The Joy of Giving Week

Before I talk about the event I just came from, I'd like to share a small story that I heard ages ago.

So, there was this successful manager at a big company, Max, making bucketloads of cash, working in New York, driving a Lexus, renting an apartment in Manhattan, you know, the works. One Christmas, after shopping at Bloomingdales for his younger brother, he was on his way back home when he saw this kid trying to flag down a ride, apparently home. He stopped his car, asked the kid to get in. Joe was his name. He was twelve years of age. He lived in an apartment on the way to Max's home. So, how Max asked Joe about himself. Joe then told him that his mother was a widow, and that he had a younger brother, Jim. His mother worked as a seamstress and Joe helped out at his uncle's shop. So, on the whole, it wasn't really a very pretty picture. Joe asked Max what was in the big box in the back seat. He replied that it was a gift for his brother who was in college. Joe looked longingly at the box. Max ask him, "What are you thinking about, Joe?"

"I wish," Joe said, "I wish I could be a brother like that."

I remember hearing this story in school in an elocution contest. And I also remember tears streaming down all my friends' eyes as this piece ended.

Coming back to today, at the inaugural function of the Joy of Giving Week when Anshu Gupta, the chief of the NGO 'Goonj', narrated to us accounts of people who lack the very things we take for granted; food, housing, and most importantly, clothes. He spoke of women who have to use rags, and sometimes even sand during their menses because they don't have even a clean piece of cloth to use as a sanitary napkin. He told us accounts of women in Rajasthan who don't have a uterus because they had to be operated upon because they'd get Cervical cancer otherwise. 'Scary' would be an understatement. Horrifying would be more like it. In a country which has one of the largest numbers of billionaires in the world, for people to live like this is simply unacceptable.

So, the answer is to just give. Not just clothes, or shoes, or money, but even your time. Think for a moment about all you have. Count your blessings.

Be like Joe.

An arrow shot from a bow...

Do you know what is common between an arrow shot from a bow and words spoken in anger? They don't come back, and they really really hurt.
Always knew this, learned it the hard way a few minutes back.
@You-know-who: My sincerest apologies.

The Polythene Bag

So there I was at my Baniya's shop (the Grocer's- for the uninitiated) this morning, getting groceries for home, when this guy came running into the shop, and asked for mustard oil. The shopkeeper handed it over, and then this customer says, "Ek polythene dena." (Give me a polythene bag).
No moral grandstanding here, but I do make it a point to take a cloth bag with me each time I go shopping. Honest. So I positively hate it when people ask for plastic bags at markets. They simply drive/walk up to the shop with their hands in their pockets and expect the shopkeepers to provide them with a plastic bag.
Some time back when polythene bags weren't that much in use, retailers used to hand out stuff in paper bags and expected the customer to carry a cloth or jute bag with them. And now? Go anywhere, retailers are hell bent on handing you plastic bags with their logos printed on them. Advertising, they call it.
At what cost do we buy this convenience? At the cost of drainage pipes jammed with plastic waste? Dead animals choked on plastic garbage? Overflowing landfills? Need I say more? And why do we take plastic bags, again? Because we're too lazy to bring our own cloth shopping bags with us? Or because it's just not cool anymore?
Think about it.

The cost of the Swine Flu

The Bird Flu in 2005, and the Swine Flu (Uh... no pun intended) in 2009. From what I saw on television, the newspapers, the internet and various other media, millions and millions of dollars were spent on the entire exercise. People were going wild, buying masks, keeping indoors, looking suspiciously at anyone who sneezed or coughed. Folks were blogging about what to do, what not to do, how to identify the infected ones and so on and so forth.
It's a great thing, no doubt, that we take care of things when they're in the initial stages. Compare it to the Black Death of 1348 or the London Plague of 1665 when there were literally millions of deaths and next to zero hygiene, and those ages were, well, Dark, things are much better now. Our healths are insured, drugs are being researched, governments stock up on medicines at even the slightest hint of anything that might go wrong.
However, having read Freakonomics and The Undercover Economist over and over, I've developed this economist's mindset. Or rather, the cynic's mindset.
A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.
The same has been said about economists of late, but then it has also been proven that governments that do not listen to them are doomed to fail.
Anyway, all I wanted to say here (in what was intended to be a short post), is that the actual number of deaths that really occurred due to Swine Flu is much much less than the number of deaths that occur each day due to factors such as air pollution, heart disease, smoking, road accidents etc. How much money do we spend on controlling those factors?
As it turns out, the Swine Flu turned out to be not that different from ordinary influenza. So, who profited from all the millions that were spent by governments and individuals alike? And we, the people, spent our money for what?
I haven't put in the statistics because I want you to Google them up and find out how many deaths happen because of smoking, alcohol abuse, narcotics abuse, heart disease, air pollution etc, and how much money is spent on preventing these more widespread pandemics.
I read somewhere that risk = hazard + outrage. Do follow up the link and get educated.
The Swine Flu and Bird Flu are important, and are to be doubtlessly tackled. But that is a very small part of the picture. The bigger picture is staring us in the face and yet we refuse to see it. Our eyes are open, but our minds are closed. They want to keep it that way by diverting our thought processes to things that aren't really that important.

Awaken.

The Learning Curve

Of late, Mom has started taking a keen interest in the Internet. Nothing too fancy, no facebook or digg or blogging. She just turns on the computer, connects to the Net, clicks here and there, and reads content.
Press the Power button on the CPU, wait for Windows to load, click on the Broadband icon to connect, and click on Internet Explorer/Firefox and just get cracking! Sounds simple enough, doesn't it? And here comes the strange (to me) part... The above instructions are simply too difficult for Mom to understand!
This often leads to some rather nasty altercations between her and me. Here are some excerpts:

Me: "Oh come on! How difficult is it for you to understand? Just click on the box next to 'User Name' and start typing there..."

