Uncommon Breed

How are you doing today?

So I thought I should reach out to you today and  perhaps remind out of something. But before that, I want you to perform the following exercise.

Close your eyes.

Take two deep breaths.

And ask yourself where were you a little over an year ago on this exact same day? Not the geographical location, but in your life, at what position were you at.

Thought of where you were? Good,

Now again, ask your self where you are now, in this same exact day (today)?

Have you changed? for the better?

Achieved something regardless of your circumstances?

Grew on an upward spiral and positively effected other people on the course?

Congratulations, I would like to officially inaugurate you into the "Uncommon Breed" family.

Why?

Because in a world mostly filled with people playing victim of circumstances, blaming their failures on others, constantly complaining about how their lives had paned out thus far and not being confidently sure about their future; You have managed to crawl out of this dungeon filled with naysayers and proved them wrong.

You did not want to be them. You did not want to complain. And when life beat you down to your knees, you had the strength, caliber and the faith to come back up. You didn't take no for an answer. And you viewed failure as just a setback in the journey and started all over again. You never feared failure. You were never afraid of "fear" because you knew if was self- imposed, meaning it only existed in your head (because you created it), and you understood that nowhere else in the universe did fear exist. And when you felt success, you were deserving and took it humbly and you strive for more. And trust me, this is very uncommon in these days. Sadly. But just like the light at the end of the tunnel, you have risen from the ashes, like the Phoenix and soared high.

I want to say, hey keep going, after all who has the right to stop you?

The Actor Within

So, as promised I am returning to you with a new post. Now, if you are among those readers who also happen to be somebody close to me, then you would know how much of a movie/theater buff I am. Actually, even if you are in the process of getting to know me, then all you would need is to just ask me this usual "getting to know you" question, "So what's your favorite movie?", and I should warn you, that the answer will be very elaborate, detailed containing the historical references of cinema regardless of genre and regions, and of course I would address your question. My typical response would be "The Godfather". Now I know that this is a favorite for many people, but it is quite personal for me. One is it contains my favorite trio, Al Pacino (my favorite actor!), Marlon Brando (my favorite actor!) and Francis Ford Coppola (One of my favorite directors!). Both of these actors had undoubtedly made this a fascinating piece of cinema, and historically referenced as one of the greatest movies of all time. Of course, Coppola chiseled the actors, but the execution by the actors was near perfect.

Act I Scene I


Actors. In my eyes, have one of the most profound jobs known to man. If you think about it, they get to travel back in time, travel to the future, outer space; work as a doctor, engineer, politician, become a husband, wife, son, daughter and even God! (Morgan Freeman in "Bruce Almighty" for example). What these people can do with their craft is limitless. All it takes is imagination and a stage. And the rest is up to the thespian to weave history.

Alright, thanks for filling me in with the details of Thespianism? What's your point?

Well, If you've known my past, my career up to this point, included a brief stint as an actor alongside with some accomplished thespians in theater. I even at one point seriously considered taking up acting as my future career. But life happened. I had to take a different route. But I don't regret that decision whatsoever.

Why?

I will tell you why. Because I am still an actor. Although I had renounced the idea of acting on a stage or in front of a camera, I never renounced the actor within myself. I nurtured him and grew him with me. And he taught me on the greatest lessons I believe to be important to every human. He taught me the value of human interactions and connecting to others in an emotional level. Isn't this the greatest goal a thespian could achieve in his or her career? To connect with their audience in an emotional level? It was my caliber to fill in others' shoes that taught me the value of a human life, the value of connection.

I believe to have attained a certain level of mastery in this aspect. To connect to people in an emotional level. And this is the most important tool or lesson one must master to achieve anything in this world. After all what else is this world made of? we are among the largest inhabitants in this planet, and if you don't know to connect to your peers emotionally, how else do you think you could achieve anything in this world? You take any profession or a part of your life; business, politics, religion, war, peace, love, marriage and even death. What is the common factor in all of them? Humans. I even believe that if we were able to connect to one another on a truly emotional level, we would have found solutions to half the conundrums that we are facing at the moment. Why? because humans are emotional beings and there is no denial.

