Meet Wendy Chin, who’s great passion is to protect the ancient mangrove forests on the coast of Langkawi in Malaysia. A business graduate with a hugely promising career in finance, Wendy found her true calling in protection of the environment. She moved to the Island of Langkawi and works ceaselessly to protect the incredible amount of species that live in the eco systems of the mangroves – and the mangroves themselves. And we all know that Mangroves provide the protection against erosion of our coast lines and against high tides and Tsumani like waves.
I was attending a Standard Chartered Bank conference at the beautiful Four Seasons Resort in Langkawi where Wendy was taking us out in boats to teach us about her beloved mangroves. From a one inch red crab scurrying into the mud to a poisonous viper that hung unseen a metre away from my head, Wendy brought the wealth of the mangroves alive for all of us, as we listened and watched with such rapt attention, feeling the very pulse of the ecosystem and becoming one with it.
The world needs more Wendy Chin’s to help save our ecosystems.
The Humanitarian problem in Sri Lnka and the threat to Tamil Nadu
Thank God it’s over, must be the answers to all the prayers for the people trapped in the final moments of the war in Sri Lanka. And while all the world clamors for investigations into terrible human rights abuses on both sides of the war, the question that one must must ask is that in a war that lasted over a quarter of a century, where was the world then ? Civilians were dying all the time.
Does that mean that slow death is much more acceptable than sudden death ? Or do we live in a word that cannot pay attention to anything unless it is high drama and melodramatic ? And is it really over ?
Seeds of resentment and memories of horror over twenty five years do not go away easily. The Sri Lankan government will have to embrace its Tamil people with compassion and resolve. Or the call for a separate Tamil nation will not go away easily.
And the LTTTE is still a force. I have come across fierce support for the LTTE amongst Tamilians in suburbs Paris and in the US, where a lot of the people came as refugees from the conflict. There is also support in Tamil Nadu itself. There is danger of the fight for a separate Tamil Nation now being nurtured in India in Tamil Nadu itself and expect the politics of Tamil Nadu to turn a blind eye to it, or even covertly support it.
With the Talibanization of Pakistan, the conflicts on our eastern borders, India can ill afford another separatist movement on it’s southern borders.
Dreams come true ?
Beware,
dreams are just dreams,
benign creatures
that give you wonderful feelings of warmth
in times when you need to cradle yourself to sleep
till they become passions and obsessions,
and develop an identity of their own,
no longer in your control
are you willing to watch your dreams
grow into demons that do not belong to you ?
a passion and obsession that takes charge of you ?
wrings out your soul
and leaves you breathless, almost lifeless
when it is done with you ?
beware of your dreams,
those subtle, benign thoughts
that saw you through hours of boredom
and took you through wonderful journeys
when your maths professor droned on
about numbers that made no emotional sense
Magical Clouds
If I had not seen clouds before
would this not have been the most magical sight ever ?
it was,
at the moment that the picture was clicked, randomly
was the first time I ever saw clouds
and was overwhelmed,
Mythology, Story Telling and Einstein
In an ‘amoral’ Universe that is neither moral nor immoral, Mythology or Mythic story telling is the attempt of our imagination to comprehend our existence in moral terms. Or moral contradictions
Our Mythology, our Mythic selves are much more than the idea of the stories that are/were told to us. We are the very stories that we tell ourselves. And always have been. From the time we were born. From the time that Human beings started to imagine.
The first art was the art of story telling.
From the time that Man tried to express lightning and thunder as the anger of the Gods and developed moral stories around it, to the postulations of Einstein’s theory’s of relativity, the beginings have been in a story told to oneself, and then shared. Stories which comes from a deep seated mythology embedded in our consciousness.
Stories are moral contradictions, re interpreted again and again. The Universe itself exists in contradictions, and the contradictions are never ending. When you solve one contradiction, another emerges. And so the Universe goes on. If the contradictions went away – the Universe would cease to exist. As would we, as would all imagination. We would cease to exist, and yes, the ultimate contradiction that we exist and do not exist at the same time is the most tantalizing contradiction of all.
So if you cannot do away with contradictions, how do you come to terms with them ? By finding Harmony in them. By being the contradiction itself. By becoming ‘one with the duality’ as Buddha and all the great spiritualists say. And so the great poet finds Harmony in the contradiction of words, the mathematician finds harmony in the contradiction of numbers ( with the concept of a non number of nothingness, the zero, being the ultimate contradiction without which modern maths could not exist). The great Musicians find Harmony in the contradiction of notes, the painters in conflicting colours, and spiritualist in the duality of existence. And Einstien searched for Harmony through his equations in the contradictions of Space and Time.
Einstien too was looking for a story to explain mythic concepts like Space and Time. He called them equations but hey ! – he was indulging in his own story telling – his own Mythology.
