In The Name of Arushi

To confess, I stopped following the Arushi murder case after two or three days only because of the sickening consumerization of the entire tragedy! Even sitcoms have managed better in depicting a death tragedy in a saner manner and here we have the Indian media with those sick minded journalists anchoring the sale on the great Indian media bazaar!

It was like, 'Hey, we have a personal tragedy, which we have sensationalized just for you! We will be back from a short break. You too be back soon with your popcorn tub!’

The Hindi news channel that claims to be the fastest, winning awards for being the best news channel is the birth of the K factor in the news media. Congratulations, Indian media has just managed to define the depth of abyss.

I feel happy and sad at the same time; happy because I got educated (and not just earned a degree to make a living) and I still manage to keep my conscience alive; sad because I think of the common man and wonder if he returns home from work, tired and all he wishes to see is the image of another common man being raped on TV?

I might be wrong - still there are people like me who stopped watching the entire case, just because inside them, they wanted to preserve the sanctity of a girl. But I am not so wrong, when I come to know that the murder case notched up the highest TRP.

Isn't the Indian media another case of Frankenstein gone out of control, just like the Indian bureaucratic setup? Ironically, the media calls itself a self-appointed watchdog of that bureaucratic setup. What do we need now? Another counter-media as a watch dog of the primary media?

It is not that all media does is vomiting out people's personal lives. We have several admirable instances where media has helped in initiating the process of justice, being a beacon of hope for the unheard common man. But it surely has setup a very wrong precedent. Aren't we contributing to our kids growing up insensitive to the concept of privacy and honor?

There has to be a line. Unfortunately, the line is a qualitative one and no demarcation can be made. Morality has no demarcation. What’s genocide to me might be another man’s cleansing contribution to society. But we do have something called as law, which is more or less, a large section of society coming to a code of conduct. If not law, then some amount of conscience can be displayed - morality, which is not born out of teaching but which is more out of human values. Something like, do not sleep with your mother.

I would love to preach and practice “Do as you would like others to do to you” saying on the individuals responsible for the heinous concept of sensationalizing the murder tragedy. How sensational it will be to see them on hidden cameras, beating their wives or confessing to their pervert fantasies?

Somewhere, we have either wrongly defined or misunderstood the concept of truth. Truth no more exists at its face value; its various manipulated variants must be priced and the highest priced variant must be sold. Days are not far when the K animal, restricted to soaps till now, marches its way into the news media.

Arushi is gone and we have played enough and enjoyed enough. Let us not anymore traumatize those close to her, those who have fond memories of her. In the name of humanity and in the name of Arushi, let us stop this utter sensationalism nonsense!

India rising!

A political system that's driven by the politics of appeasement. A middle class that's too hedonistic. A country whose emotions are driven by the media. A country whose President has the highest popularity amongst Her fellow countrymen. A small time bigot who has attained the imagination of the Marathi manoos and the non-Marathi manoos equally! A country whose GDP has the biggest contribution from the services sector; a sector which is dependent upon a nation which truly can be called as a land of the bastard capitalists, i.e. United States of America. A country whose political capital is the crime capital as well. A country whose financial capital belongs to the bigots! A country divided equally on the economic lines as well as the regional lines. A country which again has risen to the possibility of a political third front in the next general elections, which is equally invertebrate as the opposition and the ruling elite! A country whose political future is more about irrationality and factual blindness than about common sense and rationalism! A country which is populated by educated ignorants and sloths like me!
This certainly, is my India, my India rising!

An Inconvenient Truth!

What else could be a more apt title for this post other than the movie (rather documentary), An Inconvenient Truth, on Al Gore's campaign to make the people aware about Global Warming and the consequent Climate Change Crisis.

For those who have not heard about Al Gore, he is the former Vice President of USA and the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize for the year 2007. Forgive me, if I have underestimated your general awareness, but please understand, that recently I had the opportunity of watching MTV Roadies, where the level of general awareness of the participants, even though they were not selected on that criteria, made me think that the prize money of Rs. 5 crores on the show क्या आप पाँचवी पास से तेज़ हैं (an adaption of "Are you smarter than a fifth grader?" to be aired on Star Plus) will not be so easy to win.

The documentary which runs for about 100 minutes spells out the disasters that have already happened, those that are happening right now as you read this post and those that are waiting to happen on a much more destructive scale if the ecosystem plunder continues to happen at this rate.

The last line spells out a word which you would have read without actually realizing how important it is and how much importance we ought to give to it. The word is "ecosystem". At the first thought, the word means no more than eco-system or ecological system. Think for some more time and you will realize that it is a system where what goes in comes out, not necessarily in a linear fashion. It is a system which has its own way of maintaining the equilibrium which is fragile and will enter into a state of no return, once it exceeds the tipping point.

