Please stop, in the name of God!

Prominent Hindu temples in India have an age old tradition of having a temple Elephant which carries around the Idol during important festivals. This has been a practice for centuries now, a practice that needs to be stopped. Time and again I keep seeing video footage about temple elephants running amock during festivities and end up killing people. Nobody cares why they do so, such gentle giants running amock suddenly. Everyone is just bothered about the people killed or injured, no one cares a damn about why the Elephant did that.

There are many reasons. Elephants are wild animals and are meant to be in the jungles. They are social creatures and unlike dogs they cannot just be separated from family just like that and humans cannot expect them to wag a tail in apppreciation. If you watch National geographic or animal planet shows about elephants, you'll be amazed how intelligent and social these elephants are. The festivities in Indian Temples are a nightmare for the Elephants. Swelling crowd and heat around them, long processions with no water and food and with mounted howdahs on their backs, the sound of drums and crackers all around them, simply irritates the animal. And the bloody humans expect the elephant to understand and stay calm. The howdah or the carriage mounted on the animal's back with the Diety on it is usually heavy and the Elephant is usually taken on a slow and long procession around the temple town. Imagine the plight of the creature. I recently read that for the Mysore Dasara fetstival, the elephants are decorated from the previous day evening it seems for the dasara day procession. It is a beast but are we too? Have a heart people. Its your god and not the Elephant's. The funniest part is that, people say that its a honour for such privilege to be bestowed on the Elephant. Gimme a break man, what does an Elephant know about honour.

Religion and the foolishness around it appeal to humans and not to animals like Elephants. They're better off without the bane of religion and its high time that the cruel practice of temple elephants being involved in temple processions be stopped. Like Human rights, animals do have their rights too and its high time we as humans stopped playing god. The irony here is, the god that the Elephant carries on its back with much pain has also been turning a blind eye and a deaf ear to the Elephant's plight and prayers.

goedemorgen

goedemorgen, the first dutch word I learnt in my first dutch class yesterday! Yup folks, I joined a dutch for beginner's class yesterday and the first thing I learnt is greetings. goedemorgen, goedemidag, yes sir, I know how to greet good morning and good afternoon in dutch. I also know numbers 0 to 10, nul, een, twee etc in dutch. Learning a foreign language brings its own set of challenges and fun. The way my dutch instructor wished us "doei doei" was so funny and I felt a bit awkward to say it back to him, but then thats how the language is and how much ever funny it may sound, I need to embrace it and have fun while learning.

Its true but hard to believe that there is only one dutch language instructor available for service in the whole of Bangalore. My searches in google for a dutch language institute or instructor lead te always to Mr.Sayed Jafrid. With no choice left I joined his class and Vikas, my fellow RSM MBA admit, the braveheart from Delhi who booked his flight tickets the moment I told him that dutch class is available in Bangalore, has flown down here and has joined class with me.

My first class was all about greetings, numbers and days of the week and we also learnt 20 words for the day, a scheme devised by the instructor to introduce dutch vocabs to us.Today was my second class and we shifted gears to more numbers, irregular verbs and stuff like that. My classes are for 40 hours, spread across weekends.

The pronounciations is the most peculiar aspect of the dutch language. The way 'g' is pronounced in goedmorgen, with emphasis to the 'gha' sound for the mor'g'en part of it is quite different from what english is. And the way 'V' is pronounced as 'f' and 'J' as 'Ya' are all things I need to learn and remember.

I'd be happy if I can find someone here in bangalore who can speak in dutch with me, but I guess thats a wish list. Finding an instructor itself was a big task here. Anyways I plan to learn atleast the basics of dutch so that Ican practice it when I'm in NL next year. Dooi!

New look

Pretty exceited about the new look that my blog sports now. I've been reading logs like, the path untaken and A letter from Netherlands and have noticed how customised they look. Was wondering what it would take to give my blog a customised look as well, with a background, banner etc.
I set upon this over the weekend and browsed a couple of free blog template providers like thecutestblogontheblock, blogspottemplates and pyzam, of these three pyzam has rocking templates which give a digital look to the blog. Surprisingly everything that pyzam offers including templates are free and easy to use. I tried a few and it was perfect, but as life has it, not everything you like can be had. Two problems prevented me from using pyzam templates.

• side wrapper and body wrapper with less width
• less width side wrapper of pyzam rendered the much loved blogumulus widget inactive when set in background transparent mode.

I decided that I can live with narrow body wrapper and side wrapper but not without the blogumulus widget and so I've stopped using the pyzam templates. I've written to pyzam for ways to fix the issue hoping to get an answer.

So, I went back to the http://www.thecutestblogontheblock.com/ and picked up this template and voila! my blog has a new look.. Love it!

