Oxymoron of the Day: Positive Discrimination

Let me talk about myself for a second or two before I get going. Cynic: A person who believes that only selfishness motivates human actions and who disbelieves in or minimizes selfless acts or disinterested points of view. Cynical: A word used to describe the above person. Now there are a lot of folks who label me a 'Cynic' and call me 'Cynical' and I am ok with it. Even I think I am one and so it doesn't put me into one of my 'I-have-to-try-and-prove-them-wrong' mindsets because doing that would essentially mean that I would be proving my-self wrong as well and that can't be because I have a t-shirt which says "ARGUE if you must but remember that I am RIGHT". So, yes, those who label me a 'Cynic' and call me 'Cynical' are right to do so. With that out of my system, for now, let me come to the point. This article in the Telegraph. For those of you who have clicked and read through that article before continuing here, you can skip the next couple of lines unless you want to go through that mindless stuff again. For those of you who are reading this line without having clicked on that link, here is the beginning of what that article says: "New laws planned by Harriet Harman, the equalities minister, mean that firms tendering for taxpayer-funded work could be judged on new criteria including the gender and race of their staff. " I read this and was amazed that 1. There is something called an Equalities Minister 2. Which means there is an Equalities Ministry being headed by said Minister 3. And they can come-up with something so discriminatory in the name of Equality! If that statement had read "Company XYZ Inc has declared that firms tendering for work could be judged on new criteria including the gender and race of their staff" it would have been immediately called discriminatory and the dreaded 'D' word would have hung around the company as a pall of death. But no. This is the government, via its 'Equalities' minister, discriminating and hiding it under the guise of law and equality. If someone hasn't got it still, because of a skull that is too thick or too empty or both, this is how Discrimination is defined: "Treatment or consideration of, or making a distinction in favor of or against, a person or thing based on the group, class, or category to which that person or thing belongs rather than on individual merit". Which translates to "Making a decision based on a lot of other stuff that doesn't answer to the name 'Merit' ". And they call this Equality! One more excerpt from that article: "Miss Harman insisted, "We don't see this as anti-competitiveness - it actually underpins competitiveness. Equality and opportunity underpins a meritocracy. This does not hold business back, this helps business." Consider, for example, that I am a company which has a team of 3 guys and one girl, all hired based on interviews and their performance records. From what I understand after reading the article, I need to ditch one guy and go looking for another girl to be in my team for me to stand a chance of landing the contract. I can now go into related headaches I might have to face if I start something like that but I guess you get the point. And assuming I do go through the pains of finding and recruiting, on time, another female team-member who is qualified, I might still not win because the competitor already has an all-girl team. And Ms. Harman believes this underpins competitiveness! Nice, in a very nonsensical, Ministry-of-Equalities kind of way. I can imagine how this can mutate and grow going forward. These could be realistic headlines and news stories we might come across in the future: "The Department of Health has proposed new guidelines for all registered doctors which would require them to attend to a minimum of 5 patients who are not white and male before attending to a white, male patient. Male Doctors who do not follow these guidelines run the risk of being de-registered and imprisoned for discrimination" "Plastic Surgeons beat the Recession The Association Of Plastic Surgeons has reported a whopping growth in their general earnings and also a steep rise in the number of their actively practicing members. The chairman of the association attributed this raise solely to the government and its initiatives. "There has been a sudden spurt in the number of people, mostly white male, who come to us and ask to be turned into non-white males or sometime females. The most popular option for the white guy who walks into our clinic is to go out looking like an Asian. The lean, athletic types go for Heidi Klum. They say it improves their job opportunities and their social life. We have to thank the government, especially the Ministry of Equalities, for this turn around in our fortunes" "Government Ensures Equality in the Family A newly proposed law, currently under discussion, aims at inculcating the spirit of Equality into kids right from their birth by requiring families to have Identical, Different-sex Twins. The minister, speaking to the media, said that, "Our kids are our future and this will make sure our future has all the opportunity it needs to grow in an equal environment" Hopefully these things won't come to pass and someone manages to knock some sense into moronic politicians who come up with oxymorons like "positive discrimination". Disclaimer: I am not British, I don't live in England and there is no Equalities Ministry where I live. So why am I complaining? Because of the realization that politicians are the same in what they do irrespective of where they are from. We might not have an 'Equalities' ministry but we do have equally euphemistically-named ministries trying to do the same.

