Life as I know It

Go to the Home Page What shocks me the most about the Mangalore pub incident is not the brutality with which helpless girls were thrashed; not the fact that 40 men (Imagine!!) barged into a pub at 4 p.m. on a Saturday (It wasn’t even dark yet!! And anyways which partygoer, unless an addicted alcoholic, drinks in the afternoon?) and began beating the young guys and girls inside; not the fact that most of these girls were teenagers and an incident of such violence would, perhaps, leave an indelible mark on their psyche; not that the onlookers managed to do what they do best – be the dumb spectators; not the knowledge that some of these hoodlums may go scot-free after a few days in the jail; not that these 40 men used the name of Lord Ram to justify their moral policing. What bothered me the most, shocked me into shedding my nonchalant attitude and jolted me out of the confines of my comfortable existence was the stance of some people (gathered from the comments that I came across on o...

Go to the Home Page As I begin writing this post, I realize it would probably be a controversial one. The title of this post - a question that popped to my mind when I finished watching the acclaimed movie. I read and heard several perspectives, for and against the statement. But first, let me elaborate the drift of my statement. A number of patriotic Indians, including me, felt a tad disturbed by the fact that the movie portrayed, with stark realism, the ugly face of our country. Although, there was nothing in the movie that was contestable, that I could say does not happen in our country, as an Indian citizen, I felt quite sad about the storyline which incessantly depicted the sorry state of affairs in our country. No, I don’t have anything against Vikas Swarup. Or Danny Boyle, for that matter. I think it was a pretty interesting concept. The movie was well executed, the acting brilliant and the music, certainly sublime. As mentioned earlier, the movie depicts the underbelly of th...

Go to the Home Page While working out my brain cells the other day, I realized that one of the activities performed very frequently, perhaps every minute, by our mind is some or the other kind of a generalization. How many times have we heard – men think about sex every few seconds, women think about their weight (and shopping) every five minutes and so on and so forth. Now the point I am trying to make is not that the above examples are, indeed, generalizations, but the fact that how we never rave about the frequency with which our mind performs generalizations, even though it is comparable (in frequency and effect) to the above examples. In order to prove my point, I conducted a practical experiment, wherein, during a conversation with a friend, I tried to count the number of generalizations either of us made. And the number was shockingly high. I observed a similar trend during the coffee-time chit-chats with my team members in the office – people of so and so department are so i...