nowhere to go

I don't think I know my India any more
And that hurts

there are things which came into being after I left,
and now it takes a while for me to make sense of things...
And that hurts

It's like something you owned, and it owned you.
something you identified yourself with.
now it seems to be moving on, leaving you behind.
And that hurts

with time, they say, things are forgotten.
But I am not a thing!
When with every morning light, I open 'The Hindu' and call home
Home is still somewhere in India, but I seem to be losing my place
And that hurts.

Over the past years, as I came far away,
got stuck in the puzzles of life, struggle everyday,
In the struggle to grow with time, both of us seem to be too busy to catch up
And that hurts.

New roads have come about. New cell phone companies.
Nokia is no longer the leader, and new ways to make money
I feel like a stranger, looking at a foreign land... once my home.
I don't seem to belong to anywhere anymore.
And that hurts.

Discussing Rahul Gandhi and Mayawati over dinner on weekends
and playing Antakshari every 'potluck',
going to pooja every 'Thanksgiving',
it seems we are somewhere stuck
By the time we force our way out,
there would be nowhere to go
And that hurts.

The rise of Indian entrepreneurship: An outsider's perspective

Well to begin with, I do not want to be an outsider on this for long. But be that as it may, I am not involved and hence the topic...

I am excited to see that the bumbling energy in India about entrepreneurship is shining bright.  Bright enough to be visible to me sitting in the US. I think if there has to be a healthy way of life in India, it has to come from the society and not the government. Especially when people are so cynical about what the government does. Anyways its beyond the competence of a few minds to think up the growth strategy for the entire country! Lets the collective wisdom do the evolution of thought. The government should just sit back and create an environment where the society is able to do that.

What makes me this excited is that I can see this simple process in action now:

1. Common people, with all the humility in the word common, face issues in their daily lives.
2. Common people hence know what problems irk them more
3. Common people think of solutions 
4. Common people come up with enterprises to solve the issue
5. Other common people consume the service and compensate the service/good provider

And hence the circle of an issue and its solution was completed, with no visible sign of a government intervention. No matter how big/small the issue is, someone might want to earn a living out of fixing a problem. A win-win, where someone gets to earn money while reducing one issue in the society and everyone moves ahead!

I have begun to see an entrepreneurship fervor in India, which I see here in the US. Anyone who wants to open a startup/enteprise can work hard and open one! and thats a biig change from the erstwhile India. what is more exciting is the nature of startups. Many of these are about things which at best can be thought of as unusual, at least for India...

Here are 3 such startups I think are interesting. This list is in no way complete or exhaustive.

1. http://www.tulliho.com : This is an awesome idea for people who wanna get Tulli! (drunk) a yelp-esque website catering to people in Indian cities, helping them find good bars and pubs.
2. http://saleraja.com : Another site catering to the shopping needs of people, where you can get to know about sales going on in different places. 
3. http://www.babyoye.com : this site helps you buy stuff for your new kids. Sort of reinventing the buying experience with the web
4. http://windchimes.co.in : A social media company for Indian companies to use socail media advertising

None of these companies are using the 'outsourcing' model. Its democracy at its best: for the people by the people. They are interesting because what they offer would have been laughed at some years ago. I can just imagine friends, parent just yelling 'are you out of your mind' etc etc..

I guess not anymore :)

puraani photos

कुछ तो बात है इन पुरानी photos में
की दिल में कहीं एक चोट कर जाती हैं 
किसी गुज़रे हुए ज़माने की कोई बात याद दिला जाती हैं

वक़्त के हाथों जब उनका रंग फीका पड़ जाता है
तो वक़्त के ही बुने हुए sweater में अपने आप सी जाती हैं

कैसा था वो पल जो हमने इस फोटो में कैद कर लिया
एक हसीन वाकया जिसको हमने इतने सालो बाद फिर से जी लिया

गौर से देखें तो सिलवटें भी दिखेंगी उस फोटो पर
जो उसे संभाल के रखने के बाद भी उसपर पड़ गयीं
शायद तबसे आज तक की जी हुई ज़िन्दगी की दूरियां भी उसी तरह बढ़ गयीं

खैर, चलो एक बार औए कोई याद तो संजोये
और कल शायद उसो भी देख के मिल कर हसें, मिल कर रोयें...

