Life as I know It

Today, I chanced upon three news reports on the recent Maoist attack wiping out almost an entire CRPF patrol, killing 75 paramilitary men and a policeman in Chhattisgarh on April 6. It anguishes me, as it does every conscientious, patriotic Indian, that our paramilitary men became cannon fodder for the Maoists, who after mercilessly carrying out the carnage, walked away with the rifles, SLRs, bombs and other ammunition of the massacred paramilitary men. What’s even more shocking is that 48 of the 82 men of the ill-fated CRPF patrol had little idea of the area they had been patrolling for the one day and two nights before the morning of the attack. These men belonged to the Alpha Company of the CRPF transferred to the location only a week before the attack. Compare them with the rebels, who know the forests like the back of their hands because they were born there and probably have the backing of hundreds of thousands of tribal people. No wonder our jawans were sitting ducks for the Mao...

Go to the Home Page He looked through the glass door of the restaurant. From the booth that he was seated in, for the past ten minutes now, the traffic signal outside the restaurant could be seen. Every time the signal went red and hordes of pedestrians made their way across the road, some away from the restaurant and some towards it, his heart began pumping faster, his heartbeat rising like a crescendo on an exponential curve until it reached Mt. Everest and then fell as though gravitational force had suddenly betrayed Newton. Somehow, the traffic signal always seemed to turn green when he was on the verge of a cardiac arrest. At the moment, the traffic signal was green. His cardiac system functioned normally. Pouring some water into a glass, he took a sip. For the hundredth time, his sight grazed the small paper menus, the blue and white salt-pepper shakers, the overhead hanging bulb holder and the navy blue fabric covering the seats of the booth. He glanced at his watch – there ...

"Destiny is a name often given in retrospect to choices that had dramatic consequences." - J.K. Rowling. Go to the Home Page In science, in management, in other areas of study and in life, we often come across several types of curves - the learning curve, the bell curve, elliptical curves, beauty curves and so on. While deliberating over the choices we make in life and their consequences, I realized that a life can be represented by a dynamic curve, which represents the state of our life in real-time. Our life is a curve, which we metaphorically draw with our hands and every decision that we take, determines the direction and slope of the figure. At the time of our birth, when we're at the zero position on the X-axis, which represents the time axis, our Y-coordinates are determined by a number of factors - the family we're born into, the country and the society we're born in, our mental capacity, our health etc. Let's call this the beginning point of life...

Go to the Home Page This year, my birthday did not suck; well, I was enervated by the time my 24 hours drew to a close, but I wouldn't equate fatigue on the birthday with birthday blues, for, trust me, I've seen varying shades of blues on my birthdays, so consistently every year, that I, the rational being, believed my birthdays were jinxed in one way or the other. Being the thoughtful, analytical thinker that I am, I attempted introspection - in the middle of the night a day after my birthday. How is it possible that every year my birthday sucked at least for a little while during the day, regardless of how fabulous the rest of the day went, while this year, when I attended office on my birthday and worked my fingers to the bone, even though my birthday wasn't wonderful in the conventional sense of the word (no flowers! Alas! I miss those the most, not only on my birthday, but everyday, no BIG surprises and no presents), my day was great in an unconventional way, my ...

Go to the Home Page The purpose of this post is to spread awareness about the missing child and I would urge my fellow bloggers to do the same. I recently received a forwarded mail, which was not a compilation of jokes, or puzzles or fascinating pictures of nature or technology, but a desperate plea by a father whose daughter (Apurva) went missing during the Tsunami disaster and even after more than four years, the family has not been able to locate the missing girl. Here's a copy of the forwarded message: Mr. Ravi Shankar was was posted in CAR-NICOBAR in the year 2004 as a sergeant in the INDIAN AIR-FORCE. On 26th December that year his family fell victim to the unfortunateTsunami that struck the eastern coast. He along with his family was washed in the deadly waters. Reaching out, his wife managed to cling onto a tree but his small son had swallowed too much water and passed away in her arms. Ravi too lost grip of his daughter's hand and she was washed away. Sometime late...

Go to the Home Page At some time in life, one has to stop being the person one has been and start being the person one wants to be. All that is required is vision, to know what to be, and courage, to be. This post was supposed to end here, but while I decided a suitable title for it, I read about the origin of the phrase - " to be, or not to be " . It comes from William Shakespeare's Hamlet and is one of the most famous quotations in world literature . The basic interpretation is this: the choice between the life of action ("to be") and the life of silent acceptance ("not to be"). A choice each of us makes someday. Go to the Home Page

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...