Posts
Watching TV, I never thought I would be allowed such a new insight into the world Americans live in - advanced, yet worried. Intensely planned, brilliantly executed, and yet brittle and no more resilient than less touted ways of life.
You see, it is all about "the plan". Americans have a plan for everything. When that new airport design works brilliantly, it should surprise nobody, for they really thought about it. God bless the geniuses this country produces. The creative juices that flow into the cleverness of all the little things that work well are a joy to behold, unlike for instance, our Indian bank tellers who are much slower after they got computers and money counting machines!
Americans are excellent when it comes to embracing something new, and hence their engineering codes and standards are updated once every six months, whereas ours in India haven't been updated even once since independence. When this something new works neatly into the overall "plan" of things, Americans are happy, like with the fabulous iPhone, but if this something new is not part of a plan, they are completely messed up, like with Sept 11th and now, this financial crisis.
It isn't so much the matter how good this plan is, as long as there is a plan! What a strangely conditioned bunch of people! Now it makes some sense to me how they can be so overwhelmed by this phenomenon new to them called "terrorism". It isn't as if they have anything to be mortally afraid of Osama Bin Laden. But there is something inherently fluid about the man and his methods that Americans are really scared of.
That's why they went to war against Iraq - to let off some steam, but in a war they could "plan" for. You can't feel very good trying your high tech weapons against the ideology of your enemy, against his nebulous network of arms suppliers, against the prowess of his religious calling - all that is too complex and takes too much time. Americans needed some immediate action, and for that you need to knock out buildings, set fire to a few targets from far away, and move ships and troops. Afghanistan and its border with Pakistan are notoriously difficult areas to put up this kind of a show. Even the fake WMD claims were nicely accommodated into this planning mentality, which wouldn't have worked very well in rag tag mountain and cave territory where embedded reporters would have been ill at ease showing the American army as a chaotic bunch. That is the last thing Americans would want to see - their fine men and women of the armed forces in a clueless situation.
Iraq also turned out to be a clueless situation, but at every step of getting there, there was a plan. There were presidential speeches, there was media coverage, there was a clarion call for action! Then there were constant updates, up until the infamous era of beheadings. That was a clever one by the Al Sadr gang. Those rascals knew exactly what kind of below the belt blow the Americans couldn't take. They knew what truth Americans would be most uncomfortable with, and sure enough, once the heads started rolling, white people's sense of the value of a human life came sharply into focus, even though they hardly cared when thousands died in cluster bombs they dropped from far away.
See, a cluster bomb is an evil thing, but there is something fully planned about its design, the way a plane carries it, instructions are given by seemingly respectable people in military uniforms, and promises a sterile and sometimes even spectacular display as it completes its evil duty. But it doesn't look evil! It looks like a nicely planned scientific journey gone horribly right! But a beheading, even though done one at a time, is gruesome to the white American culture. It makes them sick, and they are repulsed by the sight of a human head separated from the rest of the body. All of a sudden, Moqtada Al Sadr and his men are a bunch of "savages", while the son of a bitch who dropped the cluster bomb that killed thousands more of unconnected civilians probably got a medal for his meritorious effort of pushing a button from the safety of his plane flying thousands of feet above the ground. But if it took so much effort to make a random killing machine so antiseptic in its presentation, it must be a "good" thing, that can defend our freedoms and values and our way of life.
American weapons seem to be particularly good at defending American freedoms and American values and the American way of life. I wonder if cluster bombing Wall Street will fix the financial crisis right now and do something to restore faith in the American way of life. In the least, the illicit narcotics trade seems to be the safest investment anywhere in the world, but the Americans are spending millions to stop this and have caused the creation of several druglord billions! Is it hard to get your hands on any banned substance in any part of America? Not at all! Go figure!
For a while now, I have wondered how you can be the most powerful nation on the planet and the most scared, ill informed bunch of sore, loser idiots at the same time. It is because they have been brought up on this diet of result-is-proportional-to-effort. The American Dream is itself quite a well defined three bedroom house, father, mother, two children, two cars and a dog! Is this a dream? Come on! And there are fools who believe people go to America to have just this? What is so great about it? Ah, now! See, this is something you can plan for! Your daughter snorting coke at fourteen, your son shooting his classmates, and you being sued by your neighbour for being bitten by your dog - these are not part of anybody's dream, but in reality should be part of some parents' planning!
