“With malice towards none…”

If in the past all my blog posts were well accepted, one thing for sure, till you finish this post, I will be chastised and loathed for my audacity to be honest. But I don’t mind if obituaries are written for me for being honest. Thank God that I don’t have a Publisher to please; otherwise if writing was my means of livelihood, for this article I would have had to sacrifice my job. But this is my blog and so I have the luxury to have the liberty to give vent to my ideas, uncensored!

Few days back a friend’s status message on Gtalk read like this: “Does setting up attractive status message shows someone's character in any sense OR people try to attain faaltu ka attention!!!” I kept on pondering on those lines. The word that struck me was “ATTENTION”. Was questioning myself, how many of us would really not like to have attention? This ‘attention deficit syndrome’ or ‘hyper attention disorder’ (these are terms coined by me and I am not aware whether such terms trace its origin to Psychology or Sociology) is the most common ailment human beings suffer from. And with the coming of the new age concept of ‘social-networking’ I think this ailment is finding its most visible manifestation.

I always consider this idea of social-networking as ‘self-networking’. It is the most appropriate platform for self-eulogy and self glorification. Truth is we all are narcissists. Only the extent differs. And social networking today is the most visible reflection of this narcissism. Mark Zuckerberg (for the uninitiated, he is the founder of Facebook) is the most intelligent man on earth today. He understood this logic of narcissism so well. And as a reward for this understanding and intelligence, Facebook today has over 500 million active users as of July 2010 (Source: Wikipedia). For that matter other social networking sites like Orkut and Twitter are also cashing on this logic of narcissism.

Day after day as I log in and scan through the pages of my account in Orkut/Facebook/Twitter what I come across is some unnecessary information that makes no difference in my life. But it does make a difference to other people, because it gives them publicity and helps them acquire a cult-status (of course not according to me, but its self-professed). What I fail to reason is how is buying a ‘X’ TB Hard disk drive going to help the people in your friend list ? And surprisingly this has been a status update. I have even seen status updates that say “bought a new blah blah phone with blah blah GB space and blah blah Mega pixel camera!!” Can anyone enlighten me as to what will I do with all these useless information?? The only idea that this kind of updates convey to me is that ‘look my phone/HDD/camera is new and swanky and comes for a hefty price and you don’t have one!” What would you call it then? Isn’t it narcissism? (Otherwise I don’t find any logic behind that update. Pardon my naivety in that regard.)

Let me share with you yet another instance of narcissism galore. There are people I know who the first thing they do when they are transferred to a foreign country (for any reason-job, marriage, project, education) is update the ‘Current City’ option of their accounts. For example, if someone is transferred to say New York or London or Paris, they would immediately update their “current city” option even before their flight takes them to their current city! But strikingly the same pace is not followed when some one is transferred from say Bangalore to Delhi or for that matter from New Jersey to New Delhi! I am not conjuring up stories from thin air. I have made these observations and I am writing it from my own experiences in this unreal world of social networking.

My innocent querry is that what are we trying to prove out of this silly publicity? I know and most of us know that all of us love attention. But what is the rationale behind such blatant narcissism? I have seen people upload bizarre pictures in their albums. Pictures which convey nothing but yet are fashion statements. What is the logic of having a profile picture where you are grabbing your husband or your husband is grabbing you until you or your husband choke of asphyxiation? Does that convey your love which is immeasurable or the lack of it in which case the picture bears testimony to that realization? Have we all lost our private world? Is this unreal world of social-networking everything? Does everything that happens to us need to be made public EXPLICITLY? Do we really do things keeping in mind what others would think about it or do we still do things using our own heads?

May be I am a misfit in this strange world of self-marketing. But I am happy that I have a world of my own with my loved ones where I share my dreams with them. That is all mine. I have established a ‘Firewall security’ for that world. Interestingly some of my closest friends are not even in my friends list in Orkut/Facebook. I don’t want to be known by how many followers/ friends I have. It conveys nothing to me. And I don’t experience any joy or pride in bragging that “I have bought a phone” or “going for a holiday in Singapore” or “I have completed my so and so degree.”

