Antillia.

The name of a legendary island in the west of Portugal and Spain, resting in the Atlantic Ocean, pictured in the map as almost a complete rectangle. At times it was also connected with Isle of Blessed and Fortunate Island: pious island according to Greek mythologies, considered as a paradise for the brave mortals. Nevertheless the origin of the name ‘Antillia’ is still not sure. We definitely don’t know from where this word is derived but this word is getting quite a spotlight in India and abroad now a days. You might have got the idea till now what I am about to talk here, if not then it’s also the name of a 27 story building, more like a royal one, located at Altamount road in south Mumbai, belongs to the richest Indian Mukesh Ambani. With all the world class amenities that can be thought of, having a base area of more than 4000 sq mt. with overall cost being more than 8000 crores,  it’s the most expensive house known to the modern humanity.

With the house got completed recently, it has caught everyone’s eye varying from people driving Swift to people in the backseat of Audi, from media to the corrupts everyone is talking about the opulence show from this Reliance chairman. People in India are divided with their thoughts on this mansion. I remember some of the excerpts from various print media and telemedia condemning Mr. Ambani for his newly built palace. There was a statement made by Mr MMS when this house started getting attention was related to the salaries of Indian CEOs, he believes that Indian CEOs are overwhelmingly paid and they should reckon about their salaries, as this is not morally correct to take the remuneration as high as 10000 times of per capita income of the country. The point made definitely has a meaning, as we live in a country where still more than half of the population lives in abject poverty with dejected dreams where lacuna between rich and poor has widened a lot and still widening. There is still a horde among the 1.20billion who struggle to earn their daily meal. If in such locale you show off your abundance, it’s not considered ethical being part of the same society. This point was discussed quite a time by our highly immature, publicity hungry, media too to go on few more days with a news for big-guns savvy public. After all the house also carries a reputation of a celebrity, and why not, it belongs to a celebrity too. But Mr MMS must have forgotten while making this statement that we are watching almost daily a new scam by his peers and which is making his peers to take much more than this without any hard work as done by Mukesh Ambani.

Being so much discussed everywhere; everyone wants to talk something about it now. We have a unique way of discussion anyways we can discuss on any damn topic without knowing much about it, provided that it is initiated by some one else. We improvise our speaking skills on the spot and can present our views on an alien subject too. Most of the times those are not our thoughts that we speak, rather we make our minds by listening to others and we force our minds to think in that direction in which others are thinking, without knowing the authenticity of the subject and assertions we make on it. Subjects that get attention are generally those which deal with life of others, like a tape alleged to have personal talks of Amar singh and Bipasha, breakups or starts of relations of celebrities, which we admire, Cricketers getting married or analogous to those. These are mainly the issues exaggerated by our value loosing media to gain public attention and to increase their brand. We being the busiest peoples on the earth know only what our media shows to us. We are very much untouched by other facts till those are exposed to us. For an instance: many of us didn’t know about Anna Hazare till we saw that austere personality on our television sets standing for a noble cause. We are just not bothered about existence of such persons in our country until they stand for us again and again. Now all this lack of awareness causes us to believe anything, right or wrong, bestowed upon us. We resist using our own wisdom to decide the credibility of any issue.

Not to forget that media can be biased too, no surprises if they adulterate the facts and present to us because they know very well that most of us don’t use our minds while asserting for a topic. If someone wants to correlate this, just think of the last time when you saw SRK exalted by media for his past movies or something else, was there any IPL publicity needed by him around or any of his new movie was about to release then. Even you can notice nowadays that suddenly Digvijay Singh is in the news most of the time, making ridiculous statement about anything even if he knows it or not. He was sad that no last rituals were performed for the world’s most wanted terrorist, I don’t know if Obama personally called this fellow and conveyed this thing. Think about it for a while that why he is so concerned about a man who is responsible for millions of lives for whom last rituals were not performed because of him. One of the facts is that there are upcoming elections in UP where a major vote bank is of Muslim community and anything done or any statement made which relates to a particular community, certainly last rituals carries ample emotions for any religion, will definitely help to gain popularity in that brigade. I might have taken more than needed examples here to put my point that before making any mind on certain thing one should use his mind too.

Recently there was a news flooded in the media about a statement made by Ratan Tata that Mukesh Ambani’s house shows lack of empathy to the poors. I can bet to the last penny that Ratan Tata can’t make such statement, these are just quotes taken out of context and published. Mr Tata knows what respect they have in the society and they know well how to maintain it. I have never seen this man making any such statement earlier about anyone, and to my belief he won’t do it either. These were just false alarms rang again by the media, which can’t even interpret correctly what someone intended to say. Even Tata’s representatives have said this publically that no such meaning should be drawn and they also threatened to sue the publication responsible for this. But the damage had been done and there was a new topic of interest with everyone.

We only know about the expenditure done on this villa but most of us don’t know that even today Mukesh Ambani works for more than 12hrs a day to earn the life style that he deserves. Owner of one of the biggest industrialist group worldwide, creator of millions of jobs, key player in supporting Indian GDP, one who has taken the name of India to the heights, an ideal for many entrepreneurs, because of him we have an Indian in worlds 10 richest person. This can be taken as an inspiration by anyone to get success in life and make such a reputation for himself or on the contrary this can be argued at just another tea time that why one should earn this much of money and make a show off with it. One can think of the house as a masterpiece of engineering or can think of it as a waste of land where many more could have been accommodated.

Antillia, a 27 story mammoth with a height of 173 meters, one of the masterpieces of Engineering, having a feather in its cap of being the world’s most expensive house having a worth of 8000 crore, which is in our own country, belongs to the richest Indian, must have expected eulogies from every art lover at least, instead of all the negative publicity that it has gained.

