The hidden losers

After a long time, I have found a topic I am thinking about all the time. The topic is not new. It has always been a theme running somewhere at the back of my mind.

Everyone has their own definition of losers and categories of losers. I too have mine. The ones I am going to describe in this blog are ones which are hard to identify.

Let me start by asking a few questions:

1. Have you ever met people who are super successful in their professional life?

2. Have you met people who can convince even an investment banker to put all the money in charity?

3. Have you met people who can impress one and all?

There must be many such examples. You know what, not all of them are the same. If you look at some of them closely, you will find a major difference. Many of them(I am pretty sure they are in majority) are people who have achieved something by always piggy-backing on someone else’s effort.

What skills do they have? Just one. They are good in creating a fake aura around them and making sure they mingle with the successful people(people who can give them a ride till their next big destination).

How to identify these people? Let me mention a few of their characteristics:

In Office:

1. They will have an opinion on everything, will reply to each email(preferably in flowery English, remember the only skill they have) even if they were cced because they were, in hindsight, mistakenly added in the mailing list.

2. They love giving alternatives which are “better”.

3. They will always try to correct their seniors/peers in front of senior management.

In Personal life:

1. They think they are superior because of their achievements and look down upon others.

2. They are experts in 1-2 domains (read they have crammed enough to talk inteligently) and will always try to veer a discussion in that direction and try to show-off.

3. (This is the most important one) They will always always try to correct their “friends” in front of everyone if they find some mistake(a good example is “didn’t know/didn’t knew” types). 

Why are they losers? Given that they are looked up to and have achieved so much, it is hard to imagine why I would consider them as a loser. These people will never trust anyone because they themselves must have betrayed a 100 close friends. As much as they try to pretend their friendship, deep down they hardly care about anyone who is not going to be of any importance to them. Their real definition of friends are people who worship them without ever raising their eyebrows.

Why I wrote this blog? I came to know about 1 such loser today. I know a lot of them and had done the mistake of trusting some of them. So when I saw another one, I had to release the frustration somewhere. I believe they are the real rot in our society. These people either feel satisfied in a dysfunctional group comprised of similar such people who keep praising each other. The other kind are people who are experts in pretending to be really smart and can make you believe that they are the right people to work with/be friends with. Deep down, they are as shallow as the first ones.

Why I believe they are the real rot in our society? Our society has always been swayed by people who have had great convincing powers. That is why, when such people tend to veer the opinion towards their uncompetitive belief of the society,  they usually succeed.

It is quite ironic that many of them quote books by Ayn Rand as their source of inspiration(Their facebook profiles will have quotes from her books). The only thing I can think of is a long line of Elsworth Tooheys ready to stop this world.

Lessons

One of my office colleagues recently asked me – Why do you always carry a pen?

I said: I read somewhere that a student should always carry a pen

Office Colleague: But you are not a student anymore

Me: I will always be a student………….

Speaking of lessons, everybody learns some of them. I have learnt a lot many of them. This post is just a broad classification of how I see my past:

Lessons I learnt in school: I learnt a lot of subjects. Don’t know whether it was my school or my teachers or just me, every subject I read had a common theme. They were trying to make me a human being. And I assumed that the same applied to everyone.

Lessosns I learnt in college: I learnt how education can be abused. Historically, how it has been abused. Why people just see it as a money minting weapon. And why people don’t want to understand what they learn and apply it in their life.

Lessosn I learnt in my first job: I learnt about my own capabilites. How weak I can be at times. What are my interests(to an extent). And a great thought or a great principle cannot arrive before its due time.

Ofcourse, there are more lessons to learn. Hope some of them will be as good as the ones I learnt in school……

A Trainy Day

I can never understand the love-hate relationship that I have with the Indian Railways. Latest, I travelled to my home town and as usual, I was travelling alone. Though this time also, there were a lot of hiccups, but I got a reminder of my inherent comfort while travelling in Indian Railways.

I have many reasons to hate travelling alone. Though, I am not fond of talking a lot, travelling with someone known appears more comfortable than travelling alone. Also, I always get the “honour” of travelling long distances in train.  With Indian Railways’ “super efficiency”, the journey is usually “shortened” by a few hours and that kills me. All the unknown fellow passengers have equally “contributed” to my never ending saga. I hate travelling in a sleeper class; very badly maintained and don’t suit any weather in India; and therefore always prefer to travel by an AC coach. I am too tall to fit in any of the seats and during day time, it is very hard for me to sit the whole day with my legs folded (now it is a bit painful because of my knee injury :().

