The ephemeral world... (15th Sept.'10)

मान्धाता च महीपति क्रितयुगालन्कार भूतो भवः |
सेतुर्येन महोदधौ विरचितः क्वासौ दशस्यान्तक: ||
अन्ये चापि युधिष्ठिर प्रभ्रितयो याता दिवं भूपते |
नैकेनापी समं गता वसुमति नूनं त्वया यास्यति ||

{Maandhaata cha maheepati kritayugalankar bhooto bhavah,
Seturyen mahodadhau virachitah kwasau dashasyantakah?
Anye chapi Yudhishthir prabhritayo yata divam bhupatey,
Naikenaapi samam gatha Vasumati noonam twaya yasyati!}

Context
Verse written by Prince Bhoj (later, King Bhoj or ‘Bhojraj’, the legendary king in India, immeasurably wealthy, immortalized in the saying ‘Kahan Raja Bhoj aur kahan Gangu teli’, comparing his wealth with that of an oilmaker at the opposite end of the spectrum), with his blood on a leaf, on being spared by the assassin sent by his uncle Munj, the regent who wanted to usurp his throne. Munj repented on reading the verse (realizing the essentially ephemeral nature of worldly wealth), and called Bhoj back.

Interpretation
King Mandhata used to be the jewel of Kritayuga (i.e. 'Satyayuga', the age of the pious, but departed from this earth),
(Lord Rama) who built a bridge over the sea and slayed the ten-headed (Ravana, the king of Lanka), where is he now?
Many other kings like Yudhishthir (the Pandava king in Mahabharata) came to this world (and departed),
This earth (the worldly wealth) did not go with any of them, but (from your behavior it seems) it will go with you!

Relationships... (5th Jan.'10)

A clinical psychologist of Indian origin with a practice in Chicago recently got famous after writing a book with a provocative subtitle: 'Love Will Follow' (sub-title: 'Why the Indian marriage is burning'). The book purportedly attempts a look at the emerging contours of Indian middle-class marriages, especially the changing & progressive behavior of wives in traditional marriages, based on interactions with a clutch of couples (mostly the wives) in NCR. The author has also put up a group with the same name on Facebook, and initiated a number of discussions. 

One of the discussion topics was: 'Do you think wives drive their husbands into the arms of other women'. It quoted another site with a reference to the recent Tiger Woods episode.

What is stated in the above topic line (never mind the referred website article, too long) may be untrue for the vast majority of marriages in India. Husbands may have other reasons to philander (if that's the right word). But it may well be true for some Indian marriages, even if in a minuscule minority right now. There are some husbands (and mind you, not all staying in a family home, but as a nuclear family, so the 'culture wars' factor - ref. the book - may be as good as absent) who may consciously try to get out of the MCP mould in which their then family/society may've tried to mould them into while they were of an impressionable age. Wider exposure, sometimes on travels, sometimes due to interaction with 'emancipated' individuals/bodies, may also push them towards 'progressive' behaviour.

But then, they may find the shoe on the other foot. Now that they seem to be doing all they can (in their own perception, which is of course moulded by their own upbringing) to go all the way to 'progress' (read equality in relationships - physical, financial or otherwise), they may find they are being pushed around. Perhaps not 'unfairly' from the other's standpoint, but hugely in their own perception. Like, perhaps, having to take care of the child and home single-handedly (with some help, hopefully, from in-laws and others), while the wife focuses totally on her career. Again, not 'unfair' from her point of view (esp. if she had made career sacrifices in the past for family reasons). But the point is that, for the moment, 'equality' in the relationship is gone. And a double whammy would be the total lack of face time (and consequent lack of intimacy) that it could be accompanied with.

So, what does a typical, 40-ish Indian man do in the circumstances. Perhaps he can't think of a divorce, given extended family pressures and more imporatantly considering the effects of a failed marriage/single parent on a small child. And perhaps he's not of the disposition to shout around and cause visible unpleasantness. Some men could perhaps tend to sublimate their frustrations by getting more involved with their friend circule (drinking binges?) or community efforts. But some could think of relationships outside the marriage, sexual or not. If only (and perhaps mostly) to have at least 'someone to talk to/listen'.

Caveat: No generalisations. We're not talking here of numbers or general trends or majority, only of what could happen, perhaps in a very small minority of cases currently.

And seen from another angle, the topic itself seems to be somewhat anachronistic in these 'modern' times. After all, an emotional disconnect should absolve people from the 'duty' of keeping up the pretenses in these 'emancipated' times, no? Making a brouhaha about an 'affair' is "so 20th century", if one goes by current trends. (:-)

Traffic paranoia in Delhi... (11th Sept.'09)

Whew! What happened? This Thursday (10th Sept.) evening, going back from office, I was able to just zip through the roads in the heart of South Delhi, to cover the 34 odd kms to my home in Gurgaon in just under an hour! Unprecedented!

