In India at least the doors and windows are open, or missing, and then there are roofs

I’m sure I’d die of claustrophobia.

Dr. Venugopal, Cyclone Nargis in Mayanmar

Dr. Venugopal

It is heartening to see Dr. Venugopal re-instated by the Supreme Court; he shouldn’t have been removed in the first place. There is still hope for India it seems and justice does exist, even if for a selected few.

The Pioneer has published a trenchant commentary on the utter lack of conscience in Ramadoss, the union (unhealthy) health minister. Ever since he joined the office all he has done is bother people with his nonsensical egotism. You won’t find even a single constructive step he has taken in the area of health.

This affair is also a statement on our public consciousness. Such an eminent cardiologist is harassed by an imbecile politician and no large-scale protests take place. It was a lone battle for the doctor, although high-profiled attorneys like Arun Jaitley fought for him. I wonder if there was even a PIL filed again the infamous ouster. Millions of people throng at the gates of AIIMS every year for treatment, and none of them spoke up for Dr. Venugopal.

Government hospitals like AIIMS and Safdarjung, although world-class, are known for their unhygienic conditions and shabby treatment to the patients. This was the right time for the patients to show that they could put up a joint front with the doctors.

Millions face death and starvation in Mayanmar

Repressive regimes never stop their games. For a long time Alka has been urging me to read "Reading Lolita in Tehran" in which the author has written how the government men used to surround the site where a bomb had dropped, during the Iran-Iraq war so that people couldn’t help each other and consequently, develop a bonding for each other and an opposition to the ongoing war.

The military junta in Mayanmar is not allowing foreign aid workers to come and help their own people. How diabolical can a government become? During natural calamities of such humongous proportions every single hour counts. The international aid that could have reached the flooded regions is being stopped by the authorities that are supposed to help their own people. These are the times when such countries should be taken over by an international agency. Just a thought, because I know realistically this is not possible.

Making a nation healthy

In my previous post I talked about the food becoming scarce and dear. The thought of food became a catalyst to another thought that has been coming to my mind for a few weeks, and that thought is, why don’t we feed those who don’t have food? This is no social work, this is nation-building.

I’ll talk from India’s point of view; we desperately need a thinking revamp when it comes to feeding ourselves and the others. Yesterday Alka and I were sitting in the balcony observing kids going to their schools, followed by mothers-teachers (in our building most of the mothers are teachers because this building was constructed by the society of teachers from a particular school). The children seemed to have no spirits. It was morning, and ideally they should have been full of vigor and enthusiasm; where was that charm of greeting a new day? We attributed this to food.

In India we stuff our bellies (those who can) but never give a second thought to the kind of food we are eating. We equate eating lots of food with nourishment. This misconception must be changed. We don’t need to eat lots of food, we need to eat good food.

The other thing is, we must routinely feed poor families that cannot afford food. As I mentioned above, this is not social work. There are lots of disparities in our country and that is why we are not progressing the way we should have. The poor family you try to feed might turn out to be a pack of assholes but that’s not the point. Feeding poor families will achieve two things that our country desperately needs:

1. To a tiny extent it will bridge the gap between the haves and the havenots. It will sensitize us towards each other. There is lots of animosity: the rich dislike the poor and the poor dislike the rich and I see this everywhere. Someday this feeling is going to explode and nobody will be able to control the ensuing catastrophe. Knowing the ratio of haves and havenots you can easily make out who will suffer the most at the hands of whom. Feeding will at least initiate a contact.
2. It will improve the health of people around you. With better health they will be able to work more. Take for instance your sweeper, or your maid. If you feed them, even twice a week, it will significantly improve their health and they will do their jobs better. Gradually, may be in the next 5 to 10 years, a small portion (because we cannot reach every nook and corner of the country) of the population will be healthier, happier.

From unhealthy food, and the lack of basic food, stem most of the problems India faces today. I think good food gives rise to good thoughts and good principals.

Sharing food is not as difficult as it seems. Small lifestyle changes can enable you to give food to the poor. If you eat 3 pizzas every month, eat two. If you go to a restaurant 5 times in a month, go 3 times. Don’t throw away the food after parties and marriages: let the poor have it. Be innovative and reduce your electricity bill and use that money for the extra food you need to purchase. Similarly, there are many cost-cuttings you can carry out to arrange enough money to feed a poor family.

Food consumption and the rising cost of food

Bush says the price of food has increased because people in India as well as in China are eating more. What does he intend to say, that it was better when people in these countries were impoverished and stayed malnourished? Some studies have claimed that 73% of food in the United States is disposed of, uneaten (read this). People simply consign the food on their plates to the garbage can as soon as they don’t feel like consuming it; and they take big portions even when they don’t intend to eat the whole thing. So much for causing food shortage by eating more by people in other countries.

I’m not denying that food habits in India have changed. In fact even at our house we eat a lot better than what we used to eat when we were kids. We were not poor back then but there was not much awareness regarding food-eating options and to be frank, not much was available. Due to overall progress and globalization people have access to a variety of comestibles, irrespective of the escalating costs.

But you cannot blame people for eating better, especially when people in your own country moronically go on wasting food and fuel despite the galling shortage. The problem is not the shortage, it is a litany of bad decisions. Currently, almost 30% of corn produce in the USA is converted into ethanol and similar trends are being observed in the EU where different governments are setting up targets for producing more and more biofuel.

In India more food rots in the godowns than is eaten. Shady marketers horde food so that they can sell it at the times of scarcity and in the process lots of it is destroyed, and the government doesn’t do much about this, and this must be happening in many countries. In fact numerous countries are experiencing food riots already.

