where I go into outrage mode again

Exams always did make the blogger in me come out. Allow me to outrage for a while.

• Rape jokes are not funny. Calling a cricketer a "rapist" who "raped" the opposing team with his match-winning performance is not witty. Creating and sharing a picture of the vastraharan showing Malinga as Draupadi and Kohli as Dushasana is not amusing. It is lame and pathetic and disgusting, and tells me you're an asshole.
• Why is sharing stories from Gujarat 2002 being labelled as "spreading hate"? You hold your candle marches and "never forget" campaigns every year for those who dies in 26/11; why are you so resistant to remember those who were killed ten years ago in Gujarat? I'm appalled by some of the reactions Dilip D'Souza got when he shared some experiences for his visit to Gujarat in 2002 (Which, if you haven't read, you should. It's horrific, you will not want to, but you should. here:  https://twitter.com/#!/search/%23DDGujDiary)
• Why do Indians have this "kisi ko nahi batana" attitude all the time? I've always seen it at exam time, right from my college days. It took me a long time to realize that unlike me, who never studied and therefore meant it when I said "maine kuch nahi kiya", everyone else had finished the course twice over and were "revising" when they said the same thing. And it's hilarious how the Indian folks here in B-school do the same thing. And not just about studies. I asked a classmate if he's running for club president for the Indian student club, for Pete's sake. He said no. And when the platforms came out, there it was, his name, right up at the top. Why do people have to be so devious?
• Also, while I'm at it, Indian dudes in Amreeka trying to hit on women when they're drunk is both hilarious and embarrassing to watch.

There. I'm done outraging for now. I suppose I should get back to Corporate Finance. Sigh.

Rants from the Sickbed

Fifth. Day. Running.

This is NOT good. My fever keeps fluctuating, and my grumpiness has reached new levels. I have spent quite some time berating my poor exhausted family over past grudges, mostly the change in my room's layout some months back (I hate it when that's done) and me not being allowed to buy something I've really wanted for the last five freakin' years. I'm fairly sure that if the gal pals were around, I would start screaming at them about the infamous incident from our third year; luckily, so far, only one of them has been brave enough to call and ask how I am.

If there is anything I have hated about this illness, it is the visits to the doc. First off, I don't like my doc. Her accent is all pretentious, and she talks to us as if we're 5-year-olds. Which really isn't wise around my dad, because ze father knows as much about medicines as most doctors. Very cool ze father is. So there.

Secondly, if I have to watch that damn LiveMedia screen in the clinic's waiting room one more time, I will just scream. Number one, it is clearly not "Live" if my two visits over the space of 48 hours had the same jokes being run. In fact, given that I was back in the waiting room after seeing the doc while my dad went to pick up medicines, and the same stuff from an hour back was being played, they clearly need a new name for themselves. Number two, not one of their jokes was funny. Zilch. Nada. AND, to add insult to injury, ALL their so-called jokes were grammatically wrong!!! There is major gnashing of teeth happening here.

On another note, what is with bloggers starting their posts with an apology for how long the post is? How do you actually know when you start the post how long it's going to be? I have never till date written a post which was exactly identical to how it seemed in my head before I actually started typing it; they always, always take a shape and form of their own. Plus, how does apologizing for the length make people want to read on till the end. Either they'll read the whole thing or they'll get bored halfway and leave - your regret at making them read such a long thing won't change their mind either way, because chances are, if the post is really as long as that, by the time they've reached that halfway point, they'll have forgotten all about your apology anyway.

I think I'm going to stop now.

A quick rant

Why are people such morons?

Do you really think, when you're stuck in a traffic jam, that the persons in front of you are not moving their cars because they get some sadistic pleasure out of getting you stuck? Or that they wouldn't zip right off if they just could? So how does honking away like a maniac help matters any? Other than increase the levels of noise pollution and drive me crazy?

And then there are the idiots who simply persist in driving at night with their headlights at full beam. I mean, come on. You can see the lights of the car coming towards you. Why blind the person driving that? You can see there are people in the car parked in front of you. You can see me squinting away while walking home. Would you just do me a favour and turn off the damn full beam?

I tell you, it's a country full of idiots.

Annoyed

You know, I am capable of surviving pretty much any illness you throw at me. I've got through bouts of pneumonia (in the middle of my second final exams *shudder*), bronchitis, sundry stomach illnesses, and typhoid. OK, so I nearly died of typhoid, but it wasn't as cool as you'd think it was, considering I was told I nearly died only about eight years after the incident. How boring.

