prateekshac

An interesting thing happened today.
A colleague of mine, whom I’ve never met before, dropped into my cube to ask me if I could think of any workaround to a request by the Belgium Consulate for a personal interview, in response to a tourist visa that he and his fiancée had applied for. Given the recession, have I gotten into the business of handing out friendly advices and travel tips you ask? Most definitely not. Though I can’t imagine why it might not in fact be a lucrative venture. I should probably think about it. I know now that there is demand for it.
Take this case for example. The person in question is planning on a honeymoon in Switzerland. Not surprisingly, he wants to do it right after his wedding. That means that he has to have their passports stamped well in advance, unless he wants to spend his wedding day waiting by the door for the courier. Our chap does what seems quite reasonable; gets in touch with an agent who tells him to pick Belgium as his port of entry, plans out his trip, makes all the necessary bookings, puts together photographs from their engagement and invitation cards of the wedding; and applies for the visa.
Now,inspite of the fact that he applied to the Belgium consulate which according to his agent is the most lenient one of all, our man gets a call from the consulate for a personal interview. Enter problems. Traditional Indian values and culture dictate that one must not indulge in any interaction whatsoever with members of one’s opposite sex, leave along an out station trip, until a sacred black beaded string has not been tied around the lady’s neck by the gentleman. This partially has also to do with the fact that there are not too many Indian movies in which unwed characters take off on trips and return without astounding reproductive feats that would put even the best infertility clinic to shame.
I suggested to our friend that he make the trip along with the lady and her mom, or probably his mom, or potentially even the entire family. After all, such a thing as a visit to the Belgium consulate in Mumbai for the approval of a honeymoon visa does need the entire family to be present. My heart went out to him when he said that even that was frowned upon in his culture.
The only feasible option, he felt, was to postpone all his bookings and to reapply for the visa after the sacred string had been tied. I can vouch for the loss he is going to incur in terms of unbelievably heavy cancellation fees, leave alone the headache of re planning the entire thing.
Really.. Was all of this necessary? How much are we really paying for the stringent rules we follow in the name of culture? How many opportunities are we losing out on?
Like I said, if our minds got any narrower, they might vanish.. poof!

I feel quite like a hypocrite living a religious life while at heart being a staunch atheist. Penning down this is perhaps a way to reduce my guilt.

I was born into a quasi religious family who; though were God fearing, were not religious. They believed in the existence of God as a creator; more for the lack of another theory, than anything else. However it was believed in our family that religion was nothing more than a set of man made organizations intended to bring some tangibility into the vague concept of God and to establish practices which would enable us to display faith in God in ways that would not come across as utterly obnoxious and insane to the surrounding community. To drive home that point, imagine there was no religion and people wanted to believe in God. How in the wide world would they express it? Would they all evolve different ways to express themselves? In which case, would it not look ridiculous to one person the weird ways in which his neighbor chose to express his affection for God, because after all any way you choose to acknowledge an invisible intangible being is unnatural and funny, much like how kids speak to their invisible friends and dolls. And being the social beings that we are, would we be able to live with this absence of consensus? Hence evolved religion.

In short, while it is impossible for someone who is religious to not believe in God, it is perfectly possible for someone who does believe in God to not be religious. And we belonged to the latter class.

Life was peaceful with no interference from religious differences while I was growing up, mainly because we lived many many miles away from most of our relatives; as a result of which we were never present at any of our pujas and rituals. On the other hand, we in fact lived amongst Christians, attended their masses and prayed to their God. I should mention at this point that I am technically a Hindu in that I was born to Hindu parents, in that my parents were born to HIndu parents, in that my grandparents were born to HIndu parents.. and so on. I often wonder where it all started. Which one of my ancestors, on one fine day, woke up and decided to be a Hindu. Well, getting back to my point, when I was growing up, if one had asked me which religion I belonged to, I had to say that I was as much Christian or Muslim or any other religion as I was Hindu. I spent the first two decades of my life in this state.

