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The reality of dreams

Our dreams are more real than our life’s starkest realities. If you fear failure, then you have no business dreaming at all.
by Jatin Sharma

Recently I have been part of the most interesting chats in my social circuit.

Everyone has been using this line extensively, “Mujhe na kuchh bada karna hai.”

When I dug deeper, I found a mine of dreams. Where someone who was in sales was a closet artist, where a person in programming person wanted to be a cricketer, a writer who wanted to be a director, and an architect who just wanted to be a potter.

At first, I was mighty impressed by their dreams. Their dreams had huge potential and a faith that was unshakeable. But when I asked them about making those dreams a reality, all of them postponed the dream. They postponed a dream because they had a reason today to not follow it. Or may I say, they had an excuse not to!

For me, a dream is a reality that is yet to be fulfilled. But procrastinating on following your dreams is just like letting a missed train go further away by not attempting to reach the next station, and watching it recede in the distance.

Of those who have gone ahead and chased a dream, one thing is certain: they would never have achieved their dreams if they hadn’t given those dreams first priority.

A dream is not a showpiece, it is a part of you.

A dream is a desire that is deep inside you.

A dream is an enslaved bird that wants to flap its wings and fly.

A dream is the real you. What you dream is what you wish to become, and if fear of failure stops you from being the real you, then it is really pointless that you dream at all.

The power of a dream is optimum when the word ‘failure’ goes out of your dictionary.

We all forget that the road between dreams to reality is covered just by making an effort. Dreams should always get the first priority in everyone’s life. If you are dreaming of something, just go ahead and do it. Don’t fear failure – just feel happy that you gave your dream a chance. That you tried and it didn’t work out. But at least you will be proud of yourself because for the first time, you respected yourself enough to face the unknown for the sake of a dream.

Don’t live a life that is not yours. Let dreams be your reality. A reality that you like and love. A reality that you always dreamt of. Don’t sell your dreams for a salary that you don’t really value. Don’t procrastinate on your dreams by making excuses. Don’t budget your dreams for no money that is spent on your dreams can be measured in terms of less or more.

Give yourself a chance.

Happiness is not the thousand achievements in the reality that you never wished for, it is the one failure that you go through while pursuing your dreams.

And don’t question your dream – will it work, will it not work, what happens if I fail, do I really want to do this? Question your reality. Your dreams are more real than your reality.

Follow and do what you wish to do. Do it right now.

Jatin Sharma is a media professional who doesn’t want to grow up, because if he grows up, he will be like everybody else.

(Picture courtesy helpingchurchleaders.com)

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In gaanon ki toh law lag gayi

Songs that go ‘Po po po’ and ‘Taaki taaki’ are the scourge of Bollywood. How can we ban these songs? Maybe we should have a writers’ collective that bans bad writing.
by Jatin Sharma

Let me start this piece with a PJ I just invented:
Q. What did one car say to the other car during peak hour traffic?
A. Po Po Po Po Po Po Po.

If you just went “Chheee!” with this PJ, then I would like to draw your attention to the song lyrics that are hidden in the answer, and which inspired this PJ in the first place.

Song lyrics these days are completely devoid of meaning. Absurdity seems to be the new mantra in Bollywood. The rule of the game is ‘Writers/lyricists ki kya zaroorat hai (Who needs writers/lyricists?)’, ‘Koi bhi toh likh sakta hai (Anybody can write)’. Sure, but let’s get one thing straight.

There is a difference between being literate and being a writer.

A writer weaves new words with new perspectives and gives a new definition to a mundane thing. A person who says ‘Po Po Po’ in a song, by contrast, should join circus and be fed to hungry lions. Similarly, when you say ‘Taaki oh taaki, tere baap ko main nana banaunga‘ and ‘Mere toh L lag gaye‘, you are not writing something clever, but merely trying to be clever (and failing). Just because you can buy a pen for Rs 2 doesn’t mean that you should create content that is worth the same amount too.

Yes, I know the people who want to defend these songs will say, “But that is what people want.” Well, it’s time you dusted the dust off your brains. People read and listen to what the media and writers give them. If you are not going to give them meaningful lyrics, they will listen to your absurdity and laugh for a little while, but your creation is only going to be momentary. Hard to digest? Let’s prove it with a fact. The yesteryear film songs and poems that have had beautiful meanings and are little gems of poetry cut across generations and are a hit today, too. But look at your new age Po Po Pos and Lo Lo Los: they come and go and nobody cares to find out where they disappeared. These supposed songs are a mere reflection of an attitude where business has taken over art.