Knotty times ahead

Boy meets girl They fall in love They get married They live happily ever after If only love stories were so simple and straight forward. Hmmm. But then, if they were so sasf (that's short for simple and straight forward) I am sure we wouldn't have had works like 'Romeo and Juliet' or 'Devdas'. Nor would we have had movies like 'Titanic' or 'Romeo and Juliet'. Or for that matter, the Indian mainstream motion picture industry in its entirety. As per my experience, personal and second-hand included, the real life love story goes more like this: Boy meets girls... Ok, before the self proclaimed feminist brigade raises an objection or a hue 'n' cry (whichever is easier) let me clarify that it could very well be Girl meets Boys but for the sake of brevity and lack of experience in terms of presenting that particular perspective, I shall stick to my gender as the main protagonist of the story. With that disclaimer out of the way, let me start again. The real life love story. in general, goes more like this: Boy meets girls before he finally meets THE girl Usually this is because the ones before THE girl don't think he is close to being their purrfect guy. To use a cliched phrase - our boy is "not even in the same postal code". That is, till he meets THE girl. They fall in love That she actually falls for someone rejected by so many before her might make you wonder if the girl has really low standards. What really happened was that he just moved into the right postal code!!! They fall out of love Essentially because one of them wakes up to realize that the other is not, after all, all that purrfect. Now repeat steps 1 thru 3 and after a few iterations, for reasons unknown, they progress to step 4 which is when They tell their families about their intention to get married This could lead to a varied set of reactions from said families like stunned disbelief, shock-induced heart attacks and character assassination, bracketed on one end by silent acceptance and 'Great -Wall -of-China'esque opposition on the other. This is where the real life love story ends because at this point, the 'Getting Married' and 'Living happily ever after' steps might or might not follow and hence can't be listed down with any degree of certainty. Before anyone asks, this sudden interest in love stories is because mine happens to be one of those which has managed to reach the 'Getting Married' stage. And, once again before anyone asks, my story did follow the steps above but not in the exact manner (No iterations!! To say otherwise would end up netting me a couple of black eyes, courtesy the girlfriend)

The Cat is out of the bag

Now let me get on with it. "It" being the "something" that I said I would write about next time, the last time I wrote here. In case you missed that last one, you can look at the post called The Teaser. Let me warn that it will not help much with understanding anything I write but it is confirmation that I did say I will write about something that happened. I would like to drag this out a little more because, to my own surprise, I can think up of ways to do it. But two reasons are stopping me. Someone out there might lose their patience. Normally that wouldn't bother me but I am sure Noodle House attracts ab(ove)normal folks and I am also sure that the only one who loses his (or her) patience would unfortunately (for me) turn out to be an exceptionally talented ethical hacker who would be driven to use his (or her) skills unethically for once. Result - A defaced and 'graffiti'ized Noodle House. I don't want that to happen. The second reason is that by the time I am done dragging this out like a used bubble gum in a two-year-old's hands, I am very much liable to forget what is supposed to come next. I don't want that to happen either. So what did happen? My vacation, that is what. After 4 long years, I suddenly up and left. Took a week long vacation. In the Himalayas. With friends. That was the cat in the bag which is out. Of course it was just a cat, not an earth shattering, wow-inducing event like I tried to make it sound. But it so happens that this cat is a big deal for me, since I don't do it normally. I mean, I don't take a vacation normally. And when I happen to take one, it becomes wow-inducing as in "Wow!! I am on vacation". Of course, as I mentioned before, there is also this huge opportunity for writing lots of posts under a whole set of categories - "write about the vacation", "travelogue", "anecdotes from a travel", "do the same things on a vacation as you would do on any other day but write about it because it was not done at home" to name a few - which actually makes it truly wow-inducing as in "Wow!! I can write something now". PS: More about my vacation to follow. Whether you like it or not!

