Human face

Saw , heard , performed a lot of acts ( all the world's a stage and so I think the word acts encompasses all that happens around us ) in the past few weeks .

Attended a play called women of persia ..which talks about the women of persia ( mother , daughter , sister , slave and queen ) who have been left behind when there men goes to war and what these hapless souls have to go through when led by there arrogant and foolish king the persians go to war with greece , tens of thousands of men die and the persian empire crumbles . A particularly touching scene was when after coming back from the war , the king has to face the spite of all his people ..but then the same people are forced to bow to the king against there wishes,when summoned by the queen mother .

The play was a actor centric play enacted in arena ..with minimal prop used , the background score was also sung by the actors and the persian chants just added to the whole feel of the play . The scenes where the actors grieve there lost ones shook me to my core .

Then I recently saw the bbc documentary on story of India by Michael woods . I recommend it to every India , this is a must see for everyone . It talks about India right from the time of rigveda to the british invasions . Through all of it you realise that India is basically a land of immigrants , first the africans settled in south india , the aryans from central asia came into india developing the manhattan of olden times , also called mohen jo daro , then the mughals and finally british . We are a combination of all these civilizations . The world has learnt to live conveniently with each other in India ,while respecting each others differences .

I also attended a lecture by the founder member of Engineers without borders , a organization which works with underprivileged people all over the world trying to provide basic amenities such as clean drinking water , sanitation facilities etc. I will need a whole new blog to write about all that I heard about that day . One thing I wanted to mention was that when the Professor decided he wanted to build a sanitation project in a godforsaken place in south america , half of the class offered to work on it . The professor was surprised and asked the people why they were never seen near his office earlier and all of sudden were all so enthusiatic . The students replied we are here bcoz we are bored of the meaningless engineering taught in classes (namingly solving problem5.1 to problem 5.5 ) ..since what you offer to do is engineering with a purpose we want to work with you .

Today I saw the movie Page 3 . A wonderful movie on human relationships and the fraility of them . The power hungry and the ways power can fight down a person's good motives and intentions . Once again to quote the movie ..."It is no longer good have a good motive , you should have the intelligence to make sure you can translate your motivation into the change that you want to see " , " Be in the system and fight the systems ".

So what do all these non relating stories have to say ....As my Professor once said ..We become engineers bcoz we do not want to have anything to do with the people , let the managers do that ..its only when we step out of the school that we realize that its what we had been running from that we need to deal with ....

All the stories talk about a part of the human face , be it forced reverence to a foolish king due to his stature , nobody dares to stand up against the king and thats what gets passed on to generations ...reverence of the people in power ...

The foolhardiness of engineering schools when they think that having taught there students how to integrate or build a circuit board , they have made the students ready to change the world.

The story of India made me wonder about the rights of fundamentalists trying to state that the ram mandir was at a certain place or the north indians should leave mumbai because they do not belong there . We are a country of immigrants and does anyone at the end of the day have any right to say that a certain place is ours .

People all over the world are trying to throw away others from their country because they are afraid of the people of foreign origin .They are afraid of being outnumbered or over thrown , there is so much of mistrust , fear and anger existing every where ....I guess we all need to learn from Akbar, peaceful co-existence is the need of the day and not rulers or dictators .

The same fear shows in the page 3, people who are all trying to hide behind the facade of power in the hope that it will provide them the happiness that they desire in there lives ...

I look at my own life and see influence of numerous human faces on my own life and my success and failures in dealing with them . The more I see of the world the more I realize how much this so called human face affects our lives and no matter how many technical , medical or economic advancements we make ....its the human face at the end of the day that shapes our lives ..and it is not until the time that we have unconvered the myth of these varied human faces that our lives will continue to be as chaotic as they are today .