What's Love Got To Do With It?

It's a second hand emotion, as Tina Turner so rightly crooned.

But really, what's love got to do with it? It is an unduly overrated emotion. We are talking about a lifetime here. A lifetime of commitment, of compassion, of caring for each other and of going through testing times and emerging stronger with the support of your partner by your side. We are talking about raising a family and gracefully growing old together.

The English language is constrained because it has just one word 'love' to go through the entire gamut of relationships and emotions. Context is needed to differentiate among various types of love.

People your age would take love to mean as the 'butterflies in the stomach' or 'love at first sight' feelings. But most of the time it is just a hormone-induced chemical reaction which is mistaken for love. Remember this is nature's way of ensuring that at the right age, evolutionary pressures propel you towards propagating the species.

Stop waiting for love to happen. As a sentient being, it is time for you to take off your romantic glasses and take a practical view regarding marriage. This is a lifelong commitment. Try to define the type of person you would want to spend the rest of your life with and raise your children with. Think of this as a 'Swaymvara' where you get to pick and choose. You have a vast pool of potential suitors to pick from, thanks to this age of the internet. All you need to do is discover your priorities, narrow down your choices and find someone you feel comfortable with. Don't worry about the butterflies, you may or may not get them. After you commit yourself, make an ongoing investment in nurturing that relationship. Because you gotta put in more than what you expect in return.

A few decades down the line, when you look at your partner with fondness and remember all the trials and tribulations that you went through together, you will finally understand what love is all about.

You have blood on your hands

Holding candlelight vigils and marching in protest against terror......... You are kidding me.

Do you think those candle lighting events and protest marches are going to have any impact on the menace that we are facing? What they do, is give your conscience a momentary satisfaction of having done something to help the fight against terror. And then you revert back to what you have been doing all along.

When was the last time you stopped yourself from bribing an official to get a shortcut out of a situation? You keep on bribing everybody from the lowly traffic cops to high officials to get your work done. YOU are the one who has helped poison the very moral fabric of this nation. When you buy a property, do you not agree to pay a certain amount in black? Where do you think this money goes?

Do you think that the Mumbai carnage would have been possible without the collusion of the local underworld? I feel that some factions of the underworld must have provided logistics support in either planning or the actual carrying out of this incident.

If you have ever paid protection money or if you are a celebrity and have danced to their tunes, you have blood on your hands. If you have used recreational drugs you have blood on your hands. Because guess who benefits from the trade in illegal drugs? The same people who helped carry out the carnage in Mumbai.

Those showcase events are not going to change anything. The short term measures have to be taken of course, but the long term solution lies in beginning at the grassroots level. With you and me. And by doing the right thing. Take a moral stance, even if it is detrimental in the short term. Instill the correct values in your offspring. Start taking an active role in finding solutions to existing problems and be prepared for a long tortuous journey ahead. Because only WE can help bring about change.

Being a lone wolf or a team player

What would you rather be, a team player or a do-everything-on-your-own individualist, that is the question. If you had a multi-faceted job at hand, what would you rather prefer to do? Some people would want to do everything by themselves and would give up control only under duress or extreme fatigue or when they finally realize that they need more resources than they themselves can muster.

Delegating responsibility is a management technique for not just businesses but also mundane day to day affairs as well as in organizing elaborate social functions. Including people in the decision making process and providing them with information as it becomes available, gives them a stake in the affair and makes them a part of your team. Some people adopt the policy of disseminating information on a need to know basis. Unless there is a good reason to do so, withholding information and being secretive just leads to rumor-mongering and creates unnecessary animosity.

At times, this is just a result of the clash of strong egos. Perhaps you may be angry or hurt at somebody and you want to show them that you can manage without their help. But think about what this will mean in the long term. Side stepping anyone will make them feel left out and dejected. What you end up with is creating unnecessary grudges and further complicating your already mangled relationships.

A true story

Once upon a time there lived a man who had two grown up sons. The elder son had an argument with his father on some minor issue which might have seemed really huge at that time and the son stopped communicating with his father and the rest of his family.

Years passed by and the man grew old. And with old age came ailments. The old man had a series of strokes and lost first his motor functions, then his speech and ultimately became bed-ridden. The younger son stood by his side during this traumatic period, helping as much as he could, while the elder son did not care enough to even inquire about his father's health. Perhaps because he had become stuck in that moment in time, when he had that raging argument with his father. That was the picture of his father that he carried in his mind and his anger had perhaps still not subsided.

One day, the old man died. As everyone does, sooner or later. At the funeral, what was surprising was that the elder son was weeping uncontrollably, while the younger son had not even a tear in his eyes. Later, when someone inquired why this was so, he said 'I have watched my father die a little everyday for the past few years and have already grieved for him, while for my elder brother, his death came as a shock.'

