28 and More

Contemplating on past, present, future...future's future all is a part of us.We spend countless hours for this.And all this investment comes only with the fact that we grow older!!..Yes...I am speaking of my age...very difficult for women to comment on that...and hence its 28 and more...there's a benchmarking done and there's no upper limit.What I am interested is...what has changed...The last 5 years have marked a spectacular change in everything..N (when n tends to infinity) number of malls coming up, reality shows ka tamasha and so on...But what has changed to me...Well now I am a little more wiser, or I think it to be so.One of the people I have known used to comment that people who are single still in earaly 30s or late 30s are like the left outs of food..Though I am strictly very against this funda and only because I feel anybody's value doesn’t run on depreciatiating manner. Rather it’s a constant depreciation and appreciation ,both at the same time. So perhaps now I feel it’s the peak of my lifetime in terms of being fit, energetic and thoughtful at the same time. Even my language skills have typically become great. I know gaalis in Hindi, English, Bengali, Mallu!!That’s a great achievement. Now I have started to look at the anti age cream advertisements and talk nonsense in a very serious tone. This actually worked! Recently I was given two blood reports in Apollo Clinic, for the same sample, same test and on same date. With my "nonsense speaking" skills I was successfully able to make them feel that I understand the "case management" process and should therefore get my money back. Otherwise, anyone wearing a long skirt and a simple T and having that crazy, half mad look will be considered as just a simple si ladki who is almost similar to the cow standing on Kolkata roads. And what else...Most importantly I have learnt that happiness is not something which comes when all your desires are fulfiled.Its either by stretching yourself or by accommodating yourself in the framework of what you have, you become happy. And still I hold almost all of my old favourites true.

20 Things!!!

Twenty things I dont like when I am in a bad mood:
1. To see faces which look slutty (however most of my reference point is based on Hindi movies and some stupid incomprehensible thing called inner thoughts!!?)
2. Accidental and unnecessary brushing of shoulders while walking (though the Kolkata crowd would certainly have some reasons ...like Kolkata is too crowded, they found my perfume too much addictive etc etc which are beyond the scope of my intellectually challeneged brains)
3. The lady behind me in the bus continually leaning over me for support without even giving a try to hold the bus handle to resist the laws of inertia.
4. My car going over bumps
5. Guys expressing "how much I love you" kind of dialogues
6. Completely brainless guys
7. Male Chauvinistic Guys
8. Over indulgent aunties who inflate their son's salaries and send marriage proposals
9. Stupid guys who feel salary is the only thing which can increase their ICC (Intellectual and Commonsense Counter)
10.Guys who share dirty or unreasonable sarcastic hurting jokes about every other girl but are terribly hurt, taken aback, disturbed, destroyed, ashamed,flabergasted , mourned to depression when the same is meant for their lady love who never even gives them a damn
11. People who behave as if nothing has happened and act innocent like teddy bear
12. Gals who keep on blabbering and on and on....
13. Staying in office when I have absolutely no work, no future chances of work, no hopes of staying in the same office again
14. Friends demanding to come over at midnight to have a blast when I have loads of work to do and loads of tiredness to refresh upon!!And then the inevitable blackmail, silence abuse starts...
15. Friends who pretend to be always extra terrestrially busy because of the excellent job profile they possess in an excellently dumb company
16.Friends who shoot amateur , unproductive, uninteresting , totally disgusting, unrelated ,disoriented, boring, trivial videos without any content of humour,drama,nature,character, emotion,passion,story ,adventure, thrill in it ,shot in their high resolution costly mobile phones and show those to me every time I meet them.
17.So called friends or roomies or hostel mates who by chance get hold of my hard earned completed assignment and pass it on to others saying its them who have done it , thus earning 1000000 wow points of great fellowship from others for free
18. Boy friends who show a contorted face with bow shaped eyebrows every time you mention you have something important with your parents/friends/personal.
19. Friends (who are girls) suddenly get hooked to a new found love and start complete ignorance of the presence of others in any common/uncommon place they are in
20. People who post comments in Facebook for every trivial reason, who are attention seekers and who never get that attention and who crave for it and start posting comments!!

P.S. Most of the times I am in such bad mood :)
Acknowledgement: Insprired by MangoMan..really admire his blogs!!!

This time,That year......

