kya relevance hai!

Today on a happy day, my phone was getting a reboot and I switched on the radio. I have a love hate relationship with the radio. The dumb RJs with dumb programming and irritating advertising that doesn’t connect with anything. Luckily for the new retro channels which play some good (my age) music and thanks to the lack of advertising, have some interesting programming. They are getting some good guys to come in and chat with on the radio channels who are talking about the music they created or the movies they were in with some real life insights and anecdotes. This makes the programming so rich. Like today some lady (I did not catch the name) was talking about RD Burman (always) and Asha Bhosle (again almost always) and the song Jaan – e – jaaa… oh meri jaane jaaa…. Nisha aaa aaa aa

It was a song that I was listened to as a kid. It was a fun song in which I think as kids we used to cream aloud and dance. It was released in 1982 – when I was about 7, which is an impressionable age. It was an awesome song then and is an awesome sing now, but what a singer who has worked with the music director RD Burman said, made me hear the song in a new light. She said that RD tried to get Asha to sing like a musical instrument in the song. She was talking of some musical instrument (she was also not sure) in which there is pedal or something and the noise oscillates in waves. I did not understand what she said till she sang the song on radio. I came to office and I played it and now that I understand it a little better, I have come to appreciate it a lot more. In the song Asha sings – Jaan e jaaaaaaaaaaaa, oh meri jaan e jaaaaaaaaa. As kids we would scream out this aaaaaaaaaaa in a single tone. Its only today I understood that this aaaaaaaaaa sounds awesome because it is here that RD made Asha sing the aaaaaaaaaa part in a wave like oscillation. That is the genius of this song which is so easy to miss the nuance while so easy to love the whole. Which is so impossible to bring out for an untrained singer. At least while I was singing to myself, I could clearly hear myself make a complete hash out of it.

Here listen to the song and pay attention. Of course, forgive the poor Kamal Hasan dancing like a twerp in the song and the stupid bike entry, largely forgiven purely by Reena Roy’s awesome smile and oh so lovely long hair with the stylish fringe. It’s like a complete reconciliation of the traditional beauty and a touch of modernity. And of course do not miss the scene in which she dreams about kissing him all over with him being left with lipstick marks all over his face, but no marks on the oh so sensitive lips! The confusion of 1982 India is to be seen to be believed in this movie song.

Over a period of time I have learnt to respect the Bollywood film industry as the best marketing brains in the country. It is not possible to deliver a hit without really identifying with the core audience and having a pulse on their attitudes and dreams and desires. Movies that become hits are the ones that connect with the audience, without which the audience is very clear – he is not going to part with his money and time.

In fact, while I teach marketing, my favorite lecture is in which I explain how movies and heroes have gotten their marketing right to become super stars. They connect with the screen personas with carefully nurtured off screen personas. This is the example I use to explain how super stars like brands have to mean one and only one thing to the people and the closer they are to one thing the closer they are to real meaning.

Another song that played on the radio was from Arjun. A movie released in 1985. This was when I was ten years old and I remember that era of India when there was NO hope. None what so ever. You could only get rich if you were corrupt or tyrannical or a goon or all of the above. You could get educated but there was nowhere to go once you got educated. There weren’t enough jobs and whatever jobs were there were gone to people with some influence or some friend to recommend them. It was a complete wasted generation in many ways. This movie reflected the anger of the youth. These young guys were obviously educated and were looking for jobs. The main hero leads a gang of young men, all in formal dressing, as they are all looking for jobs and want to be employed. What I remember of the movie is that they don’t get any employment and are just hanging around the neighborhood. It captures multiple emotions. The movie touches a raw nerve – that your youth is good and powerful. They study and they are unemployed because of society and not because they want to remain so. They have an energy that must be harnessed. The youth in the movie at first are seen as a nuisance as they roam around unemployed and then as the villains strike, the same youth use the only the only thing that god has given them (their youth) and fight back. Now the transformation from young, lost and unemployed to young, hailed and purposeful is complete.

