Stop it GoPee!!

While commuting in Bangalore, I bet we would see at least one guy attending to his nature’s call. His vehicle parked on the road side, he would be busy leaving his autograph on one of the walls. What is it with men and peeing in public? Lets me call this sorry lot, GoPee(s).

I guess each GoPee believes it is his contribution of essential nutrients to the soil that Bangalore a green city.

Tell me how many of us have not seen a herd of these GoPees doing their national duty?

If you ask any GoPee, I bet his answer would be “It’s like yawning. Yawning is communicable. If one yawns and rest yawn too”.

Like a dog, a GoPee too must be attracted to smell too. More the stink, it’s seems like it is merrier for every passing GoPee to go and pee.

I remember seeing a billboard near a pond, “We don’t swim in your urinals, so please don’t pee in our ponds”. And it has also become common to see walls painted with “Please do not urinate here” signs.

If this public nuisance is not combated, our city will end up being a big restroom. I see two solutions to this problem:

1. Government initiative: All policemen should be authorized to catch a GoPee charge him Rs.300/- as fine. The money collected as fines should be used to construct and keep clean public pay and use restrooms.
2. Public initiative: Any ideas?

Come let us keep our city clean.

My yearning

I’ve see people jumping in joy. It’s natural that they jump in joy because they have achieved what they’ve dreamt of.

I want to do that too. But unfortunately I don’t experience such highs at all. You must be thinking “He does not get to his goals, so he does not jump in joy”. Then I must be crying or feeling sad, which I am not either. I tend to be in a band of good spirits, not too happy or not too sad.

I dream about achieving something. Just as I realize I am going to get to my goal I raise the bar for myself. And I am motivated and start aspiring to reach the next goal.

For example, for a fortnight in May all I could think was to finish the 21km half marathon. I practiced religiously everyday during that fortnight. And on the race day I was amazed by the fact, I was able to run so comfortably. It was as simple as walking for me. And 21km seemed so achievable. Couple of kilometers before the finish line I thought I should have been doing the 42 km full marathon instead. Then and there I set my goal of 42 km for the next marathon. And I started making a schedule mentally to achieve it. And now I am working towards it

This happens all the time. Am I too over-ambitious? Or am I outright stupid? Is this normal behavior? I want to experience extreme happiness at least once.

True Love?

Let me tell you a story:

Boy meets girls
Falls in love
Marries her

Baby is born

Boy now falls in love with sister-in-law
Sister-in-law’s marriages fixed
Both boy and sister-in-law commit suicide

This is the story of a near famous footballer, who took his team to greater heights.

If he was so successful as a footballer, why did he fail so miserably as a human being.

If he really loved his wife, he would not have cheated on her and prevented himself from doing anything that would hurt her. Or given a scenario he was really in love with his sister-in-law he would not have wanted her to die.

I strongly believe “when you are in love the other person’s happiness means more than your own.”

Also research proves that in the initial stages of a relationship you cannot take sensible decisions. It is because levels of a hormone which causes calming effect falls, as low as the level of a person suffering from obsessive compulsive disorder.

Secondly he had no vision of the future. He probably never did think of what his family would go through. Whose death would his wife mourn; a husband who cheated on her or a sister who snatched her husband away from her? What will the child go through while growing up? What will be the state of his parents?

I strongly believe “Love fails, only when we fail to love”.

Does it not sound like a episode from the bold and the beautiful? Don’t you all think we are getting too westernized?

Let me tell you a “desi” story set in the UK.

Boy meets girl.
Both fall in love.
Boy marries girl.

Girl cannot give birth to a child.

Boy never leaves girl.
Treats her like a princess.
Girl dies after 40 years of marriage.

This is the story of a successful Dr.Mahesh Mirani. Here are a few lines from his personal collection he writes for his beloved wife, 6 years after her death.

I have a silent sorrow
A grief I will never impart
It breathes no sigh
It sheds no tears
But it still consumes my heart

I strongly believe “Love grows as you grow older with your partner”.

This my friends, is true love.

Lending books

I love to read books. And I can’t seem to stop myself from flaunting about the magnificence of the books I read. For some strange reason with a general enquiry of the book I insist that they should take the book and read it for themselves.

And in almost all cases it so happens that the book starts collecting dust at their place instead of mine. I do not understand my fetish of having my books with myself; I don’t even re-read the books anyway.

Sometimes it so happens I end up giving people calls to ask how far they have gone about reading the book, instead of asking how they are. As if that is not clue enough that I want my book back, they in most cases don’t return it unless explicitly asked for “multiple” times. Sometimes you listen to a dreaded response that they have re-lent the book to someone else.

And when the book is returned it is underlined along with either coffee stains or with rumples due to water, and definitely has dog ears (as my friend affectionately calls it). After the entire circus to get back the book, I don’t feel like the owner of the book.

I am not claiming I am any better either I do the same at times, because of my obsession for books. But I swear I am changing I am returning books one after another, because it is a difficult fixation to get over.