Simple pleasures of life

Just remembered this small thing. It's not everyday that you get to notice your kid brother grow up, he just does! and when you look back at pictures from 10 years ago, you realise you have come a long way...

When we both were kids (I am 5 years elder to my brother), I used to tell bedtime stories to my brother up until when my brother came into 5th grade. Funny stories, filled with jokes which I knew my brother found funny. For many years, night after night, I will tell him stories of Hari or Raju or Nainsukh and their daily lives.. The stories weren't necessarily stories but a string of slapstick jokes woven together. And by brother would every time burst out laughing on silly slapstick jokes with people slipping over spilled milk or trash on the road,  random bicycle accidents and of rats fighting and what not. This went on for years and I really didn't have to change much content. Just a new name and a new way of narrating a slapstick story...
and my brother would gradually slip into sleep happily...

Until one day when I was telling him about how Haria fell on the road while riding his cycle over a banana peel, my brother didn't laugh. Instead he noted, "Dada your sense of humor is very crass". I paused for a second to take in what had just happened. All of a sudden my kid brother seemed to have grown. Grown out of the age he had forever been in, and grown into the next stage of life. I frantically tried to make up a new story line with new humor style, but he didn't laugh. I tried again with something else, but he still didn't find that funny enough. After a few tries he got bored and went to sleep.

And I lay in my bed realizing that I had just noticed a very simple, yet very profound thing. Things change. People change. Even your kid brother. And my brother was taking his next steps in this world. And with a smile on my face, I fell asleep... Happily..

Bye bye my ancestral house...

Yes. the house in which my I, my brother, my cousins, my uncles, my father grew up is going to go. The house in which I think (I am not sure) my great grand father moved in, and my grandfather lived his complete life, with his brothers, who later branched out into a similar house somewhere else in Lucknow. The house will be demolished, a new development will come about. A new cycle of great grand fathers, grand fathers, brothers, sisters will start. Life will come a full circle...

The Lalbagh house as we call it, has been around since 1859. University of Illinois, where I work, was established in 1867. So much has happened in Lalbagh that

Its going to be difficult to shift. It's 60+ years of stuff that needs to be sorted. Stuff we had forgotten existed. stuff which we lived around, but had grown out of. The small bed which was my favorite as a child, has been lying broken now for years with no energy and urgency in anyone to fix it. Then there are calenders for the past 60 years which we stumbled upon. not at one place, but sorta everywhere... one was in the grain room, some others were in the poultry room, etc etc. Oh we found an album too! from waay back when I was born.. it had gone missing so long ago that I forgot it existed. I don't even know if I should categorize that as new memories or really old ones.

 The guava trees, in the front verandah would have to be cut, and places where we rode our tricycles would be all a part of our memories only...

I have had all emotions in Lalbagh. Love, hate, rage, excitement, sadness, cluelessness, laziness. The excitement at the prospect of samosa jalebi in the morning. the fun of running from one corner of the house to the other and panting heavily in the process. You can get actually forget the world once you are in Lalbagh. I have spent many days just watching TV. all day...

 This is the view of the terrace from the inner courtyard. I always found this view particularly spooky in the night. as you can see in the picture on the right.

It's sort of humbling to see the circle of life on your own. Something which was a little bigger than all of us in the family will be gone. To pave way for new. Funny, but I feel maybe this is the best parting gift Lalbagh could give me.

the passage I have always been 

scared of

the passage to the terrace

 

the ceiling of the living hall..

