Showing posts with label india. Show all posts
Showing posts with label india. Show all posts

He said, so I said.

Posted by Unknown
This post had been in the making for quite some time. First lack of time, then lack of sleep, and then lack of a laptop put me off from writing it.

Until I was heartbroken to see that somebody else had already written on it. My good friend Jonva, over at These Days, wrote this post to commemorate the Independence Day. Oddly enough, staunch and proud Indian I was, I couldn't but agree with what he was saying.

First off, this is the first Independence Day that I've seen quite a few of my friends actually saying that they did not quite enjoy celebrating it all that much. Possibilities:
1. I made a lot of friends this year.
2. I made a few friends this year, but they were all 'rebels'.
3. Independence Day fell on a Sunday this year; hence people actually started thinking about it, rather than thank it for a merciful holiday.

Whatever the case maybe, they are right. We're all pseudo-patriots. We take pride in our country because everybody else does. Not because we understand, give two-hoots about, or because we know what it stands for.

Our national pride and sentiment are restricted to the days when our nation comes to the rescue in the form of a national holiday. Now that is the case with most of us. I'm not quite sure where to put the army-men, freedom fighters and their kind. They seem to be fighting for the country, with the staunch belief that they're doing some good.

Though, I wonder, won't a soldier in Pakistan think the same thing? Will he, for instance, wake up one day and say: "Oh damn, Musharraf is such a dick!" I suppose not. What makes him better or worse than one of our own soldiers?

Our forefathers. And their brave actions that gave us freedom from the fat and boring English (of course, they did not have the EPL then). Why? Why did we need it so bad? What good did they think they were doing?


Fact of the matter is, we need those army-men and politicians. Though I agree with every word Jonva said in his post, I don't think he sees the point.

You see, in an ideal world, there are no hypocrites. In an ideal world, there are no politicians. No hunger, no poverty. No richer man. And no poorer man. In an ideal world, there is no money. There are no differences.

Unfortunately, we don't live in the ideal world. We probably never will. I keep thinking it will take a nuclear war for the ideal world to emerge. Still might not at the same time. We're too damaged to think as one now.

There is no answer. Just. Hope.

(Image Courtesy: human3rror.com)
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All About Distances

Posted by Unknown
I realized suddenly that I hadn't blogged in some time. Then I told myself, that's probably due to the fact that you've been travelling a lot. 


Traveled how much? I figured I should find the distance between places and then collate them all together. I was pretty sure I would find some tool to do that online. 


And here are the search results. Turns out, all of them turned out to be utterly useless. 







Why?


1. Google Maps only give you straight line distances, and it's too much of a hassle to actually sit and trace the outline of highways. (Yes, I'm not THAT jobless!)


2. The 'I-make-your-job-easy' place to place distance calculators were good, but for the fact that they did not have two cities I traveled to listed. Mananthavady in Wyanad and Gokharna in Karnataka (towns, cities, what's the difference anyhow?!) But they did have distances for journeys like Cochin - Chennai, Chennai - Bangalore etc. 


In the end, desperate and as jobless as I was, I decided to resort to the one thing that has got me past countless Math exams (barely).


Guesswork. 


So, (drumroll), the final answer would seem to be that I have traveled 3438 Kilometers in the last month. It might not seem much, but it's a first for me anyhow.


To put some perspective on that distance, supposing I was a bird, and at Kanyakumari, if I had flown North, I'd have gone past Kashmir if I had traveled the same distance. (Yeah I know, birds fly South this time of the year, but hey, what kinda bird writes blog posts anyhow!)


(Image Courtesy : wikimedia.org)
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The Taste of Silence

Posted by Unknown

Foreword: As part of a reporting assignment, me and my group of peers went to the village of Nandivaram near Guduvanchery, Chennai. It was supposed to be a reporting assignment centered mostly around food. Though, once we started walking around and experiencing the true spirit of the village, the theme underwent a magnanimous change. This is the article that I wrote at the end. :)

The absence of cacophony is almost disturbing. It is strangely peaceful this particular afternoon in the village of Nandivaram. No horns, no shouting and definitely no blaring TVs or radios. As we sit down for what will be a sumptuous lunch, my expectations of what awaits us on the other side of it are high; we’re going to tour the village today. And the lunch itself does not disappoint.


From dark shadows, people peer at us as our entourage walks by. They smile if you smile. They wave if you do. The children run away if you ask them for a hi-5. The late afternoon sun blinds us as we trek through the village’s dusty maze of roads.


We pause for a few seconds at a pond. It’s been months since I’ve seen a water source that actually had unpolluted water in it. The old men sitting under a tree nearby, eye us suspiciously; some crack a smile finally, with great difficulty, when a camera is trained at them.


Thunder shatters the air. Strangely enough, there are no clouds. We look around, puzzled. A thick plume of dust and smoke rises up in the air some distance away. “Dynamite”, our guide says.


We walk onward to a rice paddy field. They say all that glitters is not gold. They were right; it could be rice fields in the afternoon sunlight as well. The golden stalks sway in the wind with an air of magnificence. The sight is candy for sore eyes.


We continue into the innards of the village. Faces flash by. Happy faces are few; but they always return the favour if you smile at them.
We talk to a woman outside her hut. She tells us of her daughters, herself, her life. The hut is small. Comparisons fly through my head. Another woman nearby talks of loans and debts and her sons.
As we walk through the dark streets, we stumble across 12 year old Kausalya. She’s studying while sitting on the roadside. The stark beams of the streetlight above her barely do a good enough job of shedding light on her textbook. Somebody says that this was a sad setting. I tend to disagree. I rather see it as a triumph; a triumph of the human spirit. She’s our hero of the day. As we leave, she’s blushing courtesy all the attention.
We walk on. A woman is talking about her love marriage and how it alienated her from her family and her husband’s family. I think to myself: Love stories in India exist only in movies!
We talk to a politician. We sit in his plush, comfortable house and look around. With all probability, everybody was dwelling on comparisons.
The day ends where it started. At the same place where we had lunch, with the same people serving us. I realize for once, that the food and the village have entirely contrasting personalities. The food is spicy, hot, practically exploding on tongue tips. The village meanwhile, is dormant, silent. The taste of the village is the taste of silence.

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