Changing.. Rearranging..

Thin crust pizza I had the other day should have been an epitome of indulgence, as always. Why then, these days, does the heart seem to rather crave chulivarachi bhakri (not translating to avoid spoiling it for those who get it)?

Do rows of frozen desserts generate the excitement of ice-cream truck’s musical arrival during summer holidays?
Enter the neatly arranged sections of milk cartons and newspapers of that supermarket. Would you have rather preferred a daily alarm by the cheery milk-man or that whistle of the newspaper-boy?
Does a community mailbox in some centralized no-man’s lobby evoke the same emotions as the arrival of the uninformed postman?

Ha!

On one of those purely blissful evenings of heart-to-heart conversations, when you want to freeze time and let life just pass by, my cousin told me how he has occasional hallucinations about glimpses of our native home, nothing of which remains the same anymore.. I have always been a very detached person, or so people tell me. Add to that the gift of an extraordinarily abysmal memory -- but, on a quiet Saturday evening, things just seem to be melancholy.

And Nostalgia, I personally find the toughest of them all, to deal with.

Reminds me of an absolutely wonderful movie: “A Good Year”.  Well, is Ridley Scott a crazy cinematic genius or what!  And people might as well have stopped acting after Marlon Brando & Al Pacino; and Leo comes very close, but Russell Crowe is arguably the most multi-dimensional actor we have, IMO. Add to the mix, always-brilliant Marion Cotillard: probably my only girl-crush, ever. Does it get any better?**

There’s no way I could do any justice to the movie if I start writing down more, so thought would rather embed a couple of clips that appeal to me the most.
This one’s when Russell Crowe’s character, currently an extremely-high-profile investment banker in London Stock Exchange, arrives at his uncle’s dilapidated chateau that he inherits, the place where he spent most of his childhood and never bothered to return till this very moment:

And in this one, he is taking snapshots of the property in order to sell it. I somehow find it unsettling in a subtle-yet-deep sort of way:

Do I want to rant on about the supermarkets and the internet and the AI for gradual eclipses of old-world memories? Nope! The question is: If "J.A.R.V.I.S." and "Deep Thought" and other such fictional dreams have become reality (well, almost), why don't people take Dumbledore's pensieve or Asimov's time traveller more seriously?

PS:
Courtesy: clipconverter.cc could have done a better job on video quality but it's cool nevertheless!

**If I have to be a tad bit critical (just for the sake of completeness :P), it almost becomes a Videsi version of “Swades” at the end. Much like the Bollywood movie, girl is the sole trigger the guy gets all sorted, oriented and all of that. I mean, apart from the fact that this undermines the whole point, my argument is: does that ever happen in real life?

You ain't alone!

Remember days when you went through those Readers' sections from newspapers and hoped you might get some answers you seek? Not needed anymore and how! In today’s times when even aunts tell you: “Beta, aap yeh cheez google kyon nahi karate? (Why don’t you just google this?)”, the world-wide-web is your oyster!

So, there’s that exact same health advice being sought for a very specific condition;  there is a heart-breaking story of unrequited love; there is an especially quirky financial issue that needs resolution; hilarious comments/reviews that only you can totally identify with; posts that completely get you and only you can completely get!

So whether it's Stack Overflow or Quora or any other such discussion forums, you are definitely going to find some companion for your boat! In a way, web content tells you there are people who are going through similar miserable, happy, tricky, challenging, exciting times. As weird as it sounds, Internet kind of becomes your sympathizer -- even a confidant (most definitely so if you wish to contribute content yourself?). No wonder Mark Zuckerberg thinks he needs to do social psychological experiments on Facebook users and can actually tamper with people’s emotions!

Obviously there is 99.9999% of the stuff that you filter out, laugh off or don’t agree with. But the rest 0.0001% is just so uniquely relatable, it’s hard to believe it’s just statistical anomaly!

Where does this characteristic similarity of feelings/behavior/situations come from, then? A friend of mine, who excessively loves paradoxes and convolutions, keeps saying: "You are as unique as everybody else". Let’s just say: these networking sites are a good place to find some solace. Or, may be, to discover you are actually almost soulless?

Let me explain. There’s this all-time-favorite movie of mine called "Before Sunrise”. Here’s one of the many random things Ethan Hawke’s character says: (There are some loopholes.  To begin with --  I am not sure if these numbers are right; but that’s besides the point anyway.)

