On advice

Today in our RTHA(railways tunnels harbours and airports) class, there was a quote on screen from an IATA(International air transport association) magazine which said “3 kms of rail gets you downton, 3 kms of runway gives you the world” and all that came to mind was how that is the most profoundly awesome parenting advice I’ve ever heard.

That is all.

A National Lament: We Are All Guilty

Dr Gaurav Bhalla

When Damini, a human being and a woman first—medical student, daughter, sister, friend, someone’s sweetheart, law abiding citizen—not just a Delhi gang-rape victim died on Dec. 29 in Singapore, India’s soul splintered into a billion bits and disappeared to a land beyond shame.

At times like this, it is natural to point fingers and lay blame for the crime to a breakdown of governance.  While, I agree that the declining (or would non-existing be more pertinent) standards of political stewardship have significantly contributed to dumping India into an economic, moral, and lawless abyss, it would be a grave error to lay all the blame on just the government’s doorstep.

We are all guilty.

Because deep down this heinous crime is a commentary on who we are as a people. The abysmal lack of sabhyata—civility and basic goodness; sadbhavna—goodwill to others, and satkar—respect for all, goes beyond a breakdown of governance, it represents the disintegration of the fundamental institutions of a civil society—the quality of its families, the orientation of its citizens’ hearts, and the nature of the gods they worship.

No, I am not exonerating Man Mohan Singh and company, or the many institutions that routinely fail to protect women’s most basic rights.  I am urging that we go beyond blasting the government and the police, dig deeper, and take a good hard look at ourselves in the mirror.  We may find a few poignant clues within us that may help secure a more enduring cure to the epidemic confronting us.

The first institution that has failed its contract to the country is the family—the cradle of citizenship. Codes of personal conduct—sabhyata—are indispensable for the smooth functioning of democratic and civil societies. These standards of personal conduct need to be taught, they can’t be produced by mere legislation.  Consequently, even small dysfunctional practices occurring within families, often regarded as no concern of society and State, have the potential of becoming a breeding ground for larger social ills.

In his poem Tempest, the insightful Lebanese poet Khalil Gibran declares, “…show me the face of your mother and I will tell you exactly who you are….” Damini’s ghastly tragedy—a national soultricide—is an unequivocal warning that the Indian family system is seriously broken, and if not repaired will continue to spawn dangerously defective human beings like Ram Singh. These parasites come from all over India—Haryana, Punjab, Bihar, UP, Delhi, AP—and are not the work of the devil, or an evil foreign power brutally antagonistic towards women; they are homegrown, the output of malfunctioning factories called average Indian families.

Children are like wet cement. The impressions imprinted on them at a very young age are surprisingly durable hard wiring them for the rest of their lives to lead socially responsible or socially criminal lives, or any number of variations in between. Its time to ask tough questions: “Who’s doing the imprinting? Are the persons primarily responsible for this imprinting, the Parents, present, or are they absent?  “Why is the average Indian family failing its contract to the country? Is it even aware of its obligation to the country and to society? And if yes, is there a willingness to honor it?

The contract is not just producing children.  Mankind and India have known for a long time that children are not plug and play gadgets, nor do they come with elaborate how to raise your child instruction booklets.  Raising children is effortful, requires knowledge, requires that parents actively teach their children, not passively watch them grow up in the care of ayahs, 48” plasma TV sets, unholy serials, Bollywood or Hollywood tripe, shopping malls, IPL, and the streets surrounding their homes, where only a limited kind of savviness is rewarded.

On most measures, most Indian parents will be lucky to get an F- on parenting. They are failing their children, and hence the country.  Want hard proof? Remember Jessica Lal? Who killed her?  Just Manu Sharma?  Or was it Manu Sharma, and Mr. and Mrs. Sharma, and everyone in their social system who had a hand in raising him? Even an amateur psychologist knows that, like monkeys, children see children do.  Even the faintest signals are received, remembered, and some later stage in life recalled and enacted. If that signal even remotely says… it’s OK to kill…it’s OK to rape…then the Manu Sharmas and the Ram Singhs of the world will rape and kill.

Families in which parents don’t show up for work, who persistently look the other way, who approach child rearing with wishy-washy chalta hais; …it happens every day…rape…no one in our family got raped…chalo theek hai…bachen hain…seekh jayenge…can never be the cradles of citizenship and civil behavior. As long as families place emphasis on the passive seekh jayenge, as opposed to the active sikhana, …the probability of breeding Manu Sharmas and Ram Singhs will continue to stay high.

