My UK trip

It was starting of my first tour to outside my country; I was very excited as well as scared. Excited because besides climbing the career ladder I had the oppourtunity to see the culture, place and people whose ancestors dictated and ruled our ancestors and country in past. I was scared because of new unknown place with no friends (except few with whom I had text or voice communication only), more urban culture and may be also because of my poor communication skills especially in English with added sugar of accent difference. I managed to show only my excitement that’s also to a certain extent but not even a slight tint of fear. I guess only my brother Rahul may have seen some amount of fear reflected in form of anxiety. Manish one of my friend was giving me all suggestions whatever he has with his London visit during his study also another friend Amey has given me some tips as he returned from London just few weeks ago. Amey gave me some British coins which was around 5 pound and I was thinking whether I have to pay him back around 500 Rs. – but fortunately he didn’t asked for that and latter I found why didn’t he asked for that. I kept telling others that going foreign is not a big deal now a days even dogs and cats are traveling abroad and hence I am neither excited nor scared.

Finally my take off date knocked and I packed whatever I can think off starting from Rin(cloth washing detergent) soap to song cds. Night before the take off date I had a dinner with Manish, Hema, Praveen and Rahul at my room with everybody’s contribution in cooking and I felt happy that atleast some of the flour and vegetables got consumed otherwise it would have got wasted. I burnt some song cd when my friends left and I went to bed around 2 PM with the plan that I will get up at 6 AM. I had a flight at 9:00 AM for Mumbai, when I got up it was 7:15 AM and I directly went to bathroom when I came out of bathroom Rahul was still sleeping, he was suppose to company me to Airport. I woke him and told not to go with some anger and was expecting that atleast he will offer me tea but that also doesn’t happened.

I reached Mumbai and went directly to IITB and my brother received me in his hostel, we together went to Mathematics department to get a glimpse of our great professors but no luck except MKS sir, I found worthless telling him that I am going UK. It was raining whole of the day I was talking with my brother and then in night I met some of my friend Amar, Anurag, Sujay, Deepak.

I started for Mumbai international Airport and when I reached 4 hour before the flight take off time. I thought why the hell I came so early – usual instruction is to come around 3 hour early and that again could be squeezed with 2-2.30 hour with usual bullshit excuses. When Anurag returned and said final good bye I felt the real heat, reached the peak of anxiety status. I calmed down myself and started observing around me and after 4-5 minute decided to follow the trailing two leg creature, who were entering into a cave like airport. Queue was long and when I reached at the security check, guard told me I have to go to other terminal. I asked myself to hurry and reached other terminal which was about 200 meters. I went inside and realized another maze like queue when somebody told me that it’s a queue and I should start from the end not from the beginning further I realized many pairs of eyes are staring and thinking me a fool and country side guy. Next without any hassle I get into the plane and found my seat, which was in the middle of one chinki and an Indian. I kept myself composed and started judging, exploring the buttons on my seat handle and the touch screen monitor on front seat. I didn’t want to reflect that I am traveling first time to foreign country. The problem started with the announcement, which I hardly understand except that crewmembers are wishing for happy journey and plane will go to Heathrow, London in a monotonous tone.
Now I am about to finish my UK 2 month’s trip and when I look back, I have heaped memorable, funny and learning experience. For some events I laugh at myself and for some others will laugh at me. Now I am waiting for the day when I will takeoff for my land, family and friends. I would like to visit (preferably on company expense) any other countries of course not countries like Iraq and Afghanistan. Cheers mate, wicked, Stella, you bloody Indians if I will use don’t get panic - I love you all :)

I want to be someone - but not like anyone

Sometime I get fed up with my life (but never think of suicide or anything :)) - get fed up with what I am doing, what I am not doing, what I am thinking and list goes on ... I have tried many times to be consistent and work hard but ....
I will say with full authority that I will never get satisfied if I will pursue the present path - the secure path - path of more and more comfort. Even I am very sure but as I have time ahead in my life - statistically around 30 years and there is always a scope of miracle - I keep dreaming, dwelling, digging the unearthened part of my life.
I see many people around me from my family to the different era tycoons, leaders, saints and all famous personality, when I try to peek into their lives I see many voids, many black area and finally my search engines throws result "No page found try another key words".
You may be thinking that I am feeling low or confused or directionless or may be altogether - you can think whatever you feel I am not going to clear my stance as its coming out from deep inside of my mind, In addition to that what I have said is a common mental phenomenon and so hope everybody will understand it in their own domain and co-ordinates.

