Where did Murthy aunty's laughter go?

"You know Veena!" 65 year old Murthy aunty's voice was all animated. Her eyes were round and her expressive face was ready to share an "important" news. "The lady on the ground floor - she fights with her husband every evening for no reason. I sat with the lady and her husband and tried to make both of them see sense." And then with a satisfied proud look on her face she continued, "I think I was successful. But I cant help wonder why does the lady fight in the first place?" said Murthy aunty. 

Murthy aunty was this "all-friendly" neighborhood aunty. She was unbelievably talented and would easily manage functions and ceremonies organized in the apartment. And since she was so talented, she would want to make a difference in other people's lives too. However, I would find this very "caring" trait of hers a little interfering. But since she was very innocent and childlike, I would brush off her intrusions.

"Did you know about the Khannas downstairs?" Murthy aunty waited to watch the reaction on my face before she proceeded, "they have bought a two crore house in the heart of the city. They are planning to shift there in a month's time. However I am concerned about the children. I am not sure if the children will have a good company there. I have heard in that locality, people pretty much keep to themselves. I had a talk with Khanna. He asked me to not worry.. Lets see."

After a tired day, when I would walk down the garden with my daughter for our evening walks, I would spot Murthy aunty sitting on the garden chair. And as much as I liked the 15 minutes chat with her, I would honestly and sincerely wish that she would keep her thoughts to herself and not worry about people's matters. I would try to explain to her that people are power houses of energy and they were pretty much capable of solving their own situations. Once or twice when I had alluded to her that she might be interfering in people's life,  she had felt a little shocked and her eyes had filled with tears. I had let her be. I continued to enjoy the daily gossip along with my evening walks and would get back to my own life and world.

One particular day Murthy aunty was sitting on the garden chair looking a little forlorn. Apparently she had fought with one of her favorite sister-in-laws and she was lost for words. The pain that she was going through was very visible on her face. The next few days, she was unusually silent and somehow it looked as if this small incident had grown her up. 
She did not gossip too much and every time she spoke there was so much maturity in what she was saying. 

She sounded grown up and I should have been happy about it. But honestly I missed the old lively chattering aunt. I had never seen aunty so grim and I was concerned for her. But there was nothing much I could do and I let things be. Besides that weekend I was going on a long vacation to Mangalore with my family and that was more on my mind those days. 

I had a wonderful time at Mangalore and the day I came back from vacation, I met aunty again. The frantic wave of her hand showed me that she was excited. "You know I went to a party yesterday and the Sharmas and the Nairs were there. Sharma aunty and Nair aunty were avoiding each other." With a mischievous glint in her eyes, she added, "You know why? Nairs had proposed their daughter's hand in marriage to the Sharmas and even though Sharma uncle was OK about the proposal, Sharma aunty was not. Nair aunty had been very upset by that. hehehe :)" She was hardly able to speak out of excitement. Controlling her laugh, she continued, "The men had long forgotten about the proposal and were on one table with a glass of drink and laughing away. While the two women spent the whole evening avoiding each other. hahahaha " 

Murthy aunty was laughing so much by then, that she could barely stand. I myself couldn't suppress a small chuckle. I made her sit on the chair and smiled my way back my house. 

Murthy aunty was alive again. I knew that I no longer needed to worry about her.

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Ageless Beauty!

This week's post is a set of pictures I had put up on my blog in 2007. This lady is a distant relative of mine. Her beauty and smile had me totally captivated and I took a series of pictures on my Sony Ericsson k790i mobile handset.

I asked her son , must have been very pretty when she was younger.. and he replied.. "Oh ya.

She was "

"Tumala vayas kithi( How old are you )" I asked - "77" she replied !

This was one of the last set of pictures in which the lady is all decked up. Because around two years after this picture was taken, her husband expired and according old Indian customs, once the husband expires, the lady no longer wears ornaments or bright coloured clothes.

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PS: My apologies to those who have already seen this post .

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A trip down the memory lane

It had been a tiring day for me. I was a software engineer in a MNC in Bangalore. Our product was about to be released and work had been hectic. I was working for 12-13 hours a day. 12-13 hours a day along with the one hour drive through the endless and frustrating traffic would mean absence from home of 14 hours every day. As my car trudged on the highway, I spotted the sky scrapper buildings and the glass covered IT offices everywhere. Cars of the latest models and designs filled the roads. A peek into the cars revealed, expensively dressed, smart looking men and women either on phones or working on their laptops. I looked around again- bumper to bumper traffic. I sighed.

