The destructive forces of a revolution?

Karwaan (Hindi, Caravan, 2018)


Just to recapitulate what Jordan Peterson mentioned in his book 'The 12 Rules of Life', we tend to assume all social ailments or individual problems that one faces in the process of growing up must be solved with a radical restructuring of one's culture. The call for social revolution is heard loud and clear amongst the young chicklings in every generation. The oft-quoted complain among the youth is that adults are not in tune with reality or are living in the past. Names like fossils and dinosaurs have been heard. On the part of the elders, it is pejorative as well. Their offsprings have been referred to as the generation that would bring down civilisation.

What we often forget is that revolution by nature is destructive. Look back at history. Revolutions have always been of chaos, destruction and re-setting or jump-starting a failing system. If every generation feels that the generation before them had wronged them, there must be something wrong somewhere. Aeons of living together as a community, and we are still struggling to pave the best way from childhood to adulthood. Surely this cannot be true. The parents cannot be wishing ill of their downlines. This is contradictory to the theory of the selfish gene and maternal reflex of walking into a hopelessly burning building to save her young. Logically, after going through various challenges over the centuries, the human race would have surely come up with a blueprint on how to tackle teenage and growing pain issues. But then childhood, adolescence and teenage is a new construct of the 20th century. Before that, children were just little adults, beaming with desires to grow up and fill into the shoes of the adults. The priority was the community, not personal liberty.

Time is an excellent teacher. Hopefully, before the young gets all her life muddled up, they would realise that all the ranting and whining were indeed well-intended.

So, it was told...
A 5-year-old child would think that his father was the strongest, bravest or the fastest than any of his mate's father. At 10, he would not think too much of him. At 15, he cannot see eye-to-eye with him. At 20, he likes to avoid his father altogether. He only communicates with his mother (to pass the message). Then life goes on. At 40, now with children of his own, he understands that it is a Herculean task to be a parent. At 50, he appreciates his father's deeds. At 60, with his father dead and gone, it is all full circle again - his father is the strongest, smartest and most patient man.

This movie tells the story of three people who go on a journey of self-discovery when one of the protagonist's parent's remains was accidentally couriered to the wrong address. Avinash is living in daze working in an unsatisfying job, forever regretting of not pursuing his passion for photography. He has a bone to pick with his father, who had died recently during his pilgrimage, for making his childhood a living hell. His father had unilaterally decided what was best for his future.

When Avinash received his father's coffin, he realised that the sender had mixed up the package. He had to send the box to the rightful owner and reclaim his father's body. He got the help of a friend, Shaukat, with his van to travel from Bengaluru to Kochi. On the way, they had to pick a young girl, Tanya, the granddaughter of the other deceased.

The three characters all have 'daddy issues'. Avinash had a father who objected to his choice of carrier. Shaukat had a drunkard and abusive father. What puzzled him was why his mother took all the abuses and chased Shaukat out of the house instead when he raised up to question his father. Tanya grew up without a father from the age of eight. He had succumbed to cancer. Looking at Tanya's rebellious behaviour opposing all the values that Avinash holds dear to his heart, he realises that that was how his father would have felt. With the benefit of being grilled in the School of Hard Knocks of Life, Avinash can see more things than what the young Tanya just simply fail to realise.

The cinematography is quite breathtaking as the characters drive through the country road to God's own country. Watching the film just reignited our cycling team's earlier plan to cycle in India. Before the COVID pandemic brought all travels to a grinding halt, we were interested in a 950+ kilometres cycling tour through Karnataka, Kerala and Tamil Nadu. 

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Appearance not substance

I do not want to see the skyline. I want to know how the

background looks with me as the subject. It is all about me, 

myself and I. 

From a group of people who thought that peeking into a mirror was looking at the devil itself and that posing in front of a camera would drain a person's soul, we have come a long way. Our generation is easily the one that has the most access to how they look. Rather than posturing at their better side, they seem to want to see every angle of the body. They yearn to have the perfect photo-friendly display of the best that they have to offer. They want to be forever in portrait mode. Every passing moment is a potential Instagram moment, and they must be ready. They do not want to be caught in an awkward pose, opening the mouth too wide, with the hair unkempt or even with a face incongruent to the camera's angle. 

