Copenhegan

I have put ear plugs in my ears and so am immune to all the hoopla and loudspeaking at Copehegan Environmental Conference. I don’t expect anything other than complete cacophony when so many beurocrats and politicians gather together. (Huge amount of energy is wasted in keeping all of them warm in the freezing Danish winter. Isnt this ironical and representative of the way things are going! Couldn’t they have met at an environment friendly venue in a enviroment friendly way?) All of them are hassling and haggling over amounts of emission cuts without initiating any action at home, as if emission cuts are automatically fall from heaven. So I do not expect anything happening on ground whatever they agree or agree to disagree. Nothing substantive can happen from the current economic scenario which is fundamentally rooted in two notions of 'consume' and 'more'. Both these notions are diametrically opposite to emission cuts.

For too long we have let corporates tell us where our happiness lies in. Looking at the western societies we have come to realize that, beyond a certain level, material comforts do not lead to increase in happiness, rather the opposite happens. We end up loosing any meaning to our living. So if we have a fundamental relook at our lives and lifestyles then we may feel like living differently and maybe that would be immensely environfriendly way of living.
• Instead of buying, Do more (= consume less, enjoy more)
• Participate in the things in our lives (=buy less)
• Experience the joy of putting things to a newer use (=throw away less and recycle more)
• Live with nature (=have seasonal habits, use local stuff than getting things across seven seas, commute less)
• Spend more time with ourselves and with our family and friends (=enjoy the work you are doing, live close to work or find work closer to home, have time in hand to 'do' things)



WHAT DO YOU THINK? DO YOU AGREE OR DISAGREE? HAVE YOU TRIED THIS OUT? WANT TO TRY OUT?

जुन्या सवयी

गवत उपटून टाक्लं तरी
झाडं छाटून टाकली तरी,
तंतू दटून राहतातच
बिया लपून राहतातच,
पाण्य़ाची वाट पहात
संधीची वाट पहात,

अलगद रुजतात
सभोवार मुरतात
पुनःश्च फ़ोफ़ावतात,
म्हणून तर अनुभवी माळी म्हणतात
सतत मशागत करत रहावं लागतं
नाहीतर
बागेचा पुन्हा माळ व्हायला
वेळ नाही लागत

Wagging Love

Some babies are born with silver spoon in their mouth, some are born with golden spoon. I was born with doors of my house open. Love came in from all doors and windows. Even before I was born, at the first signs of my arrival love had started filling our house and our hearts. We welcomed it with open arms and wide smiles. So much of love started arriving that we had to break open the walls and make news widows. Wide big windows, from floor to roof. Our family was blessed with all that warmth and love. We kept on welcoming it.

We kept on welcoming it till one evening love followed me in the form of tiny woolly ball with wagging tail. We were all snoochy-moochy to receive this ball with a wagging tail and seducing squeaks. As time went on, my mother started realizing side-effects of love. With incessant slaps of wagging tail, woolly ball jumping through her legs during household chores, and cute squeaks asking for attention all through the night, she started feeling like love is sort of started overflowing for her. She had more than enough of love. She tried to keep that woolly ball out but it bounced back in. All efforts to get rid of this live ended in vain. So she did the next best thing she could do, that was to ensure no more love could come in. She closed all doors and windows and sealed them with latches and locks. Now nothing could come in. And nothing could go out either!

Woolly ball was naturally called Wuly. With no way to go out Wuly showered all her love on me. I used to be wet with love all the time. This wetness percolated inside to my heart and too became full of woolly love and I was always smiling, cheery, lovey. From Wuly I learnt to wag, I learnt to move my ears. When I entered a room I would know beforehand who were inside and who had left, merely by their smells. By their smells I would know who is happy or who is angry. I became so adept in these expressions that my family would lovingly call me Wulo. In school my antiques were looked at with some fascination, some fun and some ridicule. Some boys were called girlie or sissy, while I was called doggy. I did not mind it, rather I was enjoying all of it. It went on well till I went to high school, where I took fancy of girl. Soon she was called as girlfriend and I was called her dogfriend. Then I realized that things are going a bit too far. It was all alright about me but I would not want my girlfriend to be ridiculed, though she herself did not mind it. But now I was grown up and I have to take care of my girlfriend. I need to be a man.

It was very difficult for me. I needed to close doors and windows of myself. My feeling could no more flow out freely as and how they wanted. I had become man and feelings would have to walk out of me only in a manly way. That was the first jolt to my young and lively heart. Destiny had enabled me to learn all the nature's wonderful ways of expressing and receiving feelings, but now I would need to sacrifice all those in order to be a man! Ooooff!