Osama Bin Laden represents such an enormous threat to this way of life, not because he wants to rape American women and kill their dogs and feed dope to their children, but because in his world nobody is really bothered by day to day chaos. His world doesn't depend on that pin point control of events and there is no particular end result without which his tribe won't go to sleep peacefully.
That's why Islamic terrorism doesn't do anything more than irritate Indians. Radical Islam trying to inject chaos into an Indian's life is the joke of the century. Indians already have enough chaos and not only do they ignore it, they revel in it. They have partnered it, danced with it, and go to bed with it all the bloody time! This pesky business of being hit by bombs and bloodshed is rather annoying, but India is not likely to be threatened by anything being thrown out of gear.
Even in American storytelling, even in crime, planning is everything, all the way from The Day of the Jackal to Oceans Thirteen, it is all about the precision of the attack. If someone is two seconds off, it is too dangerous! I wonder how many assassins can really pull the trigger under that kind of pressure and still hit the right target. It isn't as if the madman strapped with explosive running into a bunch of people is any less effective, but to Americans, the act of killing through precision and science is always more fascinating and respectable. Islamic terrorism flies in the face of this fascination, and that's the real reason Americans hate this new adversary!
For some strange reason, Americans thought there was going to be another attack on Sept 11th, 2002! There was no intelligence, just millions poured into being "safe" on that particular day. This to me is the retarded blind belief in the spectacle of precision and the blinder belief that their enemy was likely to be like them! Osama Bin Laden really doesn't have to have the resources to call upon this kind of precision in his warfare. He has to plan to carry out something that will not be easy to detect, and that's pretty much it. If one day doesn't work out, his men will simply do it the next time they see an opportunity. If they can't do it, they will do something else. Usually their plans work because there aren't too many geniuses involved and split second precision is not needed even when displayed in a series of bombs going off in a city.
Americans on the other hand, plan so far ahead, that their banks lent fifty times their worth, believing the housing bubble would keep on expanding, and all the financial geniuses who were brought up on that diet constantly fed into that myth in a methodical frenzy that ate up all logic, and sure enough all the planning went to the toilet as soon as reality showed up.
As funny as it may seem, Islamic banking is completely insulated from the kind of mess that Wall Street finds itself in!
Sunday, October 26, 2008
Monday, October 20, 2008
The heady smell of failure
Most good stories come full circle. The adventurers who return to their village, the hero who comes back to his roots, richer for the ride and wiser for the experience, but essentially coming back to starting point after victory to share it with his tribe. The sense of belonging is one we can all identify with, and is used in no small measure by good story tellers. But for that, we must identify with the characters, the journey they chose to go on, and the ordeals on the way that made them better. In the very least, we must care.
Of late, Americans have shown up to be the drunks who went to the party, trashed the palace, and puked on the lawn and let it flow down the street called Wall Street. That's no hero's journey - it is a fool's parade and isn't funny when it takes 700 billion dollars to begin to fix, and most of the people who paid this in taxes weren't even invited to the party. But some people have such a hangover that they still don't realize the palace stinks to high heaven, and the neighbourhood is sick of the scene.
There was a segment today on NDTV called "A view from Wharton", which had a bunch of Indian clowns studying at Wharton Business School, offering their views on the financial crisis. The puppies all had rather optimistic views about them finding jobs and I wondered how and why any of us would give a rat's arse if any of them got jobs or not! When none of them was talking about getting jobs in India, how could this possibly be relevant to us here, apart from paying bored attention to some specimens from a well known tribe of Indians wanting to study and work abroad. Who cares if some Indian guy graduating from some school in the USA gets a job or not?
More than anything, I'd be worried if we're celebrating those who have chosen to learn from a failed system! I really don't want to hear from the losers on how it is done! I have always believed that you get expert opinions from people who are reasonably successful at what they do. If you want to talk about a formula one racing, you try and get Michael Schumacher, or if you have to settle for someone less, maybe Narain Karthikeyan has some insights. You most certainly do not ask the village idiot who crashed his bullock cart into the train you can hear two miles away.