"50,000 years ago, there are not even a million people on the planet. 10,000 years ago, there's, like, two million people on the planet. Now there's between five to six billion people on the planet, right? Now, if we all have our own, like, individual, unique soul, right, where do they all come from? You know, are modern souls only a fraction of the original souls? 'Cause if they are, that represents a 5,000 to 1 split of each soul in the last 50,000 years, which is, like, a blip in the Earth's time. You know, so at best we're like these tiny fractions of people, you know, walking...I mean, is that why we're so scattered?"

(Yeah, well, I am talking about souls; I am quite cool like that! )

Isn't it an absolutely crazy thought? Looks like I need to do some soul-searching.. or "soul-surfing", if you will!

Hold your ORs, please!

One of the major pain-points of working with doctorates and talented people (Bazinga! This one’s for you, Howard Wolowitz!) is their articulation or rather, lack of it.

Let me clarify at the very outset: I am not even remotely an authority on the matter. I tend to over-analyze myself and the audience (even when it’s just a small group of people) so much, that at some point or the other, I lose track of what I am saying and the continuous feedback loop causes the situation to cascade from bad to worse to disastrous. (Slightly off the topic: but speaking of how crazy these people can be, somebody told me he imagines animal heads instead of humans' to overcome the stage-fright and it works!)
That much for that disclaimer..  In this era of opinion overload, do I really have to be perfect to criticize anything?

I am not talking about stage-fright, however. Nor the language, the vocabulary or the grammar. What drives me crazy is just the sheer inability of these people to contain their thoughts and coherently communicate a point. Take this guy, for example: He has a tendency to dwell excessively on corner cases and assumptions and limitations. So, most of his arguments start with ors and buts and of-courses and the main point is lost somewhere in that cobweb. It's such a voluminous barrage of things being hammered on your brain that you don’t even register when he slips in the core idea.

Things ain’t black and white and we live in this fuzzy grey world. Be it Physics, Chemistry, Biology or applied fields, the reality is most of what people theorize is only an over-simplified version of reality. It is usually well understood that modeling things demands that certain conditions are met before anything can hold true. So why talk about things being dependent on seasons and low/high tides and rotation of the moon?

Are these know-it-alls trying to show off how comprehensive they can be? Do they actually expect listeners to understand complex points with that esoteric mess they come up with?  I mean, for God’s sake, even Einstein came up with special theory of relativity before publishing general version of it! (Not that most people understand either). But there’s this crucial difference between written and verbal communication. No denying that good written content needs some merit -  to state the least: basic flow and sound structure. However, a reader still has the luxury to revisit the content and demystify things if so desired. A listener is at far more risk to lose patience and effectively, interest. The whole stint is then just an epic fail!

Elementary, dear Mr. speaker! If you really want the audience to get what you are trying to say, it is paramount you sow simple and gradually build up complex branches. Elon Musk, The Iron Man of this generation (I mean, if anyone’s even remotely close to the title, it has to be him!), in his Reddit AMA, had the best advice on knowledge acquisition/retention I have read so far. And I think it somehow perfectly fits in this context as well: 

Hmm.. So as I prepare to put myself through one more hour of absolute frustration next week, what do you recommend I do? Bang my head on the walls? Pull my hair out? (Well, my hairline is already receding.. Won’t his hair be a better idea?)

Confessions of a Gossipaholic..

Well, admit it: Lately, Bollywood has become kind of predictable and boring -- what with everybody dating everybody else. As for hollywood, I am not (yet) "keeping up" with the Kardashians or Hiltons or the likes but I am fully tuned in when it comes to any gossip related to most of the mainstream artists.

So, an inappropriately significant fraction of my time is wasted in mulling over completely pointless things like —

• Why are Leo and Bradley so obsessed with models (with all due respect to the modeling profession)?
• Are Ben and Jen really through?
• Why won’t Ashton and Mila just admit to being married already?
• ...

I  recall spending embarrassingly long time browsing gossip magazines in aisles of superstores in the US.  What is it about celebrity rumors that makes them spread so widely and stick so hard? Research says — part of it is good old-fashioned schadenfreude. George Clooney is so annoyingly handsome that we want to believe he's really a sicko or in some way, flawed. And, of course it helps a little that the paparazzi industry cauldron is ever-so-simmering. A slightly logical part of my brain revolts at times by signaling this obsession is detrimental but to no avail.

