The ONE and Only thing we do.

"I Forget"! This is the most common thing you should find on an Indian Citizen's Resume's "Hobbies" section if he/she was to ever apply for another country's citizenship and it required a resume for the application. 26/11 happened and we forgot. A lot more happened before and after that and we forgot. Now Delhi. The capital of the biggest democracy in the world.

Whats to blame? The government? The vote bank politics? The bureaucracy? Or the half illiterate population? The government of course is to blame. (There is one other thing that is yet to be blamed.) But the government on the other hand is also blamed unnecessarily at times.

There is frustration building up inside of every Indian on the face of this earth. First corruption, then Security. Scar after Scar. After Scar. I want to protest. Protest the failure of the entire government at all levels. Protest the illiteracy rates. Protest the forgetful nature that has been bestowed upon us. Protest the fact that we still watch while Alliance Politics takes a dirty turn every time.

I say the government is blamed unnecessarily at times for one reason. A vigilant public is all it takes. The delhi incident this morning, I believe, could have been averted if we had a vigilant public. When we can draw sketches of people who might have placed the stuff that created havoc, it is pretty obvious that someone saw them put it there. This might sound silly and I welcome all criticism and discussion. When someone saw them place it there, why did not that person get suspicious and inform the police immediately? Was it the "mereko kaiku" (why do i care) attitude? I am sure the people who placed it there must have taken time enough to get out of its range of impact. That is ample time if we have a vigilant public. I am not sure how much of this makes sense but I would definitely welcome comments from people adding more sense to this as well as people who think I am out of my senses.

This is again a personal example for which my mom coughed up some money. Here is what happened. On our "street resident association's" request, we (all residents of our street) kept our cars on the Main Road because a new road was being laid through our street. Since Car is not the preferred mode of transport for us, the car remained on the main road unattended. A little dust and leaves made it look older. The next thing we know, we get a call from the grocery store guy saying our car was being broken into by the bomb squad. We rush and are told someone called up and suspected the car. That is vigilance. Though the bastard police stole our car audio's front panel and we could do nothing about it, I am glad someone cared about the public.

I am in no way saying the government did not fail. It did on a lot of fronts: On the fact that no action was taken on previous culprits and which in turn gives confidence to such people's peers to do such things time and again. On the fact that it could not use intel. On the fact that Mr. Chidambaram has failed on more than one occasion. On the fact that we still do not have technology to protect ourselves. On the fact that we still do not have restrictions on a person having a criminal history and contests an election.

The bottom line is, at 1.25 billion, we need a more vigilant and educated public. I am more than anxiously waiting for the 2014 elections to see who wins. And if sense prevails. If one of the existing parties comes to power again, at the center and the state, I will be ashamed. I will be disappointed.

A ONE sided battle that I fear might not help.

I've always been a vocal critic of what happens in India. The peaceful-war ( sounds like an oxymoron) that's happening in India right now with Anna Hazare and his gang of men is no child's play. He's single handedly shaken the conscience of a billion people and more. But, as always, there has to be a flip side. I am not even sure it should be called the "flip side". It is something like this. It is a "peaceful war" waged against the government by the people. The set of people waging the war (mathematically, in the universal set of the country) can be divided into two subsets. The first subset is of the people who want to stop people from accepting bribes. Does that end the fight? Being an Indian to the core (in all the negative sense included), I am sure the other set is the set of people giving the bribe. They are the majority.

Why do we bribe? Leave alone people who force you into bribing them. On a personal level, I think the number of people forced to bribe are far lesser than the number of people willing to bribe. Why are people willing to bribe? Because we are inherently inclined towards breaking rules. In comic circumstances, this is termed "Indianism". We prefer paying a "Rs.100/-" fine for causing an accident as against calling the cop paying the full "fine". We prefer paying "Rs.1000/-" to the guy who comes to inspect our newly built place for any plan deviations. In all this, we do not try to pay the actual fees/fines. The perfect solution to the newly built house inspection scenario is to NOT DEVIATE FROM THE SANCTIONED PLAN. But, we do it. Blatantly. Because we know we will get away with it for a meager amount.

Where is the basic fault? Where lies the culprit? It lies in the fact that we are what we are in terms of the number of people. With the kind of population and the kind of literacy levels, we are taught one thing directly or indirectly by the society, "survive by any means". We are inherently designed to behave selfish. We are inherently designed to NOT care. We are inherently designed to take the "short-cut". We are inherently "uncivil". Things are looking up but very slowly.