But the amusement value, priceless! One of these puppies thought they had the best ringside view of this crisis, and it helped them learn first hand from their faculty how exactly these things came about and they were interested in seeing how this kind of crisis could be prevented from spilling over to the rest of the world, and affect countries like India that might be more vulnerable to this kind of situation! I can usually smell stupidity coming round the corner at full speed, and even the geniuses at Wharton did not disappoint!
What exactly are these idiots learning at Wharton? This financial crisis isn't a nuclear bomb that somehow spills over the border with the wind carrying deadly radiation to other countries. It simply isn't going to be felt in areas that are not vested and dependent on the American economy. It most certainly isn't going to affect countries that have long since insulated themselves from this kind of fly and crash cycle by keeping their economies slow and steady. We in India certainly know what slow is even if we may forget steady once in a while, so who exactly has been affected in our "vulnerable" country? We don't know yet, but we are not the country pissing off billions in a war with no end in sight, and we certainly aren't going ga-ga lending to people who can never pay back.
The professor at Wharton had a better view of Indian economic experts - he said they had a mindset quite different from those of their American counterparts and while they thought about building their companies, they also thought about building their countries. Quite a fascinating viewpoint, and timely. When America was trying its best to bully us to open our markets some more in the 90s, nobody quite thought about India as being correctly cautious. Our own "financial experts" were busy comparing us to the rapid growth of the Far East and wanted more and more deregulation right away. Are we in the same planet today?
So, why are we supposed to take Wharton seriously? Apparently, there is a Wharton business school alumnus who is in charge of Bush's $700 billion bailout package, which he must dispense with in the next two months. All right genius. What about the thousands of idiots schools like Wharton must have unleashed over the years to cause this mess in the first place?
Of late, Americans have shown up to be the drunks who went to the party, trashed the palace, and puked on the lawn and let it flow down the street called Wall Street. That's no hero's journey - it is a fool's parade and isn't funny when it takes 700 billion dollars to begin to fix, and most of the people who paid this in taxes weren't even invited to the party. But some people have such a hangover that they still don't realize the palace stinks to high heaven, and the neighbourhood is sick of the scene.
There was a segment today on NDTV called "A view from Wharton", which had a bunch of Indian clowns studying at Wharton Business School, offering their views on the financial crisis. The puppies all had rather optimistic views about them finding jobs and I wondered how and why any of us would give a rat's arse if any of them got jobs or not! When none of them was talking about getting jobs in India, how could this possibly be relevant to us here, apart from paying bored attention to some specimens from a well known tribe of Indians wanting to study and work abroad. Who cares if some Indian guy graduating from some school in the USA gets a job or not?
More than anything, I'd be worried if we're celebrating those who have chosen to learn from a failed system! I really don't want to hear from the losers on how it is done! I have always believed that you get expert opinions from people who are reasonably successful at what they do. If you want to talk about a formula one racing, you try and get Michael Schumacher, or if you have to settle for someone less, maybe Narain Karthikeyan has some insights. You most certainly do not ask the village idiot who crashed his bullock cart into the train you can hear two miles away.
But the amusement value, priceless! One of these puppies thought they had the best ringside view of this crisis, and it helped them learn first hand from their faculty how exactly these things came about and they were interested in seeing how this kind of crisis could be prevented from spilling over to the rest of the world, and affect countries like India that might be more vulnerable to this kind of situation! I can usually smell stupidity coming round the corner at full speed, and even the geniuses at Wharton did not disappoint!
What exactly are these idiots learning at Wharton? This financial crisis isn't a nuclear bomb that somehow spills over the border with the wind carrying deadly radiation to other countries. It simply isn't going to be felt in areas that are not vested and dependent on the American economy. It most certainly isn't going to affect countries that have long since insulated themselves from this kind of fly and crash cycle by keeping their economies slow and steady. We in India certainly know what slow is even if we may forget steady once in a while, so who exactly has been affected in our "vulnerable" country? We don't know yet, but we are not the country pissing off billions in a war with no end in sight, and we certainly aren't going ga-ga lending to people who can never pay back.
