The love fundamentals

Another V-day came and went with plenty of hype and overflow of emotions. For some it was liberation day, for some it was a lonely day and for others it was the day to find love. Crazy things do happen on this day, like the heart broken guy in China who bought tickets for all the alternate seats in a movie theatre for the particular show he was watching, so that no couples could sit together. I think data should be collected from one city on V-day to see how many couple were made and how many were broken and that data should be matched with the data collected after one or two years to see how many are still together and how many have moved on.

Love, the one emotion for which wars have been fought and poems have been written in equal measure, but one thing that still eludes the understanding of human beings. Is it actually so difficult to comprehend? Love has many manifestations, what we feel for all the people in our lives are love in different forms. So what is so extra special about this one relationship? Why do we let this relationship consume our mind and cloud our judgement and rational thinking?

The best answer I could come up with is the weight of expectations. The fulcrum of the whole society is relationships and the associated expectations. But why does it get so enormous in one particular relationship? The answer must lie in our procreation architecture. Though we moved beyond animals and developed intimacy without procreation, the framework of procreation is stamped into us, from how our body reacts, the hormones that get released and the effect it has on our mind. The weight of expectation must be directly proportional to our self investment in any relationship. Thats why parents are so besotted with their kids. If we look at a romantic relationship closely, there are several key milestones. Boyfriend/Girlfriend->Lover->Fiance->husband/wife->Partner->Companion. How I see it is, these milestones become blurred once the relationship goes some distance and confusion, more than anything else sets in.

It is natural that when we meet someone, we are usually in our best behaviour. Same thing happens in relationships initially. People get attracted to each other because of certain characteristics or abilities about them. It’s all rosy as they savour all the goodness in each other. Then, as they draw closer, the negativities start gaining more focus. This is something unique because in all other relationships, especially in friendship, we are so good at accepting people with all their flaws. But here, the dynamics are totally different. The keyword is intolerance. Why? Because women are no longer dependent on men like women of older generations, so they do not feel it is required to be patient anymore and men, always with their inflated ego, take everything with loads of indifference. No relationship gets built this way.

When it all goes wrong, then heart break sets in. Why? Human beings have this inherent need to control what they cannot and that is what causes the biggest miseries. Unfortunately, need to control is inversely proportional to sensibility and common sense. We all move on, when sensibility returns. We can hold on to a dying or dead relationship for a while, if we can use it positively to stop us from making more mistakes and tide over from the difficult phase of loneliness. Everything in the world has an expiry date, nothing stands forever. And there is the concept of the death of the body and death of the mind. Losing someone is actually the death of that person in our minds. Accepting reality can be harsh and tough, but accepting it is what takes us to true nirvana. We know no one in life more than our parents. We are prepared for them to leave us and go some day, then what is it that we cannot accept and live with?

I see everyone’s life as a circle. When two people meet, the circles meet and intersect, where common factors come together. One circle should never overlap the other. That amounts to superimposing one person on the other which will never work. The intersection keeps expanding as mutual interests grow but only up to a certain point. There are parts of the circle that define us, who we are, what made us who we are, our personalities, our behaviour, etc. Some of that will change a bit according to changing dynamics in our lives, but trying to change everything about a person will only result in disaster. A good relationship for me is all about managing the intersection of circles and making sure it never shrinks.

My granny used to tell me that everyone has a companion born for them somewhere out there and we will meet them at the right time and when we are prepared for them. We can search for them or we can buckle down, wait and prepare ourselves. Finding love is one thing, converting that into companionship and keeping it that way is a life long activity. For me, accepting people as they are, understanding them, trusting the relationship, not taking them for granted and maintaining the line of expectations are the five pillars for healthy and long lasting relationships. Taking effort and adjusting to people will only lead to loss of self respect and building up of negative emotions which will wear us down and break the relationship with time. Most important of all, it is imperative we understand that we cannot keep everyone in our lives equally happy at the same time and someone or the other will be unhappy all the time. So the best we can do is to keep ourselves happy. True love for me is doing the best I can for the people in my life, letting them go and wishing them well. People who truly understand us, accept us for who we are and genuinely need us in their lives will always be with us, rest will go like shedding of dead skin cells. This is the best way to have the right people in our lives and live a life of less baggage. It all boils down to the concept of ‘chi’, the flow of energy. Just like proper flow of energy in our bodies keep us healthy, proper flow of energy in relationships will hold people together through the test of time.

