What really matters?

“What really matters?” asked a friend of mine to our group of friends recently. Here’s my take on it.

Philosophically or in a true sense the answer according to me is “Nothing really matters”.I think of myself on the verge of my death and ask this qn “What really matters?” and the answer I finally get is “Nothing really matters”. And for all the facade of certainty that I put up, the fact is life is uncertain and I can very well die before I even finish this post . So if I were to live every minute as my last minute, then answer is ‘Nothing really matters’ ever.

But I would not be able to do that. Because the life is uncertain I may still live even after I finish this post. But if I keep thinking of death every next instant then I would become insane. So I have to live with this facade of certainty or realise “Nothing really matters” and live like Ramana Maharishi.

So, since I am not Ramana now and I have to go on with my existence, What really matters?

To me what really matters is my integrity. By integrity I mean whether I am true to myself and I am free of any conflicts in mind. The conflict can be a small one as some disagreement I had with my Prof last week and want to let him know about my disagreement, or, it can be my behavior with someone which I regretted and want to convey my regrets about, or, it can be my fear that I may die and I need to take an insurance before it so that my parents will be financially secure in case that happens or it can be some job that I had to push myself to go to every morning..the conflict can be anything..If once aware of these conflicts I have taken steps to address them then I have retained my integrity or ‘mental peace’ as my friend K may like to call it.

However, sometimes it may happen that due to some circumstances I may have to live with that conflict. That cannot be avoided because we are social and emotional beings and no man/woman is an island. But as long as I am aware I have a conflict and take some steps to reduce the conflict given my constraint it is fine. But in the end if it turns out I need to compromise because of the constraint its fine too; then it means for me the constraint is more ‘important’ , so my integrity is intact again. So the essential thing is to be conscious of the choices I make at every point in my life and living it with integrity.

But am I living my life with integrity? Though I have realized the need for it and have been trying on and off to do so the answer would be No. But I hope to do so more in the future and go to sleep with less conflicts in my mind.

P.S.: My belief is that there is no life after death. But I were to believe in life in death, then ‘Nothing really matters’ may not not hold true.

Bangalore to Chennai

Statutory Warning: It’s a rather loooooooooooooooooooong post..Read it only when you have time…but it is interesting..atleast I hope you find it interesting…

It has been an evening of interesting (and surprising) experiences.                                

I am sitting in the waiting room of Bangalore City Railway Station. I am going home for Saraswathi Puja and Vijaya Dasami..hippie…..:) The Chennai Mail starts only at 22.45 and its just 21.00 hours now…so I have a couple of hours to kill. I had to come early as my uncle left for Delhi by Rajdhani which left at 20.30. I intended to spend an hour at the internet center here but the center guy told that he would shut at 21.00 but take the full fare for an hour’s browsing from me even though only half hour is left.

“Aasai dosai appalam vadai”

I decide to try out the waiting room.  I had seen the waiting room from outside whenever I came to catch my train to Chennai which invariably starts from Platform 1. It looked ok so decide to give it a try..

The waiting room is large with sufficient number of chairs all in good condition. The room is reasonably clean and well ventilated. It does not stink as I had expected (Indian Railways has definitely improved over the years..Kudos to the team and keep it up!) I look out for a chair under a fan and luckily find one. I settle down, take out my recently bought ipod shuffle and start listening to my assortment of music from Ravishankar to Farida Khanum.

I look around the waiting room and I am reminded of the project that we did for our Marketing Management course. We had developed a plan to rebrand Indian Railways. We presented Indian Railways as a means of “Experiencing India” first hand and relived the nostalgia of our own rail experiences during the project. One of us came up with a brilliant piece of prose (or is it a poem?) as the brand proposition of Indian Railways. Our in-house graphics expert designed a brand new logo which captured the essence of the poem and even   used the train sequences in Gandhi  to come up with an AV ad sequence. As I look around me in this waiting room now, I realize how true it is to say that the railway station or train travel provides you a microcosm of India that very few other places can provide you with. I see a Rajasthani lady feeding her child..a tamil mama and mami involved in involved discussion (I bet it is about some action of a neighbor or a relative)..some young adolescents (must be on a college trip)..some guys lying and sleeping on the floor oblivious to the noise and the activity around them..the policeman comes on a beat..some workers taking a break in one corner..This is India for you (or more appropriately one slice of India for you)..

I get impatient looking around..(lest I be appear suspicious..you will get an idea of why this thought came as u read further J)..I shuffle the pages of the Frontline (actually I went to buy Outlook; but do u know that both Outlook and India Today now costs 25 bucks..I settled for a 15 buck and more intellectual Frontline J ) that I bought some time back. I read Praful Bidwai’s eloquent argument of why India should be ashamed of playing ‘crass realpolitik’ to get the Vienna waiver. I turn to the next article..a piece on terror by Raghavan..it has a photo of a policeman checking the luggage with a metal detector in Bangalore Railway station!! I had just come through the same exercise some time back..I start thinking of how terrorism has affected us..directly and indirectly..

