The Story of Floods and 12 Feet Tall Men

Mumbai has been lashed by heavy rains - yet again. The story is the same as it was ever since I took interest in this world 20 years ago. We've had knee deep/waist deep water in some areas, trains have halted, air traffic disturbed and some homes flooded.

For those who have been in Mumbai for a very short time, this happens atleast once every year in Mumbai. And yet, this year was different compared to all those years.

What was different you ask? It was the Mumbaikar for one. Another very different thing has been the overzealous press, which has inspired the title of this post.

26th July 2005 changed the way many Mumbaikars looked at rains. I was one of the luckier ones who had the comfort of my company bus and managed to reach home by 2 AM in the night. The rest did not reach home from work till the next day. They battled for their very lives, fighting the angry waters in the most unimaginable places; highways, railway stations, roads they travelled everyday. Many lost the weary battle. Others live through it, shuddering at the sight of a bucket of water for days after.

Such was the damage that one day caused this brave and sometimes cruel city. The Mumbaikars who once readily waded through knee deep water to meet their deadlines now sit at home at the very sight of heavy rains. The first day of rains were welcome by all, as they brought relief from the sveltering heat. The rains continued to the next day and the cool comforting winds and showers took the face of fear in the minds of these people.

There was another reaction to the July floods last year. The rest of the country woke up to the fact that people live here in Mumbai. The long standing image of Mumbaikars being insensitive and invincible suddenly received a major setback as the country saw live images in the news of Mumbaikars struggling through the waters trying to save their own and their fellow citizens' lives. The Mumbai rains which regularly stop the city a couple of days every year suddenly came into the faces of the Indian news fraternity and the country.

But it seems that this visibility has done more harm than good today. The rains in the past few days (going on as I write) have brought out a very desperate side of the news channels, each one trying to top the other trying to paint a grimmer and grimmer picture of the situation, all to get viewership. Yesterday a leading news channel showed waterlogged areas in Andheri, Mumbai claiming that there was no way traffic could continue in that area. The water was barely ankle deep. Agreed that it is still a worry, but there is no way that ankle deep water could cause any harm to cars and buses.

The best news cut, which led me to write this happened a little over half hour ago today. A News reporter described (and showed ofcourse, for the added effect) a grim situation in Goregaon where the water was "6 to 7 feet high" and was about "waist deep".

OMGWTF!!! We actually have 12 feet tall men in India!

This kind of news coverage induces two things in two different kinds of people. One section of the population goes into absolute hysteria, scared of the wrath the rain gods are incurring upon us Mumbaikars. There's the other who assumes that the press reports simply cry wolf all the time to get viewership and go headlong into some very dangerous situations.

And finally, if the sensationalist reporters were not enough, major news channels have come up with the concept of a citizen journalist. This is a good initiative on the face of it, an attempt to make the citizen more aware and involved. I saw an amazing shot of the Mumbai floods as sent by one such "citizen journalist". It was a 8-10 second long clip of which 1-2 seconds showed cars and buses struggling through knee deep waters. The rest of the clip focussed on the posterior of a young woman wading through thse waters. Great journalism; lets have more of those ;-)

So in the end we have a corrupt government, an otherwise insensitive populace and a sensationalist press. And we want to be called one of the greatest democracies in the world.

crib...crib...rant :D

pehle to very intelligent ppl long ago said....whats in a name??? so hmm or anything else should hardly matter..... and waise bhi this post was an afterthought to your post so hmmm....
chup yaar...u get the point naa tat ho ya that ...........kitkita

hailaa

bohot saara likh diya
never mind......... now i dont wanna waste this post for nothing........so gyaan coming up
1 interesting bit of info tat i came across
i generally pick randomn words and look for their origin or proper meanings
i found out about "namaste" and found it very interesting..so here goes :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Namaste

hmmm

Everything is going towards the wrong direction be it career prospects for students, reservations, politics, or something as fundamental to human existence as education.

Something my dad told me when I was very young got etched on my brain (which is gonna be passed on to my next generations as well J ) -- If you study to remember, you will forget, but, If you study to understand alongwith the curiosity to know, you will remember.

Education if attained in the manner it is supposed to, could free the individual … heard of “The educated are free”. Learning, knowledge gives one an immense sense of power that no one ever can take away from you. But beware a mind could store a million facts and still remain uneducated. ‘The purpose of education is to replace empty minds with open ones’ they say and how true!

We are shut up in schools and colleges for fifteen years (minimum), and come out at last with a bellyful of words and do not know a thing. The things taught in schools and colleges are not an education, but the means of education. The onus is on our shoulders how we figure out what to do with it.

Classrooms simply focus on the best child in class and not bringing out the best in every child – the brutal mistake. Ruins the fun of knowledge gaining in itself.

We are led by a simple funda : hard work brings reward, so we pursue higher education because it brings success. If the pursuit of scientific-technical disciplines ensures success, so be it - is the argument. Profession is hardly a matter of likes/dislikes rather it is the return on investment that maters. Well, in a culture where success is measured by one’s material possessions, and where personal fulfillment often takes the back seat, one is likely to pursue the type of education that assures the greatest return on the investment.

