A road to perdition

This is ridiculous. How the hell one can build a road to Everest? And look at the reason for doing it... China wants to create world's most far reaching Olympic torch... And they find Mount Everest as the god damn place to prove their madness. How enlightening!!! isn't it? I probably feel the eternal or divine bliss when that light goes over my house. It will be like being in heaven, isn't it? But who cares ? China is notoriously known for its leaders and their ambitions . And they are right, why should they care about environment and all? They are not going to get affected anyways. Because today we are least bothered about the nature. What we bother about is everything else than nature . We bother about our career, our job, our salary, our so called FUTURE. In the rush of pursuing our materialistic goals, we are degrading the nature, which is in fact the most influential factor of the life on Earth.

History has shown it thousands of times, that whenever a human goes to any place which is naturally blessed earlier, he makes a hell lot of wastes there. And still we call a human as the most intellectual animal on Earth. God's masterpiece. Such a pity. We go for trekking with lots of plastic bags and we throw them anywhere in spite of knowing that plastic is not naturally decomposable. Similarly, China wants to build a road to Everest to make a showy display of their abilities. The abilities of crushing the rules of nature. And India is no different. Look at what we did with the lovely Badrinath in Uttarakhand? It used to be a pure place with not a tinge of pollution, and now we made it our home. A home of unmanageable people and lots of wastes.
And the saddest thing is even though we know that we are messing up with the ecology, we keep on doing the same. Imagine how pristine Ganga would have been in her early ages? How calm and clear would have been the bays of Bengal, the Arabian Sea?

It is not unknown that we will be facing a monster of Global Warming in the upcoming century. And if we keep on doing the stupid things , one day we will have to say a final good-bye to this lovely world. China and India both will be suffered from the preposterous idea of building the road. Here is what experts say...

Syed Iqbal Hasnain, senior fellow at the Centre for Policy Research and a renowned glaciologist, said, "Such an idea should be condemned outright. A road in an area like that can completely change the ecosystem dynamics. Glaciers are super fragile systems. If indirect impacts of warming can be seen so dramatically, such a direct human intervention would be dangerous for the Himalayan ecosystems in the areas the road goes through. Even in Alaska, the government refuses to build a second road despite people being there, because everyone realises what a road can do to such habitats."

He added,
"Already, there are reports of problems in glacial melt-based rivers in China suffering flooding, and India too has its share of problems from global warming. A road is like a direct attack on ecology. You have to put up the entire set-up to run such a high-altitude link. At present, people talk of removing debris & waste from the base camp and surrounding areas and now this shall completely change the dynamics

Right now I am searching for the ways by which I personally can protest this decision of building a road. Finding out some online petitions which I can fill. Do let me know if I can do something in this regard. After all, we must shoulder a share of our responsibility to protect the mother Earth.

शत जन्म शोधितांना

I was in my home-town, Nagar, before two weeks. I generally don't watch much of the television, but that day I planned to see French Open-2007 men's final between Fedrer and Nadal. So just switched on the TV. There came and advertisement of "शत जन्म शोधितांना" on ETV- Marathi, and I decided to watch that program.


शत जन्म शोधितांना - सावरकरांच्या अलौकिक प्रतिभेचा शोध was arranged by Maharashtra Military Foundation. As the name of the program suggest, it was an attempt to look at Savarkar from a perspective of a poet. I have gone through some of his poems earlier and was aware of his thoughts. So, this was another treat for me. The specialty of the program was its simplicity. There were no high-class instruments, neither a flashy display.

For the first time I heard a लावणी ( Lawani, a type of Marathi folk dance ) written by Savarkar. He is generally known for his patriotic songs and his revolutionary thoughts on Hindutva but on that day I was seeing another unseen side of one of the greatest legends of all times. He has even written some romantic poems, in midst of hardships when he was deported to Kalepani (Black Water) jails of Andaman-Nicobar. He has also written some of the plays in Marathi. As one of the scenes of a plot, Nina Kulkarni was reading dialogs of a mad woman who comes to Madhavrao Peshwe and asks him to take the revenge of Panipat's defeat. Followed by that, there was a पोवाडा ( In Maharashtra, the narrative hero laud is called as Powada, where a person tells a story in high pitched voice. A melodramatic acting is a soul of a Powada.) In all, it was a great experience to see that event.

I am currently searching for some of his poems and posting them here...

Freedom of expression

I don't understand why such incidents keep on happening. We had enough controversies when M.F.Hussain portrayed indecent pictures of Hindu deities. And this time we have yet another so called Expressive artist Chandramohan Srilamantula, who was considered as an award winning student from Vadodara's Maharaja Sayajirao University.

