#100WaysToDieInIndia

As of now (03-Mar-2012, 17:48 IST), #100WaysToDieInIndia is trending on Twitter. Globally that is. So I thought it would be amusing to see what people outside of India know about India.. In fact, so enamoured did I get with this notion that I abandoned my dissertation work in this noble pursuit.

What I found out:-
1) Indian food is deadly spicy.

2) Indians hate Pakistanis

3) It is unheard of to not love SRK

#100WaysToDieInIndia say Sharukh Khan is the shittest actor ever and he's an overrated egghead

— akbarghhhh (@akbar_0) March 3, 2012

4) Indian elders regularly beat kids with chappals

5) Cows, goats and elephants trample on us frequently. Cobras also.

#100WaysToDieInIndia get run over by a renegade Elephant.

— Taronish Elavia (@Taro_Elavia) March 3, 2012

#100WaysToDieInIndia get run over by a cow

— Henry Austin (@henryaustin) March 3, 2012

#100WaysToDieInIndia Provoke a cobra.

— Jack Brien (@JackBrien1) March 3, 2012

#100WaysToDieInIndia Trampled by a random sanjay and his elephant.

— Liam Boyle (@LBoyle33) March 3, 2012

6) Indian parents have no tolerance for their wayward (read non-engineering/medically inclined) offspring.

#100WaysToDieInIndia "I'd rather be a hairdresser, don't wanna be a doctor" *Dad prepares shotgun*

— Denzil Safo-Antwi (@DenzilSafo) March 3, 2012

7) Indians are all vegetarians

'#100WaysToDieInIndia Kill a cow and you'll be toast.' fact.

— emmanuel mwisa (@Red_AlertMe) March 3, 2012

8) Indians all have long names

#100WaysToDieInIndia GO TO MACCIES ON JALANDHAR RD AND LAUGH AT THE WORKER CALLED "ALBERT" WHEN CLEARLY HIS NAMES TO LONG FOR THE NAME TAG!!

— TWEETHOOLIGAN (@RandyBhambra) March 3, 2012

9) Indians often sell body parts to buy cricket tickets

#100WaysToDieInIndia Sell ur kidneys to buy an #IndiavPak cricket match ticket

— Mishal (@MishalHere) March 3, 2012

10) Indian men don't cheat

11) Abusing a Sardar is frowned upon.

#100WaysToDieInIndia abuse a sardar and u will die of guilt

— Chemical Locha (@DilFake_aashiq) March 3, 2012

12) We all marry our cousins. And Sanji is a real name.

#100WaysToDieInIndia not marrying your cousin sanji

— chris pennicott (@cpennicott) March 3, 2012

13) If not that then at least we must do arranged marriage

#100WaysToDieInIndia Not agreeing to marry the girl you've been arranged to marry. #MummaGonnaBeatYou

— Matthew Morgan (@MatthewMorganx) March 3, 2012

As if all of this wasn't enough, we've got these to worry about -

whatever they are..

Would you stop to listen to the music?

Back in 2007, Gene Weingarten, a journalist from the Washington Post thought of an interesting experiment to study human behaviour. He managed to convince a world class musician to exhibit his violin expertise dressed as a homeless person in busy Washington DC metro. The idea was to observe how differently people would accept the same product outside its society-assigned place of belonging - the concert hall.
Joshua Bell, the musician, had just played for a fancy audience - each of whom had paid around $100 for a ticket - a few days ago.

This is what happened.


Bell managed to earn about $32 (excluding the $20 bill he got from a fan who eventually recognised him) from more than a thousand commuters who passed by during that 45 minutes.

How screwed up is that? Imagine how differently we would look at the world if we had no set notions.