Nowadays I don’t know whom to believe and whom to suspect when I go out..

I see a couple of bags next to my chair..they have been lying here since I came..that is  for about 20 to 30 minutes now..There is no one in the two seats next to that. I grow suspicious..

“Don’t overreact” I say to myself…

“But what if it’s a bomb!!” – the other me..

“Security has improved..it can’t be a bomb!! And no one will keep a bomb in a school backpack”

“What if it is? You are sitting right next to it!! And even it blasts after you left will you be able to live with the knowledge that you suspected but did not take action?”

“Ya..moreover are we not supposed to be vigilant and help the police to counter terrorist threats..that’s the only effective way to fight terror”

Still I am hesitant..I look around for some five minutes..I gather courage and ask the person sitting in the chair behind the one having the bags.. “Sir, is it yours”..He nods a “No”…

“Leave it..don’t appear as a fool”

I start reading Frontline once again..

“What if?”

I look around again..I find some girls sitting two chairs next to me..I gather my courage again to overcome my hesitance and ask her

“Are these yours?”

“Yes”

“Appadaa…thappichom” (Thank God! Escaped!)

I reflect upon this brief conversation that I had with myself and see how terror has impacted me.

“It has made me more suspicious than normal”

“No..it has made me alert..and that’s the only way to prevent terror acts..We citizens should play our role as well”

Having so consoled myself I sit to write this blogpost..

“Gosh..i should use my laptop as a laptop and not as a desktop..Lets get cracking”

And that is the genesis of this blogpost..my first realtime blogspot..(though it can’t be posted realtime as I don’t have wireless broadband connectivity here..it has to wait atleast till Friday afternoon to see the light of the day)

P.S: I had started this blogpost by talking about interesting experiences. Here are the other two:

1. We got the call taxi in front of the City Railway Station. The driver came out to open the back and helped us in downloading the luggage. As mama, mami and me were trying to gather the required chillarai (change) among us the driver got delayed by a couple of minutes. In that short time, some one had flicked the driver’s mobile which he had left on the car dashboard (he had left the window open!)..We called his number immediately.. “The Airtel number you are trying to reach is temporarily switched off!!” We were there not more than five minutes and were there only near the car and it was enough for someone to flick a mobile right under nose!! This is my second (second-hand) experience of theft at the City railway station..A couple of years back when I was visiting Mysore with my college friends, the train had stopped in Bangalore for some thirty minutes break..some one stole a couple of bags from the train..though some of our friends were still in the train and some of us were having coffee in  the platform shop..And that bag had the money that we had collected and my friend’s ATM card..We managed to get through the helpdesk of his bank within an hour but that was enough for the thief to empty his account (we still don’t know how he knew the PIN!!!)..Luckily there was not much in the account! I still remember the famous statement that my aggrieved friend made in Mysore railway station as we went to the railway police to lodge a complaint…One of us remarked something about life to which he replied..

“Ennada vazhkai…idho enna paar..oru T-shirt Bermuda voda onnum illama verum kaiyya nikkaren paaru..idhaan da vaazkai!!” (“What do you mean by life? See me..Stranded with only the Tshirt and the Bermuda that I am wearing and nothing else..THIS IS LIFE”)..

It’s true that the most philosophical of statements come one finds oneself in desperate situations!

2. The second interesting experience..We fixed a porter to carry the luggage as it was too much and Rajdhani was in 8^th Platform…After the regular haggling we reach a consensus and he efficiently did his job to take the luggage right till inside of the train. My uncle pays him the amount..

“Thank you Sir…have a happy journey”..He darts away to catch his next customer as me and my uncle look at each other with surprise and smile at each other J

3. My ticket is RAC which got confirmed…S8 berth no 25..I only pray that it should not be the “Side Middle Berth!!!” (yet another manifestation of Lalu’s ‘Milking strategy’). But you know it has been an evening of interesting experiences…

P.S. to P.S:!!

I am sorry to extend this blog..but what can I do..the evening and now the night refuses to stop being interesting..

To ensure continuity..first let me inform you that I did not get a “Side Middle Berth” and got a Lower Berth…

Its Midnight..the train has not yet started!!! It was supposed to start at 22.45…I walk out of the train after an hour of delay..confident that the train would not start any soon J I walk up to the couple of TTs who are sitting chatting outside the compartment..

“Is the train delayed?” (“What a stupid sa question?” – Me to myself J )

The annoyed TT remarks to another passenger sitting next to him

“Tell him”

“He says some good train has derailed” – the other passenger..

