Breed

Few days back while switching channels, had passed throught NDTV good times.
Some sort of interview was going on about "pets", the owner of a club or manager or worker of that club was saying something like  "we track upto 4 generations of the dogs so we are sure of the breed".

2 months back I was on my way to Chennai , its the usual Mangalore-Chennai Mail. The train was approaching Chennai around 5am.My berth was in the middle of the compartment, so i slowly made my way to the last bay. There was an empty side berth and I sat there ,there was a lady in her 40s or 50s on the upper side berth who just came off the berth and sat there. We started talking, normal train talk, and as  I got up she asked my name and I told my
name ( as some south indians i have initials & am used to give first name),so I gave my name, she asked whats my full name , again my first name which itself is comprised of two words ( I knew where she was headed) so i gave my full name without the initial i.,e XXX YYY
Then she says , oh nice name, is it XXX YYY, ZZZZ (ZZZ being caste name, which from this part some have as their Surname.) I smiled and said no its just XXX YYY and stopped the conversation.

I hate such questions, well if am gonna get married via tradional arranged marriage I know this question of caste comes in as a part of Checklist in the proces, but if I find my girl then I wouldn't care a damn.

What am contemplating is, Is asking one's caste so bad or am I just over reacting for a question which
has similar intentions as below:
Assume you are in some trade conference or training or some sort of group activity somewhere in the world say, Iceland.
Now after few hours when you talk with a person from India , we would go further, to
where do u live? oh ur name sounds s. or n.indian? and the question usually goes as close as to
identify the person in relative to us.
If you are the only person from your country then you try to meet people who belong to your industry,then you choose the persons who are in your exact job specification etc.,
So always when we meet people we are trying to see how close that person is to our "Origins".
It need not be because you only want to talk to persons of your type, but its the yearning to see how close you two are already to start a conversation.

Even when I was working among a Scandinavian colleagues where there is no caste system  when it came to the  Prince who got married a girl from outside the country, it wasn't a happy news for everyone a female colleague said " as if he can't find a girl from our country he had to all the way to ... "

We all have the "my type" mentality, Caste based prejudice or discrimination is definitely wrong but may be the "caste" question isn't that evil all the time !

Avatar.Thank you Cameron

This is a movie that should have released a decade ago as rightly the director wanted.

I loved the movie for everything I understood that it conveyed. And what I understood is here in this post friends :)

Within half an hour I felt strongly that two points will be projected out of this movie (hopefully).
1. Adventure
2. Destruction of  people life.

Adventure:

Last year I had bought "Treasure hunt" for my niece in the hope of infusing the thrill for adventure and travel, but the idea didn't take effect in reality as it did in my mind :) .
When the initial scene where Jake confronts the beasts of Pandora and the chase starts, I was wondering if I will get in trouble if all three kids (smallest was 3yrs ) would scream and we would have to leave the movie in middle as I made about 8people come to the movie saying its a kids movie :)
However after the chase and few minutes past I was happy  when my elder niece sitting beside mewas at the edge of her seat asking me clearly whats been told so she could get upto sec update on the Pandora I thanked James Cameroon for what he gave my niece via Naavi and Pandora.
The desire to see places, a hope of such place to exist in the Universe, to have all that Naavi's experience.
Best part was very often when my translation was cut down by her "i knw that, but wat he said after that.."
This movie can make all the worries of school be washed off deck and replaced with a adventurous spirit for many kids around the world.
Its very important if you ask me specially where today there is so much competition and the stress that kids are subjected to that among all factors dominating school life one could easily put aside the Nature as they grow up.

2.Nature

As the movie started in few minutes where we are told about the trouble Naavi's are causing with mining company and mining company's frustration with the "tree huggers"- I thought about a very similar story unfolding in India that I read in Outlook.
http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?261786
I said to myself " Damn, Arundhathi Roy & Green peace is gonna love this movie"
about Roy.. I have lot of reservations against her as she talks nonsense too often. i admire some of her work like the support of  above mentioned article in Outlook magazine and of course her wonderful nick names she attributed to Bush the lesser and the Prince of darkness or evil towards Rumsfeld.

Am a believer in moderate ideologies, anything has good and bad. Communism has been a wonderful too of upliftment of masses, however when used to extreme it results in a  industry less society like Kerala where no one wants to start a factory only to deal with unions and nothing about productivity and employment.            

