Downtown

I hopped on the local inter city transit bus - I was unusually effervescent. I was quite looking forward to my appointment in Toronto. And the bus ride - always a good chance to catch up on some sleep. I find it odd that my sleep cycle forms some kind of peculiar balance sheet in my head. As though I'm saving up for some early retirement at a sleep clinic or something. As I boarded, I ran a cursory glance. Why? Call it force of habit. I chose to take the reserved seat - it was rather roomy, and I am rather spoiled. I plopped into my seat, rather smugly - looked up at the people filing in to the bus. Male, late twenties, wrinkly suit, cheap tie, unruly  hair- accountant, fresh out of school, maybe? Woman, mid-thirties, generously proportioned, excessively made up - receptionist. Most probably single. Male, early sixties. Long hair - tattooed arms, mullet, slight limp - trucker, perhaps, retired after a rather bad accident? Could just be arthritis. This little game kept me entertained for a while until I observed what seemed to be an endless parade of accountants and lawyers. Time to catch up on that sleep, I told myself. Why I need to mentally instruct myself to "go to sleep" like a child instead of just falling asleep, I don't know.

I was awoken by a girl's laughter. No, not soft, like a water meadow. Sharp, loud, and annoying. My neck was sore from sleeping like a corpse hanging from a parachute - I managed to look up behind me. It took me a few seconds to realize - but all the subjects of my painstakingly detailed observations had been replaced (save the lawyers and accountants, of course). The source of this cacophony was apparent - a girl, couldn't have been older than myself, was beside herself with glee. Save the thin headphone connected to her mobile, one would have had the urge to prescribe her some antipsychotics. Shut the fuck up, woman! Have you no sense of public decorum? Yeah - you wish I'd said that. Actually I wish I'd said that, sadly. I just sat there, shooting nasty glances which went largely unnoticed. To my surprise, so was everyone else. Cowardice wearing the mask of civility, I suppose. I found that interesting.

I closed my eyes to fall back asleep, but right then the bus took a swaying turn to the right, triggering some long dormant nostalgia - the downtown Toronto off ramp. I haven't been to this city in years, I thought. I wasn't exactly sure what it was - call it a nervous energy. Like before you go on stage to deliver that well rehearsed speech - you know it could go really well, and you also know it could go to absolute shit. 

Speaking of, the smell of steaming gutters greeted me as I stepped off the bus. I observed my surroundings - the city seemed to breath life. Not the deep, calming breath you would deserve after an ungrateful day at work - no. It sort of gave the air of being asthmatic, if anything, if you can picture that. Almost sporadically, people poured in and out of buses and trams, walked between fast changing traffic lights, with certain (and i'm sure in their minds, regal) purpose. I noticed little conversation - just very attractive, well dressed people plugged in to their worlds, in little invisible boxes. 

I will be honest. I've always been a little skeptical of walking downtown. I dislike the smell, do not care for the crowds and find the lack of parking rather irksome. I fear the street musicians and hobos - not because they might kill me or anything, but because I'm very inadept at social situations that require me to part with cash I do not actually have. You'd think they'd have some kind of hobo Interac network by now - they can be very inconsiderate indeed. Seriously, who the fuck carries cash? Pretentious prick, you say? No. My innate laziness costs me the proclivity of carrying money in my pocket.

And yet I love walking downtown. Conflicted idiot, you say? Very much so. Sure - you've got to love the giant mirrors on the side of every building, my ego was certainly competing with some of the taller buildings after I'd walked a few blocks. You've got to love how massive and awesome the buildings are - architectural marvels, some might say. You've got to love the hot dog stand on every block. You've got to love the gazillion taxis at your beck and call. But that's not why I love walking there, and that's not why I would very much love to live there sometime.

It's the feeling that you could pretty much run around downtown singing "stairway to heaven" at the top of your lungs dressed in a chicken suit - and no one would give you a dirty look or a stare down. No one could care less for you, yet there's always a chance that someone would join you and probably run around you playing air guitar. It's this cold, yet inclusive and welcoming place. It has buildings with rich character - and also some odd shaped, just plain ugly looking ones. It's an oddly neat balance of crazy and normal.  It makes you forgive the blandness of the suits and ties for the eccentricity and fun it promises. 

