Category: Opinions

Wake Up!

Recently read this news that Women and Child development ministry has come up with a proposal for making it compulsory for a husband to give half his share of income to his wife. This news brings a smile on your face, isn’t it? Now the women will have better freedom, free from hassles of husbands, maybe improved savings (eh?), no more dependencies on husbands for buying ‘your things’. Has the smile widened??? No!!! More kitty parties, incessant shopping sprees, more friends to join in the leisure-time activities, more to do in their occupied lifestyle etc. The smile must have reached at the max at both ends.
                If yes; then wait! Have you ever given a chance for this thought to reach your brain? Or you just crushed the part of the thought that was reaching for the brain under your larynx. Give it a little thought and you will realize that it’s a sort of reservation again, the same ominous thing that a simple, innocent and non-special general categorized Indian has always dreaded. The previous reservation scheme (General, OBC, SC and ST) still had some logic, but this proposal is like annexing our wallets for a reason that is beyond explanation. I am not saying this because I may be a future victim of this practice, but just because of a simple reason…… it’s ABSURD.  Women Empowerment can’t be achieved at the cost of rendering men penniless.
                It doesn’t just feel right to be deprived of the hard-earned money on the 1stday of the month. If you do not understand my concern, just imagine yourself in the shoes of the man parting with his half share of income. Applying it to the families where the husband drinks or assaults her wife is 100% justified but thrusting it to every household is largely superfluous.
Besides, there are other factors to look upon; what about the house-husbands? Do they get a share too?
And what about the families that have both partners working; are they too in consideration?
I don’t understand what is actually happening under the banner of gender equality. I doesn’t feel right; I mean fighting for what is right is one thing but fighting for the right thing that compromises someone’s way of life is wrong and needs to be checked upon. The sweet days when men used to work and wives stayed at home and wait for their spouse to return home have already long gone. They started working, we backed them; they needed shares in property. we complied with them; but now this! I strongly disagree. This step is the result of limited point of views in the committee. The ministry needs to brainstorm about the pros and cons of this proposal before handing it out in public. This is a big proposal and may cause tension in otherwise stable Indian households and so demands a lot of discernment.

Gifts of the decade!

You must have heard that some localities rammed and then burned a truck because the truck hit a boy of the locality and they even don’t leave the driver too, without knowing that the accident was the boy’s fault. They not only cause the damage to properties but they traumatize the driver too, maybe for life. What I advise them to think is, that, they can someday be a victim of a similar situation. What will he do at that point? Explain? No. Before he even opens his mouth to explain, he will be severely bruised and scarred for life, for a crime that he may have a minor contribution. These sort of news are a common occurrence but we pay no heed to it.
Using democracy the wrong way, they instantly form groups to stage protests, even if the government is planning a good initiative, but is causing them a little discomfort. An individual now practices only the rights that the constitution has given him, but what about the duties? If you can’t spare a little discomfort for a good cause, then you are not a citizen that India expects you to be. The situation is like this, that everyone wants India to reach the zenith, but no one wants to compromise. If their lives are compromised and they have to concede, they protest violently. It quite disheartening to see the people of India takes violent steps thinking that it’s the only way.
It’s like insensibility and insensitivity are the gifts of the century. It’s sad and quite funny to see that groups fighting each other on an issue as tiny as regulation of loudspeaker in an area. Why don’t they understand that there are other people living too, who need some rest at their homes after day’s hard work? But even ignoring the rules, they blow their loudspeakers out loud on accounts of celebration or religious ceremony. WTF, even god doesn’t want you to cause discomfort to others while praising him.   
                I wake up every morning, hoping that this can be the day, that the ‘mob’ remained inactive, just one day…but NO! a big fat NO as if that’s impossible. As I was writing this column, fresh riots started off in multiple districts; here in Allahabad, the Muslims started a row against the killings of Muslims in north-eastern states. But the protest ended up being violent causing a curfew being imposed in few parts of city. I hadn’t thought that I would get such a fresh example to emphasize my point. This just proves that a mob is like a herd of sheep directed by stimulants fuelled up by riots after riots.
                One of the reasons I can see is the Indian concept ‘Unity in diversity’, backfiring in the backdrop. With the current riots forged between the north-eastern and the Muslims, the stage is all set for bringing the failure to once-thought brilliant concept.
                Wait, my angel part of brain thinks that there is still hope, what a douche!!! I will listen to the devil this time…..there is no hope in living under such pitiful circumstances, where you might be the next victim of let’s say an ethnic, communal, sports hooligans, religious riot; unless the mentality of the riot-mind-infested change for the good.

