Dreams Galore

We all have our own life to pursue, our own kind of dream to be weaving. And we all have some power to make wishes come true, as long as we keep believing. - Louisa May Alcott

                               

They are the most wonderful path that guide to the life which you desire from the core of your heart. Some just dream at night, some have reasons to dream anytime they wish. Just a wink of eye, a fraction of a second and the sense of thought delves harmoniously with the sense of touch.

Even a perfume that has links with the past churns a dream so strong that the entire person could be seen and felt on the next seat. Or may be a rhythm can tinkle the memories that once were reality. Or just a step down from the train on a bustling railway station, the quick scan of the surrounding might take you back to the joyous past.

Those who dream might tell they can feel the touch, the smell and the entire reality that could have been. Some of them are so pleasant that it’s hard to distinguish whether they are real or not and some leave the eyes moist. But it’s only in those moments of dreams that we re-live life the way we want.

I dream, I live !!

Mirza Ghalib's shayri... lines which touch ones soul....

                         literary geniuus: Mirza Ghalib


here's  1 of many gem of his writings:


ishq mujhko naheen, wehshat hee sahee

meree wehshat, teree shohrat hee sahee

qata'a keeje na ta'alluq ham se

kuchch naheen hai to adaavat hee sahee

mere hone mein hai kya ruswaaee

ei woh majlis naheen khalwat hee sahee

ham bhee dushman to naheen hain apne

gair ko tujh se mohabbat hee sahee

apnee hastee hee se ho, jo kuchch ho

aagahee gar naheen ghaflat hee sahee

umr harchand ke hai barq-e-khiraam

dil ke khoon karne ki fursat hee sahee

ham koee tarq-e-wafa karte hain

na sahee ishq, museebat hee sahee

kuchch to de 'ei falak-e-na_insaaf

aah-o-fariyaad ki rukhasat hee sahee

ham bhee tasleem kee kho Daalenge

be_niyaazee teree ` aadat hee sahe

yaar se cheda chalee jaay, 'Asad'

gar nahee wasl to hasrat hee sahee

Get Busy Living or Get Busy Dying

People who know me, know me as a man of many adjectives. I love using adjectives to describe anything i like. But a certain movie which goes by the name " The Shawshank Redemption" has left me speechless. Any adjective i can think of to describe this movie would be a gross understatement. Whenever i watch this movie again i start to admire it more than the last time. I saw this movie again this time around when i went home, the other movie which i think match TSR is “FOREST GUMP” another gem of a movie immortalised by TOM HANKS I’ll write about it some other time, for now TSR. 

                     Perhaps this is the only way i can salute the movie.

TSR is based on a novel by Stephen King titled "Rita Hayworth and shawshank redemption" . The plot uses the very familiar "innocent man in prison" theme albeit with a lot of difference. Andy Dufresne( brilliantly played by Tim robbins) is a quiet banker who is wrongly convicted of the double murder of his wife and a pro golfer whom she was seeing behind his back. He is ordered to serve two consecutive life sentences in Maine's Shawshank prison beginning in 1947.Andy first learns of the dark side of Shawshank when another inmate is beaten to death by Captain Byron Hadley(Clancy Brown) who is a pawn in the hands of the twisted warden Samuel Norton(Bob Gunton).

The story is narrated by Ellis boyd "red" redding(Morgan Freeman) popular in the prison as "red", the self proclaimed entrepreneur or as he put it " the Sears and Roebuck" of shawshank prison, the man who could get you anything and everything .The first contact Andy makes with an inmate is Red, to whom he makes the unusual demand of a rock hammer.This was the beginning of a fine friendship between Red and Andy which we see grow from strength to strength throughout the film. When the rock hammer arrives Red realises that its so small that digging a tunnel might take many many years using it. Andy uses the rock hammer for a hobby of his "rock carving", so Red quickly forgot about the tunnel angle. Andy here shows steel like character as he quickly accepts the hardships that one undergoes in a prison. The dark aspects of prison life are shown when we see Andy thrown inside bowels of the prison. Periodically Andy had to bear solitary confinement due to the evil nature of the warden.

