New Blog site

Hi Everyone,

Please re-direct to www.vidhyasagari.wordpress.com

This is my new blog website.

Thanks & See you there!

Singaara Chennai

Somehow, human nature seems to have an affinity, in fact an extreme fascination for filth. Please wait, do not spite me now for this statement… read further. Unfortunately for the human kind, yours truly is learning, rather re-learning to drive in the roads of Chennai. This is an extreme arduous and dangerous task considering how insane the traffic is. But this post is not about this experience. Unfortunately, the driving school shifted to a place called ‘Kanthanchavadi’ from near my home and so I undertake a journey in an MTC bus every afternoon to this place. This road, from the Velachery bus stand to SRP is so horrible, fully treated as a garbage dump wherever convenient, with stagnant water right next to the bus stops too.

They say pictures speak a thousand words and so I am pasting a 1000 words for you down here to illustrate the scene that I see that makes me sad everyday! These were taken on my phone camera when the bus was moving.

They call this ‘Singara Chennai’ (translation-beautiful Chennai). The way from Poonamallee to Porur has huge garbage dumps that win over these pictures hands down.

It is with extreme anguish that I post this. I am seeing thousands of people pass by the same road every day, with nothing called civic sense, a sense of hygiene, ready to live in this filth and perpetuating it every minute. Children play in this, food stalls are near these garbage dumps and a bus stand is non-existent. Buses ply on the bad road (which is under repair) raising a cart load of dust which settles on everybody around. I get the taste of fine sand/mud on my mouth every time I come back home. Let me also state that this road is very near to the Perungudi bypass road where IT majors like Cognizant , RMZ millennia park exist. In this city, they introduce A/C buses and build express avenues when a major part of the city lives in garbage like this! People have made homes of the roads in the city as you can see.

I am only exposing the problem here. As an individual and a city citizen, I really do not know what to do. I do not want to get in to anything political. Is there something that we can do to help ?

Thank you ( Jesse Owens)

To those of you who have pushed me, thank you.
Without you I wouldn’t have fallen.

To those of you who laughed at me, thank you.
Without you I wouldn’t have cried.

To those of you who just couldn’t love me, thank you.
Without you I wouldn’t have known real love.

To those of you who hurt my feelings, thank you.
Without you I wouldn’t have felt them.

To those of you who left me lonely, thank you.
Without you I wouldn’t have discovered myself.

But it is to those of you who thought I couldn’t do it;
It is you I thank the most,
Because without you I wouldn’t have tried.

Thank you Jesse Owens for such a nice poem!

Travails of the morning traveller

I want to write today about the travails of a morning traveller, the traveler being none other than yours truly. Scared at the state of being idle at home, I have forced myself to take up an internship at a personalized gifting company called Carpe Diem (www.carpe-diem.co.in) and I must say that I am learning quite a bit and enjoying this stint, at least till now. More details on that possibly in another entry.

Today's entry is devoted to how I get to my office at Gandhi Nagar, Adyar from the Race course. I did attempt once this extremely brave act of commuting in a 2 wheeler to office quickly realizing that at the end of the day, the freedom that accompanied it was not worth it. I soon admitted to myself that this is a mission towards instant unwilling suicide and quickly gave up. From that day on, my mornings have started with hassling with the Chennai autowallahs.

Negotiations classes by Prof Rangamannar Veeravalli intuitively make me apply ZOPA , BATNA etc to even the meanest of transactions, but the auto rickshaw drivers are far indisposed and unsusceptible to these tactics. So much so that today morning an Auto wallah demanded Rs.150 for this distance which entails a nominal Rs. 50 and I ended up asking him if he knew where Adyar is.

I finally managed to get an auto for Rs.60 as time was flying away and I had to be in office by around 10 am. In the sweltering summer heat, we finally manage to get our way going around the Saidapet round about, thanks to which the traffic does move.

