The Lingua franca debate

When you are an Indian outside India, you are bound to get 2 questions sooner or later. #1 How do you speak English? and #2 X and you are both from India but why do you speak to each other in English and not in your local language?

The first one is obviously easier to answer with a little bit of history about how India is a commonwealth nation. The second one is a bit trickier to answer without going into the North/South divide in India and how the South considers English as the Lingua Franca while the North considers Hindi as the Lingua franca.

So which one should be the Lingua franca. To be honest , I don't care much. In fact I don't care much about languages in general.

You know why? I think language is overrated. Language is a way of expressing your thoughts. Your thoughts are important , not your language. If you stop speaking in one language and pick a new one , do your thoughts change too? Not quite right. In fact the more I think about it , I feel dividing states on a linguistic basis ended up glorifying languages all the more. That takes me to one of my favorite debates on

How do you classify someone as belonging to one state? For instance who is a Tamilian?
Language? Anyone who speaks Tamil should be a Tamilian.

All right but I am dumb. Which state do I belong to?
Hmm , okay the definition is not quite correct , anyone who resides in Tamil Nadu is a Tamilian?

Okay I am out of Tamil Nadu this week but I will be back next week. What does that make me?
Well , what about anyone who is born in Tamil Nadu?

Yeah  right, we have Nasser Hussain born in Tamil Nadu.

Combination of all of these maybe? Maybe , but a better definition would be anyone who identifies himself/herself with Tamil Nadu. Some sort of an emotional connect which goes beyond language.
I don't think you need any other pre-requisite. 

Mid-life crisis coupled with commitment issues powered by the tumultuous 30s

Nope , the lengthy title of this post has nothing to do with my previous rant about length of the blog posts. It is inspired by this one:

On a more serious note ,  I have grown to resent milestones ,  anniversaries (just the work ones I promise 😏) and long vacations.  I think that is a side effect of the tumultuous 30s. You know why? Because when one is so enagaged with the daily work ,  you do not tend to think about how to break out of the rut. It is like having blinders on , you just do not have peripheral vision. But these milestones and vacations tend to exactly do that - give you time and space for retrospection.  You start thinking about the past , what you wanted to be a decade back and the unsettling feeling that this is what life is pretty much about to be in the future. When you are in the 20s , you seem to have infinite ideas, options , energy and hope. As you grow older ,  you see constricting spaces. Ideas , options, energy and hope all tend to become finite.  It seems there is only this many things one could do from now on.  Some doors seem closed forever , others seem to be closing soon.  I call this a mid life crisis because it starts getting scary that you are going to be stuck with seemingly fewer paths to go in life.  Life seems to be converge and kind of demands you commit to the present form of it - good or bad. You tend to resent it , kind of run into a commitment phobia. I want to keep options open , doesn't matter even if fewer are available. Just do not want to settle for the current version of life. Not yet.

As you get older , probably when you transition from your 20s to 30s , one of the purposes of your life is to stabilize. One probably doesn't explicitly plan for that but that always runs on the back of your mind. At least as part of the Indian DNA. You want to get your life into a pattern , you want to actually settle down. But once you settle down , you tend to break the shackles. It is crazy sinusoidal. Maybe that is what drives life. The alternate cycles of settling down and not settling down (for lack of a better phrase) both inspire and challenge you. Whatever.

Note: Getting back to my initial note , I seriously think work anniversaries are harmful for retention. When one completes 5 or 10 years and there is a commemoration ,  one starts to feel you have completed a circle and need to try something else. If you are a HR , go ahead and make a case study on ill effects of such recognitions and celebrations. If you a people manager , do not give employees long enough vacations for them to start ruminating :). Either way , remember to give me credit for the tip.

The dichotomy of blogs

During the lead up to the decision of beginning to write a blog again , one of the constant deterrents was the thought that blogs are so old fashioned. They belong to the 2000's decade (which by the way sounds ironic as in my school days anything to do with the future was tagged as 2k-ish and now 2k  seems stone age-ish).  But I think blogs have their own place - we live today in an era of social networks where you are limited by time and space whereas not all thoughts cannot be restricted to 160 characters (or for that matter 280 characters). You need your free space and canvas where you give a damn to any sort of artificial character limit. My posts may very well be less than 160 characters but I should own the liberty of rambling if I need to.

Very well but do people have time to read long posts? Isn't conciseness good , isn't it synonymous with crisp clarity of thought? Maybe. In fact that is what led me to this post. On one side , I want to treat my blog as my personal diary , I do not want to bother about the content as well as the length of the content. If I am treating it as dumping ground for my own thoughts , why should length bother? It is my personal space and is meant to satisfy my soul. In fact it very well be anonymous. On the other side , there are times when you want to shout out things not to any person in particular but to the world. You do want to share stuff. And you want to do in a manner which is appealing to others , length wise , style of narration wise.

That's where in my opinion , the dichotomy kicks in  - these are two different purposes , two different audiences and the posts which appeal to your inner self would possibly not appeal to others. You could very well have two different blogs. Or intersperse both kind of posts and let the audience discern. No prizes for guessing my preference :).

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You know what? The biggest impediment to writing your blog or for that matter doing a lot of new things in your life is that you do not want it to be half baked , you want it to be good - really good at least to start with. That takes time and time is a luxury which or rather lack of which gives you a nice excuse to procrastinate.

Half a loaf is better than none ,  half baked is better than none at all.  Plus half baked is fun too , perfection is boring. So here we go.

Well this is a sequel of some sorts , I did have a blog (which I was never regular at but thats beside the point).  Years later when I thought I should do some writing , it felt natural to start off with a sequel rather than continue from the past. In all honesty , I also felt what I wrote 10 years back was immature and it is quite possible I will feel the same when I read this 10 years down the line. That's one of the reasons why sequels are made - you feel you can do better than your previous work and you end up making it worse.

Karma is one of my favorite topics to ponder about and hence the title. I seriously think most things are overrated in life including life on its own. Karma , I feel , is an exception. It is rather underrated. Well not surprising given that it is often (or always?) delayed . The impact is lost , the connections between the cause and impact are too dotted to realize. I wish it wasn't , I wish it had a haptic feedback mechanism. Some sort of an Instant Karma