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.

Exams over!!

Another mail from Examination Department!!!Now that I have passed out, and our convocations are also over my SCMHRD mail box welcomes this mail. These mails have been the most unwanted mails, eagerly awaited too!! Yes, because the sooner you get the bad or even the worst news the better it is because anyway Exam Department never fails to send mails!! Of course some credit we must owe to the great men or women who had managed to put chewing gum in the Exam Department's lock or those who could send mails “cancelling SAP exams".From struggling with 13 core subjects in a semester and more importantly with those non-core subjects we learnt our knowledge of statistical analysis .Since we had no clue about what exam out of those 13 is going to be given the next day morning, we indeed learnt to do some probability analysis and come out with mode values. Be it surprises like an exam on the 1st of Jan or Re-FCQs to all those privileged people, SCMHRD Exam Department rocks. I still remember the transition of perception from the time I joined SCMHRD to the time I passed out and finally to the present time. Bitterness if persisted for too long becomes a part of you and you start to like it too. May be somehow I too liked those whims of Exam Dept and now I "miss" all those. I can still visualize those print outs (sometimes "by order of Chief Learning Officer") on those notice boards. I can still visualize eager faces trying to discover something new and useful from those print outs!!And those "please allow us" sessions to ask for a Re-FCQ and then the surprised exasperation at the decision. After all who ever heard that you can "allow" for a Re-test based on your gym attendance!!They say that our MBA course had been designed to prepare us against the "uncertainty" of future, unpredictability of the world we step into after MBA, of the monotony of our professions, of the unpredictability of our boyfriends or girlfriends (who knows what makes a good choice for them!!), of the nature of what we think we know and don’t know, of each step that we take into tomorrow. And now that I have already stepped into it, I can hardly tell whether "this" helped or not. But still going back I miss Exam Department :)

Women??Assets or Liabilities?? Or Human beings??

Latest discretion by Supreme Court Judge Gyan Sudha Mishra to list her daughter’s marriage under liabilities section in the assets-liabilities declaration raises yet another question to support my non-conformity to such social obligations.
We are in the 21st century and claim to be a modern nation with a growing economy. But isn’t it shocking that there is only one woman judge in the country’s highest court and even she has discriminated her own sect? With the kind of education Justice Mishra would have got, we would expect her to be progressive, if education is meant to enlighten of course. But why, would she take such a decision? Knowing that this is surely going to attract comments? Or is it that her case just makes us broach this ancient issue once again. Yes we can take this as an opportunity to look to the current situation of our lives and delve deep about how, we women are placed in society.
I have grown up in a very modern and highly educated family and so for me it becomes impossible to conform to social ideas which make an unnecessary and unreasonable discretion to women. I have seen people, till today, paying huge sums of money to bridegroom, although that is not to be called as dowry, rather gifts of love!! And how many woman managers do we find in the higher management?Saddeningly this absence of woman managers is always mapped to “inherent inability” or “lack of that thing” but never realized that given all the expectations a woman has to fulfill, professional limitations would be just natural to her. And then, for women who are independent and confident to make it to the top are always faced with a lot of difficulties .Surprisingly these difficulties are posed by her own people, her closest people. I don’t deny that responsibility of children and family is on the lady, but how can it be just a one-sided affair? The responsibility is also vested upon the man. Most men think that they are done with their responsibility by earning a hefty amount.But when it comes to their wives, they extend, classify, change those responsibilities. The history of power has always been like this. So it is men who decide what women should do!!And that is obviously based on their convenience. We cannot blame men for taking decisions where outcome is convenient for them as every human being is exposed to bias for himself or herself. So it is not that we can urge men to take “equal” decisions but what is required is there should be equal opportunity to take decisions. I have faced this question, followed by disgust, surprise, gyan and what not from so many people on the topic of whether girls after marrying should go to stay with her in-laws or it can be the other way round. My take on it…it should be completely based on logical thinking,
1.On the requirements of each side i.e. how much my parents need me or my in-laws need their son, are their any other people who can take quality care of them,how much physically fit they are ,how much we need them
2. On our future plans, if any, and how we can converge those to our present
3. Convenience, comfort and ease of living of all parties
4. Finally, the priorities we give to each of the above factors.
Thus I can never conform to the “demeaning” attitude our social structure shows towards “ghar jamais”.I have seen ample instances of son-in-laws living happily and respectfully in their in-laws place. And why should we make our self respect so fragile as to get hurt in non-existent barriers?
It is people who can think neutrally, who could come up with social reforms. Widow Remarriage and Sati were also accepted social procedures, isn’t it?
One interesting thing my friend related was that when one of his friends didn’t change her surname after getting married, the couple was not offered a house on rent even after showing marriage registration certificate. These are all small difficulties and surely the satisfaction which the girl would have got living with her “own” name deserves much more.
Justice Mishras case has also brought up another topic of whether girls are assets (mostly non performing or toxic) or liabilities!!! And this reminds me of the diminishing value of girls...if at all they are assets!!So if you are past 30 or past 40 you become a non-value add entity in the field of marriage.Apart from the biological clock which is valid, surpirsingly there are "other" inexplicable reasons too.Strangely by social perception, single men of 40 can still get married to below 30s!!So no depreciation for men. May be the example of Crystal Harris and Huge Hefner will only prove this. But don’t we realize that there may be an economic angle to it also? Otherwise why most such cases occur between an old man who is very rich and the young girl who is very beautiful? Marriage is totally on the two people who want to get married, and unnecessary comments by third parties totally unwelcome, so why not let them derive their own value additions from each other? So the bottom-line is we cannot define the utility of human beings by age, beauty, money on a generic scale. Each person will have a different perspective and if we are thinking otherwise ,such attitude will only prove our confined perspective.
Hence let’s make this a point that we respect individual existences and not go on and on age old perceptions.