Relevance in the new age society

This is something that has been going on for ages in India but has been in the limelight for the past few years because of the increasing reach of an emboldened media who are increasingly trying to capture the attention of the masses by highlighting murders and rapes. The Khap panchayats. Khap means clan and panchayat is similar to an administrative body of people. So this is a bunch of people selected from within the clan to manage the clan and make sure the clan’s policies and beliefs are enforced on everyone in the clan. The reason why they are in the news is because, they have been ordering the execution and rape of couples who marry from within the clans.

India’s societal structure is as diverse as everything else in the country. The caste system was introduced by the Aryans and divided the society into four broad categories based on people’s occupations. Then came the clan structure. Every clan traces it’s roots to the father’s side of the family except in a couple of states where polygamy was prevalent for a very long period of time, so mother’s lineage is considered. In the new millenium and modern age, people are no longer willing to be bound by what they consider as age old and decayed practices. The mutiny within the society is being met very harshly by the Khaps, but neither are Khaps caring to explain nor are people digging into the past to understand the relevance of these customs.

Marrying from the same clan is supposed to cause negative effects on the genes of the children. We know about the effect of the genes now but the effects have been understood and observed for thousands of years. So it essentially means intra clan marriages are prevented to stop wrong gene combinations. How did people come to know of the negative effects from so long ago? I will not believe on my life that the knowledge has been obtained just from sustained observation through the ages. Then how?

Science has answers, right before our eyes. All holy books say we were created from the essence of God. What if essence meant genetics? What if we were created and we are who we are today after going through many genetic experiments? It is accepted that there is a gap in Darwin’s timeline of evolution, when humans suddenly evolved into intelligent beings. Hinduism says people had all the knowledge of the Universe passed onto them by the Gods and it is right before us, but we have forgotten how to see it because of our own vices. We were not intelligent enough to understand genetics so we followed the rules when it was made part of our society. Is this something that Khaps do not know, do not want to know and do not think is essential to educate people with?

Which takes me to the keyword: Relevance. This word is hardly spoken but we keep hearing everyone preaching about staying up to date, moving with the time and the tried and tired one “when in Rome, be a Roman”. Do we stop to think how many things do we live with in the society that have become irrelevant and have gone past their expiry dates long back? We believe in God because we are disillusioned with their own lives and are scared of suffering and going to hell after death. We always have the need to believe in something and lean on it, like how animals follow one who takes the lead. Religion has always been the twin sibling of politics and both are used to manipulate and manage people. Times have changed, people are getting enlightened, yet did either religion or politics evolve with time? No.

Another prime example is marriage. There is this new age when women shudder to think of having one baby and there was a time when all women did was have babies through their lives. Those were the times when women were dependent on men for everything and procreation was essential for the race of mankind. In the new age, both the reasons no longer have relevance, but has the concept of marriage evolved? No. We are still following the rule of “alliance of conveniences”, be it in love or arranged marriage. Life changes with time but the concept of marriage in society has stagnated thats why there is so much marital discord now.

What is the learning? First, weed out what we longer need in our own lives and change what has to be changed at the individual level. It is the collective knowledge of everyone of us that becomes wisdom of the society. Enlightenment, first by knowing ourselves, digging into our past, knowing who we are, where we are coming from, accepting that there is so much we do not know and continuous learning is what defines life and finally, passing on our wisdom to others. A wise new Indian politician, when asked about banning Khap panchayats, merely said that panchayat means an assembly of people and no constitution can ban people from assembling together. If the word Khap is banned, people will congregate using another name. It is their actions, their brutality that needs to be banned. This is wisdom, this is enlightenment. People have to be enlightened scientifically why and how wrong genetic mutation is caused by combination of genes from the same clan. We are no longer the beings who used to worship thunder and rain as Gods. We need enlightenment and we need to stay relevant, thats the only way we can progress as a society.

The dark food stories

It was just another day which started with a jolt as I was reading through news articles. Out popped the news item about a substance that Subway has been using to soften their bread, the same stuff used to soften leather. My brain cells flashed back to all those times I had devoured Subway Veggie Delites and more than anything else, I felt cheated because Subway was vying to be a symbol of fresh, clean food for all this time. But it didn’t surprise me much. In India, no one can say when a meal can go wrong and take its toll on our tummies and health.