The phenomenal growth in the Information Technology sector, also gave rise to the demand for MBAs. Every other person was an MBA whether they had any vocation or not. The motivation for a doctor in his/her career path , in the healing powers of medicine, is a lot lesser than the affluence and prestige the profession brings along with it. An e.g. that I strongly quote in this regard is the refusal of the doctors to look into the condition of a patient who breathed his last during the anti-reservation strikes. Having said this, I m not in any way ignoring the frustrations behind the meritorious doctors, whose merit was at stake but the life of a fellow human being lost in bargain was not really worth it, or have we lost all sense of value?

Education is gained by struggling to live, it is to be able to respect point of views starkly different from our own, most importantly to listen, to be patient and to spread love. Every day teaches you something, every person has something to tell, to teach. The fundamentals are lost somewhere in the race against each other. A human is lot better equipped when he works together we seem to forget.

Well the competition is killing but then worse still is when teenagers commit suicide because heir lifestyle is not as extravagant as their mates are. What are they thinking when they do such things. Too much of emphasis on how fashionable they are, how they speak, their lingo, their style statements all scream for their poor frame of minds. (ok I m cribbing now :P)

Well I have always believed that the Vedic Literature is all-encompassing and has solutions for everything. One such solution that I see is revival of the “GURUKUL” tradition of schooling. The ideal solution would be picking the ideologies of the tradition and implementing using the technologies and facilities available now. Knowledge should be free to be able to avail all.

For an intro - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gurukul

http://www.yogamag.net/archives/2002/2mar02/tradit2.shtml

Teaching as a profession has lost all its value, the importance attached to an individual imparting knowledge is lost and down in the dumps. The only people who end up as teachers are those who haven’t been able to make a mark anywhere else. There are a few gems of teachers still left…if only the right people helped in shaping the country for the future there would be better students. And yes most importantly, if you read through all of this ..thank your teacher J

P.S: another imp issue is leadership. There are always too many people talking at the same time in this country. Leadership is not magnetic personality—that can just as well be a slick tongue. It is not "making friends” and “influencing people"—that is flattery. Leadership is lifting a person's vision to higher sights, the raising of a person's performance to a higher standard, the building of a personality beyond its normal limitations. Leadership is action oriented towards service – a matter of the heart and mind.

Lack of proper leaders is what is driving the nations youth to better pastures (what normal mortals call BRAINDRAIN)

Now you know what the next post is gonna b :D

I end it just like I started (very pessimistic I must say :P) everything is going in the wrong direction…. But I will try and do my bit to improve the current state of affairsJ

The war of percentages

Student life in India seems to be ruled by one thing; percentages. Ofcourse, that is if you don't consider the lousy teachers, overcrowded classrooms, "question banks", etc.

Right from our first exams in school (remember the red and blue lines pages?) we are expected to be first in our class regardless of whether we really can do it. A second ranker is ridiculed by his parents; they want him to work harder, and harder, and harder. And harder still, till the day that they see their beloved child hanging by the neck from the ceiling fan.

While what I say is jarring, it's a very disturbing trend. It's not a new thing, people have committed suicide due exam stress before. But it has become more and more frequent as years pass. Every year we see a new benchmark set for the students to follow. You see little 12-15 year olds studying a whopping 12 hours a day to mug up every word, every punctuation mark in every book. Their aim is simple; get as many marks as possible. Who cares if they understand a word of what they're reading. What matters is that they remember all the junk. So cram we will.

What does a child study for 12 hours? If one actually has to understand what is given in the books, it will most definitely not take 12 hours a day of an entire year. The parents are proud though. They rarely understand that their child is burning up inside. While they mean well; they want their child to be successful after all; they succumb to their inner wishes to see their child as a doctor/engineer even if he/she doesn't have the aptitude for it.

The situation of colleges in India is not too great either. Junior college seats in Delhi University (as I saw today on CNN-IBN) fill up at 85% on an average for each and every stream in all the decent colleges. Engineering colleges in Mumbai fill up at staggering 94% marks. A friend had to struggle for a seat in Mumbai with 91.67% marks. If someone can't feel secure at 92% marks then what's the worth of studying all that much?

And once we finish college we look for a job. And there we have a 60% cutoff for marks in graduate exams for most of the top/mid-tier companies. These same companies make obscene presentations talking about how they have excellent methods to recognize talent and how Indian education is ineffective in the larger scheme of things. But when it comes to evaluation they cannot trust their own entrance examinations to be able to screen the talented individuals from the rest.

Whats more, even the screening tests for companies have become a major marks market today. We have many sites like Chetana Jobs, Freshers World, etc. that have massive repositories of past questions that candidates can cram up and go vomit out.

Finally, Medicine and Engineering are not the only professions in the world. There's always pure sciences (dying these days due to engineering), law, politics, journalism, sports, arts (fine arts, acting, singing, dancing, etc), agriculture, business, social services, defence services, teaching and much more. Almost every person fits into atleast one of all of these skills.

I am not a number, I'm a free man
- from the song 'Prisoner', Iron Maiden