With some luck..

In a recent conversation with my intellectually inclined father, he suddenly told me - no one can achieve any remarkable success without some luck! My knee jerk reaction was to deny it. But then I mulled over it a bit and realized it was partially true. And then I mulled over it a little longer and realized 'By god, it is true!"

Of course this so-called second hand epiphany did nothing for my sour mood. Because my subsequent thoughts were - so we can never achieve anything in life even if we are extremely talented, unless we are also lucky. Because we can have talent and bad luck and never go anywhere with that talent. Depressing thought there. And where does it out the other contradictory epiphany of "where there is a will there is a way!"'.


Can some one succeed on just sheer talent and will, even if luck never favors them? Of course, we have seen semi-talented people make it big in this world because they had the lucky break. More personally speaking, does that mean I can write deliciously and come up with zilch if lady luck turns away. Bad bad epiphany. I liked my naivety before where I believed it was all destiny, which sounded so much better and solid than luck. Luck always follows in my brain with the word fickle. Can't I just pair luck with lottery and greatness with destiny? It sounds a little less scary.

Coming back home...

For everyone of us who have left home to go far away, whether it was another state or another country, coming back home is always a bittersweet experience. Some only see the dust and dirt and some can smell the sweet air of home.

I remember the winter breaks when I was in school. We used to travel to Kolkata where the majority of the relatives stayed. Even though we enjoyed the warmer weather and meeting friends, as the vacation drew to its end, my feet will get restless and my heart will start fussing. It was time to go home.

We use to fly to either Silchar or Guwahati in Assam and then drive our little town of Haflong. It wasn't until we reached half way to Harangazao that the whole "I am almost home" feeling would hit.

We used to stop in Harangazao in the little tea shops for a break and as we stretched and took in the fresh and cold mountain air, it will smell like home. Some thing will flutter in my heart and it will not stop until I was back well inside my house.

Now that I am globe trotting, the feeling hits me the moment I step outside the airport. You can hear the buses, cars, honks and occasional crows crowing and all you can think is "Damn, it feels good to be home!" And if you don't feel it that's fine.

But there is that one little ingredient necessary to make any place feel like home. Good memories and friends. As they say, home is where the heart is. If you don't have either about a place, there is little there to make it a home. So whatever is home to you, whether its a place or even just a house - you should have someplace to come home to.

We the outsiders!

What happens when you fear being an outsider in your own country? I am referring to the ever growing trend of regionalism and separatism that seem to have caught on globally. And for a country like India, which is a kaleidoscope of cultures and ethnic origins, the possibilities are rather terrifying.

Take for instance the Jaipur bombing. Two days after the bombing, when news trickled out that a Bangladesh based terrorist organization was allegedly involved, the reaction over the table was very disturbing. All Bangladeshis will be rounded up and interrogated, I was told by one person. Which than translated to anyone speaking Bengali will be rounded up. Since the instances of mob justice have grown in the past few months in India, can anyone be blamed for fearing such a situation? Will a mob know the difference between a Indian Bengali and a Bangladeshi? To that matter, what will be the fate of those legal migrants from Bangladesh who probably have been in India since Independence. Will the angry, scared mob think twice?

The answer I am tempted to say is no. But since it has not happened yet, I will reserve my judgment and keep my fingers crossed in hope. But, aren't we, collectively the mob, being encouraged to pick on the outsider in the name of regional pride these days? Mumbai and Thackeray comes to mind, Assam and ULFA comes to mind, and numerous other outsiders will soon be feeling the brunt of being not in their own backyard very soon if the trend continues.

So what is the alternate? Last time I looked I was an Indian and India was my country. But should I now stay where I was born or where my mother tongue is spoken. Will I be an outsider in my own country, if I am in the wrong city or province. Are all our labor over writing those 'Unity in Diversity" essays in school going to waste? For a country which stood united and fought for its freedom barely half a century ago, isn't it deplorable that we took no time to fall apart and tear at each other at the name of regionalism?

MS Paint on a leisure time

The art of communication is not lost....

..its just hiding behind the television set. I read this phrase long back in Reader's Digest I think. Then television was the baddest influence on our culture and people still met over coffee, not orkut. Not that I have anything against that medium. But a recent blog by a fellow scribbler brought the whole new age communication thing into my mind and I set down to blog it.

Since my work is all about communication, I have found myself unconsciously eaves dropping on other peoples communication style - picking up the good bits and trying to avoid what doesn't work. This has also led me to realise there is a huge difference between the good communicators and the bad communicators, and it has nothing to do with their intelligence or other skills.

A lot of very intelligent and smart people fail to make the right impression or get their point across because they either cannot communicate properly or do not care to communicate properly. And I have also met many excellent communicators who can sell you the Moon. And somewhere in the middle are the truly exceptional jewels who measure their words, edit their sentences while speaking, pause at the right time, emphasize the right words....to create a crisp, clear communique that leave a great impression.

I remember back in my journalism class, we had a lecture by P. Sainath, the Magsaysay award winner journalist. He was slated to speak on Ethics in Journalism. In he walks into a class of 65 odd brats who have nothing better to do then tear the speaker apart at the first chance. And he starts by asking what we know of the Hiroshima Bombing. Did we know about the Australian reporter who was in Japan at that time and was the first to reach Hiroshima and report? No?

And then he told the story of this reporter who knew nothing about what had happened, and continued to report of the horrors until the Australian media was forced to block his report due to international pressure. He spun the ethics angle on it by and by and we were hooked. The story was told with such finesse that you could have heard a pin drop in that lecture hall. And I will always remember having met such a brilliant communicator in my life.

Of course, I have aslo come across Actors, celebrities, politicians, authors - who are able to deliver their sentiments in words or writing, precisely and concisely. And somehow I have always wished I can reach that level of communication in whatever media I choose to communicate in.

Getting back to the original argument, I feel in today's world of media exposure and trial by television, communication is not hiding behind the television set anymore, it is being flaunted in front of the camera and put up in Youtube. And we should take note and start dotting our i's and crossing our t's and try our darnest best to get our point across - or be lost somewhere in the editor's table.

El Laberinto del fauno

Or The Pan's Labyrinth is a movie that reminds me of the many intricately woven shawl I have seen in the north eastern India. The story weaves the threads of a Grimm's like fairy tale on to the cruel and dark story of the real world. Its Visually astonishing and heart rending in its story telling. A feast in any sense.

The story is told often in the lilting Spanish which itself lends a unique cadence to the story's own mythical quality. A long long time ago lived a Princess, the Daughter of the king of the woods...............who had dared to come into the world and had been lost in all humanity. But the story goes that the father always waited for his daughters soul to come back into the underworld kingdom.

Flash forward to 1944, Spain. Fascist troupes are crushing the rebels hiding in the mountains. In this scene enters the Fascist Captains heavily pregnant wife and her older daughter from a previous marriage Ofelia. Not yet a teenager, Ofelia still believes in fairies and soon finds her way into the old Labyrinth in the forest where she meets a faun or pan, a pagan god of the woods.

And she is drawn into the story of the young princess and escapes into the forest to the perform tasks given to her by the mysterious faun to prove her worthiness as the princess, as she also escapes the fascist captains dark realm where cruelty and fear abounds.

But both the world come crashing down on her when fantasy becomes terrible as well. Ofelia is left on her own to face both worlds, and both her and the rebels take a last stand against the Captain...to a stunning end. A must watch!