Whodda thunk it!

Let me clarify my position on the God issue. I am an agnostic leaning towards atheism. My childhood has been plagued with screaming fits quite akin to the child in Omen, as my parents asked me to accompany them to the temple. I went through the poonal procedure as a good tam bram, all the while lamenting that there would have been a much better use for the money than spending it on a back-scratcher. (That joke is lost on non brams, so please find the nearest bram and watch them laugh in agreement.)

So when we had sarvajanik festivals, I often complained of the noise pollution, and of the secret vote which clearly granted the responsibility of leading the aarti to the person first to get kicked out of Indian Idol auditions. I hated waking up early for the worships, and reviled being made to sit amidst the purposeful pollution that is so unique to Hindus. I went through childhood and young adulthood hating festivals and anything associated with worship. I know most of you devout ones despise me now, and that I am going to lose a significant portion of the small audience this blog has generated, but I need to get this off my chest. So, before swearing me off as a non-believing infidel, read on.

I have spent a year in the big apple now, where there are enough Indians, but there is no forced festival socializing. I accepted that warmly. As I was going through my roommate's iPod Touch (let the drooling begin) and listening to my new Bose headphones (let the drooling continue), I noticed the Ganesh-aarti on his playlist. The memories flowed as I played it. I played it again. Maybe it was just the sound quality, but I could not get enough of it. I could remember the Ganesh idol in our locality, and the loud songs of worship that blared over the sound system.

I did not believe it possible, but that song is on my playlist now. No, I have not been converted in any way, so all you believers, do not thrust your imaginary friends down my throat. I will say though, that I appreciated the song on a pure artistic level. There is something in the festivals for the non-believers too. That is what makes them so deep and mysterious.

I was told not so long ago, by a person I regard as brilliant, that atheism is a part of Hinduism. I did not see the sense of it on a religious level. I can somehow understand it now on a spiritual level.

So, to the surprise of the people who know me, and to some chagrin of fellow agnostics, Sukhkarta Dukhharta varta vighnachi…

Isn’t it funny…

1. Having a conversation with someone that neither of you wanna have but are continuing for the sake of politeness
   
2. Anyone who knows more than you is a bookworm, and anyone who knows less than you is a fool
   
3. You have a conversation with a pretty girl for over ten minutes before you discover the spinach stuck to your teeth
   
4. As my friend 'buddy' says…your bladder will overfill except when you need a urine sample
   
5. We complain that we cannot keep in touch because we are busy, and we spend most of our time complaining that we are bored
   
6. There are some programs on tv that are so bad that they make you beg for commercials
   
7. Just when you describe someone as an excellent player of the short ball, he makes a gangulyesque mistake
   
8. You look at your watch, and then need to look again one second later!
   
9. The day you actually wake up to your alarm is the day you had an amazing dream involving a celluloid beauty

What goes around…

He could not help but smile. Eight years of marriage had not worn out her body even a bit. She was as beautiful and heavenly as she was on the day he saw her. Lying on the bed in her favorite fetal position, sleeping peacefully, she looked like the angel who could deliver him from the depths of hell. He stared at her as he always did. Everything in the world could be put on hold for the moments during which he looked at her. He was grateful for this mesmerizing quality of her visage that gave him some respite from harsh realities. He always thought he kept his secrets from her to protect her, and to an extent it was right, but the truth was that it was ultimately to protect his sanity. He wanted a part of his life sequestered from the horror that captured most of his life. Just so he could have this fleeting moments of peace, of innocence when he stared at her, sleeping away a tired day with a contented smile on her lips.

It had been years since he slept like that. Now, insomnia gripped him tightly every night, and the only sleep he got was collapse due to complete exhaustion. The very few moments of unconscious relaxation that were bequeathed to him were also plagued with nightmares of his deeds. The double-entry system, he recalled his accounting professor mentioning. The system where every event had checks and balances, and that nothing could go without cross-checking. Every phenomenon had an effect which in turn became a cause for another effect. Nothing went without being recorded and re-recorded.

He had thought it was going to be fine. After all, he had graduated from the Academy with honors in both academic and physical tests. He was trained in eighteen languages where he could be fluent along with some accents which he could apply or not based on his proclivities. He was proficient with almost any vehicle, and could handle any weapon as though he was born to. The one thing that most people struggled with the most, was looking into a person's eyes and killing him without provocation. Not for self-defense, not to protect others, but simply because it was needed, either to maintain the smooth flow of an operation, or to prevent his cover from being blown.

Somehow, he could isolate the graphic horror of what he was doing from the gentle person he was. When he looked at his wife, whether across the candles on a dinner table at an expensive restaurant, or at her peaceful best lying on the bed, he could feel nothing but love and tenderness. She would never know what he was capable of. He was an electronics salesman as far as she knew.

