Identity Crisis!!!

This must have happened to every other Kashmiri… As I said, Kashmiri’s can recognize another Kashmiri by facial recognition. A long nose, a specific angular jaw line, a certain cut of the brow or a tone of skin – there is always something that makes a Kashmiri go ‘S/he must be a Kashmiri’ – Pandits or Muslims alike.

And at times, your face is such a give away – that in spite of trying you can’t hide the fact that you are a Kashmiri.

More than a decade ago – I was at a training program in Mussorie. Among my group of friends – who were also attending that same event – was Harsh (from Jaipur) who had just recently become a proud new uncle. His nephew was barely a year old and he wanted to take back home a special gift for the kid. Somehow he had got fixated on a fur coat with a cap which he had seen in a “Kashmir Art and Handicraft” shop on the Mall Road. Well, how can’t you find one such shop in a tourist place? Now a days you will find Kashmiri’s selling even Rajastani, Gujrati or Tibetian art and handicraft, imitation stuff of all kinds at all such tourist destinations or malls. But that’s a different topic.

Alarmed by the fabled tales of how Kashmiri traders dupe unsuspecting tourists by charging them 1000/- for a 100/- buck item, I warned Harsh against buying anything from the Kashmiri shop lest he was ready to get duped. But Harsh couldn’t find anything else as interesting and apt for his nephew – so he was adamant on striking a bargain. In all my naivety, I too became a silent partner to the adventure – agreeing to help him evaluate the right bargain by using my Kashmiri expertise. However, we strongly admonished Harsh from making it known to the dealer that he had a Kashmiri friend along with him to ensure that he was being asked the right price. As per plan, I and another friend decided to enter the shop only once Harsh had selected the piece he wanted to buy and the bargaining was to begin – coming in as customers unrelated to Harsh and give an opinion on the bargain – without revealing the Kashmiri identity.

But as luck would have it – the moment I stepped into the showroom, the patron there had a loud – “Aslaam waleykum!! Pandit ji yapaer kithkaen” to greet me.

10 things about a typical Kashmiri…

1. A Kashmiri will never like or appreciate a Kashmiri cuisine dish served in a restaurant, club or a hotel anywhere – say a Kashmiri Dum Aloo. Guess why? Simple. Because a real Kashmiri would know what a real Dum Aloo is supposed to be – and they never serve you even anything close to that.
   
2. First thing when in a new place, hunt for a reliable and close by source of collard greens, lotus stem vegetables, good quality red chilly powder, dry ginger powder and other such typical Kashmiri cuisine ingredients; find out that they aren’t easy to get there (at times it’s a pretty damn simple thing to guess that it won’t be available in that place, yet its mandatory to try) and then settle for a supply from the native.
3. When in a new place, always try to find other Kashmiri’s in that area, company, organization, city… There won’t be a Kashmiri who hasn’t run a search on his company directory (where it make sense to run a search) for the surnames Kaul, Koul, Raina, Dhar, Razdan, Ganjoo, etc…
4. And when s/he finds another Kashmiri and then wonder to themselves – “Ah! Where all on earth these Kashmiri’s have reached? Is there a corner on earth where I won’t find a Kashmiri”
5. And when finally met – ask the other Kashmiri – “where in Kashmir you originally hail from” – notwithstanding the fact that it’s been over 17 years now that s/he hasn’t visited that place.
6. Always try to tell a non-Kashmiri in certain indirect way that such and such celebrity is of Kashmiri decent – irrespective of relevance to the context. People from Anupam Kher to Kunal Khemmu, Vivek Razdan to Suresh Raina, Jeevan to Jawahar Wattal, Nidhi Razdan to Shirin Bhan, all names have been counted umpteen times. For that matter, its pretty secular here and also unconstrained by time. So Kashmiri decent of Alama Iqbal and Salman Rushdie or Katrina Kaif are no different in the above context. Or that Shahrukh Khan's great grandmother was half Kashmiri...
   
7. Which ever tourist destination they may go – end up comparing how the place is worthless compared to such and such place in Kashmir. Always find a tourist place without mountains and fresh water as worthless…
8. Always try and find out by face recognition other Kashmiris. 9 out of 10 times, a Kashmiri can tell another Kashmiri even in a crowd of 50 – just by facial features, and even say with same accuracy whether it’s a Kashmiri Pandit or a Kashmiri Muslim. I have some rather interesting anecdotes on that. Even just recently, a newly appointed head of sales in my organization jogged down to me after a group event – asking me my full name – just to check if I was really a Kashmiri as he had guessed. I myself had been in the same dilemma earlier, but in spite of my confidence – got misled by a wrong input on his surname.
9. Always secretly believe that they are an intellectually smart race – and often allude it to the food habit of eating rice; and then co-support it with Bengali’s and South Indian’s being equally smart intellectuals because they are rice eaters too.
10. Always talk about Kashmiris in the third person.

Crazy kiya re!!

