Jackie Chan used his kung-fu skills to get where he is, Arnold Schwarzenegger used his muscle. Every actor uses his or her own unique selling point to establish herself and if I used my sex appeal, what’s wrong with it?
– Mallika Sherawat on Talk Asia, CNN
Indeed!
It was not money and the promise of a more upscale life that made me come to the US over three years ago. It was the promise of a more liberated lifestyle. I always thought that the US was a place where you didn’t have to explain your actions and that no one would judge you for your lifestyle. After three years of living as I please, I still believe that most of that is true. Sure, there are people here who would like you to live your life according to their morals, but that’s not the average person on the street.
That’s what Indian society should have been like. After all we Indians used to believe in the idea that people could have differing opinions on the same subject thousands of years ago, when you could get persecuted in many parts of the world just for going against the majority opinion (Just look the many different philosophies that are all part of the Vedic tradition) We also wrote unabashedly about sex and didn’t think that sex was an anathema to religion. Somewhere down the line, we decided that it was better to be prudish and close-minded like western society of that time, just when they were beginning to become more liberal-minded. So today we are happy to justify narrow ideas of morality as being part of our tradition, while we snobbishly put down western society as being too degraded. Oh, the irony!
So when I’m chided by friends for having ‘abandoned’ the motherland, all I have to say is that I love India, and I love the United States too. A country is nothing but a geographical region defined by political acts and usually it has little to do with the feeling of their citizens that they are one nation. What are you supposed to feel patriotic towards? The borders? The culture? The people? Borders keep changing all the time. The same is true for culture. As for people, how are people in a country really different from the people around them?
Wouldn’t it be considered silly if I said that one has to be patriotic towards the city they were born in? Replace city with state and it still sounds silly. Replace state with country and it suddenly makes sense to us. Replace country with the world and it begins to sound silly again. Isn’t there some flaw in our thinking that makes us feel so?
We live in a world where borders mean less every day. I’d rather form my opinions on the basis of how things would affect humanity (sounds pretty pompous, but it’s worth a thought) rather than how things would affect the country where I was born. I still love India dearly and think of myself as Indian more than anything else, but I also believe that my heart is big enough to love the place I live in equally well.
If you are out of ideas on what to gift your friends’ kids on their birthdays, here’s an idea – a board game that teaches them programming concepts! C-Jump teaches important ideas like variables, and logic such as if, else. It may not make a programmer out of everyone, but it will teach them a skill that every budding scientist/engineer needs – logic.
Of course, everyone will hate you for trying to make geeks out of kids. (Blame me and I, in turn will blame Vivek for giving me this idea)
At a personal skills improvement course at work a few weeks back, the instructor asked us to write down a couple of topics that we wanted to get tips on before the class was over. I wrote down “how to chat up a beautiful girl at the bar“, while others wrote more serious work related stuff like “how to deal with difficult people”, “how to deal with criticism”. The heck, I said to myself, if you can chat up beautiful women, then who cares if you have difficult people around you, or if you are criticized. I never got any tips on that topic though, probably because I was too embarrassed to read it aloud.
I should recommend Neil Strauss to the company for the next training session. In between agonizing over his balding pate and lack of sex, he decided to do something about it. So he shaved his head and attended a class by ‘pickup artist’ Erik von Markovik, a.k.a “Mystery” where he transformed into a person who believed “he could seduce any woman in a club, bar, coffee shop or elevator.”
Mystery has a term for everything in the pickup game – a “neg” is a casual insult you tell a girl you’re interested in to show her you don’t think she’s so great (“Your nails look nice, are they real?” “Look, her nose wiggles when she laughs”). Walking up to a group of people and starting to talk to them is called “opening a set.” A “false time constraint” is a white lie that implies you’re not going to hang around and bother anybody (“I can only stay a minute,” “I have to get back to my friend”). Mystery encourages his students to tell stories that show DHV (demonstrations of higher value) and to look for IOI (indicators of interest) from their selected targets. (Yes, women are referred to as targets.)
A $2,250 bootcamp for 3 days is a cheap price to pay for such wisdom. Maybe I can get started by brushing up on the great ladder theory.
(Try searching for “neil strauss” within an Amazon search box to see the power of Amazon’s recommendation engine!)