Rumi Nations

War-fighting requires morale though not morality. Soldiers are supposed to be tough. Bravery can’t be fickle. If soldiers are going to be able to show bravery in battle, then they should be able to deal with ordinary, everyday corruption. Perhaps every nation claims that its armed forces are the best in the world and the soldiers the bravest. How do you quantify the bravery of the British in fighting the all-conquering Germans at the beginning of the Second World War? Was it not incredibly brave of the German soldiers to have accomplished all that they did? The soldiers of the Soviet Union made a lot of sacrifices too. The Japanese soldiers were also nothing if not brave including the kamikaze fighters and the soldiers who preferred to take poison and die rather than be prisoners of war. Indian soldiers have not really fought any major war with their back to the wall. India has never faced an enemy in the six decades since independence who wanted to occupy the land or the people....

The Japanese Space Agency is planning to put prisms up in space by 2030 that will help to concentrate sun light and then the generated solar power will be beamed back to Earth. This is futuristic thinking typical of the Japanese but very much a viable plan. What the implications of this might be on the global environment is for scientists to study and understand. The Japanese are of course very poor when it comes to natural resources, but they have more than made up for that poverty with their abundant human and intellectual resources. One can only wish God Speed to the Japanese!!!

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...