The Mother Teresa complex

I was watching a show on Mazhavil Manorama channel called Midukki (means Smart Girl). And I almost threw up listening to the contestants speak about themselves. Almost all the conversations went like this

-I like working with charities / underprivileged. I want to do something for cancer patients / leprosy patients / children / ….. , (take your pick )

- If I give my 100% at something , I will really be happy

- I don’t want money, I want happiness. My family is the most important thing to me

This is indeed a mysterious virus that seems to be affecting contestants of any beauty / fashion / multi-talent shows. I call it the Mother Teresa complex, which I formulate as follows :

“In a fashion / beauty contest, when a contestant is asked about what she would like to be, 99 out of 100 contestants will transform themselves to subtle variants of  Mother Teresa. The one contestant who responds with honesty will be laughed at by the entire world and will finish last in the contest”

Case in point -  Madhu Sapre who when asked “what would you do if you became the prime minister of your country?” answered truthfully that she would look to provide facilities for sports persons to practice as there are no such facilities in India now. As you would have guessed, she finished 3rd of the 3 people in final.

Honesty ? what is that ? Just not in fashion any more …..

Courage

We see examples of exemplary courage in our day to day lives. However we have been tuned to see and appreciate only acts of physical courage. A commando facing a terrorist is something all of us can immediately identify with. Would you think the same if I told you about Saina Nehwal rising to top 5 badminton players of the world, or Mary Kom becoming a multiple boxing world champion ?

I am quite sure not. “Hard work , dedication for sure, but where is the courage ? “, I hear you ask.

To continue to believe in your dream when no one else around you does, requires courage
To hold your head high and never waver from your vision even when you stumble along the way requires courage
And to tread a path along which others before you walked and failed requires courage

By this bar, I admire the courage of the above mentioned people.

Being a sports buff, I just happened to choose two random names that came to mind. But tell me, don’t you see lot more examples of courage now around you ?

Sentimental Idiot

Well, I am one. I am also often accused of being ultra-sensitive. But some situations do bring a tear to my eye

Case in point was my daughter’s annual day celebration. One of the events was a ball room dance with around 20 kids . This the one in which a boy has to partner a girl for the uninitiated

It so happened that one boy did not turn up for the dance , maybe he was unwell. There was this little girl who was partner-less and struggling to dance .She had to imagine that her partner was holding her hand while she tried to sway and whirl around. Even from the back of the auditorium, I could see her face fall as she stumbled through her steps.

What happened next was really a special moment. Her teacher ran up to her and took to the stage as her partner. Spinning and swaying with the little one, whose face suddenly lit up like a 100W bulb.  Had to flick away a tear from the corner of my eye as I watched it. I can guarantee that kid will never forget her teacher for the rest of her life.

Which reminds me, one of these days I should get back to teaching …..

Regret

Got this from a friend’s page on Google+

"Regret for the things we did can be tempered by time;
It is regret for the things we did NOT do that is inconsolable."
- Sydney J. Harris, American Journalist

I envy the people who say “I can look back on my life and say I have no-regrets in life” and really mean it. I cannot do that, I have several regrets :-(( Not necessarily ones that I brood over or spend a lot of time thinking about. But they are there still the same.

Now what are some of those regrets ? Well I regret blogging about this already for starters :-)

The latest comedy in town

House-full-2 ? Mindless , slapstick comedy, but you can get a few good laughs in

Cobra ? Pathetic excuse of a movie. Time for Mammotty to play 65 year old character roles, not this kind of nonsense.

Team Anna fiasco ? Priceless. Undoubtedly, the best comedy in town. People contradicting each other, so called up-holders of transparency becoming shrinking violets when their own team discussions are recorded. Hypocrisy flowing like the river Nile. Ugly fights on television channels. This one give you full value for your time spent :-)

Yet another example that there is one fight that you can never win, the one with the Government. They have far too many resources on hand. And just when you think you are winning, they change the rules completely.

Go ask Vodafone

Ads

Actually the story is quite old, just got around to writing my point of view after a few months. Times of India, which is on an aggressive expansion spree, put out this ad ahead of its Chennai Launch.

I thought that it was really subtle and genuinely funny. They do not not directly show The Hindu paper, just visuals of folks going to sleep clutching the paper. ( God knows that has happened to me as well. The Hindu was unreadable when I tried it a few years back, I have not dared to touch it ever since !!) 

The Hindu response was more in the face and basically calling Times of India readers dumb. I did not find it funny, it was just a rude advertisement and tasteless.

I am personally not a big fan of TOI, they have no sense of proportion while printing main stories and focus too much on sensationalism. But in the ad-war, I liked the TOI one better !!

