A puzzling correlation

Am not sure if sri Kempe Gowda & sir Thomas Stamford Raffles would ever agree with all the puzzling correlation am trying to make here between the cities they were associated with,if they both were alive today : ).Kempe Gowda whom i believe to be the modern architect of the city where I live currently lacked a greater visualization in terms of even laying the building blocks of this surprise city's infrastructure.Yes,itz Bangalore that am referring to.On the other hand sir Thomas Stamford Raffles spotted lion city's potential as a strategic trading post for Southeast Asia way back in 1819.May be at this point you might just be thinking, I shouldn't have visited city 2 from city1 in the first place.But that wasn't in my hands.

After i visited Lion City way back in 2006,being popularly referred as a city-state, my mind drew this analogy from no where.Both Bangalore & Singapore flaunts almost the same geographically inhabitant area of 709.5 square kms & 710.2 square kms respectively & a population of approximately 50,000,00 people each.Both are equally growing & inviting cities to people across the world on many fronts.

With the above 3 strikingly similar facts between these two cities,after my first return trip i asked some responsible fellow folks around me why was Lion City such a heaven & Bangalore such a broken city ?.Lion city is a beautiful example of an organised city in the world.Where as Bangalore can be listed right against it for such an in disciplined Infrastructure Management stuff.When i say Bangalore, i inturn refer to any other similar Indian city.Step in to both once & you wouldn't disagree with me in any regard.After all what do i mean by referring a place outside my country as heaven ?

#1 -The city's Airport was stunning in terms of how it functioned,how it was built & especially the way it was maintained.Above all the time they took to add a new terminal & make it full functional without any hassel to the public.
#2 - You look for a mode of transport to reach ur destination in the city.The way in which all the public mode of transport functions,the way the people operate them & how affordable is it to people matters a lot.Above all the wholesome experience of commuting by a public mode of trasport.
#3-The roads,not one but everyroad was well laid without any pothole,all spick & span,well organised routing from one point to another with sufficient number of transport services.Though there are many to list,let me stop with these here.

Initially it was very easy to prompt this question.In someway till today it is to me.In course of time i realised this is no objective question which can be replied in one word or a statement.I do understand today that an enormous amount of reasons go in to making all the indifferences that exists.Ok but can i ask Having identified the problem or rather the reason behind the strikingly dissimilar situation with some strikingly similar fundamental factors,why can't we do an error correction or whatz stopping us from doing this error correction at this point ? .This time my folks were allowed to answer short & to the point.

My Dad -My child,Rome was not built in a day.Similarly itz not an easy task to rearrange the already existing infrastructure of a fully functional city like Bangalore.
My Mentor - We don't have a very civilized population who can co-operate effectively even if such a plan is chalked out to implement.
My Friend -Until we uproot corruption in a country like India,we shouldn't be dreaming about things u said.
My Manager - All that you are expecting to happen are happening here as well but on a micro level that you don't feel the change.
My Cousin -If we have powerful leaders consistently,such planning & execution is highly possible even with less time.
My Landlord-Execution of an effective micro administrative design should help ma.
My TeamMate -Y don't you relocate to ur heaven to do much better things in life.
My Neighbour -'A place for everything,everything in itz place'.In the case of our country,since there was no place for everthing then, now we don't have place for anything new.

This time too,all suggestions & solutions seemed to be right but when are we going to jumpstart to change things around ? Or rather should i be asking Don't we really intend to change things at all? At the end i realised that i was trying to correlate a puzzle here. While all i could do was just a simple correlation rather than itz complex cracking : (

..... over a cup of coffee

Nalluswamy was mildly thrilled to find himself dig out a fact sitting in CM's office that Monday morning.He realised that it would be more than a fact even to his immediate boss.Thankfully it was not CM to the city where he belonged.He carefully analysed all the supporting evidence of his discovery to confirm his finding.Yes,he was just right.His finding was a fact that money collected from a certain insignificant source which was supposed to be deposited in the CM's Relief Fund promptly wasn't reaching the fund from the time CM took position in his territory.The sum was 77,000,00 INR.It wasn't a small money atleast to common man like Nallu.

