Orkutting Chirkutting and all

Ok i am right now in a hurry to rush to office, but i just had to write this, after the news i read, with an agency set up by the Indian government called the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team, thinking of banning the site orkut, following attacks by some senseless people because of derogatory communities / comments on some personailities etc.

And i guess i am disgusted. I mean what the heck? this is a world of more than 5 billion people, if i am not wrong, a decent ( correct me if i am wrong) percentage of that are now logged on to the net now, and a significant chunk of that would perhaps be on orkut. Now all these millions of people have different opinion, tastes, lines of thoughts, some intellectual,some downright pervert, and so on and so forth. so? Some crazy dimwit decides hes had enough of treating of a particular personanality as a God and decides to create a community to lambast that particular community. Crazy enough, as if it should in any way affect that personalitys ways of going about? or better still another jerk creates a " we hate so and so country" community and another couple of jerks join in. So?

We get all perked up and agitated and want the site to be banned? is that logical? i mean you dont like a community, dont access the webpage, dont read the comments. Why get so hyper about it? Just because someone writes something wrong about my country, or my religion or my god, or my role model, does it mean its going to change my faith/ leaning towards. True even i would perhaps get hurt, but so what, am i supposed to vouch for a uniform civil code thingy here.

And on top it all, rather than streamlining these silly protestors our good old authorities want to ban the site. Simply because its free, it does not want to take any actions, because it respects everyones lines of thoughts / opinions ( even the perverts if i may say so). Fine enough boss.

For a lot of us out here on orkut, the site is a means of getting in touch with long lost freinds, catching up with them in this world thats fast running away like a Bullet train. we really dont bother what else goes on here, and if someone amongst us even does, to him his space, so long he/she does not expect us to follow suit. Plain and simple.

To be sure, there are more important things, such as school going children getting addicted and wasting hours on the net when they should be studying / playing etc. that is a matter for parents to deal with. and parents could perhaps be given a slight education on what the site is and what so many other sites are. In fact strangely enough no one has paid heed to the fact that the site also has a number of pornographic communities that are more harmful atleast for the young impressionable minds, than some silly we hate you-you hate us stuff. Perhaps that age old adage of Sex-Sells stops people from looking at that aspect and checking ways to stop that menace.

Anyways, its been a long rant. I sincerely hope that people start to look at the broader picture than such stupid miniscule thingies. Off late this narrowmindedness on major issues seems to have really caught on like a wildfire everywhere. would write something on that later.

Mere desh ki authorities, mature for a change pleaseeeeeee.

Whew!!!!!!

Its been a whirlwind of an extended weekend. Extended, because monday here was a holiday on account of Gudi Parv, the marathi new year. Well it was actually not extended for me, coz i was working till late on saturday night.

But its been a whirlwind for a different reason. And thats coz i met neha and pragati, my old school buddies. Neha had come down from bangalore for an official trip to pune so she came over here. And so the three of us got together and had some real nice time. But well, not before some other excitements, like me getting held up in office for a time longer than i thought, neha getting delayed at her office, and starting late from pune and reaching late here in mumbai, my indicating to her, that i might just get a little late in picking her up, and she getting all red, rightly so. Then my asking her to stay at my place for the night, since it was too late to drop her at her guest house which i did not know the exact location, and then when she agreed, to very calmly leave her alone and go back to office coz the boss called. Boy, I could just about picture her, ready to tear me apart with something. But well, you know me, i am a devil. and i do like to take advantage of the fact that my freinds are all gems.......errr and i know you too are one, and will not show this to neha. promise???

So moving ahead, we had a nice sunday evening together, chittering chattering about all the things that life had to offer, and that we as young 5th class kids did in school. I for sure must say these two freinds of mine have a strong memory. goes to show i am getting old. and i better do something about it. And yeah we had a photosession all of us. Just about brought the whole of mumbai to a standstill, with these two dudettes and the stud along with them. Lolzzzzzz. it was actually crazy, all of us clicking snaps like mad while we waited for the local at bandra station. and we did allow one uncle ji to explore his photography talents.

The evening ended with all of us landing at pragati's place for some time, me showcasing my horrible dancing skills, and finally bidding the two ladies good night, before i returned to my den.

And today me and neha, we went to watch this movie that both of us really liked. and the movie deserves another post so ill write again a little later.

a wonderful weekend, lots of lovely moments and all caught within myself to savour. It sure is great to meet old time buddies. Makes you want to come alive all over again.


Chaos

Yes!!!!!!!!! there are no supermen

There is this funny yet sad thing that i have been noticing for some time now. all around me i see a lot of people with failed relationships, with things that did not work out between couples for some reason or the other. and while i am no one to comment on what was right or wrong, i do notice one peculiarity. And that being, the guy always being the one in the wrong.


