Revisiting reality

(Maybe the only thing from the Apple insiders that I will appreciate)

here's to the crazy ones...
the misfits. the rebels. the troublemakers.
the round pegs in the square holes.
the ones who see things differently.
they're not fond of rules.
they have no respect for the status quo.

you can praise them, disagree with them, quote them, disbelieve them, glorify them, or vilify them. About the only thing you can't do is ignore them.

because they change things.
they invent.
they imagine.
they heal.
they explore.
they create.
they inspire.

maybe they have to be crazy. how else can you stare at an empty canvas and see a work of art? or sit in silence and hear a song that has never been written?

while some see them as crazy, i see them as genius...

...because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.

PS: They know how to market

love ...

... is not love,
till it's embraced.
till it's displayed.
till it's celebrated.
till it's nurtured.

till it's entirety is, simply, wanted.

30 before 30

1. Skydive - check
2. Teach science in a primary school
3. Be a visiting professor in a university/have a highly-opinionated (popular) blog on world economics
4. Bungee jump (would 'from the top of macau tower' be pushing it?)
5. Learn to swim
6. Finish learning carnatic music
7. Sing a self-composed (preferably in Urdu) song while playing the guitar to it
8. Live in London and Africa for a while
9. Backpack across the length and breadth of Peru and Chile
10. Go on a vacation to the Amazon Rainforest
11. Win a quiz competition in India (I owe it to my past. It might be the toughest on the list too)
12. Make a 5ft X 5ft oil painting
13. Get a cat/dog
14. Get an MBA and/or a PhD
15. Write a column for a newspaper
16. Become a published photographer
17. Backpack across India
18. Go to Europe with family
19. Finish reading 500 books (counting here)
20. Do something for my high school
21. Build the dream house
22. Learn pottery
23. Get a tattoo
24. Backpack across Europe - check
25. Find my passion in life - check
26. Go to all National Forest Reserves/Parks in India
27. Run a half-marathon
28. Startup in India
29. Learn Tamil. Watch a Rajnikanth's movie and all Maniratnam's and understand every word :D
30. Learn a European language - check

Year 21 - Score - 4/30

I can do at least 3 more in the next year :D
and 3/yr should get me there.

Hopefully I will have this blog or some form of it until Year 30 and I can give updates on how far I have come every birthday! :)

Education in India

Do you have days when you feel like your problems weigh squat compared to the hardships in others' lives? Imagine not being given the opportunity to learn more about the world, to be trapped in a town or a city or a group of people with a frog-in-the-well mindset. I then go through the whole process of chiding myself for taking my comforts for-granted, for cribbing about the so-called difficulties in my well-cushioned life.

As a teenager I often had the dilemma - Is it 'Do I get what I deserve' or 'Do I deserve what I get'. Typical existential meltdown.

Recently I had a long discussion over cynicism and idealism in people who at some point wanted to change the world. The conversation obviously included dialogues like "Inside every cynic is a dissapointed idealist" and rebuttals of the nature "Inside every cynic is an idealist who gave up too soon". I definitely believe social change agents need perseverance and patience, if nothing. It is a hard job to defy governments and a harshly profit-centered world. People are quick to assign labels such as 'anti-development', 'marxist', 'socialist' etc. Its rather unnecessary. It definitely ticked me off when I was watching Karan Thapar interviewing Medha Patkar on Devil's Advocate and relentlessly tagging her 'anti-development'.

On another note, I also have much trust in the brilliance of Public Private Partnerships.

After much digression, coming to the title of the post.

The budget came out earlier this July and I was looking particularly at allocations on education and health care. Fiscal allocations and policy making have brought up many questions in me. The more I am exposed to the subject, the higher the number of questions.

I saw this. Very insightful.


Some observations/ideas from the past:

-> I heard from an NRI friend that the 'Teach for India' program only takes NRI's who bring in financial resources, as their fellows, and that her well-qualified IIM-A friend was rejected. Is that true?! If it is, then it is hideous and highly abominable. I love the way the 'Teach for America' program is executed. In fact UT has a very well-known teacher certification program which I was considering earlier. (Teaching in a high school is on my list of '30 before 30')

-> The Union passed a law a few years ago, that went something like this...every school in India that is surrounded by slums, should allocate an appropriate percentage of their admits for students from these communities. However, there was a lot of hullabaloo on the inefficiency of such a law. Kids from poor communities don't integrate well with the rest of the crowd, don't perform well and hence feel ousted and eventually drop-out. An extension of this is the discussion of reservations in higher levels of the Indian education system. I don't particularly oppose reservations because it is a decent quick-fix and just that. By no means is it a permanent solution. Now, if kids from poor families don't fit in a primary school, where then do you start changing things to improve the system?!

