The Masquerade

Our beloved motherland, more popularly known as India, has been proclaimed as a ‘developing country’ by suspiciously unnamed and seemingly non-existent people during recent times (exact number of years unavailable). As a permanent resident of this ‘developing country’ with no near-future plans of flying away, I am beginning to suspect that this groundbreaking declaration regarding my ‘beloved motherland’ is just a powerful wisp of rumour started by even more powerful politicians.

Now since I am a permanent resident of this ‘beloved country’, as has been already mentioned, it should be utterly evident that I have damning evidence to support my rather controversial opinion regarding our ‘beloved motherland’, and damning evidence I have!

How is it that a ‘developing country’, which is also world’s 2nd fastest growing economy, have outright, in-your-face paradoxical phenomenon occurring everywhere?

How it is that a developed place adorned with malls and multiplexes and with everything else that makes a town modern has to endure a total of 16 hours of power cut every single miserable day?

How is it that a place that can afford to have malls and multiplexes can’t afford to buy or generate enough electricity to keep these modern marvels functional?

How is it that our country, that is renowned for producing world’s finest software engineers doesn’t have one single decent ISP provider for its own people?

How is it that everyone has financial resources spare enough to own a cellphone and then incessantly talk on it so loud that defeats the very purpose of having a cellphone?

How is it that a rich affluent man is impudent enough to build the most expensive home in the country (including a helipad) that overlooks (literally) a humongous slum in the most expensive area of Bombay?

After pondering over these questions, India, to me, seems like a Third World Country masquerading as a ‘Developing Country’.

The Job

Finally, after more than 2-month sabbatical, I have managed to find myself a decent paying job. Although it’s amazing to see how I can make myself even minutely useful to someone that they are actually willing to pay me for it, I have managed to also convince myself and others around me that I am capable of writing some print worthy material.

My first day at the job required me to write 3 articles, impromptu. Now, let me confess here that I have never written more than a 100-word article for a job. So considering how amateurish I write, I managed to churn out 3 “pretty good articles” as said by my senior, in half a day there. I was proud of myself; a warm feeling of satisfaction had filled up my insides that lasted until dawn the next day.

Writing has always made me feel better. No matter what rubbish I type down, at the end of this activity I am always left with a light-as-a-feather feel. For now I only wish fervently that these after effects keep continuing at the end of each of my writing session because I don’t know about any other job that I can do now which would leave me as satisfied as this does.

There is nothing better than doing something that makes you feel good and being paid for it.

Kya SSC Board Paanchvi Paas se Tez Hai?

On June 20, Friday, HT’s front-page headline went something like this “Easy maths or tough maths?”

A catchy headline that provoked me to further investigate the article and so I perused it with growing discontent after every line. It seems our SSC Board has been idle with nothing significant to do for a while, so now; they have come out with a very “innovative strategy” to reduce the number of students that flunk in this seemingly tough maths subject in their 10^th grade.

The “Innovative Strategy”: Come 9^th standard and students will be given an option between “easy maths” and “tough maths”.

The Catch: Students stupid enough to take this bait, that is, students who opt for easy maths in their 9^th standard would not be allowed to take up Maths at plus-two level (i.e. your 12^th standard) and hence can forgo any chance of being engineers or physicists.

Our education ministry has plunged into a new low this time. To keep up the façade, they are now tampering with the syllabus. What brought on this “revolutionary change”? According to the statistics, 30% of students who appear for SSC fail in Maths every year and this is their solution for the problem! It is despicable, to say the least, that the Board in order to maintain the useless percentage of pass-outs is providing the students an easy way out.

Will the student’s 9^th standard choices now decide their career? How is a mere 9^th standard student going to decide so early on if he will be an engineer or not? How can young pupils take a mammoth decision as this when the career conundrum keeps baffling even many postgraduates too? As it is, our young generation is not the smart one anyways, then why make things harder for these scatterbrains?

If this is a viable solution then why stop here? Staggering numbers of entrants flunk IIT’s entrance exams every year too, let’s make that easier now. Easy IIT or tough IIT? Easy CAT or tough CAT? Easy CET or tough CET? Easy CA or tough CA? And so on and so forth.

Instead of dealing with the problem head-on by either revising the syllabus or making the examination papers a bit easier or changing the techniques of teaching, the Board is scrambling out of problem by providing an easy way out for itself and the students.

The grossly over-rated education system and percentage policy has been taken too far. In an attempt to increase the percentage, a mere number, the Board is compromising the learning of the students and ignoring the bigger picture.

If tomorrow, Manoj, a ninth grader, opts for “easy maths” so that it would help him secure a higher percentage to get into Science after his SSC and he decides he loves Computers later on and wants to be a computer engineer, what then? He would jarringly wake up the fact that he CANNOT take up engineering because he has not been allowed to take up Maths at plus-two level.