Because I was/am a thespian, I gained the insights to connecting emotionally to my fellow humans. And my purpose of my blog from henceforth is this; I am going to show you the way in which we all could truly and emotionally connect to one another, and this is my way of changing the world to become a better place. Sounds too idealistic? Well, flying in the air for humans sounded idealistic in the beginning and all it took was 12 seconds for the Wright Brothers to change the world. And my goal is for you to learn this art and truly achieve greatness by achieving your goals and that I believe is the recipe for change.

I am one of those actors who took Shakespeare literally when he said "All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players".
I am an actor (from within) who has chosen world as a stage to connect to the audience (the people) in an emotional level and truly convince them of the idea of changing the world. Slowly and steadily.

"The people who are crazy enough to change the world are the ones who do"- Steve Jobs


Exeunt Steffin Gomes

Revival

Greetings!

I know that I have a lot of explaining to do for my uninformed long silence. So let me get on it right away. The last time that I had really posted on this blog was a while ago and I am not going to even delve into my timeline of absence; So instead let me just bring you up to speed as to what's been happening in my life thus far which also could be accounted for my absence as well. So here's my explanation for my absence,

Simply, I changed. 

The time I took off was the time I invested in changing. How you ask? The answers are as follows:

I am now a recent graduate from a University bound by the professional ethics and code of conduct, a responsible adult (or at least I suppose!) and a useful citizen of the world with civic responsibilities waiting to be fulfilled. I had taken time to travel the world trotting from one nation to the other, meeting new people, embarking on new ventures, crafting my own sense of my future and most of all, I had one goal in mind which was to get to know the most important person in my life. Myself. I used my university days to really get to know myself, not just from the outer shell but I embarked on a journey I called "Soul Searching". This venture was extremely time consuming and it meant that I had to prioritize my time and that was one of the main reasons why I had to shy away from social media.

So now that I have returned, does this mean I have successfully ended my journey? No! I realized that the journey had just started. But my return is the sign of me being extremely comfortable with my own presence and I have attained a certain level of maturity where I could now take people with me on this journey.


So what about "Soul Searching"?


Well, again I had just begun to craft and identity for myself, which from my future posts you will be able to figure out, who I am, what my purpose is, and if possible reveal my mind to you. This is a constantly evolving process and this was the journey that i was so fondly talking about taking you with me. My goal in this quest is to identify my "soul" and help you find yours!

In the past, I had addressed a few issues in my blog and perhaps described my stance in a few worldly affairs. But I have now decided to take a different approach in what I am going to discuss in my blogs in the future. I have envisioned to my blog to serve a particular purpose/need that I have observed throughout my ventures, and hopefully it is able to bring about some positive impact. It was the premise of this article; to "revive" my blog, to give you an essence as to what I was going to cover in the near future.

What was the purpose/need my blog was going to serve you ask? Well patience is a virtue and I will slowly reveal to you as time goes by, but to ease the tension I shall give a hint. In my next article, I hope to cover the exact details from my experiences during my absence and how it shaped me as an individual and reveal to you how my blog was going to take shape henceforth.

If you felt that I had not properly given you my excuse for my absence in this article, I hope to justify it in the articles in the future; but for now feel free to browse around my blogs from the past. And I shall bid you good bye for a short while until I will see you soon. I promise ;-)

Read, Think and most importantly Question!

I don't think I need to really prove to you, how youth these days are so engaged with the social media and the internet. With Facebook, twitter and all the other social media cites, with information readily available at your fingertips, it had become so hard to keep a secret these days. Almost anything and and everything that is out there could be made into news, or subjected to controversy. But what I have really observed these days, especially among the youths is that they are becoming easily impressionable. Whatever they witness in the social media or any other sites per se, it is easily speculated. And people who know this first hand are taking into their advantage. It is so easy to make news with the youth today.


Why? Because they will believe what they see.

