urban living

Urban living

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Living in closed empty spaces

When humans first had to live in caves, it was not that they enjoyed the comfort of reeking, compact spaces. Rather it was the sense of protection that was contingent upon their living with their backs to each other that made them live in the peculiar manner.

Uncertainty was looming deep in the air, which meant that no one could truly say that he/she would survive the next day. But, more often than not the next day did come, as we can see their progenitors running all around. And they did in the glorious sunshine venture out to seek whatever means of nourishment that they could derive from their surroundings. Can i eat that, should i .... what the heck, let's just give it a try... they couldn't have cared less. life was so precious, the spirit of surviving stronger still, in spite of which they took risks that you and i in that situation would never take. don't beleive me?

well you might have in your minds the carefree risk junkies who jump from buildings, motorcycles and sometimes both... which is impressive but irrelevant to our arguement. but what about sneaking in front of the lion's den to get the fruit from the tree just beside it. And do remember that there are practically no ambulances to take you to the magic place where every wound can be undone. So, why did our great adventure junkie forefathers experiment? Or I mean how could they, knowing that the odds were so adversely against them...

given the limited amount of choices that they had, risks were inevitable part of life. and death was always looming there, so was life and a promise of having discovered something that worked, worked wonderfully well..... since no one can perform with pressure constantly hanging by the edge of your nuts, its always better to ignore certain uncertainities and live hopefully  and to your fullest. Life is short, life is beautiful.

Each one of us, apes, are born with our own special eccentricities. A chimpanzee realises pretty early in its life that every one of its mates is infact going to be irrefutably black and hairy. What sets apart one of the great evolutionary product from the other is their behaviour, attitudes and how that is reflected in their dealings with others. Early humans dressed up to show up those differences, as we do today in a less poignant manner with our subtle makeups, dresses that are inherently the very same....differences in the logo, the list goes on. Someone might disagree, but then I'd ask them to look at the subjects in any party, in any part of the world. Official parties all over contain as many suits as there are men and as many dresses as there are women. None of the subjects is too different from his neighbouring one. Not essentially, not in a big way.... why's that?

For the apes, for the our forefathers, these differences meant a lot more than what they do to us. Fashion sense is just a derivatory offset of what it meant to conciously choose and build up on your peculiar nature. Your attitude determined whether you survived or well got eaten by some tiger. It was something to be cultivated and something that was connected at the deepest level of what you really are, what the workings of your dna machinery wants you to be.

Lacking a well organised culutural delivery package meant that the field was wide open for you to choose any sort of culture that you could dream up of. Then you could hope that the one you chose helps you survive. Even as late as a couple of decades ago, people lived with their hearts out in the nature... which means they would in their daily life follow their instincts with no pre built roads and gps maps guiding them to the nearest burger outlet. They had a knack of realising that there was meat out there, the rest was matter of a good run and a throw that could peirce the very heart of the matter.

Inevitably though, not too many people made it through in the fish eat fish world. Only some very potent combination of genes could endow you with the potential to survive in tough world. A tough world, open end to end and yet conjined ( continents were joined sometime in our past). A world truly filled with the opportunities of discovering somethign really new... a new mate? a new enemy? and the uncertainity of all could drive anyone crazy in the first instance.

Today I might have all the facilities of any well endowed tribal cheif, yet I can never have the one thing that he had..... He was the absolute king of the world around him. His personality had the power over each and every thing in the environment. Quite ironically he was powerless in afflicting any large scale change. But there was no one to tell him what to do or what not to. It was he, his particularities and quirks... with every one of its fallacies that could guide him through life.

And since no particular model existed prior to him, it was wide open world for the taking.

Over the course of time, more specifically nearly 10 or more milleniums ago, some of our forefathers started farming. Rudimentary, as it was... it was well suited to the individuals whose propensity to risk taking was the least. They could stay at one place for as long as they liked. And since they had to ensure their own survival in the old age, they raised as many children as they could. All of them were disciplined to live under the constraints of agricultre and their behaviour modified by physical punishments and later as the growth of religions shows... through mental punishments...because remember, it wasn't the tribal society that wanted the homogneity... monodirectional slaves were the requirement of the agricultarists. Any deviation from the successful profile of the farmer wasn't taken kindly to, and curbed. Life had changed to closed spaces, in huts that pitted their idiosyncracies too harshly to escape unschathed.

