It was a smoggy winter morning... The feeble sunshine was trying to warm my bedroom...The chirps of the morning birds started entering into my ears... From under the quilt I searched for the mobile phone and switched on one of the Bengali FM radio channels...The Kolkata special winter morning just started...
At around half past 6 o'clock, when the morning mist was just fading away, we sat down with cups of hot tea...We started playing the Gayatri Mantra...We looked out of the window... The momentum of the nearby roadside market was just getting started...The chit-chat of the school going children were gradually becoming audible...
We got ready to visit the roadside vegetable market...We took a drab carry bag that is popularly called the “Bazarer Thole” in Bengali...
Once we reached the vegetable market, it was a total pandemonium...The shop owners were furiously trying to draw the attention of the customers with their loud, not-so-soothing voice...However, its a very common scene at any market place of Kolkata...And I think it shows the energy level of a thriving market place...If one becomes timid, it would be difficult for him to do the marketing at these market places...
While returning from the Bazar, we picked up few newspapers from a roadside vendor... Here I would like to share one aspect of this city... Here reading newspapers and getting involved in the discussions about almost all of the news at the roadside adda is considered one of the most favourite pass-times... Although people of Calcutta are changing and getting accustomed to the mad office time rushes, but the very basic nature of adda of Kolkatabasi is one of the finest attractions for aam-aadmi as well as intellectuals...I have travelled to Delhi, Bangalore and Hyderabad...Its difficult to get newspaper from roadside stalls at these places...But the roadside adda with a cup of tea and a news paper is something unique for Kolkata...
People of Kolkata are a bit laid-back...They don't race against time...A good afternoon nap is not quite uncommon for the people of Kolkata...However, Kolakatabasi are changing and adapting to the new “time is money” culture...
Let me end this discussion with the views of a guy who is seeing the changing face of Kolkata after a long time...With the mad rushes of Digital and Mobile technologies, with our blind one-sided view towards the definition of development, with the high adrenaline of the market economy, with the sprawling hi-tech shopping malls, with the centrally air-conditioned call-centers and BPO offices, with college street loosing its significance in the wake of digital library, with the adda at the old kolkata coffee house giving its way to the discussion over a cup of coffee at the brand-conscious modern air-conditioned coffee shop, will Kolkata leave behind its old-styled definition as the cultural hub of the country...Only time can answer....
Wednesday, May 5, 2010
Saturday, February 20, 2010
Freedom...
Just few minutes back I was thinking of the true meaning of Freedom. What it means when we say a free nation, a free guy, a freeway... does it mean that everyone is free to do whatever he wants to... No!!! Freedom, of course does not mean that... Freedom does not give the permission to do harm to others... but at the same time to do good for mankind one has to be freed from all sorts of shackles... a man can stand up on his own feet only when he breaks free... now there are two types of freedom – one may be freedom at a group or a community level and the other is at an individual level... when I say freedom in a community level, it means there has to be some laws and restrictions at the community level, but laws must be made for the mankind and not the vice versa... And when I say freedom at an individual level, it means one has to vow “Don't do evil”....
Freedom, to me, essentially means freedom to dream, freedom to walk, freedom to work, freedom to speak and freedom to love mankind....
Freedom, to me, essentially means freedom to dream, freedom to walk, freedom to work, freedom to speak and freedom to love mankind....
Sunday, February 14, 2010
The Mini Bharat - experience the Little India inside a train...
suddenly all the co-passengers became alert...
it was a cold winter morning... and I was traveling by a short-distance train on the way to my hometown...
having studied in Kolkata, the train between Kolkata and Purulia became almost like my second home...and every time I travelled by these trains, it gave me a sense of joy and belonging...while sipping the hot tea in the clay cup, I felt like going back in the time machine...
I have not travelled a lot...
maybe my point of view is incorrect...
however I must say to know the actual Bharat, one has to travel by local trains and short-distance trains in Bharat...It portrays the true picture of Bharat...starting from the Chaiwalas (the tea vendors) and the Jhalmuriwalas to the Cobblers and the Baul artists (in Bengal) - all of them are a part of this picture ...
The cucumber vendors, the hawkers, the magazine vendors, the students, and the daily office-goers are an integral part of this little Bharat...
I have travelled by train in Singapore, Japan, and the USA...
