Competing with the best!: "Write India"

There is an ongoing writing competition that is going on, which is called "Write India" and this is sponsored and run by Times of India. While some may have reservations to accept this as the best platform to test and hone your writing skills, many have been taking part in this competition for the past few months with the hope that they will get recognized by the top writers of english literature.

It is into its second season and the craze for this competition has been good.

Each month a passage is revealed by the author of the month with certain rules, and list of winners(usually top 10) is announced after 45 days of the contest's last date. Many people await it with wide eyes, checking for their names! The announcement happens quickly over twitter. I have seen many tweeple getting frustrated and some vowing to not write again, but I beg to differ.
Some people I have interacted with have even went to the extent to demean the platform and said that it only favours a select group of people based on their region or other irrelevant things. This made me think.

Writing is something that takes a lot out of someone's life and energy. To think of a good plot, develop that plot into a story, map out the characters and their details, create logical links between the characters, and then write the actual story(or even a short story) means a lot. To write a proper short story(maximum of 3000 words in this case) is much more difficult than writing a large story.

I believe that this is a platform which not only makes us put our best foot forward into the world of writing, but also teaches us how to respect the hard work of others, the judges and how to keep up the spirits in case we don't get selected among the winners. This spirit is most important and needed the most in the long run because as we keep writing, we need to keep a level headed approach towards the result. We need to first ask ourselves: Are we enjoying our work? Are we enjoying the process of writing a story or a book? If yes, then nothing should really dampen the spirit.

Instead of blaming the judges or authors of showing partiality and getting disheartened, why not take heart from the lost chance and try to better next time?
This "Write India" is a rare opportunity where we can compete on a national level directly without going through the regional levels. It is like playing in the ranji trophy directly without playing the state level competitions! You may not succeed initially, but it gives you a lot to learn and look forward to.

That's been my way of writing and I hope most people agree with me.

Wishing all the writers out there all the best!

With love.. Anil

Tears of a Legend

100 million views. The most awaited sequel to the biggest Indian movie. The costliest movie in the history of Indian movie industry. The biggest Indian franchise. A movie coming with the largest release, to be followed with the first VR Live action movie from India.

And there it came. The moment finally came when the promotions took the power that was expected of a big movie, going ahead with full speed.

Once one of the legendary music composers of Indian cinema took to stage and gave a re-rendition of the famous "Yevvadanta yevvadanta.." song, the captain of the ship came up to stage on his request and that was the moment: the moment when I saw the first tear of another legend, caused by the overwhelming emotions created and churned out by the first legend through touching lyrics. I just hoped the tears dont touch the earth so that the earth could remain immune to the immense effect of them! Why?Because those were not ordinary tears: They were the tears which evolved from just a water+salt mix to something so intense, so compressed with ambition that a single drop of that tear would have burnt the earth below! So just wanted the legend to control the flow of that immense pent-up energy so that he could show it in his next non-baahubali project and keep entertaining the society to levels unknown to us!

Citing a few words: "Eyes are not meant for tears and Heart is not meant for fear, Never get upset but always cheer.. Because you are the one who can make people smile for years."

By the way for those still wondering what was this all about, the first legend I talked about is M M Keeravaani(ఎం ఎం కీరవాణి), the second is S S Rajamouli(శ్రీశైల శ్రీ రాజమౌళి), and the event is the pre-release function of the movie "BAAHUBALI: THE CONCLUSION"!.. దండాలయ్యా దండాలయ్యా మా దర్శకుడివి నీవేనయ్యా!

With love.. Anil

The post-demonetisation era of digital payments and the irony!

Everyone knew the after effects of the demonetisation on India and the positive impact as well as the negative impact that it had.
But hardly did anyone think about the opportunities that lay unexplored, whether it is for the good intention or the bad. In fact, there were so many instances where merchants accepting digital payments or the customers making cashless payments were taken for a ride.
No doubt people were forced into this digital payment business due to lack of cash during the initial 1-1.5 months of demonetisation, but later the situation improved to such an extent that the ATMs again looked empty despite having the cash.
The biggest irony here is that once things came back to normalcy, there was a sudden dearth of cash in several ATMs and some bank branches. Is this due to the sudden cash flow or due to the uncontrolled printing of notes by RBI or exaggerated demand for cash from certain sections of the society?
It has to be noted that this is how the society behaves. Once the limit on daily withdrawal has been increased significantly, again the people will start to stack up the cash in their homes/offices. This is not unusual since the public's confidence in banks came down during the demonetisation. It is not the note ban itself that caused this distrust, but the fact that the banks were not able to serve the general public with the honesty expected from them. This is due to the few bad apples found in almost all departments and the situation could only get worse until and unless the govt doesnt encourage digital payments even after the availability of cash. How do they do it?
To convince the public that digital payments are better and more beneficial to them, they need to be given incentives: For example doing away with the petrol surcharges, giving cashbacks for digital payments just like how it is being done for fuel stations where a fixed 0.75% cashback is given for every fuel using debit/credit cards. Hope such promotions are given across several merchant locations.
It is here that the BHIM app is really useful and needs to be expanded and enhanced with some attractive features where cashbacks are given on certain categories of transactions.
Anyway, the present situation reminds me of a simple story: The king was given a new security chief since the existing chief has been proved to be corrupt and stealing valuable stuff from the palace. But the new chief is not popular with most of the palace staff since he is too sincere and nothing could go wrong under his supervision. So what did the staff and inmates of the royal palace do? Slowly started the misuse of their rights and brought back the previous chief in disguise. The king could not do much here since the staff are much smarter than him and they wanted to exploit the royal resources as much as they can.
So the moral of the story is that until and unless the people's mindset doesnt change, even a king cannot do anything to root out the malice of corruption and black money which go hand in hand.
The note ban was a temporary measure but the fake notes and money hoarding as well as other ways of black money strive until and unless the govt is not agile enough. Conduct review meets with the RBI and all major banks and track the money that they have in the banks or ATMs and track those dealing in huge amounts of cash. Sadly, this doesnt seem to be happening now since everything has settled and anything related to black money is hardly discussed these days on news channels or in the govt.
So the irony is that despite the hike in usage of digital payments, the usage of cash could actually increase now since the banking network is hardly enough and even if there are enough banks in india they are suffering from the lack of trust in the eyes of public. No one has any idea of what new charges are applied on their own hard earned money in the form of not maintaining AMB(depite the jan dhan yojana being touted as a movement to open crores of "zero-balance" bank accounts, many of those accounts, including those from the govt-owned banks are making it mandatory to maintain a minimum balance). Unless the financial system works in a coherent way and remain constantly in sync with the PM's vision of financial inclusion, any number of demonetisations or remonetisations will yield peanuts.



With love.. Anil