I believe I can fly

Yes, I truly do. Even if the only way to do so is trust machinery weighing a few tons :-) I also like to think. Which is not the same as saying I do think. Thinking is an area of human activity where I have a lot of catching up to do.

Posts Tagged people

What’s with the social networking craze?

Jul 18

Posted by The Practical Idealist in Musings | 4 Comments

Okay, all right! This rant is a couple of years too late to even pretend to be a surprised reaction to Facebook, Twitter, etc., but though I get these tools, I don’t quite get why people would want to Share their every activity. Or Tweet them to the whole wide world, for that matter. Like, “I went to the market today”, or “I ate a 24″ pizza :D :D ”; for eloquence, you can’t beat a simple “WTF” [pardon the language (if you understand what the acronym stands for)]. Gone was the time when children used to be worried sick about being caught using swear-words or invectives. These words have now entered the popular teen- and pre-teen-culture, and seem to have become accepted as well, their meaning be damned.

For some time, I got caught up in this let-the-world-know-what-I’m-upto craze, and then the whole thing started sounding more and more crazy to me. Why would I want everyone to know what I was up to, every hour of my day? Why would any one, for that matter? Is this some (partly) grown-up version of “I’m better” or “I have a better toy” game that kids play regularly? “Is your social network better than mine?” What is it about humans that makes them want to, at the risk of losing whatever little privacy they have in these days of the omnipresent Google street-mapping cameras, reach out to everyone in their circle, however faintly they’re connected?

I don’t have any answer that fits all these questions, but I do have some guesses:

  1. Emotional deprivation: it’s a reflection of people’s innate need to be accepted as part of some group, some circle. A need to be accepted. Period.
  2. Utility: services like Google Places, Foursquare and Yelp are conceivably helpful to people in discovering new restaurants, places of retreat, places to party, etc.
  3. Ego: some people simply want to brag about being rich enough to be in a certain location; their geekiness; themselves.

Obviously, these questions and answers / guesses merely scratch the surface of a deep, but clearly real, need for people to share their thoughts, actions, whereabouts with others, sometimes even inadvertently. The big question, Why, is something that professional sociologists are better equipped to answer than I.

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Musings…

Jun 1

Posted by The Practical Idealist in General | 4 Comments

“Has it taken more than it has given?” a friend asked me. I was about to leave a city (Pune) to go back to my hometown, and the question was aimed at the city itself. Strangely, I’d never thought of it that way. I mean, a city that takes and gives? That was new! There was a pause in the conversation as I considered it for a while.

It has been nearly six years, and I’ve often wondered, not without regret, at how my career could have been had I not made that fateful decision to move out of my previous company in a hurry. Maybe there is a lesson to be learnt here: never be in a hurry to choose a new job just because you don’t like your present one; it’s better to be late than sorry quickly. As someone said, “Never choose a job over a career.”

So yeah, my stint in this company has been long, but it has often left me agitated. At its typical (Indian government employee) Babu-like HR folks; at its policies that evoke emotions ranging from fury to helpless resignation; at its people who think it’s more important to just get a job done than it is to finish it well; at its regulations that defy all reason. I hated it, and yet, incredibly, my inertia got the better of me for three long years. I suppose you wonder what it says about me as a person, eh?

Of course, my move to this city had also given me a few things that I never realised I could like immensely. Like a sense of my space; freedom from frequent and annoying disturbances while deeply engrossed in reading; freedom to explore a place at any time of the day I chose; a chance to meet new people who became “friends for life”; a chance to experience “special” relationships (nothing came of this though!); opportunities to learn how to go about a lot of things in life (from negotiating the rent for a house, to finding the best places to eat).

Coming back to the question, in balance, it hasn’t been all that bad, especially if I left my job out of the equation. The city has given more than it has taken, and I’m happy about it.

Pune, I’ll miss your climate, your vantage location w.r.t. many interesting places, the quality of your water, but I’ll never, ever miss the really sad, I-don’t-want-your-custom attitude of your shopkeepers (hoteliers and others fall into this group too).

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The dynamics of human relationships

Mar 26

Posted by The Practical Idealist in General | 6 Comments

It’s strange how easily I get put off by the behaviour of some people, especially when I’m quite tolerant of the same or similar behaviour by some other people. Guess I am not as impartial as I want to be. Maybe you’d think of it as sick. Take your pick, it doesn’t affect me as much as you think it would, or perhaps should! ;-)

For example, I have some friends who call / mail me rarely. Let’s categorise these, for the sake of convenience, under “A”. I also have my share of friends who keep in touch quite regularly. Let’s categorise these, for the sake of convenience again, under “B”. Now, I’m not generally annoyed with my “A” friends as long as they don’t tell me things like “hey, why don’t you call me often?”; once they say that, I get really upset because I am the kind of guy who usually reciprocates people’s love many times over, and I feel hurt that they’re trying to place the responsibility for non-contact / rare contact entirely on my shoulders. Come on, it’s not like I stopped you from mailing / calling me!

Anyway, I digress. The thing is, much as I’m not irritated by the category A friends, I get put off that much more easily by the category B friends if they stop calling / mailing me with no explanation whatsoever. I’ve had such category B friends who haven’t a. returned calls, b. replied to mail, but who complain loudly when I fail to do the same occasionally. Man, I get really pissed off when they do that. But being a person who usually avoids confrontations (unless pushed to the extreme), I laugh it off or let it pass without comment. But until such absences are properly explained, I usually go crazy (when I think about those instances) trying to figure out why they did that to me: it’s like a splinter in my mind which will leave me peaceful only when it’s gone.

Now, the really interesting thing is, even among the category B friends, I have a few whose unannounced absences don’t bother me much. I haven’t been able to figure out why that’s so, short of coming to the rather unpleasant conclusion that I’m biased towards some :-( To paraphrase George Orwell, “All friends will be treated equally, but some will be treated more equally than others” !!

Just to make a few things clear: I’m not the categorising kind of person all the time, but I do like to sort things out once in a while, if only to know where I stand. I don’t believe that the measure of a friend’s love for you is the number of emails / calls you receive from him / her, but I do feel like I should constantly stay in touch with my friends because they mean so much to me.

Have you felt this way towards your friends? Do you treat all your friends the same way? Or is this madness peculiar to me?

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