Yes, that had become the sad reality. Youth today are being constantly bombarded with social issues, that they might be overwhelmed and don't know what exactly is happening. And they are conditioned to believe whatever they see or hear. And the youth cannot alone be blamed. Some media knowing for a fact that young people tend to buy anything they hear and so the media tends to exploit the truth to create a substantial "story" that better sells.

So what happened to Kony?

If my memory serves me right, not too long ago there was this video made about a Ugandan guerrilla group leader that went viral among the youth in the social media. This issue (about Kony) had been well exhausted so I wouldn't want to go into the minutiae about it. As soon as the video went viral, I saw several people open up groups about arresting Kony and his army. People were flaring with comments and sharing their thoughts about it. Please don't consider me cynical, but I found those activities extremely amusing. This goes back to my question,

what happened to Kony? He still remains at large.

Well why is this happening?

After an little bit of careful observation and research, I found two reasons.

Youth these days are missing the capabilities to think critically and question what they see or hear.

What they see they believe. They think or question very less. In today's world we are bombarded with information which could either be true or false. Sad to say mostly false. And I believe that it is our responsibility as the youth to not fall prey to narrative false stories.

It's almost like how millions of youth become "social activists" after watching a 30 minute video. Yes the stories can be extremely manipulative, but you don't need to believe it in the first place. Think about it. Do your own research and find out the truth for yourself. When the reasons convince you. Then you can believe it.

Because I'm a firm believer in the power of youth. We are young and capable. I believe that if combine our energy and fight for a true cause. Then the sky is our limit.


So the next time you read, hear or see something. Ask questions. That is your right!

Forget Creationism Or Darwinism..What We Really Need Is...

Perhaps this is least discussed "ism" out there. I see a lot of youngsters these days, especially people who are pursuing their college level education, argue furiously about how we came existance. Some say it's through evolution (Darwinism) and the others say it is through Creationsm. And to add to that we also tend to get at each others throat by arguing which political ideology is ultimately going to prevail and rule all societies, Capitalism,Communism so on and so forth. We just love to talk about politics and religion.But I have failed to see people talk about professionalism. Not even once have I come a across people who wanted to share with me their views on professionalism. And not only people have stopped talking about it. They have also stopped practicing it (And please bear in mind that I'm not talking about all working people, it is what I find to be common these days).

One might argue that professionalism is not an ideology, yes! Exactly my sentiments, but I would want to have a different approach to it, and I will reveal it to you as I lead you into my argument.

I really cannot define professionalism. Or rather tell you what standards should be set as to be considered to be professional. Each organization and individual have their own terms of professional code. We all have our own "work ethics" which we abide by, or so we say. But the question is, do we all follow what we preach? Sadly the answer is no.

I don't think I should list out all the moral standards of professionalism, like I said that would be my code of conduct. It will be extremely different from yours. What I would do instead is point out where professionalism is missing and how it is drastically affecting all of us and the society.

THAT IS NOT MY JOB!
If you had not looked at the picture above, I ask you to take a look at it again, a closer look. If you did you might have a vague idea as to what I'm going to talk about. So let me give you a scenario. Imagine your in a line in an office. You urgently need to get something done, and you have been waiting for days to do this. As you reach the officer, he/she says that there is some error in the document (and it is not your fault) and needs to be rectified. But the officer is least bothered to help you and sends you away. Your frustrated. I can bet my money that every single one of you reading this blog will have gone through this scenario at least once in your life. And If you didn't please email me the name of the country you live and I will migrate to it happily!

And I will tell you, that the above scenario is something that I went through on a daily basis.

Why does this happen?

The answer is simple and horrifying. It is ignorance. "We don't need to deal with that, or that is too much of work" attitude is becoming a contagious disease that had successfully spread among most of the working people. Making easy money is what they care about.

So what if everybody started ignoring?

What we can do, we let the other person do it, because we have a lot of the other things to do.
And that person leaves the job for the next person and so on and so forth, and ultimately the job never gets done.

This has to change. We have already created a lot of mess due to this behavior. Now just merely doing our job would not be of any use. We all have to go a little above and beyond. So that we all straighten up the mess that we made.

