Confusion Rules Large!

How often in ur life are you faced with a situation where you notice that the roads ahead are winding at an unconscionable pace,when everything you see looks like one giant jigsaw puzzle and you have no clue on how to get across.Not because your hands are tied,not because you have to contrive something out of ordinary to come around it but because you just don't feel like it.The situation in itself is not insoluble as such,but sitting idle and whigning over things doesn't make it any better either.Every single entity around you importunes you to act but nothing can shake you out of this comatose sleep.You choose to be blind,choose to protract things to suicidal limits.Why?You don't have an answer for that!

Repost:Art

[Repost of an post on my other blog,as I post,I don't think anything has changed as such,our nature continues to be the same]

The recent incidents of the attacks on Chandra Mohan, a final year Master of Visual Arts student at The Maharaja Sayajirao University who was arrested by Sayajiganj police from the university campus on Wednesday,has stirred fresh controversy of "Moral Policing'.

I feel 'moral policing' is an euphemism and a more polite way of imposing the conservative and narrow ideas to impede the regular flow of fresh ideas and what they call aping the west and following their 'culture insensitive' ideas.

Chandra Mohan,who is originally from Andhra Pradesh, has been accused of hurting the religious sentiments of Christians and Hindus in the district and has been booked under Section 153 (A) for promoting religious enmity and hurting religious sentiments with nefarious intentions like creating riots.

There are a few things that I feel I might never understand..
What exactly is this Moral Policing all about?
Do we need Moral Policing?
Is there any way we can justify the fuss that VHP/ShivSena...
activities?

The younger generation is mature enough to know and understand the difference between what is right and what is not.Mimicking the west is a totally different concept.I really do not understand if a couple chooses to go around in park,is it such a big crime that they get beaten up for that,what gives the police this right and what gives these activists the right to beat up anyone.

Issue is not just about celebrating Valentines Day/or any other day neither is it about sitti8ng in the park with your friend.It is about imposing your ideas and ideologies over others.

How an individual chooses to live is purely his/her wish.Policing for all the right reasons has never been criticised ,consider the incident of the recent raid on the Pune rave party.

The past incidents of the moral policing by these activists include,
Damaging public property on Valentines Day,what harm did the shopkeepers do,they were just doing their business and destroying their property is illiegal,Police chooses not to book cases against these people of the fear that,they might be the next target physically,politically etc.

Attacking Private Parties...

any the list goes on...

Again coming to the Chandra Mohan issue...

What I could not understand is the difference between real /genuine ART and gimmickery

I was just watching a news item on NDTV which said (as all of us all will agree) that we can never justify the actions against Chandra Mohan by a group of VHP activists led by Niraj Jain...
but if we talk about the works...
many famous artists said that many works were mediocre and aimed at drawing negative publicity and most of the concepts were not new...
the college authorities say it was just a part of the internal examination but the people who visited this include many Art collectors and exhibitors etc. in thick number....

Well...this is just another dimension to this controversy...

Are the art pieces that rake such controversies are really ''Good" works of art or as the news item put it just a few Mediocre repeats aiming at those 15 sec limelight!Well...this argument might never end!

Ban(d) Karo!

What is the Indian Government going to ban next?Memory?
It was a book on Jinnah now it is a movie on Nehru's relationship with Edwina.
Can't politicians have a private life?Does it make him any lesser if he was in a relationship?We have always drawn flak for this prudish scrutiny of anything.It is this squeamish behaviour of the Indian government that gives you the illusion that you are being kicked into the Victorian era.Some of the objections raised in the script submitted to the I&B ministry are outright lame!
Government has this strange habit of poking its nose into everything/anything it finds objectionable,how you define objectionable is the dicey part.May be it comes with the way we Indians eulogize our leaders,so much so that we make gods out of them,sample the Nehru family or even Gandhi for example.No one can question the fact that they have been some of the greatest leaders world has seen but they were ordinary people when alive.India Today had to black out its cover story on Gandhi,an interview with Gopal Godse.Recently Sach Ka Samana(Indian version of Moment of Truth) also triggered a similar storm,worse yet in the Parliament.Wonder if this is all our MPs have time after those puerile debates sponsored by the taxpayer.
Free press has always been this long-unfulfilled dream of the world,not just the intelligentsia but the hoi polloi in general.With some fine boundaries though!

