agnir jyotir ahah suklah
san-masa uttarayanam
tatra prayata gacchanti
brahma brahma-vido janah

During fire, light, daytime, the bright lunar fortnight of the waxing moon, and the six months of the northern solstice of the sun; the gods create a path, departing by which, yogis who know Brahman attain nirvana.

dhumo ratris tatha krishnah
san-masa daksinayanam
tatra candramasam jyotir
yogi prapya nivartate

During smoke, night, the dark lunar fortnight of the waning moon, and the six months of the southern solstice of the sun; the gods create a path, returning by which, the righteous person attains lunar light and reincarnates.

Bhagavat Gita, Chapter: Aksara Parabrahman, 24, 25 (The Yoga of The Imperishable Brahman)

On the shortest day of the year, I sat out in the open, watching the earth eclipse the moon. As the shadow of our planet enveloped its surface, the light from the sun made it glow like a red ball of fire. I wondered if this was a sign that some righteous man on our planet had attained lunar light and had reincarnated.

I remember reading a long time ago, that the Pueblo Indians had no words to differentiate the past from the present and the present from the future. In hindi the word for yesterday and tomorrow is the same, as is the word for the day-before-yesterday and the day-after-tomorrow. Looking up at the sky, and the stellar scintillation, and knowing that galaxies are being created and destroyed, and the stars and planets within them are being born or are being reincarnated into other celestial bodies ... I can see how time has a meaning that I cannot fathom beyond my known universe on this earth.

But, I know that this was the sky that my grandfather saw, as did his grandfather... and it hasn't changed as far as that it is glittering and wondrous as it always has been and will be! We asked the same questions about the vastness of this universe and the beauty of its design. Even when we knew nothing of the earth beyond the limits of our travels, and knew nothing of latitudes and longitudes, the geographical poles, and the earth's axis tilt, we saw solstices and eclipses and wondered about the transience of human life and the permanence of the universe.

Even when we know nothing of the universe, we know that we know nothing of the universe, but can count on its permanence.

For God said, Let there be lights in the expanse of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark seasons and days and years, and let them be lights in the expanse of the sky to give light on the earth. (Gen 1:14-15).

May the stars look down on you and may you look up to the stars always with love and wonder! Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.

My brother made a very valid point about No Impact Man and other films and books promoting environmental-consciousness.

For instance, No Impact Man is a documentary that follows the life of the Beavan family, during their year-long experiment to have zero-impact on the environment. This meant giving up everything from electricity, to carbon-based transportation, to several products including detergents and toilet paper.

It was a commendable journey that inspired a lot of praise and criticism.

My brother wondered whether by producing the documentary and writing the book to share his experiences, he caused more environmental damage that year than otherwise. Beavan's book sold millions of copies, and the documentary millions of DVDs. That's a lot of damage!

If one were able to quantify his positive influence on people, while also keeping in mind the environmental damage he caused by sharing his experience, I wonder which one would win! I am leaning towards his influence winning! Beavan was rated MSN's Ten Most Influential Men of 2007, named an Eco-Illuminator in Elle Magazine's 2008 Green Awards and his blog NoImpactMan.com was named one of the world’s top 15 environmental websites by Time Magazine.

However, could he have avoided the DVDs and books and shared his experiences in an online/digital format (e-books and e-movies) to make a greater statement about environmental damage. Would that decision have made an impact on lesser number of people... or more?

What kind of No Impact Man do you think Colin Beaven is? The kind that made no impact on you or the kind that made no impact on the environment?

I wonder why Starbucks hasn't infiltrated the movie theaters yet. They have even set themselves up in palaces and museums world over, and have managed to fend off purists trying to keep these places unsullied!

But, Luxury Screens and "Brew and View"s aside, the foyer areas of most regular theaters haven't changed much. Popcorn-and-soda is still the popular snack combo!

Earlier in the year there was news that Starbucks struck a deal with AMC Entertainment. But what? Are they only selling java!? I was hoping to see them arrive with the whole kaboodle!

I like the idea of Starbucks taking over the world... a bit like United Fruit Company taking over Guatamela, only I hope they are more welcome... I like the idea that such a world doesn't scare us! Our politics can use some more optimism. What I would like is to think of this world as one big United Colors of Brady Bunch family drinking "Triple Grande No Whip White Mocha"!

Sometimes, it worries me when I go to the trails slightly outside the city and there's no Starbucks for miles together. Starbucks is home..... erm.. to great coffee!

The UN designated

2009 as the International Year of Natural Fibers and Astronomy
2010 as the International Year of Biodiversity and Youth
2011 as the International Year of Forests and Chemistry

The trend seems to be to pick two significant topics of which one is environment-related.

Just in case you are wondering what comes out of these International Years, there are reports that are produced at the end of each year that summarize all the events and projects that took place all over the world related to that topic. Good luck finding them. They are not all in one place.

In concept, I think these International Years are a wonderful idea. I have found some inspiration in them and have dreamt of careers in the chosen areas! Last year I wanted to be a Rocket Scientist. This year, I want to grow up to be Biodiverse :) Next year, Tapi and I will live in the forest and play hunter-gatherer! (Chill out Mom! It's a joke! We are vegetarians still. We will wear tofu skin and only gather)

If you ask me, the UN can promote these International Years better! I recommend taking the help of Hallmark Cards who did such a wonderful job of promoting Friendship Day! UN can also try a facebook campaign like "I like it on" and "what color is your bra" or "change your profile picture to a cartoon from your childhood". I suggest "post your favorite animal sound"! Heehaw! (or Gobble Gobble Gobble... if you want to make a statement about extinction during this holiday season) (or Baaaaa if you don't think I am funny) (or Cuckoo... if you know me!)

I know Biodiversity is a term used to describe the variety of life on earth, but I didn't quite see it as "a measure of our planet's health", which is what I believe it is! I guess my line of thought is skewed by the fact that other planets that can't brag about biodiversity seem quite healthy! To me, something is healthy if it is working the way it ought to be working! I suppose, the way the earth ought to be working is by being home to a variety of life, which would explain why it is a measure of our planet's health! (Note to fickle-self: It took me two sentences to reject my own hypothesis!)

Around mid-May, Jupiter's broadest and darkest brown stripes known as the South Equatorial Belt had disappeared and turned white. It is the planet's most active region and home to its strongest retrograde jet stream. This prompted scientists to look track winds and other atmospheric changes to understand why this happened. They found that the usual downwelling winds that keep the region cloud-free died down and allowed clouds to float over the area and obscure the brown stripes. A few weeks ago, the scientists noticed that the clouds were clearing out again and the brown stripes were becoming visible!

One could interpret the brown-stripes story as an indication that the planet was once healthy and then fell sick and is now restoring its health again. Or one could say it has always been healthy in spite of these changes because the disappearance of the brown stripes is a phenomenon known to take place once every three to fifteen years. What would in fact be unhealthy is if the brown stripes didn't vanish at all! Think of it as the irregular menstrual cycle of the big, gaseous planet, only it is good for it! (Yikes!)

Whatever caused the disappearance of the stripes also made the Great Red Spot darker. The spot is Jupiter's most powerful anti-cyclonic storm, which is about three times the size of earth and is more than three hundred years old. As recently as the year 2000, another red spot about the size of earth called Oval BA (or Red Spot Jr.) was formed on the planet. There is speculation that Red Spot Jr. will converge with the Great Red Spot, since they pass each other about every two years. So far nothing exciting has happened. And should it happen, I would consider it unhealthy! In the same way that should the earth suddenly not be as biodiverse, I would consider that unhealthy!

The fact of the matter is, 99.9 percent of the species that have existed on Earth are now extinct. Moreover, in the same way that Jupiter's brown stripes appear and disappear every few years, species have appeared and disappeared in masses in every new epoch! But, the reason we are whinging about the diminishing biodiversity is because the rate of speciation (creation of new species) has decreased and the rate of extinction has increased dramatically since humans came to be in the Holocene Epoch!

It is estimated that we are losing up to 140,000 species a year, and 30% of all natural species will be extinct by 2050.

Ironically enough, humans have been the only species ever since Earth's creation to have worked on creating new species (unless you consider such dastardly acts such as foxes making out with wolves... or go all the way down to the cellular level and suggest that it is in fact the cells that are recreating themselves into many different species. For now, let's just run with my idea!) But while we are creating new species, we are destroying many more, and for whatever godforsaken reason, our earth isn't able to keep up and "specie-ize" quickly! Call it a writer's block if you will. If you think of species-creation like you do writing technical-code to create robots (and humanoids in the future), you will agree that writer's block is a broad, all-encompassing term that includes all kinds of creative hindrances. So the earth is allowed to have a writer's block as well.

Notice how Holocene sounds so much like Holocaust. Holo comes from the greek work Holos, which means "whole". Cene comes from the greek word Kainos, which means "entirely recent". Caust comes from the greek word kaustós, which means "burnt". Somehow, having learnt the meaning of Holocene and Holocaust, I have to say, the diminishing biodiversity sort of makes me want to believe we are in fact in the HoloCeneCaust epoch - which could mean so many things. We have Seen and it has Cost us. We are entirely recent, and have descended on this earth like a burning fire... so on

If HoloCeneCaust is too long a name, lets change it to HoloTan (haha get it? Sin/Cos=Tan... Baaa)

What comforts me is how humans have created so many fake animals, so much that we now know the fake ones better than the real ones! The other day, I was making a list of my favorite animals on this planet. See brackets for who created them -- I love the dog (humans), cougar (young atheist men), unicorn (god), phoenix (dumbledore) and dwarfs (snow white)

I wonder if we will designate a year for Conciliation. It could be a year where we make peace with whoever or whatever has us riled up. Right now, for you, it would be me!

What Summits, Diplomacy, Lobbying, Fraud and Crises look like to Ignoramuses!

I like imagining the Eurozone rescue packages as pretty gift boxes that they hand over to each country during their financial crisis, with a card that says “With Best Compliments”… Feliz Navidad Spain, Feliz Natal (also Fatal) Portugal… Ho Ho Ho to Italy, Merry Christmas! :)

This year felt like a war of words. It has been full of countries opening channels of dialogues to solve problems, albeit ending each dialogue with everyone papering over their disagreements on what the problems are, what the solutions need to be, and how to collaborate in the future.

To add to this, there have been copious number of media-related conspiracies and political and business scandals that have been widely reported.

As I scan through the news and see what is happening in the world, I find myself looking more for rundowns of whatever is being discussed than opinions. I can’t even be bothered to piece the facts together and make inferences. Most often than not, the only inferences I seem capable of making are the obvious kind, like “Barkha Dutt should have been more careful!”

I am hopeless at keeping up with the summits. Take November alone… Even before we could get a grip on where everyone stood with respect to the issues being discussed at the G20, we were bludgeoned with APEC, NATO and EU-US summits. There was the economic recession to discuss, currency disputes, fiscal stimulus, financial regulations, protectionism, free-trade agreements, UN, World Bank and IMF reforms … and so on…

Moreover, it’s just like watching a soap opera! Now we have to wait for the Cannes and Honolulu summits in 2011 to learn about how everything will be resolved… or not! (Even soap operas have a shelf life. The Days of Our Lives has finally ended after 45 years!)

In contrast, the UN’s Climate Change Conference (COP16) in Cancun seems more calm, almost like a business vacation.

It gives us time to reflect on some things that have happened over the year that are not entirely our fault – like the earthquake in Haiti, followed by the earthquake in Chile, followed by the earthquake in China, followed by the earthquake and volcanic eruption in Indonesia, the Pakistan floods, and the flash floods in Ladakh, and my most favorite… Volcanic ash eruptions in Iceland that disrupted air traffic across Europe. “Sigh! Global Warming!”

Speaking of air traffic, there was that Ethiopian Airlines crash earlier in the year that killed 90 people, followed by another plane that killed the President of Poland and 96 others, which was then followed by the Air India plane that overshot the runway and killed 158 people. I also want to add here, the 74 people who drowned after a ferry-boat capsized in India recently!

Should we consider the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the mining accident in Chile as unfortunate catastrophes beyond our control as well?

Should we ignore the ethnic riots in Kyrgyzstan that killed 2000 Uzbeks and displaced 100,000 people?

Also the elections seem to have favored the center-left (albeit partially!) in several of my favorite countries, which is, I think, an Act of God to balance out all natural calamities!

As I consider these on a philosophical level, there are the Wikileaks dump and Barkhagate to take on board. There are also hordes of scandals related to money laundering by Indian ministers… India has also seen many changes to State governments over the last few days. I am learning quickly that world crises is inexhaustible!

Aside from crises and high-level meetings and other scandals, there is a need to understand the issues themselves. I haven’t the slightest idea how to go about comprehending the ongoing European sovereign debt crisis, or the US financial crisis, and the US foreclosure crisis. I haven’t still made sense of the Healthcare and Wall Street reforms we have seen over the last year… and I am still digesting the Mid-term elections! Did that devastation really happen?

Apparently, in most cases, learning from the past is not an option. It seems rather foolhardy to look at the European crisis now in light of the previous crises in Russia and Argentina. It is also near impossible to relate textbook theories with real life scenarios. And we can’t look at any one country or one issue in isolation of several other world events!

Speaking text book theories, sometimes I have to wonder if the media needs to ask itself what its role is in this collective order of the world! Perhaps they should spend a year contemplating media ethics, and how far they can go about their journalistic enquiry without making themselves synonymous with political brokering and corporate peddling.

I am in no way trivializing their role as mediators, but I find it irritating that they disrespect diplomacy! It can’t be right to destroy confidentiality and trust between foreign officials and hamper peaceful resolution of disputes!

That to me is more wrong than the media lobbying and causing scandal just to drive sales or forward personal agenda.

I can however see leaks as being useful to expose wrongdoing or make questionable policies known to the public. In the case of Wikileaks I don’t see this as being the case. James Rubin explains this point well.

For me, the "question of the moment" is “Is everyone going to be more straitlaced and inhibited in their talks in 2011”, and can that be good?

Here's a thought I have in my head lately.

If the grass is greener on the other side, let's just not go there and ruin it. What makes us want to take over everything that is pure and beautiful?

I went to the salt market the other day and saw varieties of gourmet salt, many that claimed to be over 250 million years old! They were formed out of seas that evaporated over time and remained untouched until we decided to mine them for their health benefits and gourmet merit.

The same goes for water. The purest of sources are being mined and depleted to satisfy our discerning palate.

Some of the teas that have become popular as energy drinks are grown in the purest of soils. After each harvest, the soil takes several years to recuperate, before it can sustain new life. I have to wonder what will become of these pure soils when the energy drinks become more popular. Will there even be any left?

There are whole industries catering to this kind of mindset that is obsessed with pure, hard-to-find food products, that offer health benefits and great taste.

But, what bothers me is that it is sometimes the environmentally-conscientious people who seek pure, organic products with the intention of doing good for the environment. They are also the people who the organic market is exploiting. For instance, the organic salt that we see in the markets is not organic only because salt is not derived from living matter! The organic water too is a malicious deception because water is not organic!

The other thing that bothers me that is food-related is the new composting culture!

In most large retailer stores you can buy:
- a small bamboo compost bin (the size of a large mug) for $40
- a pail liner $13
- charcoal replacement set for $8
- and in addition spend $40 at a bait shop for a pound of red worms and dirt.

This is a $100 investment so that you can compost a handful of food in an organic way! Unfortunately, the target audience for this is the budding environmentalist! I don't mean to discourage composting. I myself am a fan of it. Here's a DIY tutorial that will tell you how to get rid of 'em banana peels and old bread in a more inexpensive, and environmentally-sound way. :)

I remember watching Attenborough in Paradise, in which he wonders whether it is hard to trace the birds of paradise because they don't want to be traced! Not all beauty is for us to behold. That's a thought to consider.

Fall happens only in the morning, when we can see the brilliant hues of changing leaves and the displays of late-blooming perennial flowers. At night when all the leaves turn into the same dark silhouettes and breathe in oxygen like they do in every other part of the year, it is not fall. It is just another season, darker and colder than the one before.

The night is when the biological world seems to reject its persona. Every living organism takes on a mystical view of life where surrendering to impermanence becomes more important than survival. Color and color pattern that are integral to their survival during the day become trivial at night. Come dusk, they let go of their war paints and become less guarded. But so do the predators and prey that use colors and patterns to camouflage themselves in their game of hide and seek. They go quiet at night and let each other rest. The ones that still remain active take over the dark silhouettes and engage in a game where color means little.

It may be in the darkness of the night that we can experience the boundlessness of time. It may be that time is fettered to restlessness of the day, when all of nature is aware of itself and presents that awareness in color. Or it may be that time is the emotions that we experience, and not the mystery of the dark that we cannot define. How would I know? How can I know anything for sure!

Will I perceive some more aspects of time if I am awake through all the changing motion around me -- if I get lost in the colorful chaos during the day and am just as aware in the monochrome at night.

But, I want to sleep. I want to dream and then I want to wake up. But, I rarely seem to find that peace in sleep. Crashing when I am tired is barely the kind of freedom from disturbance I am looking for. Tranquility is only meaningful when you can consciously perceive it. You want to get there by chance and remain there in full awareness of your restful state. You want to lose your sense of time. And it is only in that absence of time that there is tranquility.

Time can't be the same for everyone and I mean this quite literally in a very unimaginative, plain-vanilla sort of a way. This is unlike all the exciting academic and fictional talks that consider alternate time theories.

For instance, I am not conjecturing what life might have been like if time were a circle, or moved backwards, or stood still, or was absolute. I might speculate what a world would be like if there were many possible outcomes to one event all being experienced at the same time, but where it is hard to say if effect precedes cause or cause precedes effect! I might want sometimes for time to slow down or move faster and have my body time supersede mechanical time. I might want time to flutter and fly away until a point where there is no time and people have no memories.

But, we are here now -- where nothing is clear, everything is imperfect and incomplete, and time is eternally changing even before what we do now can develop into a whole -- because it all seems to stop every night!

It is almost like time is color and it is only in color that we can sense the changing rhythm of our lives. It is only in color that our nonexistent future is visible, just like it is in the absence of color (in black and white and many shades of grey) that we see the time that has passed. Either that or our past becomes the nostalgia of the present and presents itself rosily. Even so, nostalgia is somewhat quantifiable in time. It is only in our dreams that we can completely lose track of time, which may be why we can never remember if we dreamt in color or not.

Over the last few months, I have spent some time watching clouds and learning their names. It is not just about recognizing shapes in them anymore. I now see stories in the soft fluffy balls broken into fragments, the long wispy strands spread out over the sky, the gray foggy sheet forming a glowing layer of sky... It's like watching a musical unfolding slowly but in many layers... 

I learnt the other day that the beautiful curly-head girl holding the fluffy white and grey sheep looking coy, is a cumulus mediocris cloud. She wasn't looking coy as much as she was looking lost, because she didn't know which way the weather was headed. There was the sun beaming warmly and welcoming her and the sheep to graze, then there was the cold air which could make her bigger and turn her into a storm. She was a harbinger of unstable weather. 

I enjoy these stories, but I can't always tell what weather might come our way, or understand the changing patterns and rhythms meaningfully. So I check the weather in a news channel and then look at the sky to make sense of the forecast. 

But, even now getting lost in the spectacle is the most exciting thing. 

At night, I don't just see stars anymore... I see the clouds illuminated by the twilight...  together the stars and the clouds tell stories of their own. If you think about it, they are both gas and dust... but isn't it wonderful how they tell their stories so differently? 

The light from my living room window reflects on the wall creating this beautiful shadow play of the trees below. We live on the fourth floor and there is no sight of vegetation anywhere around us except maybe an occasional broccoli on the dining table of the apartment on the opposite side. (That's right. I am that creepy neighborhood prowler you want to complain about for peering into your apartments. But, oh dull this dreary neighborhood... so far I haven't found anything even slightly titillating)

So anyway... it is fun waking up in the morning and sitting on the couch and watching the silhouette of the tree swaying on the living room wall.

Today, something miraculous happened. As I was staring at the silhouette and wondering how it made its way up here when the tree is so many floors below, the whole frame moved!! Whole frame! (i.e. the sunlight on the wall that is shaped like a window frame with the silhouette of the tree)... and it moved so swiftly from one end to the another end of the wall that it had to be a paranormal phenomenon of some freaky kind. Or what was that? Was that the sun changing direction? Did it just decide to set in the east?

I wish I could explain this better. But believe me, it was so bizarre! If Tapi wasn't watching it as well, I would have though I was completely kooky... He of course, just went on with his life like it was totally normal! No reaction whatsoever. Dullsville!

(This post has to go in the Religion/Philosophy section of my blog of course!)

The one thing I find fascinating in some of these books about animals, birds and aquatic life are the maps of each species' resident range and migration routes. They instantly make me wonder what our world would have looked like if we chose to draw our countries boundaries keeping their migratory routes in mind along with ours. To some extent, this is exactly what we did. We created mobile countries as we migrated from place to place, in search of food and better opportunities… and since a lot of our food (animals, birds, aqua life) was mobile as well, and migrated to other places in search of better survival opportunities for themselves, we had to take their migratory routes into account while migrating. But this changed, when we learnt to settle down and domesticate or cultivate our food. (While we're on the subject, it would be fun to see if our ancient trade routes overlap with species migration routes in some way)

But, in the case of aquatic life, I wonder how they draw their boundaries. I suppose the most obvious way is to follow ocean currents or domicile themselves in suitable topographies based on their own physical characteristics ... but I wonder how they cope with trespassing by species alien to their territories (including humans). I also wonder how they cope when they accidentally find themselves in a different territory after a displacement, like say a tsunami. Moreover, if humans could build a world under water, what would it look like?

If you think about it, most countries as we know them today were formed as a result of boundaries drawn willfully by human migrants - marauders, settlers and invaders who shaped our political and cultural landscape for us. Today, millions of people live in spaces where their ancestors did not once belong... Like long-distance migratory birds, some humans migrated long distances, and like short-distance and sedentary birds, some humans traveled locally or settled in one place. But, where invaders occupied the land of these sedentary locals, boundaries and cultures were forced on them... and where locals escaped invasion, they managed to draw their own boundaries and keep their cultural landscape intact! Even today, many humans live a nomadic life... and for them human migration is quite literally what it had always been for several millennia, since we wandered from our evolutionary birthplace in Africa. 

In the mean time, over the last 150 million years, birds have been getting smaller and stronger and have learnt to maximize their power to fly long distances with effortless skill. Today the length of their journey seems only limited by the size of our planet.

They have been constantly challenging what we have been learning about evolution. Take for instance, Darwin’s “Survival of the Fittest”: or that competition has been the major driving force of evolution. Many claim today that it is not the lack of space or opportunities that inspires evolution, but on the contrary, the availability of opportunities and living space that does.

So birds learnt to fly and maximized the advantage of being on a different physical plane… opportunities opened up that were not available for the land dwellers! In fact in some instances birds seem to have evolved with more potential than they need. For example a songbird that usually flies 2000 ft above ground in capable of flying as high as 10,000 feet. There are raptors that can fly as high as 30,000 feet but hover at 6000 feet! It is a mystery why they are built more strongly than they really require. The human equivalent of this would have been a mutant like in Heroes, or a superhuman like Superman having strengths greater than needed… (although you can contend that necessity can be invented with opportunity! :)

Like birds, mammals roamed more freely when dinosaurs became extinct and more space became available. Humans too learnt to exploit the excess of resources available to them.

In the larger evolutionary context, all living species are therefore "environmental migrants" and we have all been making intentional and accidental existential choices, and using migration for this purpose whenever suitable.

But sometimes migration is not voluntary. In the case of humans, I immediately think of examples such as the migration during the India-Pakistan partition, slaves in different countries, and even descendants of invaders or colonizers who stayed on post-independence. But, on a lesser controversial subject, take the example of common birds that we see in our neighborhoods. Several of them may have originated elsewhere and traveled to our country along with human migrants. 

House sparrows were never meant to belong in the US. 8 pairs of them were introduced for the first time to New York from England in the 1850s, all of which perished quickly unable to cope with the new climate. It was after much trial over many years that they finally multiplied… today they are so abundant that they are considered pests!

Like the house sparrow, several other common birds such as rock pigeons and crows, which seem ubiquitous in almost every part of the world, evolved in europe and central asia and radiated out into other continents with human help. (This also explains why they don't find mention in the old folklore or mythology in countries where they now exist abundantly)

When I see them, they remind me of my own immigrant status. I wonder how soon it will be before a human immigrant is considered a pest… in fact, I wonder if we are already there! … either that or we will have made ourselves so much at home like the crows and sparrows that our existence here will seem more natural than our absence.

But, the maps of migration routes are not about these sedentary, non-migratory birds that emigrated to different places.  

They are the routes (or flyways) that birds have been creating for million years (even before human existence) as they fly to near and far places in search of better opportunities. Imagine the kind of genetic programming that has gone into these birds to help them respond to the changing weathers, lengths of days, threat from predators, as they travel from one hemisphere to another, and over several continents! They all have their preferred time of day and preferred altitudes of travel for migration... and have also learnt to adapt their flight and schedule to unexpected environmental changes.

Like birds, there are animals that have been migrating in mass for several millennia… and they too have adapted to new worlds either intentionally or accidentally. There are flowers and fruits that grow world over that once grew in isolated areas in small parts of the planet! Today they have not only adapted to new environments but have also helped create new species.

When I think of all of these non-human species and the genetic programming that has gone purely into making them ideal migrants, I have to wonder what kind of programming makes us humans good migrants as well!

We may have come a long way from thinking of evolution as a competition. But are humans the only species for whom competition has been programmed in us to make us fit for migration? Does survival of the fittest ultimately only apply to us?

I also wonder if humans are not the only species that leave an inheritance for their offspring. Most migrant species don’t live long enough to enjoy the fruits of their labor. They fly, toil and then perish before they can see their offspring’s benefit from their toil. To this point, there is an interesting fact. For many birds
migration happens in one direction and over a bird's lifespan. Such bird species are called nomads and invaders just like in the case of humans … but I would like to think of them as selfless monks with a sense of duty and a quest to find nirvana. :)

For instance a seabird called Manx Sheawaters can live up to 60 years, and covers at least a million kms in distance during its lifetime on migration alone. One particular bird of this species is said to have flown over 8 million kms during its lifetime! Incidentally, these birds also happen to live monogamously!   

What does this mean in a more human context? There is a lot of controversial conversations around environmental migration… mainly about the social ramifications of climate change. What does being an environmental refugee mean in a larger evolutionary context?

In the last eight years, I have successfully transitioned from crying at the sight of roadkill to casually commenting on it. Now when I see a dead deer or raccoon, I am thinking "Fresh Kill" or "Flat Meat" like I am about to pull over and decide which one to have for dinner! It still makes me queasy and I go quiet for a few minutes, but I think I am less sensitive to it now.

