Should you really cover up?

I have long been wanting to write about this monster called ego, that stands between human growth and stagnation. I partly touched upon this in my "change" post, but wanted to unwrap it in a harsher way.

Facebook fell prey to hackers recently, and claimed that it was a browser issue. I do not deny the genuineness of the claim, but I was very surprised to see stereotypical messages posted by my friends working in Facebook - "There have been inaccurate reports of Facebook accounts being hacked. This is not true, and no accounts have been compromised." And this was at a time when there were a dozen newspapers reporting about many thousands of Facebook accounts being hacked worldwide.

There was a post I wrote a couple of years back, when Mr. Chidambaram, as Home Minister claimed that India is a completely safe country, safer than many other countries of the world. And this was at a time when India was bombarded with bomb attacks every two weeks. How does being safer than many countries qualify India to be a safe country?

I don't deny that a company or a country should talk responsibly, but is this just responsibility? Yes, we are used to hearing the CEO say "We are looking forward to the strongest results in our history", just a week before the company would fall overnight. Yes, we are used to hearing the Central Bank say "Our economics are fundamentally strong and rationally sound", just a day before the stock market would witness its sharpest fall. But the letdown is, we are so used to these cover-ups that we've internalized this vice within ourselves too. Let us take this head to head.

There was an article recently that slammed the idea of giving Bharat Ratna to Sachin Tendulkar. The rationale was that any country's highest award is supposed to be given to someone who has made a difference to the lives of people. I do not want to talk here about the article itself, but about a comment that disagreed with the author, noting that India is a young nation and that we need to pat ourselves even for small achievements. I didn't quite understand the logic here because, I thought we were one of the oldest nations, claiming to have built marvelous cities when the rest of the world didn't know what civilization was.

Why talk about unrelated people? Try criticizing a good friend of yours, you will know. And when you lie down on bed that night after being surprised by the way your friend reacted, just introspect and find out how you had behaved all your life for any criticism you had faced.

Is this just normal human behaviour? Or is this self-righteousness? Or is this pride? Or is this ego? If even after tens of thousands of years of existence, mankind has not got egos out of their way, I'm afraid this can be called normal. If we can't even conquer ourselves, what are we trying to prove with our existence? If shame is the first step towards accomplishment, it's high time we took shame on ourselves and started accomplishing.

Let us stop covering up, let us start uncovering the beauties that exist within this wonderful creation called mankind!

May have been for business, but a trip nevertheless

It was a business trip to meet industrial customers of Western India. Cement, Textiles, Chemicals, Fertilizers, Pharma, Rubber, Power, Metals - you name and I can now smell them all even from a distance.

I flew down to Jaipur and the trip started from there. Joining different team members on the way, I had to cover ten cities in two weeks, so I didn't stay in one city for more than a day. Except for a couple of train journeys, I mostly took the road, travelling through some of the most rustic parts of rural India.

It was of course a huge learning opportunity for me to understand the business, interacting directly with customers. But this post is not about that. I seem to have discovered the child back in me during this trip and this post is about that. I may not do anything about it for some more time, because I still haven't solved the riddle of how or why I should retain things in me that I feel are not of any use to this world, but at least I was happy that the child in me was still alive.

Almost all of these factories had huge lawns covering a wide landscape, and I felt like playing in those lawns; I don't remember when I last felt that. We visited Nirma factory, and I wanted to sing the Nirma song, but you know, I was on a business trip. We visited Chittorgarh, and I wanted to visit the fort, but no one seemed to be interested. There were these cooling towers in the plants that had water dripping down like a waterfall, but no one was playing even in those. Oh yes, this was a business visit, I was not supposed to play in those either.

Ah, am I talking about being a child and such things too often now? Am I beginning to lose track? Am I starting to feel individual happiness is the way to collective harmony? Come on, it can't be.

Ok, we will leave that for now. The most wonderful part of this trip was interacting with the rural people of Rajasthan. So naive, so unsophisticated. We stopped at many roadside shops and had authentic Rajasthani food. I may have liked the food even better if I was not running temperature, but I surely enjoyed the food getting served by them. Wish I could just become one of them! But wait, I still haven't figured out how to be useful to this world by being one of them.

May have been for business, but this was a great trip nevertheless!