Back To The Beginning

This is going to be short.

In the very first post for this blog, I had shared a very personal feeling and observation, saying that everything in life goes in spirals, like a spring - a short journey starting from a point, traversing a full circle and starting another one, only that this new one is displaced in time by the earlier one. Try holding a spring in your hand and rotate it while keeping your eyes on it.

Now, I was going through this wikipedia topic yeaterday about spacetime being curved and not straight as was thought or assumed by the Special Theory of Relativity. And in there, I found a diagram giving the worldline of planet Earth (A worldline is the path traced by any object in the space time continuum).

And what did I find - the worldline of earth is a helix, a spiral, a spring just like I explained earlier. What is fascinating to me is that a small philosophical observation of events in life exactly parallels the physical and measurable phenomenon occuring within our worlds. In other words, if earth goes in spirals on a spacetime continuum, how do we, people living on the same massive body of earth, go? Another marvellous example of science coming closer to religious obervations and philosophy.

I think I am safely a philosopher now.

Merlin's Beard

I am Sevrus Snape...

I am Severus Snape...

I am Severus Snape...

I am Severus Snape...

I am Severus Snape...

I am Severus Snape...

I am Severus Snape...

I am Severus Snape...

My Patronus is a Doe......

Avrah Kedavara

‘Avrah Kedavara’ – sounds like something out of a Hogwarts syllabus you say. Let’s see. How about ‘Abra cadabra?’ Sounds similar? No….. You seriously need to be a child again buddy!!!! Any ways, I will come back to it later.
Talking of magic, less than a century ago, when man already knew that earth was round and it was not the centre of universe, Wright brothers were just about to fly and some genius brainiacs were already digging the early symbols of Quantum theory, in those days, no one would have believed that the mortal man can have the capability to wield such immense power on nature so as change the very geography, botany and biology of it. It could have been considered magic and the people suggesting so would have been burnt at stakes in open public view. Witchcraft, sorcerer or black magicians such people would have been called.
Time has moved a long way from those days yet people haven’t. With so much of scientific proof hanging around in favor of global warming and depleting resources, it will almost be impossible to pass by without noticing it. Yet many of us achieve the miraculous feat of completely ignoring it while going around in our daily lives. It is futile to describe what global warming does to the world and to people for we live in the age of internet where information moves faster than neurons of many and is abundant than the WBC’s in human body. What is more futile is that after having so much of information around us, so much of illumination around us, most of us choose not to take sides – they neither agree, nor disagree, they simply don’t care; neither for the environment, nor for the people who are not economically or physically capable of striving against the challenges forced on them by the changed climate. And who cares about the poor polar bear drowning in Atlantic?
Coming back to ‘Avrah Kedavara’ – it means ‘I create as I speak.’ It is not just a grandmother’s way of coaxing children into believing in magic, but it very closely aligns with the philosophies taught by the religions. Upnishads say – “You are a part of the Brahmin.” Bible says – “The kingdom of God is into you.” The more you dig the more you find what they all are trying to force mankind to think – We have the power to create our own realities. Good or bad reality, will be our own choice.
The opposite to ‘Avrah Kedavara’ is ‘Avada Kedavara’ meaning ‘I destroy….’
I look at the people in shopping places carrying bunches of plastic bags and dumping them into their dustbins at home; people jumping onto lifts when all it takes is 20 steps to go to another floor; water being wasted like no one has died in Sub Saharan Africa when villages were raided by armed men in order to control a well with 2 feet of water in it. Men die, women are raped and children are orphaned when mankind chooses to be indiscriminate.
Have we been saying ‘Avada Kedavara?’ I bet my life, yes.
‘What will happen if I change alone? Others are not doing anything, why should I? Why are you doing it – do you think you can achieve something?...’ These and many more are the lame questions people face, those who decide to change for the good, change for the right. Let me ask,
Do we really need others to change so that we can reuse the plastic bags while going to shop?
Do we really need a majority to tell a shopkeeper that ‘I don’t need a plastic bag,’ when it is not really needed? Or to spend money in buying a reusable bag?
Is it always needed to ride a bike or car when your destination is only a few kilometers? Have we forgotten to ride a cycle?
Or, do we need a non-democratic government to make us educate our house maid when she wastes water while washing the utensils.
Do we really need the entire water in flush to go down the drain? How much water will be saved by a 500 ml bottle of coke filled with water, when it is kept inside your toilet flushes?
Rain water harvesting needs costly appliances you say? You can save 6.5 litres of pure water with 4 buckets, a broom and 2 plastic bags when it rains for more then 30 minutes. 6.5 litres is less isn’t it? Not really, it can keep a man alive for more than 3 days.
What else do we need? I can only wonder in despondence. Is the fear of being ridiculed more than the satisfaction of doing the right thing?
Is it not the time we start saying, ‘Avrah Kedavara’ and start creating a lovely planet? Or we start taking responsibility for everything we have at disposal, things that we do not pay for? In my opinion, it definitely is and it needs no majority. In words of Albert Gore, “This little dot (referring to earth in the vast expanse of our solar system) all births and deaths have taken place, history has been made and wars have been fought and joys and sorrows have been shared. This little dot, it is all we got.”
This little dot…..

