We have never lived in so much uncertain politico-economic times before. America is in deep financial mess and the political gridlock is not making things any better. People have lost faith in conventional political alternatives. The Tea Party movements with its constitutional conservatives do not really have any agenda apart from dismantling the superstructure installed by the Obama administration. Obama seems heading for defeat, even if I hate to admit it. Sarah Palin with Madam Michelle are the pin-up girl for the movement. The political stalemate has left America paralyzed from the middle. The Wall Street-White House nexus and the destruction of regulation-whether financial or environmental, will emerge into a textbook Perfect Political Storm. Well, Belgium has not had a government for a while too, the fact is Belgium is more of a transit hub with Brussels as the European capital and Antwerp being the diamond hub, that its own politics is too trivial to matter.  India has had deafeningly slow coalition governments in the Late 90’s and the emphasis was on political stability rather than governance. Democracy is a system, simply too ineffective for the developing world; the power is simply concentrated in one elite political clique, 300 odd families rule India fro Sansad to gram panchayat level. China with its single party centralized command is a well oiled army is a competent SWAT squad, too rapid for any democratic system.

Democracy ensures plurality of views, but paralyzes as well in case of a split mandate. The unholy Lib Dem-Conservative marriage of convenience does not do any good.  The Congress led Coalition in India has simply stopped governing after the Hazare fasts, and has resigned its fate at the ballot box two and a half years from now. There seems to be a deficit of trust in democracy as a system to deliver governance. The question which might be asked is whether autocratic regimes are better; i would say depends on the talent at the top. Winning elections does not make a bunch of charismatic men and women good administrators, government is a different ball-game. Revolution to get to the top, does not mean revolution in office. An effective orator does not make a effective leader. The Pirate Party in Berlin won 15% of the vote in local polls 🙂 An obscure entity winning votes, which is fresh in the arena 🙂

The Tea Party, The Hazare Maovement, The Pirate Party are all indications of a frustration with the present status quo. Career Politicians need to do better, if they do not want to be unemployed very soon.

There are some aspect of our lives which we do not like. may be we may have been bullied in school as a school kid for being obese, or teased to death because someone stammered or have been the butt of jokes in his or her social circle. These things truly kill a personality; the notion of the semi conscious, quasi-rational self. Respect in front of ones own eyes is crucial for being respected in the eyes of the world. All stunts to gain so called friends is only a temporary band-aid  on a serious predicament which can only be solved through fundamental changes which take time emotionally and physically.  Everyone wants to feel loved and wanted, I do too.. since I have been grossly overweight since I was a teenager &  this  does not make a person very confident in the notion of the self. Losing weight has been a struggle.  Life is not a popularity contest, but losing weight is primarily for a healthier self. The realization has come late, but well in time.

Life is cruel and social darwinism is at play in its full splendor. We have to fit enough not to be relegated to the next division. Life is for playing Large, and not for the loose change. The battle is in the mind, passion is the fuel and life;  the gladiatorial amphitheater. 

Fighting the inner demons is the hardest thing, its Spiritual Warfare at its pinnacle. The world is so fast, catching up and being at the top of one’s game for a long time is indeed a battle. A Sachin Tendulkar can play at the top of the game for two decades because He knew how to keep going and striving for the next goal. A Pete Sampras and  Rodger Federer are admirable material.  Failures are there, but how one handles it differentiates a winner from a yet to be winner.

The Losers Syndrome is addictive- a love for victim psychosis, a respect for bearing pain and humiliation and not fighting back all contribute to why we hate ourselves. At the end of the day, the people who matter will matter because of who we are and not because of what we do. Lets try to love ourselves truly, for once….

This topic seems to be very left of centre or even marxist in sentiment, but poverty alleviation has been reduced to mere sedentary rhetoric, such as Bijli Sadak Paani or Electricity Roads and Water Access or Jai Kisaan Jai Jawan, as in the 60’s and 70’s in India in political discourse. Poverty is a universal affliction across the world. Even America has a great quantum of poverty who live on stamps and handouts. Recession has worsened the scene gravely. Ever since liberalization in India happened in the early 1990’s, middle class has exploded to the public imagination, agriculture has taken a backseat- hardly any structural reforms have been carried out like the financial sector. 830 million in India still live under Rs. 20 per day as per the Arjun Sengupta report a couple of years back. Farmer suicides have been in the thousands in the last decade, while the Agriculture Minister of ‘Western Maharashtra’ state seems more interested in running a ten nation game from its headquarters from Dubai.  Onion exports have resumed while retail prices have gone through the roof, so much for the ‘Aam Admi’. Energy bills for the common man have exponentially increased impacting the poor, driving millions back into poverty and its problems.  Our priorities have been away from the heart of the common man. Rural Development, Agriculture and Power are the sectors which impact poverty levels the most in India.

