Woke up unusually early today and spent my time in my balcony, and a small primary school near the building reminded me those magical lines which made us feel proud about the land we live in and the language we speak..

நீராரும் கடல் உடுத்த நில மடந்தைக் கெழிலொழுகும்
சீராரும் வதனமெனத் திகழ்பரதக் கண்டமிதில்
தெக்கணமும் அதிற்சிறந்த திராவிட நல் திருநாடும்
தக்கசிறு பிறைநுதலும் தரித்தநறும் திலகமுமே!
அத்திலக வாசனைபோல் அனைத்துலகும் இன்பமுற,
எத்திசையும் புகழ்மணக்க இருந்த பெரும் தமிழணங்கே!
தமிழணங்கே!
நின் சீரிளமைத் திறம்வியந்து
செயல் மறந்து வாழ்த்துதுமே!
வாழ்த்துதுமே!
வாழ்த்துதுமே!

Ford Figo, originally uploaded by Ford APA.

Looks freaking awesome in 'Sea grey' .. Indian hatchback market is so spoilt for choice..

Hey, we haven't talked for a while now.. I just waited on sice i thought you are too busy with your work and life around work. I wanted to talk to you on something which you forgot.. a lost passion!. When we shot photos for ourselves as a hobby or passion, we have but a single motivator, ourselves. When someone shoots for living, he is split between his own motivations and that of the client. For the contestant it is even more complex, you have the contestant, the judges, and the public. For everyone it is different, but asking the questions is the beginning of understanding yourself as an artist.

Now one word of caution here for you... Mental paralysis can develop when you have to make a decision and you don't know which way is the best direction to take. A writer calls it writers block. But in reality all it is is the lack of a clear direction to take. Pick one, any one, and don't look back. Making a decision, any decision, will get you out of a writers block. In the course of following your first decision, you may discover a better way to tackle the task at hand as always it had happened in your.. ahem our case. The brain needs to work on something if it is to work out anything, give it something to do.

So just pick something,anything, and go in that direction. You never know where it will ultimately lead you, but at least you won't be spinning in the sand..

Adios.. will talk to you again when i hear from you.

The funny thing is Steve Jobs only needs to walk into a room and the crowd does that, this nob does that and the crowd just sits there and stares and wonders!

The above sentence/title seem to be far from the story or the idea of the book, but this particular POV which the driver Farid comes up with when he takes Amir on a journey to modern day Afghanistan. I had been reading this book with immense interest and was really taken aback by the amount of details the author has put in to depict the grandiose of the environment he grew up and the subtleties of the childhood friendship. Amir recollects his golden years in Kabul and compares it with the present one whereas the driver points to a ragged man in the barren lands and says ‘you see that.. that’s the true Afghanistan.. you have always been a tourist in your own country’.

I paused for a while and soaked myself into this perspective. We all have good memories of our bringing up and our childhood watan.. But there is more to any country than what we see, what we experience. There is always a different land just miles away where a day would be totally different for a person of your same age.. Just when I thought that It kinda seemed that its the same everywhere, Its just a common template with multiple renditions. And for some reason I really began to feel that I am being a tourist in my own country..

The Kite Runner reminded me that we are all human alike, fighting similar daily and lifelong battles, just in different circumstances.

Put eight monkeys in a room. In the middle of the room is a ladder, leading to a bunch of bananas hanging from a hook on the ceiling.

Each time a monkey tries to climb the ladder, all the monkeys are sprayed with ice water, which makes them miserable. Soon enough, whenever a monkey attempts to climb the ladder, all of the other monkeys, not wanting to be sprayed, set upon him and beat him up. Soon, none of the eight monkeys ever attempts to climb the ladder.

One of the original monkeys is then removed, and a new monkey is put in the room. Seeing the bananas and the ladder, he wonders why none of the other monkeys are doing the obvious. But undaunted, he immediately begins to climb the ladder.

All the other monkeys fall upon him and beat him silly. He has no idea why.

However, he no longer attempts to climb the ladder.

A second original monkey is removed and replaced. The newcomer again attempts to climb the ladder, but all the other monkeys hammer the crap out of him.

