Once the old chestnuts of patriotism and nationalism are pulled out, it is impossible to argue further. From this self-righteous pedestal, the ‘patriot’ will dismiss or paint anyone who has even a remotely contradictory view as a treacherous traitor who is ungrateful to his/her mother/fatherland.….What is deplorable is Ramakrishnan's equation and linkage of something as lofty and noble as patriotism and nationalism with something as banal and ridiculous as the clogging of his e-mail accounts and a general disgust at being troubled by his countrymen.
… Patriotism, at its core, has an intersection of noble values. … These are the values of link and affinity with a culture, a people, a territory and a national identity. It is his sentiment alone which connects India and Indians, despite this country being the greatest aggregation of diversities on this planet."
I suppose earlier generations had to sit through all this huffing and puffing with the invention of television, the phone, cinema, radio, the car, the bicycle, printing, the wheel and so on, but you would think we would learn the way these things work, which is this:
1) everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal;
2) anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;
3) anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.
Apply this list to movies, rock music, word processors and mobile phones to work out how old you are.
“Our children, however, are doing something completely different. Risto Linturi, research fellow of the Helsinki Telephone Corporation, quoted in Wired magazine, describes the extraordinary behaviour kids in the streets of Helsinki, all carrying cellphones with messaging capabilities. They are not exchanging important business information, they’re just chattering, staying in touch. "We are herd animals," he says. "These kids are connected to their herd – they always know where it’s moving." Pervasive wireless communication, he believes will "bring us back to behaviour patterns that were natural to us and destroy behaviour patterns that were brought about by the limitations of technology."
Update : Tyler Cowen explains, in an article, that far from reducing our attention span, technologies such as the Internet help in widening it.
The Dalai Lama is credited with these lines:
"We have bigger houses but smaller families:
We have more degrees but less sense;
more knowledge but less judgements;
more experts but more problems;
more medicines, but less healthiness.
We've been all the way to the moon and back,
but we have trouble crossing the street
to meet the new neighbour.
We build more computers
to hold more information,
to produce more copies than ever,
but we have less communication.
We have become long on quantity
but short on quality.
These are times of fast foods,
but slow digestion;
tall man, but short character;
steep profits, but shallow relationships.
It is time when there is much in the window
but nothing in the room."
I came across another profound piece of Internet wisdom today:
“We live in a society where pizza gets to your house before the police”.
My advice to you would be:
1) Don't eat fast food
2) Don't eat food. Fast.
"Hire ugly. All other things being equal, I'd give the nod to an ugly candidate. It’s not charity: They have less value in the marketplace and can be hired less expensively, even though looks have, for most jobs, little or no bearing on job performance. I've found that, on average, ugly people are more likely to be kind and to work harder because they know they're working at a disadvantage. And unattractive people are more likely to stay with me because they tend to have a tough time getting hired, in part because they generally don’t network efficiently. If I treat unattractive employees well, they’re usually very loyal. (source)"
"On receiving civil charge of the district (Jubbulpore) in March, 1828, I issued a proclamation prohibiting any one from aiding or assisting in suttee; and distinctly stating, that to bring one ounce of wood for the purpose would be considered as so doing.
...On Tuesday, 24th November, 1829, I had an application from the heads of the most respectable and most extensive family of Brahmans in the district, to suffer this old widow to burn herself with the remains of her husband, Omed Sing Opuddea, who had that morning died upon the banks of the Nerbudda. I threatened to enforce my order, and punish severely any man who assisted; and placed a police guard for the purpose of seeing that no one did so. She remained sitting by the edge of the water without eating or drinking.
...Her sons, grandsons, and some other relations, remained with her, while the rest surrounded my house, the one urging me to allow her to burn, and the other urging her to desist. She remained sitting upon a bare rock in the bed of the Nerbudda, refusing every kind of sustenance, and exposed to the intense heat of the sun by day, and the severe cold of the night, with only a thin sheet thrown over her shoulders. On Thursday, to cut off all hope of her being moved from her purpose, she put on the Dhujja, or coarse red turban, and broke her bracelets in pieces, by which she became dead in law, and for ever excluded from caste. Should she choose to live after this, she could never return to her family.
...On Saturday the 28th, in the morning, I rode out ten miles to the spot, and found the poor old widow sitting with the dhujja round her head, a brass plate before her with undressed rice and flowers, and a cocoa-nut in each hand. She talked very collectedly, telling me, that "she had determined to mix her ashes with those of her departed husband, and should patiently wait my permission to do so, assured that God would enable her to sustain life till that was given, though she dared not eat or drink."