The latest bombshell from the Federal administration in Delhi came when the Planning Commission- the agency which determines economic policy and development for 1.5 billion stomachs, put a paltry Rs. 32/day for urban areas for the definition of poverty assessment by the government. It is indeed a pathetic and preposterous metricization  of a human condition. How do you measure a human predicament? By all reports Rs. 32/day is a paltry sum, rather its inhuman. The same goes for the parameters of the Millennium Development Goals of the United Nations. These are all fuzzy metrics, which do not have an impact on the ground apart from cool NGO Speak at swanky seminars.

We live in islands of prosperity around an ocean of despair. We are all heading towards an agglomeration of revolts from the Levant to Lima. The Mashreq Spring was set off due to the immolation of a vegetable vendor in Tunis. Poverty as historically known from the Bastelle revolt of 1789 to the 2011 revolt at the Pearl Square at Manama was triggered off by hunger.  Poverty should be brought back to the high table of decision making as it is emerging as a security threat for the future.

 

This is a hyphenated term which troubles me. Why does not thought necessarily translate into action? Do beliefs shape practices or does practices shape value systems. Are Structure and Agency reflexive truly? What is the missing link in the discourse, is it initiative, drive or sheer loss of control over our products of thought or alienation as Marx said that workers are alienation from the product, and as we are living in an post modern, anti meta narrative era, we are mind workers at the end of the day.  How do our value systems evolve, whether they attenuate or amplify are questions of significant importance. I understand, some people are action oriented in a naturally pre disposed fashion, and some like me are arm chair thinkers, need to have a spectacular cognitive clarity in order to take the right step. Excessive analysis does lead to paralysis of action, the threshold frequency for an idea to skip to the next energy level is the sheer passion to make it happen. Its often obsession that gets the idea across the finish line.

Often thought does not convert into meaningful meaning making out of the action due to the circumstances in the ‘Desert of the Real’.  What you have to do is what you have to do is my primer for many a decision i have taken. So whats your take, what comes first- the impulse of action or the train of thought?

We undergo a plethora of emotions, in our heads, minds and the obscure entity called the soul. Passion is the eternal source of energy , but pain is an emotion that connect all humankind. Pain is also felt by animals. The only difference is that we make meaning of the pain that we encounter. Pain is triggered by disappointments, fulfillment of our aspirations. Pain has a different shade of metaphor. Its physical pain caused by a disease or injury, emotional turmoil regarding personal matters, its complex at its best. There is no motivator like pain, it builds resolve like no other medicine, it gives immunity against events that trigger basic crisis.  It ignites a fire in the belly like no other thing can. Life would not be life sans pain. The greatest emotional scars are left by pain. Physical version of the pain leaves us crying for relief, the physical pain goes away, but the mental scar does not heal too quickly.

Managing pain is crucial, channelizing its momentum is the key. It can make us stronger or break us. I pray that every bout of physical pain or heartbreak heals and heralds a new start.

 

We have many emotions that we travel through time, during various phases in life. Sometimes, we want to feel wanted, many times we feel that we have found a soul mate, a person we have found resonance with, in terms of interests, perspectives and simply have a splendid time whenever we meet and catch up. Giving labels to relationships sometimes limits the purview of the landscape of emotions that we explore in our lives.  We feel that precious moments that are experienced wont come again, and want to feel the most of it an a singular moment. Live a life in a moment, in all the splendor that life has to offer.

