Not so Jawan Anymore

She refused to buy tickets for the movie Jawan for the 7th time today.

The movie Jawan was released on the 7th of this month and by today the global collection stands to cross 750 Cr. Each time its collection crossed a 100 Cr mark, I would get curious to see what was attracting people in hordes and would goad her to buy tickets. “My friends in Hyderabad have seen the movie and I know you and your taste; you will fret and fume and leave the hall halfway dragging all of us out with you. I don’t want to spoil my evening” was her reply. She was clear and firm on her stand this time too.

 

With my sole online booking agent refusing to comply, I am left with the only option of counting the box office collection without contributing a rupee to it. Both my taste, and opinion, and not buying its ticket are irrelevant to the success of the movie.

 

Our exposure to the world of cinema started in the early 80s when we had an array of movies to choose from. If the kitschy deluge of southern productions led by Sridevi and Jayaprada made us whistle and hoot; the best of parallel cinema by Ray, Mrinal Sen, Gautam Ghose, and Shyam Benegal made us think and Sai Paranjpe, Kundan Shah brand of humour made us smile and yearn for more. We always identified ourselves as what Ray would have termed as that sophisticated movie viewer who had the class and intellect to understand certain types of movies his ilk made.

 

To the current industry neither his review matters nor his contribution to the till. He is as irrelevant as the Khan Market intellectuals in the glitzy and noisy market of joy and celebration of India.

 

A few months back Nattu Nattu from the movie RRR won not only the Golden Globe under the best original song category but stunned all of us by winning the 95th Oscar. 

 

Deepika Padukone in the award ceremony stunned the audience with her looks, presence, and her electrifying smiles and spoke in her Indian accent, social media was abuzz with heaps of appreciation for her. Her speech to introduce the story of RRR was interrupted by intermittent cheers when she introduced the song Nattu Nattu as a Banger. The audience had not seen anything like this earlier. A team enacted the song on the stage and so riotous and energy-filled was the performance that the presenter Jimmy Kimmel was almost driven away by the dancers who performed on stage. Jimmy said, “This year we are not gonna play you off stage instead we have a group of performers from the movie RRR who are going to dance you offstage”.

 

Remember, a few years back the same Western movie world looked quizzically at the song and dance sequence of our typical movie. The characters breaking into a sudden song or a dance at every situation be it comic or tragic was something the Westerners couldn’t understand. 

But undaunted we kept producing such content because we loved it. 

 

The best of our directors and parallel cinema never got the attention of the Western movie industry barring a copy of Ray by Spielberg and a fan note by Scorsese. Now many like Priyanka Chopra have established themselves as mainstream actors doing a variety of roles and not playing the typical Asian immigrant anymore.  

 

The Bollywood songs and steps and Bhangra Punjabi beats are now an international culture to reckon with and the inspiration behind millions of views of reels, and shorts in the social media. The ones who have joined the bandwagon are just not Indians but people from the world over. 

 

A person with a rational mind and sophisticated taste can never sit through the antics and actions of a Rajnikant movie but the fact that he has more than 50,000 registered fan clubs and millions of fans in India and across the world is a tide big enough to throw these sophistication and sensible minds to the roadside.

 

Today no movie is running in parallel for that sophisticated viewer and no political party is ready to accommodate the Khan Market liberal narrative of the current situation. Those viewers with fine taste and sensibility are seen secretly wishing to see SRK and Nayanthara dishing out outrageous acts from the widescreen along with the masses and those ivory tower liberals are making rounds of the temples aligning themselves with the majoritarian. 

 

The kitsch and subaltern have arrived and are here to stay.

The lower segment of both social and cultural classes of society has crashed into the upper segment of higher consumption. And the market like a prostitute is too flexible just not to accommodate them but to bend itself to their liking. Sad but that's how cultures get formed and evolved. Market forces and popular politics are not the best ways to determine the right economics and politics for a country. At times I agree with Plato when he said not everyone should be given the power to vote.

If movies like Jawan, Pathan, and Gaddar 2 eat up 100% of the market. I don't hope to see a movie like Lunch Box will be ever made. It's a great loss to our cultural landscape. If everyone in the country becomes a fanboy of one person it will be a great loss to our democracy. 

 

The message of India is clear, love us, hate us, ridicule us, or ignore us but we are what we are. We don’t need your approval. We are mast in our world and your fine taste be damned. 

