Nostalgia - Extra Large!!!!

Kudos to whoever authored this.

(Disclaimer: this is not my creation, though I endorse the thoughts!

It came to me in a chain mail and I could not resist posting it on the blog

From then an age of scarcity (we had the incentive to value the few things that we got as precious,

including our first job, which perhaps remains the only job we ever took up!) to now an age of abundance

(plentiful to choose from, nothing is too precious, everyone and everything is in touch and within reach to

the middle class - there is just no incentive to value anything).

Some feel we have lost our moorings!

But what the hell – some think this is Progress!

 (a core characteristic of the 70's middle class). 
 

Subject: Down memory lane - Middle class India of the 70's 1. Though you may not publicly own to this, at the age of 12-17 years, you were very proud of your first "Bellbottom" or your first first Apache jeans. 2. Phantom & Mandrake were your only true heroes. The brainy ones read "Competition Success Review". 3. Your "Camlin" geometry box & Natraj/Flora pencil was your prized possession. 4. The only "Holidays" you took were to go to your grandparents' or your cousins' houses. 5. Ice-cream meant only - either an orange stick, a vanilla stick – or a Choco Bar if you were better off than most. 6. You gave your neighbour’s phone number to others with a ‘c/o’ written against it because you had booked yours only 7 years ago and were still waiting for your number to come. 7. Your first family car (and the only one) was a Fiat or an Ambassador. This often had to be pushed by the entire family to get going. 8. The glass windows in the back seats used to get stuck at the two-thirds down level and used to irk the shit out of you!   The window went down only if your puny arm could manage the tacky rotary handle to pull it down.  Locking the door was easy. You just whacked the other tacky, non-rotary handle downwards. 9. Your mom had stitched the weirdest lace curtains for all the windows of the car.  They were tied in the middle and if your dad was the comfort-oriented kinds, you had a magnificent small fan upfront. 10. Your parents were proud owners of HMT watches. You "earned" yours after SSC exams. 11. You have been to "Jumbo Circus"; have held your breath while the pretty young thing in the glittery skirt did acrobatics, quite enjoyed the elephants hitting football, the motorcyclist vrooming in the "Maut ka Gola" and it was politically okay to laugh your guts out at dwarfs hitting each other's bottoms! 12. You have at least once heard "Binaca Geet Mala and Hawa Mahal" on the radio. Another fond favourite was Cadbury's Bournvita Quiz.  13. If you had a TV, it was normal to expect the neighborhood to gather around to watch the Chitrahaar or the Sunday movie.  If you didn't have a TV, you just went to a house that did. It mattered little if you knew the owners or not. 14. Sometimes the owners of these TVs got very creative and got a bi or even a tri-coloured anti-glare screen which they attached with two side clips onto their Weston TVs. That confused the hell out of you! 15. Black & White TVs weren't so bad after all because cricket was played in whites. 16. You thought your Dad rocked because you got your own (the family's; not your own own!) colour TV when the Asian Games started.  Everyone else got the same idea as well and ever since, no one came over to your house and you didn't go to anyone else's. 17. You dreaded the death of any political leader because of the mourning they would announce on the TV.  After all how much "Shashtriya Sangeet" can a kid take? Salma Sultan also didn't smile during the mourning. 18. You knew that "Indira Gandhi" was somebody really powerful and terribly important. And that's all you needed to know. 19. The only "Gadgets" in the house were the TV, the Fridge and possibly a mixer. 20. All the gadgets had to be duly covered with a crochet cover and sometimes even with ingenious, custom-fit plastic covers. 21. Movies meant Rajesh Khanna or Amitabh Bachchan. Before the start of the movie you always had to watch the obligatory "Newsreel". 22. You thought you were so rocking because you knew almost all the songs of Abba and Boney M. 23. Your hormones went crazy when you heard "Disco Deewane" by Naziya Hassan & Zoheb Hassan. 24. School teachers, your parents and even your neighbours could whack you and it was all okay. 25. Photograph taking was a big thing. You were lucky if your family owned a camera.  A reel of 36 exposures was valuable hence it justified the half hour preparation & "setting" & the "posing" for each picture.  Therefore, you have atleast one family picture where everyone is holding their breath and standing at attention! You were really happy then...... peace of mind, no pressure no stress.

Madurai Meenakshi Amman Temple - Self Navigated Tour

This is Really  Excellent ..Just check it out..   