If only it was limited to some harmless celebrity rumors!

Well, aren't some episodes just classic! Remember Ganesha idols milk-drinking miracles of 1995?  If I'm not gullible and you're not gullible, how come some improbable stories take a long time to die?  Clearly, rumor or gossip has a way of slipping under our mental defenses before we think to question it. The best ones seem to sidestep common sense entirely.

We don’t have to go too far looking for examples. Right here is your latest on - "Curiosity killed the cat!".
My gossip and rumor-spreading qualities recently reached a pinnacle when I almost wrote a premature obituary.  We are talking about a US-based colleague of some of my seniors at work.. A person I have never seen, met, heard from or never even sent a mail to..  In my defence (or so I would like to think..), if I did have a way to cross-check this “apparent” news, I would have probably bothered to do the verification part before passing the information on..
(Note: I had to Retouch and remove the “blemishes" on iPhoto! :P)

Hmm.. I really do not know where I possibly figure on the bell-curve(?) of gossip-mongers but I have a feeling I am somewhere worse off than I would like to believe. So why do you and I gossip anyway? Is it excitement, anxiety, boredom, envy, condescension, vulnerability, attention-seeking? Hormones, neurotransmitters? A bit of everything?   Or it’s just that thing from Silence of the Lambs: “Quid pro quo. I tell you things, you tell me things.”

I have come to realize this psycho-analysis is beyond my current ability.

Ahem.. So folks, what’s the latest on Bigg Boss 9 anyway?

<Your Name>_2.0

Here’s a "QWERTY quirk" that I recently came across: Now, the earliest typewriters were mechanical gadgets where, characters were mounted on metal arms or typebars, which would clash and jam if neighboring arms were pressed at the same time or in rapid succession.  Jams were especially serious, because the typist could only discover the mishap by raising the carriage to inspect what had been typed. The solution was to place commonly used letter-pairs far apart so that their typebars were not neighboring, avoiding jams. Thus (and here’s the slightly controversial part) the QWERTY keyboard was designed to slow down speed.

Knock knock.. we do not live in mechanical world anymore. And apparently, better keyboard layouts did come along, but QWERTY had that undeniable advantage of coming out first and becoming the norm. There might be disagreements on this one, but the idea should be clear: often enough, we get into a situation where sub-optimal choices are made and tend to persist.

So, pause, think, ask yourself: Are you trapped in inferior, inefficient solutions and too lazy to move away from the comfort of familiarity? Is that inertia keeping you from doing your risk/reward analysis and taking that leap of faith? Are you, dear reader, too scared to start everything from scratch even if that’s the only way to push the envelope?

This is where, an economist Joseph Schumpeter advised: we need something he called --“Creative destruction”. Voila! Do you think you can come up with two better words to describe AB?

Reinvent, AB de Villiers' style...

Honestly, Nicole Kidman couldn't have been worse in this ad. But the lyrics is just bang on!

 "Occasionally, people come along who are not content with simply moving things along. They want to take things further -- tear up the plans and start again, then take another brave step. They will see the future and knock down the walls to reach it, insist the dream is possible; overcome all indecision and take a running jump into the uncharted.  Bored by the reinvention of the superficial kind, they want more. Because their goal isn’t to improve what’s been done before; but totally reimagine it."

Of Quotes, Sports and GOATs..

I am a sucker for quotes. Whether by super-sarcastic Calvin, narcissistic Churchill, inspirational MKG/MLK.. -- No matter what flavor it belongs to, a good quote has that inexplicable stimulus to grab you instantly; often even when isolated from original context. I could go on and on -- Brevity has never exactly been my forte. So what better than a meta-quote to convey my feelings?!
 - 'A quotation is a handy thing to have about, saving one the trouble of thinking for oneself, always a laborious business.'

Anyhow, so when I walked into this sports bar a couple of weeks ago as we were bidding adieu to a team-mate of ours, my plan was pretty standard — to have some good laughs at the expense of people in their inebriated state. I was, however, pleasantly surprised to find the menu card -- laden with quotes from(/about) the GOATs of Sports!

Well, you may argue that coming up with a good quote is not that big deal at all. But something that is substantiated with so much of sweat, pain, blood, tears (and so on..) has just so much more credibility (for the lack of better word) and appeal to it, don’t you think?

