Women

Some people need to be appreciated. Barkha Dutt.
Sadly, I have not heard her or seen her much but I'm going to let my judgement rule me today (as I allow quite often).
For some reason (refer to the Radia Tapes) Barkha has been 'pinned down' for her role by other media persons.
I saw a table conference / discussion on NDTV 24x7 where one dude was saying something against Barkha; Barkha was there and she retaliated with pain and emotion.
In those few minutes I chose to see Barkha's might, integrity and passion.
Call me sexist but it was a pleasure to see such a strong voice from a woman with an aggressive body language. I was thinking today about the clichéd statement : "Today, the woman walks shoulder to shoulder alongside man." I find that acceptable in a few cases, however, women, especially in India, even if educated, tend to stand back or are not allowed to progress because of societal structure.
I'm referring to family, marriage, motherhood and an odd suppression by the man. The last reference is to a man / husband / boyfriend who will frown on the woman being vain or her flirty/ playful nature or her ambitious loner nature or her need for independence or her need for a chance to prove herself.
This post is not an attempt at defending women, rather it's an attempt at hoping for a fairer tomorrow. An interesting, independent, strong woman is rare.

Caveat: A woman who chooses a house / family life ought to be respected. Please re-read the statement and put an emphasis on the word 'chooses'. Choice is rare.
Barkha, Thanks.

Wikipedia

Recently, I made a very small donation to Wikipedia. Wikipedia is an under-appreciated wickedly awesome creation - created by people who are working for barely (or no) money. The need for encyclopedias has dissolved, not because of various internet sources but because of one destination for largely trustworthy data.
I urge the millions who read my blog to make a small donation to this foundation.

Hopefully this link works some years from now...
All of should support this fantastic, free service that (I believe) has no advertisement revenues... don't tarry, send it some money right now. Please.

Bottles and Corks

There is a very strong post by a guy whose blog I read quite regularly.
The reason I am saying this is that for the past few days I have been thinking of working towards something concrete.
I have an immense passion for global financial markets but I cannot find a way to dedicate a large portion of my intellect and time to it; I also hope to make this society better, be it for selfish reasons... Buildings lack planning, safety and common sense, roads are narrow and flyovers or highways take too long to take physical shape, we live in a dirty dirty city where people seem agitated at every moment and relaxation is an endeavour.
I hope to find the courage to leave this race and do something meaningful.
I would really like to join an organisation that actively does some intelligent and decisive work at tackling issues that we face.
Meaningful? "Time you enjoy wasting, was not wasted." John Lennon said that and well, I just love travelling and meeting new people and old friends. What's stopping me from just taking in a bit of this one life that I have (Yes, I don't believe in rebirth and rebirth, if true, is quite inconsequential as a belief in this 'present' life).

Carpe Diem: Robin Williams made it popular... but what follows these 2 words in the original statement is important;
Carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero – "Seize the Day, trusting as little as possible in the future". I don't think this is a cynical statement, I take it to be a opportunistic and rude statement that hits you just once in a while.

Allow me to cite my Nick Drake here..."So I leave the ways that are making me be, what I really dont want to be."

The industrialized world coined the term 'giving back to society' - I say 'Let's give something to us, coz we barely have much.' And don't start citing poorer nations... I don't care about them as much as I do about me and us.

Slavery and the Pursuit of Happiness

I bought the new iPod Nano today and it's quite brilliant. I tried my best to stay away from an Apple product but this one was simply fantastic, which brings me to my point for this post.
Human progress.

I had stepped out of my office for a bit and I saw cars on the road, and it just struck me... Billions of years of (supposed) evolution and humans have created a society wherein people fret every moment, travel, 'work', earn money, spend money - all towards a largely insignificant death. Yes, this is all dreary but I'm looking at the bigger picture where I see other creatures quietly going about their stupid lives actually building things, creating things for sustenance.
What I see is a futile exercise which we have accepted as a way for society to function... what we are right now, in terms of our daily functioning would have been inconceivable a thousand years ago and for the record, a thousand years is a very short time period in the grand scheme of things...

And once in a while we come across people like Jimmy Wales - the founder of Wikipedia; an open source information centre on almost anything. Of course, he might have his own ulterior motives but I see that as a real development.
Gerald Ford revolutionized the way we commute but not much has changed since then except for congestion, blatant consumption, a supposed easier lifestyle and most importantly - becoming a slave to the machine that we have created.

