Tuesday, July 30, 2013

We Are Not Interested !



When we were much younger there were quite a few evenings when we used to assemble in a friend's house to play card games - mainly rummy. The stakes were not too high but everyone wanted to end up winning some. It used to happen quite often that one of the players would have chosen a gambit that would have only an outside chance of succeeding but, as luck would have it, it would work and he would end up winning the round. The winner would be quite pleased with himself and would set about describing to others in eloquent detail the precise moves he had made and the clever strategy he had adopted to see that he would win. It would all be due to his 'skill' and never due to his luck. All of us would be guilty of this weakness at least once as the game proceeded to the late hours of the night.

So it happened one day that as we were playing a guy by name Satyanarayan won. Then he started elaborating to others how he ensured victory:

"You know when Mathew dropped a nine of spades, even though I did not have any connected cards I picked that up because I knew that he would in the next round imagine that..."

Another guy named Nair intervened curtly,  "We are not interested !  Not only do we have to shell out the money... we also have to listen to the History !!"

We all found it amusing. But then after a round or two another guy won and began "I wouldn't have won if I.." and all of us in unison intoned "We are not interested!!!"  The poor guy laughed sheepishly.

Actually, all of are seeking validation in life. As Jaggi Vasudev has said all of want to touch other's lives and would love to get a response that we indeed have touched them. But each of them is busy seeking validation for touching others' lives that it turns out that no one really cares.

Just yesterday I read in the newspapers that a new disorder that can broadly be described as 'Social Networking Disorder' seems to be spreading. People are posting what they find exciting an interesting on social networking sites and expect their contacts to 'Like' their posts, and when these do not come in, they get anxious and depressed.

I should know! I've been writing so many things and posting in my blog hoping to get 'validation' and a proof that I am indeed touching people's lives, but there's scarcely any response. There are hardly a few people who have commented on my posts and posted them. Over a period of time I have lapsed into asking brazenly and loudly and in their face, to read my blog and to give their opinion. But it never comes. As the eagerness for validation increased I even posted in Facebook an interesting short film on validation called 'Validation' and it turned out that there was no response to that either.

So it is increasingly true of these social networking sites that people are desperately seeking validation and everyone is responding "We are not interested !"

      xxx

Sunday, July 28, 2013

Shattering the glass ceiling !


It is very common to see, especially in articles written by women on successful  women achievers, the expression 'Shattering the glass ceiling'. Whenever I encounter this expression I cannot seem to help myself from the image that my mind conjures up that dates back to Bombay of the 1970s. It makes me question why would they want to shatter it when one can ascend to the top floor in skirts ?

It was a popular rumor in Bangalore among college boys, that a famous smuggler of Bombay who had amassed great wealth, had constructed a palatial building in Bombay where one of the intermediate stories of the building had a clear transparent glass ceiling. This ceiling would form the floor of the storey immediately above (with a one-way view?). He would get to have shapely damsels with skirts and bereft of underclothing moving around on that floor even as he would lay sprawled on his bed below smoking a hookah and enjoying the scene. At that time in the 1970s, as a college student, I had not yet come across the expression 'shattering the glass ceiling' as an expression of thwarted hopes of ambitious women who desired to ascend in the hierarchy. Later on, as strong expressions of feminism picked up and I became adult enough to understand the concern of feminists, I came across this expression. I confess that I can never ever relate to the expression as my mind immediately races to the image of the glass ceiling I had formed when in college. I think of the superfluity in shattering the ceiling as I contrive to imagine how women could easily ascend to the top floor in attractive skirts without their undergarments!  Despite all my efforts to banish the 1970s image of the fortunate smuggler's home in Bombay and substitute it with the concern of feminists, it never seems to work.

It is a telling instance of how a powerful metaphor for one person in a particular context becomes an equally powerful metaphor for another in precisely the opposite way, and all this due to a quirky circumstance over which he seems to have no control. If that Bombay smuggler was not caught and exposed and the rumor about him had not floated around, the expression 'shattering the glass ceiling' would perhaps have had the same effect on me as it has on feminists.

                        xxx