Some cities fare better than others when it comes to civic sense. This is not a shot in the dark. This is personal experience. Being a hyderabadi by birth and having done my engineering in bangalore, I see one stark difference between the two cities. Civic sense. Bangaloreans have more civic sense than hyderabadis. Period. We (hyderabadis) disregard even the damn white solid line at the traffic junctions! We take pride in stopping at the lights beyond the solid white line. Bottomline: there are so many hyderabadis in bangalore. Learn from them! We do not do it. It's just not us (Indians in general).

I still remember my orientation at SPSU. The first thing we were told by this chinese lady was " Asians, especially Indians, please do not try to bribe the cops when they pull you over." I think she generalized with the word "Asians" just so the Indians do not feel too bad.

I have deviated a little from where I started. That's just me. But, what is the bottom-er-line? "Do not do wrong... You will never have to pay the bribe to escape your wrong doing." Pay the cop and ask for the receipt to ensure the money goes to the government. Do not deviate from sanctioned plans so you do not have to bribe the home inspector. Do not drive without a license. Pay your fines in whole and ensure you have receipts. Do not buy a chocolate candy without a receipt. it might take just a 30 seconds longer and it might be just a matter of "50 Paise" tax that you are saying. When a billion people do not pay the "50 paise", it costs the exchequer half a billion rupees. That is FIVE followed by SIX zeroes. Do not let the med-shop guy write your bill on the paper-handbag in which he packs your meds. Pay up.

The Lokpal Bill will do its job after we make sure the tax money reaches the government. Let's do our part first.

Disclaimer: All views personal. Opinions welcome. Open to discussion.

ONE Post no matter what!

I am determined to post something tonight. So much to write. I need to filter it all to make sense. Quite a lot has been happening around me, regarding me, with me and without me.

First things first, thank you Priyanka Jagirdar and Ramesh Kulkarni for making me an "uncle". My under-grad hostel friends already call me that but I guess this is different. WAY DIFFERENT. Hahaha. I will give my best shot to be the "cool" uncle to my nephew. Add "responsible" to it. Rest assured, he is in safe hands! :D Thanks to him, I finally can cook. Jiju will agree with this too! That does NOT mean I love cooking. LOL. The only thing I love is the thing that can happen after cooking. Eating! And I am living proof that I love doing it! Over and over again!

In all the melee, a lot of other things have happened. A full semester (Spring'11) flew-by. Spring semester was a breeze. For a change, I like what I am doing. In the meanwhile I've left two jobs for a new one and I like it too. The new job is good. Keeps my may-mester ticking. So much to learn. So much to do. I wonder what people did when there were no jobs. No interviews. No Resumes. No experience. No salary. No bills. I guess "No (other) Jobs" contributed a lot to increasing the human numbers from 2 ( Adam uncle and Eve Aunty ) to 7 billion ( I wish I could list them all here like I did with Adam uncle and Eve aunty but you know I would have problems doing that :P ).

As I speak about population, the population of Indian Female Graduate students @SPSU is going to reach ZERO by the end of May-mester. Extinct is the word. LOL. Congratulations to Lalitha Kowdeed on your graduation but it didn't help the population :P LOL. Bindu and Steffi, you guys still have the chance to stay back. Take up some extra courses. LOL. So basically when FALL starts, SPSU can be called a Banjar Bhoomi (read gay school) for international students from India. Will miss those "A-creek" days. Those long chats. Ms. Kowdeed, Bharatmovies (dot) com owes you royalty. On moral grounds. You are their single most loyal user. LOL.

Now strangely, even though I am posting this tonight, this was saved in my "postings" and never got published. This is all stuff current to may-mester. Lots has happened from may-mester to now. Up next :)

ONE: My "Trainer" of Thoughts...

ONE: My "Trainer" of Thoughts...: "So here I am. The last time when I was here, it was after a day long journey to Nashville with a few friends-turned-family. Add 2 sleepless ..."

My "Trainer" of Thoughts...

So here I am. The last time when I was here, it was after a day long journey to Nashville with a few friends-turned-family. Add 2 sleepless days prior to that and voila! I was on some kind of a high when I last blogged. No wonder, it was all about a past that I lived. It's always flashback time when you're high. Wo000osh! Thud! Oh, I just jumped into the present. Here's what goes, and has gone, into being what (or rather "whatever") I am today:

Some incidents count towards your experience. Some do not. And there comes by a third category which changes all the experience you've had so far. It spawns a new beginning. And here I am, at MY new beginning.