Ahem! So, here’s my compilation of all the 'Quotable Sports' I could reconstruct from that evening. Most of them are cliches, but I want to remain true to the experience nevertheless!

'Dream as if you’ll live forever, live as if you’ll die today.'
                                                                               — Lebron James

 'I have seen God. He bats at No. 4 for India.’
                                                                               — Matthew Hayden

'If you’re afraid of losing, then you daren’t win.'
                                                                               — Bjorn Borg

'Some people want it to happen, some wish it would happen, others make it happen.'
                                                                               — Michael Jordan

'All this going around is not aggression; if you want to see aggression on Cricket field, look into Rahul Dravid’s eyes.'
                                                                               — Matthew Hayden

'No matter how good you get, you can always get better; and that’s the exciting part.'
                                                                               — Tiger Woods

'There’s no doubt. It’s certain that I will be 100%.'
                                                                               — Lionel Messi

'Once something is a passion, the motivation is there.'
                                                                               — Michael Schumacher

'I hated every minute of training, but I said  - Don’t quit. Suffer now and live the rest of your life as a Champion.'
                                                                               — Muhammad Ali

'Everyone has a plan -- until they get punched in the face.'
                                                                               — Mike Tyson

'I once cried because I had no shoes to play football with my friends. But one day I saw a man who had no feet, and I realized how rich I am.'
                                                                               — Zinedin  Zidane

'Your love makes me strong. Your hate makes me unstoppable.'
                                                                               — Cristiano Ronaldo

This one is my personal favorite:
'Enthusiasm is everything. It must be taut and vibrating -- like a guitar string'
                                                                               — Pele
Did I mention I am a sucker for analogies, too? Something worth exploring for next post, eh?

being wuman..

Last few days, there has been huge hue-and-cry over “India’s Daughter” - a BBC production featuring Delhi gang rape convicts and defence lawyers. From whatever little snippets of it that I have watched, the documentary, unfortunately, seems as gut-wrenching and horrendously disdainful as the incident itself (might have been well-intentioned on the creators' part, I concede) Things like these just make you wonder — Would humanity ever see light of the day when violence against women will stop? When consent will prevail over machismo? When conscience will prevail over whim?

Security or well-being for women, however, is just the tip of the iceberg that is gender equality. And, with the latter, honestly, I have no hope at all. This inequality is so naturally ingrained and hard-coded in all our DNAs that it’s hard (if not impossible) to mutate it.

I watched an interview of Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and I think she might have said something very simple yet profound — “It’s so interesting — Cultures are so different around the world;  except around gender.”  

That’s how, at least, I, interpret this comic :-

A couple of months back, we had an instructor coming down from US for an external training and as it turned out,  I was the only woman amongst around 13-14 in the class. Now, I honestly have nothing against Americans but I hate all their hypocrisy and patronizing attitude towards everybody else. In the lunch-break, he asked me - “So what’s the gender ratio like, in the workforce around here?” I was quick at repartee - “I think it’s better than that of the US”. After around five seconds of calming down, I further clarified: “I have been with this company for about five and half years and this is the only company I have worked with, so I have nothing else to compare it to, but I feel the ratio is quite healthy and unless I am in denial — I don’t sense any gender discrimination”. Now, the way I began that answer, it was quite obvious I was very much in defensive mode. It’s amazing how, sometimes, we end up saying things people can clearly see through. The problem is — if you ask me that question again, my answer won’t be any different. Not only because that’s what DENIAL means, but the fact that - I (and so many others) have taken it for granted that I (/we) will have to go an extra mile for proving my (/our) worth and getting the same opportunity as my (/our) male counter-parts. I, personally, might have been mentally preparing myself for it, but is it right to expect so from every woman?

Here’s what Jennifer Garner once said — “Every single person who interviewed me, and I mean it - every single person, asked me, “How do you balance work and family? As for work-life balance, Ben said no one asked him about it that day. As a matter of fact, no one had ever asked him about it. And we do share the same family. Isn’t it time to change that conversation?"