Their every second of their existence must be an 'insta' worthy moment!

Don't even preach that inner beauty is more important and that one has to be beautiful on the inside or that beauty is skin deep. It is easier to make a conclusion by perusing the outside. Exploring inner attraction is too tiring and cumbersome.

These are some of the thoughts that went through my mind as I witnessed a few events recently. Two of them were life-altering academic achievements, while the other was festival merriment. It seems to me that well-wishers who attended the function were there to sort of mark their attendance by pixellating their presence forever. Whether they were there to genuinely extend their felicitations is another question. Their preoccupation was to take pictures of the host in different combinations of friends and relatives like in a round-robin football match to pick out the team with the most goals. In this case, the person who appears most photogenic. Do they not realise that saying that one is photogenic means that he or she is ugly in real life but deceptively appealing in pictures.  

Amma used to say, "This world is about appearance, not substance. But with time, beauty will decay, but the matter will withstand the test of time."

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

It's time to say no to our pampered student emperors

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationopinion/12073349/Its-time-to-say-No-to-our-pampered-student-emperors.html

The Rhodes statue row can be blamed on a generation raised to believe that their feelings are all that matter

A student wears a sticker calling for the removal of a statue of Cecil John Rhodes from the campus of the University of Cape Town Photo: Reuters/Mike Hutchings

By Harry Mount

5:45PM GMT 29 Dec 2015

1750 Comments

The little emperors have grown up. The babies of the late 90s – mollycoddled by their parents, spoon-fed by their teachers, indulged by society – have now reached university. Some of the brighter ones are now at Oxford, demanding that the Cecil Rhodes statue at Oriel should be torn down, because of his imperialist, racist views.

"Universities are reaping the whirlwind of two decades of child-centred education"

We shouldn’t be so surprised. If you’ve had a lifetime of people saying “yes” to you, of never being told off, you remain frozen in a permanent state of supersensitivity. I wasn’t offended by the Rhodes statue when I was at Oxford 20 years ago. But, even if I had been, I wouldn’t have thought my wounded feelings should be cured by tearing apart the delicate fabric of a beautiful university.

Universities are reaping the whirlwind of two decades of child-centred education. That whirlwind has imported imbecilic trigger warnings – when academics have to warn students that western European literature, from the Iliad on, is full of sex and violence. It has also brought the pernicious idea of “no-platforming” – when students refuse to give a stage to anyone who doesn’t fit with their narrow view of the world.

We shouldn’t blame the student emperors for all this. Their warped supersensitivity is the fault of the generation above – the teachers and parents who have so indulged them. I first noticed the disaster of child-centred education six years ago. Near my childhood home in north London, there is a late-Victorian school. According to the noticeboard outside, it didn’t have a headmaster. Instead, Mr MJ Chappel was called the “lead learner”.

The implication was clear. Mr Chappel wasn’t placed in authority above the children but was ranked alongside them. Children have as much to teach the teachers as the teachers have to teach them – an idiocy that’s difficult to attack because it sounds so charming; and because people like me sound so evil when we disagree.

  Photo: PA

That idiocy is now endemic through the primary, secondary and tertiary education sectors. I resigned from a provincial university lecturing job recently, when the disease struck my department. My colleague said it was my fault if the less clever, less hard-working undergraduates did worse in exams than their brighter, harder-working contemporaries. I was told not to penalise undergraduates for bad grammar or spelling mistakes. And I had to dumb down the exams.

The last straw was when I was told to cut down on facts in lectures. “You’re here to teach them how to think, not what to think,” the head of department told me. The tragedy was that the undergraduates weren’t little emperors. They were longing to learn facts, spelling and correct grammar but they had had precious little exposure to these things at school.

And so they sailed on serenely into the world of work, blissfully unaware that employers would throw their applications straight in the bin because of their bad English. I saw the final punishment for child-centred education a decade ago, when I worked on the Comment desk of the Telegraph. One of my jobs was to keep an eye on the interns.

Ntokozo Qwabe and the Cecil Rhodes statue on Oriel College in Oxford Photo: Rex  Photo: Rex

A charming bunch they were, too. What was astonishing, though, was how some of them took to having their grammar corrected. Because they’d never been told off about bad grammar at school or university, they logically assumed it didn’t matter; that I was some dreary old pedant, enforcing a code that died out some time in the Middle Ages.

