SOME QUESTIONS - Part 2

Now let me ask some questions about the "wedding show-off". When I was a child, I was bothered very much by the idea of dowry and had taken an oath that I'll never marry a guy who/whose family asks for dowry. (I still have a plan to say a loud "get out of my house" to any stupid fellow and his family who demands dowry to marry me.) But as I grew up, I realized that even those who speak badly about dowry becomes "a traditional citizen (it is shameful to call such persons citizens)", when it comes to their daughter's wedding. As the old tradition (blah , that tradition go to hell), they start viewing their daughter as a burden (Which you can't tolerate, then why did you make the X chromosome pair with the X itself when you were reproducing?) (not even burden as some garbage which has to be dumped anywhere as soon as possible). Well if you want to shove your daughter off somewhere, do it. Why do you have to associate it with your social status?

When I ask this question, I've to mention about the general mind set up of people.
And that mind set up is based on the fact mentioned above. Girls above a certain age are burden! somebody someday lamented this stupid thing and it became the ideology of the society! Wah! And as always the wrong ideas get popularity rather than good ideas like educating girls. Why? probably because education cannot be celebrated even if it actually increases your standards. (I'm not talking about the professional education mania. if you want to know about that mania, please read "Who wants us to be illiterate?")

And the ridiculous thing is that, parents don't want to educate girls for fear of not finding an appropriately educated guy. Plainly speaking nobody will marry a highly educated girl. So girls should be brought up as ignorant beings who will tolerate anything, because by arranging a high cost marriage you are "buying" a supposed body guard for your daughter, who actually will treat her only as his object of pleasure and a source of money and as a servant who will attend to you free of daily wages! And if your daughter opposes to agree to this stupid system and chooses to remain single until the age she prefers as an independent being, the girl is stamped by the "society" as a bad one. Even if her parents support her views and let her to live her life. And the "good society" comprising of parents who "believe" in "traditions" start making stories about the girl!

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The stories these "good parents" make against the girl and the family will be something like the following:

1) The girl is a "bad" girl. When they use bad, they want that girl to have indulged in a relationship with somebody and broke up(if their own son really does all these they won't have a problem. why? Because "he" is a "male"!). That's why this girl decided to stay single!

2) If they can't find any scandal to accuse against her, then they will accuse the girl to be a disobedient person! What they actually want to imply is this: girls have no right of choice. They should eat or gulp whatever crap they are provided with. Why? Because "we the good society" believe that girls are born to "serve men and men only". If some girl proclaims her freedom, the doomsday will be near. They should "take in" whatever comes to them and not oppose the things which they don't like. if so the girl's name should be tarnished.

3) "We the good parents" will do anything to mentally torture the parents of the independent girl and will make it look as if their social status is in question because their daughter has not got married even though she is past the "marriage age". See our daughter/daughters have been married to (Well at this point I've to make a remark about these good "parents". These are parents who will sell their properties and give big amounts as "gifts" to the guy and his financially backward family who had been waiting to find a foolish family so that they will get large amount as dowry so that they can pay the dowry to dump their daughter off somewhere.) "smart" (yes they are really smart [in reality good for nothing] to get a "pati post" without any effort at all, and earn lifelong in the name of dowry, because they were useless fellows who couldn't find a real job to provide livelihood. ) guy/guys who will "obey" us. They will act as bodyguards for our daughters wherever they go. See you have failed to "buy" a bodyguard for your daughter. So you are good for nothing! We have got all rights to abuse you in front of and behind everyone , and make stores about your daughter who doesn't stay inside the limits set by the "traditional, always good society comprising us".

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Now I've something  ask to you dear "good parents". Why do you think that the process of dumping your daughter to the mercy of some stupid person increases your social status? You've to "pay" lakhs to "buy" him off. You have to sell your properties (for example your farm land from where you used to get food crops and cash crops and a sustained income by selling them) to make  a big house/houses to "lure" the "suitors" (I mean bodyguards) for your daughter/daughters, divide the house vertically or horizontally (otherwise who knows when your daughters learn from you and start nagging about money and social status) along with the "gifts" in equal amounts (so that nobody including your daughters complains) and do the worst mistake of your life. 

