Category: The World

Rain, rivers and glaciers

California found itself in the eye of a storm. The storm has been pounding the daylight out of the state with no restraint. When I say daylight out of the state, I mean it. A quick walk at noon requires flashlights, raincoats and squashy boots.

Umbrellas that hitherto held their spokes up high now cower under the wrath of the skies.

A helpful illustration to drive home the point

This is the second umbrella of mine to suffer this fate. Umbrella sales have been brisk. Stores did not have time to run new price tags raising the price, and resorted to sticking ridiculous prices using scrap paper and licking the back of it for glue.

The rain water has become fast rivers and paper boats meet terrible fates. One tends to stop and muse about fast flowing rivers and slow flowing rivers and hardly flowing rivers. So, what does the world give to innocent ponderings such as this. The kind that could someday change the premise of the World? This.

The world has been mistakenly led to believe that all the glaciers in the Himalayas would melt by 2035.

Himalayan Glaciers Vanish
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6991177.ece

Bopa Uncle and Kreeta Aunty were enjoying the morning sun-rise from their porch house in Darjeeling. Bopa uncle always wanted to impress Kreeta Aunty and randomly pulled studies from his imagination with numbers that appealed to him. He went a bit overboard with the sun glinting and blurted out a bit dramatically perhaps, “By 2035, you take my word, by 2035, all the glaciers in the Himalayas will be gone.”

Kreeta Aunty did what was expected of her and gasped. Little did Bopa Uncle know that his jaunty boast would make it to the Times. So, while the angry skies have been trashing umbrellas and swaying trees, the world finds out that the whole thing about glaciers in the Himalayas was a fib all along.

Sigh!

Jesus Christ or Toast?

Happy New Year folks. 

Those of you who would like to jog your creativity a little bit, please head on to this link.

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/popup?id=2729440

There are a number of bizarre photographs where people see Michael Jacksons and overwhelmingly Jesus Christ.  I called upon your reserves of creativity to spot the Jesus Christ or the Michael Jackson in the pictures. Going by the news item, any bearded face with a sallow look, would qualify as Jesus Christ!

Me? I just see pancakes and grilled cheese sandwiches. What can I say? It is lunch time.

What’s a Bloke to do for some Peace?

I try to slumber through without a post. But the tantalizing world just wouldn’t allow me to go on about the important task of twiddling and spinning my pen on the desk. I mean the Dorothys** of the world have to call and discuss something. Forget the Dorothys, I say. I have discovered the joys of spinning a pen, and nothing is going to distract me from my noble pursuit today.

 

See how it spins?!

pen

Then, there is the important twitter about Obama winning the Nobel Peace Prize. What is that all about? Let the man breathe, let him take his dog for a spin. You can’t straddle a fellow with responsibility like this. Now, he has to go about talking to Taslama Bin Laddoo Boondi about peace, because he won the Peace Prize! I mean, when can he do his job as a President?

 

The man, for better or for worse, I can’t say which, proved to be an excellent orator. Now, grocers want him making speeches on organic produce, islands want him making a discourse on the prudent use of tidal waves. Add to that the strain of making the Peace speeches, what’s the speech writer to do?

I like to imagine that in the past, there were drawings to see the most strenuous jobs in the White House. The chef competed with the Chief Gardener, who competed with the Building Security. In this draw, I would have to vote for Speech Writer. He is already nose down into writing the finest speeches, and now, he is clobbered with peace?

Ah well…spin the pens on your desk for inspiration I say. It is a tough world with tough demands. Mental faculties have to be preserved.  I mean: What’s a Bloke to do for some Peace? Win the Nobel Peace Prize of course.

Let there be Peace!