In some U.S. states it is legal and even encouraged to eat roadkill. Makes sense! Take just the fact that 1.5 million deer meet their end on the road every year in the US. It made me wonder if the homeless shelters could somehow take advantage of this ... perhaps with the help of the State Trooper Association or the Dept. of Transportation?

There are tons of recipe books and websites dedicated to roadkill --- deer, raccoon, skunk, moose, bear, wolf, dog, cat, rat, elk, armadillo, small and large birds, rabbit, turtle, kangaroo, opossums, some snakes and reptiles, and hold your breath... porcupine!

It was as though the entire zoo was let out on the road to be tattooed with tire threads ... and then eaten!

A few years ago, we bumped into a very friendly couple in La Jolla in Sandiego who (apart from teaching us how to pronounce La Jolla) enlightened us on local culture... there was a whole assortment of facts peculiar only to san diego that we were happy to learn about... But related to roadkill, I remember being told that Roadkill Bingo was a popular game in the west coast. It is a nice way to kill time in long distance travel while encouraging kids to learn the animals of their natural habit.

Roadkill undoubtedly is a worldwide phenomenon (at least wherever there are roads with lots of traffic) There is clearly a lot of culture developed around it... For instance, I saw an interesting book that teaches you how to cook directly on a running car engine... I bet it was written by a very resourceful person who had a lot of experience making delicious meals out of fresh kill.

Having read Yann Martel's Beatrice and Virgil recently, I thought it was possible that roadkill art is popular with taxidermists. They could probably make a living by choosing to do just roadkill! So I went on a web search frenzy and found several sites full of roadkill art.




I also found lots of roadkill toys. Some look disgusting, or creatively mean-spirited, but there are a few that are actually not too bad. There is even a roadkilltoys.com (!)

About five years ago, Kraft Foods was forced to kill one of their gummy products. Their Trolli Road Kill Gummies were gummy-animals shaped like roadkill complete with tire threads. People thought it sent out a very bad message to kids. I wonder what that bad message was! Especially given that New Jersey, which strongly lobbied against this gummy actually lets you eat roadkill if you have a permit. Why then do they think it offensive to eat fake roadkill?

It is the equivalent of letting you eat a real human brain and banning the human brain shaped jello!

That also makes me wonder if there is protest against all other kinds of gross candy. I see several in candy stores. There are jello molds shaped like human body parts - heart, brain and intestines, candies shaped like eyeballs, sour gummies shaped like toilet plungers, bugs and worms, pigs pooping out candy. Is anyone protesting against them? (Not that I mind either way.)

One of my favor go-to comic books is Stone Soup's Road Kill for the Closet. FYI: It has nothing to do with roadkill. The comic is about a single mom bringing up her two kids. Living with her are also her mom and her recently-divorced sister who is in love with her neighbour! As simple as that. It is the most endearing comic I have read. Funny, heartening and absolutely lovable. Since the title has Road Kill on it, I thought now might be a perfect time to promote it. :)

I wonder if I might find this in my library: Flattened Fauna: A Field Guide to Common Animals of Roads, Streets, and Highways

Wouldn't it be nice if all airline tickets included a carbon offset fee to counter the effects of air travel? From the carbon calculator in Sustainable Travel International I learnt that my personal share in this DC-India round-trip is about 6.5609 tons of CO2 emissions. The total cost to offset this amount of CO2 is somewhere between $100 to $200, depending on the kind of offset project I choose to invest in. They have a few renewable energy, energy efficiency and international reforestation projects to choose from.

While this sounded exorbitant, I looked up their offset costs for domestic travel. A visit to my brother's at Boston from DC would mean .3136 tons of CO2 and can be offset for less than $10, which doesn't sound bad at all.

The site also has calculators to figure out carbon offsets for other things like driving, home energy, hotel stay and events. I figure there are tons of companies offering all sorts of offset programs in the lines of planting trees or offsetting our electricity use with wind power... Sometimes, the over-abundance of choice can be paralyzing. I started reading a wiki entry on Carbon Offsets and went on to read about different projects. They all sounded impressive and/or ambiguous, as one might imagine they would to my kind of people with contemptible intellectual and moral ignorance. How does one do the right thing? For now, I am going with my gut (and your help is welcome :)

Hyderabad, observe with me. (America, learn) :)

I counted 13 single (i.e. one in a pair) flip-flops on main roads all over the city over the last one week. Could they have just slipped off the feet of people sitting on scooters OR are slippers being flung at unsuspecting riders? If you have lost yours, or have had them flung at you, you are not alone! The Chappal Punch may be a bigger nuisance than we realize. :)


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Helvetica, which is one of the most popular fonts for commercial use all over the world hasn't yet taken over as the preferred typeface on lorries and autos :) I am happy to report that lorries and autos still have beautiful artwork painted on them in bright colors. I have been seeing the most exquisite paintings of mythical figures and auspicious symbols exemplifying several ideals and desires: spirituality, secularity, patriotism, good fortune... It is always amusing to see the permutation varieties of "Horn OK Please" painted in different typefaces. :) It's especially amusing that the phrase is still in use. The OK indicates On Kerosene and was used back in the day (around the 2nd World War) when lorries ran on kerosene, which is highly unstable. The traffic regulations don't require this warning to be attached, but it still continues to remain a cult tradition with lorry drivers. Some lorries even say "Horn Please, OK? Tata" :) There is also an Indian film called "Horn Ok Pleassss"

Why autorikshaws have "Please Sound Horn" or "Keep Safe Distance" is a mystery to me (unless we assume that they have a wicked sense of humor and want to tease us with the warning). They are the ones usually straining to squeeze between vehicles and hazardously sound their fancy tijuana-style horns to the rhythm of the music playing from their custom-mounted boom-boom stereos .

I remember my driver telling me many years ago that owners spend up to a lakh rupees per lorry getting just the bodywork done (autos spend between Rs. 5000-10,000). They take a lot of pride in the aesthetic of their conveyance, but beyond the aesthetic it is also a way to build their brand and look legit to patrons. For instance, the beautiful ornamental fittings above the lorries cab help owners hide excess goods from the traffic police. The sounding chains on the side dissuade small vehicles from driving recklessly.

It used to be that tongas and cycle rikshaws had the most beautiful flowers and birds (mostly lotuses, peacocks and tigers (or cows), which are our national flora and fauna) painted on them. They also had elegant floral or velvet hoods (if they could afford it). Some of them had these shiny pompoms hanging from both sides of the handle and ornate metallic baskets or plasticine cutouts jutting in the front. The seats had bright upholstery covers, the back rest had oil-painted portraits of film actors and actresses (sridevi), and the platform was either of a bright reflective metal kind or had rangoli painted on it. Some of them were made to look like Rathas or temple chariots. I don't see these rikshaws anymore (although DC and Manhattan are abundant in their contemporary equivalents with environmental messages pasted on them)! Here, both the cycle rikshaws and their pullers look quite haggard! I read some heartbreaking stories of their difficult lives over the last few days and it's hard to say what would make them happy - if rikshaws were banned altogether or promoted more widely. Whatever it is, I hope they at least make them safe and respectable! (Note to self: Watch Men of Burden: Pedaling Towards a Horizon)


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I find that each mode of transport is a harbinger of a different kind of message. For instance buses have become moving billboards with product ads, political posters and social messages. I am told they are highly effective and are being sought out more than ever, because they drive alongside their target audience and therefore leave a long-lasting impression. On the other hand, regular billboards catch your attention only fleetingly except at the traffic stops.
Unlike buses, autos are less propagandist and more reflective of the driver or owners' personalities. The loud music aside, their disco-style flamboyance is exhibited more inwardly (with their interiors and music).

You know how when you talk about one kind of street art, you feel the need to list out every other kind of art you see around you? (like graffiti, wall posters, billboards, retail store sign boards... also dressing up of cows, horses and camels) and then you become cognizant of your city's eye-appeal and creative use of space.... Advertisements are omnipresent! If there is a perceptible medium in view, such as a flyover, a building, a wall, a tree, a circle, a divider, a light pole, a vehicle... it becomes a canvas for some plug!


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There are plant thieves all around us. Everywhere I go, battle plans are being drawn on three broad fronts. There are the tropical summer fruits (mangoes, pomegranates, sapodillas (chikoos), jackfruits) growing on high and medium branches, vegetables growing closer to the ground, religious flowers blooming in abundance in every height, shape and form... the fear I think is also that their invasion is endangering home security. I have sat through some really hilarious conversations in at least three places where relatives were strategizing how to protect their vegetation from "hungry and religious" thieves. The good news is no one seems to be interested in wild flowers, ornamental plants, seedless vascular and nonvascular plants (that I like) and the gardens are full of them! Thieves aside, I am mostly thrilled to see beautiful gardens everywhere I go. Despite the growing jungle of buildings, I see spectacular gardens and patches, and even timberlands with tropical trees of irregular shapes that stand out beautifully amid the concrete.


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There are more bird species in Hyderabad than you can count. You only notice them when you are back on a visit after leaving the city for a few years (and have the "real" bird-flu) :) So the next time someone laments that they have all vanished wake them up at 5 in the morning and take them outside. Hyderabad is still a birds paradise with at least 20 species right in ones backyard, and hundreds in sanctuaries. There are many migratory birds traveling here all the way from eurasia every year. I have also been seeing a lot of bright-colored insects and vertebrates in the garden, especially when it rains.


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I am nurturing the tourist in me and reading up on hyderabad. I was excited to learn that the city (and the deccan plateau on the whole) is full of beautiful monolithic rocks that are among the oldest and hardest in the world. Many of them are over 2500 million years old. To put it in perspective, the himalayan mountains are 70 million years old. The city's grey and pink granite ridges are among the oldest in the world. There are trees over 500 years old (including a banyan tree in Pillalamarri near Mahbubnagar that is 700 years old). While I have spent my time both admiring and bemoaning our new and old manmade heritage (albeit ignorantly), I don't know why I never learnt about these natural wonders. I am also picking up a lot of other interesting facts and legends about the city and falling in love with it all over again. In the mean time, Hyderabad has also been keeping me entertained culturally. There's always something going on in the city - walks (like the ones organized by Greater Hyderabad Adventure Club), art exhibitions, music concerts, dance programs, plays.... There is so much variety to choose from and so little time to enjoy everything. (FYI: cluburb.com is a great place online to find events in Hyderabad)


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The cell phone music syndrome, where the caller is tormented with music, and the receiver hears a more conservative "ring ring" is shifting from bollywood and bhajans to Kabir and Tulsi Das' Dohe.

FYI from one brahmin to another: the gayatri mantram you still have as your ringtone is meant to be recited inwardly to Savitr (sun god: the impeller, rouser, vivifier) during sunrise and sunset by brahmin men only (especially that secret para you learnt during your upanayanam). Must you share your praise and appeal for wisdom and enlightenment so brazenly with us low-ranking women (also non-brahmin men) and have us commit the transgression of learning it?

Also shouldn't the "ring ring" be on the callers side and the mantram be on your side? or is the reasoning that Savitr might call you one day and listen to your appeal!


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I haven't still figured out if it is a good thing or a bad thing that there are 6 sales representatives to cater to one customer in retail stores! They all look bored, underworked and eager to help! But, perhaps, they are happy to be employed?


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In hyderabad (especially), the sine qua non is to popularize one "neutral" god or god man and celebrate him to the point of saturation. The last time I came, Shirdi Sai Baba was in vogue, this time it is Buddha. Don't get me wrong. I am not trivializing genuine devotion one feels towards spiritual powers. I am only harboring my reservation on the intention behind this craze. My suspicion is that there is some other unsavory explanation for why a sea of Buddhas has emerged everywhere all of a sudden. Could it be a sign of impudence? For instance, why was Buddha standing at the hotel entrance holding his crystal frock and flaunting it to welcome his guests? Isn't it as outrageous as drawing Mohammed? He is supposed to have renounced worldly desires in search of enlightenment!

I find myself eating a lot of ice cream every time I think about money. It makes my stomach bloat from the lactose and exacerbates my asthma. Given the little money I have, it actually makes sense to either spend it all without worrying about my future OR squirrel away my savings under a tree and forget about it until I have become really old. Why must I put myself through this futile, soul-destroying obsession with accumulating mass (both weight-wise and wealth-wise)?

Today I was looking at some ancient coins from around the world with beautiful images of kings and celestial beings, royal emblems and cyphers, nature and art... all chiseled intricately in every kind of metal and in every possible shape. There is so much to appreciate in old money. The coins alone were designed to give pleasure through beauty, a concept I hope is true for today as well, although it is only in nostalgia that we sometimes appreciate beauty.

For instance, I think of India's early decimal coins (post-independence) that I used to find lying around in some drawers at home - the flower-shaped 2 and 10 paise, the square shaped 5 paisa, the hexagon shaped 3 and 20 paise, the round 25 and 50 paise... there was a variety in metal (bronze, copper, aluminum and nickel) that I don't think exists today. It is probably all ferratic stainless steel now. But when the steel coins were introduced, I remember being so beguiled by their smooth, shiny surface that I eagerly got rid of the old coins whenever I could to exchange them for shiny steel ones. Even now, I find new coins beguiling... I save dollar coins every time I get them, because they are so rare (I don't understand why!)... but I miss the variety in the old coins. Now I realize that all those old coins I took no notice of had stories to tell that I am only learning about now, after their disappearance.

I don't mean to go off on a tangent... but what the heck! I can speak of currency notes, can't I? It's not entirely off topic. :)

I remember the animals on Indian currency notes: the tiger, the rhinoceros and the elephant, all three of which I can't help but notice have dwindled to a few thousand in population today. I wonder if we will look back at the notes with these animals in the future and speak of them in a mythical way... Will we speak of them in the same way we do the coins of the old times with kings and celestial beings, royal emblems and cyphers, nature and art?

Suddenly money is looking more meaningful to me.

I read some very interesting stories on how money have been used over the years and how it has changed over time. I quite enjoyed the legendary stories around currency. It was compelling to see how it changed the course of history from time to time and easily created and destroyed empires and nations. There were also some fascinating articles on money in fictional works like books and movies. It was interesting to see how fiction borrows from reality, but also to see how it manages to be very different from all modern, and historic currency as well. In a way, fiction is exploring money in ways we haven't considered with much seriousness in real life.

By the time I came to our nonfictional present, the money world got very complex. For one thing, it is oftentimes not in a tangible form. Some of it went over my head, especially where it spoke of how money is organized today (I clearly live in some storybook world seeing as I find the past and the fictional world more relatable). I figured however, that the sheer complexity of today's financial markets, of currency management, exchange rates, financial infrastructures, foreign investments are overwhelming, but also fascinating. It is a beautiful world we live in where money flows in simple and complex ways almost artfully. I can imagine a whole orchestrated dance with several contrasting movements and prominent themes, competing for space and attention, while playing almost harmoniously... there are parts you can only perceive but can't see, so it can be as abstract as art... There are of course the discordant bits, but I think they only make it more real. (Art can also be discordant, can't it?)

Now I am ending my day with thoughts on how I would like to see myself... A money hoarder (of the realistic world with an eye on the future) or a coin collector (absorbed in a more abstract world with an eye on the past). The latter seems to be more promising of acquiring mass in a less soul-destroying way. Moreover, numismatics (currency collection) sounds so much more cooler than saving or investing.

Help me understand this: My ipad doesnt work with my laptop that has Mac OS 10.4.x, but it does on Tapi's Windows machine!

Why is Apple being nicer to competition than it is to loyal fans?

iPad requires me to upgrade to Snow Leopard (10.6.x), which I have been resisting for a while now, even though I've heard great things about it. I find having to kill the tiger for the snow leopard very unsettling. I guess they are both endangered animals, but should I really kill one to embrace the other?

It is one of those a'gnaw'ying "what do you do when you see an endangered animal eating an endangered plant" scenarios that I would much rather not deal with.

What is Apple doing naming its operating systems after endangered animals anyway? It is so traumatic being pricked with these reminders of our cold-blooded attitude towards nature every time they come up with some alluring new product that you can't resist... Do we really need to be pricked? Let me say it again... Do we, the more stereotypically morally-conscious (at least superficially), influen"sentient" fans, really need to be pricked?

Thankfully, I haven't yet felt the need to connect the ipad to a computer. I can check emails, read books, listen to music, watch movies, download apps, and do everything that an ipad will possibly let me do. The only thing I can't do is move my media from my comp to the ipad, which doesn't bother me (yet).

So I guess I will just postpone resolving this moral dilemma!

ps: By the way, the ipad is so awesome! I don't think I've been this enamored with any device in my life before. I highly recommend it, with or without the snow leopard! ... Of course, you can do the "smart thing" and wait till the prices drop and all the kinks are worked out! Bleh! ;)

(Please be forewarned. This post is full of incongruous tangents, as happens a lot when I am ranting)

One of the things I do often is make a list of all the feelings I bought myself in a day and think about whether they were worth my time or not, and if they should have even been allowed.

I think we all do this subconsciously. Our tweets and facebook statuses are evidence of this. Some of us steer clear from publicizing our feelings, but that is because we like to keep them to ourselves without feeding people’s curiosity or eagerness to judge us.

But, our whole life can be summed up as an activity of collecting feelings. Some of us choose to collect a wide assortment of them, and some of us stick to collecting a lot of the same few feelings we think pleasurable.

But, if you consciously list out the feelings you bought yourself, you will start to see patterns in your attitudes. I do this mainly to keep myself entertained when I am occupied in some mundane activity. It’s nice to let your mind go off on tangents and think about random things with the tap running in the background when you are doing the dishes. :)

But I encourage you to try it. Here are some starters.

Who did you meet today and what kind of social conversation did you make? What do you like most about that fragrant, all-natural organic handmade soap you bought at the specialty store? What do you think of abstract art? What was the last movie you watched that you found so offensive that you thought it shouldn’t have been made? What kind of advertisements appeal to you?

The thought that’s currently occupying my mind is on the subject of creativity. I have been wiki-hopping and picking up all kinds of thoughts about this seemingly uncomplicated word.

What I set out to do was understand the value of creativity, mostly related to my work. Sometimes I am vexed by the limitations I need to conform to when I am thinking of ideas for my projects (because they make no business sense!). Then, I take a little break to encourage bitter thoughts about how my brilliance and creativity are being thwarted by these imbecilic notions of what makes sense and what does not! Why can’t people just accept that “I am talent” and shower me with praise (and money)

Mainly, how is a person to engage in the activity of being creative (or innovative) if people are constantly drawing perimeters around what is creative and what is not, what should be allowed and what should not?

As I was moping about all of this, my mind wandered slightly off-topic (although, if I want to, I can connect the dots and make them seem related). I was thinking about art. What if the role of art was not to entertain or make a compelling point, but to simply be art! By this, I don’t mean creating anti-art or anti-anti-art, but embracing the idea that art is whatever is presented as art.
The minute you define art even as one that rejects all prior definitions of art, you are creating a new definition, which too should be rejected by that same logic. But, what if we stopped defining art and started embracing everything more open-mindedly. By this I don’t mean we should accept everything we don’t find beautiful as beautiful, but that we could accept that everything need not be beautiful or compelling! Can we not collect more feelings from art than just the small set that we have assigned to it? Can we also not assess one art as being better than another because it possesses more layers of meaning?

This brings me to another of my peeves. How do we decide which cause is worthy of prioritizing over another? I keep looking at how cause marketing is evolving and making remarkable things happen. We are suddenly more aware and more pumped up about creating change than even before. I find that I am on both sides of this equation (I am the “marketer” and the “marketee”), but I especially enjoy looking at what kind of feelings businesses and nonprofits are tapping into (beyond our feelings of empathy and compassion that is) to make us respond to their satisfaction.

For instance, I was thinking about the environment, and how one of our justifications for saving the planet seems to be that it is beautiful and therefore worth saving. I am constantly watching wildlife documentaries and wondrously admiring these animals, as if the only reason they need to be saved is because they inspire wonder or awe! What if they were not so beautiful and do not inspire wonder or awe? Shouldn’t we still save them?

What if we are to prevent the extinction of tribal communities, not because we think they have a rich cultural heritage and are full of ancient wisdom, but because they deserve to live on this planet as much as we do regardless of whether we can appreciate them or not!

How about we let people, nature and things be, simply because they deserve to be and not because they appeal to our sense of gratification and our estimation of what is worthy of keeping!

You can see how my mind keeps wandering aimlessly. Now that I have ranted and gone off on tangents, I have lost the initial anger I felt a few minutes ago towards my work. Now I can go back to it in peace and conform to the limitations imposed on me without feeling so bitter :)

Is it already that time of the year when magnolia's perfume the air? 

Tapi and I went on a long enjoyable walk last night. The walks at night are usually less conversational. It is then that the hustling noises of everyday life are muffled by a symphony of sounds orchestrated by the wind into an elaborate musical composition. The rustling of trees, the songs of crickets are never so obvious in daylight. I used to think the chirping of crickets and katydids came from the stars twinkling at night because they always seemed to happen at the same time. Only, occasionally a frog would croak and break that illusion. I would then pretend that the croaking sound was the stars clearing their throat before the next performance. 

The only time Tapi and I talked was when he found me looking at people's houses through their windows. I said it was unfair that people can look out their window into where we were, but it was impolite for us to look in through that same window to where they were. He said it is because they bought themselves that privilege! We then went back to our quite walk until a little after midnight.  

Yesterday was the first day that I noticed that the sun refused to set. It was nice and warm outside, and the slight chill in the breeze felt more suggestive of winter's departure. The magnolias have already begun trumpeting the beginning of spring. I can see daffodils starting to flower. The weeping willows have budded their downy sprigs. Soon, they will dance gently to welcome the cherry blossoms. Then the cherry blossoms will have woken up the city and festivities will enliven the season. There will be walks to suit every ability, stories to appeal to every taste, parades and shows to entertain every age, food fests to tickle every palate... 

This is also the time of the year when everyone is more environmentally aware. This is when people realize that the green that is growing abundantly around them is exquisite. And then, they notice the bright sunshine, the beautiful rivers, the stars in the sky, and want to proclaim that all of this is truly worth saving. That's how the commemorative Days and Weeks set in motion. Last year, we cleaned the river, planted trees, built sustainable houses, and celebrated with thousands of like-minded environment lovers while walking the walk(s) and talked the talk(s) :)  

I am going to follow the motto of creating a list for the sake of celebrating the list and catalog all the upcoming environmental Days and Weeks. 
 
March 18th was the National Biodiesel day, which went uncelebrated. I briefly contemplated wishing Rudolph Diesel a Happy Birthday on twitter. But, I realized it would be better spent reading about vegetable oil-based fuel than just benightedly wishing him. In a 1912 speech, Diesel said “the use of vegetable oils for engine fuels may seem insignificant today, but such oils may become, in the course of time, as important as petroleum and the coal tar products of the present time.” I thought about what it meant that he made this statement almost 100 years ago. I wondered if we are in the kind of dystopian future that he prophesied. But then, I read about the Vegetable oil economy and couldn't help marveling at how far we have come since Diesel's comment. Our present and future isn't all that dystopian. We are making good progress and I am very hopeful :) 

March 22nd is the World Day for Water.  Last year the ICRC called on governments to address the need to improve the quality of water especially in conflict zones. During the time of war, water supply and purification systems are destroyed, reserves become dangerous to access, or become dangerously displaced! I find that in 2010, we are still continuing to address the quality of water. I am all for a reinforcement of commitment. :)
 
March 27th the world will go dark for an hour on Earth Hour. I remember the Ayn Rand Institute saying it is ludicrous to turn off the lights for a measly 60 minutes. "Try spending a month shivering in the dark without heating, electricity, refrigeration; without power plants or generators; without any of the labor-saving, time-saving, and therefore life-saving products that industrial energy makes possible." I sure hope our world doesn't have to suffer that fate! And as a symbolic gesture to demonstrate my hope, we will turn off the lights this year as well (for the third consecutive time).

Between April 17-24th, which is the week of the new moon, the lights will go out again. It is the National Dark-Sky week, where we celebrate the night sky without light pollution. "The night sky is a gift of such tremendous beauty that should not be hidden under a blanket of wasted light. It should be visible so that future generations do not lose touch with the wonder of our universe." I wonder if there is a nice place we can go to to look at the skies. I also wonder what it means that we have to drive several miles to get to where I can appreciate the wonder of our universe!

There are at least 32 countries celebrating Arbor Day in April. India is not in the list. Our Arbor day (Van Mahotsav) is celebrated in July. The only time I remember planting trees on Van Mahotsav is as a guide or girl scout in school. I highly doubt that those trees survived beyond a few days, but it is the thought that counts, isn't it? In the US, the National Arbor Day is celebrated on the last Friday of April (April 30th). It is the day when people are encouraged to plant and care for trees.  

May 3rd is the International Migratory day. This is not the day when birds migrate (tee hee) :) It is to celebrate the migration of birds between their summer and winter homes. Seeing as I am bird crazy in my own little way, I decided to add this to my list of spectacular things to celebrate. 

A day before I leave for India, is the International Day for Biological Diversity. I think it's wonderful that I get to go on my vacation with thoughts about the rich variety of life on Earth.    

In my home country the UN and I will celebrate World Environment Day (June 5th) and World Day to Combat Desertification and Drought (June 17). I finally help alleviate population in India, by leaving the country on World Population Day (July 11th)! 

Am I ready for spring yet? Today, I am off on my first trail which promises the regions best wildflower displays. I am looking forward to it. Snorty and I also get to learn about clouds. :)

In the spirit of the snow season, and because the atmospheric water vapor in the Deece threatens to freeze again and form a mass of ice crystals and fall as white flakes (possibly for the last time), I am going to allow myself some Snowbama humor on this blog. :)



Today, I walked two miles to a diner on a slippery main road next to a sidewalk piled up with snow and wasn't happy about it at all. Moreover, my friend who accompanied me on my way back slipped on ice and bruised her knee quite badly. I was wondering whose responsibility it is to make the roads pedestrian-friendly. Does my city council's snow ordinance say anything about requiring the sidewalks to be clean and safe to traverse at all times? It absolutely does!... I called their hotline with the intention of reading their ordinance to them and lamenting about the hazardous walking conditions they are having us live with, but their hotline is warm at best and directs you to an answering machine. Very annoying! If they don't do anything to clear the snow after tonight, I am going to try the Public Works Department next. Think that might work?

I am in a serenely happy state of mind, like I just came out of a long aromatic bath in an oversized tub. I am out the warm soapy water, have slipped into a comfortable shirt and pajamas and am ready to drift into a restful sleep. :)

There are a lot of things I learnt over the last few days that have brought me here.

