Thursday, February 24, 2005

Moving out of Sulekha Weblogs!

I have decided not to host my blogs on Sulekha.com Weblogs any more. I have also decided to move all my blogs to this site on Google's Blogger.com. The primary trigger for this is the fact that Sulekha edited my last blog: If Dad is taking a shower with Mom,DO NOT tell your BPO rep!

I had posted a picture at the beginning of the blog so that it would display as an embedded image. The link to that picture is also available at the top of my blog. The original blog looked like this: original look of the blog. Sulekha edited my blog and removed that embedded picture. Without asking my persmission. Without requesting me to remove the picture myself. Without even informing me. Is it too much to expect some basic courtesy from Sulekha towards its user community?

This is uncivilized, unevolved and unprofessional behavior. This is a serious breach of good faith. This is also a violation of my rights to my writing. The fact that I post a blog on Sulekha does not mean they have all rights to my posting and they can edit it.

The only good thing about Sulekha blogs is the user community which gives us a feeling of belonging. The nice close-knit kind which exists (existed?) in village communities. Otherwise, technically, Sulekha weblog section is PRIMITIVE and SUCKS. There is no incentive for staying on here when there are better options and tools available.

Google's Blogger.com is an excellent site I have started to use. It has great tools which are easy to learn to use. You quickly get a hang of them. The editor allows one to easily change font, size, style, color, to create hyperlinks, to align test the way we want them, etc. And it has the awesome option of being able to post pictures. Imagine sharing your pictures with fellow-bloggers, an option Sulekha does not have and does not seem to encourage! There are different blog templates which you can use and customize to suit your style. You can copy your previous blogs from Sulekha, post them here and even set the date-time, so that you continue to keep the original date-time from your blog on Sulekha.

To see what other bloggers are doing on Blogger, go to the top of this blog page where you see the NEXT BLOG link. Use this link to view another random blog. This link appears on every Blogger.com blog and you can keep clicking on it to visit random blogs and see how other people are using Blogger.

As I already mentioned, the best thing about Sulekha weblogs is the user community. We are a happy, close-knit online village. The features and facilities on Sulekha weblogs are also primitive in comparison. Blogger.com is a big international city with the comforts and facilities which come with it. We can continue to maintain our online community ties, and yet enjoy the advantages of Blogger's facilities. There are two ways of doing this:
  1. Post your blog on Blogger.com and post a link to that blog on Sulekha weblogs. The Sulekha community can click on your link and see your blog. They can post comments right there on Blogger.com. This way, we continue to maintain our network of friends and readers through Sulekha! This is exactly what I have done with this blog.
  2. Get your Blogger.com blog listed/registered (a one-time thing) on other blogger communities like BlogStreet India and Blogwise.com. These communities have thousands of other Indian bloggers from all over the world. Blogwise.com is an international site. Click here for Indian Bloggers on Blogwise.com.

I will no longer host my blogs on Sulekha. I will just post links to my blogs there. It would be great if other Sulekha bloggers joined me. It no longer feels comfortable having my blogs hosted on a site which does not think twice or have the courtesy of getting in touch with me before editing them, a site which has primitive features, and which becomes inexplicably and unapologetically unavailable about once a month or more!

PS: If you have questions or suggestions please post them in the comments section of this blog.

Monday, February 21, 2005

If Dad is taking a shower with mom, DO NOT tell your BPO rep!


BPO Honest Case Log (Click for bigger pic!)

Disclaimer: I cannot vouch for the authenticity of the above screenshot. It could well be a hoax. May be a BPO Urban Legend. But read on...

The above screenshot came to me in an email forwarded to a bunch of people in different parts of the world. Apparently, it is a funny "Example of honest case logging" at the call center of a prominent multinational company, selling computers worldwide, whose name allegedly begins with 'D'. I do not know where the call center is located. It could be anywhere in the world. It is not possible to guess from the name of the BPO representative who created this case log, which part of the world he belongs to.

