Debate or Dicussion..

He had been sitting there reminiscing what had happened this morning. Mentally going over every emotion all over again. It had been too quick and too heated a debate for him to remember every word of it. And it was only now that he was starting to understand the difference between a discussion and a debate. 

It had been a few hours since he had the heated talks with his father. It was filled with emotions and passion. He had known for some days that this discussion was overdue and when it took place, there was very little chance that he was going to like it. The problem he thought had been, that he was at home for too long. Finished with his studies and not yet gainfully employed. His father was a really compassionate guy. 'But' he had thought after giving it a lot of time. He had not known the difference between a Debate and a Discussion.

It started with a simple and honest enough question, 'Now that he had been thinking upon it for almost ten days now. What did he plan about his future?' Followed by some quick and firey arguments and counter arguments. Sparks flying, hurt emotions, dented egos. The casualty had been pretty severe.

Now retrospecting upon the morning's happenings. He decided that it was the fault of the very permises for the discussion which they had chosen. It had turned out as if he was trying to discuss, while his father had been debating his point. His father had been very logical and persuasive. There hardly was any time when, while presenting his arguments his father relented even for a moment. Mostly he had been correct, too correct actually. He painfully thought, he had been debating his own ideas with himself for the last ten days. Considering them, reconsidering them, refining, correcting and then presenting them to himself all over again. Playing the devil's advocate and finally adopting the ideas. But his father had so easily suggested corrections and revisions, that it irritated him. He thought, why did not his father care to ask him about his arguments. The reasons he decided to base his conclusions upon. Had it been so difficult for his father, to make him believe that he could see his reasons as he saw it. And only then try and amend each of his beliefs to be more in sync with his own. He bitterly thought that, his father always had a compulsive drive to make every discussion into an argument (a debate). And win every debate that he was part of.

Only if his father had known the difference between a debate, where they forced others to concede points to us and a discussion where instead of just expecting the side loosing the debate to try and accept what they heard in the arguments and incorporate it in their next debate. People tried actually understanding why did they believe whatever they believed and where was the fault in it. So that he actually took interest in making others believe in our beliefs rather than just making others follow.

What is the gender of the blog..

Do blogs have a gender? I mean, like I have two blogs. So will they be brothers or the second one will be sister blog of the first..Or is it like nations, where altough most of them are treated as Mothers (bharat mata). Some choose to call their nations as father. Germany is called Father..

MBA or M.Tech

Preparatory school, school, high school..under graduate, finally a graduate. These have been the past nineteen years of my life. Had things gone according to plan, I would have joined the famed sweatshops in the backwaters of the global IT village. Working hard to earn and then parting with the newly accessible expendable income by binging at shops, partying, and shopping some more.

But life has curious little ways of having it's own way. Finally when everyone of my peers, and my parents seemed to be happy at having done their bit to provide the honeycomb of our Society, with one more perfectly obedient worker bee, called employee. Excessively eager to while away its mundane existence to the whims of some leader bee, nomenclature boss. This curious little phenomenon called recession sent the economics of the world on a topsy-turvy ride of a roll coaster into the seeming abyss of negative growth where restructuring is the norm and the word recruitment is heard as the death knell. An elaborately cruel joke was played out on each of us, the new graduates, the freshers. As the new master of ours had already committed to allow us to serve them, so they could not simply relinquish their controls over us because of the fear of ill repute about being bankrupt enough not to be able to keep their word. So, they simply told us that they didn't need our services just yet. Wait if we can, or thy merciful selves will fully understand our eagerness to start serving some other masters.

This quirk of fate seems to have landed me into a nasty situation. For the first time, I have to make a decision which has not been already chosen for me. New jobs seem to be sparse, and good ones are outright rare. So the best way, and the only way I know until now leads right back to the college. Study some more, and weather out this recession sheltered in the deep confines of the womb of some able university. Thus, though ideas like IAS, entrepreneurship, banking jobs still keep turning over in the emptiness of my mind. They have been quite summarily awarded the status of hibernation.