Very recently, I read Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser and a few books by Michael Pollan - In Defense of Food, Omnivore’s Dilemma and bits and pieces of The Botany of Desire. I then watched a film version of The Botany of Desire, followed by Food Inc, which features Pollan and Schlosser, and Super Size Me.

They all speak of what goes into the food we eat, where they come from, and how they affect our lives from every point of view that you can think of … imagine the good, bad and the ugly played out in a socio/political/economic/ethical/scientific/cultural/nutritional scenario with regards to food (!) The Botany of Desire even describes how human desires affect the plant life from the plants point of view. It takes examples of apples, tulip, marijuana, and potatoes to show us how these species have adapted over centuries to different environments all over world by manifesting themselves in hundreds of varieties that cater to our ever-changing desires of taste, beauty and experiences. What you take home from these books and films is an aspiration to contemplate our food choices in a less monotone way…

Tapi and I watch a lot of Food and Travel shows (apart from million other shows that keep us glued to the tube). The latest season of Top Chef was especially stimulating. It brought in some really gifted chefs who inspired a great deal of respect for the art. I speak especially of the four finalists who transformed the show from competition to purely display of talent.

This excessive food-related reading and watching is making me wonder if I am addicted to what Anthony Bourdain calls “food porn”. It is an unsettling feeling when your voyeuristic urges are given an unflattering label like that. I also think it simplifies the multitude of other satisfactions I derive from them. The entertainment is not just in the visual appeal or the urge to see talent, but also in the intellectual curiosity it satisfies! ... Am I saying I am a "food porn" addict and more?

Over the weekend I watched all ten episodes of “The Life of Mammals”. I don’t know how to talk about it without feeling like in saying more I am saying less. The dominant emotion I felt while watching the series was that of astonishment. I saw myself asking if these mammals really exist on this planet! If humans are the inferior mammal—if we are a much tinier blip in this series of blips in the universe than we thought we were. Moreover, within each episode Attenborough hurdles from continent to continent like a little girl hopping from one box to another on her chalk-drawn hopscotch court on the sidewalk! One minute he is inside a dark cave full of flesh eating maggots filming hibernating bats, and right after that he is hanging hundreds of feet above ground on a thin rope tied to a tall tree in a dense forest. And he does all that without looking muscly and athletic, but as strange as a flightless bird taking to the air with ease! His enthusiasm to share his discoveries is endearing and inspiring.

I thought The Life of Mammals was a revelation until I saw Attenborough in Paradise.

In early 19th century, Alfred Russel Wallace wrote a book called The Malay Archipelago about his first sighting of the birds of paradise. In it, he describes these birds as “the most beautiful, and most wonderful living things on the planet”, with illustrations of creatures of astounding beauty with structural features and plumage beyond anything imaginable. His description of the birds inspired an ambition in Attenborough to find them, only, there was little scientific evidence of their existence. Over the years, the birds of paradise took on an almost-mythical status, and were mostly talked about in speculation of what they may have looked like based on hearsay of local tribes or illustrations of artists. Many were even thought to be extinct. But, after six decades since reading the book, and trying to find them several times, Attenborough finally manages to fulfill his ambition through this film. What you see in this film is not just beauty, but a miraculous marvel that extends beyond the aesthetic! Their unique and elaborate courtship rituals, and their ability to impress their mates through careful planning is otherworldly!

Between the Botany of Desire that speaks of how plants take advantage of human desire to perpetuate themselves, and Attenborough in Paradise that looks at beautiful creatures living spectacular lives without the knowledge of humans, I have to wonder where we fit in this overall picture… Clearly we are looking less and less like we are in control of our environment and more and more like the environment is in control of us… and also like not everything on earth is made purely for our enjoyment. There seems to be beauty even where we cannot see it. Now, how does that sit with our swollen ego!

With that thought in mind, I am off to bed after that long, warm aromatic bath in my tub!

I read an interesting report by the Worldwatch Institute about livestock and climate change. It said, more than half of the world's global emissions (51%) is caused by the life-cycle and supply chain of animals raised for food. I am having a tough time envisioning this number. It puts the whole notion that we might be able to reverse Climate Change by reducing fossil fuel into perspective. Worldwatch Institute proposes solutions ranging from reducing meat and dairy consumption, to replacing livestock products with analogs made from crops such as soy and wheat, substituting biofuels for coal, among other things. It also briefly mentions water and energy consumption of livestock and processed foods, and lists the GHGs attributable to refrigerants used for livestock and processed food products.

The more I read about Climate Change, the less I seem to understand global priorities and proposed solutions. As we getting closer to the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December, what intrigues me is how little the impact of livestock on Climate Change was spoken about at the previous Climate Change conference at Copenhagen in March, which provided a summary of existing scientific knowledge since the IPCC report two years ago. Back in '07, the United Nations' FAO reported that annual greenhouse gas emissions from cattle was 18% (not 51), which still seemed like a crazy number to be ignored, given that it was higher than transport. This tells me, they not only grossly underestimated the figures but also understated the need to take drastic measures to reverse this problem. It sounds to me like the culture of silence being played all over again. Is it too big a problem to acknowledge and do something about? I don't see it being in the agenda for the conference in December either!

My reading today focussed a lot on Food and Climate Change related topics. The conclusion seems to be that when it comes to food, people will respond to incentives to eat right just as they do with everything else. I suppose they will. We gain more weight because gaining weight is cheaper! (Here's an interesting post, which also points to how eating healthy costs more) That seems to be the logic behind the fat tax and a whole bunch of pigovian taxes. But, a million questions come to mind about the long term benefits of sin-related taxes and how one tax might impact the other. There's a very old article I read about how cigarette tax and state-controlled smoking lead to a decrease in number of smokers, but caused problems related to weight gain among these people!

I wonder what kind of incentives one might offer people to make them decrease their consumption of meat, diary and processed foods, and what regrettable repercussions that might have in store for us. I also wonder what differences might become apparent between the rich and poor in the way they react to food-related incentives! Perhaps we need to think less in terms of taking action where it hurts us most, and more in terms of dealing with those "extraneous" issues (for a lack of a better word) such as preventing land degradation, controlling water pollution and proper disposal of animal waste, preventing loss of biodiversity, and other such things.

I am concerned and yet terribly lost with this whole Climate Change debate. Have I said that already? I think i have.

All our furniture has disappeared to the new place, but Tapi and I are still in the old apartment taking care of itty bitty things like going over boxes of important papers. Let me know if you care about finding us (we have a new landline number as well).

The next few days are going to be fun as we make a home out of our apartment. We imagine it will have a lot of study and media areas, given that they are our only exciting possessions at the moment.

If you have ideas for where we might find an assortment of nature-friendly but easy-on-the-pocket shelves and accent pieces, we are your audience. The keyword is inexpensive (although we are open to accepting expensive gifts!). Right now money seems to be as pocket-friendly as an angry hedgehog!

For the first time in six years, we saw the most beautiful Red-bellied woodpecker in the balcony. I am rather peeved with the internet at the moment. It says this is a very common bird, that I should have been seeing all along. I couldn't possibly have missed a bird twice as big as a sparrow, with a bright red cap from the bill to the nape and a striking black and white barred back if it were in front of me all the while!

I am a little emotional today as I am getting close to my move date. Will the woodpecker visit me at my new place as well? :(

It feels like a scene in a Chinese wuxia film, where two opposing martial arts warriors are about to combat in a chivalric fight, in an ethereal scenic setting. Tapi and I are looking at the trees shedding their bright yellow leaves over this green lawn. They were all coursing in one direction, until all of a sudden, in one long swoosh, the leaves came flying towards each other before diverging in all directions.

Today is the International Climate Action Day. There is no event in DC that is interesting enough to make us want to get up from this surreal setting and express desire or longing for anything. Not even the continuance of this miracle.

When I speak about something generically, like say modern art or global warming (:P), my friends let me blather away unreservedly, but are also candid about how little I know (!). In my mind, if I am able to break these woolly subjects without wandering of the point, it means that I know something about them. You want to start questioning my knowledge when I yammer on and on, without getting anywhere :-) I want to think it is not the same as making blanket statements out of ignorance, because the intention behind the generalizations are less about showing off my knowledge on the topic and more about the topic itself.

Today is Blog Action Day and the focus this year is the world’s most favorite woolly subject: Climate Change. I was going to say something cynical about the pointlessness of these action “days”, but I remembered that two years ago, the focus was something environment-related as well, and at that time I collected a lot of links to blogs with interesting posts about the environment, which eventually led to my job in a sustainable development organization. :)

In 1998 New York Times published an American Petroleum Institute memo titled “Global Climate Science Communications Plan”, which gives an interesting overview on the climate change debate back then! I bring this up because the report came out only three years before I joined Grad school in India, and the Kyoto Protocol was a hot topic in media schools. The protocol was adopted in 1997, but came into force in 2005, so we were stuck in the middle of this simmering debate taking place across the globe. One particular prof usually spewing left-winged rhetoric made the climate debate even more intriguing. His lectures while factual and passionate, were far from objective. The media too was abuzz with "global warming- hoax or not", "facts and fictions of the climate change debate" type of news. The Global Warming shindig came in an interesting medley of flavors. Of course, we all know now who's winning this debate (my prof too might be happy to note!)

Back to API's memo: It says “the climate change theory being advanced by the [Kyoto] treaty supporters is based primarily on forecasting models with a very high degree of uncertainty. In fact, it is not known for sure whether (a) climate change actually is occurring, or (b) if it is, whether humans really have any influence on it.

Some more excerpts from the memo:

Project Goal
A majority of the American public, including industry leadership, recognizes that significant uncertainties exist in climate science, and therefore raises questions among those (e.g. Congress) who chart the future US course on global climate change.

Progress will be measured toward the goal. A measurement of the public’s perspective on climate science will be taken before the plan is launched, and the same measurement will be taken at one or more as-yet-to-be-determined intervals as the plan is implemented.

Victory Will Be Achieved When

• Average citizens “understand” (recognize) uncertainties in climate science; recognition of uncertainties becomes part of the “conventional wisdom”
  
• Media “understands” (recognizes) uncertainties in climate science
  
• Media coverage reflects balance on climate science and recognition of the validity of viewpoints that challenge the current “conventional wisdom”
  
• Industry senior leadership understands uncertainties in climate science, making them stronger ambassadors to those who shape climate policy
  
• Those promoting the Kyoto treaty on the basis of extant science appear to be out of touch with reality.
  

Current Reality
Unless “climate change” becomes a non-issue, meaning that the Kyoto proposal is defeated and there are no further initiatives to thwart the threat of climate change, there may be no moment when we can declare victory for our efforts. It will be necessary to establish measurements for the science effort to track progress toward achieving the goal and strategic success.

A little over a decade now, we have a whole new perspective on Climate Change. API’s website today says

Oil and natural gas take us down the street and around the world. They warm and cool our homes and businesses. They provide the ingredients for medicines, fertilizers, fabrics, plastics and other products that make life safer, easier and better.

While we rely on them for most of our energy and will likely do so for years to come, emissions from their production and use may be helping to warm our planet by enhancing the natural greenhouse effect of the atmosphere. That’s why oil and gas companies are also working to reduce their greenhouse emissions.

To see more about what companies are doing, please look at Climate Challenge: A Progress Report. To view additional and more recent information about voluntary efforts, see Companies Address Climate Change. 

Isn’t seeing change in such unambiguous terms exhilarating? It's the kind of emotion you go through when you watch those "before and after" videos of people in makeover shows. As long as you are watching the show, you have that stupid wide grin on your face like you are the one getting made over. Sometimes you can't help thinking, "This poor girl had it in her to look good all this while, and just didn't know it!" It's a nice feeling to see someone happy! But, would she have been as happy about her current state had she looked good all the while? [I was asked to strike this out because it makes me sound imbecilic!]

Some kinds of wisdom that trigger positive change are recondite and abstruse and profound even. We can show our disgruntlement on what "was", and bicker that it is only the opportunistic motives of corporates and governments that propel action to mitigate global warming today and not genuine concern. But, I would much rather we ignore the motives and celebrate what "is" and what "will be" because something tells me that the future is bright and promising. :)

I am currently eyeing this page to figure out what else I want to do to get involved in this climate action business.

Happy Diwali!

My mom's family celebrates it today, and my dad's tomorrow! (some cultural differences are convenient! :) Behind feeling the need to please both families and wanting to follow both traditions was the opportunistic motive that we got to burst crackers twice!... :). I miss my grandparents today.

The other day, my aunt was describing her vacation in Alaska. She journeyed several hours in the frigid cold just to walk on a glacier for a few minutes. She said it was an experience she wouldn’t forget.

I then read about the Himalayan glaciers and was upset that the world’s largest ice body outside of the polar caps could disappear entirely by 2035. I can’t fathom the gravity of this calamity and the disastrous implications it might have on our survival, except that it is a source for Asia's biggest rivers, the lives and livelihoods of millions of people depend on it and all hell will break lose. I want to say, we should do everything in our means to prevent this disaster, but that would not only be stating the obvious but also asking to postpone the inevitable.

It then reminded me of a Disney film I saw recently called Earth, from which I picked up facts about the Boreal forest. The forest wraps itself as a ring on top of the earth, spreading over three continents. It has over a third of the trees found on Earth and is often referred to as the “lungs of the planet”. Everyday, as the trees breathe in carbondioxide and breathe out oxygen, they behave as storehouses for the greenhouse gases (when breathing in) and re-oxygenate the earth (when breathing out), thereby giving us clean air to live! But, this rhythmic process is now under great stress like everything else in the world.

I can’t imagine this ten thousand year old ecosystem - a major source of oxygen on the planet, the largest storehouse of carbondioxide, and one of the last remaining old-growth forests in the world might be ruined by something as lame as industrial activity! I say lame because I want to think of the earth as this awesome celestial body, the design of The Great Spirit, which is impervious to such trivial things as human follies! Of course, I also never imagined that the Himalayan Glaciers or the poles for that matter will melt away entirely in a few decades!

I am going to stop reacting to news about the environment except in amusement... I already have a Gedanken-like question and this is not a thought-experiment, just a rhetorical inquiry. Could the north pole be freezing while the south pole is melting?

From my living room, I see a female brown northern cardinal hopping behind a male red cardinal from the right of the balcony to the left. I have lost sight of them. Now the male red cardinal is hopping behind the female brown cardinal. The female is undecided on which way to go. They are gone!

The place we are moving to in a month's time will have no balcony. I can't sit out in the sun or in the rain and complain about the wind playing havoc with the pages in my book; I won't have to juggle a drink in hand and a laptop in another. There will be no view of tall coniferous trees.. of birds on snowy branches, of deer walking in the woods, of geese running on the grass, of little brown rabbits or black rascaly squirrels. There will be no kids sliding in their little sledges, rolling on the ground, laughing and throwing snow balls at each other.

I am skimming through old pictures taken from my balcony. There are several blurry ones of birds that visited my balcony, of butterflies and cicadas, of spider webs and ants under dry leaves. All failed attempts at capturing nature in action. Now I have a lingering knot in my stomach. What am I trading all this for?

We are moving two blocks away, to a bigger apartment. I am trading the bad over here for the good over there. But, what about everything that I have come to love about this little nature haven? How do I let go of them?

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Even after six years, the novelty of orange cauliflowers, purple peppers and scarlet red cabbages hasn't worn off. The variety of greens from peppery to mild; of herbs from earthy to woodsy; of edible flowers sweet and sour; of stems raw and baked; of crunchy seeds and nuts draw me towards them, absolutely and irresistibly. I fail miserably at using them the right way, and then sometimes I get it so right, it makes all the trialing worth it.

I love going to the farmers markets. You are right where all the food action is taking place. It's delightful how they arrange the veggies, like little attractive bouquets spread all over the counter. When I saw a counter full of tomatoes of all different sizes and shapes, from the big wild green ones with red stripes to the tiny sweet ones that you can pop into your mouth, I was delirious.
I didn't know shrimp came in so many colors. That there are ones as big as lobsters, and as small as bumblebees.

I take pleasure in knowing that these will stay with me.

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I am listening to songs that make me feel like I have fallen in love with someone I am about to lose. I have been through this feeling before. The pounding of the heart, the feeling of ecstasy, of giving in, and letting go. I am looking up how to get over a break up, like it is a person I am about to miss. I have dreams for the new place. I have paintings I want on hang on the wall, and little projects of decoration. I have a vision of how I will live my life, the things I will do differently, the changes I will make to it. It's only two blocks away, but I see it as a fresh start, which looks promising. Why then is it hard for me to leave the old?

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Love and Longing

Restless - Alison Krauss & Union Station
Blues In the Night - Katie Melua
Corner of Your Heart - Ingrid Michaelson
Lies - Glen Hansard
Such Great Heights - Iron & Wine
The Hill - Marketa Irglova
Michael's Muzurka - Childsplay

I was rather confounded by this logo I saw on a truck today. It needs a tagline that says "Bosom Threesome, Raring to Go!" or "Gleefully Happy to be Eaten"

Metropolitan brings to mind a book I read many months ago called "The Pig that wants to be Eaten: 100 Experiments for the Armchair Philosopher". The book is full of introspective questions and thought experiments that are perfect for bathroom reading. It provoked a lot of inane Gedanken-like all-night discussions with friends. Here's a bit from the book.

After forty years of vegetarianism, Max Berger was about to sit down to a feast of pork sausages, crispy bacon and pan-fried chicken breast. Max had always missed the taste of meat, but his principles were stronger than his culinary cravings. But now he was able to eat meat with a clear conscience.

The sausages and bacon had come from a pig called Priscilla he had met the week before. The pig had been genetically engineered to be able to speak and, more importantly, to want to be eaten. Ending up on a human table was Priscilla’s lifetime ambition and she woke up on the day of her slaughter with a keen sense of anticipation. She had told all of this to Max just before rushing off to the comfortable and humane slaughterhouse. Having heard her story, Max thought it would be disrespectful not to eat her.

The chicken had come from a genetically modified bird which had been ‘decerebrated’. In other words, it lived the life of a vegetable, with no awareness of self, environment, pain or pleasure. Killing it was therefore no more barbarous than uprooting a carrot.

Yet as the plate was placed before him, Max felt a twinge of nausea. Was this just a reflex reaction, caused by a lifetime of vegetarianism? Or was it the physical sign of justifiable distress? Collecting himself, he picked up his knife and fork…

The author then rants on for a paragraph before referring to my most favorite book in the world.

What if we could create animals that had no interest in their own survival, simply because they had as little awareness as a carrot? How could it be wrong to deprive them of an existence they never knew they had? Or what if the animal actually wanted to be eaten, such as the bovine imagined by Douglas Adams in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe?

The protagonist of that novel, Arthur Dent, reconciled in horror at the suggestion, describing it as 'the most revolting thing I've ever heard'. Many would share his revulsion. But as Zaphod Beeblebrox objected to Dent, surely it's
'better than eating an animal that doesn't want to be eaten'? Dent's response seems to be no more than a version of the 'yuck factor' - the kind of instinctive recoil that people feel when confronted by something that doesn't seem natural, even if there are no moral problems with it. Organ transplants and blood transfusions seemed freakish when first conceived, but as we got used to both, the idea that they are morally wrong died out, apart from among a few religious sects.

People may talk about the dignity of the animals or of a respect for the natural order, but can we seriously suggest that the dignity of the chicken species is undermined by the creation of a decerebated version? Isn't Priscilla's death entirely dignified? And aren't even organic arable farmers, who have selected and bred varieties to grow on a mass scale, tampering with the natural order anyway? In short, is there any good reason why the vegetarian today should not share a table with Max just as soon as his menu becomes a reality?"

People keep throwing numbers all the time to validate their personal opinions on things. I find numbers persuasive, but they are not enough to propel me to take action.

On second thoughts.. instances come to mind when numbers affected me emotionally but I was paralyzed by the magnitude of the problem and didn’t know how to take action.

I remember the war in Darfur because it summons up dreadful images of violent deaths to about 500,000 people. That is almost the population of the city I am currently living in. AIDS currently affects over 35 million people in the world. There are about 40,000 reported cases of Swine flu in the world.

Perhaps, it is unfair to make a point about the relevance of numbers when we speak of something sensational like genocide or diseases. Their relevance mostly comes from numbers!

I have been reading amusing and distressing news stories related to endangered species in ecoworldly. Read this:

A species of bird so rare it was thought perhaps to be extinct was captured on video and still images in the Phillipines province of Nueva Vizcaya… right before it was cooked and eaten. Read more

Scientists succeeded for the first time in achieving the holy grail of conservation: bringing to life an extinct animal through cloning. For seven minutes. Read more

Last year one of the most critically endangered birds in the world, the Northern Bald Ibis, nested in Spain for the 1st time in 500 years. Terrific news has now arrived that a pair is nesting again in the same location this year. Read more

According to a new study, climate change could drastically alter 88% of the waters where dolphins, whales and porpoises are found. While some species may stand to benefit from the changes, the research concluded that one fifth of cetacean species could be lost forever. Read more

There are many more. If you have read this far, I highly recommend subscribing to ecoworldly. :) They have much more than news about endangered species!

As I read this kind of news every morning and become affected by it, I realize it may be the effusive way in which the numbers are relayed in these articles that makes me feel remorseful. Talk to me about something with a lot of interest, wax lyrically, even lose your sense of proportion, and I will listen to you. If you are convincing enough, I will act with you and become a champion of your cause.

That being said, if there is only one of a species left in the world, or thousands of people slaughtered in a distant country, what can I do to help! How about giving me action steps to take aside from affecting me emotionally with effusion!

I have been thinking about our sense of morality and where it comes from. It can’t all be a result of our individual conscience. It can’t also be prescriptive or based on long-standing custom through an institution like religion or the government. It has to come from a combination of blind-faith and skepticism, only, how they are combined varies from person to person. Which is why, some kinds of morality have changed over time, like our views on marriage or the way women are treated. And some have remained the same, like our views on murder and burglary.

Needless to say, there are those for who the question of morality is in a state of uncertainty, like war or abortion or capital punishment. But, we would much rather leave these decisions to the cat that is willing to bell itself!

No matter where our sense of morality comes from, it is certain to some degree at least that it has little to do with numbers. At least, our sense of right and wrong does not come from how many people agree or disagree with a value. Around the globe, over half a million people kill unlawfully every year. Does the vast number of people who take to murdering makes it morally acceptable? What we sometimes deem as deviant behavior are acts of millions of people! If our moral judgment tells us homicide is immoral, it is not because of how few people take to killing or how many people are killed. It has to do with how we define ability to empathize in another and how our conscience guides our sense of rightness and wrongness.

I am reminded of my ethics class in grad school in which I learnt of the many ways of looking at morality and ethics. It’s bewildering how much thought has gone into this area of study. As you learn about moral absolutism, relativism, realism, anti-realism and so on… where each kind is as convincing as the other, you realize that it is impossible to be right about anything, including what we now perceive as natural instinctive states of mind like empathy and compassion!

Added to that, as I read about the scientific studies on behavioral neuroscience, like how mirror neurons affect our capability to share our feelings and understand another's feelings, it makes me want to question why I feel morally answerable.

Could it be that we use these devices such as numbers and effusive expression to force a false sense of morality?

And with that statement alone, I can end this post, but I am usually in favor of overstating the obvious. :)

The thought that occupies my mind today is whether there are environmental books that make you fall in love with nature (opposed to books that you read because you love nature). When you ask yourself a question like that about something that interests you greatly, be prepared to submit your wits to an astounding explosion of disparate thoughts and memories that you unknowingly carried with you throughout your life! Your mind scuttles back and forth between the past and the present in overwhelming haste and you want to tell yourself to stop and contemplate deeply and not disjointedly, but that rarely happens. As I began to make a mental note of the environmentally-themed books I have read and how they have shaped my thinking, as I likened or compared environmental writing to other science or political writing, I realized I was getting overwhelmed and not directing my mind to grasp concrete ideas but just a slew of disparate queries. My mind is still in fast-forward mode and I am not where I want to seek answers!

What bothers me right now is the fact that despite the many fairy tales and fantasy stories that bring nature to life; the usual diet of environmentally-themed books that seek to educate; memoirs of environmentalists, preservationists, conservationists, I can’t think of many fictional books I have read that I can liken to Asimov’s Foundation Series, or Gibson’s Neuromancer, or even Cook’s Coma for that matter.

This is not to say that such books don’t exist, I am only wondering why they haven’t entered my purview. Feel free to recommend some that you think I might enjoy, while I take delight in this new found pastime. :)

Guess what I found

High sign in red: This is one of those unpopular "dear diary" posts my friends will be forced to read. Rest, be forewarned! ;)
 
The weekend in Syracuse was eventful, although oddly unremarkable. I met some new people, we did a few fun things, but at the end of it, there was something missing. A hollowness of some sort! I can't seem to put my finger on it. It may be that it was Mother's Day and I was missing mom!
 
The two days in Syracuse went by like an evening of bar-hopping with no time to have any drinks in between! We got from one place to another with no real agenda, meandered a bit, performed some tasks, and that was that! There were times when I wanted to ignore everything around me and take in the ambience, the beautiful still lakes, the open fields on our drive to the winery, the imposing churches, the assortment of colors. There was so much to absorb, but my mind kept racing from one moment to another quite restlessly, and we covered more and more ground without assimilating anything! This is usually fine by me, given that my typical weekends are even more haphazard, but we let ourselves go and have a really good time! This one just felt like an assortment of cocktail snacks at a dinner party that you relish greatly, want to have more and more of, even though it won't fill your appetite. There was no substantial main course in sight! The food distracted me from the people, the people from the ambience, the ambience from the experience, the experience from the absorption! There was no stimulation, no provocative discussions, no mindless bantering or funny repartees!
 
I could have reflected on the commencement speeches at the graduation ceremony. There was Colin Fanning, the university scholar with a very eloquent and charming speech about the importance of play in a world burdened with obstacles, then there was Joe Biden earnestly persuading students to reshape history by embracing the promise of change!     
 

Your hands are on the steering wheel, the automobile is going straight, and one slight turn sends the car into a direction fundamentally different and initially unalterable from the direction it's been going in. Few people get to put their hands on a steering wheel at that moment. There's not a single decision confronting us now that doesn't yield change from non-action as well as action. My favorite poet, William Butler Yeats, writing about Ireland, in 1916 wrote a poem about the first rising of the 20th century called "Easter Sunday 1916." In it, there was a line that's more applicable, in my view, to today than it was to his Ireland in 1916. He said "The world has changed. It has changed utterly. A terrible beauty has been born." Well, it’s clear things have changed utterly in the last 12 to 15 years. A terrible beauty has been born. It's a different world out there.