“There is no announcement” – to the TT justifying my question!

TT waves his hand and look at the announcement speaker with helplessness.

“the train will start after 12..it will go through Salem” – TT

“When will it reach?”

“maybe around 11 AM”

“If you had told me an hour earlier I would have taken the last bus available”

Silence….

I walk back to my seat and start blogging again J

Another interesting thing happened when I boarded the train..A north Indian couple boarded the train ahead of me..They stopped before boarding the train..and touched the steps and prayed for a moment before entering the train..in the same fashion as the artistes and the players do before entering the stage or playground..This is the first time I see someone doing it before boarding a train or bus…

Now I look back to that and think,

“What’s the use of that prayer?”

“Maybe this train is delayed..but it is not derailed!!” (yet… J ).

I have a dilemma now..Should I walk out if the train is delayed further and take a bus to Chennai..or should I stay in train only? Interesting Qn!! J

And to think that I was waiting for the last one week to spend three full days with amma and appa!!

The battery is down to 57%…Hope my night does not become more interesting…

Wait..there is an announcement…I had never been so attentive to railway announcements as I had been over the last one hour! It is official…the train is going to go through a different route..via Salem, Dharmapuri..Erode…

Hmm…Over the last five years as I had shuttled between Bangalore and Chennai I had travelled to Chennai by all possible means (except air – that option now is anyway in the realm of stupidness).. This is one more to my numerous experiences of travelling from Bangalore to Chennai…

I had travelled to Chennai on the day Rajkumar was cremated..the day a Supreme Court judgment on the Cauvery issue came in the favor of Tamil Nadu..On both days I took a risk..travelled through empty roads and crowded trains on both occasions…Those stories though will be told in a different blogpost..I am going to spare you of those now..

Another strange thing is that I am not hassled today even though there is so much delay that I could have gone to Chennai and even come back..maybe because I am blogging this as it happens..

 “Arey bhagwan..is raat ko aur interesting mat banao..bahut boring bana do” (Kareena Kapoor, JWM, 2007) J

What timing!! The train has started moving at last!!

“Bhagwan hai…kadavul irukaarpa..”

00.30 hours…

Peace…

P.S to P.S to P.S: I reached home at 11.30..a full six hours later than the scheduled time..Normal time to travel from Bangalore to Chennai in train/bus – six hours!!

A Prisoner of Birth

Jeffery Archer’s latest is a fiction book that I read after a long long time now. Basically got attracted due to the attention that it got in the press recently, courtesy Archer’s tour to India to promote his book. By the way I had a glimpse of him at Bangalore’s Landmark, but the crowd was too much and I neither had enough patience nor the adoration to wait and get a copy of the book signed. But I did buy a copy of his latest book “A Prisoner of Birth” and finished reading it in two days, partly because it was fast and partly because I have to finish it and move on to more important things..like..term papers!!

 

The book is not of the class of “The Fourth Estate” or “As the Crow flies”, by favorites of Archer. (I have not read “Kane and Abel” yet!!) The book is more like “Not a penny more, not a penny less” and his previous work “False Impressions”. As those of you who followed Archer’s tour and his interviews would have made out that this is a story of man whose life goes awry after being falsely convicted of murdering his best friend and how he takes his revenge on the culprits.

 

 Archer treads on areas that he is good at – London, courtrooms, prison J and legal issues – and so comes out successfully. The courtroom exchanges are very good. The protagonist, Danny Cartwright, of the novel is a car mechanic from London’s East End, one of those not so rich and posh area of London as I could make out from the book. The villains include the elite – a Queen’s counsel, an actor, an aristocrat and a successful partner at a leading law firm. Archer brings out the divide between the social strata through his depiction and dialogue and how the jury is convinced of the story of the four witnesses because of their background. And that is the basis of the title of the book, “A Prisoner of Birth”. One of the characters says in the book “Each of us suffer by being a prisoner of birth.” Cartwright is a gem of a character even though he is an uneducated car mechanic but no one believes his story because of his background whereas the false version of the four ‘elite’ witnesses is accepted.

 

Even many of us, me included, make the same mistake as the jury does, very often in life. We try to gauge our first impressions of a person from where he is from, who he is, the way he dresses, the way in which he talks, like the language etc.  and the social strata he belongs too. Sometimes we do it knowingly, but mostly we do it unconsciously because of the social conditioning. I am pretty sure that all of us would have had experiences where we had to change our initial opinion of some person (for better or worse) after interacting more with the person. These instances offer us an opportunity to learn and better ourselves.  

 

Though Archer is not preaching in his book (he knows too well not to do so), “A Prisoner of Birth” tries to indirectly point us this prejudice that many of us suffer from and that is the take-away for me from this book.

