India is not beautiful - let us face it.

The India of the 1970s & 80s we grew up, became every day an uglier country. It was a place where the very elements of life — earth, water, air — had been poisoned. The land was strewn with garbage, the rivers and urban waterways were choked with plastic bags and white chemical foam. The streets were buckled, the footpaths broken, the air thick and unbreathable. To look out at an Indian city or small town was to be greeted by a bleak sprawl of shoddily constructed low-lying buildings, shrouded in a mantle of brown smoke. It was an apocalyptic landscape with no underlying design save for an ever more urgent need to accommodate greater numbers of people.

Today, India’s environmental problems are among the grimmest in the world. They relate to raw sewage, waste and open defecation, which cause childhood malnourishment, along with diseases like hepatitis, cholera and typhoid fever. The air in the cities is so filthy from factories and cars that middle-class parents now check the levels of PM2.5, or airborne particulate matter, on their smartphones, as people in other places do the weather, before letting their children outside to play.

Courtesy - NY Times - http://nyti.ms/1ILjNXL

Technology is a poor substitute for personal interaction

All that I am experiencing mentioned in the article - teenagers hooked to video games & texting by spending hours on smart phones with negative effects on childeren's behaviour, health and academic performance. Reproducing some of the excerpts from the article to reiterate to myself and my childeren in an attempt to wean them off the smart phones. (hoping against hope?)

“If kids are allowed to play ‘Candy Crush’ on the way to school, the car ride will be quiet, but that’s not what kids need, they need time to daydream, deal with anxieties, process their thoughts and share them with parents, who can provide reassurance.” 

"Out in public, children have to know that life is fine off the screen. It’s interesting and good to be curious about other people, to learn how to listen. It teaches them social and emotional intelligence, which is critical for success in life.”

"Children who are heavy users of electronics may become adept at multitasking, but they can lose the ability to focus on what is most important, a trait critical to the deep thought and problem solving needed for many jobs and other endeavors later in life. As children have more of their communication through electronic media, and less of it face to face, they begin to feel more lonely and depressed."

There can be physical consequences, too. Children can develop pain in their fingers and wrists, narrowed blood vessels in their eyes (the long-term consequences of which are unknown), and neck and back pain from being slumped over their phones, tablets and computers.

Manspreading

Exactly as I felt last night travelling economy class on a budget airline, 4 hour journey felt forever from Hyderabad to Singapore. 

Courtesy : Financial Times - http://on.ft.com/1Iigxa1

We are all used to this well-documented phenomenon on trains but coping with it on a long flight is surely a different matter. What was the correct approach to his economy-class imperialism? It was perfectly calibrated, going just far enough to secure extra space but stopping at the point where it could still be excused as thoughtlessness rather than calculated strategy. Tactically, he played a blinder, inching into my legroom and seizing control of the strategically important armrest. I am still unsure as to the correct approach. I know how petty I must look but air travel seems designed to bring out the inner, smaller you. In these circumstances you have only two options: be the trivial bloke who defends every millimetre of space or rise above it and let someone else’s pettiness triumph. 

Cultivate your garden, the inner as the outer.

The Chinese say: “If you want to be happy for a day, get drunk; a week, kill a pig; a month, get married; for life, be a gardener.” 

The below excerpt is courtesy NY Times Op-Ed by Roger Cohen : The Great Unease

There’s a lot of status anxiety going about these days. People live suspended between the anxiety of being deluged in communication and the agony of receiving none. They have always wanted to be liked, but now they must also be “liked.” They exist under the digital pressure of reciprocal judgment, a state that knows no repose. They are either on top of things, a momentary illusion, or overwhelmed, a permanent state intermittently denied. They look around wondering how it is possible to keep up. They have access to everything and certainty about nothing. They zigzag between indulgence and denial, frenetic states and cleansing cures, their busy selves and their better selves. They have nightmares about getting a thumbs-down. They ask themselves how the Day of Judgment became day-in, day-out judgment. They make resolutions that unravel. They amass to-do lists that cannot get done. They are not sure where they stand on the ratings scales, on the lists that proliferate, on the global grading of everything and everyone. This state crept up on them. How such unease came about, who willed it and with what design, was not quite clear, but it must, they thought, have something to do with what is called progress. Where it was headed was equally murky but sometimes the destination looked unappealing, a place where peace had been crowded out by the pursuit of efficiencies.

18 Years

Procrastination

New year resolutions have not kicked in yet, this is why! We have much less concern about our future selves than our present selves — and are willing to sell our future selves down the river for the sake of present ease. But when the present marches into the future, and we are confronted with the work that our past selves refused to do, we pay the price in unmet deadlines, all-nighters and general torment. How true?

Happy New Year 2015

Happy New Year to you and all those you hold dear and we wish you true happiness, joy and success in the months to come. Cheers!

Dhoni - "the detached" lets it go

Borrowing from Harsha Bhogle's article in Indian Express....

Dhoni, while he has finished with Test cricket, he continues with the format he has been far better at. But he has walked away with no fuss at all. Remember the long-haired new captain who had just won India the first World T20? He gave away his match shirt to someone in the crowd and walked away quietly. And the suave captain who won India the 2011 World Cup? Spot him in any of the pictures? He let it be Tendulkar’s moment. He let it be about Indian cricket. It wasn’t about him and he didn’t force himself into every frame. It was actually his evening but he looked at it from afar. I thought it was cool. The sign of a confident man. He made a statement by not being there.

What he did in Test cricket was remarkable. He took his rustic game — the firm jab, the slash over point — and squeezed more out of it than you would have thought possible. An average of 38 is excellent for someone who did as many squats behind the stumps as he did, for someone who had to be in the game always. It is very difficult to be a wicket-keeper, captain and batsman. He did it for 60 Tests — remarkable.