It also emphasises that just because a Company gives good houses, education doesn't mean they have moral right to bitch about the very people from whom they grabbed the land.
I could see a HR manager of Vedanta giving out same dialogues " We give them new houses, education...."

The movie is sentimental specially with that ability of Naavi's to be able to directly link with nature or wild life.
I wish it was 3D .

Days after you see Avatar, when the workplace stress goes too much am sure many would desire a Toruk to fly away to Pandora..

Power of friendship

Yesterday when I thought about the posts I have been writting i wondered if am projecting myself as a gloomy person always writing sad topics.
A friend of mine asked if I would be upset if no one read my blog, first sentence that came out of my mouth was "No" later i corrected myself. I would be happy if people ,passer by's read and kind of either join in same thought process or speak out at the probable mistakes in my thinking process..
For me this is a place where I can write certain topics thats been in my mind for sometime now.

anyway to send a message to people who randomly reach here  that am not a gloomy person here it is:

Its a topic which is a favourite subject of mine, "friends". I am a person who love to meet new persons, know them and eventually become friends, however for me the close friends circle is quite small, friendships are like a tree, it has to be nurtured, not necessarily with attention. As long as you keep in touch, care for friend in time
you realise other person is quite close to you than to attribute the word friend. So lets say close friends or best friends. For me this circle is quite small and being studied mostly in boys only institutes it comprises mostly of men (  :(  ) , the total figure itself is just about 6.
What I wanted to write is about this superb power of your best pals at time of stress and work pressure.
This happened on two different ships I was on earlier. Once the vessel reached US and this best pal of mine
drove 2hrs to meet up, as always as it happens with cargo planners they gave a short time of ships port stay and the shore leave was too short for us to spend time roaming.
After a dinner at indian restaurent we came back to the harbour only to find ships departure was delayed.
Being a small port at that time private cars were allowed beside the ship, and so  we just parked the car and this bugger had good collection of black &white tamil songs.. We just played it and sat and talked. When ship left,i felt as if i just joined, i was rejuvenated. See at that point i had worked more than 3 months on the ship and with todays short port calls we don't venture out in most ports so todays seaman are subject to quite a lot of stress compared to good old days.
 Nothing but just listening to good old songs and talking college day stories vapourised whatever worry, negative energy i had built up to that point.
I remember a colleagues wife commenting on my "happy face" just after I met them in Smoke saloon (well the name is from old days wat it means is Tv room :)  )  cause was just the few words i had with my tom boy niece over the phone who was barely 2 at that time.

Another incident being when I joined as a Chief mate in a ship, being a chief mate is basically easy but u end up doing all the work for your el capitano and your work life depends on your boss right, so I was having quite a lot of worked up stress with my new boss. It was port of Dubai, I called up a best friend who was working there, and as always i ended up making him wait more than few hours before I could meet up and he patiently waited for me at the gate.
We had dinner in the port restaurent and as before in US with another best pal here we just sat and talked.
I came back Fresh same as it occured in US with other best pal.

So anybody in stress call up ur best pal talk to him or her.. no best pal well start talking to your good friend often , in time he or she will be there for you.

Good life ...

The first para of this post was written 2 weeks back and I hit a block not knowing what I really wanted,reading an article about Servant class ( which i had posted in previous post) gave me the opening to

write this.. so here it is friends.

Last year or the year earlier , I remember seeing an advertisement in a national daily. The ad appeared

at the right bottom corner of first page. I think it was an ad for a credit card by a bank.

It  featured a happy lady in focus, smiling and its puported to be she is so, due to her happy shopping experience.Lady must have been in her late 20's or early 30.

Few steps behind her was a man, out of focus, (this isn' a gender issue, so you can substitute it as "person" :)  ) in a concierge uniform carrying a lot of those fancy shopping bags.

I wondered why the ad didn't picture the lady carrying atleast one.

Why couldn't she carry atleast one of "Her" bags ?
Why can't politicians open their own car door?

Is good life a life where we do nothing and everything is taken care by servants.? Doesn't it resemble the life
ages ago in Kingdoms ruled by Kings. Are we going back to same lifestyle with all these advances made by us in recent centuries?
When a man builds an apartment worth billions of dollars where I saw another man washing his clothes in that
ditch  which circumvents SAHARA hotel opposite the domestic airport in Mumbai what else can I think of?