Andy gets a new job in the prison as in charge of the library because of the outgoing lifer Brooks Hatlen who has served 50 years in Shawshank. An emotional , gut wrenching moment of the film is when the inmates read a letter sent from the outside from Brooks who is on the verge of committing suicide because he couldn’t live without this place. Red calls it " institutionalisation". Andy gets on the work of building a memorial library for Brooks in the prison. After continuously pestering the officials for funds, Andy gets his way and his first major contribution to Shawshank in the form of this library begins. Andy's intelligence and know-how is quickly utilized by everyone including the warden Norton who capitalizes on Andy's skills and devises a program to put prison inmates to work for local construction projects, exploiting the prisoners' free labor for his own personal profit, with Andy acting behind the scenes as a money launderer.


Time passes by, Red's parole is always rejected and a new inmate Tommy(Gil Bellows) makes an appearance. Some information about the real killer of Andy's wife and her lover was passed on to him from Tommy. Andy pleads with Norton to look into the matter further and to help him get a new trial but the warden dismisses him, and sentences him to a month in solitary. Tommy is shot to death to prevent him from talking any further, and the situation for Andy looks very grim when he refuses to help Norton launder money. He spends another thirty days in the bowels of the prison, and we are left wondering if he will ever get out of Shawshank.



After this Andy reveals his plan of escaping to Red . Red learns of Andy's dream of starting a new life in Zihuatanejo a small island on the coast of the Pacific. Red thinks that this is a lavish dream knowing truly well that Shawshank's security system would be hard to breach. One morning they find out that Andy is missing in his cell. On probing further they find a tunnel in the wall. Then ,it hits Red. Andy did use the rock hammer for digging a tunnel. It took him 19 long years to make it but the reward was in front him. Andy had gone through the tunnel and escaped out through the drainage system( I was ready to puke here). Red rightly put it as " Crawled through half a mile of shit smelling foul". Andy escapes , withdraws all the money from the fake account the warden's money is hidden in, tells the truth about the warden to a local newspaper ultimately leading to the suicide of Samuel Norton. We see Andy driving away in a hot pair of wheels along the coast of Pacific ocean , where else but Zihuatanejo.


Red is finally given parole after he sends out what was to be one of the dialogues of the movie to the reviewer about rehabilitation in the prison. After the initial struggle in the outside world, Red decides to join his friend Andy . The last scene is a certain goosebump moment when Andy and Red embrace each other.



As a viewer I dont know how this movie failed to win an Oscar. I understand the tough competition from Forrest Gump and Pulp Fiction but clearly this movie is a notch above in more aspects than one. Firstly i have to commend the dialogue writer. Fantastic. top class. period.
The acting was some of the best I'll ever see .Both Freeman and Robbins suited the role to a 'T'. The message and the theme of storyline is like no other and how it brings out the tagline is exemplary.

"Fear can hold you prisoner, hope can set you free"

True, very true. It was hope that unlocked the gates of freedom for Andy and Red.

How the money works... part 1

This is my second post on this blog & for this particular writeup I have spent countless nights researching Money and the origins of wealth cause I had planned to write an article about it & now decided to post here. Most people take the world monetary system for granted. They think of Money as something that has always existed and something that will always exist. Here are some facts that make you think......

1) World's richest 1% own 40% of all wealth

2) Poorest 50% of world's adults own just 1% of the wealth

3) Richest 10 % account for 90 % of the world's wealth

4) Only 3% of all money in the world exists as cash.....97% of it exists as 1s and 0s in computers across banks. 

You don't have to be a very intelligent man to understand that there is something deeply wrong with the system. I have always believed that to understand something you need to go back to the basics. Question the underlying concept. 

We know that at some point in time we moved from the barter 
system to hard currency, coins and then notes. In order to understand the present monetary system, we need to go back to July 1944. I assume this to be the point when the modern monetary policy was put into effect. This is not some arbitrary date, but the time when the world money system, as we know it today, was put in place. 

