Arvind and the Wall

"....but the first guy through the wall. It always gets bloody, always. “

That’s a quote from the movie Moneyball. What it means is, whenever there is someone who is out to change the game, out to make a systemic change to how things are done, he will get clobbered. The dialogue goes further to say,

“It's the threat and not just to the way of doing business, in their minds it's threatening the game. But really what it's threatening is, is their livelihoods, it's threatening their jobs, it's threatening the way that they do things. And every time that happens, whether it's the government or a way of doing business or whatever it is, the people that are holding the reins have their hands on the switch.”

There are people who are holding the reins, they are part of the wall, the system. They will oppose any crusader coming to tear down the wall, they will bet that he is crazy. And if you think about the societal wall, the endemic system in our country, you would think its the politicians that hold the rein. But think for a while, why are we leaving out the media? Every scam is a TRP fest is it not? Wouldn’t it be a blow to their livelihood if scams stop? So lets add media to the list. Bureaucrats are on it too, because they might complain, but they profit from it just the same. The intellectuals profit as they have something to discuss on panels. The industry definitely profits, bribes are easier and cheaper than taxes. And by extension of industry, the workforce profits too. I mean, I am paid a salary that I wouldn’t pay myself in my wildest dreams, for a degree that, I agree I worked hard for, but I haven’t even bothered looking at it once since I got it a year back. Funny thing is, I am not even in the higher bracket of salaries that people of my kind get paid. Hell, I am no socialist, I am not advocating pay cuts. We may not be a part of the system, or a part of the wall, but we are surely sitting on it and enjoying ourselves slyly.

What I am trying to say is that, the bricks in the very wall that someone like Arvind Kejriwal is trying to break down, will without doubt tell themselves he is crazy. And spread the word too. They will mock his decision to enter politics. But that is what HE thinks will give him the tools. Will he succeed in bringing the wall down? Hell no. I have no doubts he will fail miserably. The lokpal bill will become a political issue and get blown by the wayside. If anything I think the ruling party are laughing themselves silly over it. All he will end up doing is divide the anti-congress vote further and ensure that they win the seats. Although, he might win a seat or two. 

The first guy through the wall always gets bloody, and many times he may not even get through. But once the wall is dented, once people see that it is coming down, there will be another guy inspired enough to chip away at that dent. Then another and another.  What if the one seat Kejriwal’s party wins is against someone like Digvijay Singh, or Kapil Sibal, or any of the DMK posse. Hell, the way corruption and criminality has penetrated our political class, any victory to his party will be welcome. All he needs to do is inspire more Kejriwal’s. After all we started with one Anna and now have Kejriwal, Bedi, Sisodiya, Bhushan and a handful of others. I see around me, people of my generation changing their attitude towards the system. There are indicators all around us. We may not all join active politics, but more people are appearing for civil services, more people are reluctant to go abroad for work, even someone who refuses to pay a bribe for not wearing a helmet and insists on paying the fine and receiving a receipt is doing something that was unheard of in the previous generation. It may take years for these efforts to fructify into something tangible. I don’t know how many, five, ten, twenty, or maybe even more. But the key is to remember not to condemn the man trying to break down the wall you are sitting on.

The first guy through the wall always gets bloody.

But Sometimes Life....

Lately I've been thinking about life.
How our dreams seem wild and impossible,
when we wake up astounded and bewildered.
But sometimes life is even more unfathomable.

For life, as it unfolds, is like a dream,
dreamed by someone else, chaotic but fair.
We might try to anticipate the next turn,
but sometimes life will catch us unawares.

An exercise in futility it is for sure.
And when things don't turn out our way, we cry and rage .
We try to bind our lives in the shackles of destiny.
But sometimes life is too valuable to be kept in a cage.

They all say take life as it comes.
But I won't say that, it's not always true.
Sometimes you can just sit back and hope.
But sometimes you have to force your way through.