And as I mentioned in the beginning, professionalism is not an ideology. But it is high time that it is considered as one. Professinalism cannot be taught in school or university. The behaviour has to accumulated through experience. The world does not need educated people, it needs professional people who love what they do for a living and are ready to go an extra mile if necessary. My intentions in this article is not for me to preach about professionalism, rather to get you thinking if you doing your job!

A New Kind Of Terrorism

I'm very sure that i dont have the need to define "terrorism" to everyone of you. We all have a very fair idea as to what it is, and why it is occurring in our society. We all had been affected and influenced by it somehow. It is present throughout the globe. And I hasten to point out that no one of us could ever say "Oh terrorism is not present in my country" as much as we would like to. And also I don't want to show you the catastrophic events that had taken place due to terrorism either because they are all sad enough, and we all have witnessed the grim effects of it first hand.

There had been all kinds of ways in which terrorists have tried to disrupt harmony in society using shear violence against people. These usually pertain the use of weaponry, abductions and assassinations. We all know this.

But my goal today was to bring to light a new kind of act of terrorism, against a particular gender only. This merciless act it slithering its way through society, and the grim effects of it are already seen. I saw this issue being addressed in an Indian t.v show (satyamev jayathey) recently.

This act of terrorism is called female foeticide. If in case you were wondering what this was, let me explain it to you. Simply put, after conception, the sex of the fetus is determined, and IF it is a female, then the fetus is aborted. This is a first class act of sex discrimination.
And this is happening all over the world, and as statistics prove that it occurs mostly in India.

Why did I label this as terrorism? Well there are two very sinister parts to this act which depict similar characteristics of terrorism.

Firstly, this abortion happens without the consent of the mother. Shockingly the husband and his family are the first culprits who organize this crime. Because if you think about this would any mother terminate her pregnancy, just because of the gender of her child that she is bearing?. Once a woman in a family is identified to be pregnant, she is taken to the hospital by her husband and his family, to determine the gender of the fetus. And if it happens to be a female they terminate the pregnancy. The woman is made to go through this abortion forcefully. Even if she declines to abort the fetus. If she retalialtes she is violently beaten and then made to comply. If she retaliates further, she is deceived by her husband that they are going to visit the hospital for a regular check up, and the woman is made unconscious and then the baby is aborted. And a woman has to go through this cycle each time she bears a female child!

Secondly, this had become a very profitable business for people in health care. Medical professionals (obviously not all) who are money hungry, have introduced new schemes where they will conduct an ultrasound (to determine the sex of the fetus) and immediately an abortion if it is it is a female, which would cost relatively lower to people who wish to do this. How convenient!

To give you a better understanding, this type of practice had created a Whopping 244 million USD industry! And further more, an esitmated 15 million girls were not born in India in the last decade. And the ratio of girls to boys is 927:1000

Apart from some of the money hungry medical professionals, why would any one want to do this? To a woman?

The answer is gruesome. It is simply the laziness for bringing up a girl. She needs to be educated, nourished, loved and cared. Well, yes that's the same case for bringing up a boy too. But their is an underlying difference, or as it seems. Which is that the girl is going to get married any way and be away from the family, so why bother to go through all these burden for someone whose going to leave, and to add to that getting her married is another burden itself. Whereas a boy would remain in the family, and also ultimately provide for the family when his time comes to earn.
This is the "philosophy" by which people who commit this organized crime abide by.

Well they do not see the bigger picture, if this continues they would not find a woman for their son to marry and continue their generation and that is what is happening right now. Their is depletion of women for men to get married to.

Apart from this, this is sex discrimination, murder (because the abortion is taking place without the mother's consent) and the physiological and psychological pain that woman had to go through is daunting. Also the medical professional who assist in this crime are ruthless and these people involved should be pusnished to the fullest extent by the law. But the sad truth is that not even one license of a medical professional was cancelled by the government of India who had committed this crime.