Nallu was a man in mid fifties who worked for the governmentof india.It was a matter of great pride to him.More so was his nature of work.He was in a decent designation few steps below the top notches in his office, who enjoyed the power & responsibility to identify & unearth the invisible revenue to be falling in to the Indian Govt's pocket from every potentially possible source in his country.Just that it happened to be a CM's office this week.

By the time Nallu decided to take this to his Boss's notice it was noon hours after a scrumptious lunch arranged by the CM's folks.He thought to himself that his drive to the union territory from his Chennai home that early morning was fruitful in someway.So he didn't mind his insomniacs & extra body pain at that age.He rang his boss who was positioned in their head quarters office in Chennai keeping in mind the political battle they might have to face later.

Boss-Tell me Nallu,howz it going there.Did U & ur team have lunch ?
Nallu-Yes sir,things have been fine.There is a finding here on Day1 itself.
Boss- Mmm...looks like you made a big catch there which might invite us some trouble.
Nallu- In a way ur guess is right sir.
Boss- Nallu let ur effort not go waste.Make an entry in our record,inform them as well.Dig for more & get back to office this friday with all ur findings.Let me pull in our Big boss by then.
Nallu- Alright sir.

Nallu disconnected the phone & got back to more action along with his team mates.Folks at CM's office are no less in sniffing things out.By end of day 3,CM's folks had devised their mitigation plan.So they seemed to be super cool.In spite of their loyalty & proving their worth to their parent org time & again,Nallu & team weren't so cheerful this time.But they did their job as ever.

By Thursday,all entries were recorded,report sent to head quarters.A copy of it left with the concerned officials at CM's office as well.Nallu & team wound up their work & headed back home the same evening after a pleading session by the officials at CM's office to drop their findings reach the head quarters.This wasn't new neither to Nallu nor to his team mates.They undergo this pleading session at almost every empire where they dig out some unpleasant facts worth huge sums.But this really wasn't,Nallu said to himself.

Nallu wasn't enjoying a great health at his age.So was more than pleased to spend first half of the next day at his home sipping his self made health drink watching his favourite NDTV Profit channel.At around 12 noon,his boss rang him up to inform about his inevitable presence at a confidential meeting at 3.30 pm at the head quarter office.He obliged to his Boss's words and decide to make his presence felt at the meeting.

Nallu reached office sharp by 3.30 pm & realised that the so called confidential meeting was already in progress without his inevitable presence.So he decided to wait until he was called.Finally at around 4.30pm his immediate Boss slipped out of the enclosure to look for his presence if any.When he spotted Nallu,he invited him in.

All that Nallu could make out was, literally over a single cup of coffee with his Boss & Big Boss hardly for an hour,2 high ranked officials who had flown from CM's office at the union territory to chennai,helped drop the findings of Mr Nallu & his team.In reality Nallu's presence did not matter to anyone there.Neither did his finding.Nallu was a pragmatic man after all.So it wasn't any shock or something to him.Infact he takes ample learning from situations like these.To update him on the case,he enquired his boss later that night as what was their point across table to drop this finding since a sum of 77,000,00 shouldn't have been a big amount to be paid back by the CM's office, in Nallu's point of view.

Oh yes,his boss cheered him up saying 'Nallu it wasn't the money which was the cause of concern here.But the CM's image.A case like this might show him on the bad light & he cannot afford to tamper with his image at this point when he is already in position in his office.So me & our Big Boss were requested by them on be-half of the CM itself.So Nallu we couldn't do much on this.I was just reading that lands around CM's office are available at rates much affordable by me.In case tomorrow either me or you happen to buy some plots there, registration and other formalities can be done without much hassel Nallu.Lemme know if u have any such plans'.

Nallu now dropped the call muttering 'A lot can happen over a cup of coffee'.

Storm in a teardrop

A tattered atlas,now in some abandoned shelf corner,referred way back in high school geography classes.Flipping through the first couple of pages,there it is on the right side,snapshots of our most treasured celestial object's sequential evolution across millions of years.Why the only single huge land mass exploded itself to drift apart in small & big fractions on the ocean bed tell us firmly,it was geography that paved way to all the history on earth.That very fact led us in to coining yet another inevitable word,Continent in its plural form & eventually its consequences. Today a child below 10 years might be fascinated if employed to put back each continent's jigsaw puzzle piece adjacent to one another just to see how they simply fit each other,elucidating the fact of oneness.

