Rumi Nations

Article first published as  The Nuclear Scarecrow  on Technorati. The events of this past week in Japan have predictably resurrected the dormant nuclear scarecrow. The usual arguments are being trotted about how nuclear power generation is an off-the-charts risky enterprise. It’s time therefore to slay the scarecrow again. Gun ownership in the United States is a peculiar left over from the 17th century and earlier. It serves no useful purpose. Yet the number of fatalities from gun-related causes is of the order of 100 per day. The number of non-fatal injuries is clearly twice or thrice as many. Yet gun ownership prospers. Thousands of coal miners die every year. Tuberculosis and malaria account for some three million deaths every year. Malnutrition and diarrhea account for millions more deaths every year. The oil and gas industry sees thousands of deaths from accidents every year. Road accidents lead to hundreds of fatalities around the world everyday. Actually, about 300...

Let’s not talk about boring stuff such as Ahmadinejad denying the Holocaust or Netanyahu scoffing such talk or India discovering water on the Moon! Instead, let’s talk about more interesting stuff — let’s talk about Indian women’s attitude towards sexuality. Just looking at things rather randomly, as you move across India, you find people’s (or women’s) attitudes varying somewhat. Women have developed different comfort levels with their sexuality. In North India, you find a typically ‘Punjabi’ attitude with females wearing ‘tight’ — body hugging — clothing that reveals the various ‘curves’ of their bodies. I am, of course, at a loss to understand the logic behind this. I mean, in the broadest sense. When females try to ‘show off’ their bodies — and what this means of course varies extravagantly when considered on a global scale — what does that mean, basically? I think she’s trying to say: look at me, admire me, look at how great my body is, how sexy I’m! Anyway, that’s not the point I...

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...