Political deterioration

Scandals, controversies, conspiracies and crimes happening and coming to light one after the other like if a chain reaction. Everything happening in and around the atrocity called politics. An irony is that both the ruling and the opposition have an equal share when something that shouldn’t happen happens.

Courtesy: Aseem Trivedi

Coal mining controversy, 2G spectrum, Highway scam, Jeep scandal, Bofors scandal.....and the innumerable sex scandals too. The list goes long... Really really long!! Never understood this high level corruption. Why do already rich and powerful people sell souls for more money they'll never be able to spend?

Sometimes we feel like politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it, misdiagnosing it, and then misapplying the wrong remedies. The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace in a continual state of alarm (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing them with an endless series of goblins, all of them imaginary. No one will really understand politics until they understand that politicians are not trying to solve our problems. They are trying to solve their own problems — of which getting elected and re-elected are number one and number two. Whatever is number three is far behind. Hope “Ruling” comes at least at number three.

Feel 'in' the crowd..

A couple of months ago, at Changi International Airport, I saw a stranger crying in public. I was transiting at Changi on my way back home. So in the meanwhile thought of photographing those Gong Xi Fa Cai (Chinese New Year) decorations done all over. And there was hours to go before my next flight, so I was just going through my FB home page. A girl, maybe 20 years old, was sitting on the couch opposite me, crying into her phone. I heard her say, “I know, I know, I know” over and over.

What did she know? Had she done something wrong? Was she being comforted? And then she said, “Mama, I know,” and the tears came harder.

What was her mother telling her? That everybody fails? Is it possible that no one was on the other end of the call, and that the girl was merely rehearsing a difficult conversation?

“Mama, I know,” she said, and hung up, placing her phone on her lap.

I was faced with a choice: I could interject myself into her life, or I could respect the boundaries between us. Intervening might make her feel worse, or be inappropriate. But then, it might ease her pain, or be helpful in some straightforward logistical way. An affluent neighbourhood at the beginning of the day is not the same as a dangerous one as night is falling. And I was me, and not someone else. There was a lot of human computing to be done.

It is harder to intervene than not to, but it is vastly harder to choose to do either than to retreat into the scrolling up and down my FB home page, or whatever one’s favourite distraction happens to be. Technology celebrates connectedness, but encourages retreat. The Facebook didn’t make me avoid the human connection, but it did make ignoring her easier in that moment, and more likely, by comfortably encouraging me to forget my choice to do so. My daily use of technological communication has been shaping me into someone more likely to forget others. The flow of water carves rock, a little bit at a time. And our personhood is carved, too, by the flow of our habits.

Everyone wants his parent’s, or friend’s, or partner’s undivided attention — even if many of us, especially children, are getting used to far less. Like someone wrote, “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” By this definition, our relationships to the world, and to one another, and to ourselves, are becoming increasingly miserly.

Most of our communication technologies began as diminished substitutes for an impossible activity. We couldn’t always see one another face to face, so the telephone made it possible to keep in touch at a distance. One is not always home, so the answering machine made a kind of interaction possible without the person being near his phone. Online communication originated as a substitute for telephonic communication, which was considered, for whatever reasons, too burdensome or inconvenient. And then texting, which facilitated yet faster, and more mobile, messaging. These inventions were not created to be improvements upon face-to-face communication, but a declension of acceptable, if diminished, substitutes for it.

But then a funny thing happened: we began to prefer the diminished substitutes. It’s easier to make a phone call than to schlep to see someone in person. Leaving a message on someone’s machine is easier than having a phone conversation — you can say what you need to say without a response; hard news is easier to leave; it’s easier to check in without becoming entangled. So we began calling when we knew no one would pick up.

Shooting off an e-mail is easier, still, because one can hide behind the absence of vocal inflection, and of course there’s no chance of accidentally catching someone. And texting is even easier, as the expectation for articulateness is further reduced, and another shell is offered to hide in. Each step “forward” has made it easier, just a little, to avoid the emotional work of being present, to convey information rather than humanity.

