And it begins
Posted by: Neena on: May 17, 2009
- In: Hope| Politics
- 2 Comments
At first, it had started as normally as always. The arrogant interviews on local television news channels, the smug speeches, the distasteful comments on opposition leaders. But the signs were always there. I suppose we all missed the desperate attempts by the CPI(M) when they tried their hands at caricatures and unhealthy banners around the city on the opposition leaders and the party.
But there was no reason to be hopeful. Every election, hope is what gets denounced. It starts out promising, with the anger towards the governing party as never before, only to Not get translated into votes. As always, the anger, the rejection was there to be seen. From bus stops to shops, from workplaces to restaurants, overhearing such conversations would not have taken you much of an effort. But the question in my mind was, would the anger be represented in the mandate?
The writing is there on the wall, now. It is unthinkable and unimaginable to some of the opposition leaders who quite unabashedly say that they never believed this could happen! Not the most politically correct statement to make, but that is a ground reality. If you take the case of the city, not one seat has gone to the CPI(M), throwing the whole industrialization factor out of the window. This picture bears no resemblance to the one painted in the 2004 elections when the opposition just got one seat out of the entire 42 seats in West Bengal.
How did this happen? For once, it is heartening to know that people with the cosmopolitan people included, agree that development cannot happen excluding the people. That industrialization at the cost of people is not acceptable. That leaders who are smug and take the people for granted can no longer remain their chosen leaders. Secondly, I am amazed at the will and determination of the people to go to vote and stand for hours when the forces of the Government did anything and everything to discourage them. Violence, insult, jamming of poll booths and all the other regular activities were not enough to stop a more than 60% voting at various places. The resentment was so strong that it has remained, rather increased from the Panchayat polls. And for once, hope is what has returned to Bengal after 25 years.
It is now for us to look beyond. This is the people’s mandate and Mamata Banerjee has to carry this to the Centre, where she is the single largest ally. West Bengal is a very badly run state and we would need concerted efforts for the rebuilding of it. I would say, I am not very satisfied at the mandate at the Centre because the Government had failed on many fronts in the last 5 years and it is only the incapability of the opposition at the Centre which has been unable to focus on issues which matter the most and has brought about the irrelevant ones. But it has turned to be the best I could have hoped for, with the Left front turning irrelevant as to who forms a Government at the Centre.
Agreed that one thinks that Mamata Banerjee is a bit mad and hysterical, but it took a mad and hysterical woman to bring down a Left inclination in Bengal, so much so that they have now become a minority. For once, I can only hope that the CPI(M) will now start treating the opposition with a bit of respect as a formidable force and not go on about their smug speeches against her. It is too much to ask for anyway.
It is a long way to go now. But the hard thing is over. For once the people are on other side. And the fight has just begun.
Emotionally Not-Yours
Posted by: Neena on: March 8, 2009
In a relaxed Sunday Afternoon, sitting on a bench across the open area of a famous shopping mall in Calcutta and looking at people passing by, P suddenly remarked
“You know, everybody in this world has a soulmate. And I am looking forward to finding her soon!”
Me: “You can’t be serious! Are you telling me that you believe the soulmate theory?”
P: “What is so wrong? I think there is a special someone for everybody.”
Me: “You have finally gone nuts, then. So, how do you plan to find this soulmate of yours? Will there be thunder? Lightning? Spotlight when she enters?”
P: ” Yeah. I was also hoping for some music and song and dance routine, you know. So that I would instantly know, its her.”
This conversation happened years ago. May be such a long time ago, that it wouldn’t seem to be strange at that age to discuss it. But quite frankly, as we grew up, or rather as I grew up, it is quite startling to find that not much has changed in this notion of soulmate which can be just laughed away or considered to be just a stupid, childish thought.
For a long time now, I have been seeing many of friends falling in and out of love. It is a strange feeling to watch and listen to their stories. Their everyday experiences, their happiness in the good times and their agony of the bad times. But most of the time, it is the latter which truly distresses me. Every one of these stories, mind you, start out to be the perfect romance of the century, promising to tear down all the boundaries and to be a worthy historical account of greatest tales of love in the modern world of tall buildings inhabited by money mongers. But quite sadly, they almost always, end in a catastrophe.
