Category: Thoughts uncut

Let’s Talk About the Starving Kids

When I was still young, I hated my vegetables. I’d eat my treats and leave the rest for the trash. Beans involved too much effort to pop into my mouth and cabbage was too rubbery to chew. My mother wouldn’t notice the oddity, though, and neither did my father. They just told me I complained too much and it was wrong not to eat the gnarled vegetables.
I was avoiding the minerals and nutrients that cookies lacked, my mother said. And no matter how much I argued that mashed potatoes were good enough for me, my parents never considered me serious.

But they did more than doubt me. They gave me a reason to finish my whole meal, unattractive though it was. I’m lucky, they said, to have a plate groaning with spinach while poor kids halfway across the world didn’t get a proper meal a day. A double-hazelnut and chocolate chip cookie is a luxury they can’t afford. And therefore it only made sense that I ate all the vitamin-rich foods I got.

How that helps starving kids remains a mystery, but I was much too young to think about the nuances of logic.

It messed with my head, though. It didn’t matter that I didn’t understand poverty and global hunger. I was eight and my mother said, “Don’t waste food, there are plenty of people starving.” And being eight and eager to remain the apple of my mother’s eye, I ate the final slice of apple even when I didn’t want it.

I was dining with my friends last night and knew I had eaten enough. But there was some pasta left over, so I grabbed a fork. I can’t help it that I can’t waste food. Because even though I’m twenty-two, I don’t feel satiated until I’d wiped my plate clean.

While at another table sat a kid with tears in her eyes. Her mother coaxed her to finish her meal. And the father threw a stern look at his daughter. “You should be thankful you have food on your plate.” He growled cutting through his wife’s gentle reproaches. “Now eat!” And she eats.

As I sat there, I saw a girl who had already eaten her share, eat the rest too. Just because somewhere someone doesn’t have enough to eat, another young girl gave into the pressure without even realising it could make her sick.

Corporate Learning

Hello, boss? I was wondering… do you have a minute, please?

Oh, I could pick your brain anytime? That’s wonderful. Thanks. Um, it’s just that I saw your email, and I didn’t understand something in it. Something about KT?

Er…no, boss. I’ve haven’t heard of that acronym in college. Not in my internships either. I’m sorry I didn’t know it was that important.

Yes, you’re right. I should’ve learnt it in college. That’s why I spent my college life stuck with teachers who wouldn’t even help me work out a project — to learn terms I could use at work four years later.

Yes, my teachers should’ve taught me what KT is. Oh, yes you’re right. It’s my fault that I didn’t care to ask.

I should’ve been more aggressive, yes. And progressive, yes. I’m sorry I’m a loser. I didn’t expect to deal with industry terms three days into my first job. And yes, a good mentor shouldn’t spoon feed me. They should let me learn stuff on my own. My bad. I should know what KT is. Thanks for helping me see that.

Yes, I will Google it. Thanks, boss. You’re the best advisor.

Kinesiology Tape… Kate Bush… Kensington Temple… This can’t be right.

Uh er, Jennifer? Can you help me? My boss sent me an email with a phrase: KT. You know what that means? Oh, I’m sorry, I had forgotten you’re new here too. Have you ever heard of this KT though before? No? Well, that’s ok. Thanks anyway.

Hello again, boss. I tried googling, like you suggested, but couldn’t find anything that seemed to fit.

Yes, yes, I’m a dumbass. I’m stupid because I can’t find something on the web, something I should’ve known coming right from college into corporate. I wonder, could you help me this once and tell me what it is? I swear I won’t come to you for help again.

Wait, what? You’re cancelling our session? We had a session? Our KT session? But I’m trying to figure out what that means!

Oh.

Yes, boss. Now that you mention it, it’s obvious. You’re right, it’s even on Wikipedia — at the bottom, though.

I am stupid not to know Knowledge Transfer. Thanks for teaching me that, boss.

Brunch and the Buck

Black Buck
No. Not this one.

It was Sunday and I was brunching with a few foreigner friends. And with us were an Indian couple who loved talking about their exotic trips to various parts of the world.

