Monday, January 16, 2012

Wandering Thoughts

Statutory Warning: I always wonder why warnings are always written in small fonts. For a change, I am keeping it bigger. Please read at your own risk. This is an exact replica of thoughts flow in subconscious mind and may induce sleep. Have patience. Happy reading.


I never thought travelling 80 km to and fro in Bangalore traffic everyday could be fun. I always pitied Bangaloreans and dithered to move to Bangalore. But destiny, like the million people here, made Bangalore my home.


Initial days when I started travelling in my company bus, I was amazed to see everyone around me dozing hard. They slept in the dusk and they slept in the dawn. Half way to my company is the downtown and the rest half it passes through a wonderful dreamland. But people slept no matter where they were.


First week, I was busy reading the shop boards, signals, sign boards etc trying to get a route map from my home to office. Next few weeks I scanned through the underpasses, metro constructions, the expressway structure etc to get an idea of the growing city. And next couple of weeks I was… errr… yea… dozing.


Sleeping in the bus indeed is my motivation to go to work. Hard to believe, but true. Since my childhood, my father kept telling that waking up before sun would bring me luck. I did that throughout my academia. When I joined my first company, I felt I have gathered enough luck to support rest of my life and started getting up late. But somewhere deep in my heart I was always guilty about it. Now here in Bangalore I have no other option than to gain more luck. I guess even the sun is now jealous about me waking up before him every day without fail. And the secret behind that is..well.. my bus routine. I get up at 5:45 am, rush, get ready and I am in bus at 6:45 am sleeping.


I love reading nonfiction. I am a book addict. But I had lost the touch for few months. I happened to visit library once looking for a reference book for my part time MBA. And just like an alcoholic losing his way back out in beer factory, I was stuck there. Rather than searching my reference book, I started peeping through the nonfiction section. I spent hours there looking at the enormous quantity of books which I wanted to read. I forgot why I was there and issued two nonfiction books that I could not tolerate lying idle in the library racks. Since then my bus routine turned into my study table.


I feel dizzy if I read on a moving bus. So I hold the book in my hand and eagerly wait for traffic signals. I am not sure if it is Murphy’s Law, these days traffic signals are not as long as it used to be during the days when I used to doze. However, I manage to read at least 10-15 pages even on a non-traffic day.


Since past few weeks, I am reading some really amazing books. They were all so inspiring that they are making me think and ponder and are not allowing me to sleep. Today morning, I carried the book "Fooled by randomness", a 300 page book along with my diary and few other books. I got into the bus, found a seat for myself and kept the bag on my lap. The bag was heavy – pretty heavy. "It is the book", I thought – "I need to remove it". I removed the book from my bag and put it on top of the bag. I felt better. Now don’t ask me how that would reduce weight since both the bag and book are still on the lap. You will get an answer when you carry an interesting book and keep the bag on your lap.


The bus travelled in slow pace, but there were no signs of getting stuck in the signals. I wanted to read the book. But I did not want to do it while the bus was moving. That will take away the charm of reading. With no option, I looked outside. I saw the roads being dug for metro work. I saw garbage dumps on the road. I saw few residential areas with no maintenance. There were large beautiful trees with all dirt and trash below. If they were clean it would have been a heaven. I closed my eyes for a while and visualized the clean city. Wow!! True this place can be a heaven.


I opened my eyes only to see the dirt all over. Frustration was paving its way out of me. Why can’t our government take some strict action for cleaning up the whole mess all around the city? They are busy fighting for seats and not even bothered to clean their own mess, forget about the country. Negativity!! aaah!! We always drill down the problems only to blame the government. Don’t we?


"Be the change you are looking for" – I had read it several times in last couple of weeks. I felt it was so true. But now I feel it is an utter crap. It is just another reason to keep quiet and "learn to live" with the odds and stop cribbing. Oh Yeah!! If it is not that, then what is it? Does it mean I should go around and clean the crap all by myself? Yes? No? What is it then?


