Waking Up to Sid

So, the movie ‘Wake up Sid’ is a look at today’s Youth and their abhorrence to the 9 to 5 job culture. It is a good portrayal of dreams and winning them and yet, many will see it as critical of the way today’s Generation is leading their lives, waking up late, shunning responsibility and not learning ‘Family values’.

Indeed, it is true that at our ages our parents were more mature, responsible and career-oriented, but allow me to show you a side which the movie only hinted at but did not explore as it devoted time to the Love story enmeshed in it. Does anyone realize that today, the average age of a person to remain a child has gone a lot further! There are many influences towards that- the increasing demands of education being one; it is impossible to get a decent job in today’s scenario with at least two degrees tucked in your belt, proof of that comes from my discovery that the taxi driver, who drove us from Guwahati to Shillong when I first came here, was a Graduate in English Literature and yet not able to secure a good job in Welcome to Shillong. Its amazing how we can proudly jump from one level of Education to another without ever gaining any real Education, vis-a-vis, experience in Life. In that sense we remain Children at least till such ages when our parents we looked at by their parents as Adults who had secured jobs and were starting families. Another influence pushing towards this attitude is the advent of Pleasure. Today, the amount of devices and methods to get sensory pleasures is a huge set. My Father first used a computer in His Masters Degree while I got mine in Class 6th. Obviously this affects our choices and level of enjoyment. Any one with a computer today listens to the latest songs and watches the latest movies at the click of the mouse, while our parents specially took out time and permission from their parents to enjoy such pleasures. Finally, we today have a lot more services which can be accessed via more comfortable means, thereby pushing us away from the real action of getting up and standing in that long queue to book that train ticket. Who is to blame? No One! Society has been consistently pushing these amenities into the hands of its children. Parents will keep loving their children and considering them children as long as they stay in their parental homes and pursue higher standards of education before getting real jobs and learning real values. You will say- “But what of those parents who push their children and make them work hard??” Read on…

The second reason why we are so misunderstood is that today, our Education System is competitive, Our Society, open-minded and pushing our creative talents but our “Traditional” look at a career still points towards a limited set of supposedly “valuable” and good careers such as Engineering, Medical and Accounts. It is this stereotyping of jobs which, at the same time both encourages our creativity and limits it. There are enough Summer camps in school to make students believe that art is a viable career yet enough pressure during exams to cause suicides even in Class 7th students. This ping-pong battle between passions and “consistent source of income” causes a messed up attitude amongst children and shows in their callousness towards life and insistence on living in the world of games and fairy tale love stories. In short, todays Youth is up for many challenges but is not encouraged to take risks. In light of this, I laud Konkona Sen’s role in the Movie, who takes a huge risk at one point of life and is courageous enough to make sure that she’s successful.

This debate and the future of the Indian Child has only two possible outcomes- the parents suddenly realize that the best way to rear children is to give them more responsibility, sooner, so that they learn how to live at nearly the same time as their parents did. This is akin to what happens in many western societies where no job is looked down at and children learn the value of menial labor earlier than their counterparts in India. Alternatively, parents will continue to crib about their children yet keep pushing them towards more books and learning without understanding. That model will only yield a generation which prefers to live in the gaming world and wake up late in the afternoons.

I wonder where India is headed…

How Indian Politics is doing what China can’t in a Hundred years

The politicians of India are decidedly against the concept of India as a Nation, a single entity with One Status and One System, an Open country with no biases and certainly no reservations against any of it’s long parts. While citizens of many other countries in the world fight over sports, break each other’s bones over the singular football match or hate each other over long histories of wins and losses in Ice Hockey matches but come together when the Country’s solidarity is questioned, Indians fight and kill when it comes to region, religion and water, but don’t care a paisa’s worth over local sports, partly because of it’s non-existent local sports and partly because it’s easier for it’s politicians to raise anger against other communities and religions instead of building dams, bridges and stadiums.

The Chinese think tank International Institute of Strategic Studies claims that Beijing

“should work towards the the break-up of India into 20-30 independent states with the help of friendly countries like Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal and Bhutan, support Ulfa in attaining its goal for Assam’s independence, back aspirations of Indian nationalities like Tamils and Nagas, encourage Bangladesh to give a push to the independence of West Bengal and lastly recover the 90,000 sq km territory in southern Tibet”.

It argues that a fragmented India would be in China’s interests and would also lead to prosperity in the region. Further, it goes on to say that if China “takes a little action, the so-called great Indian federation can be broken up”.

A lot of people on This Pakistani Forum agree with the Chinese and have even provided a ‘Map’ of India after Partition and claim that India has never existed as a Nation but Pakistan has been around since 3300 BC. Tall claims, for sure, but they need not crib so much against India.

