Rumi Nations

No. It's not about THAT. Nothing HAPPENED on the dinner table. In fact, I don't have one. And that's the point. It occurred to me out of the blue about the fact that I do not own a dinner table while most people do. (Of course, when one talks of India, probably it would be truer to say that most people in fact don't.) But clearly the readers of this blog would likely belong to the dinner table owning class. So, the point is this: how essential is it to own a dinner table? Does one's quality of life degrade in any noticeable manner (let alone significant manner) on account of not owning a dinner table?  Clearly, the stark fact has to do with our sense of priorities.  We make these choices and so many of them. Some of these choices are conscious and some are unconscious. There are individual choices made and societal ones too. Individuals choose to worry over dresses or dining tables or door frames or dogs or whatever.

When people are ‘lucky’, they tend to reflect on their good luck and tend to thank providence profusely for it and reach conclusions such as “Life is Beautiful.” I always wonder if life is indeed beautiful – and, even more pertinently, how valid an argument it is to reach that conclusion when one happens to get “lucky” by chance. I recall numerous instances of people who survive natural disasters thanking the Lord for letting them live while others died. Without citing any particular incident, let us just think for a moment how fair that is – to thank God for letting you live. How about the others who died? Were they at fault somehow and deserved to die? The recent serial blasts in Jaipur killed many people. Did the good Lord decide that these people were unworthy of living and so deserved to die and so the terrorists were in fact agents of God. So, why spend so much resource in trying to find them and punish them? The September 11, 2001 attacks in the US were carried out by pe...

        When it comes to human affairs such as love, romance … or politics, things do not change much over the centuries. Which is why history repeats itself. Surely we can find parallels in history for events occurring in contemporary Indian politics. Much is different about the electorate here. In spite of extravagant dreams and hopeful claims about the orgasmic imminence of India becoming a superpower, the dumb data points to the brutal reality. While averages may not always reveal the truth, the per capita GDP of India doesn’t paint a pretty picture. Whereas India barely makes it to the $2,000 club, wayward Russia is sitting pretty at more than $10,000. Is Russia’s average inflated because of its billionaires? Well, India has minted many billionaires in recent years too. The people of Egypt and Libya enjoy a better per capita GDP figure than India… although how much of the wealth (oil and otherwise) of those nations benefited the people as opposed to benefit...

Are we alone in the universe? The one question that fascinates me more than any other. And my perspectives are these. The sheer complexity of biological forms makes me think that the evolution of intelligent life forms (such as humans) is likely to be a rather sparse occurrence. There will be many Earth-like planets … perhaps at least millions in the outer arms of the Milky Way revolving around stars like the Sun that the Earth revolves around. But the temperatures have to be just right for water to be plentiful in all three states. What were the stuff available in the early Earth that created the conditions that led to the emergence of primitive life forms? A planet with a lot of volcanic activity, lot of carbon-based complex organic molecules, a planet with continental plates slowly drifting, pushing, merging, separating, rising, and falling, lots of lightning, etc. How many planets will have all these enablers? Reduces the candidate planets to perhaps thousands. Then on pl...

Or, the Big Bang Pope. Whichever ……………… What I’m referring to here is of course the Pope’s comment or opinion that God is apparently the ‘mind’ behind the Big Bang … oh well, who would have known that … except the Pope of course. It occurs to me though that neither the Bible nor any of the other religions have explicitly talked about the theory of the Big Bang and God being behind it. It’s only a theory that Physicists here on planet Earth came up with in the twentieth century … imagine what a very specific situation that is !!! Scientists here on one planet around one star in some ordinary, insignificant corner of this one galaxy, the Milky Way … I wonder what else knowledge the Pope is privy to on account of his ‘special’ relationship with God … why doesn’t the Pope share all his knowledge in a proactive manner rather than wait for science to come up with something and only then reacting to that. Science is far from complete of course and does not brag about itself — part of the very...

Stephen Hawking says that humanity must find an alternate to planet Earth in the next couple of centuries failing which our chances of long-term survival are slim. I am hopeful that we will certainly find habitable planets in the vast oceans of space that is our visible universe. I am sure there will be many good candidate planets for colonization in the spiral arms of the Milky Way galaxy itself. What is disheartening is to realize the enormous vastness of galaxies. When you talk about interstellar space and interstellar travel, distances inevitably need to be measured in hundreds and thousands of light years just to begin with. And the rocket technology that we have mastered so far is woefully inadequate for the task of making these interstellar journeys even inside our own galaxy. Certainly, our little, tiny planet Earth will be found to be suffocatingly small for an ever burgeoning population of billions of humans. But there's an irony there though. As long as parts of the huma...

So, India found water on the Moon!!! That was the over-simplied headline in all the newspapers and on TV channels. However, the reality is, of course, as usual a little bit more complicated than that! The simple truth is that a NASA payload, the Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3) found spectroscopic evidence of trace quantities of water on the Moon. This is not really all that of a revolutionary finding. In fact, this was kind of a discovery waiting to happen or waiting for confirmation. It is of course not as if anyone has found great flowing rivers or oceans of water on the Lunar surface - that ain't gonna happen, ever!!! The fact is this: the Moon is not where the game is as of now in terms of space exploration! All the big boys of space (U.S., Russia) have explored Moon in the sixties. The game, if India wants to play, is on Mars right now. It really is a simple matter of how much resource(a.k.a. money) you are willing to put into it. Space science is pricey and nations have to decide...