Cell woes… A Buyer’s dilemma…

Today I spent a good time of an otherwise fine Saturday – roaming the markets of Bangalore in search of my next mobile handset. Having browsed and researched different models in my shortlist over weeks now – I finally thought it was time to head to the shop and have a touch and feel decision. After all, reviews and user feedback on all these websites would tell only that much – and not make the decision for me.

Armed with a basic shortlist of 4-5 models: Nokia 5300, Nokia 5200, Sony Ericsson 700i, Sony Ericsson W550i/Z550i, Motorola Rizr Z3, LG Chocolate, Samsung Ultra X820, I went around hopping from one showroom/dealer to another – looking for the right bargain. But the hop-a-shop exercise turned out to be a rather interesting one – leaving a confused, undecided and rather introspecting me head back home without a new handset.

Having used my old Nokia 3530 to death and then the current Samsung one to its live-a-day battery state now, I must confess that I am not the current to the trend type of a person. I am not the one to buy a new model or the latest in-thing just because it’s cool and it’s in – unless I need it. Old school… I guess.

And somehow I did convince myself that the need of having to recharge my cell phone every night – is reason enough to get a new one.

But it didn’t seem so easy after all – at least for the old school person I am. Hey, but I am still on the right side of age and right side of the yuppie generation. But it didn’t help me when the sales guy would try to edge me towards a pricier model – for obvious reason – by just highlighting the additional features it had. “Sir, this has a 1.3 megapixel camera, this even has a flash, this even has a memory slot extendable to 2GB. You can carry all your music”… and I kept thinking of a Nokia ad which tried to tell us that “phone sirf baat karne ke liye nahi hota hai”. Nokia did well for them selves – but did the customer really need all that. I am not so sure anymore.

Why are we so obsessed with getting everything into and onto a single device? First it was getting your watch and alarm clock merged into the cell phone, then it added your personal organizer, then your money manager, then it some video games, then it also replaced your camera, and then the FM radio, and walkman music player, then email and the works. All in one single device.

What next do we need in our cell phone – a mini-refrigerator? Or a cell phone on which I can actually sit and go to work.

Some of the sales pitch the sales guys wanted me to buy into just turned me off – and I was left counting the existing devices which I barely used. I have a Canon Powershot A590 5MP digital camera – a great camera which I barely use. I have a 1GB Creative Zen MP3 Player which again is lying somewhere around… My wife hasn’t used the camera or the music player on her Motorola V3i much either. If I am not the customer who is really using so many of the existing products or features they have – why am I even looking at a cell phone which has more of the same stuff?

Maybe one reason is that somewhere inside me I am trying to silently fit into the crowd – a society where upgrades every quarter have become a norm. Its not that I couldn’t entirely afford some of those models – but I wasn’t convinced at the end of the touch and feel exercise that spending 15k of my good hard earned money on something – of which I was going to use only 5k worth of features was a good bargain. If I am not the tech savvy gizmo freak kind of nerd – or the ‘cool hang out in the right gang’ kind of kid around the block – nor the image conscious techie who needs to make a point about the designation he has arrived – then why do I need the N and E or the P or Q series of the latest gadget. But the market will still ensure that you are told what you ought to buy… what is the right thing you should be seen with? The sales agents were probably second guessing my salary and thereby what budget they should make me raise the bar to.

As I said, the whole exercise left me all the more confused and I returned empty handed – still
wondering at 5AM right now… am I being too much of an ‘old school’.

Maybe I am asking a blasephemous question at a time when there is all the new buzz about the iPhone - and even more blasephemous given that my own bread and butter depends on people adopting newer technology...

At the end of Nokia 5300, 6270, N72, N83, SE 880, SE 770, Moto Ming, Ping ting, Pebble, RAZR, RIZR, KRZR… Krazy kiya re!!!

Desi Obsession - 'Phoren' maal hai...Imported hai...

Blood Diamond – starring Leonardo DiCaprio

Why are we Indian’s obsessed with foreign acceptance?

This is the question that has been frustrating me today…

Earlier today – I saw a not so well known TV actor Gaurav Chopra (has been seen in some TV soaps on Zee/Star Plus and also recently as the first round elimination along with his live-in partner Narayani Shastri on “Nach Baliye”) giving a loooooong interview to a TV news channel – about his part in the Hollywood blockbuster “Blood Diamond”… and his interactions with Leonardo DiCaprio. He even had anecdotes to share on how he was mistaken for an Italian football star – and how he and Leonardo had their trailers parked side by side….and the learnings he had from Leanardo about not having starry tantrums like the other stars in Bollywood do. Quite a lot of learning from less than 5 seconds of screen time with him…

Mistaken by this bravado – I went ahead and watched the movie later today…

Much like Mallika Sherawat’s much hyped appearance in “The Myth” which didn’t last more than two minutes… Gaurav’s appearance turned out to be lesser than that a 30-seconds long with barely an un-heard dialogue “there is no space inside”.

