Category: Flawsophy

  • Singh.. when you’re happy

    The Bangalore University syndicate is about to pass a resolution which will prevent boys and girls from sitting next to each other in class.. about time, i say, after all, each gender needs to have its own space… hell, no one objects when they make separate loos for guys and girls.. 🙂
    but you cant blame these poor profs.. when guys start roaming around with long hair, and girls with short hair and all of them wear the same kind of clothes, the profs need to be able to have some sort of separation to distinguish among them… no one is thinking about the poor prof, there he is, walking around the class, lecturing and sharing a joke, he slaps a student on the back, it turns out to be a girl, and the next thing he knows, he is slapped with a sexual harassment lawsuit…
    okay, okay…thats enough of slapstick.. while i admit that its not exactly the greatest move by the university, a few years back, it was definitely an unwritten practice among students to sit separately in college classes.. yeah, maybe Kerala was a bit on the conversative side of things… a lot of kids come to colleges from all boys or all girls schools and therefore it is their first chance to learn to behave and mingle with the opposite sex… and creating an official barrier in the classroom may not be a good start at all… but hey, that still leaves the rest of the college.. and i bet the profs are thinking that while it would be a good idea to have sex education in classes, having both sex and education in classes may not be a great idea…
    But the problem that could arise is that pretty soon, the entire lot of students being churned out of BU will be of a very reserved type… and that should definitely make Arjun Singh happy, he loves the reserved types…
    until next time, boys and girls, whats your say on gender blenders!!

  • Deserving vs Reserving

    In movie halls, flights and trains, restaurants etc, there are those who are fighting for space at the last minute, and there are those who calmly walk in and take their seats… the latter deserve to do so, because they had the foresight to reserve the space .. the point to note here is that both sets of people started out on square one, some before the other, and that made the difference.. and so everything is fair.. now, if someone in the late entry set got in by just knowing the right people, thats perhaps unfair…
    and so, if we apply the same scope for reservations in the educational/ job system,. everything would be fair if everyone started from square one.. but that isnt the case, and so it makes sense to reserve places to level the scales… but what if, over a period of time, the reservations have done their job and further addition would start tipping the scale against those who normally occupied square one.. thats exactly what is happening… and that perhaps is unfair, because the regular folks havent gotten there by unfair means…
    and so perhaps it would be a good time to go back to square one, examine it and define it properly so that reservation is done only for people who are eligible even after multiple filters are put in, and since i am no expert, i can think only of socio-economic conditions as the key parameter… there have been too many changes these past few years for caste to be made a criterion.. a case in example would be that the erstwhile ‘upper castes’ in kerala are in a much poorer condition than the so called ‘lower castes’…
    it is absolutely fair that a person should not miss the chance of an education and a good life just because he doesnt have the finance for it… but in the same breath, it is absolutely unfair that a person should cede his right just because he made the most of his adequate finances and worked hard…there is an argument i made quite sometime back on the subject of meritocracy… if educationis the key to a better life, then, judging people by their intelligence levels is also perhaps unfair.. for only so much of intelligence is self gained, most of it is installed without our having a say in it… and so we are back to the theory of survival of the fittest.
    until next time, who is fit to decide what is ‘fit’ ?

  • Of Missions and Missionaries

    Consider your general position in life…:) with a title like that, thought i’ll start with that statement myself before one of you smart ones decided to comment… but the statement wasnt just for the sake of it..
    what we do in life as a profession has very little to do with what we really want to do in life.. having said that, we are part of a timeframe when this is being realised, and more and more people are setting out to do their own thing… but different things like finance, peer pressure and the sheer lethargy of moving out of a comfort zone prevents the majority from starting all over again…which is where we come to the subject of people who walk a path that they have voluntarily seeked out… missionaries so to speak.. not just those of religion, but with various other purposes like saving the narmada or setting up old age homes… does their single mindedness ever fade, do they ever begin to doubt the cause? or is their faith so strong that they go through their life without questioning the purpose at all? maybe, just maybe, its perhaps better not to have too many options…
    i have always believed that to every life there is a reason.. every person is here to do something that wouldnt have happened without him.. he is a link – big or small, in a chain of events that when seen it totality, makes a profound impact… pravin mahajan is a case in example.. by himself he might have been a nothing… but by his action, he has altered the course of a national party, and perhaps the nation itself..each of us is a case in example, some of us realise our action and its effects, and some of us will be left wondering at the end of it all, what difference did we make?
    until next time, a different position, a different life 🙂