The professor at Wharton had a better view of Indian economic experts - he said they had a mindset quite different from those of their American counterparts and while they thought about building their companies, they also thought about building their countries. Quite a fascinating viewpoint, and timely. When America was trying its best to bully us to open our markets some more in the 90s, nobody quite thought about India as being correctly cautious. Our own "financial experts" were busy comparing us to the rapid growth of the Far East and wanted more and more deregulation right away. Are we in the same planet today?
So, why are we supposed to take Wharton seriously? Apparently, there is a Wharton business school alumnus who is in charge of Bush's $700 billion bailout package, which he must dispense with in the next two months. All right genius. What about the thousands of idiots schools like Wharton must have unleashed over the years to cause this mess in the first place?
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
Old is hardly gold.
Every time I hear of the Babri Masjid demolition, I cringe. It remains one of the most retarded deeds in post Independence India and it brings out the worst in me. It is something I am ashamed of and I hate being human at times like those. This has nothing to do with my opinions of religion or freedom of expression or rights of minorities or constitutional guarantees or the expectations I have of my country or anything of that sort. It is the misplaced notion of something from the past deserving so much respect that upsets me.
It is the respect people showed for the 'belief' that the mosque was once a temple long ago in a glorious past, and that it somehow needed resurrection that always gets my goat! I always cringe at historic references to today's realities. If people let go of their ancient notions and thought progressively, we would be able to solve all of today's problems and embrace tomorrow without fear or anxiety. Wrongs need to be corrected, no doubt, but not when the corrections serve no practical purpose. Religion and dogma do not serve any practical purpose, especially in tandem.
But the real culprit is our blind reverence for all things historical. If we were so glorious in our past, why don't we demolish our cities and go infest caves again? Look at what history we have left behind - It wasn't that long ago that slavery was legal, a lot of people were lynched for their knowledge, including those that had perfectly valid theories about gravity and other laws of physics, and people with fevers that made them behave strangely were killed for being in the clutch of "witchcraft". If we had developed our transportation systems based on the theory that the earth was flat, we'd be nowhere today. If we'd believed that leaving the shores our country was somehow inauspicious, we'd hardly be the people we are today. Old is gold? No thanks, I'm happy in my polluted, buzzing, irritating, restless modern world.
I am definitely happy and blessed to be able to carry a piece of plastic with me and be able to travel anywhere in the world, eat what I want, do what I want, connect with everyone I know from wherever I am, not have to worry about my personal safety and not have to carry a weapon with me all the time. More than anything else, I am very thrilled to be in a jetliner, cruising at well over thirty thousand feet, drinking juice and relaxing on my ten hour flight that took Columbus months to cover. I love the speed of modern life, and the blessings that come with it. I love the fact that automated systems are in place to ensure very little error, and allow very little scope for human intervention and inefficiency.
Not long ago, I happened to be in Jomsom, Nepal, and I had plenty of admiration for the natural beauty of the place and the extreme weather conditions there, the howling wind, the ultra clean but hostile landscape, clear blue skies and the sheer expanse of land, mountain and sky around. Yet it was not nice to be locked in for three days because no plane would land or take off, the water would freeze in the pipes, and the heating in one of the most modern lodges there was absolutely inadequate. It was to say the least, ridiculous. This kind of misery has my full condemnation.
The escape was finally provided by a jeep willing to brave the hammering on a rocky path designed to break backbones, and a day long journey through spectacular landscapes consisting of walking, riding on the back of motorcycles, and finally, an old car that brought me and my companions to civilization. I am all for warm climates, low altitude, motorized transport, reliable water supply, and above all, hygiene, even if it comes at a price.
Extremes apart, there is no justification in my humble opinion, to keep anybody poor and impoverished, ill informed and in perennial physical hardship, to be part of a landscape that richer tourists from relatively well off places can come and 'explore'. Nothing could be more condescending than keeping one part of the world backward for the others to enjoy in their own selfish way. I am all for development that brings basic safety, health and hygiene, education, communication and transportation to each and every person on this planet, so that we may indeed live in a connected world. When I see people struggling for survival in a place that is infested by tourists from all over the world, it makes me angry, for we have reduced those people to caged animals in a zoo that serve no purpose but our vicarious pleasure in going to places that are still "caught in a time warp".
