Of Gymnosophists, Jugaad and Indian National Security

Fareed Zakaria was on prime time TV today and he did India a big favour. It was a special called Terror in Mumbai which over the span of an hour took viewers across America through the attacks last year. He made no effort to be diplomatic and boldly proclaimed the role of Pakistani entities in the attacks. Further he emphasized the Jewish angle to the attacks in a clever attempt to mobilize public opinion. So if there were any Americans/Westerners still deep in slumber over what happened, I am pretty sure they woke up and woke up hard to certain harsh realities which even the most ignorant of them will know will impact their lives. American/Western public opinion is a very powerful tool.

Also I happened to watch a particular talk on the mythical roots of belief and behavior by Devdutt Pattanaik. In the talk he goes in to examine the basis of behavior which in turn is used to explain the attitude of the concerned peoples to business. He contrasts as an example the case of the Alexander and the Gymnosophists (the link leads to beautiful anecdotes about the encounter recorded by Plutarch in his work 'Life of Alexander'). Alexander lived his life as if it was his only one while the approach of the philosopher was from the point of view of perpetual rebirth. This led each to find the others pursuit foolish. The philosopher found Alexander's yearning to conquer the world futile while the latter found the former's ascetic existence shameful. This Pattanaik concludes was probably one of the first recorded evidences of the clash of the subjective worlds. It all made very great sense. He even went on to explain his experiments in the Future Group as their Chief Belief Officer based on these deductions of subjective worlds and how he was able to rewrite established business principles in light of what would work in the gymnosophist's world i.e. India as opposed to what was true for Alexander's west. This had gone down very well with me. I was in great awe of the man as he had for once justified jugaad quite well. Jugaad can be defined as an innovative fix. This is what Indians learn from birth almost. There are constraints and rules but make it work. And gladly Indians are good at it. We do see the country running and doing surprisingly well.

Now what's the connection? The well intentioned business talk by Pattanaik innocuously explains why Fareed Zakaria was on tv today. Innovative fixing is a specialty of the Indian but I started wondering if finishing the job was. Anywhere you see we start with good intention and pursue the objective with a definitive Indian twist but do we reach the goal. Our cricket team, our collapsing flyovers, colliding trains, failing public health system and most of all a below par Internal and National Security system.

Krishna told Arjuna, do your bit and leave the rest to me. I think somewhere along the line we have lost the essence of our philosophy. That method and result are not central to Indian philosophy is well understood. But now we have completely become non-committal to our duty towards action.

A year after the worst images of terror on ever television screen and even more pitiful images of a crippled Mumbai police and a late-Latif NSG with some face-saving action by the Naval commandos, India and its people are back to what they do best, making do. Issues in the forefront are again those of a divisive yet inconsequential nature. Reports on the NSG and the troubles being faced in implementing the many changes that the attacks necessitated are in a truly Indian manner makeshift and haphazard. Mumbaikars and their government are back to worrying more about the Thackerays and their monkeying than about Lashkar and future security threats. A year later our police forces still lack special anti-terror squads, special weapons and training and most of all institutional commitment to national security. A national investigating team was refused access by the FBI to a suspect allegedly planning more attacks in India. It is shameful. What if it were the Israelis, French or the Germans?

There are many immediate solutions. But surely our attitudes need to change. So long as an Indian life is expendable we will not get anywhere close to having a safer country. There are volumes in recommendations and reports voicing the much needed changes in every conceivable system in the country and I am no expert on these issues (yet!) but I can say that I am not going to point fingers at some imbecile sitting on a chair in a stale government office. I put him there. I am equally responsible for the tokenisms and the inability to learn from the hard lessons that followed the horror of 26/11.

Screw Social Networking

Hotmail, Gmail, Facebook and Orkut. These are the first four pages I visit along with Google news everyday and every time I logon to the internet. Email I understand and so can anyone. But these days I am really starting to get annoyed with the whole fb phenomenon. Its just too intrusive and too public. People meet you once and add you. You oblige and for eternity now they can get updates on you whereabouts and doings. These people could be a fellow back-bencher from 4th standard or a summer student or some random person you meet everyday. Many of these people are part of your life for short spans. And it does make sense to have them available for these short term purposes. But very few you want to retain for long term. A neighbour from last summer was great for last summer. Its about time that they moved on by this year.

As a way to just say hello and post messages to one another, fb serves a great purpose. May be it was even the intended purpose when it first began. When i first used it in 2005 it did just that. Over the years though it has morphed into this ugly know-all wannabe so much so that people now lead their lives with great consideration for fb opportunities as I like to call them. Fb opportunities are photos, videos, notes, blogs, links and just about anything created or accessed exclusively for the purpose of posting on facebook. I was was victim of this phenomenon too. For sometime I enjoyed posting links and videos that elicited response from my circles. But now I just dont care.