I've always been the learner who learns from incidents happening around me. For example, back in my under-grad days, I was eccentric. Eccentricity was my alias 'last name'. Incidents happened and things changed. I learnt. But one thing never died in me. The urge to know new people and new places. Of course I could know a lot of people in India. That's one thing India could never fall short of. New People. But I probably was in search of new people from new places. Two jobs in one hand and a visa in the other, it was pretty darn tempting to choose "two" jobs over "one" visa. But sometimes the focus shifts. I had to chose between two "run-of-the-mill" jobs and one "gateway to a whole new experience" visa. The choice I made is pretty obvious by now.

What I get as a degree out of my Master's Program hardly matters. What job the degree gets me hardly matters. The prospect of knowing a whole new set of people and their way of life is what excites me.

One thing I have learnt out of my experience here so far: "You have one life. Live it or suck at it." Always make choices you will not regret. Always make choices you wanted to make. We, Indians, inherently suck at that fact. 1) We're always told what to do. 2) We're told what to love. If ever we combined the two and were "told to do what we love," we probably could have produced a dozen more tendulkars, nigams, bindras, nehwals and mirzas. We still believe that a "chai-wallah" is more low class than a Software Engineer. We still lack the dignity of labor. More often than not, the truth is the "chai-wallah" loves making "chai" more than the Software Engineer, who did his under-grad in Mechanical Engineering, working his behind off testing software. Mech Engg and Software!? Heck!? But that's what pays and that's what is "dignified". And, sadly, that's how we are. Even though we have the distinction of producing the highest number of engineers every year, we also have the distinction of having the lowest number of inventions/year.

We prefer to sell our ingenious rather than use it to develop indigenous products. That's how we are. Things are changing. I've heard. But that's it. I've only heard.

We are still afraid of going home and saying "Hey people, I wanna work part time jobs and earn for myself" because we're sure we'll get to hear "We will lend you money if you want but you dare not work such jobs." The only ray of hope is that things have changed to "Let me know when you work." although it actually reads "I am pissed at the idea but I won't make it evident because its not cool to be pissed." Haha.

I might be too critical here but it's too true a fact to be ignored.

The only thing constant, they say, is "Change". Eventually, things have to change. They will. Only, wish this "eventuality" is a part of my lifetime. I've got just ONE.

P.S : Fortunately, I have been blessed with people who have been supportive all the time and appreciate everything I do. A very objective post.

ONE: My Train of Thoughts...

ONE: My Train of Thoughts...: "There is 'a' turning point in everyone's life. Sometimes many. Good, Bad or Ugly. I've already had my first good turning point. Slugging my..."

My Train of Thoughts...

There is "a" turning point in everyone's life. Sometimes many. Good, Bad or Ugly.

I've already had my first good turning point. Slugging my behind off in the "IIT Industry" that is called Hyderabad, the world was all about one IIT seat. Period. I am not going to crib about not getting through the IITJEE. Instead, with every day that passes by, I thank god for not letting that happen. Of course, I missed out on studying in the best school in the country. But the first turning point in my lusterless life (read IIT-less) happened when Dad decided to send me to Bangalore (a lot about the city a little later). A city I had to go to for 4 long years. With no friends to begin with. Still remember the day when I stood on the entry door of the train (to bangalore urf bengaluru) bogie with tears in my eyes waving good bye to mum and akka. Fast forward four years. I stand there with tears again. Only this time the train was moving in the opposite direction and there I was, waving to my besties. What had happened during the fast forward? A kid sang. A kid learned to organize. A kid learned to make friends. A kid fought. A kid got belted. A kid apologized. A kid dealt with shit loads of people. A kid stayed in a hostel and didn't change roommates for 4 long years! Long story short, the kid turned into a guy. Thanks to a ton of people I met in Bangalore. Thank You for bearing with me. Thank You for listening to me. Thank You for everything that I am today! I am ever indebted to the city!

Surprisingly, I already have had my second turning point in my life. And a good one it is! Deeply confused whether I wanted to do my Master's in Science or Business Administration, I frantically looked around for suggestions/advice in my final year. Pretty obvious by now, I chose to pursue my Master's in Computer Science. Although I have changed that now to MS in Software Engineering. Immaterial information so far. Even before I could get a hang of life after college, I am here in Atlanta negotiating this new "turning point". Took me all this while to actually miss my under-grad life. Things move fast. Lightening Fast. But you learn things fast. Lightening fast.

Although its been just 6 months since I have been here, I have experienced enough to change my rationale.

More coming soon ...

An inspiring quote:

"Even if I spend my entire Life trying to do just good things, I am not sure if I can do all good things I ever wanted to do. Life's too short but make it worth the effort." -- Ramesh Kulkarni.

Thank You Priyanka Jagirdar and Ramesh Kulkarni for making my life so much more easier...