Till sometime back, i also saw it this way only. i would always see my own bretheren as the ones who would by their crass nature spoil relationships and all. yes i did that. and yet today i read this one comment somewhere on a post of another spoilt relationship ( i am sorry if i am rude in counting out the relationship, but having seen so many, i cannot but view it absolutely dispassionately). and while there were a lot of comments about how the boy was absolutely crass and all and people said things to the extent that the lady was better off without him, i read this one comment, which talked about looking from the boy's angle. and that set me thinking.


We all are humans, we all have emotions, boys or girls. so why is it, that all the time it is the boy who gets painted as the evil was a first question i asked? and just like that comment, why is this not brought out that he also has to have balance between his family and the one person he now loves. And if he unable, to strike that balance finally decides to choose the family, why is he made to be the one who is in the wrong. whereas, if the girl does something similar, she is shown to be in the right. after all family matters.

No i dont intend to play a blame game here. i dont want to pit one against the other too. and i do have the strongest amount of disgust for some of the guys who have played real truant. i know some have.

But sometimes relationships going just fine also break off. and while it would be very easy to put the blame on the guy for being insensitive, for not taking a stand ( especially if he was the one who took the first step), if one were to look at it a little more dispassionately, one would realise that really speaking no one would be to blame.

Sometimes, circumstances just about arent in your favor. and then, since the breaking point has to be some reason, it takes the form of ( unfortunately so), the boy taking some unreasonable stand. True, here in lies the inherent emotional immaturity of the boy who is not able to balance things as well as the girl of his age. a girl would be much more emotinally mature and stronger than the boy her age...more specifically this tender age of between 23-25.

Its very easy to say that one has to keep a distinction between the different catagories of people that you love, as in your family, and then the one. But here when you are talking of an amalgamation of the two sets, will it anyway be simple?

This is not to say that reasons given by a person are correct. no they are not. but then as i said, sometimes when it has to break, it will break. there are things that will be in your control and things that will be not.

at the end of it, i guess its only the circumstance that you can actually blame.

Its easy to paint one as the victim and the other as the criminal. to be frank there are no vicitims and there are no criminals in this game. all are just........humans........humans who falter, humans who make mistakes, and sometimes those mistakes hurt others too. yet humans who learn from those mistakes.

No man is complete without his woman. So also no woman is complete without her man. Nature has built us so that both complete each other. And so we keep looking for that half our lives. Sometimes we find someone, who we think completes us. and sometimes we make mistakes in that. And sometimes even when everything works all right, circumstances do not. so we loose it. and then we get into this blame game.

I have as yet not seen one story where a guy is portrayed as the victim. i am sure there must be one there too. but again, the same argument should hold true. Circumstances.


Guess there really are no supermen. And when failures do happen, its circumstances that govern more than anything else.

chaos.

Frankly My Dear I dont give a damn

I guess that is what Mr Rhett Butler would have said when queried about why the movie " Gone with the Wind", was not selected by Time Magazine as a part of its list of the 100 greatest movies of all time so far.

And hes right. Why should he or for that matter even Margaret Mitchell give a damn about the same? The reason why i ask this is because of many articles appearing in the newsprint about how surprising or shocking it was to note that the movie does not appear in the list.

Let me look at it from two veiwpoints, first the hypothetical vewipoint of the author herself, and then from that of the selectors from time magazine.

For Maragaret Mitchell, she created a masterpiece, a great novel, that enthralled and continues to enthrall readers worldwide. she wrote a book that was named as the most widely read book after the bible. All this is very very true, but at the end of the day, other than of course the actual feeling of a contentment at having created something fabulous ( in this case a great story), would possibly greatly override all the accolades showered by the rest of the world. for is it not true, that if one is not happy with ones own work, would all the accolades really matter?


As Ayn Rand would have probably stated, the work itself would be the greatest accolade possibly to the worker. So i really dont think maragaret mitchell or for that matter Rhett Butler would give a damn.


Now lets come to the selectors. Of course Gone with the wind is a fabulous novel, a romantic masterpiece. the story is beautifully written and the plot is great. But at the end of the day, its precisely this- a beautiful though sad love story. Thats it. And the movie also is just that. If you look at it from the critical angle, i dont suppose one could really find any piece of cretivity worth voting it as one of the great pictures of the century. Or anything that would have a profound impact on someone.

I suppose the selectors were probably looking for movies, that were masterpieces in terms of creativity or imagination or the effects ( for the techno age of today), or human emotions, or situations or history. In terms of that Movies like Schindlers List or our very own Satyajit Ray's Trilogy including Pather Panchali would have figured. Not a plain old flick like our GWTW, which is what it is at the end of day, made out of a great book, even though it has enamoured audiences the world over, though definitely less than the book itself.


But then reiterating what Butler said " Frankly, i dont care a damn". Neither should anyone else. The books great. thats what matters.