I sat through the speeches, amused, inspired, but kept feeling the need to suppress my animated reaction for some reason. I came out of the stadium pretending to be dispassionate, as if the words I just heard made no dent on me, as if they were like any other I had heard before -inspiring as the event demanded, but quite meaningless for all practical purposes! But, no. I don't quite see it as flaccid words in a flaccid speech. Biden said something that I am inspired to act on. I need to know how! Perhaps, it is not knowing how to act on his words that is frustrating me at the moment! It's been the lingering frustration that I have been feeling for a few weeks now. This constant desire to do something substantial and not knowing how is getting to me! I am in a state of suppression! 
 
I thought a lot about rivulets and tributaries, and it bothered me that i didn't know the difference between the two! I wondered if the former was just another word for a brook! I wondered how a creek was different from a stream, if bayous were synonymous with lakes, if most ponds are man-made, if springs emerge from caves, if basins were lands naturally drained by a river, if burns are the meetings points of rivers and seas. I wondered about how many different types of waterfalls there were, if falls cause erosion, or if erosion creates falls! My head was exploding with questions and it got to me that I didn't have the answers! How can I be in love with nature as much as I am and not know one kind of stream from the other! How can a mechanic not know the difference between a nut and a bolt! Would it have been bizarre if I lived on earth all along and did not know what a mountain was or a desert? At what point is it okay to be unaware!
 
I came home and read about streams and fluvial landforms. I am less ashamed now. Suddenly I am aware of how little I know, and how little I will know no matter how much more I read! There is a world out there that I can't even begin to fathom, let alone acknowledge! I can only hope I will pick up more and more books on rivers and absorb as much as I can about them until I run out of patience if not interest!
 
I think I am being hard on this unplanned weekend drive. The 6 hours of continuous music back and forth, and the company of fun people should have done it! I think it did! At least the people did! :) But, I need to go back and do some more soaking up! Not now! The hollowness is still raw! Maybe when I am ready for Syracuse, and not when Syracuse is ready for me!

I got a full score in the Green IQ test, and license to get on everyone's case! bruhuhahaha!

We dug up the ground, shifted dirt, raked the soil, laid the sod and came home sore! Homeowners instant gratification of a lush, green lawn wasn't all that instant. It took about 8 hours and 20 people, with shovels, rakes and barrows to prepare the lawn and make it turf-worthy. I can't remember the last time a volunteering project was this much fun! I am itching to go back on Saturday to see what they have in store next!
There are some people, like this college kid I met, who will be going on a cross-country biking trip, from DC to San Francisco and helping build sustainable houses on the way! I thought the whole concept of peddling to end poverty was very innovative, only it is open to participants ages 18-25! That doesn't seem fair! :(

Whatever happened to Earth Day being one of those weird counterculture festivals that neo-hippies celebrate to parade their lifestyle and environmental citizenship! I don’t like how everyone seems to be interested in the collapsing ecosystem these days! Can we please leave sustainable living to the real environmentalists? :) I can't afford to have millions of young and old people actively volunteering on green projects! It's takes a lot of time, commitment and physical labor and is not an easy thing to do! It's making me look bad!

Now that I got that out of the way, this weekend has been fun, as have been the last couple of weekends since the Cherry Blossom Festival! In the last two days alone, we went to two volunteering events, three music concerts, four bars and restaurants with many different people, each with their own idea of fun! The weather has been pleasant and unpleasant alternately, and threatened to be a spoilsport on Sunday during the Green Apple Festival.

It began on Friday night, with four of us going to the Tokyo String Quartet at Strathmore Hall. It was a three segment concert. The first two segments were Haydn and Beethoven's compositions, which were pleasant-sounding, but the last segment composed by Schubert is all I can think about right now! It was his richly textural String Quartet in C Major, D 956, played along with Lynn Harell, the guest cellist. The whole segment was suffused with emotion. There was that sense of poignant melancholy that lingered throughout the Adagio piece until the very end where it took a dramatic turn, which was then followed by a very stately and imposing Scherzo. It had a certain regal symphonic splendor to it! Strange that I should mention just this one segment when I enjoyed the whole concert, but I continue to experience this segment even now and quite liked how it made me go through a rollercoaster of emotions!

The next day, Tapi and I, and a group of 10 people walked on the River trail at Kenilworth Park and Aquatic Gardens for two hours quite by accident. We were there to volunteer to clean up the river at the “Anacostia Watershed Earth Day Cleanup” event, but it turned out we were in the wrong location. Where we were walking, the scenery had a pleasantly distinctive or unusual atmosphere, rather serene and picturesque and didn't seem to require cleaning! (although I hear they have their cleaning event scheduled for next week).

There were some mallards, loads of very restless canadian geese flying hither and thither, a lot of little perching birds on the trees that i was thrilled to be able to recognize - like two tiny blue-gray gnatcatchers flying rather quickly, a warbling vireo perched precariously on a tiny branch, a carolina wren, a fat little song sparrow! It reminded me again of Heinrich’s observation that until you know the names of things, they don't even exist in your closed world, and then you begin to see them everywhere!

I learnt a lot about chickadees this weekend and am quite peeved that I haven't seen any even though they are supposedly all over the place! There were a lot of discussions on how the black-capped chickadee and the carolina chickadee look almost exactly alike. What is to say that they are not the same? The more I read about birds, the more I feel like the emperor in emperor's new clothes.

Back in Dupont, as well as at the Green Apple Music Festival yesterday, I found it utterly fascinating that several birds of many different kinds were sharing the same space. There were rock pigeons, sparrows, american robins, european starlings, purple martins, all hopping together on the steps at the Air and Space Museum!  There was also the that killjoy Raven (or American crow. I still cant tell the difference) that was sitting aloofly on a tree! Whereas, the crowd of thousands of people at the fest and these volunteering events was mostly white! I couldn't help but wonder why it was so!

At home, the mourning doves seem to come and go on their own. The northern cardinals seem less ubiquitous these days. Those tiny chats and warblers (I will never learn what they really are!) just wont sit still long enough for me to observe them!  

Anyway, the River Trail was lovely! It eventually turned out that we were not the only people in the wrong location. There were at least 60 or 70 people who arrived at this scenic place, including a bus full of volunteers who were hopping from one destination to another to volunteer on different projects on their designated route (bizarre?). The real location turned out to be a mile away, at the Bladensburg Waterfront Park. By the time we arrived there, people were already muddy from head to toe! It was admirable seeing over two hundred people, including kids less than 10 and older adults over 60 traveling in canoes, filling up bags of trash, and then climbing up-hill to drop them off at the trash center! The sheer enthusiasm and eagerness to do good and work pro bono was humbling. We quickly wore our gloves and boots and began to chime in!

Volunteering at these events is always eye-opening no matter how many times you have done them before. I am always taken aback at the number of well-intentioned people in this city! Unless you are in an event, working alongside all these inspiring people, it is hard to grasp the volume of benevolence! Your own goodwill seems trivial in comparison! Just the day before, as I read about the farmer suicides in India, I was angry, cynical, and contemptuous of human nature, of our motives, our goodness. Now the world doesn’t seem as bleak! I am more hopeful!

The river cleanup took longer than we anticipated, forcing us to postpone other volunteering events we had signed up for-  like removing garlic-mustard weeds, planting trees and so on to next few weekends. In the evening, some friends and us went to the Waterfront near Georgetown after lunch at Woodlands, lied down on the lawn by the river, staring up at the sky, and talking for hours over beer! It was a clear blue sky, with just a few clouds floating hear and there! We tried to find shapes of animals and things in them. Life doesn’t get better than that! We then went to M Street and had some more beer, and then walked back to the waterfront again and had dinner at this place, where we bumped into Swapna and Srikanth who were meandering romantically by the river to celebrate their first anniversary! First anniversary! How thrilling is that! 

Yesterday was mostly celebratory! We went to the Green Apple Music Festival, where thousands of people came to celebrate Earth Day in spite of the rain. After the event many continued to stay back to clean up the trash even! It was a very laidback event, even though there were thousands of people, all sitting on the lawn or walking to the tents and learning about green practices and the work that nonprofits have been doing in the environmental field! The free concert had Flaming Lips, Moe, Los Lobos and DJ Spooky playing at the mall. Moe was phenomenal, and Flaming Lips has to be the most entertaining performance I have seen! People went crazy as the lead singer got inside a plastic ball and rolled himself onto the crowd! There was confetti being thrown all over the place, and lots of gimmicks to keep us entertained! We mostly sat on the lawn with our legs stretched out and listened to the speeches of Lisa Jackson and the likes and watched the concert lazily, until I began to shiver in the cold. Tapi then silently walked to the neighboring Air and Space museum and bought me a blanket! :) We sat wrapped in the blanket by the museum for the rest of the evening while listening to “yoshimi battles pink robots”. There were rikshaw pullers tandeming past us and advertising earth day, which I found utterly amusing!

Tapi and I then drove Gori Café, a hole in the wall type Ethiopian restaurant where we had Sambussa and a very weird tasting Thelma Juice (which Tapi thought tasted healthy, like a protein shake and greatly enjoyed it!).  We then went to the  Bohemian Caverns with Arvind, the very first bar that Tapi and I went to in DC and heard the George Washington Jazz ensemble artists make their first debut performance. Nithya, Arvind's friend, was one fo the singers in the opening band! They were all quite spectacular. The guy on the drums and the saxophonists were exceptionally good, as were some of the main singers! The vocal recital by Elizabeth Hai a lot of fun too! 
The four of us had coffee in Tapi's favorite coffee place and that was that! 

I’m done! Off to hear Arvind brilliantly defend his PhD thesis!

I wish it was a tsunami that wiped the farmers out

I hate this Earth Day weekend! The pretense of humanity, this fake democracy. It all seems pointless.

I am upset!

Saturday was the first day of the Cherry Blossom Festival.

The blooming period has just begun, with the peak bloom predicted to be between April 1-4 when a majority of the Yoshino Cherry trees will be in full bloom.

But, the city has already transformed into a sea of pink and white. There are thousands of people moseying under petal-covered rows of blossoming sakura trees.

Strangely in Maryland, the peduncle elongation seems to be relatively slower. I suspect it will take much longer before the buds turn puffy white and come into flower. But, even the partially open buds against the bare branches look beautiful when the sun catches them.

We missed the Freedom Walk and the Kite festival this time owing to dampy weather.
Tapi’s reasoning being that the blossoms are better in the shine than in the rain! But, we saw a few people flying kites in the rain yesterday, including a really cute couple hugging and flying a beautiful red kite with a long black tale in the wide open lawn area behind the Jefferson Memorial. It was a scene out of an Amelie-like film!

For some reason, I was more excited about seeing the Weeping Willows by the Potomac River than the Cherry Blossoms. The Willows have to be my favorite trees. They are to me the harbingers of spring. And what a splendid way to invite the season! I love the way they droop airily to the ground, oftentimes with tiny waterdrops on the leaves that shine with a wavering light as the branches put on view an elegant shadow play on the lawn. Yesterday as we walked behind the Lincoln memorial, the rows of weeping willows were just starting to grow. The young florescent green branches were swaying gracefully in the wind, flaunting their shimmering underside. It was a serenely beautiful sight! I know where I am going to be spending most of the evenings this season.

As we walked the three mile circumference around the tidal basin, we observed some very peculiar sights. Like a group of over hundred Purple Martins flying together from one tree to another. It was a very amusing sight. One minute they are on one tree embellishing the stark branches like black silhouetted leaves, and as though they had been pre-programmed on the next course of action, they would all rise up at once, hover in the sky for a bit, swaying this way and that as though being pushed by the wind and then settle on a different tree! And this they did again and again.

Then, next to the Roosevelt memorial, there were a group of Ring-billed gulls standing absolutely still by the water. And all of a sudden a giant brown gull, twice the size of these Ring-billed gulls swooped down from nowhere and settled right in the middle of them. I’ve always marveled at the Ring-billed gulls. They have a very stately appearance about them. It’s always breathtaking to see them glide effortlessly over the reflection pools. But, this majestic brown bird, which I started to call Regull (Hah! Sometimes, I crack myself up!) created an immediate impression of grandeur, dwarfing my favorite birds, who now looked more like his Gull-ible subjects. I learnt later that Regull is actually the juvenile Great Black-backed Gull. I can’t even imagine what the adult bird is like. I believe they are described as the King of the Gulls! (See? Regull!)

I couldn’t get enough of the Tidal basin. There was so much activity going on there that I was getting antsy that I couldn’t be in all places at once! There was street music playing, loads of food tents where we ate some yummy roasted cinnamon pecans and almonds, people sitting on top of cherry blossom trees (!!), students dressed in all kinds of clothes, from urban chic to Japanese wraps, women in sarees, scores of bikers in leather jackets. There was a very cute father and son combo on a trail bike. Sometimes the kid would forget to peddle the bike, and the dad did all the work of keeping the bicycle in motion!

The agenda for the next two weeks is to see as many Tidal Basin Stage Cultural Performances as possible. There is even a Bollywood one called Dhoonya Dance and loads of very interesting Americana and Japanese music concerts and martial arts shows.

Tapi and I will be going to the lantern tour tomorow– it’s a two-hour guide walk at the Basin starting at 8pm. I also want to go to one Cherry talk, and a few more walks.. and finally end it with the April 4th Parade. (How can I speak of April 4th and not think of Annapoorna’s birthday! She’s going to be 26 and all growned up!)

Yesterday’s Earth Hour was really quite. Tapi and I sat on the floor against the Patio glass door, with some candles and talked about very random nonsensical things. It was a wistful night and very romantic. The only dampener, was the bright luminous streetlamp that almost seemed to defeat the purpose of turning off the lights!

We made a list of trails we want to cover this spring and summer. Unlike last year where we did parks in Maryland and Virginia, we will be walking in the city! We thought we’d do some of the ones that were voted among the Top Ten USA Walks by the American Volkssport Association. The DC National Mall and Monuments Walk, The Annapolis Walk, The National Zoo/ Cathedral Walk, the Georgetown Walk, the Manhattan Walk…

I began mine with the 6-mile one in Rock Creek Park early in the morning on Sunday, which was almost otherworldly, with the stillness a stark contrast to the hustle bustle around it (the park is in the middle of the city!!) It was refreshing, but all I can think of now is my sore aching body!

So that’s that. What was that quote?

Spring is when you feel like whistling even with a shoe full of slush.

Exactly!

(On Request: Last year's posts on Earth hour can be found here and here!)

Last year, we switched off the lights for Earth Hour and played scrabble in the dark, which was a lot of fun and also the only way Tapi could beat me at the game! Will a billion really go dark this year? Will Earth Hour galvanize support for the fight against global warming? I wonder what happened from the time I turned off the light for an hour last year until now. My life continues to be the same. People continue to pull my leg about my pseudo environmentalism! I stay awake all night almost every day, when in fact I could be sleeping and saving power by turning off the lights! It is now 4 AM and I haven't slept! But, the issue was more than just put on the political agenda... an environmental revolution is taking shape in many parts of the world, and a radical alteration in our mindsets is happening in a big way!

I remember asking mom to turn off the lights for an hour last year and she said "I will, when the lights come back on after the power cut!" My mom is a horrible audience for my harangues on going green! I can't ask her not to buy liquid soap because she never does! I can't ask her to take her own bag to the grocery store, because she always has! She recycles newspapers, and donates clothes! Indians take the whole fun out of being eco-friendly! They seem to do all the right things without meaning to!    

We also missed out on Ugadi, the Telugu New Year's Festival, which also happens to be Dad's birthday according to the Hindu Lunar Calendar! What I miss about Ugadi is the show hosted by Dharmavarapu Subramanyam, where they play different comedy scenes from movies. He's a very entertaining host. His humor makes you laugh and want to tear your hair out at the same time!

Speaking of environmentalism, and the news about Earth Hour, I wonder what makes some kinds of stories newsworthy over others. With Earth Hour it is quite obvious why! But, sitting in my office everyday, I read tons of news reports on bone health that I find quite fascinating and noteworthy even: like how space travel offers insight on improving bone health; how hibernating bears hold the key to keeping our bones healthier; or how beer and wine can be good for your bones because they increase bone density (although binge drinking can cause bone disease among other things! and that's not good!)   
 
Beyond that, the environmental news I read on obscure websites everyday are quite sensational as well, like how we have finally saved the ozone layer (!), or that water production is the next big green tech innovation (!!), or even that the next step in space tourism is the development of space hotels, which is happening right now  (no kidding!!! I first need to learn to dance before I can "moon walk" and set up camp!)
 
But going back to health, last week I read about how scientists at Johns Hopkins University found the key to stopping malaria (by silencing a gene called caspar). Now, given that malaria kills nearly a million people every year, isn't this finding newsworthy? One million deaths a year is a lot more than all the reported casualties of Iraq war in over five years! If we were to look at malaria as an economic issue, where people spend close to half their annual income on treating this ailment in countries like Malawi, notwithstanding the exorbitant costs of healthcare, decreased productivity at work and eventual unemployment, I wonder why this new discovery that can possibly revivify people and economies isn't being celebrated on the front page of all big newspapers! To say that malaria seriously hinders economic development would be an understatement! 
 
In our many hundreds of years of progress we have come close to completely eradicating only a handful of diseases - plague, small pox and leprosy come to mind! We have fought many more wars than eradicated diseases, which as I pointed out, kills many more people!! Moreover war is an example of a horrible human transgression, finding a cure to a disease is an example of a great human triumph. Now, why do we "entertainment" and "maximum utility" seeking people want to do and hear more of the former and less of the latter? Why is it that when we hear that a disease has been eradicated, it seems less exciting than the news that the "I am a PC" ad was staged!
 
This baffles me especially given how small our world is now owing to globalization. People, goods and capital flow across geographical boundaries at such vast numbers, that it is hard to estimate their effect on global environment or human health, except to say that it is not entirely positive! Some of the deadliest diseases known to humans have spread over continents switfly killing thousands at a time, including malaria! They spread from one to another in all five transmission modes - air, water, blood, contact and germs!  
 
If you think the Bubonic plague of the 30s that manifested in china and raged through europe or Leprosy that began in India and spread all over the world through crusaders, spanish conquistadors, arabs, american slave traders, etc.. think of how much more faster diseases spread in this era and the impact they have on our health and the environment! (HIV  (AIDS) being the newest deadly disease entry!)

Now going back to space travel, shouldn't the giant cruiser ships we are developing, or the different space tourism options that are being made available, make it to the front page as well? Who would have thought, that we will have travelled to the moon even a few decades ago and now we speak of not just walking on it but vacationing!! This has got to be more exciting than political news which seems to be the only thing reported significantly in newspapers everyday!
 
I have reams and reams of thoughts waiting to explode on why development news never gets reported as much as it needs to be even though some of them can topple the economies of their countries simply by being unreported by the media. I understand the line of reasoning for doing this, even though I don't quite agree with it. At the same time, I think it is deplorable that only very bleak and gloomy news about developing countries gets reported internationally. But news about breakthroughs in research that can eradicate diseases is not third-world news!! It should interest anyone globally, and especially self-important people, like me who want to live longer and disease free! It is a life-altering human victory... a feat of defeat... that ought to be celebrated!

Happy Earth Hour! and
Happy Birthday Appa!! :)

In Waratah House, my grandparents’ bedroom window faces their small private garden that is closed to the rest of the world, but open to them and anyone who will peak through the window. It is an enchanting little area. Twenty feet from the window is a tall cold grey wall that serves as a frontier to our neighbor’s residence. Fortunately there are a lot of trailing plants and creepers that the eye must pass before spotting the wall.
The strong heady fragrance of sugandhi, jasmine and other flowers that I didn’t care to learn the names of are fresh in my mind thousands of miles away from home. For some reason, the trees in the private area, and especially the pomegranate tree seemed to attract a lot more birds and insects than the huge front open garden with more flowers and fruits, and the backyard, which too is thick and woodsy. It may be that they too needed the quite that the secret garden offered, and made themselves at home there.

The windowsill has a small wooden ledge protruding towards the outside. My grandmom used it as a feeding platform for sparrows. She fed them raw rice, and to my fascination they cleared off the rice every day. It used to be my pastime with her. I remember staring for hours and hours as the birds came to feed on the ledge and fly away in turns.

At home it was largely the monkeys that kept us occupied with their exploits. Monkeys were all over Secunderabad and especially Marredpally where I lived, almost competing with the stray dogs, cows and buffaloes for space. The dogs were on the street, the monkeys on the trees, men and women trying hard to walk in step with both while jumping over animal excrements. Sometimes it was comforting to walk next to the cows and buffaloes that although passive, at least offered psychological protection from the monkeys because of their size. My favorite incident with the monkey was one where I walked into mom’s bedroom to find one on the dressing table trying out mom’s makeup. That was the only time I stood there with my servant watching him from behind the door for quite sometime without calling for help. There is also a famous story that has been passed down for two generations, about an aunt who hugged a monkey in her sleep thinking it was her niece.

I have always been afraid of monkeys. They could tell the brave people from the timid, women from men, kids from grown ups. I was neither brave, nor a man nor grown up, so for most of my life, I was in the bottom of the hierarchy of domination. That being said, there is no escaping the walk to and from school, spending time alone in the terrace, or playing in the garden. So you pretend to coexist with them and find your balance. This is much like being a young woman in India any way, coexisting with stalkers who will try to feel you in the bus or as you are walking alone, whistle at you, call you names! You live with it. But, monkeys are certainly cuter. They generally keep to themselves except when they feel threatened. They are usually less harmful when in large groups.

But on the whole, notwithstanding dogs, cows and monkeys; rats and bandicoots; squirrels, cats, roaches, lizards and ants; there was no real animal life where I lived. At least not the kind that I see here, the horses, deer, the colorful birds, and so on.

Speaking specifically of birds. For a long time there were crows and sparrows that we saw everyday in Secunderabad but over the years they stopped visiting for reasons that I can’t fathom. First the crows left and then the sparrows.

At my grandparents place, there were still some crows and sparrows, and occasional visits by parrots as well (Tapi says, growing up, he too has seen parrots in Jubilee Hills and Sainikpuri). In the rainy season, just after it rains, we would hear the cooing of koel’s perched on the tall eucalyptus tree. Very rarely, we spotted monkeys, not the rhesus macaques we saw in Marredpally, but the long tailed langurs, which are more elegant in form and have a graceful movement, even though I am told they are fiercer, and more shy of people. We never knew where they came from. I believe there is a man somewhere releasing these monkeys from time to time, but god knows why he would do that. One theory is that he (and perhaps many like him) catches monkeys from nearby towns and releases them at different locations in the city from time to time, and is then hired by the local authorities to get rid of them for a fee. I’ve heard this story enough times to want to believe it is true. But, how one contacts the monkey catcher and pays him to catch the monkeys, I don't know.

Even in Manipal, we lived with rattle snakes and cobras, we saw foxes and monkeys, walked side by side with peacocks, fed cows, avoided street dogs and so on. And still I had been more overwhelmed with what nature has to offer here in the US than back in India. It’s perhaps the novelty of the wildlife here!

When I went to India two years ago, the first thing that occurred to me, was that I will never have those monkey experiences again. The apartments that have replaced the houses, razed all trees, including the oldest in the city, and with them went the birds and the animals. I am filled with indescribable sadness as I think of it. My grandparents house is still in tact with the lovely garden and backyard. But, for how long, I don’t know.

But, now as I sit in a distant country, watching the sparrows in my patio or in the open area by the plaza, I feel a close bond with them. Funny how they should exist all over the world, a common comforting thread, the ambassador’s of commonality, so to speak. Same with the rock pigeons or red jungle fowls, although I have never quite grown up with them, they seem to exist all over the world. When I see the black American crow however, I feel more like I have left home, but to visit a close cousin, who is just as lovely :)

We have had a spate of birds landing on our patio in the last few weeks. The northern cardinals and sparrows apart, there are many tiny birds I wish I knew names of. I call them warblers or chats depending on whether they have their tails up or down!! The ones we saw in summer or spring had brighter breasts of the mango yellow or sunset orange kind, but these have dull white and yellow breasts. Sometimes, we see small black birds flying past us quickly. That I can only recognize them by color and not their names or characteristics is beginning to bother me.

Today, we saw a small beautiful grey bird with a white breast and lovely greyish wings that had black dots on them. It had a distinctive crest on its head, which was so elegant. It was slightly larger than the birds that usually visit us and seemed to be in less hurry to get away. Again, name unknown.

I'm going to play with whatbird.com for a bit and see where that gets me.

I still can't find my DC birdbook, but I continue to learn more and more about winter birds in Northeast America.


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Three seconds since writing this post, Tapi finds me my DC bird book. Baah! :D

Isn't Tapi awesome? Can enough be said about him? Is he for real? :D

The aforementioned grey bird is the Blue Jay (very unlike the bright blue one I saw in Dartmouth!).
The picture is from wikipedia, but would you believe me if I told the sunny view outside our apartment and the snow is exactly like in the picture?

Isn't this the loveliest bird you have seen? Can you now relate to the disappointment when I couldn't recognize it?

Now if I can learn to distinguish the chats from the warblers and so on...

I have all these disparate thoughts about water swimming in my head right now, and strangely for reasons that have little to do with each other.

When it comes to truths about water, there are so many that had been shrouded from us for years. We have heard that nothing in the world is more flexible and yielding as water. We have seen that water is the matrix of life. But, there are elephants in the room that I hadn’t been introduced to until very recently. :)

For one thing, I had always assumed that if you add something to water, it is not water anymore. To me, water is a clear liquid with no taste, smell or color. This is what makes it fascinating. See, air has no taste, smell or color either, but that we can see the fluidity of water, moving, taking shape, and just being itself is beguiling to me. But, I am learning that there is such a thing as making this tasteless, odorless drink. The ingredients are naked to the human eye and indiscernible to our taste buds, but they exist and supposedly make water purer, even more colorless and odorless, but somehow tastier in the way only water can be tasty!

This is all very contradictory to how I have been perceiving water. I am now having to look at it not by what it is, but by what it has and does not have.

For instance, Sanfaustino makes a wicked mineral water drink that satisfies 80 percent of your daily calcium needs. But, making water is a very paradoxical term. It implies that you have taken something and changed it by adding or subtracting something from it. But, the water Sanfautisno sells, naturally has calcium in it. I am therefore forced to think of it as the soup in the stone soup story or the magnificent suit in the emperors new clothes story.

In the stone soup story, a group of hungry travelers who are refused food by the villagers decide to settle down at the village square for the night. They start a fire and begin to boil a pot of water and drop a large stone in it. It arouses the curiosity of a villager passing by. He asks them what they are doing, to which they reply “we are making the most delicious stone soup. It is almost done, but can use a little bit of garnish to improve the flavor”. The villager, eager to taste the soup, runs home and brings back his favorite seasoning and adds it to the soup. Soon, the travelers are joined by more and more curious villagers, each of whom drop in their favorite seasoning into the pot, until finally the soup is ready. The delicious and nourishing pot of soup is enjoyed by all!