I always get the patronizing argument - "But people are happy there!". Another blatant lie. What we see in people in places with a lot of physical hardship is resignation. They are happy to have guests like us, and they are happy to be nice to us, but their life of hardship is hardly one they would celebrate. Taking the example of Nepal alone, there are more Nepalese people in India than in the whole of their own country, and you can safely assume none of them came to India as tourists and fell in love with the allure of ancient India!
Offered a chance to make one's life better, most human beings, no matter where we live, would choose to take the opportunity. It is the way we are made. It is the reason we develop, it is the reason we span the cosmos in our thinking today - because we want all the time to be better off. To assume that another human being is absolutely content in his backwardness reeks of a lack of understanding of human nature. I am all for innocence, but not when it is due to ignorance. Look at villages in India today that are full of televisions and cellphones. Is anybody complaining that they have too much communication? Hardly! So, let's give them more development, and see what magic works its way to every person in the world.
Every development brings progress. There may be mistakes along the way, but that is just the price to pay for a pioneering nature that is inherent to human beings. That price is hardly the reason to retard ideas of progress. Take this blog for example. Without the internet, my thoughts wouldn't reach you so quickly, so elegantly and definitely not so cheaply. Can you imagine me mailing clay tablets to millions of people? I don't want to be the guy who has to walk twenty miles for water every day. That is not a beautiful life, unless you are one of those heartless people who watch humans on Discovery with the same mentality as watching other species.
I am especially appalled at the way white people travel to remote places, mix with natives who don't have any of the modern tools they are accustomed to, and paint romantic notions and wax eloquent about the peace and the beauty and the wonderful things that life offers in a place like Sub Saharan Africa. Quite honestly, it disgusts me that they would come up with descriptions like this for if it were half true, guess how many people would want to live there. The fact is, it is damn hard to make a living out of those hostile environments, and the room to negotiate is severely limited by the conditions. There is no way you can find yourself a bargain even for the simplest tasks. I definitely do not want to fight with animals for my right to survive and I definitely don't intend to piss off any wild animal with a bite force of over four hundred pounds per square inch.
To me, coming from a fairly developed world, while visiting backward places on the face of this earth, although coccooned by 'unspoilt' environs, it is just plain hypocrisy to see people suffering physically when technology should have provided basic creature comforts a long time ago. Go for a trek in one of Nepal's famous trekking routes and your breath will be taken away by the natural beauty of the Himalayan land. At the same time, there is really no beauty in the backbreaking work performed by individuals carrying barrels of water to a lodge just so that its customers can wash. That is what makes Nepal a backward country. I didn't see any Sherpas delirious to be working like donkeys, and though they had a sense of humour, I didn't see them delighted to be there. It is impossible to have physical and mental energy for a good time when you are not having a good time, it is as simple as that.
I expressed the notion that they ought to do something about so many tourists coming there and spending money and how they could perhaps think of a way to build a pumping system of some sort so they could have running water. The full extent of the explanation I got was that pipes would freeze. Now that is what I call a numbskull answer - to be defeated by the question even before considering the possibility. That mentality is also a symptom of backwardness. We need to get people out of this mentality on top priority, or it will retard the progress of all of mankind. When you pay over $100 a night, you should bloody well be able to get running water anywhere in the world, especially when there are thousands of fools willing to show up and shell out this kind of money. It is just the "cannot do" attitude that gets me mad. By the way, there is enough running water even in the most miserably cold places in all the developed countries, so it is not as if there are any genuine challenges beyond the lack of will.
We have cut down millions of trees, denuded millions of acres of rainforests, and raped the earth for minerals. I would rather do all this and expect to live 75 years rather than have to live in the midst of and fight nature on a daily basis and expect to croak at 32! I'm all for saving the environment, but I'm not about to forget the gifts that being modern and science have brought us. Many diseases we had no clue about, we completely avoid these days. We fix our broken bodies, heal tortured minds with therapy, kill pain with medicines, and can pass on knowledge to others in a matter of seconds.
Indeed, we run the world with concepts of money and the promise of wealth based on ideas, and we have amassed weapons of unbelievable destructive power at the cost of ignoring millions of us who have rather pressing needs, and we as a race have destroyed a great deal of our own planet, but we know of this destruction only because of our modern science. We have learnt about the environment and ecology and delicate balances of natural equations only because we have studied the cosmos with the aid of many modern tools. It is not for nothing that we are the most advanced species on this planet, and look forward to connecting with intelligent life forms from extra terrestrial origins.