 

We are a world!

Science and Superstition

ISRO successfully launched Chandrayan 3's third lunar exploration mission on 14^th July 2023. It is expected to make a soft landing on the southern lunar pole after a month-long journey on 23^rd August. When the GSLV Mark 3 (LVM 3) heavy-lift launch vehicle lifted off successfully from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Andhra Pradesh’s Sriharikota as per the scheduled launch time at 2.35 PM, the roar of the engines symbolically matched just not the joy of the people behind it, but the euphoria of the whole nation who celebrated the achievement. India stands to become the 99^th country that has such technological capabilities. The picture of ISRO scientists carrying a rocket on a bicycle to this launch of the 14^th describes the story of India which in just 75 years emerged from its struggle with poverty, malnutrition, disease, and early mortality to assert its position as a global political, economic and knowledge power to reckon with.

Basic knowledge empowers us and can make us arrogant but higher knowledge and wisdom make us aware of the limitation of our knowledge and our powerlessness.

When a neuro or a cardiothoracic surgeon bows before his God, before attempting a complex surgery to save his patient, his act demonstrates that he is nervous and aware of his limitations and the large number of exogenous factors which can affect his best-laid plans and efforts negatively. He is aware of the hopes of the patient and his relatives who think that he only can pull off a miracle after God himself. He is in the same situation as a gladiator who is expected to slay the lion by hundreds of onlookers in the gallery. He just prays for those uncertainties, and unknown and hostile forces not to act here. The doctor and the scientists are not allowed to philosophize about failures.

It's difficult for a rationalist with primary school-level knowledge of science to understand that the doctors and scientists at ISRO are not superstitious - they are humble, sincere, and wise; they want their efforts to succeed.

When Oppenheimer quoted Bhagawat Geeta after the first nuclear test, he didn't speak as a Hindu fanatic but as a wise man who knew how that act stands to destroy and change the world forever.

Time to grow out of the ego state empowered by the mechanistic and reductionist interpretation of the science we know so far and bow before those limitless powers of which we are not even aware. The scientists of the Western world who propounded and popularised those models are realizing their own folly after bringing the world to the throes of destruction in the name of industrialization and economic development.

Many treat those unknown powerful forces as Gods and not everyone who bows before those forces are religious and superstitious.

The Weed and our losing battle with it

Hold your horses. I am not going to discuss the kind of plant whose parts make some people get high and happy. The title is a bit misleading. This piece is about any plant growing where it is not wanted and our losing fight with it. The story of our fight with weeds is just not limited to the state excise department burning them deep inside some forest or apprehending the contraband in baleful during transit. 

It is as old as the fight of humanity with hunger.

Perhaps humans dealt the first dent on nature by altering it, when they identified the plants they need for their food and shelter, and they understood how and where the plants grow the best. And then he chose to be a settled agriculturist from the hunter-gatherer life of his earlier generations.

Human civilization blossomed when humans were assured of their basic requirements of food, clothing, and shelter. His engagement with agriculture provided those basics. He kept on improving that craft and his skill to deal with agriculture. That craft made him alter the contour of the land, change the quality of the soil, and regulate the quantity of water that is required for the plant to yield its best. And obviously, he didn’t want to share these carefully and painfully curated resources with anyone else. He built borders to lay his claim over the land, built fences to prevent wild animals and other humans from eating and destroying his crop, and developed various poisons of a special kind to keep the weeds, microorganisms, and animals trying to live off the same soil by consuming its nutrients.

If June made us rejoice with the arrival of monsoon, by August we are seen suffering its excess. Flood, vector-borne diseases like malaria and dengue, and water-borne diseases like typhoid, cholera, and dysentery become commonplace. Not to mention cold and cough which visit every household. The rainy season in our kind of semi-tropical climate is known as the disease season. The abundance of water and sunshine make plants of every kind grow much faster. Man, while struggling with excess water, has also to deal with diseases and overgrown trees, and shrubs everywhere. On the roof, at the shades of windows, driveway, garden, under the trees, and is well-curated lawn. Knowing that any effort to take them out is pointless, he patiently waits for the rains to stop before he does a major de-weeding.

This battle of man to banish the weed and the millions of known and unknown microorganisms which naturally lived on the land he has staked his claim recently is an interesting one.

