Life's a crazy mess!

It's summer already and Delhi is back on it's infamous heat streaks....a whopping 40 degrees for a while and lingering at 36+ in Celsius all day is anything but pretty...and to top it off, the Air Con at work was turned off....some intelligent soul decided that the Air Con deserved a holiday and thought of giving it one this Saturday. Uhm no...I'm not talking abt the situation at my company, but it's well....at a site where i'm working....the details, I shall refrain from revealing...let's just say an earlier cribbing session has come back to haunt me in the form of a project :( (Hey don't get me wrong, work's awesome!)

Another week ends and this time around instead of writing down my weekly report to my Technical Manager I thought I'd give my blog a shot...sigh and I'm back to having nothing to write. A long week can do things to you....but a long and eventful one at that. A friend flew in halfway around the world to meet me for one ;) Alright so she didn't fly down halfway around the world 'just' to meet me, there were other important things but hehe....let's just use the more appealing reason :D A Dilli Darshan that lasted almost 10hrs, loads of shopping and a goodbye at the airport sums up my thursday....did I forget to mention the amazing food? Sigh....I still drool thinking of the amazing stuff we had all thro' the day! Observe as I stuff in a 50Rs Momo :



Aaaaaah...now that we're done with the drooling...how many of you have got a compliment from a person who has later made you feel extremely uncomfortable with a racist statement? It was just another day at work, a site that is being set up by us Engineers and one of the officials from the client started up a conversation with me, let's just call him Mr K

This conversation has been translated from a combination of English and Hindi to English to assist the linguistically challenged and to avoid embarrassing myself 'coz of my extremely funny version of the National Language

Mr K: Hey Shanim, how's the progress on the site?
Me: Going on great sir. We're moving quite quickly and have managed to make and beat most of our targets. (yes yes I'm trying to make it sound 'professional' ;) )
Mr K: Do you know something, your Hindi is real good for a south indian

Blushes stammers and speaks gibberish and Mr. K regrets having uttered those few sentences mentioned above

Me: No sir, I'm far from perfect. I still make quite a few blunders as I speak. (sigh...modest ain't I?)
Mr K: Oh no, it is quite good. Since you primarily use other languages and use Hindi only to converse with us, I feel it is good. We find it very difficult to speak English, which we use only in rare situations, and you are quite fine with both English and Hindi. Even your accent sounds quite good and not like a southie.
Me: Oh!...Thank you :)

An awkward silence follows....

Mr K: So Shanim, what does your name mean?
Me (thinking): Sigh...hate this question!
Me: It doesn't really have a meaning. My dad had made it up and I find that a good enough reason to love it.
Mr K: That's real nice. So what is your full name?
Me: It's Shanim Sainul, sir.
Mr K: Oh, so you're christian are you?
Me (thinking): sigh....this would be the 2324112nd person assuming I'm X'ian...how do I tell the guy I'm agnostic?....uhm...let's leave it as Muslim
Me: No no sir, I'm Muslim

A silence follows, he looks uneasy and suddenly gets defensive

Mr K: Oh, I'm sorry, I shouldn't be asking you this. Hope you don't mind.
Me (thinking): WTF???
Me: No sir, why should it be a problem :) It's okay.

We move in different directions and he resumes his silent chantings from the Bhagvath Gita as I continue to watch my Malaysian friend talk to the sub-contractors in a language that baffles me, it's a mixture of english and a dramatic performance worthy of an award. (Uhm...yeah I do help out eventually....I mean I have to stop laughing to do so, right?)

A normal conversation isn't it? or is it? Aren't we all just plain racists? We walk around talking about people from south india as madrasis or southies and when we're down south in Bangalore, we abuse the 'northies' who have absolutely no care for the city and it's beauty. We call people Mallus, Gultes, Pandis, Chinkies, Surds....the list just goes on. True we never realize it. We probably have the worst case of racist behavior and it continues to be a part of us being Indian. I've often heard people talk about their caste and how it is not acceptable to marry someone from a different caste, or of how another person was of a lower caste and their 'kind' used to deliver milk in villages. Now why did all this spark a thought in my otherwise vacuum head?