He could remember shades of his fifteen year service as large blurs. Panama city, Marseilles, Unter den Linden, Trivandrum, St. Petersburg, Bogota…so many people, so much trouble. They were all the same no matter what nationality or race they were. They all screamed when he was about to pull the trigger albeit in different languages. They all bled the same way. He was supposedly a soldier for his country, a spy, a covert operative who was given orders and knew better than to question them.

He thought of himself as a patriot, but he knew the short term implications of what he was doing. It was all being recorded somewhere waiting to be balanced. The double entry system never fails. It had come back to hurt him now. Agents were being dispatched at the behest of someone high up. He had deployed agents like these many times. He knew that this was standard procedure when an agent turned rogue. All he had done was refuse to murder a four year old child out of a sympathy that he no longer thought himself capable of. That child had lived to identify him out of a set of pictures, and now he was not only expendable, but expediently so. They were coming for him.

He looked at his wife one more time, whispered his 'I love you' in her ear, and then stepped back. He turned away from her as he pulled the trigger. By the time she woke up she would find him on the floor. He hoped she would not scream too loudly.

Palin’ in comparison

I feel like a parent now; a parent on the day of academic results. As if my first born has brought me a straight-A report card, while the spoilt, self-indulgent other child brought me yet another note to meet the teacher. I feel like saying, "Why can't you be more like him?" Barack Obama chose a six-term senator to be his running mate, a person who has an actual plan for Iraq, a plan which seems almost like fate now, but was laughed at when Joe Biden suggested it. McCain on the other hand has chosen the governor of Alaska to be a heartbeat away from the leadership of the most powerful country in the world.

Sarah Palin, the republican candidate for Veep has been a governor for sixteen months, before which she was mayor of a town with a population of 9000. On one side is a brilliant statesman running for president with a foreign policy expert by his side, while the other side is making a mockery of democracy by putting together a ludicrous ticket of a warmonger who supports tax-cuts for the very rich with a beauty queen fledgling as his running mate. Do we even need to have an election?

Let us look at the very cynicism of this choice. At the republican convention, Sarah Palin made her first major speech where she ass-kissed Hillary Clinton more than anything while pandering to jilted Hillary supporters by saying that she is looking to shatter the glass ceiling. The GOP is banking on the radical Hillary supporters who are so upset with Obama getting nominated that they might switch sides. They refuse to consider that the woman they have commissioned in the hope of attracting votes simply because she possesses pairs of X-chromosomes has been staunchly pro-life. She has given birth to five kids, the last one being diagnosed with Down's syndrome before birth, and she knowingly did not terminate the pregnancy. She is now running all around the country campaigning leaving the four month old child to the care of the lesser able.

I am of the belief that a politician's personal life is off-limits as long as it does not affect his job performance. Somehow, personal lives have become fair-game nowadays. While running for office, you need to purge the closet of any skeletons because you can bet your life that they will be found. The Republican Party claims to be the clean people, the ones who are monogamous, and have values that the others don't have. This is of course, bullshit because values have little to do with alcohol, cigarettes and promiscuous sex. Values have more to do with honesty, integrity, a sense of duty etc etc. However, if you claim to be the party of values and morals, and look down upon others with more interesting sex-lives than you, then you better not get caught not practicing what you preach. Sarah Palin was pregnant before she got married herself. Her seventeen year old daughter is pregnant and is planning to marry the father of the baby, to save her mother's political career more than anything else. Come on, when a couple of people are irresponsible enough to get pregnant, getting them married seems to spoil the situation further.

Don't get distracted by this though. It is the responsibility of the smart ones to focus on the issues more than anything else. There is nothing worse than getting wet over the mud-slinging opportunities that are presenting themselves instead of attacking the opposition on their foreign policy and economic naiveté. McCain wants more tax cuts for the rich, plans to stay in Iraq for the next hundred years, has no plans to tackle global warming, and is patently inept at uplifting the financial situation of the country as the government plans to seize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. These are the issues that every voter must consider and not the window dressing that is being put out.

As I said before, this election, on the issues is like an India-Bangladesh cricket match. Somehow, one cannot be completely confident of an Indian victory.

(This post was possible due to a lot of help and inspiration from blogger Laksh)

Biden his time

Barack Obama has done it. The dream ticket of Hillabarack was always going to be just what it looked like: a dream. John Edwards was a good whitening of the ticket for Obama, but he would not do much to make up for Obama's lack of experience.

Choosing the six-term US senator Joe Biden will not only bolster the experience factor, it is the wisest choice because Joe Biden had the right idea about Iraq from the beginning. He always supported the idea of Iraq eventually becoming three countries belonging to the Kurds, Sunnis and the Shiites. He had this idea of Iraq when a huge part of the intelligentsia was focusing on nation-building. He saw through the "unity" of the Iraqis and understood that it was the dictatorship of Saddam that kept a country filled with people of different ethnicities together.