The adventorous spirits never did remain in an agricultural setup for long. They took to the wild with all its glory.Which ultimately meant that there were well... only less of the brave spirits in the agricultural societies. The cowards did overtake the courageous finally and the spread of organised society spread far and wide. Every farmable peice of land was utilised to get the very last drops of nutrition. Hunting graduallly was reduced to a suppliment and in the past 10 centuries or so, it has dwindled to an irratic practise..... or a pastime. We prefer the herded flock far more for we get a far better chance of getting their meat, than say a strong beautiful animal in its environs.

Our mating rituals are a very good example of what happened to our societies. A premodern man could in the spirit of his youth go all around and win with his strenght the fairest maiden that he could. As many as he could, provided he could sustain them. Those men and women, pure and untouched with the needs of cramped living would live under the free sky which they could call their own and a world that was a constant source of wonder. Like a child they would explore the experiences and colors of the world, til their youth was burned with time and they would die fairly in a beautifully mean world.

With all due respect to the improvements of modern age, variety has dwindled today. As the stock of the farmers who captured the world, we are perhaps more predisposed to ape than the apes we derive from. The rules of society aren't the only things forcing us to behave in a more or less set of uniform behaviour. Petty differences of tastes not withstanding, the globalised culture has put a certain set of values enshrined in our global conscience. Today, more than any other time in our past, we live in a similiar fashion, have the same sets of thoughts and have the largest collection of common knowledge. Ubiquitous media devices, mobiles and whatnots seem to be like the fine edged scapel that is shaping us more and more towards that amalgated common identity.

urban living pitted the individual differences too severly to be allowed to survive together. Everyone had to agree on a common behavior to be followed for the peaceful, dense co existence. No longer were there wide open spaces to go to, unexplored worlds waiting to be explored where you could take your exquisitely crafted set of attitudes and hope to survive. Its a meaner world out there today than anytime in the past if you want to be your own king. Men have taken over any and all peices of earth that they were able to and filled them as far as possible with concrete structures of thoughts and behaviors.

Little by little, men had come out of the wild. And then suddenly in the last 10 decades, there was no in. Everyone was out in the common civilisation. Today we seek to iron out all the little differences that do exist in different parts of the world. From Chinese to Belgian to Peruvian, all the cultures are loosing their inherent pecularities. The rich and famous world over don the same attire, eat the same food and act in the same conceited manner. ( There are non essential differences, but nothing as powerful as that existed between an Inuit and Negro...)

Infact, aren't we trying to follow an ideal behaviour, goals, individual ? Christ, Mohammed, Rama, Lady Gaga, Beiber are people on which millions of others base theirs. The same sets of role models throughout the world preach the same values and inspire the same attitudes.

The first men setting out of their houses, in the glorious sun peiricing its way through the untamed jungles, went about in a world that was in its every part as much of a wonder to be discovered and in an equal part a wonder to be built. I download new apps to feel the same joy.

I feel a hollow, joyless hole in my being, that needs to feel the earth beneath its feet. Not the concrete that has for too long hidden the forests, the wilderness that shoud be here. Better off though I am in my warm blankets and a laptop to convey my thoughts world over, this hole shall remain.

A part of me is still roaming around with the first men, flushed with adrelaine at the discovery of a whole new world behind the mountains... animals that seem to be a part of a dream, fruits whose taste I would know only by getting past those animals.

My thoughtless existence, without the slightest concern for my next meal is far more comfortable, but I have with the most of others closed my heart with stopgaps. Movies, novels, trecks, religion.........and yet in the innermost recesses of my mind, behind the heavy locked doors lies a part of me, frozen in urban life.

