Move on, Stay back!

There are places and situations when you move out and say goodbye to people, the people stay back and carry on their usual lives and you have something good happening around and some place exciting to goto. Then there are times when you're the one staying back and people say good bye to you!

I have lived away from home for the past 4 years now, I have shuttled frequently. When you reach home, your own town, your best friends, your favorite hangouts.... the world glitters!

Every time I came back home, I remember having a warm and enthusiastic family, my best friends, my love and everyone that really mattered most over here! I would visit them, have a lot of fun, do everything from treks on fortresses to getting high on chocolates, I would leave, they'd say good bye, a big hug and the I'd return and the same again!

This time as well, I came back. I had everyone, I had a lot of fun. They say you enjoy life more when you've all kinds of time! I had this one amazing and perhaps the last such period!

I lived it. And we rocked. Only this time, God thought it would be fun to give me the doze!

All my friends have joined colleges, post grad studies in all parts of the country in all sorts of courses and I waved them off, each one of them! They all wished me luck, hugged me and be gone and here I am, sitting alone.

I guess I am lucky, God has blessed me with such a short time for 'doing nothing'. I've invested it all in all the stuff I like. I've worked and chilled out and unwinded and hogged. I've made some startling discoveries, I finally realized why we call what we call the 'idiot box'. I've seen every shower in Jaipur. I've done all sorts of social networking and am hooked to an AOE engine type game!

I still feel the joblessness, the few weeks I'm spending like this make me realize how difficult is it to say good bye and stay and how easy is it to move on!

God has been kind, I've found people who did it everytime smiling yet letting me know how they'd be bored once I'm gone and what all we'd do on my next return.

Its a few more days to Florida. The exodus is about to begin! I'm excited. But I have it for me figured out, it can really be lonely to stay back!

Breaking Crap!

Funny as it has always been, I am once again entrapped in the strict regime of 24hr news channels blurting out nonsensical and almost whimsical accounts of everything like:

"How the Taliban in the Swat plan to regroup": something that even dear Obama doesn’t have a clue of, a question boggling intelligence agencies of atleast 10 countries!

and my current favourite...

"How the plane carrying socialite Mufatlal 'safely landed' with 72 lac worth of 'illegal' jewelry" as if any aircraft carrying anything illegal was bound to crash land!!

The video broadcast's loop-button inventors must be tumbling in their graves as they witness the horrific tragedy that has unfolded as 24hr news television in India.....

Where else do you get dedicated sections as the "Breaking News" appear everyday 20:00hrs? As if the news would wait till it’s 8 and then bang on to the world!

Now that’s some redefinition!

 The same news every half hour and on the hour was Star News (then run by NDTV) staple feed, then came the News boom and now on my Tata Sky I have at least 20 news channels churning out the same bits, feeds, crazy animation and inundating sets. You can skip anything on television these days but not the news and it sure may help a few in the iPod generation but for genuine lovers of news bulletins, it’s a sad pain. I was wondering if the Indian law doesn’t prohibit unchecked broadcast of bullshit through the wires and now digital media!

 Take This: "Kal-kripal" or "Teen-deviyan" or so many like those feature babas and sadhus and dhongis (fakesters) openly preaching stuff like IFF you are a Virgo and IFF you have a bad headache THEN you should rub some brick-powder on your head and go give a roti to a cow! 

And Holy Cow! All that your society strived to achieve for over a century, freedom from the clutches of superstitions and modern scientific thought etc. is gone, the same middle ages crap is being fed into the system again from the bottle-neck i.e. the media!

 A "necessary-evil" is the best possible position one can allot to the news scenario in India. No doubt such wonderful work has been made possible by the Indian media that it has its position as the fourth-pillar of our state well-deserved. But the evil takes its toll and by any random guess 7 out 0f 10 channels have underrated performance when it comes to even the most basic news coverage. English reporters not fluent with the language, Hindi reporters speaking as if reporting was worth the business of discussing the locality’s gossip at a tea-stall and God knows what it would be for the regional media.

