Plagiarism Unlimited

Sports Day.jpgOne wonders what is the difference between inspiration and plagiarism – I mean, I certainly do one of these two all the time. For instance just today I thought of making a poster for the forthcoming Sports Day for Phase I, and I thought of playing with the words ‘Go Play’. If you remember, they come from Diet Pepsi advert that would come on screens not much long ago. Somehow, I seem to like this one. Lately I have come to realize that I am liking making posters too much. Perhaps I should stop being a babu, and be a fulltime plagiarist….

Call of Duty

Click to enlargeMany of the people in civil services suffer from a handicap. These people have seen little of professional life, seem less of private sector jobs, and seen only a few of joining letters. I hail from such a group, old and crusty and yet immature in the world of jobs, of interviews and group discussions. Regardless, however, most people fantasize about a their joyous jubilation at the reception of the joining letter, or fondness for the golden crest they imagine, the crisp and thick page, the neat printed alphabets deciding your destiny. Not for the civil servants. For the civil servants there is always a lousy impersonal letter with a curious and long number, filled with antiseptic words from an anonymous cleric. “The government is pleased to inform that…”… I don’t know who is so pleased. When I received the joining instructions for the Foundation Course in Mussoorie from DoPT, I did not think so much about this. I was already anxious to receive something, and when the notice came it was godsent. Now, many months older and wiser in the ways of the government, I was even more scandalized when I received a lousy official correspondence in the form of a joining letter from my state. I wonder if the people in government cannot afford some good paper to print on, and get a good printout on a crested paper. I wonder if those in responsible positions could not afford to put in their signature. For all I know, there is no way to prove if this really came from the government – there is no stamp, no crest, no watermark, no signature. An anonymous, impersonal letter copied to nine places, with my name coming in at seventh position. A letter typed on a sheet of paper the kabadi wala would refuse to take for making packets. Welcome to the land of babus!

Whither Social Harmony?

Education has been held up as a single panacea for all social ills. The championing of education, with valid merit in most cases, is universal and profound. The many advantages and the many positive externalities make education seem like the single shining point of light in the midst of gross societal chaos. In India it has taken curious routes – this championing of education – and the following random points are mere pointers at the total chaos in our understanding of this phenomenon:

  1. BooksThe value of education and knowledge is ingrained in and through religion, myth, ritual and a general cultural ethos.
  2. It is not without reason that our cultural history is sprinkled with systemic and individual efforts of devotion to knowledge, efforts that generated a whole social ethos closely related to the Brahminic culture. This association became so close as to become a metaphor – the brahmin is a synonym for a knowledgeable man.
  3. Quite conversely, this ethos of knowledge survived among its practitioners by systemic denial among others. A whole system of proprietorship was evolved, developed on the foundations of crafted religion and morals – a system that sanctified such knowledge as divine, and hence, only practitionable only by the chosen elite. The corollary was ignorance of this knowledge (this is never to allege that Brahminic knowledge is the only form of valid knowledge and knowing) among the vast majority.
  4. Independent India paid handsome homage to the value of knowledge, to the utlity of demolishing this structure and system of denial, to the logic of social benefit through dissemination of knowledge. And this homage was occasioned by and met with Herculean efforts at being an Ostrich. Our contemporary history is a peaen to our myopic objectives, of compromising the future for the present, of sacrificing the many for the few. This period saw our allegiance to the notion of education and to the practice of hypocrisy. Sixty years of ‘freedom’ and our social indicators are a mess when compared with the numerous success stories drafted at around the same time.
  5. Lately, our service sector is showing a stupendous buoyancy, and a few shrewd observers have commented that our penchant for and success in white collar jobs has much to do with this social ethos that generated today’s crop of achievement. There is confusing and controverted thinking involved here – while most deplore the low social expenditure of yore, many celebrate today’s achievement as a fallout of yesterday’s investment, however minimal.

It is obvious to find that as a society, as a polity and as individuals we have still not been able to define our approach towards education and knowledge, our committment to the idea of education as a panacea, and to its utility as a tool of social engineering.

Many a times I am personally perturbed, however, when eduation is thus championed as a panacea. Many months back during the Foundation days, we had the occasion to write essays on different topics. I chose a topic that assumed much the same in its very title – it said ‘Social Harmony is Possible Through Universal Education’. I wanted to counter this assumption, and hence I wrote my essay as a rebuttal to that assumption. I am presenting here that article to forward my arguments.

Social Harmony is Possible Through Universal Education – A Counter-View

Wardi se panga : What I think is wrong with the men in uniform

With an INSAS rifle at an elevated post, on way to TawangAs a part of our training we have what is popularly called ‘Bharat Darshan’. Bharat Darshan is a romantic experience, a part of popular myth among those who have done it, a source of inspiration and fantasy for those who aspire. It is an occasion that takes you across the length and breadth of the country much beyond the tourist circuit – here you get to see how the tribals live, how the villages work, how the army secures the border, how the big MNCs function, and much more, and during these travails you traverse about half of earth’s circumference. The Army Attachment forms part of the Bharat Darshan. During this attachment, you are ‘attached’ with a Army Unit or Division, and you live with them for many days so that you can get a close look at the Defence Forces at work. Here you can live the army life, with its varied hardship and romance, with the bullets and the bazooka, the vodka and the pretty wives of the officers.

Two and a half years back I too had got an opportunity to join the Army. I did not join, hoping to join Civil Service, which I did two years later. As such, I have a love and hate relationship with the Army, and in a haste to justify my decision post facto. Thus, I traversed through the attachment as a critic, finding all the holes in the army fatigue. We had to submit a report on the Army Attachment that was drafted by me. Only today I sneaked into the report and found that it had received an excellent evaluation by the Course Coordinator. Here I am reproducing the critical and analytical part of the report, chucking the descriptive and boring part to escape your viewing displeasure.

Army Report…

Back to basics

Author - Overlooking Happy ValleyIt is a fact universally accepted that an act is done much easier if someone else does it for you. Web design and maintenance falls in the same category. How better it would be if a webmaster did not have to worry about mastering the web, if he could be just sitting and adding content! Blogs arose with the same intention, separating content from design and freeing the author from worries of the latter. But lo, in being a good author, the webmaster has stopped being the master. As a necessary corollary to freedom from design, arose the fact that you lost control over design. That font is not quite right! I wish the icon for ’email’ was a little different! I wish I could mend that CSS and that template! Well, with a blog, you just pine if you are not that technically adept. Being a webdesigner, webmaster and writer myself, I traversed all these funny emotions between the blog and the designed-website. Finally, I realize that writing is so much more fun if I leave my designer self behind. And being a webmaster, when you don’t understand half the things, and when all the things go wrong because you don’t know half the things…well, then, you go crazy. I have gone crazy many times. I have fulminated, and then ping-ponged between being a writer once and designer next. So, after more than a year of hibernation that saw much in my personal life, I add something to my blog again. I hope, like the numerous earlier times when I hoped similary but with equally dismal outcomes, that I would write more regularly. Going by my past record, it is hard to believe myself….