Good Mornings 30122011

I managed to catch a strain virus from the person I hate most in the office. She recovered very well and here I am still in sneezing and wheezing. It got worse yesterday when my nose leaked like a pipe and I wondered where did I manage to produce this amount of fluid. I just cant figure out how women still get into kitchen and cook while they are sick. I could only manage to come home and hit bed.

The newspapers have only the coldest news of the year. People developed a sudden interest in the parliament with Anna Hazare. Still our representatives couldn’t manage to behave properly. Although I am no particular fan of BJP, my respects to Jethmalani. He dared to shout out a few things our media refuse to discuss. But then even when we say it’s the governments failure Congress emerged out the winners. They managed to divide the coalitions and ultimately No LokPal,JokePal whatever.

Even on sounding unpatriotic I would declare a day of rejoicing as India crashed down. A team dependent on its four veterans doesn’t deserve much. I love how the diehard fans suddenly turn around.

There was a column in Hindu on how poverty hit the European country Greece. It sounded very chilly.

Merry Christmas

I am so happy this day. It's not just about Christmas. You are reading the 200th post on 'Think'. I didn't plan for it, just a coincidence.

Many would find it tough to maintain multiple boots. But in my case, I guess the bifurcation was clear in my mind.
Many of my fellow mates are no longer active. In the past year I couldn't follow many and simply had to unfollow a few. It's great to be there and know many people

The Christmas eve was very wet here. It turned sunny the morning and peacefully attended the mass. This time I missed out a few friends adding to my loneliness.

Indian railways

Is there any connection between corruption and efficiency?

I was coming on to the railway station when a sweet voice reminded me not to piss or defecate while a train is parked in a station.

After all these years of development and the superpower slogans, our trains release human wastes down to the tracks. Our trains have become moving toilets. Don't tell me there's been no technology yet.

Moreover in the last couple of years, the cleanliness has come.down drastically. I have a problem of opening with my mouth open. I travel early mornings on Mondays. In middle of sleep I have to check out of any bugs have crawled in.

Earlier the superfasts used to be maintained regularly. Regular checks were done on blankets and food

IRCTC, the railway website is another form of gross mismanagement. For once the commuter was freed from clutches of agents. Today you never get the site and refund value has been drastically cut down. Online booking has reduced cost of railways. Still they charge extra money for it.

Lalu Prasad was considered to be incarnation of corruption and inevitable evil of democracy. But in his era trains were a pleasure. Now the so called revolutionary and reformist has destroyed it.

The idiot tax payer

For some time I have been thinking of dedicating this small and useless space for corruption. Sadly many prefer to equate corruption to politics. I would prefer to say our whole system is corrupted and decayed.

If any one  reading this please contribute and let's atleast create some awareness.

RBI under the pretext of falling rupees value removed the ceiling of NRE rates. Now the banks have increased the rate even up to 9%. The irony is NRE accounts are exempted from tax in India.

Are we Indians who toil away idiots to pay taxes while a rich NRI get the same interest rate and escape the tax.

Or am I seeing RBI opening a new avenue for tax evasion?

Screw RBI

Stranger

Hello everyone. Hope you guys are doing fine.

On my return journey home, a shabby dressed man sat next to me. As soon as he got in, he fell asleep. The poor guy tried his best to make the seat a bed and lay all over me. I got pretty irritated and shook him a couple of times. Then I couldn't help but think, how vary have we become on a stranger's touch.

We look at a person we don't know with distrust. For us a stranger is meant to be estranged.

The holy books teaches us something else- God comes in the form of a stranger.

During an overnight journey to Bangalore, I dozed off watching a Tamil movie. In a dream a woman started stroking my thing. I slowly woke up to discover its happening for real. To my horror it was the guy next to me, giving me a hard on.

I couldn't sleep the rest of the journey, fearing my chastity. That's the sad part of obeying the holy book.

Poor man

The pay section came up with a good news for me. They found out I had an extra component in the salary. So that is going to be cut from the coming pay check including for the previous months'.

