RESURRECTION: CONNECTING THE DOTS

The one who gives up is defeated; everyone else is victorious. 

   Live life to the fullest and make the most of each day.

 The story of a terrorist who wants to mend his ways and   make     the most of everything.

They say the one who gives up is defeated; everyone else is victorious. I could have left before, but I was always too afraid to change. Maybe because after too much of effort and sacrifice, we know our present world. And even though that world might not be the best of all worlds, and even though we may not be entirely satisfied with it, at least it won’t give us nasty surprises. I see the gigantic mountains around me. Mountains always stay at the same place. Fully grown trees, when transplanted, usually die. We say we want to be like the mountains and the trees. Solid and respectable. Even though, I wake up thinking: “I wish I was like the birds, who can visit my home in Kashmir and come back whenever they want to.” I wish I was like the wind, for no one knows from where it comes or from where it goes, and it can always change its direction without even having to explain why.

Change is difficult, I presume. And I can never go back to my own people.

I am afraid to go back and acknowledge my own people and place of belonging. Life is no bed of roses. I am afraid.

The birds are always fleeing from hunters and from larger birds; and that the wind sometimes gets caught up in a whirlwind and destroys everything around it. I look at the gun in my hand.

It is nice to dream that we will have plenty of time in future to do our travelling and that, one day, we will travel. It cheers us up because we know that we are capable of doing more than we do. Dreaming carries no risks. The dangerous thing is trying to transform our dreams into reality. But the day comes when Fate knocks on our door. It might be the gentle tapping of the Angel of Good Fortune or an unwanted visitor. They both say: “Change Now!” Not next week, not next month, not next year. They say: “Now!”

We listen to them thinking where they will lead us. The answer is to a new life. And we change. We change village, habits, shoes, food and behavior. We cannot convince fate to allow us to stay as we are. Thus, there is no discussion. I still remember the fateful night when terrorists invaded my village back in Kashmir. They plundered and looted the entire village. Villagers who roused against them were brutally murdered, children were burnt alive and women raped. I remember my sister being forcefully taken inside a shack by one of the terrorists. I tried to save her but in vain. I could hear her cries but could do nothing. In utter anguish and pain I decided to take revenge by myself. I saw my own father killed as he tried to save my mother. He was a brave man. To my disbelief and shock, I realized that my sister after being assaulted- was killed. I ran inside the shack. To my horror, she lay dead. And I was literally kicked by that man.

And here I am now, sitting outside an old hut-my present residence, miles away from my home in Kashmir. I am the leader of a powerful invader-gang with hundreds of able-bodied men at my service. We kill and loot and plunder. I remember the day as the kid, when I promised myself that I will revenge the death of my family. I joined a gang. People risk taking the first step-sometimes out of curiosity, sometimes out of ambition-but generally because they feel an urge for adventure. At each bend of in the road, they feel more afraid, and yet, at the same time they surprise themselves. They are stronger and happier. My first step as a gunman was out of pain. But after my first shoot I was contented. After all this was what I had desired. I was happy.

I have come a long way since then. It has been almost a decade. Good old days can never be revived. I was born in Kashmir. My father ran a snack-cart. Both my parents were god-fearing and taught us the value of time and money. I had never even thought in my wildest imaginations that I would be someone that I am today.

 As a child, I had always wanted to be a military-cop. An honest cop, who does not spare the terrorists. The violent acts of the terrorists instilled fear among all of us. Their acts were usually perpetrated for religious, political and ideological goals. For this, they disregarded the safety of the civilians. People who retaliated were shot dead. Their aim seemed unknown. All that we wanted was to stay safe and happy.

Memories swept past by me. And I could not help breaking down. It was not often that I cried, but today there was something strange. I can never go back and recover lost moments. The truth is that we never have much choice. Life and community have already taken charge of planning our fate. I have killed and shot, fought and bled. I have taken my own share of revenge.

I adjust the black linen that I am wearing. Everything looks black just like my attire. I cannot find solace. I see my own ugliness. In my extreme thirst of taking revenge, I have forgotten my own existence. I have stopped being the sunlight; instead have become the pool of water reflecting it. I want to go back to that time and place.  But I am not sure which direction to take. Bloodsheds and killings are not going to take me anywhere.