-> Another prominent personal debate I can think of, is the rule of compulsory internships in rural areas for medical students in India. The comments that I heard from leaders of medical students' unions were atrocious. They complained about lack of safety in villages and such. I think it's wrong to say "I will not go" instead of saying "I will go if you make sure I am safe".

-> Along those lines, I also think, engineers should be made to teach basic subjects in government schools. Think about the number of engineers that India makes every year and the govt. schools that they could serve, even if each of them worked for 3 months in the 4 years of their engineering study.

-> During my high school years when we were living in Hyderabad, we had a maid at home who was 3 years older. I taught her alphabets and she was pretty thrilled that she could recognize alphabets after that, if not make sense of words. The inability to decipher the script of a language you speak is quite frustrating.

I come back to the issue of Indian demographics and allocation of resources to the needful sectors again.

People between the ages of 0 and 14 yrs - 31.1% of the population, in 2009.
Allocation to education, a meagre 2% of GDP.


and finally (on a lighter note), for Atanu Dey much 'respekt' (in the words of Ali-G) is coming, and this is why.

I do know people who want to give back to the communities that made their degrees cheaper, but there are also those who care not, and for that the 'respekt'. Not out of grudge, although I have many reasons for that too :P

New Beginnings

Looking at the frequency of the me-notepad files in the past 3 years, I realised how much I have changed. I got into an intense relationship, indulged myself thoroughly in expressing every poetic feeling with flowery sentences, transporting myself to unfamiliar worlds like the magnificent foggy roads of Delhi in winters (Yes, I can make the most ordinary of places rosy and dreamy).

As time passed, as the pain set in, as the conflict set in, I bottled my feelings in a glass container. I could look through and know they existed, I was almost scared to look for too long. It wasn't long, before I compressed them. Adiabatically at that. To keep my real-life sanity intact. To not get ahead of myself. After a great ordeal of patching up and finding pieces of me that were lost in transit, in this (I call it) at-times-miserable-but-mostly-immeasurably-happy journey, I am back! Back to cherishing lush green ivies draped on roadside trees towering unusually high, and sun showers highlighting patches of metallic mundane freeways, and writing mellifluous sentences about them :) Instead of being pre-occupied by the same drivel.

So, the mostly-immeasurably-happy journey. I was insecure, possessive, inane (in my defense, if you can't take the worst of me, then forget relishing the best). I was, simply, in love.

But I know, I did it all right.

I experienced all the magical moments life bestows upon us, besides, the uncanny irony that it is rather well-known for.

-Sitting across the table from that special person, listening to the jabber in the group and just admiring the non-sense with puppy-eyed admiration.
-Giving someone the privilege of your undivided attention and tender loving care.
-Standing at the door after he left and staring into the distance till he turned into a tiny fading speck.
-Having him admire all the idiosyncrasies you admire about yourself; be it singing halcyon one-liner songs with the sweetness of a granma's lullaby, while sitting on a lawn under the blanket of midnight's stars or in the privacy of an unlit room.
-or, Painting cartoons like drawing class exercises of primary school instead of complex recurring dreams that are begging to be portrayed and released to life.

Yes, pure indulgence.


I have finally come to the fine realisation that what matters is I have grown.
I know myself more. I understand myself better than ever and I can talk with a surreal assertion about what I want in life and that definitely contributes (one last time) to the immeasurably-happy factor.

dhum pichak dhum

Your work is to discover your work and then with all your heart to give yourself to it.” -- Buddha

if you have read a few of my previous posts you will notice the repetition of the word "eventful". I look at every phase of my life to be eventful, call it my naïveté. It works wonders for me.
So this summer has been, just that, eventful.

Imagine being absorbed in your work so much that it doesn't leave any time to question your existence, and so you strategically avoid all existential crises (and thus the process of growing up, that's another thing). Done?

Now imagine absolutely loving that work that you do all day. Something else, innit?