But this time around, I made a point to see the whole thing from a different perspective. Since I had all the time in the world to think (though thanks to my music phone and the new found habit of reading, I do keep myself occupied), I was just trying to remember what all did I like when I travelled by train. And behold!! , the scene was right in front of me. I could see my own train bending at a curve and I could feel the same rush of excitement, as I felt when I was a kid. As I explored further, I found that it had lot more to offer. When I rested my head on the walls of the compartment, the vibration were soothing (never expected such a feeling there).  

With my music phone adding a filmi touch, some of the songs, namely, hoga tumse pyaara kaun, maeri – euphoria, chaiyya chaiyya, made me wish that I could shoot one of them right then with me in the centre :). Also, I believe that my understanding of natural beauty has grown with time and what appeared during childhood as mere land with forests and farms, appeared to be a perfect place for shooting an epic. I always wished (and still do) that I will run to each and every place I see and explore every part of it. With some of the locations, my imagination ran riot and I could hardly understand why Drona had to go all the way to Namibia to save the world, he could have done it right here (now I know why it didn’t click at the box office).

I have to travel by train again. I will curse it again and will get mesmerised again.  If someone gives me an option, I can never say a yes or no to a train travel. I think every journey on it has something in store for everyone. You just need to open your eyes.

The Right Me or The Wrong You

Why is it so difficult for people to accept their mistakes? Why is logically correct not always correct?
What is the basis of living a life? Is it being a good person always or being a very successful person? Can these 2 adjectives co-exist? Logically they can, but I haven’t seen it happen till now. Talking of goodness, how do you measure that? What is the scale of relativity? The same question can be asked for success.
Logic may be difficult to apply and then we use approximations. Still we are trying to apply sound logic. I have seen people working the other way round. If they can’t apply logic, they will behave illogically. Even I have done that. I know it’s the easier approach. So do we boil down to the question: - are we scared of the difficulties of life? I still don’t feel comfortable with this question. I believe I am still not asking the right question. Logically, leading an illogical life should be more difficult. It’s haphazard, incoherent and what not.
More than 90% in exams, a greater than 9 CPI in college and an A-rated performance in office, add to that a family; mom, dad, bros and sis, cousins, uncles and aunts, later on wife and kids; and the cycle repeats for everyone. This is the application, but where is the logic? And where are the approximations? Where is goodness and success? By some theory, I assume that since the application is same (“or is forced to be the same”), all human beings must be governed by a common theory. By whatever I have formulated till now, I don’t see a place for illogic till now.
Let me add another angle to it. Since the world around is a complex equation formed by many variables with different exponents, some complexity has to come in. Lets me throw in emotions, sentiments and traditions. I have tried very hard, but till now, I have not been able to use my heart in such cases. I feel sad in my head. I feel happy, again, in my head. Heart seems to be a metaphor here and I will assume it as such. Well well, don’t we come to a logical conclusion here using our brains? Ofcourse, we do. Hmmm, adding emotions and sentiments should not bring the chaos in the equation. Let me touch upon the forbidden or shall I say the forbidding concept of traditions. I want to use the word forbidden, because it is in the name of tradition, that people are forbidden to cross stupid barriers and use logic. I think it very well suits the purpose. So are traditions creating the chaos? Let us be more sceptical before concluding anything.
If we believe in the concept of God, I want to believe that He must have made human beings to rule the world and therefore gave them superior brain power to think and create. Interestingly, we did use our mind to create some amazingly marvellous discoveries and inventions. But we also created concepts. Concepts are a fascinating thing. They can be abstract and then you can work on all the various possibilities. I assume that the concept of tradition came in because we wanted to lead a normal life and to preserve our “glorious past”. So I suppose that to rule the earth normally, we created traditions, but as far as I see, for most of us traditions rule us. It is interesting to correlate between human beings and machines. Machines work on defined rules. Most of us work on defined traditions. As machines don’t challenge the rules on which they work, we don’t challenge the traditions. I bet if machines knew what it means to challenge the rules, we must have seen a matrix in reality by now. Fortunately or unfortunately, machines don’t know it and UNFORTUNATELY, we don’t want to know it.
Let me elaborate on one of the amazing contribution of tradition: CLASSFICATION. We have all kinds of castes, creeds and on top of it the gender classification. If I quote biology here, I see that men and women have a different physical appearance and functionality because of evolution and strictly evolution. What logic does tradition or shall I say the creators of tradition have to force different ways of living for the 2 different genders. It’s absolutely true that they have none, but what baffles me is that I find it hard to trace the roots of such stupid behaviour. If I try to explain it through evolution, I see that earlier women were weaker than men and they stayed back at home and took care of the kids. But this sounds like a functional organization rather than a forced custom. What happened next is a big mystery to me.
I don’t want to deviate too much from the topic, but my point in touching the effects of tradition is to bring to the surface a point of view. A view which states that as human body evolves, our traditions have to evolve. Only then can it get a logical place in the human lifestyle. I believe that the evolution of human body has left the evolution of tradition by a millennium.
There is one more thing that needs to be looked at. And this can only happen when all kind of evolutions are at the same level and pace. If the rules governing all human beings are same, they should be exactly similar in all forms. This definitely is not true. That should mean that the life cycle, criteria for success, etc., etc., should be different for different people.
I am not a champion of waiting and letting things unfold themselves. Me and may be a few others like me would like to force the change. That I believe is logical.

