A new life: Back to blogging

So, I am not a student anymore. I am a working professional. This change took place on June 14th, 2010.

Leaving college was a painful experience. Leaving college also arouses in one the sense of excitement and a sense of the unknown. Joining the mainstream of life- where you stand on your own legs, where you work, do something more meaningful which you know affects other people, where you earn your own money for the first time and where you spend your own money- not knowing when you exhausted your first salary and are now on what you brought from home :)

This new life doesn't seem as rosy as it one thinks it would be when passing out of college. But once we start realizing that this is the life everybody leads and this is what you would be the rest of your life, you start to look beyond the campus and start trying to find out what's in store and the road that is to be taken.

For me personally, this life looks good. The fact that I am now contributing to the Indian economy and society brings a sense of responsibility. When I wake up in the morning, like most people, the thought that comes to mind is "Oh no... office!" After the intital endurance of the hardship of leaving the bed, the thought that comes is this is what one is supposed to do. Men work. Their is no other way of living. We work. We contribute. We do our part- however small. Every small contribution adds up in the final result. We work. I work.

Cheers to the life ahead. Cheers to life and cheers to production.

Dying a natural death?

Eventually, everything comes to an end. It is written even in the Bhagwad Gita. Is the blogosphere following this path and coming to an end? Has it run its full course? I cannot but muse about this lifecycle of blogging drawing to an end.

Blogs took birth not very far down the memory lane. It was welcomed whole-heartedly by the internet-enabled people of India and the rest of the world. The frenzy of activity in the blogosphere by the youth and businesses and journalists soon made headlines. Blogs were the in thing at that time. Everybody I knew was blogging feverishly- the discussion among people those days was about what the hot thing that the blogosphere is talking about and what will the next big discussion to be put on the altar. Youth blogging about move reviews and the general stuff of everyday lives- college events, breakups etc- the businesses leveraging the power of blogs to reach to the general public to sell their ideas and their brand. Blogging was everywhere.

The main purpose of blogging was to give people the power to fulfill their right to expression. People always had the right to expression but blogging took it to the next level by bringing the whole world together. Now one's views were not only heeded by one's friends' circle but by the whole world- at least by the whole internet fraternity. This power was too much for the common man and he was in no way going to let the opportunity slip. Thus the blogosphere.

Then suddenly some genius who was not in the mood of typing so much for getting his views aired came up with the idea of microblogging. This is where blogging lost out. Strangely, people appreciated this idea of less typing and getting ideas across in tweets which comes packaged with the slaughter of the English language- well there are always side-effects. But the thought that microblogging will almost completely outstrip blogging, and that too this soon, was not something that was not anticipated.

While many would argue that blogging still holds reign, the fact remains that blogging has lost. Remnants remain and journalists still publish blogs on news websites because they don't make it to the print edition but the new age is that of microblogging. Movie stars, businesses, youth and Shashi Tharoor now-a-days tweet. If we have a look at blogs now-a-days, they have become shorter and shorter which is coming to resemble more to microblogging on a blog- a hybrid.

Will the blogging community completely die someday? And will it be a natural death or will it be because of external factors? Something to ponder upon- the similarities between blogging dying due to microblogging (an external event) and the extinction of rain forests due to climate change (again an external event). Ironically, the external agent in the both the cases is the same.

On Pune…

Life isn't fair. At least that is what we hear most of the times. But sometimes, some things happen when you realize nothing could be more wrong than that. Yes, life is always fair. One should only be ready to appreciate what life gives them and not ponder for too long, far too much, on how much one has to sacrifice to get those short-lived moments when they come. Fleeting as they be, but all the more ever lasting. If you still see a paradox there, you know it is time for speculation.

It all came to me this last weekend. Not a secret, I'd been to Pune to visit my sister and my brother-in-law. And boy! What a great time I had there. I couldn't have asked for more. When most things go wrong and life seems all bleak, a little light shines through. You know you are not alone- there are people who care for you. That the disappointments, the daily monotonous life aren't everything that you are presented with. You go through to all those things day after day and in lieu of that you get that little light, that moment of joy and you know it was completely worth it.

My reason for visiting Pune so suddenly was not exactly what I should discuss. It has become immaterial after all. I'll take it as a price I'd pay for the holiday. For if it hadn't been because of that precise reason, I wouldn't have visited Pune in the first place. Meeting my sisters and my brother-in-law, those moments of laughter and joy stemming out of nothings, those eating out with family, that catching a local bus running for the first time… everything has now become a part of me and I'll always carry it with me for my life. Indeed, I can say that was the best time I had ever had as far back as I can remember.

Lastly, I want to my sister to know that she means a lot to me. She may not be the wisest person I know, she may not be the smartest person I know, she may not be the perfect person I know… but I can say this she is person who loves best her brother. And I can only hope of loving her the way she loves me… I will consider myself lucky if ever I can love anyone in the same amount she loves me and cares for me. Thank you, didi. You're the best.