 

Creative agencies like radio stations have gone the lewd way in their speech, movies based on SMS forwards and cheap jokes, and TV channels and movies churning out one product after another based on the last hit that made millions, show that India has little place for its intellectuals. Most of the good writers and people who are serious thinkers hate to associate themselves with our mass media because they are beginning to think that mediocrity rules the roost there.

Look at American TV shows like Grey’s Anatomy or Friends; you may or may not be fans of these shows, but you can’t deny that research, a well-defined plot and depth of
characterisation back these shows. And all credit goes to their writers. Now consider TV shows in India, where the basic plot revolves around love, death of the lover/married partner, followed by reincarnation after outrageous time leaps, interspersed with constant scheming and bitching, plus constant repetition of about three shots to complete an episode. Writers are looked upon as fools, called on to write incredible twists to pull up shows with sagging TRPs, put in astounding situations just to shock the audience. Because nobody respects writers, it seems that writers, too, are not respecting themselves.

Writers of an era long gone were people who would write in order to feed their passion; today they write to feed their greed. Someone has correctly said that, “Writers with empty stomachs are full of sensible words.” May be today’s writers don’t have stomachs empty enough for passion and ambition. May be they are richly fed on what works commercially. Or how to compromise on what they hold dear, so that they can create something that sells.

Naturally, writers are succumbing to the rat race and the people who demean the very art of writing, because those people hold the big bucks.

Writing meaningful things needs to rise above deadlines and restrictions. Thoughts cannot be tied up in the ropes of business. They are free and priceless. It is up to the ‘patrons’ of art to understand just how to bring the best out of such a fantastic creative process.

Jatin Sharma is a media professional who doesn’t want to grow up, because if he grows up, he will be like everybody else.

(Pictures courtesy in.movies.yahoo, community.sparknotes.com) 

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Feel the like

Jatin Sharma writes about how social networking has helped us endlessly ‘connect’ to virtual worlds while ignoring the real one.

We are the Internet generation. We are the generation of gadgets, of tablets and social networking sites. We are the Facebookers and the Twitterati. We are the people who are lost in the virtual world.

The world is closing in and our emotions are shutting down. Thanks to the virtual world, we have changed the basic definition of emotion. Earlier, an emotion used to be a feeling, now it has become a message on the wall. Earlier, birthdays used to be a celebration, now they have become a reminder of an event in our phones. Earlier, the world and being social in it was a real activity, now it has turned into one big facade.

Look at photographs; how they were all about memories and capturing a particular time. Now, photographs are judged on the basis of whether they are FB-worthy or whether they will get minimum 50 likes. The human mind is now full of unnecessary information as we have started demeaning our lives. We are becoming slaves to technology and our emotions, or the showing of them, have become a formality.

It seems quite funny to me when people prefer to Skype or chat on FB for about 10 years, and tell each other that they have been in constant ‘touch’ for so long. Ipso facto they may have met just once. Even when it comes to relationships and love affairs, people like to announce them as their relationship status. One fight and the status becomes complicated; and if the matter gets more serious, the boyfriend or the girlfriend gets to know of it on Facebook where the girl’s/boy’s friends have like the update of ‘XYZ changed their relationship status from ‘It’s complicated’ to ‘Single’.

Our emotions have become so frail in today’s times. People form an opinion, then mentally compose a clever line in order to be able to tweet about a trending topic and get as many retweets as possible. Our speech is no more about putting our thoughts into words, it’s all about getting ‘likes’ and retweets and being ‘favourited’.

We are so engrossed in this virtual world that even when we are out with our friends, we are glued to our smart phones. We are becoming ‘virtual Mayors’ of markets and restaurants, and are Whatsapping and putting out our current activities as our status messages. The whole joy of socialising is not about meeting people anymore. In fact, social networking sites should also get a Nobel Peace Prize, for the outcome of most of our fights is now decided by ‘unfriending’ or ‘blocking’ or ‘unfollowing’ a person. These are now considered to be a very fierce punishments in social networking.

Our minds are completely lost in this virtual jungle. And we are not realising that this is slowly and steadily going to ruin our basic human interactions. We all need to feel, touch and hear words in order to survive. Depression is on the rise in the world and I strongly feel that the Internet is responsible for it. The little joys of life are the ones where you can actually feel them. Don’t dedicate yourself to social networking sites. Life is much more than that which exists inside your phone or computer. For once, try to liberate yourself and be a human being. Meet people, don’t ‘poke’ them. Spend some quality time, don’t get hynotised by your phone screen. Feel like a human being. Speak, don’t just type. Feel the like, don’t just click on LIKE.

