The India i see...

I had this topic in my mind for quite some time now, and have been thinking of getting down to write about it. Am talking about the heading. Now i was lying there in my bed now - am at home u see and eating my mom's delicacies and getting fatter - and some words came into my head and i thought yes i have to write it some day. Then the next thought was- Why not now?... I cannot get any more free than this. So here i am.

Anyways lets get down to the point. What do i see then??... I see an India where my hometown gets converted to an island after as early as 6 O' clock because the police cant protect the roads connecting the town to the nearby cities from the naxalites, I see a college which is said to be one of the best in the country, but which survives not because of it being so, but because of the perseverance of a few of the faculty and a lot of students with loads of bureaucracy, I hear of relatives rejecting marriage proposals because the bride side cant spend enough on the marriage, I see an India where a farmer works thro' the year so that he can add to the meager income that he gets from his toil in the fields even though the food prices are going thro the roof, I see an education system that is failing to cope up with the aspirations of the country, and a political scene that we all wish could be better.

But along with this i also see friends and youngsters running organisations like Pratigya and Center for Civil Society that gives us hope for a better future and a place for new leaders and ideas to emerge. I also see my next door uncle buying a computer for his 8 year old on Dhanteras, I see happily married couples whose love did not matter whether they were from Delhi or Maharashtra or Jharkhand or Haryana.... I see DINK families enjoying their life and planning for their future, and i see a working mom running thro' her life with a smile on her face, I see my mom struggling to type a reply mail to her daughter-in-law in Hinglish but smiling with every word that she gets right. I see a friend looking to go abroad but who doesn't want to miss a wedding, I see 7 telecom companies in a place where there are no roads after 6... :-) ...

In fact I see an India that's so full of potential, and an India that's slowly but surely realising it. Yes i am disillusioned with my India, but i am still hopeful. Hopeful because even though the daily papers splash loads of heart shattering news across their front pages everyday, the special good news editions that run on national holidays are getting fatter year on year. I have hope because i am surviving in today's India in spite of being pessimistic. I have hope because someone has very rightly said that pessimism is a luxury for the good times. I have hope because i am a pessimist but still find reasons to smile.

Looking at my past.. Just the past...

I hear a lot of noise about the new year coming up, people are busy making resolutions, which i generally don't make. I am not a planning guy, take life as it comes, and do what u like, but then that leaves me out of writing what's going to happen in the the year to come. But i can always write about the year gone by, surely not the events happening in the world, that would be too much and too talked about. So today i am going to talk about "I".. :-) ...

Now lets see... u know human memory is contextual, u remember something when u see something similar to it, and also it gives more importance to what happened most recently, so i remember chocolates getting costlier and lighter more vividly rather than going to Chennai for a workshop, more than 6 months ago. okay, let me list what i can recall

• I got placed(Got a job)(important one, not to be forgotten),
• Chocolates got costlier.. :-)...
• My sis got married
• My father retired
• I gave a seminar that everyone liked at the time(but i dont think i am getting good grades),
• I attended a workshop in IIT Chennai(a lot of wherever i am going now comes because of that)
• A couple of my friends had babies, (making me feel old.. :(.. And wondering if i can ever be responsible enough to have one of my own.)
• I didn't go anywhere on a trek.. :(... Making it a pretty boring semester.
  
• Started off on Twitter. Liked the medium. But the problem is again separating the spam from information.
  
• -- Thats all i can remember right now... Will add more as and when i remember them.
  

Preaching thy self...

Ever had the feeling that u have yourself not being doing justice to what u say. You see i am a great believer in doing what one says, as in - practice what you preach, treat others as you wish to be treated yourself, and everything along similar lines. But a few days ago i realised that i have been saying something which if not altogether false, can only be considered otherwise because i did not know that what i was saying was wrong.

The incident was simple, i had not being playing regularly for the last week or so and hence had become a bit rusty when i got back to playing again, now trying to get back to the way i played earlier i fell back upon what i told others who asked me how to play- tilt the bat in the right way, check the speed of the ball(i play table tennis, if u are wondering). And to my utter dismay, they didn't work, now it was time for me to realise how bad the advise that i gave others was. So this time round when i did get back to playing decently, i tried to figure out what was it that i was interpreting in the wrong manner, and then came together the number of things that have always stared me in the face but i had never put them together to realise that they are all interdependent. I had written a post some while ago, it was in context of the way we learn what every emotion is, but now its time for me to realise that its not true for the abstract things only, everything that we learn is through imitation and repetition. Its the sub-conscience that does the thinking, ... I dont even know if i am making sense here... Anyways what i did realise was that there is no way to do something better than to get used to it to such an extent that one can move beyond it altogether. Practice makes a man perfect has never sounded truer to me, albeit it came from a slightly different line of thought. And what it also means is that my sub-conscience is more adept at doing a lot of tasks than me, and that implies a lot of other things, but that is a topic for another post. .. :) ..

I had a dream...

Woke up a while ago, and wondered why i had overslept, there was this strange sensation of quiet because of which i was not angry with myself. Anyways i carried on, and suddenly it all came rushing back to me when i laid my eyes on the camera. I was having a dream wherein i was out somewhere, i don't remember either alone or with someone, but i saw a new bird, i do remember thinking that its a Brahmin eagle and that i was supposed to capture it, however though the colors matched i think they were shaped a bit like vultures(if i don't make any sense, blame my dream). Now comes the interesting part, i came back to my room and got my camera, and wanted to get back and see if i can get the birds, but somehow for one reason or the other i was held up one or the way. Because i wanted to click the birds i did not want to end the dream made me to keep on sleeping, but the fact that i somehow knew that i was in a dream and should continue sleeping made my wish to click the birds a futile quest. Whats interesting about this is that, i had the knowledge about two facts that i acted upon, such that the knowledge of one nullified the other or rather the fact that the mere presence of one made the other an impossibility. But still in the dream they did not contradict each other. They coexisted, the existence of one made the other a reality instead of contradicting it, I think after the idea had taken root, and i had made up my mind that i should not get up, i had latched on to my result, and forgotten about the process that led to it, and followed the other course blindly. I think the same thing happens a lot in reality. We often discard the obvious and base our decisions on past line of thoughts, and just remember the decisions that we had taken. The need of every hour is to take the changed circumstances into account and make fresh perspectives and better decisions, that better reflect our present circumstances.

As i think over this, i am realizing that there are things in my life too that i had decided upon a long ago, but never ever subjected them to a review. I will need to reconsider them. But just as in the dream, we never really realize the mistake until its over. Now the dilemma is, even though i realize that i was wrong, or rather, am wrong, the fact still remains that i am living in a dream, one that may have to wake up from to actually realize how wrong i was.