The size of the academic institutions and research laboratories and the industries which collectively supply him with the knowledge, technology, tools, tackles, equipment, and chemicals are of staggering size. Man’s struggle with the weeds is routine and perpetual. It’s like the fight between Tom and Jerry of the Walt Disney animation series.

And both parties are stubborn not to give up.

So sure is the man about his confidence in eliminating anything and everything that he doesn’t want or is of no use to him, that he has forgotten that such pursuits have rendered the air he breaths, the water he drinks, and the soil he grows his food poisonous because of the novel chemicals he is mindlessly pumping to control the living beings which are not to his liking.

A documentary by David Attenborough on such plants comes to mind.

There he throws a different light on these plants. He showed how these resilient species strike their roots in the most inhospitable places like cemented courtyards, stone walls, cobblestone paved sidewalks, and a small hole in the drainpipe system to strike their roots and grow. Not only do they strike their roots for a short period, but they allow similar species to colonize their surrounding areas. It’s said if humans vacate their modern habitations and dwelling structures, nature will reclaim these properties in just a few years and these weeds will be at the forefront of such reclamation. The stone structures will last hundreds of years but steel and glass won’t last more than a few decades. Trees will certainly dominate the landscape within just a few years.

Natural processes continue in and around even occupied cities. One could reasonably argue that once cities are abandoned and human influence is removed, it is immediately reclaimed by nature because all that’s left are wild animals, plants, fungi, and bacteria. In the case of Chernobyl, a 1,000-square-mile exclusion zone was abandoned 31 years ago because of a nuclear power plant accident. It has been reclaimed by plants and wildlife that appear to be able to live and reproduce despite the radioactivity.

The hubris of humans to de-weed the world is rightly matched by the nemesis of nature which threaten to recolonize their lost land anytime. These weeds are lurking all around us waiting to find a small crack, a crevice to find a toehold just enough for its seed or spore invisible to us. They need only time and our absence.

We should be happy about just this one thing. 

That if the human species is wiped out from the face of Earth for its follies or due to some dramatic natural calamity caused by any extra-terrestrial events, there is still hope for this blue planet to regenerate to its past glory.

What is friendship to you?

The day before yesterday when I was about to finish a quiet dinner with a friend of mine at a corner table in a not-so-crowded restaurant, a new-age reporter with a camera in one hand and a Rode wireless microphone in another rattled me by asking this question. They were creating content for the hotel which is organising an event for Friendship Day.

I was unprepared.

Not because I didn't know what it was to me, but because I was at a loss how to capture this enormous multi-dimensional variegated feeling that we all have been living with since our adolescent days in a few casual sentences. I chose to dodge.

But it kept haunting me.

There are friends and there are experiences with friends - two different things. My analytical mind dissected the players and the experience which emanates from their interactions.

We all have the experience of having friends.

If there was one best friend during our school days, we would have lost touch with him after we got transferred. Met new people and made new friends. Some of them would have become our best friends with whom we would have liked to spend most of our available time with. Few of them would have chosen to walk away, and a few we would have liked to drop for whatever reason best known to us. We would have let a few down, and a few would have let us down - bored us, frustrated us, betrayed us, hurt us, disappointed us. In our lives, we see dozens of best friends. So, one can quickly identify who is the current best friend but can't describe all the best friends by giving one overarching definition for all of them.

So, friends are just another relationship - strong, fragile, temporary, and temporal.

If it’s challenging to define friends, it's equally difficult to determine the gamut of feelings a deep friendship offers in one umbrella definition.

We border on the danger of using the words which describe our expectations from a friend as the feelings of friendship. Words like, trust, transaction, dependency, joy, and so many are the human expectations of a relationship - not the feelings of friendship.

But then what are the feelings of friendship?

The answer to this can be found by observing the feelings that we experience with the friends we are currently engaged with?

To me, it's some kind of intimacy that attracts us to spend time with each other in either a physical or virtual way. We are attracted to share and interact on issues that are personal, social, intellectual, recreational, spiritual, of shared interest, or which are our common goals. It's gender, age, and status neutral. It can be between two lovers, between a husband and wife, a mother and her daughter, and two different unrelated people who would have met just a few days ago.

It's that state when you connect a dozen times a day, and keep each other informed about the mundane things happening at that moment. You laugh and giggle forgetting the worries around you.

It's about finding a universe of joy in that moment.