We are all parents. We, all of us, belong to one family or another. We are all guilty.

The second failure is of our shriveled hearts, bankrupt of prem or sadbhavna. For convenience I will default to the English equivalent, the overused and much abused word—Love.

Pick up any scripture, confront any guru, they will sing the virtues of love. Children, like flowers, bloom when brought up with love, they shrivel in its absence. So the question is have our hearts grown over the years and retained their capacity to love, or have they shrunk and forgotten what it is like to truly love another. And by love I don’t mean the counterfeit version that is paraded on the silver screen, on TV in wooden soaps and serials, and in cheap boy-meets-girl romance novels.  By love I mean the entire suite of virtues and values—respect, concern, sincerity, attention, the ability to listen, the ability to say yes, the ability to say no, the ability to say no, not now, later—encompassed so eloquently in the simple axiom, “Do unto others, as you wish others to do unto you.” If we truly loved our mothers, sisters, and daughters, we would not rape others’ mothers, sisters, and daughters, because we would love them as our own. But if we don’t truly love our own mothers, sisters, and daughters, what if we only pay lip service to loving them…then what…?

Let’s look around, let’s take a good hard look in the mirror and ask our selves the tough question, “What currency do our hearts use in social interactions with others, love or fear? Do we really behave towards others as we would like them to behave towards us, or do we bicycle—suck up to those who we perceive as higher than us, and crush those who we perceive as being lower.”

We don’t need the sleuthing powers of Sherlock Holmes to deduce that in India love rarely figures in the equation; we are a fear-based culture, no ifs no buts. Start with the home, where is the love; parents spend a large part of their lives getting their children to be afraid of them, then spend the rest of their lives being afraid of their children. Take schools, where is the love, there is a lot of fear; children afraid of teachers, teachers afraid of parents, parents afraid their children will not be awarded the grades that will propel them onward (notice the emphasis on awarded, not earned); hardly the best atmosphere for learning. Take the work place, where is the love; its hierarchical, its full of fear; it’s a rare boss who approaches is his staff with love and friendship, under my thumb command and control is still the norm.

OK, so we can’t all be Mother Teresa. Fine.  But do we have to be her exact opposite. Must we actually harm other people? Yes, says one MLA from UP who I bumped into in January 2011. Unfortunately he is not alone; there are many others like him. Excellent command of Hindi, uncommonly articulate…a true modern-day Machiavelli…this is what he offered me by way of education, “Sahib agar main aap ka nuksaan nahin karoonga, aap mujhse darenge kaise (if I don’t harm you, how will you be afraid of me). He then followed it up with this gem, “Jis raja se praja nahin darti, woh raja zaada der gaddi pe nahin tikta (Kings who can’t get their subjects to fear them don’t last long).” Brilliant. Here is a person, supposedly whose role is to protect his electorate and constituency whose singular goal is to get them to be afraid of him and his cronies. With love he can’t control them, but with fear he can make them dance any which way he likes.

There are others who are not MLA’s—parents, teachers, managers—who don’t have to play the politics of fear, but who still cast a vote in favor of fear over love every single day. It’s a negative commentary on us, not just our government. Each time we vote in favor of fear, we vote in favor or rape and murder, and a million other social crimes. Fear, anger, and hate are identical triplets, one can’t exist without the other (have you ever known a person who is not angry to hate?). As Alfred Adler so eloquently reminds us, “Fear and Anger are the same emotion; fear is directed inwards, we are its object; anger is nothing but fear directed outwards, others are its object.” When love is missing, anger steps in, and hate walks out on to the streets; Hitlers devastate, Ram Singhs rape, and Manu Sharmas murder.

We all have hearts that choose daily, love or fear. We are all guilty.

The third failing lies in the gods we worship.  Not Shiv, Vishnu, Kali, Laxmi—gods we can’t see—they are OK, but those we can. Gods we have created of things that we worship—money, power, food, shiny new cars, white iPhones, alcohol, tobacco, brand name clothing, helping others, harming others, love, fear…behaviors engineered to achieve one and only one goal, a feeling of, “I am better than you….”

Emily Dickinson pricks us when she declares, “I’m nobody! Who are you?

Are you nobody, too?” Brilliant poetry; unfortunately wouldn’t fly far in India, especially not among worshippers of things. Everybody is a somebody…“Hum bhee koi cheez hain (I too am something…), and not just an everyday somebody, but somebody who is big… badee cheez (…a big shot).” To be a “nobody” is to suffer a fate worse than death.