My network of friends has more people I dont talk to anymore, I dont give a shit about anymore or plainly never knew at all. And I dont want all of this. Soon the curtains shall come down on www.facebook.com/sandeepyad. So if any of you read this take a last look.

For those of you who matter, you get to read this or anything else here only because I want you to. I like knowing that only a good few friends get the info they need on my life or my thoughts.

To the rest of you, FUCK OFF!

365, 52, 1

Tall 15-foot glass windows looking onto Bloor Street.

People walking by are a great past time for the bored studier.

BMO, Scotiabank, TD and CIBC stand dwarfed by the CN tower.

In the forefront, the Varsity stadium lays through summer and the white bubble winter.

At the far end of Devonshire place, some cars pass by and occasionally the footballers run past.

Whatever the season, the joggers step on.

Cigarettes and headphones are two abundances of the college goers.

Clutters of bicycles chained on the footpath.

Linked arms, skateboards, skull caps and high heeled leather boots abound.

The parking enforcement comes by on their rounds.

Pigeons and squirrels completely urbanized are my best friends.

A New Being

I hear news that springs emotion in me. A new life, a new being.

Love

You know, a flower that has perfume is not concerned who comes to smell it, or who turns its back

upon it. So is love. Love is not a memory. Love is not a thing of the mind or the intellect. But it

comes into being naturally as compassion when this whole problem of existence—as fear, greed,

envy, despair, hope—has been understood and resolved. An ambitious man cannot love. A man

who is attached to his family has no love. Nor has jealousy anything to do with love. When you

say, ‘I love my wife’, you really do not mean it because the next moment you are jealous of her.

- Jiddu, Bombay, 1965.

I learnt something new today. The above is an excerpt from the closing lines of JK's talk titled Learning About Pleasure. In the talk he asked me to listen. That is how he began. To purely commit the act of listening and nothing else. That was very hard. Every sentence I found myself doing exaclty what he described we do when we claim to be listening but are actually not. I was aware of my sorroundings, yes, which is a very important part of listening but thats not where it ended with every passing word a comparison, an evaluation was in process. I was immediately trying to digest what was being said in contexts so varied that the import of what was said was actually being lost. That is as the speaker JK has an intention for his words which I will learn only if I listen to him with an unbiased mind which is not doing anything else but listening to him speak. But in the process of my conditioned behaviour of processing what he is saying and its applicability, its veracity and so on I have already steppedd out of the role of a good listener. I have overshadowed whatever I have heard with the internal conversations I am having with myself in the form of checks and balances my mind is applying on the input received. Therefore to begin with itself I have already lost much of what I might have learnt because I am, by virtue of my experiences and learnt behaviour, taking sides and judging the information.

Then followed a very decent, succinct definition of what discipline is. I realise that what we understand as discipline is very much an implied meaning rather its true meaning. We associate discipling with conformity rather than a nascent yearning. The latter is the state of the mind when we have put aside conditioning and opened up our senses to experience putting the internal conflict and conversation to rest. This is something I realise is very true and very difficult. Furthermore putting to rest your internal conversation so that the impact of the external sound can actually take course involves resolution not suppression. This is something I need to unlearn. Suppression plays a very important role in my life albeit negative as I am growing to realise. So long as any conflict is suppressed with in me I will never truly learn anything new as all the while the mind is occupied with what is suppressed and the threat of the suppressant resurfacing. My mind is not free.

I want to stop there. Further I write I imitate and regurgitate what I have read rather than understand and learn from my understanding.

At this very moment a lot of internal conflict is ensuing. I suppress a lot of emotion, thought and action in the search for conformity. I want to unlearn that. I want to set my senses free.

Something I read in that talk has made a deep impact on me.

Love implies great freedom—not to do what you like. But love comes only when the mind

is very quiet, disinterested, not self-centred. These are not ideals. If you have no love, do what you will—go after all the gods on earth, do all the social activities, try to reform the poor, the politics, write books, write poems—you are a dead human being. And without love your problems will increase, multiply endlessly. And with love, do what you will, there is no risk; there is no conflict. Then love is the essence of virtue.

I need to become that love.

I am a farce. I am a dead human being. I want to come alive.

The ‘being’ is not the ‘becoming’.