** For you sticklers, Dorothy is a figment of my imagination, with whom I have interacted in my dreams, if ever.

Birth and Talent

Rahul Gandhi is quoted as being open minded about caste. Laudable and all that. But given the opportunities the man had, if he HAD placed importance on caste – shame on Education! (See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rahul_Gandhi)

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/I-dont-believe-in-caste-Rahul/articleshow/5099167.cms

If you breeze over the comments, you will find folks asking for reservations to be removed too. The point is not that, comments such as “In the future, when you become Prime Minister” concern me. It is not “In the future, if you become Prime Minister”, it is “when you become Prime Minister” like a royal passage of right.

People have to work hard to get to their state of being, in order to be responsible to themselves and to society. This sort of entitlement in a democracy is trying; because we are still stating that birth is better than talent.

Blog Action Day – Climatic Change

Good Morning to you all. *Bows*

Blog Action Day is coming soon (Blogactionday.org)

The topic for the day is Climatic Change. I am here to talk to you all about the sweeping changes the climate has caused in our ecosystem.

Pardon me, but somehow ‘Climatic change’ brings the speechmaker persona in me to the fore. I can see the army of faces looking up at me in School as I rattle in the School Assembly about climate change. That’s just the nature of it. Which brings me to a rather interesting topic. Do schools have assemblies these days?

Anyway, just thought I will reference my link on Al Gore’s documentary: An Inconvenient Truth https://nourishncherish.wordpress.com/2006/12/26/an-inconvenient-truth/

Be good and nice to Bhooma Devi and all that while I siddle off to do something. I don’t want to come here and find that an icecap fell off the shelves of Antartica before I take the little one there to show her the Penguins.

The beauty of questioning

I spend a lot of time vacillating between an agnostic secular person and a religious person, who doesn’t believe 80% of what my religion has become over the ages. Suffice it to say that the days I spend in my former state far outnumber the days I spend in the latter.

Here is my problem: I like to believe in the power of hope and if belief is what brings hope, I am all for it. On the other hand, over the ages, I can categorically state that religion has done more damage to mankind than good. The moment religion ceases to be a personal experience, I can see it wreaking havoc.

I quite like the idea of finding yourself. Easily, that is the path taken by all the “founders” of religion – be it Buddha or the Sufi saints of Islam or the Bhagavad Gita. But how does one explain “finding oneself” to the masses? That is where the problem begins. So, the explanation became finding one’s moral conscience – still good. But a few centuries later, moral conscience evolves into a set of rules written by the elitist community of the religion. Slowly, the congregation becomes more of a unifying force, one to forge your identity with, than to use as a tool to better yourself.

At my wedding, the priest was a person who was my grandfather’s friend. My grandfather was a kind-hearted, generous, loving, able teacher, caring husband/father and he was a pious man. But somehow, whenever people described him, they put his piety ahead of his other virtues. This priest came to my wedding and said he would do all it takes in his power to make sure that great man’s grand-daughter lived a fantastic life, and put us through the most grueling wedding ceremony in recent times. I didn’t understand more than a few words of what was said – there was no need for me to elongate the proceedings by asking for clarifications in between on a hot day in front of the fire, with no food in my stomach. The ceremony lasted a good 9 hours of listening to things I didn’t understand. Everyone who came to congratulate me, said the priest was excellent, he hadn’t missed a single thing – who would understand how my intestines were reacting at the time? Which religion?

What I am trying to say is, some people are ritualistic by nature – to them, rituals become religion – this isn’t orthodoxy, this is just an interpretation of their own religion. It is also show-case worthy.

I have spent my growing years chanting some prayers that my mother taught me on the way to the school in the morning, as we ran for the train. That is all I know today, and probably that is all I will ever know – who knows? Every now and then, I think that just because I am part-agnostic, I should not deny the experience of a religion to my daughter. So, I take her to the local temple. She asks a million questions along the way as usual. We are in the temple, and she looks at the statues and asks – “If Ummachi (God) made everything and gave us everything, how come he isn’t even moving?”

I savoured the question – the beauty of questioning always delights me. I am sorry that when it comes to religion so few people still have the power of questioning left in them.