I see a rugged ascetic. His loud shouts caught my attention, for I could actually relate a lot to him. “No one can go back but everyone can go forward. And tomorrow, when the sun rises, all you have to say to yourself is-I am going to think this day as the first day of my life.”

I remember the members of my family. This was the very first time that I could feel their presence around me, silently sharing the much talked-about and little understood thing called love. I look at everything and it seems as if for the first time, especially the small things that I have grown used to, quite forgetting the magic surrounding them. The desert sands, for example, which are moved by an energy I cannot understand-because I cannot see the wind. 

Life is a million different things. Tonight, before leaving, I will spend time sorting through the pile of things I never had the patience to put in order. All the letters, the notes and weapons will take on their own life and tell me the story of my past and future. About all the different things in the world, all the roads traveled  all the entrances and exits of my life. I am going to put on a shirt and take off my black attire. For the first time, I noticed how it was made. I imagined the hands that wove the cotton and the river where the fibers of the plant were born. I understand that all those now invisible things are a part of the history of my shirt.

Since I am heading off into the future, I will be helped by the scuff marks left on my sandals from where I stumbled in the past. 

Everything my hand touches and my eyes see and my mouth tastes seem different. It’s like re-encountering emotions worn smooth by routine. I drank some tea that I have never tried before because others told me it tasted horrible. I will walk down a street I have never walked down before because others told me it was totally out of interest. And I will find out whether or not I would like to go back there. If it is sunny tomorrow, I want to look at the sun properly for the first time. If it is cloudy, I want to watch in which directions the clouds are going. I have always pestered and complained to god. But I now realize that I do not pay enough attention.

I want to fill my life with fantasy again. For the first time, I will smile without feeling guilty, because joy is not a sin. For the first time, I will avoid anything that makes me suffer, because suffering is not a virtue. I will not complain about life. I will listen to the music of the temple bells. The music says, love rules. I will submit to love.

I will live this day as if it were my first and, while it lasts; I will discover things that I did not even know were there.

I look at myself as if this were the first time I had ever been in contact with my own body and my own soul. I accept myself.

And even if this is to be my last day on Earth, I will make the most of it. I will live it with the innocence of a child, as if I were doing everything for the first time.

# A special reference to a friend, who had always wanted me to write on this subject. Owing to extreme laziness i was not able to keep up this commitment within stipulated period. But better late than Never. This one is for you friend! :)

               

The Meaning of Milkha...

From seeing his family being massacred during the Partition to begging for food at the Delhi railway station as an orphaned refugee to arguably India’s greatest-ever individual sportsperson, Milkha Singh remains a story that will be told over and over again. The relevance of this legend will only be more pronounced with time.

This essay is a personal tribute to a man who defined an era. It is inspired partly by the rumor of the film and partly through all the fascinating interviews one read about the man. This is a small attempt, a little fragment to the mosaic of the greatness being assembled around him. To write about Milkha Singh, is to write about a different era. It is to evoke a different set of emotions, a different philosophy of life. To see him as a runner is not enough. The sociology of sport is not enough to explain the man. In a new and independent India where our heroes were Nehru and Patel, Azad or Gandhi, Milkha Singh represented a new kind of hero-as the athlete, as the earthly son of the soul.

Milkha Singh, like many of the time was a child and creature of partition. Partition not only divided a nation but tore into the heart of a people. Many Indian biographies suggest surviving partition and exorcising-as their two main aspects. Milkha had to race against history to create history. Milkha saw his parents, brother and sister killed before him. As an orphan, he had only his siblings to rely on. Milkha tried to join the army but was rejected thrice. Finally, he joined the electrical wing of the army and then raced into folklore.

The army in India is a great institution and sociology of the army and its relation to village India has never been written. The army has created employment, a career, an honorable way of life for millions of Indians. For the honor and codes it provides, the army becomes a form of therapy. The Flying Sikh was a flying soldier. He realized he joined the army as an orphan, he graduated as a pilot. Singh, like many villagers could have been a dacoit or a thug if the army was not there. Milkha was never to forget that the Flying Sikh was first a flying soldier.

