Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from June, 2012

Cinderella Man in times of Recession- Of Lists and Pink Slips

For men, what they do is the inevitable second question in social interaction and being in-between job is not an inspiring answer. It puts a question mark on their very existence, what does a man exist for if not to provide for those who depend on him, just as what does a woman exist for if not to love and fulfil the emotional hollowness of a man? The man who just lost his name and has become a number on the list has no clue on how to respond to this sudden change in his existence. Lists are cruel, cold-hearted and top-down. One can not talk or reason with a list. The name as an individual gives an opportunity to counter, convince and cajole; The number as an individual takes away all those opportunity. It looks less of a judgement on your capability, more like the outcome of a faltering dice thrown up in the air. You can argue with a reason, you can not with the stroke of misfortune. The government of the day is moving from disaster to disaster. The celebration of completion

Inheritance of Parental Benevolence (and Vice versa)

The dust, the traffic and eternal construction of Bangalore not withstanding, the city to me has always been fun to visit, more so, in summer when the calm and embalming Bangalore whether is even more drastically differentiated than the sweltering and cruel heat of Delhi summer. A day spent with customers, with absolutely promising discussions over lovely dinner, culminated to the designation of best of the days as I got call from my old college friend while coming back to my hotel, Taj Westend, ensconced in the wonderful forest like greenery. Reaching back in the hotel, after picking him up , we say down for a long chat over a small drink of single malt. I took a long look at him, he looks a happy man though complains of discrimination at work, on account of region, language and all, worried that his career progression might not be keeping pace with his hairs going silver. I remember, as we chat about his modest career growth and my absolutely absurd financial pragmatism, of the y

Leave of Absence from Facebook

A story was cooking, pungent smelling about a father on the edge, loosing memory hit with something like Alzheimer. It started well, going backwards, as a daughter struggles to bring back her father from the edge of understanding to life as we know it for whatever of it might be left for them together. It is story which is well..a story, that too an unfinished one, but as my four year old sit by my side, and tells me of a even smaller kid, Garvin in her summer school, while running through the pictures in her storybook, the story seems so real. It could be something like what famed psychologist, Shawn Achor referred to in a wonderful TED talk on positive psychology as medical school syndrome, where in simply on account of being surrounded by so many diseases, one starts believing, one has them. Could it be that when you write about calamities that befall on the character, you somehow start believing yourself to be living through those all those calamities in life, and sometime throug

Facing the Demons- Resolution to the Problems of Life

Life is cruel, conniving and heartless companion at times. It at times holds our vision with such cold hands that a shiver runs down the spine, and while try to turn our eyes away from it, it refuses to let go of the strangle it holds us in. In moment as those, we close our eyes and want to believe that every thing is well. There could be some merit in that when one looks are some momentary misfortune has befallen on to our being, as would be advocated by the proponents of positive thinking. The gang of glass-half full, but then it does not work and at its worse, works at its negative, when the problem at hand stems from a rot which is deep within. Symptoms which pokes and hits you with brutality is just the pointer which attempts to point to something which has derailed much deeper. In situation as that, escapism is of no use, although to evaluate it with some more seriousness, it is in sheer stupidity of ours that we presume our escapist attitude, our cowardly attempt to flee into