Rumi Nations

I want to talk about real heroes today à not the kind we elevate to the status of demi-gods too easily and unthinkingly. “There’s a secret society of geniuses who weave and shape the fabric of our culture,” somebody had said about Subrahmanian Chandrasekhar (he was known among his colleagues as ‘Chandra’) on the occasion of awarding a medal to Chandra. Yes. Chandra was such a genius and so was Srinivasa Ramanujan. It is not widely known that one of NASA’s space telescopes (‘Great Observatories’) is named after him? à the Chandra X-Ray Observatory. The most well-known of the space telescopes is of course the Hubble Space Telescope which has revealed so much about the wonders of our universe in its 20 year long lifetime. Every educated person must consider it his or her bounden duty to be acquainted with the images and the results of these great space projects. To give just a bit of a primer about Chandra, some of his areas of work included these ·    ...

So how do people prepare for the time when they are dead? How well prepared are you? You could say that some people tend to be better prepared than others. People like Steve Jobs had cancer and battled it. Some forms of cancer like what Jobs had or what Christopher Hitchens had are incurable or on the borderline between curable and incurable. If you happen to get one of these ailments, of course you know that your time on Earth will soon be up. Not that anyone is ever immortal. So far. So I don’t know if it really matters much if we happen to get a form of cancer or inoperable brain tumor or glioblastoma like Ted Kennedy. And what does one do about one’s vast wealth after one’s body becomes one with nature? Well, luckily or unluckily, most of us in India don’t have to worry about such matters as not many of us are billionaires with our personal 30-storey buildings. But here are a few examples of some famous folks and their instructions about stuff to be done when they di...

Every Monday morning, there's a universal outpouring of groans — that it's MONDAY again! It's as if everybody's mom-in-law AGAIN was about to come to visit them on Monday. This deafening noise is heard in specific parts of the world. It comes from the office-going class of people. In India, the young generation of IT and other professionals make this noise through all available means such as Facebook and Twitter. I suppose it's the same in the developed world where people have been caught up in this vicious cycle for a generation or more now. I don't know about rural America or rural Europe, but in rural India, villagers don't start groaning on Monday mornings. There's hardly any difference between Mondays or other days of the week. Their life-cycle is not a weekly one. Conversely, there's invariably an exuberant outpouring of joy come Friday. It starts in the morning itself and rises to a crescendo by the afternoon by when the youngsters i...

Death is a good thing not merely because, as Mr. Jobs put it, “It’s probably the single best invention of life,” or “it’s life’s change agent,” but also because men of hubris are at last brought down to Earth (and indeed below the Earth) by the phenomenon of death. It’s a fate that no hubristic billionaire can escape … yet. The ordinary person can look at a hubris-laden individual engaged in some megalomaniacal activity and take some satisfaction out of this knowledge that death will conquer this villain as well just as it has claimed many other villains through history. What other areas of human activity can you think of where there’s virtual equality between all? Some path breaking inventions of medical science qualify. When a vaccine is available for polio, EVERYONE is suddenly safe from this scourge — street dwellers and penthouse dwellers. But they are few and far between. Technology seems to be one arena where this occurs more frequently. Consumer devices are at once cutt...

Truly strange bedfellows! One would never have guessed that there could be a link between the two but apparently there can! Here's the proof: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/11/magazine/11cryonics-t.html?hpw Well, I guess every couple has to tackle the issue in their own way. I want the folks who want to preserve themselves to be allowed to do so if they have got the money and want to do so. Perhaps, some of the 'geniuses' of the present age might be preserved in such a way ... Just a thought ... how about preserving the brain of Bill Gates or Steve Jobs or Wolfgang Ketterle ...

With all the uproar over MA Jinnah in recent days, here's my two cents worth. Chetan Bhagat made a point that the young generation of today doesn't care about who Jinnah is. For better or for worse, I think that's correct. The younger generation would be hard put to write one paragraph if asked to about who Jinnah was. Now, it's a different matter altogether whether that's a good thing or a bad thing. The young generation is busy playing with cell phones and texting and watching cricket and Bollywood movies — I am talking about the young generation in India, of course. The young generation would likely be ignorant about all history, not only about what Jinnah's role was. I love to ask this question to a gathering of youngsters (if the date happens to be August 15): why is India's Independence Day celebrated on August 15 and not on some other day out of all the 365 days of the year? Expectedly, no one knows the answer to that and indeed, nobody cares. The ot...

A recent article by the ever-articulate and engaging Tom Friedman got me thinking about this ... http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/24/opinion/24friedman.html Friedman says that once America gets cured of its addiction to oil, price of oil will go down forcing the regime in Iran to reform. There's excellent/impeccable economic reasoning behind this — attested to by historical events as mentioned by Friedman. However, I am wondering whether people of Iran will welcome a drop in oil prices leading to a lower national income and lower standards of living for themselves. Would Americans be willing to compromise on their standards of living for a different reason — climate change. Would Americans forego many of the amenities that they have become used to for the sake of aiding the environment. One random example that comes to mind is this: would Americans be willing to go back to an earlier era of hanging their clothes out to dry on a clothes line — something one has seen in old Hollywood m...