When two buddies fought over whether F1 or cricket is better
Dwindling idea of free speech
If you landed in this page hoping to get a chronological gist of the events surrounding the controversy of the movie Vishwaroopam, you might try using those words in a google search. This is an outpour of my thoughts concerning the controversy.
Free speech has been fought against and weakened by the politicians in India who’s agenda looks to be worse than the British kingdom that ended more than half a century ago. Salman Rushdie’s disallowed participation to the Jaipur Lit festival in 2011 and the banning of Facebook and twitter accounts during the incessant fear mongering against the North Eastern influx in Bangalore in 2012 proved just to be a started. Civil liberties and democratic freedom have repeatedly been targeted by separatist, vote banked, power hungry, egoistic sect in India. While the set-in-stone form of the government - the democracy has ‘free speech’
All these events tend to make you think how many groups in India are without day jobs, a phone call away from being herded to revolt and wreak havoc at the agenda of divisive vote bank politicians. Darker and worry some factor is the cancerous emotions of sectarian hatred and divisive thinking has already entered the minds of the not-so-involved working middle-class, laying the track for power hungry politicos carry on their regime. We could write books on the changes in widespread thought process but that is for another time and place and effort.
Backtracking to the original theme, the controversy surrounding the delayed release of Vishwaroopam as I empathize with artists feeling the handcuffs I cannot but shudder at the thought of the ‘other’ group, consisting mostly of bored outs and generic ‘haters’. I can understand the latter, the bitchy ones who tend to see the bad in everyone, and they need no addressal. Just want to convey this to the former group - the ones who can be that brave enough blaming Actor/Director Kamal Hasan to have not sat with the fringe groups when he got a chance earlier months leading to the movie release. You are missing a the whole point behind the term - ‘the free speech’ - that it doesn’t involve going around the country, asking each and every religion, caste, sect, street, student union, beggars union, book clubs and grandma knitting groups, for acceptance of speech before producing any work of art. It it were, we’d all be living in world that was like 500 years ago - without personal independence, like those fringe groups expect to achieve.
Why I won’t blame Video games for human tragedies
Disheartening to see the innocent souls leaving Earth earlier than their life would’ve traded for. It shudders me to think what those children would’ve gone through being holed up with their fate, one that could not be explained by keywords like karma or justice that we through around everyday. I nearly cried when I saw a picture floating online - the final words of a kid saying how he loved his mom and would meet her in heaven.
Two talking points as to how this could be controlled or prevented in future, the kind of talk that happens after every tragedy like this for a week after, are
1. Gun control
2. Video games.
To me personally I totally disagree to ppl pouncing on Video games’s violence as part of the mistake for inhuman
1. My and even the one before me have played games that border on gore- Wolfenstein, Doom 3d and also Road Rash - not many in India would’ve gotten shielded from these 3, but we turned out ok(atleast I haven’t affected another life physically),
2. lunatics exists in every country- its media coverage that has made us converse about it. Heard a Polish guy who has enslaved kids till they were around 25? Heard of countless inhuman tragedies in rural/urban India? The stoning in Rajasthan because the girl used FB?
If anything should go by, me and my buddies who’ve played NFS/Road Rash/Doom should’ve been road killers and murderers by now. No, we are not. This is because although we played those games, we were constantly educated to be courteous, and in a house that did not have parents screaming and yelling against each other that would’ve looked like a scene out of GTA in our eyes. Movies also played an important role, especially the certification process.
Last night I saw ‘The Hobbit’, and as epic and moving it was, I was appalled to see PG-13 certification. There were plenty of beheading scenes and ones involving blood that I’d have gootten nightmares if I had watched when I were 13 years of age. Same holds for video games, creators will create even filthier(if there could be one) than GTA4, just like how un-natural porn movies get produced. They feed on the uncontrolled animal and primate instincts of humans. Content either in comics or even in text feeding on extreme emotions have prevailed in all the cultures if 11th century Nordic folktales are to go by. What you do is to make it harder for unmoulded minds to access them, hence my call for stricter certifications and in an extra step - the gun control.