Archana Masih tells a wonderful story of Milkha’s home. There are no galleries of medals, no nostalgias of victory in the house. Only two pictures adorn the walls, one of the American doctor who saved his wife Nirmal Kaur’s life and other a picture of Havaldar Bikram Singh, a Kargil martyr.

To paint Milkha as a soldier, a patriot and a citizen is critical. He once complained that today we honor our cricketers not our martyrs. Our cricketers behave like mercenaries while our martyrs are forgotten. Milkha is a soldier as icon. Today we forget how the army created a sporting nation, became the nursery for the sporting greats in athletics and hockey. In an odd way our middle class obsession with cricket has blinded us to the role of army.

Milkha Singh lived with the pain of Partition through his running career. Pakistan was that empty painful space in his heart, a home which could no longer be home for a child born in Lyallapur. It was towards the end of his career that he found his cure. The Pakistanis had invited him to run against their best athletes and Milkha Singh was reluctant to go, unsure of his feelings. It was Jawaharlal Nehru who persuaded him to go and told him that he did not want more Milkhas to happen on either side. He told him that he was a soldier and his job was to fight the battle within. Milkha was afraid to smell what he called the blood in the air in Pakistan, ran and it was Ayub Khan, the President of Pakistan who gave him the sobriquet “The Flying 

Sikh".

There was something ethical about running at that time. It was the body, a pair of shoes running against the limits of one-self. The body stands as its own truth. Technology has little role to play. Almost anyone can run. Jogging and running is one of the democratic sports. Before jogging became a lifestyle thing, one just ran around the compound or the maidan barefoot or in plain canvas. Running is a philosophy in motion. You run to create a different world, a better world.

One has to understand Milkha Singh in that perspective. Milkha Singh was a runner. He just ran. He ran at a time there was little science to running in India. One trained by racing against the elements, by running on sand or running till one bled through exhaustion. There were coaches but they were not the time and motion managers, the biophysics experts we have today. One just wore shoes. There was no Nike, no prosthetics, one just ran. One trained the body but running was never the scientific experiment it is today.

Milkha Singh like our other Indian runners never won an Olympics medal. He just raced into the hearts of people who understood the poignancy of a sporting event. Milkha Singh was expected to win atleast the bronze. But he ran a badly strategized race. He opened too fast and then realized he had to slow down. He however slackened at the wrong moment to see three runners race past him. It was bad timing and he could never catch-up. There was a tragedy of defeat and regret here. For Milkha the real defeat was that he could not plant the Indian flag at the Olympics. He had tears of a patriot.

It was a race he was to run and re-run in his mind unable to forget or forgive himself for that burst of rashness. Yet even that event revealed the simplicity and greatness of the man, a legend reminding himself that he had feet of clay. Greatness is a power to look humbly at oneself and face it candidly.An absent minded government awarded him a Padma Shri and then presented him with a belated Arjuna Award. Milkha refused the latter quietly chiding the government by saying that they gave him his BA degree before awarding him his matric certificate. For pure economy and sheer simplicity, he was devastating.

The genius of Bollywood lies in the fact that it has always captured India better than social science, journalism and literature. The title says it all. The plea, “Bhag Milkha Bhag” or“Run, Milkha Run” was not the command of the coach but his father’s last plea begging him to flee so that he could save himself. The double poignancy of the title gives one a new understanding of the man and his era. FarhanAkhtar, who plays Milkha Singh in “Bhag Milkha Bhag”was profound when he said there is a Milkha in all of us. It was a reminder that all of us are runners, racing against ourselves and history.

Flaw in Fable

Wolves that go huff and puff don't have enough muzzle velocity to scare today's kids...

We had guests over, passing through on their way to Rishikesh. They had two kids, absolute pains. I was put in charge of entertaining the kids. I have a brother who is presently in 7th standard. I have forgotten what it means to entertain kids. These days you have a hard time telling them bedtime stories. So I went with the Hansel & Gretel story and how they found this gingerbread house made of sweets in the forest.

What forest, conifer or deciduous?

You want the story or not.

I want a story, but what’s with this gingerbread stuff. Couldn't they use timber?