Sanfaustino’s water is the water in the pot before it had been boiled. It naturally comes with a stone in it, which happens to be rich in calcium. In packaging the drink, Sanfaustino has essentially created a stone soup. But, since it has no added seasoning, you are left wondering if Sanfaustino is less the traveler making the soup, and more the swindler claiming to have designed the finest (nonexistent) suit for the emperor in Emperor's New Clothes! .

I have gone back and forth between
looking at all bottled waters as the stone soup - a catalyst to get you to drink what has always been good for you while making good money, and
feeling like the emperor dressed in mime, who loves his robe and flaunts it, only to find out later that he is naked!

As a result of working in a health organization, I am constantly made aware of the benefits of water by partnering companies selling water that is naturally high in calcium. I hate drinking water, and will take any added incentive to get it in my system. Unfortunately, the added incentive in this case does not change the taste of the drink for me. Still, I’d like to think I have found that space between regular water and vitamin enhanced drinks like Gatorade that are high in carbs and sugars. I may very well be the health conscientious market that Propel and Sanfaustino are targeting. :)

At one point I fancied those drinks that tasted exactly like water, but had the essence of some fruit in them. I didn’t quite like the bitter aftertaste, even though infinitesimally slight and subtle. But, if you want to be "with it", try the latest craze HINT – a premium essence water that comes in all sorts of natural fruity flavors. There’s another one I like, called O Infused Water, which is a snazzier version and even claims to "Energize" and "Vitalize" you among other things.

A few days ago, we were sitting in a Mediterranean hotel, when the waiter came up to us with a four-page menu for water, each with a fancy name and a little description on where it came from:

Wattwiller (France):
It means "village of water." So fabled is this delicacy, it is believed to have a soul. A look at Wattwiller's chemistry confirms anecdotal reverence. If you don't mind its faint salty aftertaste, this elite water delivers terrific Calcium, Magnesium, Sulphate, and Fluoride. It has a Nitrate level of ZERO!

Fonti Bauda (Italy):
Water sources Oligomineral Bauda stimulates digestion and may have a diuretic effect. Minimally mineral water and pure.

We picked one called

Acqua Panna (Italy):
It is harvested in Tuscanny Mt. Gazzaro. This wonderful treasure is loved by millions for its freshness, clarity, and neutral pH. No sodium.

Needless to say, the drink that arrived in a gorgeous bottle made me feel like the emperor (in the story)!

There was a wine list that came after that, and separate menus for each course, which is typically what my mind can assimilate, but the water menu left me bewildered for the rest of the night.

Now, I will be lying if I said I am oblivious to water being such a hyped up commodity. I am as much the guilty party as I am a victim of this new craze. When you work in a health organization, it is no surprise that water becomes a part of the healthy solution to any problem you have. But, even beyond that, on some subliminal level, I have been keeping track of all the water drinks that celebrities have been consuming. Madonna’s Voss Artesan Water, Kayne West’s Propel Fitness Water, Michael Jackson’s Evian and so on.

I find it very amusing that we are being persuaded to buy the two most vital elements that keep us alive – the air we breathe, the water we drink. It demonstrates the quirk of human fate! But, if I feel like breathing in pure air, and drinking pure water, there is neither gratis nor libre. Adam’s ale is up for sale!

Libre, I say because of all global conflicts over water. The Bechtels, Suezes, Veolio Environements of the world really raise questions about morality of commodifying water. I am less against privatization, and more concerned about the negative impact of it on the lives of people. There’s a worldwide crisis brewing over water, with 31 countries facing scarcity and over a billion people without access to drinking water. Our consumption of water has doubled in the last twenty years and at the same time, our resources are being polluted, and exploited for corporate interests. I was alarmed when I read that the world bank predicts that two thirds of the world’s population will suffer from the lack of clean drinking water by 2025.

We can already see corporations rushing to invest in water, like it is the new “oil”. There are people buying water rights, and such things as collecting rain water in a small cup during a downpour are being viewed as being in violation of privileges set-down by these companies.

In this context, is it surprising then that the hotel I went to has a water menu, or that there is a Colette in Europe, with an ultra chic water bar that serves over sixty types of water? There are over a thousand different consumer brands for bottled water being sold by over 500 companies in the US alone, that bring in billions of dollars annually. After carbonated drinks, water is the most purchased drink in the country. Alarmingly, even India has over 200 bottled water brands, most of which are produced locally. In fact, India’s bottled water companies too are cashing in on the nutritious value of water. Bisleri for instance sells water that is rich in minerals and calcium.

Back in the days, the choice in India used to be between good water and bad. There is municipal water, which is better than borewell water. Water tankers that were a step above, and bottled water that was either good or bad depending on how you want to feel about them. By choosing to buy water (or not) or do something with it like boiling or filtering it, you have made your “statement” on the water situation in your country! At home, we neither boiled nor filtered our water and drank it straight out of the tap. Mom’s side of the family on the other hand, exclusively drank bottled water even at home, which is very unusual by Indian standards, but they are as paranoid about health as my dad’s side is not!

My thoughts on water are not all related to water politics and fashion trends. Some are very random facts that I have been amassing and pondering over and some are quite ridiculous.

It occurred to me when watching mickey mouse on TV one day, that his head looks exactly like the water molecule. (I gather from google that this is heavily discussed, so I am not all that loopy) So now when I watch mickey mouse, I begin to imagine him becoming a water molecule moving around fluidly or a bubble floating listlessly in the air and then popping!

Today as I was walking home, I saw a cute baby on the road and as I was overflowing with feelings of love for her, I thought to myself “This stupid cute baby doesn’t even know that her body is 80% water. Where as mine is 60% water and the rest is all brain!” :D Fine, I am whackjob!

Drinking water makes me very uncomfortable. I feel queasy in my stomach and avoid it as much as I can, which has had some ill affects on my health, but there is one fact that blows my mind in a good way! Drinking too much water can lead to water intoxication! It dilutes the sodium level in the bloodstream and causes water imbalance in the brain. Take that you water drinkers!

There are always those odd statistics related to water floating in my head, mostly having to do with how much water there is and how much we need or consume. The most recent ones have been on how much water one needs to drink after a work-out or after sitting for an hour on a plane, or consuming an alcoholic or caffeinated drink. (the answer is between one to two cups)…....... and because Tapi religiously checks his weight everyday after he comes back from the gym, here’s a fact just for him “The weight a person loses directly after intense physical activity is weight from water, not from fat" Hah! :D

I leave with one question. What does it mean for us that water is present on the moon, in europa, or saturn’s enceladus apart from the possibility that there might me life on these planets. Can they be made fit for human habitation? There can't possibly be a more civilized race than humans in the universe no? :D

One more thought. The designs of snow crystals make beautiful diamond earrings :)

Out of desperation comes creativity and bad humor I suppose. (Fine. I laughed!)



The Hot Chick Dig website is provoking, although I am not sure if it's provoking in a good way or bad. Some parts of the site are very clever, like the "Hot Wheels" section and the galleries. Their blog too is interesting. I am curious to see if their project is really working, or if it is just us wannabe-environmentalists who are totally digging the Hot Chix even while in moral dilemma!

I am curious to know what you think!

On a different but related topic, it turns out that this Hot Chix (me!) has bronchitis and asthma. That's right. The verdict is out! I was subject to the compressed nebulizer for 15 minutes to some avail, and have been asked to rethink my resolutions for 2010 (long term plan). Such things as climbing Mt. Everest or Altitude diving may have to wait until much later, except in book-reading form or in my imagination (like right now!). However, my mind is currently occupied in such disturbing thoughts as me being one of the Hot Chix Warring Against Greek-God-like Bacteria with my UberCute Purple Advair Diskus and Antibiotics! I'm totally Digging! I even get a Nasal Spray! How cool is that! :D (That's right. This post is a result of the lack of enough oxygen supply to my lungs and brain!)

I have my favorite robot t-shirt on (you have seen it several times, for example: here with the cool animation), my bright turquoise blue and florescent green flannel socks, my white flannel flu jammies with magenta hearts, and a red woolen monkey cap! And I'm having loads of creamed soups, creamy mashed potatoes, creamy mac & cheese and idlis... im nonthinkingly reading comics and easy books, watching cartoons and other such entertaining tv, blogging, surfing, snuggling, cuddling. Life is great! :D What a way to end the year!

Have I been WAY too lucky so far? Bones intact, I survived underwater with asthma despite losing my regulator for a few seconds! I hope 2009 brings you and me LOTS AND LOTS MORE GOOD LUCK and SENSE!

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!

The wheel of fortune and the force that works to restore all balance in the world does a good job on me. There is always the bad after the good, great weather followed by a storm, sickness after health. So last night, I arrived in cold DC from warm Cancun and was welcomed by a flu! 103°, painful throat, cough and cold! Life sucks!

But it's great to be back home in my messy living room, listening to Gangsta Blues (Slumdog Millionaire) and eating rice and feeling safe!

If you thought falling from a tree was eventful enough, wait till you hear all that followed. The fall was only the overture. There were dramatic orchestral compositions that played one after the other. We rode a moped through the island of Cozumel, almost lost my life in the ocean! threw up "while" scuba diving in Barracuda, also snorkeled there and in an underground river, walked, ran, climbed a lot! Went in several modes of transport and even did regular touristy stuff and things like lazing on the beach! It was the most "active" and also the most "relaxing" holiday I have had.

Since there is SO much to write down, I am going to start a separate Cancun page that I will update over the next few days, so that I don't flood my blog with just my travel notes. But, for now, here's one of many exciting experiences!

We did Snuba, which is Snokelling and Scuba Diving combined, near a coral reef called Barracuda. The assumption was that we would kill two birds in one shot, but what we didn't realize was that we were the birds getting killed! We assumed it would be a milder version of Scuba Diving, but it turned out that "combining" snorkeling and scuba diving meant doing one after the other! The ship took us to the middle of the ocean to a coral reef. There was no land in sight, just a 360° horizon with a straight line separating the water from the sky in all sides. This in itself was daunting as hell. We were handed a diving mask, an oxygen tank with a regulator, large fins, a heavy lead weight belt that you wear around your waist for "neutral floatation" (On wearing the belt, you "literally" become the stone being plopped into the ocean. The only way you will go is down! or like the instructor explained "the belt will help you sink").

The instructor quickly muttered some instructions, like "always breathe with your mouth", "don't hold your breath" (!), "blow out air from your ear every few minutes to release pressure", "if you lose your regulator, don't panic. Slowly make your way up to the floating oxygen tank!". Now naturally, I had questions on what might happen if I accidentally breathe through my nose, or can't release ear pressure when I am thirty feet under water. There was the hope that I might hear the instructor say "you will be fine", instead I heard "You will have serious lung problems, but don't panic because you will lose clarity of thought and won't be able to follow instructions". Gulp! Then there were several hand gestures that we had to learn to indicate "how we are doing"... The only thing I learnt well was the hand shake to indicate "i'm not ok". I didn't see a need to learn anything else and as anticipated, it came in handy and saved my life!

So the boat stopped at the reef and we stood by the edge wearing our gear, shivering, legs shaking, when suddenly we heard "Jump!". Before we knew it, we were in the ocean. I cannot describe the feeling of total lack of control. It is NOTHING like being on the deep side of the swimming pool. You are trying hard to keep your head above the water and have to fight against the tide to get to wherever you are being guided. And even before you can acclimatize to the gear and being in this new environment, you are forced to dive into the depths of hell!

The water is not as frigid as you would imagine even though we were in our bikinis and swim trunks... and is also unbelievably clear. You can see all the way down to the ocean bed from on top. When you go down, there is life all around you - tropical fish, sea turtles, plant life. You are swimming amongst life that you've only seen from behind a glass wall! It's unreal! But, despite all the beautiful life around me, all I could think of is "hold on to the regulator tightly and breathe through your mouth". I also had open wounds from my tree fall that I was (belatedly) worried would get infected despite the waterproof bandages. After making it down 20 feet, my mask gave way. I panicked and gasped for breath!! As a result, I breathed through my nose, and gulped down salty water!! It was the single most painful experience of my life! I started to quickly make my way up and swam to the oxygen float! (by now you know I haven't followed any instructions on what to do when things go wrong) I felt throbbing pain in my head and breathed loudly thinking to myself "I am alive!". I looked around me, hoping to find assistance. There was no ship in site! Not ONE person. It was just me and a lot of quiet in the middle of the ocean. There is nothing in the world as scary as that. I tried hard to find the other floating tanks (and thereby the people connected to them), and after a desperate look, I spotted one a good distance away and realized I may have moved much away from the rest of the team! Tapi and I shared the same tank, so I knew he had to be around! I mustered some courage, wore my mask again, put the regulator in my mouth, and went down with the hope of finding him! This time, for some reason, I was able to appreciate the life underwater even more! The coral reef, although not as colorful as I had imagined (from all the Nat Geo shows I watched on TV) was still spectacular!!! As I was swimming in the reef, I saw the guide (still no sign of Tapi) and felt some relief. He asked me to follow him, and I saw more and more life. There is so much going on in the ocean unknown to us, and in such silence! It was surreal and almost awe-inspiring.

After a while however, I was beginning to feel nauseous, either because of fatigue from all the exertion or just being sea sick. I indicated to the guide that "I'm not okay". We went up and I tried to explain my problem! Since he spoke no english, he did not understand what I was saying. He played around with the knob in the oxygen tank and said "all ok". At this point, I managed to tell him that I would rather snorkel than dive again. So he took the weights off my waist and I swam in the ocean, looking down at the bed for a good half hour! It was the most enjoyable swim of my life! I almost felt like I could have swam for hours and hours and not get tired! Perhaps, my brain gave way! I could only feel numb satisfaction. I began to think of all the stories of Gulliver and Flashy who swam for miles in the ocean to get to land, and feel like them! It was a very heroic triumphant feeling.

When the time was up, I reluctantly swam back to the floating oxygen tank, because I was thoroughly enjoying snorkeling. We held onto the rope of the raft with the oxygen float for a good half hour waiting for the ship. During this time, I was slowly beginning to get tired and "green around the gills" (read: nauseous). The bright sun glare made it worse. Tapi looked sapped of all life! He said "was there no oxygen?" and then I realized the poor guy was under water all the while breathing less air and not knowing why! The fidgeting our guide did when we came up must have reduced supply! There was no sign of the ship still, and the guide was trying to keep us conscious and mumbled things like "you from india? elephants, camels? I know tantra mantra. I do everyday. It give peace"... At this point I threw up in the ocean!

Now, here is the deal. When you finally are in the middle of the large water mass throwing up, the feeling is one of unison. Now, the ocean knows you "in and out" and throwing up feels like most natural thing to do, especially since I was only throwing up all the water I drank when I was drowning. There is this feeling of intimacy of an inexplicable kind. You are one with nature, and nature is one with you!

The ship finally arrived. The guide took off my fins and said "Swim". It is only then that I realized how much of the work the fins had been doing. My legs felt so light without them, that they were as good as nonexistent. There is no way I could swim without the fins! I had no idea why the guide had to take them off! But, I was obviously too tired to argue and tried to make the impossible possible. I made it to the ship, gulping down more and more water, but this time without panicking because I knew I was around people who could pull me out if I went down. Then, I threw up from the boat again for as long as we were heading back to the beach and I almost lost consciousness. But, isn't the mind really weird? Despite everything I was still looking forward to the water activities we had planned for the next day at Isla Mujeres, which is snorkeling (again... although closer to the beach) and sailing on catamaran!

When I was on land, I realized I may have hit something under water, because I had some more fresh wounds on my ankle! But, all worth it :)

The only regret in this trip is that I have no pictures. I took my water camera with me, but there was NO way I could take pictures amidst all this chaos! Maybe next time?

By the way, when our Cancun trip began, we had decided that I would do all water activities on my own. Tapi did not want to venture in the water at all! But through some miracle, he mustered up courage and decided to join me despite very little swimming experience and his phobia. He's really my hero! :)

I have always been afraid of messing with batteries. There’s the thought that inside that little double A, there is a certain volatile substance that might just explode. But, all deep-seated irrational beliefs aside, I have wondered if there’s a way to revive dead batteries. Now, I don’t know the first thing about science – or the many manifestations of our physical world. So my question is based only on intuition. What could a battery possibly have that cannot be revived!

Every time I throw a dead battery into the trash, I am consumed with guilt and self-loathing and feel miserable for the rest of the day. So I googled “bringing batteries to life” and found an article that confirms my hunch! (did I tell you I won a physics argument even last new years with Anand based on a hunch? :D Even Miru and Tapi were against me! It was a terrible night! But victory was on my side)

The article says:

Bring Dead Ni-Cad Batteries Back To Life
Are you tired of having your Ni-Cad batteries that refused to charge and simply die?

So what do you do with them when they die?
Just throw them in the trash - which harms the environment?
Or just take them to a recycling facility for them to be recycled?

Well, here is the best solution, bring your dead batteries back to life that can save you a chunk of change - By zapping them!
Here is one great instructable, Revive Nicad Batteries by Zapping with a Welder. Of course, you will need a welder, and not many people has one... So I came up with this idea that almost anyone can build!

DISCLAIMER:
This instructable involves hacking a device that operates on 300 volts and can be dangerous if not handled correctly. So, I am NOT responsible whatever happens to you using this information.

I am tempted to try this, but am also skeptical owing to the scary disclaimer. Moreover the disclaimer on their actual “instructable” page says

WARNING:
If you get killed by a poisonous explosion it means you did something wrong.
Electrocution is a real possibility also.
Ask your parents how to not electrocute yourself with a welder.

Yikes! How can this possibly be ECO-friendly if it can kill me? (Unless, the idea is to eliminate humans under the pretext of recharging batteries and thereby save the environment! brilliant i say!)

and I was right. Batteries do detonate!

Side note: The instructables website looks pretty cool. I can see myself going there often. It has all kinds of resources for DIY projects. Great stuff!

We have our very own Le Pain Quotidien in Bethesda now, on our new pedestrian street called "Bethesda Lane", which has awesome written all over it. I wish I took my camera with me yesterday. It's such a cosy little lane, with boutique stores on either side. I could spend all day in it! (On the other hand, Tapi thinks I can even spend hours in my local Patel store and not get bored)

There are some places that introduce themselves slowly, making their charms and allures known over time. And thus with Bethesda Lane, although visibly interesting as we walked past it, it never got the attention it deserved all these months. But, now I want to know everything about it. It’s a really cool space, and something about it makes you feel right at home. I took to it like flies to honey, seals to water, sheep to grass, frogs to lily pads... :)

If you haven't been to Le Pain Quotidien, I would highly recommend it, with a forewarning that the food is decadently delicious and "so not good for you", even though they will like you to think of it as "wholesome and nourishing". They have bakeries all over the world, and encourage communal dining, with a long table in the middle that you can sit around. However, we went a bit non-communal, and sat next to the window for the view of the outside. There's something about that place that makes you want to linger and graze for hours. We sank in our chairs, with the fireplace right behind us and talked for hours over really good Tartines and tea.

As I was just about to leave, I realized I had 8 cups of Lapsang Souchong; a whole plate of Aged Gruyere tartines topped with Mango, Cornichons, and Sundried-tomatoes; and half a plate of Honey-coated Ricotta and Fig Tartines with sprinkles of Tomatoes and Peppers. It was heavenly!

I tried to keep away from the takeaway counter, but it was hard not to notice all the cheese muffins, baguettes and the buttery madeleines, sitting there waiting to indulge you. I think I take comfort in knowing that I can go back whenever I want. I plan to attack the dessert section next.

Incidentally, I learnt that it is a "certified green restaurant" and follows a whole bunch of ecologically-minded practices. For instance, the communal table is made with reclaimed wood from vintage Belgian train cars (!). They use nontoxic cleaning solutions, which I believe is a huge achievement, and quite a challenge when it comes to keeping restaurant kitchens clean. And then there are the organic to-go-cups and spoons that disintegrate in 30 to 90 days, organic food that’s produced locally... they use sustainable seafood and free-range meats. They have free-trade coffee even!

I can see myself picking up their organic jams, tea and chocolates often! Even their bread is so firm and crusty. The story goes that their chef Alain Coumont was so unhappy with the bread that he began to make his own old-style daily bread using stone ground flour, natural levain and salt. Which, goes back to my recurring question - what made man complicate his life over the centuries and then simplify things all of a sudden. Take our sense of design for instance – we have gone from exceedingly ornate to the new minimalist "clean and simple" trend! (more on this later..)

I can’t end this post with anything but that the waiter was really cute! :)

Forrester: Now, about this professor of yours. How did it feel having him tell you what you can't do?

Jamal: Like he knew he was better than me.

Forrester: Then let's show him what you can do.....Why is it the words we write for ourselves, are always so much better than the words we write for others? ... Sit…Go ahead.

Jamal: Go ahead and what?

Forrester: Write.

Jamal: What are you doing?

Forrester: I'm writing. Like you'll be, when you start punching those keys… Is there a problem?

Jamal: No. I'm just thinking.

Forrester: No thinking. That comes later. You write your first draft...with your heart. You rewrite with your head. The first key to writing is... to write.
Not to think.

Jamal: Jesus.

Forrester: Is there a chance you might sit down?

Jamal: "A Season of Faith's Perfection." What's this?

Forrester: Start typing that.
Sometimes the simple rhythm of typing gets us from page one to page two. When you begin to feel your own words, start typing them. Punch the keys for God's sake!

Jamal: Yes!

Forrester: You're the man now, dog.

I love reading film scripts and screenplays, and I read them with great interest after I watch some films. Watching a movie and reading the script are two very different things. They are both captivating in their own way. Think about it like owning an awesome gadget and playing with it, and then opening it up and marveling at the inner workings. They are two very different things, each with its own value.

I find sometimes that the scripts of some movies are way better than the movies themselves. I have also seen the contrary. This makes it all the more fascinating when a book adaptation metamorphosizes into a film script that in turn becomes a film. When the book works and not the movie or vice versa, it makes me wonder where the film script stands in all this.

These are all things to talk about at leisure. I could dedicate a whole blog to them. But, I really want to talk about this Finding Forrester scene. I had been thinking about this scene all day today. It’s not the most engaging film, but it has its moments and some of the dialogues are quite compelling. I wish I could find the script somewhere. I found the transcript however, with just the dialogues, but it’s not quite the same.

Still, there is something about this one scene that I find rings true for me. I relate to his theory of writing in a lot of ways, even when it comes to things like making changes to my life. I don’t always act on sane judgment, but it has worked out well so far. If anything I have come to realize some things about myself, and have grown as a result. I almost feel like when one acts on impulse, they are creating their first draft that they type out without thinking. I have a lot of first drafts that I need to develop beyond raw thought and impulse, but I am hoping that with time, I will come to see at least one "complete work" that I can be proud of!

Speaking specifically, I have decided to fast every Wednesday. I haven’t quite thought of why, but at the moment, I feel like the act of fasting to me is more important than the reasoning, which I hope will eventually come, perhaps as a consequence of the action.

A year ago I gave up leather and other products that kill animals. That was a more deliberate choice. Back then I felt like it was illogical that being vegetarian I should dress in animal skin. My act was more to defend my vegetarianism than out of genuine compassion for animals. But since the time I gave it up, I have developed the sensitivity. Now the sheer thought of dressing in leather disturbs me. I haven't discarded some of my leather boots that I bought over a year ago and I continue to wear them in pain! I can't bring myself to throw them away. There is also the thought that whether I have them at home or throw them out, I have already done the damage of buying them. How does it matter whether they exist in my apartment or outside? How can it be okay to waste them? How can I gift something that I feel ethically wrong about to someone as charity? Moreover, they are the only real formal shoes I have for work! I have all this to think about. But, until then I will continue to be pseudo-ethical and work on improving it bit by bit.

There are instances where my thought-out decisions haven’t really benefited anyone or myself. Six months ago, I gave up Starbucks coffee. At that time, I felt that I would donate the money that I had been spending on starbucks to a cause. Based on some "sensible" reasoning, I felt like I can never bring myself to donate 1000 bucks to a cause without feeling the pinch of it, even though I unthinkingly spend much more than that amount frivolously on things that I can’t even remember. So I figured, the only way I will do it is to give something up that I pay for on a regular basis and donate the amount to a cause. I do donate the amount, but I don’t feel satisfied. If anything, I feel guilty. I can’t seem to figure out why.

Six months ago I gave up using the cell phone, except to talk to my mom and sometimes my brother. I love talking to mom on the phone, she may be the only person I can talk to for hours without wanting to put the phone down, except when we get into a huge argument about what I choose to do with my life or how she chooses to live hers, at which point we end up banging down the phone and calling each other several times over the next few minutes until we have temporarily resolved our differences. Here I would also like to clarify that I am usually always right, but I give in because of my unconditional love for my mom. :-)
 
With mom and my brother as exceptions, I have stopped using my cell phone almost completely.  I carry it for emergencies, but beyond that it is as good as nonexistent to me. My friends call me at home, they send me emails, which have become longer and more entertaining overtime, they chat with me, and I meet them more often. I have come to realize that I have more meaningful conversations with them now than I did on the phone. I have also noticed that my social life has become more entertaining. I go out a lot more, I meet new people and I like what I do with my time alone as well.
 
Interestingly, I have noticed that fewer people call me at home than on my cell. I really don't know why. It is almost like people feel restricted by my use of a home phone. But it has worked out well for me. I seem to have narrowed down my options to close friends, family and tele-marketers. :-)
 
I have been having a tough time deciding what to give up next. I feel like saying email or gtalk, but I dread to think of how I would survive without them. I decided therefore to use them as minimally as possible. How I define minimal is a whole different issue. For one thing, I like the idea of checking and responding to personal emails twice a week. That's reasonable enough and even challenging given that I check my email every few minutes now. I could use gtalk over the weekends, and access facebook twice a month. But, would all this constitute as giving something up? Perhaps not.
 
In the latest Wired, there is an article by Scott Brown about facebook in which he says

“Thanks to Facebook, I never lose touch with anyone. And that, my Friend, is a problem.”

They're all there: elementary school friends, high school friends, college friends, work friends, friends of friends, friends of ex-girlfriends—the constellation of familiar faces crowds my Friendbox like medals on Mussolini's chest. I'm Friend-rich—at least onscreen. I've never lost touch with anyone, it seems. What I've lost is the right to lose touch. This says less about my innate lovability, I think, than about the current inflated state of Friendonomics.

…keeping friends requires almost no effort at all. We have achieved Infinite Friendspace, which means we need never drift from old pals nor feel the poignant tug of passive friend-loss. It also means that even the flimsiest of attachments—the chance convention buddy, the cube-mate from the '90s, the bar-napkin hookup—will be preserved, in perpetuity, under the flattering, flattening banner of "Friend."