Moving on now. So my point is, I am an exemplary patient. I can handle any kind of illness. Save one. The common cold. I hate catching a cold. It's annoying, and painful, and just downright irritating. My throat aches, I keep shivering, I keep sneezing four times in a row, and don't even get me started on how I get breathless if I try to move. And for some obscure reason, I invariably develop a craving for cold coke every freaking time.

And believe me, I've tried all the remedies there are. Steaming, gargling, dispirin in hot water, haldi milk - with or with a dash of saffron, you name it, I've tried it. Doesn't change a thing. Zilch.

I have a presentation in class tomorrow morning, which I chose to get preponed by three weeks. I'm warning you, if I'm not fit to go to university tomorrow, I am going to be one disgruntled person. More disgruntled than usual that is. So there.

Explain to me...!!!

So I have these friends who live kind of far, far away. Stingy soul that I am, the most effective way of keeping in touch with these wonderful individuals is the Internet. Unfortunately (for them, that is - I really couldn't give two hoots), these wonderful individuals have a very strange method of keeping in touch.

They come online everyday, open their email accounts, then - wait for it - open their orkut accounts to send me a scrap telling me how they have so much to tell me but are kind of busy so will email me later.

To add insult to injury, I am then expected to open my email account, see the extremely exciting notification about having received a scrap, open my orkut account, and then see that they don't have time to email me, but have time to open utterly useless accounts to inform me of that fact.

Now in the time they waste opening this second account, would it be too much to ask for to receive a simple email - even if it's just two lines long - telling me how they are and that they'll send me longer email when they're relatively free? Why waste my time just because they're so busy?!?

Now would someone explain the logic of this to me?

Go AWAY!

You know, the thing about technology is that it makes it devilishly hard for me to get rid of people. It was so much easier in the good old days (ain't I ancient?) when all you had to do was stop speaking to someone you wanted out of your life, and stop taking his/her calls. The person would eventually give up, and there would be no awkward scenes or anything. Pheobe did it so effectively that Monica never even caught onto her game for crying out loud.

Now, however, it just doesn't work that way. So you get a call on your cell phone, and since the number flashing belongs to that annoying person who only ever calls when (s)he needs something, you ignore the call and carry on with what you were doing, humming gleefully. But then the landline rings, and you just know it's that person. Luckily, your mother picks up, and catches on to what your wild gesticulations mean and makes up some excuse.

But you see, it doesn't end there. No sirree. The next time you come online, you see him/her waiting on MSN Messenger like an eagle waits for his prey to come out of hiding. Luckily, you have your settings set such that you sign in on Appear Offline mode, so you manage to block the accursed person. But what you've forgotten is that (s)he still has your other email address, and can email you whenever (s)he chooses to do so. And if you thought just ignoring the email and not replying was an option, think again. (S)he has not only visited your Orkut profile, but also the profiles of people who scrap you, and therefore knows that you have come online and have replied to others, so why not me huh? Huh? Tell me, tell me, why?

Aaaaargh!!!!

I'm sorry... I didn't plan to!

It's a good thing I neither went into journalism, nor have any plans of doing so. I think journalism, or at least the kind of journalism I'm talking about, involves a certain amount of objectivity or detachment from the facts of whatever you might be reporting. I don't have that.

There is no doubt the possibility that I might develop such an attitude in the future, but as of now, I don't see that happening. These days, I tend to get a little too worked up about most things that I read about in the papers.

I read this article earlier this week, and all I could think was, "momentary lapse"?!? Bull. Even if it was, the girl was eight years old people!!! How can you forget the utter brutality of what she underwent simply because it wasn't planned?!? Oh, and the fact that the so-and-so didn't kill her, but simply left her to bleed to death really does let him off the hook, doesn't it? And of course it doesn't fall under the category of "rarest of rare" cases, because child sexual abuse is so bloody common in this country.

Someone I know is of the opinion that Santosh Singh was given the death penalty solely because of the public opinion surrounding the case. I'm beginning to believe he's right. Do we really need to create public outrage every single time we want to see justice? Is creating a brouhaha the only way we can get justice?

I was a much happier person before I started reading the newspapers.

Dire straits

About a year ago, during a rather innocuous conversation, a friend of mine happened to mention ot me that according to Vaastu Shastra or Feng Shui or one of those things, how organized your home is supposedly signifies how clear you are in your thoughts. That day, on returning home, I went to my room and took a good look around. Sure enough, a horrible mess met my eyes.

Now, I might not believe in any of those schools of thought, but this particular line of thought made sense to me. My thoughts have been in a complete clutter for the past two years or so now, and my room, well, when has that not been a mess?!? That, my dear and not-so-dear readers, is why the train of thought in most of my entries rarely seems to follow any logical path.