I didn’t mind. It was no skin off my nose. But they should have minded – it was only the interns who either knew their grammar, or were chastened and informed by correction, who ended up getting jobs on the paper. Why should they have thought any differently? Throughout their education, they had been repeatedly encouraged to think their wounded feelings must trump the teacher’s, or employer’s, right to instruct.

"Every time the authorities are accused of racism, they bend over backwards to soothe the offended egos of the little, tinpot dictators"

The same applies to the row over Rhodes’s statue. The authorities at the university have, so far, continued to pamper the student emperors. Every time the authorities are accused of racism, they bend over backwards to soothe the offended egos of the little, tinpot dictators – rather than telling them that they, the teachers, are there to tell the students what to do; and not the other way round.

Harry Mount is author of How England Made the English (Viking)

Milliennial offspring of Helicopters

http://time.com/3154186/millennials-selfish-entitled-helicopter-parenting/

Millennials Are Selfish and Entitled, and Helicopter Parents Are to Blame

Nick Gillespie @nickgillespie Aug. 21, 2014

There are more overprotective moms and dads at a time when children are actually safer than ever

Peter Lourenco—Flickr RF/Getty Images

It’s natural to resent younger Americans — they’re younger!— but we’re on the verge of a new
generation gap that may make the nasty old fights between baby boomers and their
“Greatest Generation” parents look like something out of a Norman Rockwell painting.

Seventy-one percent of American adults think of 18-to-29-year-olds — millennials, basically — as “selfish,” and 65% of us think of them as “entitled.” That’s according to the latest Reason-Rupe Poll, a quarterly survey of 1,000 representative adult Americans.

If millennials are self-absorbed little monsters who expect the world to come to them and for their parents to clean up their rooms well into their 20s, we’ve got no one to blame but
ourselves — especially the moms and dads among us.

Indeed, the same poll documents the ridiculous level of kid-coddling that has now become the new normal. More than two-thirds of us think there ought to be a law that kids as old as 9 should be supervised while playing at a public park, which helps explain (though not justify) the arrest of a South Carolina mother who let her phone-enabled daughter play in a busy park while she worked at a nearby McDonald’s. We think on average that kids should be 10 years old before they “are allowed to play in the front yard unsupervised.” Unless you live on a traffic island or a war zone, that’s just nuts.

It gets worse: We think that our precious bundles of joy should be 12 before they can wait alone in a car for five minutes on a cool day or walk to school without an adult, and that they should be 13 before they can be trusted to stay home alone. You’d think that kids raised on Baby Einstein DVDs should be a little more advanced than that.

Curiously, this sort of ridiculous hyperprotectiveness is playing out against a backdrop in which children are safer than ever. Students reporting bullying is one-third of what it was 20 years ago, and according to a study in JAMA Pediatrics, the past decade has seen massive declines in exposure to violence for kids. Out of 50 trends studied, summarize the authors, “there were 27 significant declines and no significant increases between 2003 and 2011. Declines were particularly large for assault victimization, bullying, and sexual victimization. There were also significant declines in the perpetration of violence and property crime.”

There are surely many causes for the mainstreaming of helicopter parenting. Kids cost a hell of a lot to raise. The U.S. Department of Agriculture figures a child born in 2013 will set back middle-income parents about $245,000 up to age 17 (and that’s before college bills kick in).

We’re having fewer children, so we’re putting fewer eggs in a smaller basket, so to speak. According to the Reason-Rupe poll, only 27% of adults thought the media were overestimating threats to the day-to-day safety of children, suggesting that 73% of us are suckers for sensationalistic news coverage that distorts reality (62% of us erroneously think that today’s youth face greater dangers than previous generations). More kids are in institutional settings — whether preschool or school itself — at earlier ages, so maybe parents just assume someone will always be on call.

But whatever the reasons for our insistence that we childproof the world around us, this way madness lies. From King Lear to Mildred Pierce, classic literature (and basic common sense) suggests that coddling kids is no way to raise thriving, much less grateful, offspring. Indeed, quite the opposite. And with 58% of millennials callingthemselves “entitled” and more than 70% saying they are “selfish,” older Americans may soon be learning that lesson the hard way.