We often use technology to save time, but increasingly, it either takes the saved time along with it, or makes the saved time less present, intimate and rich. I worry that the closer the world gets to our fingertips, the farther it gets from our hearts.

Most of the time, most people are not crying in public, but everyone is always in need of something that another person can give, be it undivided attention, a kind word or deep empathy.

We live in a world made up more of story than stuff. We are creatures of memory more than reminders, of love more than likes. Being attentive to the needs of others might not be the point of life, but it is the work of life. It can be messy, and painful, and almost impossibly difficult. But it is not something we give. It is what we get in exchange for having to die.

A Policeman’s Smile :)

Today evening on my way back home, at a heavy and noisy traffic junction, I saw a very rare scene. It was a Traffic policeman wearing a rain coat, who was directing the traffic with a smile on his face. He and the rain shared the curse of all the people in a radius of 500 meters. Both were equally helpless. I was so much carried away by that man’s attitude. I couldn’t take my eyes off him. Actually if it was a little more peaceful situation, I’d surely go up to him and appreciate his attitude. I totally believe that a true smile is the best way to keep you in a good mood.

A smile is probably one of the simplest of cures for anything in this world such as broken confidence, broken dreams, and even a broken heart. I have almost lost count of how many times I have looked into the mirror and just smiled at myself, and how it has worked to get me out of a bad mood. At the end of it, you become so infected by your own smile, you wish the reflection you are seeing in the mirror were an actual person and you could hug that person and thank him for being so nice to you!

Watching someone smile is contagious, and you almost involuntarily tend to smile back at the person you saw smiling. Let anything be the situation, that man wasn’t handling an easy job there. He was dealing with infinite number of people who by any means just wanted to reach home before it’s too late. This man, the policeman, who might have been standing there for the whole day will be having the same thought in mind as well. But I’m sure that that smile would have released at least some thumbs off the horn button.

Anyways, my salute to that man in uniform for the attitude he carried…

Keep calm and......

2 days and 2 nights at Karunagappally, Kollam.

My friend, roommate and colleague from my previous company; all three being the same guy - Deepak; was all set to furnish his life to the next level. It was his engagement.

~ June 1^st

5:30 am, it was still dark. Wet roads and the dark sky, and it was too cold for life itself to feel alive. We started from our rented house at Ernakulam.

This was not the first time me staying in a company of an entirely different version of Keralites. Different version in the sense entirely different dialect, taste, orders etc. It was joyously different. I was literally enjoying though I had my usual weekend to-do list pending in my Thrissur. :)

The 6 over cricket match in the evening between his cousins with some close-to-real sledging and light moments was amazing. I was just a spectator, just to keep myself safe until the function is over the next day. Lessons learnt need to be applied when situation demands. Let that be another lesson.

~ June 2nd

In frame with the stars of the day. :)

The day!! I was also as tensed as Deepak was (But he seemed cool). Because I was the official photographer!!! I’m pretty damn sure I haven’t made it up to his expectation as it wasn’t my cup of tea by any means. But still he seems satisfied with those. May be he is being nice to me as always.

Like someone said, “Marriage is a day when two people think of their future and the rest think of food.” An engagement is nothing different. People seems like they were starving. And this was the only thing I found in Kollam, which I had seen in Thrissur, Kozhikode, Kasargode and Ernakulam. Like Srinivasan once told, “Story of humans is the same everywhere.”#Sandesham :)

With so many happy moments the function also moved smoothly. The gap granted by the monsoon mustn’t be forgotten when the credits starts rolling upwards.

Never did I feel like a guest. I was a part of it. Here ‘it’ being the family, function, fun and also the part-time umpiring for that 6 over match. Other must-mention characters are the two angels Janaki and Gouri (Deepak’s nieces). They make us feel ashamed pasting a smile on our face with their energy, when we sit tired. Kisses to both of them…

In a nutshell, at the expense of a weekend I got some real good people added to my FB friends list and to my ‘real’ friends list as well… :) Thank you all...

Congrats, Deepak and Aswathy.. God Bless..!!