Happy Birthday - The Way It Should Be

Birthday is "The" special day in our lives which comes once in every 365 days. After spending 9 months inside the protective shield of our mother's womb, it was this day when we came out to face the real world - A world which is much alien to what we might have expected while we were in there. It was on this particular day that whenever we cried, our parents smiled with joy & pride in their eyes. So, the occasion certainly calls for a celebration each year. Consistently, all of us love to celebrate our Birthday to make the day special in our own way. Some love to spend the day with the near & dear ones while some believe in partying hard to "Live Life King Size".

But, is it justifiable to celebrate one's birthday by causing general nuisance ??? Recently, I was visiting my friend's place when I was caught in a traffic jam. There was free booze and a group of people were dancing on the tunes of perfect lunacy. Amidst this chaos, in the middle of the road, some hooligans of the same group were exploding powerful firecrackers which were loud enough to rip apart the eardrums. It was a local politician celebrating his birthday with his so-called followers who are more of mental slaves and less of the class of sane homo-sapiens. Even the poor traffic policeman was having a hard time in dealing with such uncivilized barbarians. This obnoxious and vulgar display of so-called "Power" or "Authority" by the local politician showed his level of mental bankruptcy. The hooliganism showed the lack of self-esteem and dignity on the part of his followers. In fact, the followers were not actually following their "Leader". They were blindly following the free booze and chilly-chicken even though it meant to demean the very stature of their local commander. A birthday is a day when we should count our blessings rather than earning curses; and our politician was earning tons of the latter. Every harassed motorist and pedestrian was silently cursing this imbecile fellow and his insane followers on his birthday.

As my father says - "A Birthday is a day which reminds us of our unfinished business for which we have arrived onto this beautiful planet." It is a day to introspect and plan for the future. Even though birthday comes once in every 365 days, it still has the same precise 24 hours - not a minute less or more. At the end of the day, what matters is the way one has made use of these memorable 24 hours. In fact the best way to celebrate Birthday is to enjoy each and every moment of it. By enjoying, it means doing anything that gives us self satisfaction & pride. For instance, Sachin Tendulkar loves playing cricket. Nothing could be more memorable for the Little Master than celebrating his 25th B'Day with a century against Australia in Sharjah in 1998. But all of us are not Sachin Tendulkar. So how are we supposed enjoy this day by doing something great ???

The answer is really simple and is beautifully described by the famous motivational writer Shiv Khera in his tagline - "Winners don't do different things; they do things differently". Rather than doing a vulgar display of wealth, power & influence, one can do small things to make these 86400 seconds memorable. For instance, the enjoyment of attending countless phone calls of family & friends makes the day a truly "My Day". Devouring a tasty cuisine prepared by mother, or cooking a new delicacy & inviting friends to have a taste of it, boosts the feeling of being special. Spending time with family or some soulful moments with that 'Someone Special' gives us the feeling of being loved. Helping a blind person cross the road or buying a meal for a beggar, gifts us a sense of pride. Hence, there are countless ways in which we can "Make it Count" :)
So, last but not the least - "There are certain things money can't buy... For everything else, we have the remaining 364 days..." :)

Net Neutrality - The Misery Within

The battle-lines have been drawn and the War is about to begin. The battleground is Net Neutrality and the battle is between Common Man vs The Telecom Operators. Before I write more on the issue and present my views on the subject, let me first introduce what actually is this "Net Neutrality".
Net Neutrality means that the Service provider should not dictate differential prices on the websites I browse. That means, the service provider has no right to say that I can access my facebook profile for free by subscribing to a certain plan and a separate special voucher to do e-shopping in Flipkart. As both the websites (i.e. Facebook and Flipkart) need a working data connection on my phone, a violation of net neutrality principle also implies that I also need to subscribe a data plan as a pre-requisite for these apps. In other words, for a customer like me, it means A data plan + A flipkart special voucher + A facebook special voucher to make the most of my smartphone.
Common sense dictates that this is a preposterous proposition. This is because one thing is definitely common in accessing facebook profile or doing shopping in flipkart or booking IRCTC tickets online i.e. Data in 0 & 1 (bits and bytes). In techno babble it translates to something like this - "Pay Rs 100 to send 0011001100000111 through the network and Rs 200 to send 1100110011111000 through the same network". Even a Class 12 student who has studied basics of computer system can say that this scheme is totally illogical, irrational, absurd and last but not the least exploitative. As a consumer, as long as I pay for the amount of data I consume, the service provider should not be bothered about whether I send 1000 or 0111 through the network. In other words, tariffs should be fixed upon the quantity of data consumed and not on what data I consume.
Now, arises the bigger question - Why are the technologically literate telecom companies are fighting tooth and nail to implement this irrational & exploitative scheme ? To answer this, let me present this same situation from a service provider's perspective. Suppose I want to start a new telecom company of my own. For that I need to apply for millions of licenses, permits, clearances and then bid for spectrum. For each of these transactions to take place, I need to do N number of "under the table" transactions. That means a huge amount of bribe with my ledger starting from the municipality office peon to the minister, everybody on my payroll. Now as a capitalist, my intention is to make profit as it the the very reason which motivated me to start the business. In ideal case, if my investment would have been Rs 1000, then I would have calculated a target profit of Rs 500 and fix my selling price at Rs 1000+500 i.e. Rs 1500. That is simple mathematics and I would have charged my customers reasonably & ethically to run a sustainable business. But if my investment is Rs 10000 with Rs 9000 being spent on bribing everyone, then what should be my selling price ??? If I can buy the services of certain dishonest government people, then why should I bother about the various legislations and legal aspects of the business ??? The recent 2G scam is a perfect example of this as many telecom companies and politicians were involved in a transaction of Rs 1.76 lakh crores which the Law of the Land terms as illegal.
Again you might be pondering why this politician needs such a huge bribe and kickback to perform his/her designated duties ??? For any politician, contesting elections is a huge investment. So, he/she feels that it is his/her birth right to amass the principal amount and compound interest of the investment from the general public indiscriminately by whatever means - ethical or unethical.
So, in this scenario nobody i.e. the common man, the telecom operator or the politician/bureaucrat is guilty and at the same time everyone of them is guilty. They are guilty because of the miserly attitude they have in their minds. By miserly attitude, I mean to say, each one of us have the attitude to evaluate life as a balance sheet or a profit-loss statement. The common man does not want to bear the monetary loss of the service provider; who in turn does not want its share of loss in the politician's transactions. Ultimately, the politician also does not want to make a loss on his 5 year investment to contest elections. If any one of the above mentioned entities removes this vicious profit-loss statement from the issue and analyze the situation fundamentally, rationally and ethically, then the world may become a better place to live in. As Mahatma Gandhi rightly said - "The world has enough for everyone's need, but not enough for everyone's greed."

