The Princely Experience

It doesn’t rain much in Ahmadabad. Definitely not for someone who spent his life in Lucknow and Dhanbad before coming to Ahmadabad. So when it started raining yesterday, my heart was all joy and contented at the sight of a familiar but recently rare pleasure giving phenomenon. When the rains continued through the night my hearts joy knew no bounds and then when today the rains yielded the skies to a cool breeze with the relaxing touch on the skin I was ecstatic. Yet there has to be a spoilsport in a PhD scholars life and work it was for me. I had to review this document sent by abhishek. But me being me , my mind leaped and jumped form here to there in an attempt to find a magic solution to emerge out of the anomaly of life and enjoy the beautiful evening.

With heavy steps and a heavier heart I trudged the weary way from my room to the new LAN at the other end of the campus a good 700 m walk. My mind was restless. As I came to the LAN I realised my mind was not restless it was not at rest. And behold an idea flashes. I open the door to the balcony of the LAN and take my chair with wheels out to the balcony knowing that I have a laptop to work on. Sadly the balcony has no room for a breeze when I am in there in a mood to enjoy. I needed an alternative and soon there was one. I put my laptop on the chair and skilfully guided it through the work space to outside it to the portico and corridor above the main ramp in the new campus. Where the breeze flows in from a neat half km free flow and crosses to the other half of the campus . the brilliance of the idea could not be mixed. My feet firmly rested on the railings and my self on the chair began the review of the document and then I remembered the wonderful gift of rashmita – soothing music from the land of ladakh and I instantly clicked on Nawang Khechoggs favourite collection. The setting was complete.

I was seated like a maharajah with half a km of approach road leading to my high perch – the main lounge area of the new campus. I was taken back to old memories of castles and palaces and movies and dream theatres of the prince sitting on his balcony overlooking the beautiful gardens in his palace as he waited for the next adventure in his life which took him to his princess as well. More strong was the princely feeling of a kingdom on earth with free flowing air, beautiful rain , greenery and flowers, long wide roads , and the luxury to enjoy it all. And I silently thanked god for two things – one for my bringing me to IIMA and the second for the love that nature has always showered on me in blessing me with these luxuries of life.

So come join me… lets create luxury in life.

a fun post.. not all of this is true

I Lie down on the grass, green and serene in the Louis Kahn Plaza, as i write this piece that i don't know what shall be. the moon is there - a full moon and it reminds me of so many faces, sound and beautiful, all lost to the vagaries of life. Pretty much like the moon that fades behind the dark clouds. The majestic buildings stand tall and firm having seen battles and Earthquakes- battles of a corporate and academic nature. The moon peeps on me from between two clouds and as i look back it hides behind the cloud and a cool breeze embraces me in congratulating me on my victory over the moon. The cool breeze and the lovely but rainless weather take me to my own self inside.

The structure stands firm having seen and endured many a battle and earthquake. Yet the bricks are all tattered and old. A new fabric is needed and a new look to the structure over due. the metamorphosis (this is the year of the metamorphosis) is proving to be painful and surely a test on many accounts. Patience is just one of it.

I lie down and look at the vast sky and huge clouds above, ready to fall on me. My heart knows no fear and it knows not a friend either. My hears sees beyond the clouds into outer space for it is like the outer space - distant , dark, remote, existing but never seen or realized. Person after person that i have met and friend after friend that i have failed reminds of the expectations (that died long back) i had that someone will understand my heart.
People closest to me have had no inkling of what is happening within me or why? Where i am floating and on what? The search for my own self has become a pursuit of the self of others. I know the moon feels no joy in the sky when clouds fly by and it is lost to the breeze and games of nature. i know how inspiring the moon is and how it is capable of bringing tides to the mighty oceans. i wonder if some celestial being ever asked the moon , does it want to do so?

Every night it sets out. Lovers of the world feel that it is there to remind them of romance, inspire the poets they feel, to predict the weather the meteorologist thinks and for the kids to hear fables and fairy tales. having done this why does it need to move out again the next night on the same path and night after night in a seemingly never ending pursuit. Maybe it just wants to ensure that all is well with its beloved, somewhere, she might be.

seeing me write about itself the shy moon has hid behind the clouds and i lying on the grass in LKP (Louis Kahn Plaza) amidst the tall buildings and distant trees feel like falling in a big deep pit... of eternity and oblivion... in a world of my own.