I was getting close to my destination. I'd walked almost eleven blocks, day dreaming about downtown while being downtown. I stopped and turned to look back. A group of professionals on their smartphones skillfully navigated around me, never once looking up from their phones - not even to curse the guy stopping dead right in front of them. I watched as the sun glowed orange in between two mammoth structures, and the horizon narrowed to a close, the streets busy as ever.

Fair Trade

This is a topic I happened to chance upon during the progression of my Ethics and social responsibility course at school. I thought this topic was particularly interesting and decided it was time to shove some more opinions down your throats.

Fair trade is a tricky topic – while Fair trade takes a good stand for imposing ethically sound principles in manufacturing goods, it also has its criticisms. From a first look, what I can say is that Fair trade is good in principle - it protects farmers and small scale producers from foreign companies that poach cheap labor. Under the right guidelines and circumstances, it has seemingly done well - it has alleviated working conditions, increased employee wages and helped in structuring unions that elevate workers’ rights. Fair Trade, to an extent also balances the lack of strict government policies for minimum wages, working conditions and worker payoffs. It also protects workers from local companies that might want to exploit this lack of regulations to act as middlemen providing the cheapest product to both local and foreign markets, who may be unaware of the working conditions in which the product has been made. It is a great step towards increasing ethical standards of working all around the world.

As wonderful as it sounds, why hasn’t it caught on as quickly as some of the other larger world movements – like the green movement, for example? A movement such as the green movement has much more tangible benefits for the countries involved than does Fair Trade – a lot more people are sufficiently educated on the effects of climate change, melting of the polar ice caps, global warming and their carbon footprint than they are about the unethical working conditions of a farmer in Colombia or Costa Rica.

Another reason is how profit making companies can choose to contribute to the movement – with Fair Trade, they see an obvious increase in product prices, which they will, eventually, pass on to their consumers – they will see a drop in consumers, drop in profits and a dip in share prices. They’d rather stick to their current plan than be a part of this dim forecast. On the other hand, companies can contribute to the Green movement in any number of ways, starting from small changes on the factory floor to exchanging emissions with other companies (or countries) or making use of Personal Carbon Trading. This brings me to my next point – government intervention. Notice the extent of government mandates with regard to reducing pollution and global warming versus their decrees to impose Fair Trade. As long as a profit making organization has a choice – it will not choose to produce something more expensively unless it has to. The reason is simple – if it does take the moral high ground and try to lead by example, their loss in profits will simply crush them in the free market, unless it has some encouragement from the government to do so.

There are a multitude of other problems with Fair Trade, starting with corruption to plain old boring demand and supply. Starbucks – it is a company that has such a strong brand name and loyal customer following. When they decided to offer the option of “Fair Trade Coffee”, there was criticism of the company acting unethically and “depriving farmers in Ethiopia of $88M a year by opposing the Ethiopian government’s efforts to trademark three popular varieties of local coffee bean.”  Take another company with a strong brand loyalty – Apple. The company that produces Apple products, Foxconn, has factories in China with workers working inhumane conditions and horrendous work hours. The result - a brilliant piece of engineering innovation at your nearest electronics outlet for a fairly reasonable price. What would happen if Apple decided to go “Fair Trade” and route the manufacturing to a place with better government regulations on working conditions? An iphone 4S that costs CAD749 may end up costing twice, maybe three times as much. The question we would then need to ask is – how high a price do people want to pay for “ethically made goods”? Will they be loyal enough to the brand to take a stand along with them and support their initiative? Or will they desert them and move on the next company that offers a reasonably priced phone?

As it stands now, Fair Trade, while good in principle, sadly has a very real possibility of quietly fading away because it is impractical, and simply does not tie into the economic framework within which profit making companies operate, unless the governments involved take steps to making Fair Trade a mandatory policy.  The only way a movement like Fair Trade will ever become a revolution is if society as a whole is willing to pay the price for it – as they are with global warming and the green movement. They need to be educated in the long term implications of producing something unethically, and what it speaks about them as a culture, from a perspective other than the ones offered by charities and non-profit-organizations. 

Random thought #343 :)

Just realised that the 2nd of October is a few weeks from now. Wondering whether we still hang on to any of that pride that made the little man from Gujarat the father of an entire nation. I wonder if we have lost that grit and utterly enduring belief in our principles that made us an independent nation 64 years ago. Yes, I think we are a proud people. Pride is good to have. Maybe not so much so that we paint a picture of perfection not even we can live up to. 

