Cliché Nazis

We are a bunch of cliche nazis! We love to see people from our own perspective, from our own looking glass, filter them through our sieve and if someone does not comply, we brand them 'not good' or worse yet 'sick'. What a few people would never understand or do not want to understand would be the fact that a person is defined by the society he grew up in and the friends he keeps.Even pretty mundane things like what or how you would judge right from wrong or otherwise. This situational and circumstantial prudence could be regarding anything or everything.It is how you see things and people around.

I understand that overt forms of bigotry are strictly proscribed fortified by culture and ensconced in the conscious but if you are ruling a person out or looking down at way he looks at things or understands his world or choose to vilify that individual for this reason,then please understand that this act of yours is insanely foolish.

Exempli Gratia, most of the people in and around the southern part of India would believe that you have no ambition in your life if you are not doing your Engineering or got done with it and are not planning to do your masters in Management.You are a person of flexible morals and gullible principles if you had been into more than one relationship in your past;for them you have,if you do, to have been into only one relationship in your past and should get married to that person else in all probability you would be looked down at as a person who fools around and philanders or as they would put it,'no one might take you seriously'.I am yet to figure out why people around would not take you seriously because of what you were to or with some person or some other person was to you,sometime in your past.Life is big,it's bigger than anyone of us,sometimes things happen,and you have no say in that,most of the times.What happened or how you reacted to certain things or how you perceive your environment now depends on an equation that has a heavy weighted variable for uncertainty.

For the Love of God!

Well after a break of what felt like ages, am back to blogging. It feels great to realize that you are alive and blogging. This is not just a block-breaker but something that has been doing rounds in my brain for years now.

I was never sure of my spiritual inclinations, neither am I now. Being in such a position could be pretty dicey, esp. when you are from a place where people kill and get killed for the love of God, well, not exactly God but their own renditions and names of him. Being a Hindu by birth, I was exposed to a million and half gods by the time I had reached my early teens, let alone the number of daemons and the negative forces that could possibly harm you.
Children world over are taught to get up in the mornings, remember the name of God, almighty as many times in a day as possible and pray before you go back to bed. Sounds pretty harmless but what we are actually doing is forcefully insinuating our thoughts and ideas into their heads. Worse yet, we teach the philosophy of God in schools. This has become so inherent of our cultures that we seldom see anyone question anything. Any person who dare raise his voice against this is termed an infidel and the idea or proposal is rubbished as blasphemy. No matter how forward we go or however civilized we say we are, we never were or are open to a debate on this. For us this has always been something that has to be blindly believed in and worshipped.
These remind me of an episode from Boston Legal where Alan Shore asks Denny Crane, "Denny, why do you believe in God". To which Denny replies, "If there is no God, then am safe, for we lose nothing by believing in Him. But if God happens to exist then we are all screwed!" Our stand on this is no different; just that most of us would never say such a thing, even though deep down somewhere inside many of the believers would choose to worship and be safe.
By now you would have started frowning at my post, but believe me; I have nothing against any of the existing religions and absolutely nothing against God. But, I believe that believing in some unnamed super power above and choosing to worship that should be a personal choice and not rubbed upon people, unlike what we do today. Instead what we can do is give children a holistic view of things and leave the choice to them, just like you would do for a career option.
I personally have nothing against the 'God created the universe’,’ offer him some form of sacrifice'[intangible, that is],'pray daily' concepts. Do those if you feel you reach some psychological or spiritual high ground by doing so, but again having said that I can never understand why kilos of ghee, milk, musk and honey are poured on an idol while millions go starving? I can never understand why you would shoo off a person begging for alms but drop a gold chain in the hundi or get a 3Cr rupees crown made for an idol. I better not discuss why you would kill or beat a person up for not worshipping 'your' GOD!
You needn’t visit some distant temple or go far off places or flog yourself or trek mountains to find God. Do that only if it is your way of worship not because others do so. But first love the person beside you, you would find God.

Searching Life!