 Solve it? Here lies the problem, TV and especially news television has become a media so powerful that it can make or break public image in a matter of hours. The dragon unleashed, even the government of the day wouldn't dare tame it as it risks being tainted for the rest of its term!

Print media may still serve a fair semblance in this context but when it comes to television, the average viewer sees news channels as a clan, that competes within to nadir-low levels in claiming that their experts had predicted that a certain team would loose a match before analysts on the other channel did. Yet, whenever a finger is raised upon anyone, clan-o-nomics comes into play and the fraternity would most vociferously protect its members and their idiocy. Even seasoned journalists like Barkha Dutt and Pranoy Roy haven’t been able to resist this temptation and if you look close enough, the clan is essentially same blood.

We would listen day long expert sessions on all aspects of life, sport, human, divine and politics but please inform me if there's a session on any channel which forces the media to introspect or brings to light its failures!

Nothing is perfect, and same goes with the media. The only way out is for strong and opinionated voices (still about 40%) in Indian TV Journalism to step forward and create common minimum standards of what is and what is not going down the wire!

Till then, remember that in one interview with a rape victim in Orissa the reporter asks the woman, “ab apko kaisa lag raha hai?” (“How are you feeling now?”). A fitting analogy to when you as a viewer are asked to write-in and tell us , "how was our show"!

from the Lectern, reporting for meaningful news television in India!

I met Me

I woke up early this morning. It was barely 5 am. I was cold. Ankit leaves the window open as its usually stuffy and hot because of two people, a refrigerator and a laptop running 24/7 in a small room made for a single person!

I could feel the cold settling on my skin, its familiar yet such a strange feeling. I was not shivering, I was warm on the bed but on my face and arms I knew I was cold. The curtain fluttered in intermittent gushes and I gazed at the ever bright street lights of Paris. Through the cover of the trees came this shimmering flash of light, periodic. Its almost the rapid eye movement sort of a feeling, you know you are awake but at any moment you would be in the dreams again! My eyes were heavy and I was cold!

Object of Curiosity! the periodic flash of light..... Got my head spinning and as it happens with 5yr olds, I couldn't sleep. I pushed myself up on the elbow, waited for the periodic period; strange as it seems, it took longer than the usual for it to appear again or was it just me observing!

A lot of things kept me thinking. I don't even remember all of them. But I clearly remember me telling myself, record yourself. I almost all of a sudden put myself into the third person's perspective. Or should I say that my consciousness was in the third person. I now saw a boy looking out of a window, tracking a changing light. I remembered the documentary on Hiroshima I saw last night, the Coldplay song "Talk" was running through my head. I thought about why was I looking, what was I waiting for. I knew it was all but an insignificant flash of light. I could feel my head grow heavy and I was cold, yet I was looking out of the window.

I asked myself, what drives you now. I was curious about the flash, I was more curious about why I was curious. Its something you most rarely, if ever, experience. A flash of light! that's all it took to get my head spinning. I've heard they say a lot of what goes around in your head is the expression of what you see around yourself. I was thinking about thinking. I was curious about curiosity. I have never concentrated this hard on this ever before.

I was driven into deeper thought. I was thinking about man's essential nature: The explorer. The curious. Had I just struck a cord with a fundamental instinct at 5am on a cold morning? Had I that gush of a feeling that had our ancestors come from being hunter gatherers to flight pioneers to space explorers to blog writers. A 10,000 year old civilizational saga all driven by this simple "What is it?"!

I was excited, again the 5yr old kid. I could feel the hair on my forearms rise. Excitement or cold. Decide for yourself! But it was so true. I was curious about the thought of the flash (it hadn't occur ed again as yet). I was as excited about myself as I was perhaps at the last ball of the T20 India Pak final or at the result site for semester results or at the climax of a thriller.

Then as smoothly as it had started, it came to an end. I was still staring at the window. That's the road next to the Stade Charlety, I realized and that I'm in my room and I'm feeling cold.


Then came the flash. It was from a advertisement scroll, that sort that roll between advertisements. That's all that took to take me into a short but I feel a remarkably beautiful journey!

Now that I think of it, I feel like did it actually happen. But that's one reason I post this so that I remember that once on a cold early morning.. I Met Myself!