Masks we wear

I am prompted by nothing in particular to write this journal entry. Truth be told, I am not the most deliberate individual, and writing journals is, unfortunately, not a habit of mine. It is not pessimistic to reflect that there’s a time in every individual’s existence when he seeks the pleasure of his own company- where family and friends remain but a distraction, albeit a healthy one, one could reflect in hindsight- but I remain sheltered and nourished by the depths of my own conscience.  It does not bode me well to hurt others by the solitude I seek, for that is not my intention. But, as does often occur in the pursuit of isolation, the ones around you are affected, invariably.  Questions about my destiny remain now nothing but wild musings with no answers, casual social debates with no resolution. My soul remains troubled with uncertainties, uncertainties that have nothing to do with the outside world –am I a puppet that exists to entertain the world around me, or do I truly have any dreams of my own? I do not know. I may never know. But, in my own world, the outside is filled with apparent warmth and love. I, like every other person on this planet, have a job, a family and good friends. But I understand not the guises that people wear, the veil of lies and deceit behind which they hide. I do not know if the smile across the room comes from the lips, or from the eyes. But I hope I make them smile from their hearts. I hope the disguises I wear disarm theirs. I reflect mirthlessly on the irony of my profession. For alas, one must understand, must one not, the art of subtle deception, before one hides behind a mask?

Masks we wear

I am prompted by nothing in particular to write this journal entry. Truth be told, I am not the most deliberate individual, and writing journals is, unfortunately, not a habit of mine. It is not pessimistic to reflect that there’s a time in every individual’s existence when he seeks the pleasure of his own company- where family and friends remain but a distraction, albeit a healthy one, one could reflect in hindsight- but I remain sheltered and nourished by the depths of my own conscience.  It does not bode me well to hurt others by the solitude I seek, for that is not my intention. But, as it often occurs in the pursuit of isolation, the ones around me are affected, invariably.  Questions about my destiny remain now nothing but wild musings with no answers, casual social debates with no resolution. My soul remains troubled with uncertainties, uncertainties that have nothing to do with the outside world –am I a puppet that exists to entertain the world around me, or do I truly have any dreams of my own? I do not know. I may never know.

                But, in my own world, the outside is filled with apparent warmth and love. I, like every other person on this planet, have a job, a family and good friends. But I understand not the guises that people wear, the veil of lies and deceit behind which they hide. I do not know if the smile across the room comes from the lips, or from the eyes. But I hope I make them smile from their hearts. I hope the disguises I wear disarm theirs.

I reflect mirthlessly on the irony of my profession. For alas, one must understand, must one not, the art of subtle deception, before one hides behind a mask?

-A. Clown

In the fall of 2006, I was what you'd call the typical Indian teenager. Pimply faced, slightly overweight and generally distracted in life. My first year of college was a blast - I had great friends, I was studying in a great school, and best of all, it was in Goa - India's own Vegas, you could say. The lifestyle on campus could be described simply by one word : unleashed. All of us, having prepared for some form of crazy entrance examination, were finally settled in to start enjoying life for four full years.

*For those unaware, the Indian schooling system will take full credit for manufacturing millions of students that for the most part only take up two streams of study - Science (read Engineering, not Research) or Commerce (read Chartered Accountancy) : to set their lives up for two of the most paying and broadly divided job sectors in the country. This involves spending the majority of high school with your nose buried in books, and your bottom on a chair. While this maybe a good strategy for a top notch GPA, the collateral is quite simple and obvious : we tend to churn out really smart, but physically unfit college students (I'm speaking of the majority here, and I'm sure you wouldn't disagree).

I'm trying here to comprehend the difference in lifestyles between our 

Change

What comes to mind when we encounter the word Change? Every word, no matter how seemingly insignificant, has a place in our mind - and it associates itself with a certain emotion, a certain memory, a certain reaction. In that sense, for the most part, what does the word Change trigger in the majority of us - Excitement? Apprehension? Fear? Dread?  

Why, as a society, have we become so content in our little cocoons of comfort? When did we lose the ability to break out of the ordinary and try some extraordinary for a change? Why is it that the more we grow, the more we rapidly lose touch with that childlike wonder and energy that drives us to keep our mind more open to change? Why is it that the more we grow as individuals, the narrower our focus becomes? Shouldn't our experience in fact widen our gaze, make us receptive to more and more, rather than slowly killing each field of possibility from that seemingly infinite sea of possibilities we had as innocents? Were the words grow up meant as wisdom one needed to be grateful for, or were they meant as sharp reminders to keep our dreams in check? What is our comfort zone but the constant chiseling that we take from society as we grow? Do we take this as the artistic and deliberate chiseling of the sculptor in the road to achieving some meaningful end, or as the ruthless erosion of the river bank at the mercy of raging eddies? 

