Year end notes

A difficult year with a long sought after career switch to creative space.

They say, creativity flourishes with poverty. I have effectively become poor, but creativity is yet to bloom.

The bright spot of the year was meeting my friend Sree Kumar from school after nearly two decades.

Cannot help being grateful to have come across:

Kim Klassen of www.shuttersisters.com

Jerry Jones of www.shadowhousecreations.blogspot.com

&

Don Talwar of www.seocontentlab.com

Thank you for taking me to a different level of mind space.

Brave heart

NH 47 passes by our small town. Before the liberalization of our economy ours was a small town, most of us crossed this highway over to go to the other side without much trouble. But as our country has grown leap and bounds, our little town too has become crowded and the highway busy. Only we the locals did not realize it, trying to cross the road in carefree abandon till avoidable accidents made us sit up and take notice.

So whenever one of us get run down by the bus or the speeding cars and trucks, Ali Ikka, who runs a tea stall close to the bus stop, is the first to run to the rescue of the unfortunate. The latest was a few weeks ago, he really had a tough time picking up the severed limps of our neighbors. I might have presented this without much emotion, these accidents have become many and we have did nothing to avoid it and I am very much disappointed about it, but for Ali Ikka, I honestly hope the Muncipal authorities would award him for his heart.

Christmas

yet another year, of joy and togetherness,
of home coming and friendship,
the day has just went by,
but am still holding on to,
the spirit of christmas.

Nurses RIP

The two young nurses from Kerala, lost their lives, while saving their patients at the ICU of the hospital which caught fire, in Calcutta. When so much of not so good news were in circulation about the nurses from Kerala, your commitment to your job and the way you gave up your lives saving the ones under your care is an inspiration and highly praiseworthy.

The Kerala government gave them a burial complete with full state honors, rightly due to the worthy daughters.

I just hope and pray nursing will soon become in India a highly paid profession just like the IT jobs and these girls will get the respect and recognition they deserve.

Sachin Tendulkar

Does it matter if Sachin Tendulkar scores "100" or not?

Not the least.

For me, Sachin Tendulkar is much more than the 1oo, the whole of India is supposedly waiting for. He is the true breed of Indians who took their craft to the best of the world and proved, he indeed is the best.

He belong to a generation of Indians, the confidence on whom, prompted the elders to liberate our economy. Though difficult at first, for the home grown Indians to cope with the world standards this change challenged the young of India with, the good among us did well in computers, accounting, Engineering, advertising and such. All of it is history as we all know.

The Australians were perhaps the best of the cricket ever had. They had all the best of the cricketing system, which spotted the young talents, provided them with sponsorhip and world class training facilities, exposed them through well organised local tournaments and moulded them to super competitive international cricketiers who could beat any team any where.

But in India we had nothing of that scale. That's why I love Sachin Tendulkar, he loved his craft, thanked god for giving him the gift and stayed true to his talents till the end working hard and training well to develop his skills, while being grateful to God always for the blessing.

Man, that's the true spirit of India.

Sachin Tendulkar, you will be our hero, whether you make that "100" or not. You will own our hearts till the day we die.

Rest

Mathew 11:29Take my yoke upon you and learn from me for I am gentle and humble of heart; and you will find rest.

How does it feel to be old and abandoned?

Well, nothing much as long as we can earn our own bread. But what about the anxiety about tomorrow, whether one will have the health to take care of ones self?

Children are a blessing in old age. But with micro families these days, will we be hoping too much if we expect one of our children to stay back with us in these days.

Does having many children help in the old age, at least one of the children..

PS: The logo on the tuition class board actually belong to Robe di Kappa, the Italian designer brand. Symbolises the completion of man and woman in supporting each other. Sad to see the man in the photograph sitting alone and lost in thought, taken at Madras last month.

A day

...in building India.

Nurses

We often hear about nurses from Kerala being ill treated up at North India where they go for work. I've a great respect for that profession and for the boys and girls who take up that Angels profession as career from Kerala and elsewhere. Those of us who were born and brought up in Kerala and had gone "out" to work, might have come across this situation at some point or the other and we understand how miserable it feels to be made felt substandard. True, we do have a language problem with Hindi, as we have to pick these language from the scratch, and it take us a while to cope with the native speakers. That catching up time is often the Waterloo for most of us with insults hurled at us mercilessly everyday, especially when we are at a job where we have to meet a lot of people.

Perhaps, we can think of forming self-help groups with volunteers from different walks of life, assisting with some kind of language workshops to help those who need it. Various religious and social organization can make a very good platform for this.

