Be the change yourself, to bring about a change in our society, as the Father of the Nation, Mahatma Gandhi in India famously said.
Help your community. Be part of their most cherished common goals. That should give one a fulfilled life.
You may be a parent, an uncle or an aunt, a caring brother, a teacher, a retired engineer or a scientist, but how much you helped your community should always count in the end.
I have been a volunteer all through my life.
I was just 15 when I volunteered first as a sports organizer in my native village. Served in college as a member of the National Social Service. Conducted various training camps for students who chose journalism as a career. I served as parent volunteer at my son’s school in London.
I am still a volunteer. I’m proud to serve my community in Chennai, Tamilnadu, India.
‘Every Little Helps’. Helping others is how humanity survives.
Man is a social animal as said by Aristotle. We find our strength in numbers. Give your big hands, please.
As office-bearers in our society, we serve people. We serve them free. This is a voluntary job which I love to do.
The year was 2004, the Tsunami struck in Chennai. An Earthquake off the Indian Ocean near an island in Indonesia caused havoc. Over 600 dead. That includes many children.
Without the volunteers’ help, many would have suffered. People took shelter in huge community halls, thanks to timely help from volunteers.
The same was the case in 2015 when it rained in buckets. Volunteers pitched in and saved the community.
Those two huge disasters have shown how people conduct themselves in times of emergency.
Linda Goodman’s Sun Signs (1968) was the first book on astrology to figure on the New York Times bestseller list. She read what was the collective thought in a community and that catapulted her to success.
Dale Carnagey was his original name. But seeing a sell-out crowd for his lecture at Carnegie Hall in 1916, he changed his name to Carnegie, after the steel merchant Andrew Carnegie. Such was the impact a community gathering could have.
Ryan Kaji was only eight when he started a channel on YouTube. His Ryan’s World now has about 35 million subscribers. All he does is do reviews of toys.
Mahatma Gandhi found a purpose in life and a nation of a billion just followed him.
Have a purpose. The community will follow you.
Be a volunteer. Be the change. And bring the change.
How have you adapted to the changes brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic?
The virus hit India in 2020. The pandemic took us by dozens. Some of us have miraculously recovered. It has been a tough year.
Many deaths. Hospitals in Chennai, Tamilnadu were full. We have seen ambulances operating 24/7. Doctors and staff were working day and night attending to infected patients.
Only the arrival of vaccines brought a stop to the spread. That’s not the end of the story.
No vaccines can prevent 100% of infections. The second wave hit us big. It was much worse.
People have stayed mostly indoors. The lockdown affected our daily lives. The business houses were shut.
‘Living with the Virus’ was how many of us have sadly adapted. The deadly virus continued to mutate and caused havoc in people’s lives.
The cities in India have taken ages to come back to normal.
We avoided crowds, maintained distance and always wore masks. Hand sanitizers have become a part of our daily ritual.
Offices run mostly through Zoom meetings. Many have lost jobs. I, too, have lost mine.
I suffered from sleep disturbances. Many of us don’t feel alright with our mental health. Such is the trauma.
We do yoga and sit in meditation for longer hours. We have been advised to do deep breathing as exercise to come clean from the trauma.
And the big plus is I have got time to write. My blogs are now regular. One every day, at least.
Remote working is the new hope. Many corporate companies offer jobs to people who choose to work from home. But at what cost?
Companies fear productivity will suffer when people will work from home.
But a poll in the UK has proved their fear wrong.
53% of respondents in a survey (post Covid19) comprising of 1500 participants said they felt much better mentally when working from home.
The survey included both the owners of business houses and employees of companies.
And they said further that the productivity also didn’t suffer because of the switch. Good!
I eat, work and sleep. All in the same place now.
I know now how to defeat a deadly virus which killed many millions. No fear!
When we were young, we imagined animals were ferocious. And they killed other animals for food.
But when we watched the cartoon characters such as Tom and Jerry on Disney, we were so humbled.
Alex, the lion, from the Madagascar series’ Escape to Africa movie, was a captive, pals with other animals, dancing and entertaining. Hilarious!
The King of the Jungle was shown a laughingstock as Alex stood a complete joker in the movie with a fruit-hat.
That just makes one laugh.
The same is the case with people we see every day in our life.
We laugh when big people cry at the doctor’s clinics. We laughed when we saw George Galloway, the MP from Bethnal Green dressed as a cat crawling on all fours at the Celebrity Big Brother show in 2006.
Have a personal story to tell.
I used to coach my 8-year-old cousin Sindhu. I had just finished college and my parents told me to teach her civics, history and science.
She had many friends, and they treated me with respect. I felt I was like a professor emeritus.
The girls often played with a skipping rope.
One day, Sindhu asked me during break if I could beat one of her friends, Akila, in a skipping game. Her friends said she was a sport, and she held the record for most jumps.
I said, oh yes. Why not? Throw the rope. We gathered in the driveway in front of her house.
Akila first started. By the time I got into a pair of track pants, she had already finished 50. She was seriously an athlete.
She gave me the rope after finishing 70. At a stretch, without a break. I was really worried. The other girls clapped. It’s my turn now.
My uncle, aunt and the maid have all gathered now to see the challenge. Loads of audience, waiting. Interesting!
I picked up the rope and started jumping. I quickly counted 20 and was just racing. I thought it was so easy.
When I reached 35, I felt something wasn’t alright. My stomach was giving me some discomfort.
Oh! God, no! Not now!
By the time I reached 40, I ripped one out so loud. Thrrrrrrrrrrrreppp!