The humor in the case is apparent and I suppose we could laugh about it. But what concerns me is that, the above screenshot came to me without the personal information of the call center employee and the customer being blacked out. I blacked them out before posting here! And the original screenshot without black-outs is probably being forwarded by people via email to their friends across the world, as I type this. Pretty soon email users around the world would have seen it.

In the original screen shot I received, you could see the customer's first name and last name, his email address and telephone number. You could also see the call center employee's first name and last name. I think it is the employee's true name because it did not sound like a Westernized name which call center people use for their Western customers. I could be wrong, of course.

Just to check further, I called the customer's phone number and asked for him by name. A female voice answered. She told me that he is not home right now and I should call later. So, the customer's information is probably true too!

If you were that customer, the world knows what you were doing with your wife at a particular time, on a particular date. The world also knows your email address and phone number. They can call you or write to you to discuss it with you! Think about it. Scary, huh?

Sunday, February 13, 2005

9-year-old stumbles on love!

Love is a thing you keep discovering again and again in different ways... provided you are open to it. One such profound discovery happened when I was 9-10 years old, although I did not know at that time that it was profound.

There used to be a woman in our neighborhood who worked as a maidservant in several houses. Her face was what could be termed simply as "disfigured". I don't know if it was congenital or caused by an accident. It was severely contorted on the left side. The flesh near the left cheekbone was disproportionately swollen, her mouth was stretched back to the left and up somewhat permanently, she had one or two long front teeth, and several other teeth in the front were missing, she could usually be seen with dishevelled hair, wearing old rag-like clothes. She looked like a classic scary witch!

This lady had two beautiful daughters who were teenaged in those days and helped in her work. They were either twins or very close to each other in age. The girls were true South Indian nubile beauties. Dark skinned and long haired, pretty faced and slim built. Even as a 9-year-old boy, their beauty was not lost on me.

The contrast between the mother and her daughters made me wonder, how such an ugly woman could have such pretty daughters. And then I wondered about her husband. How did he feel about her? How did he marry her in the first place? Then it dawned on my little 9 year old heart and mind: he married her probably because he found her acceptable and loveable despite her looks. The thought progressed some more and I concluded that is probably true of every person in the world: no matter how ugly or undesirable they looked to the rest of the world, there must be at least one person who would like them and love them. And then my thoughts drifted to other things.

Years later, as an adult, I remembered those thoughts and conclusions I had about the maidservant in our neighborhood and I was amazed. I figured out how old I must have been at that time based on the circumstances and I was amazed again. I realized that it was truly a profound discovery, and that too for a young boy to stumble on it was a wonderful thing.

Most of us go through life as if we are not deserving enough of love. We are afraid to love or express it because we think we don't deserve it. We hold back love from others because we think they don't deserve it. All of us end up being miserly about love and acting as if there is a great scarcity of it in the world. While the fact all along is that, there is an abundance of love everywhere. Yet, daily we come across people who are malnourished with lack of love.

Scarcity of love in the world, is like the scarcity of food. The problem is not one of production, it is one of distribution. The first step to resolve the problem is to realize what I discovered when I was a 9-year-old boy: everyone is loveable. And then, to live by that realization, to love a little more and spread a little more love everywhere.

I hope the lady and her daughters, who inspired this discovery are content, happy and well-loved, whereever they are now.

Friday, February 11, 2005

Five Years - a simple, real love story!

Just stumbled across this short real love story: Five Years

It's so simply told with no pretences. Sounds so sweet. And I am beginning to sound like a girrrllll!

Wednesday, February 09, 2005

Transformed From An Ugly Duckling to The Charming Beast

This piece of writing has been long overdue. I have had conversations about this with a few close friends. I am finally inspired to put this down in writing after reading this blog: Chronicles of an Ugly Duckling by mountain_dreamer.

