I am sitting on board a flight from Bangalore to Delhi. The passengers are still trickling in and rushing to occupy whatever little overhead baggage space that is still available. The air hostesses are wearing devilish red and the air conditioning seems to be working overtime. I raise my hand upwards and turn a knob to switch off the cold air hitting me from the top. I am sitting at the emergency exit, a place I usually try to seek since it has the maximum leg space (perhaps more than the business class too).

I sit back, take a deep breath to prepare for a long tiring journey (2.5 hours to be precise) and buckle-in the seat belt mechanism with a satisfactory click sound. A tall well built man comes down the aisle and takes up the window seat. He looks at me, smiles and says with a loud voice, “How are you doing?”

“Pretty good”, I reply and continue burying my face in the day’s edition of the Times of India. The river Kosi has spread havoc. But this news is not the main news, a status accorded to the political turmoil of a neighbouring country.

“Is that the Delhi edition?”, the man asks.
I look at the top of the paper and strain my eye to read the small font which says New Delhi.

“Yeah”

Upon hearing this, he reaches out and picks up the paper from the pouch in front of his seat. What if it was the Bombay edition? He wouldn’t have read it then?, I ask myself.

“By the way, my name is Anil”, he announces with an outstretched hand across the seat that lies vacant between him and me.

I shake his hand and introduce myself. I immediately sensed that it was going to be the talkative co-passenger type of a flight.

The air hostess walks down the aisle, suddenly stops and looks at this man who is toying with his expensive looking Blackberry.

In a stern voice which would have done any school principal proud, she says “Sir, please switch off your mobile phone.” Clearly, this air hostess is pretty annoyed about something in her daily dealings.

My fellow passenger has apparently initiated a shut down of his mobile device and just shows the instrument to the air hostess, pointing out the shutting down message to her, with a frown on his face. The angel in red scoffs, checks herself quickly and just walks away. Far from a customer-is-the-king philosophy, but I don’t blame her. My fellow passenger sure isn’t going to get a good meal, I think to myself.

“Bangalore traffic sucks”, he says after a while.
“Yeah”
“Delhi is much better”
“Yeah”

“I think it is because it is where I’ve lived all my life”, he continued.
“Yeah. True”, I take an effort to seem interested.

“So you are a Gujarati”, he affirms based on my last name. “I, by the way, am a Punjabi”, he announces.

I nod my head. Couldn’t agree with him more on this, factually.
“We Punjabis just like two things in life – eating and drinking”, he chuckles and I add in a smile.

“Work in Delhi?”

“Sorry?”, I look at him

“Going for work there?”

“Yeah” and I tell him where I work.

“Great. I work for a private equity fund. Investments et al”

“Oh, that’s nice”

“Which college did you go to?”, Anil continues

I tell him my B-School and turns out one of my former batchmates has worked with him in some investment related role. I try to recall the batchmate but unfortunately don’t have much to say about him.

“You travel often to Delhi?”, he changes the topic

“Not really. Once in a while”

“Ok. The only city in this country having good infrastructure is Chandigarh”.

I nod, with an all-knowing fabric stretched across my mind.

“I’ve travelled a lot around. Work takes me places”

“That is nice. I don’t like much travelling though”, I add

“You know, the only city which has really made tremendous progress is Ahmedabad. In fact the entire state of Gujarat is developing at a great rate”

“True. The Modi government has done a lot of development I hear”

“Yes, and corruption is at an all-time low. They are doing some great work out there”

“But I think the communal riots and subsequent genocide was sickening. Not sure if the development and progress is acceptable when there has been such a horrific past.”

“Sugar comes along with its propensity to cause diabetes”, he chuckles.

“Sorry?”, I fail to understand

“Simple yaar. Medicine is always bitter. It is a trade-off. Somethings need to be done, can’t help it”

I didn’t have much of a response there. Hundreds of people died brutal deaths in those riots and here it was being casually brushed aside, an insignificant event that didn’t deserve to be spoken while sipping on fresh lime juice in an expensive airline.

Our conversation continued and I learnt how carefree about the world people can really be. No carrying burdens of the society, no worrying about your role and its impact and definitely not bothering to build an opinion of things that didn’t affect you directly. It was a different world, but a world that seemed easy and smooth.

Was that the right way to go? It didn’t have any issues or dilemmas or social empathizing, it was individualistic, free and devoid of any bindings. Analogous to being a libertarian compared to a socialist? As I thought about all this, the conversation moved from the good hotels in Bangalore to the most expensive watch outlets in Delhi.

