Recent farm debt waiver in the states of MP and Rajasthan has once again generated heated discussions on the prudence of such generosity by Governments using public money. In an interesting cartoon published in one of the dailies, a middle class person is shown carrying the weight of super rich (corporate borrowers), who are defaulters and absconders on one side and farmers, whose debt is written off, on the other. In normal day to day conversation also, we lament the plight of hard working and honest tax paying middle class. However, being a middle class myself, I have a slightly different view here, especially in respect of farm debt waiver.

Indian farmer is much disadvantaged vi’s-a-vi’s his counterparts in developed nations. His land holdings are small, making the scale of farming unviable. On top of it, very few farmers enjoy the luxury of perennial irrigation, a majority still depending on rains. On top of it, mechanisation of farming activity is again limited to affluent farmers and the cost of inputs is ever rising. A farmer barely manages to earn enough to sustain his family for two square meals. An illness or a social obligation forces him to take debt and sometimes whole lifetime goes in servicing debt. What’s the alternative available to a hardworking, debt laden, severely underprivileged farmer other than committing suicide, which we are seeing dime a dozen day after day. If as an election plank, once in 5 years their small debt (sometimes it’s not even in lakhs; it’s few thousands only) is waived, why make such a hue and cry? Farming is physically tough activity and reward for labour is severely disproportionate. Under the circumstances, we, living in the comforts of our plush city homes, should not discuss this over sumptuous meals, even if the move is considered to be politically motivated and an economic disaster!

Second perspective I just got from a very sharp writing that I came across in one of the WhatsApp groups of which I am also a member. This post said, ” Nothing wrong in middle class bearing the load. The middle class does not take risk. The people in this category have great paying capacity by saving lifelong out of lazy jobs. Saving is leakage in economy system – savings is a leakage in the economy of the circular flow model. -Keynes”.

As aforesaid, though a middle class myself and pretending to be working very hard under lot of stress and duress, with mega responsibilities, the words “saving lifelong out of lazy jobs” has shaken my core, inspiring me to write this blog.

If one is to be asked about the most well known or recalled brand, chances are that Coca Cola or Coke, as it is fondly known as, will appear very high on the list. The brand is iconic and the drink is much loved. Therefore, I was rather taken back to see the latest media ad of Coke released in US that was sent to me on WhatsApp by a friend of mine, who is very active on social media. The ad starts with concerns on obesity and that how more than 600 beverages produced by Coca Cola Company were contributing to this worldwide concern. It goes on to further say that even diet, zero calories, low sugar versions of these beverages were equally harmful and the only way out is to stop consuming these products. WhatsApp post also eulogised the Company for having such large heart to advertise its own funeral!

I smelt a rat and immediately searched google to ascertain the fact. Immediately, it could be inferred that there was a fake coke ad doing rounds in the social media that was a perverse edition of the original ad. The original ad indeed begins with the concerns on obesity and harmful effects of direct consumption of sugar but then goes on to highlighting all the measures taken by the company to reduce the negative effects. The ad highlights all the initiatives – zero sugar, diet version, smaller quantifies, reduction of sugar content in beverages, encouraging school children to have water and juices instead of beverages etc that Coke has undertaken to make the drink safer and more fun to have. The company is also supporting physical exercises initiatives.

Currently, an ad is doing rounds on FM that how we should avoid forwarding a forwarded message without verifying the contents and the ad ends with a tag line- ” let’s spread happiness on WhatsApp not rumours”. My respect for Coca Cola Company has gone up several notches for this awareness campaign where they actually run the risk of tapering sales! My salute to this iconic company and its brands for this initiative that shows the way to other large companies about social responsibility. Simultaneously, it reaffirms my belief that unless social media is used with responsibility its impact can be disastrous and bizarre. We all, the users of social media, must take it upon ourselves to forward a message only after checking its auntheticity as wrong information or knowledge spread across the society can be detrimental to the cause of society.

