The Rugged Altruists

The Rugged Altruists

Rye Barcott was a student at the University of North Carolina who spent a summer sharing a 10-by-10 shack in Kibera, the largest slum in Nairobi, Kenya. One night he awoke with diarrhea and stumbled to the public outhouse. He slid onto the cement floor and vomited as his bare body hit puddles of human waste.

He left his soiled pants outside the hut, but when he went to find them later they were gone. He was directed to another hut where a stick-thin girl, with missing clumps of hair, had the pants, scrubbed and folded, in her lap. Barcott said softly, “I’m grateful,” and asked her why she had cleaned them. “Because I can,” she replied. A week later, she died of AIDS and her body was taken in a wheelbarrow to a communal grave.

3 out of 5000 students is statistically not important

Suicide at IIT-M

"Why are you always reporting negative news about IIT Madras? We also have the maximum number of patents but you didn't report that. But you would want to report the death of 3 out of 5000 students which is statistically not important. Why don't you go to other engineering institutes and find out how many died there. Why only IIT?"

Why did Nitin Kumar Reddy die? Is it as simple as 'inability to handle pressure'? Or is it good enough to blame the rat race?

Why did the dean of students say 3 out of 5000 is statistically insignificant? Is it as simple as callous attitude? Or is it good enough to blame the media which apparently pressurized him into making such a statement?

If at all one is truly distressed by such sad events, one would dig deep into the cause of such happenings and every unquestioned assumption will be looked into.

Why is the desire for careers and big pay packets by all the educated ones around is disconnected from the suicide? Why is the callous / desensitized attitude we all show towards all the violence around us disconnected from the deans reply? How come peoples desire to buy apartment after apartment disconnected from the recent 2G scam in India? How are the million rupee marriages in India disconnected from the rat race? How is the desire to ensure ones kids go to IIT and then to Stanford disconnected from the death of Nitin Kumar? Why is the need to uphold family pride and the urge to gossip ill about others not a contributing factor? Why is our acts of pressurizing others to respect / love one unconnected? Ultimately, why is the desire to establish oneself as a separate person, disconnected from all of creation, not related to this sad event?

Only when we care enough to see the fullest extent of the causal matrix, can we notice that all the fears and desires we carry in our heads are fueling that causal matrix. And only when we act decisively to change ourselves, can we even nurse a hope of putting an end to such completely unnecessary sad events. The refusal to act despite all this is no different from the (apparent) insensitive comments of the dean.

Links

The big endosulfan betrayal

So India spoke and said endosulfan is essential and the only cheap pesticide the country has. It also said it is safe and not proven to be toxic in Indian conditions.

Day after suicide at IIT-M, blame game on

When asked as to what the Institute in general and Guidance and Counselling Unit (GCU) in particular was doing to address the situation and to improve the response against such incidents, dean of students Govardhan M said, "Why are you always reporting negative news about IIT Madras? We also have the maximum number of patents but you didn't report that. But you would want to report the death of 3 out of 5000 students which is statistically not important. Why don't you go to other engineering institutes and find out how many died there. Why only IIT?"

Links

Plastic Circulating Endlessly in World's Oceans

Peak Water Has Already Come and Gone

Spyhill Landfill Site

Security forces running riot in Dantewada?

German makes a clean sweep of Bangalore

Links

A cinema unfolding here!

Doc who did Sadhick Batcha autopsy resigns

People with a conscience are usually perceived as threats to the established order!

China takes hard line on activists, many missing

Those who dont learn from history (read Fukushima / Chernobyl / Bhopal / Three Mile Island) are condemned to repeat it!

State terrorism prevails in Jaitapur

Links

Next mass extinction an eyeblink away

Inequality is our country's fastest growing sector

Links

Regulation Lax as Gas Wells’ Tainted Water Hits Rivers

Turtles now world's most threatened vertebrates

Godhra: 'What happened to the accused is a crime'

Godhra: 'What happened to the accused is a crime'

These were people who had lost nine years of their lives because they were caught in the crossfire in a battle between the state government and civil activists, who disagreed on how the case should be conducted. In the police buses were people who had never seen their children. There were people who could not perform their fathers' last rites.

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"It takes one day to apply POTA, and eight years to clear your name after that. Don't ask us if this is a win for us. What happened to my father is a crime"

Ahimsa paramo dharmah

Southern suburbs of Chennai woke up to the grisly news of double death at a religious place there.