The Bretton Woods system of monetary management established the rules for commercial and financial relations among the world's major industrial states. The Bretton Woods system was the first example of a fully negotiated monetary order intended to govern monetary relations among independent nation-states.

Preparing to rebuild the international economic system as World War II was still raging, 730 delegates from all 44 Allied nations gathered at the Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, United States, for the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference. The delegates deliberated upon and signed the Bretton Woods Agreements during the first three weeks of July 1944.  

Setting up a system of rules, institutions, and procedures to regulate the international monetary system, the planners at Bretton Woods established the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) (now one of five institutions in the World Bank Group) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). These organizations became operational in 1945 after a sufficient number of countries had ratified the agreement.

The chief features of the Bretton Woods system were an obligation for each country to adopt a monetary policy that maintained the exchange rate of its currency within a fixed value—plus or minus one percent—in terms of gold and the ability of the IMF to bridge temporary imbalances of payments. In the face of increasing strain, the system collapsed in 1971, following the United States' suspension of convertibility from dollars to gold. This created the unique situation whereby the United States dollar became the "reserve currency" for the nation-states which had signed the agreement.

I copied the 2 paragraphs above from WIKI :) 

You can read the whole history if you are interested in Economics. Its extremely interesting, I can tell u that. 

In 1945, the world was very different from what it is today. The economy of Europe was destroyed because of the first world war, the great depression and the second world war. Most Asian and African countries were still colonies fighting for freedom. They had nothing....Nothing! No money, no rights and no power to negotiate. The only country that emerged relatively unscathed was the USA. 

Before the agreement, the currencies of the world were valued or pegged against gold. Each country had its own gold reserves, their currency was guaranteed by gold and gold was the major unit of trade between countries in case they had a major trade deficit. 

As a consequence of the bretton woods agreement all the governments of the world transferred their gold reserves to the US. It still resides there today . About 70% of all gold ever mined in the world is in the US. Only the US dollar was now backed by gold  !!! And the world currencies pounds, francs, rupees etc etc were now backed by US dollars, making the US dollar the reserve currency of the world !!!! Later after this system failed in 1971, even the US dollar was not backed by gold. Essentially it is backed by nothing. If the US fails, so does the world. 

If you think this is not fraud enough....you haven't heard the worst of it !!

THE IMF 

The IMF was to be the world organization that would assist, finance (  lend at an interest ) to countries who had big trade deficits. 

The big question at the Bretton Woods conference with respect to the institution that would emerge as the IMF was the issue of future access to international liquidity and whether that source should be akin to a world central bank able to create new reserves at will or a more limited borrowing mechanism.

What emerged largely reflected U.S. preferences: a system of subscriptions and quotas embedded in the IMF, which itself was to be no more than a fixed pool of national currencies and gold subscribed by each country as opposed to a world central bank capable of creating money. The Fund was charged with managing various nations' trade deficits so that they would not produce currency devaluations.  

When joining the IMF, members were assigned "quotas" reflecting their relative economic power, and, as a sort of credit deposit, were obliged to pay a "subscription" of an amount commensurate to the quota. The subscription was to be paid 25% in gold or currency convertible into gold (effectively the dollar, which was the only currency then still directly gold convertible for central banks) and 75% in the member's own currency.

In the event of a deficit in the current account, Fund members, when short of reserves, would be able to borrow foreign currency in amounts determined by the size of its quota. In other words, the higher the country's contribution was, the higher the sum of money it could borrow from the IMF.The countries issued bonds and they got cash.

Now if the inequality of this system is not immediately apparent to you , you are not intelligent enough to view this blog...please stop reading !!

Now lets talk about the Quotas :)  If you think quotas for SC/ST etc are wrong. This is a completely different type of quota. It is like giving quotas to the upper class which is even dumber.....

