Easy Bliss

Hanami is picnicking under the sakura bloom. Sakura is the Japanese word for Cherry Blossom and sakura-viewing is ‘mono no aware’ meaning empathy towards everything. The tradition has been taking place for thousands of years. The Japanese view the bloom, which hardly lasts a fortnight, almost in a meditative way watching it hours on end. They also feel very sad when the bloom starts fading away. It is during March end or April month during which the cherry blossom tree blooms and during which time the hotels in Tokyo and Kyoto are booked years in advance to see the spectacle of the bloom.
Many Indians have suggested starting a similar festival of the Golden Shower Tree or Laburnum in India. The tree too blooms in April, summer time in India. At the peak of its bloom the flowers are so dense that you wouldn’t see a leaf or a trunk or a bark. You will find these trees lined up in many cities of India like Mumbai and Noida and in Kerala and many parts of India. They present a very soothing site during the scorching summer time and are relaxing and de-stressing. Authorities will need to create meadows lined up with these trees to create gardens and picnic spots. The festival has to catch the imagination of the authorities and the population at large. It is also vacation time for schools in India.
The Zen masters have known to teach meditation, relaxing with your body stretched in bath tubs. They have also prescribed meditative walks. In this you can sit on a sofa and imagine you change into a track suit and then wear your sport shoes. You then go out of your house in your mind, remaining in your sofa into a garden lined up with beautiful flowers. You simultaneously measure every step of your walk. You can return back from this imaginary long walk home feeling fit and retrieving on your sofa without moving a limb.
As for me I got up today in the morning to find a blanket of dark clouds on the dome of the sky with a steady drizzle. Sounds of thick drops falling from the 17th floor roof over three floors below me created music to the incessant shower. Green branches of tall thicket trees standing meekly in ovation. Sometimes the drizzle turned awry increasing in intensity to the howl of wind. I gazed at the Mumbai rains for an hour. It was a spell I will not forget for a long time. I recalled a similar hex standing on the bank of a lake in Chhatisgarh scattered with lotus flowers and watching the reflection of birds and passing billows of white clouds on the serene waters. It was bliss.

Olympics and India

India had won six medals in the last London Olympics. We won just two bronze at Rio. It was expected that they would win more this time around. Most countries have grown steadily in their medal tallies over the years before reaching stagnation.
There have been tweets and counter-tweets. People have blamed the sports authorities. There have been controversies on doping. Some people have criticized us for not creating good athletes in a country of 1.20 billion people.
The fact is that there is nobody to take responsibility. The sports ministry does not have targets. There is no organised planning and we have no clue to win an Olympic medal. Whatever financial resources are available are not channelized properly. We don’t know how to go about a sport. We don’t know how to pick talented athletes. We don’t know how to pick managers and trainers. Whatever we have achieved are mostly individual efforts.
Small backward countries including Kenya and Jamaica are creating legends. Korea, Japan and most small European countries produce winners consistently.
We have a vast country with varied climate and skins of all colors and fitness of all sorts. The north-east has stiff competitors, the Haryanvis are great wrestlers. Keralites are good athletes and weight-lifters. We have no dearth of talent. The government offers lots of gifts and free-bees in terms of money and property to winners (Sakshi Malik the wrestler bronze medalist will win at least Rs Three crores and lots of awards including Khel Ratna and accolades). What is wrong is with the way we are handling these affairs. We need to convert novices into qualifiers, qualifiers into medal winners.

Should we stop bearing children

During the last 50 yrs the population of Europe grew by 10% from 400 million to 500 million. American population will rise by a 100 million in the next 50 yrs. African population is destined to grow from the present 16 to 25% in the next 35 yrs. The only consolation is Asia’s population rise will fall from 60 to 54 % in the next 35 yrs.
Looking at the growth it is imminent that there will be immigration to cities. Cities will grow tall but mostly wide. Agricultural land will be encroached. Managing natural resources would be difficult and changes like increased temperatures and flooding will result in degradation of the environmental.
All this leads to my insecurities. This is quite a depressing scenario. The words fading, waning, depleting, hounding ring in my ears.
Sometimes I wonder whether our future generations would have enough space to sleep and enough fields to grow the grains we require. I have been living by such scares since childhood. It all began when we were trained in school to hide below benches on the siren hooting began on the attacks of fighter Pakistani planes during the 1965 Indo-Pak war. We were in Pune and the ammunition factory in Pimpri was their hot target. It drove a childs mind wild in imagination of what lay in life. The perception of a bomb killing you and all your aspirations shattered were nerve racking.
Now I believe life goes on. If we are short of land we may migrate to another planet. If we are short of resources we might tap from a passing asteroid. Nothing will stop!