By selecting Joe Biden, Obama has not only shown courage in not picking a veep from the people closest to him on the Democratic primaries; he has also shown remarkable foresight and understood that Iraq would be the defining problem for the next prez and handling it successfully or even competently would make him a hero. For that, he needed to choose the best foreign policy person he could find...now let's see...could it be Bosnian sniper fire survivor Hillary or ambulance chasing ethanol supporting Iowa pandering John Edwards? There was some talk that Obama might look towards Gen. Wesley Clark to match the military experience of McCain, but this seems to be a wiser decision.

The general election seems to be like an India Bangladesh cricket match. One team clearly has the better players and on paper it should be a slam dunk. Yet, there is this apprehension that every Indian cricket fan knows all too well. Here too, the issues are on Obama's side. He has made excellent contributions to the Energy policy Act of 2005, he co-introduced the Coburn-Obama transparency Act in 2006, and has an actual health plan which, though not covering every person (contrast Hillary and Edwards) seems easier to implement. In this field, he far outstrips McCain. McCain on the other hand was a survivor of the "Keating Five", another card Obama should be playing.

McCain realized pretty quickly that he needed to distance himself from W to even be in the running. He did, however, say that the US needs to be in Iraq for the next hundred years, and he seems like he is going to use his military career to say that he is the best person to defend the country.

Obama needs to be careful here. The public here is like a girlfriend on the verge of tears. One wrong word, one wrong tone of voice, or even a careless expression can push it over the edge. He has counter the military goodwill of his opponent with care. He needs to give him his due for being the pow in Vietnam while highlighting that a military career, distinguished though it may be, does not equip one with the goods necessary to be elected to the highest office in the land.
He needs to point out that McCain is weak on real issues like global warming, the war, the economy and the gas tax holiday that he proposed for the summer was truly for the birds.

Obama has been biding his time taking the high road against all of Hillary's barbs and now McCain's. It is time for him to start some serious mud-slinging and because there are a lot of brain-washed voters too dumb to vote for their own interest and fooled to voting for or against non-issues like prayer in schools.

Paul Krugman wrote an excellent column in the gray lady where he touched upon various items on the Obama agenda which should get him the oval office. From the gas prices to real estate to Biden and such like. He concludes brilliantly by saying, "All it (the Obama campaign) has to do is tarnish Mr. McCain’s image enough so that voters see this as a race between a Democrat and a Republican. And that’s a race the Democrat will easily win."
Sounds easy enough huh...lets see.

Silence

"Speech silvern but silence golden" I had no use for that phrase all through my life. I liked to talk and I loved to listen. I always thought that speaking is an amazing talent that we have and using it helps us interact effectively. Ergo, I loved to talk and liked people who talked a lot.

But something changes when I moved to the US for graduate school. There was a huge change. Suddenly I started wanting to hang around people who spoke less and measured their words. They were more interesting. I started to watch what I said. I mean this not in a weird autocratic way which precludes unpopular opinions. I mean it in the context of superfluous blabbering, and how life is more fulfilling without it.

Less speaking means more time for thinking. At least that's what I think.

As I was pondering this, another thing occurred to me. I started to think about silence in itself, and its properties. The uses of silence are many and cover various emotions. Studies show that the average man takes at least a half hour to understand that his silent significant other is angry with him. Until then, he considers the silent time as a bonus. He actually thinks he is getting some quiet time. After a half hour, it dawns on him that he was being punished while his girlfriend decides that he is sleeping on the couch that night. Silence can mean so many other things.

I have very few friends. The really good friends for me are those with whom I can share long silent periods where each one of us is doing our own work, and we are in peaceful company. The silence there is palpably soothing, and nobody wants to talk at that time. Silence at other times can be used to intimidate. In a stress interview, strict questions are mixed with silent stares to check the mental toughness of the interviewee. There, each moment of that silence can be brutal.

When I did something wrong, I would be afraid of the silent questioning that I got from my father. It was a quiet disappointment which hurt more than a thousand scoldings from my mother. I felt exposed of all my guile and completely surrendered to the silence. Later, of course, as with most things, I got immune to it.

I have learnt to respect silence for its power, tenderness, peace, turmoil and above all, the sheer sound of silence. (A quiet tribute to Simon & Garfunkel)

Hiatus

To my readers:

I don't know why this is happening. I seem to have been blocked right now, what with my laptop completely bailing out on me. Now that I have got a new one, I am not yet ready to start writing. So this hiatus! When the urge to write seizes me again, which I'm sure it will, I will be back to enthrall, question, annoy and entertain. Till then, take care everyone.

No choice?

