The wrong altar

The problem with us modern humans, is that we have, for the last few hundred years, chosen to worship at the altar of Intelligence than that of Wisdom!

Sad. And it is proving disastrous for the world.

And there's Hope....

Barack Obama's election as U.S President could well be a turning point, not just for that nation, but for the entire world as well. I have to emphasize the word could, because of the possibilities that now exist to finding a solution for the world's climate change problems, provided it is not just empty rhetoric of another smooth-talking politician. I honestly think that this man means what he says most of the time, but you never know. And I have been wrong before! :-(

From a President who didn't believe climate change existed to one who has already articulated his views emphatically, is a significant and huge transformation waiting to happen, since a lot hinges on how the largest economy and the biggest polluting nation tackles emissions and leads the way to making this planet greener and cleaner. Here's keeping fingers crossed.

The Art of Losing!

The art of losing is something all true winners know about. John McCain, in his wonderfully gracious and moving speech, demonstrated just that. Even if one was a Barack Obama supporter, it would have been hard not to salute this man for the way he has conducted himself so far after losing a bitterly fought presidential election.

In the end, despite the crushing defeat, John McCain proved himself to be a worthy opponent for a man whom the world is already calling a once-in-a-generation leader. Nice too, to see the respect these two men have for each other's achievements despite their political differences, and their common belief that their country comes first.

Wish we could see more of that in Indian politics!

A great way to commute....

I took the MRTS for the first time 10 days ago. I've been wanting to do this for a few years, but didn't get around to it. So a couple of Sundays ago, I took the train from Kasturba Nagar/Madhya Kailash Station to Park Town (Central Station). Took me all of 17 minutes to get to the destination!! Fantastic! Especially knowing it takes me an hour these days to travel by car from T.Nagar to Besant Nagar in peak hour traffic!

I clicked some pictures. Interesting view of the city from an elevated platform....

View from Kotturpuram. The Adyar Bridge can be seen.

A flute-seller in one of the stations.

Passing through Mylapore...

The train travels right behind the Marina Grounds, a popular venue for cricket matches.

View of the Chepauk Palace (?)

The Cooum River....the Napier Bridge can be seen in the distance.

Probably, the most famous landmark in Chennai!!

Am amazed that the government is not doing enough to promote MRTS....this is definitely the future! The badly maintained, tourist-and-traveller-unfriendly stations hardly inspire confidence for a city that is supposed to be the gateway to the South.

Neverthless, I recommend a trip for all those who haven't tried it so far!

There's no such thing as Society!

I was no great fan of Margaret Thatcher, but I agree with her views expressed sometime in the late 1980s, that I chanced upon to read. So very relevant to India which is ruled right now by the most unscrupulous, near-sighted bunch of politicians that form this unholy alliance called the UPA. But the people get the kind of rulers they deserve, I guess.

This is what Thatcher said back then:

"I think we have gone through a period when too many children and people have been given to understand "I have a problem, it is the Government's job to cope with it!" or "I have a problem, I will go and get a grant to cope with it!" "I am homeless, the Government must house me!" and so they are casting their problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first. It is our duty to look after ourselves and then also to help look after our neighbour and life is a reciprocal business and people have got the entitlements too much in mind without the obligations.."

A very bold thing to say, for a Prime Minister of a country. That too for a democratically elected one. I can't imagine a single politician in India to have the guts to say something of this nature in public.

The problem with socialism, if it is not checked, is the growth of (more often than not) the apathetic, irresponsible individual. Consider this:
- A man loses his money that he unwisely, against all conventional wisdom, invested in a dubious firm. He then organizes protests, dharnas and the like along with similarly affected people demanding that the government intervene and help get the money back.
- A man takes up a dangerous assignment in a war-torn country like Afghanistan, Iraq etc., knowing fully well the risks involved. No sooner does he get abducted by militants, than do his family appeal to the government (usually with the help of a paparazzi-like media) to get him released. If he gets killed, the families even demand compensation, as if the man died serving the armed forces! And to make things worse, the government even pays them using tax-payer's money.

All too familiar happenings in this country. Of course, I do know that people do take up jobs of this nature because of they badly need the money, but why should the government (actually tax-payers!!) pay for an individual's folly?