We all need helping hands definetly, when we check in at a hotel we need a helping hand to lift the huge suitcase over the stairs as we gotta carry hand baggage too.
We all know we have terrible 18th century infrastructure in railway stations where with no escalators or lifts so we have to make use of Coolie service.
Its a sad fact that their political masters don't care to help them migrate from what they do now to better careers. And neither these incompetent robbers(politicians)allow better infrastructure such as lifts/escalators.
Maids, servants will always be there its only when they are expected to perform more than a
maid or servant's job spec it tends to cross the line.

Thousands ofyears ago men carried their load on  their head, now we still do how pathetic..

This vacation...

Its 0300hrs on 15Jan2010. Am on a drilling ship off the coast of Andhra.
I just had a "Short change", its the term they use on this rig for change of duty, for last 2 weeks I was on
1800hrs to 0600hrs watch, yesterday had switched watch(Duty hours). That means , day before yesterday I went to work at 1800hrs stopped working at 2400hrs, then went to work at  yesterday 0600hrs untill 1800hrs.
So biological clock woke me up at 0000hrs today,stomach churning for some food, I lay on the bunk ( hmm yes, those big deepsea ship cabins aren't the lifestyle here in the rig) just wondering about certain things.
Few days back I had made  a deal with a friend of mine, asking her to go ahead and make a purchase which she has been procrastinating for quite sometime and I will shed my shyness ( ya.. i have this thing with the cam) and get those casual shots of normal life .It may be a cliche, hei but there is something special with candid shots of humans.

So I wondered about my plan what to take, there are few projects that been in my head for some years , of the top is 1. Plastics 2. Men / Women and most importantly children working with garbage.

Years after Bangalore became the IT hub, I visited Bangalore and was going somewhere on a Auto, as newcomer I was looking at the new buildings , then Auto went over a small bridge which was over a canal which long back must have carried good pure water. On that day what I saw was a raft made of Bamboo and the Man who was riding the raft must be around 10 or 12years. The kid was collecting garbage in the flowing water.......
He is supposed to be in a classroom.....

Incidents such as this always made me irritated when anyone talked about "developed India".  Not because of their ignorance  but at the cocoon we are ensconsed in , of not seeing what real India has in her boundaries.
There is an article which talks about this self inflicted blindess in highly developed materialistc society.
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/the-dark-side-of-dubai-1664368.html

I have thought of a theme will try to take snaps on that . Am afraid to spill it out incase I won't deliver it.
Will update furhter in coming days..

What colour

Few months back there was a Outlook feature which detailed about the ugly side of Indian pysche when we were crying about Australian racist attacks. It was about the dark skin prejudice.

Best part i liked is where it mentioned how Krishna (The Hindu God Krishna who by his very name means "Dark/ black" in sanskrit) was made into a unique blue bodied human so that everyone would accept.

Ofcourse not everyone considered the play boy as blue, Tamil Poet Bharathi sang well when he wrote " Kakai chiraginle ..." (I see your colour in a crow's wings).

A good friend of mine who has beautiful dark complexion told me how she was bullied as a child  due to her colour.  I consider her as her as one of my well read, intelligent friends so I initially brushed it aside , but she said she hoped her second child is same as her first cutie, meaning their skin complexion shouldn't differ, I could guess how much it has been a trauma for her.

Now with all the advances we made in social life this prejudice or this pathetic mentality still lingers in society.

Recent story being , a dark skinned ( i would say medium complexion) guy who went to see a girl as part of arranged marriage. He didn't carry forward the alliance because he felt she was darker, not that she did't sync with this thoughts, life plans, etc, but because she was darker than him.

I grew up in area surrounded by villages, usually when they see a young man or women do something stupid or a mistake first thing that they say is " enna pa padicha payan ne ipadi panalama" (Hey kid, how can you do this being educated  ,for them Education = ENLIGHTENED). That is the respect rural folks have for educated men &women  !

How sad that many such years of education doesn't tell us what not to do.

When Rajini's Sivaji movie came ,I was in UK for my senior navigating license, all our housemates  booked tickets for1st show and watched it.Being UK we could afford to get the ticket one day prior. (Am not a rajini fan, but I liked shivaji for what it was, commericial movie of Rajini with all the hype of what his movies became in the last part of his career.)

When the comedy revolving Solamon Papay's daughters came, I was shocked i couldn't laugh and I wondered how the hell this wasn't censored and most important how on earth Solomon Pappaya, the distinguished  patimandram speaker (Cultural tamil debate) could have accepted to do this.