A fart in the middle of a sport wasn’t so nice. The girls giggled.
48, 49, 50 and this time it was long. Frrrrt… Frrrrrrrrrt!
I could hear Sindhu, Akila and friends bursting out into a roaring laugh.
I didn’t stop. I couldn’t. My pride was at stake. I kept jumping.
The fart now had got worse. It sounded wet. So serious.
57, 58, 59. I saw my uncle, aunt and the maid getting up and running inside the house laughing out loud. The place had suddenly become a circus.
I couldn’t continue beyond 63 and gave up.
Fart played a spoil-sport. I couldn’t help but join in their laughter.
I laughed, they laughed, and did you have a laugh?
We often see people giving no two hoots about other peoples’ privacy. Nor do they give a damn about respecting others.
As the world is now reduced to a smartphone, we see people glued to social media such as FB, X (formerly Twitter), Instagram and YouTube. The result is reality is out gone for a toss.
I have been to a coaching academy, based in Trichy, Tamilnadu, recently as a mentor. Students I found there were a lot ill-disciplined.
They pay no attention in class. They sleep. No hygiene. Nor do they give respect to the teachers and staff. And the parents always say their wards are right.
Come home to my building in Chennai, Tamilnadu. We have a functioning association under the Residents Welfare Society act. But people don’t pay the maintenance charges on time. They don’t keep the surroundings tidy and clean.
The traffic in India is one of the worst in the world. There’s no such thing here as a bus-lane. No limited hours. Nor do the authorities collect congestion tax like the one we see in the US and in the UK.
You can see people always rushing through traffic and creating confusion. Because they often run to school and office late or miss the time of scheduled meetings.
People are nosy in our neighbourhood. Gossiping is routine. Invasion of privacy is just an everyday affair.
It’s election time in India now. Politicians reap a heavy harvest of people’s innocence. They promise heaven while campaigning and do nothing after grabbing seats in the August houses of Parliament.
Knowing your rights is what people need now. When will they understand?
When you were five, what did you want to be when you grew up?
When we were five, we were mostly dreamers. A dreamer with eyes wide open. A dreamer deep asleep.
I was too young to think of what I would become as I was told a lot of stories about animals and characters in cartoons. I lived purely in an imaginary world. A fairy tale life, to be precise.
I enjoyed listening to those stories and I imagined I would one day go meet them really and want to spend time with them.
Some stories wouldn’t end well as characters were chased and put to death. That gave me nightmares.
I remember I asked my parents one day if I could stop people killing animals. My parents told me that I should then become a forest officer, wear a uniform, carry a gun and travel in an open jeep. All day and night. A life in the wilderness.
That’s when I imagined I would be an officer who was out and about helping save the animals.
That gave me pleasure. I thought I would bring those animals home, live with them in the comfort of my parents, brothers and sister.
When we studied Mass Communication and Journalism in the late 80s, many of us wanted to work in print, on the radio or assist cinema directors.
The copywriter’s job didn’t pay very much. They gave us copies to write about ₹200 ($2) worth of di-pole television antennas. Disgusting!
Television hit India big in the mid 90s. A lot of us could find jobs in the news and entertainment television. The job paid us well.
We were just about halfway through mastering the analogue format of broadcasting and the digital world hit us blind.
4:3 (aspect ratio) gave way to 16:9. All in a blink. Star Group’s Channel V was a rage among the younger music-loving audience. People watched MTV-grind till late at home.
Tapes were gone and we carried large disks. Digitization was a jiffy. Edit at a low resolution and make the master copy in high-res. Multi-layering helped insert cut-away shots quickly. Broadcasting soon became 24/7.
Social media came like a deluge. That hit us big. We were threatened with job losses at Y2K. We sat clueless many times.
Machines have become smaller and one machine (Fire, Flint and Finalcut Pros) did it all. From scripting, sequencing, digitizing, editing, keying, GFX, sound-mixing, titles and mastering. All from the word GO!
The cameras have a lot of pixels to offer. Technicians shot many episodes on a given day.
Citizens journalism is the new kid in town. Thanks to an explosion called YouTube.
The tool for shooting a film sequence is now just a phone. A smartphone is your pocket broadcaster. All credit to technology.
Amateurish pan-shots. Bad cuts. Jump videos. Poor quality soundbites. No ‘rule of third’ in the composition. Long boring stories. Unethical content. No age-appropriate certificate.
And the greater casualty is the watershed at 9pm was gone. Anyone can watch anything, anytime.
YouTube has become the broadcaster’s market for cheap goods. Made in China.
The ‘cheaper a dozen’ market now has around 2.6 billion (about 250 crore) active users per month.
More than 114 million (about 12 crore) active channels.
People upload 2,500 new videos every minute and more than 150,000 videos are available on your phone every hour. There’s no stopping a video on YouTube.
The last time we heard about an assembly line of a product was when Henry Ford made cars.
Such is the scale of spoil in the mind of an avid video-watching kid.
Ryan Kaji is a nine-year-old boy from Texas. He has over 29 million subscribers on his YouTube channel, Ryan’s World. In 2020, Kaji earned nearly $30 (about ₹3 crores) million from his channel. All he does is review toys for kids.
We lost the race a long time ago, thanks to the arrival of technology. IMHO!
PS: Today I could sit and ask an AI (ChatGPT) to write a brief about how technology affected an editor’s or a news producer’s job in the television industry. But, why?
This is the only time I could give the AI some rest and do a job that’s genuinely mine. So I’ve chosen to write one myself.
"சென்றிடுவீர் எட்டுத் திக்கும்" 