Rumi Nations

Or, is it a ticking time bomb? Call it what you will, but I think Indians are not adequately appreciative of the lurking dangers that lie ahead. The United States has a population of just over 300 million. India's population is soon going to reach 1,200 million. United States has a land area that is three times as much as India's. I do not think anyone will disagree that this is the most important 'natural reource' that a nation needs. So, let's do some basic maths. Four times as many people are crammed into an area that is one-third as much. If my arithmatic is accurate, that simply means a population density 12 times that of the United States. So, considering the land surface of India, it should be having a population of 300 million to start with — equal to that of the United States. But even then India will have three times the population density of the United States. So, to match the population density of the U.S., India's population will need to go down to ...

I was thinking back to the days when I was younger and living at home. My father was not so much into these festivities and would go to sleep early ... as usual. He would wake up early next morning ... as usual and go to office at the appointed time. I wonder if that work ethic is worth emulating or what. We live in a time when we 'celebrate' so many things. It's not unusual now a days to see youngsters celebrating the birthdays of their parents!!! Would have been unheard of in my time. I will definitely feel a bit silly, I think, if my birthday were to be celebrated when I am 50 or 60 or 70 years old. Anyways, a new year is beginning and also a new decade. I wonder if I will live to see the end of this new decade and welcome another new decade. If I were asked to choose one thing I would love to see happen before I die, I will say this: I have thought about that and my only query about nature that I would love to see answered before my death is this: Are we alone in the U...

The Ruchika case has attracted a lot of media attention. There's talk of giving death sentence to the perpetrator. That's a question which might seem an easy one on the face of it but when you delve into it, there are complexities involved. The obvious danger of course is misuse. Same goes for how stringent punishment for dowry related torture should be. One can think of the maximum punishment to deter people from committing these heinous crimes. But in today's society, there's scope for people using these laws to blackmail innocent people. When there's not a shred of doubt about the fact that such a crime has taken place, then there is really no problem with the death sentence. India really needs some strict laws and some people to be punished in an exemplary fashion. The desire to take short cuts in life needs to be curbed among the people of India. In a country that is beset with so many intractable problems and so much economic disparity, this desire is particul...

Small pox has been eradicated since a long time with the help of vaccines — one of the major triumphs of medical science ever. But scientists continue to do research on a few samples kept in highly secure locations such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. This is not an idle quest. When we have better understanding of how the small pox virus causes such havoc, we will be ready to face other similar viral foes in the future. Here's a link ... http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/174679.php

We often deal with grief with more resilience than we might have thought possible. This is one of the interesting themes of a book reviewed in the New York Times ... http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/29/health/29book.html?emc=eta1 I have no hesitation with agreeing with the above contention. The ease with which people cope with tragedy is commonplace ... it would have some relation to various factors such as how 'important' financially the deceased person may have been to the grieving one. In India certainly, it's imperative to demonstrative one's grief in a very public and melodramatic fashion. I am one who would prefer to keep grief private. In traditional societies such as India, society plays a part in how anyone copes with a death. There are a bunch of meaningless rituals which must be complied with at all costs. People of India being exceptionally strong believers in a benevolent God take solace in ascribing some one's death to His inscrutable will and better j...

I say let's give Tiger some slack. May be this will help put things in perspective. 1. Tiger didn't murder anyone, did he? 2. He didn't inspire some suicide bombers, did he? 3. He didn't steal taxpayers' money, did he? 4. He didn't set up phony financial schemes to cheat people, did he? 5. He didn't rape or molest women or minors, did he? 6. He didn't pontificate about leading a 'moral' life or doing 'God's work,' did he? 7. He didn't point fingers at others or blame others, did he? 8. He didn't act as if he was entitled to anything, did he? 9. He didn't break the law, did he? 10. Unless of course sex between two consenting adults means breaking the law.

