helpless

back to blogging. generally, its anger which brings me here; this time though, its surprise - genuine surprise which has quite shaken me out of my comfortable indifference. the mumbai attacks. and now i am tempted to launch into the obvious stuff about "worst attack ever", "shocking" etc but will cut it out.

so they are saying - is this the defining moment for mumbai? or even for india? i hope so. for india. for us to finally say a strong definite NO to terrorism. having lived with extremism (which i still contend is very different from terrorism) all our lives, many of us (speak for yourself i say - hence maybe i should say "i") have quite got used to killings, bombings etc. we ("i") shrug it off. i say it happens. it happens in india. thats life. right. wrong. wrong? well, not entirely. it is part of life. but it does not have to be. not at this scale. not to this point of lawlessness.

it does not have to be? how not? there must be a way. some way. maybe many ways.

education? yeah. but do we wait around for everybody (including everybody in our neighbouring countries) to get educated enough to understand that killing other people is not really a good thing. no please, we dont want to.

information? maybe. the assam blasts last month (yes yes always assam which really makes parochial assamese me think/care etc) frustated me into thinking about information as a step. a terror helpline. a terror site. with information about all extremist/terrorist groups operating in india. something like a wiki. and with telephone numbers. so that it reaches every corner of india (as pointed out by yoga). terror does not come from a big bang. it starts somewhere. like a small group. then spreads out, recruits, extorts, spreads its ideas. people know about it. from the beginning. there is information. that information we need to share and put out. somebody hears something, sees something - give that somebody a channel to put that information out.

one federal anti-terrorism agency? yes, definitely. an obvious idea i finally heard on tv today. a professional agency. with one huge network. well funded, powerful and everywhere. why is RAW something we rarely hear about? why does it not inspire confidence? maybe it should even inspire fear. why is it not something i can join?

give the people tools. an agency they can join. a service they can report to. security weaknesses they can point out and which will be taken care of. in my head, its a solution which will go some way.

that helpless feeling. that same feeling which leads an honest man to compromise on his way to power, another honest man on his way to extremism, another on his way to terrorism. and the rest of us to cultivating a shield of indifference.

or maybe we are all hindus. we leave it to fate. and to the terrorists. (oh, hinduism is apparently a religion. i meant it as a way of life. a way of life for all of us from every religious denomination in india. that way of life which leads us to fault fate for our own flaws. or is that a strength? yes. but not now please.)

i'm digressing. i'm helpless.

The "do something significant" bug

Just wassuped a friend. Her response was to say she didnt do anything significant the last week. She meant significant at work, but whatever. I dont get this line of thinking, this need to do something significant. We live, we think, we feel - thats significant. Everything else - the doing thing, the traveling thing, the picnic thing, the party thing - they are just add-ons to life. Not to say add-ons are bad. They are definitely good to have (sometimes:p) but they are still not central to life.

And I can never forget that one line a colleague once said when going on vacation - "I going to ski and I love it; and of course I love work but ski-ing would be nice for a few days." Why I cant forget it is the context - he was really excited to go ski-ing and he mentioned the "love work" thing then very honestly it struck me he actually (ACTUALLY) meant it. Of course why I cant forget it is coz I like my work but I'd always prefer not working to working. Work to me is a loss of independence and time, which is one hell of a sacrifice (independence being the only true value and time being the only scarce resource)

Or maybe I'm just weird. (yeah i know grrrr)

Why Europeans have the travel bug

It struck me today that most of the time I am outside here in Amsterdam, its a constant struggle against the elements - the biting cold that makes u want to shrivel up within yourself or the chilly wind thats blowing your umbrella off or that painfully slow drizzle which never gets to be the downpour I love. And this is what people here live with, and have forever lived with. No wonder then they wanted out and they travelled out in their ships the first chance they got. No wonder also that they are so structured and disciplined like machines - humans couldn't possibly have survived in such conditions otherwise.

Cricket.. (if google will.. argh)

Last time I wanted to write something about cricket, google pained me with getting me to creating some stupid google account with my blogger account. Fortunately, they dont seem upto any new tricks today.

Just a thought - another way in which cricket differs from football - both are beautiful sports; and both showcase individual brilliance and teamwork too; football however requires a certain amount of teamwork to do the individual brilliance which can then make a telling difference to the result of the game; cricket on the other hand can have great individual play without teamwork but that has less of an effect on the result (A goal or two can decice a game more than a fifty or a century - particularly test cricket.)

The other differences like how test cricket is more of a man game's rather than football etc are of course obvious :)

All that shit...

Excerpt from FT's "Why the climate change wolf is so hard to kill off" (By Martin Wolf) (Published: December 4 2007 19:02)
(http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/fc338d2a-a292-11dc-81c4-0000779fd2ac.html)

...we must confront the fact that the world is far from a single country. This creates three huge problems: collective (in)action; perceived injustice; and indifference.

First, not only does each country want to be a free rider on the efforts of others but none feels wholly responsible for the outcome.

Second, the contributions made by different countries to the problem have been (and remain) enormously different. Collectively, the rich countries account for seven out of every 10 tonnes of CO2 emitted since the start of the industrial era. While China is the biggest emitter in the world, its emissions are still only one-fifth of US levels per head. India’s are one-fifteenth.

Third, as the report spells out in compelling detail, the heaviest cost will be borne by the world’s poor...............But this, if we were honest, is why the rich are unlikely to make the huge reductions in emissions the report demands. The powerful will continue to act without much consideration for the poor. This, after all, is a world that spends 10 times as much on defence (much of it useless) as on aid to poor countries.

....

The truth, moreover, is that this will happen only if the US also takes the lead. No country will deliver radical cuts if the US does not do so, too. No leaps forward in science and technology will occur if the US is not prepared to commit its resources to those ends. The US can no longer wait for a lead from others. Either it takes the lead now or the cause, in all probability, will be lost.....