Then Science happened. Science is wonderful in that it strives to ask questions and provide explanations. It exercises your mind by making you think and reason rather than memorize and adopt. It encourages rational thinking and is not afraid of being questioned. When Science happened, it beat all the other ideologies in my life downright. And while doing so, it provided the most elegant and beautiful explanation to various questions I had had growing up as to who created us and how we all came into being. Science provided the answers that the theory of God could not.
When a child hangs a sock out on the eve of Christmas, and finds his much anticipated toy in it the next morning, one can reason it out in the following two ways. You can believe that a jolly old fat man in red with a white beard driving a cart drawn by rein deers flew in, picked from his sack the goodie that the kid had prayed for, and put it in there; OR you can believe that your pretty young dad in pajamas , possibly clean shaven, went to the store, bought it the previous night, wrapped it with love and put it in there. Up to the age of five or ten maybe, the first theory is highly fanciful; after which it increases in its ridiculousness quotient so rapidly that by the age of fifteen, if you still believe in Santa Claus, you will be harassed out of your wits by your peers.
If you spend even five mins thinking about the above example(maybe fifteen for the highly religious), it becomes impossible to deny that it sounds suspiciously similar to the God versus Science explanations we have for nature, and how we all came to be.

Getting back, it was fairly easy for me to be seduced by Science given that the God theory was getting weaker and weaker in my mind, owing to the fact that it had not an ounce of evidence to support, nor any reason why we should believe something that had no evidence to support it whatsoever. And quite rapidly I moved on to being an Atheist. I should at this point accept that there was a short period in time when I claimed to be agnostic for the fear of coming out into the open. I believed that it is simply easier to ignore the entire issue rather than go up against family members and friends with years and years of conditioning.

However, after I got married, a bunch of questions arose in my mind, which jolted me out of my comfortable position as an Agnostic. Given that my extended family was highly religious and performed every single puja without fail, these questions arose in my mind with higher frequencies. The most important of those questions was, What stand am I going to take with my child (if and when I have one) when he/she asks me what I think about the God that his grandparents and friends worship. Do I believe in it?

I know now that when my child asks me that, I will answer in the negative. I will say ” I do not believe in God dear. And I have a reason for it. The earth is flat. We breathe air. Sugar is sweet. Killing is Bad. There is no SantaClaus and there is not God.”

This is ofcourse just my take. But it is some take, so go ahead and take a look.
So here is the thing. In my world, there are many forms of caste-ism. Traditional caste-ism like Brahmins and Kshatriyas in Hindus, catholics and protestants in Christians etc. This is the accepted definition of caste-ism. But there are hundreds of examples even outside of this which in my world is still Caste-ism.
I’ll name a few.
Music fanboy groups. All music lovers are divided into very distinct groups. There are the metalheads, the boyband fans, the retro fans, the classical fans and so on and so forth.
Then there are the technology fanboy groups. The main groups here are the open source guys and the not so open source guys.
There are also fanboy groups in hmm say movie watchers. Some examples include the ‘i love any form of senti mush’ group, to the ‘i love bollywood masala and fantasy’ group, to the ‘quentin tarantino type i love only critically acclaimed movies’ group to the ‘i love mindless action’ group.
I think you get my drift by now.
Now why do I say all of these are castes?
Caste-ism according to me; is a form of groupism where each group is identified by a set of qualities, the primary one being the identifying quality that puts you in the group in the first place ( like you liking metal or you liking bollywood movies or you being born to a brahmin family). However this is accompanied by a set of other qualities deeply associated with each group as a result of the aggregation of all qualities displayed by the group members from times immemorial. This can include good and bad qualities, and this set of qualities that you associate with a particular caste differs from person to person. (Note: in this post I use the word group and caste interchangeably just to reduce monotony)
I for example associate the qualities ‘passionate’,'interesting’ and ‘arrogant’ with the group ‘metalheads’ . Ive met thousands and am married to one so its not like I have anything against them. Its just that over time I have gotten myself to associate the above mentioned set of qualities with a metalhead. You on the otherhand might associate a completely different set of qualities with the same group.

Lets move on to a more controversial caste ‘Brahminism’. I associate the following qualities to ‘Brahminism’.. ‘well educated’,'arrogant’,'lucky’,'vegetarian’,'orthodox’ and ‘religious’ (lucky being less of a quality and more of just a result of being in the right place at the right time in the wrong system) . I was born to a Brahmin family, so once again I do not have anything against them.

So what I mean by all this is that to me this entire world is filled with lots of groups of people(called castes in a social context) identified in my mind by certain traits. I have to point out here that in my mind, just by possessing the identifying quality one need not necessarily belong to a particular group. However once someone chooses to belong to a particular group, they will invariably always most definitely be assigned all the qualities of that group by me, whether they like it or not. For eg: I was born a Brahmin like I mentioned, but I voluntarily choose not to belong to that group because even though I am well educated, lucky and may be arrogant too :-), I am neither orthodox nor religious.