Release was scheduled in another 3 days. I would be free then at least for another 2 weeks. I sighed again - this time in relief. I logged into my laptop lost in my thoughts, when a mail blinked at me. My friend Priya was in Baroda the coming week - could I come and spend some time with her, she asked?

Baroda! I hadn’t been there for 15 years. I had studied there. Plus I needed a break.
I immediately booked my tickets.

I landed at the Baroda airport with my one year old daughter Nishka without much thought. The only thing that I looked forward to was spending time with my dear friend. But then I was in for surprises.

To start with the drive back from airport to my friend's house took "just" 15 mins. I had visited my friend’s house many times during my college days. But that day it looked more lively and beautiful than I had remembered. The house was a bungalow in a quiet locality. Flowering trees ran in veins in front of the house, and flowers of all colours fell in front of the house.

"Tomato, Potato waaalllllllllllaaaa.. !! Tomato, Potato leeee loooo !!" I heard a voice call out as I sat in the veranda eating the breakfast. I had to be dreaming. Do they still do door to door selling of vegetables? And just as I was pinching myself, I heard another voice, "Kabbaadi wallaa" I smiled. It was the newspaper guy announcing himself.  A while later I heard a "mooooo" outside the house. A beautiful white cow with brown spots stood at the door. Aunty brought out her green waste to feed it.

After a short rest, Priya, Nishka and me set out shopping - in her two-wheeler! I hadn’t been in a two wheeler for years and Nishka was travelling on the two-wheeler for the first time. She sat like a pro between Priya and me and giggled merrily as she felt the breeze on her face. She craned her neck around Priya to have a good view of the road ahead. To say that she enjoyed the ride would be a huge understatement...!

For sure, we shopped that day. But the highlight of that ride was our visit to the house I spent my teenage in. Memories and emotions gushed in as I saw the house. The house was a single storey independent home that had a huge garden around it. The house looked pretty much the same, but now there was no one living there. The garden around the house had grown wild and there were weeds and bushes all around. When we stayed there, there were 4 or 5 tall Ashoka trees in the front garden. Now only two of them stood there. I looked a little further at the huge veranda in front of the main door. I remembered how our cycles would be parked there- My brother's blue BSA SLR and my red. I remembered how my brother's bicycle was stolen one morning from the same veranda.

I went to the backyard. The kitchen was in the back portion of the house and there used to be a huge cellar beneath the kitchen. The kitchen had a wooden door that led into the cellar and the cellar would always be filled with water during the rains. I saw the sink in the kitchen garden. I remembered how I had heard my father cry in pain for the first time in my life. He had had a slip disc as he was lifting a full bucket of water. My heart choked with emotion. I turned around and saw weeds all over the garden where there used to be my mother's kitchen garden. I spent the next half an hour of our drive back in silence.

The quiet drive back home was exactly what woke me from my reverie. There were no honking cars and neck to neck traffic there. I looked around a little more. The roads were full of two wheeler traffic. No big cars. Mostly Zens, Altos and Maruti 800s. I looked at the people in them. They seemed happy. A few malls dotted the roads on which we were driving. No skyscrapers. All the major pizza, burger or cloth brands seemed to have established themselves here. Most of the roads were wide and old palatial buildings sneaked in through the huge gardens.

It had been only 3 hours, but I realized that I had enjoyed one of the best drives of my life.

Next two days passed in spending time with some old friends and chatting with Priya and her family.

As I sat on the plane on my way back, I reclined back and thought about my visit. People in Baroda lived in old style houses. Their houses were big, but their hearts were bigger. Their cars were not the latest model, but they were enough to drive friends around. Back home we had latest styled houses. We had the latest cars and mobiles and yet we felt a little outdated every 3 months. We seemed to be running but were perpetually stuck in traffic jams. We had posh houses but sometimes lacked the time to spend with friends.

I knew I was being a little too harsh to my lifestyle in Bangalore. But then I also knew that I needed to do some serious rethinking and put my life back in perspective.
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*Some names, place and incidents mentioned in this post have been fictionalised.

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Ayn Rand - Atlas Shrugged - 'Trusting your mind'

"Do not say that you’re afraid to trust your mind because you know so little. Are you safer in surrendering to mystics and discarding the little you do know? Live and act within the limit of your knowledge and keep expanding it to the limit of your life. Redeem your mind from the hock-shops of authority. Accept the fact that you are not omniscient, but playing a zombie will not give you omniscience—that your mind is fallible but becoming mindless will not make you infallible—that an error made on your own is safer than ten truths accepted on faith, because the first leaves you the means to correct it, but the second destroys your capacity to distinguish truth from error" - John Galt, Atlas Shrugged.

