Rumi Nations

My debt of gratitude to Mr. Hitchens continues to grow. Not on a daily basis but every time I see an interview with him, I come out wiser after watching it. As a polemicist, Christopher has chosen to take on many individuals who have become larger than life. Mr. Hitchens has been a scathing critic of the false piousness of Mother Teresa. He has also been critical of the people's princess business with respect to Diana. Above all, Bill Clinton has been portrayed as a consummate and perhaps congenital smooth liar. That is where I came out with a lesson after watching Mr. Hitchens' interview yesterday. Mr. Clinton, it must be axiomatic, has to be narcissistic. So, why am I rooting for him? Why are so many? Indeed. Quite a point. It is perhaps yet another instance of how dangerously flawed we can be in our perceptions. We are perhaps giving a lot of leeway to Mr. Clinton because of his good looks. We may be doing this subconsciously without even realizing it. Perhaps, i...

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...

So, I enjoy sleeping. I mean with myself ... not with someone else — that would be a different story altogether. I am merely talking about the prosaic routine we all indulge in for about eight hours every night ... of course, if you are one of the multitude of youngsters employed by India's call center/BPO industry, then you would probably be indulging in this activity during day time ... Anyway, it occurred to me that if more people enjoyed this activity more and partook of it more often in more copious quantities, our species might be better off in some ways ... I mean, what do some folks do when they are not asleep ... planning new ways of killing other people, planning how to proselytize and persuade normal people to become suicide bombers, devise ever more powerful nuclear weapons or missiles or whatever, ever more stealthy nuclear submarines or airplanes, etc. How I wish Hitler was more fund of sleeping and just took an afternoon siesta like folks in my state of Orissa ... so...

It's not that I am unfamiliar with the topics that Sagan covers in this series. In fact, I've read Cosmos and many of Sagan's other books. So, I guess the reason why I am lovin ' it so much is because it has been quite a while since I touched base with all these concepts that are so close to my heart. In this episode, Sagan daring touches upon what one might describe as the somewhat treacherous and murky grounds of UFOs and extraterrestrial intelligence. It was instructive to see him emphasize and repeat that ' extraordinary claims require extraordinary proofs .' The way he categorically ruled out that all the sightings of UFOs are anything but figment's of people's imaginations showed the essential spirit of scientific inquiry at its best — one might almost have concluded that Sagan doesn't really think that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe at all. But in fact Sagan and most other scientists do believe in the existence of extraterre...