“Innovation is the only way to survive, and the ability to look beyond the horizons is the only the way to innovate.”
The moment you come up with an idea, there are at least 10 people who will have proposed it and another 10 who will be working on it and who knows there might be someone in the world who has already implemented it and you are not aware of it. This is a parallel world, and the only way to survive is to offset others , to run ahead of others, to move on quickly , not yielding to emotions , not breaking down to sentiments ,and always trying to make the “impossible possible “. You may have reasons to prove why it didn’t work, reasons to explain why you failed, but nobody listens to you, because the world is behind successful people, and interested to listen to success stories and, if you are not telling them one they are not interested in you!”
“How many of you have thrown a stone to a mango tree? Or a guava tree?” Well it was a very simple and straight forward question from one of the professors in my college… My response was out of instinct; my hands just went up, nothing special in it. I was surprised, there are 26 people in my class and not even 50% of them had raised their hands. Haven’t you pelted a stone to a mango tree? Are you kidding me? That’s just unbelievable! I have been doing it for 20 years now and there are 13 out of 26 who have not tried this at all! But the matter of fact is that they were all saying the truth .they havent’ done it anytime in their life!
This has been the summary of the story so far. People are running, vehicles are buzzing, busy life, crowded busses, densely populated PG’s and round the clock routines, new faces new characters and what not! Life is so busy!! And yeah , it’s a year now since I left my home , for my masters ,and landed in the so called garden city , Bangalore . And it took me a month’s time to just analyze the way things move and happen here ,when compared to my hometown located in the footsteps of the western Ghats where I lived all my life till an year ago . I had my neighbor half a kilometer away from my home , and here I see 10 people sharing a 3BHK apartment , there were hardly 30 people in a square kilometer area around my house ,here there are 60 people in my PG!! I had to move out of my house to watch for sun, because his canopy of greenery just masked him up all the time, here I move from my room’s window to avoid the rays of sun! The best hotel in the town was 12 kilometers away from my home, and the vada-pav stall was 2kilometers away. And here there are at least 10-15 hotels in a stretch of 800 meters all the way from road side tea stalls to cuisine bars. There my neighbor was careful enough to notice a new dent in my car, but here even my roommate doesn’t know my full name!!
What I am trying to say is , there are two different forms of life , and they do exist in parallel , one which says you that you are a loser unless you achieve big , when I say “ACHIEVE BIG” it means make more money , bully more people ,sell more products, burn your asses all week long and sleep on weekends . Go on holidays to sea side resorts or on a trekking trip to some nice forest, Upload #insta pics, share facebook statuses, get completely lost in the realms of search engines, and isolated company cubicles, give that wry smile saying you are not happy with your workplace or college, and still live it! And another life, where you don’t really care about inventions, you are not worried about a memristor being invented or the world moving towards an “Internet of products”, neither are you affected by the falling sensex or increasing fuel prices, you are not worried about if USA stops outsourcing its IT projects. The biggest discussion will be about India winning a match against some country, or the IPL fun or about an accident which happened the village nearby or a murder in the town.
I am not trying to compare these life styles, or trying to say one is better than the other. I am just thinking why can’t the good’s of two be merged and a correlated eco system be developed. I used to see at least 20 species of birds in our farm ,and over 10 to 15 species of snakes , 100’s of types of butterflies, countless varieties of insects , over 60 varieties of hibiscus flowers that grew in our farm ,and here I just managed to find crows and pigeons! When I go back to my home town, I see a real concern in his face, when the vada pav stall owner asks me “Where were you all these days?” Or when the barber of the saloon where I used to usually go, says “I thought you chose a different saloon”.
I have spent countless number of days just sitting outside the house and counting stars, I have slept forgetting to lock the door before I fell asleep! I have eaten so much of fresh fruits as soon as they were plucked from trees, and enjoyed tender coconuts sitting next to the coconut tree. And here when I see people buying bowls of cut fruits and eating them in the name of diet and fresh food , I just feel like laughing , because I have tasted it here , and I can pin point and say none of them are naturally ripened , you can smell chemicals everywhere .. And they drink tender coconuts with straws!!
I could never feel the natural taste of tender coconut when I tried drinking it with straw! Whoa! You bought a guava flavor at Naturals, I have pelted stones and have eaten fresh guava.
But on the other hand in villages like mine speaking English is a great thing. B.E is a great degree, speaking about Audi, Volkswagen or the Mercedes is something out of the planet. Owning one makes you feel as if you are next to Bill Gates , lower internet speeds , power which just goes out for days and weeks ,where apple still is a thing which people know as a fruit and even as a fruit is considered as a costly one and is bought only occasionally because it is costly, and a small issue that you do is a matter of discussion for weeks! I still remember I had bandage for 20 days after my first bike accident, and it was spoken for 2 months or so!! But that life was cool. I did pull-ups in the v-branch of mango trees and pushups in shades of trees. I was running to avoid sprinkler water falling on me inside the farm, had bathed in cold water in the name of car wash! That coolness curbs your zeal to achieve and grow big, but it also keeps you down to earth! Looking forward for a day where you could achieve big cradled in love in the embraces of the beauty of nature and mother earth! Can that day come sometime soon, or am I going to be lost in the smoke of exhaust! I wish I could get lost in the fog that falls every winter evening in the Ghats, have a long ride!! And sleep the next two days with flu, and yet meet my project deadlines working from home with say 16mbp internet speed!!!