Well. Let me take a deep breath and assume I am going to clean the crap for the time being. How will I do it? First, I do not want to touch them in my bear hands. I will apply sanitizers first. I will wear plastic disposable gloves. I think I will put those plastic back to recycle along with other non-degradable stuff I clean. I will buy a navy blue gown (is that a gown that shop floor workers in chemical industries wear? Ok something similar), buy boots, a face mask and a hair cover. I will cover myself toe to head to ensure I don’t get any infection while cleaning the mess. It will cost me some bucks but I can afford it for the fact that I am going to do some noble work.


But it is very unrealistic of me cleaning the whole mess all by myself. I need some helping hands. There are lots of unemployed folks who may be interested to join the hands provided I pay them wage. I need to take care of their health too. So I should get some good amount of gloves, gowns, boots, and sanitizers. Oh hold on. Why I would spend something from my pocket, when I myself am earning a few bucks to meet my ends. So, financial support is a showstopper.


Wait. I have completed Non-Profit Organization Management course. I have Harper University certificate with me. Then why not open a Non-Profit Organization to support this noble cause? Sounds like a good idea. All I need to start this organization is, hmm.. a name. I will name this Organization as "Clean City Movement". People start calling it "CC move". Now how cool is that. Ok. Let me not concentrate on trivial things like naming the organization.


How to get this work? Probably, we need to advertise. (Oh it is so nice to see the transition from ‘I’ to ‘we’ already.) Let a group of 10-25 houses, who would like to see their areas clean and healthy form a "Clean City Community". Short form will be ‘CCC’ or ’triple C’ or ‘C cube’. This is cool. The houses in a community should preferably be located in a single street. It is advisable to get consent from each of the house owners. Also, we may have to build some rules like, even if any one of the house in a street or area do not consent to the CC move, team will not take up the project, mainly because we do not want to spend time convincing someone on the need of cleanliness. Or moreover we do not want to create controversies and create a fight over it which our people are very good at. Yes, this is exactly what it is.


We will provide a presentation in various area of Bangalore on how CC move works to build a healthier and happier environment. It will be a PowerPoint presentation and of course I will prepare the presentation. I love doing that. We will collect monthly maintenance amount from each approved CCC. Amount will be evaluated based on the type of area, kind of garbage etc. We will try to keep the amount to an affordable limit. But we may still not be able to meet the edges considering the amount of crap we have around. We need help from big hands. Probably, I will write a letter to Chief Minister, Prime Minister, and President. Again back to government and politics huh? No. Better to approach Big Bees of the society who would like to donate for some noble cause.


Well now that involves lot of money and accounting. I need to have a separate accounting department. I need genuine, trustworthy and loyal workers. I will do a personal interview and gauge them. To maintain records, I need to have a reliable system; I definitely want to reduce the paperwork. If there is a web site, that will be real great. But I do not want to spend money on software. Let me call for projects from engineering students. Let it be a competition. I will have good reward for the team that comes up with a working model.


Aah! That reminds me my engineering project. I enjoyed every bit of it. I was such a good programmer. Was?? I am. Even today. I wanted to brush up the skills by building a re-usable impact analysis tool for my project. I think I can do it today or probably this month.


Sqeeeeeeezzzzzeeeee!!! The bus stopped in the campus and my fellow colleagues woke up from their morning nap and rushed to get down. I too got down thinking about the tool I am planning to build, leaving the clean city in the dream world.

1 comment:

  1. Amazing!!! I don’t have the words to express the thoughts you carried in your wistful dream.

    We try to blame others when things around us are frustrating and we being the mental victim of this dissatisfaction. So we try to dream of clearing this mess around us. But we never saw what concerned us to do what we dreamt. Wandering thoughts told many things what we saw.

    “We dream of our outsized competence and never try to attempt what we dreamt”.

    But when we try to rationalize our thoughts there are some outcome for these thoughts. We don’t have to do something big. When there is a trash (ex : a paper waste) in the street, don’t ignore it. This trash has place and we need to relocate it. Take a new initiative in our life and tomorrow we will not suffer of our own behavior.

    LEARN TO LIVE WITH OUR DREAM.

    ReplyDelete

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