How can there be any relationship if two people don't enjoy being with each other? How pleasant was the experience? That's the beginning of every human relationship smaller or bigger.

What is yours?

Ode to Monsoon

By the beginning of June after enduring the harshness of the hot and humid Indian summer season from March, the nation starts looking skyward for the rain clouds to appear. The parched earth and roasted humans in utter despair go to their Gods, weathermen, and astrologers to hear the good news of the arrival of monsoon.

Their huge errors in predictions in the past don’t stop the hapless populace from dabbling with the discussion over rains even if it’s just in the discussion. The pain and hope behind this trepidation are like the hopes of one of the lovers in a broken relationship for the other to return.

The arrival of the monsoon on the Kerala coast is the most awaited event in the month of June.

Why not, when most of our rivers are rain-fed and agriculture is mostly dependent on timely and adequate rains and most of our festivals follow the agrarian calendar? Government and economists prepare themselves for the consequences if it doesn’t rain. Our lives directly or indirectly are dependent on monsoons. In certain years it's timely and adequate and in some it's scarce and so more that it calls for national emergency response. This annual climatic event does something so magical to everything living and non-living who dwell on this vast sub-continent so routinely that all have learned to dance to the tune of it.

I am not the first one who has chosen to write about it nor will be the last one to do so.

With the first monsoon rain humanity erupts into joy. The postings of pictures, videos, reels, and songs on social media by the citizens indicate the magnitude of joy that they are experiencing. Tomes of literature have been written on the monsoon. In the movies, rain is used as a metaphor for ecstasy, blessings, and love. Not only the peacocks are seen serenading their potential mates, but heroines also break into song and dance to celebrate the spirit of the season. 

In the novel Train to Pakistan, Khuswant Singh while describing the most violent episode of the subcontinent’s history couldn’t stop himself from pausing the narrative to describe the first rain of monsoon. He uses three pages to describe it and I am sure he would have held out to the editor’s request or pressure to truncate it. It’s the best description of monsoon I have ever read. Go through the best three paragraphs of his narrative.

“The dust hanging in the air settles on your books, furniture, and food; it gets in your eyes and ears and throat and nose.

This happens over and over again until the people have lost all hope. They are disillusioned, dejected, thirsty, and sweating. The prickly heat on the back of their necks is like emery paper. There is another lull. A hot petrified silence prevails. Then comes the shrill, strange call of a bird. Why has it left its cool bosky shade and come out in the sun? People look up wearily at the lifeless sky. Yes, there it is with its mate! They are like large black-and-white bulbuls with perky crests and long tails. They are pied-crusted cuckoos who have flown all the way from Africa ahead of the monsoon. Isn’t there a gentle breeze blowing? And hasn’t it a damp smell? And wasn’t the rumble which drowned the birds’ anguished cry the sound of thunder? The people hurry to the roofs to see. The same ebony wall is coming up from the east. A flock of herons fly across. There is a flash of lightning which outshines the daylight. The wind fills the black sails of the clouds, and they billow out across the sun. A profound shadow falls on the earth. There is another clap of thunder. Big drops of rain fall and dry up in the dust: A fragrant smell rises from the earth. Another flash of lightning and another crack of thunder like the roar of a hungry tiger. It has come! Sheets of water, wave after wave. The people lift their faces to the clouds and let the abundance of water cover them. Schools and offices close. All work stops. Men, women and children run madly about the streets, waving their arms and shouting “Ho, Ho,”- hosannas to the miracles of the monsoon.

The monsoon is not like ordinary rain which comes and goes. Once it is on, it stays for two months or more. Its advent is greeted with joy. Parties set out for picnics and litter the countryside with the skins and stones of mangoes. Women and children make swings on branches of trees and spend the day in sport and song. Peacocks spread their tails and strut about with their mates; the woods echo with their shrill cries.”

When David Attenborough in one of his documentaries describes the Himalayas and Monsoon in his calming, soothing voice …“. Warm winds from India filled with moisture are forced upwards by the Himalayas to cool which causes clouds to form thus monsoon is born…” the background music and the dramatic time-lapse video beautifully captures the drama and the magic this phenomenon creates over this vast geography.

It almost seems as if God is manifesting himself before humankind.