The Teaser

Noodle House is another of my many pet projects that was started with a lot of enthusiasm and lost steam before it even had a decent shot at becoming something more permanent. Not that I have abandoned it completely (this post is proof positive of that) but it definitely aint the 'new post every single day' blog it started out as. Unlike my other pet projects, though, this state of affairs is not the result of losing interest mid-way. It is more a result of I having reached a point where I had covered everything even remotely interesting in my life that it was getting progressively more difficult to find new stuff to write about. Add to it my twin assets of having a tiny memory and an enormous appetite for laziness and this whole think-about-something-interesting-to-write-and-write-about-it exercise was probably doomed to neglect and failure from the beginning. But then like time, life also goes on and letting life go on has finally resulted in something happening that is worth writing about. If you thought you were now going to read about what happened, sorry to disappoint you. You will have to wait a little. Because, you see, I have decided to milk this event for what it is worth. Actually for more than what it is worth. I might not be the crispest cookie in the jar but I am not dumb enough to not realize that this is an opportunity to add posts to the 'House. So this is how I see this playing out - First I get this teaser out, hopefully to pique interest in what I might say in my coming posts. Next I come out with a few interesting posts about what happened. Finally I will clam up as usual for the next I don't know how many months before I come here with yet another reason for why I don't come here all that often anymore. This plan seems ok and I guess I will stick with this. So till tomorrow or the day after or whenever it is that I write my 'interesting' post, see ya! PS: By the way, I am thinking that I have just set myself up for a 'both feet in my mouth' situation by claiming that the posts to follow would be "interesting". What made me make that claim when I don't even know the meaning of the word is something I can not explain. But come the next post, I will make sure I have clean feet.

I am a Tree

I have just returned from an out of city experience that was supposed to be three days long but ended up stretching across the better part of five. I find myself a little mentally drained because of that experience and taking into account the fact that there nothing much there to drain in the first place, I guess you can say that my condition is a little above alarming and a little below catastrophic on the panic scale. Over the years, I have found that a dose of good, old laziness is the best plug for all mental leaks. That was exactly what I was helping myself to, literally feeling the drains in my brain slowly but surely dry up and close. I was sure I would have the use of my full mental resources by the time I step back into office on Monday. I shouldn't have been so sure!!! Opening your e-mail and deleting spam is not something that is supposed to be mentally taxing. Especially when that is all there is to your mail. I was about to do a 'Select All - Delete All' when I noticed that there was a new mail in my inbox. In my INBOX!! Get it? I usually don't get stuff in my inbox and my spam filter is quite thorough. But there it was, the rogue that found its way past my spam defense. That shock was enough for my mental drains to start again. I would have blindly deleted it, added the sender to the list of blocked ids and re-started the process of recuperating. But just as I was about to send the electrons on their irreversible path of deletion, the Id happened to ring a bell in some deep recess in my brain. That, in itself, was another shock because that recess was not supposed to be there in the first place! Anyway, first the id and then its human owner started taking shape in my head and I realized that I somehow still remembered my friend from school. Apparently so did he since the proof of that was right there, in my inbox. And by now the drains were fully open and my mental was well and truly on the way out! The shock slowly gave way to curiosity as I wondered what he had to tell me after all these years. You see, after high school we had gone our separate ways and were in touch for sometime but that was it. And now out of the blue, after a gap of nearly a decade, a mail. No wonder I wondered. Anybody in my shoes would have. Not that I was wearing shoes when I saw the mail, but that’s beside the point. Anyway, I click it open to see what it was he had to tell me. I read through the mail and turns out that he wanted to tell me, after all these years, that I am a Walnut Tree!!! Just as I read that, I could feel the last of my mental drain out of me.