Of course I  don't want us to become so paranoid as in one show Russel peter's takes on how some in US go to difficulty in describing a african american .Speaking of which I can never accept the idea that african americans can call themselves with the N word whereas when others call its racism( k,let me not deviate )

My younger sister is carrying at present, I was asked by mother & elder sis to get some "kunguma poo" (Believe this is a dry petal of a particular flower) from Dubai . And I had a friend who was coming on a vacation.

Common perception is this helps  the baby to have fairer skin colour.The stand taken at home is that its something to do normal nutritious food that would do good for the Mother & baby.

Anyway the thing is after i was asked to arrange, many weeks passed by and I was at my sisters home and while doing combined kitchen work (of course less contribution from my side ) conversation happened something like:

Me: "hei i forgot about that kunguma poo, will arrange it before i join my next ship"

Sis:  " No "

Me: Why you got it already?

Sis: No..but  am not gonna discriminate my child, let the child come as she/he comes with her own skin

I looked at my bro in law , who smiled and said "ya murali i think she is right"

It instantly made me happy , you can say I was proud of them even though its a simple issue.Could be because after hearing all above stories and most importantly growing advertisements on fairness cream products and what they purport gave me that happiness.

Well now since our Mother insisted its good for Mom&baby in many ways, its reached my home few days back.

Beauty is a perception that varies to each personnel , an attractive girl to me may not be so attractive to a friend , but why she isn't attractive to this friend shouldn't be subject to one issue such as this.

One may like a colour yes, but when finding, deciding on lifes most important relationships (frds, a life partner )based purely on this  is what a literate illiterate or illiterates do..

Stupid , irritating , advertisements in recent times

1. Mont blanc  ( As one article mentioned in a paper, its a writing instrument what on earth have these two characters written ? U didn't get any worthwhile writers? , for record Anil Kapoor is a fav actor of mine from               Tezab days, do wanna hit him for bein part of murdering  "Usual suspects" in chocolate form.
2. Airtel broadband tv ( What r they trying to convey, entire nation watches actor/ actresses personal life !)
3. Docomo superb train ride ( So u get onto a bus thats the India you see, all well dressed ! )
4. White skin phobia.. the entire white trash ads.( it has no logic, its discriminating..What on earth is Censor   board for)

.ah... can;t get it on mind now.. will add as it comes.. love to see what others have  felt about other advertisements...

Life: Does form matter

Am sure the second post of mine will ensure or confirm to "googled" passer by's that am one another confused soul.

The incident I show here happened many years ago , I had shared it on my diary ( oh yes ihave one, but it isn't dear diary system, i write at gaps, sometimes the gap is days sometimes months, right now its almost a year).

I had visited my elder Sister for few days and returning to my home in Kozhikode (Calicut).Train was in the early morning around 5.20 or 5.40 . Often an auto is arranged the previous day so i can leave little late from home. On that day we couldn't get one, so i had started to walk to the station.
The station is just about 15 to 20 minutes walk . Ottapalam being an old town has narrow streets, this street I was about to enter had line of shops on either side. On the right side, a small drain was present which was covered by block of granites. The granites are just simple,uneven cut rocks.
As i entered the street, something made me smile instantly. I think it would make anyone smile, it was a small kitten,it was jumping across the boulders ,it was FULL OF LIFE. Early morning, it was full of energy and its body language was funny enough like a kid. And then and there it disappeared.. i just froze as I realised what had happened. I ran to the spot i saw the kitten , hoping its there atleast half way down amidst the gaps of those granites.
It wasn't there, i could hear the meek sound it made, i looked around , it was just me in the street.I was running late for the train.Boulders are too heavy for me to lift, a autorickshaw passed by as I was standing in front of a closed shop looking down at a drain with a mini flash light ( Cell phone)

I was 5mins away from station, there would be a Q for ticket, train usually is on other side of track... all thoughts running, I myself fakely assured that kitten will live this day holding on to some small recess in the drain structure.. I walked hurriedly towards the station, cursing the favourite form of God I trouble often.
3mins to the station I saw a cat, searching for something or some one..Its kitten ! i cursed again, i just looked at it and walked in reverse , She would go to few places sniffing and slowly walking calling out for her kitten.

