Beat the heat this summer

“That shirt sir, is fine linen. And it is light and absorbent. Should be just the thing for this heat”

And so you fall for the spiel and buy the damn thing from the smart sales guy in the swanky store which promises you relief from the Mumbai heat.

After all it’s Linen. Or it’s 100% cotton. Or has a light breezy weave. And so it ought to work.

But it doesn’t.

Not that it’s entirely its fault. After all the garment was designed for ideal test conditions. And not commuting in the Indian summer.

It is after you get into a train with the thing on that you realize that there’s not much space for it to do its climate control thing. And that it’s super absorbent status means that you’re soaking up perspiration from the people around you in the train as well.

Which is not exactly a very comforting thought to have lingering in your mind for the rest of the day at work.

And so you tolerate the shirt’s presence on your back till you can get home, rip it off and dump it into the machine.

And then you realize that a cold shower is the only thing that offers any respite from this heat, however brief.

But all this is after you kick yourself for falling for marketing gibberish and glossy ad copy.

Again.

First impressions on Rang de Basanti

I saw Rang De Basanti yesterday. After making numerous plans to see it on the big screen with a particular friend of mine which never seemed to materialize, I finally went ahead and saw it in the comfort of my home on a 15” laptop screen.

But I did see it. And it’s good.

While the plot of indifferent modern day youth taking up the torch for a cause is original and makes for compelling viewing, you realize as you power down your laptop that it’s not going to work. A revolution a la Rang de Basanti in India, that is.

For a number of reasons.

Part of the problem is that we’re too indifferent to things around us. And too caught up in surviving in a cut throat world to care about the larger perspective of where the nation is headed.

We see it. And maybe even brace ourselves for the crash. But we do nothing. Absolutely nothing at all.

Maybe because of this escapist notion that we have that the way things are today are not our fault. “Hey, this is what the world was like when I inherited it. Someone else screwed up along the way, not me”.

But that approach doesn’t fix problems. And they don’t go away if you pretend that they aren’t there.

Then there’s the great Indian disinclination towards action. Someone else is always supposed to fix things, not me. My civic duty is just to ensure that the person with the relatively cleaner record gets elected. And it’s so much more comfortable keeping it at that.

Or maybe it’s the overall Indian attitude towards risk. If it ain’t completely broken, why fix it, especially if it involves sticking out my neck.

We’re too cynical. And too disbelieving. And too laidback to start risking ourselves for things we believe in.

But we’re also very wrong about ourselves. And somewhere within all of us there’s a part that wants to fix this mess that we’ve gotten ourselves into.

So maybe it is time that we started taking ourselves seriously.

And realize that the greatest risk is to risk nothing at all.

I'm Back

Have been away from my blog for quite a while now-my last post was a little over a month ago.

I have been besieged by complaints (if you can call infrequent complaints by three friends that) saying that I should get online and write more often, and that the essence of a blog is in plodding on, no matter what.

Part of the problem is that not many of my friends are aware that my blog exists. And that is because I’d thought (very prudently) that I’d at least have a dozen more posts in place before I spread the word around. Not much point in telling people that you have a blog going if there’s nothing on it. ”Yeah, I read that blog of yours like you told me to. Haven’t been upto much, have you?”

In fact, the truth is pretty much the opposite. I have been busy. And hence the brief hiatus.

I have been reassigned to a different role. Shinier, brighter and more sparkly as they say in the ads. And have pretty much been spending all my time learning the ropes for what essentially is a very different profile.

The blogs will get more frequent as my learning curve kicks in and I’m able to function more or less in auto mode at work.

That’s not to say that I could blog while at work. Don’t feel upto it after replying to that nth e-mail of the day.

So have vowed to compose my posts offline at home (weekends?) and post them whenever I can.

Not very efficient, but still better than no posts at all.