About Groups

Since the time of Ogg the Neanderthal, humans have felt the need to belong to groups. The herd mentality as it is termed. Its not so bad. In fact it makes a lot of sense to stick to others. United we stand, divided we fall. If we were lonely nomads, we would have died off long ago. The question that begs to be answered is, how do we choose which groups we belong to? Safety? Some common bond? Love for something?

But we cannot always choose to be a part of a group. A person who is born Chinese does not have any choice in the matter. He will look like other Chinese people, will speak in Chinese and in general would feel more comfortable with people who look, talk and behave like him. This is the case with everyone.

So it boggles my mind when people come up with crazy groups on facebook like “I’m from Mumbai. That automatically makes me 10 times cooler than you.” The response to this would be a similar group for Chennai, Delhi, Bangalore, etc. How does the fact that your parents or grandparents decided to settle down in Mumbai and had kids make you cool? You had no choice in this. I understand people who support football clubs and the like joining their groups because they consciously take the decision to be a part of something. But for the rest of us who think we are cooler than someone else just because we are from XYZ place or speak ABC language, wake up guys, its really lame.

The Global Soap Project

As part of a management course I take at Tech, I get to attend talks by some very interesting people every week. CEOs of companies talk about leadership, entrepreneurship, their own companies and struggles. Today, I had the privilege of listening to Mr. Derreck Kayongo.

Mr. Kayongo is the founder of the Global Soap Project. The idea of the project is simple. For people around the world who live on less than 1$ a day, soap is a luxury they cannot afford. If they had access to soap, the risk of people in underdeveloped countries catching infectious diseases would decrease by half. Every day, hotels around the world throw away millions of bars of soap which have been used only once or twice. They replace them with new soap bars. What happens to the old ones? They are thrown in the trash. What the Global Soap Project does is ask the hotels to give them the soap bars which would otherwise be thrown. They melt the bars and recast them to remove what Mr. Kayongo describes as the “yuck” factor. Then they ship it to Africa.

The problem is the project is new and they need help and funds. Hopefully Mr. Kanyogo would be able to secure both soon because I think this is a brilliant idea. All the best to him. Long live the Global Soap Project.

P.S. I really think he should be on TED

For ye Entrepreneurs

A good post on that essential skill for all budding entrepreneurs – Networking.

How could we forget?

While Mile Sur Mera Tumhaara remains my favourite, there is another brilliant composition which I forgot to mention.

More a Mirage than an Oasis

This is a brilliant article on Dubai by Johann Hari. It seems very long but its well worth your time.

The song of India

I miss my 1990s. If there was one thing that defined television during that decade, it was Doordarshan and its wonderful shows like Dekh Bhai Dekh, Circus, Flop Show and Alif Laila to name a few. But the most wonderful thing that aired on DD every night without fail was the piece known as “Mile Sur Mera Tumhara“. Billed as the song of India, it was conceptualized by Piyush Pandey, at O&M. It featured prominent Indian actors, sportspersons and singers singing the words “Mile sur mera tumhara, toh sur bane humaara” in their native languages.

It was a 6 minute, grand tour of India with greats like Pandit Bhimsen Joshi, Bala Murali Krishnan, Lataa Mangeshkar and a host of other regional singers lending their wonderful voices to the words which underscored the “Unity in Diversity” theme. And how I loved it. How we all loved it.

The advent of cable television however seemed to spell doom for this masterpiece, the voices of its singers lost in mindless reruns of outdated shows like Full House and Friends. We lost sight of the song for many years. Then YouTube happened. Suddenly we could see it in all its glory as many times as we wanted to and what a sweet feeling that was. It is by far my favourite video and I believe I can speak for Jinju and Debu too. Many hours in college were spent repeating the timeless lines in every Indian language and many more just humming the tune and contemplating its underlying beauty. Singing it is one of the things I miss the most in Atlanta. It surprises me to know that people can actually find it lame.

Today, Dimple provided me with the link for “Phir Mile Sur Mera Tumhaara”, a remake of the original which attempts to capture the zeitgeist of India. The opening sequence featuring A. R. Rahman makes it look very inviting but the very next one involving Amitabh Bachchan disappoints. There seems to be an urge to do justice to all the languages and the song is 16 minutes long. Bollywood celebrities are very well represented along with actors from other film industries throughout India. Singers like Shaan and Sonu Nigam / Niggam/ Niggggaammm274yt873#$% (however he spells it now) too make an appearance.

But the song is a complete letdown. There is so much emphasis on the glamour and bling that the original message is lost in the background. There is no need for people like Shahid Kapoor or Priyanka Chopra or Abhishek Bachchan or Karan Johar to be there. And shockingly, while each celebrity gets more than adequate screentime, sportsmen are relegated to a 45 second sequence at the end which they have to share with the men and women of the Indian Army, Air Force and Navy. It is a shame to treat them with such disrespect considering the efforts they put in for the country. That is my only grouse with the original where there are far too few sportsmen and sportswomen compared to actors. However that is the way the people in charge prioritize things in India. One of the only good things about the new one is a sequence featuring Salman Khan and some children in sign language. It was very well thought out and deserved to be in the original too.

So a new attempt has been made to tell the people of India that we are united. The message will be lost if this is the way they have chosen to go about it. It certainly will be if it is only broadcast on DD alone. My suggestion is let things be. Buy slots on other channels and broadcast the original. It at least makes you feel proud. This one just seems to tell us that all Indians should aspire to be are lousy actors and pampered and overrated celebrities.

The first Archimedes moment

Eureka!

This word has something to it doesn’t it? You wouldn’t ever say it out loud because you would sound too pretentious but it is the perfect word to describe a brainwave. One can almost imagine what Archimedes would have felt like.