To set the record straight, I am all for a woman's right to choose. The right and the power to abort a fetus must reasonably rest with the woman who has to nurture it and later, raise the baby. Having said that, I do understand the rules which do not allow abortion after a certain time period of pregnancy unless, continuing the pregnancy would harm the mother-to-be. The Niketa Mehta case where a 26 week pregnant woman wants to abort her fetus is an example of the abortion laws flying in the face of their own principle.

Let us examine the principle behind the pro-choice stance. It basically values the life and the well-being of the woman more than that of the unborn child. This makes sense to me, and this is why I am pro-choice myself. However, abortion is not allowed after a certain period of pregnancy, for many reasons. The stated one is that the woman's life could be endangered. One suspects however, that a 25 week old fetus incites a lot more sympathy than a week old morula. That could be another reason for this caveat in the rule. Abortion will still be allowed at such a juncture if the pregnancy is proven to cause danger to the mother. Again, this rule is consistent. It is favoring the life and comfort of the mother.

In Niketa Mehta's case, her gynecologist told her, very late, that her baby could have serious complications. The gynecologist is not able to prove this conclusively or even state this to almost certainty. The Mumbai High Court ruled that she may not be allowed to abort the fetus, as there is no conclusive proof that either the mother or the baby will suffer serious complications.

Usually when I post something in my blog, I am very opinionated, and I rarely sit on the fence. On this one, I am confused. This post is more of an opening to a discussion than a periodic rant.

I think of this in two ways. Firstly, I feel that the court is wrong considering that the legislative intent of the law is to favor the well-being of the mother. If this woman is sure that her baby is going to be born deformed, shouldn't she have the right to abort her baby? This law favors women who forgot to take the morning after pill and then realized weeks later, that they are pregnant! So, when someone has an actual medical reason to abort, why deny her the right? After all, she is aware of the risks of aborting; shouldn't she have the right to assume those risks? Is this not a free society?

But my thoughts go another way too. When I think of the big picture, as I explore the legislative intent of the law, I think that allowing this woman to abort by a mere suggestion of a possible physical deformity in the baby would set a precedent of bending the rules. The fact that abortion is disallowed after a certain period of pregnancy means that there is some consideration to the baby's health. Also, if one argues that the court is considering the mother's health and the possible risks of a late abortion, then it encroaches on the mother's free choice. Either way, there is a higher interference of the court in the mother's choice here.

Personally, there are a lot of social evils today. Abortion is not one of them. It is a personal choice, and when done reasonably, seems like a balanced, smart decision. In this case, however, I am confused as to what would have been the right decision. I understand that the judges had to follow the law, which is black-and-white here. There was no evidence of probable damage to the baby, and the decision is in accordance with the law. One wonders though, whether the law itself needs amendment here?

There is another nagging question in my mind. Did the Mehtas do an amniocentesis test to figure out the sex of the baby? It is illegal in India, but people find ways of doing it. Would we be surprised if, the test was actually done, and it was going to be a girl? I do doubt that these educated well-to-do people would favor a male child, but who knows?

For tam bram eyes only

This post is merely my presentation of an article in The Times of India, 25^th Aug 2001 by a Ms. Vandana Parthasarthy.

It is dedicated to blue-blooded tam-brahms everywhere!

"You graduated in literature, right?" asked my young cousin. "No, in economics." I hastily clarified. "Economics honours," I added for good measure. The question coming from anyone else would have been innocuous, but from my cousin who was a third year engineering student, it was almost offending. As a card carrying member of the tamilian brahmin community, or tam brams, as the endearment goes, i knew that in his world—and that included his parents, relatives, colony friends, project group, dorm mates—someone who graduated in literature obviously did so because he or she had a learning disability. the poor thing was a freak who couldn't get admission into an engineering college or even a pitiful, but definitely more acceptable, science course. Or worse, such a specimen was a wasted wanton whose desire to do b.a. was an irresponsible, rebellious act, almost akin to joining a neo-nazi like cult group and living on the edge of civilised society.

In any such conversation with a bonafide tam bram, I find myself fervently hoping, that despite falling under the horrifying category of b.a economics, with its connotations of statistics and analysis of numbers and trends, would redeem me a little in their maths-science obsessed eyes.

For a middle class tam bram family (and that means the whole lot of them for all tam brams qualify as middle class if you take outlook and behaviour as parameters), mathematics and science are not merely subjects in the school curriculum. they are a religion. and the dharma of every tam bram student is to master them and pave his way to the heavenly portal of an IIT, or at least to the ordinary portal of a local engineering college, which the family will eventually reconcile to, in the absence of the 'real thing'.