What prevents us from vacating the daily grind after we have made an adequate amount of money?
Isn't this equivalent to slavery or succumbing to societal norms and pressures?

A friend described me well when she said that a girl would hate to be in a relationship with me because one day she would wake up without me by her side; she would call me and ask for my whereabouts... I would say, O! I am travelling.. Buzz off...

37

T: Did you know that Aishwaria is 37 years old??!!
H: Ya. So?
T: 37!!! That's 13 years away!!! That's half our age away... That's a long long time away.

Thots

Short-term pleasures may cause short, medium or long-term pain.

A humble pauper is a useless sight.

Rumination

Europe has changed me for the better (or less worse). Today, I attended a lecture on 'superparticles' which could be a part of particle physics; may be for the first time I sat for a lecture without the compulsion to learn and remember and that made the lecture quite enjoyable...
I read about Sufjan Stevens, Casimir Pulaski, Nick Drake, Modigliani and I see the horror that this society has transformed into...
I still thank my friend for telling me about Into the Wild because it made me sincerely question materialism. Yes, yes ... I'm not a complete disaster yet (or would I be called a victor?).
We still have artists and brilliant scientists in our midst (not so much in our midst, but you get the vibe...) however, they don't seem to be as strong as earlier. They seem weak, succumbing to the lure of materialism which is understandable but deplorable for society as a whole.

Yes, a decade from now people might appreciate some artists whom we don't right now but I don't see a painter, a sculptor, a writer or a poet then... I see successful bands which will have made people happy not through their art but through their canvas.

I said that Europe has been beneficial because I saw a weird joy in people - as the french say "joie de vivre" which means "the joy of living". I see in India people who are old at 25 years of age where the only form of them being young is partying and boozing (extreme generalization).

Next week I'm going for a contemporary dance performance at the NCPA. Will I like it? I don't know but it's a brilliant mode of escapism.


I love the world of particle physics and quantum physics - particularly because it is so difficult to imagine some of the things postulated or proven.
2 galaxies colliding 4 billion light years away?
A very small amount of energy in daily life, such as 1TeV, which is difficult to 'create' or 'capture'...
Weakly Interacting Massive Particles which could hold the key to finding a 'theory of everything'. For the record, experiments are underway in a mine where supercooled Germanium crystals are used to capture the faintest of vibrations from particles such as WIMPs.

Take a step back my friend and you will see how inconsequential our lives are...
We live for 60-90 years.
We pursue money and affection.
We are heartbroken and we feel loved.
We sleep less, we sleep too much, we smile too little, we are serious and not as jovial as we ought to be...
You ask me why I loved Into the Wild?
Here's why:



"So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservatism, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more dangerous to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man's living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun."
— Chris McCandless

"The core of mans' spirit comes from new experiences."
— Chris McCandless

Age

I was listening to Elton John today morning on the radio and the RJ said something about he's 63 years old and still belting out music :)
And I - idealistic and stupid (not) - thought of how we tend to while away our time without due consideration given to our smiles and to the pursuit of something that has no real end...
I thought of my friend's friend, the dude, supposedly, just jams with his amateur band every (other?) Saturday. He's just one example.
But what I see clearly missing in India and in Indians is passion... Need to find it.

The meaning of it all

Richard Feynman provokes thought. He is described as having been a passionate guy. This is a statement that is often used for other people too but rarely meant.
Branching off... When I read physics or see something on science or when I read about nature and all the simple glory that is away from human settlement, I see how futile our sojourns are (that was an amusing statement if you caught my bitchiness).
Of course, we will work our way through this society that we have created but the least we could do is give a thought to 'why?' and to possibly pursue an escape.
Circles they grow and they swallow people whole.

RRG v/s Berchtesgaden

I'm writing after a long long time :)
A friend asked me if Berchtesgaden was better than the Red River Gorge - I thought for a bit and I had the answer.
Berchtesgaden was magnificent, but it was picturesquely brilliant; RRG was like going through an old earth.
RRG was plain, raw, brilliant and an awesome place to find solitude; a place where one can pace himself and keep walking endlessly. Berchtesgaden was great for mountaineers and photographers.

