Being a Good Human Being

1. Break the taboo on rank. Make it a safe subject for discussion in the workplace.

2. Acknowledge the roles of others and support equitable compensation.

3. Keep your promises to “somebodies” and “nobodies” alike.

4. Teach your children their rights. Respect children so they will be respectful.

5. Honor your Inner Nobody and your Inner Somebody alike.

6. Be aware rankism begets rankism. If you’re feeling frustrated, don’t pick on someone of lower rank; and don’t kick the dog!

7. Encourage respect for the other side in sports, debate, and daily life.

8. Think about what you want to pass on. And do it.

9. Health care providers can enlist patients as partners.

10. Show the world dignity through your profession.

11. Recognize that servers are people, too.

12. Try to see outside your position and build a model that synthesizes your outlook with the views of others.

13. Give recognition to someone who deserves it.

14. Bring dignity to law enforcement and conflict resolution.

15. Choose not to participate in disrespectful jokes or conversations.

16. Give your attention to someone you might normally avoid interacting with. Someone with a disability. Someone of another culture. Someone of a different faith.

17. Assist or advocate for immigrants, homeless individuals, the disabled, the elderly, anyone who is especially vulnerable to assaults on their dignity.

18. Offer assistance to someone who may not be getting the help or recognition he or she needs – an elderly neighbor, a new mother, a caregiver.

19. Ask questions about people in authority. Do they use their power to help others, or to keep them down? Have they earned their authority or are they just assuming it?

20. Exemplify rather than exhort.

Source: http://www.breakingranks.net/weblog/20-ways/

Jumbo offers to rain at Pragati Maidan as TimesJobs fair begins - The Times of India on Mobile

http://m.timesofindia.com/city/delhi/Jumbo-offers-to-rain-at-Pragati-Maidan-as-TimesJobs-fair-begins/articleshow/20691854.cms

Jumbo offers to rain at Pragati Maidan as TimesJobs fair begins - The Times of India

NEW DELHI: India's biggest job fair- The TimesJobs.com Jumbo Job and Career Fair 2013-will be held from Friday onwards. The job fair, which will take place at hall number 7, Pragati Maidan, will continue till Sunday. Prospective employees will get a chance to directly interact with fast-growing local businesses as well as Fortune 500 companies.

The major recruiters participating at the Jumbo Job Fair 2013 include Convergys, Genpact, Barclays, HCL Technologies, iEnergizer, Just Dial, Tech Mahindra, Accenture, Wipro BPO, Dish TV, Principal Retirement Advisors, Eli Research India, Sitel, High Technologies Solutions, Mahan Computer Services, IGT, ITM and Spice Jet.

"At TimesJobs.com, our aim is to get a job for each and every job seeker at different levels of experience. It gives us immense pleasure and satisfaction to play a vital role in developing an individual's growth matrix and at the same time offer quality services to our clients," said Amit Jain, business head, TimesJobs.com. He added that the concept of 'job fairs', which have become a standard practice and a preferred channel and source of recruitment across the country, was pioneered by them. "It has won us accolades from the corporate world for the successful implementation of this economical and time-saving concept," Jain said.

Ashish Garg, director and head of recruitment, Convergys said, "We are glad to associate ourselves with the TimesJobs.com Jumbo, which is a great opportunity for people from NCR and other regions of North India to meet multiple employers under one roof and get the right direction for their career and aspirations."

A contingent of professional educational institutes will also be present at the fair. Candidates interested in post-secondary education and post-graduate opportunities stand to benefit from the fair as it will help them in developing and changing their career path.

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Aseem Seth

'The Beautiful People' - The music and its relevance

'The Beautiful People' is a song written in 1997 about the '60s - STILL RELEVANT (to me) TODAY.

The song incorporates extensive use of guitar distortion, and the use of palm muting creates a highly rhythmic, driving style amplified by a heavy percussion track. The song's characteristic element is its repetitive drum beat: a five-beat common time pattern played on floor toms.

Marilyn Manson - The Beautiful People


I heard this song when I was in school ... only once. 

And true to its reputation - it has stuck in my head for over two decades. And I still don't own the album or track... 

While I am no longer a fan of this genre of music (I've got old*) But each time, I see rank commercialism and sexual objectification in our media and culture - this song invariably starts playing in my head.

To me, it has come to symbolise a rant and a paean simultaneously to what is viewed as "acceptable decadence" - the cult of the superficial.  


Here's the artiste's own explanation - 

MARILYN MANSON was featured in last week's Kerrang! magazine as part of a feature called "How I Wrote...", talking about the inspiration behind the song "The Beautiful People".