The first time i seriously understood this was when I was in primary school and on one sunny day was gleefully reading out my final exam results to grandpa who was sitting on the porch and frowning in attention. "English: 90 percent, Hindi: 85 percent, social studies: 87 percent..." i prattled on. "How much in maths?" interrupted grandpa. "Maths: 97 percent," I said grinning widely. "What happened to the remaining marks?" was his unexpected reaction. After which he asked me to fetch the question paper, spent the next two hours going through each problem and figured out where i could have lost the precious three marks. "Nothing less than a centum in maths next time." he said finally.

'Centum' is a word unique to the tam bram world, that a child grows up listening to. It is a figure that even if sometimes elusive, is never lost sight of throughout the academic career. centum, maths, science, brilliant tutorials, engineering, iit, b.tech, computer science, usa, financial aid, I-20, student visa, MS, San Jose, California, Oracle, Microsoft, Intel. These words and names are like carefully arranged furniture in the mental landscape of a tam bram boy—and increasingly girl— below the age of 25. Care is taken not to clutter it with anything related to useless stuff like literature, history or art. Show me a tam bram boy who wants to be a fashion designer, vj, historian or air force pilot and I'll show you something wrong in his blood line. For all such are heathen, a blemish on the fair face of the community. Till about 15 years ago, the only heathens were girls who did not sing.

Formidable maamis from the neighborhood would drop in for a casual afternoon gossip session with grandmom and on espying any hapless young girls in the vicinity, would pounce on them with the dreaded entreaty, "oru paatu paadein." (sing a song). A simple three word sentence, you would think, but in maamiland it is a deceptively camouflaged barometer of the girl's cultural grooming and readiness for tam bram society (read marriage market) and her mother's efforts in making her a fine tamilian lady. a tam bram girl's singing talents always have to be on standby, as they could be called upon by anyone no matter what the time of day, nature of the occasion or profile of the audience, by simply uttering the three powerful words, "oru paatu paadein," and woe betide the girl who in shameful ignorance, takes the words at face value, like I once did in the naivete of extreme youth. When the words were uttered by a visiting neighbour, I readily accepted and joyously broke into a popular Hindi film ditty. I had finished the second paragraph when i stopped to check audience response. My mother had a strained, embarrassed smile on her face, grandmom was scowling hard, an aunt hurriedly excused herself and went inside and the venerable neighbour looked so disturbed, I thought she was on the verge of a heart attack. "Well...That was nice, but don't you sing any varnams or keerthanais?" she finally asked, after an awkward silence.

My mother hurriedly explained how in the culturally bereft north we were unable to locate a carnatic music teacher nearby...but hopefully by this summer she would manage to do something about it. that's when I realised that the only music that was expected to pour out of your mellifluous throat where classical carnatic songs. If you didn't know any, you simply shut up and ducked out of sight of visiting maamis. And if like me, you are a non-engineer-non-carnatic-trained loser of a tam bram, you should be drowning yourself in a drum full of idli batter for having wasted this lifetime. And all the best for the next one.

No Smoking? Nose poking!

Bill Gates and Michael Bloomberg want India and China to quit smoking. No kidding...forget the all-consuming war in Iraq, the deficit America is suffering from, the money they owe to most countries, the erosion of international goodwill for America, the increasingly elusive universal health care etc.; two of the USA's most influential men feel that the levels of smoking and other tobacco consumption in India and China are appalling.

"A world without tobacco is a world in which people live longer, and have happier lives," Bloomberg, the mayor of New York has said. First of all, this man is the mayor of the city in which I currently reside, and I must say, it is not perfect. So his desperate desire to purge the third world of tobacco says that there is more to this than meets the eye. This extremely rich pair of businessmen is setting its sights on the two fastest developing countries in the world today.

There is one point they make which catches the eye. They say that as more and more Americans are quitting smoking, the tobacco companies are looking towards developing countries as potential markets. When people rail against tobacco companies, they describe them as evil money-making machines which target the innocent people, and avoid printing warning labels in countries where they are not mandatory. This point is often said, and to an extent it is valid.

One small problem: of the two countries being targeted for cleansing, India has statutory warnings on all cigarette packs and in China, the cigarette companies are nationalized. So the govt. controls everything for them. In truth, the image of the tobacco company as the rapacious money guzzling, "spare no health" pure evil cannot be used as a motivator for the current approach that these two philanthropists are taking.

Let us assume for a second that altruism is the only motivation for this undertaking. They are planning to put down $500 million. Aren't there better ways to spend this money? You can use it to improve conditions in the USA. Why must you interfere with other countries?