Alvivi forever and ever?

In the limelight but for how long?

By now we are all too familiar with the now infamous blog 'Sumptuous Eriotica' with the authors' (s)exploits and public display of their supposedly private expression of their casual love. And the hysteria that had followed suit, by the main stream newspapers who would otherwise have to continue churning out oft nauseating news of praise of the ruling party and bashing of the opposition.
The issue, stems from the fact that it is just a difference of importance placed by two different generations. The older generation lived a life trying to pacify the needs of the society whilst sometimes sacrificing personal needs or desires. The newer generation on the other hand live for themselves, to satisfy their needs and care a damn of others. They can all go to hell for all they care. It is already a challenge trying keep pace with others and establishing themselves in this competitive world. Compromising for others is not on their agenda right now. The social norm has changed. The differences between the Eastern and Western accepted social mores have become blurrier as we speak. What was taboo a generation ago in the Eastern culture is now embraced wholeheartedly by the generation next.
Gone are the days where the youngsters are seen and not heard. Their voice are heard loud and clear the world over.
This friction between generations (a.k.a. generation gap) started with the Elvis the Pelvis when he started his hip gyrating rock and roll numbers. Expression of the youth have never been the same...

FG says... It all started in Silicon Valley when everything everything started becoming informal; you don't have to dress up to go to work, you can dress down; you don't have to work fixed hours, you work flexi hours; you don't need hierarchy and cubicle in workplace, you practice open concept; this type of lackadaisical attitude slowly permeated into all facets of daily life; rules and regulations are made to be broken....

Alvivi forever?

Sex blogger takes to Facebook to blast media, critics

By Lydia Gomez | Yahoo Newsroom – Mon, Oct 22, 2012

KUALA LUMPUR, Mon.: When it comes to sex bloggers Alvin Tan and Vivian Lee's attitude towards their expose', the phrase 'taking it in their stride' is a gross understatement.

The duo, whose mercurial rise to infamy became the topic of frenzied online discussions and non-stop media coverage, have bulldozed their way through the harshest criticism with what appears to be confident, sarcastic rebukes.

Tan, an ASEAN scholar and law undergraduate at the National University of Singapore (NUS), took to his Facebook account to systematically rebut the highly publicised brickbats thrown at them, mostly through local news headlines.

 Taken from his profile, these are his posts:

 "I love these NUS Board of Discipline hearings, where the judge and the prosecutor are the same people" - [The NUS is conducting an internal disciplinary hearing into the sex blog].

 "Psychologists who have clever things to say about our behaviour should tone it down. How credible is your "appraisal" if you haven't even met us, much less conducted a proper assessment on us?" - [In a recent report, a psychiatrist claimed that both Tan and Lee's sex blog was nothing more than a 'cry for attention']

 "To those who say that we teach children the wrong things, look: those are your children. The world is bad and evil, and it is your job as parents to shield them or educate them about things like this. Ultimately, we don't owe more than an ounce of responsibility towards the young individuals whom you bring to this world. If your children get their hands on this so-called obscene material that we published, you only have yourselves to blame for not knowing how to control your kids. It's not our duty to make parenting and education easy for you, so go and learn how to be good parents instead of blaming others when it is you who failed." [ In a related report, parents labelled both Tan and Lee as 'stupid, disgraceful and selfish']

 "Shame on me as a businessman. They're making a FORTUNE out of Vivian and me -- just look at the numbers! APPEARANCE FEE TIME. >.<" [on an article about him and Lee 'still hogging the limelight'].

 "I used to look up to (MCA president) Datuk Seri Dr Chua Soi Lek, sexually. Funny how things turned out." [MCA Youth chief Datuk Wee Ka Siong blasted the pair for giving a 'free show']"Datuk Seri Wong Chun Wai's overly-kind words of me; I'm flattered 1,000%" [In response to The Star's Group Chief Editor Wong Chun Wai in which Wong observed and said : Tan seems to be your average boy next door. He is polite, plays the piano really well (his repertoire includes classical numbers) and is a gymnast. His body is well-toned with a six-pack to show off, as those who have seen his pictures on
the Net would know.
He speaks impeccable English and talks in measured tones, very controlled and yet very open. He would put many of our politicians to shame when it comes to fielding questions from the media, really.
He is after all a graduate from the prestigious Raffles Institution in Singapore, an Asean scholar, and is reading law at the National University of Singapore. He is obviously a very smart guy. I try to think that the smartest and cleverest ones have a certain streak of eccentricity in them."]