Had the TV channel even bothered to find out what he was upto in the movie...? What did Gaurav think before making such long statements...

What made Gaurav come on national television with such hype and pride? Maybe he thought not many will see the movie anyway (which is probably true) and yet he will get away with some brownie points… and some better scope with the talent hunters for the next soap on air… Or is it the sheer over powering urge we Indians have with getting a phoren’ stamp – be it the ‘now here now gone’ appearances of Gulshan Grover in Hollywood flicks which he doesn’t tire speaking about or be it the - ‘I will get an H1 before marriage at any cost’ attitude of each and every South Indians…we want a stamp of ‘phoren’ acceptance – irrespective of whether its worth anything at all. I have seen a few good close friends, who delayed getting married around the 2001 slowdown – just because they didn’t want to marry without an H1 stamped on their passports, bore the costs of their visa’s by paying the bodyshoppers, went to USA and hunted for tech jobs at their own cost – and once finally industry turned around and they stuck some good luck – they did get married too, the same traditional way they would have got married a good 2 years ago. But aaah… they wouldn’t have had the foreign colour to they visa that time.

Why is every Indian obsessed with when Aishwarya is doing her next Hollywood film, when Amitabh or Hrithik will break into a Los Angel’s movie career or what happened to Salam Khan’s Hollywood escapade “Marigold”, and what even an otherwise not-so-starry Kabir Bedi did in Hollywood or the American soaps like “Bold and Beautiful”…or when Sush will be seen alongside Richard Gere…or they never ending question - Oscar?

Be it the movie arena, or be it the whites adopting our age-old yoga, ayurveda, pranayama techniques or vedic thoughts - we seem to acknowledge and accept faster once the west has given a stamp of approval.

Are we still living in a colonial past…? Are we still burdened with the load of acceptance by the white skin…?

Apple and Microsoft Partnership...

An interesting archive...



And see that in perspective with this one...the story behind Microsoft and Apple.. (a spoof)




And see them now...

Grasshopper Politics – 'India Today'!!!

Found this floating on the internet – I don’t know who the real author is - but who ever wrote this managed to capture the truth of present day India so aptly…

OLD VERSION...

The ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long building his house and laying up supplies for the winter. The grasshopper thinks the ant's a fool and laughs & dances & plays the summer away. Come winter, the ant is warm and well fed. The grasshopper has no food or shelter so he dies out in the cold.

MODERN VERSION…

The ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter. The grasshopper thinks the ant's a fool and laughs & dances & plays the summer away. Come winter, the shivering grasshopper calls a press conference and demands to know why the ant should be allowed to be warm and well fed while others are cold and starving.

NDTV, BBC, CNN show up to provide pictures of the shivering grasshopper next to a video of the ant in his comfortable home with a table filled with food.
The World is stunned by the sharp contrast. How can this be that this poor grasshopper is allowed to suffer so?

Arundhati Roy stages a demonstration in front of the ant's house. Medha Patkar goes on a fast along with other grasshoppers demanding that grasshoppers be relocated to warmer climates during winter. Amnesty International and Koffi Annan criticize the Indian Government for not upholding the fundamental rights of the grasshopper. The Internet is flooded with online petitions seeking support to the grasshopper (many promising Heaven and Everlasting Peace for prompt support as against the wrath of God for non-compliance). Opposition MP's stage a walkout. Left parties call for "Bharat Bandh" in West Bengal and Kerala demanding a Judicial Enquiry.CPM in Kerala immediately passes a law preventing Ants from working hard in the heat so as to bring about equality of poverty among ants and grasshoppers. SamajHopperwadi Party and G-BSP each fight for the claim of being true messiah’s of grasshoppers and their true friends and each blame the other for having failed them. BJP recruits some grasshoppers into their national executive too to ensure some vote bank chances.

Lalu Prasad allocates one free coach to Grasshoppers on all Indian Railway Trains, aptly named as the 'Grasshopper Rath'.

Finally, the Judicial Committee drafts the Prevention of Terrorism against Grasshoppers Act [POTAGA]", with effect from the beginning of the winter.

Arjun Singh makes Special Reservation for Grass Hopper in educational Institutions & in Govt Services.

The ant is fined for failing to comply with POTAGA and, having nothing left to pay his retroactive taxes, his home is confiscated by the Government and handed over to the grasshopper in a ceremony covered by NDTV.

Arundhati Roy calls it "a triumph of justice". Lalu calls it 'Socialistic Justice'. CPM calls it the 'revolutionary resurgence of the downtrodden' Koffi Annan invites the grasshopper to address the UN General Assembly. The writer of this piece is condemned as an anti-national and anti-social right wing radical with no regard for the poor and downtrodden grasshopper...

Many years later...The ant has since migrated to the US and set up a multi billion dollar company in silicon valley.100s of grasshoppers still die of starvation despite reservation somewhere in India...