Its awful to think of the state of mind of a superior who will tear off a uniform of an employee just to make a point like it happened in a famous hospital at Delhi. It will be easy to term such as racism, but we know better no matter where we are in India, if our skills are good enough, a Malayalee is a very well sought after resource. We all have a lot of experience to share in our "working away" life where we were appreciated and cherished for our attitude to work and sincerity to the employer.

My sympathies are with those unfortunate young nurses (both reported and unreported) who has to go through these severe emotional experience at work, please know, we are proud of your ambition and will to go far out to support your career and families, let us not be disheartened by these little things, let us always remember what we came out for and work hard for it, we know in our heart when we make our "grades" we will be more bright than anybody else or as bright as the best in our country.

My Country

Anna Hazare and his movement gave us hope, that there will be leaders who think above their political party belief, think in the way of our country like Gandhi and the other respected freedom fighters did.

So, when Sonu Gujjar and Shiv Kumar lead the protest at Maruti Suzuki's Maneswar plant when the company denied the formation of an independent Labor Union, we thought "aha! here is something, that could bring a change and a fresh wave of leadership - free from dynasty and political DNA's." But our hopes were gone with the wind, when the newspapers reported these "Knights of miserables" took nearly 40 lakh each and resigned from their jobs abandoning their colleagues and fellow protestors and the movement with its objectives.

Ofcourse there will be a story behind it. Someday it will all come out.

Meanwhile, let us continue to hope and wait for the days, when our leaders will start talking about, pension for all the working citizens - no matter they work for the government or not - health cover for all the citizens and respect for all individuals no matter what kind of work they do and how much they earn or what kind of house they live.

PS: The picture is that of some workers, cleaning themselves on the Trichur Railway Station platform after unloading cement from a wagon.

Events

The community events that keep the society together, poised on a common cause - generally with a positive lesson- Onam for us is such an event, a festival which celebrates the harvest and goodness of man.
Even in our small canal, the boat race has become a hit. Earlier, when Champakara boat race started years ago we had the big "Nehru Trophy" Boat race going in Vembanad Lake at Kochi. We never gave a second thought to this third league race, but things changed with the discontinuation of Nehru Trophy and the growth of Kochi as a metro. Even the minor leagues like this provides an opportunity for community entertainment and gatherings during the monsoon festival season.
The rains have been good this year, the harvest not "bad". For the workers who have come here from the North and North eastern States, our boat race was an astonishing experience.

Boat clubs are coming up in good numbers and are very serious in their practice, hopefully in the coming years, these events could be a national event.

My Country

The dare to dream..

Englad Tour

When West Indies were super power, we had tasted defeat like the one India has during the on-going England Tour. We are beaten and beaten badly in all the aspect of the game. Nasser Hussein the cricketer turned commentator and columnist has even gone to the extent of comparing some of our fielders to donkeys. Before taking that as an insult I was wondering, was our team that bad on the field?

Is it possible for bowlers like Ishant Sharma and Sreesanth to ever feel like India's top bowlers again, when they were hit around like practice bowlers while the British bowlers drew blood of Indian batsmen. Can they ever feel like men in-front of Zaheer Khan whose unfortunate injury took him out of the team and eventually made Indian attack look like some kid pack on the beach playing soft ball.

Even with all these, most of us back our team whole heartedly, yes they have been defeated, yes they have played badly, but its the same team who lifted our joy and spirit with their world conquering feats earlier. We should also not forget the fact that, we had a recent change of the Coach and the manager, Mr. Fletcher, what was his contribution to this mess? It seems, he has taken the team to an unbelievable low, far from anywhere near maintaining our level for which he was hired.

Yes, England will be touring India soon, hopefully let us see how their strategy of aiming at a batsman's rib cage and call it the spirit of the game work on our pitches.

I am sure the Indian team and cricket loving Indians will not forget the "Donkey" remark.

Passion

On request, took this picture of the handlebar which was welded in the middle and grinded to perfection. Amazing how driven are some in their passion.

Reclaiming coolness.

It is indeed a blessing, to have a mind which is a light to our feet. But we humans have to undergo the battle of everyday, where our emotions can be elevated or crushed.

What can save our mind from being really affected by such things for a long period there by coloring all our other priorities.

How can our mind recoup faster..:):):) Eventually that determines the success of our life. Reclaiming coolness.

For a change, I enjoyed the famous Burka Dutta (of 24x7) struggling with her questions when a far more learned mind of Kabil Sybil withered the storm of her probing questions on Lokpal Bill and Baba Ramdev. Burka Dutta is my favorite TV anchors who delights me with her sharpness and the trouble she put to learn the issue at hand. An inspiration, so was the IITian Kabil Sybil.

