Books and Memories

Ahh! Back here after a long time. Basically this means there is something going on in my head and I am in one of my **stay away from human communication** moods. So I am here to vent.
I was just going through quora, chanced upon a couple of questions on books. Wrote an answer for a Harry Potter question. In the midst realized how much time has changed. Its been ages since I read a book. I guess I miss reading. It used to be a world of its own, letting your imagination run wild. Seeing the characters develop in your mind, the moment when your heart skipped a beat seeing your beloved character in danger because it wasn't just a character at that moment, it had become your friend, it had become someone you had known for ages. Remember sitting on the study table, pretending to read RD Sharma when you were actually hiding a novel behind it. Remember finding your spot near the balcony and then spending your entire weekend there with your beloved book. Remember getting annoyed when people folded book pages. Remember getting super annoyed when people thought using marker in a book was cool. And remember getting really sad on seeing a torn book and then spending hours with your mom on trying to repair and bind it again. I remember the time when I knew every corner of the fiction section of my library. I remember Ghosh Sir from JB, the school where I first fell in love with books. I remember how his face used to light up on seeing me enter the library knowing that I had come again to eat his head and yes, to borrow more books. I remember reading famous five and wondering when will my adventure time come. I remember reading Harry Potter and waiting for my Hogwarts letter. I remember reading Dan Brown and seriously contemplating taking up History as a major. I remember reading Nicholas Sparks and crying because the emotions got too much to handle. I remember reading Amish and debating with my friends on why Indian authors and the Indian mythology had a lot on potential. And I remember those Bangalore bus rides when Howard Roark gave me company.

Oh! Nostalgia...thou art a heartless bitch.....

Because sky is the limit

I am finally on the last leg of my education! Remember your 10^th boards? That was the first time many of us heard this famous dialogue from our moms “Beta bas is baar padh lo, life ban jayegi”, little we knew this was a dialogue we were going to hear many more times. Well, I am the lucky one, the last two years of my academic life are here and thankfully it seems to be fun and exciting up till now!

Recently I had a chance to read a couple of chapters from the book “Monk who sold his Ferrari” by Robin Sharma as part of an assignment. Though I am generally not too fond of self help books, I liked this one. I used to think these self help books are just a load of gyaan and does not make much sense practically. Luckily for me I was forced to read it, and wonder of wonder! I liked it! Reading it, I realized how little we know about ourselves and how important self awareness is for our personal growth. I feel like sharing a couple of things that really gave me a different perspective of how I view things in life.

Have you ever thought about the percentage of time you speak in a conversation and the percentage of time you actually listen? I am not trying to undermine the importance of voicing up your opinion, it is absolutely essential that you put across your point. But you can also not underestimate the power of listening, the power of understanding and accepting. One should be like a cup, open and receptive to new ideas. Those who know me closely are aware of my talking prowess, how I can talk and talk endlessly! But now I am on the path of self improvement and have started speaking less and listening more (yes yes, I can hear you guys laughing :P ) .

Another thing that I realized after reading the book was how pain is a motivator. Pain shows us our limits, it shows us how much we can stretch ourselves. At every moment that you say you cant take it anymore, believe me you can.  Same is the case with fear, I will not say much about it. This quote from the book captures it beautifully “Fear is nothing more than a mental monster you have created, a negative stream of consciousness”. And what do you do with a monster, you challenge it and you slay it because you my dear are capable of doing anything.  

You, yes You, who are reading this right now, just wanted to tell that you are beautiful and your potential limitless!

In the next post I will write about the 10 rituals of radiant living, till then keep smiling!

The muddled puddled mind

What do you do when your mind is a hazy interwoven labyrinth of confusions? Do you go by your gut feeling (yes, everyone of us has a gut feeling about everything) or do you tell your heart and gut to shut up and let the brain make the decision? Some people try to find a pattern in everything, they wore some shirt when they gave an exam and the exam went well, for those stupid people the exam went well because they wore that particular shirt. And so they wear that same shirt for every exam. Continuing the stupidity forward they wear it on the result day believing that the shirt is a good luck charm. But this is where it gets interesting, what if they are right? Ofcourse they cant prove it true because for all that they believe some of exams do get fucked up inspite of wearing that shirt. But can I prove them wrong? Every scientific rule/law has exceptions, what if the failures were just some exception in the shirt rule. Can they not be just outliers? What if everything is connected, from your shirt to that exam to the date to possibly anything. If you have seen the series "Touch" you would probably be getting an idea of what I want to say. So coming back to the decision taking part, how would you take a decision which can change your life. Remember change is change, it can be both good and bad. How do you calculate the probability of whether the change will be good or bad. How do you decide that you want to change the course of your life? Include the condition that the present course is not bad, its actually good but there is a probability that if you change the course, you might chance upon that better path that you were looking. Now what if you take that leap of faith but fall down. How do you spend your life then? Do you repent that decision or do you take it in a stride and move on? But whatever you do, you have to accept that your life is worse because of that decision.
Now that I have muddled your minds as much as mine was muddled, its time to take a leave!

Cyprus Economic Crisis

Today I have officially recognized the fact the I am old **sob** **sob** (for those who are startled by this rather surprising statement especially from me, it is because today is holi and I spent it working in the office). Now that I am old **sigh** I think I should start off writing about some grown up thing! Well so here I am with an analysis of the recent Cyprus economic crisis.