I’d rather Manoj didn’t study at all. It would do him a world of good if he just proceeded to learning computers himself and be an engineer instead of wasting his years choosing between “easy maths” and “tough maths”.

Saving English

It takes a strong as steel gut and stronger than steel mind to deal with unbridled criticism from someone who has only seen your picture on a tiny window on Gtalk and doesn’t even know your last name.

In my case, where I am not kindly receptive of criticism from anyone, this blow hit me harder than expected. I was seething with fury. I was half off my couch to take the next train to the loudmouth’s office and literally pluck out every one of those hair on her head with my naked fingers. Were it not for the monsoon disrupting trains, there will be a one bald loudmouth girl roaming the streets of Bombay.

Itching has engulfed my fingers since I suppressed this raging desire. It’s getting hard even to type or maybe it’s just me who can’t write or more precisely in the words of another loudmouth “I decry the use of bad language and still use it myself”.

Both loudmouths seem to be of the strong opinion that I, a nobody from a place of which no one has heard of, is raping English language. Soon there will be formulated a new law wherein I would not be allowed to thrive in the proximity of any kind of keyboards, keypads, pen, pencil, paper or anything else that would enable me to conjure up even minutely sensible sentences or even words that would subject the unsuspecting readers to unbearable agony and scar them for life.

In order to forestall such trying calamities I will be soon, in the near future, not allowed to write or publish any of my ghastly penned concoctions. Rejoice!

Provoked

As the subtitle to my blog says, “When I am idle, I write” So, here I am writing away.

I have been grossly avoiding writing my blog since some months and in process have lost what miniscule amount of readers I had for my blog. Ironically, an ill-fated episode spurred me into getting back to blogging with a vengeance.

Since the time I met with that unfortunate incident where my trusty foot ditched me far away from my heavenly abode (read: Ulhasnagar) and left me to partake the ordeal of making it home with one able foot, I have been consigned to house arrest of the worst kind. Initially, I welcomed this leisure time after having dogged in college and at “work” and facing an extensive commute for 4 hours a day. However, the fun and frolic soon wore off and now I face those dreadful empty days after emptier days.

24 hours of nothingness times 10, hop, skip and jump to the loo, begging and bribing the younger sibling to get things done, several hours of radioactive rays barging in my eyes from our Sony TV and last but not the least, mastering my shooting and targeting skills on GTA San Andreas. This has been my life for the past 10 days. If this is not provocation enough for a girl to go bonkers and start churning out rubbish and flaunting it to the world at large then I don’t know what is.

Read my blog and judge for yourselves. Meanwhile, I would keep gobbling up the virtual space.

Wishlist

I want to……

1. Raze all the Sify outlets everywhere in this country.
2. Fashion an umbrella big enough to envelope the whole of Bombay (including the ill fated suburbs)
3. Wear an astronaut silver jump suit to work.
4. Ransack all Landmark, Crossword, Oxford outlets in this country.
5. Send all our ministers back to school.
6. Kill all the canines in this world, except pugs.
7. Personally hunt down all the lizards on this earth and deep fry them in oil. Live!
8. Set the BMC office ablaze (they are no use, then why waste space?)
9. Ban news channels from airing “NEWS”.
10. Make it mandatory for every child who is above the age of 6 to watch South Park everyday.

Isn’t it Ironic? Don’t you think?

Tamanna unveils the ultimate law of job hunt

The indisputable law of the job hunt is, “No one would revert until you get a job”. I am certain that anyone who has ever gone on a job hunt has without fail, experienced this.

It all starts with you, the prey, scrambling all over the place (virtual as well as otherwise) to look for that one perfect job that you would love and that would also give you some monetary benefits in return of your invaluable (in your humble, modest opinion) services. You will spend a fortune in calling your prospective employers or trying desperately to get in touch with these seemingly “busy bodies”. I say seemingly because you will find this microscopic group of other employers who will contact you soon enough! While others, after having given out a cry for help and announcing the vacancy in their organization on every site and in ever paper available on earth will never revert. Believe me, once you apply to these people, you will never hear from them again until one fine day when you do have a job.

If ever you are fortunate enough to actually see one of these people or even hear their honorable voice over the phone, they will have you understand in clear and vivid terms that they do not have time for a low-life as you. The only thing that escapes my tiny brain is why most of the people in upper echelons of any organization act so haughty and condescending when it comes to interacting with beginners and newcomers in the field. To me, they seem like bullies who feed on other people’s self-confidence to hide their insecurities.

Once you get a job, or even think of committing to a place, your phone starts ringing incessantly and your inbox is flooded with people calling for interviews. I think they have radar that detects newly employed people so that they can bait them before these unsuspecting preys take a plunge into any other offer.