Il romanticismo italiano

Finally, finally, finally, after a lot of maths, geography, history and logistics, we made it to Italy. Spent a day in London before heading off to Italy. The journey started from Venice and ended in Rome with Florence and Pisa in between. 4 days, some hectic travelling and a marvellous holiday. So lets see how we spent those days without a clue of passing time:

It always starts with the air and stepping onto Marco Polo I wondered if the air would smell of the ocean. There was no clue of it during the hour long ride from the airport to the Piazza de San Marco in the water bus and I didnt miss it. The pristine (almost) water and the albatrosses squaking on the poles bode a good start of the day. The water bus travelled around the perimeter of most of Venice and I got to see what I only had seen in movies till date - simple houses standing side by side on the edge of the dancing waters. They left little space between them yet it didnt seem congested for some reason. May be the prevailing serenity swalloed the send of uneasiness which possibly never existed in the first place.

I won't mention San Marco since there was nothing different with it - A piece of dying history flooded by tourists, ristorantes, road side shops selling fancy masks (really beautiful) and some locals ready to mug you at the first chance. But for Venice, I would allow myself the foolishness to think that the city was carved under the sea by Poseidon and then pushed out to the surface for the world to admire. The homes never seem separated from the sea, they just appeared like a part of it, an extension of itself that the sea would neer give away. Wife described it as beautiful, paradise and hoped that global warming would never engulf it.

We moved to florence in the evening and it welcomed us with rain. I loved walking in Florence. I trotted the narrow lanes between old buildings over pebbled streets and wondered if the Stendhal Syndrome hits me. It didn't.

A perfect line to describe it would have been 'We moved back in time,' but I won't use it since I lost the very track of time in the first place. The place was so beautiful, living yet serene, new yet old, a place where the past and the present would dance hand in hand every moment of the day. Ricardo, the hotel manager told us to visit Piazza le MichaelAngelo and he said that if I didnt see this, I didnt see Florence. I imagined that place to be a couple of statues, a fountain in the garden. But after a tiring trek (!!!!), we came to know why we wouldn't have seen florence without seeing it. It's a flattened platform on the top of a hill with a bronze statue of David (replica) in the middle. The hill overlooked Florence and from there I came to know that my assumption of Florence as another metropolitan city was wrong. Its a city sitting in the lap of mountains which on that day were hidden under the clouds that marked their edges. If we talk about man made dwellings, nothing could compare an Italian town.

I would skip the trip to Academia and rush to Pisa where I saw the Leaning Tower. Il Torre as the italians call it. There is something about Italian. It can make you fall in love with it again and again and again. Something that I didnt find in any other languages I touched. So, Il Torre, the twisted page of history which is tilting more and more as we speak. One fine day it would crumble to dust and history would be erased. History is a strange thing to me because though I never liked it, yet always believed that it tells us about our roots. Without history, human race would be an orphan - a massive civilization with no trace of where it came from.

We travelled to Rome during the day and now I am sure that the best way to see a country is by train (or by a car provided you are not driving). Having boasted the English countryside for the past three years, I now officially gift that accolade to Italy. Italian countryside is beautiful, much beautiful.