There are certain terms that are inherent to Christmas. Some of the more popular of these terms are:

(1) Midnight Mass- As I write this blog, devout catholics are starting to throng the churches in their respective parish or any popular church all over to participate in this special mass that is organised on the Christmas Eve. Churches look resplendent in colourful lights and other decorations that adorn them to celebrate the birth of Jesus, son of the God.

(2) Nativity- Though dictionary says that the term means the birth, it is especially associated with the birth of Jesus. As the folklore goes, Jesus was born to Virgin Mary in the Church of Nativity in the city of Bethlehem.

(3) Virgin Mary- Mother of Jesus and equally idolised, adored and worshipped. Jesus was born to virgin mother who conceived Jesus through Holy Spirit without the intervention of a human father.

(4) Noel – Another term used for Christmas, it is also used for Christmas Carols.

(5) Christmas tree – Evergreen fir tree has traditionally been used to decorate homes during Christmas. It’s symbolic of everlasting life with God for Christians. Though Fir tree is most popular, there has been tradition of using cherry or hawthorn trees also.

(6) Santa Claus – Santa Claus, also known as Saint Nicholas, Kris Kringle, Father Christmas, or simply Santa, is a legendary figure originating in Western Christian culture who is said to bring gifts to the homes of well-behaved children on Christmas Eve and the early morning hours of Christmas. A Christmas stocking is an empty sock or sock-shaped bag that is hung on Saint Nicholas Day so that Santa can fill it with small toys, candy, fruit, coins or other small gifts when he arrives. Some people even put their Christmas stocking by their bedposts so that Santa Claus can fill it with goodies when they are asleep, because St. Nicholas is a gift-giver.

(7) Christmas music – Christmas music comprises several genres like carols, jingles, hymns, nursery rhymes, instrumental etc. While Jingle bells is known by heart to every child, the songs like White Christmas, 12 days of Christmas, White Christmas are equally well known. 12 days of Christmas is representative of 12 days of celebration as January 6 is celebrated as the day of epiphany when 3 wise men visited baby Jesus.

Doesn’t the above all sound familiar? Isn’t the birth of Jesus as dramatic as the birth of Krishna inside Mathura Jail and all those miracles associated with his life! Christmas, Janmashtami, Gurupurab or Eid Milan un nabi are all celebration around birth of God, son of God or messenger of God and the spirit and fervour are same, though traditions and manner of celebration could be different!

Merry Christmas to all! May this Christmas bring lots of cheers and happiness to one and all!

Yesterday’s event in a way was reminiscent of my childhood and boyhood. My department had organised an internal cricket tournament aptly named CBO Cricket League (CCL) that had 4 teams. There were 3 matches in all – the first two were knockout matches and the winners of the two games were to clash for the trophy. Though all the four teams comprised my own people, yet I captained one of the teams. It was fun all the way, with spectators cheering all good shots, fielding efforts and catches. In all respects, it was a good break from the daily routine of office chores.

Though, it was all fun – the fun heightened by the likes of me, who were captaining the team, but were more of liability than asset to the team ( I for once neither batted nor bowled, dropped a catch and let ball got past me several times) and by other unfit seniors, yet when I reflect on the event, there were certain subtle lessons to be learnt from it. I sum these up as below:

(1) Competition brings out the best out of people. Those whom we consider ordinary, can surprise you when they are challenged in a competition.

(2) Hunger to win raises your capabilities by several notches and this was in evidence repeatedly yesterday.

(3) Team work builds camaraderie and suddenly individuals having unequal capabilities when put in a team, form a team that’s not an addition but multiplication of their individual capabilities.

(4) Morale of soldiers gets boosted when captain stands with the team. As one of my team members said, ” Your presence gives us energy and courage to give our best”. I stood their under the sun for good 2-3 hours, may not be contributing anything and having sore muscles and cramps at night, but it encouraged the team to give its best.