There's 2 ways to interpret this.
1. It's possible to wonder if the talent in question is overrated. Maybe Bell is just a mediocre violinist who got a series of lucky breaks. If the crowd didn't listen, does that mean the music wasn't really good?
This is a very valid point, especially in this age where a video of a dog twitching in it's sleep can go viral.
There are so many chance happenings that serendipity has lost its charm today. How do you know if Justin Bieber would be where he is today even if Scooter Braun hadn't 'discovered' him? What is Braun had not updated his flash player or chose this guy instead?
I could go on...
It's all arguable i suppose, but maybe I'm being naive in saying that talents like Joshua Bell, AR Rahman and others are the few for whom luck might not have played as much a role as their gift and their hardwork did.
For them not to have been noticed would have taken life full of lousy luck and bad decision-making.
Which brings us to the second point of view.

2. Let's say these famous guys are really talented (Okay, excepting Snooki, the Kardashians, anybody in Bigggg Boss and Zayed Khan), so there's nothing wrong with a little bit of luck helping them out right?
But imagine if the same amount of luck was given to everyone. How many potential superstars are lurking in the world with no chance of recognition? The supremely overdone example ofcourse is 'How many Sachin Tendulkars might exist among the millions of galli cricket players'.

ACTUALLY

this was not even a point with which I began this blog entry. I meant to write about how shackled we are by our responsibilities and by perceptions of the society as a whole. How without realizing it, most of us form most of our opinions based on already formed ones.

Sounded really deep in my head, but like wannabe trash on paper. Will publish this still because I'm self destructive that way.

FAIL.

Cramped.

Some things in nature seem so unnecessary. Like menstrual cramps. As if it isn't enough that women give birth, we have to be reminded about it every 30 days. Knowing why it happens may not really make it worthwhile (hah!), it may even piss you off more, but if you're lucky it'll at least distract you for a few minutes.

Every uterus has a bloody lining
So us mammals have this thing called the uterus aka the womb and in lay terms that's where the baby hangs out for nine months. Unfortunately, even if you're not pregnant, things are still happening in there.
The protagonist in this violent story is a slimy fellow called the endometrium (ENDO-MET-RIUM). So the endometrium is the inner lining of the uterus which gets recycled every month since your first period - which is from when, as unnecessary as it sounds, a woman is ready to bear child. So every month, your body is (somewhat stupidly) prepping itself to get pregnant. And since pregnancy is signalled by the embryo (egg+sperm=zygote -> embryo) embedding itself on the uterus wall, the uterus wall needs to toughen up in anticipation of this happening at any moment. After about four weeks of waiting and no victorious sperm emerging even after ovulation (monthly release of eggs - best time to get pregnant, unless you're Monica and Chandler Bing), your uterus finally gets the hint and realizes it thickened the endometrium for nothing. And apparently, the endometrium has to be fresh to successfully embed the embryo so we can't just have it getting stale waiting for you to get pregnant. So now the body has to get rid of this tissue doesn't it. And what better way to do this than bleed through your privates! Hormone levels (in this case decreasing estrogen and progesterone) signal the endometrium to get swollen and begin shedding. That, in a nutshell, is what happens every month during your period.

'If suffer we must, let's suffer on the heights'
Pain, blood's loyal ally, has a good reason to be here too. As the old lining starts to weaken, chemicals called prostaglandins are released. Prostaglandins prod the old lining into actual disintegration. They do this by causing the uterus wall to contract (imagine flexed biceps) and thereby restrict blood flow and oxygen to the outdated endometrium. The endometrium, as a result wither away and die. To get it out of our system, the walls keep contracting so that the waste tissue ultimately gets squeezed out of the vagina. As you can imagine, this squeezing is nothing but the cramp that we love to hate, made further painful by clots of bloody tissue trying to escape the narrow cervical canal (that leads the uterus to the vagina).

That's all there is to it. Of course this is highly simplified and each step I've described is actually governed by dozens of hormones and regulatory mechanisms, some of which illustrator Wendy Bryan has described in a fun way here. A more detailed account can be got here.

Oh and there's this totally stoner menstruation video i found that's highly annoying but so damn funny I just have to share. It could be useful to visualize but i'm not entirely sure what that egg is doing there.
Oh, and I'm not a doctor so do let me know if i'm wrong or if any of you know anything I don't.