Everything was fine. Sushi is deceptive, I learnt. They packed my unsuspecting mouth with so much of rice and flavour that three rolls stuffed me. Though it could’ve been because I had also eaten some risotto, bread and brie, and noodles, washing it all down with a tall glass of Mocktail.

By the time the storytellers began their cruise somewhere in central Europe, I had almost dozed off. But it was a party, and I had to play my part. I smiled and nodded as if it was the most interesting thing I had ever heard. It was, too, to an extent. I even felt a tinge of jealousy that they could lounge in a jacuzzi for thirty minutes while on a ship that in itself was a large jacuzzi.

And then the man of the couple began narrating the incredible story of his iPhone meeting water. Since they were in the middle of the sea, mobile network was out of the picture. Great. But he had taken his phone over to a water tub — a jacuzzi if you prefer the fancy term — to take pictures. Pictures of what, he didn’t say, and I didn’t know him well enough to ask. Anyway, he had become engrossed in the water to remember the phone in his pocket.

To summarise, he had spent a fortune on the cruise and had gone into the jacuzzi with his phone still in his pants. Awesome. Thirty minutes he relaxed before kicking himself for losing his iPhone to the perilous chemicals of h2o.

Social convention seemed to dictate we laugh at this point. So we did.

He went on. His heart had broken and his phone’s soul had shattered, but he had given it a royal goodbye. At this point, I didn’t know whether I should laugh or put on a sad face. I decided to plaster a smile, showing I was politely interested. Not too much, not too little I thought to myself.

While I had been busy thinking, he had been talking. When I turned my attention to him again, he began telling us tough it was to replace the phone he had just finished mourning. It’s hard, I heard, to get an iPhone replaced. They ask a lot of questions. And a lot of money. Not too surprising, since we were talking Apple and a drenched iPhone that they never claimed was water-proof. “It cost me a bloody 20,000 bucks!”

Hold it right there, buddy.

I was wide awake now. “20,000 bucks”?

A lot of Indians used “Rupee” and “buck” to mean the same thing, but our North American friends — from the looks on the faces — didn’t. The storyteller seemed too invested in his story to notice, but for a moment, there was silence. And “buck” was the culprit.

Plenty of my close colleagues say “buck” when they mean “Rupee” and it always left me with a knot in my stomach. I’d ache to give them a stern look over my glasses and correct their distinct sense of senselessness. They are two different things; a buck in America is 65 rupees in India, which is the approximate cost of a cup of coffee in a semi-fancy restaurant.

Twenty thousand Indian rupees is about $300. And I could imagine our company’s horror when they heard a figure that meant $20,000 to them. Sure, they were all too nice to blurt it out to my Indian friend, but he did sound silly.

We might spend weekends watching Hollywood movies or pretend to read modern American literature, or even chat on Tinder with people from the other side of the world. But some things don’t change. The “Rupee” couldn’t ever become the “buck.” And I wish my iPhone-losing friend hadn’t interwoven our economies like that, given how unstable they are. (But that’s for another time.)

I’m No Goldfish

Yesterday, I read an article about goldfish. The author claimed that the human attention span has equalled a goldfish’s.

goldfish3

So now my attention span is just about 9 seconds. That’s one piece of trivia I can relate to. I forget to finish a lot of my tasks, and I don’t read past the headlines in most of the pieces I see online. And thanks to Buzzfeed’s listicle culture, most articles nowadays follow the same format. So I don’t need to read past the heading of each paragraph. As someone who writes for a living, I can sympathize with the writer’s hard work, but I still I don’t read that huge chunk of content myself.

It’s obvious. People take articles for granted now. No one expects a random online surfer to read through an entire piece about how the economic bubble is bubbling. And so, most writers, too, focus only on the headlines and a paragraph or two in between. (Just in case.)

And the article I read yesterday also said people don’t read longer posts because they’re mobile most of the time, looking for instant answers. And the author also says we jump from one tab to another.

Sure, I do that. If I can’t find what I’m looking for in a website, I close the tab and move on. Any writer beating about the bush would drive readers away. After all, there are plenty of sites out there littered with information.