India's Ministers and Members of Parliament are extremely proficient in this. They are aware that most of India's voting electorate is illiterate and too worried about earning their daily bread to follow the goings on in a parliament in distant Delhi that is light years removed from the reality of their lives. So, the lawmakers do not mind framing and passing into law a bill that offers more free airline tickets to their own relatives as well as 'companions.' It's an interesting word to include in the bill. It seems our members of Parliament have become quite modern and want to take along on their free junkets people who may not be their spouses or children or relatives. Case in point: Suppose I am a powerful MP or better still, a minister, I might get to become 'friends' with models or other members of the Page 3 fraternity. So, when I go on vacations to Goa or elsewhere at the taxpayer's expense, I would also like to take along the beautiful female ...

Being a regular user of amlodipine and atenolol for controlling high blood pressure, I am somewhat aware of the power of prescription drugs. I had carelessly taken more than what my doc had prescribed for a few days and my blood pressure went sharply in the other direction — from too high to too low. Hollywood has seen some untimely deaths due to misuse of prescription drugs. Last year saw the death of Heath Ledger and this year has seen the death of Brittany Murphy. Michael Jackson's is a somewhat different story, I guess. So, the lesson to learn is to beware of prescription drugs — these are not things to play with. These powerful substances can be extremely helpful to the body but when not used properly, they can cause havoc as well.

It's a complex issue but one that needs to be confronted head on. All religions are old belief systems and naturally reflect their age. All religions need to change to keep up with changing times and advances in human civilization. There's no way that one can cling on to ways of life propounded in texts written thousands of years ago — no matter how suited those ways of life might have been to the times and climes they were written in. Let's face it: religions came into being as humans tried to make sense of a perplexing universe. There was no science then. So, religions provided simplistic explanations for natural phenomena. Pretty much all religions have concepts of heaven and hell. They talk about living a pious or righteous life here on Earth so that one gets to go to heaven in the afterlife instead of getting punishment in hell for eternity. This is certainly as silly as it sounds. I don't know how people can believe in childish stuff such as this. Beyond this, dif...

Americans are having to scrimp … saving quarters for diapers … Americans luckily have access to a few social safety nets provided by the government such as Medicaid, unemployment benefits, food stamps, etc. Then, non-governmental organizations and religious charities pitch in to provide whatever help they can. The effects of this prolonged recession are definitely going to be far-reaching on the psyche of those who will have gone through long periods of unemployment. This is happening after some seven decades. So, very few are alive today who had experienced it the last time it happened. The last recession was followed by an economic boom aided by both government policies as well as the ‘martial’ nations of Europe who still wanted to fight one last great, climactic mother of all wars after the Great War. The lessons for India? I think the message is a very sobering one. If a nation as advanced and prosperous can suffer such havoc from economic cycles of boom and bust, what chance does...

The Large Hadron Collider is back in action ... this time without the hoopla and the misunderstanding. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/10/science/10collide.html?th&emc=th It's great to see a pure science project of this magnitude getting completed in the current global economic climate.

I admire the visionary thinking behind 2012. It's easy to dismiss it as typical Hollywood production-line stuff but I think the movie has a message if only people are willing to ponder. Of course, the movie could have done without all the razzmatazz: the special effects and the biblical allusions. But that's perhaps necessary to engage an audience with very short attention spans. I would perhaps have preferred a movie that debated not only this particular possibility that might put a spanner in all our corporate-ladder-climbing careers but other possibilities as well. But may be that's up to Seth Sostak and Discvoery Channel. The world may not quite turn turtle come 2012 and the Mayans may not quite have gotten it right — I certainly hope so — but there are dangers on the horizon for humanity. This permanent fiesta can't last. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction, as Newton's Third Law says. What we are doing to the planet will have an equal and opposite ...