Food arrived, so did coffee and tea in small compact flasks. Clouds filled up the view outside and the lights dimmed. A short nap and I find myself landing at the Indira Gandhi Airport. We get out, take the bus to the terminal, bid goodbye and find our respective cars to go wherever we were supposed to go. A hundred cars whiz by as my taxi gets on to the highway and picks up speed. A hundred lives, a hundred minds, a hundred souls. Who is right and who is wrong. How many rights are there and how many wrongs. What is right and what is wrong.

The Mid-day has covered The Better India in this article yesterday. This is encouraging and will help us spread the word faster.
And of course, we are super thrilled about this

Thanks to L Romal Singh for featuring us there!

This post is about a former German heroine, Irena Sendlerowa. She landed a job to work at the Warsaw ghetto as a plumber specialist. However, the reason for her going for this job was not quite that of aiding the Nazis in their plans of eliminating Jews.

Irena, secretly, started smuggling out infants from the camp inside her large toolbox! Some of the other older children were placed in a bag at the back of her truck. To prevent being caught easily, she had trained her dog to bark whenever the Nazi guards let her in or out of the camp. This would cover the noises, if any, made by the children being rescued.

However, she was finally caught and the Nazi regime assaulted her brutally, breaking all her limbs. In order to re-unite the children with their family members, Irena had noted down the names of all the children with her. After the war, she set out to search for the family members who, by chance, might have managed to escape the holocaust. Needless to say, most of them hadn’t survived the large scale massacre.

According to this post, she was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize and lost it to Al Gore. This piece of information is not that important to me. What is more important is that this person and her deed should be given more publicity.

There is a website set up called The Irena Sendler Project. It has quite a lot of information and details about Irena.

Trudging through the traffic can be interesting at times. Or, at the least, fleetingly amusing.
Driving behind a Santro, wondering whether to overtake or not, a sticker at the rear of that car screams back at me:

Warning. Master Rohan is in the car.

I, of course, pay heed to the warning and solemnly follow the car lest Master Rohan should unleash his fury on me.

Then, I spotted a Valvo (no spelling mistake there):

Going further, there was a bike with “Feel My Love” written in cursive on the rear guard. Aerosmith’s Pink plays on the radio and all this becomes a bit too much to handle, I might add.

Enjoy. And yes, if you really Valvo value your life, don’t mess with Master Rohan.

Fantastic Contraption – This game is addictive. More so for people who have an inclination towards things like Lego bricks and building simple gadgets. The game involves taking a pink object from the “workshop” to a pink colored box called, simply, the “goal”.

Now, the object to be taken across to the goal maybe a simple disc or a square. You get various tools like rotating wheels, fluid rods and straight rods, and some other structures. These tools are to be used in your workshop, connect them with the object and then let the contraption run.

Might appear to be a bit complicated to understand here, but just take the tour of the game and you will be well on your way to at least a few hours of fun!
Link to the game here (http://fantasticcontraption.com/)

Tip: Thanks to Ashwini for sending this across!

One of the newspapers I read more often than others is The Mint, which is a venture between Hindustan Times (HT) and the Wall Street Journal (WSJ). It is probably one of the best business papers we have today in India and is far ahead of its peers even in non-business articles.

This weekend’s Lounge edition carried an extensive insight into the life and thoughts of Infosys chief Nandan Nilekani. You may (read as should) read the article here.

I must admit I didn’t know much about Mr. Nilekani; in fact not even half as much as what I knew about the former chief Narayan Murthy. This article showcases some amazing aspects of Mr. Nilekani’s personality and is highly recommended that you read it.

Some excerpts:

“I call him the closure man,” says Nandita Gurjar, head of human resources (HR) at Infosys. “He is a man in a hurry. Once I went to him with a global award that we had won; very prestigious; and he’s like, ‘Oh great!’ and moves right on.” She recalls asking him, “Nandan, what award would make you stop and take notice?” A dramatic pause and then he replies: ‘The Nobel Prize’.”

Nilekani works out of a spacious corner office in the corporate block of Infosys, surrounded by the leafy tops of trees with pink tabebuia flowers. His desk is spare. Shelves hold multiple awards and photographs of him with various powerful people: Nilekani with Tony Blair; shaking hands with Bill Clinton; with a large India contingent in Davos; with Manmohan and Mrs Singh in the White House with Laura Bush. On his desk is a small black-and-white photograph of Rohini and him.

Link to the article here.