Life

I am passionate. At this point, I tried looking up the meaning of the word “passion” in a dictionary, and much to my consternation, I couldn’t find a concise meaning that I could use here. So, I will just stick to my own interpretation of the word. I have been passionate about quite a few things (for the lack of a better term). Most of these passions have been purely academic; I have never acted on any of them. But a few of them, I charted my life around them; I followed them. A long time ago, I started acting on the management bug. I read books, followed people, perused biographies, idolized the likes of Iacocca and Welch, and was convinced that an MBA was all that was missing in my arsenal. But as time went on, this passion in management waned. I tried to analyze why this happened, and could come up only with two axiomatic reasons which couldn’t be questioned further: lack of intrinsic interest and no pleasure. Maybe those two are closely related, but thats a different thought altogether. ...

In reasonably traditional/orthodox Indian marriages, the bride’s first name is also changed. The ‘also’ is to underscore the point that the last name gets changed almost always. The first name of a person, I have always believed, is very important to her. If that is indeed the case, I am surprised that some Indian women are happy/OK with this name-changing business. Its not just names we are talking about here. Indian weddings come with dowry, customs that ridicule the bride’s family, how the groom is the King during and after the wedding, and a whole lot of other male chauvinistic cultural elements. As an anecdote, during a recent wedding, a North Indian friend of mine was shocked to see the groom taking photographs of a group of the bride’s brother’s friends. He was shocked to see the men of the family taking care of cooking and serving a traditional meal at another religious occasion. I guess South India is a little more progressive/liberal regarding these gender roles than the North – but its all still pretty much the same. ...

Different priorities exist. Broadly, Maslow established them at a high level, and I try to think about them at some level of granularity that might or might not fit into his framework. Partition of India, the Holocaust, Earthquakes, Tsunamis, Corruption in the corridors of power, Organizational Behavior, Poverty, Administration, Political Science, Computer Science, Logic, Formalization, and various other aspects of my world hold me captive. These affect me deeply. But this is almost always restricted to the intellect. I get depressed or elated when I am reading about them, when I am talking about them, when I am writing about them. But rarely have these affected me from within – Deeply. ...

I was told once that we make a lot of special days: Birthdays, Anniversaries, Valentine Day, New Year’s Eve, etc. We expect a little too much these days, we want things to turn around from how they are, and suddenly become utopian, we want surprises, we want perfect days. All this, all the while sets us up for some kind of disappointment at the end of the day. Sometimes, the foreboding thought that expectations will not be met is enough to induce sadness. ...

I am mostly someone else to the world. I am not what others consider I am. This might be true with most of us, but what surprises/saddens/shocks/intrigues me is that I am mostly someone else to myself. A simple question settled my doubts on this regard. How many times have I told myself that I was good (bad) at something because of some (lack of) intrinsic ability, while time and experience had shown me otherwise? I have fooled myself many times this way. A game of football, chess, academics, work, physical abilities, and mostly – events of everyday life and my having total control over all of them. Everyday events are strange; they don’t mean much in the long run, but they have shown me that my level of control over things are somewhat hazy, mostly absent. I don’t have full control, but it doesn’t seem to matter very much. ...

My usual gang here at IIT, we hang out at Nishant’s room (H5, #76), be it after dinner, after lunch, just bored, just about anytime. And occasionally, we end up having disagreements. And today was one such. It was the usual Capitalism vs. Socialism debate that’s been haunting me for a while now. And this time, I tried playing the devil’s advocate and tried defending Capitalism; tried everything I had in my arsenal: globalization, trickle-down effect, jungle-culture, primal-instinct, and myriad other theories. When Amit was here a few weeks back, we had had the same argument through his entire stay in Bombay, and I tried to remember what he had used then, and tried in vain to use it now. But after an hour of heated discussions, I realized that it is incredibly hard to defend something you truly don’t believe in. ...

I heard someone say that “If you have the ability to do something (good), its your responsibility to do so.” This put me in a quandary of sorts; I have always known that I have had the ability to do a lot of things, and some of these things could’ve made the world a better place, maybe in a very limited way. But, I have never taken the responsibility for most of these. Mostly, moments of this sort pass by without us realizing that it is indeed our responsibility to do certain things in life. The irony is that there are also times in life when the responsibility is very clear, but the ability is somewhat questionable. Both situations arise in life, and we give them both a raw deal. ...