The First Family

This was one post that I wanted to write for a long time but had kept as a draft for a while now. I have lived in BTM, Bangalore for almost 3 years now till until a month back when I moved to Fraser town, Bangalore. One of the prominent activities that perpetually goes on in BTM is building construction, apartments mostly. Construction in Bangalore is not just powered by cement and steel but also by families of migrant workers from neighbouring states of TamilNadu and Andhra and as well as from states as far away as Bihar. To me when I first saw families constructing buildings in BTM, it was a queer sight because I've never witnessed it before. I've witnessed building construction as a 8 to 6 activity in which the building is left in peace at night to rest and to grow the next day.

This is how it works in Bangalore. A family or a couple of families come stay at the site of the building and start constructing the building from scratch. The worker's families construct small shelters out of mud and hollow blocks to live adjacent to the building when it starts to grow from pits and concrete basements. The men from who work at the site are skilled while women mostly cook and take care of the unskilled part of the construction like gathering sand and stones. I've seen the children play around unmindful of the construction with other children and dogs that feed and grow along with them. The children grow up amusingly among steel and cement and sand around the building and as they grow big so does the building.

Women at the site cook using earthen stoves, usually rice and vegetable bought from the neighbouring shops, new found neighbours, neighbours introduced to them by the building they've come to construct. I've seen men bathe at the bore well pumps drilled for the building's use. They bathe on the road adjacent to the building unmindful of passers by or the traffic, they bathe as though they want to show off their hardened biceps and abs to passing by software engineers who go to high tech gyms and pay a bounty to try and reduce their excess fat.

There is always a pack of dogs around the building site and the working families. Dogs that spring up as puppies from nowhere when the construction starts and grow with the children and the building. The house warming of the building happens on the night when the building gets a roof over it. Its the time that the working families move from the shelter along the roadside into the house amongst stacked up floor tiles and timber. They live as the first occupants of the building in unfinished rooms with no walls and doors.

Its the time of the year that the construction families find a new home again. The building they set out to build is completed and its time for them to move on. They've raised the building as they'd raised their children and the dogs that grew with their children. They had built it with their sweat and labour and the building had been grateful to them as well. It gave them a livelihood and a home, but alas, its time to move on and they part ways. The men, women and children move along with the real estate market of the town and the building stays back with the dogs that grew with it, awaiting its new occupants. The construction families with their tents and dogs are nomads in this concrete jungle and they are the first family of this real estate market.

Opinions are useless

We have our own opinion about anything and everybody in our lives. We tag people, objects, organizations and governments alike. We spare nothing that comes across our paths. Everything is tagged and categorized as either good or bad, black or white. When I talk about opinions here it doesn't mean our understanding about a person or an object but rather the opinion that we form about the person or object. Let me explain with an example to make things clear. Its my understanding that my neighbor is cranky in the mornings and its my opinion that he may start a fight with me given a chance. Sometimes we magnify our understanding of a subject to disproportionate levels and form useless opinions about the subject which may not be true after all. Many a times we absurdly form opinions about a subject that we have not encountered in person but have heard of it through the words of others.

The reason I feel opinions are useless is because it puts a filter to our minds. Once the filter is formed we tend to view the subject through that filter always and this doesn't give us the real picture about the subject. For instance, many of the stereotypes in this world, a source of misunderstanding and conflict is because of the opinions that were formed about the subject in question. From terming Jews as misers to terming the Muslims as bomb makers, its all our opinions into play. I've experienced this in my day to day life and I've wondered how stupid I was to have opinions about someone. For instance, in my induction there was a guy who spoke aloud, with a gruff voice, I immediately formed an opinion about him that he was an aggressor. He then turned up to be in my team and once I started to know him in person I understood that he is one of the nicest guys around and I was surprised about how I'd formed an opinion about him that clouded my mind.

Opinions about subjects in life doesn't give us an open mind and puts us through unwanted emotions. A open minded approach without filters in our minds would help us stay calm and would help us avoid anxiety and misunderstanding. In short, Opinions are useless.

Blogumus, The Flash widget

What do you think of the flash widget that I've set up under Labels? Cool eh? I'm really fascinated by the way the labels just swirl in that space. I first saw this widget in Amanda's blog, A letter from Netherlands.Yesterday I was so fizzed out in office that I wanted to do something for a change and decided to set up the Flash widget for my blog. Googled and found out that the original flash widget by Roy Tanck was customised for blogspot by Amanda Fazani and its called as Blogumus. Setting up Blogumus was surprisingly simple and here we are with a blogumus for my blog. Only after setting up Blogumus did I found out that I seldom tag my blogs, just two tags were swirling in the empty space of blogumus, so I rolled up my sleeves and started to tag all my published blogs and fed Blogumus and boy did Blogumus started looking good :-)