Jatin Sharma is a media professional who doesn’t want to grow up, because if he grows up, he will be like everybody else.

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Bura maano, Holi hai!

Jatin Sharma is aghast at people’s moronic behaviour during Holi, and wonders why they forget basic decency while having fun.

Holi stands apart from all the other festivals in India. For starters, Holi is the only festival in which, instead of wearing new clothes, we head out the door wearing our old tattered ones. For another, it is the most mischievous festival of the country. In fact, the statement ‘Bura na maano, Holi hai’ pretty much explains everything that is allowed in the name of Holi.

Holi is one festival where everybody has the ‘license’ to tease others in society. But in recent times, people have forgotten the most important aspect of Holi: it is still a festival.

By itself, a festival is supposed to spread sweetness and light, and Holi also does that. A festival is meant to bring society together to share good thought and happy moments. But as time goes by, everyone has turned Holi into a joke holiday tinged with cruelty.

People are now looking at Holi as a festival that gives them the chance to harass and torture others, sometimes complete strangers. How else do you explain the use of polythene bags in place of balloons or oil paints instead of gulaal? The simple gulaal-and-water routine of Holi has now given way to Chinese colours and rain dances. And the ‘festivity’ starts even before the day of revelry, with groups of people hitting the terraces of their buildings and aiming for people on the streets, especially those who are well-dressed and probably going for job interviews.

The more I see it, the more it begins to appear that the only reason we use these strange colours during Holi is so that we can laugh at others for the next 10 days as the colours refuse to fade quickly. And certain men should just go ahead and announce that the only reason they participate in the festival is so that they can touch women inappropriately in the guise of celebration.

We have become such hooligans with this festival, not caring how people will suffer for our five minutes of enjoyment. We aim for moving bikes, trying to hit the rider as hard as we can with our water balloons, not realising that we are putting the rider at risk of death or blindness with our antics. We put fear in the hearts of several girls who fear being molested in the name of Holi. We deliberately colour somebody’s head so that he or she has to keep washing their hair for a week, and still find colour with each wash.

Let alone human beings, our moronic behaviour extends to targetting animals as well. Painted dogs and tattooed cows are becoming a common sight post-Holi in recent years.

If we are one those characters who use pakka rang, or waste water, or paint animals, or throw balloons on passers-by or molest girls, we should be ashamed of ourselves. On the one hand, we try to show the world that we are a decent society that stands against the atrocities on women, but on the other, we go ahead and molest women in fun. On the one hand, Maharashtra is going through a severe drought, which we discuss during our smoke breaks at work, but on the day of the revelry, we will still waste water because it is ‘only for one day, so it’s okay’.

We say we love animals, but we think colouring them green, yellow and red is funny. We talk of donating our eyes and urge others to do so too, but we think nothing of blinding others with chemical colours.

The hypocrisy in our society has made us forget the actual fun and frolic of Holi, and that it is a festival of colours to be celebrated with goodness and innocence. It should make people and animals feel safe, and let them rejoice without having to look over their shoulders.

Most importantly, it should be celebrated in the spirit that Lord Krishna celebrated it with. He would have hated our silver and green chemical colours, and He would never put oil paints on gopis. And He definitely wouldn’t put gulaal on his cow.

This year, celebrate Holi to spread happiness, and not to target people. And if you’re still looking at it as an excuse to harass people, then to everyone else I say, please, bura maano, Holi hai.

Jatin Sharma is a media professional who doesn’t want to grow up, because if he grows up, he will be like everybody else.

(Picture courtesy telegraph.co.uk)

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Ignore that begging hand

Jatin Sharma is annoyed by beggars who play on his emotions to make money, instead of looking for honest work.

Begging was once a destiny. Now it’s a profession – it’s a chosen way of life, for all the shameful (and shameless) ones who are lazy in life.

A long time ago, Mumbai was fortunate to have real beggars, who gave you blessings, who were grateful for your help, who were really laachar and bebas. But not any more. Nowadays, when I look at beggars, I don’t see people I want to help. I see people I want to avoid, run away from because they are so utterly irritating. They desensitise every emotion in me; or maybe it is because I cannot, or don’t want to, feel another man’s pain any more.

