Just Musings

The Noble Elephant An interesting story these days is doing the rounds and I am sure many of you have read it. The story of The Dirty Pig and The Clean Elephant. For those living under the rocks these past few days, let's retell the story.  An elephant took a bath in a river and was walking on the road. When it neared a bridge, it saw a pig, fully soaked in mud, coming from the opposite direction. The elephant quietly moved to one side, allowed the dirty pig to pass and then continued its onward journey. The unclean pig then spoke to its friends in arrogance, "See how big I am, even the elephant was afraid of me and moved to one side to let me pass."  On hearing this, some of the elephant's questioned their friend, the reason for its action. Was it out of fear? The elephant smiled and said, "I could have easily crushed the pig under my leg but I was clean and the pig was very dirty. By crushing it, my leg would have become dirty and I wanted to av...

Hi, friends. It has been sometime since I posted anything. I am excited to announce the launch of my book,  Betrayals and Paybacks , which was published some months ago on Amazon has been republished by Write India Publishers and will be launched sometime around Diwali. I t is already available for pre-order on Amazon.in. So please check out the the teaser video above and please read the book. Your reviews will be welcome. A Happy Diwali to one and all!!! And i will back soon.

The human race is strange to say the least (I could say despicable but let’s go with strange). We see ourselves as martyr’s when life pulls us down. We believe ourselves chosen if we suffer. We let our beliefs in a greater power guide us straight to religions that haven’t made sense since it was propagated by self-promoting people, who dictated what we should or shouldn’t do. We think near death experiences can make us achieve some sort of ‘nirvana’ and we go around preaching to others how we re-discovered our life after the experience. We spew philosophical nonsenses that really help no one. Poverty is glorified by self-serving politicians so that they can bank on you voting for them, by doling out a few incentives. People in the corridors of power have spent years, plotting and planning strategies to keep most of the world hungry, sick and in need so that they could make a killing on it. We pay them to keep us miserable. We have the powerful few who control governments world ov...

Another woman’s day. Bet your social media was flooded with messages wishing you, extolling the virtues of being a women and how ‘beautiful’ and ‘fantastic’ it is to be a women. There is deluge of messages telling us to stay fantastic, strong, blah, blah, blah…. Maybe if you are among the lucky few, you even got a day off and went to lunch/dinner with your girlfriends, caught a movie, maybe even got drunk. What the heck!! It is women’s day, you are allowed. You caught that discount sale just for all you beautiful women, smiled when the shopkeeper wished you and generally had a top of the world feeling. That is what women’s day has been reduced to for most of us anyway. Discount offers on movies, dinners, clothes and the celebration that we feel we are entitled to. But wait, pause, think, rewind. Is this what we have fought for? For centuries? We have come a long way, agreed. Today we have a right to education, the right to vote, the right to go out into the world and earn a liv...

So we are almost at the end of the year 2016. And boy, what a year it has been! A joke doing the rounds in certain social media circle aptly describes the experience.  The joke goes something like this: The year is a hundred or so hence and a history teacher tells his class, “So that concludes the history lesson for year 2015 and now let’s move on to year 2017.” Surprised, one student stands up and asks him, “But sir, what about 2016?” and the teacher answers “We don’t talk about it.” Jokes apart, does this message strike home? Is this year going to be our shame, an embarrassment, we will never talk about?  Let’s have a look at the events. Brexit, Trump’s victory in the presidential election, an increase in racist attacks on migrants and people being judged for their skin colour, religion and their ethnic backgrounds rather than intelligence (even Obama and his wife Michelle have been targets of such racism) and closer home an increasing shift in how we vie...

16 th October is celebrated the world over as World Food Day. Bet you didn’t know that. Well, I didn’t. What pops into our minds when we think of this day? World hunger? Shortage of food? Wastage of food? Yes, all of it.  Let us concentrate on wastage here, though. After all each one of us is contributing to it on a personal level. It is estimated that the amount of food wasted on a daily basis, around the world is enough to feed up to 3 billion people. In India alone around 40 to 45% of the food produced is wasted, i.e a whopping 58,000 crores, according to the Food and Agricultural Ministry. Of course this is because of various factors like an increase in population, lack of proper facilities to store food, climate changes, hoarding, inflation, etc. But we also waste food on a personal level too. We, Indians tend to live large; sometimes larger than what our wallet allows for various social reasons. Huge weddings and lavish parties are a norm. Have you ever wondered what happe...