Rumi Nations

Or, rather why that is an unlikely event. Dreaming of revolutions might appear quite romantic for middle class Indians but when you dig deep, you’ll see that the situation is both better and worse than Egypt of 2011 or America of 1776. The American War of Independence was driven mostly by economic factors and Britain enacting a host of draconian laws to augment His Majesty’s revenue not to mention to offset the losses suffered in misadventures against the French. All of which sound suspiciously familiar to an Indian … the British apparently learnt nothing and went on to repeat the same things in India in the early part of the 20th century. The Egyptian Revolution of 2011 is too recent and the discontents that may have fuelled it are yet to be distilled by historians. The per capita GDP of Egypt however is way higher than India’s. It would appear that people in different nations have different thresholds of tolerance towards what is broadly known as ‘poverty.’ Indians seem to have an ex...

And I am not talking Arthur C. Clarke kind of science fiction. "A start-up company from the Seattle area won $900,000 on Friday in a NASA contest to build a miniature prototype of a machine that could one day climb from Earth to outer space," according to a New York Times article here ... http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/08/science/space/08nasa.html?hpw Arthur Clarke has of course envisioned high-rise buildings going all the way up to geostationary orbit at 36,000 kms. Well, I would not be around to witness any of that ... Which is just as well because I don't have the brains either to develop something like that ... As each generation gives way to the next smarter generation, humans will eventually acquire the smarts to realize what might seem today to be crazy dreams. But then the cellphones that we find to be so commonplace today would have seemed quite magical one century ago ... same goes for airplanes. There's no reason why people won't go to Mars for their ho...