Only once did I feel alone and comfortable - on my way from Stahlhaus to Lake Konigsee - I was alone, carefree and scared.
Picture this: I start when the sun is bright, 1 litre of weissbeer downed, I start my journey towards the lake. I pass through the clouds which have enveloped the valley. The sun loses its shine and the weather is pleasant. I stop and I hear me breathing and I hear a gentle stream a few metres away. I walk again and come to a proper path but now the sky is dark and when I say dark I mean... dark. I can see till only a few metres away but luckily there is some light hitting me from the town.
I reach the town - exhausted and settle at the first restaurant. There is only one server and I'm really hungry. I walk for an additional fifteen minutes and reach the restaurant by the lake. I come to it and a guy says HI!! to me - "Hey! we met while we were climbing that mountain!!" - I mumble something because I didn't remember the guy. The dude recommends Goulash which is deer with gravy :)
Then he recommends a plum cake :)
And of course, I need weissbeer :)
Semi drunk and completely satiated I walk to my bed n breakfast. I sleep for 10 hours :D

However, when I saw a picture from Red River Gorge (The auxier ridge trail) I missed it immediately. Berchtesgaden is not a place I would miss or long to go back to but RRG - that was truly gorgeous :)

Commonwealth Games

I can't believe I haven't written about this fiasco :)
Horrible planning, horrible supervision, poor accountability, disgraceful public relations management and sheer contempt for responsibility and maintaining 'national' pride.
A pedestrian bridge which linked the main stadium to the car park collapsed because of a faulty support while still under construction approx 13 days before the CWG start.
The main stadium suffered from water leaks; yesterday part of the false ceiling fell, the CWG village is in a poor condition.
Does this make me happy? Very.

The fact that responsibility lay in the hands of govt. officials, this was bound to happen. Corruption and bureaucracy - blah blah blah... you know the drill. There was a good opinion the other day in Live Mint and I second that opinion.
The CWG disaster should serve as a stimulus for the government to allocate more infrastructure projects to private parties - established entities with proven track records. Not something like J Kumar Infraprojects who have a crappy website and are doing an even crappier job at completing projects in Mumbai.
I am amazed at how fantastic and practical the L&T link from the international airport looks - it was even completed without much disruption to traffic.

May be the CWG are just what India need to begin serious work towards improving public infrastructure in India.

Death and Celebrations

There was a train collision in Madhya Pradesh wherein 21 people died and many other injured - cause: human error.
Floods in Uttarakhand and the Yamuna overflowing just north of Delhi - Countless made homeless, don't know how many died.
2 people shot at near Jama Masjid in New Delhi - supposed terror attack.
Ganesh Chaturthi celebrated with much chutzpah in Mumbai.

Are we insensitive? Or is this normal behaviour?
Politically speaking, we like to equate all human lives and frown at untoward incidences, but frankly I don't see people caring about people who they don't really care about. Convoluted statement?

Faith is a wonderful thing. I walked near my place in the evening where the gullies were empty and the roads were filled with people dancing around the Ganpati idols. Nonchalance characterised my walk that evening as I am not a religious person, but I loved looking at people and how simply some of them were sitting patiently and how others were dancing simply merrily - I even saw one guy trying his version of a break dance :)
I see some of our religious festivals as means to unify India across caste divides - clearly seen during Ganesh Visarjan yesterday.

I might never understand what excites foreigners when the come to India and see such social behaviour :)

Underground Metro Peace March at Juhu

So I went for a 'Peace March' today. It was primarily comprised of Juhu residents asking / demanding an underground metro through the suburbs instead of an overhead metro. It seems like a sensible demand but a rather useless demand.
The more immediate and painful issues are water supply, potholes and the dearth of roads and flyover through the city. However, this 'protest' did ask for accountability and answers.
Why is erection taking so long? (No pun) How much is it really costing Mumbai-ites in kind - time, energy, traffic (you know what I mean). Why have patches of road been under construction for so long a time?
I did not care too much about the metro's elevation because I really see the lack of proper road infrastructure as a pressing issue. Nonetheless, I did go for the rally because I wanted to see the show that people were capable of putting up. Moreover, only when we support protests will we have more meaningful protests.
I left 1 hour into the rally while the others kept marching on, but I would gladly be a part of such movements in the future and hopefully one day help in organising such a rally.

O yes, almost forgot to mention this. The route that the people were going to take had posters by the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena ( O! How I love them from the bottom of my butt) supporting the cause. What a (poop) turnoff! Yes, yes... at least 'they' were supporting the cause... BS

Bridges of Madison County

This movie compels me to write again about infidelity.
Robert Kincaid (Clint) noted something peculiar about modern society and each person's want for something(s). When Francesca remarked - 'Things Change',

Robert said, "They always do, it's one of the things of nature. Most people are afraid of change, but if you look at it as something you can always count on, then it can be a comfort. There are not many things you can count on."