(5) Success after hard work gives lots of joy and readies the team members to give better to chase more successes.

So, it was not s Saturday wasted in playing a game of cricket; it turned out to be an important management workshop providing so much to learn along with great fun.

Continuing the spirit of Christmas, this blog deals with conferring of Sainthood on special persons in Christianity. Generally, there’s a waiting period up to 5 years after the death of the person. This is to allow time for emotions to die down. However, this wait period can be waived by Pope (Pope Benedict XVI set aside the waiting period for his predecessor, John Paul II). Once the five years are up or waiver is granted, the bishop of diocese where the person died can open investigation into the life of the person to establish whether the person lived his or her life with sufficient holiness. Evidence is gathered, including witness testimonies. If there’s sufficient evidence, then recommendation is sent to Pope and once the case is accepted for consideration, the individual can be called a “servant of God”.

A group ( called the congregation of the causes of saints) scrutinises the evidence of the candidate’s holiness and if congregation approves the case, it is passed to the Pope. If the Pope decides that the person had indeed lived a life of heroic virtue, the person can then be called “venerable”. The next stage, beatification, can be reached if a miracle can be attributed to prayers made to the individual after his/her death. These incidents of miracles need to be verified before acceptance. After beatification, the candidate is given the title “blessed”.

Canonisation is the final step in declaring a deceased person a saint. To reach this, a second miracle needs to be attributed to prayers made to the person ( for example, the second miracle in John Paul’s case was the reported “inexplicable recovery” of a Costa Rican woman from serious brain illness) .

Thus, it’s a very structured process – wait period to servant of god to venerable to blessed to saint. And while the above process of canonisation could be of theoretical interest to us earlier, the process assumed significance for us when our very own Mother Teresa was canonised as a Saint on 4th September 2016.

We have sadhus, fakirs, gyanis in religions other than Catholicism and they have their cult following, asanas, gaddis and mazars where thousands of devotees throng to pay their obeisance and offer prayers. However, in the absence of any structured process of establishing their holiness and attributing miracles to them, they are there in the minds and hearts of their followers but not on the World’s horizon. Whether we believe in miracles, rituals, prayers, sainthood or not, nothing should bar us from celebrating the spirit of festival, be it Diwali, Eid or forthcoming Christmas!

I don’t know how many of us still go through the print media and read good old Reader’s Digest, but this childhood habit has remained with me and of late, I have been reading this magazine non-stop for last 20 years. The latest December issue of RD has heartwarming lores capturing the spirit of Christmas.

The first story relates to a young girl of 4 years, who loses her father, but refuses to come to grips with the reality. The attempts by her mother and grandmother to convince that her father is in heaven from where no one returns bear no fruits. To cut the story short, on her father’s birthday, the girl buys a Little Mermaid birthday card, wraps it in plastic and ties it to a helium balloon so as to make it reach her father. Days later this balloon is noticed by a forest ranger, who in curiosity, opens the plastic packet and reads the message. He is surprised to read “Happy birthday Daddy” message sent to heaven that travels some 6000 kilometers away in a village called Mermaid in Eastern Canada. The ranger and his wife buy the book “The Little Mermaid”, pen a letter for the young girl saying that as her father cannot buy this book in heaven, he has requested them to buy it for her to be sent to her as gift from him. This has changed the life of the little girl, who now knows that though her father is in heaven, he is perpetually with her at all points of time. The balloon carrying little mermaid card and reaching the place called Mermaid some 6000 kilometers with the card in tact, if not a miracle, cannot be called anything else.

The second story is about an Australian couple to whom twins, a boy and girl are born prematurely and the boy is almost still born. Doctors have no hope of saving the boy, but mother notices a little gasp that doctors dismiss to be her imagination. She asks husband to come close to her and than holds the baby between them , hoping that skin touch and body warmth will revive the baby. And miracle happens and the boy, declared irretrievable by doctors few minutes back, starts breathing normally. Today the twins are healthy babies 9 years old.