Lets talk numbers :)

USA - 17% 

UK -  5 %

France - 5 %

Japan - 6.13 %

Germany - 6 %

Italy - 3.25 % 

China -  3.72 %

Saudi Arabia - 3.21 %

Canada - 3 %

Russia - 2.74 %

Pot Smoking Netherlands - 2.38 %

Belgium- 2.12 %

India - 1.91 %

Switzerland - 1.6 %

Australia - 1.5 % 

Mexico- 1.45 %

Spain - 1.4 %

Brazil - 1.4 %

Argentina - 1 %

Pakistan - 0.5%

Keep in mind that these quotas are the latest and have been arrived upon by successive iterations every 5 -10 years. The Initial quotas of 1945, gave about 60% voting rights to G8 at that time. 

About 21 countries are indebted to the IMF since it was started. Those in debt include Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Pakistan, South Africa and most of Africa. 

I think the men who put the Monetary system of the world in place probably did it with the best of intentions, or maybe they were just plain evil. But the fact remains that this is the system we live in. They could never have fathomed the kind of world we live in today, the kind of technology that would exists. Think about it. We produce enough food every year to feed the whole world for a year and a half, yet people die of hunger. 

I think I have given you enough to think about and shed some light on the shady monetary system of the world. 

Will continue this post later :) 

I am posting references so u can make intelligent comments  ....

http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2006/dec/06/business.internationalnews

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Monetary_Fund

http://www.imf.org/external/np/sec/memdir/members.htm

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bretton_Woods_system

kick off.............

The start of a brand new blog....

I’ve started-up on so many unfinished projects that I can bear perfect testimony to it. I even had a blog once, which fell into disuse thanks to what I call my chronic writers’ block, another polite excuse for my laziness. Whenever you start to write a new piece, you have the basic idea about the stuff you are going to put into it. Say you are going to write a novel. You would have figured out all the basic things, the names of the hero and the villain (lol), the basic plot, maybe even some kick-ass action sequences involving the protagonist. But ask yourself, would you have decided on what exactly you would write in the first ever line of the first ever chapter? Most of you will answer this with a ‘no’ and I’ve full sympathy with you (absolutely none if you said yes). 

Beginnings are difficult. They’re so very surprisingly difficult, they could actually make you never begin, and today I face the exact same problem. I figured out that I really wanted to start this blog, after a certain write up i wrote about state of affairs in Indian parliamentary system, and the article, inspired mainly from the style of cyrus and fuelled by sarcasm and frustration wasn’t exactly the best thing I’ve put up on paper. But luckily I shared it on  to further its popularity. This turned out to be a move as awesome as a  back-flip blow (no, it doesn’t really exist, and yes, it’s senseless). I received a moderately good response to that article and that inspired some more ideas on similar lines of thought. Those lines of thought have led me to this so i made this pretty instantaenous decision of writing a blog which is pretty much as intellectual and sophisticated i might get on the internet.. Obviously, that did not help me with the beginning of this blog and here I am, still writing down completely irrelevant thoughts.

                                 

   Another very difficult thing about starting to write something new, is deciding on a title. Your title is the first impression, the single most motivating aspect for a potential reader and probably the biggest factor in deciding how awesome your article finally is. I mean your article can have good matter and flow, but a messy title can wreak havoc with its image.

After using up so much space in explaining the title’s importance, I would like to explain my choice of title. I call this blog " The Perennial Psyche" don't confuse with psycho, it  may sound as bizarre as it seems but trust me after so many titles that crossed through my mind none seemed to settle down better than this one, don't complicate yourself deciphering its meaning let me put it simply-Lasting or remaining active throughout the year, or all the time, the human mind as the central force in thought, emotion, and behavior of an individual.

Nah! Mostly I just chose it because it sounds cool.                       

Now that’s a pretty long beginning for someone who took two paragraphs to explain why they suck.

I guess I’ll end the beginning now.

                                            

                                                

So folks thats the end of the first episode. Stay tuned for more exciting episodes of " The Perennial Psyche"

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