So, I started another blog. This one, long pending and long niggling, is about the books I read and the films I watch. Perhaps it might also be about the music I listen to. Like the current blog, the new one too has a strange, not-quite-explainable name. But then, where's the fun of anything without some quirk.

thepinklimoreads.blogspot.in

Some months ago, I was having a discussion (more a debate) about the choice of cars in India, when compared to the US. The conversation was with someone who has been living in the US for close to 15 years now.
"India should allow more foreign cars to be sold in the country; consumers get more choice--like they do in the US."--he said. "And competition is always good."
"Yes, I have heard this before."--I thought. "Do you know which is the largest selling brand of cars in the US?" I asked.
"Um, no."
"Toyotas and Hondas."
"Hm."
"You do know what the Japanese carmakers did to the American car industry?"
"Hm. Yes. Sort of."

This conversation has been coming back to me when I see so many other things around me. Just this afternoon I had a conversation about how shopping websites have made life easier. Then there are those conversations about how Uber and Ola having made life easier. Not to speak of Whatsapp making life easier. Going by all these "innovations" that are "making life easier", all our lives should be a cake-walk by now, isn't it? We should be traipsing through it. But are we?

Convenience cannot be the only defining reason for doing anything. Especially if you consider yourself to be among those who are better read and more aware of how simple behaviour patterns can have huge collective effects.

Yes, shopping online is easier. But what happens to the hundreds of thousands of people employed in shops and the entire logistics industry that keeps shops running? And the online discounts that most shoppers run after will soon dry up. They have to. No business survives on discounts alone.
Uber and Ola flout the laws of every country they function in, find legal loopholes to enter new markets, and charge far higher than the regular fare (surge pricing) when they know you need a taxi during crunch times. And while I have waited for a BEST bus, boarded it and gone home, my colleague has been left standing on the pavement, waiting for Uber to tell her if any cab is coming her way. Hailing a taxi the old-fashioned way is not cool any longer. Staring at your phone app unendingly is.
And Whatsapp... Barring my mother, everyone I know has it and is confounded why I don't, specially when "it is free". (They are clearly not looking at their phone bills if they think Whatsapp is free, but that's another matter.) In the past couple of years, I have lost touch with almost all the friends I had because it is not convenient any longer to even email, let alone pick up the phone and call. Oh, and phone calls cost money. The horror of it!
And then, of course, there is the whole issue of what information apps mine from mobile phones, but, hell, who cares, right? Apps are convenient, and cool.

Are we even aware of what we are becoming and the lives we are leading if we are willing to sacrifice all else at the altar of convenience? I doubt. I wonder what we do with all the time and energy that we surely must be saving by all these convenient inventions.

There was a time, not too many years ago, when I had thought that there was nothing much else to fight for in the world. I mean, when I looked around myself—around the cocoon that I then inhabited—a lot of things were alright. Not perfect, perhaps, but alright. And that there were few things—women’s rights apart—that warranted a battle. I would even mope in private about how I was born at the wrong time in history when all the biggest issues have already been dealt with and there was nothing much left for my generation to do; like I had been denied the opportunity to put some wrong right and change the world; well, denied a good fight, at the least.

I did say I inhabited a cocoon, didn’t I?

And now, when I look around the world I inhabit, I don’t even know where to begin the fight… or perhaps, I have been at it for so long already, I don’t see it as a fight anymore. It is just a way being.
Perhaps, at least some of the battles you pick—you have to pick them, because there are simply so many—are the ones you make a part of your lives. You don’t announce them, you don’t march for them, you don’t plaster posters for them, or (sigh) write Facebook rants about them, but you fight them every day, every waking hour. And sometimes these battles are fought in the confines of your own solitary mind.
There are days, and nights, when you question every thing you are doing, question the need for these unending hostilities, the futility of all the effort and pain and heartache. Wouldn’t it be easier to simply give in? Give up? Raise a white rag and say, ‘You win’?

But how do you then live with yourself for the rest of your life?