Very romantic indeed the notion that old is gold! Old is rubbish, the new is always to be welcomed. It is the way of the world, and has been the way of the universe for ever. The human race has pioneered a great deal of change, and the only way forward is to accelerate progress, not retard it. Yes, but at what cost? - ask the detractors, and many misled environmentalists. At any cost, would be my consistent reply, for without trusting our ability to develop with responsibility, we wouldn't be able to trust one another at all. The empires of old were built on this inherent mistrust of "other" human beings. The wasted investments in offensive capability were all built on mistrust. There is no place for this mistrust in ourselves. Today's internet generation has less room for animosity because they are able to connect with one another much more easily, and get to know the world and their place in it - much more than any classroom can ever teach.
Why is it that backward thinkers are always worried about countries losing their cultures, and people losing their moral compasses? I am all for today's culture that doesn't allow public executions, looks down upon open drains, and lays down laws to make people physically safer from other humans. Sure, child pornography would not be a multibillion dollar industry without the internet, but that is not the fault of the internet. The perverted mind is the problem when it chooses to use the internet for pornography instead of something better! The emperors of old had harems of women and a multitude of children to be forever tarnished as the king's descendants, but without any royal rights. Talk about ancient glory if you were one of those! We burnt widows along with their dead husbands in those days. I'm not sure how many of those women would have politely refused a chance at a longer life in order to maintain their tradition.
The human race will expand its presence to other planets. It is inevitable and it is the best ambition to have. We have no business thinking we should be confined to the limitations of our own beloved Mother Earth. Not just for giving our race a chance of surviving beyond the spectre of being hit by a meteor that could wipe out life on earth as we know it, but for the chance of finding out what might lie elsewhere. Genetic engineering and stem cell technology will give us a new wave of knowledge to put away some really challenging diseases and medical problems, some of them permanently. But we have even today, some people as significant as the leaders of advanced countries, standing in the way with typically idiotic and dogmatic resistance to these developments. We have not been gifted the intelligence and the resources to finally allow dogma to hold ourselves back from being all we can be as entrepreneurs and pioneers.
There is nothing in the human make up to suggest we should be satisfied with what we have. There is no place for misplaced guilt and other assumed emotional reservations in our quest for newer horizons. We deserve it, and the universe that gave us our capabilities deserves it. The way forward is to shed all exaggerated reverence for all things that don't serve us properly. Ancient knowledge doesn't become wisdom just because it is ancient. It needs to undergo as much if not greater scrutiny by our modern minds.
It is the respect people showed for the 'belief' that the mosque was once a temple long ago in a glorious past, and that it somehow needed resurrection that always gets my goat! I always cringe at historic references to today's realities. If people let go of their ancient notions and thought progressively, we would be able to solve all of today's problems and embrace tomorrow without fear or anxiety. Wrongs need to be corrected, no doubt, but not when the corrections serve no practical purpose. Religion and dogma do not serve any practical purpose, especially in tandem.
But the real culprit is our blind reverence for all things historical. If we were so glorious in our past, why don't we demolish our cities and go infest caves again? Look at what history we have left behind - It wasn't that long ago that slavery was legal, a lot of people were lynched for their knowledge, including those that had perfectly valid theories about gravity and other laws of physics, and people with fevers that made them behave strangely were killed for being in the clutch of "witchcraft". If we had developed our transportation systems based on the theory that the earth was flat, we'd be nowhere today. If we'd believed that leaving the shores our country was somehow inauspicious, we'd hardly be the people we are today. Old is gold? No thanks, I'm happy in my polluted, buzzing, irritating, restless modern world.
I am definitely happy and blessed to be able to carry a piece of plastic with me and be able to travel anywhere in the world, eat what I want, do what I want, connect with everyone I know from wherever I am, not have to worry about my personal safety and not have to carry a weapon with me all the time. More than anything else, I am very thrilled to be in a jetliner, cruising at well over thirty thousand feet, drinking juice and relaxing on my ten hour flight that took Columbus months to cover. I love the speed of modern life, and the blessings that come with it. I love the fact that automated systems are in place to ensure very little error, and allow very little scope for human intervention and inefficiency.