This over-dependence on government results, like it has right now in India, in producing a "robbing-Peter-to-pay-Paul" brand of politics. This, is then extended by political parties to offer free-power, free-TV sets etc., to bribe people into letting them remain in power, so they can loot more, which in turn allows them to become more powerful and these policies, till the country is run-down completely. Sort of like the Story of Ten Men....

Politicians will not change policies, only their colours to suit the circumstances, so they can survive and hold on to power. It is the people who need to take the required responsibility of running their lives (and that of their families) and let the politicians do what is expected of them in a good democracy. To govern. Take care of law and order, justice, education and healthcare. Nothing else.

The Education Conundrum

There have been a great many debates about the purpose of education, and its relevance, in today's world. Education as we see it in conventional schools and colleges in the western world and in those nations elsewhere where the western style of education has found root. Like in India, for instance. A system loved and encouraged by most upwardly mobile families the world over.

Martin Luther King said that the purpose of education should be moral and not just utilitarian. He said, "To save man from the morass of propaganda, in my opinion, is one of the chief aims of education. Education must enable one to sift and weigh evidence, to discern the true from the false, the real from the unreal, and the facts from the fiction." How true! There are many other scholars, philosophers, thinkers who have warned about the dangers that declining standards of education can have on society, and indeed the world at large. The struggle to save this planet from destruction is basically a fight against a kind of thinking (influenced by a certain kind of education) that has caused/still causing the mess in the first place.

Sadly education has been reduced wholly to ONLY satisfy a practical need. Which is to gain economic prosperity and to do little else. This bull-in-a-china-shop approach towards gaining wealth that modern man seems to have has ensured we are already paying the price for going down the wrong road for the last couple of hundred or so years. Probably from around the time of industrial revolution. Yes, there were many benefits as a result of industrialization, but unfortunately man's arrogance led to hitherto unexpected levels of exploitation of the planet by force that he now had gained. I talked briefly about the role of religion in this in one of my earlier blogs.

Most academic institutions today seem to be successful only in mass-producing low-thinking, selfish, mind-numbed individuals incapable of having any foresight or vision. To have a vision for the future one has to be a leader. To produce leaders we need education that, like Martin Luther King said, should be both utilitarian and moral. One that will build character and culture. One that will lead not to just knowledge and intelligence, but to Wisdom. So there.

Eleanor Roosevelt said, "A nation must have leaders, men who have the power to see a little farther, to imagine a little better life than the present. But if this vision is to be fulfilled, it must also have a vast army of men and women capable of understanding and following these leaders intelligently. These citizens must understand their government from the smallest election district to the highest administrative office. It must be no closed book to them, and each one must carry his own particular responsibility or the whole army will lag."

This is without doubt most relevant for all of us who continually lament about the quality of politicians we end up electing and yet choose to send our children through a system of education that excels in producing precisely those kind of individuals.

Good culture is a result of good education and good values. Good culture protects and heals all that is considered sacred, and in turn automatically protects the world around it. Something that ancient cultures were extremely successful with; a legacy that is getting rapidly eroded by us today.


(Click here to read a brilliant speech on the same subject by David Orr, an environmental educator in 1990!)

Balkanization of India?

Gandhi was a remarkable man, a truly once-in-millennium human being. I say so, not because he led a successful freedom struggle against the British, but for uniting a totally disparate group of people who live in this land we call India, a land with such unparallelled diversity of cultures, customs, races, languages.

Yeah well, we have all read this in history books alright. But the above fact has never hit me as hard as it has in the recent months. Have no idea exactly why, but maybe I can blame it on a heightened level of awareness (that I hitherto did not possess) in perceiving what's going on in this country.

The concept of India as a nation cannot have happened but for Gandhi, because it must have been an audacious thought to even imagine such a diverse bunch of people could decide to be citizens of the same country! It was his legacy (and a few of his followers') that India managed to stay as one nation, although one could see cracks developing on the walls all these years.

