Terror strikes Mumbai. Again. Again. and Again.

Terror has struck Mumbai again. The first time this happened in 1993 was in the form of serial bomb blasts, striking critical centers in the financial capital of India, killing scores of people. TADA was brought in and quite a few people were apprehended. After that? Nothing. People were sure sentenced but no government is ready to take any further action for fear of losing a critical vote bank. The next time it happened in 2006 in the form of train blasts. Each and every time something of this sort has happened, governments have done next to nothing to pre empt future attacks.
All that has been done is to "condemn the cowardly attacks in the strongest possible terms". And that "terrorists have no religion or compassion" and other sound bites such as these. Thank you Mr PM and Mrs President, but what's the outcome? Where are the friggin results? Terrorists still enjoy a free run in the country as and when they please. Our intelligence is a failure and our cops are a joke. This is India Shining? I have my doubts. As does everyone else. We have placed our faith in our leaders. We deserve to have our faith rewarded.
How long are we going to be like sitting ducks? But another thought strikes me. Those "leaders", the politicians that we elect year after year do not want us to be peaceful. They do not want us to look at all mankind as our brothers and sisters. You know why? Because the day that there is peace and equality in society, we won't need them any more. We would simply throw them away like a bad habit. Just the same way that no company will ever release a perfect product to the market. Because once a perfect product or a perfect system is in place, we would not need anything else anymore. In the buyer's market, consumer is king. Or so they would have us believe. No matter how much we consume or are able to afford to consume, they will always be on top. Don't you see? Consumer is never king. The consumer on the other hand, is always a slave. It is the producer who is king. He has been king, and will remain so till kingdom come.
Getting back to the moot topic. The voter very rarely if ever has any say in a democracy nor does he get what he deserves, or what he wants. Strange isn't it, that in a system of the people for the people and by the people, it is the people who have been conveniently sidelined? Isn't it funny that the person we voted for never leads us... That we only get led by some arbitrary third person who is most easily manipulable by all the tiny parties that join together at the crucial moment, prove majority and make an alliance under a creative sounding name.
In the process, we get what is coming to us. They say that democracy is a system of government that is no better than what the a country deserves. Maybe we do deserve this.

There will be anarchy...

I have been proved wrong! Of course, this is not the first time that I have been proved wrong, but it definitely is the first time that I am happy that I have been proved wrong. Apropos to my previous blog post ***** I see the governments of the world taking action, together, to combat climate change. The US government, which has, since time immemorial, sucked up to the Big 3, finds itself to have finally caught the GM-Ford-Chrysler cartel by the balls.

As the Big 3 find it unable to sustain themselves, no thanks to their own business models, the people see a change emerging from the sidelines. The darkest cloud truly has a silver lining. In this case, all the layoffs from the auto biggies the world over has got them wondering where things went wrong.
Primarily, it’s time folks realized that the Internal Combustion engine is a part of the past now. We cannot afford to sustain ourselves by burning gasoline and the sort to run our vehicles. Electric vehicles and mass transit is the way to go. This had to be seen about 30 years back, during the Oil embargo of the 70’s. But highly effective lobbying on the part of the Big 3 saw to it that this solution never struck the collective imagination nor did any such suggestion ever be passed by the Congress. Time and again, these companies have warded off requirements to increase fuel efficiency on their part, which was an extremely stupid thing to do. These guys obviously did not see the next curve coming. The way IBM had infamously said in the 50’s that the entire world required just 5 computers, and the way that Western Union had said that they thought that the telephone was an impractical invention, and scores of other such examples of bozocities, hence missing out on being the next big thing of the curve. The Big 3 ought to have quit the oil dependency in the 70’s and begun research on engines running on renewable, clean energy sources. But heck, no! What did they do? They maximized their profits by refusing to retool and to re-train their workers, and to do more research. With the amount of cash those companies sit on, they could very well have retained their top spots for all these years, saved the climate from being ruined the way it is being ruined now.
Next, This might sound like a chapter lifted straight out of the Zeitgeist Addendum, but it’s true nevertheless.  All the while that the world has been using dirty fuel sources such as coal and gas and nuclear energy to power its energy requirements, we should have forced our governments to go for clean energy sources such as Solar energy farms, Wind Farms, and Tidal energy. These energy sources have practically no repetitive costs such as buying oil, coal and gas and paying all those “friendly” governments to remain so and to then pay for all the externalities of using these dirty fuels. Think about Chernobyl, and the Polar Ice caps melting the way they are, threatening to raise sea levels by about 10 meters. Just imagine how the world would look like if things continue the way they are right now. London, Florida, Bangladesh, Australia, all submerged under the oceans. The number of climate refugees would be overwhelming and economies the world over would be thrown haywire by unexpected arrivals.
Unexpected? Think again. All this is a very very plausible scenario. And it is not an alarmist’s point of view. As politics in all countries fight for votes and power and money, the world is going down the drain. Literally. It’s time we stood up for ourselves. It’s time we stopped worrying about our jobs and our security and the sort. Because fairly soon, there will be nothing to worry about. If things continue the way they are today, there will be anarchy.