Initially, I thought it was because I started a bit late. It was already 6.30 by the time I finished whatever it was that I was doing in office. Having resigned myself to the usual killing traffic which I was destined to encounter at that hour, I took my own time getting out. I even browsed through the company notice board while going out, something I hadn't done in months! I gently eased my car into the traffic from under the Modi Mill flyover and... whoa! what was this? An almost empty Kalkaji mandir flyover greeted me. Usually, I can see vehicles strung out jostling on that bridge, looking none less than the Queen's Necklace of Bombay.

So I thanked my stars at having found what I thought was a 'gap' in the traffic (from Noida, Faridabad,...) coming down the Modi Mill flyover, and reached the Nehru Place flyover in record time, all the time dreading the prospect of the usual jam at the next turn. The usually sparse traffic at N.P. bridge was no surprise,but... even near C.R. Park/Pamposh Enclave there was no traffice to speak of. Rounding the Greater Kailash flyover and on to the Chirag Delhi one, I felt blessed. This was the very spot, at the foot of the Chirag bridge, where a few meters of waterlogging the previous day and caused a traffic jam right back up to Nehru Place, causing me to cover the princely distance of 5 kms. from my office to Panchsheel in an hour.

Continuing past Panchsheel at the same pace, it all finally began to sink in. What could've happened (purely my reading) is that having burnt their fingers (and much else) the previous day in traffic, many (most?) Delhites on that route had chosen to make an 'early run' and cross much of the potentially 'dangerous' road space in good time. OR was it that the 3-hour long traffic jam on the same (and surrounding) roads of South Delhi the same morning had caused many to 'miss' their office (I know, for instance, that one of my friends heard about the jams from morning TV news and decided to give his office a miss - understandable, given that he hass to travel from Gurgoan to Noida every day, a distance of 45 kms.!)?

So that's the extent of road paranoia, if I may call it that, that pervades the heart of every Delhite (and NCR-ite!). We dread running into traffic, some of us take loooonnng detours just to avoid heavy traffic, we avoid going to places where we are not likely to find parking space (I've myself once long back gone from my home in GK-II to nearby Lajpat Nagar, taking 45 mins. to do that, then circled around the place a few time, not finding parking space, coming back home - and that was about 9 years back!), even changing our schedules (including birthday/anniversary celebrations!) to suit the traffic.

A large part of the reason for the traffic mess in which we find ourselves is all kinds of construction (Metro, flyovers, 'beautifications' - road medians dug up & the loose earth & to-be-installed light-poles dumped on the road alongside, a normal sight all over South Delhi) currently going on, some (e.g. the sewerage work from NH-8 all the way to Najafgarh) beautifully timed to coincide with the rains, thus ensuring that the dug up roads are not filled up and metalled again for months. That the bigger problem is the unsustainable rise in the city's vehicle population, some may say stoked by the vehicle financing boom over the last decade, is another story, fit for a different forum.

Next morning (i.e. Friday 11th, yeah, anniversary of the famour nine-eleven), I was rudely jolted out of my reverie by a (usual?) traffic jam near Kalkaji mandir, where it took me an hour and a quarter to cover the distance of the last 1 kilometre to my office (the same time it had taken me to cover the other 33!). Welcome to Delhi!

Wise like Sahadev? (14th Aug.'09)

Sahdev, being the youngest (or one among the youngest, being one part of the twins) of the Pandava brothers in Mahabharata, is probably one of the least celebrated mythical characters. If anything, he's sometimes denigrated for being 'the silent one'. I still remember one of my former bosses eons back berating me for remaining 'silent like Sahdev'! This should not, though, detract from Sahdev's valour - wasn't he the one who killed the evil Shakuni in battle (I hope I'm right - too lazy to Google for this).

So it was quite a surprise to find the name of Sahadev mentioned in a positive light, that too in a business rag. In a piece on training strategies in the 'Corporate Dossier' section of Economic Times 14-Aug-09, the 'Chief Belief Officer' of Future Group (which runs the Big Bazaar chain of hypermarkets, among other businesses) says "We encourage them (that is, the training participants) to be like Sahadev (who knows all answers but speaks only when asked)...". This is said in the context of the need for the knowledge-seeker to go to the trainer, not the other way round, like king Vikramaditya having to go to the ghost (Vetaal) which is the theme of that piece.

Set me thinking. This quality of keeping mum even when you know all (or most of) the answers is perhaps something to be treasured. I go back to my first training program with an INGO, where the facilitator explained that feedback is appreciated by the recipient only when it's given upon being asked for. That is, unsolicited feedback (or for that matter, any piece of wisdom), many a times in the thin disguise of homilies ('upadesh'), is hardly likely to be appreciated by the recipient, regardless of its intrinsic merits. 