Smoking is a poisonous habit which will lead to poor health. That is my opinion. I have to admit though, that smoking is a personal choice. Longevity need not be the key to everyone's life. Some people in the world are willing to make the trade-off and lose a few years of their life in exchange for that cigarette. Even if we don't understand it, can we not respect it? And don't give me the nonsense about how second-hand smoke kills. We are living in a polluted world filled with huge hummers pouring carbon monoxide into the atmosphere, while we are driving to Burger Kings, KFCs and other harbingers of cardiac arrest, drinking till we puke, having bottles of coke with 26grams of sugar in them, but god forbid if someone around us lit up a cigarette! Also, let's not forget that these days, smokers are shunned away and pushed into corners at all places. Anyone who chooses to smoke has to consent to being treated like a second-class citizen.

Second-hand smoke is very rare these days because smoking is prohibited in almost all public places. The very idea that smoking and drug consumption are the bane of our society shows how myopic we are as a people. There is ethnic cleansing happening in so many countries where people are killing their own neighbors for being the wrong religion. People are fighting over the regions in India right now, and we have people clamoring for reservations in academic fields.

During this entire hullabaloo, the last thing we need to be blowing money on is curbing smoking. It is bad enough that Anbumani Ramadoss (read attention seeking Dramadoss) keeps taunting some or the other actor for smoking on screen. Now he is going to get international sanction and support. The USA declared a 'war on drugs' which has turned out to be a complete flop. There is no reason for it to work here.

In India, the govt. taxes the tobacco companies, and this makes cigarettes and cigars expensive. That is the best thing. Make it expensive to smoke in the country. The people who are still interested in it will have to shell out more, and with the proper segregated areas for smoking, they can have a good time without hurting other people. Must we make everything complicated? Isn't this one of those things which can be regulated easily and does not need any policing?

Just a small thought

Sometimes I have the nastiest habit of reading too much into things. On one of my "extremely frustrated" days, I went to Manhattan armed with my Nikon Coolpix S550 and decided to just walk around and look around. The thing is, I walk for hours at a stretch. Then I stop at some quiet coffee shop and have a grande whilst writing something, and then off I go again. If I see something worth photographing, I snap. You might expect the same old-same old photos of Times Square, Empire State Building, Statue of Liberty and the like. But that is a very small part of NYC. Manhattan has so much more to offer that, I feel I will never discover its depths even in many years.

So there I was, walking through Central Park, looking for things to capture, when I saw this amazing view. You can see it in the two amateur photos above. It is a view of a building outside the park, seen from the Park. I was trying to capture this tree stump along with the building in some warped "Nature meets man" way. As you can see in the first pic, the stump is clear, the building is not. I concluded that this was because there was too much light falling on the camera, and placed my hand as a sunshade over the camera. The next pic shows the building clearly but the tree stump takes a beating.

A normal, intelligent person would reach the conclusion that I am truly an amateur and that a professional would have found a way to get both.

I just got another idea. It looked to me like the building was encroaching upon the tree's right to our attention. Only when we starve the building of attention, do we see the tree properly. The way I see it, we have a choice. We can choose whether to blind ourselves by not allowing the light to hit us, just to further the buildings' interest, or we can wake up, embrace the truth, and save nature before we lose it altogether.

The principle at work

The primary argument of any person supporting creationism is that the entire world could not have evolved by chance, or that the principle governing the functioning of living beings cannot be randomness or chance. They have a point. What they ignore is that there is a pattern which determines what has happened and what will happen. The principle is not chance, but is randomness. It is not the randomness that people associate with chance, but that which is associated with probability.

Perhaps a more scientific way of reading this is stability. We all agree that energy is ubiquitous. No one challenges the abundance of energy. Einstein shed light on this matter by saying that the sum of matter and energy in the universe is constant, and all we have is inter-conversion. Consider the case of water in a vessel which is connected to another vessel. The shapes of the two vessels are different, and hence the volumes they can contain are different. Yet, when a liquid is poured into the vessels, it flows between the two vessels such that the height of liquid in one vessel is the same as the other connected vessel. This is not magic, or any miracle, but the property of a liquid governed by pressure due to liquid column as well as gravity, and ultimately the law of conservation of energy.

When you look at the final state of this liquid, the word that comes to mind is stability. It is towards this stability that all forms of matter and energy move. Plants, animals and of course humans cannot escape this fundamental truth. Our evolutionary progress is a spiraling one, which is an ultimate search for stability. Evolutionary biologists use various concepts like natural selection to explain this, but are unable to completely explain the principle behind natural selection. They are on the right track, but cannot give a necessary and sufficient basis for natural selection. Any evolutionary change in a species, or any activity performed by any animal, or any plant is simply not probed enough to deal with why this happens.