Until the latest remarkable evolution of our most treasured planet there ceased to exist the teardrop island which today hangs like a vestigial land to the Asian continent.Life sometimes is wonderful if some things ceased to exist.One such thing in my cease wish list would be this tear drop island appearing orphaned on the waters of earth right under the Indian foot.History tells me every single human life out there today flourished as a consequence of desired settlement for a pie of land within the tear drop island, innumerable centuries back. On further dig with my inquisitive shovel,I only find that they were all migrants from our Indian subcontinent & from nowhere else.Which just means all their roots trace back to our rich cultural, social & political heritage.Even if they refuse to acknowledge,it still is the embedded truth lying uncluttered in their deep selves.

Though the summary of Ceylon's ancient history sounds much like a fairy tale, it is much more than a horror flick right now.First landed an Indian king from a far India with his small army, followed by some Buddha bikshus & then the men from the near India.The far Indians transformed in to what they like to call themselves.The Sinhalese.Deriving a religion, language & custom of their own by borrowing it from every possible neighboring Indian state.The near Indians remained to be what they were.The Tamils.The crux of all the existing agony there today in a way seem to derive from chronological difference in each other’s arrival time.Since the far Indians were the initial inhabitants,they still believe that they hold an upper hand & hence the exploitation of the late comers.But late comers too agonized the former by waging wars at inappropriate times in the past,all standing as a stifling factor to the already fragile world peace, today.

But if you wish to take a close look from the time a demon ruled this island till the time tigers were finally traumatized,you will notice just like me,how finely destiny devices its own disaster plan,time & again,symbolizing the remarkably visible tear shape of this land in the lives of its inhabitants too.The divide between people became so bitter that it gradually became a land of twin tales.I simply wonder how history will unfold this double version events & interpretations to the world tomorrow.

Why the sleeping tigers were provoked in the first place, answers many similar ethnic conflict stories around the world.Like the most prevalent black& white divide in the Columbus discovered continent,in the tear drop island too,the Tamil sect was suppressed from the beginning denying their social & political rights as citizens.A fight for their basic rights began long time back paving way to multiple gangs of liberation tigers.One huge tiger swallowed the rest to emerge as a super tiger which claimed it to be the LTTE.Prabhakaran's pristine cause behind his tiny freedom fight picked up too many distracting controversial factors along its way and stood as a huge threat factory to the world in course of time.Once the wild cats tasted blood & flesh, basic goals seem to have forgotten.Civilians - the very word which addressed only the suffering Tamils faced threat from their own freedom fight heads, letting evaporate the very essence of a once focused goal.How many of us know what it means to live without peace, happiness, home, food, work & above all loved ones?.Particularly does the other pampered sect there know what it means to lose one’s identity & stand orphan in one’s own country?.

While all this is just one side of the story, let’s flash some light on the other side. Just to destroy an insignificant number(after all whose basic intrinsic intention was to fight for their sect’s safety & rights),will any democratic government play with the lives of millions of innocent people?.Should we blame the British government who followed a divide & rule policy by failing to include Lanka as an Indian province when the far away string of Andaman Islands came under our shelter?.Though all this is out of hands right now, at times it simply appears as reflection of a deep rooted hatred for their counterparts by the Sinhalese to destroy the Tamil sect completely.In the name of destroying the liberation tigers, they silently seem to have dwindled the count of innocent Tamils.

Sinhalese are the ones actually in the safe zone who didn't know what is it to be on the war front shedding blood & lives.Every day the black & white prints paint only the red blood story of those dreamt of a Tamil Elam.We neither found any thoughtful strategy been devised nor any concrete solutions put forward to rescue the suffering souls. International community's voice fell only on the deaf ears of the Lankan democrats.As an island nation, it preferred to nurture friendship & good relationship with countries across continents but failed to make peace with people within its own boundary.How strange is that?.The war has kept the country from development for more than a quarter century now.

