Random pickings of a sleepy mind

You’ve been thinking of the perfect way to start a conversation or have been struggling with a quick comeback to something your friend or colleague had said or it’s just that you wanted a perfect opening to the next blog or article you wanted to write and all this eluded your grasp at that particular time no matter how hard you tried.

Now let’s fast forward to the time when you hit your head on the pillow and are ready to call it a night. Just when you’ve closed your eyes and have gone through what’s happened during the day and are almost drifting off to sleepy land the unimaginable happens. The answer to your conversation starter, smart comeback or perfect opening creep up on you.

And without a thought as to why it’s coming in now you go on to place your mind at that thoughts disposal, weaving lines and words into beautiful order, so much so that it kind of feels like it is running into a beautiful commentary. You always wonder at some point as to how articulate you are and feel proud that you could produce a work like this, forgetting that it is just a work of fiction, and in more ways than one.

There have been days, or rather nights to be precise, where I have had deep arguments and conversations with people who I’ve wanted to give a piece of my mind or written a beautiful piece in those minutes when I was just slipping into dream land and then to be lost forever when I wake up the next day.

I sometimes wonder if these would resurface again and if the logic and points I had raised in my thoughts during those moments would come to my aide if I were in a similar situation some time later. But I’m never sure how that works or if once the thoughts are formed they are lost somewhere in the echelons of the mind buried within other data never to see the light of day or pen again.

Talking of pens, I’ve often thought of keeping a pen and paper at my bedside table to help jot down the points, but hey I’m too lazy to wake and put those thoughts to paper. Who knows when I wake up mayhap I lose the plot all together. So I’ll just stick on to enjoy that moment when I can and not sweat too much about how I could use it for my benefit. 

Words of wonder...

I’ve always been fascinated by words and the picture they are able to create when strung in a particular order. Rudyard Kipling referred to words as the most powerful drug used by mankind. Ever since I was able to string together the alphabets to form words and then to join them and form sentences, it was always a thrill to unravel a new world or see the same one through the eyes of different authors. I’ve travelled the length and breadth of some places thanks to the picture the words have painted.

Tom Sawyer always brings to my mind a picture of a small naughty boy with a pail of whitewash in hand and paintbrush in the other, slowly moving on to how he eventually makes dimes out of his task. I’ve almost felt the breath of the Swiss Alps and tasted goat’s milk in Heidi through the description of the author. I’ve sailed the whale ship Pequod along with Ishmael and almost felt the terror Captain Ahab put us through to get his personal vendetta against Moby Dick. Like Matilda I went on olden-day sailing ships with Joseph Conrad, went to Africa with Ernest Hemingway and travelled India with Rudyard Kipling. I travelled all over the world while sitting in my little room at home. There are many a times I’ve felt suspense and thrill and not put the book down till I got to the end of a Famous Five, Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys or The Secret Seven as if I was almost helping them solve the mystery myself.

I’m sure there are a lot of books which have been just narratives of things as they were or mere explanations of things as they should be. However, nothing brought alive the war and its consequences as ‘The Diary of a Young Girl’ by Anne Frank or ‘The Book Thief’ by Markus Zusak or ‘Désirée’ by Annemarie Selinko. The characters tell a story and the authors have weaved the tales around how the war was affecting the lives of people like no other history book I had read when in school. Although I guess, it might have been a task getting a bunch of kids to read heavy literature when reading curriculum books itself was considered a chore!

There are many a evenings when with my head stacked with pillows and feet tucked in my favourite blanket, with my mother’s incessant nagging in the background that I would one day spoil my eyes, I’ve peeked along with Alice in Wonderland or slept off to the tales of talking animals by Enid Blyton or relived the life of Black Beauty. I’ve dreamt of mythical beings and the magic of the land of Narnia as C. S. Lewis painted it for us and have joined in the movement with the inmates of George Orwell’s The Animal Farm. These stories left open doors to multiple interpretations with my mind being the only barrier to how far I could stretch the boundaries.

Food was often the victim of abandonment and so were academics and friends as I was engrossed in the lives that I was unveiling through the author’s eyes. Times have changed. Different genres of literature have held me captivated at various stages of interest. The more I read, the more I want to continue reading and explore. I could be lost in the beauty of a sunset as seen on a beach or be enthralled by the beauty of nature as seen from the top of a mountain. However, even when my eyes are not reading the printed letters, I find myself writing notes in my mind to go along with the picture to capture the essence of the moment. That is what adds flavour to the memory when I pick it out of my memoirs someday to reminisce. Like Helen Keller said, Literature is my Utopia!