This one stands out - "I don't think obsessions have a reason, that's why they're obsessions."

Francesca: You have friends too?
Robert: I'm a loner not a monk.
Francesca: You really don't need anyone?
Robert: No, I need everybody.

Francesca: You ever regret not having a family?
Robert: Not everyone's supposed to have a family.

What he noted about society:
"There's too much of 'This is mine' or 'He or she is mine'... Too many lines being drawn; that kinda thing... you know?"
Coming to infidelity. "She is mine!".
This statement ought not to make sense, but it does. We have been tuned to securing our surroundings and possessing things around us. Inanimate object should be fine but another person of free will?
What can stop a guy from pursuing sexual or emotional pleasures with another woman? In our society... Guilt, commitment and responsibility methinks.
People are fickle-minded and can sway from time to time. At times, we need to adjust to unacceptable behaviour.
When a guy has a random one night stand, not much is said... when a girl does the same, she is labeled a slut. Guys having one night stands are more common, but that is not possible... because usually, a guy would have a one night stand with a girl, implying that guys tend to brag about their adventures whereas girls are more secretive.
Secretive because of societal pressures and because a girl usually does not need to proclaim her accomplishments as much as a guy does. Hence, the age old debate about how women are more mature than men. Men succumb easily to ego boosts and proclamation of their achievements and turfs.

What lies ahead for humans...

"For the first 2 billion years or so , the rate of increase in complexity (of DNA) must have been of the order of one bit of information every hundred years. The rate of increase of DNA complexity gradually rose to about one bit a year over the last few million years.
But then, about six or eight thousand years ago, a major new development occurred. We developed written language.
This meant that information could be passed on from one generation to the next without having to wait for the very slow process of random mutations and natural selection to code it into the DNA sequence."

Stephen Hawking is trying to say that evolution - because of this development - has just become a whole lot faster.
I love the guy's candor.

"Because we claim to be intelligent, though perhaps without much ground, we tend to see intelligence as an inevitable consequence of evolution. However one can question that. It is not clear that intelligence has much survival value. Bacteria do very well without intelligence and will survive us if our so-called intelligence causes us to wipe ourselves out in a nuclear war."

He also posited that advanced life-forms have already found us but are just chilling and looking at us. But then, if they are so advanced why have they not destroyed us - for example, we don't think twice before killing a bug. :D

I had a thought. What if there were more advanced life-forms but similar to what we might do in the future, they destroyed themselves some million years ago on Earth? May be they managed to destroy themselves so well that they left no trace of themselves or their subordinate beings...

7 minutes to write this post...

As an amateur and largely ignorant human it's quite grounding to read about the universe.
The nearest quasar, for example, is at the least 780 million light years away.
A light year is the distance that light would cover in one year which amounts to approx. 10 trillion kilometers.
A distance such as this is almost impossible to relate to.

Another thought: Everything we look at is the past. Because light takes a finite amount of time to reach the human eye, whatever we see has happened in the past.
It is insignificant in daily life but, for example, the sun we see is as it was 8 minutes ago. Similarly, when we look at the oldest quasars in the universe - approximated at 28 billion light years away - we are looking at that which existed a really long time ago, probably at the beginning of the universe (if the universe did indeed have a 'beginning').

The hypothesis behind the existence of a blackhole is quite intriguing. Earth is a small planet and therefore has a very small escape velocity - 11.2 km/s. The sun has a larger mass and therefore its escape velocity is estimated at 617.5 km/s. The hypothesis that Feynman came up with was that there could possibly be a large enough mass (or gravitational force) that would not let even light escape. Escape velocity higher than 300000 km/s.

Information from Wiki and from 'Universe in a nutshell' - Stephen Hawking. Why do these things intrigue me? Because once in a while, I like to take a step back and look at humans. Hawking said something to the effect of: We should not try to find extra-terrestrial lifeforms because the odds are that they will be more advanced than us and possibly hostile. The future for humans lies in space because the Earth will one day be too small a place for humans.

I just wrote about quasars being 780 million light years away. We can confidently say that humans have developed themselves quite rapidly in the past 2000 years. It is not plausible to discount the existence of other lifeforms even 10000 years ahead of us, let alone millions of years ahead of us.