It's 10:30pm. I walk home after a tiring day at work and a tough search for some snacks for the long night (fine....I choose to make the nights long by sleeping at 2am) and on my way to the gate I overheard a very weird conversation. A man, quite tall and bulky was talking to a cycle rickshaw guy. The only thing I heard (which was quite loud mind you) was "Tum Hindu ho ke Musalmaan??" (Translated as "Are you Hindu or Muslim??"). I was distracted by a friend of mine at this point and didn't see what happened next but.......does this question really matter???? I often get jealous of the Chinese....most of them are free-thinkers and are not limited in their sights and perspective to just religion or castes for that matter. A Chinese friend of mine was fascinated when we talked about religion. She had never heard of Buddhism and Islam before and she looked at us like a 5-yr old at a candy store.

We remain in our closed boxes, shying away from interacting with people from 'other' backgrounds. After all, they are different and they can be threatening to us. Why the $!#@# are we still living in a archaic society??? Isn't it time we moved on and changed our perspective?

A religion is merely our guide to be good to the world, it's there to give us peace of mind and more often than not, we're born into it (atleast in India). Is this a reason to fight on or profile?? BEATS ME!!

"Hey...don't ever let somebody tell you 'You can't do something'....not even me alright?

You got a dream, you gotta protect it...people can't do something themselves, they tell you 'You can't do it'....you want something? Go get it!...Period!!" --Chris Gardner in 'The Pursuit of Happyness'

A couple of words that struck my heart like a sword and struck it good. I've no better word to say about this movie than "Amazing!!". Adding one more quote from the movie to end this tiny post.

"And it was at that time that I thought about Thomas Jefferson writing that Declaration of Independence. Him saying that we have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And I thought about how he knew to put the 'pursuit' in there, like no one can actually have happiness. We can only pursue it."

Maybe it's just all around us....maybe it's just waiting for us to call on it...maybe we've forgotten to smile and welcome happiness into our lives....maybe...just maybe.....

An interesting conversation sparked up the other day while we were traveling to a site in Delhi. My manager and another of his colleagues were with me in a tiny cab which apparently had more accidents than engine parts. We were talking about some incidents that had occurred recently in the country and eventually ended up having a discussion on drugs.

It is known to most students in the country that drugs are very much in business and available cheap. Local panwallahs near colleges are often the easiest links to get 100gms of Weed for a amounts that can be considered pretty much like pocket change. And this is surprising?? Think again!!

We often hear from our conservative parents that such things are true only in places like "Bangalore", "Bombay" etc....me being from Kerala, they continue to vouch for the state and tell me that the state is a real nice place and doesn't have any influence of sorts. Reality, however, contradicts! It may be true that my college didn't have much of an influence to this and if it did, I was unaware of the same, but move out of the place and into most other cities and tourist hubs and you're bound to find a stoned foreigner or student walking around. The pretext of coming into the country for "religious" and "spiritual" peace is more or less a couple of words that just mean nothing if you were to look at it carefully. The reason why India is known to be mystical and magical is probably because half the tourists who come in here remain 'high' through their stay here and....well it's kinda obvious what happens then right?

So what exactly am I talking about here? An external link may help : High in the mountains...

Video Reports of the same : Video

A coincidence? Maybe not....with things happening around the country (and the world for that matter) it was bound to come out sooner or later. Kudos to the reported and CNN-IBN for covering such a controversial topic! And yep, the 3.9 million tourist inflow (as of 2005) may just surge higher after this report...

Last night I was unable to get a wink of sleep and spent 2 hours walking around my tiny room wondering what to do. Spent sometime online (yep nothing new) and then after a couple of blog reading and commenting I moved on to gaming and then a book and finally the newspaper. I've been keeping off the paper in Delhi lately since it's the Indian Express and the paper hasn't really caught my attention much owing to it's very brief content.....until last night ie.

The Front Page of Saturday's Newspaper had a disturbing tale to tell us and it shocked me.

Children all over the country seem to be going missing and not many seem to care, or atleast don't seem to notice. We often find kids walking around the roads and traffic signals begging for alms, we given them a cold shoulder and just walk by. How often do we stop to think twice or maybe ask them where they're from? I'm sure we being Indians love to know what's happening in our neighbour's house or maybe Amitabh Bachan's family but little do we care about the children walking around on the streets with tattered clothes abused psychologically, physically and often sexually. And where do they come from? Probably homes like ours or maybe our neighbours' (where we so often poke our noses into).

