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!

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. :-)