You marry off your daughter spending lakhs of rupees. Lakhs for the ornaments the girl has to display on the wedding day, lakhs for the huge car (so that the "smart" fellow can travel alone and cause traffic blocks on Indian roads) to be "gifted" to your "daughter", lakhs for the wedding ceremony which lasts barely three hours! Unless you invite atleast thousand people and conduct your daughter's marriage in a BBBBBBBBBBIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIGGGGGGGGGGGG auditorium, nobody will respect you. Correct. You don't have anything else to become famous or top be known for. You didn't study well, so you don't have a decent job. You don't have special talents, so you can't participate in a reality show. You've inferiority complex when you compare yourself with others in your family. You have nothing else to do rather than sit at home and dial numbers and spread gossips all over and collect news (actually gossips) from all over, the world. So the only way you can become famous is by conducting a "fancy show" by yourself. And the actors are your daughter and her bride groom.

You'll definitely become famous in two ways. Stupid people who don't see anything other than glitter will come and "admire" the saree/costume and ornaments worn by your daughter. They won't even bother to look at the decoration of the stage. Admire here means to count. Those who attend weddings will be experts in "weighing" gold without a weighing machine (isn't it what you want?). they'll spread the word of how many kilograms of gold did your daughter wear on her wedding day. The way is that after all the wedding halla is over, you will be bankrupt and will become famous for that. does your social status increase with all these?

If you've money, can't you use it judiciously? Do you really have to spend it for something which has no guarantee? I mean is there an y guarantee that the couple whose wedding was conducted at the cost of being bankrupt will last for ever? Provide the "banglaa,gaadi,babe" motto of the "smart" guys, can you say that the marriage will not end in divorce? If it does then, wasn't it a bad decision to spend money extravagantly like you did? Why are you laughing at independent people?

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Having a married life and giving birth to a child or expanding your family doesn't increase your social status. [At this point I've to make a remark. If you respect a double mother, then you should respect single mothers in the society, because they are the ones who didn't kill their their children under hostile circumstances and decided to bring them up bravely.] If you have some delusions like that you can keep it inside your under developed useless brain. You are a middle class person. What is so shameful about that? When you lament about the things which you don't have, why don't you look at people who don't have food,water,clothes and shelter. Do you have to sleep on a dirty pavement on a rainy night? Then why are you bothered about silly things like how much gold to be spent to "secure" (infact dump off) your daughters life?


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SOME QUESTIONS - Part 1

In the last post I wrote how I experienced sound pollution in one of its worst forms. This has prompted me to ask many questions, which I've been wanting to ask for a long time, but a festival has made me ask it now. As I wrote earlier, I don't think that the obsession Indians have to explosives is not localized , but it is universal. One reason I had never heard a cracker sound in Mumbai was that, I used to live on the 12th and 6th floors and whatever sounds used to be made would have come as feeble (but persistant and irritating, like the ones when you put music in loudspeaker for a full day and I had that experience in Mumbai). There was a report in Mumbai mirror about a boy of 21 years old, who died from heart attack, since he played holi with his friends for the whole day. Bad age to die. Isn't it? And the saddest part is that he died for nothing! yesterday's torture reminded me of this report. I was wondering if the old people in our lane were so strong and "hard hearted" that they didn't feel irritated by full day explosions.

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Festivals in India are colourful. Acceptable. But why do they have to be noisy and messy? Almost all festivals celebrated in India have religious basis (except the poor, Independence day or Republic day or Gandhi Jayanti which our "patriotic" janta manage to ignore conveniently). So instead of understanding the true spirit of that festival, why do you want to "celebrate" and squander money over it? Is it because your living standards have gone up that you will do anything what you want, without caring about how it is affecting the person sitting next to you? Yesterday I would have heard atleast 500 cracker noises. Notice "atleast". I don't know what is the psychology behind spending money to buy these many crackers. There are not many families in our lane. So whatever crackers were there, were exploded by those limited number of people, who bought gigantic amounts of explosives. One question to the parents : Are you training your children to become terrorists? 

Why do you spend so much money on something which lasts for not even a minute? If you are so rich, why can't you spend it on something else. Buy clothes, buy food, buy gold ornaments. But why do you buy crackers and explode it in others ears and deafen them? Will you pay the compensation if you cause damage to somebody's health? Will you accept your fault if your crackers cause somebody's sudden death due to cardiac arrest? NO. BIG NO. YOU WON'T BECAUSE YOU ARE NOTHING BUT A SELFISH PERSON. So selfish that you just want to show off that you've got this and got that. And you think that you can buy anything with money.

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Dear middle class fellow, I've got a question for you. You are in Trishanku Swargam, neither down, nor up. So you've the privilage of having luxuries, but you don't have them all. So you are the most complex class of society. Nobody wants to be poor. But when you become reasonably rich, you forget your limitations and try to ascertain your social "status" by becoming a big costumer. Market knows this and they exploit you without your knowledge. Well as far as your purchases don't affect others it may be called ok. But when it starts to affect others in the society, it is really bad. And the fact that people become more self centered in a market ruled world is a painful reality. But it is true. And the result? Your society in which you live (actually my society in which I live) becomes cancerous.