Both as a country and as a people, we are thickly coated with a sense of, “I am a big shot.” And when you perceive yourself to be a big shot, you feel you are superior to others. And when you believe you are superior to others you consider yourself to be above it all; none of the rules apply to you. And when you are above it all, you feel entitled, entitled to have whatever you want—the world owes you—recognition, praise, applause—and perhaps the most dangerous, instant gratification.

And it doesn’t stop there. Since superior persons are special, and since special persons feels entitled, and since entitled persons have to have what they want, by definition, a sense of entitlement can only have one consequence, a total disregard for satkar—abrogation of another’s rights. Other people become mere means to an end, toys to gratify one’s own oversized ego. If they come through, good: if not, they have to be dealt with—which is polite lingo for they have to be taught a lesson, usually an abusive, violent lesson.

“I want a drink…what…the bar is closed…open it…didn’t you hear me…I want a drink….” How can she, Jessica Lal, deny Manu Sharma—this superior, special, entitled person—a drink? I am going to teach her a lesson. And he does, he shoots her.

“I feel like having sex…with you…doesn’t matter if you don’t want to have sex with me…I want to….” How can she, this slut, wearing jeans and a t-shirt, who is obviously sleeping with other guys (she is with another man, they are holding hands, seems happy, must be sleeping with him) say no to me. I will teach her a lesson. And he does, he rapes her.

Entitled people are abusive people; it’s as simple as that. They are a menace because they treat others like property, to be consumed and disposed as they please, especially the ones they consider inferior. For these frustrated, angry, insecure toll collectors, it’s only a small stretch from the world owes me to you owe me, and beware, because all hell will break loose if you say no to “superior me.”

We are all guilty.

What then should we do, all of us?

Social crimes of all types, especially against women, children, minorities, and other vulnerable sections of society, must be deterred, fought, and severely punished. Rape is rotten, and the rotten apples must be thrown out of the basket. No question. If we feel that the death penalty will act as a deterrent, let us impose it. But while we are building gallows let’s also ask, “Will it be sufficient?” My personal feeling is it will not. It may scare a few, retard the occurrence of these heinous crimes, but will the threat of death, long-term incarceration, even lynching by every day vigilantes, will that give rise to new and more enlightened standard of personal conduct, which in the long run is the only sure foundation for safeguarding the rights of all, and creating a civil society. If the latter is to happen we should also make an investment, starting right now, in building better cradles of citizenship, cultivating hearts that chose love over hate, and eliminating gods-of-things that compel us to divide the world into superior and inferior; giving the superiors free license to kick around the inferiors for their wanton pleasure.  For this we don’t need the government.  Let us hold the government’s feet to the fire—they need to build better laws, flawlessly, consistently, and impartially implement them, and punish swiftly and severely on the occasions when crimes are committed. But building better people is not the government’s job. That’s our job.

And if we don’t, we are all guilty.

 

Yeah, that’s Oman

Later! =D

Out and some where about

Well, since I got this phone, chief among the many questionable things I’ve done with it are install and regularly mess around with photography on instagram. Here’s a random bunch from around Muscat.

Qurum beach road (with the shit filtered out of it :p)

Midway through putting up our tree

I don’t think they sell cards for these anymore….

Squish*

Post squash chill out (^.^). Because ‘eff you exercise, that’s why.

Walking around taking pictures, I know not why…..

In an arcade :O . Yes they still have those.

Poker night. Instagrammed.

Ta-dah.

Later! =D

Ta-dah.

Here’s the thing. It was incredibly hard to keep up with my blogworld this semester. It was.

Now, I have myself an s3 and a wordpress app…

Obviously posting from a smartphone will more mean tumblr-esque posts…

Luckily that will be offset by my inability to stick to a point for 5 minutes. So everyone who finds my cluelessness playing out to the tune of 500 characters can chill out.

That said, there will be more pictures and short posts with random thoughts so anyone who might find that too spammy…. you’ve been warned.

Also, I’m on twitter 24/7 @AntonyJustin1.

Later! =D

About

My default state may be compared to that of a shut in. I love spending time by myself, I am perfectly comfortable and free around my thoughts and for that reason they feel free to fuck with me as they please.

However, I am also smart enough to know that no matter how good of an understanding I develop of myself over time (it’s not a finished thing), I’m never going to be able to keep up with where the world is headed from the confines of my room and mind. For this reason and because I realize what being in situations that are not in your comfort zone does for you, I’ve taken up blogging.