Everywhere it gave me a different feeling and I wondered about the smooth ride and the perfect timings...
however, the journey on a local train in Bharat is altogether different...
it's not because of a smooth ride...
it's because of the people who ride the train...
it's not plastic... it's very lively...of course, one has to open up his mind to enjoy this journey...
one may bump into a long-lost friend and shout
"Bondhu ki khabor bol... kotodin dakha hoyni..."
the compartments may lack air-conditioned facilities and the compartment windows may not be soundproof... but one has to look outside the window to feel the gusty air and the lush green...
that's the true Bharat, indeed...
So.... here I am... enjoy the song...
Sunday, January 31, 2010
The Romance that is called Load shedding
The Moonlit Evening...
looking at the full moon evening through the eucalyptus trees outside my apartment window, I thought had there been no load shedding we would not have realized the romance of a full moon evening...
Power cuts or black outs or load shedding as it is commonly known in India is quite a common phenomenon in Indian cities, towns, and villages...Even in the late 70s and early 80s, one designer style of shirts and trousers came to win the Indian youths which used to be called load shedding shirts and trousers...
However, my experience with load shedding in my first major job interview was not soothing...I was grilled for about half an hour about the cause, effect, and remedy of load shedding in that interview - from a technical point of view, of course... had I been in my present state of mind, I would probably have asked that interviewer if he knew the "Romance" behind the "load shedding"...
Monday, November 23, 2009
Future generation of Indians - in my eyes
We have invested hell lot of money and energy to build the infrastructure of the country... But have we ever given it a thought how the future generations of India should look like... I think the time has come when we should invest all our energy to develop future Indians... Otherwise we will get India without Indians...
I was just thinking how our future generation should be like... I would prefer a moral Indian to a smart Indian - a simple Indian who will stick to his morality instead of getting his work done by hook or by crook... A student who would study by heart instead of taking help of unfair means to qualify the examination - a student who would stick to the fair means whatever may be the outcome of the exam... An Indian above corruption...
To fight the corruption we must change the mindset of our future generation... We must create simple Indians, ( and i mean it... not ultra smart Indians) who just cannot think of getting corrupted... Its not easy to fight corruption only by RTI because as the adage goes..."prevention is better than cure..." Hence we must create Indians who just cannot think of getting the things done in whatever possible way, even if it is by unfair means... but Indians who stick to their moral grounds, unsucceptible to the outcome...
We got India from British Raj almost 60 years back... but in the ecstasy that followed to build modern India did we somewhere forget to start the process of building Indians in the line of Buddha, Gandhi, Swami Vivekananda, Rabindranath Tagore, Bhagat Singh or Netaji?
I know its very difficult to create such Indians without proper nurturing and it becomes more difficult as the surroundings have already become corrupted... But we should give it an honest try...
I was just thinking how our future generation should be like... I would prefer a moral Indian to a smart Indian - a simple Indian who will stick to his morality instead of getting his work done by hook or by crook... A student who would study by heart instead of taking help of unfair means to qualify the examination - a student who would stick to the fair means whatever may be the outcome of the exam... An Indian above corruption...
To fight the corruption we must change the mindset of our future generation... We must create simple Indians, ( and i mean it... not ultra smart Indians) who just cannot think of getting corrupted... Its not easy to fight corruption only by RTI because as the adage goes..."prevention is better than cure..." Hence we must create Indians who just cannot think of getting the things done in whatever possible way, even if it is by unfair means... but Indians who stick to their moral grounds, unsucceptible to the outcome...
We got India from British Raj almost 60 years back... but in the ecstasy that followed to build modern India did we somewhere forget to start the process of building Indians in the line of Buddha, Gandhi, Swami Vivekananda, Rabindranath Tagore, Bhagat Singh or Netaji?
I know its very difficult to create such Indians without proper nurturing and it becomes more difficult as the surroundings have already become corrupted... But we should give it an honest try...
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
The change management
Sometimes back i appeared for a test of a subject called "Change Management" for my professional purpose. This subject dealt with the mindset change to adapt to the changing environment of a corporate world - be it in the form of requirement change for a software product or the change in process of the internal system of an organization. But have we ever thought of the change management in our lives that we did in the last few years or so? Let me try to elaborate a little more...