Have you ever felt that the increasing number of cars in which there is a single person (the driver) which cause endless traffic jams in cities is like a spreading cancer? I have. Whenever I am stuck in a traffic jam, I notice cars with only a single person in it. Then I ask myself "Why can't they travel in a bus?" There used to be an ad in tv when I was small. It is like this : A group of four people are headed towards an office. Each one drives a car and there occurs many confusions in the mean time. Then the announcement comes that they should use a single car, and they all get into the same car and got to the office. So they save fuel.

Actually that ad was made to promote fuel conservation. I won't tell you to conserve fuel. It is a known fact that all fuel will be used up some day and you'll have to walk then. What I want to say is this. Your parents inject "professional mania" into you, you get into an IT company or some other hugely paid institution, get lakhs per month and your money start aching to be spent. So you'll ache to have "bangla,gaadi and babe". Probably the first thing you'll have is a gaadi. And that too, not a small reasonable one, but a huge monstrous one which you'll take to the unorganised, already cluttered roads of India and cause traffic jams (because you are not the only person has the "bangla,gaadi,babe" motto) giving claustrophobic feelings to poor people like me and scaring poor pedastrians (Where is the pavement to walk?). WHY? Does this increase your social status? Multinationals are cleaver. They pay you huge amounts and salary and they make sure that they get that money back. (Just like the scene in "The world is not enough" where  Valentin Zukovsky pays huge amounts to his call girls and asks his assistant to make sure that they spend them all in his won casino.) But those suffer are ordinary people who travel by bus or train or by foot.



So you've a gaadi, you buy a banglaa and what next? wait. Your banglaa will be in a quiet place where you park your car on the street. No fear of summer, no fear of rain, you've a car, so you don't bother whether the road is ruined or not and whether the poor people who have to wade through the bad water are suffering or not. And what about ordinary people? They battle with rain and garbage and complain sadly about the plight of the place. Will the corporation do something even if all these are happening under its nose? No. Why because it didn't bother when some hundreds of people came and parked their gigantic vehicles in an area starting from its gate to the middle of the public main road, when some single person came to submit the nomination to contest in an election. Are yaar, why do you have to come with your huge vehicle if somebody else is giving nomination? If you wanted to show your loyalty , your whole group would have come walking (taking pains because you've to walk in a city, and that would have been the real "sacrifice") and waited for your "leader". (If the supporter is like this, what will the leader be? Who is running this country?) 
So much for the democracy. These can be called "big and unsolvable issues." (Well all of them are unsolvable and will become big if you keep on turning blind eyes towards them, telling that you can't do anything about them.)

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SHABDAVALI

Well this name will seem to be weird to you; but I can't find a better word to describe what I want to write. Write? Oh My God! Can I write something in this state of mind? If the post seems to be incoherent at some point, please excuse me, because I'm in a dazed state. Plainly speaking the point is this I had the worst Deepavali of all times, yesterday. Elaborately speaking, it is as follows:

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Like all of us know, Deepavali is the festival of lights, supposed to be celebration of the victory of goodness over evil. Well...... All these are theoretical. In the modern world, I mean the current times, I doubt the motivation behind the festival. I don't know, if it is "universal" all over India (at least not in Kerala as far as I know) or if it is Chennai special (it is more likely to be universal; so this article is dedicated to all who encourage sound pollution). Anyway yesterday I "experienced" what is called "Diwali Dhamaka" aka, "Diwali Nuisance". At this point I recall an article by some stupid fellow who calls himself a journalist who proudly wrote in a local newspaper on the occasion of Durga Puja, how the festival is badly celebrated in other states of India. According to him, the festival is "best celebrated" in the locality! Dear megalomaniac journalist, I suppose you are deaf and blind, that's why you are unaware of the fact that Diwali is an occasion on which the people in your place cause public nuisance by means of fire crackers. Now, if you write an article about how badly Diwali is celebrated, probably this locality will top the charts. :-x


Oh! I should speak about my day of torture. I told about this torture to one of my friends, she replied that we can have "fun" for just a day! Man, if this is your idea of fun, then what is your idea of torture? Fine I understand that this is festival time, and poor children who have hectic schedules in schools otherwise can "chill" only during this ten day holiday time they get once in a year. But why do you have to spend it in a way that tortures others' ear drums? Who told you that Deepavali is a day on which you have to explode crackers non-stop during day time? If that is your idea of Deepavali, then it should be renamed "Shabdavali" or "shalyaavali"."Shalyaavali" because you foolish people with nothing inside your craniums are causing nuisance ("Shalyam") to people in the name of celebrations.