Forever young

The secret recipe for being young is still at large. I’m sure cosmetologists and estheticians across the world are trying to figure out a magic formula that would help the human race be young for long. While the brilliant minds are still at work to develop this magic drug, I had a stimulating experience which kind of opened up my mind to looking beyond the physical and focus on being young at heart.

I was back in a college campus when an inter-collegiate event was on, giving company to my spouse or just wanting to see him work in his environment. The atmosphere in this campus was filled with energy, enthusiasm, high levels of emotions with each emotion being felt so strongly like there is no tomorrow. Yet, these students, once they graduate out of the college portals and embroil themselves with work, create their own definitions of success, get too indulged in their lives goals that they don’t realize when slowly life’s experiences turn them old and jaded. That is when they reminiscence of old days and the way things were back when they were in college.

Professors, now they are another cup of tea! And these are the genre of people who continue to stay young. I tell you why. Most of them stay in the campus, watch batches of students come in and watch them move on as young adults ready to take on the world. Since the energy levels in a campus is contagious, it means that some of all the mad energy is going to get passed on to them too. That’s not just it, they need to stay a step ahead of their students and so they learn some of their little tricks too!

Professors at most times need to converse, advice, cajole the students at certain tasks and the best results are got when they do that in the same wavelength as the student and not just as a higher up. This is an electrifying combination. The mind is constantly stimulated to process new information, along with the continuous young energy and I guess that’s the reason, most of the popular Professors are still young, atleast at heart. It’s another matter that most of the student antics might have given most of them premature greying or even go bald! Talk to any ‘popular’ professors and you’ll get what I’m trying to talk about.  

We were just discussing on the pros and cons of being a lecturer on our way back home. Would teaching of any kind have the same effect? We were not able to conclude emphatically, but both of us did feel that this strange bond between students and professors might be limited to education above a certain level. Does this make me want to take up teaching? Heck no! But I think I’ll be back for a dip from that fountain some time!  

All work and no play...

Work-life balance? What’s that? At one level it seems almost absurd to pose the question when work is so hard to come by. Whatever the government

may say about green shoots of recovery, the reality is jobs are scarce. You know that for sure when you’re told the biggest recruiters at IIT Delhi this year were Jalandhar’s Lovely Professional University, started by a mithai-magnate (it picked up 21 graduates) and ICFAI Institute of Science and Technology, (which recruited 17), not fancy names like Goldman Sachs and Credit Suisse.

If things are so bad for kids who’ve been through one of the toughest selection processes in the country and who, till yesterday, were spoilt for choice, imagine how much worse it must be for others hoping to start their careers. And for many already in the workforce who are desperately hanging on to their jobs for want of alternatives. In such a scenario, where not only are jobs scarce, but unlike in the US, there is no safety net whatsoever, work ought to be prized above all else.

So is it strange, even plain stupid, to write a Sunday column on work-life balance? What’s that, many of today’s youngsters with 24 by 7 jobs might ask. Some quaint idea? What’s life if you don’t have work? The counter, what’s work if you don’t have a life somehow never seems to get posed at all.

And so for the generation that’s just started work in the midst of what is arguably the severest downturn the world has witnessed since the Great Depression and for those in sectors hard hit by the slowdown, life is only work, work, and more work. If you’re lucky enough to have a job, you’d better put your nose to the grindstone and slog; from dawn to dusk and possibly till later too. Remember Andy Grove’s, ‘Only the paranoid survive’? Well, barring the public sector, that seems to be the motto in the private sector the world over.

Let me qualify that. The country’s second largest private sector bank, HDFC Bank, has once again shown it is different. The bank has reportedly told its employees it doesn’t want them to spend too much time in office. All employees have been told to shut down their computers two hours after the close of banking and not work much beyond ‘normal’ (10am – 4pm) working hours.

It’s asked them to ‘Go get a life’, says a report in The Financial Chronicle. And suiting action to words, the bank’s managing director, Aditya Puri, sets an example by leaving office at 5.30 pm sharp. Sadly, organisations like HDFC Bank are rare. In most organisations, performance is measured, not by the quantum and quality of output, but by the number of hours spent in office. Never mind whether it is spent productively or not (usually the latter)! Barring the odd day, there is usually no reason why a normal work load cannot be completed in a 8-10 hour working day, yet for most the workday stretches interminably.

Even more unfortunate is the practice (actively encouraged by bosses) of hanging around in office till the boss leaves. This is what makes HDFC Bank a trendsetter of sorts. Not only does it tell its employees to vamoose once their work is done but their boss does likewise. Delhi Metro legendary chief E Sreedharan is another boss who doesn’t believe in his staff ‘hanging’ around. He seldom stays late in office and does not encourage his staff to do so either. Yet Delhi Metro has, time and again, beaten the deadline.

