Winners, Losers, You and i

There are basically four kinds of people on this planet... Winners, Losers, people who write about them.. and the people who read about them...

The winners seldom know (or accept) that they are winner... Because they fear complacency... They fear contentment... They fear that one day they will lose that hunger... that mojo... They keep on doing that they do... and they pass away...

The loser seldom accept (or know) that they are losers.... For them, success is the shadow behind their tail... It is just around the corner.... It is tomorrow..... it was in a moment that destiny took away from them... it is any moment but now.... Life is not made up of milestones... when they are born, they were not given out KRAs or KPIs.... They dont have annual appraisals where the almighty gives them a run down on a job poorly done.... They keep on doing what they do... and they cease to exist a long long time before they pass away....

The writers... like me.... find great pleasure in looking at the world in black and white.... in terms of rich and poor.... the strong and the weak..... the have's and the have not's..... the winners and losers.... They set milestones which they deem to be targets of success... all who manage to go on the other side (irrespective of the means used) are "winners".... everyone else is a loser..... They comment about everything and everybody except.... except the people who read what they write.... They never know for sure if the reader is a winner... because the winner never knows if he is... and they dare not term the reader as a loser..... unless of course they want to end up being one as well....

And then there are the readers.... YOU..... no comments.....

A tale of two cities...

Mumbai never ceases to amaze me... The kind of variety, depth and confluence that I see here is unparalleled..

I saw two movies in Mumbai this weekend... on consecutive days... Wanted and Wake up Sid.... I saw Wanted at Maratha Mandir in the heart of Mumbai... Mumbai central... The balcony ticket cost me 75 bucks.... It was a nostalgic moment for me as it has been quite sometime since I bought a ticket @ 75 bucks... I go inside the auditorium and I see families... Which again is quite a rarity nowadays.... Before the movie, Jana Gana Mana.... everyone stands up, I can see a group of guys keeping one hand on the heart and the other put forwards in an oath... The national anthem ends with rapturous applause... The movie starts with whistles and howls.... There is a series of claps every time Salman (or Sallu bhai) mouths a dialogue (which, for the record, are straight out of Rajnikant movies).... Interval.... Samosa cost 15 bucks... coffee: 15 bucks... Popcorn: 10 bucks.... I've got tears in my eyes!!!... Shortly after interval, a brawl ensues in the stalls below.... apparently, some guy actually did a Munnabhai from Rangeela and kept his legs on the seat ahead of him.... Rukavat ke liye khed hai.... off we go again... the movie ends... and I see a collective murmur of the people as they stream through the narrow back alley of the movie hall... Paisa Vasool....

The second day I went to Fame at Inorbit mall..... Wake up sid.... Tickets: 220 bucks per head... Hot dog: *Inaugural offer of 100 bucks only*..... Tea (from tea bags, mind you): 25 bucks.... I have tears in my eyes again....I see couples streaming in.... strutting their stuff as if it were a fashion runway (I never understood the funda behind dressing up for a movie... isn't it dark in there?).... I can see people scrambling for their seats even as the National Anthem goes on... Movie starts in an eerie silence.... no clapping.... no whistles.... Just a nod of approval whenever a scene comes that reminds us of something real.... The movie ends... we better not talk about the value for money quotient here... From the theater, we enter the capitalistic capital of the Mall area... the food plaza and the game zone.... 150 gm of Pasta and 1 slice of 18 inch pizza: 220 bucks... *sigh*.... One round of dance karaoke: 60 bucks.... One portrait: 54 bucks (10% discount as my cousin has apparently been upgraded to a Platinum card)..... I come out of InOrbit with a heavy heart and an equally light wallet....

Two ends of a spectrum in two days... I love this city.... It makes me cry for so many reasons... :-)

what they taught me in college...

