You may say I’m a gamer… But I’m not the only one…

It would be quite interesting to see what gaming means to each one of us. Hmm, what about myself? Well, over a period of last 10 years, I have personally spent innumerable number of hours on computer games. It would be quite fair to say that it has been some sort of semi-addiction to me from time to time.

Although my schedule in recent years doesn’t allow me to do so, I myself have been quite a versatile gamer. I have played 3D action games ranging from the legendary Wolfenstein to the more recent ones like Max Payne. I have been a forever loyal fan to strategy games like Age of Empires (a game I would actually recommend as a fun way of learning about history), Caesar and even Commandos. I had quite a fiery fling going on with a Need For Speed 5: Porsche Unleashed (a racing game) before my longer lasting love affairs with games such as GTA: San Andreas (role playing strategy) and The Sims (virtual simulation of real life).

But it was not till the recent time that I realized why I actually loved gaming so much. Now that I come to think of it, I find that we humans sometimes act like such ridiculously dumb creatures! We go on doing a thing without even realizing why the hell we started doing it in the first place! But I guess that’s the charm of it, isn’t it?

All these years, all I was looking for was a chance to become someone/something in the virtual world which I probably cannot become in my real life time. If you come to think of it, there are so many things one would just love to do in his own life, but just cannot. For example, who would not like to experience adrenaline rush of driving a German sports car at insanely high speeds without the possibility of getting actually hurt in the process? Who wouldn’t want to be a king of a great empire of the old ages and win huge wars against his enemies?

I was always fascinated by the kind of activities the soldiers did during the World War II. Various strategies that the allied forces used during the war still interest me a lot. However, given the sort of person I am, I would probably neither survive the strict discipline of an army nor be so ruthless as to stab another person to death with a knife. But a game like Commandos gave me the chance to follow the footsteps of those brave soldiers and totally teleported me into that era. I have thoroughly enjoyed every single mission in this game.

A game like GTA: San Andreas gave me the thrill of playing the role of a thug who becomes a master criminal as the story progresses. You steal cars, you ride stylish bikes, you fight against rival gangs (occasionally against police too)… In short, you get to become the rock star of the imaginary underworld. Now it can be argued that such games might encourage young minds towards criminal mentality. Here, I am not trying to glorify criminal behavior. I agree that there are some objectionable and controversial features in such games (even various other games do have a lot of violence & other inappropriate content). But I feel that if handled sensibly, such games do give us the kind of thrill we all secretly wanted to experience some times. Come on… let’s agree on the fact that we all were at one point or the other fascinated by the anti-heroes in various stylish Hollywood movies!

Again, a game like The Sims actually gives us the chance to live a second life! The virtual person that you control can actually do the things that you would have loved to do with your own life – play a musical instrument like a maestro, own a huge house, progress through different attractive careers, form different relationships with other (virtual) people, go shopping, wear fashionable cloths and what not. You can actually live your dream life in a virtual avatar!

Now I know that spending lot of time (and money!) on computer games has its own negative consequences too. Your studies and even your eventual careers may get affected because of it. But if kept under control, I feel it is a pretty useful thing to have with you – a thing that allows you to forget the harsh realities of life for some time. If you are sensible enough, you should be able to keep your priorities right. You will know where to draw a line. But within this given space, if you are getting a chance to experience something that you may never get to experience, I think it is a risk worth taking.

There are countless numbers of gamers out there with various degree of interest in gaming. Some may categorize gaming as a total waste of time and money, while some may even go to the extent of considering playing games as their full time profession. Having said that, I feel that surely there has to be fairly good amount of ones who will agree with my above point of view.

With the help of the legendary John Lennon, all I can say is: “You may say I’m a gamer… But I’m not the only one…”

Sarwatmaka Shivasundara...

I remember those assemblies of 8^th standard in my school. Basically, an assembly was a weekly cultural hour, where we all used to gather in the auditorium and sing some prayers, poem, songs and if time permitted, some performance like a skit or a group song would be presented by some of the students.

To be frank, nobody liked to sing those poems or prayers in those days. As kids, we all loved the popular Hindi movie songs of those times, but performing such a song was a big no-no in school. We were all supposed to sing nice poems and prayers, so that we could have some good learnings out of them. (I bet that the different magazines, TV shows and movies of those times did not agree with the school’s agenda!)

Till the 8^th standard, our music teacher – we called her Viju tai ­­- had got used to ask us “shall we sing again??” after a poem/prayer was sung by us, approx 500 students. We too, due to the lack of courage to say “no” on any teacher’s face, had got used to say “yessss” and sing the poem/song once again, despite how-much-ever we did not want to sing it once again. (Of course, all of the above used to go on in Marathi, being a Marathi-medium school.)

But by the time we reached the 8^th standard, we had gathered the courage to collectively say “noooo”… It felt so awesome when we said that for the first time!! And Viju tai (who was indeed a really nice and jovial person) and other teachers also took it so sportingly… (I think probably that’s the time the teachers must be realizing that the kids are growing up.)

But, however I hated singing some of those school-poems repeatedly, a poem called sarwatmaka shivasundara will always be evergreen in my memories. Whenever I remember that song, some unknown emotions of nostalgia just rise up inside me and try to break free.

“Sarwatmaka shivasundara

Sweekaar ya abhivadana

Timiratuni tejakade

Prabhu amucha ne jeevana”

(It’s a prayer to god, urging him to lift our lives from darkness to light.)