As a child, I have been told frankly by my mother and grandmothers, and at times by assorted aunts, that I was dark, ugly, thin and weak. Apparently, I had been much better looking when I was a chubby, yerra (meaning "red" in Telugu, they meant fair-skinned) baby. For years as a growing child, I was criticized for not looking as nice as I did when I was a baby. They did not hesitate to talk about my bad looks in any place, at any time, in front of anyone. But I heard their rants most often when I made a fuss about eating. As a child, I was very particular about what I ate and how it was cooked. They believed that talking about how bad and weak I looked would encourage me to eat better. They also believed that frankly appreciating someone's good looks would put an evil eye on that person. There is something terrible about the culture of Indian elders which makes them talk more loudly of their kids' shortcomings than of the good things about them.

As an innocent child who is most influenced by the older women in the family, I believed that I was ugly. I often stood in front of the mirror to figure out just why I was ugly. I could never figure out. I had normal eyes, nose, mouth, teeth, face. Where was I ugly? I just could not find out. Nevertheless, I believed I was ugly. Now, in retrospect, I just can't understand how adults could do that to an impressionable child. In the US especially, I see how delicately and sensitively the kids are treated and that makes me wonder just what the hell the elders in my household were thinking.

I don't mean that they did not love me or not treat me well. In fact, they took very good care of me and I was a favored child. It was only when talking about how good or bad the kids looked, more so in the context of eating well, they seemed to think I was not upto the mark. And their opinions stuck in my head.

Things became worse in my teens. I had a bad case of acne. In mid- to late teens, the first "premature" grey hair started to appear. So now, not only did I hear rants about being dark, thin and ugly, I also had to hear about my acne and grey hair. I was acutely aware of looking different from most other boys my age. Different in an unattractive way.

I knew that I did not have the kind of good looks girls would moon over. Unfortunately, I was very interested in girls. Romantically interested too. But none of them liked me. I never got a single girl to like me in those days. I saw so many girls get together with the good-looking guys. I saw the girls being obviously interested in such guys. I have seen girls I had a crush on, in turn have a crush on other guys who seemed to be better than me in looks only.

Not one of the girls who rejected my interests told me why they found me unacceptable. Almost every single one of them just said, "I don't feel that way about you." I was left to wonder and speculate why they did not feel "that way" about me. I could not see anything wrong with any other aspect of myself. I was alright academically and on the career front, had a good home and family. I thought the only thing that was obviously "not good" about me was the way I looked. I was convinced that all the girls I was interested in did not like me because of my looks. Perhaps, I was wrong. But the point is that things became progressively worse for me as I grew from a child to a boy to an adolescent to a young man.

In my early 20's, I thought of myself as The Beast and the girl I was interested in as The Beauty. The Beast archetype became predominant in my consciousness. I was a sad young man who thought the first impression girls would have of me was to be repulsed. Then later, when they got to know me better as a person, may be they might become friendly. But it would all stop there, at friendliness. Needless to say my self-esteem was very very low.

During all those years of adolescence and early 20's when I was down with a bad self-image and low confidence, all it would have taken for me to feel so much better was for just one girl I loved, to love me back and tell me that she found me attractive. Just one girl. I can't believe how much power just one girl would have had. That is the kind of power a lover has.

So, I came to the US as a sad young man, low on self-esteem from years of conditioning, low on self-confidence and emotionally scarred because of all the unsuccessful trysts with romance. The Ugly Duckling. The Beast.

Things changed in the US as if by magic. Within months of landing here, I went out a couple of times with the prettiest white girl on the floor, who said I looked "trim and smart". I pursued other women. The reactions of American women to my interests were refreshingly different. There was no ambiguity in their responses. If they did not like me, they told me frankly. If they liked me, they expressed it even more frankly. In words and in actions. There never was any reason for me to wonder if they liked me or not. They made it very clear at all times. Nor was there any reason for me to wonder why they did not like me. They usually made that clear too. What is more, when it was obvious that they did not like my looks, I could even tell myself, that was only because they were not used to the South Indian looks, and/or they were not adventurous enough to like foreigners. I am really appreciative of the American unambiguous communications.