The above was a part of a discussion I led on ‘Mythology and Story telling’ at a Screenwriting workshop at the IIT campus in Chennai, which was a lot of fun,
And Einstein.
Solitary Confinement
The mind looks to confine
to measure
to contextualize
to give meaning
to itself
for the ego
can exist only
in finite possibilities
needing to enclose itself
in a part of the universe
walled off
from the rest of creation
and from within that prison
to show itself off
yearning to be recognized,
to be individualized
to be admired
and from within that prison
to be loved !
imagining
that everything around itself
has confined itself too
imprisoned itself too
sensing the universe
surrounded by
imagined bits of similar prisons
Imagine
a love you could embrace
the whole universe with
if only you came out of
the solitary confinement
your ego has imprisoned you in
What is a Prayer ? from Cinda
what is this prayer? what does the words do when they leave your thoughts and transend to the winds of free flowingness? is it the words? is it the thought that goes with the words? is it the intention that creates the power to move the energy from one form to the next?
do the intentions come naturally or are they already prefixed and they just enter us at moments of aligned frequency?how do we do what we do? where does the prayer get processed…does it need processing?
what is a prayer?
Why was I born ?
I looked for my true calling
I looked for my true purpose
what I am supposed to do on the planet
why was I born ?
and I asked the question deep inside me
beyond logic, beyond thought, deep in the bowels
of the space where I connect to the universe
where I can be thrown into the raging storm of ‘not knowing’
and the answer hit me in an immense tidal wave of understanding
“you are your own purpose
nothing more, and nothing less
a bundle of purpose and karma
all existing within itself
and the only thing holding it back
is the separation created by
words like ‘I’ and ‘my’ and ‘me'”
The end of Democracy in India ?
If only 40% of the eligible voting population in a country bothers to vote, then is the country truly democratic ? Whatever government comes to power, it has a mandate from less than half the people. It’s truly a government by default.
First the politicians and media have absolutely no right to blame the electorate. I do not believe in the statement that ” it’s the apathy of the people that gives them a government they deserve”.
Second the arrogant attitude of some of our media stars that expressed ‘outrage’ at the low voting turn out , after “all they did to pursude them to do so” in Mumbai, should learn that while they can drive people to the cinemas, the people have little faith in their intellectual or political understanding beyond entertainment. Not everyone gets their picture o page 3 when they vote.
Third, how many times do the people of India need to come out and say ” WE DO NOT BELIEVE IN THE POLITICIANS OR POLITICS ANYMORE”. The Mumbaikers did not vote not because they went away for a long weekend, nor because of the sweltering heat, but because none of the candidates made a substantial stand that aroused their passions, their desire to better the political system. I remember how the people of India came out in droves to vote to end the Emergency imposed by Indira Gandhi, or who came out in droves again to re instate her when they were unhappy. Or when they came out in droves to vote for Rajiv Gandhi after Indira’s assassination.
We are a passionate feeling people that respond to our emotion, to our community. We need a leader to arouse those passions in us, someone to believe in, someone that we can trust that has the power, the integrity and the vision to lead us in this new century.
Give us, the people of India such a leader and watch us come out in droves to vote. And if not, then accept that democracy in India will be an excercise in futility and the forces of change will be ultimately thrust upon us by non democratic forces like the fundamentalists, like the the naxalitites that are threatening to invade our cities soon,
True lasting love : is it devotion ?
This came in from Cinda and I found it very beautiful :
It was a busy morning, about 8:30, when an elderly gentleman in his 80s arrived to have his stitches removed from his thumb. He said he was in a hurry as he had an appointment at 9:00. I took his vital signs and had him take a seat, knowing it would be over an hour before someone would be able to see him. I saw him looking at his watch and decided since I was not busy with another patient, I would evaluate his wound. On examining it I saw it was well healed, so I talked to one of the doctors and got the needed supplies to remove his sutures and redress his wound.
While taking care of his wound, I asked him if he had another doctor’s appointment this morning, as he was in such a hurry. The gentleman told me no, that he needed to go to the nursing home to eat breakfast with his wife. I inquired as to her health. He told me that she had been there for a while as she suffers with Alzheimer’s disease.
As we talked, I asked if she would be upset if he was a bit late. He replied that she no longer knew who he was, that she had not recognized him in five years now. I was surprised and asked him, “And do you still go every morning, even though she doesn’t know who you are?”
He smiled as he patted my hand and said, “She doesn’t know me anymore but I still know who she is.” I had to hold back tears as he left, I had goose bumps on my arm and thought,
“That is the kind of love I want in my life. True love is neither physical nor romantic.”
True love is an acceptance of all that is, has been, will be, and will not be……