Monday, December 10, 2007

The State Of Fear

Lets Remember where we live. We live on the third planet from a medium-size sun. Our planet is 5 Billion years old, and it has been changing constantly all during this time. The is Earth is now on its third atmosphere.


The first atmosphere was helium and hydrogen. It dissipated early n, because the planet was so hot. Then, as the planet cooled, there were volcanic eruptions produced in the second atmosphere of steam and carbon dioxide. Later the water vapour condensed, forming the oceans that cover most of the planet. Then around three million years ago, some bacteria evolved to consume carbon dioxide and excrete a highly toxic gas, oxygen. Other bacteria released nitrogen. The atmospheric concentration of these gases slowly increased. Organisms that could not adapt died out.


Meanwhile the planet’s land masses, floating on huge tectonic plates, eventually came together in a configuration that inferred with the circulation of ocean currents. It began to get cold for the first time. The first ice appeared two billion years ago.


And for the last seven hundred thousand years, our planet has been in a geological ice age, characterised by advancing and retreating glacial ice. No one is entirely sure why, but ice now covers the planet every hundred thousand years, with smaller advances every twenty thousand or so. The last advance was twenty thousand years ago, so we’re due for the next one.


And even today, after five billion years, our planet remains amazingly active. We have five hundred volcanoes, and an eruption every two weeks. Earthquakes are continuous: a million and half a year, a moderate Richter 5 quake every six hours, a big earthquake every ten days. Tsunamis race across the
Pacific Ocean every three months.


Our atmosphere is as violent as the land beneath it. At any moment there are one thousand five hundred electrical storms across the planet. Eleven lightening bolts strike the ground every second. A tornado teas across the surface every six hours. And every four days, a giant cyclonic storm, hundreds of miles in diameter, spins over the ocean and wreaks havoc on the land.


The nasty little apes that call themselves human beings can do nothing except run and hide. For these same apes to imagine they can stabilise this atmosphere is arrogant beyond belief. They cant control the climate.


The reality is, they run from the storms.


Conclusion:


  • We know astonishingly little about every aspect of the environment, from its past history to its present state, to how to conserve and protect it.
  • Natural warming trend began in the year 1850, as we emerged from a 400- year cold spell known as the “Little Ice Age”
  • Nobody knows how much of the present warming trend might be a natural phenomenon.
  • Nobody knows how much of the present warming trend might be man- made.
  • Nobody know how much warming will occur in the next century.


We cant ‘assess’ the future, nor can we ‘predict’ it. These are euphemisms. We can only guess. An informed guess is just a guess.

Friday, November 2, 2007

You Are'nt My Friend

In the pre-internet days neither of us would have even thought of calling each other friends. We’d have called ourselves friends of friends who met once and yet, for some reason, kept sending each other grammatically challenged, inappropriately flirty letters with photos of ourselves attached. Police might have gotten involved.

But now we are definitively friends, having taken public vow on friendship on friend-based websites, wearing meta-phorical friendship bracelets on the earnest Facebook, Orkut etc. You message me and comment about me and write on my walls and dedicate songs to me and invite me to join groups. More than once you have taken it upon yourself to poke me.

This is hard to say to a friend, but our relationship is starting to take too much time. Its weird that I know more about you than I do about my actual friends that I hang out with in person- whom I propose to distinguish by calling non-metafriends. In fact I know more about you than I know about myself.

Also you’re a bit aggressive in our friendship. Would a non-metafriend call me up and say” Hey! Guess what? I have a bunch of new pictures of me?” or tell that he has coloured on the map all the places he has been to. Its as if I suddenly met a new group of people who were all in the special classes.

The horror is, I cant opt out. Just as I cant stop making money or my metafriends will have more stuff than I do, I cant stop running up my tally of Orkut friends or I will be a loser. Just as money made wealth quantifiable social networks have provided a metric of popularity.

I am sure social networks serves many a functions that improve our lives, such as reconnecting us with our old friends and finding out that the people we used to date are still good looking. And all networks have a messaging function, which would have made an excellent way of sending messages if no one invented e-mail.

But frankly these sites are not about connecting or reconnecting, its all about Self- branding. We’re not sharing things which we don’t want others to know. We are showing our best posed, retouched photos. We’re listing the Pynchon Books we want to think we have read all the way through. We’re allowing others to write whatever they want about us on our walls, unless we don’t like it, in which case we erase it. If we had so much privacy in real life the bathrooms at the Mumbai airport would be empty.

And like the abrasively direct ads for soaps and cleaning products at the beginning of the advertising age, our self branding is none too subtle. We’re a blunt lot, in our bikinis and our demands that our friends go right now to check out our blog postings. We are, as a social network, all so awesome that we will soon not be able to type the number 1, because we will have worn out the exclamation mark that shares its key.

Until we come out with something where we can portray our true flawed selves – perhaps a genius could invent something that takes place in the house over dinner with wine-I say we strip down our online communities to just the important ones.

With enough venture funding- by which I mean the volunteer services of a dude who knows how to make a website- I hope to launch a Truestatus.com on which people are allowed to submit their names, their occupation, a photo, a square footage of their home and a list of any celebrities they happen to know. Then other people can vote from the scale of 1 to 100 on how awesome they are. At the end of the year the ones with the most n. of votes are made the king and queen, which if I remember correctly, should send their scores plummeting. If nothing else, it should finally rid us of Tila Tequila.

Inspired from Joel Stein- TIME magazine

Monday, October 22, 2007

City Of Angles( Dialogue)

I would rather have had
One breath of her hair
One kiss of her mouth
One touch of her hand
Than an eternity without it
One

City Of Angles

“And I give up forever to touch you
Cause I know that your feeling is so nice
You’re the closest heaven that I’ll ever be
And I don’t want to go home right now
And all I can taste is this moment
And all I can breathe is your lie
When sooner or later it over
I just don’t want to miss you tonight
And I don’t want the world to see me
Cause I don’t think that they’d understand
When everything is made to be broken
I just want you to know who I am”.

Moonstruck(Definition of Love)

“I love you. Not like they told you love is. And didn’t know this either, love don’t make things nice- it ruins everything. It breaks your heart. It makes things a mess. . We aren’t here to make things perfect. Not us. Not us! We are here to ruin ourselves and break our hearts and love the wrong people and die… Now I want you to come upstairs with me and get in my bed!”

Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind

“How happy is the blameless vessels lot?
The world forgetting by the world forgot
Eternal sunshine of a spotless mind
Each prayers accepted and Each wishes resigned”.