How Good Am I?

The title of this post is something that crosses all of our minds now and then, and a very tricky question to give a clear cut answer. All of us want to be good. Only being good is different in different peoples’ perspectives. It can be excelling in work, studies, sports, cooking, fashion, looks, and the like (category 1) or it can be being devotional, altruistic, considerate, loving, caring, and the like (category 2). Many a time, it happens that we struggle to find a balance between the two categories. All of us crave for excellence, but many of us don’t know what excellence is.

What I learned from my life so far is that, there is a very fine line between good/bad or right/wrong. Many of us travel through the intersection area of these two phenomena. What we judge as a good deed may seem a wrong activity in someone else’s perspective.

In the modern world, the outlook of youth is very different from what it was for our previous generations. For us, everything should seem cool, rocking, trendy, dashing… The usage of these terms does not matter as long as they refer to something acceptable, but many a time the factors that are described by these adjectives do matter… For many of us cool or trendy or rocking are things like iPhones, other electronic gadgets, movies, outfits that are in, automobiles, etc.

Our generation is extremely materialistic (I admit that I too am one, though I try my level best not to be). Yeah, how can we be not, with all the development in technology, all the gadgets that are irresistible, and many a times affordable?

Our status statements lie on what all we posses, how updated we are, how good are we with using those gadgets. I am not saying that these are not good, but how many of us do think about the not so fortunate people who we see everyday around us? I feel guilty all the time about the luxuries I have when I see all these people struggling to make ends meet.

Again, this is a very frequently raised issue that we come across all the time. I know many of you are fed up of such ‘utopian’ questions asked by many. Just think about it, is this really a ‘utopian’ statement?  Can’t we do something about this, and have a balance in our ways of life and theirs? According to me, I am good if I can do something for the unfortunate ones and live a satisfied life.

Newspaper Now

Every morning I open the news paper hoping that I might find some article worth reading. Now days, it is pretty difficult to spot a news article on the daily news paper, which has some news value. It is mostly filled with details of rape case statistics in a particular city/region/country, new rape cases, celebrity scandals, murders, and the like. I know that these are no silly matters, but are these the only things that are worth reporting in a news paper? I mean, we know such things are happening all around us, but reporting them over and over again makes the reader feel that there is nothing else happening in the world.

Come to think of it, be it regional news, national news, international news, or the sports page; you get to see at least two articles regarding some scandal where some well known people are associated with some girl/guy. That can be their girl/boy friend, extra marital relationship, or their own spouse. So, what is the difference between a main stream news paper report and a paparazzi report? Where sports page is ideally meant to report news related to sports/games events, we get to read news regarding sports persons’ life events. I mean, what is the whole point of spoiling the name of a very good sports person when he still is a good player? Be it Tiger Woods or Anna Kurnikova, it is their game that we like to read about and not what they do when not on field.

We hardly get to read details of new developments in science and technology. If there is any development in this field, it will be reported somewhere deep inside the pages, with a small heading and just to the point details, so that people hardly notice the piece. On the contrary the front pages will be presented with news like “A rare photo of John F Kennedy with Marilyn Monroe Released” or “The list of women Tiger Woods is associated with”.  What value does such data add to a person’s knowledge of the world? These are nothing but trash.

This is what we get to read in almost all newspapers that are published in India. The worth of news reporting is being deteriorated everyday and the reason the publishers give is that, that is what the public asks for. No, that is not what the public asks for, the media has made public interested in such matters by publishing these over and over again. The reporters have lost their sense of duty towards the public as to report facts that are significant for the general well being.

My Daily Adventure Ride

Please do not get into conclusions about me being exploratory or daring, just by reading the title of the post. Yeah, it is an adventurous ride that I’m talking about. But, there is around one tenth of Pune’s total population that joins me in this ride every weekday. Yeah, I’m talking about my daily trip from home to office.

It is an adventure ride because the road is never the same in any two consecutive days. If it were a perfectly maintained road, I could have travelled the one way distance from home to office in at most 15 minutes. Alas, that is never the case. It is almost one and a half years since I started working here. This particular road has never been what you would call a tarred road.

Every morning you see a new pothole in the road. The older ones get bigger along with the appearance of new ones. When some of them grow to the size of small ponds, they (I don’t exactly know who) fill them up with wet mud!!! Just think about it… wet mud??? Once in a while, they fill them with melted tar, and just the tar… no reinforcement. This is the way one of the busiest roads in Pune is maintained.

If you have a car, you are bound to be stuck in this stretch for at least 45minutes. Luckily, I have a bike, which helps me avoid some of those deep holes, though it still is a roller coaster ride. But it is not just the road that causes all this commotion. The attitude of people is another major issue. Tell me, if you are stuck in a traffic jam, where you can see that there is a huge line of cars waiting to move in front of you, what is the whole point of honking loudly at the vehicle right in front of you??? Will he/she be able to fly over the whole jam so that you get one or two feet advancement??? This is what I get to endure almost all days when I’m stuck in a traffic jam.

Another thing is, when in a jam, with the formation of one or two lines of cars in a direction of traffic flow, you get to see a huge number of bike riders taking the wrong way, either from the left or the right side, to get to the front, which eventually results in a much more blocked traffic, which would take another hour or so to move.

On top of all these, you will be bathed in dust cloud all through the trip. I guess, there is more dust in this stretch, than there is over 200 kilometers of highway trip from Pune to Mumbai. Now the road works department has started doing something about this road, (guess they are planning to widen the road), which has been going on for around 4-5 months, though there is not much of improvement in the total landscape. What I cannot understand is, why do not the authorities give much importance to such matters when this particular stretch is one of the most used roads in Pune with huge amount of traffic flowing in and out every day. I know that this is not an isolated case, and many of you must be facing similar situation every day, but I just felt like sharing my frustration with you.