Monday 25 February 2008

Blinded...


The good thing about going back home late from office is that you get a lot of breathing space, a lot of walking space - in the trains, on the roads, on the railway platform, everywhere. That Friday evening though, things were a little different. The normal quiet that beseeches the railway platform in the late night hours was conspicuously missing from the Guindy Railway Station.

My eight months stay in this city had been enough to make me feel at home among people who conversed in a language I had failed to get to terms with, my efforts to learn it notwithstanding. The chirp and the enthusiasm of the youth would make you feel as if it was a large group returning from a picnic. There was no sign of the long and tiring day at office on any face, let alone the hot and humid Chennai weather. Maybe everyone was excited about the weekend that was to follow, about the ensuing India-Australia Twenty- Twenty International. There were families too at the station; little kids fussing around with their grandparents, fathers and mothers trying to make their few months olds sleep in the cuddle of their arms, newly wed couples trying to enjoy every one of those few precious moments they got to spend together. It seemed more like a party, than a wait for a local that hadn’t arrived for quite sometime now.

It is then when the central character of my story plundered into the party, uninvited, unnoticed and maybe even unwanted. The tattered clothes, the not so slight stoop, the limp in his walk definitely didn’t make you want to look at him again. I assumed the stick he was using, was to keep him on his feet. But there was more to it. The central character hadn’t been blessed with eyes that saw. The people on the platform were thoughtful enough to make way for the old man as he made his way to, only he and god know where. I thought about the inane crowd in Mumbai that just wouldn’t care to do so. It was then that I noticed, that something was going wrong. The old man seemed to have lost his way and was not moving along the platform. Rather, he seemed to be heading straight for its edge, towards the tracks. But the people around him seemed to be least concerned about what was happening. The party was going on and everybody seemed to be on a high. The uninvited guest’s stick was in his right hand, and he was slowly slipping towards the tracks on his left. I could see the lights of the much-awaited local train about half a kilometer in the distance. I didn’t feel like relying on the goodwill of the people around the man and decided to start running. He was a good 25 meters away from me. I rushed towards him and pulled him away from the edge of the platform. What he hurled at me was in Tamil; I hope it was a rude thank you. The man walked on, the crowd didn’t. The people around him were staring at the person who had just run in from nowhere. I stared back. A few of the people looked away, maybe feeling guilty. But a few others continued to stare; it was a cold steely stare. They must be the people who wouldn’t mind wiping dust off the leather of their shoes with their hands, before they enter their boss’s room but would definitely not want to touch a dirty, blind, old cripple who moved around with a bowl in one hand and a stick in another. I guess they wanted to avoid the late night bath they’d have had to take for touching the ‘one who dare not be touched’. I just hope those eyes I was looking into, were not those of the resurgent India that we all are so proud about.


My roommates with whom I share the talks I would have loved to, with my soul mate viewed the whole incident in different lights. One just shook his head and went out of the room. The other retorted, “And our cricket board president says that India is not a racist country. The caste system we have in our country and the narrow mindedness that still persists in the minds of our so called educated community is worse than the apartheid and similar social stigmas in the rest of the world.”
The best was to come from my third friend. He said, “You missed out on a byline, my friend. You could have shot the whole incident and later asked the people around, why they didn’t care to help. They win Pulitzers for covering such exclusive stories, live. A big prize at a small price - One Life.”

Facts


Facts, how much ever they may hurt, are best when they are accepted as facts and not theories.

The ones who love you will never need to tell you that they do. And the ones, who don't, never will, no matter how many times you hear them say so; in your head, in your dreams...



One job pays you a hundred dollars to pull the trigger; the other, a cent to carry the dying to the doctor. I guess you would still choose the latter...
If hundred were to be made a million, and you were to win a Nobel for pulling the trigger, what would you have done?
Do we really know what we want, what we want to do?
And if yes, how often do we do, what we want to?

Who is driving this economy?
The one who is speeding along the flyover, in his new C Class, or the one who is sitting under it. The one who wants one more flyover to come up, not because he doesn't like to see the elegant Mercedes get caught up in traffic, but because it really is easy to buy his kids, two meals a day, when there is a lot of work at hand....
I guess this must be the inclusive growth that every single industrialist in India so proudly announces that his company upholds....

I am not surprised that the capitalism is what the rich, the famous, the learned uphold, because that is what gets you a hundred dollars for a cent. And then you can always boast about all the good that you have done, by organizing a lavish luncheon for the famous, the elite, the media and release a glossy report on Corporate Social Opportunity, oops, Corporate Social Responsibility, whatsoever you may call it, sirs.

From those who matter to those who matter more.
From those who make the difference, to those who feel the difference, those who bear the difference.
From those who feed on the difference, to those who have to, those who are made to live with the difference.
Those, who miss a meal because of the difference.

But I guess just yapping never serves the point; you got to do something about it. It’s all very good to write a touching story about the people everyone sees every other day, make a few eyes swell, and feel bad about the gap that is widening. But can just writing about things help? Am I really doing what I want to? Are we?

I am a journalist, a business correspondent. Today I write, have to write about people who matter, people who make the difference. I am not happy about it. I hope that someday I will write about, someday I will write for, the ones who matter a little more.

Monday 11 February 2008

I quit...


It was the 6th of December. I was fiddling with the pen in my hand. I was confused in my head, not sure whether the drastic measure that I was going to opt for, called for a rethink. All kinds of advices were pouring in, from everyone who cared for me. I wasn't too sure what to take note of and what to discard.
That's when I came upon this piece of shit I had scribbled, rather typed, during my early days (first couple of weeks) in TCS, Chennai. It seemed a real long time since then, and things definitely hadn't got any better...



'The worst times are those when you have all the time in the world at your disposal, you have a sea full of ideas floating in your head, but when you sit down to pen them down, er, well in modern terminologies, to type them down, the words just seem to have drowned in that sea of thoughts and nothing seems to surface to your fingertips. At this moment in time, I am face to face with one of those times. I, as per the speculations and au contraire to all my aspirations am an employee of TCS. Well, of the 22 years of sunrises that I have managed to miss to wake up to, not one of them has been, dreaming about sitting in an air conditioned room, working on a machine that almost thinks, talking to some part of it in a language that my heart fails and doesn’t care to understand and my head just dares to; and sitting surrounded by men and women who are least considerate about my existence and who are mocking it by talking in a language my head just can’t understand and my heart yearns to. My time’s up. No, don’t rush to dial 911, I meant, my time at work is up. It’s past 6 pm and there’s no one who can pin me down to this seat which is so bored of me. No, it won’t prick my conscience either if I pick my bag and just walk out of this office. But there’s a small problem. There’s no place my feet can walk to, both where they are welcome and not so reluctant to go to. I am feeling like a guy who is stranded in the middle of an ocean, who definitely knows how to swim, but can't see one solid thing apart from the moon and the stars, he can swim up to. What do I do? Conserve every ounce of energy I got; staring at the stars, lying in wait, for one of them to fall , lying in wait for someone to rescue me from the middle of nowhere...
Or do I swim in which so ever direction my heart takes me. I maybe heading in a direction away from the shore, I may get so tired swimming, that I may not last till someone finally finds me.
What do I do?'


Sometimes words that seem nothing more than insane babble at one point of time, start making a lot of sense at some other point of time. Words that never were written to mean a thing. Words, that when read, make everything clear, at some other point in time.
Guess, everything makes sense, when the head speaks the language of the heart.

By the way, on the 6th of December, 2007 I chose to swim. Don't know where to, don’t know what for, but away from the middle of nowhere....