at stake. Everyone who was a someone was talking about how we should try to stop the auction, and if we cannot, then try our level best to bid the highest and acquire all the items that belonged to Gandhiji.

The initial attempt of trying to stop the auction didn’t succeed. The person in possession of the items refused it and told that he wanted the money to carry on with his philanthropic activities. Now, everyone’s trying to see how we could ensure that the country and no one else gets to keep these items. It sure will be a proud moment if India does manage to finally win these items in the auction. It would be yet another example of a triumphant India emerging against all odds over the various billionaires in the world. We could then probably see various articles on how the younger generation is no longer shackled by the colonial hangover and how the country is ready to tackle any challenge, anywhere in the world, against anyone regardless of the race, region, etc., and is still able to come on top. Truly magnificent, I say.

Well, we have ascertained that it would be magnificent, but is it necessary? In these troubled times, with economic doom spread all over the world, I don’t think one can afford pride over necessity. Here is a country, where half the population still struggle to have one proper meal a day, getting ready to spend a few hundred thousands of Rupees so that we could get back a few personal belongings of one person, albeit that person being the Father of the Nation. Will India’s position in the world change one bit by this acquisition? I don’t think so. Will this eradicate poverty in the country? I don’t think so. Will this improve our safety or defense? I don’t think so. Will it improve the power or water situation in the country? I don’t think so. Will it inflate my ego? It might. So, for inflating my ego, I am ready to compromise the entire tax-paying public’s money. Gandhiji is not alive today, but I’m sure he would have preferred that money going to any of these earlier categories than the last one. Would it diminish Gandhiji’s greatness or India’s standing if these items were to actually go to someone else? If so, why? Gandhiji isn’t just India’s property; he is great enough to be the world’s property.

I would be glad if an Indian manages to outbid others in the auction and manages to win Gandhiji’s personal items. That said, I won’t be feeling sad if it were to go to someone else as well. What would make me really happy is if they were to show the proper respect to those items, considering the greatness of the person who donned them. As long as that is done, why should it really matter whether they are in India or outside? I only hope that a decision is taken with the mind in this matter and not with the heart, because at times, mind makes a better decision than the heart.

Mobile Desibells

As a whole, India is a nation of high decibel levels. Whether it be the human beings or the animals or even our vehicles or industries, all of us seem to have turned our volumes turned up to the full. While the debate still rages as to how much we are aping the West with regards to our culture, religion, clothes, choice of beverages, language, etc., we have managed to stay true with regards to our decibel levels. Nothing exemplifies this than our mobile phone usage.

Mobile phones came as an elitist gadget. There’s this story about a Bollywood star who possessed one and felt the need to show it off in a restaurant. So, he took it off and used all his acting skills in replying to an imaginary caller. To everyone’s amusement and his utter embarrassment, his phone rang at just that time! Very soon, mobile phones became much more popular, but it took Dhirubhai Ambani to dream for mobile phones to be accessible to a wider population. Overnight, India had a mobile revolution, and every other building seemed to sport a tele-tower. Handsets got smaller and sleeker, and they also opened up avenues for revenue generation in the form of games, ringtones, wallpapers etc. which all could be downloaded for a price. Very soon, we had an addition to the city’s airwaves – ringtones ranging from musical to funny to obnoxious. Indians were breaking out from the colonial hangover and nothing exemplified this better than the emergence of the brash mobile wielders. It was considered quite cool to have your mobile suddenly break out into a Bollywood item number while you were praying at a temple for some peace in your life. To get a call in the midst of attending a concert was hoped for, so that you will be the center of attention, even if it wasn’t a very welcome one. In this age of any publicity being good publicity, mobile ring tones certainly became the flag bearers.

If there’s anything more intolerable than mobile ring tones, then it is the way people talk over the mobile phones. Of course, the blame lies with the nation for producing people who don’t understand the meaning of talking softly. Right from the time a baby is born, it has to yell at the top of its voice to be heard above the din that’s present each day. Cars would be honking, dogs would be barking, salesmen will be yelling and all of them doing it mostly needlessly. With all this happening around me, it is quite difficult trying to have a conversation going through a telephone in the confines of my house. So, imagine having to have that same conversation in the midst of all the din. Now one begins to realize how tough it is for someone using the mobile phone to keep their voice levels down. There are going to be certain times when all around me is quite silent, but is that my fault? After all, how much can you expect me to accommodate? I am accommodating enough when you are making noise around me and still carrying on with my conversation; do you expect me to be accommodating even when you are quiet?

That said, the lack of control over the voice chords does provide some interesting trivia at the most unexpected of moments. I was once going from Bangalore to Coimbatore in a bus and having to suffer through a Kollywood torture called Vel, starring Surya. So, even as I watched Surya jump over a couple of trucks to reach near the villain, I heard my neighbour’s phone ringing. Not realizing how much more interesting this was going to get (having seen Vel for 10 minutes, I should have guessed), I didn’t really pay attention initially, but his voice demanded my attention. In fact, I am sure half the bus was forced to listen to it while he described how he managed to impress his girlfriend, the various techniques used in this operation, and how he finally proposed and made her his wife. I could see many youngsters looking at him with great respect after that for having taught them some effective dating techniques. Another time was while at a theater where a senior manager (I guessed that because he had an impressive potbelly preceding him) revealed a few things about corporate life when he announced how busy he was, attending a meeting and he couldn’t be disturbed even as Emraan Hashmi was about to indulge in yet another of his liplocks. Yet another time, this time in a train, I came to realize about a certain woman’s lack of appetite during menstrual cycle and her aversion towards men with bodily hair. As I said, very interesting trivia, though the usefulness of some of these might be questioned.

With the attack by the moral police on the rise, I don’t think people are going to be really brave enough to lower their voices while talking lest they be considered as digressing from our culture. In fact, I am sure the younger generation will get to learn a lot more about the world around them if they are to just listen to others around them. The good thing about this is that they won’t even have to work hard for it since people would be shouting anyways. I am glad that West hasn’t been able to influence our desibells! Jai ho!!!