Amazing Indian Landscapes

This is the collection of some of my best photographs shot at different locations across the country, showing how beautiful India is!!!!

Jan Gan Mann

India is celebrating its 63rd Independence Day today! I attended a flag hoisting ceremony earlier today, which was organised in a housing complex nearby.

As our Tricolour was unfurled and we sang "Jan Gan Mann", several thoughts were crisscrossing the contours of my mind.

I thought about what I had written on my blog last Independence Day - "Is India truly Independent?" I also thought about what we as a nation aspire for ourselves and our nation. And a lot of other thoughts came to my mind.

At the end of it, I felt that the freer we get, the lesser we think of what independence means to us. Let us compare ourselves to say our grandparents or even our parents. We have much more freedom than them, more choices in life and more opportunities. In our pursuit for the right selection for ourselves, we seem to have forgotten what freedom of this country really means to us, as Indians.

Today we think of self-actualisation (if I may borrow the concept from Maslow's Hierarchy). We have come up with the new age concepts of the world being one, the irrelevance of borders. Surely, this is a new fad.

Let's accept it, in all this we are forgetting what price our grandparents had to pay for this freedom. The freedom struggle and consequent Independence was not way back in the past - it was just 2-3 generations before us. yet we have forgotten all that happened?

We seem to worry more about the where the economy is headed, but we had forgotten the blood being shed by our armed forces in encounters every day on our western frontier, trying to prevent armed intrusions into India by so called jihadists who are threatening to destroy the Indian way of life.

I made this point on one of the Independence Day messages on Facebook. Soon I received an avalanche of angry messages from some people identifying themselves as liberals and peaceniks. Sample this: "Borders only lead to bloodshed - first create imaginary lines, call them borders, fight over them, shed your blood and then rejoice at a unknown freedom."

So how about opening our borders, welcoming the Chinese in, the Taliban in, etc. etc.? Well the peaceniks who advocate a bouundaryless world will be shitting bricks in their pants like the rest of us. The free speech that they enjoy (and liberally misuse) today to rant out all this will be gone, gone forever! I am not talking of the torture and pain we all will face. For freedom is something you never realise you have till you lose it!

Agreed, we need to be open minded. We certainly need to open borders for trade, technology inflow, intellectual discourse, but certainly not at the cost of India's security.

We need to reinforce within us and in generations to come, the price that we paid for our Independence and how we could sustain it. We need a collective patriotic feeling for our nation.

Towards this end, small steps help in the long run.

For instance, in Bombay, all cinemas play the national anthem before the show begins. And voluntarily everyone stands in attention and passionately sings silently. And if there is someone whose cellphone is ringing or is standing at attention - this person would certainly have it - he would get angry glares, etc. which would force him to fall in line the next time and least think what Jan Gan Mann means to us, hopefully bringing within him, a change of heart someday.

A Swades Moment

Last Sunday, Neeti and I travelled to Jambulwadi with a group of socially conscious people. Jambulwadi is a small hamlet nearly 80 kilometres from Bombay about 10 kilometres off the Nasik highway. Our cousin, Anshum, joined us for this trip.
Our objective was to help the villagers help themselves. We had organised a fruit tree plantation programme for them. The fruit trees would not only be a source of livelihood but also check soil erosion and help recharge the water table.

We left Lokhandwala at 7.45 AM in a bus - a cloudy lazy Sunday morning. We were a group of nearly 25 adults and a handful of playful kids.

Within half an hour we touched Eastern Express Highway, which in itself is a feat, given the reputation of traffic in this megapolis!

Each one of us were in very high spirits. We were all enthusiastically participating in dumb charades. For me, it was the first time - I had never done dumb charades before. But it was indeed a thrilling experience. All this proves only one thing - the city really sucks you dry. And every opportunity to get away does help, so to say, to recharge one's "batteries"!

Stopped at a roadside eatery for a quick breakfast and then continued on towards Jambulwadi.It's amazing how the countryside turns green on the onset of the Monsoons. The varied hues of green are a treat for the eyes. It's always wonderful to see the colors that Nature shows us. But do we have the time is the biggest question.At Jambulwadi, we were given a traditional welcome with a tikka, a wild flower bouquet and a welcome song by the tribal schoolgirls. We had taken biscuits for the village kids. The peels of glee and joy from little village kids was an expression of pure emotion, which is again so hard to find in the city.Our group then proceeded to the fields to plant the saplings. The children accompanying us enthusiastically participated in planting the trees. After completing the plantation, we trekked down towards the small rivulet. It was a wonderful steep trek down with birds chirping and the clean fresh air, that we all yearn for. Almost the entire group, kids and the elderly, took to the stream like ducks to the water. A few kids went about searching for fish in the rivulet.