Purgatory

a clean slate my life

unmarked untouched

awaiting a stroke of

inspiration

a blank canvas my day

shadows contrast to

the drought of

colour

an abyssmal hollow my spirit

trodden forgotten beneath

endless crushing

misery

a cruel venom my blood

flowing serving saving

the flesh that bears the

suffering

a contorted maze my mind

thoughtlessly conscious

of its vain attempts to a

meaning

an divine lie my belief

comforting numbing brutal

excuse for the fiction of

being

a putrid bowl my soul

i endure the shameful deceit

of the unforgiven

sin

a consummating void my heart

i wait and tire

in the eternal

hope

(de-)Evolution: Hair Gel To Hair Oil

I vividly remember. My mother would look her legs around me and get a grip. It was a smart way to hold a hyperactive little devil who hated what was to follow. Out came the blue plastic of Parachute and the thick goo or thin slime poured out depending on what the weather was like. What followed was a juggalbandi of howls and frets, one party fighting the other. I always lost. By the time the death grip was released my fully oiled hair reeked of coconut complicating the stickiness of all the tears that I wasted. This was the daily routine of oiling. I was four.

As time went on, learning tamed me. Somethings were better left unresisted. And may be that brought with it a certain pack of Smarties or Kinder egg. It was a fair deal. Suffering was rewarded. How subtle yet profound are simple things in life. This phase of learning though didnt last long. I was more of a man every passing day. One day it happened. My mother didnt recognise my voice when I blasted through the doors back home from school. Lessons ended, I was no longer a cub. The teen years were teen years. Change was the mantra. Especially changing everything that even remotely seemed to vindicate the lessons handed down from the adults, those darned adults.

Move over oil, welcome hair gel! Parachute gave way to a long line of contenders for the job of styling my hair. Notice that style is the keyword here. But before the the gel era, there was one occasion when the hair oil routine was broken. After a trip to the barber I wanted the mist-sprayer/atomizer that those fellows used to wet the hair. I realised this could make my strands bend any which way. That was the first acknowledgement of the need to style. This led to a tantrum and a misled father buying me a Silvikrin Hairspray Ultra hold. Yes, I used hair spray.

It started with a cheap jar of Man gel. Now I know that sounds shady and may even trigger humorous but untrue ideas. But that was the first hair gel I used. From there I moved onto Wellaflex. High school is plagued with such kind of standards. Everything had a defined best. Wella was the best for hair gels. That too was an ultrastrong hold. Haircuts had to be tailored to suit the use of gel. What would later come to be known in India even till as late as 2002 when I joined college, the 'dil chahta hai' cut now simply called spikes was already prevalent by 10th standard. Also I had my own take on the Ultrastrong holds dilute it with some water and get that slick look. What essentially I was aiming at was a Wet look.

StudioFx from L'oreal followed. It was a wet look gel. But either my cohort wasnt completely conversant with reportoire of hair products or my image was not consistent with a cool dude as one of the sad fallouts of the wet look gel was a question that was often shot at me quite innocently, why is your hair so oiled up? Much to my annoyance I tried to stop explaining that it all was about. I took my hair gel quite seriously. After some more tubes of StudioFx and may be even some DesignerFx I finished school and arrived in India only to be more aggravated my friends who had not experienced the hair gel. And so the questions of oily hair abounded. Ofcourse not everyone cared as many of the guys themselves had bathed their locks in oil.

The careless attitude that took me over in the later part of the first year lasted a long while or may be even to the end of medical college but in second year during a trip to Kuwait I did purchase Clairol Herbal Essence Hair Styling gel. That was the dawn of a newer understanding. Thick black locks are not forever. Grey showing more frequently made me to look at my hair gel with an eye of suspicion for the first time. Style gave way to worries of Healthy hair(yes I know hair is actually dead, but still). So for those occasions like the Hyderabad trips and the college days when I still cared to groom myself, this more conservative gel devoid of special effects like strong hold and wet looks served me for a long period.

The postgraduation period which was mostly time spent in the library, hair gel took a back seat. Although I lived in Toronto, the libraries of the University of Toronto provided a certain damn-care environment where what did you did was your own statement. And so I benefitted from the collegial confusions of those kids and dumped the hair gel into oblivion, till Akka's wedding. A bad 450 rupee Jawed Habib haircut later hair gel was needed to salvage the remanants. So it was Garnier Fructis hair gel this time. And it was pathetic, probably the worst hair gel I used even more so because it came in a small spray bottle like the one that started it all at the barber's shop. Luckily for me it leaked on the way back to Toronto and so found way to the trash can.

Now more than ever I understand that beautiful hair, flat abs and toned biceps are not forever. Just at 24 I start to realise that this body needs to be cared for or else I would find it taking a beating of a lifestyle which is still very erratic. In Los Angeles a couple of days ago I found my bava's Parachute. And on the way to the shower just emptied a blob of grey slime and rubbed it into my hair. The premature grey was starting to show ever more prominently. I was scared. And this time it was the death grip of my fears of losing my youth held me down while I lost the battle to myself. I oiled my hair. The circle was complete.

At 14 or 15 there are things you believe can never happen to you.