So hence my theory states the following:
One is highly likely to identify themselves as belonging to a particular group/caste if
a) they possess the identifying quality AND
a) they feel they possess all or most of the qualities ‘they think’ are associated with that group(other than the identifying quality) AND
b) the qualities they don’t possess are qualities they wish to possess or wish for others to believe that they possess AND
c) the group of qualities they possess and associate with the group do not comprise of a ‘negative quality’ that they would not wish others to think that they possess.

If you are still with me, don’t forget to leave a comment. :-)
Oh going back to the title, I personally dislike caste-ism primarily because I do not like to be generalized in any manner, whether it be good or bad.

In this age of technology, have hacks become the only way of measuring a person’s tendency to take initiatives? I have often seen people boast about what they have hacked and why they feel that it should in turn reflect that they are extremely creative people who take initiatives.
I personally feel that it is a purely one track mind that assumes that a person can be judged based on his hack record :-) I totally understand that you want to create a prototype when you hit upon a brilliant idea. But I do not understand the need to spend all your time and brainpower trying to come up with the ultimate ‘brilliant idea’ just so that you can add another prototype to your collection of hacks. I often find this convoluted form of cause-effect driving many folks nowadays. I also often find that many of these hacks are so defined by their creator’s motivation that they do not actually inherently do anything useful for the community.

I personally am not in the business of searching for problems to solve(I do not imply here that there is anything wrong with those that work towards identifying problems) but rather in the business of searching for solutions to the millions of problems we already have. Many people think that this is an inferior way of thinking and have implied so to me too. But unfortunately I still find that I am never as excited about searching for problems as I am about searching for solutions to them.

My mother and father have been partly blessed to not have been born in the technology age and thus have escaped this one track mind conditioning. However I see on an everyday basis that my parents take initiatives very actively be it in their personal lives, improving their family, improving the society around them, improving their workplace or in areas directly related to their work. They have been hailed by their peers as creative people that take initiatives and rightly so.

But if I, being a ‘technology person’ were to take initiatives in my personal life, improving my family, improving the society around me, improving my workplace and in areas that I am working on, that wouldnt be enough to qualify me as a creative person. I would still need a repository of hacks.

There was a time when there was so much stress put on excelling in the ‘traditional grading system’, that people never found the bandwidth to get creative.It was truly unfortunate. However,ironically I find now that there is so much stress on excelling in the ‘traditional creativity grading system aka hacks’ that people are inturn once again losing sight of the big picture; the definition of being creative.

I am saddened by this unfortunate mindbend. I am sure that not everyone feels this way, but I do know that some people do.

July 8th 2007, I graduated along with all my friends, with a Masters in Information Technology, from iiitb .
And here are a few snaps

We did the ‘walk’..

It was one day we are not going to forget in a long long time… Wish you all the happiness in this world Class of 2005′.

June,2007 saw the end of a lovely term at MSR. Here are a few goodbye pictures and a collage we presented to our team before leaving.

This is Joseph, our manager. I really miss him..

Here is a picture of myself,Robin and God. Yes, we called Samarth, God for his amazing technical abilities and also for the fact that he often managed to develop a halo around his head in photographs. I have picked a few fortunate pictures where God has decided to be humble and show himself clearly.

On the Left, we have Thanuja added to the group. Thanuja was from Srilanka. She was a really sweet person and taught us tons of stuff about life in Srilanka. One amazing thing that I learnt was that in Srilanka, they actually have ‘Religion’ as a subject in school. And each student gets to pick the religion of her choice and study all about it. I thought that was really interesting.

Below, we have Robin and Mohit. This is a picture I took and am very proud of. I think both of them have come out very nice in it.

And finally all of us, just before leaving.. It was a sad day… :-(

A very good morning to all of you!! Its a beautiful day, and I want to start it by writing a post or two.
I hope to be a little more frequent than I was the past few months. :-)

I went for ‘Cheeni Kum’ (pronounced as chee nee kam)(literally translated to sugar less) yesterday in the evening. It was running (I wonder why they say a movie runs..) in Rex..

Cheeni Kum is a refreshingly funny story about a 64 yr old Buddha(played by Big B), also fondly called ‘Ghaaspuus’, who falls in love with a 34 year old Neena(Tabu), who he reciprocates with a polite ‘Thangdikabab’. Ghaaspuus heads a restaurant that claims to be the finest Indian restaurant in London. Neena doesnt do much.(Or atleast I couldnt figure out what she does for a living).