The stories are all quite similar and familiar. As I said earlier, it starts being perfect, then people realize that the courtship period is over so that they can be themselves, and then they realize they don’t like each other so they have to treat the relationship as a burden which needs to be carried on. Finally, the volcanic eruption happens through the cracks, the molten lava comes out quickly and well, that’s the end of it all.
During the periods of unlimited bliss though, the lines are wonderful. “Oh, she has been a huge emotional support for me” or “I love him more than myself” and the like. And I sit and smile, and I wonder, why do people need an external emotional support when they have themselves? Or, can a man or a woman possibly love someone more than himself or herself? Is that really possible? I dare not read these questions aloud, because I already have a very bad reputation of being cynical person always crying doom when things are going hunky-dory. I know that. But emotional dependency on people is something so difficult for me to relate to, that it makes me say aloud, “You know, you shouldn’t be so emotionally involved”.
“Oh! I love him and very serious about this relationship. And besides what do you know? We are even thinking about opening joint bank accounts”
Yeah, that’s a pretty serious thing. It scares the living daylights out of me, you know. The idea of opening joint bank accounts with my boyfriend would pretty much rob me off my peaceful life.
But anyway, most people really don’t agree with me when I say this, that the moment you become emotional with something or someone, the end result would only be a very big disaster. It is because, that treating people with emotions makes us irrational. It pretty much makes us stupid. And stupid people don’t make good decisions or they don’t handle situations like smart people, who think logically. So the whole volcano and the molten lava story gets inserted here.
Emotions is not the correct E. The correct E is Empathy. One needs to understand that people are living beings and they have their own life where they need to play a lot of roles. Roles need to be prioritized, and since human beings are essentially narcissistic , we like to spend more time on those things which makes us happy and which are a lot of fun. Now if a relationship has been squeezed out of the fun factor, (and I don’t mean fun as a euphemism only), it is obvious that a role in that relationship would not be prioritized compared to watching football with the friends on a weekend. And for a relationship to be fun, it needs to less of the emotional baggage of the have-tos and the expectations of the should-haves. It is but only natural, that taking things slowly and enjoying the ride is the best way to go rather than conducting the merry go round all by yourself.
“Oh that’s a very crude way of putting things!” I hear you say, but unfortunately it is for the better.
The plague called Optimism
Posted by: Neena on: January 17, 2009
The title of the post will possibly raise many eyebrows, and I will try my best to send your eyebrows to Mars after you have finished reading it. Well, that’s an optimistic start.
The good thing about writing a blog is that you suddenly attain this position of authority, and yet at the same time, distance yourself from the reality as if the situation in no way affects you. That possibly, you haven’t committed the same mistakes which you would like to point out here. It is so amusing to write, to dictate, to prove the follies we commit, the fallacies associated with our lives and not be humble enough to accept our mistakes or rectify them.
For years I have wondered the state of mind of being “Optimistic”. What does it actually mean? And how is it supposedly superior to being “Pessimistic”? The Bear can make as much money as the Bull. Logically, the Bear will make money when the Bull will not. And vice-versa. But there is a counter argument to it, which says, even the Bear is “optimistic” about the bad times in market.
Human beings would always like to be optimistic. It is a good thing, to be optimistic, to hope that things will turn around, that there will be light in the end of every dark tunnel, to know what you are doing is always right and believe that it will yield results. But that is where the main reasons for debacle lie.
Look around you. Do you see good things? How is your life? Does the future seem bright? No. No at this moment. No matter what status you have in your society, no matter how much you earn, no matter how secure your life is, the future does not seem too good. But why? Why this is so, possibly lies in the instinct of human beings being ”Optimistic”. The belief that things just cannot go wrong. The absence of humility that plagues us, erodes us every day, preventing us to believe, that we can go wrong.
This is not about always treating ourselves as failure. That is not the point I am driving at. The hindrance to development does not lie in the instance of thinking that we can go wrong. On the contrary, it might help us to reassess what we are doing or what we are about to do. This cannot be termed as second thoughts. But it is just giving us a space to look at things from a different angle, and to try to make all angles perfect. But our prejudice forbids us to explore.
We just cannot face up to the fact that we may be wrong, we may be incompetent and we may not possess appropriate skills. Sometimes, when we attain a certain age or status, learning is seen to be a matter of disgrace. I feel that the word “Learning” has some sort of a long term (equal to Economics’ terminology) connotations attached to it. This is absolutely not true. Learning is continuous. It happens every day, every minute, and every second of our life. This process of learning and replicating is so subconscious and so continuous, that we possibly do not even understand or stop to look at, or marvel at this process. But there are some things in life which need to be consciously learned, and replicated.