Turnaround

Perhaps the most effective means of measuring a country's economic development is checking out developments in the rural and semi urban areas. We all know, India is growing economically @9% consistently. Development of infrastructures like Highways connecting the nation politically and commercially is one example of India on the move. Here is a portrait of a Porotta Maker at Aroor, Cochin, who has found his bread in one of those successful make shift eateries that has sprang up along the high ways. He makes a decent living.

Yes, India is changing, obviously little slow to kick off the ball of growth compared to China, but we have started rolling and rolling well.

Logos Hope 2011

Logos Hope, the floating library, called on our Cochin port in May for twenty days, opening its library doors to everyone. A lot of social events were organized where crew members interacted with the locals, on board and on shore.

They say the ship could hold nearly 1000 guest at any time with additional 700 in Logos Lounge and theater put together. The ship can accommodate 500 crew members and guests in its 200 cabins.
The crew was friendly, of course, but I seriously doubt whether they had handled as big crowd as they had to in Cochin.
For the crew members and the crowd it was one wonderful experience. We got an opportunity to see people from different countries, Europe, America, South East Asia, Africa..For a local Cochin man it was a wonderful exposure!!
They were assisted by the local protestant churches in on shore arrangement. They did a beautiful job.
CISF officers did the security and they were cordial as ever. The only issue, I had was, they did not let me take the camera on-board, which unfortunately made me loose my chance of actually going inside. I did not had a place to keep the camera and the parking area was a few miles away.
The last Saturday before the departure, the crowd huge and the que was long. But the folks were well behaved and decent.
The local stalls had a good day of business, in fact twenty days of business. :):)

ICC WORLD CUP 2011

Back in 1983 I was in School at NSS, Tripunithura, when India won the world cup. We had to wait till the Sunday Newspaper arrived to know the result. The game was not that popular and TV was still a luxury. Then too, the final was on a Saturday. I still remember the sweet feeling of victory over the mighty West Indies. "Kapil's Devils" was truly awesome in bundling up the kings of the world cricket, especially when they were trying to retain the world cup for a third time. Roger Binny with his banana swings became the highest wicket taker and Krishnamachari Srikanth with his fearless innings in the final became our heroes, ofcourse Kapil Dev and Mohinder Amarnath was our pride when they came action framed in the pages of "Sportstar".

No matter how fiercely loyal we were to our team, we knew in our heart, we won 'cos we were lucky. But in 2011 after 28 years we won the World cup again, this time on the merit of our game. Mahendra Singh Dhoni, the Indian captain became the new hero, the man. Ofcourse, we cannot forget Sachin Tendulkar, the True Indian, who has given everything for Indian cricket, a joy for millions of us who have nothing else to feel happy about, except his batting. He help us in forgetting the worries of our life, with his strokes, his game.

Every body is talking about the BCCI, the selectors, for their vision, how they put the resource to build team India, the facilities and the way they built up national cricket feeling; Gary Kirsten, the exemplary coach and the support staff who made team India strong enough for the grind of a World Cup. But we should not forget Greg Chappel, the Australian who turned the wind for us by adding "dare" to our fresh young blood.

Like the commentators opined the Australian era of cricket dominance is over. What a dominance it was. No cricket lover can ever forget how well they played their game for over two decades, especially in the last decade after the West Indies ran dry on their talents. Three time world champions in a row, Australia the team that showed how to play cricket any where and win, I am lucky to live in that era and watched the way the likes of Ricky Ponting, Adam Gilchrist, Mathew Hayden, Glen Mcgrath, Shane Warn mastered the game.

Now, we all have this beautiful feeling, India has arrived, our time has come. I kinda believe, we will defend our World Champion title successfully, next year.

Summer thoughts

My friend KT was relieved when he made "big" money when Sensex shot up 468 points on 25.03'.11. He was not particularly happy though after riding the high wave before the closing of the derivative contract period which is on March 31st. He had been nearly wiped out in the pre-budget mad flush.

Warren Buffet of the Berkshire Hathway is visiting India to the joy of Indian business channels who are airing exclusive without trying too hard to cover up their joy for having him on their program. He came along with Bill and Melinda Gates, the multi-billionaires who are using the rest of their life after retirement for the improvement of the world which need such benefactors badly. Some section of the media, just like our society, gossiped that philanthropy for this millionaires is a way to get into a certain other industrial segment say like Agriculture with GM seeds (which produce more crops) and Education. They had in mind the $23 million investment Bill & Melinda Gates foundation made in the Agriculture company Mosanto who are on a path breaking trail to make seeds which has unimaginably high productivity.

What ever it is I do believe these mega humans have mega minds and I am glad some ordinary folks around the world are going to have an improved way of life some way or the other.

To us third worlders who have the habit of following the developed world even to the way we comb our hair, I am sure a lot of "Mega" Indians will follow this noble act resulting in some miserable souls somewhere in India getting a better chance in life.