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Showing posts from 2009

Cracks

Headline: 13 Killed by a shooter in Binghamton, New York. As the economic downturn gets worse the stress is beginning to show. I know what all of you are thinking. “Beginning to show”, is he out of his mind. The financial markets have been plummeting for more than a year. The stress I am talking about is of a different kind. It began as an annoyance here and an annoyance there. But over the past couple of months, random acts of violence have been on the rise. Almost on a daily basis you hear of someone who went on a shooting spree. What is even more disturbing about this trend is that most of these cases end up with the killer ending his or her life as well. What does it say about our society when fathers think of turning on their own children? We always conclude that terrorists become suicidal when they have nothing to lose. When all hope has died and they are singly focused on inflicting pain on the enemy at the cost of their own life. Now if you extrapolate the same to these random

Walking straight

“How many times do I have to tell you to walk straight?” It was a frequent thing I heard from my dad. He was very disturbed by the fact that I walked with bent knees. My dad always walked straight. He often heard people commenting that he looked like an army officer with an extremely straight posture. For him posture was very important and it was kind of disappointing that his son refused to walk straight. I never figured out the mysteries of walking straight until I heard a very innocent comment from a friend of mine years later. He asked me if my shoe sole always wore off at the arch rather than the heel. It got me thinking. In fact he had hit the nail on the head. I do walk on arch of my feet rather than the heel. This mystery was solved. I needed to simply starting landing on my heels while walking and the posture would be fixed automatically. Now all I need to do is teach myself to walk properly at this ripe old age.

Immigrants Dilemma

I watched as the dawn was breaking outside the bedroom window . I could feel the knots in my stomach getting tighter. I was just hours away from boarding a flight to a land I had only seen in my dreams. I was on my way to America, the land of opportunities. I had spent the previous night embroiled in a futile argument with my father about the merits of staying back in India. Though I was trying to make a constructive argument out of it, the real reason behind that exchange was my fear of leaving home and going to a strange land. After ending that evening on a losing note I went to bed but couldn't sleep a wink.On top of my worry list was my finances. Though my dad had graciously offered to pay for my education here in the United States, I was reluctant to burden him with that responsibility. After all, funding an US education with an Indian salary was never a prudent idea. As a student in Virginia, I was chronically aware of my financial limiatations and was always always counting