Some of  you may never had a chance to visit Meenakshi Amman Temple . Some  others may not want to see the temple at all. OK! here is a deal..  You need not travel to Madurai . Even if you are in Madurai , you  need not get out of your comforts to go all the way to the temple.  No tickets, no travel, no crowd. Go and explore one of the  magnificent temples of the world. You will be virtually inside the  temple, you can go close to the dolls adorning the towers, you can  climb and reach the top of the tower, you can even feel the cool of  the granite floors, you can enjoy the paintings on the roof without  troubling your neck. Have a wonderful tour of the temple at your  finger tips, just in few clicks away you will be inside the temple.   

Don't get  lost! 

PLS USE YOUR MOUSE TO MOVE  AROUND 

http://www.view360.in/virtualtour/madurai/ 

The Caste conundrum in India's Census

India's once-in-a-decade census is underway! Its a gargantuan task! And kudos to the officials in charge of conducting and delivering the same.

But there are a bunch of self seeking politicians -- nay that's tautological, I should only say politicians - of different colours who are right now fighting over whether a person's caste should be included alongwith the demographic data.

I see the argument at two levels! But first some background is in order.

Caste classifications are inherent in the Indian social psyche having been so for centuries. One's caste is the caste or grouping that one is born into. The caste system essentially classifies people into four castes with the lowest in status being relegated to all the menial jobs and also ostracized from mingling with the upper castes. Clearly, not done! But it undeniably exists to this day! This leads to untold hardships and misery being heaped on the lower castes who are variously described as 'dalits'  (or downtrodden) or ' Harijan' (God's people) - a term coined by Mahatma Gandhi in a bid to draw attention to the fact that God does not create people differently or discriminate based on an accident of birth.

Although some system of positive discrimination policy to benefit the lower castes had been in place before India's independence, successive post independence governments have, guided by a sense of righting years of wrong,  been pursuing a formal policy of positive discrimination by ensuring caste based reservations in Government Schools, Institutions of higher learning as well as jobs and promotions. These reservations were based on the approximate proportion of the 'backward' castes in the Indian population as per the Census. While meant to uplift the downtrodden, such a policy has contributed to perverse incentives for every caste group to fight to be included in the list of 'backward' castes and therefore benefit from the positive discrimination policies. Alternatively those that could not prove their years of discrimination, just used the strength of their numbers to ensure that the ambit of the Reservations policies was widened to ensure a piece of the reservation cake! Thus the caste system instead of  being erased from the psyche of the people actually got more entrenched.

Having got the background in context, let me explain my two levels of the argument.

The high-moral ground argument against inclusion of caste information in the current census, is apparently aimed at sending out the 'noble' message that the government wants to move on and and leave the baggage of the past behind us. It also seems to send out the message that (maybe apart from our gender) there is really no difference between one Indian and another. Accordingly, being Indian is both our nationality and our caste. But this begs the question, what then will be the basis for a review of the positive discrimination (Reservations) policy, which is a vital element of our social and economic planning. This argument appears to me, to be a case of 'living in denial' as it appears to ignore caste based differences at one level while pursuing the same caste based differentiation at a plethora of other levels! Clearly, no government can function with such anomalies as well as lack of a key demographic data element!

The second level of the argument is the more practical argument for inclusion of caste information. Wherever we go in society today, among the first questions that is asked or silently sought is our caste. Some examples. Try approaching a landlord for renting his house (mainly in the smaller cities/villages) and he will either ask you your caste outright or try to guess the same from your surname. Go for school admission in a government or government aided school and one's caste is a key demographic data required, because that is one of the parameters of the admission decision.  One's caste is almost as ubiquitous as one's gender!

I whole-heartedly support the high-moral-ground argument. Clearly there is merit in this course of action but only after we address some ground realities! It is indeed easy to erase the caste column from the census data form. But what we need to first aim for and achieve is the harder task of getting rid of the Caste classification that is written in invisible ink into the destinies of so many of us Indians.

Let's therefore be practical and collect caste information now. We need it guide our socio economic development plans and policies!

How history gets written in other parts of the world -- and in India!!

Got the following in the mail!.. interesting stuff hence sharing it!

A 19 year old ex-cheerleader (now an Air Force Security Forces Sniper) was watching a road that led to a NATO military base when she observed a man digging by the road. She engaged the target, i.e., she shot him.

It turned out he was a bomb maker for the Taliban, and he was burying an IED that was to be detonated when a Canadian patrol walked by 30 minutes later. It would have certainly killed and wounded several soldiers.

