The truth is, I won’t be too happy if Facebook did get a Peace prize. It has only made me a more depressed person. Constant photo and status updates from people who all seem to be having a better Life than me, is hard to deal with. Lets be honest. Secondly, I am not too sure if I like Zuckerberg after watching The Social Network. I am pro-nice Men which you’d have figured by now. So no Nobel Peace Prize for you dude.

Fear is the oldest and strongest emotion of the mankind – H.P. Lovecraft

We are griped by this emotion the very second we are out of the womb, we are afraid to take the first step and we are afraid to talk to others. Even when we become adults we fear a lot but we handle is pretty well. We buy insurance.

From Wikipedia – “Insurance is defined as the equitable transfer of the risk of a loss, from one entity to another, in exchange for a premium, and can be thought of as a guaranteed and known small loss to prevent a large, possibly devastating loss”

Doesn’t this sound similar to the laws of energy? The fear is still lurking around us but in different form. Insurance has now covered our minds with the thoughts that someone else will fear for us now. It has made us fear-free which lets us do various activities (we would have done them otherwise) carelessly. Now we can drive our car and even if we end up in an accident, someone else has to scratch their pocket. One can play with fire inside their house. Personally, I am thrilled and I would buy insurance for everything because I can be more careless. We get entangled in these frolic activities we tend to forget that we end up paying for someone’s frolic activities too. Thinking about this, three questions came to my mind.

1. Are we paying in excess for every product we purchase?
2. Are we being paid less for the work we do?
3. Can there be a world without insurance?

A milk carton we purchase from a Walmart store has not only the cost of the raw materials and labor for people who made it but also includes additional insurance cost paid by the manufacturer, the trucking company and the retail store. This cost is nothing but the fear of the equipments getting damaged in the factory, fear of the truck ending up in an accident, fear of theft in the retail store and also the fear of product getting damaged during the entire chain. I am happy to pay for the machines, raw material and labor used to make the product but why should I pay for someone else’s fear? We are paying in excess for something (fear) which is unreal.

Your employer hires you to get some job done. During the recruitment process there is always a stage where the hirer and the hiree have discussion about the wage or compensation. The hirer calculates the CTC (Cost to Company) and unfortunately that includes the risk associated with the job that you do. Again being in the state of fear, insurance is paid to account for the risk and thus your CTC which could have been a little higher is now less. Again, why should I do the same work but get paid less because someone else fears of me doing something wrong?

Imagining the third question was itself difficult. Is that even possible to have a world without insurance? Let us say the manufacturer doesn’t fear of anything, we drive safely and try to be really careful, doctors will be more careful in examining and treating the patients well. We would take care of our health so that we don’t get any disease. Isn’t it nice to imagine that people will be healthy, careful and attentive? Now, I don’t see a reason why we can’t survive without insurance but if even one person takes an insurance, others will be forced to take one because the very idea of insurance to push the fear from you to someone else. The only solution to avoid insurance is when everyone is brave.

We are like this chicken on the road. According to me the chicken crossed the road because it had insurance and it can be as careless as possible.

Finally, we arrived at the conclusion, smartness is being nice to people and treating people with respect. Knowing how to communicate well with others became our new definition of smartness and oddly enough I seem to agree as well. It will take time for a Randian to get over the idea that brilliant man need not always be nice men and that maybe nice men are a much better choice than brilliant men. Atlas Shrugged with its iconic heroes… changed my perception of smartness. Anconia, Galt or Rearden weren’t men known for their niceness, social skills or humility!!!! To me great men equalled brilliant men equalled successful men- but then it was a great/successful/brilliant man who said this as well:

Try not to become a man of success but rather to become a man of value-Albert Einstein

For now…entharo mahanubhavulu anthariki vandanamulu.

I saw this news in the Hindu. I want to clarify what I believe as reserved quota in the first place. Lets take a case, among a group of people who have secured same marks in an exam, the person who is socially backward and who has scored lower marks than his peers gets to choose that job. This means he is getting a job which was not in his reach under a unreserved system or we can say that he is given an option to choose a higher position in the job ladder. I don’t understand why should a panel of judges decide the same for the unreserved seats. I feel this is another way of trying to increase the size of the reserved quota. I love a lot of things about my country except this. I would rather focus on providing quotas to economically backward than socially backward people.

