Sunday, January 27, 2008

White collar 'crimes'

When I have a quick water cooler chat at work or when I meet people over lunch, one of the favorite topics of discussion is traffic problem. I often hear my friends/colleagues complain about a truck/auto/cab driver driving recklessly and causing danger to everyone on the road. Sometimes the discussion moves on to other related areas of public nuisance. I hear people complaining about the behavior of parking lot attenders at work, cafeteria crew, traffic cops, apartment construction companies, the Government, etc.

If a total outsider, like a foreigner were to join such a discussion, he/she would get this picture: The lower strata of the society, where there are less educated, poor/lower middle class people, is what causes *all* of the problems in Indian society. Bangalore is a better place because it has a large number of software engineers, who are a much better breed. Because hey, you don't hear complaints about other software engineers or other such white collar people. If we were to only look at the English language media, the same opinion will be cemented in our mind.

So in my opinion, software engineers, being the most educated, creamy layer of the society, should be setting examples for others to follow. But are we really doing it? Do we always behave on the road, following all road rules? Do we all stick to lane discipline while taking U-turns? Do we treat the parking lot attenders with respect? Do we thank them for their help in parking our vehicle? Do we thank any support staff at our office? If we ever did, do we do it with a smile on our face?

Whenever I see a silly traffic jam being created by a well heeled, sophisticated type of person in a Corolla, I get doubly angry than seeing a call center cab do the same mistake. Other examples are my colleagues spilling coffee in the microwave and not bother to clean it up, jump queues at the cafeteria, spit chewing gum in the rest room wash basin and so on.

Thursday, January 17, 2008

The way things change and the way they don't

I visit my native place (a small village right at the sea coast in Udupi district) once or twice a year, for a couple of days. My visits were much more frequent when I was a kid. Hence most of my memories of my native place are from my childhood. This often makes me blind to the changes that have happened there and I continue to think that the place is as it was a couple of decades back. However, when I see carefully, the changes are vast. Modernisation has swept the entire district and changed it forever.

I clearly remember walking 2 kms from the nearby town Saligrama to reach my grandfather's house, because we would have to wait 4 hours for the next bus. Now, people in the village don't depend on buses which ply every 30minutes. All auto drivers in the town have cell phones. People in the village just call them up and within 15 minutes, you have the auto at your door. People don't mind shelling out 50Rs for this. Also, walking those 2 kms to the town is close to non-existent now.

There are innumerable things that have changed rapidly in the last decade or so. People are eating chaats, buying expensive cars, sending their children to English medium schools, are already tired of Big Bazaar, just like their counterparts in Bangalore. Seeing all this, it is often easy to conclude that everything has changed.

The last time I was in my native place, it was for the annual religious ceremony at the village temple. I had not attended this event for a very long time. I have fond memories of this ceremony from my childhood, when the entire day would be filled with fun and frolic for us. It ended with a grand puja in the evening, followed by distribution of 'prasada' that was extremely tasty. This time, I was observing to see how this has changed in the last couple of decades.

First and foremost, I observed that I was the _only_ one in the entire gathering of hundreds of people who was wearing a trouser, everyone else was in a dhoti. There is no restriction that one should not wear trousers at this event, so I was very surprised to see that even teenagers had worn a dhoti. Later, I observed that the process of the puja had remained virtually unchanged since my childhood. The same procedure, the same puja, kids having a fun time running around the place, elders trying to bring them to order, nostalgic senior citizens... Everything was just the same. For a few hours, I was transported back in time by 20 years.

It is my gut feeling that things will change here too. Eventually, young people will attend the puja wearing cargos or even shorts and eventually there will also be jeans-wearing girls. But for now, the place has resisted the sweeping change and has clung on to an era gone by. I wonder for how much longer.

Sunday, January 13, 2008

What's in a name?

When I became a father 3 months back, I had no idea how difficult it was going to be to find a name for my daughter. After all, I have succeeded in giving wonderful (I think so) names to other's kids in the past. How difficult could it be to name my own kid? From what I have learnt in the last few months, a lot. I and my wife had a clear idea of the kind of name we wanted for our baby. However, her idea was completely different from mine :-)

These days, there are a number of avenues available to search for names. There are the good old books, there is the Internet and of course, there are relatives. Relatives suggested names from various places. Some worked as teachers and they remembered the names of all the kids in their class, some suggested names from TV serials, some suggested names they had heard, names of kids of their friends and so on. We read through a couple of "Baby names" books and went through a number of websites.

One of the main problems in reaching a conclusion is that we want a name that has a nice meaning, or at least not have a bad meaning. These days it is easy to choose a cute, sweet name for your baby, having heard it somewhere among your relatives and later realize that the name actually means "lunatic". Most baby name websites publish meanings of the names. However, the meanings are either whatever was given by contributors to the website, or given by whoever among their employees was free when the name was added to the site. It is not uncommon to see a name that doesn't mean anything, but someone in some website says it has some meaning in Hebrew. Or Icelandic.

It was very difficult to find names that was acceptable to both me and my wife and also had a nice meaning. We have not even bothered to get a consensus from other stakeholders. After a lot of effort, we have narrowed down to a small list of names. Next weekend is the deadline before which we need to narrow it down to just one name. Wish me luck please. And never underestimate the complexity of the process of naming your baby.