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On the eve of the festival it was something like isolated cracker sounds from some distant place. I happened to see with my own eyes how a boy was firing crackers two days before the festival in a housing colony near to the main road. Vehicles are stuck in the traffic, this boy, uncontrolled (I don't think that the parents would have controlled him anyway, because they are the ones who gave him money to buy the cracker and he might have inherited the trait from them only)  by anybody was exploding crackers freely at such a peak time in the place which is so near to the road that anything could fly and fall on any passerby. A poor dog ran scared from that campus into the middle of the traffic and it was so scared that it didn't have control over its senses. For a moment I thought that it was run over. The poor dog disappeared somewhere in the dense traffic.


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Diwali Dhamaka : That was just the teaser trailer! Picture tabhi bhi baaki tha! And it was a violent picture full of explosions! (Now that I'm writing it I suspect that the so called "super hit" films have their contributions to making people explosive obsessive.) On Diwali morning I woke up  around 6.45 hearing the nasty sound of explosives. I tried to sleep again with curtains drawn (poor things they are not sound proof), then windows closed (poor things again) and finally woke up hungry and angry to the day of torture. I can't say how much irritating it is to tolerate sound pollution when you are hungry. Your stomach is burning, so you've to cook some food to stop it; sounds hazardous to your ear drum are coming practically from everywhere, so you've to close your ears with your fingers for no cotton or headset can reduce it as good as your finger does and you are forced to do so for 5 minutes at a stretch. If you had to do it once, it is ok. Only ok. Not good. But what if you've to do it atleast 20 times a day? And that too on a day when you want to celebrate it peacefully and serenely?

I thought that children were causing all these nuisance (as children left to themselves can behave in all possible ways) and was wondering why weren't the parents advising them not to cause too much nuisance to other people. But on second thoughts I understood that the children couldn't have bought so much of crackers themselves. They don't work, they don't earn. So where did they get the money to buy these crackers? From elders of course! And I happened to see a very curios sight. A girl (or a very young woman) crossing the small road (which makes up the lane on each side of which we live), and placing a cracker and lighting it, and coming back. Then a man did the same, then another woman did the same! The thing is they were keeping these crackers near by the wall of an IT company! It is not their house, so no danger to it, somebody else's property who cares if something happens to that?! There is a shrine sort of thing just opposite to our apartment, and they also sponsored this nuisance! Everybody had been exploding on a public road where people are supposed to walk!

By some 9am there was some rest (ooh that might be breakfast time) and by 10 am everything resumed. Visitors clad in ornaments and silk sarees (man All are completely mad; you explode things irrationally and wear easily inflammable clothes, why are tv channels broadcasting safety ads) and other new dresses land in the avenue and the explosives start again as if to welcome them! And that too lined up in the whole street and everything explodes in series over the road!


I did my cleaning work in the midst of this nuisance and finally didn't even feel hungry (saturated with explosive sounds) and went and slept. Even rain didn't fall down, to stop this nuisance! Again I woke up hearing the damn sound around 17.45! The cracker nuisance had resumed. Along with crackers with light only. I can understand the reason why you want to light crackers with light. But why explode those with no light but only sound? And as if to ensure their social status everybody started exploding crackers in series again by 21.00. And this went on till 22, 23 hours. Even election campaign can't be done beyond 10pm. Do these people think that they are above the law and out of its reach just because they have money? I heard some isolated crackers around midnight.



Finally I went to sleep thinking that the damn nuisance had stopped. I was wrong. Today morning I was woken by the irritating sound of crackers again. No parental control nothing, children of age ten and below are exploding them
in the park nearby! What kind of a land is this? I can't express my rage in words, because I'm in such a state. Yesterday at some point when I couldn't tolerate the damn explosion I just wanted to go and slap everybody and pour water on top of all crackers and extinguish them. Hmmmm...

Strangest thing! Nobody had lightened up their houses! How could they have? Everybody was on the street like mad people. I used to curse Mumbaikars for wasting current in the name of Deepavali, because you can always see houses decorated with illuminations and fancy lamps. But this... This is too much..... Compared to this putting lamps for a week is far better.


I've some questions to ask. And I'm going to ask it in my next post.


PS : It is said that people worship Lakshmi devi on deepavali day. Lakshmi devi would have run away hearing the explosions.

PPS : Everybody had been asking me whether I was going home for Deepavali or not. Trust me, I will go home for Deepavali from next year onwards so that I can sit in peace.