Esmile Puhrleese

OR should I say, "smile please" or whatever it is in your language to ask someone to smile towards the camera. And sometimes, we dont need to say cheese. It just happens. And we catch it on camera.

These days, kodak moments have become more "capture-able" because of recent advances in technology. We have upto 8 megapixels of CCDs on our cell phones to take pictures.
But you know what? We waste them. When was the last time you took a picture that actually had meaning? A picture that would end up on the mantel piece and not just on your SD card?

Well, the answer to that will vary from person to person, but the simple truth is that most of the pictures in the world are not picture perfect. We can surely find a flaw in it. Just like most scenes, just like most people. Just like just about everything.

There is however one image, that can be picture perfect; and that is a smile. A genuine smile, no matter when, no matter where, is picture perfect. But smiles are now reserved. We fake them for the cameras all around us. People are not in the "to smile to" category. Sometimes, even our family cant get it.

Where there would be a unit of fun and laughter and smiles, we have now created functional units where relationships are merely tags. Mum is the lady who drives me to and from school. Dad is the guy with the money. And we donot even fake smiles for them.

But we surely will for the cameras.

And we call ourselves a superior race? Even ants communicate, and I am sure they smile to each other! So here goes: Picture perfect does exist. It exists when there are genuine smiles. When the world dos not sap the innocence from the smiles.

This post is dedicated to all the people who make me smile. My family, my friends who form my extended family, and to every one who has ever smiled because of me. I consider you all my family. You are the people who make pictures perfect. Your smiles brightens up not only a view finder, but colours a life.

Esmile Puhrleese, its more than you give it credit for! It could change a life!

Wordless!

Hi everyone.. To those who follow this blog, and the others who were forced into reading it! I have been away for a while (Doing what? Even I dont know!!), but as I sat messaging a friend today, my fingers remebered the joy of words, and.. Am back!
All this time away from the blogsphere has not left what you would call a gaping hole, but has made my last post date almost ancient. And as I write this I remember the passion that goes into anything, major or minor. This is the passion that brings us together with other people.
I dedicate this to one such person who makes my day with words, but remains wordless! Confused? Well, this person IS the words that emanate from her. But somewhere deep inside, the effect is wordless!

People come into your life as a blank sheet of paper. This is the paper of your emotions, your soul. Some people are merely a pencil mark on the paper: readily erasable, easily forgettable. Others make small marks with pens. Some are like calligraphy. And there are a few, who mark themselves wordlessly as perforations in the whole sheet (kinda like the exam answer sheet markings!).
It is these people who I will talk about today. Everyone expects everyone else to have that one close friend, the one person to miss, the one person to remember, and that one person you share everything with.

And that one person becomes a part of your life. A very integral one at that! But why so?
A simple explanation is there in the Twilight series. Vampires usually exist in pairs. So do we. These pairs can be friendships, or other relationships. In every group of people, you will find that one person.
I cannot generalise how that one person is. Usually, the person will be like your favorite brand of chocolate. You love the flavour, you love the smell, you love the texture. You love everything about it.
And most off all, it usually has enough caffiene to give us the kick we need! And in the manner of chocolates, the one person gives you that kick you need. Its awe inspiring!! At the basic level, this person leaves you.. Wordless!
If you have reached here and not got a name, go out and find that person. It need not be the partner in your relationship, it may not be your best friend, but it is there. You need to have another side to the coin that is you.
Only then can you describe it, and believe me, you will be: wordless!!

Micro skirts in a macro mindset?

A city which is the adobe of the hep-est university in India, Delhi University.

With 2,20,000 students; most of them carefully reared into making DU hep, the campus is a favorite for newsies, politicians, and a wide array of other such characters.
The newsies, of course love this place. All manner of articles can be seen from this one university. One that caught my eye quite recently was titled "DU students show the latest Fashion", and showed a photo of two girls in skimpy clothes (that was what actually caught my attention!)
Well, Fashion=Skimpy Clothes???
Help me out a little. I thought fashion meant the latest and most admired style in clothes and cosmetics and behavior, but here in Delhi, it seems to have a absolute different meaning.
Lets explore this meaning further.
And to do it, I have asked a few people to answer some of my questions on 'fashion'. This post is dedicated to you guys!!
Back to the topic, but lets move to Mangalore. Remember the case where a few decided to make a point by roughing up some girls who were trying to have a good time? That was meant to be a political statement.