I am not saying women are better than men. I am not saying women can do everything men can. And I genuinely do not believe so. That’s hardly the point, though. The moot question is —  In all walks of life, why are women constantly being judged on a different scale? Why are the benchmarks and standards different across genders? Cynical, as it may seem, but I don’t relish how educated gentlemen celebrate Women’s day by saying they are so very grateful to women, how men would be nowhere without women and how and why they think all women are super-women.. (and blah blah.. Come on, you have enough content on FB and WhatsApp today!)

I am asking: Why do we want every woman to be a super-woman? Aren’t we just like men - ordinary, fallible human-beings?

Am I my mother’s daughter?

Existential much?!

“She comes across as such a genuine and nice person!” My mother tells me on the phone line, talking about a friend of mine that she just bumped into.

Now, I can’t claim to know how mothers think. But if community wisdom is anything to go by, I don’t see her being very displeased about how her daughters turned out, generally speaking.  And yet, that comment just seems to kill something within me, I keep wondering whether she feels slightly let down by her two daughters — that they would probably not fall in “good-natured” category, by any definition of the word. Of the zillion ways I must have disappointed my mother so far, this, somehow, bothers me the most.

I have always been fascinated by anecdotes about her — from my maternal/paternal grandparents, Mausis (mother's sisters), her friends and so on. They consistently remark about her as someone very simple, shy, intelligent, kind, responsible, mature, hard-working — right since they have known her, to this very day. With my atrocious memory, I only recall few glimpses of her from my early childhood - whether it was me and my sister causing her public embarrassment by vomiting all over the MSRTC buses during our summer travels or my (infamously loud) weekly head-baths on Sunday mornings. And there onwards, rest and most of it has been me just being me, I guess. Obnoxious and stubborn (In that regard, I am yet to meet my equal). And she? She has been her self all along - Calm and assuring. As a parent, I would think a tad bit laid-back but always fully supportive and also supremely feisty when situation so demanded.

Now -- it seems for reasons beyond my comprehension - I never aspired to be a particularly "sweet" person. So, neither do I ever force myself to act like one nor do I have any regrets on that front. And so it goes for my sister too - brutally honest, straight-forward, self-righteous, extremely opinionated and unabashedly argumentative.. Qualities that I actually have grown to admire. Sure, there are times when I feel I might have overstepped a little bit - like when I reprimand my juniors at work or my occasional tirades and mood swings that my close friends have to put up with. 

So much for honesty, huh? But, seriously -- without getting into (so far personally uncharted) complexities of what parenthood demands off people, what extraordinary feats parents accomplish and sacrifices that they make, it stands to reason to assume that they would like to see their children as some kind of extension, if not reflection, of themselves. May be a way to carry forward some sort of legacy of all the good things they represent, stand for and take pride in?

Reminds me of something that probably won’t make much sense without the context. (Let me give it a try: An immigrated Spanish mother who is protective of her daughter being American-ized.) 

So here goes the last scene from movie 'Spanglish’ — (In words of the narrator/daughter )

Shortly after we left, my mother told me of another decision she had reached — I would no longer go to the private school.

"NO! You can't do that to me! You ruined everything. This ruins my life! You've ruined everything. This is exactly what I was worried about. I will never be able to forgive you. No, it'll never be all right. You're wrong. I will never forgive you. I have a scholarship! And nobody gives this up!"

The 1.3 miles from the Clasky house to our bus stop was the longest walk I'll ever know. I had publicly scorned my mother. And yet she had not reacted.

What did spark our climactic moment was my use of a common American phrase. "Not right now. I need some space.” 

—"No space between us.”

In the midst of confrontation, she found clarity. She expressed regret that she had to ask me to deal with the basic question of my life at such a young age. 

And then she asked it  —"Is that what you want for yourself - to become someone very different than me?" 

"I've been overwhelmed by your encouragement to apply to your university and your list of scholarships available to me. Though, as I hope this essay shows, your acceptance, while it would thrill me, will not define me. My identity rests firmly and happily on one fact: I am my mother's daughter."                       

                                                                           Thank you, Cristina Moreno          

                                                                                                                                                                                          

Why..

..blog? It’s so passe!

Nobody puts it better than this mind-bogglingly perceptive teenage girl..

"Writing in a diary is a really strange experience for someone like me. Not only because I’ve never written anything before, but also because it seems to me that later on neither I nor anyone else will be interested in the musings of a thirteen-year old school girl. Oh well, it doesn’t matter. I feel like writing.”

                                                                                                                               - Anne Frank