Creationists argue that while science can answer the how questions about life, you need a theologian to answer the why questions. To this, the great Richard Dawkins says that why questions are not always legitimate. I do agree, except on this issue. Here, the why question can be answered easily and profoundly by understanding the physical and chemical basis of most phenomena. Consider the second law of thermodynamics: Any spontaneous reaction favors an increase in entropy. This statement is represented to the layperson as "You cannot heat a substance with another substance colder than the first substance." Sounds like a redundant statement, but it is necessary. It implies that there is an inherent need in nature to even things out. Even in case of living beings. There is a tendency to attain an ultimate equilibrium which governs the behavior and changes in most living beings. One question would be, if that is the case, then why don't we reach the equilibrium that we have been threatening to reach for so many years?

I mentioned "spiraling" initially. Now is the time to elaborate. When one event happens and triggers off other adaptive events, there is a spiraling effect as those adaptive events become causes for other events. And so on. Hence, there is no completion of the full circle of cause and effect but an outward spiral which seems to go on increasing. There is a mathematical proof that I will not go into here, which says that the degree of randomness in the universe is forever increasing. Not to be bothered, this does not mean that our universe is haphazard, but in fact, it supports or rather is a bulwark for the theory that this entire firmament is based on natural selection, evening out and processes in search of the ultimate stability.

My new hero Richard Dawkins said that scientists who say they are religious are religious in a more nebulous way than zealots. They do not believe in an old man in the sky or any junk of that sort, nor do they believe in heaven or hell. They are far too smart and too well equipped with the power of critical thinking to subscribe to such naiveté. They believe that no matter how much they find out about life, the universe and the eternal connection, there will always be an unknown. It is to this unknown that they owe their grudging respect and their obeisance. It is this unknown that they consider supernatural, hitherto unconquered, but never unconquerable.

I know I am ending this abruptly and I apologize. There needs to be more, and I will write more as it comes to me.

Dissimilar grief

Tears were rolling down her eyes. He clasped her hands with one hand, and used the other to wipe her swollen cheeks. Even when she was so patently distraught, he could not help noticing the glistening tears on her perfect eyelashes. No matter what her mood, the eyelashes always seemed happy. The eyes always twinkled. It was inexplicable.

He was lost in her poetic beauty while she continued talking. As his eyes rolled towards her lips, he noticed that they were moving.

He regrouped his thoughts and refocused on the conversation. It was too much for her, she said. She was trying her best to reconcile her guilt for not loving him. She had forced herself to think that she could play this game forever, but now, she could see the truth clearly.

He knew all this. She had explained it all over the phone. He wondered why women needed to reiterate their feelings ad nauseam. It was probably guilt, he thought. Why else would she repeat something exactly as she had said it before?

He could not be blamed, he thought, for being mesmerized by her physical allure. The relationship had lasted a year, and he would miss her physical vitality the most. Maybe men are superficial, but it was the sheer physicality of her affection that had held him on in this monogamous, emotionally unavailable relationship.

The tears seemed to have stopped; she had just made a cynical joke, and laughed mirthlessly at it, while he missed the whole point, or at least the humor of it. Well, at least she was not crying anymore.

He was looking over head at a group of single girls who were good-looking. There was one among them who was definitely eye-candy. He wished for this to be over soon, so that he could resume his single life.

She spotted his roving eye, and scolded him for losing focus during the break-up. She accused him of trivializing the yearlong commitment by window-shopping so obviously.

He, of course, disagreed and desisted. What was the point of putting something on life-support, just to kill it with ceremony? If it was over, it was over. Why couldn't they move on, and not make such a big deal?

She turned beetroot red at this rebuttal. She fished through her purse and threw on the table $30 for her share of the meal. He knew, as did she, that $30 covered the entire tab and a generous tip. Still, after a year of him paying, this was a refreshing change. He did not protest.

She got up and walked out. He did not even watch her leave. He walked over to the table with the single girls. It was going to be an amazing night.

The next morning, he entered his home, with a contented smile on his lips. He switched on the music system and un-wedged his t-shirt from under the chair.

It came loose, along with a red scarf. He lifted it and was mesmerized by the smell. It was hers alright. He sat down and began to sob.

The birds, the bees & evolution

The bees are disappearing. Einstein had plainly said, "If the bee were to disappear, mankind would have only four years of existence." Colony collapse: that's what it's being called.

Entomophily is pollination by insects. Personally, I would give bee-pollination a separate status, maybe Apiphily?

Anyway, bees seem to be chief pollinators for many of the plants in today's existence. These bees, once gone, will leave behind a hash of unpollinated flowers, giving a few 'bee-free' but numbered years to live.

Bees do not fly near cell-phones. The electromagnetic radiation (radio frequency) interferes with their navigation system. We, of course, are not motivated to quit the cell phone despite its implications in various brain tumors. So, convincing people to quit the phone over bees is going to be tough.

There isn't enough research, or there isn't enough publicizing of said research in this field. With people obsessing over flag-lapel pins and pastors, it is hard to convince them of imminent dangers. The victory of gossip over learning and intelligent debate is ubiquitous. There is something about gossip that makes it flow faster from mouth to ear.