While gathering facts for this article I came to know that interior decoration of the house of Praful Patel, our aviation minister, is going on and the house has an enormous area of 1 lakh sq feets which is more than double of the Antillia, but we may not know about expenditure on this ever as he is not a industrialist who have to get his expenses audited and again media can be paid to not to make this news public.

What we know is only what we see, we still don’t know the names holding 100s of accounts in Swiss bank. We don’t know how the wealth of certain politicians grew from few thousands to million dollars in one or two years, we dont know how the budget of commonwealth got up by 1000 crores. For us Bill G is the richest man but what if some unnamed politician posses much more of it already which is not known to anybody. There are many more things to ponder than cursing a man for living in his deserved dream house. Think if only 100 out of 120 million of us got motivated by this man or his house may be and only one or two of them can turn up like him, wont there be ample number of jobs created inside the nation during their course of success.

P.S Please leave a feedback comment below if any.....

One more Love Story .....!!

With the Sun giving hugs to the climate these days and the mercury is about to come out of thermometer, hanging out for the whole day on weekends is not a good option in this summer. Although moving out for some window shopping in the evening proves to be an idle bird watch and you realize that there is something really hot out of the idiot box too. In summer you can see some really exotic and shortest of dress collection around. Evenings were fine but what to do with the whole day of weekends was something I was mulling over.  Books and movies seem to be the best buddies in this situation. After having enough of motion stories, I thought to switch to the printed ones. With a thought to read a book again and then writing about it, earlier was ‘I too had a Love Story’, this time choice was ‘Love Story’ by Erich Segal.  Unlike the earlier one this doesn’t contain a ‘had’ in its title. I remember when I had encountered this past tense, ’had’, in the title first time there was a anxiety within me to know why such a title was used. Fear of the worst while reading it was appeased when I began it but came true while in the last pages of the book. That was a tear jerking moment when all of a sudden everything changed in the life of Ravin, Ravin and Khushi were the lead characters of the book, with the death of Khushi, khushi being Ravin’s fiancée. It was sad to read that book after knowing that the story was real.

This all made me to choose a fiction this time with no past tense or something strange in the title. I opted for ‘Love Story’, title being as simple as it can be and sounds more like a romantic tale. Moreover it was not a giant mammoth sized book and thus everything was in favor of me reading it.

This became quite interesting as soon as I encountered the first line of the book, which phrases the death of a twenty five year old girl. I was surprised at first if all the books I read will kill girls or every love story ends like this only. I also had a thought of saving this girl, as already they are not in sufficient number, by not going deep into the book but knowing that it was a fiction I decided to go with it. So now I knew that the girl here is going to die too, fictionally though but girls should not die even in books. It reduces their count further.

It starts as:

“What can you say about a twenty-five-year-old girl who died? That she was beautiful. And brilliant. That she loved Mozart and Bach. And the Beatles. And me.”

It’s not even easy to say about a book which starts from this line. Best seller of 1970s, a true art, Love Story definitely leaves a imprint on you as soon as you start reading it. Death mentioned in the beginning is quite enough for one’s curiosity to build up for this book. First look and the name act as a curtain raiser for the theme of the book: a romantic fiction that catches attention at first line itself.

Eric Wolf Segal the author of the book has originally drafted this as a script of a screenplay which was sold to Paramount pictures for production of a movie on it. While the film was produced Paramount wanted Eric to write it as a Novel as well, which became the US best seller of its time before the movie was completed.It builds an expectation from the book when you come to know that the Author is a Harvard graduate as a poet and a Latin Salutatorian: the title given in US to the second highest rank person in whole graduating class of a particular discipline. The master’s and doctorate degrees in literature add more feathers to his cap.

Story revolves around two individuals Oliver Barrett IV, the successor of the Barretts and the only heir of the Barretts legacy and Jennifier Cavilleri, daughter of a not so rich baker, but quick witted and charming, she was also a music student at Redcliff. Having a background of wealthy and well reputed Harvard graduates, Oliver also was pursuing his graduation from the Harvard. He meets Jenny at the Redcliff’s library. Conversation starts with a kind of fight among them and ended up with a date between the two. They fall in love with each other. The story nicely depicts their initial days of love. Even short conversations between them are beautifully brightened with thoughts that you feel involved in the story. There are quite interesting conversations of son and father too, Junior and Senior Oliver. Those conversation frames an image of a quite disciplined and obedient son.

After graduation they both decided to marry but Oliver’s father stands against the marriage, which made them to marry against the senior Oliver will. This step severed Oliver IV from his father’s will. The couple started living in a rented house and Jenny chose to work as a teacher. Graduating as a law student with flying colors makes Oliver to get a reputed job. With everything going fine now, there was a sudden shock when Jenny was diagnosed with Leukemia. 

Limited financial flow with their jobs was just enough to sustain them and desperate need of money arises as Jenny was admitted to the hospital. Book describes emotions and feelings with each and every conversation between its characters. One of such heartrending conversation is when Jenny speaks to her father about her funeral. Now in the story the first statement qualifies with the death of Jenny. End leaves you with mixed feelings of joy, when their romance was at peak in the initial days and sorrow when life became cruel to them and the girl died finally.

One of the touching lines said, by Jenny and Oliver to his father in the book which you always remember after reading is “Love means never having to say you are sorry”.

Finally, 4/5 to the book for presenting everything in such a beautiful way, that you tend to complete it. Go for it if you want some short romantic story.