The villagers told us that they had to fetch water from the rivulet at least three times a day. It must be quite a task to trek up and down the steep valley. We very often take water and electricity for granted, but it's a completely different matter in the countryside. Makes me think there are two Indias - one with plenty and the other which barely survives. I am told eastern India is worse off in that sense.

On the way back, we saw men ploughing the land and women planting paddy. Barely do we appreciate the effort that goes into growing the food that we consume. Silently, I saluted these hardworking men and women who toil for their existence.

Truly, a Swades moment, as Anshum had put it....

Hum Aise Hi Hain!

Last night I attended a talk given by a member of a social organisation who led a team of Indian professionals for a vocational exchange to Germany. The speaker shared his (and his team's) experiences of the 2 months they had spent in Germany.

He went to say that initially they were impressed by the efficiency, precision and timeliness of the Germans, but soon got a little tired of it.

The speaker spoke about how they were amazed initially, and later bothered, by the punctuality and discipline of the Germans. The group kind of found the emphasis of punctuality of the Germans a bit unnerving.

The food, he mentioned was a major issue - they found it particularly difficult to adapt to the local cuisine. He recommended carrying packs of MTR to anyone travelling abroad! Can you beat that?

And then came the amazing part - the speaker mentioned his elation on landing back in the grime and sweaty heat of Bombay. He mentioned how he enjoyed driving his car back home from the airport - in his own admission, he was carefree - a bit of indisciplined driving chalta hai!

And then to top it all, he, says, 'saare jahan se accha hindustan hamara' and went on to wax-eloquent about about the Indian-way!

These descriptions are symptomatic of what ails us as a country. These attitudes gives us clues why despite having a billion industrious people we are where we are, down in the dumps and love it down there.

If one studies the history of the world, every superpower of the world has had one thing in common - the willingness to look outwards, out of their set ideas, hunger to explore and to take on the world.

From ancient times till now, great powers have had this common thread running through generations, right across various civilisations - from the ancient Greeks and Romans to sea-faring Spaniards, Portuguese and the Englishmen. Even the Frenchmen were quite inward looking till the Napoleonistic-expansion.

The Chinese who inward looking like us were at the receiving end of the then Western superpowers, from Genghis Khan in the Middle Ages to the British in modern times - remember the construction of the Great Wall to ward off the Mongols, to the Opium Wars of the 1800s. The result - each successive generation of Chinese got weaker and weaker.

However this changed when Deng Xiaopeng not only opened China, but took China on an expansionist and exploratory path. And only then Chinese took to the world like ducks to water!

India lacks that very instinct. We think we are modern, but we are inward looking. Having Guccis, Armanis and Pradas within our reach at a stone's throw doesn't make us modern. Do we really understand the world of today? Do we really know how the world thinks?

It is said that inbreeding weakens the gene pool. A similar analogy would apply to thought. Reinforcing generations of thought, accepting "our way" as the only "way" and "hum to aise hi hain" are perfect examples of that weakening, debilitating, paralysing process of an "inbreeding" of thought. It was precisely the same reason why India had historically been weak - remember that it was considered against the Hindu religion to travel across the seas. It was precisely for the same reason ancient-medieval India never had a navy till the era of the Mughals and Shivaji, leaving us vulnerable to invasions.

We want an "India" wherever we travel. A simple example is food. Travel agents selling tour packages to the West or the Orient proudly advertise they would have an Indian cooks with them and the tourists would be served Indian meals all through the day! How the hell would these tourists experience, say for instance, France, if they were to have tandoori chicken or theplas over there?

I have experienced this first not only in India but also abroad. Travelling to Kerala for a conference about 7 years ago, I was surprised to see our very own North Indians demanding dal-roti. Similarly, I have also seen Indians travelling abroad abhorring the thought of having local cuisine, settling for bread-butter. One Indian couple travelling was crazy about finding a KFC outlet, which they thought was closest to familiar Indian food, though I wonder how?

And then we say, we love our food - that's the way we Indians are. Sure we do love our food. Who doesn't? Surely the Americans miss their beefy burgers when they travel abroad (Am reminded of the movie Outsourced where the protagonist, a call center head, Todd Anderson, misses American junk food in India and goes so crazy when he sees an advertisement of a McDonald's clone in a newspaper, that he travels 40-odd kilometers to have a burger!).