But there is some light of hope in this darkness. In Kerela the sex ratio is more than one. That is there are more females than males since the census prove from 1901. And Kerela also has been helping several NGOs to counter this issue. (at least quite pleasing to know that there are still some intelligent people around) and several other nations are taking this matter seriously to counter this ongoing problem.

I thought that women only had to fight during their lives, but now reality slapped me hard showing that they literally have to fight to be born. And women who conceive female children had to fight to keep their children alive. When we think of warriors we tend to think of men. NO. It's the women. And hats off to them.

I also thought how ironic is it of us to think of the human race going to be extinct due to global warming, and how we forbid same sex marriages. Because if we continue to commit this crime ultimately, men would have to marry men and which would obviously lead to extinction.

You find my logic hard to digest?

Women are precious. We need them. You and I would not be here if not for them.

Works cited

Wikipedia


Darussalam, Brunei. Female feticide in India. N.p., 2010. Web. 31 May 2012.

The person your calling is now busy, please try again later....

How many times have you heard this and got really frustrated? i know i have. I mean, it is understandable to miss a call from your loved one, parent or a close friend when your in the middle of something important. But what really frustrates is when you don't get back to them for the whole day.

I have observed recently that we are so caught up in trying to produce the best results in whatever work we are attending to, that we tend to forget that there is a life outside work. As much as i would really appreciate people who put their heart and soul in order to be the best in what they do, but that doesn't mean you have to completely forget what you have.

Our professional lives are important, it is a part of who we are and what we are capable of. It nourishes us, pays out bills. (And mind you, when i mention professional lives, i'm including full time students too. Because they are also "working" only without a pay). But that doesn't mean that our work should come at the expense of our loved ones.

What made me write this article is that we are so caught up in chasing after what we want, we forget that we are slowly loosing what we have.

A son would say his mother that he was busy and that he couldn't call her for almost a week. A wife would say to her husband that she was at the office busy and that she couldn't return his call. A student would say to his or her friend that he couldn't reply to the message because he/she was so busy.

Now you would have observed that i had mentioned the word "busy" quite a few times in their last paragraph. The word "busy" seems so unrealistic to me. "Busy" means that you have engaged yourself with some piece of work. But can you really be busy throughout the day? 24 hours ? and all throughout the week?. IF it were possible I really would like to meet a person like that.  The human brain has a maximum attention span, and i don't think it can work efficiently for more than a certain period of time, (depending on the person). It clearly cannot be for 24 hours.

Most of the people give this as an excuse. That they were "busy" and that they could not attend to their loved ones. But i don't believe in such excuses. Because you clearly were not busy. You surely did have personal time. You had time to eat, sleep, drink, watch t.v and go on Facebook. It is not that i don't respect people's time that they allocate for work, but i think it is unacceptable to ignore your loved ones for work. How is it that you don't forget to watch t.v, Facebook or eat and sleep but you forget to get back to your friends and family. Think of the number of marriage break ups, friendship break ups, children suffering from parental care and vice versa. Most of these have one common factor. Ignorance. It is such a pain to bear, being ignored is worst than getting shot at point blank. Imagine a son ignoring his mother, a girl ignoring her significant other, a friend ignoring his/her friend all because of work.

I mean, do you honestly not find five minutes from you day to send a message or call them, reminding that you do care about them? i really don't think that five minutes is a huge bargain of your time and you are not going to lose anything to spend it for your loved ones. We need to remember that we go to work and come back home. 

Even in my personal experience i have friends who take ages to reply to my messages or phone calls or sometime they even don't. I on the other hand make time for my loved ones. No matter what time of the day it is, and whatever work i'm attending to, i get back to them. I have set this as a priority in my life. ( You can ask my friends if you want to clarify) 

I know what ignorance and loneliness feels like, and the pain associated with it. That person whom called you or messaged you, did that for a reason, he or she needed you at that time. Maybe they needed advice on something, they wanted to share something with you or simply they just needed to be heard. Listen to them. Hear what they said, that could be the only way to ease their pain, by just listening.

And please if you get a message, reply and if you missed a call, call them back! because you would want the same happening to you, if you were in such a situation..