People fail to realize that the Second amendment, like the Caste based reservations, are out-dated laws. A hundred-and-fifty years ago, there were no organized civil servants police, CIA or the FBI. People could ride on their horses, come to your house, shoot you and go about their ways. Women protection was all time low at that time, and that called for owning concealed arms. Now with all the law enforcements that go over their distance to track every move you make, it’s absurd that this amendment has yet been overturned.
It’s the access to the means that makes the lunatic’s agenda get possible that is the mistake - here it is the Guns.
Fortune Cookie : My entry for the Get Published contest
Astrology is something that you cannot ignore. What if someone can read your future to the granularity of time of the hour? What if that prediction is one that could affect not only you but a wider domain? How will your thoughts, decisions and actions change after that? The story delves around the above predicament.
The story revolves around twins, separated by birth with a unique disorder - each one houses opposite sides of a single one - the one housing right side being a hyper creative personality. He draws abstract paintings, solves UI problems for Mobile industry developers in a flash and on hearing a song once he can write the note of a single instrument through the length of the song. He is extremely disorganized, eats unhealthy food as he fails to find time with the unorderly life of his.
The other twin, let’s call him B, houses the left-hemisphere of the brain is extremely organized but very boring and uncreative one. His orderliness goes to the extent of maintaining written transcripts of customer service calls he makes. He works as an accountant of a firm and his reputation to find the best way for tax-deductions and keeping the books in order made him a huge hit. He gets offers for co-ownership of a firm if he could move away from the company he works for, but being extremely logical he goes to the extent of doing probability calculations for ending up successful with them, and declines their offer. He invests impeccably and makes the right decisions when coming to company stocks and makes huge wealth. He writes books on being orderly, investments, money managements, business ideas but ends up selling them for publishers instead of self-publishing.
One day just for the fun of it, the creative one, call him C for simplicity, is being pushed to consult an astrologer by his girlfriend. The Astrologer, we call him A, has a reputation of being very good at his job, and has once consulted for the Prime minister. He goes and tells a shocking prediction about C.
After a week, he meets B(the logical one) and discovers that he was indeed a twin of C. He also reads the same shocking prediction for B that he did for C, and with that newly gathered knowledge he suppresses revealing his find of B’s twin-ship with C . He discovers that a single-soul has been torn apart at birth into two and the shocking prediction, if it got real will have twice the effect. He decides to stop that from happening and so lies to B’s with a false prediction.
How would their life change because of one true shocking prediction and a false one, the thoughts and actions from B and C post their consultation with A affect their future? What would happen if and when they meet? How would they feel about each other? Will they discover the one-ness of their souls? What would happen of the shocking event that A predicted?
Key :
A- Astrologer
B- The logical one
C- The Creative one
© 2012 Arun Srinivasan
This is my entry for the HarperCollins–IndiBlogger Get Published contest, which is run with inputs fromYashodhara Lal and HarperCollins India.
Glory is not in never falling,
but in rising,
Everytime you fall.
If we fall, we don’t need self-recrimination or blame or anger — we need a reawakening of our intention and a willingness to recommit, to be wholehearted once again. Each decision we make, each action we take, is born out of an intention.
— Sharon Salzberg, O Magazine
What we do and how we do it rests entirely on our intent to do it. Blog, tweet, ‘seamless’ FB share or the good-old mail, we strive to get attention of the reader. A short-story or a comic column strives to say what we really need to, albeit in a more plausible way.
While the world tweets 50+ million times a day and blogs a tenth of it every week, what we say should take away unnecessary stuff from people, not add crap to their lives. The automated tweets from my foursquare account and re-sharing from Facebook are perfect examples of what Frank Chimero calls ‘huffing the exhaust from other people’s digital lives’.