20-Something...and optimistic

Being in your 20’s in India is tough. For several reasons, perhaps too many to enlist in one article, but there’s nothing like having a good whine about it after spending a sleepless night because there was no electricity. The electricity bill for our two bedroom rented apartment, where two people live amounted to a whopping 16,000 rupees for 2 months. That, after 2 hours of daily power cuts, a minimum of 8 hours everyday when no one is at home, and the supply voltage so low during peak hours that none of the appliances work. All this with the hottest summer in five years. I know, I know, everyone is going, ‘Oh what a cry baby, there’s people getting killed, doctors mal-practising, and what not, just watch Amir’s show’. This brings me to the next part of my lament. Television. At this age, I’ve done my studying, I’ve found my calling, or rather stumbled upon it while getting shoved around in The Herd, and when I get home after work, I want to switch on the TV and be entertained. What do I get? Arnab Goswami demanding ‘answers on the behalf of the nation’. I click the remote and there’s Barkha asking Shah Rukh Khan not to be a role model and not to shirk from controversy. After bawling her eyes out and apologizing to everyone in her profession, merely a year back, she’s back in form. So SRK will do good to take her advice. The other anchors are screaming their heads off talking about some Team...Anna or Kolkata, I don’t know, and some Baba...Ramdev or Rahul, I don’t care. I mean, yeah ok, I do care about all that stuff and I carry out my bit of ‘social responsibility’, but I have worked hard enough to have earnt a few hours of entertainment. If I haven’t, my parents’ life of toil should have.

There are no sports on because Neo Sports has the rights to every half-decent sporting event, and I wouldn’t watch that channel even if I had shelled out the extra 100 bucks to subscribe to it. My high speed internet isn’t working because of some technical problems, and I can’t download movies (illegally ofcourse, what’s the point of being in India if I have to buy DVD’s) because the courts have banned the websites. Meanwhile, the internet data recharge I got on my prepaid phone has mysteriously expired before the due date and my phone balance is somehow down to 45 bucks. That’s not sooo bad is it? Well no, except for when I try to call anybody, there’s a highpitched voice telling me that my balance is low....in Tamil. She then informs me the same in English. I could step outside and go for a drive, but after the fuel price hike, recreational burning of petrol is even more indecent than skipping Satyamev Jayate on Sundays.

So I am left to sit there, in the flickering tubelight, sweaty and smelly, (haven’t bathed, no water supply today), wondering whether my parents spent their lives, making sure I was able to spend my youth, giving exams and interviews, for this? Things better start looking up around here, and soon. And as my cynical, whiny, cranky, rant slowly subsides, I kind of start thinking that things will be better. Electricity is back, I call in sick for the day, I make myself tea from milk from a tetrapack carton, I find a hack to access a torrent website once the internet is back up, I recharge my phone online and call the electricity board helpline to lodge a complaint which is received quite surprisingly in a helpful and assuring manner. I am sure none of that happened to my dad when he was 20-something and optimistic.

Best of both worlds

We all give in to a bit of intellectual vomiting now and then. Back in my grad days, these sessions sometimes carried on for entire nights until the ‘fuelled’ bon-fire of thoughts would be extinguished by hunger and other primitive human functions. It was these regurgitations that sometimes resulted in scrawlings on the wall, almost always status messages. In fact I am pretty confident that they would have led to a novel or two had not Chetan Bhagat beat us all too it. That guy ruined the novelty for the rest of us. (Pun intended.) But something that would always surely result from such a session was a blog post. But is that why we used to indulge in them? To write a blog? To announce to the rest of the world that even though we were studying engineering we shouldn’t be considered literarily challenged? Quite frankly, I think it was because we had nothing else to do. Bhagat recently wrote an article (again, I had nothing else to do at that time) for the TOI in which he coined a new term ‘lerd’. I can quite imagine MR. ‘I-do-all-my-writing-on-flights’ smiling smugly to the air-hostess as he was penning this, no doubt basking in the glory of being able to brandish his literary license in the face of innocent readers yet again. Apparently, lerds are the literary students, the social intellectuals. They are the other side of the coin of which nerds, the scientific intellectuals form one face. He then goes on to suggest the failings of each of these groups. He also considers himself a nerd and quite humbly (well, for him atleast) accepts that his ‘rigorous’ scientific studies have rendered him socially inept.

The point is, CB advocates a meeting of minds, a give-and-take between the nerds and the lerds of this country in order to reach solutions to the problems of this country. But reading between the lines, you can clearly see that he is actually invoking a hybrid of the two species. Maybe an engineer? Someone who went on to study the interplay of arts and science that is called management or business administration? Also, maybe someone who led a highly goal-oriented life, like that of a banker, but pursued non-goal oriented dreams, like that of an author? You get the drift; the conceit of CB betrays him in his article. In a nutshell, he seems to suggest that he and his kind are the future of the country. Bhagat knows his readership base quite well and rightly assumes that they will fail to see through the pedestrian screen of words he has put up once again to hide the big flickering neon sign that says ‘ME’.