At the end even the father comes and tells his child that he was right. It sent a signal to the young and unemployed that they were not wasted but were a being wasted thanks to the system. The feeling was universal and as I saw up on Wikipedia the movie was then translated into multiple languages showing how the issues were widespread across India.

Here is the song – mamaiyo kero kero kero mama

Mamaiya Kero Kero Kero Mama - Arjun (1985... by TalishaHatcher

The entire song is set in  public spaces with the gang bordering on lawlessness and at the end you also see the hero riding a Pitch roller which is being pulled by his team, in the middle of the Mumbai roads – How’s that for complete cock a  snook at the system.

Its funny why this clip is on daily motion and not on youtube. Must be some royalty quirk. A movie like this, no matter how well made would just have no relevance today. Kids find their love soon enough and get drafted into the system that is giving them some jobs, mobile phones and T shirts to order and wear. They don’t need to use violence to save the society. They probably just need a cell phone camera, or a tweet then and then some social shares.

Check this

An exam is not an exam, Jispa!

I almost forgot to write this story down, but it deserves being there for posterity. It is something that Jispa will probably laugh over when she grows up and this one is seriously good.

One evening I come home and see Jispa having her dinner on the dining table. Jasmine was sitting on the sofa. I have no idea why Jasmine doesn’t like sitting for food with the entire family. I have spent the last 16 years coaxing her to do it, but she just doesn’t like it, or values it. I hate this aspect of her, but that is another story for another day. Bah!

So I come home and watch Jispa eating her dinner alone. I ask her whats up, how was her day. “bad” she replies. OK… now I am listening. So what happened, I asked her. “you finish and come here, I will tell you”. OK. I wash my hands and come to sit on the table and I am ready for dinner. “what happened today sweetheart?”. “I want mommy over here as well” she insists. Ok mom, you sit here and we all sit around the table for a chat. It was pretty serious, I assume. We all wait as the big thing is about to revealed. The she says “I will tell you but you will nottell me anything immediately afterwards. You can tell me later, but can’t get upset at me or tell me anything now.” “ok” what choice do we parents have in this case. Of course I agreed and gave her the freedom to talk freely without any repercussions. Then she starts “today was math test. It was horrible. The teacher gave us the papers ten minutes late and we were solving it and I couldn’t finish the paper on time”. “ok” I urged her one as I saw one tear coming down her cheek. “I think I am going to get a C”. “ok – how do you know you are getting a C” I enquired. “I calculated the marks. I know. This is bad.”

Now what to do with this. Math is important. Tests are important. Scoring is important, but crying over a test – that’s shit. I remember my childhood. School and studies were bad enough but this, this exam shit was way too bad. For many years after, I still got nightmares about not being prepared for exams. About going to exams late, about failing, about being blank… many such things. I think once I turned up late for one paper, once I studied the wrong paper and things like that as well. It was crazy growing up and managing exams. It was so stressful. One thing that I wanted in education for my child was – absence of fear from an exam. Everything else can be managed. Everything else is a function of the stress the kids put on themselves. Their hair is not ok, they have pimples on their faces, they like other boys, everything else – I really don’t care… that stuff is self-imposed. But exams – that’s one thing that is imposed by the parents on the kids in connivance with the teachers and the whole freaking education system. Exams are designed to kill you and make your life shorter in the long run but stretch it for eternity in the short run.

So what advice should I now give her? I start:

Ok. I hear you but if you give me permission to say one thing, may I say it. (she gives me permission) Cool. Thanks. First – I don’t care about your exam grades. That’s ok. More so – I don’t care about exams in general. I think they are too measly a thing to be upset about. So that’s my point of view, but if you now allow me to talk completely and freely, I can explain further. ( I get permission again).

So you couldn’t complete it, because you did not understand it or you did not have time? (it was time she said). Well then that’s ok. Math is all about speed and practice. They purposely are now raising the bar for you and getting you to know that now you area bug girl who needs to solve math fast. That’s important now going forward. The only way to get it right is to keep solving the papers, again and again. Chat with your teacher, tell her you want to improve and ask her how. Tell her you are not used to this and that you don’t have tuitions and you want to go beyond. So that’s about the paper in question.