POLITICAL STATEMENT??!! you ask.
'Yes' I aver.

What sort of democracy allows for such statements?
The same sort where the only meaning for fasion is showing enough skin.

Which brings us back to the topic of this blog. Our mindset is still stuck somewhere in the early 1900s, and that is why we are here. We have had a woman prime minister, a woman speaker, hell, even a woman president, but we are still chauvinists deep down inside.
This deep down, is, unfortunately coming up to the surface now. It is singeing everything else around it.

Thats why DU is only fasionable as long as there are skimpy clothes on campus, and the only sort of statement that works is one where women need to be "controlled" (their words!!)

Where does that leave the aam aadmi, who is trying to widen his horizons and globalise his mindset?, it leaves him burnt, and he also goes back to the stone ages. He also decides that the teenaged girl at home shoud be controlled. That if she looks at a guy, she is lusting for him. That if she is fasionable, its a curse! And this is the same person who calls himself a 'broad-minded man'!

Wake up people.

We are allowing fanatics with rabid emotions to control our lives. The sooner e notice this, the better it will be.
And that will usher in a macro-mindset, for real

Addendum: Tuesday, July 14, 2009 : 13:56 hrs

This just in! Yesterday's news reports that the governmment of a certain indian state was helping a lot of girls from under-privelaged families to get married. But, guess what? The 150- odd girls first had virginity checks done on them to ensure they were pure enough to be married.

That the party conducting the tests was the same one involved un Mangalore (they try to wash their hands off it, but we know better; dont we?!) was no surprise. What was surprising is that it rocked the house of parliment. And thats good. But, the mud slinging began, and it became a political fight.

So much for Macro mindset, huh??

You take away all the dignity that a woman has on her wedding day.

You take away their dignity in pubs.

You dont let them work.

And you want to call India a growing democracy?

Yup it is! India.. the growing democracy with a rapidly shrinking mindset.

Of staples cabinets and dots

As i type this, there is a small bar on the top allowing me to change the font of this article. A few days back, I found out why this existed.. Some programmer had taken a caligraphy class in college! He said it al came down to "connecting the dots".

But think again.

The dots havent been conected at all. Its more like a curve fitting, where the dots have been pushed into the the line which is supposed to be connecting them.

I feel it is more like paper. Each episode is a piece of paper. We staple them together when we feel the dots are connected.

If the curve gets out of bound, we open the staple, shuffle the pages, put in some new ones, pull out the old ones, and staple it again.

The papers we pull out get filed away. Into some little nook in a filing cabinet.

Some days, when we need to open the staples, our lives are in a disarray. We grovel for order, and wheedle ourselves into connecting the dots yet again. The papers all come out, the stapler ready as a virgin, and we sift, we  sort, we screen, we classify, we arrange, we order, we rank, and then we staple.

Our life moves on till the next incident.

And this is repeated

Imagine the filing cabinet is lost

That will be the day we learn to live our lives. Yes, we will look back, but we will look at a life well lived, for good or bad.

But what is lost?

Our ideas. The only legacy we leave is our ideas. People will forget the Mahatma, but not non-violence.  We dont connect the dots to see what we have achieved, rather to ensure that we achieved something.

All boils down to the good ole self-realisation.

So if we loose the cabinet, we loose the only source of self-realisation! The same man who spoke about connecting the dots felt that in his failures, he let down a generation of entrepreneurs.

Wake up! 

It didn't matter to any of the entrepreneurs! You just stapled the pages wrong.

Staple them again, and your whole life changes.

That is the difference between an optimist and a pessimist.

At the end,  the order is immaterial.. People come and go, their cabinets go with them.

As do their neatly stapled files.

So staple away to optimism or pessimism.. to joy or misery.. The stapler's in your hand!

Dynamism: A Tribute to all the Martyrs

What drives you?
What makes you feel alive?
Is it eluding you?

