Rumi Nations

Here's my perspective -- from 10,000 miles away. The craziness about gun possession. Who'll explain to Americans that they're not pioneers anymore nor is the West wild. Guns make about as much sense as horse-drawn buggies for commuting to the office from Brooklyn to downtown Manhattan or riding a horse to the office in sprawling L.A. The never-retiring justices of the Supreme Court. And what is it with them being so openly, politically partisan anyway? Overturning the popular vote in presidential elections, venturing into policy formulation ... let the folks retire at 70 or 75. That reminds of the crazy election in 2000 when Al Gore got more votes than Bush -- but guess what! Bush wins because he got Florida and thus more votes in the crazy Electoral College, a relic of the 18th century. And those hanging chads appear anachronistic from the perspective of 3rd world nations. India uses EVMs !! Kill the Electoral College!

The Pope has apparently authored some book and pontificated as is his habit ... I can't believe how people let someone who's completely unqualified to talk about anything lecture about everything ! Just give it a thought. The Pope gives about the use of contraceptive techniques. Is he a professional gynecologist or something of a related nature? The Pope opines that science should not investigate about what happened before the Big Bang. Is he a trained general relativist which makes him qualified to talk about this? The Pope does not like the idea of embryonic stem cell research. He considers it an example of humans playing god. Is he an embryologist ... a microbiologist ... a geneticist perhaps? What about the theory of evolution? Clearly, the religious potentates won't be so stupid as to look at the fossilized remains of a dinosaur and dismiss it entirely as a figment of human imagination. At the same time, they can't give their stamp of approval to the theory of ev...

Today is as good a day as any to reflect on this tragi-comic situation. Religion committed one more murder the other day . And Hindus commemorated Shiva, one of the numerous gods of Hinduism just the other day. For the uninitiated, Shiva is the guy who's responsible for the destruction of the world as opposed to Vishnu who is the creator of worlds ... Brahma is responsible for the day-to-day upkeep of worlds ... correct me if I am wrong since it's a long time since my childhood when I learnt these things. So, you've got a guy who's basically responsible for the Big Bang and another guy who's responsible for the Big Crunch ... so to say. Pretty nifty. Anyway, this god Shiva or Lord Shiva as Hindus would have it has got some interesting characteristics such as: He lives on the top of one particular mountain named Kailash ... in the Himalayas of course. I would imagine it would be pretty cold (as in sub-zero temperatures) up there. But clearly, since he's a god, he...

Are we alone in the universe? The one question that fascinates me more than any other. And my perspectives are these. The sheer complexity of biological forms makes me think that the evolution of intelligent life forms (such as humans) is likely to be a rather sparse occurrence. There will be many Earth-like planets … perhaps at least millions in the outer arms of the Milky Way revolving around stars like the Sun that the Earth revolves around. But the temperatures have to be just right for water to be plentiful in all three states. What were the stuff available in the early Earth that created the conditions that led to the emergence of primitive life forms? A planet with a lot of volcanic activity, lot of carbon-based complex organic molecules, a planet with continental plates slowly drifting, pushing, merging, separating, rising, and falling, lots of lightning, etc. How many planets will have all these enablers? Reduces the candidate planets to perhaps thousands. Then on pl...

Or, the Big Bang Pope. Whichever ……………… What I’m referring to here is of course the Pope’s comment or opinion that God is apparently the ‘mind’ behind the Big Bang … oh well, who would have known that … except the Pope of course. It occurs to me though that neither the Bible nor any of the other religions have explicitly talked about the theory of the Big Bang and God being behind it. It’s only a theory that Physicists here on planet Earth came up with in the twentieth century … imagine what a very specific situation that is !!! Scientists here on one planet around one star in some ordinary, insignificant corner of this one galaxy, the Milky Way … I wonder what else knowledge the Pope is privy to on account of his ‘special’ relationship with God … why doesn’t the Pope share all his knowledge in a proactive manner rather than wait for science to come up with something and only then reacting to that. Science is far from complete of course and does not brag about itself — part of the very...