A dancing Christmas tree gifted by a father and kept in store was taken out one Christmas much after the father’s death. The tree had long exhausted its battery and was put up like a normal tree, when it started dancing without replacement of batteries. It was a miracle attributed to the father sending his blessings to his children on Christmas.

Last story is again of a mother losing her 3 years old baby in an accident caused by a drugged driver. Her only solace was a photograph with the child sitting on her lap. When the photo got misplaced, the mother’s trauma returned to haunt her when during the Christmas clean up, she recovers the old photograph tucked inside an old book. This miracle on Christmas was the best gift she could ever hope.

Heart touching stories that have relevance in any background or any season of festival.

For us in Delhi, Christmas meant extreme and harsh winters (generally winters used to be very severe during 10 days of school winter break running up to New Year, with foggy morning, cloudy days and extremely cold nights) and Christmas bazaar at iconic Connaught Place, which was decked up like a bride. Wengers, the famous cake and pastry shop that has seen many winters and still retains its numero uno position as the best cake shop in the capital, used to sell out most of its products by the early evening leaving the connoisseurs disappointed. The local Church near our home had a mid night mass on the Christmas Eve and a fate where some of the typical delicacies were available.

However, the beauty and festivity of Christmas was much more pronounced when I moved out of Delhi, settled in Mumbai and visited overseas destinations such as Singapore and Johannesburg around Christmas/ New Year period. Bright lights, shops overflowing with Christmas goodies and prominent stores and market places having Santa distributing gifts to children caught my imagination. Catholic dominated localities like Bandra and Orlem ( Malad) wearing bridal looks transported one to a different world altogether.

It’s Christmas time once again and I am looking forward to relishing all these unique offerings of this cosmopolitan city Mumbai.

It’s Christmas time and festivity is in the air. The weather has taken turn towards coolness and there couldn’t be a better time for one to seek fulfilment of one’s wishes. While it’s common for us to ask for favours for ourselves and our nears and dears, I have a special wish list that goes much above the personal wishes. You may laugh at some of my wishes, but I am sure you would not disagree. Let me unveil my wish list.

(1) My first wish is that on a planet that has 2/3rd water and only 1/3rd land and yet potable water is in serious deficit, man should discover something that immediately, effortlessly and cheaply turns the sea water into sweet potable water. There will be abundance of usable water for drinking and doing household chores and our farmers will have plenty to irrigate their lands rather than commit suicide.

(2) Mankind has achieved much and today the world produces enough to provide food security. Yet the population explosion is outpacing the growth in food, water and other resources. Can humans’ reproduction be limited to a maximum of 2 or 3 children so that we control population without any coercion and the dispute of one community breeding at a faster pace than other is buried forever?

(3) Can the entire population of the world have at least this minimum to feed their children, provide them shelter and send them to school so that poor and developing nations solve the problem of hunger, pavement dwelling and illiteracy that is neutralising all their development ?

(4) Can the boundaries separating the nations of the World be obliterated so that there is free movement of people and no territorial disputes whatsoever that is the root cause of all the past and future wars?

(5) Can we have vehicles running on solar energy so that pollution caused by fossil fuels is ended, there is no fear of exhaustion of these reserves and no risk of petrol prices touching Rs100 a litre? The world can breathe easy.

(6) Can we overcome the menace of cancer, AIDS, Dengue and other killer diseases so that the world becomes a healthy place to live and the racket around mediclaim and expensive treatments is eradicated forever?

(7) And lastly, can we have matured intelligent politicians that are not rabble rousers, dividers of society, corrupt and partisan so that there is peace all around including peaceful and fair elections?

As a nursery rhyme says, if wishes were horses, the beggars would fly! The above wishes are horses on which my imagination rides but not for selfish me but for the world to become a great place to live!