Early humans realized early how closely nature is intertwined with its existence and chose to respect and worship nature. No wonder very early humans conceptualized God in his role as the creator, nourisher, nurturer, and destroyer by looking at the same aspects in various natural phenomena. It’s only a few hundred years back from the present era, humans as a departure from their earlier convictions saw mother earth as a resource to be exploited for its insatiable greed triggering what we now know as Global Warming and Climate Change.

We are witness to the changing patterns of rain.

Rains have become erratic. Slow drizzle over weeks which was good for farming and absorption into the soil has become non-existent now and what we witness is a cloud burst-like situation over a limited area for a few days which erodes the most precious commodity of the nation - top soil and causes flash floods and immense human misery.

If the rich soils and monsoon rains have been instrumental in developing us from our settled agriculturist days into a civilization of 140 cr to recon with because of our literature, and wisdom; how a changed monsoon pattern triggered by climate change stands to change us is a matter of grave national concern. 

To my kids on Father's Day

If I was instrumental in bringing you into the world, certain things came along the deal which I'm responsible for; you better know about the roles I'm going to play in your life.

As the Protector:

My primary role as a father is to give you physical, emotional, social, and financial protection to the best of my ability till you become an adult. It's also my role to provide you with exactly that much protection which will prepare you to be independent and autonomous and not make you dependent on me for life. Don't expect me to protect you when you are wrong; I'm not your private bouncer. But when you fall, betrayed by your love and the world, I will be there to provide the safety net and a launch pad to swing you back into life.

As the Provider:

My role is also to provide the resources which are needed for you to develop into an educated, sensitive, emotionally stable, well-mannered, and respectful human being with values and principles who can provide for himself and lead a small but honorable life. It will start with my being the example of all of it. I'm not here to give you a luxury lifestyle, foreign vacation, and admission to fancy foreign universities. You have to earn it yourself. Don't try to make me look deficient as a father because your friends' fathers are breaking their backs trying to live up to the expectations of their wives and children. Period!

As the Disciplinarian:

If I'm doing the above two things well, be prepared for the third. My job is to discipline you, your thoughts, and your actions. I am here to set standards and instill values and principles in you. Breaking you in is no easy job and I don't want you to love me for this. You can run to your mother, and grandmother to cry and complain against me to release your angst. I want you to remember my face when you do anything wrong and fear the consequences even if I am not around.

Your Gen Z friends will say that your dad is old school, controlling, orthodox, and chauvinistic but digest that and do as I say.

You will remember all the things that I did to you as discussed above when you become an adult and have your own children to raise. You will remember me and appreciate the hard choices I made when you would be falling and rising and successfully navigating the obstacles of life. But by then I would be history; not around to know your appreciation of my role in making you.

That's a dad’s life.

Those Old Toys

They were stowed away and forgotten for close to 15 years till we discovered them while clearing the cupboards yesterday. But as I look closely at each one of them, flashes of memories come rushing back.

From the day they came into our house - either bought or gifted, how my kids played with each of them, how many kilometres they travelled with us, what all the places they visited with us, and how many times they suffered being smeared in Cerelac and how many times they had to suffer the washing machine and the tumble dryer to the mountains of joy they brought into our kids’ lives. They were living beings with individual personalities and identities in the chaotic circus we called home.

They were on our beck and call working untiringly along with us to raise our kids.

The children outgrew them years back and when their role as their emotional support started dwindling, we wrapped them in a polybag to declutter our home. When we met them today, one of them had lost an eye, many had lost their lustre, and some wore tattered jackets. Logic says that the time to say goodbye has come and let them go as they neither are needed by our children nor by us.

Now, they are like the nanny we had but don't need her anymore.

Now even after they were conveniently forgotten for 15 years; they look as happy as always - ready to make us joyful again.

Should I let them go or can I let them go rather? Kids will leave us one day, but can I ever let go of the memory of their growing up phase and the awkwardness of ours as untrained parents and those million experiences. These lifeless stuffed toys are the objects around which these precious memories are woven.

Will know by this evening.

22nd May 2023

Different Strokes

In another few hours, the deadliest train accident of our living memories will be 52 hours old. Hours will be days, days will become weeks, and weeks will become months.

Life will go on but those gory images of dismembered bodies, strewn body parts, and the sound in our minds of a huge mass of metal hitting another at great speed, wailing of people crushed under the metal carriages crying for help will keep playing in a loop and haunt us a lifetime. As many times its memory would visit us, that many times our hands will rise in prayer for this not to happen again. If the macro picture of this tragedy was unsettling, micro tales of personal tragedies that will roll out one after the other will leave us devastated emotionally in the months to come. 