Communication Problem

From yesterday I am really contemplating to stop all communication esp through mobile, mails. When I look back I see nothing constructive I have achieved with this mobile. I am not able to stop wild thoughts so will write latter. As I

am I really mean minded

I was getting late to office(Which is a daily routine) and the local buses were out of sight. It happens especially at the time when I should have to be on my desk. Finally I was thinking to get an auto and reach office with being minimal late. Suddenly I saw that one lady and one girl(not very charming) were negotiating with auto ricksaw driver for fare. Without delay I approached and asked If I could share the same auto. They said ok and finally we moved for our destination. The girl was sitting next to me and since she was not charming I was more interested on road scene. After some time I saw that the girl was giving some money to that lady because she had to get down in middle. They talked in thier regional language, only thing I understood that lady told that she will pay the money. Girl got down and I was thinking that I am not going to share her fare. Lady has refused to take money so let him to pay for that girl also.

For convincing myself thoroughly my philosphical mind started giving the reasons in support of what I was thinking. I got convinced that if I will keep giving fare of every person who is in the same auto then I will have to beg very soon. My mind raised questions over girls conscience also that even if ladies offered her fare then she should not have accepted. While thinking these reasons I prepared myself for argument with the lady and took out only 10 rupees from my purse. I was just waiting for her to ask me for money but she directly gave 50 Rs to driver and said him to take the whole fare. Although I was not prepared for this response(rare) but immediately I given my share of money to her and got down from the auto. I am still ashamed on my thought and mean mindedness.

Spend time with family

A man came home from work late, tired and irritated, to find his 5-year-old son waiting for him at the door...

Son: "Daddy, may I ask you a question"

Daddy: "Yeah sure, what it is?"

Son: "Dad, how much do you make an hour"

Daddy: "That's none of your business. Why do you ask such a thing? " thatman said angrily

Son: "I just want to know. Please tell me, how much do you make an hour?"

Daddy: "I make Rs. 500 an hour"

"Oh", the little boy replied, with his head down. Looking up, he said,
"Dad, may I please borrow Rs. 300?"

The father was furious, "if the only reason you asked that is so you can borrow some money to buy a silly toy or other nonsense, then march yourself to your room and go to bed. Think why you are being so selfish. I work hard everyday for such this childish behavior"

The little boy quietly went to his room and shut the door. The man sat down and started to get even angrier about the little boy's questions.

How dare he ask such questions only to get some money?

After about an hour or so, the man had calmed down, and started to think:"May be there was something he really needed to buy with that Rs. 300 and he really didn't ask for money very often!"

The man went to the door of little boy's room and opened the door.
"Are you asleep, son?" He asked.
"No daddy, I'm awake," replied the boy.

"I've been thinking, may be I was too hard on you earlier", said the man, "It's been a long day and I took out my aggravation on you. Here's the Rs.300 you asked for" The little boy sat straight up, smiling "oh thank you dad!" He yelled.

Then, reaching under his pillow he pulled some crippled up notes.The man, seeing that the boy already had money, started to get angry again.

The little boy slowly counted out his money, then looked up at his father.

"Why do you want money if you already had some?" the father grumbled.

"Because I didn't have enough, but now I do," the little boy replied."Daddy I have Rs. 500 now. Can I buy an hour of your time? Please come home early tomorrow. I would like to have dinner with you"

MORAL
It's just a short reminder to all of you working so hard in life. We should not let time slip through our fingers without having spent some time with those who really matter to us, those close to our hearts.

If we die tomorrow, the company that we are working for could easily replace us in a matter of days. But the family & friends we leave behind will feel the loss for the rest of their lives. And come to think of it, we pour ourselves more into work than to our family. An
unwise investment indeed!

What I Learnt from Mom

by sudeepks

My mother has gone insane.

My father says so. My brother says so. Many others say so.
A couple of days back, my brother wrote to me saying that she has a strong desire to stay with him at any cost, and said he's running from home.

I wasn't surprised.

Like all other mothers, our mother fed us, clothed us, cared for us and raised us. She also taught at a primary school.

While my father, like all other fathers, enjoyed being the family man, party worker, union leader and press reporter, along with a bit of teaching. He was an important person in the town, while my mom didn't have any say either at home or outside.

It is not that she detested social respect. She enjoyed it whenever she got a taste of it. Most of the time, in an alarming manner. Because she wasn't used to getting any kind of admiration for the person in her, as opposed to what is expected of her as a wife and as a mother. There are rare moments when she shares with us the dreams that she had as a young girl, how she used to do well in sports, and how her friends and teachers admired her.

We quarreled with mom when the food got late. We never even bothered to find out what is involved in getting our meals on the table. All we know is that "mummy ka haath ka khana" is supposed to be the best. Yes, like all mothers, she too lived for others. Which meant her husband and children. So it doesn't come as a surprise if she asks for my brother's life in return. Or mine. Or my father's.

A few days back I overheard someone in my institute lamenting to his foreign friends that in our country, nobody cares if a husband and wife got along with each other. And that his mother was much more attached to him than to his father. Apparently this was curbing his movement, and even the four years of his engineering away from home is turning out to be a torture for his mother.

