Girlfriend = Grade hike?

Well, to be honest, I've been reading SuperFreakonomics of late, and that has got me thinking about quite a bit of interesting stuff... As the title of this blog post indicates, I plan on tackling the issue of whether having a girlfriend/boyfriend results in a grade hike for students in different colleges, and across different cross sections of society.

The assumptions that I will be making over here are that the people in question here is matured enough to take their careers seriously and also that they are looking at a long(-ish?) term commitment towards their respective amours.

My theory regarding this comes from my experience the last time that I had a girlfriend, back in engineering college during the second year. Before I had a girlfriend, my grades were pretty decent, but that was because college had just begun and I was pretty serious about my studies. In the second term, I found someone special, and my grades just zoomed up like anything! It was a long distance relationship, and predictably enough, we broke up by the end of the 2nd year of college. I went into mourning, and my grades went through the floor, and probably emerged somewhere in Colorado. I didn't really check where they went for about a year, and then by my 4th year of college, I had gained some control of my life and managed to put up a decent show by the end of engineering college.

This said, my theory says that having a girlfriend gave me that focus in life, knowing that I was loved by a beautiful beautiful person and that I also loved her back. I guess this would be generalizing too much, but I think that as long as I did not have a girlfriend, I focussed on trying to find one, trying my luck out with different girls, spending time networking online, offline, through friends and so on. Post the breakup, I spent time moping around, getting philosophical, trying to figure out what went wrong, where I could have behaved differently, and doing everything except studying. Sure enough, my grades plummeted.

So my advice to budding lovebirds would be to get a girlfriend/boyfriend and stick with them for a long term, keep a bigger goal in your life so that if you just have your amours as your sole goal in your lives, your world will crumble around you, like mine did 5 years ago, but if you really want to do something with your lives, then a small hiccup in your love life shouldn't affect you as much. It should just inspire you to work harder towards your ultimate BIG goal, and then maybe find another somebody special along the way.

"Can I drop you off somewhere, Ms Kempster?" - Part 2

So, about 6 months after my previous post on the same topic, I was riding my scooter down the same road in CH Area a week back when I saw a familiar figure walking down the sidewalk.
Aged, slightly hunched, more salt than pepper, she walked on braving the sun. But this time I wasn't in my car. I was on a 1987 model Bajaj Super scooter.
And this time, I didn't stop by, to ask whether she'd like a ride home. I just rode on, didn't even slow down. I felt this guilt for not having visited her home to ask after her and her ailing sister. And then I felt some more guilt; this time for not having visited the grave of my nursery teacher, Mrs Palamkote. The graveyard is just a kilometer from the campus. She spent her life getting kids in shape, up to scratch, and well mannered. Come to think about it, she didn't just give us knowledge, she actually gave us an education. She taught us to eat with our mouths closed, to walk noiselessly, without dragging our feet, to always say "Thank You" and "Please", no matter who we spoke to. She made us little gentlemen.
We've all gone our separate ways since then, each one of us. And even then, I can make out how different we, Mrs Palamkote's children (calling us her students would be an insult), are from the rest of the kids. Love truly can do wonders. Mrs Palamkote passed on a few years back. I couldn't bring myself to go to her funeral. And it pinches me every time I tell my friends that I'm at XLRI now, a few feet away from the place I started my education from. I cannot but bite my lip every time I tell my friends this, because I haven't had the guts to visit Mrs Palamkote's grave.
I don't know what I'm afraid of more. Whether I will break down when I go to the cemetery, or whether I won't feel a thing. I really don't know. But I hope that I find the strength to stop my vehicle the next time for Mrs Kempster when I see her walking on the sidewalk, and that I actually am brave enough to cross the road and say hello to one of my school teachers, or to help someone who needs it. I think that's all I gotta say about that.

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.