About Me

I never know how to fill the About Me sections in social networks. I still fill them up, but most of the time it embarrasses me later. As probably will this one

Dear Self,

I’ve always considered my tendency to admire traits in people so instantly and intensely as a weakness. It doesn’t sound healthy to constantly harp on in your mind about one person’s integrity, another person’s straightforwardness, another’s free spiritedness, and yet another’s genuine don’t-give-a-rat’s-ass-ity, does it? What’s confusing is diagnosing this condition. Is it even admiration at all? It could very well be envy (How can they be this perfect?) or perhaps insecurity, a kind of defense mechanism (I can’t be them, so I look up to them), maybe it’s simply the easy-to-please nature of my character (I like everybody) or maybe it’s harmless perennial infatuations. Each of those explanations is progressively less appealing than the last.

Maybe it doesn’t have to be just one of those. Different circumstances call for different theories. Take All India Radio jockey for example, back in high school. He was clearly a teenage infatuation. On the other hand, in the uncle(s)’ case it’s the kind of admiration that is strong enough and real enough to make me try to be like them. But with that arbitrary boy/girl in college who you barely even know but feel an inexplicable pang of respect for, that’s when it gets tricky. How do you justify reverence by observation? Simply reading someone’s writing, following their tweets, listening to their music and looking at their arty Facebook photos sometimes instill in me an unwarranted awe.

It could be that this is a positive way to channel envy. Instead of childishly feeling resentful to someone who’s got something that you want really badly, it makes more sense to make the competition your ally.

If I’m easy to please, then I think that too need not necessarily be a bad thing, as long as it does not cross the fine line to naiveté. I’ve never been overly competitive or ambitious and I guess that has its perks. It makes it easier for me to appreciate the good in most people. I can get real critical; those who know me really well should be able to vouch for that, but my wariness for an individual is often easy to ignore when there’s some amount of good stuff in them.

See, I’m a fiercely guarded person. People who’ve been on the receiving end of my infinite supply of fart jokes, over-active virtual life, and verbal diarrhoea may scoff, and I understand. But most of what I talk about myself is the bits I don’t care about. I don’t care about being ladylike, in my pursuit of making people laugh. I don’t care about people branding me an exhibitionist, my virtual life is the easiest way for me to communicate with the world and I need to communicate.

With this comfortable distance between me and pretty much every person I meet, it becomes easy to bring a degree of subjectivity to personal relations. It’s easier to respect, easier to take it easy, and easier to not be disappointed when you realize the person in question isn’t all you made him or her out to be. In my case, this reality check is most often accompanied by a sense of closure; there’s some sort of relief in realizing even that person is only human. I don’t mean it to be sadistic, but truth is that I feel more at peace once I know their human side.

Depending on the nature of the so called ‘human’ quality, I either like them more, or feel myself falling out of awe with them. Clinginess is one human quality I find myself unwittingly shying away from. Vulnerability makes me feel fonder. Kind of contradictory, but that’s just the way I can articulate the situation, for now.

Love,
Me

Image from New Yorker

Ammu

A Photo I took at the neighbourhood government school. We caused a minor stampede. Everybody wanted their picture taken! The headmaster told us most of these children come from broken homes. They eat their only meals in the school that is in itself grossly undermaintained and underfunded. The headmaster Mr. Lukeman Durai and a teacher we met called Ms. Violet-something-Julie are very well spoken people. They've dedicated close to a decade of their lives to teach these kids, a significant percent of whom drop out at grade 8. Stories of inspiration like these are everywhere.

We were just leaving the area - Pannanthope colony in Ayanavaram - content with the information we had collected for our documentary, yet still missing that crucial component that would thread all the disparate bytes of visuals and voices. But that crucial component usually turns up during the last minute frenzy, or so I hoped.

A scrumptious lunch on our minds (a treat for our pampered selves, soiled by the interaction with poverty), we headed towards the bus stop. On our way we spotted a particularly miserable stretch of slum dwellings; a long compelling shot of that would be fantastic for the documentary, wouldn't it! So we took on our flipcam and began to do so. I was slinking around, trying in vain to look as inconspicuous as I could; taking photos of personal properties always makes me uncomfortable.