I felt he was talking for a generation. How can one then blame the Saas who gets insecure when the power she had on her son faces a threat? My mother had also been very attached to me, but I consciously stayed away. Refusing to play the role of a son-- of letting her enjoy the power a mother has over her son. Because I thought it is better to try and change these things that get taken for granted than doing a self sacrifice. My brother believed otherwise, and he kept trying to make a pretty family picture until he reached a point where he couldn't take it any more. I am now writing this piece as a Mother's day gift to my mom.

My friend's mother called the other day and said that her husband gets insecure with every social relationship she develops. And he wakes up in the night and starts weeping if she is not at home even for a day. My poor father also goes into a low if mom is not home. I find it sad that we men grow up without learning to cope with our emotions. It is very convenient for us to hold someone else responsible for our emotional well-being always. Be it mother or wife.

After she retired, my mom used to attend some events of her interest but now she doesn't, because dad doesn't like it. But he used to be out for days during our childhood. That is accepted. Caring for children and raising them is anyway mothers' job. Naturally, when it becomes difficult for her to stay at home without any exposure to the outer world, she tries to find a life in her children.

Some say city women are better off. But seeing them manage the pressures of their career along with the job of taking emotional care of the husband and children, I don't buy it any more.

I learnt from every mom that all moms are insane. Some succeed in keeping it to themselves, some within the four walls of the family.

A recent survey placed mother as the most beautiful word in English language. I learnt from my mom that the beauty of that word comes at the cost of a life. And this cost adds up to nearly half the population of the world.

This mother's day, talk to your mother and find out the price that is being payed for our convenience and our irresponsiblity.


[This was written in the first week of May when rediff, as part of their mother's day celebrations, invited the readers to tell them "what you learnt from mom". They said they'd publish selected entries on "Get Ahead". Rediff hasn't carried this write-up till date.]

Cat in a box

Who is Schrodinger's cat? Arguably the world's most famous purely hypothetical feline. Never lived, but some say he's both dead and alive. At the same time. Ask your nearest physicist.

Erwin Schrodinger was a Nobel winning German physicist who died in 1961. The cat was part of a thought experiment he devised to explain one of the fundamental ideas of modern physics: Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle.

Shorn of jargon, the Uncertainty Principle says something very simple: the act of measuring something changes the result of that measurement. Heisenberg showed that simultaneously determining both the position of an electron and the speed at which it is moving is impossible. If you can measure its speed accurately, that measurement will itself make its location wildly uncertain. And vice versa.

Put another way, measurement decides the state of the electron.

This is not such an esoteric idea. Examples abound, and not just among electrons. Imagine an anthropologist visiting a remote tribal village to study its inhabitants. His very presence disturbs the villagers, who will behave differently with this stranger in their midst. So by simply observing, the anthropologist affects what he wants to observe; and thus can never hope to get a true picture of life there.

This is all very well with tiny particles nobody can see anyway, and maybe also with distant tribals. But what about everyday objects around us? What about, say, cats?

Well, that very question occured to Schrodinger. His famous thought experiment goes something like this. Let's say we have a sealed box with a cat in it. Also in the box is a device that can randomly emit marbles. In the course of a minute, the chances are exactly 50-50 that it emits one. If it does, the marble breaks a vial and releases a poisonous gas into the box. Kitty is instantly asphyxiated. Otherwise, nothing happens.

We put the box somewhere far away, where we have no way to tell what's going on inside it. Suppose we turn on the device for exactly one minute. Question: what happens to the cat?

It must seem like a trivial question. The answer is that we don't know. We cannot predict whether a marble was actually emitted. So we don't know if the cat is alive or dead.

But if we walk up to the box and open it to hear -- let's hope -- the loud miaow of a very puzzled cat, only then do we actually know that it has survived its uncertain ordeal.

Before then, the best we can say about the cat is the non-sequitur that it is either alive or dead. But that's not really such a non-sequitur. It is entirely consistent with the laws of physics to think of the cat, before we open its box, as being both alive and dead, with a probability of 50 per cent for each state. Here's the point of the experiment: our act of opening the box and observing the cat -- taking a measurement, in other words -- is what puts the cat definitely into one of those states.

Cat, alive.

So what's the point, you want to know. What's so earth-shaking about this cat shut in a box?

There are many points, actually: the effect of measurement, the idea of uncertainty, the fact of indeterminacy (of that, perhaps another time). But probably the deepest and yet simplest point is this interesting view of the world: reality takes shape only when, precisely when, we sense it. Until then, it's uncertain. That's the Principle.

The anthropologist gets a picture of tribal behaviour only when he actually observes them, even if that changes the way they behave. We really know the fate of that poor cat only when we open Schrodinger's box.

All of us have wondered on these lines. Is my image in a mirror really there if I cannot see the mirror -- if I've turned my back to it, for example? Does a tree falling in a forest make a sound, if nobody is there to hear it?

Is there reality without observation, existence without consciousness?

Schrodinger's cat showed that the laws of physics might answer that last question with "no". That may be too extreme a view for most people's tastes, people who believe reality surrounds them without needing to be looked at. Then again, Schrodinger's cat wasn't real himself.