The interesting fact of this story is the shot was measured at 725 yards! She shot him as he was bent over burying the bomb. The shot went through his butt and into the bomb, which detonated; he was blown to pieces.

The Air Force made a motivational poster of her!

That is Canada!!

If it had been an Indian Jawan, the following would be the aftermath.

1. J&K state declares hartal and violent demonstrations follow.

2. Civil Right Groups demand an enquiry.

3. Teesta Setalwad says the man was probably just answering nature's call and files a case against Modi accusing him of ordering the fire.

4. Painter Hussain will draw a bare butt to honour the slain victim. "The Hindu" will hail Hussain's freedom and artistry.

5. Barhka Dutt, Rajdeep Sardesai, Prannoy Roy and all other ‘intellectuals’ will debate for a week if it was correct to fire at the butt.

6. The Air Force sniper faces departmental enquiry and suspension.

7. Manmohan loses a night's sleep and declares a compensation of Rs. 10 lacs to the victim's family!!

************ **

If You Can Not Stand Behind Our Troops ,

Please Feel Free To Stand In Front Of Them!

Jerome Kerviel - the guy who has been left to hang!

Just watched an interesting news report on CNN International covering the trial of Jérôme Kerviel, the French trader who has been charged in the January 2008 in the Société Générale trading loss incident, resulting in losses valued at about $ 7 Bn.

The Bank has painted Kerviel as a rogue trader who made these trades alone and more importantly without any authorization. The trader, of course, denied this and has claimed that that such activites are widespread and that as long as his trades were generating big profits, everyone in the hierarchy turned a blind eye.

I do not know the truth of the matter and I guess no one ever will. But the trial will surely unearth some skeletons, especially the extent of oversight required within Banks driven by an obsessive drive among Bank managements to deliver extra-ordinary profits, quarter over quarter, to feed the excessive greed of shareholders and investors.

Although, not recognized as a ‘Star’ trader, Kerviel was expecting a big 2007 bonus of about a Million Dollars had he not been caught out! However, everyone recognizes that he did not personally benefit from the alleged fraud.

But given the fact that he was part of a team, an entire heirarchy above him, who were responsible for oversight of such trading activity, would have also benefited by way of recognition and the dirty ‘B’ word. However, when the time came to catch the crooks, the Bank, (aided by the Prosecutors), seem to have let off his supervisors, without charging them for acts of negligence and ommission (if not ‘commission’)! Self preservation appears to be the main motivation for this.

In the past, Kerviel has been apparently cooperative with the investigation, and has told prosecutors his actions were common across the company. Clearly, he did exceed his limits, but so long as he was making profits everyone seems to have a turned a blind eye. At worst, whenever abnormal volumes were noticed, his supervisors seemed to have bought his argument that they were erronneous trades and allowed him to reverse the same. To me it appears that Kerviel is being made a scapegoat in the whole episode – maybe to hide the heavy losses that the Bank was incurring at the time.
His comment on today’s CNN news report, which triggered this blog post, was really telling and went something like this: “While I accept my share of the blame, I am sad that I am the only one being prosecuted.” He went on to add: ‘I was the prostitute at the banking orgy!’

Is the Euro about to break up?

Watching the Greece and the larger Euro zone crisis unfold, it seems to me that it is no longer inconceivable to think of a break up of the Euro! The huge pressure of disparate fiscal policies resulting in each members' economy becoming increasingly out of tune with the centralized monetary policy (ECB) will require such a move. Put simply, one of Greece's hindrance in being able to address its current problems is its inability to devalue its currency! Therefore, the first exit candidate would naturally be Greece!
Under these circumstances I have been wondering whether the ECB / Euro nations even have a Disaster Recovery Plan to revert to their erstwhile national currencies. i.e., have they documented the procedures will kick in once they decide to break away and have they stored enough drachmas, francs, marks etc in their vaults to issue the same quickly?

Kuwait Traffic Week

World over it is a common human tendency for any driver – and I think this cuts across the genders, so no sexist bias here – to blame the other driver in case of an accident or skirmish. So one would have thought that along the lines of ‘Charity begins at home’, the regulators or authorities in all their campaigns would advise their citizens to improve their road manners and drive with the utmost regard for traffic rules.

However, the Middle East is different!

Kuwait, along with the five other GCC nations, is this week observing a Traffic week to generate awareness about Traffic safety among the citizens and residents. And guess what the slogan for this campaign is?

It is : Be aware of others’ mistakes!

Yeah, we are all indeed aware of the Other’s mistakes! We do not need any motivation to accept that dictum or be reminded about it!