Today, in 2008, one just has to survey the political scene in this country to see how fragmented things have become. The last decade or so, has shown that the days of the single-party rule is over and smaller and smaller groups have started wielding power. The rise of regional parties with distinctly regional interests such as the BSP, the SP, the Telugu Desam, the BJD, the PMK etc., have shown that the national identity is fast being replaced by a regional one. And the regional identities are getting smaller and smaller as has been shown by groups such as TRS in Andhra Pradesh that is demanding a separate statehood for the region.

Could this be the start of the balkanization of India? A few years earlier, I would have laughed if someone had ventured to suggest the idea that India, on the cusp of an unparalleled economic boom, faced a threat to it sovereignty. But today am not so sure. Heck, it is scary to think that this might even happen in my lifetime!

When the two of major news headlines I read today happened to be about...
a) the shameless overtures made by the UPA and the NDA to criminals and
b) the communist party's senior leader proclaiming Mayawati as a possible future PM if the UPA government falls
....I have a empty feeling in my stomach.

It is too easy to blame our politicians for the mess like so many of us do simply because we just hate being accountable. It's easier to have a bogeyman, a whipping boy, to fix the blame on and go on living our lives showing just the right amount of self-righteousness and indignation whenever it is required socially. The rot is too deep and the blame lies on all of us who have chosen to each time put self over the nation and think it is somebody else's job to govern and rule.

The wrong kind of people get to the top in politics because they are allowed to by an electorate that is either ignorant or ill-informed or selfishly-motivated and narrow-minded. When a society elects its leaders for all the wrong reasons, what hope can there be for its survival.

When there is rotting carcass for dinner, expect the vultures not butterflies.

What was that again?

I read this news item on Yahoo! this morning - "Pope calls on religions to unite against terrorism" - with a feeling, I can only describe as incredulity.

How does the head of one of the world's largest religions - one that is built around a central belief that it is superior to all other religions and whose practitioners are led to believe that "the Christian way is the only way to God" - hope to "unite" religions??

One would think that someone who goes by the title "the Holy Father", would have the wisdom to realise that you can't unite people by rhetoric alone. Till the Church (or indeed, any other similar religious body) starts practicing inclusiveness and tolerance towards other faiths, it will remain just that!

Who, or what, created the Mess?

The planet's in a mess! Pollution, environmental degradation, global warming, ozone layer depletion....Most of us know this, but right now choose to look the other way and hope someone else will figure things out and clean up the mess. Hoping, maybe, Al Gore or some other messiah will save us from impending destruction!

Like many, many people who wonder about where the human race went wrong, I too have done my share of thinking. Like in the case of the most complex problems, the answer did not come straight away, but emerged like a scenery viewed through a fog. I must say, the picture is still not fully formed, but I think I am beginning to see it.

It's funny, but modern man (primarily from the western world) mocked, scoffed (continues to do so) at ancient, tribal cultures that existed all over the world for being "backward". The empowered western world, immediately after the industrial revolution, set about conquering, destroying, annhilating other nations culturally, socially, environmentally... This is true of all that happened in Africa, Australia and the rest of Oceania, the Americas and Asia. This much is common knowledge and everyone knows this.

My attempt here, is not to recount history, but to drive at what made these men behave the way they did - completely subjugate and destroy cultures, enslave people and most importantly plunder the natural resources of this planet, wipe out entire habitats and animals leaving behind a mess that nations/governments are struggling to deal with??? What kind of thinking results in such behaviour??

I tried coming up with some answers:

a. The western man was arrogant in belief that all other cultures, beliefs and religions were inferior to his own and therefore not worthy of respect.
b. His total lack of understanding of nature and the way it works! Something that most ancient, tribal cultures possessed. (After all these very same cultures did a very good job protecting the planet for thousands of years till the white man took over in the last couple of hundred years!)

And then I read this from the white man's Holy Book:
Genesis 1.26

Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”

and this...

Genesis 1.28

God blessed them; and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”

Rule over? Subdue? See the connection?

Need I say more???

No Country for Old Men

Wonder what has happened to film makers in Hollywood the last decade or so. Many of them seem to have become prisoners of an all-pervasive style of film-making that seems to be the norm these days. One that is over-stylized, pretentious and self-indulgent.