It is true. It seems like there is no such thing as falling out with old pals and moving on. You are stuck with them and even their buddies for eternity. But, I have a lot of old school and college buddies that I have come back in contact with through orkut and facebook and it is exciting to talk to them after several years. I can't think of people I wouldn't want to keep in touch with, moreover I have made new friends and love them to death. I can only see benefits to using these sites. But, I miss having private conversations with close buddies. I also miss the idea of knowing everyone on a personal level. I need that. I think I am getting that more now with my communication restrictions than ever before.

Note: This is something Tapi drew on Paint many years ago, which became a huge controversy. Isn't he a cutie? It totally cracks me up. :D

I can tell my evening walks are coming to an end. I got out of the metro and was greeted with cold gusty wind blowing so strong that I had a tough time putting one foot in front of another.

I am not ready for this. I thought the birds leaving suddenly was depressing enough. But, one day I sat on the patio, fighting the wind, and I saw the most spectacular little bird, with a bright red head and a black body. What a strange little thing it was. It left as quickly as it came. I felt a sudden jolt of excitement. There might be interesting life on earth this winter after all. There are the usual sparrows and european starlings, and what I think are ravens, which for all you know are crows. :-) But, for all colorful purposes, the birds are gone. The ravens, I am curious about, as a result of having read so much about them in A Year in the Maine Woods.

I can’t seem to tell if the fall colors came and left, or if I am to look forward to them still. We drove to Shenandoah over the weekend, and were welcomed with fog. It may not have been the best time to see color, but what little we saw was still quite surreal. We were treated to some sweeping views of the hills thick with trees, meadows in a distance, all veiled by mist. There was an element of mystery to them all. In some places the fog was so thick that you couldn’t see the view directly in front of you. In two occasions, we almost hit a doe and a squirrel, for not being able to see a few feet ahead of us.

Every once in a while, we came upon outlooks that had clearer views. I wish I had walked through a trail to see the trees in near sight. From a distance, they all looked like Maples, Chestnuts or Oaks. I suspect there is also an abundance of Conifers or some sort of evergreens seeing as there was so much green around us. We didn’t see a lot of Anthocyanins or scarlets or reds, but we saw a lot of Carotenoids or bright oranges, yellows and russets and dull yellow-browns. More than the colors, I was fascinated with the dewdrops on the trees settling on the tiny branches, on the little dark berries, on soft mossy plants and on tips of tiny flowers.

I want to go back again this coming weekend, equipped with more knowledge about the hardwood forests of Shenandoah. I want to do the six hour hike on Old Rag Mountain and be able to recognize the Birches and Ashes, and whatever else adorns the trail.

Now returning to the aforementioned gusty wind on my way back home from the metro…I was fighting it but I also felt like I needed to enjoy it. I know it will get colder, and despite the wind, it was still not too unbearably chilly. It was at least bearable enough for a short walk. So I forced myself to take the longer route home. I walked for a good hour, give or take a few minutes. It helps when you have the rustling of the leaves to listen to. One day that too will be gone.

As I was thinking about all this, and the fact that I don’t hear the riot of the crickets any more, my ears exploded with pain, my eyes watered, my nose burned with cold, my head was bent down in resistance to the wind, but I still enjoyed the walk. Strangely, as long as I am out in the wind, I don’t cough like I have been coughing indoors. And then, a block away from my apartment building I saw the most spectacular sight. There was an explosion of color in front of my eyes. This is such a contrast to the sight in front of the metro, where the reds are all turning brown, the leaves are drier, but here in my apartment, the colors are just coming to view. I can see bright yellows and oranges on the Maple and Sakura trees, some scarlet and deep shades of red, some russets and lots of purple shrubs.

What I have been noticing more this time is where the leaves change color on the trees, especially on the ones that still retain the green. For instance, some of the pointed trees have a lovely red on the top, and green on the bottom, like green cotton candy topped with red sprinkles on a stick. There are some trees that are green on one half and colored on the other, almost suggesting the reluctance of the former half to yield to the changing weather. It continues to grow and produce chlorophyll.

But, I always wondered why the leaves closer to the sun are redder than the ones in the shade. I would have expected it to be the other way, given the explanation for why leaves change color. Then again, I am a bit glum that I didn’t get around to reading those lovely books about Fall as I had intended.

Fall Color and Woodland Harvests: A Guide to the More Colorful Fall Leaves and Fruits of the Eastern Forests by by C. Ritchie; Lindsey, Anne H. Bell

And

Fall Foliage: The Mystery, Science, and Folklore of Autumn Leaves (Paperback)
by Charles W. G. Smith (Author)

My Nature Handbook and the net will have to do this time. :-(

Description: This blend of earthy humor and scientific accuracy is perfect for nature lovers and activists. Twenty different "specimens" of North American endangered animals are identified and labeled with the names of their perpetrators.

Perpetrating Animals: Grizzly Bear, Point Arena Mountain Beaver, Woodland Caribou, Key Deer, Black-footed Ferret, San Joaquin Kit Fox, California Red-legged Frog, Mona Ground Iguana, Island Night Lizard, Florida Panther, Utah Prairie Dog, Sonoran Pronghorn, New Mexican Ridge-nosed Rattlesnake, Shenandoah Salamander, Bighorn Sheep, Dismal Swamp Southeastern Shrew, Virginia Northern Flying Squirrel, Wyoming Toad, Amargosa Vole and Gray Wolf

I think the "Dismal Swamp Southeastern Shrew" really did it for me!

--

In response to this post I received an email from a friend with another t-shirt.



Say again. How am I to interpret this?

Toemale (toe-muh-lay) - Hemp



• It contains no animal byproducts or even regular animal products. It is a vegan friendly and veggie friendly shoe.
• It has hemp uppers
• It has coconut buttons
• It is lined in certified organic cotton fleece
• It has a natural latex and cork blended topsole
• It has a rubbahyde rand
• It has a recycled car tire outsole
• It has a bamboo wedge heel
• It is held together with water based cements
• It has 100% post consumer paper pulp foot forms
• It shipped in a totally state-of-the-art/back-to-the-future post-consumer recycled box
• It contains LATEX

* The bottom of these shoes used to be tires that rolled around on an axle that was connected to a car. Given the inherent nature of use like this, the shoe bottoms are marked up a little. But I can totally deal with the past life of the car tire! :) How cool am I!

Toetally - Wool Felt



• It has organic cotton/linen, printed wool, and wool felt uppers
• It is bamboo lined
• It has a cushioned felt heel pad
• It has a molded latex outsole
• It has a rubbahyde rand
• It has unfinished brass hardware
• It has jute laces
• It has a removable natural latex pedbed with a cotton canvas cover
• It has a natural crepe rubber midsole
• It has a slight crepe wedge
• It is held together water based cements
• It has 100% post consumer paper pulp foot forms

Guess what I'm wearing until winter?

Toetem- Hemp



• It contains no animal byproducts or even regular animal products. It is a vegan friendly and veggie friendly shoe.
• It has certified organic cotton uppers
• It has recycled PET (that’s recycled plastic bottles) wrapped natural latex elastic
• It is bamboo lined
• It has a natural latex pedbed with a certified organic cotton canvas cover
• It has a natural crepe rubber midsole and an actual car tire outsole.
• It is held together water based cements
• It contains latex
• It has 100% post consumer paper pulp foot forms
• It shipped in a totally state-of-the-art/back-to-the-future post-consumer recycled box

I bet Simple Shoes is wicked happy right now. They totally cashed in on my "responsible" buying obsession.

A few thousand years ago, man played god and a dog was born. Ever since, man hasn’t stopped playing god. While there are many men who have created dogs in every imaginable shape and size, with every imaginable trait, deserving to be loved and admired, there are some that are embarrassing mistakes. Saying just that is probably enough, but I absolutely want to say more about the dog and the dog god! =)

I always assumed that dogs, like humans were a part of evolution, or that they evolved over time just as humans did. While that may be true, there’s more to it.

That we are human is a result of 85 million years of changes to the physical form and structure of a species. It has to do with “natural selection”, where in, a species naturally changes over a period of time, by retaining favorable traits and rejecting unfavorable ones to adapt to the changing environment. If ape became man it is because, at some point in time, ape had to become man in order to survive. That is the divine design! I say divine design, not to call attention to the role of god, but even if there is no god, the divine design is just that there is no intentional intervention.

Dogs on the other hand were a result of “artificial selection”. They are actually wolves that were selectively bred by humans in many different ways and for many different generations, and even interbred with other species like jackals and foxes, to suit our needs. Clearly, needs we have many! Even if it's with dogs!

What is most baffling is that more than half of the existing dog species today are only 150 years old. What is 150 years, in comparison with 3.7 billion years of life on earth! It is one of the world's newest species and most definitely the world's newest mammal.

Dogs are the biggest victims of eugenics, or the science of perfecting a species. Now, why they were put through it, is a long story and a very interesting one. I saw an amazing show on National Geographic called “The Science of Dogs” that explains just that and more.

The show has some of the most astonishing examples of how man created dogs that today serve as our companions, protectors, guides, hunters, crime fighters and entertainers. It introduces us to the science of creating a dog, of finding cures for diseases, of nurturing a species, of destroying a species. What more? It is about the history of classes and cultures. How something as uncomplicated as a dog can can have such a complicated saga to it is remarkable.

The show starts with an example of Dogo Argentino of Texas. The breed was designed over a period of 25 years with just one aim in mind – to find the recipe for the perfect dog that can attack and hold a wild boar weighing up to 400 pounds.
From the official website, here’s the formula that lead to the creation.

1) the Fighting Dog of Cordoba, to which he added blood from
2) the Pointer to give him a keen sense of smell which would be essential for the hunt.
3) The Boxer added vivacity and gentleness;
4) the Great Dane it's size;
5) the Bull Terrier, fearlessness;
6) the Bulldog gave it an ample chest and boldness;
7) the Irish Wolfhound brought it's instinct as a hunter of wild game;
8) the Dogue de Bordeaux contributed it's powerful jaws;
9) the Great Pyrenees it's white coat and
10) the Spanish Mastiff gave it's quota of power.

Another example from the show was the Sulimov, a trainable bomb-sniffing dog. A Soviet expert mated several breeds of hunting dogs with wild jackals to arrive at the Sulimov. Its sensitive nose can detect 12 different chemical compounds used in explosives and can even sniff out an explosive that’s a size of a small sand grain in a large airport with lots of activity. There are only 40 Sulimovs in this world, all of which are a protected property of the Soviet.

The show takes us back in time, to the Victorian era, in the mid 19th century, when the industrial revolution transformed our landscape. The industrial revolution was when the Railways came into being. There were major changes to the manufacturing and transportation industries. It was also the Age of Enlightenment, when systematic thinking influenced all areas of human activity. All the progress during this time gave rise to a large upper middle class society. People began to emphasize their status and class hierarchy became very important. Gardens and Architecture became signs of wealth and prestige. Fascinatingly, dogs too became a status symbol and about 320 species were instantly created. The pure breds we know today were in fact the ones that were created at this time. They conformed to set breed standards that were established so as to distinguish superior dogs from the inferior ones.

But, over time all the tinkering of genes came with a huge price. Today, one out of every four pure breds has some sort of serious genetic problem or the other. The shallow gene pool resulted in dogs with eye problems, deafness, heart problems and other ailments. Moreover, as man and dog share the same environment, the dogs have a lot of the same ailments that men do. They suffer for the same cancers and poxes that we do and it is all our fault.

Whatever the fate of dogs, all this has proved to be a blessing for man. Now research on dogs is helping man fight his own genetic problems and find cures for diseases. And in all likelihood, the cure will eventually help the dog as well.

There is no mammal on earth that exists in as many varieties as the dog. There are no cows with curly tails, or pigs with long legs. But, if you’ve ever wondered why, it is simply because dogs have the most malleable genes. Humans didn’t have to know this to breed dogs, dogs just happened to be most susceptible to modification.

Here is a fact t omarvel at. A two-pound Chihuahua and a 250-pound Mastiff share 99.8% of the same genes. It is just one small tweak to a single IGF-1 gene fo a dog that causes the changes in size, shape, personality and everything else that varies from breed to breed.

It is that single gene that makes a great dane different from a dalmatian, a poodle different from bull dog. It is that single gene that makes some dogs better at sniffing out cancer, and some capable of jumping 25 feet, some better at sniffing out explosives, some capable of running at 40 mph, some friendlier, some more aggressive, some with defects that make them chase their tales in circles until they throw up, some with spots on their bodies causing deafness… the list goes on.

Now, in creating dogs and dog breeds, and doing what we did, we have unknowingly protected a species and facilitated the process of evolution in a smooth way. In taming the animal, we have made it possible for it to survive with us in a way that no other mammal has been able to. But, all this does little for the actual wolf, whose natural habitat is rapidly facing destruction.

The final segment of the show focuses on the differences in the temperament of the wolf and a dog to show how much the human-canine interaction has altered the very nature of the species. The experiment show us how the dogs have become dependent on humans for survival. They look to humans for instructions or ideas on how to work things. When given an obstacle, they expect humans to help them with their problems. The wolf on the other hand, works independently. It may have a pack leader, but that pack leader is definitely not human!

All said and done, I don’t know what to make of this science project. In fact, we have gone way beyond judgement time. The dog is here to stay, whether it is good, bad or ugly. We can just marvel at the creation of a species and at the same time deride some of the terrible outcomes, and hope that progress will only lead us to the creation of a real Superdog and not a four-legged Frankenstien.

On a totally non-scientific note, I am wondering how we managed to generate so many stray dogs in this world! =)

Discovery News never fails to amuse me! Take the Animals Section for instance. Today I read:

Ants Slack Off for Colony's Greater Good
Leaf cutter ants carry much less than they're capable of, research finds, but their small burdens turn out to be the perfect size for ants processing the leaves.

There might be a lesson in this for my colleagues, but first I need to prove to them that I am the processing ant! And then I will work my way up to becoming queen and hire someone to be in charge of ant colony optimization. ;-)

Zoo Animals Try Online Dating
Just like the digital dating services that pair up people, so-called studbooks are used to match most animals held in captivity. The databases containing information on sex, age and weight -- not so much about favorite comfort foods or long walks on the beach -- are used by more than 200 zoos nationally and some internationally. They're practically taking the place of Mother Nature in the not-so wild world of captive animal breeding.

Feeling threatened by this animal invasion into social networks, facebook decided to become friends with the enemy. They let you create profiles for pets using the dogbook and catbook applications. They even let animals tittletattle about long walks and favorite comfort foods, but it seems more and more like their human parents are doing all the tittling and tattling for them these days. Here's where I read about it: Facebook with whiskers

Jamaican Lizards Work Out at Dusk and Dawn
In a demonstration of reptilian strength, Jamaican anole lizards begin and end each day with a visual display that includes push-ups, head bobs and flashy showings of their colorful neck flaps, according to a new study.

The head-bobbing sounds doable. Tapi? :-D

Songbirds Duel With Duets
Some sweet-sounding bird songs may carry a sinister message.

My neighbors seem to be getting the sinister messages in my songs and not the sweet sounds! Hello birds, how about some tutoring on twittering this weekend!

American Woolly Mammoths Pushed Out Siberian Kin
DNA shows the world's last surviving woolly mammoths were born in the United States and the Arctic. Woolly mammoths from those regions displaced Siberian mammoths, causing the latter group to mysteriously disappear off the face of the Earth.

And thus began US imperialism. :O

Tiny Critters Survive Space (With No Spacesuit)
When it comes to surviving open exposure in space, a tiny invertebrate now stands out: tardigrades, also known as "water-bears."

Spacing out, we can do too. (With no Spacesuit)

Blog break again people! This time my laptop charger decided to seize up. :(

Since I have less than a minute before it shuts down, here is my unfinished post.

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This post is in memory of the wasp and the butterfly that died on my front porch in the last week. I stood very long watching their last moments of agony, goading them to move even though I was afraid of impeding their passing. I am glad it is over, even though their struggle for life will remain with me forever.

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The year I joined film school, the cicadas came out of the ground after 17 years. In clusters of hundreds they would charge into every door or window, sidewalk or shrub, creating disruptive chaos for the few hours that they were alive. The shrill discordant singing of the males, their bright red eyes, their glossy black body, their long fragile wings, were all a miracle perceptible only for a month before they vanished. Before they died the females laid five hundred eggs each, the lives of which I may never see, at least not for the next two decades.

The cicadas gave shape to a lot of creative expression that year. All the films submitted by students that semester had one distinct but unifying quality, which was their allegorical interpretation of the insect’s existence.

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As I walked out of my office the other day, I saw a full wing of a rock pigeon on the sidewalk. It was a very saddening sight. The wing looked liked it was cut clean with a knife at the joint.

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What I like most about sparrows and pigeons is that they are reminders of home. They are the very same birds I grew up with in India. How strange that they must exist so many continents away. The ones in Dupont are fatter from the abundance of leftover food from the restaurants.

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There is one kind of pigeon I have come to like in the US. The white ones with a brown head. They look so unlike the typical grey rock pigeons. Something about them makes me smile.

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This winter our patio served as a retreat for a lot of birds. The northern cardinals and american robins were omnipresent the whole of winter and spring. I don’t see as many American robins these days and am beginning to miss their charmingly sprightly personalities, their heads held high, their quick hops, their beautiful song.

The male northern cardinals are imperial looking bright red things. They visited my apartment almost everyday throughout winter, although I saw fewer and fewer of them as the days went by. The female cardinals, with their elegant brown coat and bright orange beaks were so hard to find except on weekends when the curtain is open all day. In my opinion the females are unfairly held in low esteem because of their color.

We have been seeing warblers and chats fly past us quickly. They sit on our patio sometimes but only for a second, never long enough for me to observe them.

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Lately we have had new visitors. The mourning doves, grey and brown come over every once in a while, seemingly oblivious to our presence. Despite their dull color, they are pleasantly delicate to look at and manage to grab your attention with their subtle grace if not anything else.

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In winter, and more so in Fall we saw a lot of ring-billed gulls by the reflecting pool in the capitol. They are perhaps used to visitors, for they are impervious to tourists who come dead close to them. The gulls have a very stately appearance. Watching them circle overhead with their broad wings or glide smoothly in an effortless manner is pure pleasure. This is one of the few things I look forward to during the frigid days ahead.

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The reflection pool at the Lincoln memorial and the Potomac river are home to a lot of dabbling ducks. The beautiful male mallards with their glossy green heads, brown bodies and black tails must give their dull brown female counterparts a complex if they don’t manage to attract them. The one thing I haven’t noticed of both mallards that I have seen in pictures is their bright blue wings as they take flight.

Some of my most memorable experiences with birds has been with mallards. Sitting in the Potomac with our bare legs in the water, Anand, Tapi and I observed the female mallards approach us from a distance to almost a foot away, staying put for a bit and then moving past us. The only dampener to the experience was having sewer rats clandestinely run past us, their cold sleazy bodies touching our feet.

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American crows are jet black and shrewd looking, very unlike the grey-breasted Indian crows that have a gentle appearance. I haven’t been able to tell them apart from the ravens, except sometimes when they seem to look smaller and less shaggy. I am told the ravens are usually solitary, but I cant remember seeing large flocks of crows either. They seem to be in small groups of five or ten.

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I have been seeing hawks and eagles soaring in the sky. But sometimes its hard to tell the difference despite acquiring some theoretical knowledge and seeing pictures. It may be that I haven’t studied them at all despite what I would have you believe.

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Every once in a while I come across a black bird with a beautiful white tail. I have been wanting to know what that bird is. I hope I find out some day. My ignorance is only making me more and more obsessed with this bird. I look for it everywhere.

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I am eager to learn the names of three bees that I saw this year. One im particular had enchanting features. It had a beautiful round glossy yellow body with black polka dots and a black head. I am also keen on learning the names of three butterflies that I found in the trail in virginia. I have taken a lot of pictures of flowers and am embarrassed to say that I don’t know the names of many. Such a shame!

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The european starlings are still here. Their bewitching black coat with a peacock green shine is getting duller and the white spots all over the body are more apparent.They are still just as evasive, but even from a distance they wobbly walk is just as adorable.

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Where did the new black squirrels and grey rabbits in the apartment building come from? The more I see them, the less I see the deer and the geese.

Is genocide a strong enough word? I can only answer for myself. I don’t think it is strong enough. It doesn’t evoke enough horror. When I think of everything that the word represents, I feel knotted inside in a way that is hard to describe in words. I am imagining very shameful acts that should not be imagined, and there are some acts I suspect that are worse than anything I can imagine. I can barely form images of what I am told of in my mind.

Feelings of empathy and powerlessness come easily. What do I do about it?

I buy a grande white mocha with whipped cream in starbucks every weekday morning. That is roughly $80 on coffee every month. It is a part of my daily routine now, and I drink it whether I feel like it or not. I spend over a thousand dollars a year on coffee. I am a self-proclaimed coffee hater. I hate the smell of coffee. White chocolate mocha, I love.

There was a cyclone that killed thousands of people in Myanmar recently. People are still dying or living a life worse than death. I research for hours carefully on relief organizations working to rescue them. I go back and forth with family on how much is a good amount to donate. “50 is enough” “who knows how those organizations will use your donation” “You cant help everyone in the world even if you give away your lifetime’s earnings” “There will be some other crisis tomorrow, what will you do then” “why Myanmar? donate in India. Here too thousands are dying” In the end, I spend half as much as I do on a year’s coffee.

I discovered for myself that I react spontaneously to satisfy my desires. I don’t research a company’s trade policies or their ethical stance before I buy their clothes or shoes. But, when it comes to doing things out of good concern, there is endless discussion on whom to approach and whether it is an endeavor in futility or not. It seems, magnanimity is a trait to be cultivated, so that you react with compassion as spontaneously as you react with desire. How does one cultivate it?

We are seeing an end of a species. There are only 720 mountain gorillas left in the world. It is such a small number that their survival is considered genetically unviable, meaning our kids may not see mountain gorillas in their lifetime. Some of us haven’t even seen one in our lifetime. In ten years they will be gone if something dramatic is not done now.


Civil war in Congo is mainly to blame. As thousands of men and women are losing their lives and their dignity, you would imagine that this dreadful war is affecting only humans, but mountain gorillas and bonobos are being slaughtered mindlessly (even as we speak). Many are being killed systematically, in execution-style. And then there are poachers, illegal timber harvesters and charcoal traders making things worse.

The gorillas live exclusively in the Democratic Republic of Congo, in Virunga National Park, which is the only park in the world where these gorillas continue to exist.
In 1994, when 800,000 Tutsis were killed in Rwanda, thousands of refugees moved to the Virunga park border, cutting down trees to clear up space to live. Soon they began illegal charcoal production for their everyday needs and to fund the operations of rebel Tutsi fighters. Cutting down of trees and close contact with humans has resulted in the spread of infectious diseases. Several gorillas died as a result. Moreover, the rebels fighting the government have been killing the endangered apes to make a political point, or sometimes out of sheer ignorance of the effects of close contact of humans with apes.

Three issues fight for attention: War among humans, genocide and the extinction of a species.

As the incidences of genocides in the world are growing we are made more and more aware of a basic flaw in our humanity. We cannot relate to mass tragedy. We can act only if we see individuals suffer, like when we see a picture of an orphaned child dying of hunger, or a even an old woman crossing the road. But, somehow we are not able to see individuals within a mass. The more numbers we hear of people suffering, the more paralyzed we become into inaction.

A reporter on NPR pointed out that the death of two gorillas has become bigger news now than the genocide issue or the war in Congo, because with a number as small as two, it is easier for us to feel like we are capable of helping. We react immediately, and want to urge someone to pull the gorillas out of the park and into safety. But the war in congo is barely made known to the world, we too are indifferent to it.

Still the gorillas are dying, the humans are killing each other and destroying everything around them, and there is nothing we can do about the former or the latter. The problems are too big for us. We move on.

When Priti came to DC we had a few shots of a really good Canadian Vodka, which incidentally happens to be the world's only eco-friendly "luxury" vodka, also rated one of the finest.

Terms like "smooth" used with liquor is somewhat misleading. You would imagine that it rides down your throat like silk, but to me vodkas always sting as they go down, no matter how hard you try to sell it to me otherwise. I like that about it. But, there are different levels of stinging, and this one is most definitely the least demanding of my facial muscles and my throat.

Perhaps smooth has to do with the "effect" of the vodka as much as it has to do with the taste. Tapi's colleague from "Vodka land" once told us that it is the only drink that doesn't give you a hangover in the morning after, which explains how Russians are able to gulp it down during the day and go on with life. I believe him.

Going back to it's eco-friendliness (notwithstanding the destruction of the human liver and some brain cells), Vodka 360s commitment to the environment is admirable. It uses the most recycled material possible and is eco-friendly in every stage of distilling, packaging and marketing.

From an article I read recently:

The bottle, commonly reused by consumers for water and olive oil, is made from 85 percent recycled glass, giving each bottle a unique green hue. The label on the bottle is made with 100 percent post consumer paper with special water based inks that won't harm the environment; and the swing-top closure comes with a pre-paid envelope empowering Canadians to return it for reuse and have $1.00 donated to a local environmental organization.

The sustainability is also evident in the retail shipping cases which are 100 percent recycled, stable enough to support the weight of a full-grown man and the exact size of a standard storage box fitting file folders, magazines and other common storage items.

While everything outside the bottle promotes reusability, everything inside is about efficiency and quality. 360 Vodka boasts a state-of-the-art production process that is second to none in the industry and 200 percent more efficient than the conventional pot still method. Distilled four times using the column distillation process and filtered five times featuring a proprietary charcoal coconut filter system, the end result is a clean, silky smooth liquid, that competes with the world's finest vodkas.

By selecting the finest American grains grown less than 95 miles from the distillery, 360 Vodka also reduces fossil fuel consumption in transporting raw materials to the distillery. In addition, their marketing materials are all made with recycled paper and produced using the most ecologically friendly materials.

And for those unsure of the brand's commitment, the bottle showcases a regularly updated eco-audit that lists the benefits to the environment including the number of trees, energy, solid waste, water and greenhouse gasses that were saved at the time the label was printed.

"I genuinely believe 360 Vodka is a remarkable achievement and represents the kind of change we need in order to secure our ecosystem's future," added Pechar. "It truly is the evolution of vodka."

Web site: http://www.vodka360.com

Again, another beautiful bird escapes my camera. European Starling! I'll get you one day.

“Priority is a function of context.” - Stephen R. Covey

I always have the knack of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and this time with absolutely no benefit whatsoever. While the President of Liberia, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf was delivering an inspiring speech at my brother's commencement at Dartmouth University, I was busy running behind a Blue Jay out of desperate worry that I might never see such a beautiful bird in my life again. After all the black, red and brown birds I had been seeing all through Spring, I was thrilled to spot a blue one, with a long cobalt tail and a magnificent crest on its head.