The Value System of the Media... are they opinion builders or scam creators?

how many times as a 14 year old did i think my parents were curtailing my freedom and strangulating my creativity and expression...i guess once almost every week...
how many beautiful 14 year old girls have guys queuing up to "patao" them.. in the age of today talking of 2008. i guess more than 80% of the 14 year old girls have someone flirting with them..
how many professionals in high stress jobs do not like to take stress home and discuss with some colleague who can understand it irrespective of whether the colleague is male or female? i guess about 70 % in metros..

you would be wondering why am i writing all this where the title suggests that it should have something to do with media. well I'm talking about arushi talwar and Dr. talwar and the family. AND

HOW ASHAMED THE MEDIA SHOULD BE AT ITS ROLE...

given the figures i estimate above and a lot of people agree (yes i have informally surveyed this with my friends..) so given the figures above.. i never found reason or rationale enough to frame Dr. talwar in the whole affair. and the finger points at only one direction for the same. THE MEDIA.

it was the media which wanted to show evidence and circumstantial information on the TV before even the police had gone through it.
it was the media which thought that probably having read enough detective novels they could play sherlock holmes this time ..the reporters went into elaborate analyses beyond the "expert" investigators that they got on TV in explaining how and when Dr. rajesh talwar had killed his own 14 year old daughter....can those reporters today stand in front of a crowd on thousand odd people one side and the talwar family on the other and beg forgivenness for the trauma they have inflicted.

just because some 20 something year old reporter reads the wrong magazines and stories. s/he thinks that a doctor in a detective novel should have an extra-marital affair and it would shock the people most if the father killed the so young and delicate daughter. i wonder if they think the same way about their own families and friends.. id be happy not to have some such friends..

a media which is responsive to society can also do business seems to have been erased from the memories but what remains is a business that can also manage the media. sadly enough the latter is true for the times i have to lift a newspaper and watch a television.

the first day Dr. talwar had been indicted by the media i was stunned.. i remembered the arguments that i had with my parents in my teens and i knew a father cant hurt a child without reason but these are not the values that the media believes in . it seems to believe in incest, homicide, murder, motive, fraud, scam and scoop more than anything. i ask "what are the values of the media?"

last but not the least.. i turn my attention to the family.. a mother and a father who lost a darling child after 14 years of nurturing her in this world where values are askew and in turn get blamed for nothing short than murder.. a 60 day trauma of being in jail for Dr. talwar and he has only his wife.. and the two are separated on two sides of the jail. in the loss of a child the husband and wife so much need each other and the media ensured that they had no such avenue to come to terms with the loss. i wonder if there is an avenue where we can put the media on trial and yet i rest that idea cause the trauma for the family has only now begun. they still have to come to terms with the loss of a teenage daughter while for the media the story has ended.

may god bless the departed soul.

a lily of a day is fairer in may.....

ECONOMICS OF PEOPLE

I have thought about writing this many times but then people are not what i relish writing about so i always let go of it. However this recent new experience makes me think twice about doing that and here is a post.

Well its about how economics is applied to daily life in our interaction with people.

When two strangers meet and a common platform is discovered to keep the conversation going ..initially there is a lot that they have to discover about each other .. these are new things and facts or projections not known earlier by one about the other. As such the marginal value returned by every added moment of interaction is pretty high and as such there is a desire on part of both to spend more and more time with each other. As such it is evident that a lot of time is spent together and some exceptions are made in schedule. (the given graph is from http://www.davidfriedman.com)

As more time is spent with each other, more facts and aspects are discovered about each other and the new things to learn keep on reducing unless new experiences are created. What this means in practical terms is that the focus needs to shift from learning or talking the past to the living the present and building the future. If that does not happen then the incremental learning from new facts decreases as they are linked to now known facts and also the probability of coming up with a fact not now already known reduces. In economical terms the marginal value added by every moment of interaction goes down. Asuch the incentive to spend more and more time with each other goes down and new options are sought priorities are reset , the exceptions disappear, and what some people call it as "distances creep in".

So next time this happens in your or our life don't worry .. don't fret about it don't feel cheated it is a perfectly rational approach in the larger frame of bounded rationality.