Conclusion: “To get a job, you should always have a job” Ironic, eh?

It’s Raining Mess,Hallelujah

It is that time of the year, when finally our country has a chance to sanitise itself with annual showers! Considering how filthy our roads and any other land, which doesn’t bear the burden of dusty buildings, are, I think we should have rains all year long. That way, atleast a minute part of the vast amount of dirt accumulated over half a century on our part of the earth is washed away.

On second thoughts, I don’t think we should have rains AT ALL. Because, when it rains in Bombay, it doesn’t pour, it just floods! Trains refuse to run, it becomes a Herculean task just to get to office for some people and when they do accomplish this mission impossible they are left stranded and hungry, news channels at last find a way to air something useful ,weather reports (not the saucy weather girls, we don’t even have them anymore), irritating devils masquerading as children swarm the building halls since they can’t go out and make life hell for others, newspapers arrive at your doorstep shredded in bits and pieces and that too DRENCHED, clothes left out to drip dry don’t dry they just keep dripping and make you smell like it’s you who hasn’t showered since you were 10 and a special and honorable mention again to our only lifeline, TRAINS, local trains don’t need rains to stop functioning, they just need clouds enough to block the sunlight to go on a sabbatical.

Phew! I think I have cribbed enough about the rains considering many are delighted with them falling on our HEADS. I shall sign out before my laptop dies on me, as it hasn’t been refueled because the lights went out and no points for guessing why the lights are out.

Cracked!

The fateful day of 2nd June saw me fall prey to the one of many things that makes Bombay (I refuse to call it Mumbai) infamous. Potholes! (BMC, are you listening……err……reading…err….god damn! How are we supposed to get through to these guys?) Anyways, so while on my way to a job interview I twisted my leg while walking because I almost tripped on a goddamn pothole in the goddamn Dadar! However, being a smart lady that I am *Smiling proudly like a monkey*, I managed to not fall over the mangy dog nestling right next to the goddamn pothole and was surprised to find that my foot didn’t hurt even a bit. At this point, I am thinking to myself, “Wow, I am strong” and breaking into the same monkey smile and scaring away some of the kids on the roadside.

And so I trudged along and fared quite well in the interview feeling good about the nice day I had just spent, completely unaware of the peril awaiting me in the afternoon. I went for a delicious lunch of chicken biryani and sat with my legs folded in the hotel to savour the delicious delicacy. After I had swallowed the last morsel of the lunch and paid the bill (or should I be cool and say “check”?), I realised I could not put my foot back in my chappal! It had swollen to twice its size and would send shots of pain up and down the whole foot even if the air rustled around it.

Scenario: I am in Kurla at this moment and I live in Ulhasnagar, which is 1 and a half hour away and to add insult to injury (literally) my rest of the family is out of town and not expected back till night, so no chance of dear daddy and Swift coming to the rescue.

What happened next and how I got home must go down as miracle in the Pepsi Book of World Miracles, wherein I would like to thank only and only Hari who took upon my burden on himself (and I am not talking metaphorically here) and brought me home safe and sound.

Currently, I am sitting home and since this supposed sprain has turned out to be a hairline fracture, I will LITERALLY be sitting home for the coming 10 days.

The Bluest Eye.

Toni Morrison’s books have been endorsed and especially preferred by the Oprah all these years for, what I can comprehend till now to be, only one reason. Toni Morrison strives to bring out the plight of black people in America or just black people in general. All her novels vividly bring out the REAL, and not what is perceived by others, life of black people.

The Bluest Eye, as expected, is based on the same lines as Toni’s other novels.

The novel’s protagonist Pecola Breedlove, an ugly black girl coming from poverty stricken, shattered beyond repair black family harbours a wish to get blue eyes which are stereotyped as the eyes of beautiful girls. Pecola having been ignored all her life and jeered at by others for being ugly wants to get blue eyes to turn what she believes to be beautiful.

The book is broken into parts and the narrative takes on views of different people at different times. It brings out the intra caste racism prevailing in the black society at the time of Depression in America. Digging deep into the history of Breedlove’s family Toni Morrison dishes out the much talked about black people’s life in America in a succinct and heart rending manner.

However, the bluest eye goes beyond talking about black people and the ordeal that is their life. It delves in critical problems of how people have stereotyped ‘a beautiful girl’ and how anyone who doesn’t fit this image is subjected to jeers and made to feel ugly and how it can devastate a fragile life of 12 year old.

An excellently worded book, The Bluest Eye, will be a pleasant read for book lovers. Every reader would learn something new, something different and something worthwhile.

As for me, I would read it again to find something I missed the first time.