The Petro Dollar Scam

I recently got a mail from a friend about the PetroDollar Scam. I was completely astounded by its content. If what it claims is correct then a lot of my perceptions about the United States will have to change.
Firstly, we all should stop looking at the US through the lens of Hollywood, completely altruistic, and self righteous. What we to realize is that the US has never been dragged into any war thus far. They have had an underhand interest in all of their recent military incursions. They talk about the sovereignty of Georgia that Russia had recently pushed back. Georgia has always kissed the great big American ass and yet they were unable to get any help from their godfathers because Russia has recently emerged as an oil supplier. For a country that consumes over 25% of the world's oil supplies that is major incentive to not act!
Secondly, we should stop asking for US intervention for every goddamn issue that folks in a country have with any other country. Successive Pakistani governments have surreptitiously sought and received American help in the form of military aid, in the form of aid against Taliban(which the US itself supported at one point in time to chase the Russians out of Afghanistan). The global community must stop things like this from happening. American foreign policy has always been one to support its own ends in any local mess, even in Iraq. Under the veil of "restoring democracy", they have attacked sovereign countries. They have invaded invalid countries such as Nicaragua and Vietnam, getting the permissions for those wars from the Congress by depicting a false danger in the form of the US being "run over" by Nicaraguan Contras or the Commies in 'Nam.
Finally, I would really like to see ONE solid reason why we all trade in US Dollars when the currency clearly has no value. What will they do when folks come around asking the Fed for the real value of the US Dollar in gold? Is it that because they have an ulterior understanding with the Sauds, the rest of the world should keep the USD in their Forex? A currency that cannot stand for itself in the standard that is followed in the rest of the world? What are we so afraid of? Upsetting the established World Order? Have we asked who established the "world order" in the first place? Why should the rest of the world pay for the American Glutton so that he can have Mac Burgers n Fries to go, for free?
Don't get me wrong, America is a great country. A country where anyone who can dream it can do it. A country where the human will overpowers any other will. Inspite of all this, one must keep in mind what flimsy roots this country is standing upon. A house of cards, in due course, must collapse.

Demolition Accomplished

Here's a very interesting article I came across by Paul Krugman, okay it was shoved down my throat by the RSS reader, about Republican politics/policies and why the Democrats(Nancy Pelosi et al) are now exacting revenge on the Paulson $700 billion bailout plan. Read and enjoy!

