Myths busted

That the Lion is the king of the jungle:
Until not long ago it was The Jungle book and The Lion King who ruled the forest. The lion would dictate terms except in books like Animal Farm where even pigs could have a say.
With their nimble gallops they would attack the prey and gorge with all theirb kin was the humble image in my mind. We looked at the lion with awe and would like him to be in the jungles and our memories. But now we have flaunted them in our zoos making them appear as if they were not captives and lived in their abode as always although humans coded them numbered them and watched every movement the lion could never think of.
The worst is all those TV channels who feigned innocence of protecting them, watched, filmed and tamed them. They even shot movies of counter attacks on lions by the wild buffalos caring for its kind and a herd of elephants protecting its infant. The lions were helpless and retrieved to my dismay.

Innocence once existed: The simplicity and purity of thought and giving.
India still remains a paradoxical country with reference to its demography. On one hand you have tall sky scrapers on the other there are slums. The forefathers of these slum dwellers were innocent migrants from various parts of India who came to make two ends meet. The present generation somehow have a genetic changeover of two generations as well as the education they have partaken and who understand life beyond simple measures of the value of their homes or the standard of living since TV’s and Fridges have become a part of life and affordable. Thus innocence which had remained in the masses and who came from agricultural background (who came from close to nature) has been waning in the two or three decades like never before.
Innocence is being gradually taken over by education but yet there are innocent people around us. This is to be taken as universal innocence a characteristic one inhibits at birth. Some of us are more wise than others and it could be said that some of us more innocent than others. Although the number of innocent is waning it is also a pure form of humanity. The wicked may want to have the innocent for them to be used but humanity needs innocence to sustain itself. The innocent can look at the world without wearing lenses.
Holocaust/doomsday theories:
As a boy the scariest part of living was the Indo Pak war of 1964. Pasting newspapers on windows to avoid light getting outside the house so that the enemy planes won’t see the city below (the government need not have to bother about blackouts). Hiding yourself below benches (as we were then trained to do) in schools when a hotter installed in all localities went louder. I then kept thinking whether this was the end. Wouldn’t we live to see the beautiful life laid in our future? But now I am sure nothing can destroy this earth. No holocaust, no doomsday as all these theories were propagated through a scare. The earth is capable of surviving on its own. It is designed to! Whatever the circumstances! Let countries have nuclear warheads, let there be terrorism, let there be religious dogmas or let there be a divide between the rich and the poor we are here to remain forever.
Cities will burst at their seams:
They have already burst. Mumbai, Dubai, New York have traffic jams where people are struck hours on end. A citizen new to Mumbai will not be able to board and alight a suburban train at peak hours. If this is not bursting what is! More vehicles are offloaded on to the roads everyday in all megacities of the world without bothering to add equivalent length of roads. People and government are not ready to accept that the cities are so overcrowded the meagre footpaths are not sufficient to walk, the pressure and tension to cross these roads is so immense that they just cross without bothering about their lives but don’t complain and even if they do it is so superfluous.

Sustainability

The biggest curse of modernisation is probably the environmental damage out of green house gases and carbon emissions. Consider the falling air quality index levels in metropolis and the pollutants and toxins released by municipalities in rivers and seas. Global temperatures are rising, weather parameters are taking a bad shape and what the earth would undergo in a hundred years is a wild imagination guessed by scientists and meteorologists. We have all become well conversed in all this over the past few years.
So what have we done to correct this situation? Modern management stresses not to have corrections or mitigations but to have a solution and system devoid of it.
A small news item in a newspaper has triggered my mind. It says a device made out of a paper, pencil and a Teflon tape can generate enough electricity to operate a remote control that requires a 3 Volt charge. I chanced to encounter recently with a kitchen basket that converts household trash into compost and requires nothing to be disposed away (Imagine how you could get away with the entire garbage disposal system of a city). I recently saw a video of an artificial tree depicting wind energy which had about one feet long rotating cylindrical wind-mills jutting out vertically from its several branches producing electricity (what an amazing sight?). A successful entrepreneur, taken to a social cause, has manufactured a bicycle when run for an hour manually, can produce enough electricity to light 24 filament bulbs and a fan for a day.
Magical inventions, are they not?
We long back devised water falling on turbines through penstocks so as to generate electricity. We have used invertors to store electricity so as to be used when there is a shutdown or for starting cars. Likewise there are eco-inverter air conditioners that are power saving. There are LED lights replacing CFL’S that are more energy efficient.
We are at the cusp of a revolution. Humanity will survive as long as the wind keeps blowing, the sun spreads light, the rivers keep flowing and the seas keep churning. There is enough hope. Back to nature!