See, I don’t like the life of a social bee, yet that is what I seem to have evolved in to as my way of coping with my lack of comfort with being around people ALL the time. There’s only a certain level of closeness I’m comfortable with for a person I’ve known for a specific amount of time and that’s that. As a result I’m there in every social circle and yet never fully in any. It’s a sad, sad thing to acknowledge but the truth is, this blog being my attempt to discern a middle ground of rational behavior that people accept in a social setting and one that works for me in the long term, I have to acknowledge the extremes; as that of solid comfort with myself accompanied by an unwillingness to spend too much time with the thoughts of others and flitting from group to group but never really tying in with anyone.

 

Bottom line, I’ve overreached in an attempt to counter my tendency to cocoon but I’m now finding middle ground. Why? Why bother trying to fit in? Because I remember a time when I used to understand the rules. I’m getting back in the huddle.

 

Later! =D

 

Dork

There is no such thing is beauty. No, really, there isn’t. There is only that which you see in a moment, make your peace with, in the next and think back fondly to thereafter. That which you first saw, it wasn’t beauty but a spark. A spark of life. A violent, bewildering, free thing. It’s as ugly as the manure under a flower, as rotten and as despicable. Then the seed blooms and beauty presents as something your mind has manifested as that manure’s present and by extension it’s past and entire life.

India is a mess, it’s rotten, it’s unruly and despicable. It was never a thing of great beauty or a poetic battleground for justice, that is what we choose to see it as for all the ugliness of death and corruption and greed and deceit that it flowers over. We are where we are. I am in it.

Later! =)

Bombay again

There’s a reason I still call Bombay ‘Bombay’ and not Mumbai. Russell Peters explains it best: It took us about half a century to realize that ‘Hey, wait a second! We can call this place whatever we want to#%@!^#’. If it takes that long to gather up the collective genitalia, then sorry but I’m not listening to a word you have to say. Bombay it is and that’s where I spent a month this summer interning with L&T ECC (Larsen and Toubro, Engineering construction and contracts div.). No it wasn’t a paid internship, it actually wasn’t so much of an internship as it was an industrial training thing…… Obviously, seeing as I had no actual job skills before this summer. Anyways, this wasn’t my first trip to Bombay; it was the second trip after a previous one about a decade ago, the last one having been a five day trip last September. This time around I was there for a full month, and had an hour and a half long commute both ways and worked from mon-sat. Among other things, my best friend from school, Prateek was also there interning with another firm and so we got to hang out quite a bit too.
My own pics taken during that one month were all, consistently bad. If you do want to see some rather good pictures depicting life in Mumbai, I’ve also found an expat blogger based in Mumbai whose posts are simply brilliant. Do take a look.

I’ve had to edit most of my photos and here they are:

That’s what I saw when I looked out the 8th floor window on the first day. I was staying with my Uncle who’s in the Navy. Navy nagar as it is known is the southernmost tip of Bombay. The lighthouse from that window is it. As anyone who has been to Bombay will tell you, Colaba causeway is among the busiest places in Mumbai, filled with unrelenting traffic and crazy touristy types. Keep driving down the causeway 2 minutes from the end of the shopping segment and you’ve reached this incredibly quiet un-Mumbai like locale barely 5 minutes from the heart of the city. Another thing I’ve learnt is this; sure, you can Photoshop a sunrise….. Doesn’t mean you should.

That is where I did my Industrial training, well actually no, 95% of my time was spent in the office of which 80% was spent waiting for project managers to free up time and the rest reading briefs and contract documents, design drawings and all manner of things they could give us to keep us occupied. Larsen and Toubro is a massive, massive organization and I hadn’t realized just how massive till I spent a month with them. They have their hands in everything from road works to Nuclear power plants. They are pretty good at doing airports and have been/are involved in a bunch of airport constructions as the contractor or through joint ventures. It’s actually an Indian mnc set up by two Danish engineers in India in the 30’s.
I was working on the new Mumbai airport terminal’s construction project.

Mumbai is full of gorgeous old architecture like that, from British times. Victorian architecture is it? I dunno, my cousin who lives in Mumbai and is studying architecture was going on about this sort of thing. All I know is, that looks pretty damn cool.