I went home ,called up my Aunt who loves cats and dogs, asked if she could ring up the shop ( i had noted the name of the shop)to know in case some dead cat had turned up with awful smell. I kept saying myself the calling up etc., is just not to feel guilty.
oh ya i also tried another route to justify my abandoning the kitten. The morning i left sisters house I had killed one huge spider ( the moist humid Kerala weather really attracts weird sized spiders i guess), so i wondered I didn't think twice before I killed that insect and why am I getting all senti over a kitten. Is it because in that short span of time we met, with its energy, cuteness the kitten became more dearer !
I thought about few philosophies of religion i follow a.k.a every living , non living is same. form is different but the core of what makes each one is same. etc.
anyway by pondering over the "why the kittten not the spider " i passed over the guilt of abandoning the kitten.

To give or not to ...

We were on a train to Mangalore, evening time. Sitting in a reserved compartment. Side upper and side lower had been booked.

I enjoyed the view. Always loved this view of landscapes passing by as you sit in one place. Used to be awake during night bus journeys from Calicut to Madurai ..vice-versa .Looking through the big glass ,seeing villages asleep.Dark silhouetted trees would pass by, mountains would be far away, huts , tiled houses, terraces, giving you a feel for the persons staying in each and every house.
thanks to the air suspension in private buses you could just feel the bump a little ,not too much to affect the sight seeing.

Train journeys, very similar i love it.

So on that day's journey, was sitting along with mom..in a reserved AC 3 tier, we had put the seats down so it can be one huge platform. we were talking family matters. Train stopped at a station. Lot of crowd was getting on and off the train, i saw a couple who i would say were probably day workers from neighbouring state. simply and neatly dressed, the father had a small beard, lean features, Mom too simple yet in a nice saree, jasmine flowers on her head. Had a tiny baby, they were waiting for another train. But they were walking around passing our window more than twice.

I looked at them and thought... why can't we have a system of second class where all boggies of second class are alike, AC and good seats assured. ok fine don't give AC atleast make it comfortable to enjoy the travel with peace. Every one knows whereever you go in India there is crowd, that doesn't mean make less fortunate ppl travel like Nazi's did years back when they transported prisoners across ( Think russians did worse refering to the book GULAG by Anne Applebaum )
Do they have an oppurtunity in the life time to be in the comfort which I have?
Does the Mom dream of her son/ daughter to become a well paid say IT chap, in that case can she
enroll him in a school that gives quality education? And doesn't she dream of siting in such comfort  with her son in years to come.

Scandinavian countries are known to have a good human development index,making a huge part of population acheive certain comforts with easiness, primary being education.

How I wish we could achieve same level of comfort. Very rich and very poor will always be there in any country, but I believe their percentage should be less in a population. Majority should be able to enjoy same level of comfort in many public aspects i.e education, Transport.

We started our walk to globalisation years behind other countries, then why haven't we learnt from its mistakes and tried to patch up. The disparity is huge in our case, i earn more than what my father earned, so why isn't  same happening with people who are below my socio economical strata too..?

Recently I read a nice post of a friend who describes how nice it is to bump onto a good auto driver who sticks to the meter.That post deals with the sweetness of meeting a good human amidst the bad ones the urban society brews.
I have had similar good interaction with some auto drivers who took exact metre fare or incase agreed 1.5 of metre charge if it exceeded city corporation limits.When I met with auto drivers asking more, demanding more I rarely argued beyond a point.

This has been a dilemma for me since i started earning. Not just auto drivers many such "sir this isn't enough" questions make me only see a valid reason behind them asking me.
Would our auto drivers ask /argue more if we had a system that paid them fairly?
When riding in auto's for instance if the driver asks for more than the share he should get , say for 50rs ride he  demands 100rs

i would bring it to abt 75 and i would take that ride knowing he is getting more than he should.

But the context i avoid arguing too much isn't that it doesn't look nice :) It is because :

1. The 25rs though in terms of monetary value is the same for us living in same country. The

quality of what he would get with it is more than what I would buy

i.e a pencil box he buys for his kid is definetly more valuable than a magazine for 50rs.

2. If the meter's were adjusted according to the actual fuel consumption+fuel price in todays traffic? Would he demand for more ? (Sure some crooks are there in auto drivers but not all are one)

3. karma :) If he takes more than necessary now , he will loose more at a time of utmost need. So let the karma govern with it.

Above doesn't mean I endorse his "Grab" nature with senior citizens and normal people.I only hope he doesn't do that to above two category.

So am I saying its ok for auto drivers to take more from people who earn substantially higher than him ?
Yes.As long as the metre isn't a fair reflection of his work
 Does he have right to deny ride to other passengers who wouldn't pay more than meter?
NO. if he does his license should be cancelled. autos are FOR HIRE.. they have no right to deny a passenger a ride.