The first change that i saw during childhood was the source of entertainment of my family members. When i was a child, my dad used to switch on his big HMV radio set on every Sunday morning for the Binaca Geetmala. My Mom used to listen to Chayachobir Asor almost regularly... That big radio set became smaller and smaller with the advent of time and ultimately got scrapped. Then during the mid-80's, we first experienced a new source of entertainment in the form of a black and white television. There used to be an huge Yagi antenna (please excuse me for this technical term) on the roof top. There used to be device called Booster used in conjunction with the antenna. And the most interesting part was that whenever there was poor signal strength, there used to be talks of increasing the heights of the antenna or changing its direction. However, the impact of the change in the source of entertainment was pretty big. Our beloved radio set went almost into oblivion...
However, the TV programs at that time in my place was pretty simple. There used to be only a single national channel, and the station that used to relay that program in my place usually used to stop relaying after 9:30 pm or 10:00 pm (i am sorry i can't remember the exact timing). But the craze was definitely in the air. People from neighborhood used to gather in our house to see programs like Chitrahhar, or Saturday/Sunday's movies, or Ramayana. People used to curse the electricity board if there was a power cut during those times. We did the necessary change management to adapt from Radio to TV.
With that change another change started taking shapes in rural India. That change is from Football to Cricket. During my childhood it was pretty common to see boys playing football in villages. But with India's victory in the Cricket World Cup and WCC cup, the choice for the favorite game tilted from Football to Cricket. And this change was huge. We started to forget listening to the relay of Mohun Bagan - East Bengal football match in the radio and adapted to cricket relay. Thus the whole new generation of cricket fans became omnipresent. We did another change management...
Then there was another change with the advent of Cable TV in 90's. The antennas from the roof top were pulled down and we started getting familiar with the new source of entertainment. Our National channels gradually gave way to the Star TV. MTv and channel V gradually took the place of the Chitrahaar. The movies of Saturday and Sunday and the Rangolli of the Sunday morning gradually lost their significance with the 24/7 entertainment of the private channels. The 8:30 pm national news lost their shines with the advent of news channels... And we did another change management....
In the 90's there was another change that was taking shape in India. This was the change in the way we communicate. With the advent of advanced telecommunication technologies the old black telephone (POTs) which used to be the status symbol of a family, gave way to the modern telephone. It became a pretty common gadget in the Indian house holds. People then started to communicate over the phone. The appointment with a doctor or getting news for an exam result became dependent on this small device placed in one corner of Indian homes...We did another change management in our lives...
But the real change in the way we communicate was no sooner than late 90's when the mobile phone gradually started invading the Indian minds. With the advent of Mobile technologies, people in the cities first got used to pager... and then they switched over to the Mobile phones... But the phones at that time was brick phones and it is really difficult to match it with today's slick phones...But still mobile phones were a status symbol in the early stage of deployment of the network... But gradually it became omnipresent and now-a-days, probably we can't imagine our lives a mobile phones...We did another change management in our lives...
Then the next change happened in our lives was with the way we get information - the internet...But still in the late 90s or the early 2000, internet was again a status symbol. There used to be point to point protocol (PPP), dial-in networks... The internet was very slow... Yet it started opening up another era to us... But with the advent of Broadband in the late 2000, Internet became a force to beckon with... And now-a-days probably, we have changed ourselves to mix-up with Internet...We did another change management...
And with the advent of 3G and 4G, WiMax, WiFi - probably we are about to see another change management in the Indian households... We are about to see how Mobile Banking would change our lives, how the social networking websites are flooding the internet space... how online radio and youtube are changing the way we entertain ourselves...Probably we will have to do a lot of change management in our lives in the years to come...
The first change that i saw during childhood was the source of entertainment of my family members. When i was a child, my dad used to switch on his big HMV radio set on every Sunday morning for the Binaca Geetmala. My Mom used to listen to Chayachobir Asor almost regularly... That big radio set became smaller and smaller with the advent of time and ultimately got scrapped. Then during the mid-80's, we first experienced a new source of entertainment in the form of a black and white television. There used to be an huge Yagi antenna (please excuse me for this technical term) on the roof top. There used to be device called Booster used in conjunction with the antenna. And the most interesting part was that whenever there was poor signal strength, there used to be talks of increasing the heights of the antenna or changing its direction. However, the impact of the change in the source of entertainment was pretty big. Our beloved radio set went almost into oblivion...
However, the TV programs at that time in my place was pretty simple. There used to be only a single national channel, and the station that used to relay that program in my place usually used to stop relaying after 9:30 pm or 10:00 pm (i am sorry i can't remember the exact timing). But the craze was definitely in the air. People from neighborhood used to gather in our house to see programs like Chitrahhar, or Saturday/Sunday's movies, or Ramayana. People used to curse the electricity board if there was a power cut during those times. We did the necessary change management to adapt from Radio to TV.
