Loma Harshanam - It means “the hearing of which makes one’s hairs stand on end”.

And one such hearing I had today… the rendering of “Ksheera sagara sayana” in Devagandhari ragam by the unbeaten Chembai Vaidyanatha Bhagavathar. The place he goes in to a high with “taraka nama…” is simply, literally hair raising!

Oookey… its official then. The great hunt has begun.

I am not talking about the Robert Jordan book. Me talks about the hunt for the person who will have to suffer me for the rest of her life. (Take a joke, ok?) But guess what the trouble is!!!? There are hardly any girls who fall within an acceptable height compared to mine (about 183cms) and even those that do come close, seem to be always from the same, dreaded “Bharadwaja Gothram”. Sucks. And if somehow I manage to find some to my liking, the great Gods (read ‘parents’) throw thunderbolts of flimsy (IMO) reasons to reject it.

Oh well, s***t happens.

But I must confess that I have had quite an amusing time browsing through profiles at you-know-where and am surprised to see that almost every Jane Doe is “God fearing, respects elders, respects tradition, soft-spoken” and would like their partner to be “tall, fair, handsome, well settled, well read, respecting elders and traditions”. Almost 75% of the crowd I have looked at seem to work in either Infosys, CTS, TCS or Wipro. And to boot, many of them prefer only an ‘Amarickaa Mapillai’… and have a fine print saying “would like to pursue higher studies”. (I got nothing against such arrangements but just feeling sorry for unfortunate males, like me, who have to shell out parents money and drag our asses across to USA and get a degree. )

All in all, People, the future looks bleak for me.

Father abuses daughter for 24 years

What more horrors will this world face in the years to come?

We had this activity of writing a poem about women for last month’s Birthday Bash at work, which took on the theme of Women’s day.

Below is the poem I wrote.

Many a man’s success, many a nation’s demise
Bear the footprint of a woman, with virtue or vice.

Love of the mother, for life given,
Bond of the wife, until life taken,
Like two rains from two clouds in the same sky
One nourishing, other balancing.

Understand the origins of life… I can,
Understand a feminine mind… I cannot.
Contradictions, galore, in harmony… a woman!

Students commiting suicide

News like the one above makes me very, very sad. Committing suicide in fear of exams? What must have driven those young minds to take such terrible, desperate steps? What kind of stress those kids must have been going through before coming to such a disastrous decision? And here we are, complaining about stress at jobs, stress in marriage and what not. We have thousands of crack pot stress relief programs to teach us how to ‘deal’ with stress, effective or not. What do these innocent kids have? Who is to tell them it is alright to have failures in life, leave alone in exams, as long as one doesn’t loses hope? Who is to encourage them to face failure and try again, without denting their confidence and self-esteem?

Education in India is mostly driven by strong emotions of parents who want to see their child ’succeed’ in life. Parents, esp. in India think that hurting their child’s self-esteem by making negative statements about the kids abilities, like comparing their kids with someone else’s, threatening the child with humiliation in event of ‘failure’ (as defined by the parents), will actually make the child want to put in more effort and make the parents proud.

But what does a child know about pride? What does a child know about Indian family politics, where ’status’ is determined by how much one earns and the name of the company he/ she works for?

Statements like

“If you don’t get good marks in the board exams, you will spoil your entire life!”
“All your friends will ridicule you if you don’t study for engineering or MBBS”
“Why don’t you get smart and have only the top rankers in your class as friends?”
“You have to put study efforts for at least 14hrs a day… 8hrs at school, 6hrs at home. If you don’t, you will not get good marks and then you will become worthless!”
“You got only 85% marks!! Miserable wretch! You are only fit to herd pigs!! May be I will get you 50 pigs… no, you won’t be able to do even that!”
…

don’t actually help a child! These kind of comments blows holes in the child’s confidence like a shotgun firing through a sheet of paper. It breaks the fragile minds, giving them a feeling that no matter how hard they try they will not satisfy expectations. Some also begin to believe that if they ‘fail’ in something, ‘they’ have proven to be worthless.