Sub Prime crisis

I was in a very interesting discussion with a bunch of rather interesting people this evening. I actually got to know what the Sub Prime mortgage crisis was that destroyed the American banking sector. Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae have been bought off by the government, Nobody wants to touch Lehman Brothers right now, Bear Stearns has been totally annihilated, and now there are talks of Goldman Sachs going down too. Where does this end? These companies are the cornerstones of the American economy. With an absolute idiot for a President and another one closely competing for the next Presidency, I really fail to see where the world's so-called leading economy is headed. Well, I do see it going somewhere, but I really don't want to believe it. For years, generations have looked up at the US, emulating and well, just sucking up to them!
I really don't know if that's been such a great idea now. Their spending patterns are plain stupid. They waste the planet's resources like there's no tomorrow, and they think that everyone else in the world except for them is to be blamed. The global food crisis is blamed on increasing consumption by countries like India and China, whereas the real culprit happens to be the excessive wastage of food by developed countries like the US. They blame developing nations for increasing oil consumption whereas the US happens to consume about 25% of the total oil consumed in the world, even though the population fraction turns out to be much lesser than that; I'd say, 4%? Are the Americans really blind? Or is such the tragedy of their lives that they just cannot imagine life without consuming so much of the planet? So whether this is a moral question or not is up to you: Would you rather emulate the people of a country who are hell bent on destroying the planet, or would you stand up and be heard?
Buck the trend, make a difference. Don't be blind. The real tragedy is not when one is blind, but when there is no vision.

Sure has been a while...

Folks, It's quite a while since I've posted something my blog. First things first, there has been a bit of an upheaval at my end and just in case someone doesn't know about this, I quit my job at Aditi, Bangalore in July after completing a year and two days there, and moved back home to Jamshedpur. Not that I wasn't really satisfied with my job or anything, but I thought that it was time to move on to something new. People who know me since I was little will vouch for the fact that I was never really a computer geek/nerd. I had always preferred to be on the user end of the computer end, rather than a producer end, so that's that. No regrets, I'm happy I took the leap. There's this law that I heard of in the Last Lecture by Randy Pausch named the Law of Diminishing Intent that I had decided to beat.
This law says that if we put off something to later, we lose the passion and intensity to do it and we keep on postponing these life changing decisions until we put them on hold indefinitely and we finally give up on them because there are just 30 million reasons for not doing something, but not ONE excuse. So enough circumlocuting, let me take control of my blog and start putting something on it for a start!

The human being will become extinct one day

There's something wrong with the world today,
I dont know what it is,
Somethings wrong with our eyes,
We're seeing things in a different way,
God knows it ain't His,
Its surely no surprise,
Yeah, we're livin on the edge.

Steve Tyler wrote these words sometime when he saw the world crumbling to bits. It sure is crumbling to bits, isn't it? We humans are eating it all up. And we want more. More of the world to plunder and pillage. We don't want to stop. I had a passionate discussion with a friend of mine sometime back about this. She wanted data on Global Warming and climate change. Words tossed around too oft these days. What I don't understand is why do people actually lie to themselves in seeming interested in saving the Earth, per se, to look fashionable, perhaps?
The same people who "want" to do something are the same people who do not take a bus instead of an auto-rickshaw, the same people who go to the market and bring home polythene bags instead of carrying their own cloth bags with them, the same people who do not turn off their monitors before going home, the same people who waste half a dozen tissue papers each time they wash their hands. Those are the same people who buy a car with their hiked salaries and commute alone, leaving behind a gargantuan carbon footprint. And these people claim to be interested in saving Mother Earth?
We humans are the only species that I'm aware of that's capable of slaughtering it's own brethren. And finding better ways to do away with more and more of them. We clear out rainforests everyday, and yet we cringe when someone brings up the topic of Climate Change in a conversation. I have actually been in situations where people have turned around and walked off claiming to have "work" to do when this topic came up. So this friend of mine, she asks me, why don't people do anything about things they only talk about? I had just one answer for it. It's not like we can't change. It's more like we don't WANT to change. We dont want to make changes to the choices we make everyday. We don't want to change ourselves. We would rather make fun of someone making an honest effort rather than look within ourselves and think about whether what we're doing is right or not.
And at the end of it all, when we all would have died, and death and disease has claimed every one of us the very last human being will think, "Did we do this to ourselves?" but he would already know the answer.
It's true that the human being will become extinct one day. God knows, we deserve it.