The bottomline is, while my room occasionally does undergo a thorough spring-cleaning session, the clutter my thoughts have been in for the last two years has reached a point where I don't seem to be able to sort them out even if I tried. Moreover, this feeling has intensified in the recent past. I feel pulled in different directions all the time in pretty much every aspect of my life these days. There are innumerable options, demands, suggestions, commands, and roads that seem to magically appear before me without me evincing the slightest bit of desire for any of it. I sometimes feel like a captured octopus who has eight different idiots pulling at each of its legs - not a very pleasnt image to bring to mind, I agree. The desparation for answers seems to be just increasing at times.

I think I would be in a better state - at least mentally, if nothing else - if I had some degree of faith in yoga, or art of living, or reiki, or something. Unfortunately, I don't. And that means that I am quite likely to finally give in to my long-cherished desire of throwing a crystal vase at the wall and smashing it to smithereens very soon.

Help!

I am very curious about a certain phenomenon that seems to have started these days. Apparently, when someone has an accident, or turns out to have some kind of serious illness, either an email service or a mobile network service comes forward and offers to give a certain amount of money every time a message about the individual concerned is forwarded. Now, here's my question: how does the mobile/email service in question know when the message is forwarded? Do they encrypt some kind of tracking code into the message (I wouldn't know if that's the correct terminology; I'm rather ignorant about these things)? Or they do have access to all our inboxes, and therefore know just how often we send/receive these messages (and therefore being a complete violation of privacy)?

Now, if it is one of these things, wouldn't it just be simpler to directly and openly hand over a huge some of money to the individual in need? At least, that way, they'd get a great deal of publicity. Oh, and they could even throw a huge bash and get their photos on Page 3 in the process!!!

Did I hear someone call me a cynic? Guilty as charged. I don't believe in altruism. At least, not when there's nothing in it for you in return. And definitely not for utter strangers. Sure, I help my friends and family if they need me to, because for some odd reason, I care about the bunch of them. I also help random classmates and colleagues, but if I was to examine my motives, it would probably be in the hope that when I need help from them, I'll get it (plus there's the fact that I'm not too good at saying no). And as far as strangers are concerned I don't think I've helped out more than one or two in my life!

So here's what I'm curious about (no, it wasn't the question at the beginning): what makes all these people so gullible to believe these forwards, and thereafter so willing and eager to send them on? They don't know these individuals, yet they will continue to send forward after forward to "help" them.

I mean, come on, I've been using the World Wide Web for seven to eight years now, and that girl Rachel who supposedly has cancer has been the same freaking age ever since! Sure, even I got taken in initially... Oui, even I have been nice enough to send out that mail a few times, but then you see, after a year or so, I wisened up. So why don't these people?

To quote a wise woman, "People are stupid".

What's your motive?

A/N: This piece was written some months back when it seemed fairly relevant to what was happening around me. Time has passed, but the issue has persisted in hanging around! So I figured I'll put it up here. For the record, I am not passing judgment on anyone; I'm simply stating an opinion.

April 09, 2006:
My generation's in a furore these days. The HRD Minister announced an increase in the reservation quotas for SC/ST/OBCs in institutions of higher education. So protest marches, SMS forwards, impassioned emails, online petitions et al. have been back in full force. In fact, this time, even fasting and self-immolation were being used from what I hear.

Immanuel Kant said that the value of action depends on their motives, not results. He spoke of "duty for duty's sake"; the only proper motivation for any action is faith in moral law. According to him, doing something because you feel it is good or right to do it is immoral. I don't agree with him to the extent of calling it immoral, but to a certain extent, he makes sense.

One of the emails I got asked us not to join in on the protests simply because Rang De Basanti made it cool to speak out. The writer was right; many of the people who protested against the verdict in the Jessica Lall trial did so for that very reason. There are dozens of such verdicts made in this country, which go unnoticed - either because the victim isn't a model, or because these isn't an inspiring movie around at the time to propel people to notice it.

I'm not saying the hype shouldn't have happened. On the contrary, I'm glad it did. At least Jessica will get justice - hopefully. But I do believe the reason the hype happened was not wholly a desire to see justice. And that is sad.

The motivation for people reacting against the possibe quota is very different. This time, it affects us directly. My own chances of getting into a decent master's program went straight from a fairly optimistic 5% to 0.1%. No kidding.

So I'm guessing the protests will be even more vociferous this time round. However, chances are, the protests won't be covered by as many news channels this time round (After all, Salman Khan just got bail!!!). The hype will be there, but not as visible.