"Pothigata Bidya" - The Bookish Knowledge

It was June 2014. The General Elections had just ended with a massive victory for Narendra Modi. The 129 years Grand Old Congress Party had been decimated in the electoral process. I was having a discussion with my roommate who had high regards for highly educated people like former PM Dr Manmohan Singh & Home Minister P Chidambaram. He was puzzled that how come such highly educated persons having very high caliber just got decimated in the elections. To explain it, I narrated my roommate a bed-time Panchatantra story which my father used to tell me when I was a small kid. The story goes like this -

Once upon a time there were four scholars from Ujjain. After finishing their education, they were returning home through a dense forest boasting of their knowledge all the way. Suddenly, they found a decomposing carcass of a lion. The first scholar boasted that he has a divine mantra, with which he can re-assemble the skeleton of the lion. To demonstrate his skill, he chanted the mantra and within a split second, the lion skeleton was assembled. The second scholar taunted him and said that this was a child's play compared to his mantra, wherein he can give flesh & blood to the skeleton framework. To demonstrate his skill, the second scholar chanted a mantra and in no time the skeleton was converted into a dead lion with flesh, bones & skin. The third scholar laughed at the others and said that their skills was nothing compared to his mantra, which has the power to give life to any dead organism. Before the third scholar could chant his mantra, the fourth said that he was afraid of whatever they are doing. All the three scholars laughed him off and taunted him to be a coward and dull student. Out of fear, the fourth scholar climbed up a tree. As the third chanted his divine mantra, the dead lion came back to life and pounced upon the three scholars and mauled them to death. 

Moral of the Story: Knowing the purpose of what you know is the Real Knowledge.

Coming back to our discussion I told my roommate that the revered personalities whom he mentioned just now are like the 3 scholars. They have high knowledge in their respective fields but lacked the ability to visualize the consequences of their actions, as the 3 scholars in the story were ignorant about the consequences of their skills. On the contrary, the present PM Mr Narendra Modi was like the fourth scholar. During the election campaign, many have thrown their jibes on his humble beginnings as a tea-seller which seems no match for a Harvard or Oxford or London School of Economics degree. But, what our PM does possess is an extraordinary degree of common sense. He knew the purpose of what he has learnt and that is the main reason for his rise from a tea-seller to the Prime Minister of India.

Most of us believe that knowledge is directly proportional to the number of books one has read. This is true provided one knows how to read. For instance, a book is written by a human being based on his experiences, perceptions and knowledge. Reading a large number of books is good as it helps us to know in vivid detail about each and every aspect of the subject. But the problem lies when we do not use our own brain and stop questioning what's written in the book. Stereotyping a subject starts when we read only the lines of a book and not read between the lines. In short when we use more of our eyes to scan each and every alphabet of the book rather than our brain to interpret each and every fact, the problem starts.

A person with bookish knowledge knows about the Gravitational Force F = (G*m1*m2)/(r*r). That person can beautifully explain about how the moon rotates around the earth due to earth's gravitational force. But such a person's knowledge runs off the rails when you ask him/her that what causes the entire milky way galaxy to rotate. This is because, 10th standard Physics do not give the concept of Supermassive Black Holes. On the other hand, a person who knows how to read between the lines, intrapolate and extrapolate facts can do this very easily. For such a person, if the earth can rotate another heavenly body like moon by sheer force of its gravity, then how much mass is needed for a central object to rotate millions of stars in Milky Way galaxy around it. Just by estimating the mass of the central object to be somewhere around millions of stars, one can easily say that there is a super massive black hole at the centre of our own Milky Way galaxy.

So, is it a folly to read more books to acquire knowledge ??? The answer is a big NO. One should read books, but the knowledge acquired should act like a base for further research. In Mahabharat, all princes including Jayadrath were pupils of Dronacharya. Jayadratha kept on reading the lines. He seldom used his innovation in archery and restricted his skills to day warfare which rendered him defenseless when Arjuna slayed him in the darkness of a solar eclipse. On the other hand, wielding bows & arrows was just a foundation course for Arjuna. He did reading between the lines and practiced archery in all possible permutations & combinations like shooting in darkness, shooting with left hand (Sabyasachi - The Ambidextrous) etc. This made Arjuna the greatest archer of all times. Hence, to sum up, the idea is to read voraciously; but smartly with more use of brain and less of eyes.