The recent Nithari case was a wake up call. And yet we fail to understand that this is just one of a million other similar occurrences around the country. A whopping 1,047 children go missing in Kerala alone, as per the article. This from a state that boasts to have one of the best Police forces in the country. I shudder to think what the numbers are in other states or of the many that go unreported! A child going out for a haircut, another to play cricket or another out to meet a friend....all missing, and we aren't just talking of young children but some as old as 16yrs.

Fear sets in one's mind just picturing this and I wonder...."How safe are our kids??"

Gurugiri v/s Gandhigiri

The year is 1947, our leaders stand proud and announce that the Republic of India is now a reality. No longer will we be ruled by a queen residing in an island nation over 7000 miles away, no longer will we have to listen like slaves to men and women from a different nation who claim to be our masters, and no longer will we be split up in the name of caste, colour or creed......or so they say!

A law was then put forward, to bring up those who suffered in the name of castes, by which Scheduled castes and Scheduled tribes were given priority in both education and jobs to help them climb up the ladder in a society they were long forgotten in. 59 years hence, we have politicians who believe everyone in the nation is now equally backward and handicapped and they too need help. The solution? Reservations for OBCs!
Isn't it time we woke up to reality and re-assessed where we went wrong? 59 years and things haven't changed? Doesn't that seem to ring alarm bells telling us we went sorely wrong assuming reservations were the answer. And yet its being implemented once more under the pretext that things will work out this time around. Come on! This ain't some sort of video game where all we have to do is move a dial and things just seem to work out. Real world scenarios ain't about just increasing or decreasing things, its about working out solutions, something our present politicians just run away from. Guess thinking is too hard a process for them..it would actually involve some work.

A recent interview of our HRD minister proves how incompetent our ministers are. The guy didn't know what percentage of the country are OBCs and yet he intends to increase reservations to a value much higher than the percentage of OBCs in the country! What's worse? Its just reservations...if you can't get a person to complete high school with good grades how can you expect him to study a course that even the best in the country end up dropping out of. Not stereotyping here, there are quite a few brilliant SC/STs and OBCs in our country and I'm proud to know many. Without competition however, they're minds are left to idle their way through education and pretty soon it will cover the job domain too. Are we really helping anyone in this context? I doubt it. Our minds excel only when placed in a situation when its challenged. If it isn't, we're just animals...or worse "bots"....we don't think, but just let others think for us.

"To our dearest ministers, I'm pretty sure you ain't listening to us but what the heck...if you really want to do something, do something that would help our nation rather than rape it of its good.

Bring in scholarships for those who do well, you want OBCs and SC/STs to get a bigger share, then give it in terms of scholarships rather than reservations. Remove our country's biggest hurdle, the caste system, once and for all. Its been over a thousand years and it still lingers in our nation, you are just making the whole system more concrete by doing this. Give aide based on the present financial status of the person rather than ancient castes which should no longer be relevant in our country!"

"Could you teach me a little bit of that subject. I can't seem to understand how we do that" he said and without hesitation she agreed. They moved to two empty seats in their college classroom and started engrossing themselves in intense studies. Exams are nearing and its not easy to mug up the whole course material without some help. An hour passed and suddenly the room fell empty. It was just them and then suddenly he held her hand and rubbed it around his body moving it closer to his privates. The girl was shocked and tears popped out of her eyes when she realised what her "friend" was doing. She pleaded through her tears to let her go and pulled her hand back but he wouldn't stop. He slowly moved his hand around her admist the tears and her pleas to let her go..."No...No!...Please Don't..." He wouldn't stop...and then he heard someone coming and let go off her and she fled.....her tears flew fiercer than a river during a flood but she couldn't complain for he had a girlfriend and she was too innocent at heart and couldn't hurt someone by telling her girlfriend how ruthless and pathetic he was. Time passed and the hurt girl continued with her life, suffering all the pain she had gone through and the incident just never leaves her, haunting her everyday as she sees him sitting on the other end of her class....tears escape her eyes everytime she thinks about it...yet she can't speak it out and ease her pain...

Why is this world so cruel???? Rape attempts happen all over the world every other day. These days 4 yr old kids aren't spared either....I had to learn that the hard way when one of my best pal's sister was raped and murdered. And the court of our beloved nation let them go 'coz they were juveniles! If I were the judge I'd probably put the kids into prison and put their parents in too. Are we guys that bad? Can't we think of anything besides sex in our lives and constantly abuse the fairer sex? Life just doesn't seem to be fair.