Moral Terrorist

The first thing I knew this morning was there was blood all around in Mumbai. Family, friends and their families were fine, but I feel miserable. A friend of mine said that I was traumatic – and she deserved thanks from me – my feeling was not anonymous any more. I felt slightly less miserable.
Every Indian I met this morning smiled at me, I smiled at them. Most of us didn’t say anything but somehow we all understood. It was written all over our faces. I haven’t heard a known casualty by now but this doesn’t help my misery. What makes it all more miserable is how I came to know about it. The stock markets page told me that the markets were closed due to terror attack in Mumbai. The link directed me to a web site which had loads of links in bold telling the story of dead blood and living tears. But guess what, the first link I clicked was the one with the news that England’s cricket tour of India has been cancelled. The first thought was a sad thought – No more matches. And then I read the news of the mayhem that left me in the grasp on an unknown misery – like claws of steel gripping my throat and choking my wind pipe as if that was what I deserved.
What have I become? What have we become? If I am the personification of a country then what has my country become? And if this is what my country has become then what right do we have to mourn over what another man does to my country and to my people? Demographically my country is 60% people under the age of 30. 60% of the whole population are in the age when there is nothing impossible for them – and what have we made use of it apart from worrying over stock markets, cricket, football and abolition of smoking in bars? We are a generation bred by greed, bred by ambition but devoid of responsibility. The people who kill, throw grenades, slit throats of journalists, rape women, slit their wombs and dance with the foetus on the tip of their blood thirsty swords, they are all like me, like the rest of my country – greedy, ambitious but without a trace of responsibility. It’s only ironic that their greed is opposite to us. The inevitable act of Nature – balance.
Somebody asked me that why this mayhem in my country and I said that I belong to a country of greedy foxes, coward chicken and sleeping lions. And I felt a little bit more relieved – may be because I had found someone to blame. But then I realised that I myself belong to one of the three groups. And then I found that belonged to the class of coward chickens – and because of that, I and everybody like me, the rest of the 60%, deserved to feel the pain of helplessness which only comes when somebody dies. Unfortunately, the pain of knowing that somebody is killing somebody for reasons not fit in the rules of mankind, the pain is the exactly the same. Helplessness – this is the choice we make when we decide to care more for our own cars than the old man walking by a cane by the road side and we decide to drive by. This is the what we deserve when we choose to throw the food in our plates while millions sleep hungry every night. This is the consequence when we decide to be just ‘I.’
I am a terrorist myself because deep at my core, I have the same motives and impetus as the man who would have laughed draconically while rotating a firing sten gun around people indiscriminately. My country, just like any other country has been shaped by wars – mean who decided that they held the fate of others in their own hands. Some were good, some were bad and we inherited all of it. And left it to rot with time while we lay merry in our cosy homes with costly whisky warming our throats. Are we the people for whose future, men and women died? Do we have the slightest right to live in the country of Nehru and Bose and Gandhi and every single man and woman who took the slightest of bruise on their innocent bodies for the sake of the freedom of our country? Are we in a free country? Do we call this country free where white-clad men and saffron-clad women trample the flag of my country every night and let democracy take the blame of their selfish motives? Did we inherit this country just to sleep and express sadness when innocents die and then just go back to work the next day as if nothing had happened? When will we realise that we need wait for pain to pinch us to realise that it hurts? How much do we wait to understand that we are the only ones responsible of that fact that others dare to think of standing on our motherland and killing our families? Why have we become so scattered by our selfish ambitions that we don’t realise that we are breaking up? How many lectures of Panchatantra we need to understand that if we don’t stand united, we will fall and a great nation will see its worst days?
The enemy is not at the gates, it’s within, and unless India becomes what it had transformed into on the day of 1857, we will not be able to stop them. We have no right to cry unless we ourselves stop being the Moral Terrorists that we have become. My country does not a uniformed army to protect; my country needs a common man with a slightest sense of responsibility and a little respect for the blood which has already been shed and millions of tears which will continue just because we were living with out eyes closed.
The sleeping lion has to awake and the coward chickens have to stand with them. We have to UNITE. Then we will regain our right to pain. And the right to peace.