I believed in the quota system but now I feel it is present so as to gain political power. I want the socially backward communities to have the ability to afford the essentials and hence need good education and jobs but aren’t there people in forward communities who are economically backward? Who takes care of them? 50 years back the socially forward would have been economically forward too but now I can assure you that is not the case. When time changes your perspective of the problem should also change, we cant have 1950′s policies to solve problems in the 21st century.

We grew up learning about the world war’s, the american civil war, Lincoln, Churchill, Kennedy were names as familiar as Gandhiji/Nehru were. Over the past two decades, liberalization has made us see beyond being termed a third-world developing nation(ignorant are any of you who have no clue what India is right now)
Nevertheless, we still don’t have access to good infrastructure and of course corruption will always keep us behind. Some of us make it big despite all of this. The rest of us who don’t want to attempt and fail in such a system where most often your caste/father’s political connections matter; come to the land of big dreams.
The United States of America.

So did he. My first friend at NC State-Thanks to Nandini.
We never got to spend a lot of time together. He was committed to his work and never had a life apart from his school work and the blogosphere. Very talented writer and a wonderful human being. Tomorrow he is going back to India. Why has it affected me so much? Rarely do people take a place in my heart. He sure did, despite the fact I barely know him to call him a best friend and despite the fact he can irritate me very easily.

Recession has hit all of us in some way or the other. I can’t find an internship. I might not get one. It hurts. It hurts all the more to see someone like Adi having to go back because he was born a couple of years late compared to our seniors who escaped this situation(at least most of them) Most of us have our folks paying for us or we are on loans- with the recession, it only gets worse. This is certainly not a joke. It’s an amazing feeling landing in JFK(some of you in Chicago or other airports) and seeing this nation for the first time. I had that feeling as a ten year old and it’s something I’ll never forget though I had no clue at that point what Life is. You want to be a part of this place, to be one of those many Indian relatives of yours who made it! made it big! Alas, not us, maybe it’s not written in Our destiny book.

As a young man, Abraham Lincoln went to war a captain and returned a private. Afterwards, he was a failure as a businessman. As a lawyer in Springfield, he was too impractical and temperamental to be a success. He turned to politics and was defeated in his first try for the legislature, again defeated in his first attempt to be nominated for congress, defeated in his application to be commissioner of the General Land Office, defeated in the senatorial election of 1854, defeated in his efforts for the vice-presidency in 1856, and defeated in the senatorial election of 1858. At about that time, he wrote in a letter to a friend, “I am now the most miserable man living. If what I feel were equally distributed to the whole human family, there would not be one cheerful face on the earth.”

I find strength in this individual. When I read about him, I think my Life is better. Maybe thats why Lincoln is Lincoln.

I will miss you a lot. I felt good to know you were in this country, just like me, to achieve all we can, for a better life, to make our parents happy and proud.

I loved the strength you found in your voice when you called me today. With that strength in you, I want you to achieve all you can. People who struggle have always done extraordinary stuff. So would you.

This happened quite recently, when I was having a casual conversation with my friend (karthik) who is also an avid fan of Asimov, both of us were amazed by the concepts of psychohistory.  It was defined by Asimov as (reference wikipedia)

“Psychohistory, a fictional science in Isaac Asimov‘s Foundation universe, combines history, sociology, and mathematical statistics to make (nearly) exact predictions of the collective actions of very large groups of people. Psychohistory depends on the idea that, while one cannot foresee the actions of a particular individual, the laws of statistics as applied to large groups of people could predict the general flow of future events”

This science (fictional) as you see deals with the behaviour of the mass (a large group of people and not an individual) and the conversation went about relating this recession / global crisis and this field of science. We didnt continue the discussion beyond that. It didnt make any sense at that time (may be even now it doesn’t). However, I am here trying to bridge the idea of how psychohistory can infulence political behaviour and macroeconomics. Its not difficult for a layman to understand that both politics and economics are associated / influenced by a large group of people and not by an individual.

During the past few months, we could see some noticeable developments and actions were taken because there were no other options available at that time. Consider, the rise and fall of oil prices, Lehman Brothers going bankrupt etc.. etc… These actions have created a significant impact in both the political structure and economy of a country. It has changed the mindset of people completely.

so why am I babbling about these thing now? I find this as just another way of looking at the crisis. So I say that, these different approaches that are being used to resolve this global crisis are pre defined and these are the only ways to mitigate this recession. So may be we dont need to think what else could be done, because we will forced to act in a pre-determined way when the time comes.  I think it is best we remain  ignorant of the results of the application of psychohistorical analyses.