Mujhe sab mil gaya

When I started blogging, I thought that I will write about my confused mind. But since I do occasional blogging, I decided to update about some significant events in my life. Although recently, I have started feeling about some things quite strongly and wanted to pen down them here. This is one of those thoughts which I have devoted quite a while and it still intrigues me. I will only mention the thought and wont try to force a point of view as I myself is not aware of what is right and what is wrong.
A week back, Teji Bacchan, mother of the superstar Amitabh Bacchan died after prolonged illness. The media, as usual did their hoopla over this very personal affair of the Bacchan family. I happened to see one of the news coverage in which the news reader was constantly stressing on the fact that Teji Bacchan was very proud of her son Amitabh. Suddenly I felt a sense of déjà vu. This was not the first time I was hearing people talking about parents being extremely proud and happy about their children’s achievement. Teji Bacchan, herself an amateur actor, is better known as the wife of literary genius Harivansh Rai Bacchan and mother of Amitabh Bacchan. Was it sufficient for her to be known because of her distinguished husband and son ? Or for that matter, is it sufficient for any father or mother to be satisfied with the success of their children ?
Thinking about it casually, the argument seems banal. The whole perspective depends on person to person. Also, achievements of one’s family members add to the happiness from her/his own achievements. But when I look around, almost all parents are concerned about their children’s achievements, their career has definitely taken a backseat. Though I have also seen the trends changing with parents becoming more and more career oriented, but I am sure at the back of their mind, they must be thinking still about their children’s performance.
I will try to put forth my points more objectively and present two different view points. Though I am quite young and questions concerning parental care should not be bothering me. What intrigues me though is the sudden change in the outlook. People, fresh out of colleges, are raring to go and want to make a mark of their own. But as soon as they settle down, things become altogether different. I agree that the number of responsibilities increase tremendously, but why does their career take a backseat ? Is it that the increased responsibilities force them to change their priorities ? Or do their minds evolve in a different direction at that particular stage of life ? At this point, it is hard for me to imagine that I will ever stop thinking about my career with the same excitement. But looking at every one around me, it seems inevitable.
The second line of thought which fascinates me is the sense of achievement parents get when their daughter/son achieves something. They feel that they have conquered the world and have made their life count. I agree that they will be the happiest to see their children win because they have put in a lot of hard work to make their children capable of performing in such a competitive world. Is this sense of achievement indirect ? Or this is a pay-off of their hard work that they have invested in their children ? Whenever children achieve great heights, I hear parents saying that they have got everything that they ever wanted. Is it really true ? What about their own career and achievement ? In all my arguments, I have tried to develop a case where achievement means success in your own career because I know that the success of their children is one of the biggest achievement that parents always dream of.
Kya unhe sab mil jaata hai ?