When I joined Twitter I had X number of followers and today I might be having X+X number of followers, but how does it matter to me ? My world does not revolve around these ‘Virtual Friends’. Tweets mentioning going for blah blah meeting, shooting for blah blah movie, gave a blah blah speech or inaugurated a blah blah auditorium are nothing but mindless mementoes of trying to rise from mediocrity. I used to follow Tharoor, Shahrukh and many such stars. But eventually I lost interest in their tweets because it has nothing but information about their daily schedules and LOVE YOU ALL, HUGS TO ALL-type messages. I want to learn and status messages like these portray nothing but insensible narcissism.

So readers (both friends and anonymous) bash me, hate me or criticize me after reading this post, cause I know for a post like this more brickbats would be laid than bouquets ( because if not all, there would be some who would fall in any one of the above mentioned categories of narcissists !). But I am not a ‘please all’ type of a character.Social networking can and should be used for connecting with the society.Explicit narcissism would defeat the entire idea behind 'networking' and would eclipse the essence of the word 'social'.

A Route to Life...

Amidst the hullabaloo of the soccer mania that has swept us in the past one month, a recurring theme occupied my mind and at times went to the extent of intriguing whatever logical scaffoldings my brain could construct all these years. A very good friend of mine who time and again tickles my brain cells with his logical reasoning on a wide gamut of issues, on this particular occasion supplied the food for thought. He kept on asking me what keeps us so excited about the FIFA World Cup, when our own country was not participating.

I am a cricket enthusiast like any other ordinary Indian. Although I won’t say that I don’t understand football, but given a choice between cricket and football, I would go for cricket any day. So what makes India predominantly a cricket loving and cricketer worshiping nation loose sleep over the FIFA World cup? How does one explain the phenomenon of Indians being so much engrossed in a World Cup where India is not a participating nation?

I tried hard to fathom out the reasons behind such a craze. For once it appeared that the idea of nation and nationalism is passé now. Scratching my head, I thought that Benedict Anderson was right when he said that nations are nothing but ‘imagined communities’. So it does not matter whether you are an Indian working in USA, or a Pakistani studying in UK, you still have something to cheer for, as you became a Brazilian or for that matter an Argentine for this World Cup. It was as if globalization had erased the idea of nationalism from our memories. But that argument does not hold forte because the boundaries are still clearly chalked out on maps and border issues still happen to be one of the pertinent causes of inter-state conflicts and a strong sense of nationalism still pervade among the countries that are fighting it out in the football field there in South Africa. Glimpses of historical rivalries come to the fore when one thinks of a Germany Vs England match or for that matter an Indo-Pak hockey or cricket match.

Next argument that I tried to eke out was that Indians love to have an opinion on every issue under the sun. So be it football World Cup, or Wimbledon or for that matter F1 racing, we love to have ‘our team’ and fight it out with fellow Indians on the strength or weaknesess of our favourite team and try and snub the other out with stats as to how a particular player scored a goal from a particular angle on a particular match, or how Sharapova has a better back-hand or how Lewis Hamilton won pole position in the Spanish Grand Prix ! That argument made some sense but I was still not fully satisfied that it was ‘the reason’ beyond the hightened enthusiasm of the maddening Indian crowd towards the football fever.

It was only yesterday while watching the Germans loose the semi-final match against Spain, it struck me as to why were we so frenzied about the World Cup where there was no team representing India, my country. It is not about the spirit of nationalism, or enthusiasm about sports (Of course, for the numerous football enthusiasts this football World Cup is an event extraordinaire. And I am not speaking for them. My arguments are for the masses for whom football means only World Cup Football). It is about finding a way out of the monotonous life where your mornings begin with the dreadful thought of meeting a client, or meeting a deadline to submit a project report or for students to appear for the weekly tests. Such small little events makes us laugh, cry, fight and the feeling that sweeps us all through this phase is one of enjoyment. Forgetting the mundane mechanized moribund life for a moment we try to escape to a place where thrill and excitement awaits us. After all what is life without thrill! So in the past one month we got up in the morning thinking how the Brazilian side would thrash its opponents or how Germany would annihilate Argentina. And trust me these feelings made the days more exciting and the wait more fulfilling. Every time ‘your side’ won, the sleep at night after 2 am was so peaceful !