Keeping Faith is tough, we ask multiple questions of ourselves; am i good enough, can i make it through, will i screw up bigtime… are all the million riyal questions that we ask of ourselves when we meet a person, opening  or a situation that we do not wish to lose, even at the cost of our lives. I pray hard for the Will of GOD to be established in my life.  Well, Faith as small as a mustard seed can move a mountain.  Every journey has a lesson, a key take-away that transforms our mundane existence for the better. Life is Beautiful in all its strange contours. Faith leads to prayer and that directs us to hope against hope for the worse off option to not be actualized.  There are a million different things going on in my life. These are opportunities, thoughts, people, ideas moving in and out at differential velocities according to the weights they carry in the scheme of life.  Life is short, keeping up the passion and the drive is the key to make the best of the window of opportunities which GOD presents us.

Faith, Prayer, Love and finally hope are the sides of the same square that define our lives. These all elements are invaluable in the journey called life. Its bewildering at times lah! Keeping Faith is hard, failing takes a pound of emotional flesh out of our psyche as dreams dont realize all the time. We are expected to perform at our epoch perennially. Work Life Balance is indeed an oxymoron. Either we do well in our career or have reasonably fulfilling non work related time.  Let us atleast try to fulfill our calling 🙂

I hope, I hope…..

Heartbreak is something which is fundamentally common to everyone, more common to people who are chronologically young and also to those young at heart. This is a basic emotion, a one which makes us feel human. One of those very bundle of sentiments which causes us to retrospect, introspect and changes us one heartbeat at a time. Heartbreak is not connected to only a romantic notion, but it is experienced when we intercept failure when our hopes and reality do not collide. A heartbreak from a failure either from a event, occasion or a human relationship, makes us either very strong or makes us fragile in the event of another failure. It makes us skeptical of risk of venturing out in to the unknown.  Or it makes us fearless, having the faith of seen it all and what more worse can come out of this latest human initiative.

Heartbreak is one emotion well characterized in the entertainment industry. I follow Bollywood very closely so I have my personal favorites for heart break season. Tanhayee from Dil Chahata Hai, Mitwa from Kal Ho Na Ho in case of relationships or Tanha Dil from Shaan or a track from Lagaan can pep  me up for the day in case of a setback. This is one strand of sentiment that hits hard, and real rough. Its raw and real. Transformative power can felt in those quickened breaths and tears trickling down from the corner of the ears. The soul can see me through my real me from the outside.

Maturity is demonstrated in the light of a disappointing heart break. It keeps us sad for sometime  and then makes us realize that life is long beyond the incident and the zest is awaiting us at the next bend, it is the hope that keeps us alive.

Yet, we all hope at the back of our mind that we wish that things had worked out as we has planned, life’s beautiful is in its vagaries and its time that we acknowledge and appreciate it.

We all have this wonderful opportunity and a gift called life. The realization only comes when we have lost invaluable time in the process to pandering to our emotions and egos. A huge quantum of chronological space is lost in growing up and making sense of who we are. The question which comes to my mind frequently is ‘are we just here, to life a stable, comfortable existence, to continue the status quo or to make a dent in the wall of time’. Well, making a dent is very hard, it seems all the easy issues have been dealt with and all the intractable big issues are left and no body wants to touch them. These issues are significant, but the best minds are all working in financial services in front of rolling numbers on a screen.  Lets admit it, money matters and that Sunday brunch at the Four Seasons is pretty cool.

Change has to fight with the historical inertia of time. Making a simple academic domain transition is met with resistance and suspicion. Life seems to be reduced to a paper called a Resume, and a advert called a Cover Letter. Everything during University seems to be for the CV. Its all a project towards a ‘well rounded personality’. Anybody who goes against the tide of society and time is torn away into pieces. We live in the era of instant gratification, its all about instant success. No body has patience. I would like to thank my teachers on the eve of Teachers Day, who had patience when I was growing up and had the confidence in me to persist.

Life is a project with a definite timeline. No space for redundancies called ’emotions and sentiments’ are factored in to the bottomline of the balancesheet. Its a perennial rush hour to work. As Marx said in ‘Estranged Labour’, ‘the labour’s product is something alien , as a power independent of its producer’. Work is for survival, Social Darwinism at its glorious best.  The meaning of existence is lost as we do not have any time to think and to reflect. Its all a race to the finish line. Life is indeed a race and not a stroll in the park.  It seems the concept of the film Matrix is realizing itself, day by day that are all in a program to maintain the status quo and to keep us subdued via the regime of work life. Life is work and work is life.

Lets take out one day in our lives to rediscover ourselves, find raw joy and emotion once again…