RePost:Crutches to hop around

Crutches to hop around

This was about time when I was fresh out of Engineering Admission Counselling and had to throw away the seat I wanted to someone who had scored half as much as I did.Reservation on any ground puts me off.This was also about time when I had started sending articles to The Hindu and they used to publish it!Found this on one of the usual random browsing rounds.

Read On...

Come the counselling sessions for admission into post graduate or undergraduate courses and the bright and hardworking students have to face "the ground realities". A friend or classmate of his manages to get into a better college and stream.
How? He has reservation, on social grounds.
In my college I see and meet scores of bright students, who cannot afford even the bare minimum amenities a student needs, and their families toil hard just to pay their semester fees.
And there are students who would spend an equivalent or even a few times more the same amount just on `ordinary outings'.
Let me remind u that the latter are the same people for whom our government reserved a certain percentage of seats and the former category of students, in most cases, are among those who have been burning the proverbial midnight oil till now and have worked out of their skins.
Some have toiled for more than a couple of years, just to get into a college and study with the people whom he has seen wasting time and money, roaming around and having a gala time till now.
Just imagine how depressing it can be!
These students get a seat into the most preferred stream in the most preferred college or somewhere near that, still way lot better than the seat he would have ordinarily got.
No wonder they continue the same wayward attitude here as well.
As in any other case, there are still many backward classes, which need reservation, and it was for this section of people that the system of reservation was initially launched and is still in place because many of these people need an opportunity to progress.
But I strongly feel that there should be reservation on Economic grounds.
Contrary to popular perception, the so-called socially backward class is in most cases economically better of than most of the socially forward class people and vice versa.
As one person aptly put it -India is perhaps the only country where the rich enjoy the fruits of socialism while the poor are fully exposed to the vagaries of capitalism.
But people cannot be blamed for this it is just the politicians who cannot let go of a valuable tool to get the votes in their favour.
But again the government should not forget that the knowledge is the cutting edge of development and social reservation just blunts it.

Read the Original Article Published in THE HINDU

Read the Original Blog Post

Masters (?) of Business Administration

November is coming and the MBA fever is catching up.Every year lakhs of students in India plan their future on something they are not even half sure of.The whole MBA thing looks so amusing that I couldn't resist but blog about it.I am sure all of you would be nodding your heads in disapproval at the end this.

I have been looking(read observing)at this India-goes-MBA crowd for some years now and have broadly divided them into five categories.

Why do you want to do an MBA?

First response: It is cool!

A good majority.

Let us accept that the glitz and glam factor attracts us much like a cotton candy attracting a five year old.We see and hear so much about how they party,how the booze flows from the fountains at their colleges,about how much the girls like young MBA graduates; that it is hard to ignore that twang in the tummy whenever someone says the word M-B-A!But as far as my knowledge goes(which I am sure is tad bit better than that of a freshly passed out college graduate) the gloss would at the max last only as long as your farewell party.And would still be an understatement if I am to explain how ephemeral all this is.

Next Response: The pay is high .

This would come a close second.

This,I bet you will discover as soon as you enter the college, would be the silliest reason ever.No one cares about how much you get or worse yet,chooses a job based on the weight of the pay packet.

Response #3: Everyone else is doing,why should I be left out?!

Honest and sick.

What are you going to plan and what are you going to manage if you are not sure what you want to do with your own future?End of discussion!

Response #4 :Nothing else to do.

Again honest but this time,the limpest of all the reasons.

commune d'intervention:I have always dreamt of it and have wanted to do an MBA for quite sometime now.

Dicey!

Ask yourself,why an MBA?If you get

a clear answer,prepare well for the exams.

But I don't see more than some one or two percent in the last category.Result we have thousands of unfit MBAs passing out of the factories-in-India.

Then there are some others like:

I have two options MS or an MBA.