At another point, during a session on 'organisational politics', the facilitator dwelt upon the 'four quadrants of wisdom', depicted as four animals - donkey, fox, vulture & owl. Among them, the highest place was reserved for 'the wise owl' who is aware of all the goings on but choses his own time to intervene (or even help others). The Sahadev syndrome again?

There seems to be definite merit in the concept. Learning is lifelong, and we should all aspire to accumulate knowledge all our life as a continous process. But it serves no purpose to fritter away such knowledge on unresponsive minds. The only purpose such unsolicited 'donation' of knowledge may achieve is boosting one's ego, nothing else. Like the 'experts' and 'commentators' I listen to on radio, espcially on the economic/financial programs, who excel in proffering their take on all and sundry issues given half a chance (pity nobody seems to keep track of their 'predictions' and hold them to account for the same).

The ET piece is based on an interesting concept of using the so called 'children's tales', part of India's heritage, as training tools par excellence, and rightfully so. This is in sync with the other pieces in the same issue which describe the increasing use of classical literature for management learning, including at IIMs in India. Pretty interesting. Maybe the 'Panchatantra' tales we avidly read when young would also some day find takers in the business training space?

When will I get back my Delhi? (29th July'09)

I lived the first 35 years of my life in Delhi. It's only in the last few years that work (mostly) has taken me outside, to Gurgaon in NCR. I remember the time when I used to drive on a mobike on the long and wide roads of Delhi. Admittedly, I don't get to do that very often these days and, when I drive/am driven, it's mostly confined to South Delhi where my workplace and most of my relatives are.

So it was quite a disappointment when, on a recent trip back from out of town, our taxi took us through the once enchanting Delhi roads to meet... a roadblock at every step. Literally. All this beautification and metro-isation and road-widening and flyover-ing is alright, but my heart weeps when I see what all this has reduced the famed Delhi roads to. More than the minor irritation of having to take a detour, it is the disfiguration of and encroachment on the famed vistas and roundabouts and (in some cases) green spaces, even if temporary, that is disheartening.

Most of this is being done in the name of Commonwealth Games 2010. There is a minor question of whether all these big projects, started almost at the last minute possible, will reach their fruition before the commencement of the Games. The big ones like the airport and most of the Metro, yes, but what about all the flyovers? All the road beautification and widening? And firstly, was all this absolutely essential? So much essential as to put the bulk of Delhites through an extended period of hellish living, more so in the rainy season?

I'd give an example of the strange timing of certain works. There was a stretch of tree lined road along a row of farmhouses which connects National Hightway 8 (Gurgaon expressway) to the old Delhi-Gurgaon road at a place in South West Delhi called 'Kapas Hera'. The sewer line work on this stretch was taken up only a few months back, blocking the whole road and leading to detours. But more importantly, the work has been over for more than a month (well before the rainy season) but nobody bothered to resurface the road. With the result that the road has now been converted to a mini-canal!

Not only that, the sewer work was then extended across the traffic square towards Najafgarh, and this extentsion was started within the last month, coinciding with the rainy season - talk about timing! Now one half of this road was dug up and the sewer line put in. And what happened next was quite predictable. With the first rains, the layer of earth put on top of the sewer line just caved in at places one fine day. Only a couple of days back (after the rains returned with full fury), you could see a 3-wheeler goods carrier lying in one portion of the caved in road/earth at a queer angle. And I hope this doesn't happen to a truck or a bus some day.

So my question to all the concerned Govt. & other agencies, as a Delhite (which I consider myself to be, even if I only have an office & not a home in Delhi but in NCR), is: When will you give me back my Delhi?

Cellphone manners (7th July'09)

[A recent post on an HT Blog on travel touched upon how being connected may enable busy people to holiday more. I share here my abridged comments]

While it’s true that new technology is good if it actually ‘frees’ you, is that mostly the case? Some personal experiences may be diametrically opposite. You schedule a holiday to ‘get away from it all’. And then all your companions seem to be doing is going around like zombies with the cellphone glued to their ears!

The new tech. may enable some people to holiday so much more now than 20 years back, but does holidaying just mean physically going around places  and sites? Isn’t it an added (the main?) benefit that people otherwise too busy to connect with one another in daily life, except on a perfunctory basis, should be able to get adequate face time to ‘really’ connect? And how do you get that face time if the face itself is partly obscured by a cellphone almost all the time!

It's no wonder that some people are truly sick and tired of the cellphone, which is perhaps the most ubiquitous manifestation of new tech. More to the point, they are tired of the blatant misuse of the cellphone, if it can be put that way. People seem to be hiding behind new tech. in general (email?) and the cellphone in particular, seemingly to avoid any personal contact.