Mom: "You raise your voice at me one more time and no lunch for you, young man!"

After several days of such heated discussions(to euphemise that is; "screaming our lungs out" would be more applicable) I decided to take a step back and think about it. What seemed so damn simple to me was obviously very difficult for Mom. And the reason was painfully obvious. It wasn't that she didn't want to learn, it's simply that she couldn't. The learning process slows down after a certain age.
However, this is not the end of the discussion. It is only the beginning. Our parents tell us so many things that simply don't make any sense to us; don't waste the food on your plate, don't wear torn jeans, don't forget to turn out the lights, and so on and so forth. We fail to understand the reason behind those statements... Because for the same reason as our parents are unable to pick up on new technologies, we cannot pick up on old wisdom.
They tell us to not waste food because their parents often had trouble arranging for two square meals a day.
They tell us to not wear torn jeans because, way back, in their childhood, our parents often had no option but to wear torn handed down trousers.
They tell us to turn out the lights because they didn't have electricity.

And naive as we are, we call our parents stubborn, miserly, inconsiderate, while they call us thoughtless, wasteful, and (as in my case) threaten to not make lunch!
Now, I won't be all goody two shoes and say that I listen to what my parents tell me all the time because I'm not and I don't. What I will say, however, is that there always is a reason for the way people behave.
And as the next generation that we belong to, we must never stop questioning, we must never stop trying to find the reasons to why things are the way they are. The Learning Curve must always be climbed. For the generations that are to follow will think the same of us as we think of the ones before us.
Like they say in French, c'est la vie. Life goes on.

MBA

Since I'm going to start with my MBA this June, I was pretty smug with my explanation of studying "cases studies" being how I see MBA adding value to my profile. However, the Dilbert comic strip below shattered my illusion.



Image (c) Scott Adams

"Can I drop you off somewhere, Ms Kempster?"

Flashback to a minute before I said this. I was driving back home in the car with the aircon at full blast, listening to Jagjit Singh's Kagaz Ki Kashti, and thanking Dad and God at the same time for inspiring the creation of two of the best things to happen to mankind (and worst things to Mother Nature) Cars and Airconditioning, when I saw this frail figure standing at the side of a road, close to a traffic intersection trying to flag down an auto rickshaw.
I was driving too fast to stop in time, so I didn't even slow down. I was deliberating whether that could really be Mrs Kempster from Kindergarten. She used to be feared back then, 20 years ago.
Boy, even as I write this, I feel old. Have two decades really passed by since I joined Loyola School in '89?
I'd love to say that I took the first exit, circled around, and came back to where I saw Ms Kempster. But I didn't. I think the world has made too much a cynic of me to really still believe that one must be chivalrous and helpful and all those nice things that one learns to be in school, the things that make the difference between being educated and being literate. Even if I had stopped on time, what would I have asked her? What if she lived somewhere off route from where I was headed? Then I'd have to go out of my way and drop her. What would I tell my mom if she asked what had taken me so long? What if...?
"BALLS to everything.", I said to myself. I took the next free left, circled around and got back to where I had seen Ms Kempster about a minute ago. She wasn't there. I turned down the volume on the car stereo; Ghazals make me sadder than I already am. Decided that she had found an autorickshaw to take her to her destination.
"Damn, I should've turned around then only." I mentally cursed myself for taking too much time to think, for worrying too much about what someone else would think about my decision, for ...
"Hey wait a second, there she is!". I saw Ms Kempster walking down that road I had just driven along before taking the free left. I drive slowly when I've got too many things on my mind so I did a handbrake stop(no idea why!), rolled down the passenger side window and called out, "Can I drop you off somewhere, Ms Kempster?".
She couldn't believe that someone had actually stopped by to help her, I could make out from her expression. She got into the car, and the conversation started on some random topics, which batch I was from, etc etc. About half a minute of driving later, she asked me to turn right, on C.H. Area Road No. 4. That was barely a 20 second detour from my route.
"You remember the senior Ms Kempster?", she asked. "Of course!", I replied, half expecting to hear some sad news about her. She was pretty old even twenty years ago. "She has taken too many falls and is bedridden. I take care of her now.", said Ms Kempster. Twenty years have passed by since I last saw her. Wow.
Then she asked me to stop the car in front of some rather swank apartments. "Those are some really nice apartments there!", I said rather naively and rather too soon. She smiled, "We don't live in the apartments, we live in those small rooms behind the apartments. We moved here about a month ago. You must have heard about Loyola Flats...". "Yeah, I heard they've renamed it Loyola Niwas and now the Fathers live there.", I said.
And then it hit me. All at once. Like I'd been sitting on a nuclear bomb all along and then it had decided to suddenly explode. Loyola Flats are the apartments that are now known as Loyola Niwas. The old teachers from Loyola used to live there and that is where Ms Kempster and Ms Kempster lived. Until a month ago. Loyola Niwas now sports high ramparts, it's almost fortress-like now. And only the school Fathers live there. All the old timer teachers have been evicted from their decades old homes. Teachers who did not marry so as to carry on the profession that they so loved with the students they adored. Teachers who quite literally spent their lives teaching generation after generation of children. Can anyone from our generation even imagine spending our lives doing something? In our impatience for obtaining success in different forms and fields, we forget the things that matter most.
Ms Kempster and I said our goodbyes and she left. I reached home taking at least thrice the time that I'd ordinarily take... It's difficult to drive with tears in one's eyes, you know.