Parenting in India

Are you admission-savvy? This is a million-dollar question to which you have to answer a "yes" if you want to be a successful Indian parent. From K.G. to P.G and beyond, you have to learn to be a submissive moron with a generous bent of mind, to be able to succeed in the eternal quest for admissions for your kid, something like the fired-up Knights of the Round Table of ancient times. New times, new avatars! Also, a strong belief in God helps, coz otherwise, whom do you curse in case the quest fails?
Therefore, to find out if you have what it takes, answer the question above. And thou shalt know.

Silicon Valley of India

Sitting in Electronics City, Bangalore, pretty close to Infosys, I do not feel too thrilled about the state of our state (Karnataka). If this is what every info-techie has to go through on a daily basis- just getting here and back is hellish- GOD help the future tech employees, coz their lives are going to get worse, not better. The mess with the Bangalore airport will make common citizens who had taken to flying run back into the waiting arms of Laloo and his railways, or the bus service. And the Metro seems like a never-reachable dream right now. When will we start planning ahead of population booms? Well, many such questions are only rhetorical, and have no real answers! Let's hope that the elections don't throw up another hung assembly. Then we are well and truly HUNG!

House-hunting

House-hunting is a mixed feeling. Only the desperate feeling of otherwise becoming homeless keeps you going. And shows you a varietyof characters that you otherwise may not meet-both realty brokers and home-owners. Having gone through a recent experience in Bangalore, I would rather build a hut once and for all, and settle down, never to move again. But then, building anything (even a hut) is said to be traumatic. So why not enjoy the (mixed) feeling, hunt till you drop, and settle in for a while, if only to rest until the next one. Being peripatetic (job-hopping) has its downsides, I suppose! Oh, well.....

Power and Greed

That is the title of a book I read last weekend. Very nicely critiques the wars fought by Europeans for colonizing and similar other reasons. Does not spare the other war-mongers (Asian, African, and other types), and likens the global corporations to old war mongers with acquisitive ambitions. Changes your perspective completely, from the currently fashionable Islamic-terrorist perspective of the media moghuls on almost all TV channels. It shows there are no saints in this business. That power and greed are universal. That only the ancient Greeks and a couple of modern countries with democracies modeled on the Greek system have been able to keep the greedy from taking over. Though the chapter on Napolean is a bit sympathetic to (him), the rest of it is fairly in-the-face and deserved criticism of all the powerful and the greedy along the millennia. A balanced history lesson.

Re-viewing movies

I am into watching old Hindi movies. I just saw Inquilab, starring Big B, from the eighties. In an otherwise ordinary formula movie, one thing stands out. The name of a smuggler, played by Shakti Kapoor. His name is Khoya Khoya Attache. I think that is brilliant, whoever thought of it! The end is quite innovative, with a chief minister (the Big B) shooting his entire cabinet to death, because they are all corrupt people. Not a bad idea, but there is no guarantee the next lot will be any better. Politics, thy middle name is corruption. Voter, thy middle name is cynicism.

What Keeps Me Going

What keeps you going may be different, but I think books keep me going. More accurately, reading...coz it could be comics like Phantom or Asterix, not books alone. I am reading one called "Genome" right now, which tries to explain what genes do for us- which is almost everything! Nicely written, if I can understand some of it. The analogy with computers- or rather, digital on/off switches is also effective, and explains a lot that happens inside us. But then, are we a machine, or a learning machine, or an 'atma' searching for the 'parmaatma'? That is still not clear. Does it matter? Probably not, considering our insignificant life span compared with the cosmic one. But how else can we pass our time, if not ruminating on profound fundas?

Productivity in Arts

How do we measure productivity in arts? Is quality related to productivity? For example, in teaching/academics, the current trend is to measure a person's "greatness" or GQ, by the number of papers he/she has published. In general, my feeling is, whenever we are unable to judge quality, we measure quantity, and think we have done a great job. Maybe this needs a rethink. What if the guy who wrote Ramayana wrote nothing else?