Friday, February 29, 2008

Leader's GPA !

Recently there was a lot of huzz buzzz related to the Lead India competition [http://lead.timesofindia.com/default.asp]. It was a search for the future leaders of India . What struck me was a thought of what should be a leader material and could there a be any single criteria that is must filtering criteria for a leader. Should future leaders have a minimum education criteria ??

Most obvious and generic answer to this question is YES ! . Most of the people I know believe that this should be definitely true for all leaders. They should at least have one area of specialization . How would a illiterate non-graduate person understand the complexities in this arena of globalization . Would his decision making be simply based on personal instincts and favoritism with a complete absence of any logistics behind it! .

While most of the people agree with the above views , I am still not 100% in favor of keeping a strict eligibility for a leader. When we say a graduate , there are so many graduates around us from various background who lack the basic knowledge of their own expertise. Automobile Engineers who are far worse than an automobile mechanic around , commerce graduates who cannot do any more calculations and analysis than a shopkeeper can do. Moreover most of their time is spent in attending some useless lectures and mugging up the most likely questions for their exams. Social life is limited to a hostel room , night parties and college gatherings . Do these people really represent the common man ? Do they have a slightest insights of the needs and difficulties of the poor ? . Have they seen any world outside their urban culture . Moreover how do these people earn public support and keep party members happy and loyal without slogging for the party . Do their earned certificates give them a right to rule the people since all they did was passed some graduate exam . Could anyone testify that they are always better than an illiterate leader who never got an opportunity to study and spent his life working for the people around and thereby increasing his good will and support.

To sum it up few things that are essential for a leader is decision making , domination at least in the party , guts to withstand and play political moves and ability to earn popular support even if by misguiding the common people ! . A future leader should definitely be able to not only understand the global opportunities and issues apart from local and national politics but also be able to put the implementation to the grass root . Should there be any rule demanding leaders to be academically proficient still remains a controversial issue for me !

Saturday, February 9, 2008

Sarhad Insano ke liye hein ...

New controversies have engaged people of Maharashtra these days [http://news.webindia123.com/news/Articles/India/20080209/885935.html] and I thought it isn't wise to stay behind :) ...

First of all .. a generic question .. What was the theory behind dividing people on the basis of countries .. was it their dna , culture , demography or a mix of all these things .. Today if we call ourselves a global citizen then we should be allowed to move to any place in this world , build properties , do business etc ..,in the same way as an India citizen is allowed to move to any state and live life .. So what would happen if the true global citizen concept comes to a reality ? CHAOS !! ... well welcome to Maharashtra !!

So the main concern here is .. on what level should this distinction go to .. country level , state level , district level or even to more granular levels!. There's a huge rush of ppl migrating to developed parts. But also there is an restriction on number of people that a particular region can nurture.. anything above the limit .. imbalance gonna result .Center and States should try and analyze the factors to check y few states are prospering and remaining are not .I wonder why no one questions the inabilities of the states like Madhya Pradesh and Bihar which are rich in culture , natural resources etc . Most of my OMS friends also agree that there is goonda raj and ignorance prevailing there. So isn’t one cause responsible for this chaos also lying in other states. Should there be a need for visa and work permit to travel among states ,. then such imbalance would not result ..however then it would be too difficult for people to move across and progress .. it would be impossible to have cultural exchange .. in short we[this is in context of country being the level of distinction!] would get divided.. On top of it most of the immigrants have little interest to mix with people from the state and have the tendency to create mini- Bihar,Delhi , Chennai etc ..along with their disregard for the culture . This all further adds to the growing anguish not to mention the inability of the regions to satisfy the basic needs of food , shelter and employment to the alarmingly increasing migrants. I feel there should be some laws to check the migrants among the states and a more balanced development should be sought .. otherwise there remains no rational in stopping people from pakistan,nepal ,bhutan etc migrating to India in search of better life .
It also isn’t fair to let the culture and identity of one place to die completely .. the way Indian culture is getting westernized. Its however important that a given culture evolves with time.

Though there is a need of political attention to these factors .. the way the anguish is been shown and motivated by political parties and used to attract the support of majority is nothing but dirty politics.

All in all Center as well as State is responsible for not achieving balanced development across regions. Strict rules to curtail ppl from migrating also isn't favorable since this would add to the imbalance in development. What is to be done in such a scenario still remains controversial ,and such unhappy incidents would keep on popping up and political parties would continue to reap benefits out of this mistrust and uncertainties.


Friday, February 1, 2008

Love or Arranged !!

I wonder if Adam and Eve had ever thought that they should go for love or arranged marriage.. as if they had a choice .. infact as if they got married !! . However in today’s cosmopolitan culture one is often grounded by the love and arranged marriage scenario.

I have come across so many people in love[wonder if that really exists] around me , ranging from those who go allgushy pushy in public to those who have those gr8 secretive love affairs ,from the time they are together to the time they break-up .. If we plot a graph of the relationship ...peak in the starting to disrupts in the middle and then crash at the end, would represents senSEX. Most of the time peak is characterized by infatuation , center is sustainable only due to memories of the past and anticipations in the future and the as the memories decrease and anticipation turns into disappointment relationship crashes. Recently there are so many articles in Times regarding how to keep your relationship alive /going etc ... Sometimes I wonder y do relationships need such a tonic and in that case is it Love or just plain adjustment . One of my friend who believes a lot in love said " There is no blind love in todays world .. ultimately you even start loving a dog when you spend a long time with him !!".. well I seriously think its very true in the real world . There have been so many cases that a pair madly in love[right now this word is getting more and more controversial!] with each other separated due to some reason discovers love in some other person and the relationship dies!. So many cases where one of them likes other but other doesn't have that feeling however after spending a good amount of time with the same person ..both fall in love with each other [reminds me of the dog]!! . So many cases [in fact all] where 2 people are in love with each others however they also have feelings for some other XYZ but just that they don't think that they would be able to make it to them .. settle for someone else and still call it love !. Few cases when both of them cannot decide whether they are in love or not and decide that if until XYZ age they don’t discover anyone better they ll get married !!

The other side , I have a friend who recently got engaged the arranged way . She once said "My family has decided a filter that only those guys whose current salary is more than 7-8Lac are screened !!" . I wonder if she would have had such liberties if she would have fallen in love with any of her colleague earning same as her !!. I personally don't feel she or family was wrong in any way by looking for a person who is economically very balanced , all they did was they set a benchmark for them based on the girls qualities/qualifications etc . Well we have already seen that there is no blind love, then what’s wrong in keeping the eyes completely open ! And the surprising fact was after they got engaged they got along so well like a pair in love .. having late night calls ,pet names , streams of SMS chatting!! . Same thing happened with one of my relative who got engaged the arranged way and was sharing few of their personal conversation with me. It appeared as if they were in Love !! ..

Apparently it appeared to me that whether you discover someone by infatuations or in an arranged way you reach the same state of controversial love .. which eventually turns into a duty, responsibility , a relationship for which you need tonic to keep it going in form of best practices that are printed in the Times .

Ultimately if Love that we are talking about is all about being able to spend the rest of time together than arranged marriage seems to be a safe bet where you get to choose and decide exactly what do you want from your partner as against those cases where you select someone because you start liking him/her just because you spent a good time with each other in times of loneliness. At the same time its very dangerous and difficult to know the person properly in very short time as in case of arranged marriages !!


My verdict : Adam and Eve were Lucky !!