As regards exams, come on kid. It never the exam. It’s the preparation. I have always pushed you to prepare right for the exams and not bother about the results. Results are important but only as an indicator of the preparations you put in. Exams are over rated. Don’t push yourself on this. I have always had a hate hate relationship with exams. They never did do well for me. You have to figure a way to attack the question papers and game the system. In eight grade, I once failed a Hindi paper. Mom flunked a year in 4^th or 5^th grade when her mom was in US. That too in History or something. Its ok. It doesn’t matter. In my final year in economics, I just about passed. I got a 36 on 100. Today I teach economic concepts to people. When I first saw the paper, I distinctly remember, that I thought I was going to fail. I had obviously underprepared myself for the exam and I was shit scared. I remember then gathering myself and telling myself, if I fail this paper then 90% of Maharashtra will fail. I am better than 90% of my peers. So I spent 30 minutes just thinking of how to attack this paper.  Which questions can I write the most without even knowing anything. I will attempt and attempt well. I will write and write long. I will not give up. I then remember for writing non-stop for the next two hours. I wrote so much that my hands got tired. I wrote so much rubbish and about anything and everything I could write about. I wrote. If today, I see that paper I will probably die of laughter. But I wrote. No exam could get the better of me. And I passed! I was so excited about passing. It was such a relief. My other scores ensured that my aggregate went up beyond 60 (62%) and I got first class. Mom managed a 35 in the same paper and Vinu managed a 26 and got 9 marks grace. It was an epic paper.

So Jispa – exams are a piece of shit. Don’t give it more importance than they deserve. Go ahead, study for a paper. Give it your best, but please, please don’t cry after the paper is done. It’s over, enjoy, have fun. Learn from there on. Exams are bad things. Don’t give them importance in your life. Study. Study hard but learn more. Have fun giving exams. Write whatever you think is right, write anything, have a blast and come out happy. Whatever you do, don’t get stressed by an exam. Kick its butt, but don’t get stressed by it.

I work hard and try and build a career with pays decently well and I save money. I try to read and teach. I do everything so that some of the basic stuff that I hated while growing up is avoided in your life. The scare of exams rank up there amongst the top things to hate and remove from your life.

Jasmine thinks I am a bit too lenient on this. But I really don’t care. When we conceived Jispa, I was clear. I was going to love my child and have a few things that I will dream for them. I wanted a healthy child, a child that could do good in some sports, a child with insatiable curiosity and a child with little stress to perform – at least little or no stress from me. AND definitely – NO EXAM STRESS.

Now that I think about it, my dad was pretty advanced in his thinking. He told me that till the tenth standard, it is my job to push you to study. After that it’s your problem. True to his word, he never did give me any grief on it afterwards. The least I can do is advance that by two years. Now Jispa is in 8^th. It’s time to back off and to let her pursue what she wants to do and how she wants to do. Basically – let’s not see the grades and stress out.

Enjoy! This is the age to enjoy life and studies not loathe it.

travel to learn

The fun bit with being a client is that you have agencies trying their best to vie for your attention. Of all places that I have gone thanks to work, this month I found myself in Russia.

Moscow to be precise. I have had a fascination for the place ever since childhood. Russia, the big super power of the world and an ally of India, against the mean big consumerist USA! Oh what a fool I too was. The communist country collapsed under its own weight and then came Peristroika and complete confusion. I don’t think Russia knows what they are anymore. Whether they are a controlled or a free market economy or a political nation.

But I was super happy to see Moscow. These are cities that will not normally be on your tourist radar. I am happy that my work has taken me to these places and I was able to add to my experiences. Jispa has to find her own experiences that take her places. I feel bad for Jasmine though. I would love to take her places that she hasn’t been to before.