Visions, Images and Reality

Recently I read of an artist who saw two planets in the two halves of an apple. He saw the entire cosmos in a Roti, the Indian bread. Some others saw constellations in other food articles. However this is an art of magnifying the object under the scrutiny of photographic frames.
We know of phenomena when the patterns on a bed of sand make different objects. These could be elongated arms and legs and weird faces with stretched eyes and elongated nose. We see white sponges of clouds on a moonlit sky moving swiftly in the wind taking different shapes of animals and trees.
In the 10th Chapter of the Bhagwadgita, the epitome of Hindu philosophy, Krishna tells Arjuna that he exists in everything. He is the centre of the cosmos. He is the God of all God’s. He is the embodiment of all knowledge. He is the pinnacle of the Himalaya. He goes on to explain his presence in the best of everything existing.
The artists visions of the cosmos and the phenomena of watching patterns in sand and the clouds are perceptions coming out of a foggy mind groping to see something. It could be just that the cosmos exists in a piece of bread or in the moirés of sand or in the formation of different images in a cloud. But what Krishna says is very clear. We need to have certain beliefs to start with. Then we can build on them and see the eternity of life.

Water

Every astronomer is thirsty. Yes! Thirsty of water. It is the most talked about word in the glass cubicles of astronomy theatres and in books written on astronomy. When deep penetrating telescopes, like the Hubble and the Spitzer, return with views from the skies astronomers look for clues relating to the existence of water on those objects. They are happy when they see ice on the moon, Mars, asteroids, comets and elsewhere in the cosmos. The presence of water vapour too increases the possibility of a habitable zone. Why they have affinity for water and vapour is that it raises the possibility of life. Life in any form from microbes to humanity or any other higher forms!
The water molecule has two components - hydrogen and oxygen. Both are very precious. Oxygen you can breathe with and other can be profusely used to create energy. When our Chandrayan confirmed ice on moon all Indian were proud about it. The euphoria generated by patterns of streams on Mars surface lasted a decade until it was confirmed that water did exist on Mars indeed albeit in the form of ice. And now European Space Agency’s Rosetta’s lander Philae has found water on Churyumov Gerasimenko the comet.
Besides Hydrogen and Oxygen, Carbon for the formation of fuel and Nitrogen are important. This will entail the formation of amino acids.
What is common to the solar system could be possible anywhere in the light years of the cosmos. However it is to be seen if life can exist without these basic elements. There is a possibility that what we consider as building blocks of life may then have more hues of combinations. May be some other life exists around us which our senses may not have the receptors to feel them!!

Mrinalini Sarabhai

What a way of paying homage to a departed soul. Dancing in its physical presence! That is what Mallika Sarabhai and her daughter Anahita along with Mrinalinis students did before taking her mortal remains for the last rites. Mrinalini Sarabhai aged 97 years practised and preached the art of dancing all her life-time. Almost 75 years of dancing in a lifetime. The only perfect way to pay homage was to dance for her.
Everybody is born to die. But what ensues in those years in between of birth and death, matters. It becomes more extraordinary when you know that it was in those times when dancing was taboo in good families and considered an art to lure the wealthy as courtesans.
Mrinalini Sarabhai never lived a life in the shadow of her late husband the doyen, the pioneer of Indian Space Explorations Vikram Sarabhai. She was as dedicated to her art as Vikram was dedicated to space. She set up the Darpan Academy of Performing Arts in Ahmedabad and nurtured it and created a legend of Bharat Natyam dancers. You can only dance this long with creativity. She created her own masterpieces. Dance was the breath of her life.
She will remain in the minds and hearts of her followers.