The economy is in recession and I could have gotten a moolah paying, sort of soul-selling job this summer, instead, I did what my dad calls 'crazy'. I am volunteering for the Health Systems Lab at the Earth Institute, Columbia University. It's the 2nd smartest thing I have done in my 21 years of existence(First, being declaring a Economics major, 4th year into engineering). This stint is giving me the validation to what I merely 'guessed' was my passion. I like to believe I have a knack of creating win-win situations. So here I am, sitting and creating a whole road-map for what a health system in a sub-Saharan country should be like, drawing successful examples from the world, criticizing the failed ones, and drawing win-win situations!



Read this. Idealistic. But there is truth in it. Yes, you can turn on your cynical radar and spew your criticism all over it.

I was telling a half Indian-half American friend about what I think Indian mentality is like..."we Indians we look around a little, if it seems ok, we take up a job and then learn to love it, likewise, we look around a little, if it seems ok, we get into a marriage and then learn to love the spouse." She found it comical, but agreed and said, "its a very western idea to 'seek out for your passion', the western culture doesn't care about financial security or stability contrary to the eastern counterparts".

But I have grown up seeing people ask for more. Some friends I have will not settle for non-gratifying jobs. Sure, they have difficulties of shunning custom, so they start companies and work after coming home from a 9 to 5 job, and then they leap when they have seen their brainchildren grow to give them that financial security or stability.

It is a 'movement'.

If you are not part of it then you are missing out. Imagine being a college student in 1968 and not being a Sechziger (60er). Not knowing what revolution is. Not knowing what rebellion is. Not knowing what it is to be part of a protest.

Dont miss out on this movement!

Difficulties

Yesterday was one of the most eventful days ever in my life.

I spent all day making country profiles of Ethiopia and Tanzania for my oh-so-awesome internship with the Earth Institute. Morbid research truth be told. It is to compile information on demographics, health care scheme failures, existing health care policies - urban and rural and also to form disease profiles. I spent the latter part of the day reading a lot about Jacqueline Novogratz (yes, the Acumen Fund CEO), its been on my to-do list for way too long now. I looked into the Acumen Fellows application (obv!).

I was pretty exhausted by the end of the day and really wanted to get out of for some fresh air, and thanks to the D's blah mood, we went and got some amazing starbucks and went on a 45 mile drive! I am sucker for drives, I would do almost anything for someone to drive me around, while I sit and watch the world pass by and let the breeze graze my face.

I dont have enough words to describe what DC is like. I love the city. Its a perfect mix of fast-pace and culture. Its somewhere between austin and houston and new york. Ok, that's a lot of betweens. Well, personally, I would say its a mix of Heidelberg, parts of Austin downtown and Switzerland (yeah! seriously). It has many quaint old victorian era type bridges with bricked-arches and bricked road-side walls with growing green creepers. Also, the fact that I am here during the prettiest time of the year, makes me love the place more. Its definitely one of the cities I would love to live/work in.

Now for the grand finale.

Maslow's hierarchy of needs goes something like this.

I recently had a discussion saying I don't quite agree with where the Social Needs are placed, more so, that I wouldn't want my social needs to come before "self-actualization". (Adding to never-ending list of 'wants')

D recently moved to a new house in a very pretty 'upscale' neighbourhood. It is surrounded by a very huge park. By park, I mean, a semi-jungle. We see deer and rabbits from time to time in the back patio. The living room has a huge whole-wall french window and another half-wall glass window. The architecture is such that the living room feels like an extension of the backyard with its lush green foliage because of the transparency of the partitions and the absence of curtains on these huge windows. D also has a roommate, who happened to be in the living room late in the night reading a book with a lot of lights on. She suddenly looked out and saw a while male naked, a foot away from the window looking at her and masturbating. She obviously freaked out and came running into the bedrooms and we all screamed as hard as we could and went into one room, and calmed each other down in a minute and tippy-toed back to the living room, called 911, had the police come over. They patrolled the area for a while, but considering the patio is backed by woods is hard to find anyone in the pitch darkness.

Now coming back to Maslow, I experienced what it feels like to be devoid of 'safety needs'. It's tortuously hard to think about anything else when all you can think of is whether someone is after your dear life. I woke up every minute the rest of the night to look at every possible shadow from the windows and in the process, freak myself out a little more. Lots of Paranoia ensued. The thought of being violated leaves an indelible impression. Even being part of the middle-class India, it's been hard to escape sexual abuse, I know at least 3 other people in my friends circle who have been abused in their childhood and who have never vocalized their experience. Its always a deep dark secret you share with the most intimate of people in your life. I have always questioned the carnal-centric nature of humans.

