I was angry and sad at the same time when I read that there was a proposal for setting up an IIT exclusively for women at Amaravati. I don’t see any purpose in setting up such an institution except for a desire to pamper the minorities.

Has anyone given a thought to what happens when women get a degree from this IIT? Are we going to set up all-women companies for them? Even if these women turn entrepreneurs they can’t say that they will deal with only women. If these women will have to deal with men when they ultimately step out to make use of their education then why not equip them with the necessary skills by setting up more co-ed institutions?

If on the other hand, these women will sit at home with their degrees, what’s the point of setting up an IIT for educating them?

And it’s ironical that this proposal had blessings from India’s first woman president Pratibha Patil. I was glad to read that for whatever reasons the Planning Commission nipped it in the bud.

Women maybe from Venus and men from Mars but they have to co-exist on this “3rd rock from the Sun”. The sooner we realize this, the better!

Every year as the day of the Ganesha Immersion (Visarjan) draws near I am reminded of a song that is never played in any of the pandals or processions. That’s because it’s a sad song – a sort of a tearful grievance to the Almighty, almost an accusation that He who sees all somehow missed out on the sorrow of one of his devotees. This song is from the movie “Dard Ka Rishta” which starred Sunil Datt and Khushbu who then was a child star. The pain and anguish of a father who is on the verge of losing his child to cancer is plain in the words:

Mere man mandir me tum bhagwan rahe
Mere dukh se tum kaise anjaan rahe
Mere ghar me kitne din mehmaan rahe
Mere dukh se tum kaise anjaan rahe

(My mind is your temple, how it is then that you are ignorant of my grief?
You stayed in my home for many days, how it is then that you are ignorant of my grief?)

A scene plays out often in my mind these days. It’s from the movie Ashoka. I have mentioned in this blog before that I am not a member of SRK’s fan club. One look at his Samrat Ashoka getup and I wisely stayed away from the movie theatres screening it. But sometime later I chanced on the movie’s end on one TV channel. And it’s that scene that has been playing itself out in front of my mind’s eyes.

Ashoka is sitting with the dead body of the young prince clutched in his arms – unable to accept the reality that greed can be ruthless enough to extinguish a life so young and so innocent, the enormity of the war and his hand in bringing about so much death and destruction finally dawning upon him. Then you see a small group of Budhhist monks (Bhikkus) slowly making their way across the battlefield - their very appearance preaching peace and forgiveness. It’s the moment of truth for Ashoka and the moment that changes his life, forever.

Today as I see violence and destruction claiming the lives of the innocent I wonder when the moment of truth will arrive for those who don’t hold human life in very high esteem. I hope and pray that it’s soon.

I have managed to devour 2 more books - Clive Cussler's "The Navigator" and Agatha Christie's "Appointment with Death" :-) Needless to say, loved both.

P.S. I am not sure but it looked as if "The Navigator" had a typo in one of the pages at the end. One character is initially referred to as "Fred Turner" and later as "Bender". Now I am reading Agatha Christie's "Nemesis". :-)

Journey to the Centre of the Earth

I enjoyed every minute of the movie “Journey to the Centre of the Earth”. Must say I was a bit apprehensive about sinking my hard-earned money on another Brendan Fraser starrer. I haven’t yet fully recovered from the disaster called "The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor" But I have enjoyed reading Jules Verne’s "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea". Since I had not bothered to check the story line on imdb.com when I checked the movie’s rating, I assumed that it is based on Verne’s novel of the same name. During the first few minutes into the movie I realized that that’s not the case.

Ok, I will let you in on a secret here. I didn’t get the storyline 100% but what little I could glean I will put forth here. Brendan is a scientist who teaches as well as does research using the lab founded in the name of his brother who was lost years ago on one his expeditions. Now the university is pulling a plug on the project as the theories they are working on are deemed impossible. Just when he is figuring out if there could be a way to save the lab, his sister-in-law dumps his teenage nephew at his doorstep as she arranges their immigration to Canada.

Brendan is just learning to cope with the teenager when he realizes that one of the probes set up by him on some remote location is showing signs of a seismic activity. The readings in 3 other locations match up exactly with those jotted down by his lost brother in the pages of Verne’s book. So Brandon goes to check on the probe with his nephew in toe. In walks a beautiful mountain guide whose late father also believed in those theories. Thus begins the journey to the centre of the earth!

I am glad that though I didn’t get the storyline in its entirety that didn’t stop me from enjoying the movie. Oh, I don’t mean to say that I believe that there are dinosaurs in a world deep within the earth’s core. That thought is downright scary and exactly the stuff nightmares are made up of. But I liked the old abandoned mine, the scary free falls and the entry into a world that humankind has never rested its eyes on. I was mentally tired of reading books that talked of what was happening to people in flesh and blood in some country. And so I was glad for this escape into a world of fantasy – even if it showed a cell phone getting a reception deep down in the centre of the earth :-)

If you guessed that I will find time to go through Verne’s original novel, you guessed it right pal! Jules Verne, here I come :-)

How The Mighty Fall

The twin towers fell again on 9/15. The reporters had a field day coining headlines such as “Lehman Lynched” and "Nightmare on Wall Street" as Lehman Brothers went belly up and Merrill Lynch had to sell itself. Lehman’s bankruptacy wasn’t a surprise for anyone following what’s been happening on the Wall Street. But Merrill came as a nasty surprise. And then there was AIG which fortunately was thrown a lifeline by the US Fed.