war, saws and tigers

As the last remaining Sumatran tiger would glance up through the wounded canopy of Indonesian forests, he would under perhaps with a certain incredulity as to what happened to the green cover that had so beautifully protected him for as long as he could remember.
And mind you, tiger memories are not merely those which he learns in this world, tigers like all animals are blessed with a certain disposition, neural pathways and millions of years of evolutionary history that has allowed them to get a deep, almost ethereal link with the natural environment in which they live and are intrinsic product of. Deep down, it knows in its bones that this wasn't meant to be.
Its not that tigers dropped suddenly from the sky, in a quirk of creationism. Tigers are perhaps as much a part of the jungle and its lifecycle as the trees, the plants and the climate. Their development right from a single amoeba to a specialised, differentiated animal fine tuned to its very last atom to adapt in its environment is a marvel of heredity, chance and the forces of nature at work. Its recreation in the later history of this entire universe might not even be possible as far as we know. So, when this last tiger dies, it takes with itself a very fundamental force of nature with itself.
But then, no one is interested in the poor tiger who can barely afford the high rates of rent that “nature based” properties nowadays command. Had it a bare idea of the process at work, he might have hunted some prized goats and brought them in order to reach some kind of compromise. Sadly, the goats too have been hunted quite a while ago. It must sell its own fur to ensure its survival, quite ironical if you think over it.
World leaders are considerably annoyed with the economic downturn to give their sympathies to the striped cat.The Warsaw meet that concluded recently, gave a very fuzzy outcome. The fact that the world cannot come to any conclusion regarding the emission reduction plans gave a rude albeit expected shock to environmentalists all over the world. In this world of competitive economics, no quarter can be left. Jungles will keep on burning, tigers will burn bright only in the poems that we have. Sympathy, love and empathy haven’t been effectively monetised as of yet, so we cannot expect these from the world leaders.
At the present rate of human growth, the resources that we consume are going to be more difficult to come by, especially for those who cannot afford to buy them. The animals are going to be the most affected in the global war for extracting the last drops from the fields of earth.
Environmental protection or conserving wildlife at the cost of human settlements or potential real estate gains has started becoming more and more difficult to ignore in the global downturn of economies. It has to be noted however that the economies will recover one day but the environmental scars can never fully heal.
A time might come when only the humans are left. The only trace of the animals are their stories and the genetic materials stored in museums which is used to clone some animals for a weekly show.

we the people

Vacuum, scientifically defined is a space where nothingness exists. A paradoxical term to define nothing of something. But there is nothing paradoxical about the power struggle going  at the vacuum of centre.

The moral vacuum at the centre of our nation is strangely conductive to sound waves and a lot of name calling has been heard passing through it lately.

A decade or two earlier, a protagonist of Indian politics had been called rather pre-emptively a “ gungi gudia” or a dumb doll. That the doll later turned out to be the most powerful Indian Empress is another issue.

The labels and stickers should be given only after the career of the politician is over rather than at any earlier time. Rahul Gandhi has been often seen as too immature for politics and Narendra Modi has been referred to as a ‘chai wallah’ and a dictator. Both of them are only starting in their careers as candidates for prime ministership and we might be proven entirely wrong about our assumptions and therefore I won’t therefore venture out to call anyone a ‘wimpy boy’, or ‘mr. t’ ( from rocky 3 fame).

There were others too, who had taken up obsequious titles and later had to back down from their stance. “The Iron Man” apart from being an entertaining flick is also the name that a septuagenarian of Indian politics took up. The only part of him that was made of iron was the walking stick that he had to use to move around. That Indian superheroes in arena of politics often fall flat, is a sobering reminder of the fact that fiction is different from reality.

The Silent Man is perhaps the only prominent superhero who has been able to fully utilize his superpower to thwart every attempt of his enemies to put him down. Shri Tusshar Kapoor had been the progenitor of ‘silent’ class of superheroes, so we must pay due credit to him for Silent Man’s success.

A lot of other characters have propped up in the Indian scene to further develop the character line up. Kejriwal is foremost amongst the lineup of emerging superheroes. If we were to give a sobriquet to him, the competition would be between “ The Exposer” or “The Cleaner”. But given the propensity of giving fancy names to our heroes, it would have to be something else. ( Fauladi Jhadu?)

The people of our nation have since time immemorial harboured the keen desire to have a ‘saviour’, who would by waving his magical wand lift the masses out of their desperate conditions. The bollywood movie ‘Naik’ would be a very accurate description of what the people want. An honest man rising out of the masses and taking over the mantle of saving the country all on himself.

With a rather unimaginative name,  the AAP party seeks to project itself as being the only party concerned with the welfare of the common man. Their movement to weed out corruption however is not new in the Indian scene. BJP too had in its heyday been ‘the saviour’. The movement by the venerable JP had been directed against the “the tyrannies of authority”. Today, no one would vouch for their saintliness. Indistinguishable they lie with the rest, wallowing in muds of Indian polity.

Western countries, to which we often look up for setting our own moral compass, haven’t evolved their strong institutes overnight. The Americans once had powerful nexus between the immigrants and their politicians, the French had their corrupt aristocracy, the British barons had to defeat their king to get their bill of rights or Magna Carta. In short, a strong grassroots movement had resulted in masses becoming aware of their rights, duties and had to fight to get them. No self respecting despot would have handed over the power to the people.