How can you monstrously hurt someone and traumatize them for the rest of their life for a few moments' of self-centered "pleasure"?

Feeling vulnerable in the most powerful nation's capital definitely makes me respect a mother in Africa who has to wait for the end of the day to know if her kid is even alive to get back home.

The burden is hard to fathom.

We, the people

Many times in life we come across people - some who end up becoming a significant part of your life and the journey, some others who swoosh past like a fleeting speck of light and yet end up making an indelible impression, somehow. Every now and then, I end up reminiscing about people of the latter kind to make myself realize the need to detach myself from the former kind. I met some of the most interesting people on cab rides and flights.

On my flight to DC, I made one such acquaintance. She was a 25 yr old with 3 kids. Carrying and 5 months far with the last one, 2 yr old boy and another 8 yr old boy. Do the math. She is a high school drop-out. She lost her 2nd boy 4 months ago and I got the impression she was still grieving. The oldest lives with her 'boyfriend'. She showed me pictures of the 2nd boy and kept talking about how much they spent on his grave and what engravings they got and how technology has come so far that they could laminate a photo of his into the stone. I was out of words. Frankly, I was glad she wasn't talking about how much she missed the cute little kid. She deviated from it all the while, I don't think I would've had any consoling words for her. I can't utter a single appropriate word in situations such as this. I didn't even end up saying "I am sure he knows he is missed" or "May he rest in peace". We moved to brighter topics after that, about how her very close friend is Black Eyed Peas' *wait for it* costume stylist! Such awesomeness in the new 'boom boom pow' song. Me like.

Well, I have a long account of at least 5 other such acquaintances. I will save it for another time.

Life is full of you passing judgments on people you don't know, sometimes on meager qualities like accents. I watched this (I have never liked anyone reading 'If' by Rudyard Kipling more than this, not even the very suave english prof from last sem!). I find it especially cute and absolutely adorable. It must be the exotic-ness of a foreign accent, then i thought about how I find it ridiculous when a fellow south-indian says ayrport or em-en-ey for M-N-A, why?! I bet well-accented-english speaking spaniards find Nadal's english accent just as ridiculous. For me, more than the accent its the indifference to learning the right way of pronunciation that's bothersome, so I let people correct me. Anyways, thats my spiel about judgements.

and I forgot to say, yayyyy DC!

Return

It seems like AGES since I last wrote a post. That aside, lots of musing has been happening. About Life, battles people choose to fight, give up on and what not.

A person I know went missing, its been 4 days now. Her parents brought in a private investigator onto the case and they recently discovered that she bought a bus ticket to another city and took off. I tried to put myself in many shoes in the last few days; her parents, her younger sister, and her. I feel like I should be saying "I knew her quite well" after the many conversations her parents and me had.However, I don't feel that way, maybe because she is such an introvert. I keep asking "Why are you putting your parents through all that agony if you just wanted to run away from them?, why couldn't you just tell them to leave you alone, tell them you don't want any parental advice in life?". She was born in India and brought up in the States and it brings me to my perennial musings on how hard parenting can be. She was stuck between being in a country that posed freedom, liberation, free-thinking, taking control of life and 'values of the Indian system' that make parents expect a lot of things from their kids - be it for reputation, social acceptance or just conforming to the society. Now they are readily accepting of anything she might say "I will drop out of college", "I will give up on a stable money-earning, family-supporting career", "I will sit at home and bum around".

That's of course just one scenario. Maybe she is in real trouble, maybe she got into bad company and that took her to another city. Maybe she is scared of something in life and needs real help.

Talking to the investigator I understand that securing ones privacy is utmost in most sectors of the system, which makes finding details very hard. Details like what was her last phone call, what did she go to the hospital for, what did she use her credit card for etc. Once you are 21, you can go missing and no one will find you, unless you want to be found. No one will continue looking for you, even if you are a detective, if the detective is convinced that there is no threat to her life.

I realise that with exposure to new worlds comes the urge to embrace, but not everything can be abandoned. You need to know how to convince the people in your life that something in life is what you want, know how to stand by it and explain till they understand and also learn to turn away if they refuse to try to understand, because at the end of it, you have one chance at every opportunity. One Life.