Humans, Aliens and the third Entity and the philosophy that makes us

What we consider as the natural way of things could be abstract in the cosmic sense.
Let us begin this with our own body. Essentially we have a head with two upper and two lower limbs joined by a diaphragm. We seek a similar figure of an alien with extensions of this typical body like longer arms or a bolder head and so on.
We tend to think that the oxygen or the composition of the earth’s atmosphere keeps us going. There is a very big theory about the position of our planet earth with respect to the Milky way galaxy. There is something called the goldilocks zone in the Milky Way galaxy in which our Sun is located and the distance of the earth from the Sun and the ideal temperatures that overwhelm the presence of life on earth. We look for planets and aliens in space with similar circumstances whenever we surf through the Hubble or the Chandra Space Telescope.
We feel that the earth is going because of the intelligent life we are and because of the Flora and Fauna around us. We tend to think that the physical abilities/disabilities we are bestowed with is almost perfect and nothing can come close.
That the Sun rises in the east and sets in the west with variations due to the tilt of the poles causing seasons and all this is very ideal. Also the proportion of ocean to earth space and the dissimilar climates makes up the very essence. Also the layers of atmosphere that the earth is surrounded by and the ozone cocoon above that due to which the radiation and the ultra violet rays are blocked is how we live in a cosy comfort.
These and other endless parameters make up the success of earth as a habitable planet. Some saintly people have ascribed all these parameters to be fulfilled to be the intervention of the almighty God otherwise it would be impossible for so many unlikely happenings to come together. So your lives and ours are God gifted and use it to nurture kindness for we are all one.
Let us think this some other way. Imagine that this very God made a separate set of parameters and made another intelligent life whose perception we don’t have at all. Neither can that other ever come to know about us! How will we recognise him? How will we know him? Imagine that it is not water, oxygen, food or climate that is required for his survival. He does not require shelter or is there any need for him to wear clothes. He does not require civilization or industrialisation or for that matter the need of brooks, rivers and seas. There is no need of hills, mountains and rains. Imagine this human having a sack like form without any limbs or head. He has an immune system that does not carry any diseases. That he does not have emotions and feelings and cartilage and boons.
I think it is a possibility. He may be around us or we may be around him. There may be this universe that he may see like we or a parallel universe with entirely new parameters that may co-exist or entirely separated out.
The aliens mean that they are a part of our universe. That we may encounter them some day! That we may speak, eat, fight or have a war for survival of our own community!! May be these are not the parameters that work for the other entity which God created for a parallel universe with other parameters.
Also there is a possibility that there may be infinite universes with any number of parameters. Like, we tend to think these days about having 13 dimensions.
I think it is the eyes that make up the humans. I don’t think only the mind would have worked. The others appurtenances make us formidable enough to think about the entire universe and its philosophies.

The art of swimming

Most people who know swimming will tell you that the key to good health is swimming. There is no exercise better than swimming! It is also a great pleasure to float on water and that every muscle and sinew gets a rub.
In my school days I used to visit my maternal uncles village during summer vacations. The crops are harvested by March and in May when we visited the fields used to be parched. However there was enough water in the wells to swim and wash your clothes. The learners used to be tied around the waist with branches of drumstick wood entwined with a rope (they are extremely light in weight and can float along-with the weight of your body). I was the type who was extremely scared of water and got choked-up and wary. Every-one around advised me the lifetime rewards of being a perfect swimmer. But still I fled away with a morose face. Again I returned the next vacation to find my mentor, a very senior farmer, again persuading me to learn swimming and I persisted with my fleeing habit.
All the good resorts in the country today have shallow swimming pools with deepest end being 5 feet. All those who know swimming can have a good swim free-styling or breast-stroking and all those who don’t can have a dip quite enjoyable. You can sit, thump your legs on the floor of the pool and get a floating feeling. Worst you could sit on the side-lines and watch people swimming. This is no less meditative!

Disciplined in-discipline

We are not perfect. There is nothing called perfection. Only God may achieve it. The Japanese exhibit this in a way. You have a perfectly mowed landscape with trees and plants meticulously shaven. What the Japanese will do is spread it around with, may be, foliage. This is to show that perfection does’nt exist. This they call perfectly imperfect.
The cosmic set-up too is extremely disciplined. Moons move around planets, planets move around the stars, stars move around galaxies and galaxies around groups. But there are indisciplined objects like quasars and pulsars which exhibit strange characteristics. Yet there is a discipline in the cosmic set-up.
In an office setting everything cannot go with military discipline. There have to be moments of camaraderie and linger and laughing and joking. It is like all work and no leisure. But if these periods extend beyond certain limits it can be harmful to the office environ which may begin to unabashedly start creating groups, exhibit prejudices and start loose talk and become gossip friendly and so on.
What probably we are looking here is disciplined in-discipline. This is not easy since there a lot of human characteristics with various hues existing in an office set-up. Probably what can come to the managements rescue here is the setting-up of targets, having training sessions, meetings. All in all keeping the staff on their toes.