And in the future when I'll be bogged down by disappointments (which will undoubtedly happen), I will just have to close my eyes and think of the sweet memories and remember a line which a friend of mine always says, "God works in mysterious ways."

26/11

India is a, indeed, a strange land. And from every point of view-the cultural multi-diversity, the plethora of languages that we speak and, foremost, our diplomats. It's more than a year since the Mumbai attacks. Let's see what has happened since then.

To describe it tersely, one say, it went from outrage to rage to token gestures to a comfortable mellowing down. Nothing's changed after the Mumbai attacks. No tangible action. Nothing, in the least, that could result in some tangible action in the future. The oh-so-interesting case of Kasab, which invariably and with a growing uninteresting episode of events, hasn't yet be concluded, and what we get to encounter are the notorious and funny demands of the terrorist. Clearly, it's not helping. We could as well hang him while I complete this post. Some columns in the newspaper every now and then, with decreasing frequency and even more rapidly decreasing length of those, only suggest that we haven't yet got amnesia.

No one can ever forget what the mood was just after the attacks- it's surely going down the history line. The world at that time was sympathetic to India. The US was just too eager to help India to wipe out terrorism from Afghanistan and the place where it is bred- Pakistan. Pakistan sure had a tough time to deal with. But, I got to say, Pakistan diplomats are far too clever for us to recognize that. They stuck to their old theory that India is a "soft state". And we just proved it with a more concrete proof. Islamabad was keen to buy time and Delhi sold them- at a bargain. Now, it does not take a rocket scientist to figure out that US, too, thinks that. We are a soft state.

So is everything lost? The lives taken all goes futile? Supposedly, yes. And no one's helping. India took a tough stance by stopping outright the dialogue process with Pakistan on the Kashmir issue. Though they should have done that when the Shimla pact was no more respected, but nevertheless, better late than never. Omar Abudallah, the CM of J&K, wants the talks to be revived now. It is no surprise Pakistan seconds that opinion. And the US, given the turn of events, will also want that- maybe it'll also lure India to start the peace talks by showing a lollipop called the "permanent member of the Security Council". Newspaper editorials, which at that time, commended Delhi's move now talk in the same vein. But the question why should the talks be revived? Just because a year has passed and the dead people doesn't matter anymore. Talks were cancelled for a reason- so that some tangible action will be taken by Pakistan. Even after dossier after dossier on the masterminding of the Pakistan terrorists, Pakistan still claims the evidences are inconclusive.

In short, the Mumbai attacks were just another chapter with no real significance. India is known not to have a foreign policy- only a Pakistan policy. It seems Delhi is losing the Pakistan policy as well. War is not the answer. The dilemma is, what is the answer?

If such attacks are meant just to be forgotten, India might well be schizophrenic.

BCCI- A complete business organization

The Income Tax Department of India has slapped a 120 crore income tax on the BCCI because the BCCI has been reduced to just another business organization. Now, this is not really uncalled for. In recent times, it was but only more than obvious that the BCCI has been doing very brisk business earning huge revenues for every run scored, for every wicket taken, for every boundary hit. We are all aware of how the advertisements just pop out from the bottom of television screen reducing the actual play arena to an even smaller area. I found it disgusting at many times- peculiarly during the T20 matches when the frequency of boundaries is very large.

The I-T department has said that the surpluses which the BCCI generates from the matches and the aggressive advertising policies are spent on the players and not on the further promotion of the game- which is true. We haven't quite seen newer venues for the game, the game being taken so much into the European markets where the game is virtually non-existent. Being the almost-supreme body of cricket management, these ought to be the duties of the BCCI. After all, what's the use of giving so many tax exemptions for the organizing body if its main job is just to organize matches and earn profits rather than doing something for the game per se? Apart from the subcontinent and Australia, the reach of the game is very minimal. Even in England and the West Indies, the game has been suffering so much so that, it'll not be a surprise that we'll get to read editorials on the decline of the game in these regions in a year or two.

One can argue that BCCI gave us the IPL- possibly the biggest and hottest thing in cricket bringing so many people together from various nations and raking up huge revenues. The big question is how is that money being spent? We haven't seen BCCI building new stadiums anywhere in India. Many states doesn't even host a game of cricket is years. The current debacle of the match in Feroz Shah Kotla is another case to argue in favor of the tax exemptions. We want the cricket- as lovely a game as it is- should be accessible to even a larger population- even though the population currently is enough for the game. But that is not the point. Just because we have achieved a certain stage of excellence doesn't mean that we stop striving!

I can only hope that the stringent measure taken by the I-T department be a clarion call to the BCCI and they start thinking on the lines of betterment to the game rather than just betterment of the players and themselves. The audience that watches the game deserver more than just matches.

Copenhagen- A joke?