After the Super Cyclone, Odisha registered itself at the top of one more list which no one wants its name on.

When an incident of such tragic proportions happens, baser minds like ours get tempted to ask the unseen - why? What were his plans? Why did he orchestrate such a sanguineous drama to destroy hundreds of innocent lives and leave behind ten times more people scarred for life?

The exact number of dead is not known yet. 288, 295+, 175, and 1000 are the numbers flying around and each source has its own method of counting and each will stick to their number. We thought human beings were countable but now we realise that dead bodies are not.

The response to the accident was straight out of the disaster management textbook. This is what we get to see in American movies. Well-drilled professionals were cutting through the chaos with the precision of a surgeon.

Before the agencies could arrive the locals came in droves and started rescuing people using locally available crude tools and ladders. The picture of them pulling out people alive, injured, maimed, and dead was so moving and heartening. The people from the nearby towns came in hundreds to volunteer and donate blood. For them, the world was a binary. The ones who can help and the ones who need help. Every life mattered and every minute was precious. Balasore rose above faith, regionality, language, and economic divide and set a benchmark of what civilians can do sans power and resources.

The scale of the tragedy though caught various state agencies unaware, the alacrity, efficiency, coordination, and cooperation among them showed no sign that they represent three different governments ruled by three different political parties who are known for their differences. No one was blaming anyone, no one was trying to steal the limelight, and no one was trying to gain political mileage in the time of this monumental crisis facing humanity. In their mind the same binary played. The ones who can help and the ones who need help.

But the scene in the virtual world of social media which didn't stand anywhere near lending a helping hand was in stark contrast to what was on the ground. The grief and outrage of people were painted with political and communal colours, people who generally wore the garb of decency didn't bat an eyelid to shed it and turn vituperative and personally abusive, and many pandered and fuelled conspiracy theories against a particular section of the society. No one wanted to miss the opportunity at hand to grind their personal axes of hatred and divisive politics.

Behind the cloak, some were seen with a pair of wings of goodness and ready to take humanity to the next level and some were seen carrying a dagger to slit someone's jugular.

Incidents like these throw us to our bare selves, exposing our core values and intentions - wings and scabs.

 

Being Odia

Being an Odia in Odisha whose fate is tied and tightly coupled with the whims and fancies of another Odia would speak of another Odisha which it never was or should be.

For centuries we have proved that we make very good servants, sincere, loyal, and honest; efficiency was not expected from the one who just has to guard the post to protect his master's interest. From being the Balasore Bearers to a Babu in the highest office and now as waiters and security guards in metros we have done every role because the lure of risk-free, easy, and secure life is hard to resist. It's time we resurrected that dormant gene that made some of us kings and emperors.

Though after seeing our current practice of servility and the way it gets rewarded, it fills me with doubt if the kings of the past were bred and raised here or were imported.

Let's stop stealing from our master's warehouse and treasury to build our riches and also stop managing his business well and wait indefinitely for him to give us the reward and certificate of good conduct; let's build it on our own. Both share the same easy path to a secure life, differentiated only by honesty. Stop behaving like a king with his power of attorney in your hand; because he can annul it anytime. Great servants never build great nations; they live off it.

Let's build the courage to do something new, hit the monolith with a disruptive thought and idea, design a different method, a product, break new grounds, shake the status quo at its base, and push our art, language, and endowments to the next level by creating things anew, be an employer and not just aspire to be a very civil servant as the symbol of our collective and ultimate aspiration if we want our state to regain its past glory.

Stop being delusional about our past when the present doesn't promise a glorious future. Let's help each other to do things that are different.

My Utkala Dibasa thought.

Bhubaneswar – The city which adopted this nomad.

Vividly remember that Sunday afternoon in the summer of 1974 when Baba drove us to a plot he had recently acquired.

After crossing the last human habitation with some rickety unimpressive houses at Acharya Vihar, we were on the highway towards Khurda. After about a kilometre plus he turned right to a barren geography with no shrub in sight. New roads were being demarcated with mounds of aggregates dotting the sides of stormwater drains. Our Jeep rattled on it and stopped at a point where the road ended and overlooked a valley. We were asked to get down and Baba proudly showed us his first material acquisition after struggling for a decade plus to raise his 4 children.