That mosque out there in the sea which you can’t quite see because of my awesome photographical skill and my tendency to take pictures out of moving vehicles is called the Hajji….. somethingsomething. Ok I forgot the name but if you go over to Bronwyn’s blog and look at the header image, you can get a pretty good idea of what I cannot photograph, not in a million years. It’s quite an inspiring sight.

That’s the famous Leopold café. Established… I suppose around when they claim it was and an iconic Mumbai hangout, it’s been patronized by the crazy types for a long long time. It’s involved in some of the key moments of one of my favorite books, ‘Shantaram’ and even though I made sure I visited it on my last trip to Mumbai I ended up going there again with Prateek and a friend of his. It gained a bit more notoriety when it was targeted during the Mumbai terrorist attacks.
Earlier in the day, Prateek’s aunt had taken us out for lunch to this tiny little restaurant called Trishnas which was in the midst of this quaint little clump of old-ish buildings. Insanely good seafood. That was a pretty good Sunday actually, dinner was steak at the navy club, out exactly 3 feet away and 8 feet above the water at the southern tip of Mumbai. Ok, brilliant Sunday.

Like I said, I met up with Prateek and like the geniuses we are, we jumped at every chance we got to explore the fascinating, anything-can-happen, grimy reality of Bombay….. and decided to spend every single moment we got hanging out at a mall they call the Palladium for some reason. Ok so just the cafés and the pub…. And the food. But then again, that’s what we dooooo (^.^) .

Bombay’s famous marine drive and boy is it packed with people on a Sunday evening. Walked a bit up and down, caught up, enjoyed the scenery, inhaled the air… and then some.  That would be the Sunset from Marine drive.

Later! =D

DUBAI

I was in Dubai over the summer and while it was not my first trip there, it was the first in a decade. So really, the first time since all the crazy shit went down…. Like just about 90% of everything Dubai is known for today. I got to experience the famous gridlock first hand, spent half a day inside the IKEA store, cricked my neck, got lost in a pseudo city was familiarized with Nini cooper.

Dubai’s international borders all have iris scanners as part of the security. What they do is link each retina with a passport. That’s supposed to put an end to international hit squads using Dubai to do their dirty business like that incident a few years ago where a hit on some terrorist type (allegedly) was caught on camera and about 10 forged passports of half a dozen nationalities were involved. Anyways, I was pretty happy after it was all done and I was across the border.

I once went on a trip to the turtle beach at Sur when I was in the 6^th or 7^th grade; it was a trip from school with my friends. When I got back, people were rather annoyed with the sheer number of pictures of random scenery, rocks and just about everything else, everything other than people. There was just one solitary picture of all of us testing the bed springs at the hotel. Clearly times have changed and I’ve started to find human photography as a tad bit more interesting than the rock option ( by very little, mind you) ….. narcissistic tendencies aside.

My head really isn’t shaped like that. *Scouts honor*

Me on the right, younger sibling on the left. The mall of the emirates houses Ski Dubai, yeah that crazy indoor ski slope. I thought I’d try it out before I actually got there….. as it turned out, there was no service to clean beginners off the wall at the end of the slopes and the other area with the ice slides were full of teeny tiny kids I would’ve squashed…..

One of the Dubai metro stations. I would’ve made love to that thing if it had been any smaller, I swear.

Hey! Will you look at that! Someone put up a giant dong in the middle of the desert!!
Seriously though, pretty damn cool.

That’s the fountain wall inside Dubai mall. Absolutely gorgeous thing, that. We stood there and took pictures from a hundred different angles.

Inside the Dubai mall aquarium. If you want to get a sense of what they’ve gone for while theme setting, get this: the aquarium offers three packages platinum, diamond and ultimate aside from the other diving and stuff…… since when did gold not make the cut?

Clearly the one meant to go on facebook.

With the cast of finding Nemo .

At the rear of the Dubai mall, the complex where the Burj Khalifa lies. We were there to see the fountain show and there was quite a crowd.

The lights, the water and the music; Whitney Houston that evening .

Later! =D

Talking shop

You know those tired old days when you’re propped up on your pillow, looking out at a grey sky, all manner of wrappers and empty packets littered on your bed? At some point, you’re going to crumple up some of that junk and take a toss at the bin sitting ….. in all probability, at the corner of the room farthest from you. Chances are you’ll miss and in time, you’ll haul your lazy ass out of bed and fix that half hearted attempt.

The garbage can’s full, your aim only as good as you think it is and any real chance of you making that shot stick in is if you go there and push it in yourself. Such is life.

I don’t know why I talk like this…… really have no ‘effin clue.

Later! =D