Or is it ourselves that need to pick up the chisel and define what this marble with limitless potential is to become? Does this mean remapping our minds and meandering away from every crippling thought and instinct we have come to possess? Could it truly mean that all those years of conformity were just wasted, and that our destinies can be altered instantaneously by a single thought? 

Why then, is Change so hard?

The Sai Babas of the World

The recent passing of the Hindu guru Sathya Sai Baba brought up an interesting discussion recently, and I want to share my views here. For those unfamiliar with the name, this man was considered by many to be an ascetic with healing powers - some even go to the extent of calling him a reincarnation of god.
On the one hand, if you were to presume that the quality of a man's life is judged by the tears shed when he is gone, then one can only conclude, by the thousands that wept at the Sai Baba's funeral, that he was a leader and shepherd of men. Superficially, this seems like a reasonable conclusion to draw from a reasonable presumption.

But, all this is just that - on the surface. There is this basic human need for fulfillment and belonging that is met somewhere in the process, but we are prepared to endure so much pain, just for those few moments of happiness. Why else would people lead their entire lives believing in "gods" and ideas that have no basis in reality and fact? When viewed objectively, these are just blatant lies, aren't they? They are a jigsaw of all the little pieces of fiction created along the way to make our lies seem like a intangible truths backed by the conviction of faith. Take the time to think about this.

When someone says, "I don't know that God exists, but I believe", it is tantamount to an admission of pure ignorance. Ignorance isn't bliss. Ignorance is painful. The reason our lives are filled with so much pain and internal turmoil is simply because we refuse to acknowledge the fact that most of the groundwork we lay for our lives is not based on anything real! Things that go wrong because of our lapse in judgement or action become "the mysterious ways in which the lord works". Think about how easy it is to pass the buck to this fantastic character : God - your perfect personal life insurance policy! All the important aspects of our lives are in our control, but just in case, just in case we screw up, we need coverage from the divine insurance policy. And in case we don't, what do we do? Why, we do what any rightly indignant customer would do - complain.

There is a distinctly satiating clarity that comes from accepting the Unknown as what it simply is - unknown. A clarity that we will never achieve by being shepherded by anyone other than yourself. Simply doing this gives us something we unconsciously spend our whole lives searching for - a sense of purpose. It is this sense of purpose that will pave the path to true knowledge of ourselves and of the universe, of which each of our lives is a microcosm.

Special Thanks...

If I could afford a therapist, I'm guessing she would probably ask me to delve into some self-reflecting exercise, like make a 10 point list of things I am thankful for, for starters. Just off the top of my head, here goes:

1. To the executive armchair: For extensive and unwavering lumbar support in times of a nerd infested WAN party of fps/strategy/rpg and the occasional sitcom marathon (note to self: also thank the 500ml diet coke for doubling up as my urinal).
2. To the physiotherapist: fixing my carpal tunnel caused by activities stemming from endless boredom.
3. To Charlie Sheen: for showing us that there are things worse than, say, crystal meth. The phrase "tiger blood" comes to mind.
4. To Charlie Sheen: for showing us that our miserable 9-5 lives are little slices of paradise when viewed in perspective.
5. To facebook: for turning me into a stubby spud with a 4 year old profile picture and zero social life.
6. To BP: From the bottom of the ocean, for the 206 million gallons of sludge. Good news is that BP stock is soaring, which is more than I can say for the oily avians it left behind.
7. To William and Kate: I really don't know who these people are, but apparently their 50 million dollar wedding is all the rage. So thank you both, for giving the media something factual to report on for a change.
8. To Glenn Beck: For 5 years of great television. Without you, we would not know that America is under an impending alien-nazi-communist-socialist-jewish lobbyist-marxist-monkey-hemorrhoid invasion.
9. To Jackass 3D: For showing us what flying feces looks like in 3D. Also for showing us that crack babies abandoned by their parents can someday have a future starring in movies that show feces flying in 3D.
10. To the Federal Aviation Administration : For feeling us up in public. Do 1000 reward Air Miles get me a free lapdance?

You know what, therapeutically, this really helped.

Until next time,

yours truly.