Imagination gone puff!

Read it somewhere on the internet, but it really paints the picture merely from words.
                “9 year old today have Facebook, Twitter, phones, and iPods.
                When I was their age, I had colouring books, crayons, chalk and imagination.”
Well, at first, it may sound absurd, but the truth is that’s what has happened with the human evolution after the introduction of TV’s, Computer and other digital devices capable of showing us what only our naked eye could have shown, a century ago. This may seem rhetoric, but you will realize that just how apt it is when you think about it seriously.
                There were methods to stay creative, knowingly or unknowingly, the brain in way of processing our daily activities found necessary ingredients that helped it stay fit and healthy. But the unhealthy timetable of a person nowadays is either so hectic or so ‘lazy-like’ that it is affecting the brain in a bad way.
We, as kids, used to go to the terraces when the electricity wasn’t there and certainly not worried about when will the electricity be back again…we would do all kinds of stuff, enjoy the calmness beneath the sky, the refreshing breezy air, succumbing to the Mother Nature and yet appreciating the beauty of it. There would be an open exchange of ideas, the thoughts pouring in on the open minds: that’s all you need to get an out of box idea, isn’t it? But, nowadays, the common trend is being engrossed in TVs, video games, playstations, PSPs, Facebook etc. With no time for building their thought process, the probability that they might contribute something fruitful to the society looks a bit diminishing. Why only kids or students, parents too aren’t impregnable by these activities. Nowadays, an average office-going person spends more than a third of his day at his office cubicle and when he returns home, is again entrapped in a bigger cubicle, only this time he has a television in front of him. Some even take their professional work to home.
I am not asking to put a ban on the television etc., it’s true that it’s a way creative people show their skills to the world via the daily soaps, reality gigs, game shows, movies etc but inadvertently they are putting the imaginative bird of the viewers to sleep. Yes, that is arguably true, because your brain can work as much you want it to be, but give it a hint of distraction and it switches itself off. These are acting like distraction and putting our mind away from the real thing for which the brain is made up for. Our brain is not compatible with such long viewing hours of televisions or anything of that sort.
 Now hours of thinking have been replaced with hours of TV sitting, talking face to face with friends has been replaced with communication via social networking. It’s not healthy; neither for any individual’s health nor for the society.  The solution to this remains an enigma.* But can be circumcised by a little awareness from the parents. Being aware of this problem is also a big success while working towards the solution. Giving a limited time to the digital Medias may help too. Earn some time for yourself, and think about who are you, how have you been living? Daydream about what you want. Daydream is actually our brain’s way of getting us to creatively focus on what it is we really want. These solutions may not be easy to follow, but will surely bring your life back to track.