Now which paper do I read ? I prefer Deccan Herald. Less to read and more relevant :-)

A tune out of nowhere

Life does seem a bit surreal at times. [Actually now that I used the word surreal, I realized that I don’t exactly know what it means :-)] A quick reference online  and now I can confirm that surreal is indeed the word to describe it.

Had to step out to buy dinner tonight, so took a parcel from close to Marathahalli. As I crossed the busy old airport road and walked towards my car, Istarted humming a tune - Laung da Lashkara ( see link below) . I had no real reason to hum it, I do not understand the lyrics ( heck I can’t tell if it is hindi or punjabi) , I had heard the song only couple of times before and never in full. And I do not really hum too much anyways !! [ With good reason too . If I sing at full volume, there would be few better crowd dispersal tools. Pepper spray and water cannon included  ;-) ]

Got into the car , turned it on and guess what song is playing on the FM radio ? The exact same one !!! What are the odds of that happening ?

Actually now that I have listened to the song in full, it is nice to listen to. Still no idea what it means though :-(

Rs. 32 …

To have so many people struggling to meet ends in such a vast nation is sad enough, what we don’t require is for moronic excel sheet economists to come in and say if you earn more than Rs.32 a day, you are not poor.

Most likely that guy never stepped outside his air-conditioned office, has no clue what it is like to live on the brink. 

The guy who is poor has enough things to worry about, least the economic wizards can do is not to insult them and us with this definition .

Read this too : http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/open-page/article2622214.ece

Older , Wiser

Yet another birthday passes buy.

A sign of growing old is that …………….. well , I forgot :-D

Done with the mandatory growing old part, the growing up part continues to be work in progress. Guess it always will be , belated happy birthday to myself :-)

Daddy, what do you do …

“Daddy , you have seen my time-table at school, right ? “

Yes Indeed, I have

“So you know what I do throughout the day at school?”

Yes, I do know what you do at school. In fact I almost have your daily schedule memorized

“So tell me this. What do you do whole day in office ?”

Errrr ….. I go to the lab, test some things. if they are not working, I try to fix it

“So you are like a repair-man”

Well …… no, not exactly. Sometimes I think of better way to do things. Like I get lot of ideas.(Actually daddy goes to office, drinks coffee, cracks lots of jokes, browses the net, checks mail and comes back . But what the heck, the previous explanation sounds impressive, even to me)

“BLANK STARE”

What do I tell ?

How about “I think about the really tough problems facing us today and try to come up ways to solve them” ? Nice statement, but that is not really what I do most of the time :-(

Should I say that I am a researcher who does not know half the time whether he is right or wrong ?

Or if I am someone whose job involves making vague power point presentations on how to solve problems that may or may not exist ?

I really need to think on how to put this nicely to a 6 year old !!

Terrorism …..

I was browsing the net when I came across this article talking about a potential 9/11 10th anniversary attack in the U.S. I certainly hope that this would not be true

However I am confused after reading the article. The article quotes a person from Homeland security as saying “In this instance, it’s accurate that there is specific, credible but unconfirmed threat information.’’

If its accurate , credible and specific, how the heck can it be un-confirmed ????? I can’t figure this one out, can you ?

Joys of life

My little one has her headphones plugged into wifey’s 5800 Xpress music. She is listening to “Country Roads” by John Denver. Not just listening too, she is belting the tune out at great volume, with the occasional Air Guitar routine thrown in. Nice to hear , her singing genes ,thankfully, are inherited from the Mom’s side:-)

So different from a year or so back when I was wading in pools of misery. Where have all the dark days gone ? The nature of human mind must be such that a few months of good times and you begin to wonder what the fuss was all about during the not-so-good times .

Here is the song :

Pet hates ..

Some time back in by blog, I had professed the pure hatred I have to all the folks who pay through Sodexho / Ticket restaurant coupons.

Well, I have a new category of people to add to the hate list : The nit-pickers.

The very same category of people who insist on picking up any fruit or vegetable one by one. They seem to be incapable of counting in anything more than one unit at a time. By all means you should pick up certain things in units of one --> Coconuts, Apples, Mangoes, Pineapples, Tomatoes .. I have no problems there.

But WHY would you want to pick up 1/4 kg of green chillies one at a time ? Or beans ? Or leaves like curry leaves , mint or coriander. 

I guess India is a free country and they can do whatever they want…………………. As long as they don’t do it front of me, I’m ok too !! :-D

I have the same policy for vehicles with L board, driving slowly in the middle of the road and blocking traffic. I tend to honk the daylights out of them. Couple of friends suggested that I should go gentle on these poor souls.

I have the same answer, You wanna learn driving ? Fine , do it . BUT NOT IN FRONT OF ME !!

Eight years

And still going strong. Happy Anniversary to us !!