Psychology, as a subject of study, always intrigued me; but psychology as a subject of study in my graduation never interested me. Out of all the stimuli J that I was subjected to during the 3 yrs of my grads, I hardly have reminiscence of a handful. One such concept is that of Gestalt psychology. Gestalt is basically a school of thought in Psychology that believes that “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts”. That the personality of a person is something greater than all the characteristic behavior that is shown by that person. I loved the inclusion of the ingredient X in this concoction of human behavior, which gave it the added flavor of mysticism and completed it.

The greatest test of education is when it is tested against reality. Education is only as good as its level of practicality in everyday life. Even the complex topic of Relativity is often explained using the example of a moving train and a stationary object on the platform. All our studies stem from some part of reality that surrounds us. But more often than not, we never see the concepts of a textbook in the conceptions that surround us. Sometimes we can’t, sometimes we choose not to.

Take for example, Gestalt psychology. As I work in an organization, do I know what my place in this organization is? The raw material for me, is the work done by somebody else and my work is a raw material for someone else. At the end of the day, what comes out of the organization is greater than the sum of all the efforts put by everyone in the organization. For that matter, what is Home? Is it just a collection of a family under a common roof? Doesn’t it include all the happiness, sorrows, experience and naivety? Isn’t there an ingredient X that transforms a house into a home?

Every successful person needs to have the inquisitiveness to question the environment, the courage to seek an answer, and the wisdom to accept the outcome. Wish you all the best.

Cutting corners...

I've always been penny wise and pound foolish. I still remember how I used to take money from mom in order to have dinner out with friends and would end up having a Rs.20 pav-bhaji (with no extra pav, they used to cost 3 bucks each) and I'd make a neat profit of 20 odd bucks.. I never knew what I was saving for, never managed to make a fortune out of it, but nevertheless, kept on cutting the corners to such an extent that a point came where only a point remained.

Even today, when I have dinner outside (out of compulsion, rather than choice) I have a paratha or a puri... I scrap off the upper layer, eat it like a roti and then eat the base... serves absolutely no purpose except giving me a feel as if I've had two rotis instead of one.

What am i doing at 4:30 in the morning? haven't slept a wink all night.... at some level, its just a naive attempt to remain awake for a night and day to get the feeling that I've lived two days instead of one... just imagine... had there been no punctuation mark would you know where one statement ended and other began... sleep is a way in which the body and the mind tell each other that a day has ended and new day begins... what happens when one become emotionally attached to a specific day?

And thus begins, the process of cutting corners all over again...

Vomit on a notepad

I read a lot from a lot of non-conventional media... I seldom remember the person from whom the quote originated, but I always remember the quote.. Sometimes, its so brilliant that a misconception arises... A misconception that so original a thought, could have existed only in the realms of my own intelligence. As if I had always thought of it, I had just waited for someone else to draft it into words. Just the other day I read the wonderful quote "every time the radius of my knowledge increase, so does the circumference of ignorance"... Like I said, the origin of the quote is seldom remembered.

By any stretch of imagination, I have been quite irregular about updating my blog. At some level, I feel that its because I've become too critical of myself. At some point this heady cocktail of adulation (both self and from others) and this constant sense of wanting to better my ownself, has brought me to a stage where I cant write anything that surprises me. As if, in the time that lapses between the point where I think of something to where i eventually type it out, that idea has lost all relevance. On many occasions, I had to backspace all the words that I drawled on to the notepad (somehow the idea of ctrl+A and delete never interested me, the very idea of seeing your idea disintegrating with every click of the button, has given me a high).

I had a queer childhood where I read history books while others were reading comics... Used to finish of the various chapter of the English textbook even before the summer break got over... so at the time of exams, I used to prepare for the essays.. I guess I'd ve been the only guy in my school to have a book on how to write essays. Even if there were others, I never knew... One such book started with the foreword that I've never managed to forget. "An essay is nothing but a loose sally of mind, a vomit of thoughts on to a sheet of paper".... How true! and isn't it true for blogs as well?...

A blog is never supposed to make sense in the original draft... the beauty of a classic is that it is interpreted in a different way by every person who reads it... sometimes, you need to bear a child and leave it to the nature to make what it wants to make of it. And without much further ado, I present to you, my sally of mind..