No Country for Old Men was a big disappointment! I loved one of Coen brothers earlier creation Fargo, so was curious to watch this movie. (Fargo had brilliant performers in William H. Macy and Frances McDormand; the latter winning a well-deserved academy award for her performance.) The movie has great cinematography - the desert-landscape captured beautifully - but that's about it.

The killer in No Country for Old Men roams around freely killing people at will - in motels, highways, practically everywhere usually blowing them with a bazooka-like gun and/or, what Wikipedia informs, is a captive bolt pistol (need to thank the Coen brothers for introducing the audience to this charming weapon of destruction!). No one sees him or reports him - he walks into a motel, guns down people and calmly walks out.

Another bounty hunter (Woody Harrelson) mysteriously tracks down the character played by Josh Brolin, but we are not told how. He also, on his own, zeroes in on the exact spot of the satchel containing money that the latter hurriedly throws near the U.S-Mexican border. How, we again do not know. The movie is full of such flaws and silly mistakes. The directors seem to have got so engrossed in the making a thriller where the main characters play a cat-and-mouse game, that they seem to have thrown common sense and logic out of the window.

Javier Bardem, has won an Oscar for best supporting actor for this performance which at least a hundred other actors in Hollywood could have sleep-walked through. He plays an unemotional, deep-voiced, malevolent killer with no special flair. And they denied Leonardo DiCaprio the same award for his wonderful performance in that wonderfully quirky movie What's Eating Gilbert Grape!

My idea of a good thriller is The Sleuth, a 1972 movie with Lawrence Olivier and Michael Caine. Brilliant performances by both actors, with edge-of-the-seat excitement without the blood and gore and excellent screenplay.

I wish Hollywood would stop this crazy obsession with style and technique and revert to good, solid film-making where the story and screenplay take precedence.

YMCA

Last Sunday morning I visited the YMCA complex. This sports complex in Nandanam, Chennai (Madras) was a real life-saver for us kids who grew up in the neighbourhood. Life in the 1970s and the early 1980s was a time was a TV-less, internet-less existence. Which meant we had to spend time playing outside.

The YMCA was (and still is) a sprawling campus with a sports college, a school and multiple grounds meant for different sports disciplines - football, track and field, hockey, cricket etc. To the south of the campus lies the lush green golf club belonging to the Cosmopolitan Club and to its east/south-east flows the Adyar river.

We hung around a lot, especially during summer holidays, on the banks of the river, chucking stones into it, climbing trees, trying to catch a lizard or try to catch some fish with improvised fishing "rods" (made up of a string and a bent safety pin with earthworms as bait!) from a nearby artificial pond! Didn't think much about cruelty to animals and stuff...But that apart, it was a wonderful time! At the risk of sounding cliched, it does seem a long time ago when life seemed, well, different.

I was so glad that very little has changed, although one can see that the place seems a little run-down and less vibrant, primarily because I didn't see many kids around.

The YMCA offers a membership (the parking attendant quoted some ridiculously low figure that I need to verify) to use its facilities. I intend taking up one so I can maintain the connection to this wonderful place that was such an important part of my childhood!

90 orbits around the sun

One of the great science fiction writers of our time and visionaries Arthur C. Clarke is dead, aged 90.

Growing up in the 1980s, when the genre of science fiction was a lot more popular than it is today, Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury were some of the authors who were popular. Great books, ultimate fantasy and adventure that was space travel would transport me to a different realm. God, am I glad that I grew up at a time when television didn't dominate our lives!! Coincidentally, I am reading one of his books, The Garden of Rama, right now. And who can forget the magical 2001: A Space Odyssey.

I am glad Arthur C. Clarke lived long enough to see Richard Branson's brave attempt at space tourism. Check out, what is probably, his last video message on his birthday in Dec 2007.

Farewell space traveller and thanks for all the magic!

The story of ten men

(P. Chidambaram's recent budget, in which he waived an unprecedented 60,000 crores of farmer debt, reminded me of this story (which I have reproduced below) I read sometime ago. Looks like things in India are headed in this direction!)

Suppose that every day, ten men go out for beer and the bill for all ten comes to $100.

