Roadside Mirchi Shops

It was a cloudy afternoon. Rain was in the air. As i was walking empty stomach towards my home, an aroma tingled my nostrils. Turning back, i saw a heaps of deep fried savories. Pakoda as you would call it in India....Bread pakodas, Aloo bondaas, Gram cutlets and my favorite Mirchis. Looking beyond my eyes popped up. He was frying Jillibis. i had no option but to retrace my steps and stand in front of the shop. I had a wonderful lunch of hot Jillibis and even hotter Mirchis.

I was first exposed to the "Mirchi"s almost a decade back in Hyderabad. Mirchi is made of big Green Chillies coated with Bason and deep fried.

There is definitely something special about these roadside pakoda shops and the tea stalls in India. The energy level with which these shops are bestowed with is something special. The agility and the multi functioning activities that the shop owner shows while handling different customers, frying the mirchis, serving tea and managing the cash all by himself is something awesome. The business in these shops are run by the words of mouth. There is no calculator, no bill receipts, no computers.

Almost all of these shops in rural India are similar in looks. It will have one big bowl in which few fried Mirchis will be piled in open air. There will be a big Kaday with hot oil on an open Burner (rather a Chulla) on one side of the shop. Beside that, the shop owner will sit with one hand busy frying Mirchi and the other managing Tea and Cash. And there will be the customers standing in front of the shop busy in chit chatting and enjoying hot Mirchis and tea. With all probabilities, the tea will be served in small clay cups. However, in modern days cups made of glasses and plastics have made an inroad. And of course there is different dialects depending on the location. For example, in Mumbai, it may be "Ek cutting chai" and in Delhi it may be "Ek batta Do chai". In West Bengal it may be "Ek Half tea"....

Although the glamor of these shops are threatened by sophisticated food joints and the supernatural advertisements of the soft drinks of modern days, but people in India still flock to them. People may complain about these shops being unhygienic and a poor quality oil being used..... But who can resist the delicious spicy Mirchis, sweet jillibies and a cup of tea there?

Negotiation skill

It is said worldwide that we the Indians are good at negotiation skills. Its because we have to negotiate everywhere, everyday. We negotiate while traveling by auto rickshaw, we negotiate while buying groceries, we negotiate at the fish market, we negotiate with the hawkers on the footpath. We grow up seeing our parents and neighbors negotiating in their everyday lives. The better we negotiate the smarter we are called. But this tendency to negotiate has created an air of disbelief in almost all of us. We cannot believe the shop owner, we cannot believe the auto rickshaw driver, we cannot believe the hawkers. While staying in Japan, i noticed that we did not have to disbelieve people. Generally they are honest and we can believe them without any loss. Does it mean that this negotiation skill have made us smarter or simply cheaters?

In Gita, it is said that a person by nature is full of faith. It is said that whatever we do without faith is fruitless because it is an untruth (Asatya). A child believes everything till his/her thought processing is polluted by external forces. Does it mean that we are living our daily lives in untruth while negotiating in every step?

I have a dream... the importance of dreaming...

Nazriya - a poem written and recited by my wife Reema

It's all a matter of Nazriya - how we look at certain things - the perspective.

There is a fundamental mistake in the thought processing of our leaders. They think people in distress look forward to availing of subsidies. However, I think it's not the subsidies they look for, they look for a leader who will make them capable of dreaming - dreaming of a new India, dreaming of a new era, dreaming of raising their families with dignity, dreaming of making a Home out of their Huts. There is fundamentally nothing wrong with being poor, however, it's an unpardonable sin to stop dreaming. Even during the British Raj, there was poverty, illiteracy, poor health system. But one thing had united all the people of India. It was the dream of a free India. People got united to follow that dream. We had leaders who helped us see that dream. It was the dream of "Jonathon Livingstone Seagull" which made him immortal. It was the dream of "Iqbal" which made him wear the blue jersey. 

So it's all about a dream that will make our country a better nation. People don't need subsidies, they want to dream. A dream of a better Bharat, a dream of a free nation, a dream of a dignified life. 

It would be nice to see a leader starting his speech with 

"I have a dream"....

My childhood days

Today morning as i was gazing at the tree full of yellow leaves getting ready to embrace the winter in USA, some memories of my childhood days took me to that small world where i spent almost sixteen years of my life. i was feeling terribly nostalgic. The memories of my school days, the memories of Mahalaya's morning, the memories of days of Durga Puja, the memories of the "Choto" Vs. "Boro" football match on the morning of 15th August, the memories of the march past of the school children at Jail Ground on the occasion of 26th January, the memories of Raas Mela, the memories of the fair at the Science Museum, the memories of our adda on the bank of Saheb Bandh, the memories of basking in the sun on the rooftop during winter, the memories of the Chayachobir asor in the big HMV radio in the afternoon and lots more flooded my calm soul. We were a big joint family with almost ten members. Life was so simple with almost no modern days electronic gadgets but still it was so full. Still i remember my role as the shopkeeper at my grand parent's small shop.