I strictly feel that all the beggars from the city should be banned and at least in Mumbai we should act on those who beg, because begging really is illegal. For those who think I am being both brutal and politically incorrect, I would only like to say: pick a beggar and observe him/her for a week. Then you will understand  how organised the entire process of begging is. 

This has nothing to do with me being born in a better family and having more opportunity than other, less fortunate ones. Yes, I agree that these beggars didn’t get a good life like me, but that doesn’t mean that the rest of their lives should continue to be devoid of opportunity. If we continue to feel bad for them, they will continue to be beggars. Our pity is their salary.

Secondly, I have met several beggars in Mumbai and I have come to a conclusion: they are beggars not because God wants them to be, but because they want to be.

In Mumbai, no man who is willing to work will beg. And even if he has to beg – some people are victims of circumstance, being swindled out of all their money, or being abandoned by family in their old age, to state just two reasons – at least he should not irritate my city and her visitors from outside. The so-called beggars of my city are a disgrace to the financial capital of my country. And no, I don’t think that there are any individual beggars in the city, they work as a part of a larger mafia now.

They have taken over every traffic signal, every religious place and every transport station, and have slowly taken over the city. They approach people with bandaged hands that are soaked in red-coloured water, they rub their saliva on their faces to pass it off as tears, and touch people’s feet not to arouse pity in them, but a feeling of revulsion and annoyance, so that they get some money.

Take the example of the Gateway of India beggars. Most of them, exposed as they are to the constant barrage of foreign tourists thronging the site, can speak English, a smattering of French, and several other languages. They can almost correctly guess the nationalities of the visitors and have designed their begging strategies accordingly – one of which is to allot areas to people fluent in a language spoken by the foreigners most likely to frequent that area. Tell me, for a person clever enough to pick up a formal language without formal training, is it so difficult to use that cleverness in an honest trade and make honest money? Why is such a person still begging?

Begging has now evolved into a fine art. In fact, beggars are so organised and their work so scientifically carried out, I wouldn’t be surprised if a contingent of beggars was not some day invited to lecture B-students about efficiency and marketing themselves.

It’s not begging any more. Little children, unwashed and sometimes physically deformed, come up to you and ask for food. The moment you give them food, they go and sell it! Some of them are emphatic that they want money, not food, so that they can go buy some chemical to sniff at and get high, or else do cheap drugs with other children their age. Most children have to surrender the money they make from begging to a common pool each evening, from which he/she gets an equal share as allotted by the dada that controls them.

Nobody says much against them, because in India, we are an emotional lot. And we have let this menace of begging get out of hand; we have allowed it to become an organised, well-paying activity that is both demeaning and exploitative. While we have been quick to protest against the evils of drinking or prostitution, we have not been as strict with begging. As a developing country, we should be ashamed that so many of our countrymen are beggars, that so many of our young children are street urchins with no present and not much hope at a future. We hear cases of parents pushing their children out of their homes to beg – what do we do after hearing these stories?

And why would we? At the risk of sounding really harsh, let me say that at some point in all our lives, we have all begged – begged with police officers to forgive our mistakes, begged with teachers to give us grace marks and pass us, begged to be promoted, begged for another chance…begged and begged again. We excel at playing the victim card repeatedly, just to get what we want, and if we have to beg to do it, we will. Heck, we even use the term ‘beg, borrow, steal’ really easily in our normal conversation, sometimes in front of our impressionable children.

What really stops us, a country that supplies a lot of labour and technology to the rest of the world, from taking a stand? Do we lack the spine for it? Do we not have the power to set things right? Is it because we accord emotions the first priority in everything?

Is this what makes us let the beggars be, the politicians continue to scam unabated, let the country run the way it is being run? Or is it because we are too afraid to let new thoughts, however radical or tough, come to life and breathe?

Let your new thoughts take seed and grow. Don’t give out largesse to someone just because he/she makes a sad face and asks for it. Don’t pay these actors on the roads. Avoid. Ignore. And ban! 

Jatin Sharma is a media professional who doesn’t want to grow up, because if he grows up, he will be like everybody else.

(Picture courtesy rottenview.blogspot.com)

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Iss English ki toh…

Jatin Sharma takes up the cudgels on behalf of the non-English speakers, wondering why we’ve become lingual terrorists against them.

“Oh , he is such an idiot, doesn’t even know English.”

“Do you know she just said, ‘I don’t riks my life’?”

“His English grammar is pathetic.”