Someone beautifully sums up the ordeal of lending a book, quote “Summer vacation is a time for reading, and my friends come to me to borrow books because I have more than most people. In their limited wisdom, they have no idea of what I go through in lending a book. They don't understand that I think of myself as offering them love, truth, beauty, wisdom. Nor do they suspect that I feel about lending a book the way most fathers feel about their daughters living with a man out of wedlock” unquote

Just chaos ...

Last night I did witness a practical depiction of random theory during my 30 km travel from Bangalore south to Bangalore north. The opportunity to see randomness is presented to us everyday because of the chaos in traffic.

I could bet my life that there is no mathematical method to find out how the vehicle next to you would move. Any science student will tell you that the traffic follows Brownian movement (continuous zig-zag motion). And a mathematician will tell you that it is an NP Hard problem (Non-deterministic Polynomial-time Hard, where the solution can neither be obtained nor verified in finite time).

I wondered is it a flaw in mathematics and the sciences that we could not find a solution for this randomness and unpredictability? A little thought made me believe that this is a fundamental flaw in our legal system.

It is because of the simple fact that the value of human life is so negligible in our legal system. Let us consider a scenario where one’s fault leads to another’s death, it has to be compensated by him own; would you see anybody breaking the law?

People break the law all the time because it is known that if you run over 2 cops it only costs you only Rs.950/- to get out on bail and it won’t be long before the case is forgotten (Aditya Pancholi). And it costs a paltry sum of Rs.30,000/- to walk scot-free after moving down four people (Puru Rajkumar).

Is this the value of human life? Don’t you also think if our legal system treats the value of human life with a little more dignity it deserves we will see discipline in many areas of concern including traffic mannerism?

Do we really get smarter as we grow older?

I forced myself not to write about what I am penning now. This has troubled me so much from a couple of days that I just can’t seem to stop myself anymore.

I have always heard that age gives maturity in thought, which helps you take rational and sensible decisions. There is this one incident that will prove every believer wrong.

A 27 year old mother of 5 was raped by her father-in-law. The village panchayat (a council of elders representing a village) and the maulvi (supposed to be a very learned man) took a decision that the lady’s marriage with her husband is annulled because of the bodily congress of her and her father-in-law. Now she is the wife of her father-in-law. And her husband is her son.

Well this is the wildest thing I have ever heard. Does this imply that her own kids are her grandkids? Or are her children and her husband now siblings?

This does not end here. The panchayat along with the maulvi go on and insist that if the father-in-law is arrested, the daughter-in-law too has to be arrested, because it takes two for such an act! What a bunch of idiots.

Though I had heard a song “Dhodavaru ella jaanara alla”(meaning: all elders are not smart) when I was a kid, I believed it was a fun song. But now these buffoons have proved to me wrong.

Attacked !!

Have you heard fairy tales where the prince wants to reach his palace but the chariot is attacked by the enemy? Similar is the story for a lot of us when we are going on our two wheelers when we are chased by stray dogs.

This has been a regular affair whenever I get back home late. There has not been a single night when I have not been chased by stray dogs. Earlier it used to scare the living day light out of me and I used to speed much faster or completely avoid those roads, just to be chased by a new set of stray dogs.

Now I have realized that the dogs are only as brave as most of us. You stop and stare at them or even scream at them they will run away. But I guess even I would not dare do it all the time.

So what can be done? After 1992, it has become illegal for municipalities to kill stray dogs. A dog farm outside Pune collects the stray dogs and provides shelter and food – a home for them. We need dog farms like these in addition to shelter and food they should also sterilize these dogs. Any dog-lover interested in starting an NGO for the same reason? I wish others would also make an effort in showing a little charity.

Whats does you soul say?

I just finished making a documentary called “Bangalore: Swalpa Adjust maadi”. The documentary is built around what is called as “the soul of the city”. Now that that the documentary is released, I am wondering what is it that makes my soul what it is.

It undoubtedly has to be eternal optimism. I have become my own version of an optimist. If I can't make it through one door, I'll go through another door - or I'll make a door.

I know the slop side of it too. When I let lose a bit of my optimism, I feel lost in the spirals of life and get consumed by my own nightmares. So I try to avoid looking forward or backward, and always try to keep looking upward.

HeartFront...

When I got up in the morning today, little did I know that I would feely gloomy like the weather outside. I was to attend a wedding in the morning, the wedding of a friend from college.

This friend was special. She was my first crush. In spite of my denial that I did not like her one bit, my mind could not think of anything but her during that time. She had the most beautiful smile and was forever bubbly. I would be pushed into a hypnotic spell every time I was around her.

That one year we were together in college, I never had the courage to tell her that she made my heart skip a beat every time I saw her. I let her fade away into the oblivion of my heart.

Not that I wanted something to work between us, I met her years later wanting to tell her that she had a very special place in my heart as she was my first crush. But thanks to the spell she used to cast with her voice and her small antics I could not gather myself to tell her, what she meant to me.

Today when she was standing with her better half on the platform performing her part of the rituals, I felt really happy for her. Because she is betrothed and now married to a really nice guy.

Presently listening to “Lonely” by Akon, I am thinking of all the people whom I let go. I hope I would find my self a companion who would make me feel like the way she used to make me feel.