How many of you girls reading this can relate to incidents like pinching or fondling in public places by strangers around you? Or even further a casual touch on the wrong parts with all the wrong notions by guy friends of yours?...or worse...an attempt of something a lot more serious? Why haven't most of you voiced out your pain? Do you think the respect we have for you will die down 'coz of it? Get real ppl, its just gonna get better and we'd probably help you fight it. It took one of my friends 10yrs to tell her parents of being molested when she was a kid...I'm glad she did. Most don't and things just seem to get worse for them in their lives.

People often condemn my religion and its concept of Hijab. I'm no religious preacher but there's one part of the hijab that most of you might have not heard of. The first part of Hijab is meant for the guys and not for the girls. If a guy were to see a girl who is provoking his desires he should not look at her and keep his eyes down. The covering up for the girl and the scarf is the second part of the Hijab. Its funny how only the second seems to be practised now.

The world seems to be going to the dogs and nymphomaniacs....and I'm getting pissed with life 'coz of how many of my friends are being victims of such crazy acts.........

As I say..."Life's a Crazy MESSSS!!!"

A long conversation with a friend made me realise how narrow minded the whole world is....

It all started with a lousy forward which involved a kid's hand being run over by a vehicle all 'coz he had stolen food. The blame was targetted on Islam and the muslims who enforced the punishment on the poor kid. Kinda shocked me actually, seeing such a forward was nothing near amusing and I still can't understand why the acts of fundamentalists end up being blamed on the religion. I responded (yep the idiot that I was...i actually did) by saying that it was not the religion but the idiots who felt their religion preached violence and nonsense. This resulted in a huge debate on how that person's religion (not mentioning names or religion) was superior to others. Ok, it kinda got far and I had this lousy taste in my mouth at the end of the day....

First and foremost, I'm no orthodox believer of my religion, but the essence of my religion or any religion for that matter is nothing but love. Impart love, do good and be good. Although all religions seem to impart the same thing, why do we argue over the fine prints of the religion and make a big issue of the same? Does any1 have a clue on this?

I'm an Indian. A land where almost a zillion religions (literally) survive together and our laws promote secularism. But hey its not like we don't have our share of problems, we have our Muslim Leagues, VHPs and a billion other extremists who test the country's secularism but hey...wats the deal?? Why bother with such lousy arguments?? Life has better things which are far more important than religion. What makes a billion ppl around the world argue on religion and make a big deal out of it i can't seem to understand. Take a look at the US for example. All muslims according to them are extremists Jihadi terrorists. And this about a religion that talks about love for all humans.

Sigh...oh well this is more or less a lousy topic, but I just had to get some steam out. Oh well...sorry guys, shall get some better topic next time around..

Hey ppl...yep i know its been a while since I last posted something significant...so let me attempt something :)

Last evening was great...barring the cold that I caught in the night walking around in the terrace of my flat...yep I was nuts to walk around in the cold for about half an hour doing practically nothing..but hey...we are talking about Shanim here...let me get back to what I was trying to bring out here..."Rang De Basanthi" happened yesterday...roughly translated as "Give me color Basanthi"....if I've made a bunch of heads spin in confusion by what I just said its a movie guys and a really good one at that! Alright so I'm gonna give you an idea of what the movie is...India has a wonderful history, a history that most of us are proud of, on how we managed to get the British colonists out of our nation after a 200 years struggle....and what worked was non-violence. Our freedom fighters did a great job by sacrificing everything they had just to give us the world's largest multi party democracy.....but what we are with right now is not a democracy, but more of a democrazy...

The movie brings out the patriot in us, the guy who sitting behind most of our heads wondering why we are doing nutty things and screwing up our nation instead of actually doing something to make it the best in the world. And we needed a bunch of kids to come out into a revolution and kill a minister in the movie to awaken us. But guys...seriously, is that the solution? Killing a bunch of politicians? Yeah...all you end up with is a name that you are a terrorist and a traitor to the nation.

