The Monkey Mind !

MONKEY MIND !

Very troubling! The way my mind runs ! And makes me guilty for entertaining such thoughts. Well, not exactly ! Because it is quite entertaining and amusing.

As I was walking down Mahatma Gandhi Road this morning, I saw a well-endowed girl in a snug t-shirt emblazoned at the prominent place, the words 'GIVE ME A BREAK !'. "You want a break?" my mind questioned, "But you seem to be craving for a squeeze !" my mind told me. And with thoughts like these I end up feeling guilty !

This morning I visited my cousins house. They have a cute child that they have named Abhay. Quite a calm sprite actually, the child. But today it seemed mischievous. The mother, patiently at first said, "Abhay". The mischief continued and the mother said somewhat irritated "Abhay!". On continued mischief, the mother got wild and shouted "Abhay !!" Then I patiently explained - "The mistake is yours actually! You have named him Abhay (fearless). How do you expect him to be scared of you if you glower "Abhay!!"

In India we have a trdition of considering children the gift of god. So quite often children are named 'Ramprasad', meaning 'gift of Ram' and so on. This colleague of mine already had two sons. He did not want anymore children. Neither did he want to spend money on condoms. He bought one on a fateful day and on the fateful night it ruptured and as a result he had another son. We asked him "Why not name him Nirodh Prasad!"


I had a friend in college who was a year junior to me. It so happened that he also joined the Geological Survey of India in a post that was two ranks junior. Around the year 1978 or '79 he happened to marry the sister of Narayanamurthy (INFOSYS). At the time of his marriage, Narayanmurthy was like any other middle-class bloke leading a placid life sans limelight. My colleague too was middle class, and had to be very stringent in his spending and careful with his money. Maybe he was even less fortunate than me, and perhaps was economically weaker.

Now picking up another thread, Indian babies, as already explained, are named by their proud parents after gods they revere intensely and also in great gratitude. So maybe Narayanamurthy was named as the idol (Murthy) and visage of Lord Narayana.

As years progressed and the 1990s rolled on, INFOSYS became a very successful company which made huge profits and the share prices shot up phenomenally and went through the ceiling! And generous and benevolent and transparent in their dealings that the founders of the company were, every employee of the company prospered phenomenally and became tremendously wealthy. And so too did many of their relative and friends! And sure enough the fortunes of my colleague mutated magnificently and he became one of the wealthiest employees of GSI which generally has very middle class people. He purchased a new mansion, a car, and was generally very prosperous.

Well! He was beholden to Narayanamurthy who was chiefly responsible for his prosperity and was grateful to his benefactor and held him in high esteem. He celebrated the wedding of his daughter with a very successful engineer working in USA. At the wedding I was remarking to a Bengali friend about my colleague's success story and told him that my colleague was so beholden to Narayanamurthy that if his daughter gave birth to a son, he would name him Narayanamurthy Murthy!