Hills That We Climbed

Friday, January 10, 2025

Thoughts: Making India Europe Again

A neighbor shared a picture of a housing society in his WhatsApp status, and it was surprising how European it was looking. I have been to Europe and this building looked like a modern European building in all aspects. It reminded me of how Indian builders love to give their projects a European sounding name. A large percentage of housing societies in India have English or French names these days. Even schools have such sounding names. Pretending to be European has become gold-standard in modern India. And it is so sad.

While visiting places, I notice the housing and architecture of the buildings and the speed at which our places are becoming bland and standard, is sad. At my hometown, at some distance from our home, someone has made a four storey building and each corner of the roof has a Hindu temple like structure. The peaks are painted in gold and the while rest of the building looks pretty standard, roof has been made to resemble part of some Hindu temple or Indian palace. I really liked it.

It is not difficult to make buildings and housing societies on the theme of Indian palaces (Raj mahals), forts or temples. It depends on how much efforts go towards which motive. It seems that currently, our entire nation’s building and construction professionals are trying hard to make India “Europe again”. If they spent similar efforts in making India “Bharat again”, we would be seeing more beautiful native landmarks we could be proud of.

I have seen the Legislative House in Bengaluru, which looks like a palace, and also read the inspiration behind it. It is designed in neo-Dravidian architectural style and includes elements of from various dynasties such as Chalukyas, Hoysalas and Vijayanagara. It is a wonderful building and it is Indian.

I hope people of our country stop this weird madness of trying to make India look like Europe again and give attention to our native architectural styles and use their creativity to make us all proud of ourselves.

- Rahul

Thursday, January 9, 2025

Life: Simple Honesty

During my last job, I had kept a picture in my Microsoft Office profile, which was about 6 years old. I kept the same picture after I joined my current job and one day I noticed it and felt that I needed to update my profile picture. I tried to take few selfies and realized a magical fact that our photographs turn out to be worse along with time. After struggling to take a good enough selfie, and selfie was a bad idea for a formal looking picture anyway, one fine morning I just took few selfies after taking a bath and wearing my favorite tshirt, and I felt it was good enough. I resized it to make it smaller, cropped it, blurred it just enough, and uploaded it on my MS Office profile picture.

My colleages immediately took note of it and spoke about it in the team meeting. I told them that my earlier picture was about 6 years old and hence I changed it. They seemed to like the new picture. During another call, my manager joined and other team members told him about my new profile picture and he mentioned a few words trying to be polite and happy, but including something like “at least some of us are getting old”. From that, I realized that I was looking older in this new picture; and it was completely fine for me since I was indeed getting older with time and there is nothing wrong in it. I remembered one manager from one of my previous jobs and she had loaded her college picture in her profile picture and never updated it despite completing 10 years on the job; and she said her inspiration was to keep looking like her college picture! Did she actually look like her 10-year-old picture? In her 10-year-old picture, she was laughing cheerfully like young people do, and perhaps the picture was cropped from a large group photograph from her college days. Everyone is happy in college days, even the bad people. In her current age, she was not really like her old days, but who was going to tell her that?

Coming back to my story; I was aware that the picture was not very good, and I was fine with it. Then one day while talking to my niece who was looking at how I was working on my laptop, she noticed my profile picture and said, “this is bad”. I was taken aback for a moment with her blunt honesty, but since she was right about it and I am not too touchy about my looks anyway, I just took it as honest feedback. I am planning to change my profile picture now.

End of the story is that I was touched with my niece’s raw honesty.

There is something very good about “simple honesty”.

- Rahul

Thursday, January 2, 2025

New Year Resolutions

Over last few years, I have tried to think of “new year resolutions”, and as it typically happens, not much of those have been achieved as exactly planned. Last to last year, I wanted to start my old habit of reading again and I indeed did well in that year. Last year I wanted to improve upon it and totally failed. I would like to catch up again and I need to finish all the books I have already purchased over the past.

Last year in 2024, I also wanted to catch up with my old practice of visiting temples and although I totally forgot about this resolution later, I think I did well on this account during the year.

I also planned to post at least 100 blog posts in the year, and I indeed have posted exactly 100 posts during year 2024. I wanted to stop traveling much, and I have done drastically bad on this goal, and thank God for that. All through the year, I have travelled, and I loved it.

For 2025, I want to keep up with my habits of reading, writing and visiting places – few things I love. Apart from that, my major focus will be to bring routine to my daily life, with disciplined eating and taking care of health.

These days, I am trying to reduce my carbon footprint and to keep old world alive away from modern humdrum as much as possible. I have realized how modern lifestyle and modern businesses are destroying our nation’s health and wealth both, and we are largely unaware of it. When I visit smaller places, I realize how life there is still saner as compared to the cities. While returning to the old world may not be possible, to the extent possible, we can still “resist” the mad rush of soulless modern world. I would like to continue these explorations during this year too.

- Rahul