Guess I'll have to live a poor man's Christmas. Yes agreed I knew about the component. And a 1000 bucks may mean a lot to me which is a sizeable percent of my salary. But it might mean a little to the organisation.

I wonder where my young age ideals have gone. When it comes to hard life, it's difficult to choose.
What I couldn't stand was the bugger's lecture on ideals. He may have been smart enough to go undetected.

I'll have to blame someone- The system corrupted me

Things that wont simply go off

She texted me up yesterday. It has been sometime we have been in touch. I did deliberately put a full stop, as her marriage had been on the cards for sometime.

She sounded a bit flustered. The guy was showing up his real ‘face’. He put up a lot of restrictions on her- attire, joking, going out. He seems to be disenchanted of the future. He doesn’t open up. She sounded ultimately confused on where this is leading. I knew her persona very well- a very romantic, sensous, humorous person. The fate might be coming up with just the opposite.

I didn’t bother to console her. Is there any point in doing so? The combination of tough horoscope and huge dowry market makes it tough for her parents to get a match. I asked her to face the song.

Its so sad to see even after all the years of female empowerment, we see the total exploitation in the so called institution- marriage. The enormous dowry you have to come up with plus the expenses, it just drains the sanctity off. Earlier the love matches were exempted from dowry, now it became more prevalent there. I recently saw a very old couple mortgaging their home for their daughter’s marriage. The mortgage rates are very high in India, you’ll have no scope of repaying it. The funny part is the couple aren’t poor. They might come into the upper middle class and still they cant afford the ‘marriage’.

Speaking about the horoscopes- I don’t know. There are people who believe in it. I am not questioning the faith. But when the horoscopes becomes an indirect tool for exploitation, is it a right thing?

Good Mornings 08122011

The last day Tharoor tweeted on how Sibal assured him that internet censoring was only against religious inflammation. But the data from google said otherwise. Out of the 358 items asked to be removed 255 were criticism of the government. And the interesting part is only 3 were from the pornography area. I cant figure out if Tharoor really thinks his twitter followers are idiots.

I really don’t think our government would encroach into the pornography area. We have men spending an average of 3 hours on internet porn. There is no better tool to isolate an individual and shut out his creative portion of the brain for most part of the day. Even drinking can arouse creativity and free thinking. May be, government will think of subsidizing porn industry in the coming days.

Another interesting news was the government slashed the EPF rates drastically. Now they encourage the banks to sell New Pension System. There is a hefty commission for that as well. I read in a column yesterday how NPS returns very huge interest rates. We know very well how the old people lost all their savings when markets crashed. I simply cant figure out the logic of playing with the common man’s savings again, while the rich stashed theirs in Switzerland.

Good Mornings 02122011

Day in and out the neo Indian intelligentsia have been tweeting and retweeting about ‘much needed economic reforms in India’. ‘The parliamentarians seem to be stabbing the growing India by not debating’. I find it strange that the government passes a crucial, face changing bill and then brings it to the floor. The whole process of democracy looks quite irrelevant here.

The new generation Indians too suffer from a strange case of memory loss. The nuclear bill that had been passed hastily without much discussion and lots of noise catapulted the PM to an exalted position winning him the next election. But I hear no news of it. There have been no plants as promised. But retailing is going to be different and we are going to see lots of changes in Indian landscape but hope there is a debate prior to it.

Sardesai and Tharoor have been quite busy on twitter and so is the financial analysts. But except for some vague expression of job generation, only thing assured is some low cost consumerism. I engaged in a debate with a guy on twitter. He spoke passionately on opening up economy at ‘lower levels’, now whatever that means I asked him a couple of questions:

1. Shutting out competition- is it safe in the long run?

2. How is the small landholders going to benefit

3. Speaking about job generation- why cant these honchos generate jobs in USA and UK?

What followed was a single sentence- we are going to get goods at a low cost. So that’s what is all about-plain greed and ugly consumerism.

I am on leave today and am going for ‘Dirty Picture’ :D a sensible thing to do in these times