Today’s kids have no imagination; they can’t let it fly. Tell them about Rapunzel letting down her hair so the prince could climb up the tresses and you get sums about torque and weight and if the prince was over 48.5 kg he would have pulled her over and hair cannot take more weight than that much per square inch.

 Listen kid, that’s the way it is.

I told the child about Snow White and the seven dwarfs and she said, horizontally deprived men, get it politically correct. How would it sound if we wrote, and off they went to work, the seven horizontally deprived men singing, hey ho, hey ho, off to work we go.

Remember Jack & the beanstalk and how we lay awake at night after hearing the story, waiting for the giant to roar. You tell that story to today’s kids and they tell you the beanstalk is all rubbish, beans don’t grow that high, show me one stalk that goes that high, huh, come on, show me.

It was a magic beanstalk.

Mom, she’s bluffing again.

What do you expect? They watch Addams family for fun, Frankenstein for relaxation, horror and terror over a sandwich. They gambol in Jurassic Park, they enjoy screaming. They see 4000 T.V murders, 3000 shootings and knifing, when they are still in school. And you tell them about wolves that go huff and puff and try to blow houses down. Not enough muzzle velocity there.

Try the Little Red Riding Hood yarn on a modern child. Get to the part where the wolf gobbles her up. You see this curl of the lip as the child tries to absorb the drivel you are flinging at him. Then you say, the woodcutter came and rescued the Little Red Riding Hood.

From his stomach? Yes. Like a caesarian? Sort of, kid.

Let me get this straight. The wolf swallowed her whole, right, in one big gulp. Yes, kid.

Just like that, huh? Go to sleep, kid.

Remember our time. We believed in Goldilocks and the three bears and Cinderella’s pumpkin turning into a coach. Try telling Junior that one, specially the bit about the mice swinging into six white coach men. You will get this lengthy diatribe on DNA and how it would never work.

# a special reference  to a friend who had a tough time taking care of her 4 and the half year old little sister while their parents were away. She chose to be anonymous...Nevertheless, i salute her (y) _/\_

ROCKET MAN : RANBIR KAPOOR

He does not look common enough to be Everyman Amol Palekar, but then he is not as hunky as Hrithik Roshan. He is not brooding enough to be a Bachchan and he does not have Salman Khan's bulging biceps either. Yet Ranbir Kapoor's raffish looks and boyish charm have helped him wrench out more space for himself in the league of extraordinary gentlemen of Bollywood...

Midway into the movie, Yeh Jawani Hai Deewani(YJHD), there is a scene where Ranbir and Deepika set out to climb a haunted hill on a full moon night. There over a bottle of shared local brew, they strike a connection and he bares his heart: “Main udna chahta hoon. Main daudna chahta hoon. Girna bhi chahta hoon. Bas rukna nahi chahta (I want to fly. I want to run. I want to fail or fall too. What is don’t want is to stop.)”

That pretty much describes this man as Ranbir Kapoor’s box-office fortunes have been soaring, shattering quite a few records. 

• ·        Yeh Jawani Hai Deewani ( Rs 176 crore and counting) is already one of the top three grossing Hindi films across India, after 3 Idiots( Rs 202 crore) and Ek tha Tiger( Rs 198 crore).
• ·        YJHD took just seven days to reach the coveted 100 crore mark.
• ·        YJHD has become the first non-Khan film to enter the list of Top 10 Bollywood hits abroad.

YJHD, the biggest hit of 2013 yet, has added to Ranbir’s resume is: a solo blockbuster, both home and abroad.

RK-the new ‘Superman’ of Indian Cinema, is young, energetic and has cool looks which makes him popular across age brackets.

For Rishi Kapoor’s son( and Raj Kapoor’s grandson), the khandan casts a rather long shadow. But the 30 year old does not seem weighed down by lineage; he even referenced uncle Shammi’s song, ”Yeh Chand Sa Roshan Chehra” in Rockstar. In his TV interviews, Ranbir has often displayed un-star like candor. For instance, the actor has admitted to experimenting with drugs during his New York days. “I have tried it…but I am not endorsing it. It is important for me to be honest”, he told a news channel sometime back.