Why do we do that, though? I wouldn’t go to another site if I get what I want from the site I’m looking at. That’s more of a case of what’s in the article than a case of my attention span.

So I disagree with the author. Our attention span isn’t that limited. Plenty of people read a thousand-word article and still stay on in the same page. I’ve done it and I can attest that even impatient readers will sit through an article if it’s gripping enough.

Attention span and content are two different things. If I’m boring, I’ve lost my reader. If my title doesn’t resonate with the reader, they won’t read more. If my writing is too convoluted, I’ve lost my reader. If I make the reader refer a dictionary for every second word, I should know they’re not coming back.

goldfish2

It’s got nothing to do with the goldfish and its attention span. I don’t often credit people enough, but humans are cleverer than fish. We have the capacity to assess before we process, and process before we prosecute. Goldfish can’t do that.

The Twentieth Century

Here in India, we love the West. And by West, I mean the Western culture — or what we think we know about it. As technology crossed the seas and landed the television in an otherwise untelevised society, we became adept at making Friends our weeknight companions. We went from staring at stars in the sky to staring at stars on the screen.

While we indulged in “Seinfeld” and “The 70s Show,” and laughed at Homer’s jokes, the British came over telling us to “Mind Your Language.”

And we thought that was funny. Every time a funny episode aired, we’d huddle around and gape at white women sporting little black dresses and short shiny skirts. And as time went by, it didn’t feel awkward anymore. The white men in the sitcoms didn’t think it weird, so perhaps it isn’t.

Our women tried fancy clothes and our men tried perfumed sprays. Oiled hair became gelled hair, and the once turmeric-clad skin now looked “up to ten years younger.”
Thirteen-year-old girls went to school instead of their mother-in-law’s house. They learned to do their homework rather than their home work.

India — or a part — of it, saw a whole new world blooming under the influence of the West. There was a time when we got goosebumps as the hero and heroine made eye contact, but now, not even public display of affection (or PDA!) makes us flinch.

And we have fewer 19-year-old mothers cradling 2-year-old children. The system of the woman in the kitchen and the man on the porch reading a newspaper made less sense to a breed of youngsters born in a new era.

We’re now in a world of promise and freedom of thought. From being a suppressed generation of youth, we’ve embraced the wisdom that came with booze and books. We learned, and we craved for more. We adopted new ways and gave way to newfangled emotions.

We fell in love with the modernity that the West showed us. And we shunned the peculiarity that home instilled in us.

From being a society that had its eyes cast down, we began looking up at others. We started talking to the others, dating, falling in love, and did everything else we hadn’t heard of before. Arranged marriages are no longer the norm. We’ve dabbled in life and experienced things we’ve seen only in sitcoms before, like nuclear families, sex before marriage, pregnancy before you’re ready, miscarriage, abortion, divorce, and — distortion of reality.

We thought we had become forward. We thought we had it all figured out. We thought we’d become trendy folks, that we’re revolutionary, that we’d gained the right to free speech and opinionated blog posts.

We love the West because we think it changed our thinking.

It didn’t. The West changed our thinking about thinking. We think we’re more open-minded and free . We live in fallacy. Because, every day, at least one person undergoes harassment and abuse because of our “modern thinking.”

It’s not the fancy skirt, and it’s not the drinking. It’s the thinking.

We’ve adopted many important practices from the West, but we missed the vital ones. Sex is fine but talking about it isn’t. We don’t have sex education in school but encourage aborting unwanted pregnancies. We say love is universal but *gulp* men holding hands? We talk about the wage gap in careers and ignore the chore gap at home. We think like the West, and we stop at thinking. Thinking is no good unless we do something.

It’s the twenty-first century. But for most of India, it’s still the twentieth. We’ve moved on from vintage to montage, but most people live under taboos and traditions. We’re nowhere close to the West of twenty years ago. We are not modern. We just live in a fake version of reality that we created to feel good about ourselves.

Even though we haven’t moved on since Friends, the world has. Sure, technology will bring us closer to the West, but we need more than ideal ideas and tall talks.

Otherwise, we’re just a powerful society clueless about the power they hold.