How important can it be to score grades in exams or to have a huge bank balance or number of visa stampings on your passport?Do these numbers count?Yeah they do and to what extent!Let us ignore the more mundane things like college admissions and price tag on the groom for a while,for these would be the most obvious benefits(I'd say implications) of it all.
We talk about the huge percentage of Indians being in NASA or surgeons in the US on one hand and at the same time can't ignore the fact that almost 30% of the nation is below the poverty line,deprived of basic amenities,education included.Only 61% of Indians are 'literate' and things look pretty planned up for a good percentage of these people.
So what do these lucky few do?Slog out for their percentages in the board examinations,choose a stream,which more often then not happens to be Engineering and most of these people choose an Electronics or a Computer Science all to do what?Take up a 'Software' job.Run after their managers for a good rating or a decent appraisal or a much sought after 'onsite' opportunity,which for dummies,is a company paid trip abroad.While there are many who have their feet on the ground there are still many who believe that they contribute to almost half of India's GDP.Pretty harmless so far, but things turn insipid when the former category of extremely 'successful' individuals starts believing that those who did not go cookie pushing in the last couple of years have nothing 'planned up'.
How many of these planned up souls dare say that they are doing what they have always wanted to.Don't tell me that you had always wanted to be one 'software engineer' , kowtowing to anyone who gives you a good deal or that you had always wanted to be that manager who doesn't have the liberty to take a day off for his family/friends or anyone else who can't think or act on his/her own or doesn't have the liberty to do so.Get a life guys! If you can't, then atleast let the people who live life on their own terms do so and not taunt them based on what you think is correct, judging these few sane souls on your own parameters.
I wonder sometimes if ever there were scores for say environmental awareness or a person's etiquette quotient or the frequently quoted but often misunderstood societal awareness.How much would these successful people score.If they would score less would they be looked down on,gibed at and be virtually vilified. Can't picture it,right? Because it might never even happen.
Stats?I have none.
Surveys to back it up?Nay.

Then how can you be sure of such a thing?
Why do we get so judgmental when it comes to numbers,scores in exams,ranks,points at workplace? 'Conceit',I feel, should be at the top on the Cardinal Sins classification.We Human Beings have got used to being so full of ourselves that somewhere down within we have forgotten the feeling of how it is Being Human!

Not Just Skin Deep!

One thing pretty consistent of we Indians is the White skin fetish. Fair girls are often called pretty, where as the darker ones are often ignored, to an extent that they find it difficult to get a match for wedding, many of my friends don't want a dark girl as a girlfriend, the blight doesn't end there. It's appalling to note that we need to import models for our advertisements and worse yet movies. While we in India have blends of every possible shade. What we ignore is the fact that it is not just an ad film it is we the people who are wrong and it's our perception which is prejudiced. Here in India fair means beautiful, when elderly ladies comment ladki doodh si gori hai ,that means that she's beautiful according to them. To them it hardly matters if another darker complexioned girl looks prettier than her doodh si gori.Even the matrimonial ads hunt for tall, ’fair’ and slim girl of blah-blah caste, Doesn’t matter even if the prospective groom is dark, stout and balding.

While world over tanned skin is considered aesthetic, here in India everyone from your mother to relatives to friends to even neighbors would be at your back and ready to comment on your skin and would be ready as ever to offer their two cents on how to get fair. The 'remedial' measures include home treatments and exotic creams and everything that had ever brought a fair patch on the skin of some lone inhabitant of a distant planet in some galaxy no one had yet ever heard of.

What is it with fairness that makes it a national obsession(read aspiration)?It is more of a neurosis now with color. The total size of the grooming products market in India was estimated to be worth Rs. 8.0 billion in 2007 and the total fairness cream market alone is worth around Rs 820Cr. Another interesting stat that I stumbled upon was that when Kolkata-based Emami Limited, had launched India’s first-ever fairness cream for men it had launched that exclusively in Andhra Pradesh and according to a report the male users account for 26 per cent of the state’s total fairness cream market worth Rs 80Cr. What's the truth? Can fairness creams, soaps and talc turn Black Beauties into Snowhites? Expert verdict is a clear no. The reality is not so cut and dry. Even though there is no scientific backing of the claims made by manufacturers, sales of fairness products continue to gallop.

Irony is that we Indians complain that others are racist while we are hardcore racists at heart and this segregation based on complexion is nothing but profiling.The ‘fairnesss’ products are doing no good to the cause either, no wonder India is one of the largest markets for these ‘fairness’ products that claim to make you upto a couple of tones fairer. Films demand a foreign looking Indian actress or an Indian looking foreign actress as one lady head of a top media group sighed on the award winning episode of We the People on NDTV. Some even suggested that the word ‘fairness’ be banned. But if we look at things we would understand that the folklore is deeper than the ads. Even the gods supposedly lament their dark complexion - Krishna sings plaintively, "Radha kyoon gori, main kyoon kala? (Why is Radha so fair when I'm dark?)" . Sociologically we prefer fairer skin. Media is just a mirror of the society. No offence meant to anybody,but the first thing that most north Indians exclaim when then fly down south is the dark complexion,not that south Indians per se don’t look good or that the north Indians do, but it is the skin complexion that features top on the eye scan list. We only see what we want to see. We might never change, but we can atleast dream of a society which is less foolishly vain and targets to go up a couple of tones on things other than the fairness-scale.