He typifies the new cool among the young: effortless, carefree and intelligent. People find it easy to relate to him. He is a representative and keeper of Kapoor legacy. So he is old reinvented as new and new reinventing itself further. He is the only actor with intelligence and mystique. Members of the Kapoor clan believe that Ranbir’s success lies in the fact that he is such an original. He is not “like” anyone else in the family and is the finest actor in the Kapoor clan. Being grounded is the quality his parents give him full marks for. His mother Neetu calls him a “film-encyclopedia”. She says that her son takes success in his stride.

Much like Mount Everest these days, Bollywood box-office summit is a crowded place. Apart from the three Khans, Salman, Aamir and Shah Rukh, Hrithik Roshan too is back in the reckoning after two consecutive winners, Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara and Agneepath. And there is no evidence that any of the four is vacating space. But clearly in the past two years, Ranbir has wrenched out more space for himself in the league of extraordinary gentlemen. As for actors from his own generation, nobody even comes close to Ranbir. That he shares great onscreen chemistry with most female co-stars-Katrina Kaif( Ajab Prem…), Priyanka Chopra( Anjaana Anjaani), Ileana D’ Cruz(Barfi!) or Deepika Padukone(YJHD)-and has shown a knack of sensitive romantic scenes, has only helped his cause.

The actor has done it on his terms. YJHD director Ayan Mukerji says that Ranbir follows his instinct while choosing scripts. Mukerji says that he was very anxious when he went to Ranbir’s house with the script of his film Wake Up Sid (2009). The actor heard him narrate the story for two and a half hours without uttering a word. At the end of it, he just said, “I love it and I will do it”. He is really unafraid to be who he wants to be.

He has been far more experimental than any major star at such an early age of his career. That includes stripping rather strategically in his debut film, Saawariya (2007), playing a sardar ( Rocket Singh) or a deaf-mute (Barfi!). With Barfi!, he has already shown that no role is too difficult for him and no project too risky. He basically opts for the “alternative within mainstream”.

Ranbir is not without flaws. Critics say there is a similarity in the way he plays most of his characters. There is no pronounced difference in the way he interprets the commitment-phobic philander in Bachna Ae Haseeno, the slacker in Wake Up Sid, the ethical salesman in Rocket Singh and the individualist in YJHD-all boys who end up as men by the last reel; the trajectory of their transformation being the film’s narrative and emotional core. In Rockstar too, while he brings out the rage and angst of JJ, another boy-man, his Haryanvi accent keeps slipping like his towel. But he generally manages to be better than the movie he acts in. Irrespective of the director, he brings something to the table which is his very own.

He is more an instinctive actor than someone who prepares in detail for a role.

Ranbir Kapoor, salesman of the year! The actor is currently the ambassador for eight leading global companies including Lenovo, Panasonic, Hero Moto Corp, Blackberry and PepsiCo among others. With every new film- and Ranbir is constantly reinventing himself in his films-his brand image is growing. This is attracting diversified brands. Brands for all age groups and consumers want him.

When it comes to the choice of roles, Ranbir says that he has always gone with his heart. He does not have a preconceived notion. If he likes the script, the character and the director’s vibes-he says yes! In an interview he said that Acting is his “only calling” and his reason to get out of bed in the morning-otherwise he would be happy to sleep in till 6 pm. But he works hard for his success. His grandmother-Krishna Raj Kapoor, after watching his film Rockstar, gifted him their family heirloom-an ancestral gold coin that her father-in-law Prithviraj Kapoor had won at a drama competition in Peshawar in British India. She believes that Ranbir would indeed take the family name forward.

There is always something nuanced about his performance. The raffish charm and showboating dance moves in YJHD, the protagonist Bunny(played by Ranbir) has several shades of grey. He hates his step-mother, forgets about his best friends when he gets a job of his dreams, spurns true love and even misses his father’s funeral. That by the end of the movie, he manages to make Bunny one of us, or at least something many of us imagine ourselves to be, is a compliment to Ranbir!

Dummies’ guide to punters

• The punter is drawn from the worlds of business, finance or Bollywood. He has access to large sums of money, and is a habitué of the party circuit, where movies and cricket collide. And he has easy, unquestioned entrée into the hotels and dressing rooms of the cricketers

Per legend and lore, as crafted in the media and given further heft by Bollywood (Think Emraan Hashmi in the film Jannat), this mythical figure is an end-to-end gambling solution. And so, we who love stories clean and unambiguous have over time created an archetype: the super fixer.