This is the confused category,precisely they know nothing about either fields and are heavily misinformed.Coaching institutes cash in on this ignorance of the crowd to introduce packages such as GRE+CAT and GRE+GMAT for people from this category.They should sit and think what they want rather than which is better.

All said and done I still cannot comprehend the heated discussions before an exam and this applies to our approach to all the exams in India.If there are two or more CAT aspirants,try eavesdropping and you will hear things that start at what the scores are like,but then head to dumb-er topics.

The TV channels also do their bit,inviting center directors and other students.All this is pretty usual and might sound innocuous to everyone.But then there is the crowd which makes heroes out of the people who have made it to any of the top colleges and also assume that those who haven't are mere losers.At times I feel like tie-gag-ing these guys up and then screaming out loud that what a person chooses to do with his life is his personal and we should respect him for that.I know scores of my friends who are doing fantastically well in their area of core competence,I can talk about only the engineering fields,simply because I have been in that field and have closely been and worked with them.

Having said that I still feel that those beautiful people who choose to work for an NGO or dedicate their lives for what they love,not worrying a bit about how much money they are going to make are the real managers.Time and again I have been with people for whom money is everything in life,and no I am not talking contra-socialism here,I know what is the significance of money but do not quite understand the need for the abundance of it.

I have always maintained that Manage-men-t is for people who can Manage-Me(self) and then Manage-Men(people around).Joining the MBA forums,'Bell the Cat Community' on Orkut,posting your scores on PG and TG,attending seminars,building your profile,solving tonnes of problems,indoctrinating people on why one should do MBA or even cracking the exam does not make a manager out of you.Come on guys,get a life!

India,the land of prejudices

I was just reading about the recent case of a British national Kaya being humiliated in the court to a point where she broke down.The defence lawyer asked her obnoxiously irrelevant questions,people in the courtroom were all laughing,the defence council was laughing;but this is no laughing matter neither is this an independent incident.The lawyer,Prajapati represents the sorry state of the rest of the nation.Even today a girl who dresses in a certain way,ties her hair in a certain way,drinks or smokes is considered to have 'invited' molestation(whatever that means!).It is absolutely ok for a guy to smoke or drink but not a girl?How can a girl dressing in a certain way 'provoke' a guy to molest her?We aren't animals,or are we?Kaya,the girl who was molested and then humiliated in the court of law ,said that she would file a defamation case.The issue doesn't end there,we cannot go about filing defamation suits;what we can do is sensitise the society and general public on how to treat women.

Respect for someone does not,and I presume should not,change with her choice of clothing or lifestyle.The problem is more about education and awareness than anything else.Till the time we set these things right we'd continue giving such shady pretexts as foreigners are casual about love,a girl who dresses western outfits could be molested on similar grounds. All this sounds so lame!It's high time we started debating about such things on open forums.

CAT 2009 voucher sale: Violence on the bank floor

by Allwin Agnel on 09 September 2009

97 comments

CAT Vouchers are available today at Axis bank branches and along with it came violence, parents, lovers and god’s blessings – ok, and some vouchers were finally acquired by students as well.

The following pictures were taken at Hyderabad by kk_karthik , known as highflyer on PG, while he stood in line with hundreds of others to take a shot at being one of the first to buy the CAT vouchers. Better resolution pictures are below:

http://twitpic.com/h23ot
http://twitpic.com/h247y
http://twitpic.com/h239j
http://twitpic.com/h23gf (Check out the line at 8.30AM)
http://twitpic.com/h23di

Rohit aka estranged_gnrs, being the enthu guy he is, travelled from Chembur to Vashi (in Mumbai) and was one of the early ones to go and try to buy the forms. Early morning he tweeted the following – “There r ppl with god’s blessings, parents bunkin office, lovers givin moral support,standing in queue to buy the CAT voucher”.

Apurv headed to Shivaji park at Dadar to buy forms and sent us this pic

http://twitpic.com/h22px

Send us pics of violence, love, peace and hope. Tell us the best branches, the worst ones and the most awesome things you noticed while being in line!

CAT is here people, rock on!

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Source: http://www.pagalguy.com/2009/09/violence-at-the-bank-floor/