Introduction

Cyprus is one of the 17 countries in the European Union which use the same currency (euro). Many countries of the EU have recently been struggling with economic crisis of varied magnitude like Greece, Ireland, Spain, Italy, Germany and many more. Greece is one country which has hogged the limelight the most ( and yes, for all the wrong reasons). If this article goes well, I will do another one on Greece! So coming back to Cyprus. It is a very small country both size wise and population wise. But its banking industry is huge, mostly attributable to the fact of it being popular as an offshore tax haven. Tax haven is basically a place where taxes are low and there are almost no checks on the source of the money. So people with a lot of money from not so legal sources choose to park their money in such countries. The impact of Cyprus being a tax haven can be easily gauged by the size of its banking industry. The size of the Cypriot banking industry is almost 5 times the size of its economy according to Standard & Poor. It is estimated that almost one third of the money in these banks belongs to Russian oligarchs. 

Precursor

Okay all this is good but you must be wondering where does economic crisis come into this. Well, 2007-08 was the time when US was hit by the subprime mortgage crisis (again an article can be written on this). Because of the size of the US economy, it had a domino like negative effect on many other economies. In 2009 the Cypriot economy shrank by 1.67%  mostly due to a sharp fall in its tourism and shipping sector. This led to unemployment, now the state expenditure increased due to the increasing unemployment benefit costs. Another significant event that happened in 2011 was the EU decision for a haircut on the Greek bonds, Cyprus had invested heavily into these bonds. As the banking industry is huge, it was well understood that if these banks crashed, Cyprus economy would go to the grounds also. International rating agencies also downgraded the credit rating of Cyprus. It was at this time that Cyprus requested for a bailout from the EU.

The Crisis and Bailout

 Negotiations then started between Cyprus government and the troika of European Commission, International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank. On 16^th March 2013 it was decided that 10 billion euro bailout package would be given to Cyprus on one condition. The condition was to close the 2^nd largest bank of Cyprus , the Cyprus Popular Bank (Laiki Bank). The biggest losers will be the bondholders and depositors who have more than 100,000 euros in their accounts. It is estimated that they might loose upto 20% of their deposits and even more in some cases. Depositors having less than 100,000 euros in their accounts will not be affected. 

Impact

Now because Russians have a lot of money here, they will ofcourse be angry. An interesting thing happened here also. It was reported that Russian President Vladmir Putin and Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev had  initially criticized the EU bailout has being tantamount to theft. They were against the bank deposit levy and Medvedev went as far as to channel Vladmir Lenin by saying “The stealing of the stolen is continuing there, I think.” But recent reports are saying that Putin has had a change of heart and is now supporting the bailout. So this was in very short (and I am sure with some factual errors also) a description of the recent Cyprus economic crisis. 

Lingering Questions

Now what ? This crisis has some raised some questions over the tax havens. Come to think of it, the Russians had deposited their money in Cyprus Banks to save taxes and now they are suffering losses. After this people across the world who take advantage of the lax rules and laws in the tax haven will think twice about shifting their money from their own country to these tax havens. Would Cyprus have agreed to this deal had the money in these banks belonged to its own people? This will seriously impact the unrestricted movement of capital which has become the norm now. Lets see how things change in the coming days.

PS: If you find any factual error, please comment. I have tried to be as correct as possible but because I am a human (sad, being alien would have been nice :P ) mistakes do happen!

PPS: First grown up post! YaY!!

PPPS: Is it nice ? ;)

The physical, psychological stereotyping starts in the family, when doctor comes and say “ It is a girl !!!

I believe now is the best time for anyone to be born in this world. There are unlimited opportunities for everyone irrespective of their gender, caste, religion. But yes, there are different roadblocks on everyone’s path, it our responsibility to get past them and reach our destination. Being a girl in today’s world is a challenge but I am sure we are ready to take that challenge head on.

It is extremely sad that in a country where women are worshipped as Goddesses, female foeticide still exists. To get a chance to come into this world is in itself a great miracle. This is inspite of the fact that we find women excelling in diverse fields. Whether it be Naina Lal Kidwai in the corporate world or Saina Nehwal in the sports or Sonia Gandhi in politics we find women at every field’s pinnacle. But if you thought once born life gets easy for girls, let me correct you, the challenge just starts for them. From fighting for a chance to go to school to struggling for freedom to go out with their friends, life constantly keeps testing their mettle. It is a common assumption that such practices exist only in the lower economic strata of our society but sadly this also happens in well to do and educated families. Earlier it was considered that the so called economic burden that comes with a girl in the form of dowry, which in itself is another social evil, was the main cause why boys were preferred. But now it is the stoneage mindset of people which is the main culprit.

Even after the girl succeeds in her efforts and gets a chance to study and make a career for herself, the patriarchal mindset of people still stands in her way. The recent delhi gang rape is a testimony to the fact that girls are not safe on Indian roads. There has been a lot of discussion as to why men commit such heinous crimes and the basic reason that has been found is the feeling of male dominance. Rape is a way of proving that men are more powerful than women. But personally for me it just proves the opposite.

But the optimist in me still believes that better times lie ahead. These challenges just make a women stronger and more determined to create a space for herself in this male dominated society. Gone are the days when women would accept the insults lying down, the present day women is courageous enough to stand up to these useless diktats and  build a new path for herself. These relics of the past might slow her down but they can never stop her journey.