I am really impressed with this field of science even though its fictional and quantitative, it can be related to the events that occur in reality. I feel its worth looking for Mr.Seldon. Where are you Hari Seldon?

http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=the%20recession&gprop=news&cmpt=q

Even Americans haven’t shown as much seriousness as we have or it can mean that Indians mostly use google

Now with all seriousness, I feel its as an important step to save their assets (from devalued USD) and from the mistakes committed by Corporations in US. Poeple have called it as political ploy (Create Hot air around and nothing more!) and also it sounds impractical to bring about a change with such a huge magnitude (Rather I am unable to even imagine the size of change).

I have been trying to see why in first place USD became an International Currency. I have asked this question to my dad who is a banker and to few others but the only answer I got (It didn’t convince me though) was its a super power , worlds biggest economy.. so on.. I think a major reason could be that it has a hold on several organizations that has sprung up since WWI and WWII. Now other countries have the military strength and have the economy to support themselves under any situation, which is why they are fighting back.

All my reasoning is based on the bits of information that I have gathered using google, I would appreciate if you could help me with some more Info on this change in the attitude towards dollar.

I happened to ask three of my friends I caught online living in the US like me, the top 3 things they missed most about India

Koothu payyan(Detroit)
1: TV
2: Hanging out on the street
3: Food

Arnie Varnie(Philadelphia)
1: Hostel
2: Food
3: Illegal download of movies

BG(Raleigh)
1: People on the streets
2: Parents/Relatives
3: Shops behind my house

Well I wanted to ask someone living in NY as well; I feel shops on the streets won’t be a rare sight for them or for that matter people on the streets. Like two of them mentioned PEOPLE on the streets is something I too miss. Sometimes I lose my way on the road when I drive with my bad sense of direction and I long to see someone standing outside their home with one arm on the mailbox and having a random conversation with their neighbor on how their maid servant didn’t turn up today. Raleigh/ Cary are suburbs- again in the US suburbs are very well developed. In many cases much better than big cities like NY/DC; unless you’re like me and love crowds, traffic and rush and loooooove indian and chinese cuisine(NYC obviously has more choice of eat outs)
I miss the exhibitions, landmark, sathyam, bollywood, pollution, that smell of madras, evening lights, people people people everywhere! raw mango with chilli that you get to buy from street hawkers beside bus stops, bhajjis on the beach, auto rickshaws. I miss arguing with auto drivers and bargaining. I miss the chilli sandwich Lcp introduced me to. The camphor burning and smoke in Kaapaleeshwar temple. Silk sari’s, colourful salwars of subbi, aiswy’s chunky earings and kajal and of course sandhya’s bangles. Ama’s kappa meen, poori, puttu and acha’s soaky milkmaid french toast. Not that I don’t like american food and not that I don’t try them out. I love pizza’s but somehow nothing makes up for the traditional Indian food. This is what I love best about India most of the metro’s have the heart of a village and a global city. Most internationals don’t see beyond the pollution, over-population and corruption that hold us back. Slum-dog millionaire isn’t India. It’s a part of India. Like every other country who has a dark side like that. India has some of the best talents in this world and one of the best places to visit if you can look beyond those negatives and appreciate the culture, the beautiful people, the diversity and the spicy food and yes we have cell phones, big buildings, multinational companies and don’t need a permit to burst fire crackers – which can be a nuisance at times

Lets get a little positive now- stuff i love about US and NC State!
a: Students can use the elevators! No more “only faculty” signs!
b: Cell phones are allowed…yes! even in the library. Your ID won’t be confiscated if you spoke to your friend sitting next to you. No SILENCE boards; people remain silent without being asked to!
c: Most people maintain queues/ open doors for others/ wait for other people to get into the bus
d: I don’t need to pay 1000 rupees to become an alum of my college
e: No compulsory attendance- surprisingly on any day more than 90% is present in the class!
f: GOOD roads! I love driving mainly because of this. I am ever ready to chauffeur people around, run errands for ammachi, etc. Structure everywhere makes life simple.

I searched a lot for an apt video- unsuccessful & don’t have more time to waste on this. Didn’t find one as good with Madras I like the following sights in this video- the hens, the agarbathi, the tulsi plant, the bajaj scooter and the traffic jam.

Wish I had the best of both worlds… maybe someday we would. Like he said- one day India will be the place to be and we’ll have Americans with Indian passports!