When I read a newspapers, everywhere I see people pin-pointing Bajrang Dal and other organizations who believe in Hindutva. Especially editor's of almost every newspaper try their best to prove how violent or iconoclastic these groups are. At the same time they deliberately overlook the root cause of the agitation. When someone uses the freedom of expression to express something which is morally very hateful, then he / she must be punished and should be shunned from doing so. It's because freedom of speech does not mean expressing something that will hurt the sentiments of the society. One should not take liberty of doing anything just because he / she lives in a democratic country.

Few of these questions that I would like to ask to those existing and emerging "Expressive Artists" and to the useless National Human Rights Commission of India and to all those who don't understand the difference between a sacrilegious act and a real art.

1. Why is always a Hindu god / goddess chosen to express their aesthetic approach. Why not any god / goddess from other religion ?

2. Why the name of a painting is related to India, e.g. Bharatmata drawn by M.F.Hussain? Why can't it be Queen Victoria? Why can't it be a icon of Christianity like Pope? Why can't it be Mohammad Paigambar.

3. Why is Nandita Das named as Sita and Shabana Azmi as Radha in the movie Fire? Why can't they find any other names?

4. Why only minorities are counted as seekers of justice? Why not the pracharak of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangha who were hostages for a long time and found dead in North-Eastern India?

5. Why an Al-Quida bellicose who killed hundreds of innocent people is suddenly considered as humane at the time of testimony?

Wikipedia effect

These days I am enamored with Wikipedia. It is such a wonderful site. Each day you get lots of new stuff to read. And though the contents could be edited by anyone, we get highly authentic information. That makes it a true wiki site, combined with a great oracular repository of information.

I was reading Srinivasa Ramanujan, C.V. Raman, Chandrasekhar Bose, Dr. Homi Bhabha and Dr. Vikram Sarabhai. Their work and their contribution towards our motherland was amazing . These eminent Indians did a pioneering job in Mathematics, Physics, Indian Aerospace Programs. And they did suffer a lot while doing so, perhaps that's what made them so great. After completing these articles, I started experiencing pity on myself. There are people who had done some great jobs in past and here I am, pushing each day, waiting for a rosy weekend.

I don't want to compare myself with those great souls. But still, I feel I should do something that will make me feel proud. Leave the rest of the world, I want to make myself happy.I argued with one of my friends about my monotonous life . I was not convinced that my job makes me so exhausted that after office hours all I can think of is a sound sleep. Neither a fact that we did not meet with a situation that could foster our creative thinking. I fretted about my problems and hardly tried to solve them. And these great people faced difficulties, surmounted them. Their difficulties were certainly bigger than mine.

I need to read more and keep myself motivated by these sources of information. Let's see if it can make some change in my "way of looking at things" and could help me somehow?

Thanks Wikipedia for those nice articles.

Birds fly away to the southern sky searching a home

This is a line from Parikrama's song 'But it rained'. I am writing this blog when one of dearest friends Sanket is flying to Japan. His company has got a Japanese account and they need him on site. It will take almost a year for him to come back to India. When I first knew it I was delighted. And why shouldn't I ? You don't go on-site so often; at least not at the start of your professional career. It's not that I am not happy but I don't know why I feel so nauseated.

Sanket, Bhushan, Charu, Nikhil, Abhishek, Amey and me. We had some great times in our college-days. I still miss those golden moments that we enjoyed together. But someone said is right, time doesn't wait for anyone. As days passed, we graduated, earned jobs. And now I see, we all are cruising towards some aim, a demanding aim that will never keep us physically together. We will never play cricket in the scorching sun neither bunk our computer classes for a football match. We will never talk about 'always welcome' topics of our discussion that includes everything in our little world ,neither will spend a complete night bugging each other.

As I see it today, Amey is getting married soon. Charu and Nikhil are enjoying their jobs in Bangalore and are planning for their post-graduation most probably in US. Abhishek found his love and will soon be getting engaged and will be pursuing his PG in States. Bhushan is doing his job and looking forward for C-DAC preparations. And I am preparing for GRE. Looks like everyone is set for a new beginning.

Yeh, this was bound to happen one day, we knew it. But I never thought that this day will come so sooner. I may sound a bit emotional, but guessed that this is a right topic to write a blog on. Thanks a lot to the revolutionary internet,messengers and emails, phones that will keep us all together.
So, here I am taking an opportunity to wish a bright career to all of my friends.

We will always be in touch, wherever we go...
Friends forever!!!!