Saturday, August 24, 2013

Male Bashing & Delhi Rape.

This is an old write-up that was left un-published.

29th December 2012: The young paramedic student, raped and beaten up by six men in a moving private bus and thrown out of it after 30 minutes of torture along with her male friend, succumbed to massive internal injuries after battling with them for over 12 days.

This is one of the most shocking news of a young student dying at such a tender age, because of brutality of a fellow human being, sexually.
 
My sincere condolences to the girl and sympathy for the family. I would be first to publicly hang the culprit if given a chance.

Having said that I wonder why we are ignoring that the boy could have been dead too. Few weeks back a boy was stabbed to death by the eve-teasers near Kalyan, Mumbai when he tried to intervene physically. Fistfight led to stabbing and death. The girl is safe.

So is it any safe for men? It is unfortunate that feminists and social media is taking this to gender in-equality. Gender inequality exists but is irrelevant to both these killings.

These killings are act of crime by anti-social elements. And we should condemn from that perspective of it being a crime, rather than politicizing the matter relating it to gender disputes and a male chauvinist mindset.

Tuesday, August 20, 2013

The big thud! Why your parcels get thrown when couriered.

There have a lot of times I have seen courier guys man-handling and throwing the parcels when it could have been just placed. But who takes that effort? There are so many parcels to be delivered.
courier, blue dart, dhl, fedex, india

Even while boarding flights, when you see out of the window before take-off, you would notice the plight of the bags and parcels being couriered. They are all thrown into and out of the airplane. The bigger muscles throw the longest and hardest.

Yesterday, I realized why the courier companies throw our parcels with care-free abandon.

I was couriering one DVD using one of the best logistic brands - BlueDart. When I approached the counter, I was told to put the DVD in a hard DVD case, and then seal the hard DVD case into a foamed CD mailer.

I went searching for a stationery shop, found one close-by, bought the required plastic DVD case and the CD Mailer envelope. After I sealed the DVD inside, I understood the importance of doing so, and was impressed.

Now the DVD can only break if an elephant decides to weigh himself on it.

With a happy face, I went to the counter and gave the sealed DVD package. In return, he gave an agreement to sign. The agreement said that the consignment is fragile and the courier company takes no responsible if the content of the consignment breaks. I thought, do they really have an elephant traveling with this harmless DVD package?

I tried to argue saying, "This package is no longer fragile. It was fragile when I came to your desk the first time." The counter guy was surprised. Perhaps he has mostly seen consumers signing whatever documents they present to be signed. He had no counter argument to my logic, and referred my case to his manager sitting beside him.

She listened to me, and then bluntly said, "We just move things from one place to another. We are not responsible for breakages". God knows if she really meant to say that. She further added, "DVD is fragile and so you have to sign this agreement in order to get your DVD couriered".

I had to sign. Who has the time to argue with BlueDart employees, who are just following processes instituted by the higher management.

I signed and gave them permission to literally man-handle my courier package with carefree abandon, without any risk of penalty for breakage.

All of us do. Isn't it amazing?