Education - basic or higher

I am really not sure how i should present this topic - where we should stress more - basic primary education or higher education. As government after government spend huge sum for primary education (although i don't know whether it really goes to the actual needy), let me tell you the bleak picture of our higher education. As i have come from a very backward district of West Bengal, i can at least try to give you the real picture.

i studied till 10th standard in a school which can boast of anything but good quality students. we had a strength of about 100 students at Xth standard appearing for the board examination. Out of those 100 students, just three got first class. And out of those three probably i am the only one who could break the wall of the small town to come into a life to compete with the global workforce. Now you may wonder what has happened to those unlucky 97 students who could not make it big. i can tell you very few of them have become financially independent in lives. please don't take it otherwise. i am trying to give you a statistics not to boast about myself, but the real picture of education in small towns.

so my point is all of the 100 students had got the basic education. most of them came from well-to-do families. then why is this failure in building a career out of their good basic education? hence providing basic education is not the solution, but to provide an education so that a student can earn a livelihood out of that education is the challenge.

i think we are stressing too much on just the enrollment of students at the primary schools. but it is important at the same time to see whether those students are able to earn a livelihood out of that education. making a student self sufficient so that he can earn a livelihood with his basic education should have been our motto instead of just getting the students enrolled at the primary schools. i can bet that in small towns and villages, even with education up to 10th standard in so called local schools, people end up in doing menial works.

now as we stress too much on primary education, should not we start thinking that people with good higher education can build a society where the students having basic education can be absorbed? there should be a balance between the stress given to primary education and higher education. its a different matter, although, that even with good higher education, people remain unemployable.

Education - Basic or Higher

I am really not sure how i should present this topic - where we should stress more - basic primary education or higher education. As government after government spend huge sum for primary education (although i don't know whether it really goes to the actual needy), let me tell you the bleak picture of our higher education. As i have come from a very backward district of West Bengal, i can at least try to give you the real picture.

i studied till 10th standard in a school which can boast about anything but good quality students.

Ignorance is bliss - burden of knowledge

I don't know how I should tell people about the problem of burden of knowledge. However, I think this has become a phenomenon with people thriving to aquire more knowledge. The more we know, the more we try to see the world from behind the colored glasses of that knowledge. Thats why probably we have stopped seeing the world as seen by a child with his simplicities.

To give a practical scenario of the problem, let me give you an example. If someday my wife can't lit up the gas stove of my home, i would probably try to see if there is any gas in the cylinder, then try to unscrew the burner and then lodge a complaint with the concerned person. However, i may not try to lit up the gas with an alternative lighter, say with a match box. Hence my thought processing goes from complex to more complex logical flow of events. However, my wife would probably try the last method, say try with an alternative lighter.

All of us know that we start our programming career with the Hello World problem. In a simple C++ environment it is few lines of code. However, the same poblem can be solved by applying knowledge of distributed computing, design pattern, UML and so on and so forth. May be when we start applying all these knowledge to print a simple Hello World sentence on the screen, it may not be possible for a newcomer to decipher the code.

As i was a student of Electronics & TeleCommunication engineering, i have felt it strongly that if the basic purpose of the subject of communication is lost in the wilderness of some fourier analysis and frequency domain-time domain analysis, then it does not meet the need of the education. i believe that if the purpose of subject like economics go away from the well-beingness of people to the maze of some probability and calculus equations, then the basic purpose of economy is defeated.

Hence i believe knowledge is powerful as long as it makes our life simpler; otherwise it becomes a burden. My Mom used to say one adage quite often which goes like this...

"Je Janena Uttor-Pub...
Tar janbe saday sukh..."

Thats why probably it is said that "Ignorance is bliss"......

So we must utilize our knowledge to simplify our lives or else it becomes a monster.....

I would like to conclude this discussion with the following words of wisdom from Hindu philosophy:

"
asato ma sadgamaya
tamaso ma jyotirgamayo
mrityu ma amritum gamaya
"

This means

"O Lord! take me from the world of untruth to the world of truth...
O Lord! take me from the world of darkness to the world of lights...
O Lord! take me from the world of death to the world of immortality....
"