This includes the previous new monkey, who, grateful that he’s not on the receiving end this time, participates in the beating because all the other monkeys are doing it. However, he has no idea why he’s attacking the new monkey.

One by one, all the original monkeys are replaced. Eight new monkeys are now in the room. None of them have ever been sprayed by ice water. None of them attempt to climb the ladder. All of them will enthusiastically beat up any new monkey who tries, without having any idea why.

And that is how most companies’ corporate policies get established.

Source: laughitout.com – on basis of experiments conducted in the UK

Every once in a while a writer appears who would prefer to write about reality as it is instead of writing about illusion we created for ourselves. Being blinded by our own success and opportunities we miss to see real life around us with all its drawback and negative issues.
Arvind Adiga falls under the aforementioned category and his Man Booker Prize winning Debut work "The White Tiger" exposes the problems of a common man from the villages trapped in a societal bondage which he terms as the "Rooster Coop".

The White Tiger is a powerful social commentary on injustice and power in the form of a class struggle in India. It portrays the anti-hero Balram, who represents the downtrodden sections of society, juxtaposed against the rich.

Balram Halwai, the protagonist of The White Tiger, having no identity of his own, like any other protagonist dreams of going from rags to riches. Eventually, he becomes a maniac who slits his boss' throat and confesses the mystery surrounding his rise to entrepreneurship. It makes one think this might be the only way to be an entrepreneur in India as the successful ones seem to have some dark side to them almost always. He labels his life’s story, ‘The Autobiography of a Half-Baked Indian’. He coins the idea of the Rooster Coop, Adiga examines how Balram is trapped in it and subsequently breaks out to freedom. He is a rare and eccentric like a “White Tiger” which is a very uncommon rare occurrence.

the following are some intriguing topics and snippets from the book during the course of his narration

“Go to Old Delhi ...and look at the way they keep chickens there in the market. Hundreds of pale hens and brightly colored roosters, stuffed tightly into wire-mesh cages...They see the organs of their brothers lying around them. They know they're next. Yet they do not rebel. They do not try to get out of the coop. The very same thing is done with human beings in this country.”

the analogy made above might seemed too poetic or even clichéd to some.. but the essence he is trying to bring out from a perspective of a servant is an interesting thing to sit back and take a note.

"Indians are the world's most honest people, like the prime minister's booklet will inform you?
No. It's because 99.9% of us are caught in the Rooster Coop just like those guys in the poultry market.
The Rooster Coop doesn't always work with minuscule sums of money. Don't test your chauffeur with a rupee coin or two - he may well steal that much. But leave a million dollars in front of a servant and he won't touch a penny of it... He's no Gandhi, he's human, he's you and me. But he's in the Rooster Coop."

kinda true right... i felt that every person who works 'FOR' someone as a servant of any order will feel that he is tied to some unknown rules.. some mysterious laws of social slavery. Like Adiga quotes from a famous poet "You were in search of the key all these time, But the door was open all along"

Never before in human history have so few owed so much to so many. A handful of men in this country have trained the remaining 99.9 per cent - as strong, as talented, as intelligent in every way - to exist in perpetual servitude; a servitude so strong that you can put the key of his emancipation in a man's hands and he will throw it back at you with a curse."

He also draws attention to the way a master-servant relationship is established, based on a philosophy of trust, by which servants are caught in the Rooster Coop. It maintains the perpetual servitude of the poor, letting a minority possess all the wealth of the nation. As the protagonist says, “The Indian family, is the reason we are trapped and tied to the coop….only a man who is prepared to see his family destroyed – hunted, beaten, and burned alive by masters – can break out of the coop. That would take no normal human being, but a freak, a pervert of nature.”

It was a gripping tale which made me go wild with thoughts after reading this. I was trying to relate myself to the Rooster Coop and what would be the consequences if I even tried something in the minimal as an effort to come out of it. Even though there seemed to be possibilities it was also evident that there are imminent side-effects of it which will come back to haunt me and the very reason of my being. I do agree that in a country like India it takes balls of steel, cold blood and a heart made of stone to be a White Tiger.

For Indian Buyers:

http://www.flipkart.com/white-tiger-aravind-adiga/8172237456-yv23ftp8lb

http://www.indiaplaza.in/white-tiger-adiga-arvind/books/9788172237455.htm