Just My Two Cents

It’s the Mother’s Day and I Couldn’t Care Less

It’s the Mother’s Day and I Couldn’t Care Less

Right from my childhood days till now, they have dinned into my ears about the essence of universal brotherhood and respect for my motherland (read homeland). To begin with, their sexism theory has offered me comical relief time and again. Equally hilarious are the social dynamics that blindly support this theory of “mother-land” while talking about one’s home country and “brother-hood” to denote the world community at large.

Worse, they have done gross injustice to both the terms in their entirety. However, being the bygone of hypocrisy as it is, many of our countrymen just do what they have been known for doing – disrespecting the very motherland they apparently tend to pay respect to only in words.

I’m not going to leverage this occasion to blast the hypocrites, but only remind them of what they are not supposed to be doing if they have to show their motherland any respect.

This country is essentially divided into two sections – ones that rule (the politicians and bureaucrats) and the ones that are ruled. The general countrywide perception towards the politicians is virtually unanimous – they are some incompetent corrupt buttholes out there to guzzle up the taxpayers’ money and do no good to the country. And, the perceptions towards the bureaucrats are relatively less malicious because they are not directly at the helm of this country’s governance, although they are the ones that rape their motherland right, left and center on a daily basis.

So what about the ones that are being ruled – the ordinary citizens of this country?

They too are a fucked-up lot. Everybody talks at length about seeing a better tomorrow for this country, but wow, they choose to retreat when it comes to performing their duties towards the nation responsibly.

Quite hypocritical, aren’t they?

Since my schooldays till now, I’ve heard “braindrain” being a bane to the country’s future. But, did anybody ever ponder over the reasons that lead to the exodus of people to the greener pasture? Here in this country, people have a penchant for taking each other for granted to serve their own interests. They do little to contribute towards a better future, and extend no support when you’re fired with enthusiasm to effect at least some changes to the going-on.

Over here, people have no civic sense to begin with, no respect towards the rules of the state they live in, and absolutely no discretion while exercising their civil rights. In short, they are venal, always ready to be bought and sold for a few bucks. I’m not exaggerating the truth; if you have lived in Indian as long as I have, you can only agree with these facts.

General elections, state assembly elections, municipality elections or gram panchayat elections, I have seen people sell themselves short, reducing themselves to a bunch of no-hopers. Why talk about a better future if you can’t change a damn thing yourself!

The Confusion Called Corruption
Last year, Anna Hazare, a social activist started off a tirade against the corrupt politicians and unsurprisingly, quite a few of the so-called social responsible young citizens joined the revolution. Some also compared it to the National Movement headed by Mahatma Gandhi against the oppressive British Rulers in the pre-independence era.

So much so that one almost begins to wonder if the country would become the Heaven on Earth, if political corruption ceased to exist. As a matter of fact, corruption in India is a lifestyle choice, breeding well within the psyche of the common man since time immemorial. We’ve seen many succumb to corruption to get themselves a job in the government offices, seek favoritism to cut corners and abuse their rights to get their job done. Who cares about corruption anyways! And, since when have we woken up to the plight of others? Anna Hazare or not, the common man would continue to rape his motherland to serve his own interests. Indian would continue to suffer from the cancer of corruption until we choose to heal it from within.

What the Heck is Civic Sense?
I live in Bhubaneswar, one of the emerging cities in India. They say this city is poised for growth and development. Well, what good is the development if there is seemingly no change in the popular civic sense? The city is shinning but we won’t stop riding dirty until the cops nail our ass. The roads are nice and wide, but dare you stop me from exercising my civil rights (read spitting indiscriminately on the roads)! I can park my personal vehicles wherever I want because the roads have become wide enough for others to ride through, even it may lead to potential accidents. Who cares!

I am a resident of Nayapalli. They say it’s a posh area, being the epicenters of all VIPs in the city. They ride luxurious cars, live in expensive bungalows and pay the city administration enough to “shut the fuck off and mind your own business”, while they indulge themselves in committing corruption. Let’s talk about the fellow residents – they throw garbage on the streets with gay abandon and construct their house at the cost of the comfort of other people living in area. They don’t care about the locality as long as everything is okay in their personal lives.

That’s city’s civic sense for you!

While a lot of this going on around here, people just choose to offer their token support most hypocritically by celebrating Mother’s Day, just another day on the Gregorian calendar. God help this country and his people that are only empty upstairs.

No entrepreneur worth their salt would ever tell you what it takes to run a start-up. Because, if they could define what it takes, they probably haven’t been running one long enough.

Life is No Fun without Inventions: Steve Jobs

How do you live your life? You essentially have two choices to make: you want to spend a lifetime living off the beautiful things invented by other people who are just as simple as you, or go beyond the limits, and build things that add to society you want to live in. Life is a matter of choices and creating things is what allows our life to make some sense. This is a very simple philosophy of life, but quite a few people prefer to operate in their comfort zone until they breathe their last. Which side of life would you rather be on?

Why Entrepreneurship is NOT always about the Bottom-line

Why Entrepreneurship is NOT always about the Bottom-line

I remember when I was a kid, my dad would run a mid-scale brick factory in the outskirt of our hometown. My dad was a hardcore communist by passion, and would always sympathize with the cause of the socially oppressed and financially challenged. He would hire day wage laborers to aid the process of brick manufacturing, pay them at the end of the day, even when they would not complete their job properly. Sometimes, he would pay them even if they didn’t complete a task for the day. His empathy for the so-called low-caste and socially stigmatized people also reflected quite prominently in his approach towards them in his day to day life. For instance, he would, quite wholeheartedly, allow the destitute to move in and stay in some of our vacant houses for free, for years.