These are some lovely lines that have fallen on my ears time and time again. In fact, once while I was at a production house to meet a friend, waiting for the lift to arrive, I heard someone shouting. It was a woman, about 30 years old, and she was talking, no, shouting at someone over her phone. Since my lift hadn’t arrived yet, I took the chance to listen in on this screaming person.

What I heard shocked me. The girl was yelling at her mother for coming to her birthday party to surprise her, because the girl was embarrassed. Why? Because her  mother couldn’t speak English. The girl felt really bad when her mother tried to speak English in her front of her friends, and failed with a line. She felt even worse when her friends laughed.

Before hanging up the phone, the girl said, “You are such an embarassement, mom. Learn English.”

My lift arrived. As I entered it, I began to wonder: why would someone feel elated or dumb, happy or sad, secure or insecure in this world only on the basis of them (or somebody else) knowing or not knowing how to speak English? Since when, and why, has English become so important, that we have started judging people on the basis of the language they speak? Why has the world forgotten to dwell on the importance of good thought?

Language, as I know it, is a tool to express and understand your thoughts. It doesn’t matter whether it is Hindi, Gujarati, Urdu, Punjabi, Marathi, English, French, Italian or Pashto. No doubt that English is what most of the people in the world speak today, but judging other people and their talent on the basis of their fluency in English is just ridiculous. You can rejoice if someone’s English is extraordinary, but making fun of people who don’t know English is just demeaning them.

A rickshawwallah from Benaras once told me, “Angrez chale gaye, angrezi chhod gaye! Pehle angrez ke ghulam the, aaj angrezi ke ghulam ban rahe hain (the English have gone, but they have left English behind! Englishmen ruled us, and now English is making us its slaves.)” He was very happy that he cared for people more than the language they spoke. I asked him about his education. He said that he never attended school, but that he is still literate because he knows not to judge people.

“Angrezi bolne se koi vidvaan nahin banta, Shiva ko angrezi thode hi aati thi! (Nobody is intelligent because they can speak English, did Lord Shiva speak English?)” he said. I knew I was going to remember these words for a lifetime.

We judge each other on the basis of how well we speak English, and we are brazen enough to laugh at people who don’t speak it well. Has anyone realised that English is a foreign language? It became a world language only because of the British man’s rule all over the world. They made slaves out of other people and became rich by looting and plundering. So there’s nothing to feel proud of if you speak their language well.

And if you think that the British can speak English well because they are British, think again. I once met a girl in India – she was from England – and when I read her diary, the first thing I noticed was that she couldn’t even spell the word ‘sympathetic’. I laughed in my head; if she had been Indian, I would have just pointed at her and laughed aloud, making her feel really stupid about not knowing how to spell an English word.

Let a language be a language. Don’t make it a tool to judge a person. We are Indians, we are doing great in the world. Our culture is already awesome, packed as it is with so many languages. We have Sanskrit, which is forgotten in our country but which is becoming really popular in Germany. We have the Vedas, and we are the fathers of yoga, which is a phenomenon all over the world.

So what I’m trying to say is, it’s okay if Indians behave like Indians. Why try to turn them into Englishmen and Americans?

And while we’re on the subject, I want to point out that the English language itself has some fundamental flaws of pronunciation. I still don’t know how you can have a ‘p’ at the start of a word and say it is silent. I still haven’t figured out why certain words have similar spellings and completely different pronunciations. Also, why is the word ‘the’ pronounced differently in two different situations? And why did the British change the names of our cities; are these names so difficult to pronounce? I can say Kolkata and Calcutta equally well, so why can’t they?

A language, its writing and its pronunciation, must have a science driving it. Hindi has a science backing its words. Sanskrit is a flawless language, the main reason why the Germans are planning to programme their computers with it, because it has no errors.

Again, look at the French and how proud they are of their language. You don’t find them laughing at their own countrymen for not knowing English. Look at the Chinese; the Premier of their country takes a translator along on his trips and tells the world that he is a proud Chinese.

Yes, English is required for progress. But we have to be supportive of those who can’t speak English and who prefer to speak in Indian languages. No language is more superior than another. Languages are meant to connect hearts and minds. So don’t become a lingual terrorist, hating people left, right and centre just because they are incapable of speaking English. Listen to their thoughts and not their words. And while you’re doing so, take pride in yourself, rather than the person you are trying to be.

Jatin Sharma is a media professional who doesn’t want to grow up, because he believes that if he grows up, he will be like everybody else.

(Picture courtesy ascentinstitute.org)

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