The gift of democracy that the people got in 1947 wasn’t attained in the same step by step manner. Neither were people ready to handle the responsibilities that suddenly came with freedom. Such institutes take decades, if not centuries to perfect.  They cannot be thrust upon a nation in the same manner that a seed cannot be expected to sprout fruits the very day it’s planted. A lot of nurturing and a lot of inputs are required for both to grow healthily.

In the coming months, elections would run rife once again in our landscape. Arvind Kejriwal for all his politician bashings, expose’s and the array of degrees and certificates that he has, is going into a pig sty. And by going into politics he has to realise that the politicians are uncannily similar to the pigs in at least one way, they both enjoy a dirty fight and you cannot win from a politician in a dirty fight. Neither can you defeat a pig, especially if it enjoys the mud.

For all the euphoria that Anna campaign had generated, the transformation of a nation takes the intense will of its own people. An educated, politically aware and morally strong populace would select an ethical leader. Would we?

Anna/Kejriwal efforts to transform India might not bring result the next summer, but what is sure to happen is that more and more candidates are going to prop up against the morally defunct parliamentary wall to sprinkle their own colors on parliamentary walls. Parliamentary walls are already a grotesque mix of different yellows, a legacy of some of the earlier leaders who too sought to leave their respective marks.

Most of the times, election is reduced to a long drawn tv show where the erudite scholars of field come on the idiot box and the disinterested audience grunts and huffs and puffs and then switches off the tv to sleep. Why should anyone care about politics? It’s all dirty and I am too high in caste ladder to do the cleaning.

opinion on opinions

Opinions on opinion polls

Inspite of all the brouhaha over the opinions that opinion polls have generated, I decided to go ahead and conduct a poll of my own. This one was on the validity of opinion polls.

The poll on polls generated some poles of opinions. Ok, enough with the wordplay. The result of my pop

 ( polls on polls) came out with a result. According to this result 99.95% people interviewed disliked opinion polls and considered it to be the biggest threat on democracy.

Obviously some errors had crept into the poll. For one, I had conducted this poll on a single person, my roommate and had cleverly worked up till the question. This is how I conducted my poll.

Interviewer: given the massive corruption in ad agencies in the past few years do you think that we should depend on the results of opinion polls

Respondent: ahmm..  I guess not.

Interviewer: With the ownership of majority of media houses in hands of a few business firms, do you think that the news channels are often biased

Respondent: I guess so…

Interviewer: The growing closeness between media houses and political bosses has fractured ethical journalism. What do you think?

Respondent: I guess you are right… gosh I never thought of it from this angle

Interviewer: do you think opinion polls are trustworthy and necessary in a democracy

Respondent: ofcourse not!!

So here, we see that there were some fundamental inaccuracies that I hadn’t disclosed earlier. First of all the sample size was limited to only one person. I had twisted my words and arranged the questions so as to suit my purpose, thus effectively eliminating any neutral opinions in the purpose. There was no check on how, where or in what situations I had conducted my grand poll.

Thus, all these inaccuracies were brushed aside when I merely published my result and made no effort to present the audience with the context. Perhaps if I had published this very poll in a reputed magazine with a nicely illustrated graphic showing the result, majority of people would have taken the results at their face value. Their own beliefs could further have been affected had I shown that even Sachin Tendulkar had taken part in the polls.

It’s a fundamental fact that most of the people don’t always have independent opinions on each and every topic and more often than not follow the bandwagon or the example of a person whom they consider to be respected. But that doesn’t mean that all the polls conducted are unfair. To ban them outright would be a refutation to the scientific methods established to accurately assess the public opinion.

Given the uneven distribution of wealth and power in our society, more often than not it’s the richest who are able to voice their opinions. The weaker sections are more concerned about their daily needs rather than being able to push across their views. Thus sometimes these polls are the only way in which the majority can put their opinions, concerns and problems in the larger public domain.

Thus, political parties would often be misled on the general mood of the country if they don’t have the facility of an accurate opinion poll. Truly there would be some deviations from the reality and there would also be some attempts of sabotaging these, but instead of giving in we might as well try to  monitor these or perhaps poll on the polls.

Whatever be the result of the latest controversy, the voice of democracy needs to come through the din of political squabbles. Perhaps if people poll on opinion polls, then the ministers would be forced to reconsider.