Instead of giving love and affection, parents end up scorning, beating and sometimes even endangering the child’s future as well as life.

I don’t usually see hindi movies… hardly, actually. But I saw ‘Taare Zameen Par’. Excellent movie. There is one statement in that movie which sums up the solution to problems faced by millions of children (Indian, too) throughout the world.

“Parents should stop burdening their children with the huge weight of their own ambitions.”

I completely agree with it.

It might seem ironical.

But I really, really am beginning to hate SMS. Don’t get me wrong. I love the utility part… where in if you don’t want to speak to someone, you can just use a template and shoot a message.

What I do hate about SMS is the fact that people begin to replace a 1 min verbal communication by not less than 3 messages! I have seen people glued by their fingers to their mobile phones… always tapping out something… tap tap tap tap tap tap… Arrrghhh!!

First, its painful on your fingers if you overdo it, given the size of the mobile phones and their keypads. Second, its rude to do it when you are with company, especially when you are out at lunch with someone and you keep typing out your messages when the other person is trying to have a conversation.

Even technology has a time, place and circumstance for usage… ‘proper’ usage.

1. Enforce a rule saying all new bore-wells should be dug bottom-up… not top down. Too many children make it to the news because of such things!!
2. Decree that any school that does not enough space to park at least 500 cars in their grounds should be shifted out of city limits.
3. Convince the city corporation to gather all able-bodied beggars in the city and give them the job of keep Marina beach clean… and make sure they clean it to earn their living. Of course, they will also be covered under the provident fund and are entitled for promotion and salary hikes.
4. Put a blanket ban on use of all types of vehicle horns within the city.
5. In order to reduce the chaos due to the previous rule, introduce a new rule saying that all vehicles should move only at 20Kmph within city limits.
6. Ban all wall-poster printing and posting within the city. The unemployed from that industry can be employed in scratching out, cleaning and re-painting the scarred walls of thousands of buildings in the city.

Yep. Thats about it for now.

There are few things that are much harder to understand than the mind of a girl.

I never get tired of listening to the composition of “Amba Kamakshi” by Syama Sastri. Set in Bhairavi Raga, the rendition by Semmangudi Srinivasa Iyer was the first one I heard. 30 mins long… it nearly brought tears to my eyes.

I got another 10 min rendition by Chembai Vaidyanatha Bhagavathar. Simply Exquisite!! Bhagavathar’s style and dedication only make this hearing experience even more out of this world.

If anyone wants to get a very intense but mind relaxing experience of carnatic music, I seriously suggest listening to this Kriti sung by the above two great singers.

The lyrics and other details can be found here.

This is something I wanted to write about for the past year… yes, believe it or not, I never could get myself to pen my thoughts on this.

I walk to office daily (yeah, its about 15mins from my home :)). I always take the same route back and forth.

There are about 5 beggars sitting in various places in my way. A sort of old man with a torn bag, a muslim man with a clean kurta and ‘lungi’ but sporting an always bandaged hands and feet, a woman with very dirty clothes and crutches, an old man who has his hands eaten by leprosy and an old woman who… is just old.

I have been taking the walk to my office for the past 19 months or so by the same route everyday. I was freshly back from USA and you know, my emotions were at war with  reason. (You will not understand it if you haven’t gone through it). Anyway, initially, I used to actually feel sorry for these people and if I had any change in my pockets, I used to drop them to these beggars twice or thrice a week.

But as time passed, I began to literally become numb to seeing these beggars… and stopped giving them alms. My feeling was that these were just trying to live off others’ pity and money. It was fueled by the fact I have seen many other people by now that have the same physical problems as these beggars but are doing some kind of work to earn their bread. That’s my ‘reason’ speaking.

My ‘emotion’ side says I have just become hard hearted… that I no longer reflect on the suffering around me… that I have become just one another machine doing its job day in and day out.