The scourge of control

People in Cuba can use PCs at home now. If you think this is the news from the early 90s you are mistaken. The communist government in Cuba never allowed its citizens to use computers. The Internet is still banned there. Empowerment and access to information are the most scary things for such regimes. Sometimes I feel certain people deserve such Draconian governments; they are too lazy or laid-back to overthrow their governments.

A couple of days ago I was reading in a forum that countries like India, China, Saudi Arabia, etc. don’t allow their citizens to use VoIP services like Skype because this will give them unrestricted power to communicate. Actually, Skype has many wonderful subscription features that allow you to make unlimited calls to landline phones as well as cellphones all over the world for a fixed, nominal, monthly fee. Only recently having a telephone itself was a luxury in India.

Absurd Time

I was going through Time’s The World’s Most Influential people of 2008 and among The Dalai Lama, Miley Cyrus, Vladimir Putin and Aung San Suu Kyi I noticed our very own Soniaji ebulliently smiling at number 16. Incidentally, Aung San Suu Kyi appears at number 37. Mercifully, The Dalai Lama appears at the first spot.

I was wondering what our own madam ji was doing in the list and what feat she has achieved but then I thought of Paris Hilton and said, "Well, why not?!" If she can become a celebrity without doing anything, why can’t Sonia Gandhi appear in the list of top hundred influential people of the world? After all she wields lots of influence among the army of sycophants she has gathered around her. By the way I don’t loath Paris Hilton so much that I’d compare her to Sonia Gandhi.

Due to work I don’t get to watch TV these days, not even news channels, but Alka was telling me that NDTV was hosting a debate on whether LK Advani has the ability to become the prime minister of the country. These "secular" (tedious sarcasm, I know) channels never hold debates on the capabilities of Sonia ji and Rahul baba and the inabilities of Man(?)mohan Singh. Even our lazy maid will do a better job than him.

The infinite power of our brain

The new research is revealing that the universe is like a brain cell. An average human brain has over 100 billion brain cells (neurons). So if one brain cell is like a universe, does it mean an average brain has around 100 billion universes?

Source

Our brain has infinite power; we just don’t know how to tap into that power and use it constructively. Recently I was reading this very interesting article on Wired on how with the help of a software we can improve our capacity to remember things and in the end the author has very rightly remarked:

As a science fiction fan, I had always assumed that when computers supplemented our intelligence, it would be because we outsourced some of our memory to them. We would ask questions, and our machines would give oracular — or supremely practical — replies. Wozniak has discovered a different route. When he entrusts his mental life to a machine, it is not to throw off the burden of thought but to make his mind more swift. Extreme knowledge is not something for which he programs a computer but for which his computer is programming him.

You need to read the article to understand the context. This article re-awakened my desire to make my brain stronger without resorting to gadgets and programs to manage my memory — of late I had been doing that a lot. Remember how many phone numbers we could recall? Now since all the phone numbers are stored there is no need to remember them. Similarly, even for smaller calculations we use calculators and computers. And not that we are preserving the power to utilize it on some other activity.

Trust is something you should take seriously

I don’t trust people easily, and I don’t take it in the negative sense. My life has taught me pretty good lessons on trust. But it doesn’t mean that I don’t entertain any sort of trust. For instance, these days sometimes I outsource content writing work and then I have to trust that the writers will finish the job in a decent manner, on time. Then, I trust that my clients will pay me for the content I deliver them. But this is as far as it goes: I don’t trust in the goodness of people just like that. This lady did and paid with her life. I trust very close family members though.

A good way to make money

Unfortunately, the utility value is only for men.

Roots

Roots was sent to me by my dear sister who in turn was given this book by her friend Mukta. Just as it happens with every book that knocks at the doors of my existence, it stood outside for a long time before I opened the door.

Roots is one of those books that change your perspective of how you treat life and people, although I firmly believe that every kind of book possesses this monumental ability. That’s why I cannot read books piecemeal; they affect me a lot. There are a very few books that I have read, and almost every book has left its imprints upon my consciousness.

I wouldn’t call Roots a "literary experience"; it’s a journey, it’s a part of life that you spend with people struggling to survive through inhumanity, injustice, and existential void. It’s a story about how you sustain the warmth of life in the icy caverns of hopelessness so that even if individuals perish, generations survive. After having a child, I know what this means.

Roots is a story of a Mandinka warrior named Kunta Kinte from the Gambia, Africa, who is captured by slave traders, shipped to America under the most base conditions you can imagine as a human being, and then sold to further, interminable sufferings. His jungle instinct makes him run again and again and every time he is captured until his hope begins to fade like a twilight star. You can really feel the crushing of the soul. Here’s a human being full of dreams, knowledge and plans. He is sensitive, religious and philosophical. He has great plans for himself, his family and his village. He is healthy and strong and a trained warrior. And then he is captured, kept like a rat in a sewage wallowing in his own excreta and vomit and disease, beaten again and again, and chained in such a manner that he cannot even lie straight. Once bought, he is kept tied to a poll outside the house like a dog.

Slaves were kept like animals and in fact, worse than animals. Their white captors hated them with great severity. They were not supposed to have human feelings and needs. If you were a slave, total surrender was expected of you and even that too was considered your duty. You were to feel thankful if you were not beaten and humiliated even if you were loyal to your master. People were sold just like chicken. Your husband, wife, parent, sibling, child, friend, could be sold away any day and you could do nothing about it. Sometimes children were auctioned even before they were born. Anything could be done to your loved ones in front of your eyes and you could not intervene because if you did, your master could punish you in whatever way he wanted to, according to the law. Baffling? For the American whites it was as normal as eating chicken.

So under these conditions Kunta Kinte survives and gives rise to this epic story spanning many generations.

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