Interestingly I too allowed myself to get inundated with the football mania. My profile on Orkut and Facebook bore a German jersey all the while. The intense rivalry on the various social networking sites was only pointers to the fact that the excitement was palpable and it gave the Indians a chance to sneak a welcome break from their tight schedules. While hedging bets on the prospect of his/her team for a particular match, the first thing that came to people’s mind was that what should be an apt update for his/her Facebook account today? Or each time our team lost, the initial reaction was how people would make a fun on Facebook ! And all these, did precipitate some fervor of excitement in our routinized life. So, whether David Villa wins a Golden Boot or not on 12th July, we already had some golden moments all the while. Moments that made us revel in glory or regret in defeat and that too not for the Indian team but ‘our team’. That’s our own world where we live for ourselves all within us. I think now I have an answer. Its not escapism, it’s a route to enjoy and live life. All of us have one life, my advice is, rediscover that forgotten path time an again, that will make you smile and forget for a moment that life is nothing but a long arduous walk. Live life and not let life leave you…

Dividing Lines

Millions in India woke up to a different news story this 1st of Jan 2010. Families in India whose morning begin with the usual Indian cup of tea and the evergreen ‘Times of India’, this 1st of Jan had an interesting news item to make that cup of morning tea even more relishing- "Aman ki Asha" - the latest venture by The Times of India and The Jang group of Pakistan. It is a bold initiative to, as they call it “…energize the process of peace between India and Pakistan.” Incidentally, India-Pakistan relations happen to be a case study of my research. I have tried to be as objective as possible in this quest to understand the intricacies of their relations. Sometimes research is not about reading twenty odd books and describing the facts which have already been captured in those pages of the book. Research is also about talking to people to understand and analyze an issue closely. After reading the Times of India, every individual I spoke to was upbeat about this initiative. One even went to the extent of saying, “could not have expected a better article for the first day of the year than this.”

It was not my intention to write on a topic as clichéd and controversial (especially if you are in the sub-continent) as India-Pakistan relations as a comeback article for my blog, after months of stoic silence. But I could not help vent out my disappointment at the way the two sides are hooked into a war of words. On the one side we talk about an initiative like Aman ki Asha and on the other side we have repeated diatribes hurled against the political establishments of the two countries by the political elites,thanks to the recent IPL controversy. All through the years of discord between India-Pak, it was sports and cultural diplomacy that provided some hope of a common chord amidst the political maze riddled in the haze of suspicion. Now unfortunately its sports that has stirred a hornet’s nest and awakened the hawks in the foreign policy establishment of both the countries. The doves have been driven away in the cacophony of conflict largely due to the baggage of history.

I still remember how cricket was an uniting force in 2004 when our PM Dr.Manmohan Singh and the the then Pak President General Musharraf together saw the cricket test match between India-Pakistan in Islamabad. Most of you will also agree with me when it comes to the thrill of an India-Pakistan cricket match.But now cricket divides us. The IPL controversy has had its ‘cascading effect’. And this conjures up a dismal picture for many Pakistanis and Indians like me who believe that tit-for-tat strategy will never hold water.An example of the cascading effect- Pakistani govt. has cancelled the scheduled visit of its team of the Election Commission and Parliamentarians to attend the diamond jubilee celebrations of our Election Commission in India.Even in the Jaipur Literary Festival,sparks flew among the dignitaries from both the countries,with Aasma Jehangir,Chairperson of the Pakistan Human Rights Commission saying openly,"how would you feel if we did the same?" Really,what would have been the Indian reaction had Indian cricketers not been granted visa by Pakistan ? Commoners in India and Pakistan swear by cricket.For them Afridi is more popular than a Matthew Hayden.Who then is responsible for this IPL decision,which would have always had political repercussions ? All of a sudden are all the Pakistanis players out of form ? Why no takers then ? I have never been a supporter of the IPL particularly.It has institutionalized the commercialization of sports in India.When sports like hockey and athletics are cash starved,look at the price a cricketer is paid for the IPL season. And now the IPL is vitiating the relation between India and Pakistan.Why cant some sensibility prevail in our gestures ? Was it not enough for terrorism to stop the forward movement of our ties that now even sports is acting as a speed breaker. For both the countries,defense has already eaten into our developmental expenditures for long.Lets not channelize the funds that could be for bread towards the guns.As Amitabh Bacchan says in one of the ads for Aman ki Asha- "...in lakidon ko zameen par hi rehne do,dilon pe mat khichon..." ( let these lines be there on the ground and not in our hearts).When Rahat Fateh Ali Khan and Kailash Kher; Hari Haran and Ghulam Ali Khan can pitch their voices together for peace why turn the cricket pitch into a war ? Necessity is to wage a war against war...a war for peace.