In the early stages of evolution as man started reaping benefits of developed mind, its focus shifted more and more towards mind. In the process all other facets and abilities got neglected. Today we have reached such a stage that we have hardly anything to fear from the external world. The biggest threats to mankind are from its own kinds, from its own selves. So many of conflicts, so many fights arise out of misunderstandings that if man had been able to communicated better his life in turn would become a lot better. A man would not have to doubt about his girl-friend or a woman about her boyfriend. She would not need to ask him, "Do you love me?". She would know herself by his smell, his sound, his so many bodily actions. When a person is trying to feign his emotions, others would immediately know what he is really feeling. People would not need to go around uttering "I love you, dear" so many times as to make those three lovely words a cliché. Our expressions, our smell, our sounds, our touch, our actions, anything and everything would clearly speak out our love, our anger, our sulkiness.

We have reached a state where most of our basic needs are getting satisfied with minimal of efforts and time, and we have left with lots of time to do nothing. This is pushing us to contemplating, to look deeper into ourselves, to seek to find out 'why's of our actions. And what we are seeing is surprising many. Most of our seemingly rational, logical actions arise from emotional, completely irrational roots. Rationality is seeing to be inadequate to satisfy our emotional needs. And we are seeing the changes. The old time heroes with stony faces and inhuman actions maybe bygones. Today's heroes are more explicit in their expressions. We are seeing many of hard-nut sportsment openly giving out their intense emotions. We see them shout aloud, see them kiss ground, see them laugh or cry, cry both in pain of loss and in pleasure of winning. Just yesterday a young Chief Minister of an Indian state said publicly, "If I react with a bit of emotion, good. For too long, politics has been dehumanized in this country". Well said, Chief Minsiter. My whole hearted applause to you. I too am looking forward to the days when I can muster enough courage to raise my ears and to wag my tail openly and to the days when my friends too can gather courage to respond to me with wagging their tails.

Power of Places

I have been to different places for my morning workout of walking and jogging. I have been to bylanes of Dahanukar Colony, to Kothrud Hill, to Deccan Gymkhana jogging track, to other grounds, to Prabhat Road bylanes, and to Law College Hill from Kanchan Lane. (For those who are not from the western part of Pune, these names may sound unfamiliar. But they can of course google to see the places. If they are not satisfied with simple googling they can also google MSN or Yahoo!)

We Indians have this special knack of converting proper nouns into common nouns, or even into verbs. For us Xerox is not a company which makes photocopying machines. For us Xerox is everything and that. Xerox machine can be a Canon photocopying machine, to xerox is to photocopy. A yellow board with XEROX written in black paint outside a shop means a shop vendor who is offering many facilities in addition to photocopying. We have converted Cadbury chocolate into Cadbury = chocolate. So we have Amul's cadbury, Nestle's cadbury and so on. So . . . . We google Google, we google MSN, and we google many other things.

Oh, I must return to my hill, the Law College Hill, if I have to continue writing. This hill casts a sort of magical spell on me, that once I am in its shadow my mind starts acting creatively. While my feet are wandering through bushes and trees of the hill, my heart and my mind are wandering all over the world and beyond. There on that divine hill my mind often leaves this earthly world and wanders into the worlds beyond. Its wanderings and wonderings were so blessed by the hill that they not only travelled to different worlds but created newer worlds. The worlds I had never experienced in my life before, were lighting up inside me. And slowly that life started sneaking out through the thick dark wall that I had created myself. And then what happened I could not believe myself, and maybe you may not believe it either. But its true as I have experienced it. Nothing can be truer than experience. In this light of new worlds I started seeing This world differently.

Inside my house there is one such place. Its my bathroom. This place to casts it magic over my creativity. But this is a different spell than the one by my hill. This one leads me into oration, to music, and to things I don’t even utter outside of this place. In the outside world I am shit scared of public speaking. But here, I have given longest and strongest speeches with all the accompanying bodily expressions. Here, when I am describing flying I don’t only describe with words, I do actually FLY. Aah, flying inside bathroom! ! ! But yes I do, I really do fly inside my bathroom. Its such a fun. Once a friend told me that fear of public speaking is the most common of all fears. I believed him right away, without even an iota of doubt. When I enter my bathroom, there is no fear, no apprehension. A huge crowd is eagerly waiting for me to speak and I too am all eager to start. Once I start there is all smiles and laughs and claps and shouts. I am enjoying everything that’s going on inside and outside. I am in state of bliss. Be it speaking or singing, I am simply unstoppable, unbeatable. I transgress the boundaries of this world and be in a different world. Its MY world. I am the actor and I am the observer.


Women have this charm of creating such divine places near to themselves. Be they mothers or be lovers, once they take you close, you start dissolving. No more there is any body nor clothes. Your heart is in direct contact, heart to heart, heart to divinity, you to God.