Design - the keyword that encompasses everything from the origin of our universe to the cup we drink tea from speaks much about the usefulness and ability to remove complexities from one’s life, not add to it. Although the social media tries to bridge the gap between one’s true platonic desires and their presence, the tendency to add what digital users call noise has increased multi-fold.
Technology has not spared us either. As the world is awash with amazement from tablets like iPad with the ability to connect online, the complex nature of typing reduces it’s productivity. Microsoft is coming out with cover-keyboard that tries to reduce the complexity in user input. Design has always shared parallel roads with intent.
The above video by John Hockenberry goes into the intentional design in great depths. 20 minutes seems to go swiftly thanks to his ‘intent’ and the way he approaches it.
All I ask before tweeting or sharing something is, am I adding value to the ten seconds the audience has granted me?
As one blogger wrote
Am I writing for the people who want to leave a mark on the world? Or am I sharing for people who don’t like to get out of bed?
Follow. Don’t lead.
The news in Op-ED section of The Hindu describing the meeting between the Indian Minister and U.S Secretary of state Hillary Clinton briefs about how the ‘Community college’ model in the States could revitalize vocational training in India sends out the message of ‘Follow. Don’t lead’.
I and almost all friends of mine can agree that what comes to their mind when they hear the term vocational training in India is ITIs (and ITCs). They impart affordable - government/privately funded education that aims to help individuals kickstart their career quicker than the longer graduate studies offered in the University education. The only difference is that the skills and knowledge imparted focusses on current requirements in the industry, not the deeper understanding of the subjects. There are many industries, like mechanical, electrical and automation where this is sought after. A symbiotic relationship exists where the companies require individuals qualified enough to handle the instruments and do a pre-check QA of the output filled-in by the pool of students who require quicker start to their careers and need to earn for financial stability.
Many countries in Europe during the mid-decades of Industrial revolution tried a model that would be counter intuitive - the internship model. Students who pursue graduate and broader education would work in the space that out ITIs fulfill, as interns, that would be considered for credits against theire requirement against graduation. The failure of this model was due to ever-changing faces - the human contact varies between every term of study and the industries were not very interested in bringing new students up to speed in variety of domain-specific skills that would give them returns just for that term.
The general feeling that a reader gets when reading the news about a deal struck and the community college model being introduced in India is nothing but our own government showing empty palms ceding we don’t have resources or knowledge to achieve the gap in practical education required for industrial work and one imparted in graduate studies. This sways away from the required and achievable model that deals with expansion of ITIs and ITCs in India. The ITIs and ITCs concentrate mainly the mechanical and electrical domains. There are not many cheap computer education or media education, and while the latter is found enough in Arts and Science institutions the mood that it is not practical based enough is rampant.
What the deal would do is to allow investments and business transactions by foreign entities into a field that India is classically known for - education. While we forward chain-emails 1 boasting about Aryabhattas and Homi Babas, we don’t spend time to sit and think of variables that are out of the ‘normal path’ 2 and thought process needed to move the derailing education train back on the rails. Beefing up the current vocational training, providing subsidies for private instituitions that do so, and adding newer and prevelant domains could be a start.
The thought that this generation a.k.a Facebook generation gets sold on buzzwords like ‘Foreign community college’ should be negated by increased involvement by our public in social thought process. The Lead, don’t follow mentality that is much required in sustained development of middle class and in-turn the country’s economy should be emphasized in these times where the signs of ‘reverse brain-drain’ are getting bolder.
1- which are basically to collect email-ids for marketing purposes using the patriotic or any other sentiments
2- I wish to not use the word wrong as it would send out an opposing message of what I am trying to convey here
‘Unity in diversity?’ - what’s that?
Some wise man said India is a country that practices ‘Unity in diversity’ and at the same time drew lines dividing it mainly along language and culture. Although the latter’s differences are blurring every day thank the globalization, the ‘basic differences’ have always been the wildcard for political outfits to use in times of dire needs. Those needs have never forgot to show up before every election process.
The biggest tangential growth is the feeling of ‘it did not happen to me’ amongst the people. I have two incidents to show it currently is and will hurt India the most.
