Rumi Nations

So, the Nobel Committee has sprung a surprise -- or, as one might say, sprung a rabbit out of the hat. And the deabte is raging in full bloom! My first reaction was one of happiness as I have no qualms admitting that I'm an Obama fan. Is this premature? Perhaps as the Nobel Committee has said this is a recognition of the window of opportunity that Obama has been able to open by the very fact of his being President. Whether these opportunities turn into real victories ... only time will tell. Often, or usually, that depends on many players ... in complex international affairs. If one were to debate the deservedness of Nobel winners, one might debate whether Peres, Rabin and Arafat were deserving winners ... did they manage to carve out some sort of enduring peace deal out of their efforts? I guess these are often open-ended questions with no definitiveness about them. I have a feeling that Bill Clinton might have reacted with a lot of surprise ... I would love to see his public reac...

The Japanese have a legendary appetite for seafood — much to the misfortune of sea life. Tuna fish happen to be one of the victims of this food fancy. Of course, just as the Japanese have pretty much hunted whales almost to the point of extinction, the seas near Japan have similarly lost much of their population of tuna fish. The Japanese have such a legendary appetite for such stuff that they even import seafood (specifically, prawns) from Orissa in India which happens to be my home state. It seems somewhat astonishing or bewildering that we humans who occupy less than one-third of the planet’s surface which is land should be able to deplete resources from the oceans which occupy more than two-thirds of the planet’s surface. On a completely different note — global warming deniers claim that humans are too insignificant a presence on the planet to be able to affect something as vast as the planet’s climate as the planet is too big. As the state of marine life shows, we humans certainly...