That paragraph brought a smile on my face. I remembered a professor's lecture during my management studies. He was telling us about how the professors also get to make some money by doing consulting assignments for some corporate. This particular professor had a good sense of humour. After telling us about how the consulting practice worked, he said, “You know most of the times, the corporate are the best judge of what decisions to take. Since they are a part of the system, they know the system in and out. Truthfully, we are just outsiders." Then he paused for a while, looked at us with a twinkle in his eye and said, "You know why they hire us?" He suppressed a smile, and said, "They hire us, so that tomorrow, if the decision is proved wrong, they can pass on the buck to us and say - look even an IIMB professor, couldn’t make a difference to this. Basically, they need someone’s shoulder to lean on – someone to call the shots."

In life, many of us don’t trust our own self and our decisions. In a tough situation, we look for someone else to call the shots. When I had completed my college and just got into life, I would look for anchors to help me with my decisions. The way I led my life was primarily based on how my parents, teachers or friends would have led theirs. Sometimes it would work. But then there were times it wouldn't.

It took me quite a while to realize that life at every moment is different and unique to each one of us. I realized that the best way to live life was to make decisions based on the situations, circumstances and mental, emotional state we are in. Doing that would mean allowing ourselves to fail. But it would also mean, allowing ourselves to understand life on our own and stand proud.  

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Mario Puzo - Godfather - Tactics and Strategy

Most of us at some or other point in our lives, either while reading or while at work would have heard about the two terms 'Tactics' and 'Strategy'. I had come across these terms during my management studies. And I came across the terms again when I was reading 'Godfather' by Mario Puzo. In the post below, I am sharing excerpts from the novel that show the difference between "tactics" and "strategy".

In the scene below, Sonny the elder son of Don massacres all the other Don "families" in a retaliation fight.
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Perhaps it was the stalemate that made Sonny Corleone embark on the bloody course of attrition that ended in his own death. Perhaps it was his dark violent nature given full rein. In any case, that spring and summer he mounted senseless raids on enemy auxiliaries. Tattaglia Family pimps were shot to death in Harlem, dock goons were massacred. This slaughter was senseless because it could not affect the outcome of the war. Sonny was a brilliant tactician and won his brilliant victories. But what was needed was the strategical genius of Don Corleone. The whole thing degenerated into such a deadly guerrilla war that both sides found themselves losing a great deal of revenue and lives to no purpose. The Corleone Family was finally forced to close down some of its most profitable bookmaking stations.

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The war that Sonny wages was triggered out of pure rage. He did not think about the long term implication of what he is doing - his thoughts and actions were short termed and his victories were short termed too. The result of this was that in the end he himself got killed and nothing good was gained out of this war. Sonny was good at executing "tactics" but he lost out on the long term focus.

Don on the other hand, was a strategical genius. He would have a long term plan or a strategy in mind, and use all his contacts, resources to realize the long term vision. This strategy would be executed as one or more "short term plans" (  tactics ) to achieve specific goals.

The paragraph below talks about Don's "strategical" genius. Don, who had been badly hurt, rises from his hospital bed and proposes peace with the five families that were at war as shown in the paragraph above.

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"Thank God my health has been restored and maybe I can help set this affair aright. Perhaps my son was too rash, too headstrong, I don't say no to that. .....I'm willing to make the peace," he said. "Tattaglia has lost a son, I have lost a son. We are quits. What would the world come to if people kept carrying grudges against all reason? That has been the cross of Sicily, where men are so busy with vendettas they have no time to earn bread for their families. It's foolishness. So I say now, let things be as they were before. I have not taken any steps to learn who betrayed and killed my son. Given peace, I will not do so. I have a son who cannot come home and I must receive assurances that when I arrange matters so that he can return safely that there will be no interference, no danger from the authorities. Once that's settled maybe we can talk about other matters that interest us and do ourselves, all of us, a profitable service today." Corleone gestured expressively, submissively, with his hands. "That is all I want."
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This move from the Don, was part of his long term plan to ensure his younger son's, Michael( who is on the run for killing a goon who attempted the Don's murder ) return. Once Michael does return, he takes control over the family business and brings back the Don's family in power.

As shown above, the Don did not mind a short term failure( as shown here by his submission to the other Don families ) in return for a longer term success. That showed Don's "strategical genius".

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