This is the season 2 of the popular Indian version of the program Bigg Boss. The original program is called 'Big Brother'.
It is a fantastic experiment in human behaviour. We can keep changing the set of people, try new permutations and combinations of profiles (the famous, the not so famous, the beautiful, the not so beautiful, rich, not so rich, educated and not so educated). But the reactions are all the same.
There are many similarities between the Bigg Bosses House and a Corporate Office. We have jokingly started referring to our own office as the Bigg Bosses house.
When people are put in together in to the house, Bigg Bosses House, they are good with each other. They go out of their way to help each other. There are cameras capturing every minutes.
Just like people are good to a new joinee in an organisation. They go out of their way to be nice to a new joinee. Same is the case with Bigg Boss. You are always being watched!
With time, groupism starts. People start hanging together in groups. People start bitching about each others.
So much of it happens in a Corporate office too. There are groups and ever one wants to be with a group. You have no place if you don’t belong to a group.
Then it is time to start nominations. Initially the unsuspecting one's are asked nominated. Most of the time they don’t even know why they have been nominated.
The same thing happens in a corporate office. Completely unsuspecting people are picked up as scape goats.
It just gets murkier inside the house. People start abusing each other, plans are made to oust people from the other group. It is a war of sorts.
Well well well.....nothing different in a corporate office....
As the competition heads towards the final lap, it is a question of ones own survival. The starts parasitic behaviour. Inmates from the same group start nominating people from within the group. Friends on face, but in the confession room they nominate each other. The realisation then dawns on the participants and the viewers too, that; there are no friends out there in the house. They are only competitors. It is a competition and any form of competition has to be eliminated.
Well...well...well...Not at all different in a corporate at all....It is a question of survival and no one is a friend. And so even in the so called civil, professional and task driven environment of the fortune 500 companies of the world, we demonstrate the same behaviour as the inmates of Bigg Boss.
A fantastic, unfailing experiment in human behaviour.
Thursday, September 18, 2008
Thursday, August 7, 2008
Living in the present.
It is sad to see that our approach towards life is becoming so tactical. We live from one day to another day. Forget thinking about doing good work, earning good karma for the betterment of next birth/life. We don't want to spend time thinking about this life! It's all right here, right now approach.
Life is about living in the present moment. Because there is nothing else to life other than the present. The spiritual context of living life in the present means, drop all your karma at this minute and move on. I had attended a corporate workshop conducted by the Isha Yoga Foundation (Coimbatore, India) few years back. Our spiritual teacher taught us that the only way to happiness is to live in the present moment and drop all your karma at this moment and move on.
But what do we do instead? We carry this baggage of karma with us all our life. And like the bag that Santa Claus carries with him, we keep filling the bag with life's experiences!!! The good and the bad. Happy moments and sad moments. Love, hatred, likes, dislikes, attachments, anger, and many more mixed bag of thoughts, memories and feelings. With passing age, the bag only but becomes heavy. And we carry this weight with us. Remember, had we dropped all the little and big karma on the way and moved on, life would have been so light. So carefree. So happy. Living in the present means moving on without the karma.
Coming back to where I started from, the definition of living in the present has taken a dangerous meaning today. For most, living in the present means shrugging off their responsibility towards a better future. "Why should I worry about the future? I am not going to be here when the glaciers melt. I am living in the present. Let those who come in the future worry about their present."
It is right here, right now. This attitude is creating a recklessness in all of us. We have become careless about our actions and their consequences. Because, we may not live to see the consequences of our reckless actions. The future feels somewhere far away and distant. It is not the next second which has to come after the present moment has gone in the past. The glaciers will take a long time to melt, the last tiger will take a long time to disappear from the earth, it will be long time before humanity is wiped off from the surface of this earth. That is what everyone is thinking. There is 3 kinds of visible life on the earth and we have started a war against all of them, to DESTROY THEM!
Why else are we destroying nature by cutting forests and trees?
Why else are we destroying rare species of birds and animals?
Why else are we destroying humanity by planting bombs and killing each other so mercilessly?
Because we are all living in the present. Right here, right now. We know that the future of our planet is very bleak and scary. But who cares. We will not be here to see our planet gradually die away. Whose planet is it anyways?
Life is about living in the present moment. Because there is nothing else to life other than the present. The spiritual context of living life in the present means, drop all your karma at this minute and move on. I had attended a corporate workshop conducted by the Isha Yoga Foundation (Coimbatore, India) few years back. Our spiritual teacher taught us that the only way to happiness is to live in the present moment and drop all your karma at this moment and move on.
But what do we do instead? We carry this baggage of karma with us all our life. And like the bag that Santa Claus carries with him, we keep filling the bag with life's experiences!!! The good and the bad. Happy moments and sad moments. Love, hatred, likes, dislikes, attachments, anger, and many more mixed bag of thoughts, memories and feelings. With passing age, the bag only but becomes heavy. And we carry this weight with us. Remember, had we dropped all the little and big karma on the way and moved on, life would have been so light. So carefree. So happy. Living in the present means moving on without the karma.