 

Maa, as a forest officer's wife was too used to living in mini estates and was least impressed with this postage stamp-sized plot. To her, plots are measured in acres, not square feet. She sarcastically suggested that ideally, he should have bought some land a bit ahead which would have been easier for us to take care of cultivation at our ancestral village near Chilka. With the ego of the man of the house punctured, the drive back can only be expected to be in uncomfortable silence.

 

That was IRC Village then. Can't tell about others, but a part of me stayed back at that exact spot constantly beaconing me to return.

 

Born into a nomadic life because of constant transfers of Baba, we were to hop from place to place every two, or three years, get attached to that setting and agree to a willful separation and strike root at an unknown place. This perhaps gave me a stronger heart to drop people and deal with future disappointments and breakups.

But while living that peripatetic life, my mind always wanted to come to that spot someday in the future and settle down.

 

Another chance transfer in 1986 made us denizens of this city which I had longed to be a part of since 74. This place has seen our family of 6 grow to 18 at its peak and with all the life's dramas - the birth of my children and the death of my father. Never thought of leaving it even once and I'm sure this place will witness my final journey.

 

At times I ask myself what drew me to this city. I came here with zero friends and no relatives to speak of and with no dreams or ambitions - I just wanted to be here. Was I running away from my past? No! Then?

 

The words of two people partially answer my question.

 

Baba used to say that it's in the soil. He jokingly attributed the color red to the blood of his ancestors who had valiantly fought off invaders and staged mutinies. And of Priyadarshy Dash Bhaina when he said, he agreed to a lesser pay package while opting for a shift to Bhubaneswar because he would get a few lakhs worth of free breeze every evening to make good. Its appeal and magnetism perhaps lie in its air and soil.

 

This city which has housed us and shaped our lives and nurtured our dreams has completed 75 years today and at 75, two things still look beautiful, the city you love and your mother.

 

It's on us how we together shape its future.

A father’s letter to his daughter

Dear,

Today is your first day at your office and your first step into the world as a professional. I as a father feel I must tell you certain home truths and things that will help you take on the uncertain water and navigate in the new world filled with unknown people and their unknown interests.

 

Leap not with romantic hopes but with practical understanding.

 

A Job is an opportunity:

It’s not a job, it’s also not a trophy you have bagged. It’s a responsibility that you have agreed to take. Be thankful that you got this opportunity to show your talent, give back to your organization and learn from others. Evaluate the opportunity in terms of the quality of responsibility the organization gives you. Responsibility is not a burden; it’s a silent acknowledgment of your capability and the trust that the organization reposes in you. It's invaluable for your growth and learning and much bigger than the CTC. Make the best of it.

 

Gratitude:

Only some get this opportunity. A hundred factors have coincided to bring you where you are today. Remain in gratitude for your upbringing, grace, good wishes, and blessings of many known and unknown to you.

 

You are just not a packaged skill:

Remember in the initial days you will be evaluated based on your attitude towards work, learning, and people, not on your skill sets. The organization will evaluate you on how well you deal with people, how committed you are to your responsibilities, and how open you are to exploring and learning new things and delivering them at work.   

 

Let your conduct speak:

Build your professional reputation by being punctual, being attentive during a discussion, showing sincerity by seeking clarification and help, and demonstrating commitment by delivering things on time. A reminder is a negative score you earn.

 

Respect and Command Respect:

Respect is not demonstrated through obsequity, it is communicated through activities and behavior. Be respectful towards others and be watchful of your boundaries; guard them against being breached.

 

Pleasantness:

Everyone loves a pleasing personality. Differentiate between friendliness and pleasantness. Exude pleasantness, positivity, energy, smartness, and team spirit. You communicate a lot through how you dress and groomed and how you deal with people who are lower to you in order.

 

Shun Negativities:

The organization will not treat you the way you want it to treat you. You will encounter unfairness and bias. Don’t jump to a conclusion. You won’t see the total picture when you are a party. The organization could be having its compulsions and reasons. Control your envy, jealousy, and the urge to pull others down when you feel side-lined. Don't discuss anything negative about your friends, relatives, colleagues, or organization. Never express your disappointment in public. Never!