Similarly, the Scots miss their Haggis. The Japanese their Sushi. The Aussies, their beer! What makes us Indians different is our unwillingness to experiment even for a short period of even a week.

I also remember a cross-over desi movie about Indian students in the US. One of the characters had a drinking binge with, obviously, other Indian pals, gets totally sloshed, pees in the lawn and shouts out loud - "This is freedom!". We love our freedom to pee anywhere, to drive the way we want to, to intrude into the personal spaces of others, to show scant respect for privacy and of being loud and brash, and the chaos all around us. Has our new-found openness taught us anything?

Zilch!

Another example that completely paralyses the Indian minds and reinforces "our way" is a complete lack of fraternising with the natives. How many of us strike a genuine conversation with say a cab-driver or a waiter or a hotel front-desk manager when we are abroad. We have conversations that are absolutely essential. Indian co-workers and students would hang around with each other instead of being with peers of different ethnicities. This makes the natives hate Indians. No wonder Indians are least understood, hardly respected and most hated the world over. This is not a new phenomena.

The expulsion of Asians from Uganda in the 1970s, "dot buster" crimes in the US of the 1980s, expulsions of Indians following the Fiji coup of 1989 and the recent hate crimes in Australia all point to that.

A budding superpower needs to understand the world and look at it from a position of strength. It cannot afford to lose its goodwill, yet we are doing just that.

We've given the world spirituality, yoga, Bollywood, back-office services, etc. but that's hardly anything. We, as a people, need to change our attitudes, we need to explore the world, we need to get aggressive, we need to press the reset button now before its too late.

Till then, hum aise hi hain!

The Next Step

Looking back at the last few years of my life, I am getting increasingly convinced of what a lot of people around me had been telling me.
Nothing in life ever has an enduring permanence. I have had quite a few failures and a few successes in life. On failing, I have so often felt that failure has brought me to the end of the world, and that heavens had fallen. But slowly life creeped in and I looked at the possibilities around, trying to make the best out of the worst. Gradually, things changed for the better, leading to the next success. What a waste is all that worry and depression? It only slows down the process of recovery making the journey a lot more painful and drains the energy levels. Yet it becomes so hard to realize all that when one is in that situation.
The other side of the story is that during periods of success, one doesn't even contemplate failure. But that's the way we like it. Rather, we should be preparing ourselves to face the worst, when we are enjoying the ecstasy of success.
In all this, it helps if we realize that nothing in life is permanent. Things change, scenarios change, environments change. Only we don't. We have had successes in the past and we will in the future.
Don't we worry too much about tomorrow that we forget to live today? We all know that the ultimate truth in life is death, but that doesn't stop us from breathing, does it? So why worry our guts out about what tomorrow will bring. Live the day, make the most of today, make it a success. Surely, if we were to start doing that, we would certainly start the next day on a high note, which becomes the stepping stone for the next success.
In everything one does, there is certainly a Superior Power guiding us, a hand to guide you to the next step. I have felt that more than once in life, when one success follows another, when I beat the expectations that I had of myself. Yet we fail to see the Hand when we are successful and we yearn for it when we fail. The Superior Power, the Hand could be one's faith, something one calls God. Why shouldn't we thank the Hand for being with us at each step, when we are successful? Such gratitude does help in keeping the focus, that life is, by and large, good and interesting.
So often, we all crib about the pathetic people we have to deal with each day, the unkind, mean, abrasive attitudes. Yet for hundreds of such people we meet aren't there a handful of people who make our life worth living? In all our complaints about the nasty guys, we fail to reinforce the positivity we get from these nice guys. Shouldn't we cut out the crap from the nasty guys? Perhaps, the best way to do it is to assume that such guys merely exist in today, but matter in the long run, because what matters tomorrow is the positivity radiating from being around a few nice guys.
I have made all these mistakes at different points in life. Yet each time someone in life guided me to the positives, the other side that I failed to look at, which according to me, at that point of time, didn't make any sense. Thankfully, I was wrong each time, I am happy to admit this. I believe everyone goes through these moments.
Let's accept it, no matter what life brings us, it remains the most valuable possession we have. And we get from life what we give it. So if we look at life with hope, patience and gratitude, we will get a lot of peace and calm, which is required for the Next Step.