The Art Of Kite Flying

Yesterday was 15th Jan and the day of winter solstice in the northern hemisphere. Generally the winter solstice is on the 14th Jan but since this is a leap year with 365 days and February a 29 day month it fell on the 15th.
It is also a season of harvesting in India and the sub-continent and the day is celebrated with a lot of gusto and passion under different festival names eg in Maharashtra it is Makar Sankranti and in the south of India it is Pongal and in the north east it is Bihu.
It is also a season of kite flying. The kites vary in sizes and shapes with a straight bamboo stick woven with a bow shaped stick perpendicular to it and made out of paper and Chinese plastic. A soft breeze flies them high into the skies and Oh! The colours are delightful. Horizontal stripes and vertical stripes of different colours made into national flags, religious emblems and famous film stars and sometimes with religious and philosophical and advertorial messages inscribed.
There is an art in tying the cord to the kite which makes all the balance possible and to manoeuvre the kite in the skies. The strand that connects you and the kite in the sky is the most important thread. As a boy I use to coat this thread with crushed glass mixed with glue and colour. This is the thread that is the combat weapon when taking on another kite in the sky. This is where the entire art of kite flying is exhibited. There is a definite methodology on taking on a foe. There is an art of diving over another kite to cut its stings. Another is to get deep under it and pull the string of your kite fast enough to create a friction and cut the others strings. There are various other ways like jerking, leaving the string of your kite over the others and releasing gradually. What follows a cut of another kite is a loud cry of exulting a win over another kite in the sky.
At the end of the day you have flown a lot of kites and the echoes of the surrounding sky fill your heart with joy and grief with the wins and losses and blood oozes out of the joints of your finger due to the cuts of the crushed glass coated strands.
And then you salute to the setting sun and darkness envelopes the skies. Here begins another joy of releasing sky lanterns as you light a candle inside the pink balloons which take off one after the other and fill the night sky with bright luminaries.

Nostalgia

As you grow in age the one thing everyone lives with is nostalgia. The billions of neurons in our brain with emotional and practical hemispheres bring forth flashes of memories from the school days (your teachers, the punishments the spats you had with your mates) shopping and picnics with your parents and neighbours, the loves in your college days etc etc. This erupt more so on the onset of monsoons when your brain leashes extra spurts of amino acids. .
Socially too your mind gets into a melancholy when you hear of some past iconic places dying. There were two news articles alongside in the TOI Mumbai edition dtd 26.11.15. One was Cafe Madras selling Idlis at 20 Paise (the younger generation would ask what are these paisas and how they looked?) at the price at which it sold Idlis in 1940. This was to commemorate 75 years of its presence in Matunga without any change in taste and quality. This elevated my heart for the fond memories i had over the visits to my in laws place there and the frequent visits to Cafe Madras. On the other hand there was this news of The Rythm House, the shop selling music over seven decades at the famous location of Kala Ghoda, closing down. No one listens to CD’s and DVD’s anymore. They are bought online or simply downloaded free.
The old is waning. As the suburbs have their own shopping and Bazaar culture evolved there is no attendance at these iconic places. The Irani restaurants have mostly disappeared replaced by jazzy clothing and apparel shops. Dadar lost Mama Kane. The textile mills and along with it an entire culture lost in half of Mumbai now being replaced by plush sky scrapers. So many green areas so many hills and knolls cut down to make way for popping up new residential complex.
We are developing. We are making the world a better place to live in. But we are definitely losing something. Our generations to come may not have anything from the old past to show them to their grandchildren as the earth becomes a more populated place, may be just the Tajmahal and the Kutubminar and other such major structures.