points to ponder ...

I received this piece as an email. It got to me thinking and so I felt I should share it with everybody. Here it goes:

If we miniatrurize the world population [population of the Earth] to a small town with 100 people and keep the proportions, it will look like this -
57 Asians 21 Europeans 14 Americans (northern and southern) 8 Africans
52 women 48 men
70 coloured-skins 30 caucasians
6 people would own 59% of the whole world wealth and all of them will be from the United States of America
80 would have bad living conditions
70 will be uneducated
50 will be underfed
1 would die
2 would be born
1 will have a computer
1 (only one) will have higher education

Isn't this shocking !!!

living on hope ...

Donkey A: My owner beats me a Lot.

Donkey B: Why don't you run away ?

Donkey A: I wanted to.... but my future is really bright here...

Donkey B: How do you say that?

Donkey A: Whenever my owner's beautiful daughter commits a mistake, my owner warns her by saying, "I'll marry you with a donkey if you repeat any mistake!"
That's why I'm still here........

Moral: Keeping hopes may not improve your future, but it will certainly reduce the pain of today !!!

bande mei tha dum ... vande maataram

It's not difficult to market Gandhi and his philosophies; it's been done to death by people who have used 'khadi', 'charkha' meaninglessly and his discourses and speeches have been snipped to make quotable quotes. But then, it's not easy to market him either for precisely the same reasons.

Every time there is an act of non-violence people turn around to question "is Gandhi relevant in today's time?" I have never doubted his relevance ever. He will be relevant till the end of times; its just the way we market him to reach a wider audience and spread the Gandhian message.

In 'Lage Raho Munnabhai', the script-writer re-invented Gandhi. Whom the whole world addresses as 'bapu', he had the audacity to call him 'banda' meaning dude...
That was just the first thing. The psyche behind calling him 'banda' was that he could make him relevant to today's youth and the college going students would identify with him. The moment you call someone 'banda' half your burden of respect and honor gets dumped; and you get that feeling of being among your owns.

Now comes the bigger problem of trying to miniaturize his greatness so that people are not intimidated by it. They should not feel that they cannot emulate him. So, what he does next is disguise his greatness, his courage, his fortitude, his inner-calm, his sacrifice into a single word "dum" meaning power/potential...

So, now we have a Gandhi who is a dude with some potential; just like the guy next door. He becomes more approachable and people would not feel dwarfed by his greatness. And the final punch is the reiteration of nationalism in the form of 'Vande Maataram'.

Our national song just got edited or we can say re-invented, so that the youth of today can sing/hum and make more sense of it. Lets give it a shot : bande mei tha dum ... vande maataram; bande mei tha dum ... vande maataram

when i was travelled ...

I came across a very funny post on our firm's Bulletin Board. It was a narration of a bad experience, and I couldn't help but laugh. I laughed not because I am apathetic but because the diction was unbelievably bad and it had loads of grammatical mistakes. And let me tell you that it was not a typo, it was more a case of literally translating sentences from ones mother-tongue to English. I am copy-pasting a snippet of that post:

I had also bad experience in KPN before two weeks. When i was travelled from BLR to my hometown ; near Salem, at 12:00 pm the bus tyre was not in good condition and the bus was dashed with the lorry which was standing on the side of National highway. The passenger sat infront had suffered a lot(including me). At that time one more KPN bus was on the way but they did not stop and some government buses was also not stop . how helpless fellow?????? then after some time, some kpn bus(various places) came on the way and we went to salem ,and then they arranged spare bus for moving from salem to hometown.

So if anyone please tell me a good bus service from Bangalore to Madurai