It is a translation of the age-old 'work v. play' concept, except people have (notwithstanding their predilection for fun) reacted responsibly when the dangers of their ignorance were explained to them. So, what distinguishes the iPod generation from older ones? Is it the isolation we crave that makes us callous? Are we so hyper-entitled to personal space & private lives that we abhor social thought?

I have always believed in personal goal-setting and motivated meticulousness in pursuit of said goals. Even I shudder to think of the situations which demand that we shed, or at least, suspend dogged selfishness for global or societal benefit.

We cannot waste time debating evolution v. creationism, when we are faced with a threat (albeit distant) of extinction. Extinction is a part of natural selection. Species have, since time immemorial, ceased to exist at some point due to their inability to adapt to various conditions, thus paving the way for newer, improved versions.

We however, are uniquely equipped in this evolutionary chain. We have amazing capacities of observation, which coupled with our ability to reason, gives us the necessary tools to be the difference between extinction and perpetuation.

If we wake up in time, take preventive measures, and thus stave off possible extinction, we would have, in the truest sense (albeit micro-chronic) evolved. If we see a mortal danger as the likely result of our actions, and we suspend those actions, is it not evolution?

If we ignore these warnings, we will move faster and faster towards extinction, and be the victims, (instead of survivors) of natural selection.

It has probably never happened before, that a species on the brink of being endangered was afforded by nature itself, a chance of beating it. (Temporarily)

As I think further, there have been many plants and animals which have survived & existed for a much longer span than we; while I am not comparing their mental faculties to ours, it would not be implausible that, they too (on a much smaller scale) perceived extinction as a likely outcome of their features/behaviors and shed them.

Giving in

I opened the door and went in

With a guilt inexplicable within

To get something I knew I wanted

By giving in to temptations undaunted

 

The old lady saw me and smiled

She knew what I had come for

She knew how much I resisted coming

And yet she knew I would come

 

There was finality in her glance

As if she knew I had no chance

Of limiting myself, of tethering myself

Or even regulating pleasuring myself

 

She made an expression of disapproval

Almost as if she hoped I would

Not walk down this path again

She considered me with disdain

 

I told her what I was looking for

She motioned me to a corner unseen before

I went obediently and stood aside

To let hedonism and control collide

With a clear winner, as always

Favoring pleasure over malaise

 

I took what I wanted, the heathen pleasure

A satisfaction I felt beyond measure

During my vulgar enjoyment of my fill

I saw no one, remembered nothing, and felt nevermore

 

When I was done I considered myself

With utter rebuke, and some pity

For self-control and discipline

Were disappearing from my repertoire

 

I exited the place with anger

Chiding myself for bringing

The inevitable misfortune one must expect

After a meal at Burger King

Things we do that prove we are stupid

1. We read horoscopes early in the morning newspaper, and proceed on our days trying to match the horoscope with our choices, and then read them again at night, and then marvel at the accuracy of said horoscope.
   
2. We check our email to see stupid forwards that we hate anyway but forward them anyway.
   
3. We speak loudly to people having hearing-aids.
   
4. We speak extra loudly to blind people.
   
5. When we are walking on the road, and we get a call on our cell phone, we stop and talk.
   
6. When we answer our phone, and we hear no one at the other end, the tone of our "hello" varies from short and normal to long and high pitched, as if the right frequency would squeeze an answer from the other person.
   
7. We have personal laptops, iPods and cell phones and complain that people are no longer friendly and approachable.
   
8. We watch trendsetting TV shows to learn what to do, and then watch trend spotting shows to see if everyone is doing what we do.
   
9. We claim that our privacy is invaded, when we have no problems writing our every thought on blogs.

The other month

Thunderstorms, Dunkin Donuts, and noisy people lead to only one thing - Thought escapism: the method by which we imagine new mundane things just to escape the mundaneness of everyday life.

On one of these expeditions, I was geekily thinking about weeks and months. What if every month had exactly four weeks? Just like February in a non-leap year? I mean, the extra days would pile up. We have four 30-day months, seven 31-day months, which means 8+21=29 days extra. Now, that's a whole month. (Yes, there is one extra day, but bear with me) Surely, this must have been the first thought of the Gregorians. Then they probably noticed that we would have 13 months in a year – which is of course, unacceptable! So, they decided to distribute the extra days in a patternless manner.

Most of us have noticed that in a non-leap year, February and March have identical calendars – simply because 28 is divisible by 7. Can you imagine how boring it would be for every month to look the same? No changing of the calendar. In fact, we wouldn't even need one.

The coffee cup is cooling down, and I turn my attention to it. The thunderstorm (Mumbaikars read as drizzle) has subsided, and I need to pack up and leave!