 "P.S. Given how sophisticated the level of discussion was... People with bad English, please stay out -- you might as well be listening to French. :D" [ On the 'tricky' interview with Capital FM and Red FM].

 "Getting into the media limelight was never my intention. But now I have media attention knocking on my door, I have two choices: hide from it or learn to manage and use it to my advantage. The point is that a lot of people are focused on the wrong aspect; they are focusing on the nature of my publicity (sex, morality, ingratitude to certain institutions, etc.). That aspect, i.e. how I rose to fame, is immaterial. I, being the cunning and conniving character I've always been, am focusing on the magnitude and thus potential of that publicity."

In another lengthy post from Saturday, Tan reflects on the nature of the media which he sees as 'hungry canines' that would 'discard you faster than a woman would discard a heavily-soiled sanitary pad once they milked all there is to milk out of your story'.

"Before they get the story, they will treat you like a king or celebrity. That is the cold, hard truth that I know and accept."
Tan, who has never shied from the media spotlight (apart from taking down his blog) since his 'Sumptuous Erotica' sex blog exploded earlier last week, had this to say about reporters: I would personally send all those so-called journalists back to journalism school for forgetting the key legitimising characteristic that the media should have: objectivity.

 "I also overwhelmingly prefer TV/radio interviews over newspaper interviews, because, with the former, there's much less latitude to twist and turn my words. They have to present my views and opinions in their original, sensory format, except maybe for some cutting and pasting and bleeping. Newspapers, conversely, are actually secondary sources, even with the use of quotes (here's the truth: newspaper quotes are almost never verbatim -- "(sic)" is an obsolete concept). Even the so-called credible newspapers, like The Straits Times and The Star, have the annoying tendency to take quotes out of context to print the story that they want to portray, not report the story as it is."

In his latest post (yesterday) Tan dedicated the following image to 'the 9GAG generation':

Generation Next?

I probably will let my imagination go berserk on this one. It may stink of stereotyping, generalization and gross assumption. I may be wrong but what the heck. It is the only way to keep the neurons firing away and keeping senility at bay. Talking about senility and selective amnesia at will, we have seen many around us guilty by the first degree on this charge!
Just the other day, I saw a lassy pushing a deep pram like contraption with three thorough bred puppies sticking their heads looking at passers by. The lassy,  in her mid 20s, in a well confident poise, brimming with self confidence with her equal well sculptured gymnasium time spent thighs and legs and hot pants, stiletto to accentuate her bragging rights and tops leaving little imagination of the modesty that it was meant to cover which was nothing to feel outraged about anyway, was trying to get her 'babies' into her car with her partner. The partner, probably not witnessed by fire, tea ceremony, cross or people sanctioned ceremony but by mutual consent was finding get great pleasure in gently making the animals comfortably at home in the car. Partner? Yeah, they look too cosy, touchy and civilised to be married!
Welcome to Generation Next! The generation who believe that they make the centre of the universe. Living for them by their way is their right. They would do any which way they choose but loose! Societal and theological regulations are good movie scripts and Aesop's toddler bedtime stories. It is their life and they choose the way they want to live it.

Children? Nah, they have bigger things on their plates than things that bog them down, like career advancements and seeing the whole world before they die.
Carnal indulgence? Please! Don't ask the obvious. There is a reason why they call it carnival (carnal festival?) and that they discovered contraception and sex education, to empower women and to ensure that all conceptions are received with open arms. Anyway, sex education is not wasted on them. Whenever they are afflicted with a sexually transmitted infection, they make it their God sent decree to impose upon themselves to contact their ex'es which ever corner of the world they may be so that all those in their wide web of sexual footprint are treated. That much they owe it upon themselves as social responsibility.
Role models? Kim Kardashian (who wants to elope with Kanye West) and socialite Paris Hilton who uses her giant sized handbag and puny sized lap dog chihuahua as ornamental accessories to complete her appearance!
Of course my sweeping statements above may be utterly out of context and wrong on all accounts. After all it is just an observational study that does not hold any water...