If the time, attention & money the Lankan government spent in destroying lives of innocent people & in trying to destroy LTTE without a trace, be spent in giving equal rights to the Tamil sect & treat everyone like its own children, I don't see any reason for gangs like LTTE to have uprooted in the first place. Since they failed to do so, it paved way for a powerful gang to bud into an inevitable evil in their own soil.Prabhakaran’s is only a chapter in the red blood book of Sri Lankan history until now.In fact I believe the entire International community was distracted tactfully which kept us guessing how & when Prabhakaran’s life will end.Prabhakaran’s death was not the exact need of the hour to anyone.That might not even matter much to the million suffering souls.Restoring social & political rights to the Tamil sect & ensuring their safety & respect was the bottom line expectation from the Lankan government for over many decades now.

Better late than never.Even now this can be done, to prevent yet another big cat species evolve out of hatred for the Sinhalese.Few thoughtful & sensible government policies could easily spread harmony among people,painting back those lost colors in the lives of the existing ones.Will the Lankan govt give rights to the Tamil sect at least now?.Will Prabhakaran's dream of a Tamil Elam come true at least after his claimed & confirmed death?.If yes, what he couldn't achieve in his life time might stand materialized after a couple of bullets on his head.

Above all isn't it time the Lankans moved on in time and thought as a Sri Lankan nation rather than either a Sinhalese or Tamilian.If we Indians can think Indians first & then our Individual race, why is it not possible for them ?.Shall we simply ask an Indian child to gift our planet earth's jigsaw puzzle pack to the Sinhalese, to sit back and assemble them once to bring in a realization that all their bloodshed history could simply be traced back to a simple geographical phenomenon on earth.

Did slumdog make us dumb dogs?

Oh,now don't fume on this title, please. I really want to know if it's true. From the hands of a British director what took shape from an Indian plot & cast, finally won an American award. At the end of the day slumdog is just the summation of these. But we hyped it so much that watching the movie became less significant than watching it's terrific reviews,trailers, debates and fights for more than a month now. From various angles cracked by media & journals in bits and pieces across various news streams,i would like to ponder again by asking ,did slumdog really make us dumb dogs, for a reaffirmation.

Didn't we act so dumb by sulking on the very name of the movie?.Our anger and resentment burst out more for the movie name revealing doggy attitude with which we personify the animal in our minds than for seeing such sorry but true images of India. As someone pointed out, is an image more important than true living conditions ?How long do we want to see stories with posh Indian houses & faces. At least slumdog wasn't named with any intention with which we imbibe the title. And it had a much deeper and a strong message conveying the World & India. Don't you think what Karan Johar didn't do in his movies was done by Danny Boyle ?Shouldn't we pick up the thread from somewhere to disentangle it.?Atleast should we hate Boyle for this ?

The movie made us dumb by spreading viral emotions. We jumped to conclusions saying how could a foreign director shoot us back with a movie like this. In spite of growing beyond a 100 crore brain pool bound by a nation,none of us could even collectively come up with a working plan to eradicate or at least alleviate such sorry basic living conditions of millions which still is multiplying everyday,across the country. If i were to understand my fellow Indian minds from an emotional angle, if bringing slums of daravi in the maximum city of India to the limelight for non feel good reasons hurt them,did any of the money laden Indian or a Mumbai's big shot ever choose to make a 0.0000001 % difference to the living condition of a single slum dweller and his family in a significant way ? At least Danny Boyle felt the need to give back from his profits which he didn't have to.

At last they made us dumb struck by crediting two Indian talents behind the movie with some believed to be prestigious awards, across the world. Did we cease to celebrate this ?Or did we stop ourselves from being so proud the very moment, two Indians gripped the until now untouched solid mass of gold, from this land?.Are we telling ourselves that talent in India deserves a global recognition but poverty in the same country deserves just millions of blind eyes & no pair hands to act on ?

Why ?

Life always isn't the way we perceive it.Every crest has a trough & every trough looks forward to a crest.There are constant times when we are either on falling or on rising curves of this sinusoidal wave of life .And it happens in every man's life.None of us are an exception to this rule.I know when in distress we must take it as a grace from the lord.But does the mind understand inspite of the repeated positive churning in ?.What lies beneath the fragile human life & happiness is definitely an astounding mystery.We all live under this hazy theory which still demands a striking elucidation.Looks like this still remains as one unprobed area where man is unable to comprehend things beyond his reach & realisation though he has reasons of why and what,sometimes.Probably being a true non-atheist I would say this is where god draws a line of demarcation between him and his creations.If man was able to comprehend all that happens in his life then y do we have a god?