Well, right now I remember only these four main lines from the poem. One of my favorite teachers in school, Mrs. Shobhatai Parulekar had given a wonderful tune to it. Whenever I think of this poem, those 3 o’ clock assembly sessions just come alive in front of my eyes. We all sang this poem while ending the assembly. Afterwards we all used to go back to our classrooms in one single line, of course with some masti-mazak on the way. The time would be around 4 o’ clock by now. One last lecture would be remaining. I think it used to be mostly of geography or history. Everybody would be just waiting to get over with it and already planning the things to do after school. Soon the bell would ring and we all were free to go wherever we wanted to!

The corridors outside the school hall… Canteen on the 2^nd floor… Typical wooden dark brown colored stairs, with metal plates on their edges... I can still hear inside my head the sound we used to make out of those metal plates while running up and down… Huge bell near the library on 1^st floor that used to ring after lectures got over… The amazing third floor balcony… Those corridors outside the classrooms… Our crumpled white uniform shirts... Punjabi Samosas from canteen, which I loved so much that I would want to have them just for myself…

It’s so wonderful that merely four lines of a poem are greatly responsible to carve all the above moments in the memory. Even the very mention of the poem brings them back to surface as if they happened just recently. No single other thing stirs my emotions about school more than this one does. Although now I don’t believe in the concept of god like most of the other people around me do, this poem creates some holy emotion inside me. I find this emotion very beautiful. I don’t attribute it to the existence of god, but whatever it is, I definitely love this mix of emotions that I feel whenever I think about Sarwatmaka shivasundara… definitely one of my favorite memories!

Playing the game...

“Success is all about human relations.”

That was the topic for the group discussion. It was the time when I was going through the selection process, hoping to get selected for the MBA program.

I happened to raise a few good points that time, I think. How the success is not only about human relations, how the concept of success should not be restricted to corporate success only and so on. I must have done a fairly decent job there because it got my into the MBA program eventually.

It is funny how one’s perspective towards life changes at different ages. That time I was god damn sure about the points I was making, especially when I said: Success is not only about human relations. One has to be equally skilled at the work he/she is going. Only then the human relations can enhance your chances. (I could have even given more emphasis on capability part against the human relations portion.)

But after completing the course and having taken a break from job market after working for almost two years, it feels rather different. I have had my fair share of interaction-experiences with different people. I believe that our thoughts are generally influenced by the events in our recent past. And even more so, when the events occur in a time when you are trying to get to know yourself towards building a career.

If I were the person I am today while appearing for that group discussion a few years back, I am sure my point of views would have been different. And given the nature of these thoughts (combined with my rather over-honest approach of dealing with things), I am not sure if the evaluators would have given me a seat in the program.

There’s a dialogue in the TV series Dexter when the character Dexter Morgan is telling his sister Debra, roughly meaning the following: The reason why Lieutenant LaGuerta (another character in the series) has been successful so far is that she may not be the most intelligent one, but she knows how to play the game.

I think the above statement answers the debate for me at this moment. Human relations seem to be a far more deciding factor than your actual competencies these days; rather, soft skills seem to have been emerged as the deciding factor for so-called-success.

A person may call it networking. Another may call it favoritism towards friends. It may also have different other names such as politics, lobbying, back-stabbing, unethically competing; but eventually these are different degrees of the same strategy towards emerging as the eventual winner.

Please don’t mistake me for someone who compartmentalizes this as a necessarily unethical/bad practice. Even I may have been a beneficiary of networking at some point of time. For example, may be some time I got a chance to perform in a music program because my college friend was performing there and he called me to join them.

I am not even saying that the successful ones are always only the manipulative ones with no other skills whatsoever. After all, they indeed had to have good (or even excellent) work skills to sustain their performance through the years. What differentiates them from the rest is the fact that they know how to play the game and beat the system. Making the right connections, knowing whom to avoid, making a shrewd move at a right time, knowing when to cut your losses and move on – they know it pretty damn well.

But having accepted it as a part and parcel of life, I feel really sad when a highly deserving person doesn’t get something which a highly undeserving person gets. (What someone deserves is a matter of plain individual opinion though.) As stereotypical as it may sound, but let’s say you are a good actor with a wide range of brilliant performances on your resume, you are even short-listed by the director for the lead role, but eventually you may not get the role in the film because the producer won’t finance the film unless the role is given to his son.

Unless the performance difference is quite obvious, it doesn’t matter greatly whether you are better at the given competencies than your opponent. Only thing that matters is how well you play the game. Skills, talents, knowledge, wisdom, creativity, strength, money, ethics – everything is important, alright, but those are only the aspects of the game and not the game itself.

I always thought that such I-will-do-whatever-it-takes-to-get-me-there attitude existed only in high level positions in politics, cinema, business etc. But you don’t realize certain things unless they happen to you or in your close proximity. I agree that I am more of an idealistic person than a pragmatic one, but I never realized until recent times how it affects even the seemingly simplest of the life situations. These situations do not include only the widely known infamous politics about promotions in various offices, but also something like a student establishing favorable relations with a teacher with different motives in mind.

I always believed that if I stick to improving myself without caring too much about the “interpersonal dynamics and emotional undercurrents” of others, I will surely achieve success one day. Unfortunately, to achieve that kind of success, apparently there are a few other ways too.

In order achieve the so-called success, it is a topic of yet another discussion which practice should be acceptable and which one not. So, as of now, let’s just say that as long as you are scoring more goals than your opponent in a football match, it doesn’t matter even if you get a few red cards for foul play or you play pre-match mind games with the rival team members … well, its not something I would like to do or will do, but definitely something that’s known as blatant truth.

But as always, it comes down to your personal definition of success. You may not have what others call as success, but if you know you have given your best shot within the boundaries of your own value system, I think nothing else should matter.

This reminds me of a wonderful line from the film Cool Runnings: A gold medal is a wonderful thing. But if you're not enough without it, you'll never be enough with it.