I am sure the most searched for items on the net these days would be “subprime”, “CDO”, “CDS” and Derivatives (Warren Buffet seems like a prophet now because he had already described them as weapons of mass financial destruction!). I am no exception and must confess that I now regret sleeping through my Options and Futures class in the B school days. How I long to go back.

One article summed it best when it said that the reaction world over swings between the two – glee at the fall of the so-called “Masters of the Universe” and an uneasy fear over what wreakage the tsunami that hit the Wall Street will cause closer home.

I guess when the dust finally does settle, there should be a movie on this bloodbath titled “Wall S” :-)

How many of you will say that you are into Bird Watching? I can almost see an amused expression on the faces of the guys reading this. But rest assured - I am talking about birds of a feathered kind here. :-) So if you are one of those who drop whatever you are doing when you hear a bird call outside, do check this site – Birdcalls.info. It has categories of birds with their pictures and calls. Happy Bird Watching!

P.S. The bird call of the species “Malabar Whistling Thrush” is very interesting :-)

A Thousand Splendid Suns

It’s the end of a typical college day. I can almost see myself and my best friend sitting on the steps outside our classroom before we leave for the day. All around us we see the campus emptying out – a few souls lingering back like us. It’s one of those days when you want to talk philosophy – even when your age at the last birthday was 20. We somehow get into talking about what it means to be a woman in a patriarchial society.

There are childish comments about being able to choose between multi-colored and designed dresses. Then of course there is jewellery (I see that these days women have lost their sole right over this!). But then there were some profound statements (for that age!) like privilege to mould the next generation and a chance to fight for your place in the society instead of being handed out everything on a platter. We both agreed that given a chance we both would like to come back as women in all our future lifetimes.

But as we made our way out of the campus in the gathering twilight we both had forgotten one vital thing when we reached that conclusion – the privilege of being born in a family that makes no distinction between a male child and a female child.

I had more than one occasion to reflect back on that day last week when I read Khaled Hosseini’s “A Thousand Splendid Suns”. I had a general idea about what I would find in its pages when I checked it out of the library. Afterall, I have read “Not without my daughter”. But I didn’t know I would find things that would simultaneously infuriate and nauseate me.

The story begins in a Kolba or hut outside the city of Herat in Afghanistan. The story is of Mariam who comes into the world with a stamp of being an illegitimate child of a wealthy man from Herat. Mariam suffers from the malady that many of us also suffer from – we don’t appreciate what we have till we lose it and by then it’s too late. She is always resenting her life in the Kolba with her mother and forever dreams of staying with her father along with his family of 3 lawful wives and 10 legitimate children. Then one cruel twist of fate takes it all away from her and she finds herself, at the age of about 15-16, in an unfamiliar city – married to a man almost thrice her age.

I am ashamed of myself because I was naïve enough to believe, not unlike Mariam, that maybe her troubles will now reduce, if not downright vanish. But Mariam finds out that a woman’s worth is always determined by the number of male children she bears – or not. By the time she reaches her 30s she is almost reconciled to her fate when life deals her another blow. A war raging in Afghanistan brings a girl of 15-16 into her home and her life – Laila. And it was at this point that I felt sickened by the story – so much that I didn’t have the heart to open the book for 2 whole days. What kind of a 60+ man marries a child of 15-16 – a child who would be the same age as his grandchild? It’s a miracle that I didn’t throw up on reading that Laila bears his child. And the arrogance and rudeness just because he was born a man is enough to boil blood of any self-respecting woman. Mariam and Laila start the journey as enemies and end up being friends. There is a final twist to Mariam’s tale which completes her transformation from someone who came to this world unwanted but ended up as someone who was loved and cherished.

I have always believed that women carry within themselves an unlimited source of strength and resilience. They don’t need to seek any external assurances because they know within their hearts what they are capable of. That gives them the ability to come up trumps in situations that demand their best. But I was amazed at the courage and nerve that these women display in making the best of every situation and finally in fighting for their lives. If I was surprised at the calmness with which they share cups of tea in the backyard of their home in war-torn Afghanistan, it also tore up my heart that someone should consider even such a simple act a luxury.

The lot of the women hasn’t been better in India as well. Maybe things are not as bad for them as they were for Mariam and Laila. But who knows? There could be remote villages where India could be having its own versions of Mariam and Laila. It’s not even about one particular faith treating their women in an inferior manner. It’s the mentality in many cases which tries to find a justification of its actions in the scriptures and holy books. My sadness was for all such women whom fate probably never gave a chance to fight for themselves.

It’s not the following lines that gave the book its title that will always stay with me:

One could not count the moons that shimmer on her roofs
Or the thousand splendid suns that hide behind her walls.

but what Mariam’s mother tells her to always remember:

“Like a compass needle that always finds the North, a man’s accusing finger always finds a woman”.