Life After Death

teek--taak---teek--taak-- . . . . Pendulum goes on. Which precedes what . . . pendulum goes on.
Hen--egg--hen--egg-- . . . .cycle goes on. Which is original, which is product. . . Cycle goes on.
death--birth--death--birth-- … life goes on. Which is later, which is first. . . Life goes round.

WAIT ! ! ! Life does NOT go round like this. I KNOW, I EXPERIENCE that life does NOT go round like this. There is birth and there is death, and that is the end. I can see things travelling from birth to death. But I have not ever seen anything from death to birth. I have not seen, I have not felt, I have not experienced.

Some people say that only thing certain is death. Anything that is born must die. Some scientists say that the only certainty is vibrations, everything else is uncertainty. Vibrations, periodics, cycles go on and on. Anything that goes up comes down, up-and-down, expansion-and-compression, life-and-death! It goes on and on


If anything that is born dies, then what happens to that which dies. We are not getting buried under dead rubble. So everything that dies must be getting born again. Anything that dies is born and anything that is born dies again. Life goes on, and death goes on. What is it that dies and what is it that is born from it. Is it same or are those different? We feel that when something is born that thing goes ahead and dies. If the one that’s born and the one that dies are one and the same, wouldn’t it be same for the one that dies. The one that dies should be the same as the one that gets born. But we don't experience this. We experience that life changes, life forms change, things change when they die. Experiences of life before death and the one after death are fundamentally different. But don’t experience anything before its born. So the experiences of death before birth and after birth are different.

China And India

Economically, militarily, politically China is growing much faster than India. Its become a fashion in India to point at China and say, "What progress!"
Before I go further let me honestly state that I have a strong bias against China. I feel the political system, social hierarchy strongly exploitative. I can not call a revolution a 'social revolution' when it is rises and survives on the lives of multitude of common citizens, however noble the goal may be. I fail to call it a 'developed' or 'progressed' nation where battle tanks are rolled over young men lying on the road, protesting silently. I thank God that I dont have to feel proud of such a country as 'My Nation'. I surely wouldn't want even my enemy to have to lead a horrendous life of a chinese miner. I am sure I dont even want to be the cruel owner of such mines.
I can not count the number of time I have felt grateful to God for sending Mahatma Gandhi to my country at the time. Had he not carved and guided the philosophy and ethics of Independent India, I dont know what path we would have walked.
It surprises me no end that people and the countries preaching morality and claiming moral superiority are so silent towards the state of humanity in China. The same people are vociferous about the plight of muslim women, but dont have even a drop of tear or a bit of voice about the state of miners and industrial workers in China. Maybe they are afraid that if they speak up it may cause the wages in China to go up. That would mean rise in prices of chinese goods. If prices go up people may buy less and if people buy less then what would happen to 'economy'?
LONG LIVE ECONOMY ! ! !
Somebody noted that its probably the first time that Nobel prize for Economics has been given to a non-quanitative work. The critic went on to say that the time has come for economics to learn from its closed realtives - psychology and sociology.
I COULDN'T AGRESS LESS ! ! !

Overcapacity

As a student I would finish my studies in short time and would keep on wondering what to do for the rest of the period, how to fill the time. Later I realised that I wasn't alone. Many, rather most, people frequently feel this problem of how to fill time. Animals spend lot of their time in sleeping, searching for food, digesting food, and be wary of own safety and on lookout for threats. Remaining small time they can spend idleing, but always alert. Man has evolved much beyond that. He need to work small part of his time to make sure of his basic needs, not only in the present but for the rest of his life. He has evolved in such a way that he no longer needs to feel physically insecure, need not constantly spend his time and energy in being alert. He can afford to sleep like a log and still wake up to see light next morning.

This huge amount of idleness brings in emptiness. Earlier times religion and religious rituals etc took up quite amount of time. Even after that a lot of time remained empty. This emptiness, this hollowness, this feeling petty, worthless was countered by quest for external power. Power, control over things, animals and even fellow humans. In quest of power and control men went in fights and wars. Women spent their times in caring for families, looking better and attracting men-of-power.

In modern world today this basic human psychology is manifested differently. Religious power have weakened and corporates have taken over the reins. Men feel this power in using, consuming wildly and in wild things. This is power of money. A roaring car, designed by somebody and manufactured by somebody else, but the owner feels the pride by having spending the money to own it. This perception of power, of control, of esteem, of goodness only through monetary terms has spread so deeply into our psychology that we can not even imagine a state of well-being devoid of money. (Actually the word wealth has its roots in the word well-being. See how what it means today!)
Many of the problems individuals and societies face today may be resolved we can find ways to deal our own overcapacity.
One of the ways may be to shift our focus from doing to being. Instead of constantly looking for things to do, if we can find enjoyment or peace in whatever wherever we are then probably we can see more meaning inside, rather than futilely searching it outside