The Bored Engineer

The dazzle of their beautiful lives bewildered him. He spent countless hours looking at their picture perfect life. He watched all of them equally but somehow she overshadowed all the others. He would be engrossed in peeping into someone else’s lives when suddenly she would make her presence felt and he would leave all his active pursuits to follow her. Looking at that face of hers, with the perfect smile of hers. She had a load of friends, roaming around with them and discussing all the fun they had. Sometimes he wondered if she did really have all that fun or if it was all a charade designed to make him miserable. Then what if she’s as lonely and miserable as I am. Why does she keep boasting her friends all the time, she could break the world of glass she had created for her to live in a house of bricks with him. Thoughts troubled him and he thought about it a lot. It was not all that bad. Sometimes he understood that he was trapped in a cycle of unending misery that he had inf...

‘Kashmir’ - an issue so volatile it can polarize the sanest of the minds into mind numbing extremism. Whenever Kashmir is on the boil or in the headline for any reason even the most liberal sounding people on my Facebook friend-list suddenly tear apart all their identities and fall into two categories: Kashmiris (mostly living outside the state and in other parts of India) who suddenly feel the need to highlight the ‘human right abuses’ which may or may not have been happening and people from rest of India who feel the need to thump their chest and abuse Kashmiris. While the silent majority looks on, occasionally expressing its dismay over the human right abuses and occasionally supporting the anti-terror operations of our armed forces (anti –terror not anti-protestors). I have been a part of the silent majority as well, looking around at people from both sides calling each other names and ‘highlighting’ facts which in their view are suppressed by ‘vested interests’. I do not ...

In the Times of India editorial DIGITAL INDIA IS DYING dated(July 4, 2016) the author has made a pitch for some sort of protectionist policies being implementing to ‘save’ the digital start-ups in India which are in a nascent stage from their international or more importantly American competitors with deep pockets. The author makes a compelling case for Flipkart, Snapdeal and OLA which are facing stiff competition from Amazon and Uber. The author airs his fears of India becoming the digital colony of America just like Europe has been while praising china for it closed market which have given it a home grown versions of google and Facebook. While I don’t dispute the writers claims about Indian digital companies facing an uphill task against their American rivals but I doubt if we should ever take sides. We had a closed economy for a good 40 years simply because we felt so burnt and exploited of foreign colonial exploitation that had just ended that we missed the global growth...

The Ikea Play Report 2014 suggests that Indian parents are concerned that their children are obsessed with social networking and the traditional family system is falling apart with 59% agreeing that “sometimes in my family everyone is using their mobile devices and not talking to each other”. With growth of internet services and more inexpensive devices hitting markets every day the trend is surely going upwards and does possess some serious challenges as to how family structures are going to evolve against this new threat of virtualization that eliminates the need for a face-to-face conversation with family. Although this may seem a bit depressing but it’s not all bad out there. With social networks getting stronger we see people collaborating and teaming up to solve various problems from suggesting ideas at national level (using mygov.in etc.) to coming together to protest a new regulation or an archaic law, online Indian is connected like never before. A recent example that ca...