How much forest does a man need

If you flew over Delhi around june 2010, one thing would be kinda clear. That you couldn't see anything clearly at all from the window. Well, part of it could have been because most of the city was dug up for Commonwealth games, but there was a major part ascribed to plain dust in the air. Maybe it was due to scorching summer and lack of humidity in the air too.

But then the question comes, if there was so much dust in the atmosphere, wouldn't everyone be inhaling it? And with lax industry laws, there of course are many pollutants in the air too! And all of them simply, pretty much forcibly just get into your lungs!


The next question is why are people not doing anything about it? Well, I think that's because people, mostly, are not empowered to do anything beyond their own backyard. And the people who are empowered, are either so dumb to not see the issue, or plain and simple ignorant, or just too busy minting money to see that this effects everyone! including the PM and the President. Well, only when they are out in the open...

So then how do we actually see how bad the picture is? For one, every one could take a flight in to Delhi, which, for obvious reasons isn't the most economical way of conducting a study. So I thought I should do the next best thing. Take pictures from high above and paste them here.

Thanks to google maps and jing technologies, I was able to put these pics here:

Lucknow, India

Hyderabad suburbs, India

Nerul, Navi Mumbai, India

Noida, India

Schaumburg, US

Nice, France

Tooting, London, UK

I tried to compare apples to apples by keeping the resolution level the same. I also tried to consider only what I thought were suburbs, since they seem to have a better control over land and hence tree cover.

What is clearly visible is that number of trees in the captured area are faar less for Indian cities, no matter where they are, when compared to, suburbs in US or Europe.

This is not a research study, so I am sure the sample data I am looking at would be flawed after a point. But I definitely wanted to put up some comparison between what Indian cities are doing, vs the 'better'  cities of US/Europe. Also, since these are suburbs, in both cases (India or others) they were settled down into, rather recently.

We all have known that tree cover is said to be beneficial for MANY things, including water table restoration, reduction in free dust just flying around in the air, reducing average temperature of the areas, and keeping the land healthier in general.

Given this, I wanted to hit at at least one problem. That of awareness in people in India about the shoddy state of their green cover. Only 12% of land mass in India is covered with forests, as compared to 33% in the US, 30% over the world, 34% in Canada, 22% in China and so on.

I think the green cover is especially more important in city areas given the concentration of pollutants in general.

Maybe we should start from where we do have control. Our backyard. And then move up from there. Otherwise the average life expectancy in our cities will continue to be low and maybe drop lower with new industrialization and growth happening...

Why should India try to be a sporting nation?

Here is a video from NDTV about sporting culture in India.



These guys were discussing why isn't India a sporting nation. The arguments I heard were like:

1. lack of infrastructure
2. cricket cricket cricket
3. risk of failure, which in absence of govt support can leave you hungry and poor
4. there is simply not enough money in the country to support sportsmen
5. culture(something like shaastra was mentioned in the video) doesn't give sports any place in our lives 

etc etc. While I think these are the tangible reasons why Sports don't flourish in India, but these by themselves aren't the problem. I think all these guys sort of missed the main point. Sports is a tremendous character builder. It teaches one to accept defeat but not be a loser or have a defeatist attitude.

Another thing, on a very basic level, was also missed was that sports keep us much healthier and hence increase the happiness in people! lesser instances of diseases in people, better lifestyle choices etc all come in to make a country healthy, happy and eventually prosperous.

I think most of our leaders were unlucky enough to not see this perspective, which all developed countries( and societies) follow so well! I live in the US and I see people running at any time during the day! they are MUCH more healthier than most of the affluent Indians I know!

It's not about playing sports for the professional value of it, its about playing sports whatever your profession is, so that you are healthy enough to make most of what your body has to offer.

On a different note. The debate by itself was so much of an opinion-based discussion. If experts were called in, why weren't empirical data based examples given? why can't a sound argument be made to support what they say?

In addition to the sporting culture, we also need a good debating culture :)