Calling time a dimension puts a new twist to all that we worry about because in the grand scheme of things everything is quite irrelevant.
What is also questionable is that which we assume to be real and why reality should even matter to us.

With this post I can say that I have come a full circle. Questioning reality has been my most fruitless pass-time. Questioning purpose and daily illusions can also be added to the prior sentence.

Passing Thoughts

When will pleasing your boss annoy you?
When will you stop floating through life?
Why don't you go out and eat good food or try something new?
Are you really scared of the next morning because it's as mundane as yesterday's?
How much will you regret things if you were to die right now?
Do you want to push away things that make you smaller?

Day once dawned...

Music is a beautiful creation. This thought (re)dawned on me when I was travelling in a rick listening to Nick Drake. Of course, there is an unusual simplicity to his creations but for a moment, his music took me away from the noise of traffic around me and from the swarm of people crowding the streets. For some unusual reason Bach and Rahul Sharma do something similar. At times, we fall into a trap with our music-listening tendencies and songs that we like are made monotonous, songs that we would pleasantly hum before are mechanically copied and then, just like that, the monotony is broken and we remember the song for what it used to be.
I still remember a school friend who once told me that she does not like music. I was and still am a person who does not get surprised by people's uncharacteristic, individualistic choices but I remember my astonishment then to something I could not comprehend. To this day I believe that she did not really mean what she said then.

A smile hidden by a mustache

My day started off with a smile. As I neared my house the sweeper outside the building opened the gate for me even though it wasn't his job. When I stepped out I went to him and said, "Boss, thank you haan." I was greeted with an odd simple smile nestled under his thick mustache followed by a gesture with his broom.
A wise man once said, "People wear clothes."
This statement is quite hilarious as soon as we juxtapose man against other species. Clothes provide protection against the elements and also serve as ornaments, possibly to attract mates :| however society has restricted mating through the creation of 'marriage'.
Let's go back a couple of thousand years and we note that man used to be simple. Hunting, farming, eating, procreation, sleeping and miscellaneous chores. It is around this time that the capitalist system or the need to earn, multiply, preserve and spend wealth was created.
What we call technology, innovation and ease of life may be termed futile by another species - which brings me to an earlier post where I mentioned :
Prime Minister Lyonchhen Jigmi Y. Thinley once said, "We are losing our humanness to become robots programmed to be productive through endless labour so as to earn to consume more and more without satisfaction."

Where is the simplicity to life? Is it just a farce? Or are we just doomed to follow this ritual laid out by present-day humans believing this to be the only meaningful way of passing through life?

Tolerance-ism

History is precious and makes us smile ever so often.

"
I am proud to belong to a religion which has taught the world both tolerance and universal acceptance. We believe not only in universal toleration, but we accept all religions as true. I am proud to belong to a nation which has sheltered the persecuted and the refugees of all religions and all nations of the earth. I am proud to tell you that we have gathered in our bosom the purest remnant of the Israelites, who came to Southern India and took refuge with us in the very year in which their holy temple was shattered to pieces by Roman tyranny. I am proud to belong to the religion which has sheltered and is still fostering the remnant of the grand Zoroastrian nation. I will quote to you, brethren, a few lines from a hymn which I remember to have repeated from my earliest boyhood, which is every day repeated by millions of human beings: "As the different streams having their sources in different paths which men take through different tendencies, various though they appear, crooked or straight, all lead to Thee."

The present convention, which is one of the most august assemblies ever held, is in itself a vindication, a declaration to the world of the wonderful doctrine preached in the Gita: "Whosoever comes to Me, through whatsoever form, I reach him; all men are struggling through paths which in the end lead to me."
"

-Swami Vivekanand, Chicago's World Parliament of Religions in 1893.

May be we should send out this message to regional fanatics threatening violence at the rustle of a peaceful leaf.
O wait, I have something for the stupid Sainiks...

Mughal historian Khafi Khan: Shivaji "made it a rule that wherever his followers were plundering, they should do no harm to the mosques, the book of God, or to the women of any one. Whenever a copy of the sacred Quran came into his hands, he treated it with respect, and gave it to some of his Mussalman followers."


The problem with religions is that as time progresses religions, or rather, the idea of religions is metamorphosed to something that suits a particular set of people. The people who decide are the people whom other people look up to. Power is desirable and through the medium of religion people can contort a fundamental idea such as 'tolerance' to something akin to 'fighting to maintain our identity and pride'.

Special thanks to Shashi Tharoor