Being an engineer by qualification, I got two most obvious options for me to choose from..Master of Business Administration or Master of Technology. MBA is something which has an image of leading to quick mega bucks. Getting to lead several other promising indivisuals to mint money for me. And it was this lure which had me try my luck with with CAT. This year, after my second attempt, I got 93.11 %ile. This was an improvement of almost 7 %ile over my first attempt, so I am pretty sure I will get the best calls if I risk it again.

Where as talking about the second choice, M. Tech. This is what I have done and loved my entire life. Science. Basically I like computer programming, so I ended up with a Computer Sc. Engineering degree from a reputed private college in Kolkata. But the thing was I liked only the computer programming part, so I ended up being pretty terrible at all my other subjects. Which means that if I want to do an M. Tech..I am gonna be working my a*s off preparing for the entrance exams. The problem does not lie with the hard work, but the fact that I have worked hard to reach 93%ile in CAT and if now I switch I will be letting go of all of this.

So I want and need all the help from everyone of you out there reading this post. Give your suggestions, feedback, opinion, ideas or absolutely anything which you can think of as being relevant to solving this dilemma of mine.

The Culture of Giving.

This post was inspired by the post I read on my friend Sormita's blog.

It stated the story of a 6 year old, named Maaike who chose not to take any presents on her birthday. Rather asked all her friends and their parents to donate to one of the two charities pursuing the cause she recognised with.

She managed to raise Rs 3500 for planting trees in and around her neighbourhood in Banglore. 

Now this story would surely have been inspiring, motivating any day. But this story reminded me about Venkat Krishnan, an entrepreneur with a social cause at his heart. He is our common PGP graduate from IIM, Ahemdabad (1993 batch). He worked with Times of India, Sony Entertainment Television, but then quit the corporate life for a startup school Eklavya. He was part of the school for about four years. And then moved on, to establish another organisation GiveIndia.

I would like to quote an excerpt from their first ever annual report. It is supposed to be a paragraph which he hopes to see in the annual statement of the company for 2020.

"Dear Stakeholders,

 We are pleased to inform you that GiveIndia has closed down. Donors are now active, they are finding NGOs, they are engaging with them, they are giving money directly and they don't need GiveIndia."

This extract should give the essence of the passion driving this idea. The idea for this non-profit financial exchange for connecting common people to NGOs germinated while he was travelling extensively through Europe and USA to research about the education system there so that he could improve upon his own school. The very idea is that the difference between the people there and back here in India is that they have a sense of ownership towards their country. They recognise with its achievements as well as its problems as their own. Paying taxes is not a kind of statement to the government that, "Okay, we did our part. Now do whatever you want to do with it. Just don't get back to us to harass us even more." Everyone is held accountable for whatever they did and whatever they did not. And instead of just blaming the government for whatever that is wrong with the society they decide to participate and do their own bit of whatever they can do. 

The idea of GiveIndia is that it is not big charities or corporate donations alone that cultivate a change in the culture of a place. It is us, the common people who when change our attitude of neglect towards the problems we face and see on a daily basis that revolutions take place. And today with ever more financially secure middle class we are a lot more recipient to the idea of giving. But again the very first thing which hits us is, who do we give to. How do we ensure that the money given is not wasted but utilised properly and how do we ensure that it is spent on a cause we recognise with. This is where GiveIndia comes in, to give everyone a platform to find the causes they want to work for, and give to NGOs working for it. We get to choose whether we feel education is more important than food, or how our money is spent.

Just like Maaike chose to recognise with a cause she felt about. And she not only chose to do something about what she believed in, but took a sort of ownership to the cause. After all we can never convince ourselves to spend our hard earned money onto something which we do not have an emotional attachment to.

blogosphere link of giveindia: http://giveindia.blogsome.com/

My First Post..

Hello folks..

This is my first post. I have been recently back to blogging, and basically I have been reading a lot of posts from several people. People with wonderful writing skills. My earlier attempt at blogosphere with no consistent internet connection was a miserable failure. Neither did I keep posting, post a few initial posts nor was I reading up all that I would have loved to.

Khair this time around, I will try to be a lot more consistent. Regular articles, sprinkled with jokes and quotes. I hope all of you will help make my life around here a lot more enjoyable.

*I am also trying to improve upon my lanuage skills. So if you see some grammatical errors or use of a word in an inappropriate fashion. Feel free to mark it for me.