The Background:

Marilyn Manson: "I write phrases constantly and I have about 15 different notebooks going at the same time. I'll write lots of different things in each book. I have to lay them all out in the same place and pull things from each of them to write a song. I was on tour and I remember recording it on my four-track with Twiggy [Ramirez, bass] and my drummer Ginger in a hotel room. It was somewhere in the South, which is ironic. I remember playing the drum beat on the floor and then having my drummer duplicate that on the drum machine. It happened in one day pretty much. It happened maybe two-and-a-half years before 'Antichrist Superstar' was released, and if I played you that four-track recording, it would sound identical."

The Inspiration:

Marilyn Manson: "The term 'The Beautiful People' was inspired by a book that came out in the mid-'60s. It was about the Kennedys, politics and fashion at the time. The whole culture of beauty as being created at the time. We live in a world where the culture of beauty is taken for granted, but it didn't exist in the same way in the '60s. Then Charles Manson and his 'family' took that culture, hated it and reacted against it. In many ways his reaction is the same as mine, but I'm playing with it from both sides. I make things glamorous as a revolt to glamour."

The Legacy:

Marilyn Manson: "I wasn't thinking about it in terms like, 'Is this a classic?'. But I knew we'd arrived at our defining sound when we wrote it. Even now, when I go back and listen to it, it sounds big. I hear things in it that I didn't hear before. I'm still very happy and proud of it. I don't get sick of playing it live and I don't think I will get tired of it."

(Thanks: MansonUSA.com)

Additional Reading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beautiful_People_(Marilyn_Manson_song)

Here's the Video (not recommended for viewing) -

* Old - “To know what you like is the beginning of wisdom and of old age. Youth is wholly experimental. The essence and charm of that unquiet and delightful epoch is ignorance of self as well as ignorance of life.” ~ Robert Louis Stevenson

Protect yourself by Juggle-Bandhi : Jug Suraiya's blog-The Times Of India

Jug Suraiya, one of the Top Editors at my newspaper, has a wonderful way of highlighting really disturbing issues in a humorous manner - I was particularly moved by this post of his, so i re-blog it here.

Protect yourself

Your local government school has no teachers, textbooks or even a blackboard? No problem. Send your children to a private school. No sarkari hospital or even basic health centre where you live? So go to a private hospital or clinic. No electricity or municipal water in your house? Buy a generator and send for a water tanker.

Step by step, the Indian state has been giving up its most basic duties and obligations to its citizens and leaving them no option but to fend for themselves: you either pay a private agency for a service which by rights the sarkar should provide, or you learn to live without it.

The latest service which is the fundamental duty of the state to provide and which it seems to be handing over to those who can afford to pay for it is law and order.

The Supreme Court has questioned the government's agreement to provide a Z-class category security cover of 33 Central Reserve Police Force personnel to Mukesh Ambani and his family for the payment of 15 lakh a month. "If you provide security (to the common man instead), five- and six-year-olds will not be raped," Justice G S Singhvi said, referring to the horrifying case of a child who has been sexually violated and mutilated in a public toilet in Delhi at about the same time as a CRPF contingent was preparing to move into Antilia, the Ambani's super high-rise home in Mumbai.

While the court's obvious distress about this state of affairs is laudable, it is also belated. Politically-connected individuals – including many who have officially retired or withdrawn from public life, and who face no obvious threat from terrorists or other criminals – have long and routinely been given state protection while the so-called 'common citizen' – for whose benefit and behalf the state is supposed to exist, to begin with – is left helpless.The anomaly – of the state protecting itself and its own representatives, such as politicians and officials, while leaving ordinary citizens dangerously vulnerable – was brought tragically to the forefront by the lethal gang rape of the young woman that the TOI named Nirbhaya. Had police surveillance and protection in Delhi been more equitably distributed between so-called VVIPs and the common folk – the aam admi, or the 'mango people' as one such VVIP disdainfully called them – Nirbhaya might well have been safe and alive today.

The first duty of a state, any state, to its citizens is that of protection. The state is Hobbes's 'Leviathan', to which individuals submit their freedom in return for security from the lawlessness and disorder of nature where life is 'nasty, brutish and short'. A state which, by implication, tells its citizens to protect themselves as best as they can because it can no longer ensure their safety – unless they are rich enough, or have enough political clout, to pay for it, one way or another – ceases to have the right to call itself a legitimate state.

It is often said that there are two Indias: the India of the haves and that of the have-nots. Similarly, we have those who are clearly above the law, which they treat as any other purchasable commodity. And there are those who remain below the law, a luxury which they cannot afford to buy.

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Source: http://blogs.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/jugglebandhi/entry/protect-yourself