With that change another change started taking shapes in rural India. That change is from Football to Cricket. During my childhood it was pretty common to see boys playing football in villages. But with India's victory in the Cricket World Cup and WCC cup, the choice for the favorite game tilted from Football to Cricket. And this change was huge. We started to forget listening to the relay of Mohun Bagan - East Bengal football match in the radio and adapted to cricket relay. Thus the whole new generation of cricket fans became omnipresent. We did another change management...
Then there was another change with the advent of Cable TV in 90's. The antennas from the roof top were pulled down and we started getting familiar with the new source of entertainment. Our National channels gradually gave way to the Star TV. MTv and channel V gradually took the place of the Chitrahaar. The movies of Saturday and Sunday and the Rangolli of the Sunday morning gradually lost their significance with the 24/7 entertainment of the private channels. The 8:30 pm national news lost their shines with the advent of news channels... And we did another change management....
In the 90's there was another change that was taking shape in India. This was the change in the way we communicate. With the advent of advanced telecommunication technologies the old black telephone (POTs) which used to be the status symbol of a family, gave way to the modern telephone. It became a pretty common gadget in the Indian house holds. People then started to communicate over the phone. The appointment with a doctor or getting news for an exam result became dependent on this small device placed in one corner of Indian homes...We did another change management in our lives...
But the real change in the way we communicate was no sooner than late 90's when the mobile phone gradually started invading the Indian minds. With the advent of Mobile technologies, people in the cities first got used to pager... and then they switched over to the Mobile phones... But the phones at that time was brick phones and it is really difficult to match it with today's slick phones...But still mobile phones were a status symbol in the early stage of deployment of the network... But gradually it became omnipresent and now-a-days, probably we can't imagine our lives a mobile phones...We did another change management in our lives...
Then the next change happened in our lives was with the way we get information - the internet...But still in the late 90s or the early 2000, internet was again a status symbol. There used to be point to point protocol (PPP), dial-in networks... The internet was very slow... Yet it started opening up another era to us... But with the advent of Broadband in the late 2000, Internet became a force to beckon with... And now-a-days probably, we have changed ourselves to mix-up with Internet...We did another change management...
And with the advent of 3G and 4G, WiMax, WiFi - probably we are about to see another change management in the Indian households... We are about to see how Mobile Banking would change our lives, how the social networking websites are flooding the internet space... how online radio and youtube are changing the way we entertain ourselves...Probably we will have to do a lot of change management in our lives in the years to come...
Sunday, August 9, 2009
"Saach ka Saamna"
Satymeva Jayate
When a child does something wrong and runs to his Mom and whispers in her ears "Mamma.. i have done something wrong... ", that is what we can call "Saach ka samna...". When a person goes to temple or church, sits in front of God and weepingly confesses..."Oh Lord! I have done something wrong... Please pardon me...", that can be called "Saach ka saamna..." When the husband confesses about his wrong doings in front of his wife in the cozy corner of his home, that is "Saach ka saamna..." Because that is when we speak out our conscience...
There are differences between fact findings and truth findings. There is always two sides of an action or a thought...One is the fact and the other is the truth behind that fact...
It reminds me of one of his famous poems of Tagore called
"Debotar Graas".
In this poem after getting pissed off, the mother of a child uttered "Chol tore diye asi sagorer jole..." meaning that she would like to immolate her child in the river... But in Tagore's own words "Sunecho ki mukher katha...Sononi ki jananir antorer katha...", meaning these were the words of her mouth, but not the words from the heart of a mother...
Now the fact is that she did utter those cruel words to her son, but the truth is that she never meant that...
So what is the truth and what is the fact behind those words from a mother?
When a poor person takes the first bribe in his life, he sells out his dignity. Probably it hurts him more than had he not taken the bribe...So the fact is that the guy indeed took bribe... but did he really want to do that?
I strongly believe that a man dies as many times as his dignity is hurt.
When a person confesses in front of the TV camera and lie detector and becomes fully aware of his importance for speaking out the truth, it does not remain "Saach ka Samna"... it becomes another short cut to earn some quick bucks and grab the lime light...
Then at most it can be termed as one of the many so-called reality shows or fact finding shows, glued wrongly against the backdrop of truth...but not the "Saach ka Saamna"....
because it presents facts... not the real truth...
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