This whole journey for the driver is a battle of wits, an attempt at outsmarting other fellows on the road, diagonally moving from one end of the road to another to make use of an available one inch of space. This is equivalent to a mathematical puzzle, except that you don't know where you are heading next. Discipline and courtesy are words that lose meaning and this is a game of accepted murder and I sometimes literally close my eyes and pray that I reach safely.
So much for me learning to drive in a Metro! I have to give my idea of taking up lessons a serious second thought.

Added to this is the amazing self belief that everyone here carries that honking is going to lead them straight to heaven. It irritates the hell out of anyone traveling in an open vehicle like this poor auto of mine and disorients the drivers, sometimes in to the danger of losing focus.
We are on the left side of the road when we reach the Madhya Kailash signal and I see a 2 wheeler tagging along our auto fully knowing that he was going to take a right turn to get in to the Rajiv Gandhi IT corridor. I sit amazed at the amount of planning that has gone in to constructing a multiple lane highway when the source of input to it is a bottleneck where vehicles have to wait for half an hour before entering it.

From that signal onwards my auto driver got cracking and gave me lessons on tube less tires, their technology, costing, which type of vehicles have those tires, how they fill hydrogen and then spanning on to lessons in inflatable air bags which cost 1 lakh etc...... I am learning lessons everywhere these days !

Marriage

Recently, I came across these lines about Marriage by the Great Khalil Gibran, which I thought would be nice to share: so here goes...

You were born together, and together you shall be forevermore.

You shall be together when the white wings of death scatter your days.

Aye, you shall be together even in the silent memory of God.

But let there be spaces in your togetherness, And let the winds of the heavens dance between you.

Love one another, but make not a bond of love. Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.

Fill each other's cup but drink not from one cup.

Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf.

Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each of you be alone, Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music.

Give your hearts, but not into each other's keeping.

For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts.

And stand together, yet not too near together.

For the pillars of the temple stand apart, And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other's shadow.

Vinnai thaandi varathe !

How could music be so shallow? Being a part of an one year MBA program, I am not that up to date with the genre and class of tamil film music releases these days. Should I call it unfortunate that I stumbled upon two songs - 'Omana Penne' and 'Hosanna' - Vinnai thaandi varuvaaya in Youtube? Terribly dissapointed is the least I could say. There was a semblance of music, no strong tune or feeling in both these songs. As is the characteristic of AR songs, both of them sounded the same to me. Even if you put forth the argument that it is usual practice to listen to AR songs multiple times before you really like them, both were beyond this line.

In contrast, I had listened to the Sikkil Gurucharan rendition of Swathi Thirunaal's ' Omana Thingal" few weeks back and what music that was ! It was a fusion of piano and vocal and nevertheless can be classified in to mordern genre, but it was way beyond the mindless music that I heard today.

Over the ages, the only thing that we have achieved with big strides in technology and the vast literature that has been left to us is to dilute the greatness of popular music. Kudos !

Every time I step in to this temple, I am awed by its splendor and grandeur and I am silenced by the God who lives inside in the form of a huge Linga. I am talking about the Thanjavur Periya kovil ( Tanjore Big temple for the benefit of outsiders) which is around an hour's travel from my hometown, Trichy. I had already planned my visit this weekend and my dad and I set out on such a beautiful Saturday which made Tanjore feel like Ooty. Such a huge temple could belittle the huge ego of man and it is the tiny man who has built a temple of this size. This is a must visit to anybody who visits the southern part of Tamilnadu. Pictures (by my phone camera & hence poor quality) do not convey the beauty of what I am describing. King Raja Raja chola built the "Bhrihadeeswarar Temple" probably in 1100 . As my dad and I went around we imagined how this temple would have acted as a place for social gathering, how it was used to foster and grow arts, how it would have been used as a place for refuge during the time of wars.Even though there were inscriptions written in my mother tongue Tamil on the walls of temple, very least of it made sense to me. That’s the variety of Tamil, one in old written form, one in new written form and another in spoken form. This temple is rumored to have had endowments in the form of huge hectares of land in Burma, Srilanka etc (Info courtesy: My dad). It is also a practice of performing an “abhishegam” with chillies to ‘Nandi” for good rains every year. Please make an effort to visit this, even if you are an atheist, at least to experience the joy of seeing such an architectural wonder.