To be sure Delhi Metro is a public sector undertaking (with a private sector work ethos!) But make no mistake! HDFC Bank is not setting it-self up as a sucker when it tells its employees to go home, spend time with family and friends, have a blast, whatever, even as employees at competitor banks ‘work’ their fingers to their bone. It knows all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. Employees cannot be productive if they are cooped up in office all day.

‘Eureka’ moments seldom come while sitting at a desk. In creative jobs, in particular, and these days almost all work is creative, it is important to re-charge your batteries and that cannot happen in the confines of an office. Companies and managements that recognise that more (hours in office) means less quality output and strive to ensure their employees have a work-life balance are the winners.

(Source: Economic Times)

Thicker than blood

Someone quite rightly said that you don’t get to choose your relatives but then you do get to choose your friends.. I guess that God just let us choose the best! I’m not sure how many have been lucky with friends but I should say that I am one fortunate person who has been surrounded by so many loved ones at times when I needed them most that today I feel I can easily attribute a lot of what I am to them..

There are times when you feel like you should be left alone and you are surrounded by ‘them’ and they don’t let you to sit and think, you just wish that they’d just all disappear so that you could sit in corner and lick your wounds in private, but then on a later day you realise that your friends had actually tried to take your mind away from the problem, had tried to fill your thoughts with a little bit of sunshine so that they could see the smile back up on your face..

There are times when you’ve just wanted to talk and felt that the world was not treating you fairly. You just needed to tell someone that ‘It is not just fair!’ as though you’d just discovered the secret of living and then you dial the number of an old friend and pour it all out.

I’m glad there are friends, God knows how dreary life would have been without them.. So let’s toast a drink to them!! Cheers Amigos!

The 'true' stroy of Valentines Day

I just got this hilarious forward from Joe and I thought it ought to be shared...

In spite of what you have been told by everyone, especially the propagandist English media, the truth is that Valentine's Day originated hundreds of years ago, in India, and to top it all, in Narendrabhai's Gujarat!

It is a well known fact that Gujarati men, specially the Patels, (used to?) mistreat and disrespect their wives. One fine day – it happened to be the 14th day of February – one brave Mrs. Patel, having had enough of "torture" from her husband, finally chose to rebel against the system and thrashed her husband up with a velan, the rolling pin that is used to make chapattis. Yes, the same velan with which she made chapattis for him. Only, this time, instead of the dough, it was the husband who was flattened.

This was a momentous occasion for all Gujarati women and the revolt soon spread like wild fire, with thousands of housewives beating up their husbands with the velan. It was a watershed event in the history of love.

Soon, the "chapatti-ed" husbands from Anand to Amdavad, and all of the Patel men-folk, quickly learnt that their women armed with velans were truly a force, and started behaving more respectfully with their wives.

Thereafter, to commemorate that eventful day, on 14th February every year, the womenfolk of Gujarat would beat up their husbands with the velan and the men had to display the supreme joy of submitting to the will of the women they loved.

February 14^th became – as it remains even today – too much of an ordeal for the men and the most awaited day for the women. The wise among the men decided to use Gandhigiri in true Gujarati style to lose the battle and win the war. Soon the men started making offerings of flowers and sweets and gifts to please their 'patni devi's and bought their mercy at a price. And thus began the tradition of velan time.

As Gujarat fell under the influence of Western culture, and the Patels began to settle from Durban to Trinidad, the ritual and the celebrations (or the ordeal?) soon spread through out the British commonwealth, and then to the western countries that had trade relations with the colonies.

In course of time, velan time, got anglicized to 'Velantine' and then to 'Valentine'. As you know, today it is celebrated world over as Valentine's Day, and as people who are proud of 'Indian culture', it is imperative that we celebrate it in the original Indian way, and not in the corrupt westernized and commercial way. 

Back again!

Well.. I wouldn’t describe myself to be a prolific writer and somebody who has the creative juices flowing out through their hands. I guess I am just happy when left by myself to do what I feel like.. but then when I do 

need an output for my vent up thoughts, I do pick up a pen and jot em’ down in my 

diary... 

I’ve been one to keep a diary for years now. Not as somebody who chronicles each day of her life, but on some days when I feel I want to share my thoughts with someone.

It has been not a very difficult transformation to make now that everything has gone ‘online’. You work from remote areas and are connected ‘online’. Your friends who once sat in the very same bench with you in college and canteen and library and now in different parts of the earth are in touch only because they are ‘online’. You network for your work ‘online’ and nowadays there have been more and more instances of people finding their life patners also ‘online’. So I just thought it might be time to just make that move and make my diary an ‘online blog’ too!

With this in mind I’m just making the resolve that I would write in my nomadic and wandering thoughts to paper more often now..