When I grew up and became young enough to help dad run his brick factory, I tried interfering in his decision making process by telling him he should justify the expenses vis-à-vis the revenues. He would always disagree with me and say he could never go to bed peacefully if he paid less than what he thought a worker always deserved. These differences in our individual perception remained until he retired from active business operation and shut down the brick factory operation for lack of funds. What still survived though were his philosophy towards communism and belief of helping the downtrodden.

It’s 2012 and I am running a different operation here in my city. I had never thought I’d become an entrepreneur because I’d never thought I was motivated enough to marshal human resources. Making a lot of money was never my objective in life as I’d always believe the real charm of life boils down to attaining sound sleep at the end of the day. By some divine intervention, I entered the realm of entrepreneurship back in 2008 when I was quite inexperienced with running a company. I would always trust people, regardless of their intent. Eventually, they stabbed in my back, and I stepped down from running the operation, building another company on my own.

It’s been nearly 4 years since I started operating my own company. It has always been my mission to empower people professionally and personally. I have hired many people from my known circle in the past, although some of them have turned their back on me eventually. In those last 4 years, I have learned quite a few things about being an entrepreneur.
Simply running an enterprise doesn’t make one an entrepreneur; that, at best, makes you a businessman. An entrepreneur is someone who dreams big and feeds on his passion to achieve something valuable, something that outlives him. It’s not about looking out for ways to save operational costs to double the revenues. It’s about mentally drawing a picture of how rapidly you can realize your dream and develop an ecosystem of empowered co-workers and an incredible service that empowers your customers. It’s not about building a business model based revenue generation. It’s about thinking everyone you hire of your own, albeit with a great deal of caution.

I am not a businessman because I don’t even know how much I make each month. I’m not worried about losing bad employees to the competition. I am rather happy to be breathing free in a peaceful environment, free of any stress. When you choose to run a lot of people in order to make a fortune, you become a businessman. I’d rather manage a small team, and focus on developing a healthy ecosystem of knowledge, sustainable growth, empowerment and mutual trust. I’d rather remain an entrepreneur than develop into a profit-centric businessman. This is exactly what I have in my mind for this year as we enter the fourth anniversary of our organization.

Even today, I look back at my dad with his small brick factory, and realize he was always right.

How Long Will Our City Take to Reach NYC Standards?

How Long Will Our City Take to Reach NYC Standards?

I’m a big fan of Pete Cashmore @mashable. I happened to come across one of his tweets this morning, which shared some beautiful pics of Big Apple in #NYC’s Facebook contest. Some of the pics were so amazing that I gave in to my urge to share them on Facebook. In the next couple of minutes, I ended up sharing the pics on Discover Bhubaneswar, a popular Facebook Community I admin. For obvious reasons, it generated quite a few responses from the fans across the city. Many of the answers were funny, some of were thought-provoking and the rest were what essentially brought me to write this post in the first place.

After I read all the comments, some of which carried a rather hypocritical undertone, made it evident that we, as a city or country fellowmen, have a looooooong way to go. Let’s forget about the geographical context for a while, and what you get is a true perspective of the popular mindset here.


The shared pics were indicative of the infrastructural wonder the NYC is known for, and therefore, were good enough to reflect the underlying essence of the question asked in the post. However, a few of the participants apparently read between the lines and perceived the question in a manner not intended by the admin. Their insights simply cast light on the shallowness of our national thought process. What was also interesting to notice that many of our people still prefer to dwell in utter hypocrisy, a tag that some of us have been trying to get rid of.

One would lose count of how often we discuss the infrastructure, movie theatres and KFCs on our community, or how paranoid we are about the growth of our roads and IT infrastructure in the city. Even if we compare our city to NYC as a model, it’s NOT offensive at any stretch of imagination. Many choose to selectively forget about the number of city dwellers that still live under the poverty life, struggle to make their ends meet on a daily basis. Many choose to turn a blind eye at the state of public toilets in the city, or an absolute lack thereof. Many choose to officially throw garbage at their neighbor’s empty land, taking it for granted that it’s a dumping ground. And, lest we forget, many of the so-called upwardly mobile people would abuse their discretions and authority to thrive financially at the cost of others on one hand, and delivering ethical discourse on the other.

Forget about the NYC; just browse through the pages of the history, and one would see a lack of public awareness, governmental apathy and popular indolence contributing, in tandem, to the cultural poverty of this city. The condition of the roads and bylanes in Saheed Nagar, the epicenter of so-called bureaucrats, and city heavyweights, remained ridiculously pathetic for years, and it took nearly a couple of decades for the local authorities to wake up from the hibernation and fix the roads for offering a decent “STANDARD” of living to the city dwellers.

More often than not, I have brought up questions to check the Awareness Quotient of our fans, and either their participation has been exemplarily ordinary, or their awareness level has been pathetically on the lower side.

Well, there are examples galore to define what our city lacks, and let’s have no shame in the admission of the truth or find no pride in taking refuge in hypocrisy either. Let’s call a spade a spade.

I, for one, believe that if anything pollutes our psyche and disables us from thinking like a world citizen, it’s our inability to accept allegiance to a piece of the planet earth outside our territorial limitations. We don’t feel hurt comparing our city with that of one located within our country, as much as we do when the same is compared with one that lies outside of our national periphery.

I’m born and brought up in Dhenkanal, a district 90 kms away from the capital city, but I barely feel hurt when people compare it with the capital city. I’ve been living outside my hometown since 2003, and never felt any closer to it. That doesn’t make any less responsible a citizen of my birth place. It’s just a piece of land where I was born, but I was destined to relocate to the City of Temples.

As they always say: a piece of land is just as great as the people dwelling over it. As 13th April, the Foundation Day of the Temple City is just two days away, it’s the perfect time to ponder over how we contribute to a better city, and not take away from it.


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