In simple humanitarian terms the economics of people is about a utility function of deriving added value.. in other terms its plain utilitarianism.

The rains are here :) HURRAH

Ever since Yahoo 360 started misbehaving i had no option but to move to some other blogging avenue and that brought me back to this old experiment of mine. and so now its time to revive this and return to my blogging times..



so lets start with some happy news.. it finally rained in Ahmadabad .. and it rained cats and dogs... and true to my spirit i was out under the clouds getting drenched like a kid.. i roamed in waist deep water... found a football and played and made thirty others play with it in ankle deep water lol so much fun and then i also rolled on the floor on the ramp to let the waves of flowing water hit my head .. by the way that is very soothing like a head massage after a hot and tiring day.



so what i can write in few sentences is two hours of fun and a parting gift to a hardworking boy trying to make his place in this world. someone who has slogged and worked hard and came to iim as an employee to find that the students are very much like him but no one taught him to speak good English or build his cv. so it made me happy to give him the happiness.



rain always seems like gods love and i feel as if mother nature is embracing me so it is very very difficult to keep me away from it. my own mother always keep me away from rain as i was delicate as a child but now every time i get drenched i remember her love:) strange are the ways we associate things and justify them to ourselves.

it also brought many people on campus to see the kid in me. i am sure not many would have noticed that there is about a decade between me and them and yet we are all kids inside.

the rain made me miss a lot of people that i have enjoyed with in the rains... the fun the frolic the eroticism the ecstasy the legacy of paper boats and the wild splashing of dirty water lols i feel so energetic again.
the worst is all good things have to come to an end so two hours and i had to gt back to my room to sleep.. and this post has to end to make way for another soon :) till then keep Yo-ing

im back

after a long gap.. yeah years to go by .. ill be back.. :) and the cosmic dance will never stop...

cosmic dance more

hi guys and gals

and i have a sense that since a male brought up in a typically male domionated indian society writes this most of the readers are bound to be males rather than females.

well its time to unleash the cosmic dance.

why do we celebrate so much segregation of the sexes in the indian society? is it a traditional thing as some people claim it to be or is it just a fad for the out of phase people in the modern era?

well truly speaking i have not come across a single proof in support of segregation in the ancient past except for separate dormataries for lady students in the gurukuls and that too i found was based on the reasoning that by then the division of labour in the society had set in and the separate dorms were part of learnign mechanisms that led to different social functions and it was only to in aid of that and nothing else as per this reding that i had come across long back and forget its reference.

even the movies like trishagni have shown how we have started misinterpreting things for vested interests and how they can put both religion and traditional knowledge in the wrong light.

i have lost so many friends in my life to the segragation of sexes in the indian society despite the fact that i was brought up in the more liberal urban societies. the friends i lost are greatly treasued and the loss has taught me how the so called traditionalists just distrust relationships in the name of culture and tradition without even understanding tradition and culture itself.

wll things move on as they will and so will the world but in the small time duration that we are given (in a metaphysical sense) can we each make a differnce ?? i think we surely can by each trying to abolish one such social misnomer form our lives in our life. did someone say not a big task? i contend that.. our social upbringing drives some things so deep into us because every stimulus is geared to a single but hopelessely wrong end that it makes such a small task a great uphill task in itself.

i have tried and so far have not met with a good measure of success on anything that i have tried in my life but then most of the small time still remains for me and i am not to lose heart so easily. i keep on trying confident to drive above the driven down deep musings of a social upbringing till i can come up with an example to show what i mean when i say that can we try to root out one such social misnomer from our lives?


love to all...jughead

opening the dance party

hi folks this is my first attempt at making a blog and today ill be jsut content with starting a blog which shall let me share something deep inside me with you all. i am a man of varied interests and a myriad of experiences come my way and as such i call this blog a cosmic dance because ill make you travel with me through not just worldly phenomenon but things which can be celestial and at times transcend the pure physical material domain and into the grey domain of spirituality and well well what the celtics call the skeptical existential reality and at times ill be contradicting myself as well because i believe in learning and i solidly believe in what walt whitman had written somewhere " i am large, i contradict myself , i contain multitudes"

thats all for now i am in a good mood today.