What was that all about? After all the brouhaha, after all those editorial columns and all those ceaseless ranting on television, the Copenhagen summit can aptly be summarized as a joke- a very badly brewed wine which leaves a really bad taste, an ineffective Viagra which just doesn't give an erection…puhhh! The tall claims by politicians all over the world- especially from India and China- were just that-claims!

At the end of summit, the only thing which one would have noticed was that the summit instead of coming up with concrete solutions for reducing the greenhouse effect and somehow keeping the temperature rise below 2 degrees centigrade, only added to the climate and greenhouse woes. Oh, you can't just ignore the planes and jets which pumped more gases into the atmosphere which were used to carry the delegates to a useless summit which was speculated to bring about a huge change in the climate change equations. Mr. Obama and his Obamonomics really is something to be aware of. He is the one person whose contribution to this catastrophe cannot be overlooked. Toeing the line is what all he could conjure up. Not giving into the demands of the developing world (which of course Obama might still be referring to as "the Third World" in his study) and to the demands of the time, the USA, quite typical of itself, was always more interested in its own domestic problems rather than concerning itself with global problems- which it ought to considering the fact that it just loves to play Godfather in every damn thing that happens in the world.

So much for the "USA-Obama" bashing. European nations, which by far, have been the worst contributors to the climate change, were equally reluctant. Well, in the case of European nations the reluctance was understandable. They were never very enthusiastic about the whole affair. What was surprising, but, was the stance of Japan in the whole issue. With the leadership change in Japan, I had thought that the new leadership would be more than keen to display its might in a global platform and take on the challenge which USA seems to stall every time. But so much so for wishes.

India and China, and maybe Brazil, were the only countries which seemed to be enthusiastic to take on the menace at once. They were ready to decrease their carbon footprint subject to the condition that the already developed countries- which incidentally have been the major contributors- should do the same to an even greater magnitude. Now that is not an unrealistic demand- the per capita carbon footprint in India and China is still way lower than USA. Now some would account that to the large population of the two countries but that is baseless argument- energy consumption should be measured on a per-person basis and not country-wise.

The final outcome of the summit was that it was decided that the greenhouse effect needs to be mitigated by the joint efforts of all the countries by mitigation or alternative sources of energy and that the climate change is indeed a grave concern. Like we didn't know that! Seriously, does someone think we need a damn summit to realize the ill-effects the graveness of the situation? No doubt, the climate change experts and scientists say, in a whisper in public and screaming in private, the game is over.

Smelly CAT

Though this post comes late but the severity of the discussion cannot be undermined. Indeed, CAT 2009- the admission test to the prestigious IIMs- has been a disaster. And no amount of argument will change the fact. Prometric, the organization, which had been given the contract for conducting the first ever computerized CAT, for a whopping $40 million sum, had failed miserably, though not quite understandably, to deliver their promise.

Right from day one of the CAT, news channels had quite a blast covering the server failure at so many centers across India. Students whose exams had got cancelled due to so-called “technical” glitches called foul and had a lot to say about the negligence in conducting CAT and the ignorance of the proctors about their own systems. Indeed, yes, the proctors had no idea whatsoever about how the systems work. And they were there to invigilate the examination! Phew…! Most interestingly, there was no official word from either the IIMs or the Prometric-wallahs. Guess they were themselves in a daze about what went wrong. Nevertheless, it was the just the first day and some problems were excepted. But no, the same “server-problem” again cropped on the second and the third day. Good heavens, what complacency! Were the Prometric guys supposed to work throughout the night and fix the problem on the first day itself? The answer is no, they were not, as it sadly turned out to be.

Some days later, the “server problem” was not the actual reason anymore. Word had it that the server was virus infected and that the anti-virus was unable to detect and clean it. Given the magnitude and importance attached with the CAT exam, this excuse seems nothing but lame. The rest of the days of the CAT went more or less smoothly. But this was not the end of all. Supposedly, the questions on subsequent days were getting allegedly repeated. This enraged the coaching institutes, in particular, and demands for a re-test in the conventional format had cropped up. The IIM directors didn’t take any decision at that moment and deferred it to after the CAT.

Now, some days before the IIM directors had met for a decision but there could have been none. Can this go anymore haywire? The fairness of the test could not be decided as some IIMs wanted the test to be done away with as such while others wanted a conventional re-test. Finally, they have come to a decision that the students who could not appear for the test will be tested in January.

But, this still a lot of questions unanswered. What about the questions getting repeated? What about the waste of time of so many people? And when you are conducting a test again in January, it means that some students are getting a month more for their preparation. Is this not unfair? Why was a mock CAT not conducted before the actual one to dispel of any glitches that could have appeared? The answer is, sadly, whatever be done, CAT 2009 was unfair and was not the CAT exam after all. And people used to say, “Mirror, mirror which is the fairest of all?” Mirror: “The CAT exam!”

But no more.