C

'C' is a very strange letter and has wide morphisms - exotic, erotic, eternal, extraordinary and what more.... my vocab is not that good. One morphism however stands out to me, one of my favorites - Choice. Choice - it's just like a human brain; rarely used to full capacity in an average life span of an average human being. Not even Einstein used it to 100%. Just like a prosthetic limb waiting to shrink and dissolve into the frothy stream of time and let us evolve into something we never were. Or never would be.
However, 'C' stands for another thing. The new kid in the town - Climate Change. And everybody is talking about it as if it has been wild boar walking in a bikini in city centre. We, at our organization also talk about it. It is the latest buzz word in our daily routine now a days. Recently heard that GLT Energy Marshalls group managed to save 56 tones of CO2 in the last 3 months. Vow. Appreciative. 'C' also stands for confusion. So without dwelling too much into it, I would come to the point. Which however here is that what took us so long to act? I remember the very first imprint of a climate change article in the recycled pages of a Hindi newspaper in my small town. It was almost 10 years ago. And even after reading about climate change 10 years ago, I chose not to act for it, And now after 10 years of time, I shoved my ass in a rainforest in the middle of leeches and snakes to plant trees.
Why did I need something like an organization to push me into this? 10 years of extra carbon footprint!!! Vow. I wonder how much of my contribution would have been in the melting of arctic ice cover? And how much inches I would have pushed a specie closed to annihilation? And how much 6 billion homosapiens walking this globe would have contributed?
I chose the word 'homosapiens' because we didn't choose. Choice is what makes us a human - A Woman or A Man; someone who can define their destiny, someone who can defy their destiny. When we don't chose, we just let other factors 'decide' our destiny. And that's exactly what we have been doing - despite knowing tons about Climate Change, we have always chosen to be a passive spectator of it.
Now, we need to 'choose.' It will be foolish to say that now its the time to think. No. The time to think has died a lonely death under the cartridges of our ever buzzing printers. Now is the time to act. Now is the time to choose between an imposed destiny and a desired world.
Now is the time to shape. Now is the time to break the shells we have been breeding ourselves till date and stop being incumbent on somebody else to motivate or push us. Now we have to take the charge with or without others. Move beyond the walls of our cubicles and balconies and reach out to the world and tell them that our earth is being scarred by their carbon footprints. Its now the time to tell people that everyone of us has a responsibility to the air we breathe and the water we drink and the food we waste in our dinner plates. Its time for mankind to take another giant leap.
And its not just about others. Its time for us to choose what we would like to be remembered as - as hypothetical Climate Champions breathing withing the space of our organization, burdened by the titles inferred on us, or as free human beings who set out to change the world, shape it for better.
We need a vision, something that we need to carry on this difficult road uncharted since recorded time. Just like what the greats of Da Vinci or Galileo or Gandhi or a Mandela. It's time to choose our own destinies. Now.
An interesting person once told me his equally interesting theory - what if the world was not made for 6 billion people? What if it was only made for 3 billion people? And may be that's why this Climate Change is happening so that people and animals can die and the earth comes back to what it can support. I totally agreed with him. But then I also believe that since the dawn of time, humans have had the audacity to fight the erasing fate destiny had chose for them. We too, belong to the same race. We too have to carry the honored legacy of being a 'human.' If Climate Change is out there to kill us, then we fight. We stand tall until the very hand that wrote our destiny salutes us and feels a secret pride of having created us.
So let's justify the most honored tradition of humanity, break the shackles of our title and change this beautiful earth for the better. Let's choose to defy destiny. Once again.

The Theory

This isn't a physics class but this is about a spring - the coiled piece of wire which retracts back if you leave it after you have pulled it along its length. The spring, the spiral - a circle coming out of another circle and merging into yet another. Endless as it is, hypnotizing it can be, dangerous it often becomes. This is the spring, the life.
It has been an unending debate about what life is, how it is and there are billions of explanations - money, position, fun, love, family, friends, adventure, self and more and more and more..... And at the center of everything is a circle, no beginning no end, a lowest point and a highest point and a multitude of points in between; and an invisible pointer moving along those points traversing the invisible locus, the circle. It simply means that everyone in life has an equal share of goods and bads, happiness and pains, riches and rags, success of failures and so on..... and all this keeps repeating and is never constant. Just like day and night. Just like spring and autumn. And as strange and unknown the universe be, everything follows the same thing - the motion of planets around the sun, the motion of electrons around the nucleus. Nature manifests itself in everything; even in us and even in our life. It doesn't change, it doesn't alter, it goes on in the same misunderstood way since the day time has begun. And it continue to be so.
So that is life. The unsaid law of life. But what next? People say that if life is a circle then it means that man has a destiny which is pre-decided by an invisible hand even before we are conceived in the wombs; our choices loose their meanings; our conflicts loose their truth. But thats where the spring comes in. A spiral - a tiny spec of earth decides to move away from its roots and in its tryst it pulls apart and grows like a stem out of the very thing that defines it and it takes the same course and the circle becomes a spiral, a spring. A new dimension is added to what already was, what already was conceived by another hand, what already was shaped by others. The new circle is a new choice - made by the living. A good choice or a bad choice is non significant. All that matters is a choice. Or else, nothing would matter. Nothing would be controlled. Nothing would be chosen. And this is the only thing that would make give us the right to call ourself 'humans.' Else we are all animals.