God particle isn’t in the hands of God anymore

The discovery has been finally made. The Standard model of quantum physics holds true. The researches and the hard work put up by Peter Higgs and his team of scientists has finally paid dividends. When Higgs gave the theoretical model of this particle back in 1964, very few accepted it; infact he was mocked. When the science community was expecting the found particle to be the Higgs-boson particle, Stephen Hawking even lost a 100$ bet with Gordon Kane (of Michigan University), that the results would be different. Well, a little heads up for those who are expecting concrete results; CERN says they have found a new particle with 99.999% certainty, it will take some time to confirm the found particle is indeed the much speculated Higgs-boson or not.
                The particle is nicknamed the ‘God particle’ (obviously by non-scientists), that brought the attention of media towards this research and resulted in the jaw-dropping publicity and may have offended some theists due to its nickname.
                To know more about the whole story, let’s take you back a few years back.  A Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was built by CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) in 2008 (actually it took about 10 years to be built), at the Swiss- French border near Geneva. Laid in a 27 km length, it was setup to validate the existence of the Higgs- boson experimentally. According to the theory, two 7 TeV proton beams collide to create an environment for observing the Higgs-boson particle. Currently, the LHC can accelerate protons to 4 TeV only, but soon it will be upgraded for optimum work. For getting better results, researches were carried out by two teams working independently to ensure that the results that are going to follow don’t look like a fluke. However, after combining datasets of the two teams, CMS and ATLAS, the results looked consistent and promising.
                It all started when bosons was discovered in the mid 1920s, which are nothing but subatomic particles with integer spin. The bosons is named after Satyendra Nath Bose, who did pioneering work in Bose- Einstein statistics, along with Einstein. The Higgs boson is an elementary boson, having no spin, is believed to give mass to other particles via the Higgs mechanism. According to this mechanism, a particle gains mass in a Higgs field, in the presence of some fundamental particles. One of the fundamental particle is Higgs boson.
                Well! long story short, if the synthesized particle is proved to be the Higgs boson, it will surely be a major breakthrough for science. Plus it will firmly cement the Standard model in science community.

Last night fighters

Let me make the definition clear to you, in case you get the wrong impression: Last night fighter is the name given to the students (generally engineering ones), that do not study the whole semester, and when the water level is well above their necks, they panic in to start from the start.
Unlike the name suggests, these are not real fighters, but I certainly won’t rank them below, they don’t have such deadly weapons, but pen and other stationeries. But hey! A pen is mightier than sword.
These are mostly and usually last benchers, who make a huge mockery of the teachers, by studying the whole syllabus in just 2 or 3 days before exams, when the latter takes a whole semester for doing that.
As once said by our ex- president Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam,
                                             ‘’ If you want to top in the exams, ask the front seators
                                             But if you want to succeed in life, ask the last benchers.’’
They prove their mettle as studies show that people that are respected were mostly these folks. The idea behind this is not you are right now concluding but I want to incentivize you to not go by the bookish knowledge, but forming your own thoughts, which personally I think is needed and appreciated worldwide…….this comes from my personal experience which I duly learned at right time.
              Now focussing back on topic, these students are real champs, and the fact that they score, if not more, not much less than their so called bright counterparts, make them special. They generally attend classes, get the basic idea and that’s it…they are done…..revising it one more time, will get that in their brains.
              Last night fighting is not always natural, but it an also be developed, but after its development, it is superfluous, and has surplus advantages. The best ones are the ones, that man-oeuvre the task on the last night, fighting for survival, and looking for ways (like important questions, ways of cheating etc.) to get the best marks. Well, engineering life is all about that. If you can’t, not a problem; but if are equipped, time to feel proud.
              I bow down to these masterpieces, to their precious skill, to the spirit, to the limitless stamina (Here stamina is defined a little bit differently from the general definition), to the prowess ability to form & execute their plans in a day.
Much is said about them, about the damage they are conceding, but they are adamant, showing that if the teaching system isn’t going to improve, they aren’t going to be either.

Fighters

Black Swan

I saw this movie last week, directed by  Darren Aronofsky, starring Natalie Portman as Nina, the prime ballet dancer.
The movie commences slowly, but as Nina unfolds the fight with herself, it takes movie to a whole new level. Some of the scenes in the movie are very well enacted and executed with perfection. 


Nina is chosen as the ‘Swan Queen’, comprising of the fragile and innocent White Swan and the sensuous Black Swan. Nina is perfect for the  role of White Swan but not as a Black Swan. She is chosen to be the ‘Swan Queen’, on the promise that she will perfect the role of Black Swan too. As the director of her ballet says she is very controlled, and needs to lose some control on herself and she needs to let go for herself to perfectly depict the Black Swan. She thinks that Lily(a character) wants to steal her role…..but as the movie progresses its interesting to note down her realizations
The movie shows the trauma of working in an over competitive environment, where everyone wanted to be the Swan Queen. In the end, she transforms herself into a black swan, which is when she realises that the biggest competition for her is herself.


It won many critics praises.


I have embedded a trailer courtesy- You Tube.
[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jaI1XOB-bs&w=640&h=390]



I would say its a must watch.
Go for it, if you haven’t still!