Wisdom from a six year old

We went to the railway station couple of days back to see-off my sister, brother-in-law and niece. Diya had just spent the good part of her two month summer vacation with them. She has always been extremely attached my sister's family

So predictably on the way back she was sobbing uncontrollably in the car . Both me and my wife were trying to console her and she settled down somewhat after a while.

And then the rain started, the onset of Monsoon in Bangalore.

She turns to me and says "See daddy, it is not only me who is crying. The whole world is crying with me"

What do I say ....... Where does she get this imagination from ?

Keep marching

Often corporate strategies are not very different from what Alfred Tennyson described in his poem The charge of the Light Brigade.

Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
"Forward the Light Brigade!
Charge for the guns!" he said.
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.

Forward, the Light Brigade!"
Was there a man dismay'd?
Not tho' the soldier knew
Some one had blunder'd.
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die.
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.

Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon in front of them
Volley'd and thunder'd;
Storm'd at with shot and shell,
Boldly they rode and well,
Into the jaws of Death,
Into the mouth of hell
Rode the six hundred

Just replace six hundred by whatever is the appropriate number for your organization. The poem would pretty much hold true at some stage during the evolution of the company.

Try sticking around in any one company long enough and you will know how true Tennyson was :-)

Conversations with my daughter

"Daddyyyyyyy, after you finish 10th standard, what do you do" ?
Well, then you have to join for +2
"So after you finish your +2, then will you get a degree"
(Where is she getting these terms like degree from ???) No, you have to join for a degree course after that
"So after that you become a doctor is it ?"
No, there are several kinds of degree courses. You can become a doctor, engineer, a writer, what not
"You know what I want to become ? "
(She is six and she already knows ? I am nearing thirty five and I'm still not sure !! What can she say, she'll say either Doctor like her mom or Engineer like her Dad ) No, I don't know, why don't you tell me ?
"I want to become a dance performer. I want to dance on stage and entertain people "

Considering that my child-hood dream was to become a KSRTC bus driver, I have to say my daughter's one is considerably better

The breaking point

You know, sometime you look at a person and can just sense that they are just about to break. One tiny provocation and they will just come at you with all that they have got.

I am reminded of this each time I see Dr.Manmohan Singh. Don't think so, check this out

• Got taken to the cleaners in the 2G scam. Opposition just stopped short of accusing him of taking money himself.
• Announced a JPC to probe the scam, opposition slammed him for doing it "without grace"
• Supreme court quashed the appointment of Thomas as CVC and after supporting his appointment for long, sadly PM was left with an egg on his face
• To his credit , he tried to own up responsibility a bit faster this time, still got murdered by opposition for 'un-satisfactory' statement
• Got blamed for everything from onion price rise to Bofors, still managed to cling on
• Tried to hold a press conference to clear the air, ended up in shooting himself in the foot badly with the 'pressures of coalition politics comment
• And don't forget, the MP bribery scam following the No-confidence vote following Indo US nuclear deal in 2008. Guess who backed the deal to the hilt ? Right answer, our PM himself. Expect a lot more heat to be piled up on him in the coming weeks

What I expect is a spectacular breakdown when he takes on his opponents with a choice of four letter words in Punjabi :-)) Who knows, he may already be at it behind the walls of his house !! :-D

I have the deepest sympathies for our PM. Politics is indeed the most fickle of all professions. Ask V.S.Achuthanandan from Kerala. CM today, not even an MLA tomorrow. Such is life .....

SMS flood

Generally I am all for technology, but in some cases people misuse to the point of absurdity. Take SMS for example. I get all sorts of nonsense wishes on my cell phone, here are various samples that I have got over the past few months

1. Happy New Year ( Well this is not too bad, apart form the awful text art some folks seem hell bent on making)
2. Happy Republic day !!? ( really ??? when was the last time you wished somebody in person for this ?)
3. Happy Men’s day ( Please, never ever wish a man on “Men’s” day, if at all there is such a day. I beg of you, please don’t)
4. Happy Bandh !!! ( this was when there was a call for a one day Bandh in Karnataka following the fights between CM and the Governor)
5. Best wishes for “XYZ”-festival ( Might be useful to check at least if this is a festival that I am even aware of, let alone celebrate !!)
6. Motivational messages – (I do read a considerable amount of books, so chances that you will tell me something original is slim. Why not avoid it altogether ? )

I really need to update my phone to something that can bulk-delete. My old-fashioned phone is killing me :-(

Life would be fair if ….

1. Life would have been fair if eating and sleeping made you leaner and exercise made you fat.

I would have been sporting rippling six packs if this were true. But alas, no such luck.

2. Life also would be fair if Engineers made all the money and Managers did all the work !!!!

hmmmm, now that I mentioned it, #1 seems to have a higher likelihood of success than #2 :-((