Rumi Nations

And I am not talking Arthur C. Clarke kind of science fiction. "A start-up company from the Seattle area won $900,000 on Friday in a NASA contest to build a miniature prototype of a machine that could one day climb from Earth to outer space," according to a New York Times article here ... http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/08/science/space/08nasa.html?hpw Arthur Clarke has of course envisioned high-rise buildings going all the way up to geostationary orbit at 36,000 kms. Well, I would not be around to witness any of that ... Which is just as well because I don't have the brains either to develop something like that ... As each generation gives way to the next smarter generation, humans will eventually acquire the smarts to realize what might seem today to be crazy dreams. But then the cellphones that we find to be so commonplace today would have seemed quite magical one century ago ... same goes for airplanes. There's no reason why people won't go to Mars for their ho...

Bob Herbert talks about President Obama promoting solar energy in his New York Times column here ... http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/03/opinion/03herbert.html?_r=1&hp Meanwhile, David Brooks of the New York Times has written an interestingly argued article about the chaging nature of relationships in the age of texting and cellphones here ... http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/03/opinion/03brooks.html?hp Roger Cohen of the New York Times both reminisces about the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall as well as pines for a different outcome to the recent semi-uprising/revolt in Iran here ... http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/03/opinion/03iht-edcohen.html?hp What more do you want? Enough nutritious intellectual fodder for a day?

At last, the Government has chosen to adopt the easy route of banning pre-paid mobile services in the state of Jammu and Kashmir. This is such an asinine decision that it boggles ones mind. Are we living in a democracy or what! Just because a few individuals are using mobile phones to plan their anti-India activities, the Govt. thought it fit to issue a dictat that will inconvenience hundreds of thousands of innocent people going about their daily lives. What do the ordinary people of J&K use their pre-paid connections for? I imagine they would use it for the same purposes as people anywhere else in the country would ... to enable families to stay closer and stay connected, to share the family gossip, youngsters of course would be using these connections to pursue their illicit love affairs, or secret love affairs, I should say, traders and small businessmen would be using phone connections to keep their ears close to the ground and be one up on the competition, the owner of an app...