This is the age when most of the food items we buy, be it grains, vegetables, fruits or meat are born in our labs. Technological advances have indeed helped to make food production extremely simple, but all of this has been at the cost of choosing quantity over quality. A doctor I know taught me the “flies test” on fruits. Buy fruits that flies are attracted to and wash them thoroughly before eating. He replied to my wide open eyes that flies mean those fruits do not carry the effects of fertilizers. The raw food items are already compromised before they even reach the retailers.

The laugh riot Bollywood movie Delhi Belly brilliantly showcased the dark side of Indian food culture in a few scenes. On one of the busiest streets of Delhi, a street vendor is shown scratching over his dirty loincloth and then giving a grilled chicken leg to one of the protagonists of the movie with the same hand. If this is one side of the story, the other side isn’t any better either. A famous Indian tennis player was almost on the verge of death due to a mystery illness which was finally diagnosed to a worm in his brain. It seems the salad he had eaten from a star restaurant was made my someone who hadn’t washed his hands properly after going to toilet.

All of these issues with hygiene can be solved by creating more awareness. But the real danger with food in countries like India lies hidden right before our eyes. And the culprits are reused oil and adulterated food. Indians consume large quantities of deep fried and oily food. A typical Indian restaurant kitchen looks like this: huge frying vessels full of oil are working overtime frying vegetarian and non vegetarian items in the same vessels. The oil that remains in the vessels at the end of the day is kept for the next day. Different food items are prepared with different mix of spices, yet they are all fried in the same vessel, thereby ruining the taste as well. The next day, fresh oil is added to the old oil and the process continues. Mixing used and fresh oil causes the most damage. I am sure different countries have their own ways of reusing cooking items, primarily because this is one of the many ways how restaurants make good to great profit margins.

Food adulteration is another bane that continues to torture the people of countries like India. Chalk powder mixed with chilli and turmeric powder and limestone powder mixed with milk are a few of the many that I have heard of. Corruption plays a big hand in this and everyone from the ministers to cops to administrators get paid handsomely so adulteration continues unabated and the perpetrators never get caught or punished and they continue toying with the health of common people. Another one that I have been hearing is restaurants buying low grade or partially damaged vegetables at considerably reduced costs.

So how do we deal with all of this? The key to surviving in large cities is to keep eating from outside even if we fall ill till our body gets used to the food. Back in 2004, a couple of Norwegian guys who were client’s employees had visited Bangalore when I was working there. Every day, by seeing an office boy carrying a mountain of pizza boxes to them for lunch, I understood how they were surviving. One day, the bigger guy went missing. Then I found out that the previous day when he was travelling back to his hotel in the evening in a rickshaw, he couldn’t resist the smell of food that was emanating from all the eateries everywhere. He ended up spending a day in the toilet. My apartment mate during MBA went on an eating spree on the streets of Shanghai and one night, he blacked out, fell in the bathroom and had to be hospitalized. When the doctors were suspecting epilepsy, my doctor in India correctly diagnosed it as low blood pressure caused by MSG or Ajinomotto, which is added to all Chinese food to increase taste. Friends have told me that the best way to eat meat is to cook it along with it’s blood. Yes, we started off by eating raw meat but we have come a long way from there. Our stomach is not made to digest meat. In fact, it is not even made to digest pure milk.

I understood the dangers of eating outside long before I left home to work. There are no guarantees about how food, especially meat is cooked and if it even gets washed properly. Quitting all kinds of meat did make my menu smaller, but went a long way in keeping my tummy and health steady. Even then, I still had to ward off enough troubles with vegetarian food because of the way it was getting cooked. Starting to cook my own food was one of the best decisions I ever made. Taste wise it would never match the food from restaurants, but buying good vegetables, using minimum spices and never reusing oil did wonders to my health.

Vani Hari (foodbabe.com), who has dug out Subway’s dark secret is one of the many people in the world who is striving and doing a commendable job in creating awareness about food adulteration and how to evolve into eating healthy food that fits our lifestyle in the modern age. I come from a place where people primarily eat brown rice which is heavier because it contains lot more starch. Brown rice is good for health provided it is digested completely. It is meant for people who do hard labour or are physically very active and not for someone like me. I feel my body weight increasing whenever I start having brown rice so I stopped having it completely. Knowing our own body, it’s ability to digest different food and knowing what to eat that fits our life style are key factors in maintaining a good food regime, especially for professionals who cannot afford to risk frequent health issues and stonewall their careers.