But more than that, I am deeply grateful to the American women who accepted me. Not all, but some of them did. The ones who did, showed their attraction and appreciation without inhibitions. They made me feel like a worthy man. I still remember the first time one of them told me that I looked "so handsome". I frankly did not believe her. It took some sincere repetitions by her and by others, backed by self-evident actions, to convince me that they really found me attractive and they were not just being kind. It did wonders for my confidence and self-esteem. Since then, I have been complimented for my presentable personality, my smile, my eyes, my butt and other more personal aspects. I have had a girlfriend caress my butt in public and even had gay men hit on me.

If you knew me well, you would realize that I am the devil-may-care kind of person who is not too concerned about what others say. I do not seek external validation for my thoughts and feelings. My sense of self-worth is built on a solid foundation of adequate self-cognition and evident achievements. Despite all that, I was not immune to the conditioning about my looks nor feelings of inadequacy brought on by consistent rejection from Indian girls. I have heard and read the usual lines and phrases: "Looks are not everything", "There is nothing wrong about your looks", "Beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder", etc. I have tried to tell myself that I have things going great for me in every other aspect of life and looks don't matter. But none of that helped. When healing came, it came from the solid actions and expressions of others, not from any cliched lines. It came from shared love and passion.

I am indebted to American womanhood. They accepted me with open minds, open hearts, open arms, open eyes and open thighs. They loved me and they healed me. They kissed me and transformed me from An Ugly Duckling to The Charming Beast.

Today, I am secure and content about how I look. I dress the way I want, I style my hair the way I want, I eat the way I want. I have found that no matter how I style myself, there are those who like it and there are those who don't. Even when I grew a beard for 3 months and looked like a barbaric cave dweller, someone told me they found it attractive (BIG grateful thanks to her!) And when I grew my moustache really big and thick like Kamal Haasan in the movie Devar Magan, an ex-girlfriend told me I looked like an adorable rapist (she's a hottie who doesn't know just how hot she is)!

I think it's all good. Very very rarely I fantasize about having the kind of looks which would make all heads in a room turn, which would make any woman fall for me. But sanity comes back soon enough. I am glad that there will always be those who like my looks and those who don't. I think looking too good would have spoilt my mental and emotional health, may be even my physical health. I like the fact that I can never predict a strange woman's reactions to my looks. She may be very repulsed or she may be very attracted, or she may feel anything between those extremes. I like that mystery. It suits me and my looks just fine.

Monday, February 07, 2005

Saturday, February 05, 2005

Eating alone and waking up alone in the morning!

Watched a Korean movie last night: Shiri.

Really liked it. It is a political action thriller with a romantic story woven in. It is apparently the most commercially successful Korean movie to date.

I watched it at this colleague-friend's place Friday evening, after work. (Was surprised that he had chosen a Korean movie; did not think he was the foreign movie type). Anyway, I was going home later, driving alone and remembered the romantic moments from the movie and the heart-movingly cute heroine. I remembered the romantic moments... their going to a play, their having dinner together, their standing on the side walk, taking shelter from the rain, their kissing... And I remembered my looong single status and loneliness... Felt unhappy and frustrated. Left with a feeling of helplessness and inadequacy.

I wonder why I am alone. It's not like anything is wrong with me. I have consciously made myself into the best person I could be. I am stably employed, I am well educated, I am smart. I have good tastes, I am polite and cultured, I am deeply interested in spirituality. I am friendly and kind and romantic. I can sing, I can cook, I can make a woman feel like she is the most special person in the world. I can even dance when I am in the mood. And I am really really nice.

So, why don't I have an equally nice girl with me right now? To share similar romantic moments as the ones I saw in the movie? Someone to fill my life and world with the yin energy, the feminine smells and sounds and preferences. Someone who would eat with me and who would be there when I wake up. The heroine in the movie tells the hero, "You did not like eating alone and waking up alone in the morning." That is exactly what I do, and what I hate!

Wednesday, February 02, 2005

"Difference between love, romance, and sex?"

Question on a message board:

So, what do you think is the difference between love, romance, and sex?

My response:

For animals and gods, they are all the same. That is why I ask people to get in touch with the animal and divine sides within themselves. Every person has three aspects: animal, god and human. Getting in touch with the animal and divine sides within us will help us love and make love truthfully, sincerely, joyfully.

- Swami Libran Lover