An old-ish woman carrying a naked infant seemed to have appeared from the depths of the slum. I went towards where she was hovering.

'Amma, if you know of any hostels then please let me know,' she said in Tamil.
'Enna?', I asked, handicapped by my shameful grasp of the language I ought to know.
'My daughter has gone missing and I have no idea where she is. We have filed a complaint many times. She's been gone since September. She was a grown girl. Now I have to take care of my three grandchildren,' she lamented, 'all girls,' she added with a sad smile.

By then my journalistic radar was ringing. I'd asked my friend to start recording, and the woman seemed to not be bothered.

'The children do not have a father. He was very abusive, beat her a lot. I do not know what to do with the children. We live off my younger daughter's meager pay.'

As taken in as I was with her tragic story, cruel pragmatism made me try to steer her conversation to the general state of her slum and what authorities had done about it; which was what we were supposed to uncover.

Enthusiastically she began relating her woes in a manner that was both undramatic and stirring at the same time.
'Nobody has agreed to help us. The politicians promise us things but nothing has improved. The waterlogging and garbage overflowing makes the kids sick. The police have not managed to find anything about my daughter's whereabouts.' I noticed that every passage of conversation kept finding its way back to her missing daughter.
'I don't know what to do. I can't bring myself to go to work thinking about her and these kids I have to take care of.'

In those two minutes she covered so many nuances of poverty. The burden of the girl child, abuse of women in the household, children growing up in broken homes, diseases, hopelessness, desperation, resilience, her missing daughter.
At no point in this heavy conversation did we have to egg her on. Neither did she ask us for anything material. For food for the baby, money, nothing.

'Please pray for my children. Just pray that is enough.'

We made empty promises to try and help. I know I shall forget about this soon, succumb to the cosy ignorance of richness.

What is your name, we asked her.
'Mine? Jessy' she said. I saw a glassy eyed smile; mine or hers I could not tell.
'Ponnu peru Ammu. Japam pannungo ma'

Ammu is her daughter's name. If you're not going back, Ammu, I hope you've found a better life than what you left behind. I'm not that optimistic about your three daughters.

Twitteretiquette, Self Importance and Being judgamental on a perfectly pleasant Sunday

Shashi Tharoor retweets a LOT.

Tell him it's Jhansi Rani's birthday, Please RT. He'll RT.
Real Example 1
ABC
@ShashiTharoor Today is the Birthday Anniversary of Rani Laxmibai. Why No media reporting freedom fighter birthday. http://on.fb.me/slBGB3
1 hour ago
Retweeted by ShashiTharoor

Tell him it's your birthday and the best gift would be a RT. Oh he'll RT.
Real Example 2
XYZ
A RT from our beloved @ShashiTharoor would be the highlight of my day... my birthday.... U guys think ill get it?
23 hours ago
Retweeted by ShashiTharoor

And why shouldn't he, you may ask. I thought about it, though and I've come to the conclusion that it takes someone enormously pig-headed and filled with disillusioned righteousness (not to mention a LOT of time.. though to be fair, I'm not one to talk about that) to do that.
See, it's fine if you think Jhansi Rani should be given her due. I think so too. But do you actually think it makes any difference if you retweet it? If you actually care, write a tribute. One click of a mouse is not gonna make the media sit up and take notice. They have better more profitable things to do.
Obviously this is a manifestation of a need to be praised constantly, to be adored, to maintain a set of unwavering fans who fawn over every noble tweet. Don't discredit your intelligent followers with such double faced patriotism.