Well, think about it.. This is for the person that awakens a sense of immanence in me ( continuing with my devoted to you series), and to a blogger I ardently follow ( thanks for the title!).

So back to the story of a life , and of a relationship. Most relationships follow this at some point of time, so it isnt something new to us. Condone the banality of the passage, and bear with me.

Boy meets girl, they fall in love, shit happens, they fall apart, and then, et voila back again!!

Whew.. That does it. But this scenario is what the Warner Brothers, and their co-conspirators earn millions from. What makes it so magical?

We do. We see the magic in it. And it makes us feel alive!

We see the magic in simple words and transform them into feelings. These can be awakened by characters so far away, so displaced from us that we will never understand their world. But we know it is also our world.

Whether you are in the third row with popcorn in one hand and that person on the other, or in a dark and depressing room, you feel the dynamism get you.

This dynamism is what we live for. Some get it from money, some from power, some by a face.

But what when you have neither of these with you, but everything you do defines this for a billion people, where does the dynamism come from?

It comes again from us. All our armymen know that one smile is all that they want. A gesture of love, a minute of rememberance.   In their dynamism lies death waiting, but they want us to remember what keeps us going. It keeps them going.

The worlds a stage, a major play is on, but someone goofed up on the script. All the men were players. Now all men are merely in the stands. The script is written only for the armymen.

And death is repeated.

Lets try to change the script. 

And while watching your next movie and feeling the dynamism creep through, remember, that those who let the love story happen, were themselves in something far more deific.

Figure out for yourself my lad,
You have all that the greatest of men have had,
2 arms, 2 legs, 2 hands, 2 eyes,
And a bran to use if you would be wise,
Will all this equipment they began,
Do start from the top and say 'I can'.

Look them over, the wise and the great,

They take their food from a common plate,

And similar knives and forks they use,

With similar laces they tie thier shoes,

The world considers them brave and smart,

But you have all they had when they made start.

You can triumph and come to skill,
You can be great if you only will,
You have arms and legs and a brain to use,
And a man who has risen great deeds to do,
Begins his life with no more than you.

You are the handicap you must face,

You are the one who must choose his place,

You must say where you want to go

How much will you study, the truth to know

God has equipped you for life, but he,

Lets you decide what you want to be.

Courage must come from the soul within,

The man must furnish his will to win,

So figure it out for yourself my lad,

You were born with all that the great had,

With your equipment they all began,

Get hold of yourself and say 'I CAN"

-Unknown Author

This was put up on a door somewhere and is the most inpiring poem. Ever.

The mascot

Told you i changed my phone?? This one i way cooler than the thing i used earlier. That made me finally get down to actually doing some stuff that i was planning to with my phone. For starters, I attached a picture to each name. That is when the dilemma Which picture do use for the home landline?? For all other numbers, there was one person who would be most lkely to call, or answer the phone. I started thinking, and voila, i got the answer...

And this post is dedicated to him, the family mascot, Ochre.
He is a small cute cocker spaniel with a big apetite for food and tummy-rubs. He can melt your heart with his eyes..Make you love him. That is the power of a mascot. When you com home to meet the family, the mascot is always on your mind.
That set me thinking (thank god it did, or else I would never be able to write this post). What will the mascot for earth be when we have found extraterrestrials(or maybe settled on mars)? What defines Earth?
LIFE
D-uh, life already exists on another planet now, right?
So I was thinking again.
And i got it.
POVERTY
that is the one thing everybody on earth suffers from.
Bill Gates from the poverty of time. The roadside beggar from the poverty of money. That african in the middle of a sub-saharan village with no water: poverty of hope.
We are poor not because we have less, but because we want more. Too much more.
Isnt that human nature?
I guess so. In our quest for more, we get more. To become developed.
And we have lost the world.
So when we have found the other "worlds", will we hate this planet we have come to take for granted?
I dont know. But hope that there is an answer.
What i do know is that the flag of this earth will have one theme.
And I am sure you already know what it is.
Change the poverty.
Not by giving alms, but by changing mindsets. Becuase you need an Ochre-ish mascot. Charming and Lovable.
Not poverty.
Because it is the mascot that flashes everytime a call comes.
And it sticks in your head.