Rumi Nations

It's probably only if you live in a First World country that you start pondering the 'Big Questions' when a man gets killed/murdered/lynched/hacked or dies naturally. Take a look at this Guardian article where the writer is wondering ... rather proclaiming that she STILL HAS FAITH in Humanity despite witnessing the Woolwich murder. One has to be really ... ummm delicate perhaps to be someone who can be moved to ponder the big questions when one person dies. So I was driven to put in this comment on The Guardian article: People in developed nations can be so coddled! Come to India or go visit and live in some other poor African nation. You will see poverty and the ramifications thereof left, right and center. Then, we shall see how much faith in humanity you will be left with.

It's interesting to look at the Coursera communities around the world. Here are the   Top 10 cities on the list . They are: 1) Stanford, 2) New York, 3) London, 4) Bangalore, 5) San Francisco, 6) Moscow, 7) Athens, 8) Toronto, 9) Washington, DC, 10) Mumbai. What to make of this list? No wonder four American cities are in the list. Multi-cultural London is there. A bit odd to see Moscow there but not Beijing or Shanghai or Hong Kong. Good to see Bangalore (or is it Bangaluru?) and Mumbai (and not Bombay!) on the list. Athens is probably the biggest 'surprise' presence here. The next are: 11) to 15): Kyyiv, Chicago, Vanderbilt, Barcelona, Sao Paulo; 16) to 20): Hong Kong, Delhi, Singapore, Los Angeles, Boston, and Madrid. The next 11 are: St. Petersburg, Seattle, Melbourne, Pune, Chennai, Hyderabad, Sydney, Paris, Philadelphia, Beijing, and Bogota.

The rich Indian shall spend her honeymoon basking in the sun draped sands of the beaches in Mauritius and Seychelles and Pattaya and elsewhere. She shall go saree and shoe shopping in Dubai and London. Depending on her social class, she shall sashay down the London High Street (is that where the top brand-name shops or boutiques or whatever they are called are located?) and shoo in to Saks Fifth Avenue in Manhattan and then Bergdorf Goodman and also visit the Bijan boutique on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills. These are surely the immutable laws of nature --> enforced more stringently by the ruling gods of the universe than other may-be laws such as those said to have been discovered by Newton upon the fall of an Apple iPhone. Indians will surely continue to perform these activities even in the 22nd century. Or till all the hydrogen in the interior of the sun runs out and the dying sun blows out like a grotesque, bloated corpse in another five billion years and devours Earth itself...

This is not a question but a statement. I was just thinking about Nehru's famous last will and testament where he poetically talks about wanting some of his ashes to be mixed with the Ganga river at Allahbad — something a traditional, ritualistic Hindu would dearly love to do. And this was the "agnostic visionary of modern India" who expressed this wish. And of course he opted for a typical Hindu cremation and nothing else. When I think of myself, I too find that cremating a dead body is a logical thing to do rather than burying it like Christians. And I am supposed to be a staunch atheist. I am wondering how much of my thinking is ultimately colored by the fact that I was born a 'Hindu' and how much by pure logic. The only logic that I can see to burning a dead body rather than burying it is this: when you bury a dead body, you are basically occupying a piece of ground for ever ... and to think that our time on this planet began when we were born ... we didn'...