Gandhiji had strict instructions regarding Quotas, they were a system to bring the backward classes of India’s Society into the mainstream so as to provide Total Equality, yet more than 60 years after his death, the system continues, reinforcing the sickly condition of India’s education, job, social and moral infrastructure. Some time back, a few more quotas were introduced into the Education system with a keen eye on the voters. Then the concept of quotas for teachers was thought up, bring up a whole new system of prejudice ( People can say, “I am a Khatri, why should I study from a lowly class teacher?? “). Recently, Maharashtra reserved 80% jobs in state industries for locals. Shiv Sena and BJP promised to implement this rule strictly if voted to power.  There’s not going to be much time before every state starts playing the ’sons of the soil’ card and promising such ridiculous reservations. What will the outcome be?? Well, what happens when you reserve jobs, the most important reason for migration of people? The flux of people stops and soon regions become tightly locked strongholds of Politico-Religious affiliations and look at every outsider as an enemy or worse. This kind of attitude leads to glorification of the State above the Nation and though this is relatively healthy for the growth and cleanliness of areas within the State, it is bad for the concept of the Nation as a whole and Pride in the Nation. How many Indians today even utter the words, “I am proud of India”? The ultimate result, that of disjointed, hateful and suspicious states, is what many political powers wish to achieve about India.

Let us now look at an Organisation where this will not happen. The Defense Forces of India, the Indian Air Force, Army and Navy, are prime examples of anti-quota systems. No matter what his father earns or what his caste is, every soldier kisses the mud in the NDA training. No matter how much bank balance a person has, they all get the same houses at the same Rank, they all drive the same vehicles to work and get the same ration to eat food. A Squadron posted in Madras does not crib when it gets a Commander from Kashmir and a Platoon deep in the jungles of Assam will not say a word if a Rajasthani boss comes and tells them how to execute guerrilla warfare. Nor do they reserve 80 pc quota for locals. For this reason alone, they do not have any qualms about making friends with people of different religions, cultures, color or social standing. They have an open institution where anyone can be posted to any part of the country, ensuring that they fall in love with India and not Maharashtra, Assam or Haryana.

There are a lot of NGOs willing to fight the Tatas from building Seaports and to launch massive protests against private organisations for their wrong doings, but very few NGOs stand up against such blatant misuse of Public power by politicians to destroy the sovereign status of India.

Do you really want to see India as this one day??

The future??

Very few organize human chains, unending sms lists, forwarded emails and collect online signatures to present a letter to the President of India (who, strangely, has no power at all).

Very few organize human chains, unending sms lists, forwarded emails and collect online signatures to present a letter to the President of India (who, strangely, has no power at all) when politicians continually abuse Indians with Vote-gathering schemes based on instigating the common man’s anger against ‘outsiders’. Very few indeed…

There ought to be more.

The Fifth Dimension

I hereby declare that I have come to understand that the fifth dimension after the length, width and breadth of an object and the presence of it in time, is Energy.

Now, how do I come to this conclusion? By understanding that there is nothing within the first four dimensions which can explain the presence of mass and the effects of forces such as gravity on an object.

Let us imagine an area in space, far off from any matter, the presence of which would affect our to-be object’s presence (not tough to assume since there are large swathes in our Universe  which are empty).

Now let us say there exists time in that area (hey, time exists in our Universe doesn’t it??).

Now, the emptiness of the space will not change in any manner possible after any amount of time simply because there’s nothing to change there.

Next, let us say that there exists a cube with negligible dimensions, just a set of thin, very, very thin wires forming just the outline of a cube and not it’s body or walls which exists for only a small period of time, say a second. Obviously, the cube is here now, but gone the next second. This shows that the cube must exist in time in order to exist at all!

This we say that the wire frame cube now exists for a long period of time, say a few million years, just so that we can observe it.

Hence, we are now looking at our wire frame cube just float in the universe with nothing else anywhere near it to affect it at all. We also see that if, theoretically, the mass of each wire in the frame is nil, making then perfect lines along the x-,y- and z- planes, the wire exists in space and in time, but it does nothing.

Why isn’t that a very boring cube? It does nothing and hardly even exists!

But here we introduce Energy. The frame now has energy and by virtue of it having energy, it can move around, spin and do the Hula…

But more importantly, since the cube has energy, it’s wires need a place to store that energy and that location is defined in mass. Therefore, mass is but a derivative of Energy and since it is underivable using any other dimension, it is derived from Energy.

Now let us consider one more idea. Let us replace our wire frame with nothingness. There’s nothing in that bit of space where we are looking. Does time exist? Yes, it does. Do the first three dimensions exist? Indeed, they do and that can be proven by the presence of any object in that space.

Does energy exist in that space? Let us put a single ray of sunlight there, a single wave of light which does not require any medium to travel. Does this wave have any energy? Yes. Does it exist in time? Yes, it travels at, well, the speed of light. Does it have any spatial dimension? In other words, does it have a precise shape in any of the first three dimensions? Nope! This wave does not have a fixed shape in the spatial dimensions and changes over time. This is an example of pure Energy, with no mass. But is it the perfect example? No. Why not? Because at any given moment of time, if the wave is fixed, frozen and looked at, it has a direction, thereby meaning that it has a spatial dimension too.

So what is the best example of pure energy which exists in time but not space?

Is it a magnetic field?

Is it a gravitational field?

Is it Superman?

I don’t know, keep looking…