True we are in a country of free speech and a lot of things along with that, but free speech just causes more confusion to an already confused nation. We have corruption out here that reaches all the way from the roadside beggar to the journalists who bring us most of the news. Wouldn't want to speak too much about our journalists, they seem to be running out of topics to talk about that they've actually come up with some of the most hilarious reasoning for issues that pertain our lives here (with reference to some guys working off TOI). Hey I ain't saying the whole country is a mess, but we have our share....and we have our share of greatness....thank you NDTV for bringing the best out of journalism in india.

There have been a billion and one comments about me complaining of everything under the sun. Why do I do that you ask? Well I'm frustrated. Our country doesn't deserve the treatment we give it. Our country would probably be the only country in the world who's so obsessed with everything and anything that comes with a sign that says "foreign". In a country like Britain, they shy away from all products that are not "British"...some of which aren't half as good as the foreign counterparts...I know of many restaurants out here in India that actually charge you tenfolds for something that has imported written on it. What's with us?

Now this would get me a free visa into the world of Shiv Sena and the million others who talk about patriotism and swadeshi blah blah. Hey I don't believe in that. We need all the foreign influence we can get in our country, 'coz that's the best way to learn and work on our own. As an example, look at the car industry...if it wasn't for competition from the likes of Toyota and Honda, we wouldn't have seen a Mahindra Scorpio....or for that matter a Bajaj Pulsar (one of the best bike in india purely designed in India...atleast I was told that). What we guys lack is the drive to do anything in the country we call our own.

Where have we made the mistake? Blame the govt...they don't do anything for us....i beg to differ, they've given us education, good (atleast some) roads, freedom to do anything we want...even get to the parliament and scream out our views or spit on the roads and get away with it. If there is any1 to blame it would be us, our education and everything else.

We have been told, from the moment our minds can recognise an apple from an orange, that the world in india can be taken for granted. And our minds are moulded to mug up anything and everything that has the word 'Text' on its title. We haven't really given the oppurtunity or the freedom to think for ourselves. I remember when I was a kid, I had written an answer for an exam on my own with the end result more or less the same as what was written in my classwork note book (yep we had a bunch of questions which were pre determined as important by our gurujis in school) and I was scored low for the same. When I had asked for a feedback from my teacher on the same, the response was that it wasn't the same answer as that in the classwork book.....come on!!!!! Thankfully my lecturers and teachers in the later years were the kind who encouraged me to think and bring on my own thoughts in the books rather than a bunch of nonsense in our texts...

So where have we lost it? We have lost our imagination. Even the IT industry that our country is so proud of is doing more or less the same. The prime of our imagination is when we have just joined a company fresh from college....when management jargon hasn't taken over our minds and what are the jobs we are alloted? I'm sure most of you would agree when I say its either documentation or some unworthy jobs....thankfully I haven't yet been put into a project so I can't really say where I'm headed. Everyone in our country is here to jeopardize our imagination and they are pretty much succeeding in the same.

Oh well...I may just never end with my cribbing....but someday I hope...I too would be able to leave a mark on my nation and the world as many in our country have.......someone like a Bose maybe....or uhm....Sabeer Bhatia? Oh well...life's just begun...I'll get there....

Peace out ppl

Hey guys, I'm back...was a little busy with life and hence didn't really get the time to blog. Alright, first for some news, the queen of England has invited me for tea ;) So maybe the queen of England in reality didn't but my cutie pie niece did...and I'm off the UK for a holiday! Yep, will be off in a week's time and will get back prbbly sometime next month. Shall blog from there as often as I can and keep you posted on how pretty the daffodils are.....uhm..alright other stuff too.

Started the day on a very wrong note today....had to drop my dad off at the airport and since I happened to have an Indian license, I can't drive a car :) Just kidding, so maybe i can drive a car, but well I don't have one and hence can't get anywhere. We rented a cab to get to the airport and on the way back I made a huge mistake of responding to the cabbie's conversations. Ended up getting pretty pissed off and well I still am a bit.