For that we need the humility. Humility, I am afraid, cannot be learned.
It was this optimism; that things just could not go wrong; which made people in US cash in on the Realty Boom. Everyone knows about the roots of this recession. But no one questions the Why. Why didn’t anyone anticipate the fall in the demand? And why didn’t anyone reassess the situation; how will things change if the demand fell? And why did anyone not act upon it?
It is not the Greed, that people so scornfully refer to, that has destroyed Economies after Economies. Greed, per se, does not destroy you. The fables of Ali Baba does not hold true in the age of Capitalism anymore. Rather, if you do not have the Greed, you probably will not explore potential areas of growth. And the importance of Growth cannot be overemphasized anywhere.
It is Humility of not accepting that Human Beings can go wrong, because they are humans.
It is Optimism, and illogical Optimism that, which makes us turn the blind eye to us being Humans.
Answers by an Unknown
Posted by: Neena on: September 8, 2008
In the midst of a crowd, among the noises and the commotion, I try to sit quietly, and plan my next move. What should I do to calm my senses, to regain myself which I have been fast losing being amongst so many people at a time? I just cannot seem to find the answer.
It is so easy to lose yourself when one is with so many people at a time. Who am I now? Where do I fit into this new scheme of things? How to stretch myself? It is so hard to find what I want. So many people telling you what you should do, what you should not do. How to approach a problem, how to solve it. It is almost like you are fast losing your identity, because the way you do things is what makes you. How can you even try to break yourself and build a new you? Prejudice stops you and so does your vanity.
So, I sit back and observe the people around me. There are some who are constant sources of information. It is easy to read them. They are the ones who have issues which are trivial and they are continuously trying to cultivate it as an excuse to brood. Do I sound arrogant when I say this? May be yes, but I stop to think, why react to people who have no effect on you? Why react to situations which cannot change the way you get on with your life? Why not focus on issues which you have full control, rather than divert your energies to those which you do not have control upon?
And then there are some people, who can be phlegmatic and unfazed by people as if they are not visible, as if their words do not reach their ears. People around them are unimportant, their actions meaningless. I admire these people, and I feel intrigued as to how they can make everything related to them, when in reality, for an outsider, he may well seem to be someone who sits in a corner and looks at everything with expressionless eyes. Nothing moves him. You may talk to him; say something about why things are what they seem to be. He listens, with those expressionless eyes, and then turns to whatever he seemed to be doing before, that is nothing.
I feel flustered. When you articulate your emotions to human language, you expect a reaction, even a wry smile or a monosyllabic reaction. But then I stop, and I realize, what is the need to react to people? Is there a compulsion to always have a reaction? And that too for someone whom you don’t know? People have been forced into the relationships of acquaintances here, we all have been. But we cannot be forced into making reactions, to the people and to the situations around us.
But it is difficult for me to inculcate that behavior. I find myself thinking a lot, about a situation which I have no control upon. So much so, that I try to force myself into believing that it is under my control. Everything around is under my control, and if it has to be out of my control, then that shortcoming rests with me. This clouds my mind, and I lose myself because such things make me weak. The fact that things are out of my purview make me jittery and I question myself. And the answers are hard to come by.
I wish again that I could look at things without expressions and without emotions. I wish I could learn how not to involve myself with lifeless things, just like the expressionless-eyed fellow. But then, I would become him, someone I don’t know.
2 years..down the line
Posted by: Neena on: August 7, 2008
- In: Hope| Random
- 3 Comments
This is a bit of an overenthusiastic post on my part. But two years have passed since I first blogged. Precisely it was August 23 2006 when I started and look how it has grown! I mean, yeah it hasn’t grown that big like Google, but yes, it has been a handsome growth. To all those people who have liked my style of writing, thank you! And to all those people who have not, no thank you. I hope I will continue writing in such busy times, and you will continue reading my rubbish, illogical and rhetorical rants which have no meaning in real life, whatsoever.
Heres to more such wasteful times! Cheers!
How to beat the Inflation Heat
Posted by: Neena on: June 25, 2008
- In: Economy| Random| Sarcasm
- Leave a Comment
What we believe is what we want to believe.