For e.g., you keep your electrical appliances running when you really don't need to, I take the liberty of stretching out my imagination to list down the following consequences that you face:

1. Your electricity bill shoots up.
2. The company generating the electricity will burn more amount of coal and consequently more carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere there by increasing the temperature of the earth. This will someday, if you are of the better paid category, force you to install an air conditioner in your home (if you don't have it already) there by further shooting up your electricity bills.
3. Because of consequence number 2, the company burns more coal to cool your home there by releasing even more amount of see-0-two into the ecosystem. As a simple consequence of law of supply and demand, the price of the coal shoots up thereby increasing the input cost and hence the output cost of electricity which is passed on to you in your bill.
4. Because you were not careful enough to switch off your appliances, the temperature of earth increases and so do the number of diseases/pests due to change in the climate pattern. God forbid, if this leads you or your loved and dependent ones to contract one of these diseases, you spend more amount of money visiting the doctor.
5. The last but definitely not the least, floods, droughts and other ecological disasters that happened and in which you, rather we, played a major role.

I shall stop my flights of fancy here, but believe me, this is a possibility if millions of people start to behave in this fashion. Also, the worst part is, this is already happening.

And this brings us to the how? How do we stop it? Well, to keep it simple, you do not have to join any protest rally to stop it. You just need to have/copy/develop common sense. The underlying question behind all your actions should be, "How can I do this in a more efficient way that will save energy?"

I shall stop being a preacher at this point. Watch the movie; it is full of scientific facts and figures and will keep you interested till the end.

Also, here is the official website, http://www.climatecrisis.net that is full of much more information and simple tips to save the energy and consequently the ecosystem.
And please do find time to register your vote here to support the call for taking measures that would address this issue. It won't take more than a minute.

The best way to finish the post will be the way the movie ends, with the song "I Need To Wake Up" by Melissa Etheridge:

Have I been sleeping?
I’ve been so still
Afraid of crumbling
Have I been careless?
Dismissing all the distant rumblings
Take me where I am supposed to be
To comprehend the things that I can’t see

Cause I need to move
I need to wake up
I need to change
I need to shake up
I need to speak out
Something’s got to break up
I’ve been asleep
And I need to wake up
Now

And as a child
I danced like it was 1999
My dreams were wild
The promise of this new world
Would be mine
Now I am throwing off the carelessness of youth
To listen to an inconvenient truth

That I need to move
I need to wake up
I need to change
I need to shake up
I need to speak out
Something’s got to break up
I’ve been asleep
And I need to wake up
Now

I am not an island
I am not alone
I am my intentions
Trapped here in this flesh and bone

And I need to move
I need to wake up
I need to change
I need to shake up
I need to speak out
Something’s got to break up
I’ve been asleep
And I need to wake up
Now

I want to change
I need to shake up
I need to speak out
Oh, Something’s got to break up
I’ve been asleep
And I need to wake up
Now

Thrusted upon you

I once heard someone, somewhere saying:
"Some people are born great, some people have greatness thrusted upon them"..

Or probably a better statement would be
"You are born as what you are, or what you are is thrusted upon you"..

Ergo, you don't have a choice...
You have to choose the choice you are supposed to, or anyways, you'll be forced to choose...

So it all ends up at "the denial of free will"...
No matter what you do, you end up doing what you are supposed to do...

In "The Matrix" terminology you call that purpose....You've already made the choice, you are here to know, why you have made that choice, what is your purpose....

This realization of "denial of free will" sometimes, to those who feel they've have a free will, seems like an unbearbale pain upon their souls....

The existence seems like questioned, the word "intellectualism" seems like a fallacy, with its purpose being reduced to justifying the state of our lives that we are currently in....

What if we had a free will and we could do whatever we wanted to?
Would that have been like an uncontrolled nuclear chain reaction, with one desire leading to another??

Armageddon: A selfish death

Time is coming when the hibernation inside the protective shell will come to an end....
For me its being like Steven Tyler singing "I don't want to miss a thing..."
Being too selfish, am I?
Or being too paranoic?
To come out of that protective shell and face the outer world?
May be....
Is this a similar to a child being born, crying while leaving the protective covering which he was in for 9 months, in my case transforms to around 45 months...
But it is also a birth, here a rebirth, after I died the image which I lived before entering this shell, my second home....
The shell gave me a new image to live for and moreover the capability to build the iamge I want to live....
But here's the stark differnece....
When u r born, there are two guides to guide you, to support you, to make sure that you are not lost in the wilderness of this "really" virtual world...
Here the shell will leave me on my own, and then it will be upto me, upto to those teachings which I got from the serveral guides during this protective phase, to test the waters of this world...
Till the time Armageddon occurs, its time for me to enjoy the warmth and love that the shell provides me...

A masterpiece for a master

Sachin Ramesh Tendulkar

???A Failed God

I always wonder, whether God deliberately created an imperfect system, so as to make sure that Change becomes the law of Nature and he can just sit there and relax, watching some of His creations struggling, to make their lives happier, and in the end going through mental and physical anguish.... Cause if it were not so, a perfect system would have made our lives static, and He would have to assign work to all of us like a HR manager....

Just was wondering, what would've happened if we or the system we live became perfect...
Would then, our mental function called ego would be rendered uselss? Because then we would not need to acheive anything more, then we would have attained perfection....
Or in that case also, our ego would make us feel that perfection is imperfect and that we need to redefine perfection...

But then I feel that God is also imperfect.. Because he is imperfect in creating a perfect system.

Feel free to post your comment on this piece that i've written....