The commemoration event and the whole exercise of running behind the bird turned out to be a situation of conflicting cues, with equally desirable alternatives - one catering to my esthetic needs and the other to my aural. There was Africa's first elected female President, a champion of peace and justice and a role model to women all over the world, giving her speech right where I was standing. And there was that enticing bird that interrupted my eagerness for inspiration.


In the end, my camera didnt catch up with my feet, my feet with my target and I was both minus one President and one bird.

“By its very nature the beautiful is isolated from everything else. From beauty no road leads to reality.”

(sometimes i use the most random quotes in my post)

Here are some pictures I took while trailing the Blue Jay! It will at least add color to my text-intensive blog.

Although I can't claim to be very knowledgeable about wildlife filmmaking, I was fortunate to have met some passionate wildlife filmmakers through their film premieres, workshops and lectures in my grad school. In the last semester of my Masters program, I chose to take classes in environmental and wildlife filmmaking under Chris Palmer, a renowned filmmaker with 300 hours of programming in prime-time television and IMAX films. His film Dolphins was nominated for an Academy Award.

Prof. Palmer was (to say the least) one of the most energetic and inspiring professors I have had, who introduced himself by walking on his hands on the first day of class. He has swum with dolphins and whales, confronted sharks and bears, camped with wolves, waded hip-deep through Everglades swamps, he has done it all.

In his class, I learnt everything from production techniques for shooting in the wild to the ethics of wildlife filmmaking, but the class I remember most was around the time that the film "Grizzly Man" was released. The film was about the bear enthusiast Timothy Treadwell, who was killed and eaten by the Alaska brown bears that he loved and trusted. He was well known for his close encounters with the grizzlies, and even touched them several times despite the warnings of park officials. For this, he was both admired and ridiculed by environmentalists and received extensive media attention. In the end, he paid the price for his encounters with his own life.

In class, we spoke about the delicate line between man and nature, and how far a filmmaker can go without invading the natural boundaries between predator and prey, and what the justification for taking such liberties could possibly be. It is ironic that Treadwell's intention had always been to protect the bears to his "last breath", and unfortunately such intentions have caused a lot of harm to both man and the animals.

> Meet the Documentarian

After my class with Prof. Palmer, I interned with a very distinguished producer who made films for Discovery Channel. She had just made a film called "The Making of the Leopard's Son" and took a break from environmental filmmaking for a bit, in order to make her first social documentary. Although I had not been a part of her environmental filmmaking experience, I was awed by her stories and wondered what it was like to shoot in the wild, with little to no protection.

When it finally came to making a decision on which road to take, I kept away from this profession for the fear of putting myself in a life-threatening situation when shooting in the wild. Perhaps, that was a cowardly thing to do and spoke very little for the knowledge and understanding of wildlife as was promoted by these renowned filmmakers. But, I needed time to think about it and to assure myself that it IS in fact safe or at least as safe as crossing an indian main street with chaotic traffic.

A few days ago, I met with a cousin who insisted that filmmakers who shoot in the wild go with a massive crew, taking every possible precaution to keep their lives safe, including guns to protect themselves from ferocious attacks. He said, the production team goes into deep jungles with a van full of medications for every conceivable accident. The broadcast channels wouldn't put their crew at risk of grave injury especially for fear of being sued. He said that animals are unpredictable even for people who claim to be knowledgeable about their behavior, and such precaution was therefore necessary. What is more, he is certain that a lot of those “dangerous” encounters were either staged or manipulated post-production.

I wanted to tell him that he was right about the unpredictability of nature and the nature of wildlife. Filmmakers have a deep understanding of animal behavior but need to prepare for unexpected danger. That being said, the truth to his claims end there. It is NOT true that all filmmakers have previous training in film making. The video of Palmer above is proof of that. He has three engineering degrees and none in filmmaking or wildlife/environmental studies. The encounters are NOT staged. They are “planned for”, but not staged. In occasions that they ARE staged, it is acknowledged and even obvious to trained-eye. And when not acknowledged it is pointed out and critized by commentators and even charged for deceit (example: The case against wildlife filmmaker Marty Stouffer). While filmmakers take a lot of safety measures, none of them involve using guns or violence. As a matter of fact, a gun does very little to protect a person from a huge charging bear. It also does little to protect him or her from media/environmental watchdogs ;-)

If they sense the slightest danger, they pack up and go to safety. Often than not, the crew can sense danger quickly, by guaging their environment and planning accordingly. It is rarely that their plans go awry, except when they willingly put themselves in a dangerous situation. And when a filmmaker knowingly puts himself at risk, there is a chance that he is wrong in believing that he has built enough trust with the animals or that he can handle an animal’s attack. This confidence has caused loss of lives of many great filmmakers.

But, in all my classes and encounters with filmmakers, I hadn't once heard of the crew suing the broadcast channels or production companies for their injuries. I have also not heard of filmmakers using guns to protect themselves from the wild. After all, the films are about wildlife protection and it would be tragic if they did. I could only think of small things like pepper sprays and lightning rods as being used for protection, but my explanation did not convince my cousin. My classes, my internship, my meetings with filmmakers were not enough to provide authority to counter his statements. So I looked over the net for proof, hoping that he would trust the net more that he trusts my knowledge. The links below are lectures of wildlife filmmakers who talk about whether wildlife filmmaking is dangerous or not. They quote examples of filmmakers who had been attacked by animals and also talk about the precautions filmmakers take to protect themselves while shooting.

Here's what I collected so far.

• Colin Willock: The dangers of wildlife filmmaking
• 
  
• Violence, lies and videotape: wildlife filmmaking takes a few liberties with the truth
• 
  
• Wildlife Filmmakers, Dangers and Mishaps
• 
  
• Up Close and Dangerous
• 
  
• Unearthed

You may be aware of the cyclone that has ravaged Myanmar (formerly Burma) in Southeast Asia. The death toll from the devastating cyclone might exceed 100,000. To put this in perspective, the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004 consumed about 200,000 lives and Hurricane Katrina took about 2,000 lives.

About six million people in Myanmar are directly affected by this catastrophe, and the entire country is reeling from severe shortages in food and medicine. Current foreign aid is highly inadequate and slow-moving, partly because of blocked access to the country by the ruling military junta. Yet many international organizations are making tireless efforts to respond to this crisis.

I humbly ask for your contribution towards helping our unfortunate brethren in Myanmar if you haven’t given already.

I have compiled a small list of some international organizations that are working on the ground in Myanmar and providing humanitarian aid. While this is certainly no comprehensive list, you might find this helpful in making your donation.

http://helpmyanmar.blogspot.com/

Anand

I am so glad I am not a teenager anymore, because today's news would have made me extremely unhappy.
I learnt about a unique kind of mosquito, the shocking kind that needs a serious slap on the back. =)

It says on their official website that:

The Mosquito™ ultrasonic teenage deterrent is the solution to the eternal problem of unwanted gatherings of youths and teenagers in shopping malls, around shops and anywhere else they are causing problems. The presence of these teenagers discourages genuine shoppers and customers’ from coming into your shop, affecting your turnover and profits. Anti social behavior has become the biggest threat to private property over the last decade and there has been no effective deterrent until now. Acclaimed by the Police forces of many areas of the United Kingdom, the Mosquito ultrasonic teenage deterrent has been described as “the most effective tool in our fight against anti social behaviour”. Shop keepers around the world have purchased the device to move along unwanted gatherings of teenagers and anti social youths. Railway companies have placed the device to discourage youths from spraying graffiti on their trains and the walls of stations.

Since the device emits high frequency sounds that are only audible to young people, adults are oblivious to this sound. That (thankfully) hasn't stopped the device from receiving all the criticism it deserves, with one campaign called Buzz Off taking the lead. There is no doubt that anti-social behavior needs to be tackled, but the Mosquito is a weapon against all young people (babies included) whether they are misbehaving or not. Canada and the United States are now selling this device, and private citizens too can legally purchase the product and use it at home. Imagine the Mosquito being the punishment at home for not cleaning your room or doing your homework! Yikes!

Here's the much needed silver lining. Smart teenagers have been putting this "repelling" product to a very sly use. They have turned the annoying Mosquito buzz into a ring tone, which is inaudible to adults and therefore can be used in class without the teachers' knowledge. =)
----
Speaking of human rights violations and the curbing of right to freedom, I also learnt that Louisiana town is banning "controversial clothing", meaning saggy pants revealing undergarments or "certain" body parts. The penalty is set to 6 months in jail and a $500 fine. Back in India, when my college banned short skirts or spaghetti tops, we were all so outraged. After I left college, I was told that the authorities further restricted students from wearing any western clothes. Of course, that is nothing compared to the dress restrictions imposed in some nations or the curbing of certain religious beliefs in some other. Still, I'm finding all these restrictions and sonic tortures very bothersome.

--
You may wonder why this article is labeled under "Environment". It turns out, this Mosquito too breaks some environmental laws (specifically Noise and Nuisance Acts) even though it does not sting or cause long term health problems. And it's wrongly labeled under "Philanthropy" because that's the closest label in my list to "Social Issues". I use it for all matters affecting members of a society concerning moral or ethical values. I take my blog too seriously, don't I! =)

I promise. This is the last bird post for a while.
I had been trying to take pictures of the American Robins that I see every morning on my way to work, except my camera and these beautiful red breasted birds don't seem to want to connect.

Today, I was walking back home from work and saw him sitting on the lawn, unperturbed by the kids playing ball around him. It was a marvelous sight. I never thought I would see a bird sitting fearlessly amongst so much chaos. I ran as quickly as I could into the house to get my camera. When I couldn't find my good one, I brought out my old kodak point-and-shoot and ran back to where he was. The bird was still there-not quite in the same place, but sitting on a more bare surface with little grass and pecking on the pink sakura petals. I walked towards him, almost at touching distance and he still stayed put, not budging an inch. But somehow, just as I pulled out my camera from my pocket, he started hopping a few steps away at a time. The closer I went towards him, the further he moved. While this whole game of follow-your-leader was a lot of fun, my hopeless camera wasn't cooperating. It wouldn't zoom enough and the pictures turned out badly too. Still, I shot some with the hope that I will take better ones some other day. The Robin is in for some serious shooting and he doesn't even have a hood to hide under! ;)

Note: By the way, this is NOT Lil' Robin - the Northern Cardinal. I caught a glimpse of him hiding behind the woods today. But he can only hide for so long. At some point he has to reveal himself in the open!

--

This is an image from wikipedia that does a better job of displaying the American Robin than my low grade pics. Notice the bright yellow beak, the orange-red breast contrasting with the elegant greyish wings and the stark black head with a broken white eye ring. The more you look at him, the more charming he gets. I bet he's even aware of that.

He even has the most beautiful song and vocalizes clearly. I love hearing him sing, except on weekend mornings when it gets a little annoying, because he just won't stop singing.

Wikipedia says:

The male American Robin, as with many thrushes, has a beautiful, complex and almost continuous song. Its song is commonly described as a cheerily carol, made up of discrete units, often repeated, and spliced together into a string with brief pauses in between.[17] The song varies regionally, and its style varies by time of day. The song period is from early March in California to late July or early August; some birds, particularly in the east, sing occasionally into September or later. The American Robin is often among the first songbirds singing as dawn rises, and last as evening sets in. It usually sings from a high perch in a tree.[10] The song of T. m. confinis is weaker than that of the nominate subspecies, and lacks any clear notes.

Their eggs are a nice tealish blue! I haven't seem them except in pictures but they look lovely. The female Robins are a bit duller looking, as apparently is the case with most female birds. Such discrimination. hmph!

Day 2:
We got up at 7 a.m. today and went out to take pictures of the blossoms again only to find that it was raining outside. We still managed to take some pictures of the cherry blossoms in the front yard. I've added those to the slideshow in my previous post.

Lil' Robin was still missing. But, we saw some of his friends, - the tiny brown and red American Robins and some small black birds (Im guessing European Starlings or Common Grackles, I really couldn't tell) They were all so far off that we couldn't get decent pictures on our camera.

Around afternoon time, it stopped raining and we drove down to the Thomas Jefferson Memorial for the Cherry Blossom Festival. We decided to save all festival-related activity for next weekend, which happens to be the last weekend of the festival. The last days are usually a lot grander, with a parade, the Sakura Matsuri Festival - which is the nation's largest Japanese Street Festival, live music and dance performances, some Madame Tussaud's wax museum highlights, Blossom Secrets Stroll - where we hear stories about blossoms during a walking tour, an introduction to other flowering cherry trees in the city, a photo safari (how cool is that!), a lantern walk (!), and most importantly the Cherry Blossom River Tea service where tea is served on a two-hour cruise.

It's going to be tough picking which ones to go to. Left to me, I'd try to squeeze in as many events as possible! But, we are two of us, so it's not entirely left to me!

Anyway, this weekend was perfect. There was the right amount of crowd, and we had no agenda on our mind, so we strolled around slowly, even though it was a bit chilly. The weather didn't come in the way of us enjoying the most heavenly nature walk we've had in a long time. Here are some pictures.



I am aware that my blog has lately been filled with too many cherry blossom posts. But that's the nature of the season! (no pun-intended... yeah right!)

We finally got around to taking some pictures of the cherry blossom trees outside our apartment. Tomorrow, if we don't oversleep, we might be able to take some more in the morning light, when it is more quite. The contrast between the flowers and the branches is something else in the wee hours of the morning. It's almost surreal.



We have also been seeing a lot more birds in our patio lately. Perhaps, the gift of spring time? There was a bright red northern cardinal (male) sitting on the patio railing, but before we could take a picture, away he went! I call him Lil' Robin, even though he is "technically" a Redbird. =) I am hoping Lil' Robin will be back tomorrow.

After he flew away, we ran out and looked for him for quite sometime. I could hear a lot of birds chirping, but didn't hear him. He's supposed to have a beautiful song and I would love to hear him sing for me. =D Till tomorrow, we'll make do with a stock image, won't we!



We also took some pictures of a little girl playing goosey goosey gander with two canada geese. It was a beautiful day and I bet they were out thinking it might be a good time to meander slowly, taking in the sights and sounds just like us, and didn't at all expect to be shooed away. This is proof that a wild goose chase doesn't necessarily make the goose happy! ;) Boy am I on a roll! I even have one about the little girl wanting the golden eggs, but was afraid that that would be overkill!

Post Earth Hour, I received some emails and phone calls from friends and family asking if there really is a point to Earth Hour or if we are fooling ourselves into thinking that we can do something about the climate change problem. Some people went on to criticize the event as another meaningless fad of pseudo-intellectuals pretending to care about the world and its problems.

In India, people thought the whole idea was pointless given the number of power-cuts in the country anyway. They didn't need an Earth Hour when they are already suffering an Earth Life. Still, some places are turning off power on May 3rd. I wonder why India chose a different date from the rest of the world.

Today morning I received an email from my brother with a link to an article on Time. He said:

Happened to run into this article on TIME... makes me wonder how real change can happen. Are we saving pennies while someone loots our bank?

http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1725947,00.html?cnn=yes

To sum up the article in a few words it says:

Given that the entire world emits around 27 billion tons of CO2 each year through transportation, electricity use, deforestation., there's very little that any of us can do on an individual level to stop climate change. What is one hour of saving electricity going to achieve when even by living like monks for the rest of our lives, we'll barely scratch the surface.

Still, Earth Hour is important as a symbolic gesture, to collectively make a statement about our commitment to solving the problem of climate change.

The only way to truly reduce greenhouse gas emissions, to take the pressure off global warming, is an international regime that puts a cap and a price on climate pollution. And the only way that will happen is if politicians around the world become convinced that climate change is an issue that matters to people, one that will make them change the way they live, buy — and vote.

The environmental movement is reaching a delicate moment. We're well past the point where just doing your bit to save the Earth deserves endless praise. But this is the moment when we need to keep pushing in every way we can. The technologies that will help us decarbonize energy are developing, but they need a push — and that will only happen if we keep climate change near the top of our political agenda. Earth Hour, Earth Day, Earth Year — we'll need it all.

The article sums up how I feel about the event. I don't see Earth Hour as a solution, but as a symbol of concern, of hope. I see people coming together from all over the world, wanting to do something about the environment... anything that makes sense, that puts the issue on the political agenda. I see Earth Hour as a gesture that symbolizes people's commitment to energy conservation. It is a first step of many steps, a reminder of what is important and a celebration of humanity and unity as people come together with one concern that affects all of them, irrespective of where they live on the globe. Perhaps switching off the lights, using public transport, recycling products is not enough. There is more to be done. But by starting here and showing how much it means to us, we hope to make this a priority and eventually find a solution.

As far as not finding a need to celebrate Earth Hour in India goes, somehow the power cuts don't seem to help with our country's ecological footprint. With a .8 gha, we may be lower than the world average but it is still higher than the nation's bio-capacity. This is after the compulsory load shedding being thrust on us. According to WWF’s Living Planet Report ranked India 3rd on the list of ‘ecological deficit’ countries with 802 million gha.

India hosts about 1% of the world’s forests and 2.2% of land mass but is home for 16% (1.3 billion) of the world population. The recorded forests in the country are about 77.5 million ha or 23.6% of land area. Although forest cover in India in 2003 was higher than previous estimates, the dense forests (canopy density above 40%) continue to be lost at a higher rate (1.3 million ha/year). Conversion of forests for non-forest purposes is one of the key factors in these changes. Globally, the forest loss is about 16 million ha per year and the conversion of forests in the world’s critical eco-regions can lead to irreversible changes in ecosystems and loss of biodiversity. Source Panda.org

You may call this irony but I see this as as all the more reason for us to participate in Earth Hour. Moreover, as global citizens, we should see energy conservation as a world problem not as a problem of one nation. After all, with every other problem in our country related to poverty, we look to other countries for support and hope that they will empathize with our situation and help us in whatever way they can. And then, switching off the lights for an hour is a symbolic gesture of concern, its not an act to conserve energy within that one hour, so I don't see how regular power-cuts can come in the way of demonstrating that you care (if you care).

In fact I would urge countries doing well energy-wise to participate too and lead by example!

On March 29, 2008 at 8 p.m., join millions of people around the world in making a statement about climate change by turning off your lights for Earth Hour, an event created by the World Wildlife Fund.

Earth Hour was created by WWF in Sydney, Australia in 2007, and in one year has grown from an event in one city to a global movement. In 2008, millions of people, businesses, governments and civic organizations in nearly 200 cities around the globe will turn out for Earth Hour. More than 100 cities across North America will participate, including the US flagships–Atlanta, Chicago, Phoenix and San Francisco and Ottawa, Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver.

We invite everyone throughout North America and around the world to turn off the lights for an hour starting at 8 p.m. (your own local time)–whether at home or at work, with friends and family or solo, in a big city or a small town.

What will you do when the lights are off? We have lots of ideas.

Join people all around the world in showing that you care about our planet and want to play a part in helping to fight climate change. Don’t forget to sign up and let us know you want to join Earth Hour.

One hour, America. Earth Hour. Turn out for Earth Hour!

Just when you need a camera, you either cant find it or it has run out of battery.

It will soon be that time of year when you can sit out under the blooming cherry blossom trees and enjoy the array of colors that surround you. The clear blue sky, the pink flowers of the trees, and the lush green of the grass, their reflection in the water.. it's a sight to behold.

Cherry blossom trees are all over the city and were first gifted to Washington DC by Japan in 1912 to celebrate the nations' growing friendship. Now, The National Cherry Blossom Festival in spring attracts hundreds of thousands of tourists every year who come to the tidal basin from all over the world to see the extraordinary display of blossoming cherry trees and participate in the street festival (parade included). I'll share my festival experiences when I attend it this year between March 28th and April 6th.

For now, I just wanted to share a picture of the bark of the cherry blossom tree in front of my apartment building. After a beautiful fall, when the leaves of the trees transformed to the most vibrant shades of yellow, orange and red, winter erased all color and exposed the bare shiny barks. It is not one of the most appreciated features, but, I think it's lovely and nothing like I have seen on any other tree. The rich dark color, and the shine against the snow adds to the winter interest.

I will replace the picture below with an original from my camera, but for now this is a stock photo glimpse of one I found on the net after a long search.


I wonder what the technical term for a bark of this kind is. My guess is it's either a ring bark, going by the successive concentric periderms in a nice smooth pattern or a smooth bark because of the glossy thin sheets like those of Jatropha plants.

Naturalists, forgive my arrogance, but I've made up my mind! Smooth bark it is.

In the cherry blossom's shade
there's no such thing
as a stranger.
– Kobayashi Issa (English Version: Robert Hass)

Remember The HungerSite with a magic button that generates a cup of rice to the hungry for free? I always wondered if it was a prank. How could it be possible? But of course, it is. By clicking on the button, we are generating advertising revenue for their website, which makes it possible for them to donate a cup of rice to the hungry!

But even though the idea of helping without volunteering services or shelling a dime sounded good, it wasn't enough to make me do it. For some time, I set HungerSite as my homepage on the browser, and clicked on the button everyday before I did anything else. But soon, it got old. I didn't feel like it anymore. What was my cup of rice going to do!

Maybe I needed more value for the click, like a sack of rice instead of a cup. I most certainly needed something to boost my ego. I would have continued to click everyday if I had proof of people benefiting from it; if they met me in person or sent me a youtube video bowing down to me and saying Thank You. I needed something to tell me that I wasn't wasting my time. And not just that, I needed something to tell me that what they benefit from my click outweighs the effort it takes me to click everyday. Now, how is HungerSite supposed to do that? How much more easy can they make this process? They don't ask for money, they don't ask for services, not even time. All they want is a click a day.

Still, my homepage on the browser changed to Google. I went to The HungerSite only once in a while, when I felt philanthropic or guilty and now my visit is down to once every 6 months.

Over time, there were more click-to-donate sites on the web. In fact, this site called Daily Charity has a button that lets you donate to almost every click-to-donate site on the net in one go. So here's truly one site that does promise more value for a click. I can feed the hungry, stop breast cancer, plant more trees, increase illiteracy, prevent extinction of species … all in just one click.


Was that enough for me to do it? Not in the least bit. I needed more.

Recently, a friend's email to Free Rice roused my interest. It is a website with a vocabulary game. For every right answer to a vocabulary question, they donate 20 grains of rice to UN’s World Food Programme that distributes food in some of the world’s poorest countries.


Now, you may ask what English vocabulary and 20 grains of rice can do to the world. But I am told that they donate about 3,200,000,000 grains of rice (444445 cups of rice or 150000 pounds of rice or 7500 sacks of rice @ 20 lbs/sack) via this game every month.

What about English Vocabulary? They say, it will help you:

Formulate your ideas better
Write better papers, emails and business letters
Speak more precisely and persuasively
Comprehend more of what you read
Read faster because you comprehend better
Get better grades in high school, college and graduate school
Score higher on tests like the SAT, GRE, LSAT and GMAT
Perform better at job interviews and conferences
Sell yourself, your services, and your products better
Be more effective and successful at your job

Moreover the game is entertaining and has proved to be quite addictive so far. Tell me I fell for a marketing gimmick or that it is utterly disgusting that it took an entertaining game to provoke me to act, or even that what I am doing is not helping, but I just hope it sticks….. until something better comes my way that requires no clicking either. Some day, maybe fantasizing about a utopian world alone will do. But for now I will do good only if I am done good to!

My brother found this amazing music video of a french rock group called Mickey 3D. It's called Respire.

He said,

I was looking for a video for Ananya (his daughter) and came across this French video, which absolutely blew me away. I was completely mesmerized in the beginning, and the ending made me and Miru (his wife) reflect upon our future…

Trouble shopping for Valentine's Day? Guess what I found you.

Magic Global Warming Knickers! As the Knickers warm up the sea overcomes the land to show the effects of Global Warming.
100% Fair Trade Organic Cotton

Yup, That's exactly what we need! GreenKnickers with a message. There's obviously more on their website. Enjoy!

One of my anonymous readers sent me a link to this image of a tree branch bike a few months ago in response to my "This Bike Ain't No Lemon" post. I didn't care about it then, but ever since, google has been directing a lot of people to my blog.
I wish I knew where this image was taken. There is nothing about it online! sorry.

It looks like a chinese wooden bike but is definitely not a "working" model. It's more like an art sculpture. The misaligned wheels, the lack of seat or pedal, or even a steering method makes it seem less like a transportation device.

Here's a working chinese wooden bike that i found on Flickr, which was shot by Ken Power in Kashgar, China. It even has wooden wheels!






There are tons of really fascinating wooden bikes online. In fact, woodenbikes.com is a really amazing website by Tom Kabat, who builds really unusual bicycles and shares his design techniques on his site.






But, what really caught my attention was this post on on cobbers.com

Handmade wooden bicycles are part of daily life in rural Rwanda.They’re not playthings either, and are used as virtual trucks to move goods and often to carry water.In December 2005, Tom Ritchey [pictured with a Rwandan friend] and Gary Boulanger, directors of Servant Leaders Outreach, toured Rwanda by mountain bike. A short DVD documentary was filmed to capture their Rwandan experience, the first for both. The trip opened their eyes to the beauty of the people and the need to assist Rwanda in its continuing reconciliation 12 years after the genocide that killed nearly one million people in 100 days.By February 2006, Project Rwanda was established.It’s vision is to “further the economic development of Rwanda through initiatives based on the bicycle as a tool and symbol of hope. Our goal is use the bike to help boost the Rwandan economy as well as re-brand Rwanda as a beautiful and safe place to do business and visit freely.

It's interesting to think of a bike as a missionary or a symbol of progress for a country. There is not just one organization but many working on just that. For instance, Bikes To Rwanda provides cargo bicycles to co-operative coffee farmers in Rwanda, with the hope that it will improve their quality of life.

From Wooden Bike Coffee website:

Rwanda is a tiny African country surrounded by volcanoes and gorilla habitats. The bicycle is a symbol of progress for Rwanda, yet only 1 out of 40 can afford a bike, so they make them out of wood. These wooden bikes allow the growers to haul several hundred pounds of coffee cherries to the finishing stations quickly. This efficiency increases the premium they receive for fresh delivery. The bicycle is the perfect tool for this transport because of its lower maintenance technology and it allows growers to manage their own transport infrastructure without overly large investments. Hope for a better world shines through the smiles of each Rwandan; the heart of its people is what makes Rwanda so beautiful, a true “Land of a Thousand Hills.” And the Rwandan Rusenyi coffee bean makes distinctly rich and delicious coffee.

Here is another interesting wooden bike made out of beech plywood. It's called Renovatia, and is by Jens Eichler (the guy riding in front). It may not be all-wood but is definitely hi-tech and looks sleek and has a very polished finish.