And wishing me on my birthday. See, sometimes we regular folk get carried away by celebrities. I, for instance, think you write well; I even bought your book for my best friend's pregnant sister. But let's say I was completely crazy about you (hypothetical situation) I might be driven against good judgement and self respect to request you for a retweet like Mr. XYZ did. I might even feel a few minutes of thrill if u retweeted. But trust me, unless I was an exceptionally sad human being it would NOT be the highlight of my day. If i said it would i was simply being melodramatic. And you should know that you are not making the world a better place for me. And let's say XYZ was an exceptionally sad human being, then it's completely thoughtless of you to encourage his groveling. XYZ deserves better than that, but I suppose it makes you feel better about yourself.

Then there was this tweet..
Shashi Tharoor
Those who sneer at politicians attending weddings shld see how happy people r that u chose2b part of their special day. Glad2share their joy
13 Nov

I'm sorry you're so filled with this feeling that your presence is so special. I'm sorry but I'm still sneering.

Image from www.kindofcrap.com

The American Poor

We have a new professor called Steve Ross who takes a week long module for us. It's Day 2 and boy has he shown up in my life right when he was needed!
It's been a rough few weeks. Too much work. Too many annoyances. And dissatisfied professors. So for Steve Ross, who taught at Columbia University for more than a decade to manage not to be completely stupefied at our stupidity comes as a BIG encouragement.

So anyway, I could go on about him, but I don't wanna ramble cuz i'm not nearly as FANTASTIC as he is at that area (I swear i've never met anybody who could start off talking about a nuclear awareness website and branch off into the working of a battery made from cowdung and ACTUALLY make sense before. Is it still rambling if you paranthetise? Is paratherise a word?)

So Professor Steve Ross was showing us some pictures that his wife Rachel Ellner took for a feature series on the homeless in America. And it was amazing.
I don't mean the photographs, which no no doubt were, but it was the people in the pictures themselves. New York, according to Mr. Ross has thousands and thousands (I remember him saying 150,00, but thats seems so big I'm gonna have to double check) homeless people! Not what you think of when you think of New York sitting here, is it? But what stood out is the in-your-face difference between the poor in America and the poor in India.

In the photos he showed us, it might sound callous (I've been told I sometimes sound so), but the instinctive reaction was to dismiss their suffering. They all wear clothes.. they may look unwashed yes, but it's all there! shirt jacket jeans cap.. some goth homeless girl had some pretty kickass accessories and black nailpolish! Seriously!

Photo from stock.xchng

One of the reasons for this I gathered was the reasons for their poverty. In India, the urban poor are poor because there parents were poor. Except for maybe the disabled ones and the mentally challenged who are abandoned. In America, from what little I saw, poverty was due to a whole variety of other reasons. Lisa ran away from an abusive home. Scott has a severe drug habit. Elise and Roger and drug addicts and broke. All the stereotypical American names are made up btw. The rest is real.

I can't imagine that happening (exceptions prove the rule) to Urban youngsters here. For example, I was not fiercely independent/rebellious/stupid enough to actually run away from home and live on the streets when my parents wanted me to apply for a PhD. My parents would never kick me out of my home even if I had a drug habit (I hope that's not just wishful thinking) and if I ever lost my job, I would probably succumb to the temptation of living off a kind relative, even though I would hate myself for it. I give examples of myself because I can't talk for anybody else. But I dare say there are people who can relate. It's not even that I'm actually that spineless. As a matter of fact I often fancy myself to be a pretty fiercely independent for a 23yr old who still lives with her parents. Might not sound like much but I know more and more people who are a lot more infuriatingly submissive than I am.

Also the American homeless often hang around the streets with boards saying 'Need Work' and other more creative alternatives. Whereas I've never bumped into an Indian homeless person who's asked for a job and not money. Not that any of us rich folks would ever 'risk' employing someone we found on the street (what would the neighbours say!)

Image from http://kjwonka.hubpages.com/hub/New-Yorks-hot-new-export---homeless-people

The difference between the Indian and American homeless is even more emphasized when you look at this NY city website i found for their Dept of Homeless Services. So in this site they have a section called 'Homeless Now?' Can you imagine that! They are actually in a scenario where they can expect homeless people to log into the internet and find this page!

The very notion of having a website for homeless beggars to log on to here in India seems absurd at best..