The movie begins with quite a few boring scenes where Ghaaspuus disciplines his fellow workers and gives them valuable gyaan about the art of cooking. For a minute there I thought the movie would be another ‘lesson in sahi aur galath, and anushaasan’ that Big B loves to deliver. But luckily Neena steps in and Ghaaspuus falls in love..
The oddly matched couple actually look cute onscreen.. The movie is filled with a horde of witty repartees and situational humour and a fortunate lack of unnecessary dramatics.. The couple is just like any other teenage couple you see in reality and you soon forget the age factor.. Infact everything seems great until Ghaaspuus and Neena decide to get married. Thats when Ghaaspuus meets Neena’s father, Paresh rawal who is 6 years younger in age.Thats when Ghaaspuus (as well as the audience) start realizing how ridiculous the situation seems…

There are a few other angles to the movie… One of which is ‘sexy’, an 8 year old girl who keeps ghaaspuus company at all times, other than when he is in his restaurant. Sexy unfortunately, has blood cancer(or some other such thing) and is undergoing chemotheraphy.Sexy, along the way, manages to unknowingly teach ghaaspuus and us, a number of valuable lessons in life….

One other interesting character is ‘Colgate’, a waiter in Ghaaspuus’s restaurant, with an extrememly amusing personality and two shiny white bunny teeth. Unlike many other comedians in Hindi movies, Colgate manages to entertain you effectively without getting to the point of irritation…

Everyone has played their part very nicely.Music is nice, and luckily limited and in the background..(Yes, songs in the middle of movies can be extremely irritating). On the whole a very entertaining movie that you can watch once.

I had been out for lunch on Brigade road today, with a friend. Lunch done, we walked to where we had parked our bike.We successfully manoeuvred it out of where it was jammed between two other bikes ( I wonder why parking lots are so crowded on Monday afternoons.Is everyone as jobless as myself and my friend were?). Anyway back to the point. After easing it out of the jam and backing it on to the road, we were finally about to leave when our con man came running from nowhere demanding his fee.

I cannot help but wonder, fee for what? For standing around and watching us struggle with our bike without moving a finger? For coming running to us in time and grabbing our attention? Exactly for what were we paying him?

I, being the prim and proper myself( as lots of my friends put it), asked him for the ticket. “Ticket??” he asked.”I don’t have any ticket”. “Duh.” I said. “I’m not giving you any money without a ticket.”

Lot of people call me adamant and too ‘by the book’. But the fact is, I did not know why I had to pay him. No, its not the money.Its a question of ethics. I don’t mind paying him ten times that if he could show me some evidence that the money was going to someone who deserved it. The government for instance, for letting out the space to park. A laborer who cleans the footpaths. Heck, even someone who helped us get our bike out. But our man did nothing of that sort. He just felt he deserved the money.

What I have to say about such things is that, without parking tickets to sell, he has as much authority to demand a fee from people, as you or me or the person sitting next to us in the restaurant we ate. Just because he dresses up shabbily and walks around the bikes and pretends like he is doing something, does not give him the rights to your parking fee.
If he did help you out,you might like to tip him (Absolutely nothing wrong with that.Just a show of gratitude). If he was walking around begging, you might take pity upon him and give him something ( Nothing wrong there too. ).. But this virtual begging with a cocky attitude. Nope does not work.
If anything, know that you are NOT obliged to pay each and everyone that walks up to you on your shopping trip. Use your discretion. Pay if you feel like. But if you don’t, know that you don’t have to.

Last week, a few colleagues of mine checked out a gymnasium/fitness center called Talwalkars very close to where we work. On questioned as to how it was, the following is the reply that I got. “Hmm it was quite nice. But slightly expensive.” How much is slightly you ask? about Rs 8,000/- for three or four months.
Huh? Excuse me. I was pretty sure I had not heard right. Either that or I was old. Really really old,belonging to the previous century probably.

Well, it looks like I am getting old. Because yes. ‘slightly’ is that much. And as if I was not old enough already, there was more news. Gold gym trying very hard to sound as reasonable as possible stated that they charge only Rs 5000/- a month. Their argument is essentially that you can end up paying upto a good sum of 1,00,000/- if you try an annual membership at a gym at any five star hotel. Which costs you around 8500/- per month (if you take an annual membership ie). And if you dont, then it could go upto 10,000/- a month.Phew.

On the bright side, most of these gyms do come with state of the art equipment and trained professionals to guide you with well planned (or so they say) programmes. And they even allow you to bring your own music sometimes :-).

With all those facts out there, do I think it is a good deal?? Well, though I am getting used to the idea, Im afraid it hasn’t sounded as appealing to me yet. But there are tons of people who think otherwise. And as long as there are, Talwalkars and Gold will continue on their successful rampages..