1. Old Airport road – Bengaluru, Karnataka
It is Saturday night around 8 pm when the whole ‘beer’ district warms up to an eventful weekend. While the attitude and unoriginal scheme of things that happen in most of the hotspots warrants a separate discussion, the point here is about what happened in the middle of a crowded road at rush (to drink) hour. We sit in the middle of the road praying to various Gods that somehow magically the entire stretch of signals would turn green and we arrive at our spot in time when the boring milieu turns dramatic fuelled by a heated argument between a Honda Civic and bikers stranded next to it. The instigating event has been the biker almost hitting the car trying to overtake when an earlier signal went green and the driver/owner of the car asking (shouting) at him to ride good.
A relaxed argument (distance between source>10 feet) changed into heated discussion(5 feet) and before I could comprehend the gravity of the situation the passenger got down the bike, removed his helmet and started banging the Honda’s windshield. Around a hundred people turned their heads to watch at a live drama while not a single soul barraged at the man at fault, weak against a moderate weapon at the hands of ONE assailant. I tried getting down but my nearest family advised me otherwise, that one person defending this mad men (include: biker) is not a good idea and that people would be more thrilled to look at the quarrel ling duo rather than help.
The light went green and we felt bad for the guy inside the car and WISHING the attacker gets punished at least by his karma, rode away.
2. Apartment complex
This happened to a person who had recently moved-in to a high-class (read ‘income’) apartment complex. As he was single and worked around twelve hours a day, from home, he couldn’t socialize and did not have many acquaintances save the neighbors opposite to his. It so happened that in the past permission had been granted and work completed on combining adjoining apartments in the ground floor into one, after tearing down a non-load bearing wall. This had set a precinct that anyone could tear down their homes be it anytime of the day even on Saturdays.
The scene of the incident is X’s apartment that is in fifth floor, a bright morning when starting to work gets shaken accompanied by the soundtrack of a powerful electric drill. X having no experience with earthquakes rushes out to find that the same type of ‘apartment-joining’ started in the floor above him. After waiting for around fifteen minutes and not being able to sustain the calming activities, he calls the manager and informs the activity unfolding. The reply was so corrosive that he felt battered because of it than the original event of aggression.
It was so that the permission had been granted and that they were ‘rich’ family with ‘police and political connections’ against which one cannot openly war. After talking to the apartment society president the best suggested plan of action was to write to the society about the event.
Not able to digest the callousness he goes to talk to the owner of the flat above, only to be answered that he could make any complaint and take any action and that nothing would be done by him to change the plan of re-modeling. He contacts the broker/lawyer and everyone and finds for the first time that
After five days of intense quarrel and complaints regarding dust allergy the friend gets first luck in the form of a crack in the wall in house below his. Feeling sorry for them while with a smug that nothing happened to his, here were his recollections of replies from neighbors when he asked for help
Believe me, I am not exaggerating anything here but stating a few of far more acidic attitude of the high-class circle. This happened in an apartment complex with a rate of around Rs. 3500 per/sq.foot. Although we all know that money and goodness at heart are not directly proportional I was astounded by the thought process carried on by each person before they decided. People quickly jump into the island of living-space for a small issue like this tells much about decision-making ability towards a larger issue like election and social cause etc. It says much towards why many social workers who do little more than what is decent and required, get featured in weekend magazines frequently.
Is this the society/country our forefathers dream’t of? Is dividing India through language/cultural lines the cause? I beg to find an answer or at least a discussion on similar topics. We might have a urban society with access to all things cool thanks to the software exports but we definitely have imported negatives inside our lives at the cost of false social conventions.
{P.S yes we introduced my friend to a lawyer and legal stuff has happened, he is dead angry and determined to do something about the incident. While I try to calm him down saying what’s gone is gone, the hurt and corrosive arguments would take time to subside.}
{P.S 2 - Chiildren of lesser parents - brought a tear}