Random rambling.....competition

It’s a competitive world with competition everywhere. There is competition for a hospital bed to deliver a baby, competition to get into school, competition to go to college, competition in markets, competition in getting a funeral pyre too!

In this competitive world driven by capitalism and a zest for continuously redrawing boundaries, the lesson of the tortoise is no longer heeded. The world is much more impatient today and everything is fast – communication, food etc.

They say humans perform better under the stress of competition. Economists have dedicated their lives proving this – must be true. Well, competition and a constant awareness of others being better than you does definitely induce self doubt; especially in a country like India where the ‘others’ are in such preposterous numbers.

Well, with more competition, it seems people are getting more and more ruthless, more driven, but also maybe more and more insecure. Maybe, people and nations alike are more aware of their own inabilities today than in any generation before us. With opened up economies and borders never as liquid as before maybe competition has forced us to be a generation which is more susceptible, self doubting and sceptical than any before.

Even though we have are a high-tech race with one leap in technology after another taking place in crazily quick time, maybe competition is one thing which is still keeping us human. Otherwise, with all this technology and facebook enabling us to have 300 people for company at all times wouldn’t we just be robots? Self doubt keeps one in touch with oneself and the more the competition the more the doubt and the more the humans! :)

Saying goodbye.....Rahul Dravid

They say change is good. They also say that change is the only thing that is constant in life. Who are they?

For me, as for most people I believe that change is uncomfortable, awkward, painful. But, things change. People in companies, teams, in life itself are replaced and indeed life goes on. Well, people themselves change.

But, then these once in a generation people come along and touch the lives of millions by what they were put on this planet to do; A Muhammad Ali, A Sachin Tendulkar, A Leonardo Da Vinci. Their names are etched forever in history and everyone else after them, however good they might be shall be allowed to own a little lesser piece of history than the immortals.

Well, such thoughts triggered by what? By Mr. Rahul Dravid, the wall of Indian Cricket for the past fifteen years. Even though his rude exit from the shorter format a few years back was beginning to feel like a goodbye, there was hope that you might indeed get the chance to say another goodbye; a proper goodbye; a goodbye that he deserved.

Well, most unexpectedly that has happened. Against all odds, an old, wrinkled, slow man from Bangalore was called upon to carry out that emergency surgical procedure the Indian batting line up needed, a procedure he carried out so wonderfully in the debacle before.

But, the final goodbye is the toughest one to say; that realization that this is it, the end of the hope you so desperately held on to. But, the old is replaced with the new; rule of life. But, the only consolation could be that the last hurrah leaves a memory of a lifetime.

Rain permitting, come on Rahul Dravid, show the general masses why they should have respected you more after you gave them 10,000 plus runs in both formats, a feat established by few before and in all likelihood very few long after you're gone. Give me and millions others that consolation that will make the goodbye just a bit more easier........

That face in the crowd

Two eyes, a nose, a set of ears -- the usual furniture. It is often difficult to have a moment of isolation in this cramped, crazy world of ours; always surrounded, always hounded, always competing; competing with those faces around you. Those faces you see on the train, on the bike next to you at the traffic light; faces as sad, happy, loved as yours is from time to time.

There is a face you relate to on a particular day; the same face you might have ignored earlier. Every face tells you a story, a perception you build around that unique piece of furniture fitted on the same frame all humanity shares. But, doesn't every face has a perception behind it; some perceptions we build, most we ignore. We just don't have the time.

Well, the ones that do have the time become the writers, the directors, the creative nutty guys. Whatever the disclaimer at the start of a movie or a novel tells you, events in the story are definitely out of some real life story or perception.

Why don't we have the time to relate to that face who might just be a mirror to your own consciousness, your own frailties, your own wrongs, your own rights? Isn't society built on connection? Or have we left that to a phenomenon called the internet where a billion robots on a trillion keys in some digital form or another hammer out matter that is always there?

Well, maybe I am just an analogue, old fashioned guy in this digital world!