Coming back to where I started from, the definition of living in the present has taken a dangerous meaning today. For most, living in the present means shrugging off their responsibility towards a better future. "Why should I worry about the future? I am not going to be here when the glaciers melt. I am living in the present. Let those who come in the future worry about their present."
It is right here, right now. This attitude is creating a recklessness in all of us. We have become careless about our actions and their consequences. Because, we may not live to see the consequences of our reckless actions. The future feels somewhere far away and distant. It is not the next second which has to come after the present moment has gone in the past. The glaciers will take a long time to melt, the last tiger will take a long time to disappear from the earth, it will be long time before humanity is wiped off from the surface of this earth. That is what everyone is thinking. There is 3 kinds of visible life on the earth and we have started a war against all of them, to DESTROY THEM!
Why else are we destroying nature by cutting forests and trees?
Why else are we destroying rare species of birds and animals?
Why else are we destroying humanity by planting bombs and killing each other so mercilessly?
Because we are all living in the present. Right here, right now. We know that the future of our planet is very bleak and scary. But who cares. We will not be here to see our planet gradually die away. Whose planet is it anyways?
Saturday, August 2, 2008
Media has become a carrier of bad news for the nation.
Sometimes I ponder about whats happening around us. Economic growth, science and research, technology, life style and social changes, education, longer life span....so much of positivity.
On the other hand there is increased crime rate, terrorism, dangerous life threatening illness and viruses never heard before, degenerating moral fabric, breaking family and societal systems, fanaticism.....so much negativity.
Are things really so bad? Or are we being misled? By whom?
Media is to blame. Irresponsible, insensitive and sub standard journalism. The 24 hour news channels have become a nuisance. No censorship, No cultural sensitivity and off all no humanity.
Anything is the name of the game to get TRPs and then ad revenue. The same clipping (of barely a few seconds or a minute or two duration) is played and replayed through out the day to increase the TRPs. And not only is it shown many times over on one channel it is shown many times over and many channels. Let me illustrate this point. When the Jaipur bomb explosions happened; the video footage was repeated nothing short of 20 times during the day for about 3-4 days. Which makes it 60-70 times in a span of 3-4 days. Now if there are about 10 news channels and all of them replayed it with the same frequency, the same event was telecast about 600-700 times on the television all over the country. No doubt people absolutely panic when ever even a small explosion happens.
And this applies to types of news. Recently a Karnataka MLAs wife went missing and her body was found hanging in a room in Delhi. The video footage of her body hanging was all over the media being replayed and replayed. No censorship that there are small children sitting in front of the television watching.
A small child is found dead in Asaramjis Ashram with his head inside a bucket. There goes the media replaying the same footage all over the television.
The murder images of Arushi and her servant Hemraj still haunt me in the night.
26th July images of flooded Mumbai are being replayed, year after year news channels. As a result even if there is no flooding people in Mumbai prefer staying home. Causing huge financial losses to the city.
Media has become the bad news carrier. Media is bringing depression, stress and hopelessness in our lives.
Media is to blame for making things look so grim. By exaggerating them beyond reality.
I come back to where I started from. Economic growth, science and research, technology, life style and social changes, education, longer life span....so much of positivity. Why isn't media talking about this. Why doesn't media carry good news into our homes and over drawing rooms?
On the other hand there is increased crime rate, terrorism, dangerous life threatening illness and viruses never heard before, degenerating moral fabric, breaking family and societal systems, fanaticism.....so much negativity.
Are things really so bad? Or are we being misled? By whom?
Media is to blame. Irresponsible, insensitive and sub standard journalism. The 24 hour news channels have become a nuisance. No censorship, No cultural sensitivity and off all no humanity.
Anything is the name of the game to get TRPs and then ad revenue. The same clipping (of barely a few seconds or a minute or two duration) is played and replayed through out the day to increase the TRPs. And not only is it shown many times over on one channel it is shown many times over and many channels. Let me illustrate this point. When the Jaipur bomb explosions happened; the video footage was repeated nothing short of 20 times during the day for about 3-4 days. Which makes it 60-70 times in a span of 3-4 days. Now if there are about 10 news channels and all of them replayed it with the same frequency, the same event was telecast about 600-700 times on the television all over the country. No doubt people absolutely panic when ever even a small explosion happens.
And this applies to types of news. Recently a Karnataka MLAs wife went missing and her body was found hanging in a room in Delhi. The video footage of her body hanging was all over the media being replayed and replayed. No censorship that there are small children sitting in front of the television watching.
A small child is found dead in Asaramjis Ashram with his head inside a bucket. There goes the media replaying the same footage all over the television.
The murder images of Arushi and her servant Hemraj still haunt me in the night.
26th July images of flooded Mumbai are being replayed, year after year news channels. As a result even if there is no flooding people in Mumbai prefer staying home. Causing huge financial losses to the city.
Media has become the bad news carrier. Media is bringing depression, stress and hopelessness in our lives.
Media is to blame for making things look so grim. By exaggerating them beyond reality.
I come back to where I started from. Economic growth, science and research, technology, life style and social changes, education, longer life span....so much of positivity. Why isn't media talking about this. Why doesn't media carry good news into our homes and over drawing rooms?
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