Not long ago, I happened to be in Jomsom, Nepal, and I had plenty of admiration for the natural beauty of the place and the extreme weather conditions there, the howling wind, the ultra clean but hostile landscape, clear blue skies and the sheer expanse of land, mountain and sky around. Yet it was not nice to be locked in for three days because no plane would land or take off, the water would freeze in the pipes, and the heating in one of the most modern lodges there was absolutely inadequate. It was to say the least, ridiculous. This kind of misery has my full condemnation.
The escape was finally provided by a jeep willing to brave the hammering on a rocky path designed to break backbones, and a day long journey through spectacular landscapes consisting of walking, riding on the back of motorcycles, and finally, an old car that brought me and my companions to civilization. I am all for warm climates, low altitude, motorized transport, reliable water supply, and above all, hygiene, even if it comes at a price.
Extremes apart, there is no justification in my humble opinion, to keep anybody poor and impoverished, ill informed and in perennial physical hardship, to be part of a landscape that richer tourists from relatively well off places can come and 'explore'. Nothing could be more condescending than keeping one part of the world backward for the others to enjoy in their own selfish way. I am all for development that brings basic safety, health and hygiene, education, communication and transportation to each and every person on this planet, so that we may indeed live in a connected world. When I see people struggling for survival in a place that is infested by tourists from all over the world, it makes me angry, for we have reduced those people to caged animals in a zoo that serve no purpose but our vicarious pleasure in going to places that are still "caught in a time warp".
I always get the patronizing argument - "But people are happy there!". Another blatant lie. What we see in people in places with a lot of physical hardship is resignation. They are happy to have guests like us, and they are happy to be nice to us, but their life of hardship is hardly one they would celebrate. Taking the example of Nepal alone, there are more Nepalese people in India than in the whole of their own country, and you can safely assume none of them came to India as tourists and fell in love with the allure of ancient India!
Offered a chance to make one's life better, most human beings, no matter where we live, would choose to take the opportunity. It is the way we are made. It is the reason we develop, it is the reason we span the cosmos in our thinking today - because we want all the time to be better off. To assume that another human being is absolutely content in his backwardness reeks of a lack of understanding of human nature. I am all for innocence, but not when it is due to ignorance. Look at villages in India today that are full of televisions and cellphones. Is anybody complaining that they have too much communication? Hardly! So, let's give them more development, and see what magic works its way to every person in the world.
Every development brings progress. There may be mistakes along the way, but that is just the price to pay for a pioneering nature that is inherent to human beings. That price is hardly the reason to retard ideas of progress. Take this blog for example. Without the internet, my thoughts wouldn't reach you so quickly, so elegantly and definitely not so cheaply. Can you imagine me mailing clay tablets to millions of people? I don't want to be the guy who has to walk twenty miles for water every day. That is not a beautiful life, unless you are one of those heartless people who watch humans on Discovery with the same mentality as watching other species.
I am especially appalled at the way white people travel to remote places, mix with natives who don't have any of the modern tools they are accustomed to, and paint romantic notions and wax eloquent about the peace and the beauty and the wonderful things that life offers in a place like Sub Saharan Africa. Quite honestly, it disgusts me that they would come up with descriptions like this for if it were half true, guess how many people would want to live there. The fact is, it is damn hard to make a living out of those hostile environments, and the room to negotiate is severely limited by the conditions. There is no way you can find yourself a bargain even for the simplest tasks. I definitely do not want to fight with animals for my right to survive and I definitely don't intend to piss off any wild animal with a bite force of over four hundred pounds per square inch.
To me, coming from a fairly developed world, while visiting backward places on the face of this earth, although coccooned by 'unspoilt' environs, it is just plain hypocrisy to see people suffering physically when technology should have provided basic creature comforts a long time ago. Go for a trek in one of Nepal's famous trekking routes and your breath will be taken away by the natural beauty of the Himalayan land. At the same time, there is really no beauty in the backbreaking work performed by individuals carrying barrels of water to a lodge just so that its customers can wash. That is what makes Nepal a backward country. I didn't see any Sherpas delirious to be working like donkeys, and though they had a sense of humour, I didn't see them delighted to be there. It is impossible to have physical and mental energy for a good time when you are not having a good time, it is as simple as that.