 

P.S: As for the book do read it if you like fiction, revenge and courtroom exchanges.

Fever Pitch – It’s easy to change for those you love

A couple of brand makeovers in the recent past had captured my attention – interestingly both them being that of banks. One was UTI Bank’s makeover as Axis bank, which used a series of ads featuring twins and the message that everything is the same except the name. The other, the subject matter of this blog, is the brand makeover of Canara Bank trying to shrug off its laidback PSU image into a modern banking one. The Canara Bank story was based on the message “It is easy to change for those you love. We are changing for you”.  I found the UTI ads cute because of the twins, but found it not great on message as I ended up thinking “Whats the use when thre is no change but the name?”. While the second set of ads on Canara Bank were powerful to get across the message that the bank is taking steps to change for you – the customer. These marketing analysis apart I really loved and believed in thier message – “It is easy to change for those you love”.

Isn’t it true? Isn’t it what life is all about? A movie that I saw yesterday, “Fever Pitch” made me thinking on these lines agin.

 

“Fever Pitch” is a romantic comedy featuring Drew Barrymore and Jimmy Fallon. Fallon who plays Ben Wrightman is a huge huge fan of the Boston Red Sox baseball team and that is an understatement. Having spent his childhood with a divorcee mother and Uncle Carl whose only interest was in baseball, the Red Sox and the Fenway Park (Red Sox’s home ground) are the friend, family and everything for Ben. Every season he watches every game at the Fenway Park courtesy the season tickets that his uncle had inherited to him. This big obsession of his has been a problem with his previous dates as well. Ben meets Lindsey (Drew Barrymore), an ambitious upcoming corporate executive and asks her out after the first meeting. Their first date turns out to be a cute little disaster! Lindsey is sick and puking by the time he arrives at her home. He helps her, make her rest, cleans up the mess and falls asleep on the sofa!! (Now, you can’t ask for a better first date than that to show your love to your lady, can you?) Lindsey starts liking Ben too, a different sort of guy than all the previous executive sort of guys she had dated before. Lindsey asks Ben to come over to her parent’s place for the Easter weekend when Ben tells her of his ‘problem’ regarding to his obsession with the Red Sox.  In fact, he asks her to come to the opening weekend with her breaking her traditional Easter vacation with her parents and she obliges. She starts learning about the game and accompanies him for the games. But she finds it difficult to manage her office as well where she is fighting to get the next promotion. Things get worse when Lindsey asks Ben to accompany her to Paris where she is going on an official trip, but for Ben he cannot miss his game. Upset with this and that her plans of letting Ben know of her pregnancy when in Paris not happening, Lindsey snaps with him and even aborts her child, having doubts on the relationship now. A couple of make-ups and break-ups later, the movie heads to the climax, when at last Ben decides to sell his season tickets to a friend of his in order to prove his love for Lindsey. The beautiful climax has Lindsey running all across the Fenway park in the middle of a baseball game and stopping Ben. “You love me enough to sell your tickets. I love you enough not to let you. What do you say we try to do all of it?” she says.

 

And that friends sum up the message used by Canara Bank as well. We all change for the people we care and we love..and we must. It is very easy to live our lives on our own terms without any regard for others but it makes a great and a fuller life if one can accommodate for the near and dear ones. I am not saying that one should not have any individual goals or that sort of thing, but it is important to respect those you love – be it your parents, friends, wife or kids – and make some adjustments in life. Ben decided to give up his lifelong obsession for his love, of course it is just a moive, but  we can sure make some small adjustments for the people we care. And it is these small adjustments that strengthens a relationship, brings it more joy and fulfillment and makes this life worthwhile.

 

P.S: Coming back to the movie, I liked the movie very much. Some of the dialogues are very good like these ones:

“Look if I keep these seats, all I think about every time I am here is what I gave up to be here” – Ben to his friends in the Fenway park who urge him not to sell his tickets.

 

“He fanned me with a magazine for four years when I was going through menopause. I can put up with this” – Lindsey’s mother to Lindsey, when Lindsey asks how she could put up with her father’s new hairdo

 

“You love the Sox..but have they ever loved you back” – A school boy to Ben

 

“Are you faking it, because we don’t have to really do it if you don’t want to “ – Ben to Lindsey when he sees her puking on him coming to her house for the first date.

 

So do watch the movie if you get hold of it. It is definitely worth your hour and a half.

 

And yes, it is official. I have become a fan of Drew Barrymore. She is really cute, pretty and beautiful. Will watch more movies of her now J

 

 

 

 

 

 

Life – a paradox?

Got these lines in a SMS from a friend :

“Life is a paradox. Whatever we want, we do not get; whatever we get, we do not enjoy; whatever we enjoy is not permanent; whatever is permanent is boring!!”