Now there is some value in what he says in the article, but I don’t think, that the likes of Chetan Bhagat are what this country needs. Let me explain why. To my mind, the hybrid that hesuggests will never give rise to an offspring that has the best qualities of both. In fact, most certainly it will be the mediocrities of both groups. We need to go back to those sessions in grad school to understand why. As I said, the reason for those sessions was that we had nothing better to do. I can look back today and see clearly that those who enjoyed the ‘rigorous’ scientific studies rarely indulged in these vomiting sessions. It was us lot that found themselves disillusioned with what they thought they would be doing in a engineering school that indulged. My lerd friends too would indulge in scientific pursuits only if they found the Sociology 101 akin to chewing cardboard. What happens when a nerd tries to be a lerd? Chetan Bhagat and his notion that he will inspire the youth of India into greatness. Now I am not saying that an engineer shouldn’t write a book, or an arts graduate shouldn’t head an automobile manufacturer. What I am saying is, we shouldn’t even start to assume that we are shaping a country’s future or in fact achieving any other such goals of similar magnitudes. What we are, are nothing but the outcome of a marriage of mediocrity of both worlds.

Now there are some people who are the best of both worlds. And there is a title given to such people. They are called polymaths. They are the likes of Benjamin Franklin, Michelangelo and maybe Steve Jobs, in his own way, was one too. But history suggests that polymaths are not ‘made’, they just ‘are’. And quite clearly, Chetan Bhagat isn't.

Well, maybe that is what Chetan Bhagat meant afterall. Yet again, it takes lengthy rant to fathom that his lenghty rant about how he is a nerd and other blahs, was actually a one liner. India needs some polymaths.

p.s. A word on TOI. The newspaper has well and truly sold its soul now. The sunday editorials page was the only space that still maintained the class and stature of the old days. But now Chetan Bhagat frequently features on it.

What I learnt from manchester united

I never really understood entirely why I follow Manchester United FC like a fanatic. The club website is always open in one of the tabs on my browser. I have set google news alerts that sends me abridged digests of news about Man Utd everyday. I currently own or have owned a plethora of their merchandise and in the last ten or so years, every other thing in my life has changed apart from this devotion to Man Utd. To cut it short, as a fan once put it, "Cut me and I'll bleed red". Which makes it surprising that I haven't written a single article on my blog about manchester united. I probably was trying to write stuff that would appeal to a wider range of readers. Well, I guess thats another thing I don't care anymore for. So, let me write about what i've learnt from manchester united and those not interested can maybe like just not read on. And any scouser can maybe instead watch some reruns of when liverpool won their last league title (did they have video back then though?).

Foremost, I've learnt that there is no better mantra for success than being yourself and being true to you character. Over the years, manchester united has earned as many fans as there have been man utd haters. I think that is the truest test of character. Any pure, honest entitiy will always have lovers and haters in equal measure. The impurities arise when one tries to please-all. You may succeed for a while but it is difficult to carry on, because the lack of integrity will always surface in times of strife and make you realise how hollow you are in truth. (Arsenal fans please note). At manchester united, many times you get the feeling that it is Manchester United vs Rest of the World. Some may look at it as a narcissistic state of existence, and those are the haters, while others feel that there is nothing more glorious and heroic than standing up to the world and saying, "Here I am, you can all try to beat me down, but I will keep coming back, and I will eventually prevail over all of you. Not by winning over your hearts, not by any other sly vendetta. I will do it by brute force and my will to survive against all odds and against all of you put together".

There can be no sentiment in the pursuit of a goal. Decades ago, Manchester United embarked on a quest to be the most successful club in England and then Europe. Along the way there have been many people who were instrumental in shaping the club and there were times when these people had to be let go. Simply because they were no longer going to be helpful in the club's quest for glory. It is truly a masterclass to watch when things like these happen. It is does with the least amount of emotion and almost always the person leaving is looking for any other way that he can contribute. This year's farewells to Neville and Scholes are the cases-in-point here. There is a lesson in managing human resources here. I have rarely seen such loyalty elsewhere.

Lastly, what many perceive as luck, is actually what winners call seizing the opportunity. Luck is never a factor in the long term as it evens out in the end. Manchester United are famous as well as infamous for snatching last-gasp victories, many-a-times through seemingly scratchy and lucky efforts. It is not significant that it manages to happen time and again, what is to be noted is that manchester united repeatedly put themselves in a position where a little bit of luck will turn things their way. They keep chipping away and never give up. A cliched but unpractised life lesson.

EndNote: I hope non-believers took the effort to read the above stuff. I do not intend this to be a eulogy to manchester united. My purpose is to point out that something as everyday as a favourite football club can be a source of inspiration and a pool of life lessons that may have been repeated often but rarely acknowledged and utilised. Look for such sources in your life, you will be surprised by how many there are.