...She held out her arm, and said —" My pulse has long ceased to beat—my spirit has departed—and I have nothing left but a little earth that I wish to mix with the ashes of my husband—I shall suffer nothing in burning; and if you wish proof, order some fire, and you shall see this arm consumed without giving me any pain." I did not attempt to feel her pulse, but some of my people did, and declared that it had ceased to be perceptible.
...Satisfied myself that it would be unavailing to attempt to save her life, I sent for all the principal members of the family, and consented that she should be suffered to burn herself. As she rose up, fire was set to the pile, and it was instantly in a blaze. The distance was about one hundred and fifty yards—she came on with a calm and cheerful countenance—stopped once, and casting her eyes upward said—" Why have they kept me five days from thee, my husband!" On coming to the sentries her supporters stopped—she walked once round the pit, paused a moment; and while muttering a prayer threw some flowers into the fire. She then walked up deliberately and steadily to the brink, stepped into the centre of the flame, sat down, and leaning back in the midst as if reposing upon a couch, was consumed without uttering a shriek or betraying one sign of agony!
...I am persuaded that it was the desire of again being united to her husband in the next world, and the entire confidence that she would be so if she now burned herself, that alone sustained her. From the morning of the day he died, Tuesday, till Wednesday evening, she ate pawns or betel leaves, but nothing else and from Wednesday evening she ceased eating them. She drank no water from Tuesday. She went into the fire with the same cloth about her that she had worn in the bed of the river; but it was made wet, from a persuasion, that even the shadow of any impure thing falling upon her when going to the pile contaminates the woman, unless counteracted by the sheet moistened in the holy stream."
“Darwin’s treatment of human evolution in his most famous work, 'On the Origin of Species', is limited to twelve portentous words: “Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history’. That is the wording of the first edition. By the sixth (and last) edition, Darwin allowed himself to stretch a point and the sentence became “Much light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history’. I like to think of his pen, poised over the fifth edition, while the great man judiciously pondered whether to indulge himself in the luxury of “Much’. Even with it, the sentence is a calculated understatement.”
“As for your use of language: Remember that two great masters of language, William Shakespeare and James Joyce, wrote sentences which were almost childlike when their subjects were most profound. “To be or not to be?” asks Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The longest word is three letters long. Joyce, when he was frisky, could put together a sentence as intricate and as glittering as a necklace for Cleopatra, but my favorite sentence in his short story “Eveline” is this one: “She was tired.” At that point in the story, no other words could break the heart of a reader as those three words do.
Simplicity of language is not only reputable, but perhaps even sacred. The Bible opens with a sentence well within the writing skills of a lively fourteen-year-old: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth”
..Given the lack of independent evidence, the rest of the world only has India's word about the size and scope of most of the announced blasts, or even whether they took place at all.
Certainly India already seems to be exaggerating its achievement. Estimates by Indian seismologists of the explosive energy of Monday's large blast are more than double those of American experts.
For the Monday series, India said one was a ''thermonuclear device,'' meaning it had more force than an atom bomb. And it said the tests on Wednesday were in the ''sub-kiloton range,'' meaning they had a force of less than 1,000 tons of high explosive.
A bizarre twist, given that India and Pakistan are old foes, is that the best seismic data on the Indian blast came from a seismometer in Pakistan, 435 miles from the Indian test site.
The seismogram of a Monday blast, held a hint of what was perhaps another blast signature.
The clue is a tiny ripple in the flat line of the tracing before it zigs and zags wildly as energy from the blast was received and recorded. That tiny blip, he said, might have been caused by an earthquake or a small bomb detonated just before the big one.
…The energy of the large blast appeared to be equal to about 25,000 tons of high explosive, or about half of what Indian scientists have claimed.
“For most people in the modern industrial world, the only way to get access to any kind of wealth – that is, any good or service – is to get access to money first, and exchange the money for the wealth. This makes it all too easy to confuse money with wealth, and it also fosters the habit of thought that treats money as the driving force in economic life, and thinks of wealth as a product of money, rather than seeing money as an arbitrary measure of wealth.”.And adds::
The thought experiment of placing a hundred economists on a desert island with $1 million each but no food or water is a good corrective to this delusion. Unfortunately this same experiment is being tried on a much vaster scale by the world’s industrial economies right now. We have seven billion people on a planet with a finite and dwindling supply of the concentrated energy resources that are keeping most of them alive, and governments and businesses alike are acting as though the only possible difficulty in this situation is coming up with enough money to pay for investments in the energy industry.
If economists took a wider view of the history of their discipline than they generally do, they might have noticed that what most of them consider a fundamental feature of all economies worth studying – the centrality of money – is actually a unique feature of an economic era defined by cheap abundant energy. Since the fossil fuels that made that era possible are being extracted at a pace many times the rate at which new supplies are being discovered, current assumptions about the role of money in society may be in for a series of unexpected revisions.
