The Bored Engineer

Silence had befallen the auditorium after the thunderous applause died down that had accompanied Dr. Zutshi, the world famous doctor of prosthetic sciences. Students had been waiting for his lecture since the beginning of semester and soon it was the most talked about event in the All India Institute of Medical Sciences. The doctor looked at the gathering with blank expression on his face. He wondered as to what should be his words to the students at his  Alma  mater. He had his speech ready in front of him but it did  didn't  seem right to him to brag about his achievements in a subtle way and then bore the students with his case studies. Taking a deep breath he uttered, “This  doesn't  feel right. Another lecture by another old man with very little to offer to the future. I don’t want to talk about cases and complications, you will have a lot of them in your career. If there is something that I can say to help you fellows in your ...

Marriages are forged in heaven but the bonds of matrimony are broken here on the earth, and no one knew that better than Sanjay. With a career spanning over twenty years as a divorce attorney he knew more about breaking up families than saving them and it suited him well. But right now he wished quite the opposite. Because for now he was trying to save the marriage of his best friend Aakash who had suddenly developed a strange affinity for some college girl who met him at some seminar-or-convention. He didn’t know much about her except the fact that Aakash had been acting weird since he met her and his once a family-man best friend was today missing along with a girl half his age, leaving him to manage the wrath of his wife. As she disconnected the call from her mother, Maya’s temper seemed to flare up quickly. It had been 12 hours since she had returned from her parents’ home in Delhi and Aakash was nowhere to be found. Couple that with a photo of Aakash with that girl fro...

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...

How much does a man need? Should we be really satisfied with what we have and when does growing need give birth to greed. I don’t know answers to that and I don’t expect you to have them either. After all how can we? All our lives we have spent taking care of and listening to just one person, that one person we call ‘I’. Yeah, we may have occasionally given a thought or two to other peoples’ lives, the lives that are connected to ours. The lives of our brothers and sisters, of our parents and of our friends and relatives. But that’s it. I for one always thought that I am a caring person who thinks about others, of the direction our nation is heading to, of eliminating poverty etc. continuous reading books and watching documentaries and interviews, surfing internet and discussing with friends and family. I thought this is what everyone was supposed to do and I was doing my part. Yesterday, it was Raksha Bandhan, the festival of love, of the strong sibling bond that has ev...

In the run-up to the recently concluded Delhi Assembly Elections many personal allegations made their way onto national media. Some of them utterly nonsensical while others made a little sense although their relevance in an election campaign was questionable. Once such issue that cropped up was that Arvind Kejriwal who always made a hue and cry about being an Aam Aadmi and denounced other politicians for being Elitist and pro-capitalists totally ignoring the majority population and favouring the few Khaas Aadmi . To make his point he even travelled in Delhi Metro on the way to his inauguration ceremony, refused security cover and to a certain extent endorsed a somewhat messed-up ‘fashion- statement’ resembling more of a rickshawala (although I don’t mean to imply that dressing like that is deplorable, but well at certain times it didn’t meet the dress code of the event he was attending). But all things aside, he made his version of Aam Aadmi into a very successful brand, su...

Recently at a quizzing event I came across a strange fact. The Santa-Banta jokes were named after the killers of late Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in order to humiliate the Sikh community and punish them. Although I tried to cross check the fact on the internet, I was unable to verify the authenticity of the above stated fact, but what made me think was that this is not the case of two imaginary individuals (read fools) but an entire community is ridiculed. As I said earlier I can’t verify the origin of these Sardar jokes but the fact that we are openly stereotyping an entire community and ridiculing it is no less disturbing than trampling their basic human rights (The right to live their life with dignity). Can this be considered any less than an Indian version of Apartheid? After all no matter what part of India you are in you will hear a Sardarji joke. People of almost every region and ethnicity make Sardar jokes and forward these jokes on their social networks. Bollywood itse...

World’s largest democracy, India. A nation of 1.25 billion people uniting themselves under the Tricolour abiding by their fundamental duties as well as enjoying the fruits of being a free nation. Our constitution guarantees us freedom of expression, religion and in return expects us to respect the national flag, constitution and educate ourselves so that we may serve the nation better. Now as lucrative as it may seem, the reality is quite otherwise. We as a nation despise freedom. We look down upon youngsters (mostly females) and their dressing sense, we hate it when a woman asking for civil rights has been on a fast for more than 10 years, and we don’t like a person from some other state makes a living in our state. We hate it all. Our politics is not about liking a politician or their policies, rather we hate other politicians. We take pride on calling ourselves a pluralistic society but look around you and see how much we hate the economic or social diversity. We hate ...