I was wondering about how great the differences are ... Most of the people on the planet live engrossed in the occurences of their daily lives. Without giving much thought to abstract issues. Then we have other people who devote their lives to the same abstract issues. I have particularly great respect for scientists/physicists. Where would humanity be, or rather how poor would humanity be without the contributions of Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Richard Feynman, Carl Sagan, and so many others like these. There are great scientists in the biological sciences who have found cures for diseases and contributed so much to our understanding about our own selves. Great scientists in the various physical sciences who have helped invent so many of the tools that have helped improve the quality of our lives. And we take all of these things for granted ... And continue to live in our tiny, little rat-holes. It's like much of humanity is like parasites that lives off of the...

The way Tiger Woods is being hounded, it would appear as if he were an elected official who had been caught with his hand in the till. But this is not the case. So, why all this fuss? Why do people want to foist greatness on someone? Tiger's genius lies in how he can hit the golf ball. Nothing has changed on that front. His golf skills enabled him to earn millions. His skills are exceptional. So, is his wealth. Why do people expect him to live an ordinary life like the rest of us ... the no-skills folks? What is the purpose of slogging so hard and having all that money if you can't go out and spend it the way you like? Why do people expect that everyone will accept the moribund rules of our society? Let's face it: the rules and regulations that govern our society are pretty old-fashioned and not really suited to our times and realities. If people are not brave enough to dump those rules in their entirety, that's people's problems. Through all of human history, peopl...

It's good that there are people out there who are involved in these endeavors and that there are nations who are willing to finance these intellectual endeavors. It's not possible to put a price on what they find. How do you put a picture on Hubble's look at the edge of the universe? http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2009/31/ When we are all consumed in various ways by various concerns in our daily lives, Hubble's images do help to put things in perspective. Humans though are motivated by things that have a more immediate resonance for them. What a pity...

Theodore Roosevelt's lasting legacy as a President is perhaps what he did to preserve and protect the extraordinary wilderness of America for posterity. The role he played in bringing to an end the war between Russia and Japan is open to interpreations. It may have indirectly led to Pearl Harbor. Woodrow Wilson's exertions in forming the League of Nations are known. However, the eventual outcome of that endeavor might have been war rather than peace. Nobody can argue with the true greatness of some of the other winners: King or Mandela. Gandhi of course remains a jarring omission from that roster of winners. But overall, if one thinks of all the winners over more than one hundred years, does the list comprise of mostly great men and women with a few ordinary folks, or is the list mostly populated by ordinary people and even some very controversial winners such as Henry Kissinger? In a hundred years from now, Obama would become a footnote in the story of human civilization and w...

India is a nation of meaningless rituals. Indians tend to their risible rituals with the utmost devotion so as to avoid the difficult task of having to think. Indians like to celebrate various yearly rituals ... of both happy as well as sad occasions. One such recent anniversary was that of the Bhopal gas tragedy. Not long before that, there was the anniversary of Indira Gandhi's assassination. Then, people also remembered the Babri Masjid demolition. A more recent tragedy from Mumbai a year ago was also piously observed. Even Sachin's playing for 20 years occasioned an outpouring of admiration and adulation. Sadly, I think people don't have any sense of proportion at all. Otherwise, we would not have seen the absurd eulogizing of Sachin. Public outrage about the death of a model fortunatly led to the incarceration of a playboy-turned-murderer. Similar outrage is unfortunately completely absent when the dead happen to be the ordinary people of India. This dichotomy is deepl...

I didn't know that Tiger Woods was the first billionaire sportsperson of the world. One doesn't become a billionaire without being extraordinarily driven. Being rich has its advantages ... just as being powerful has its. History tells us that Moghul Emperors had many wives in their harems — one of the perks of being an Emperor. Even some present-day kings continue to follow in their footsteps. Today though, money mostly has become equivalent to power. So. those with money can afford to lead rather laissez faire lifestyles. I don't see any problems with that — as long as they don't preach and pretend to be modern day Mahatma Gandhis. I am only thinking of how Donald Trump would react to Tiger's troubles: he would remind everyone again with his signature style how crazy it was not to have "pre-nuptials." http://betting.betfair.com/sports/oddly-enough/the-10-richest-sports-stars-in-the-world-and-what-160309.html One's respect for the genius of Tiger on th...