Travelling abroad is a real irritating thing for me these days. The fact that you going abroad means you are spending a whole lot of money and then you really want to make the vacation count and take in as much as you can. You have to do a lot of research and you have to plan and figure and do everything. It’s a painful process. I then suddenly realized that I have been a real pain. A complete ass. Now I am making a decent sum of money. Our daily life is small and our daily requirements do not really amount to much. We can after we have accounted for all our expenses manage to spend that money once a year.  Jispa wanted to go to Greece and I agreed but then when we researched we realized that June July is peak season with long queues and high prices it may not be the right thing to do. And then in any other season we would get a smaller break and then I would love to go for at least two weeks! So we ditched the plan. I feel so mean.

In around 2008, we had planned to got o Hong Kong and then the economy went kaput and we felt scared and did not go to Hong Kong. I think that was the biggest regret I have had with respect to Jispa and taking her to vacations. I think while she was growing up she would have enjoyed Disney Land. I have always wanted to go to Disney land as a child but never did and I wanted my child to go to Disney land. I am feeling like a joker now that we cancelled the plan. I so goddamn regret it. So now we have a 14 year old kid who hasn’t been to Disney and because her father was a jerk.

Now I realized that I wasn’t taking her anywhere else as well because of the same reason. SO we ended up doing a lot of India vacations. Not that India vacations are bad. You can get to see a lot of what is interesting in India. It can end fun and enjoyable and enriching as well, but there is of course a lot of enrichment that can be done outside India, that will completely help you expand.

One interesting thing in Moscow that I noticed was that Moscow built the most amazing dense network of underground tube stations. All the lines cross the city and try and connect people. They started this following the British and I think they picked up steam after the world war. In the heart of the network they built a circular line through which every other line would crisscross. Obviously these would be the most used lines by the people. These station on the circular line were chosen for beautification and beautification in a totalitarian regime is nothing but propaganda. The stations are amazingly beautiful. One has beautiful stories depicting the great Russian history on the ceiling, one has absolutely magnificent stained glass and the other has statues of brass alongside the platforms.

Everyone saw it as beautiful, which they were, but I saw it for what I think it was – propaganda. The tube stations are used by the proletariat for their day to day life, and it would be impossible to miss the main circle line on your daily commute. It is here that these monuments were built to the glory of the working class, instilling a pride of being a Russian.  A lot of the statues were about humble people working and of course believing that this work is going towards nation building. The poor people are always fed on dreams of a greater society working for a greater good. No book comes close to explaining this within the communist context than Animal Farm, which explains how the poor and the hardworking just have to work harder and harder. Large beautiful nameless generic statues are built honoring the hard work and selfless dedication of these beautiful people. You are supposed to look at them and find yourselves in them and believe that your boring drudgery is a part of the greater purpose.

This is also one the reasons we honor the soldiers through another long set of nameless statues. The tomb of the unknown soldiers is a perfect example. These poor kids went off to battle and died saving the motherland. These wars are fought on the behest of idiotic politicians who put these young brave soldiers in front of bullets without much care about these lives.

When we in corporate life took a lot of these structures and ideals onto the organization, we too took these ideas and put them as at the hall of fame thing. We inspire and make professionals believe that this is the glory of life, we make them believe that we are what we are thanks to the effort of the common worker who slogs his ass out from 9 to 9 leaving his health and family at the altar of the common greatness and shit like that.

What a pain. No wonder I have never received an over achiever award ever in my life. I have never won anything like that – no best student, no best worker nothing. I don’t think that I have ever received any incentive for anything either. Just end of year bonuses. Nothing else.

I guess I am proud of that. The only real award I received was in college, ”principal’s special award for extra-curricular activities”, that’s it. That was good enough for me. I won that for basically not attending class but doing all sorts of fun things in college. I was put on the college magazine as one of the stars of the college. Hah!

So yes travelling is fun and you do get to learn a lot, and the further you travel from home, the better it is for you. Any pretext is good, as long as you travel. So I am planning to do so as far as I can afford to. Let’s see. I plan for sure to go somewhere in the next summer vacation that Jispa has. Till then, this vacation, I am going to the Indian Himalayan foothills this Diwali vacation. A cheap simple vacation where the most of the learnings are going to come from the train ride that we will be taking with Jispa after a really long time!