In days of yore, most people would be offended if you so much as looked away while talking to them, much less start talking to a third person. But these days nobody seems to notice how the cellphone is accorded the pride of place and the highest priority of response even while talking to someone face to face. You may leave the other person looking forlorn but, hey, what the heck, it’s the cellphone after all. And it HAS to be answered come what may!

The bottomline is: how much respect does someone accord to you. Enought to give you his/her undivided attention for at least a few minutes? If not, s/he perhaps deserves the same response and the same level of respect.

This holds true even for those who are no technophobes, those using computers at work since years, present on FB, Twitter, G-talk, Messenger, Orkut, blogging regularly, having own websites, and having tried out IE 8, Opera & Chrome (does that qualify?!). But still the lack of cellphone manners, and the lack of respect for the other that it portrays, may leave them frothing in the mouth.

Doctor heal thyself (10th June'09)

Does aggressiveness and irresponsible behaviour flow from a kind of peer pressure? (The mob theory.) The question struck me when I heard someone I know being asked by his wife “Did you talk to the driver?” What had happened was – the errant family driver in question had gone off on a leave without prior notice, having gone on some sort of a short pilgrimage to another state with family. And on a Saturday (when the employers usually took it easy, not bothering him unless needed) when he was specifically called on duty. The reasons the driver/his wife kept giving during the 2.5 days of absence kept changing – wife’s ailment first, changing houses next, pilgrimage thereafter. So it was not wonder that the fellow was given a sound berating by the employer’s bro-in-law who had originally referred him, including a threat of sacking.

Still, it probably didn’t satisfy the wife until the husband himself ‘took on’ the driver. She was satisfied only when the husband told her (in suitable tones) that he himself HAD indeed ‘taken on’ the driver and repeated some of the same berating and threats. 


Takes me back to a day some years back when I was maneuvering my car through a narrow, one way lane when a fellow on bicycle came along the wrong side. Now, I am a most peaceful and ‘empathetic’ fellow in general. But that day, maybe because I was quite pissed off with the traffic and the maneuvering, I let the errant man have a piece of my mind (no expletives though – my colleagues 20 years back used to taunt me that the strongest expletive I knew was ‘saala’, almost an endearment). You should’ve seen the glow on wifey’s face – seemed to imply that for once I had ‘stood up’.

Got me thinking. Is a degree of aggressiveness ingrained into us by social conditioning. Say, your child comes home sobbing because some other child may’ve taunted him/her or even pushed him/her. What do you do? Do you try to reason with you child and help him/her put the incident in perspective? Do you talk/complain to the parents of the other child? Or do you tell your child to retaliate the next time around? While the level-headed response (the first one) may be quite rare, the response may’ve been limited to the second one till a few years (decades?) back. 

However, perhaps these days parents would be quite comfortable adopting the third alternative, telling themselves that ‘after all, the child needs to be aggressive to get what s/he wants in this bad, bad world’. The latent fear (sometimes brought on due to personal experiences while young) is also that their child may be seen as a wimp. But is it really the ‘bad, bad world’ outside, or are we contributing to making it that way with our attitude. This can be extended to parents looking the other way when their teenagers indulge in minor misdemeanors while driving, only to have them knocking down a few policemen, while driving drunk in the dead of night. I know this seems like a rampant generlisation, but so be it.

It seems we, as parents and as citizens, have abdicated our duty. Takes me back to the old apocryphal tale of the criminal who, standing in the dock, accused his mother of making him into a criminal by overlooking his early misdemeanours. At least those of us who rant against ‘the system’ can perhaps look at the issues from their micro perspective, to realize how they themselves are contributing to perpetuation of the rotten state of affairs. We continue to criticize the government for the power shortage, but leave lights/fans/ACs/geysers running in vacant rooms/toilets when the power is available. Same with water shortage. And don’t many of us (the paragons of virtue that we are!) gloat in private when the shopkeeper/bus conductor/ autorickshaw driver gives us back more money than is due? Then how can we even tell our children to be virtuous/truthful/honest/conserving (take your pick), leave along actually expecting them to adhere to such high standards.

Alas, it doesn’t look as if people are wont to learn from this. I am realistic enough to realize that people will go on blaming ‘the system’ or the ‘bad, bad world’ for all ills, while merrily going about doing the same things at personal level which, when done by the multitudes, evolve into ‘the system’. There is a sort of disconnect (accentuated by city living) which doesn’t let people see that it is THEY who make up ‘the society’ and then ‘the bad, bad world’. For people to realize this, perhaps we would’ve to go back (or forth, depending on how much of the ‘kaala’ mythology you believe) to ‘Satya Yuga’.

Till then, carry on!