He scripts every detail of cricket matches. Beginning with toss, incorporating the ebbs and flows of the game and ‘taking it right down the wire’. He bribes, coaxes, cajoles and threatens the cricketers into following the script. With his granular knowledge of what is going to happen, he then fixes the odds to favor to suck the gullible punter into betting on what he has already ensured will not happen. In doing all this, he manages to pull off two mutually contradictory requirements: On one hand, he rubs shoulders with top cricket stars and on the other hand, he remains a will-o-the-wisp, invisible to the authority. This combination of fixer and bookie died little over ten years ago and gave way to the era of the super-punter as fulcrum in the world of illicit gambling on cricket.

Typically, the punter is drawn from the worlds of business, finance or Bollywood. He has access to large sums of money, and is a habitué of the party circuit, where movies and cricket collide. And he has easy, unquestioned entrée into the hotels and dressing rooms of the cricketers.

His presence at the dinner with a cricketer is unremarkable and goes unremarked. And the cricketer-young and mostly naïve, drawn from the backwaters with his eyes blinded by glitz-revels in the friendship he has struck with this very important person who can get him into big parties, and put him next to Bollywood starlets and models who show a willingness, to ignore the cricketers gaucherie and join him for public fun and private pleasure.

So when his new-found friend asks him in the course of casual dinner-table conversation- what the team composition for the big game is, what the team makes of the pitch and atmospherics, what changes if any there will be in the batting order or who will open the bowling, which batsman is fit and which one is struggling with physical or mental niggles-innocent questions of the kind fans pose to cricketers everywhere-the player thinks nothing of sharing these details with his obliging influential friend!

In gambling, just like any area of business, knowledge is money. And the punter armed with this inside knowledge places his bets on certain outcomes he is able to predict with fair degree of certainty.

He wins, and shares a slice of his winning with his friend- the cricketer. It is all very jolly, all done with a nudge, a wink, a chuckle. The cycle repeats a couple of times until it is taken for granted by both parties. From then on, it is not even necessary for the punter to meet the cricketer in person-a late phone call before a big game, to ask relevant questions and gain actionable information, becomes routine, as does the post-game ‘gift’-in gratification.

Almost without knowing it, the cricketer goes beyond merely answering questions, and begins to volunteer information-anything he thinks will give his friend an edge in the betting market. Technically, this process is called ‘grooming’.

And then one day, the ‘routine’ phone call comes with an unexpected twist. “Can you bowl a shoddy over in your first spell; manage to give away say 15 runs?” “Can you get out before crossing the 20s?”

By now, “What the hell, where is the harm?” works like an anesthetic on the cricketer’s conscience. The threat lies in the fact that the cricketer has inadvertently helped a gambler and have profited therefrom; to say no now might result in his outing and resultant disgrace. And so he bowls that short one outside off or he backs away from his stumps to cut, misses the line and is bowled.

What does a bad over, an indiscreet shot matter if there is a party, a willing scarlet, an SUV or a foreign holiday waiting on the other side of it?

And who would ever suspect? The bookie, operating deep within the underworld, is a ‘person of interest’ to law enforcement agencies. His movements are watched and his phone is tapped. He has no easy access to team hotels and dressing rooms. And the cricketer is aware of the risk he runs if he takes a call from a bookie or meets him. The punter, however, is not readily identifiable as such. The punter, too, is a celebrity himself of whatever wattage, and is perfectly at home in the restaurants and lobbies of the star hotels that house the cricketers on tour. And thus the risk of association is nullified.

With the arrival of the super-punter, the bookie realized he no longer needs to run the risk of fixing matches. All he has to do is to follow the money. The world of bookie is structured like a classical pyramid. At the top, sits the kingpin. At the next level are a string of ‘Tier A’ bookies that form a loose confederation, each building up his own select clientele. Below them are ‘Tier B’ bookies, operating on small or medium scale. Thousands of Tier B bookies are affiliated to each ‘Tier A’bookie. The punter and the bookies work together. They make a guess about the quality of insider information underlying the bet itself, thus deriving the benefits of the ‘fix’, without the risk of exposure.