Relationships are an evolving phenomenon because you need people for a relationship and people keep evolving. If you had a falling out with someone today, are you doing the right thing by putting the relationship on hold and by going katti with him or her? Especially when it is family? Because you can't choose your family. You are stuck with them for the rest of your life. Because there will be a lot of pain and heartache that you will have caused in the meantime, by your being incommunicado. And because no amount of remorse can turn back the clocks. Does it really matter who was right and who was wrong, in the long run?

The future is here now….

I read somewhere that as your age progresses, the way you perceive the passage of time changes. Time moves faster for older people, and I guess it is true in the sense that I am able to accomplish much less in the same amount of time than I used to in my youth.

That brings me to another question, if you were given a bonus couple of years, where would you want those added? At the end of your lifespan, in your childhood or in your youth? Most people would answer youth and I agree with that. The point is that for you kids, this is not the time to sit back and relax. It is the time for you to accomplish whatever you need to, so that you are prepared for the future because it is here now!!!

Gone are the days when the world changed at a leisurely pace. The impact of technology in everyday life is not subtle anymore. We are communicating much more than our parents and to a much larger audience. The technologies in the workplace are changing at such a fast pace that people in their forties have a hard time keeping up.

You kids are going to face a much hostile work environment than your parents, in the sense that your skills will constantly have to remain current to cope with the demands that a fast-changing workplace may make. And because millions of people in China and India are hungry for your jobs!!!

N.B. This was posted on my wordpress blog on Saturday, Jan 5 2008. But I had posted it on a new page and this was the only post I was not able to automatically migrate, so had to do it manually. :( This post completes the migration process and I will be posting here in the future, not on the Wordpress blog anymore.

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The pursuit of excellence or mediocrity?

There is a couplet in our folklore which goes like this: "Janani jan to bhakt jan, ka data ka shur; nahitar raheje vanzani, mat gumavish nur". At first reading, it might seem like the author is asking the mother to produce a specific type of child. But if you think about it, what the author is trying to tell the mother, is to make sure that her children achieve their full potential. That means working towards achieving the right type of circumstances and providing the correct influences. The second line basically denounces mediocrity.

Your parents or teachers can try to teach you to strive for excellence, but ultimately it depends on the individual. One has to be exposed to excellence to really appreciate it. What generally happens is that kids strive to be better than their peer groups, either academically or in terms of income generated, or perhaps perceived social status. This is what is usually defined as ambition. But once they achieve that goal, people tend to sit on their laurels and enjoy the warm sunshine.

The pursuit of excellence is a lifelong process. One strives to do the best one can in every endeavor one undertakes. You try not just to do a good or acceptable job, but the best you can and try to better it the next time. Turning out work you can be proud of, is the foundation of the pursuit for excellence.

But the pursuit does not end in the workplace. This is a way of life. You keep on upgrading your education and your skill-sets and have a long term view of what you would like to do in terms of realizing your full potential. This will affect those around you as well, providing them with a better alternative or perhaps an example to follow.

Remember that your generation has a multitude of choices and is not bound by the constraints our generation faced while growing up, whether financial or social. As a young adult, you have the right to choose a mediocre existence for yourself and no one can fault you for doing that. But by doing that, you will be denying your progeny the opportunity to fully realize their potential.

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This island is not home, son.....

I know son, I have been there. You have this feeling because you grew up here. Same thing with me, my childhood was spent here and I always considered this home. But after spending a lifetime here, I realise that this is not home for me or for my kids, or for that matter any of the expatriate kids who grew up here. This is a very stratified society, where you will never be able to achieve your full potential or live with the human dignity which should be your birthright. As if that realisation was not enough, this has been confirmed by a high official of the U.A.E. .

As I said, i have spent all my life here and what do I have to show for it? I mean I have made good money but should that be the only factor to be considered? In retrospect, i think what I have gained here in monetary terms does not compensate for what I have lost in terms of my unrealized potential. I do not want my kids to look back in a few years time and realize the same thing. That is why I strongly advise all of you kids to get out of this part of the world as soon as possible and make your life in a country where you will not face the restraints that you face here and will be able to enjoy the freedoms and the dignity that you deserve.

On the other hand, if you continue to live here and spend your life here, you will find that sooner or later you will face a glass ceiling in your career. As if that were not enough, you will see undeserving locals advancing and being promoted ahead of you, on the basis of their nationality. Socially, you will move in your own circles segregated from other nationalities or the local culture, because there is no assimilating with the local culture as they have an even worse class system than we have in India . As I said earlier, this is a highly stratified society, worse than the caste system in India. You will find that as a Hindi, you will always remain at the lowest rungs of this society.

And in a few decades time, when you have kids of your own, you will find that as soon as they become adults, they will become unwelcome here unless you arrange labour visas for them. One day, as you are on the verge of stepping into old age, you will have to pack up your belongings and move to an unknown land to spend your remaining years, for this paradise is for worker bees only.

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