Jaswant Singh has only himself to blame

Jaswant Singh may have said the truth in his book on Jinnah.

But I can't imagine someone wasting 5 years trying to write a book on something which doesn't matter anymore in the present context. Had it been published circa 1947, it may have mellowed the animosity between the then Congress and Muslim League. But 62 years later, this doesn't have any relevance.

Why then did Jaswant Singh write the goddamn book? After the backlash Advani got when he praised Jinnah when in Pakistan, did he think that this book would disrupt BJP and get him a better footing in the party?

Either ways, serves him right for wasting everybody's time.

The joy of cooking

I had never really considered that cooking could be fun. I mean, standing at a place and baking 20 chapathis for a family seemed pretty mundane.

But having gotten sick of bread and a patty in between (they call them burgers), I was forced to start cooking.

I was pleased when a colleague I was moving in with, told me "I am an excellent cook."

The arrogant self appraisal pricked me but I was optimistic for my own good.

But then when we finally moved into the apartment:

"But I know only vegetarian" he said.

"$^%#$!@#!"

So, one noon, after a week of vegan, the craving for some chicken legs started and I called on a friend who gave instructions. That attempt turned out to be surprisingly good and then I was hooked.

Since then I have made chicken curries, barbecue chicken and then upuma and potato curry after calling mom for the recipe which turned out really good.

There is nothing more satisfying than making something really tasty. What makes it interesting is that, much like building anything else, unless the whole is built, you usually don't know how its going to turn out. And the careful calibration required while adding spices and such is nothing less than an art.

But still, there are things I do not like. Like, washing dishes and making rotis.

Utopian Work Culture

Vicious Cycle

The era of ridiculous consumption is over, at least for your lifetime.

I believe the next big change in society will involve simplifying our lives, getting rid of the waste and inconvenience that we drifted into, and finding meaning through more social involvement. -- Scott Adams

The recession probably helps the movement into a less materialistic life but it is true that the Americans are headed in that direction.

Isn't that where we Indians were? And where are we going now?

Re: Why Indians don’t give back to society?

Looking at instances of bad behaviour and attributing that to a country's culture has become a fad among who else? Indians.

Why Indians don’t give back to society? is one such pathetic article coming from an otherwise decent news site.

Take for e.g. his citing of Max Weber:

Max Weber explained the success of capitalism in the US, Germany and Britain as coming from their populations’ Protestant faith. This ethic, or culture, was missing from the Catholic populations of South America, Italy and Spain. Protestants, Weber said, extended Christianity’s message of doing good deeds, to doing work well. Industry and enterprise had an ultimate motive: public good. That explains the philanthropists of the US, from John D. Rockefeller to Andrew Carnegie to Bill Gates.

To take a few outstanding individuals and attribute that to the general population is nothing but a general fallacy of implying causation by correlation which doesn't seem to be a new thing to the author himself.

Next he says, "Some characterestics unite Indians. The most visible is our oppurtunism." How can oppurtunism ever unite anyone?

Next:

One good way to judge a society is to see it in motion. On the road, we observe the opportunism in the behaviour of the Indian driver. Where traffic halts on one side of the road in India, motorists will encroach the oncoming side because there is space available there. If that leads to both sides being blocked, that is fine, as long as we maintain our advantage over people behind us or next to us. This is because the other man cannot be trusted to stay in his place.

Mr Aakar, did you even spend time thinking why it might be so? Before giving marks of decency to people in other countries, did you think that this could be related to the fact that those countries have better traffic management or better roadways in the firstplace? Please don't jump to any conclusion about the mentality of the driver, even in your overenthusiastic tone of deriding your own country.

What follows is more such examples and finally an attribution of all the problems to the major religion, Hinduism. Even though religion is probably the last thing on anybody trying to make a living.

The author 'opportunistically' misses the fact that a lot impatience we show is mostly due to the limited resources we have which leads to the 'zero-sum-game' mentality.

Perhaps the biggest problem we have is a lack of national pride which encourages authors like 'Aakar Patel' to write articles like those. We are also too tolerant a society to condone such writings. Clearly, he was oppurtunistic in that regard.

Blame that on the culture, man!

No praise for idleness

Recession has taken its toll and budgets have been freezed, salaries cut, people fired. But the worst impact for me has been that new development in our product has been freezed, thereby shunning us to doing boring maintenance work.

A week of doing that and I am already fed up of it. So much so, that I have to drag myself to work and run back at 5 PM sharp. And even though I don't do much work, just sitting idle drains so much energy that you don't want to do anything else than surf the web/watch TV. On the contrary, working very hard seems to energize people as long as it is interesting.

I can now clearly imagine the lives of govt. employees who don't have any stimulating work which makes them unproductive. They are unproductive not because they can't do it. They are, because they don't like doing it.

An idle mind is truly a devil's workshop. Its also probably why there is so much corruption and politics in the management. :)

I am turning out to be more and more 'strategically incompetent' too with the work I don't like to do. You can tolerate 10% boring stuff when 90% is OK but when it is the reverse, it really gets you.

I really hope I get fired in the coming days so that I will be forced to do something new.

The most important job skill

... is not the skill that make you good at work. It is career skills.

1. How to negotiate better salaries/raises

2. Knowing when to jump companies

3. Knowing how to be at the right place at the right time

4. How to suck up to your boss

5. Doing well in job interviews

6. Knowing how to take advantage of the system

7. Knowing a lot of jargons