If they paid their bill the way we pay our taxes, it would go something like this:

The first four men (the poorest) would pay nothing.
The fifth would pay $1.
The sixth would pay $3.
The seventh would pay $7.
The eighth would pay $12.
The ninth would pay $18.
The tenth man (the richest) would pay $59.

So, that's what they decided to do.

The ten men drank in the bar every day and seemed quite happy with the arrangement, until on day, the owner threw them a curve.

"Since you are all such good customers," he said, "I'm going to reduce the cost of your daily beer by $20."Drinks for the ten now cost just $80.

The group still wanted to pay their bill the way we pay our taxes so the first four men were unaffected. They would still drink for free. But what about the other six men - the paying customers? How could they divide the $20 windfall so that everyone would get his 'fair share?'

They realized that $20 divided by six is $3.33. But if they subtracted that from everybody's share, then the fifth man and the sixth man would each end up being paid to drink his beer.

So, the bar owner suggested that it would be fair to reduce each man's bill by roughly the same amount, and he proceeded to work out the amounts each should pay.

And so:

The fifth man, like the first four, now paid nothing (100% savings).
The sixth now paid $2 instead of $3 (33%savings).
The seventh now pay $5 instead of $7 (28%savings).
The eighth now paid $9 instead of $12 (25% savings).
The ninth now paid $14 instead of $18 (22% savings).
The tenth now paid $49 instead of $59 (16% savings).

Each of the six was better off than before. And the first four continued to drink for free. But once outside the restaurant, the men began to compare their savings.

"I only got a dollar out of the $20,"declared the sixth man. He pointed to the tenth man," but he got $10!"
"Yeah, that's right," exclaimed the fifth man. "I only saved a dollar, too. It's unfair that he got TEN times more than I!"
"That's true!!" shouted the seventh man. "Why should he get $10 back when I got only two? The wealthy get all the breaks!"
"Wait a minute," yelled the first four men in unison. "We didn't get anything at all. The system exploits the poor!"
The nine men surrounded the tenth and beat him up.

The next night the tenth man didn't show up for drinks, so the nine sat down and had beers without him. But when it came time to pay the bill, they discovered something important. They didn't have enough money between all of them for even half of the bill!

And that, boys and girls, journalists and college professors, is how our tax system works. The people who pay the highest taxes get the most benefit from a tax reduction. Tax them too much, attack them for being wealthy, and they just may not show up anymore. In fact, they might start drinking overseas where the atmosphere is somewhat friendlier.

Wisdom of the Buddha!

Read this while browsing randomly...Simply beautiful!

"Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it.
Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many.
Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books.
Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders.
Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations.
But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it."

The Buddha

Inverse paranoid?! - What the hell is that?

"I have always been the opposite of paranoid. I operate as if everyone is part of a plot to enhance my well-being". - Stan Dale - founder of the Human Awareness Institute.

I had never heard about this Stan Dale till I read this quote by him in a great book that I am reading right now called "The Success Principles" by Jack Canfield, co-author of the Chicken Soup series of book.

But WHAT A THOUGHT!!

Pranab's faux pas

Several articles have been written in newspapers in connection with the release of Kashmir Singh, who languished in Pakistani jails for 35 years. I read one such article in Deccan Chronicle that talked about other people who could still be imprisoned in jails across the border and the attempts made by their families to get them released.

Turns out, some members of these long-suffering families met External Affairs Minister, Pranab Mukherjee to submit a petition. In response, the Congress veteran is supposed to have asked, "Do you really believe they are still alive?" A lady, whose husband went missing during the 1971 war, is reported to have tersely said, "But Minister, you are still alive." (The missing man is around the same age as the minister.)

And they gave this man the Padma Vibhushan this year!!

Sham of the Year!

My knowledge about Economics was fuzzy for a long time and even today, consider myself no expert. But even I was shocked by the absurdity of the sham that was the Budget 2008!

P. Chidambaram says "the budget will stimulate growth and investment" and his boss, the honourable Dr. Manmohan Singh calls it an "outstanding budget". The latter has a doctorate in Economics, so I guess the ordinary man is not supposed to question his credentials. But how does one manage to say such things with conviction after deciding to simply write off an incredible Rs. 60,000 crore?!! Either these men must be geniuses who deserve this year's Nobel Prize for Economics or, simply, people who are willing to sell the country down the river just for the sake of remaining in power.