Well...has been thinking for a long to write something but always find myself either bored or lethargic or too busy!! But then the mail came...the mail for testimonials...and I could not help but open that excel sheet again. Yes…almost this time last year we were busy filling up those lines, juggling with our multi colored thoughts for our friends. Some of those friends who are still there in our lives, some others whose thoughts are imbibed. And life isn’t about gaining or loosing people around us, it’s about how we deal with that, what we become after all the experiences we gain. A very touchy issue it is indeed. Yet, today has made me a bit happier, when I read through those lines. May be some of those were written in lieu of the final parting which was to be there after an overwhelming 2 years of college life, but nevertheless they were to some extent true. They were feelings felt. Last year on the 13th of Feb I was supposed to go to German Bakery and yet went somewhere else…on that fateful day. Remember all the shopping I did with my friend .My life also could have changed. Last year this day I was in a train travelling back home...the urge for reaching home was getting more and deeper, stronger. Last year, today midnight I reached the smoky station of Jamshedpur …and then went to Ranchi. We visited Bodhgaya..An enlightening experience. We as a class,struggled with the Google docs link hanging again and again...the entire class struggled with it .Still we ensured that we write what we want to for our friends.I know somewhere down the line all those testimonials will be lost...infact the hard copy of the year book (costing a good Rs 300) has already been placed in some corner of my room which I don’t remember.But whenever we happen to come across those comments..Nostalgia pours in. A trail of memories burst open through a small, almost forgotten orifice. Trying to balance, balance hard…yet they come back...Ganapatipule ,Matheran, Mumbai, Sweet chariot, Idlisius, FC Road, Vaishali, E-Square, Campus,407,308,Placements…..and finally the goodbyes….

http://writer.zoho.com/public/bidishapaul/testimonials/noband

She

Her lot is all around .By “her lot” I mean people from her country. Kolkata’s strategic position makes them travel here, sometimes settle here forever. The other day when I was roaming around New Market, saw a bunch of them. Those peaceful faces, soft like butter faces, making their way carefully through Kolkata crowd. She also used to be like this...every step, rather every small step that she put forward was cautious..as if one small push from the crowd can melt her. Yet I have never seen someone who could be so strong, both mentally and physically. And she never had any inhibitions for doing anything hectic, unless, it was something that she would not like to do. Motivation had been a big factor for her, even in making efforts in understanding others. May be motivation, may be confusion. Those small rounded fingers and those weird colours on them, that “no matter what” calm and expressionless face, is it true that her countrymen are also like her or is it me who perceives them like her? Otherwise why should I find similarities even in the way of walking, speaking, and glancing!! Those sweet Hindi words infested with God knows what grammar, those generous mix-ups of “karta-karti”,”jaata-jaati” in Hindi...they are so much known to me. And I do remember her on many such simple occasions…

Like or Dislike?

How do you do marketing? Especially for services which are very relation-centric? Places where maintaining public relations is important or else relation with audience is important? One trend that I have been noticing off late is abuse. Yes abuse is in!! Believe it or not, we like to see, feel, experience, know others abuse each other, insult each other. Take for example the realty shows. Till a decade ago when the realty shows were introduced the prime point of the shows were dancing and singing. Shows like Boogie-Woogie or Sa-Re-Ga-Ma (which were one of the first really shows on TV) were seen to have judges judging the performances. By “judging” I mean expressing their view calmly and solely about the performance. Then came in Indian Idol, en-cashing on weak and ugly man’s desires to become hep and happening. So people with oiled heads and smelling shirts left Indian Idol with hair that stands straight, colored in purple or jackets that would cost a fortune. All in the name of confidence building and providing opportunity to underpriviledged.And lo!! Huge sum of money in the pocket of organisors.But take a break.Becasue the next few years change the trend. Here comes judges who are hired just for abusing others, accusations, altercations...all become hep.So judges fight among themselves, contestants question judges’ discretion and what not. Even the promos change. Earlier, normally the promos used to show glimpses of the extraordinary performances. Now they show all those caustic elements. And then comes the next genre of realty shows. Be it Sach ka samna or Big Boss. Entertainment means getting a glimpse of man’s darker side. That’s it. Be it facing the ugliest of truths of one’s life with his family or acrimonious dialogues with fellow people living in the same house. Unhealthiness, abuse, acrimony are in. The latest addition to this is Maa Exchange that deals with the disgust, boredom, distrust and most importantly power play that goes on around the leading lady in a family. And does this mean that by enjoying all these the audience actually can fantasize about their deepest unhealthy desires ,at least on screen? We all know that every human being has a good and a bad part!!So "live" spying on girl friend, or trying out obnoxious(I can hardly say it brave as eating snakes and cockroaches doesn’t converge to bravery) things can make you stick to your sofa and get glued to the television. So we love to see others getting fooled, getting abused. I was surprised to see the promos of a cine awards ceremony showing Shah Rukh Khan in a caustic banter with Akshay Kumar. And in a recent Karan Johar show Deepika was seen making fun of her ex-boyfriend. Fair enough...isn’t it. After all break-ups are spicier than tie-ups.And we have known such people even in our college days too. Who could abuse anyone and everyone without any prior thoughts? Those who thought themselves as witty!!Just unaware of their inability to deliver healthy and humorous entertainment. Surprisingly there is a group of people too who consider these people as wise and great dialogue deliverers and want to somehow copy them. Who knows the NextGen Facebook may look like this:

Proposed IIT Fee Hike

IITs have recommended increasing their tuition fees from 50 k a year to 250 k a year. While I don’t deny the fact that IITs and IIMs are the finest institutes for engineering and MBA in the country, but the subsequent fee rise leads us to think certain issues.
The trend is potent. It gained momentum with the IIMs raising their fee from around 4-5 lacs to around 11 lacs .And then it followed to the other B-schools also...including my own,SCMHRD. And now IITs too vouch for the same. Premier Institutions have simply detected a growing market for their product (education that offers great career) and hence increased the exchange value. The question is what is our perception of education? Even though not the IIMs( because Management Institutes have always got that tag of capitalist, money crazy education), but IITs used to come with the perception of being the “right” place for the intelligent, who may be poor or rich. Graduation colleges are the first place where a student leaps into a world where he has got admission because of his mere self and not because of his family income, proximity to the locality or such causes. At least IITs were so. The main motivation of students to get through IITs used to be being extremely intelligent. The mere concept that “if” you are good enough, you can join an IIT, served as an energizing drink for aspirants. The solution that is being suggested by the IIT committees after the fee hike, in case of poor students is , the availability of “easy” loans. Given that India is a country with a huge chunk of its population staying in the suburbs, awareness about loans is a pain. Statistics from the RBI website suggest that only 0.6% of the loan amount allocated to education is being utilized in practice. Only 10% of the population in India has access to bank credit We should remember in this aspect that the prospective students to IITs are just Higher Secondary Pass outs; they may be brilliant but not aware about nitty-gritty of loan. And if they come from rural remote uneducated backgrounds, it is not expected for their guardians to know too.
So first question, will this fee rise not serve as a turn-off? Will it not de-motivate our young aspirants? Or else will this not motivate only a certain section of society, other left behind?
Secondly, tied to my first question, doesn’t, somewhere this has the smell of the age old problem…that we tend to add more to those who already are affluent? Increased fees of IITs, coupled with the near compulsory coaching classes in big cities, shifting the profiles of prospective students more and more towards being children of wealthy, aware parents…where does India stand in future?
Thirdly, can’t help drawing this analogy-earlier days parents used to get their unruly sons married early to “sunder, sushil bahu” who could keep them at home and tied to family. These days, educational institutes encourage students to take loans (managing yearly 2.5 lacs would be difficult for even middle class families) and tie them in the unending cycle of loans. An education loan at the age of 18, then a home loan at 25, car loan at 26 and here starts the inevitable EMIs…NO ESCAPE.
Fourthly, the primary reason premier institutes raise their fees is the want of autonomy. Accepting government grants is no longer desirable. Does this mean that premier institutes do not subscribe to the credibility of Government or it has some underlying problems that should be addressed?
Fifthly, how can we take steps collectively to increase awareness about bank loans in education and guarantee easy accessibility? There are bank managers who are reluctant or who simply not believe in the credit worthiness of students. How can we overcome such conservatives? May be Government can offer insurance schemes for students who would not be able to pay back.

However having raised this question, I would expect simple and intelligent solution to this problem such that the future remains secured…clichéd but true 

God,To me

Have you always not missed them when they are not around? At home, at work place, at schools and colleges? While they hail almost always from the “not so happening” group of people around us, nevertheless we need them and need them desperately!! Yes I am talking about agony aunts and blame takers!! At home , for the room being unclean ,for the food being bad, at office for the boring work you have to do, for the almost insignificant pay hike, in college for the “C”s and “D”s and for all those occasions when you were supposed to be the “game maker” and could not…just because of….yes..Because of that tolerant, calm and not so bothered face. The confident face that would easily take your blame and yet not be bolstered by it. Someone who could easily be “responsible” for your girl friend ditching you or your best friend getting an “A” for the assignment copied from yours. For ages, in families, women, typically have played this role. So while there is always a woman behind every successful man, there are a host of other women to pull him down  . In today’s age, mostly it would be people who are perceived as being weak. So is personification so inherent? Don’t we see that it is our inner weaknesses that are the main cause? Is it really needed that we tend to “blame” a “human”? But yes, of course, it is very difficult, almost impossible to redirect all our queries, regrets, and needs to our own selves. That is why it is very difficult to be an atheist.At least my brief stint as an atheist, (for about 2 years) leaves me with this. During that phase, what I realized is that, there is nobody to fall back to. There is no one who can make things uneven...We want ourselves to be the happiest, richest, most beautiful, most knowledgeable. We need God, whether he/she is there or not. We need someone to be there at least to be our greatest agony aunt and blame taker. And that is why I believe in God, this faith gives me the courage to face odd things, and in turn increases my inner strength. It gives me the desire to overcome my prejudices and weaknesses, to cleanse my thoughts. God is a name that initiates changes that are good. And it is because of this that to me, God and religious practices are not same. Religious practices to me are mostly fun, friends and family get together, coming back. So necessarily external processes. While God is very much inherent, internal, my own.