Of Latitudes and Attidudes

A friend has me hooked to a program of helping . It's really a way to help the self and the way it works, one has to do an act of kindness every week and write about it (regrettably I manage at a much lower frequency). So recently when I was at a conference in Barcelona (home of Gaudi) I wondered, wouldn't it be great to do a little act of kindness in a far away city? I went through the lively La Rambla street - enjoying the scene and (in the back of my mind) looking for an opportunity of kindness - but I couldn't find something right away. It was mostly tourists and street vendors. Finally, I returned to the hotel past midnight when a haggardly old man came up and asked if I could buy a rose. He had not sold one all day and was tired and hungry. I had a friend with me. She warned me that this could be simply a 'line' to rope me in. But I knew what to do. I bought 2 roses, gave her one and walked inside the hotel lobby and surprised someone with the second rose. Ult...

I have mixed feelings about her. It was many cycles of learning, re-learning, and unlearning ago that I first heard her speak. Eloquent. Sheer magic with words that simply left me dazzled and wanting more. Then came the gradual, almost imperceptible signs of her betrayal. Arundhati Roy is more than the sum of words of her first political essay on Narmada dam. Her passion for the those left behind in the meteoric rise up the economic ladder by urban India is enlivening. Her ideas for social justice not so. That's because I have rarely found her offering ideas. She hides behind a snippet of offerings as to what could be done citing lack of "expertise" - after all, she is only an "author". But ask her about what should not be done, and from the same non-expert sprouts voluminous advise faster than one can digest the polysyllabic words used to convey the thoughts. Yes, it's intimidating. But I am grateful to her for bringing to me the deeper awareness of social...

NY City public radio started this series called Radio Lab. This is a summary of a fascinating discussion on time that I had to capture somewhere. What better place than here? Time was a very personal concept back in the middle of the 19th century. Cities throughout the country had their local time that was synchronized to the day, so at noon it was pretty much 12 o'clock no matter where in the country you were. Even within a locality though, there were different times. So when the railroad was introduced, the question became "whose time should we choose?" Would it be the bank's time or the grocer's whose clock ran 10mins ahead of the banker, or the bar, whose clock was 10mins slower than the bank. So, for the sake of it's own business, the Railways introduced their own clocks and prominently displayed them at each railway station. As it turned out, the businesses soon found it necessary to synch up with the railway clocks - the banks because they got cash by t...

(thoughts from a trip to Israel in Jun'04) Even if it was planned, the outcome could not have been more favorable. Before setting off for Israel, a part of me wanted to use the trip to discover first-hand the issues behind the conflict but without knowing the region, not having "kept-up" with a situation that provides "newsbytes" almost daily (and yet, ironically, has remained stagnant for decades), I was going in there as a confused outsider. Not sure how well my hosts would open up to this very personal and seemingly touchy subject, I resolved to simply make the best of it. No expectations, no disappointments. But I was in for a surprise. Not only did I get to meet the major players, I got to engage in deep conversations that have led to this brief write-up. What follows is a small attempt at cataloging a series of interview styled discussions. The idea, of course, is to pen the thoughts before memory betrays me, so it is a bit personal – however, since the ...

I am sitting at a diner located near my office and I am wrapped up in my thoughts. Work, life, progress, future, service - the usual stuff. Lately, it's been a more continuous, more sustained feeling of sorrow and loss. Not sure due to what but something seems amiss. The concept of sustained development has been ingrained in the mind but a newer concept is now taking root - sustainable happiness. That should be the metric of our success in life. For how long, and to what degree we have managed to remain happy. Simple. If we take the premise that one who is content is happy, then happiness is the mere satisfaction of our wants. But how do we sustain it? The answer simply is to control the wants and mitigate the needs. So how do we control the wants? Suppose I'm working at this office, I have a house to live in and I have a decent family. In this simple case, my wants can range from wanting that promotion or pay raise at the office, to wanting to pay out my mortage completely, to...

I was on my toes, desperately trying to see what she was doing over the counter. The cursive flow of her writing intrigued me and I wondered how women have such different handwriting than men. But I am not supposed to be here; I am not a regular. She was old and seemed patient but even in the situation I was in, I could not understand why she would simply not shove the form on my face and have me fill out the personal details. Instead, across the counter and behind the protection of a thick glass window, the practiced hand was copying details from my arrest warrant. The unexpected holiday gift was a reprieve from not having to post a bail in the amount of 6,000 dollars or go to jail. Valid only from Dec 1st to 31st. If you turn yourself in during this month, you essentially get a 'get-out-of-jail-free' card. I was here to cash in on my good luck. Armed with my checkbook, I had reached the Santa Clara County sheriff's office with the express purpose of turning myself in. I ...

Millions of years ago, the land of Upanishads and Vedas had already established its preference for vegetarian food. Grass-Eating Dinosaurs Think of dinosaurs' diets, and red meat comes to mind. Or, for herbivores, ferns and palms. But scientists in India have found the first clear evidence that some dinosaurs also ate grass. Fossilized dung of what are believed to be titanosaurs - those big-bodied, tiny-headed creatures - contains rigid structures called phytoliths, which were identified as coming from many different types of grasses. The finding is reported in Science. The fossils date from the late Cretaceous, near the end of the dinosaurs' reign 65 million years ago. That makes this one of the earliest findings of grasses in the fossil record, and shows that grasses had already diversified by then. cheers...