The false & murky world of advertising

There was a time when watching advertisements was one of the eagerly awaited aspects of TV viewing. Many of those advertisements of old are still so endearing, I see people flocking to see them on YouTube. And the best part is, we have so many of our own memories associated with them. All of that changed and changed so fast, advertisements siphon off major portions of our time now, be it on print or TV, earning nothing else but our loathe and ire.

Advertising is truly amazing and fascinating. Being a part time business correspondent and caption writer in an advertising firm during my under graduation days was a massive learning curve. Caption writing can become so crazy, it can cause mental disorders if we do not control our mind. A great caption is just good enough to capture the imagination of customers. So a good caption writer should be able to write captions for anything that they see. Every morning, I used to think what caption would I write to sell a toothbrush and toothpaste when I am brushing my teeth and it would start off from there. There was a time when great captions and pictures were enough to push a product into people’s minds. But that was also a time when markets were not crowded and competition was not intense.

All of that changed, and changed drastically in very short time, especially after the Cold War ended. Across the world, markets started opening out and many of them, like India, were green pastures yet to be grazed. Companies flooded their products into these markets and after the initial mayhem, settled down into what has developed into intense, ‘mother-of-all-battles’ competition to occupy every inch of market space. All of this changed the face of advertising forever. The effects are cataclysmic. More products meant more space and airtime for advertisements in the media, so companies started buying space and airtime which led to the creation of more magazines and TV channels. What is worse, companies are increasingly buying more airtime for advertisements on news channels which is all the more pathetic.

Now there are so many toothpaste brands in the market and they are so everywhere on advertisements, I have no clue which brand will be better for my teeth. This is the case with everything in the market now. When so many products and their advertisements stifled markets and jammed people’s minds, companies took the ladder to the next level. Use celebrities to endorse their products, creating the next wave of calamities. Cricket, once considered the gentleman’s game changed into a money spinning genie in no time. In fact, a new format of the game got created just because companies were pouring in money for more airtime to promote their products. Now celebrities from all walks of life, be it actors or sportsmen are being roped in to endorse products, be it jewellery, talcum powder, cement or PVC pipes. And it is working perfectly. Human beings have the habit of herding, like cattle. We have a natural tendency to follow anyone who takes the lead. So when an actor endorses a product, his/her fans are more than happy to vouch for that product. Markets have become segregated and marginalized just because of people’s affinity towards celebrities. What companies ultimately succeeded in doing is to hijack people’s buying power and rob our purchasing sense. But things haven’t been so hunky dork for them after all.

The cheesy and tacky advertisements of Axe brand of deodorants and other products attracted the ire of an Indian customer who used the products for three years and then sued Unilever for falsely claiming through their advertisements that using Axe products would attract the opposite sex. I was watching a video on a social network a few days back in which a lady is seeing addressing an audience and she is enlightening them about how photos of models are morphed and trimmed using advanced software to make them look more lean and curvaceous, leading to the rapidly spreading ‘disease’ called anorexia. Girls are losing their health permanently because of eating disorders developed from their obsession to lose weight and look like the celebrities they worship. Many of them have ultimately developed mental disorders and lost their lives.

But it doesn’t look like all is lost. Kate Winslet, the leading Hollywood actor issued a statement saying some of her pictures that came out in print recently were morphed and specifically mentioned which of her body parts were morphed to make her look leaner. In India, Aamir Khan, the acclaimed Bollywood actor endorses products only when he is convinced that he is not passing on a false message to the customers. But these examples are far and few. The money that comes from endorsements is many times more than what comes from playing a sport or acting in a movie. So, becoming a celebrity is the easiest way to make loads of cash in no time. All those reality shows that have sprung up across the world are prime examples. Kids are no longer interested in education and why not, when there are so many avenues to cash in on money and fame in so less time. The game of cricket is losing it’s charm and sheen because youngsters are increasingly finding it an easy way to find fame and money without investing a lot of effort and years. And to top it all, so much money breeds nothing but booze, prostitution and drugs which is disintegrating the very fabric of our society.

Laws making companies and celebrities equally responsible for the products they sell and endorse will rein in this money bonanza to some extent and I am so glad this step is being considered in India now. Paying so much to celebrities sky rockets companies’ expenses and the only way to make up that cost is to pass it down to customers. In a country like India which is plagued by inflation and corruption, all these advertising gimmicks create another layer of never ending struggle for the common man. It is high time people have greater awareness of the mired world of corporates and their advertising strategies and how the virtual world they have created have engulfed our lives and made us their puppets more than customers.