If you are a quizzer and a there is a question on the screen which your team absolutely has to answer and you are chewing your lip and thinking hard, eliminating some answers and trying to test your guesses and suddenly it strikes you. You just know the answer you have on your mind is right. You practically shout it out, knowing fully well that you have won your team those crucial points. That is an Archimedes moment.

A look at a map of the USA suddenly reminded of my first Archimedes moment. Quizzing was always fun and there was this occasion when I was in competition for a chance to represent my school at a quiz. The prize was big and the competition was tough. There was a contest among the aspiring in which I ended up as a finalist along with another guy who had the reputation of being brilliant at quizzes. The teacher asked us one question after another and there was a tie, which naturally led to a tie breaker.

The question was, “Which American river takes its name from its original name Misha Sipokni, which means river beyond age?”

There was no time to think. If he answered correctly, he would win. I rolled the word around my mouth and suddenly had an image of Huckleberry Finn. That clinched it. I blurted out Mississippi and as it turned out, I was correct. That moment made my day. All I could think of after winning was going home and telling my parents how brilliantly I deduced it.

What happened in the inter school quiz you ask? Well let’s just say I ran out of my Archimedes moments. But the one which made it possible for me to go to another school and take a shot at a big prize will remain special.

Anybody else remember their first Archimedes moment?

Irrelevance

This was an article in the Hindustan Times about communist leader Jyoti Basu’s demise. Over the course of his long (too long in my opinion) political career, he achieved many things. However for some inexplicable reason, the report introduces him as the man who “could have been the world’s first democratically elected Marxist prime minister”.

This statement is largely irrelevant as he was not. How about the fact that he served as chief minister of West Bengal for 23 long years? It just seems that the HT writers wanted to stand out from the crowd. But appears as just another wtf? to me.

The Jim Corbett of the South

Much has been written about India’s pioneer conservationist, man-eater killer and humanitarian Jim Corbett. Almost everyone has heard of him and about Corbett National Park. Indeed, Jim ruled the roost in the north and was widely known and respected. However, not many know that South India too had one such individual who was routinely called upon to rid valleys and villages of man eating tigers and panthers. The gentleman I am referring to is Kenneth Anderson.

Mr. Anderson came from a Scottish family that had settled in India six generations previously. He was as much a native of south India as anyone could expect. His fluency in Tamil, Kannada and Hindi and the utter ease with which he mingled with the native tribes in the south made him very popular. He has authored several books on the jungle, its inhabitants, man eaters and rouge elephants.

Like all hunters, he started out as a murderer, killing in the name of sport. However in time he recognized the folly of this pursuit and swapped the rifle for a camera.

My father is a keen reader of Kenneth Anderson’s works and I was fortunate enough to be introduced to his books at a very early age. I have read the entire collection several times over and every reading just makes me wonder about the life in the jungles long gone. The books would not be considered literary classics. But they are written with such a simplistic style and with such a sense of purpose that one cannot help but be drawn into the stories. His love for the jungles and the people of the land he had called home ever since he was born is evident and although his criticism of the Indian natives’ philosophy of blaming fate for their problems is a bit annoying, it just reveals his deep desire for them to get rid of age old superstitions.

Unfortunately Mr. Anderson died of cancer in 1974, leaving his last book unfinished. Not much is known about him now though. Its a classic case of Kenneth who? However I strongly recommend his books as his stories transport you to another place and another time, where you are the hunter in his machan above a bait, straining your eyes and ears and waiting and watching for that instant when the tiger roars.

For those who came in late

The past few months I have seen a slew of bloggers from SPCE-SPIT. Many of them are still in college with some in their first year. Over the past four years, much has changed in college. Some places have changed their locations and some have ceased to exist altogether. This post is just a record of my recollections of SPCE and I hope whoever reads this looks at the campus in a different light.

Ten things you didn’t know about SP:
1) The year I was an FE i.e. 2005-06, was the year SPIT came into existence. Before that there was just the SPCE Aided wing with Civil, Mechanical and Electrical Engineering and SPCE unaided with Computers, IT, Electronics.

2) The 2005-09 batch of EXTC was the first EXTC batch to pass out of college. Hence placements for that batch were awful.

3) There used to be only one General Secretary, Cultural Secretary and Magazine Secretary for SPCE-SPIT combined even when we were in our Second Year. Rules used to change every year after that and we ended up screwing every college festival.

4) SPACE ‘06 was the best SPACE to ever happen. No arguments about that. Jal had come to college. Bhavan’s ground was packed and all the events were amazing

5) We had two canteens when we were in FE. There was the normal canteen where we would get misal pav, poha, etc. and there was a sandwich, paratha, pizza, etc. counter near the stairs on the ground floor near the SPIT entrance i.e. opposite the elevator and adjacent to the SPIT office. The sandwich counter was shifted to the canteen in our SE.

6) The new SPIT wing did not exist in my FE. There was nothing there. Just the remnants of an old structure. Me and the rest of FE Trical spent many happy afternoons playing football there.

Notice the background?

7) There was no grille and no barriers separating the Quad from the college. The quad was all-access till my SE. And also the Quad height did not vary as much as it does now. There weren’t any fans or curtains.

In SPCE midterms were never taken seriously at all. Still aren’t I guess.

9) There was a reading room adjacent to the SPCE library. After our FE, they broke the wall and expanded the library.

10) This is just for the record really.

Rohit Ajitkumar, Chinmay Kamat and Siddharth Deekshit are the official founders of Sardar Patel Quiz Club, fondly known as SPQC. And BE Trical batch of 2009 will remain the undisputed SPQC Champions. Doubt it? We will take you on anytime, anywhere.

P.S. If anyone remembers anything else I missed out on, please let me know