I am tired of hearing people say what a nice gentleman our Prime Minister is, how he shines through in a Cabinet dominated by petty politicians etc. But a leader and, more importantly a patriot, is someone who has not only knowledge, but the vision and the strength to go against the flow and take tough decisions irrespective of electoral gains. Not someone willing to so shamelessly pander to the wishes of an ignorant and power-hungry bunch of colleagues and political allies!

A man has to be judged by his actions and not by reputation. History, in all probability, will judge Manmohan Singh as the man who presided over a government that presented a Budget that was shocking for the sheer audacity with which it has attempted to fool the people of this country! It will be ironical for a man who was instrumental in liberalising the economy and putting the country on the growth path.

Only in India....

Find out why students went on a rampage in Bihar recently. Amazing!

The Archbishops' gaffe

The head of the Roman Catholic church in Chennai, Archbishop Chinnappa came up with a shocker recently. Speaking on Christmas eve, he urged "all Christians to send their children to only Christian schools". Interestingly, another Archbishop (of Changanacherry in Kerala) issued a similar statement a few days earlier. Obviously this is not a coincidence and there is more to it than meets the eye.

If the statements made by these two men of cloth are not communal, then what is? How absurd can they get?! This, when progressive thinking warrants building an inclusive society. What next, similar statements exhorting Christians to eat only in restaurants run by fellow-Christians? Maybe a directive to all Christians that they should seek employment only in Christian organisations? (So goodbye to the Tatas, Reliance, Infosys, Wipro?) Where will these gentlemen draw a line, when it comes to this kind of thinking? What happens when every religious group starts thinking the same way?

Dangerous, regressive thinking. The sort that is not conducive for a secular society and one that needs to be condemned with the contempt it deserves!

Buddha's enlightenment!

Gautama Buddha attained enlightenment after meditating under a Bodhi Tree.

Looks like Buddhadeb Bhattacharya, Chief Minister of W.Bengal, and a man named after the Enlightened One, too has attained some enlightenment of sorts! Only it is not clear whether he too meditated under a tree or just woke up from some Rip Van Winkle-kind-of slumber, only to see that the world looks and works differently than in the dreams he had been having!

He says "We have to accept capitalism; where is State capital? This is being realistic in a situation where there is no alternative.” Amazing isn't it? What a profound discovery!! What's next I wonder...a discovery that "people need to work, else they won't be able to earn money" or some such nugget of wisdom?

It's amusing, that when I googled for this, I found The Hindu, a leftist newspaper I no longer read, has reported this! Read the Economic Times article that talks about his predecessor's support for the same.

I think the government's job is to govern. Provide law & order, justice, good education, healthcare etc. Not to interfere with business or "provide" jobs! The latter simply won't work because there's no accountability with the government to run anything efficiently and profitably. We have seen wonderful examples of this in the last several decades and everytime we come in contact with those denizens occupying important positions in those Public Sector companies and government offices. If there is a bunch of more uncaring, corrupt and dehumanised species of humankind available anywhere in this planet, do let me know. This is what socialism ends up creating. Am not saying, that there are not any well-intentioned socialists who mean well, but the system just does not work. And if intentions are everything, then all men are Mahathma Gandhi and all women, Mother Teresa!

No, the yardstick for measuring a succesful state is to, well, see if it has succeeded, for God's sake!! If, after 30 years of ruling the state uninterruptedly, the Communists still haven't got their act together, I don't think they ever will. Hence all these noises about adopting capitalism etc., since all options are fast running out in the rapidly-changing world.

To put it in a nutshell, socialism does not create (or provide opportunities for) wealth-equity as well as capitalism does. Why else did the USSR and the left bloc collapse and not the USA, Germany, Japan and the rest? Mind you, capitalism is not a perfect system and has a lot of problems. But to borrow Churchill's views on democracy and use the same logic, "Capitalism is the worst form of economics except for all those that have been tried before".

Meanwhile, the show, for the CPI (M) and other like-minded political parties, must go on.