ALSO- next time- I promise, I’ll have a different topic to post on! Guess my blog posts will come under this category “I miss my home so much: let me blog”

“Beauty is skin deep” -When Kim won the beauty contest in Chennai, I was 14 and she said this to the newspaper reporter. I loved her for this.

Indian’s are obsessed with light skin. I’m still trying to understand why. I am not sure if it’s the colonial suppression or whether we had this even before the British colonised us. When I was a kid, I always had an inferiority complex about my wheatish/dark skin compared to the rest of the women in my family. Surprisingly, my very well-educated family sometimes talk about light-skinned grooms/brides and most of them are hypocrites.  It took me 21 years to realise what Kim said is true.  I finally feel good about my colour. I am not sure if it’s the million odd white faces around me that makes me love my colour.

My friend and I came up with this theory once, that most often beautiful women are less smart than the conventionally not-so-good looking ones. He said this is because the good looking ones need to spend time on maintaining their beauty and in the process don’t spend enough time to develop their over all personality. Of course there are exceptions to these. I’ve known many who have the beauty and the brains. Yet never have I come across an extremely smart girl who happens to be extremely pretty. So, I guess Mayur’s theory holds true.

Men have a way of making you feel small. The first time it really hit me that I am ugly(which I am not) but I felt so, when my first love’s first love happened to be a cute/ fair girl. Then it struck me, to be loved madly you need to be fair. Fortunately I did not use Fair and Lovely I always used an umbrella. I hated the Madras Sun- which I long for now amidst the snow and the cold in Raleigh. Most Indian girls(thank God) prefer dark-skinned tall men. I think it matters to us that the guy has to be smart rather than handsome/fair.

Guess I should bring out the difference between dressing smart and looking beautiful. It’s important to look impressive and confident. Good looks and shabby clothes don’t do well most often.

Movies do influence such thoughts. Many Indian movie songs appreciate the gora(fair) skin. Surprisingly this one doesn’t and this one does! Ironically the heroine in the second video is dusky and the lyrics that translate to fair-fair cheeks doesn’t make sense. I think tamilians are very bright. Unfortunately, the tamil movie industry seems to be obsessed with fair-skinned heroines from the north.

The little smartness in me I feel is thanks to my Dad who seldom encouraged any form of vanity. He detested eye-liners, lip-sticks and make-up; my silver anklets flew out of the window when I was four. He made sure my hair was always short, I was made to watch BBC and he never participated in childish talk. We spoke about Kiran Bedi (India’s first woman IPS officer) not Aishwarya Rai (Miss World ’94 from India and considered the most beautiful woman in this world).

Now that I am an adult. I have long hair, love eye-liners and lip-gloss and think Aishwarya Rai is a beauty:)

Been missing India a lot these days. I think I need to make a trip soon to make me realise how comfortable I am in the US. I am very lucky to be living with family in the US. I don’t need to worry about money or food. A car for myself that I didn’t pay a penny for and an amazing one that too. Clothes often when Arch goes on a shopping spree. Two lovely babies. It’s surprising how babies can bring so much happiness. Despite all this, I miss India. I terribly miss Madras. I guess I miss my college days more than the place as such. I miss the sudden trips to sathyam, singing with Sakshi the auto rides, the traffic, the pollution, 7.30PM Nungambakkam, Landmark, my hostel room, Vaishu, the surprise harish bike ride all the way to tidel park, my rainboww gang, cathedral road long walks, the beach!!, the balloon shooting game in the beach, mumu and my kite flying experience with bhajjis. Makes life so much more exciting. I was also very lucky to have met the best buddies ever… Jay, Sub, Vaish, Priya and Sakshi. 05/EC/11 to 05/EC/65.  

I did have a lot of fun with Sai, Arn etc ice-skating and laser shooting and of course a ridiculous movie called Yes Man! None of it seems to match my Madras fun. Maybe I’ll miss all this when I move to a new place.

Sometimes I wish India was a little more flexible about a lot of things. Nevertheless, its the best place on earth. Where else can a silly song like Masakali be made and yet have people get addicted to it.

Considering my options, which are very limited, looks like I need to return to India soon:) With no internships, no jobs, no H1 B’s I really don’t mind that option. I bet I’ll value my home way more than I ever did and I’ll really be happy that I got this wonderful American experience and go back.

Maybe I should go for the Virsa Da Punjab bhangra party tonite to make my life here a little more exciting!