            The Meiyappans and Dara Singhs of this world are super-punters; their position in the worlds of celebrity and/or team management allows them- to acquire information on events, even to manipulate said events. This in turn allows them to do what in financial circles would be insider trading which in turn feeds into the activities of the book-making syndicate!

And all this is criminal.

#Courtesy : THE TIMES OF INDIA

Virtual Vanity

• You know you have gone too far when you start typing your name in the Google Search Engine...

Like most teenagers, I dreamed myself of one day having my name in lights. Perhaps, an interview in National Geographic for my work with African apes. Maybe an Oscar for my portrayal of a feisty heroine in an epic drama preferably set in Scotland. Or a Nobel prize for writing, which I would collect in Stockholm wearing a black turtleneck.

To be honest, none of these has come true. I prefer dogs to apes. My writings are used to line the bottom of my sock drawer. And, I have never been to Scotland.

Sure, as a writer I got my name in the occasional glow of a byline in our school magazine and even today in the college journal but the Oscars and Nobels, interviews and going places is but a distant dream!

Like most users, I am a gratuitous Googler, squandering valuable work time looking up for invaluable topics such as the trailers of recent movies( and of course, watch endless flicks too!), repeat telecasts of a couple of soaps, pdf files of the books I want to read or the latest footwear in the market. But among these endless searches will be a valuable constant: my own name.

In the great scheme of things, I am not very important. I have never been medically paroled from jail. I have never gone to rehab and I am not about to marry a famous celebrity. But when I Google my name, I realize that besides being me, I am apparently also a student at IIT Kharagpur. I am a healthcare executive and the branch manager of a Ranchi-based travel agency. I am in a relationship which is complicated. I also speak multiple languages. Phew!

My dad once jokingly suggested that I should seek psychological help for my addiction. True, I Google myself every day. And yes, there are times when, like a bulimic digging into a second bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken, I feel out of control, gorging on images and news groups for glimpses of myself.

I could counter that my profession as an amateur blogger demands that I check in on myself to ensure accuracy! I could argue that other people stare at themselves in the mirror, or hoard fake friends on Facebook, so what’s the difference?

In cyberspace, there is no such thing as big fish in little ponds, or little fish in big ponds. Instead, it is one swirling, bubbling swamp of amoebas, all gasping for their own share of air. And for ego surfers, it is important we float to the surface. Research by the Pew Internet and American Life Project in 2007 found that 47% of internet users in the US have performed self-Googling more than double the number from five years prior. Now, new web tools such as popuri.us, addictomatic.com and egoSurf.org are attempting to confer some sort of hierarchy to the pond. Type in your name, and they will plumb the depths of the swamp, casting their nets far and wide, generating ego ranking for you, calculated on how many times you are mentioned in the murk.

I have realized like wine, watching soaps and eating pizzas, modernization is the key to virtual vanity-and keeping it to your self-paramount. When you plunge in the competitive realm of rival surfing, a frantic search of name, searching colleagues, heroes or any relationship for that matter, you are sure to sink into the hell of self-doubt and comparisons. There is always someone out there with a higher ranking, a better picture, a bigger job.

You might even discover that your nemesis has won a Nobel Prize, been interviewed by Karan Johar, saved every ape from the Congo to Cambodia and has landed a movie role-set in Scotland!

No one needs that net result.

Happy Birthday Maa! :)

A woman like no other.

She gave me life, nurtured me, taught me, dressed me, fought for me, held me, shouted at me, kissed me, but most importantly loved me unconditionally.

I’m rich because of how much time and love she has invested in me and the sacrifices she has made for my benefit. There couldn't be a Mother more wonderful than her.

I love you so much mom, more than you can even imagine! You have been such a strong support to me. I will never be able to thank you enough for all of it. 

Good kids come from good Mothers! :D

You have always been the most amazing Mom.!! :)

I promise you a lot of happiness in every way.

Happy Birthday to the best mom in the world and the prettiest lady i have ever seen!!! 

                                                                    Love,

                                                          Avi n Betu :)