It all started off with a discussion of the recent revision of fuel prices here. Hey I agree it may not be thoroughly justified, 'coz all of us have to end up paying a huge sum from our tiny pockets on fuel, which is an essential commodity. But when you think in numbers, it doesn't seem so bad, considering the fact that the oil prices have risen a whole 10$ a barrel while the increase has been restricted to just 3Rs a litre. Yeah I know, there is a huge difference between a barrel and a litre and they could have kept it a notch lower. Oil prices have been on the rise for the past few months and continues to rise all over the world, and India ain't the only place this is happening. Why else would you explain ppl around most developed nations switching over to more efficient engine technologies and environment friendly means of transportation (read as walking). Our country, atleast my state seems to think otherwise. Guess the communism inside them just makes them want to give everything off for charity and put our government in a greater loss than it already is in. Alright so they want the excise duty reduced, I agree that could help. And I really wish the Central Govt does take a look into that....but seriously, will that end all our problems? I don't think so, if its not fuel, its something else! Yesterday was a state-wide protest on the same and none of the taxis, ricks, and private buses were running. Thankfully Trivandrum has a mass transit system that is run by the State Govt, and hence we weren't affected, but the rest of the state suffered....and well this ain't the first time!

Most people here love talking about how China did this and China did that and then about how Russia did this and Russia did that...hey im no anti-communist, infact I was a pro-communism guy till I got down to Kerala (odd isn't it, most ppl change otherwise...guess my Civics texts had me fooled for a while). At present I just can't understand why each party in our country seems to be contradicting their views which they held when they were the opposition. So China has been growing fast, well so have we...the figures show, and that's one of the reasons why Foreign investments in the country are on the rise and that's the reason why most of us have jobs with pays that our parents and grandparents couldn't dream of when they were youths. China has a lovely way of giving everything to their ppl, but they expect their ppl to do their duties perfectly as well, if not....guess I wouldn't know much but I've heard its hell...Indians on the other hand love getting freebies and goodies out their way, but if you ask them to take a walk down the park and buy a newspaper on the way, they'd say its none of their business! You have people here who actually run around protesting for "God knows wat" just 'coz they get a free meal and 50 bucks at the end of the day (at most times even they have no idea wat they're protesting for!). If they had used their senses and just worked for something that could prove to be productive eventually, we'd prbbly never have had to protest in the first place! What's worse? There are people here who complain about VAT. Guess the rates aren't really all that sensible but well I'm glad they're finally auditing taxes...and hopefully within a year or two the rates should come further down rather than the usual up. More than 50% of our population doesn't really pay taxes properly. Do you?? Why even I doubt if I do. Lets take a normal procedure of buying a computer for example (alright so maybe its not normal but this is one instance i could think of), most shops ask you a question before you pay up....do u want a bill? Uhm...if this was any country besides India, the consumer would have screamed the hell out and probably called up some friends in higher places 'coz of that question, but we indians casually ask if the rates would be lower, to which we get a response that we don't need to pay the sales tax then and we readily agree to purchase a 20k-40k commodity without paying a penny to the government. The government at this point must have an idea to probably build a lovely new road from you home to your office, but its short of funds thanks to you not putting in your part. We end up with a road that has more holes than the moon has craters and end up protesting for the same (oh yes, ppl in here would protest for that). I pity our finance minister who tries so much to get some sense into our ppl's heads about this fact, 'coz well as we are, we just prefer taking everything for granted!

Anyways, I put the conversation to an end when he actually mentioned that he would prefer having the rules of Saudi Arabia in India (no offense to those from KSA). hmmmm...so i guess he's a guy who prefers being held on four sides by bars rather than the freedom which our forefathers so bravely fought to achieve. The air we breath, the words we speak and the thoughts we let out....our freedom! Just can't understand how ppl could have such thoughts crossing their minds. Trust me guys, I've seen things there and I've met people from all over the world (Indians ie.) who just wanna get back and get work here if our country is ready to provide them a decent living. Something that at present seems possible, provided we do something. :) You have no idea how proud I felt when I was in Abu Dhabi talking about the oppurtunities that our country promises us now, our IT sector (it has its problems but its great)...our airlines industry....and almost everything under the sun. Life's just so much better here and we've got all the freedom our heart desires. And yet we complain about the same freedom we take for granted! Oh well.....this is out to deaf ears...so might as well shut up.



Disclaimer:

To all those from the US (including any Govt Agency that may be reading this including Blogger.com's administrators), these are individual views and not meant to cause hatred, but just love for my country. I have absolutely nothing against any of the nations I've mentioned in the article or yours and respect the way of life in the respective countries with all my heart. All I wish to express in this is my frustration at my own people who so readily complain about their Govt, when they are not ready to do anything themselves.