These words were probably told by me in this very blog a few months ago. Although, I never anticipated such change of fortunes, I still was somewhat correct. Even though, the primary reason for such rise can be attributed to crude oil prices, which is not doing to much good to our deficit in Current Accounts, still, even a minor part of it can be because of us.
Yes, us. The increase of so many food joints, retail explosion, technology advancements, product lines etc makes the word “Buy More” written in bold red letters in front of us, the buyers. Since, every year, with the budget, the finance ministers excludes people in certain income brackets from paying taxes, the virtue of thrift has become obsolete. Now, you may think, that I am slowly taking the lines of President Bush and his incomprehensible viewpoints, but when you do come to a point in your life when you somewhat agree to President Bush, you know the universe is wrong. And we need to correct it.
By this time, you have probably understood, that my effective ways of reducing the villain of the story to ashes, are only but rhetorical and not practical in their true sense. But wait! After giving a lot of thought to the problems at hand, I have some quite simple ways of reducing the pinch of price rise which if implemented, can bear some fruitful results. Not for the economy mind you, but for your own self. Even if you are rich and filthy enough to not care, still, caring for inflation has become a fashion statement. Caring for inflation, is an absolute in thing. It is more like saving the world from global warming, adopting children from third world countries, doing aerobic yoga etc.
Let us look at some of them.
- Celibacy: This is the most effective and the most difficult method of the lot. You see, the amount of money we spend is directly proportional to the amount of people of opposite sex we interact with. Men need to project what they are not; they try to dress somberly, they try and implement manicures and pedicures, they do some funny things to their hair and what not. Obviously, cars and bikes, latest gadgets are something to be considered, but a large chunk does go for the chitchats in restaurants, and watching rubbish films all for the sake of that “special” someone. In case of women, my lips are sealed. If I were to comment on the likelihood of women spending quality time and money on beauty care only to impress Men, the feminists will be enraged. But if we were to seriously consider the reduction of opposite-sex interaction, a lot of inflation related problems could be solved. Women would find it very difficult to undertake complicated shopping decision if they don’t have Men standing in one corner looking absolutely bored to death and Men would never need to spend time out of watching football in their televison which is quite a cost-effective activity.
- Increase of Saas Bahu Serials: I understand that attaining efficient levels of celibacy is but a hard thing to do, especially, because it is against the Indian norms. But, again not a problem. Increase the amount of Indian fictional television soaps and reduce the reality. This would progressively promote the need for starvation, to give long life to your husband. Or, women, if you don’t like the idea of starving for the husband, aim to attain enlightenment by starvation. In fact, I disagree now with my take on reducing reality television series. Increase them, to promote God, and God like attributes by the eternal tried and tested method of a perpetual struggle. The closer you are to God, the farther you will move from Inflation.
- Say no to Communication: I also believe that a large amount of buyer spending is on communication. What is the need to get tangled in the world wide web? Or involving yourself in worthless conversation with another human being ? Human beings are but cynical, the world is made up of selfish people who don’t care this bit about you and your phone bill. You can do better things than living one-sixth of the lifetime talking to people you hardly know and in doing such better things, you can reduce inflation. Remember, you are doing yourself good, and the phone companies bad. Think about that poor little dog who keeps running around roads and ponds. Reducing inflation and preventing animal exploitation all at one go!
- Know yourself: In creating full proof methods of isolation from people you will finally come to know who you are. What we are possibly is only known to the subconscious mind. Don’t go out, don’t spend petrol/diesel, don’t read newspapers, don’t play squash in the club. Just try to find yourself. In doing so, you may be able to find the genius that is hidden behind that face in the mirror. Who knows, may be you will find more ways to love yourself and that would do you a world of good, not to mention how much good it would do to the inflation situation.
- Eat less, think more: Now would be the ideal time to utilize your isolated moments. With the global food crisis looming large and your weight issues getting bigger by the day, it is time to direct your energies to be fitter and finer. Reduce your visits to the nearest pizza outlet. Instead, jog to your nearest bank and invest and then don’t forget to jog right back to your house. Eating a lot of good food, reduces a lot of thinking prowess, because after every session of good food, you are already thinking about the next session and the contents of that. What would be more important now, is to think, understand and appreciate the inflationary situation and how you can do good things to ensure that they are in fact good. Utilise your time to think more about how to add more points on how to reduce inflation. And write to me.
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