  • Memories

    …of the relatively ignorant bliss of childhood… of the roller coaster ride of adolescence, the exhilrating times of youth… so far.. and perhaps as we grow older, the realisation of middle age, and the inevitability of old age… by the time we reach the twilight of ourlives, perhaps these memories become one of the pillars of our lives…
    something that we never work towards, and assume that our minds would automatically record and catalog it – by person, by time, by taste, smell and hordes of other things that cant be described..
    I saw a malayalam movie recently, a movie i was looking forward to seeing, featuring my fave actor and directed by a one movie old director, who had set an extremely high benchmark with his debut movie.. and thankfully, it delivered, and how!! it reinstored my faith in actor whose performance screamed out that all he needed were good scripts and he would do the rest.
    that was a necessary digression, because even the trigger for a post has to be acknowledged, specially one as deserving as this movie…the story of a man who, while having never accomplished his dream, retains his faith in his intellectual abilities, and hopes that he can live his dream through his son. a man who has to balance his duty towards his father with that towards his son.. and while he focuses all his energies on all these happenings in his life, gets struck with alzheimers…. i cant remember a malayalam movie in years which can come remotely close to this one .. and no, thats not because of any ailment, its because there hasnt been a movie like this in years…:)
    its a movie that made me think.. day after day after day, we go around focusing ourselves on the short term and long term things we aspire to do.. some get a joy out of a night with friends, some get it with the knowledge that their investments are safe and sound, some get a joy out of having achieved something..but all of us get a joy out of remembering the good times we have had in our lives… what if we cant remember those.. in His infinite wisdom, perhaps he has answered this too, for if we dont know that we cant remember, theres no pain… we will live small lives, with joys and sorrows we would never remember later…
    until next time, remember to drop in again 🙂

  • Beginnings and Endings

    Saw a lot of new year resolutions on blogs, and that sparked a little post in my head, and it was given a little more sense of direction by a couple of posts – by Aqua and Hyde…
    It is customary to fix a few resolutions on New year, or so they say.. from going to the gym to stop being rude to others to control on number of parallel love lives, it could be anything, depending on subjective fancies..some of us keep it, and some of us just keep it…
    On a larger canvas, by the time we reach the age when we can decide about ourselves, and have quite about decided on ourselves, there are some goals we set for ourselves – personally,professionally and a lot of things that are general, and having to do with the fact that we will be living a certain number of years on the planet… things that we must do (we feel),things that we aspire to do, and things we would love to do… (i wonder if the higher power interferes while we set these)
    as we progress in life, and as our lives progress on us, a lot of these get changed, because of time, the people we interact with, and ironically also because of the sheer inertia that prevents us from changing our habits… (i would love to be at x kgs all my life, but i cant wake up at x am daily to exercise)..and suddenly one day, when we sit staring at the stars, we realise how much we have changed,and how different we are from the original age when we had set these goals… the arbit comments we make on ourselves like ‘i had never thought i would do this’ are only words and we are perhaps not aware of the statement’s depth…
    maybe the initial ideals were right, and maybe the current ‘us’ is right… there is no way to anlayse the paths that might have been… do we owe something to the first time we set our goals, and do we owe something to a higher power which might have set a goal for us…meanwhile, life happens, and perhaps we only happen to be in it….
    until next time, whats happening??