 

Opportunities to learn:

The opportunity will make you realize how little you know and how much is out there to be learned. The time you have in hand should be spent learning newer things and acquiring newer skills to be a smart problem solver. Self-improvement is key to long-term success. Better your best.

 

A job is the best fit:

Remember that organizations will hire you when they need you for solving a specific problem they are facing then. The old models of organizations are fast disappearing. Organizations are becoming lean and changing quickly because they have come to realize that they only can survive when they change fast with the changing time. See your job as the best fit for demand at that time and your ability to supply the same. Evaluate how much did you contribute to the revenue side of the organization. You will be important if there is a need for it. A job is not a personal relationship or a life-long commitment. They are not obliged to help and support you achieve your personal goals and your career dreams.

 

It's a very important day in your life as from today you are going to wear your own identity. You will be identified and recognized for your work and not as my daughter anymore. You will create your relevance in the organization and over the next few years discover how successful you have become. All these can happen with your effort and at your own cost. The world will take you through your paces. It will be a testing time for our years of upbringing, education, skill, and attitude all combined.

 

Wish you Godspeed!

Sunday Blues and our perpetual fight with Procrastination

It’s a Sunday afternoon and after the post-lunch siesta, I wake up to a mixed feeling of having lost out, being left behind, guilty, and filled with self-doubt - a sense of dejà vu.

Familiar with it; deep down I know that this will continue till I reach the office and start taking up things. I have lived through this feeling since my adolescence and only recently realized that many adults like me do undergo this feeling routinely and it has a name.

It is called ‘Sunday Blues’.

Research shows that about 66% of the respondents in the UK experience ‘Sunday Blues’ anxiety triggered by thoughts of work the following day. Things are also the same here it seems. For someone who has a punishing 6-day work schedule wasting 50% of his weekend time in a state of gloom is not happy news. Also, not good news for a professional who is suffering from work-related anxieties regularly.

What we are seeing here is the beginning of stress.

In our professional lives, we have to commit ourselves to some delivery. At the beginning of our career, we are pretty comfortable delivering and very few works get postponed. But as we grow in age other important tasks of personal nature like health issues in the family, social commitments, and many unforeseen events make us defer things more. In the process, only the ‘Urgent’ ones get the attention and the ones that are also ‘Important’ gets postponed. And one day the long list of unfinished ‘Important’ things jostles for engagement with the ’Urgent’ things of that moment causing what is called Stress.

Simply put, Stress is our inability to deal with the task which we have committed to do on that day.

And staying under a long period of stress does irreparable damage to one’s mind and body affecting his personal and professional life. A huge industry exists to solve this problem because a large number of people can’t get their acts together to refuse what they can’t deliver what they are expected to by the scheduled days. The sincere types who are aware of their postponement acts suffer the guilt of doing so and start seeing themselves as habitual ‘Procrastinators’ and resign to that nomenclature.

Experts say that there are no Procrastinators but there are many who are in the habit of procrastinating.

What then is the habit of procrastinating?

The anatomy of habit has three basic components. There is a Trigger, there is a Pattern and there is a Reward for doing so. Here the jostling of 'Urgent’ and ‘Important’ fight for space and attention and that results in stress. This stress acts as a trigger for the Reaction. As deferring some of the not-so-urgent tasks gives us temporary relief, it acts as a reward for someone to develop a pattern of such deferment.

We all know how the act of organizing the cupboard, our wardrobe, the file cabinet, or the travel documents for reimbursements gets deferred for months and months and we develop some fear of touching it. But one day it confronts us to be taken up because by then we would have exhausted all our excuses, it adds to the existing stress. Once we give in to the pattern of procrastinating it results in our feeling guilty, which causes panic and makes us take more and newer excuses to procrastinate further.

Many of us helplessly surrender to a downward spiralling loop of stress and guilt unless something throws us out of it. Many people in the creative field suffer from this infamy as more mental focus and discipline are required to deliver creative content as opposed to those who do repetitive and routine work. 

Experts say that nothing can help us come out of this loop unless we help ourselves out of it.

They say that the core of the problem lies in giving in to the stress and reacting to it by deferring the pending tasks and enjoying temporary relief. 

They say that of all the tasks which you are too tempted to defer, at least if one task is accommodated in that days scheduled and pushed to some start; one can complete the task soon if he gets over the fear of restarting it. And completing one such task fuels the confidence to complete all others.

That is the only way to deal with it - to take the bull by its horn.