I expressed the notion that they ought to do something about so many tourists coming there and spending money and how they could perhaps think of a way to build a pumping system of some sort so they could have running water. The full extent of the explanation I got was that pipes would freeze. Now that is what I call a numbskull answer - to be defeated by the question even before considering the possibility. That mentality is also a symptom of backwardness. We need to get people out of this mentality on top priority, or it will retard the progress of all of mankind. When you pay over $100 a night, you should bloody well be able to get running water anywhere in the world, especially when there are thousands of fools willing to show up and shell out this kind of money. It is just the "cannot do" attitude that gets me mad. By the way, there is enough running water even in the most miserably cold places in all the developed countries, so it is not as if there are any genuine challenges beyond the lack of will.
We have cut down millions of trees, denuded millions of acres of rainforests, and raped the earth for minerals. I would rather do all this and expect to live 75 years rather than have to live in the midst of and fight nature on a daily basis and expect to croak at 32! I'm all for saving the environment, but I'm not about to forget the gifts that being modern and science have brought us. Many diseases we had no clue about, we completely avoid these days. We fix our broken bodies, heal tortured minds with therapy, kill pain with medicines, and can pass on knowledge to others in a matter of seconds.
Indeed, we run the world with concepts of money and the promise of wealth based on ideas, and we have amassed weapons of unbelievable destructive power at the cost of ignoring millions of us who have rather pressing needs, and we as a race have destroyed a great deal of our own planet, but we know of this destruction only because of our modern science. We have learnt about the environment and ecology and delicate balances of natural equations only because we have studied the cosmos with the aid of many modern tools. It is not for nothing that we are the most advanced species on this planet, and look forward to connecting with intelligent life forms from extra terrestrial origins.
Very romantic indeed the notion that old is gold! Old is rubbish, the new is always to be welcomed. It is the way of the world, and has been the way of the universe for ever. The human race has pioneered a great deal of change, and the only way forward is to accelerate progress, not retard it. Yes, but at what cost? - ask the detractors, and many misled environmentalists. At any cost, would be my consistent reply, for without trusting our ability to develop with responsibility, we wouldn't be able to trust one another at all. The empires of old were built on this inherent mistrust of "other" human beings. The wasted investments in offensive capability were all built on mistrust. There is no place for this mistrust in ourselves. Today's internet generation has less room for animosity because they are able to connect with one another much more easily, and get to know the world and their place in it - much more than any classroom can ever teach.
Why is it that backward thinkers are always worried about countries losing their cultures, and people losing their moral compasses? I am all for today's culture that doesn't allow public executions, looks down upon open drains, and lays down laws to make people physically safer from other humans. Sure, child pornography would not be a multibillion dollar industry without the internet, but that is not the fault of the internet. The perverted mind is the problem when it chooses to use the internet for pornography instead of something better! The emperors of old had harems of women and a multitude of children to be forever tarnished as the king's descendants, but without any royal rights. Talk about ancient glory if you were one of those! We burnt widows along with their dead husbands in those days. I'm not sure how many of those women would have politely refused a chance at a longer life in order to maintain their tradition.
The human race will expand its presence to other planets. It is inevitable and it is the best ambition to have. We have no business thinking we should be confined to the limitations of our own beloved Mother Earth. Not just for giving our race a chance of surviving beyond the spectre of being hit by a meteor that could wipe out life on earth as we know it, but for the chance of finding out what might lie elsewhere. Genetic engineering and stem cell technology will give us a new wave of knowledge to put away some really challenging diseases and medical problems, some of them permanently. But we have even today, some people as significant as the leaders of advanced countries, standing in the way with typically idiotic and dogmatic resistance to these developments. We have not been gifted the intelligence and the resources to finally allow dogma to hold ourselves back from being all we can be as entrepreneurs and pioneers.
There is nothing in the human make up to suggest we should be satisfied with what we have. There is no place for misplaced guilt and other assumed emotional reservations in our quest for newer horizons. We deserve it, and the universe that gave us our capabilities deserves it. The way forward is to shed all exaggerated reverence for all things that don't serve us properly. Ancient knowledge doesn't become wisdom just because it is ancient. It needs to undergo as much if not greater scrutiny by our modern minds.
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