There are many more peculiar looking wooden bikes online. Also try searching for wooden motorcycles and cars. You'll be amazed at the variety of peculiar wooden vehicles there is around the world!

I wanted to add this to my previous post on "Metal Birds" but decided to give it its own space.

Who said car wheels are the only things that deserve decorative disks? Sculptor Ptolemy Elrington, the creator and owner of Hubcap Creatures in Brighton, England makes magnificent fishes out of discarded hubcaps.

From the website:

"Hubcap creatures are made entirely from re-cycled materials. All the hubcaps are found, usually on the side of the road, and therefore bear the scars of their previous lives in the form of scratches and abrasions. I believe these marks add texture and history to the creatures they decorate, and so choose not to fill, overpaint or alter them in any way."

I have seen this kind of work before, but the use of reclaimed or recycled material to make art pieces is still fascinating. I dont know what it brings out more, the nature of value or the value of nature.


I learnt about Ptolemy first on reading a book called "cool green stuff" that features a gallery of environmentally friendly products. Soon, I made it to his website and then to several blogs and articles about him. He works with an organization called rivercare to improve the riverside environments in the Anglian Water region. As part of one of their campaigns to reclaim riversides as vibrant green spaces, and educate people on the harms (to wildlife and humans) of dumping litter in the river, he created huge sculptures of river creatures out of shopping carts and other rubbish that he pulled out of these rivers. I still cant wrap my head around the fact that there were so many shopping carts in these rivers and water canals (unless the local groceries have pet-food aisles underwater!). The Anglian Water channels provide drinking water services to over 2 and a half million properties in East Anglia and East Midlands!

The "Rivercare Trolley Art Campaign", was recently the winner of the 2007 PR Week Award.

There was an episode on Seinfeld, where George Costanza is extremely angry about receiving a "donation for charity" instead of a christmas gift, so he takes revenge by making up his own charity and handing out fake donations as gifts to people.

I was reminded of that episode while designing "thank you" greeting cards for my organization. The cards are handed out to people who donate money for a project as a gift to a loved one.

Donating for a cause in the name of someone instead of giving them a gift is a very noble idea. I knew it could work well (in concept) but it was only in the last few weeks that I witnessed how enriching the whole experience can be.


My organization participated in some Alternative Gift Fairs and I went to one as a representative. The event was held in Takoma Park, MD and about two dozen organizations set up their tables with interesting posters and articles and waited anxiously for visitors to come and learn about the most pressing problems in the world and what these organizations (and through them these visitors) can do to make a difference!

So here's how it worked. As soon as the visitors entered, they were given a gift form with a list of the participating organizations and their "gift options".

They walked by each table and browsed through the displays and talked to the representatives about the organizations work (in as much detail as the visitor liked) and picked up a handful of brochures and cards to "learn more" later.


There was Ashoka's HeroRat.org, an organization that trains rats to sniff out landmines to save people's lives; there was Las Pacayas giving academic scholarships to girls as an incentive to attend school; there was Internews Network giving out wind-up radios to refugees in Pakistan and Chad... among many others.

Surprisingly, we were the only environmental organization at the fair, and an international one at that. In an attempt to broaden the impact of gift giving to include sustainable development projects and the environment, my organization offered three environmental business training projects to support youth and women entrepreneurs to start and run successful businesses in Africa as Alternative Gifts.

Our first gift option was to help the youth in Kibera slums produce mini solar panels that can charge cell phones or any electronic device; The second was to help women make low-cost briquets (small round discs made out of agricultural waste such as leaves, paper, sawdust...) that can be used instead of charcoal as a cheaper, healthier and more eco-friendly fuel alternative; and the third was to provide renewable energy training to individuals wanting to learn how to convert waste into fuel.

While the work done by each organization was impressive, I was taken aback by the large number of visitors who attended the gift fair. Imagine, spending a good half of your regular weekend in some charity gift fair! How does one pick a fair to attend? Where do they hear about it? What motivates them to get off the couch on a Sunday morning and drag their entire family to learn about different social issues? I talk about wanting to do a lot of things, but I never get around to them unless I'm forced to, and somehow assumed that it was okay to be that way because there are a lot of people in this world who are as lazy and unpersevering as me. But, now I feel terrible after seeing how little I actually do in comparison with a lot of other active and socially conscious people around me.

I am yet to find out how much money we made during the event and don't think I will until the end of next month. I hear the gift fair made over a hundred thousand dollars in gift donations last year.

Anyway, now that it is all over and done with, I ask myself if I would honor someone with a charity donation on their behalf... and I know I will not! At least not as a gift. I spent a lot of money donating to organizations at the fair, but realized the picking a cause to donate to is a personal decision that involves not just money, but a lot of emotions and a certain set of beliefs. It's best done on your own and for your own satisfaction than as a gift, unless you are very sure that your loved ones will be pleased with your donating money to a specific cause as a gift to them.

I also find that making a donation a "gift" in a way "objectifies" the social issue, even though it does benefit it at some level. It also encourages big-headedness or self-aggrandizing. I am also not convinced that it serves as a long term solution. That said, I like the idea of providing "training" as a gift, like my organization does. Business training is one that will last a lifetime and will continue to multiply as entrepreneurs share their success with their families and communities. It could make a good "gift" but more than that it is something I would donate to anyway, not just as a gift.

Moreover, I love giving and receiving gifts. Even thinking about tearing a gift-wrap open to see what's inside gives me goose-bumps! =) But, what I took from this gift fair experience is really that I would like to put a conscious effort into buying gifts that are purposeful. Buying a gift takes up a lot of time and energy. It only makes sense to mitigate the damage that choosing the wrong gift does (both in terms of product wastage as well as the heartache it causes) by picking useful, eco-friendly gifts. I know that for every giftable product in this world, there is an eco-friendly alternative. So it's not hard to make that choice.

Come to think of it, the overall environmental impact of gift-giving holidays (like Christmas and diwali) is huge. We are not just wasting money, but leaving a massive ecological footprint. Right from the millions of chopped down trees, to home decorations, to megawatts of power usage from single-use flashing lights, to wrapping papers, bouquets, ... the list is endless.

But, it's motivating to see people adopting new Christmas traditions and willing to make slight adjustments from gift-giving to the moment of celebration, to make their holidays special for their families, friends while honoring the earth and its people =) Happy Holidays!

Tapi insists that I should put this on my blog with "Mega-Nerd to the Power of Nutcase" as title. We were looking out the patio when I saw a tree that was completely red on one side and green on the other and I said "It looks like this tree can't make up its mind on whether it is coniferous or deciduous". =)
In my defense, that does NOT qualify me as nerd or even fractional nerd because:
a) They are not opposites and may have been if i said "evergreen" instead of coniferous.
b) The statement was simply a memorizing mechanism owing to that brilliant Nature Handbook that I have become addicted to. I challenge anyone to pick it up (and peruse for at least thirty seconds) and not be enslaved by it.
c) Most importantly, I don't even know if that statement makes sense, thereby proving that I was wrong and that in itself automatically disqualifies me as nerd.

(commiting to memory: coniferous deciduous coniferous deciduous ... deciduous diminishing coniferous evergreen deciduous diminishing coniferous evergreen ... )

There was a great roman philosopher in the 1st century called Seneca the Elder who said “Give yourself time and room; what reason could not avoid, delay has often cured”
I find that I am reminded of this quote as I think of the toucans I saw a few months ago at the National Zoo in Washington DC. I had been meaning to write about them, but never really got around to it. The toucan is as tiny as a crow but with a spectacular beak that’s at least half as big as the rest of its body. As I was standing in front of their display admiring their bright, multicolored beaks, a birder and his wife came over. The man tilted his head slightly upwards and observed the bird keenly through his glasses and said “these guys love to be scratched”. I thought that was a very odd thing to say about a bird. I quickly asked “You mean petted?”. He nodded without looking at me and said “No, scratched.” I said, “Wow, I would never have associated scratching with birds” At this point, he turned towards me and said “Oh no, it’s not unusual. A lot of birds love to be scratched and cuddled. They even purr when you show them affection.” I was amused to hear this, but still wanted to google to find out if what he said about scratching was true. In the mean time, I asked if they fly, to which he said “with some difficulty” and he wondered if it had anything to do with the size of the beak and I thought that was natural. I imagined that the beak probably weighed as much as the rest of its body, to which he responded that the beak is in fact hollow and therefore very light and is made of keratin, just like our fingernails, which is also why they are fugivorous and prefer small berries as they cannot bite or crunch food very well.
I rushed home and found a website that completely concurred with him. I wonder if his knowledge about the bird came from the very same source. I want to share other things I learnt from the website:

The function of their enormous bill has puzzled scientists for a long time. What use is such an instrument? It is not a weapon, the toucan's usual enemies being much too strong to be fooled by even the heftiest bill. It is not a special tool for gathering food, since all toucans are frugivorous, and eat berries, seeds, and ripe fruit. A shorter, more solid bill would do just as well! Some ornithologists think it is simply a distinguishing feature, a visual threat to would-be competitors. But this hypothesis is not very convincing, since the bill of both the male and the female is exactly the same. So the mystery of the toucan's bill remains unsolved!
Toucans are very noisy members of the jungle society, and live in smallish communities, equivalent to several families. They are related to the woodpeckers, and appropriate holes in tree trunks in the same way. One might well ask how a bird like a toucan manages to sleep at the bottom of a tight-fitting hole. Quite simply, it bends double; the beak is twisted round and rests on its back, its tail is folded up on to its breast, its wings wrap round the rest of its body - and voila! A feathery ball!
During their nuptial display, both partners play a game which consists of throwing berries to each other or tossing them between them with their beaks.

But, after obsessing over toucans these last few months, one visit to the Baltimore National Aquarium changed everything. I am preoccupied with Puffins now. They are the most adorable birds I have seen. They are black and white birds with bright red beaks and can be best placed between a parrot and a penguin. Yup! The impossible is possible. There was one particular puffin that was darn adorable. He wobbled towards the glass screen that stood between us and stared at the audience for quite some time before he dived into the water and swam away. I hear they even fly very well. A puffin’s wings can beat up to 400 times a minute and they move so fast that they become a blur and resemble a football. After seeing them wobble on the ground like a penguin, it was hard to envisage an efficiently flying bird. They are even called the "clowns of the sea". It seems, we got to see them before their bills turned from red to gray to adapt to winter and are usually brightest during spring time, which is their mating season.

We have lived in Washington DC for over four years now and yet, quite embarrassingly, this is the first time that I have taken an interest in watching the birds in the city. The ring-billed gulls that fly towards the on-lookers at the Capitol, the friendly mallards by the reflection-pools that allow tourists to pat them, the house sparrows at the plaza, the bluebirds in the backyard, the purple martins that we see once in the while, and the little red bird sitting on the snow covered branches in winter have come and gone without much fanfare. It’s time to rectify oversight and watch some birds! =)

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A few days ago, my brother went to his friend's farm in Mocaco, Brazil. When he saw this post on my blog, he wrote that he saw a couple of toucans flying around and sent me this picture of one on top of a tree.


I was so excited to hear that and could only imagine how much more exciting it must have been for him to have witnessed them flying at such close proximity. He also said, he saw a lot of other pretty birds in Brazil that I'm hoping he will share pictures of soon. I really wish I was there to see the birds myself. Maybe some day!

But, now I wonder what the birder meant when he said the toucans can fly "with some difficulty". My brother said they seemed to be flying very well. After I published this post yesterday, I also learnt from another site that they eat small insects, and therefore are not entirely frugivorous, even though they feed on fruit for most part. I wonder if I misunderstood the birder or if he didn't know much himself. They do have weak beaks, and cant crunch very well, so I think I should give him the benefit of the doubt! =)

This tiny yo-yo like gadget generates electricity. You pull the cord repeatedly for a minute and build enough electricity to power up your ipod for hours (1 pull = 1 song)
It’s light, it’s cool, it’s ingenious, you save on electricity, save the environment… it’s win-win all the way. Believe it or not, it can power everything from rechargeable batteries to house lighting, cell phones to GPS, and even laptops.

I can’t wait to get my hands on it. But, here’s the kicker. Imagine sitting in a slum with no power, but a working laptop! Isn’t that tremendous? Potenco, the company that make’s this product has created an alliance with the “One Laptop Per Child project” that will provide laptops to children in developing countries. And each laptop will come with this yo-yo that will charge their computers to circumvent the need for electricity to use advanced technology.

A few days ago, the environmental organization I work at introduced me to the Juice Bag, a laptop bag that powers laptops on the move using solar energy. It’s incredible that we have advanced to a point where we can charge cell phones, gps units, or even laptops anywhere in the world.

Then I learnt about mini solar panels that can charge phones and radios using just a car charger adapter. They are being sold by Kibera slum dwellers. Kibera is the world’s largest slum located near Nairobi, where the average wage is about $1 a day. The solar panel is made with discarded industry material and takes only few minutes to put together and can sell for $5, which is an incredible income source for these dwellers. The panel itself looks unsophisticated, but the idea that something as primitive looking as that can serve as a charger of hi-tech devices should be incentive enough to buy.


Coming back to yo-yo’s, there’s another one that’s making listening to music a ton of fun. The ReGEN yo-yo has an in-built mp-3 player that can be charged for an hour with just 10 to 12 tosses. What more? When you are bored and have nothing to do with your hands, you can yo-yo while you listen to music and perfect your skill. Say goodbye to adapters and extra batteries. This one even comes with a wireless headset. Isn’t that a dream come true?

I’m not a yo-yoer, but for some reason, as is the case with million other things, I know a few things about the yo-yo. =) It may have to do with my dad living in Philippines for a bit (you’ll see why), or just the fact that I am by and large a collector of useless information. But, as luck would have it, my yo-yo knowledge has found a place in my blog today. =)

For a long time I thought yo-yos were invented in Phillipines (the dad-connection) in the early 1800s and indeed yo-yo is a Filipino word that means “to spin”. Wikipedia concurs with me. I also learnt that they were first manufactured in the United States in the State of Wisconsin during the Depression Era and therefore Wisconsin is dubbed the “Yo-yo capital of the world”. There's even a World Yo-yo Championship takes place in the United States in Florida!

Since last week, this knowledge on yo-yos increased owing to some of the emails I received in gmail about green yo-yo technology among other things. It turns out, gmail advertisements are not as unobtrusive as they say they are. They display “relevant” advertisements on the sidebar related to the text within the emails. So, I clicked on yoyoguy.com, a yoyo treasure trove that we never knew existed. And eventually wikipediaed yo-yo and googled yoyo history!

My dull work-day quickly transformed into a top-spinning adventurous. Apart from gathering trivia facts about yo-yo related world records and companies making yo-yo training videos, I found the ultimate yoyo website online belonging to the “Museum of Yo-yo” . I saw some fantastically designed yo-yos of the past, and learnt a great deal about the history. It turns out that while they originated in China, the first evidence of its existence was found in Greece way back in 400-500 BC. It’s all very fascinating information with paintings of royalty in different countries with yo-yos in them, to knowledge on the most suitable shapes for yo-yos, the artistic design qualities, yo-yo’s as a sport toy, the different materials used to make them etc.

More recently a man called Tom Kuhn is said to have revolutionized yo-yo technology and brought the gadget back to life. Almost all the innovations we see in yoyos today are supposed to have been inspired by his designs.

But, of all yo-yo related innovations, I find the new energy use that they are being put to, the most exciting.

I love Joe Pogans work. He creates fascinating animal sculptures using nuts and bolts and other discarded-metal objects that he finds here and there. On his website he talks about his style: "I start by welding a frame to make the general shape. Then I weld or braze the metal objects one at a time, to form the outer shell of the sculpture. I use a "blending" technique that leaves no space between the objects, so the sculpture looks solid. This allows me to hide interesting objects all over each piece, which enhances the excitement of discovery. Some of the works are mounted on a hardwood base that I finish with natural oil."

Animal sculpting seems to be a recurrent theme with a lot of ecoist artists. While that's "natural" (no pun intended), what's interesting is the use of metal for these sculptoral creations. Come to think of it, I don't see why not. Metal is a very versatile and textural design element which appeals very well to our visual senses. It is long-lasting and is one of the most recyclable or reusable materials we know and are familiar with. It's only an added bonus that these artists decided not to buy metal but make use of metal that already exists in familiar product forms.


For instance, Anna Built creates colorful metal birds with abandoned cans and bins. I find her work fascinating, because it's colorful and ingenious. More than that however, it takes me back in time. As a kid, I used to visit a city fair (that we call the exhibition) with my friends and relatives. Like in any part of the world, a visit to the fair generally meant the fun rides on the roller coasters and the ferris wheel (that was human powered in India), magic shows and bike shows, and loads of popcorn and flavor-free pink cotton candy. Now that's the fair bit. There was also the exhibition bit, where craftsmen and other small sellers sold everything from beautiful clothes and artwork to cheap vinyl and rubber toys in hundreds of haphazardly organized stalls. The whole ambience was a multi-sensory experience. Coming back to the stalls, there were some toys that I always came back with - the yo-yo, the slinky spring toy, and a metal click toy (i wish i knew what it is called) made with old tins.. I should have had a huge collection of these by now, if not for the fact that I was (and still am) quite short-sighted. The best part of the click toys, apart from the click itself is the fact that I could sometimes identify what purpose they served before they were converted to toy form. Usually, they were paint cans or old tins with "caution" labels on them. There were even some with a lot of text, making them borderline questionable. Anyway, of all metals toys, I wish I bought one type of toy that I always avoided then. They were the discarded-metal wind-up toys, usually a walking parrot, a clapping monkey or a dented car. I really see them in new light today (the wistful mushy reminiscence light).

There is one artist whom I find particularly inspiring today. Going by the hundreds of pages on google about him, I can say with some certainty that he is very popular.

Joseph Cornell is an artist with absolutely no formal art training. However, his love for surrealism (note: not the environment or recycling) inspired him to make some very beautiful collages. He shopped local junk shops and dime stores and used his collection of maps, toys, marbles, springs, feathers and sequins to create boxes "filled with fantasy and longing".

My apartment is filled with junk. I don't even need to make a trip to a junk store. So with some inspiration and patience, I should be able to explore l'art de junk sculpture. I have nothing stopping me (except, not having a creative bent of mind!)

I am just adding this post for my own future reference. When I log into my Blogger dashboard everyday, I read the "Blogger Buzz" for links to interesting sites on the net and other activities.
Since I've become a "wannabe Ecoist", these inspiring environmental blogs will keep me occupied for a bit.
There are so many methods to this environmental madness and I am still struggling to find mine. The more I soak up information on what I can do, the more guilty I am of my indifference. I have made a lot of changes to my life, from the way I live to what I do for a living, but my effort pales in comparison with the millions of environmentalists who have been doing marvelous things to restore our world and our ethical fiber.

Environmental Blog Roundup

In honor of Blog Action Day, we wanted to highlight some of the many Blogger-powered blogs that are focused on the environment, climate change, and sustainability. Want to see more Blog Action Day participants from around the web? Find them on Blog Search.

• Cleantech Blog - Commentary on technologies, news, and issues relating to next generation energy and the environment.
• The Conscious Earth - Earth-centered news for the health of air, water, habitat and the fight against global warming.
• Earth Meanders - Earth essays placing environmental sustainability within the context of other contemporary issues.
• Environmental Action Blog - Current environmental issues and green energy news.
• The Future is Green - Thoughts on the coming of a society that is in balance with nature.
• The Green Skeptic - Devoted to challenging assumptions about how we live on the earth and protect our environment.
• Haute*Nature - Ecologically based creative ideas, art & green products for your children, home and lifestyle, blending style with sustainability.
• The Lazy Environmentalist - Sustainable living made easy.
• Lights Out America - A grassroots community group organizing nationwide energy savings events.
• The Nature Writers of Texas - The best nature writing from the newspaper, magazine, blog and book authors of the Lone Star State.
• Rachel Carson Centennial Book Club - Considering the legacy of Rachel Carson's literary and scientific contributions with a different book each month.
• Sustainablog - News, information and personal meanderings related to environmental and economic sustainability, green and sustainable business, and environmental politics.
• These Come From Trees - An experiment in environmentalism, viral marketing, and user interface design with the goal of reducing consumer waste paper.

— Graham

Great! How is this supposed to make me feel? Suddenly size matters and not that I am the center of the universe!

In this game of marbles, we can clearly see how the sun performs against some of the largest stars. Our earth of course is insignificant.

Antares is a star that belongs to Constellation Scorpius. He is 700 times the diameter of our Sun, and 10,000 times brighter (We'll see about that!). And what does Bright Mr.Antares do? He expels a lot of gas that glows brightly and is visible to us from 600 light years away. Ah, see? Flatulence that glows. But, there is one thing Antares can't do, which is stink up the place. Hah! There!

The saying goes:
"Don't blow it - good planets are hard to find”

Now let's try to figure out what that means from the piddling earthlings perspective.

This is the ground-breaking all-natural Calfee Bamboo Racer Bike made using bamboo tubes and industrial hemp fiber lugs. It's surprisingly one of the smoothest bikes available for professional bikers, with much better vibration damping, crash tolerance and performance frame than it's carbon fiber competitor. It's now being touted as a cheap and sustainable transportation alternative. The bike has already gone from Santa Cruz to Ghana, with the idea of providing the impoverished with mobility. Unfortunately, I'll have to wait long before I can afford one. The bike you see is the $3,195 version being sold to pros in the US. Obviously Ghanan's will be riding a less sophisticated version. Hopefully, so will I... soon!

So what is it like driving a recyclable car? When I heard a Ford employee proclaim that the concept of “gas stations” will soon be alien to his son, I sat there amazed gaping at the television screen.


The employee was talking about the Ford Model U, a concept car that’s powered by a hydrogen duel cell supercharged engine that emits absolutely no carbondioxide and is 25% more fuel efficient than a gasoline engine. What is more, all of the parts are recyclable or biodegradable including: recyclable polyester seats, dash, steering wheel, door trim, corn-based biopolymer roof and carpet mats; corn-based fillers in the rubber tires to improve rolling resistance and thus fuel economy; soy-based composite resins for the rear tailgate and side panels; soy-based composite foam for seating; and lightweight, recyclable aluminum body.*

As soon as the film ended, I rushed to the computer to google Ford Model U and found not one, but several cars that have been working on alternative fuels and hybrid models. No just that, companies are coming up with revolutionary concepts to create high performance cars, including supercars and sports cars that are completely eco-friendly throughout it’s life cycle – in the way they are produced, used and then disposed.

It’s not surprising that motor vehicles are the most environmentally damaging consumer products on the planet. Therefore, it is not unpredictable that there are many companies trying to make more fuel efficient cars. What is disturbing is our deliberate rejection of green cars even when we know that they are as cool and sleek as some of the top notch cars we long to drive. In most cases, we can’t even tell the difference. Then why do we kill green cars, especially when they are more efficient and much less expensive in the long run? We were unjustly absolved of killing the electric car because of our ignorance and our ambivalence to new technology. But now that the damage is done, it’s time to redeem ourselves.

Links about Green Cars:
•How to Green Your Car
•Top Green Cars
•Green Car
•What Green Car
•Green Cars: A Guide to Cleaner Vehicle Production, Use and Disposal

My favorite Green Car films:
•Who Killed the Electric Car?
•Big Ideas for a Small Planet: Paper or Plastic

*from Sundance’s description of the Ford Model U.

Green is getting to my head. I spent a lot of time learning why I need to embrace an environmentally-friendly lifestyle and what that even means, not to mention how to go about it. Finally, I see myself making some changes.

1. It’s neither paper nor plastic for me. I use recyclable, reusable shopping bags for everything from grocery to frivolous shopping.

2. The plastic bags I have at home have found a new purpose. I don’t think I’ll need to buy trash bags anymore. My old plastic bags hold all kinds of garbage – in the car, in the kitchen, in the bathroom. They also serve as packing material.
I am learning how to make wastebaskets, tote bags and rugs out of them. But for now, I use them, abuse them, until they can serve no purpose, and then find a way to dispose of the clean ones at a plastic recycling store, along with other recyclable plastic stuff.

3. I try to avoid using Seran food wraps as they are non-recyclable.

4. Vinyl scares me. Vinyl's everywhere.

5. I sterilize and reuse undamaged plastic bottles. In fact, I recycle and reuse everything, from paper in every form - cardobard, newspapers, magazines, shopping bags, junkmail, used A4 sheets, toilet roll centers, resealable envelopes, egg cartons to glass bottles and containers to non-plastic-but-obscure cans and boxes, to broken crockery. And I am getting more and more creative at giving them a new life and a new purpose.

5. I am on a sustainable clothes, shoes and accessories hunt. I saw an inspiring documentary film about eco-friendly clothes and learnt that Linda Loudermilk makes fashionable clothes using recycled soda cans, bamboo, sea cell, soya, and other organic, natural, healthy sustainable fabric. They looked so beautiful that I have decided to go completely organic on clothes. I have found so many stores and the choice is abundant that I don’t see a reason to buy non-eco-friendly stuff anymore. I only wish vegetable-dyed clothes didn't bleed color. Wendy Tremayne’s Swap-O-Rama-Rama is also an exciting do-it-yourself workshop that explores recycling of old clothes, bags and shoes through reusing, in a creative way. Unfortunately, they don’t have a Swap in DC and I’m not inspired enough to start one. But, I will reuse old clothes and recycle or donate the ones that I can’t use.

6. Treehugger has inspired me to go organic and local with my food choices. I didn’t realize mainstream production was such an expensive and unhealthy affair, until I learnt about the production process and the extravagant usage of gasoline and petroleum resources, toxic chemicals and energy worldwide to produce what can be produced simply and easily but cutting down or completely eliminating expenditure- locally and organically.

7. I am powering everything down. I keep the windows open and let as much light into my apartment as possible to save on power. Life is suddenly more interesting. I saw four deer outside my apartment today.
I unplug my microwave and other appliances when they are not in use. I also turn off the TV when I don’t watch it.
I can’t seem to shutdown my computer without feeling the withdrawal symptoms within 10 minutes. So now I listen to music on my computer, instead of turning on the music system. I need good speakers, but my headphones are awesome. I don’t use the AC in summer. I am not sure if I can say that confidently in winter.

8. I use cold water whenever possible.

9. Luckily, my lethargy has facilitated less cooking and therefore little use of gas.

10. I have always been a vegetarian, but now I am rethinking what it really means. I am trying to figure out where I should draw the line and am strongly leaning towards the “as long as it doesn’t feel bad” motto instead of the “as long as it feels good” motto. More work to do in this area.

Click here for the basic Green Guide. This most certainly does not encompass everything there is to green living, but it's a motivating first step.