Merry Christmas in advance! There will be more posts on this festival season!

We were expected to get up when our grandfather walked into our room at home or our senior walked up to us in office. We were told by our parents to eat silently and not to make chomping noise while eating food or slurpy noise while drinking water. Many clubs would bar the entry of members or their guests if they were not properly dressed. Likes of Sabeera Merchant used to conduct classes on etiquette relating to dining table and use of cutlery! All the above are things of yore and though they form my favourite topic, I realise the futility of barking a dead tree! Instead, I am touching an aspect that’s more topical and relevant and this relates to the use of mobile phones!

In an earlier blog, I tried to bring out our obsession with this palm sized instrument called mobile phone and transformation of our lives around it. First thing that we do on waking up is not to thank God but to check WhatsApp messages that might have got accumulated over the night! And then to check all new posts on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn rather than craving for the morning newspaper . This obsession is fine as it at least does not cause any botheration to others. The question of manners and etiquettes comes in when one is using the mobile while walking or driving on the road (that endangers his/her and others’ lives) and worst when inside the lift or any public place amongst the crowds! The mood of conversation can range from being romantic to obnoxious, but it’s all for everyone’s ears in buses, trains and lifts. Not sure about the user, but sometimes this could be of a ute embarrassment to others. The provocation for this blog ( as opposed to inspiration that drives most of my blogs) was today morning’s incident when a lady colleague was walking in the middle of the path totally engrossed in her phone with her earphones making her deaf to the outside world. When my multiple “Excuse ME’s” didn’t work and I was in tearing hurry to catch up on a scheduled appointment, I had no option but to squeeze myself past the lady and in the process brushing her arm slightly in spite of all the caution! Of course, I profusely apologised to her though inside my heart I was all aghast at her lack of etiquette on using her mobile. She seemed oblivious, too much engrossed in her conversation or video, whatever, but I am still shivering hours after the incident fearing a ” #Me Too” campaign against me! God save this planet from Mobile Phone obsession.

In elections that are being considered as semi finals in run up to 2019 Lok Sabha elections, the grand old party, Congress, is back in reckoning by making s strong imprint in Hindi heartland. It won Chhattisgarh by large margin, Rajasthan fairly nicely and MP by eking out a thin majority over it’s arch rival BJP, which was ruling in all these 3 states. Popular TRS Govt retained Telangana, while with Mizoram supporting MNF, Congress is now wiped out of North East.

Congress is naturally rejoicing the outcome and media is talking about acceptability of Rahul Gandhi as a National leader and eventual PM! The analysts are also writing Amit Shah off as an invincible strategist. The moot point here is, what’s the reality? Let’s enumerate the facts serially:

1. Congress under Rahul’s leadership has won 3 important states.

2. Opposition seems largely aligned under Congress leadership for the oncoming Lok Sabha polls.

3. BJP faced strong anti incumbency in all these 3 states, as these states were under BJP rule for 10-15 years at a stretch.

4. There is some ire against Modi Govt on account of GST, Demonetisation, Rafale deal, RBI Issue, Ram Mandir related tension etc.

5. Many associates of NDA are abandoning the ship, more prominent being TDP, a party that seems to be becoming fulcrum of opposition unity.

However, in spite of not being a Modi sycophant, I think there is tinge of sadness at the loss, because though some of the measures initiated by Modi were big disruptions, these were meant for achieving something good for the country. The final outcome of these might not have been aligned to the initial objective, but the sincerity of intention cannot really be questioned! I also feel that not too much may be read at the electoral setback to BJP in three states as it is now a proven fact that Indian voter is matured enough to vote differently in Lok Sabha and state elections. Also, except for Chhattisgarh it was just a defeat and not a humiliating rout for BJP.

If the party can make one last ditch effort to pursue the agenda of all inclusiveness instead of risking on polarisation, it may not rake up numbers of 2014, but it may still give continuity to developmental agenda of PM Modi.