Briefly, a robber came in in to the Mutt in the wee hours of Sunday and murdered a woman who raised an alarm regarding the robbers presence. The robber, who was wielding a knife, was later overpowered, and, according to the news report above, was beaten up by the other people present there to the extent that he was struggling for life by the time the cops arrived. He later died at a local hospital.

Such needless violence is really sad. While the use of force might have been needed to overpower the robber who was threatening violence, the needless beating him up to death is really sad. True religion is only about spreading unconditional love and ahimsa. Beating up of a person to death, and that too after overpowering him is simply uncalled for. This is the sad state of most religious institutions, no matter which religion. They exist purely as a form of entertainment. Most of them seem to have no clue about ahimsa or non-violence being the highest truth.

Can we all change this? Can we recognize every single part of us that is violent and eliminate all of them, instead of being lost in all kinds of crazy practices in the name of religion, no matter which religion it is that we are brought up to believe?

Romance killer

Wonder if saying 'Do you want some immunity' would be a good pickup line!!! :P

Kissing was developed to spread germs

I find this kinda reporting / science quite lame. It could be true that kissing could pass on immunity as the news article claims, but concluding that this is the sole purpose of it and hence kissing was developed for this purpose is quite lame!

PS: Thx to Steve for passing on this info through google reader!

Lack of awareness could kill

11 run over by trains in a single day

Eleven people died while crossing railway tracks on Tuesday, under the Chennai division (stretches up to Erode and Coimbatore) of Southern Railway. The 11 deaths occurred in Korukkupet, Gummidipoondi, Erode, Pothanur, Morappur, Athur, Tambaram (two cases), Chromepet, Annanur and Basin Bridge. The deaths were due to careless crossing of tracks. A majority of the accidents occur because commuters cross railway tracks while talking on mobile phones. The victims were all run over by trains.

This is really sad and scary too! I have found myself being lost in thoughts and/or lost in conversation in phone many a times on the road. I have personally had one or two close shaves also. I am sure many of you have experienced this. We better practice awareness and especially intense awareness while on the move on Indian roads.

Basava Premanand

Basava Premanand, an eminent skeptic and a leader of the rationalist movement in India passed away. He was India's biggest paranormal claims buster.

He hit the news when he took on the claims of paranormal powers of Sathya Sai Baba of Puttaparthi.

Beyond insanity

Mass whipping of women to cast away ‘evil spirit’

In a strange ritual, more than 2,000 women including school-going teen-aged girls, who were believed to be ‘possessed’ by evil spirits were given vicious whip lashes to “free them from these bad elements” at the annual festival of the ancient Sri Achappan Temple at Bavithram Vellalapatti, a remote village situated on the border of Tiruchi and Namakkal districts, on Monday, the Vijayadasami Day.

The men priests, dressed in traditional attire, cracked whips on the ‘possessed’ women, the salvation seekers, who sat in a half-kilometre-long queue for nearly five hours on a sprawling open space called ‘lashing ground’ near the temple.

Many of them were young school and college-going girls, who winced when they received the lashes and writhed in pain on the ground. The long and wieldy whips, which descended on them in full ferocity, had left them gasping for breath, causing burning marks of wounds on them and forcing them to sob and cry in searing pain. Many were given three to four flogs to drive away the ‘multiple spirits’ that possessed them.

Depths of Tamas!!!

India's 'green and clean' village

India's green and clean village

Every piece of litter and almost every leaf that has fallen from a tree is immediately discarded. Plastic is completely banned and all waste disposal is environmentally friendly. Rubbish is thrown into a pit dug in a forest near the village where it is left to turn into compost. The villagers here say that lessons in hygiene start in school so that children can be taught from an early age how to keep their surroundings clean and green.
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Mawlynnong's success is entirely driven by local initiative. It has been so successful that the state government has been prompted to promote eco-tourism in the area but the locals are resisting this.

Externalizing trouble

From toxic waste to toxic assets, the same people always get dumped on

An article by journalist George Monbiot

It was revolting, monstrous, inhumane – and scarcely different from what happens in Africa almost every day. The oil trading company Trafigura has just agreed to pay compensation to 31,000 people in Ivory Coast, after the Guardian and the BBC's Newsnight obtained emails sent by its traders. They reveal that Trafigura knew that the oil slops it sent there in 2006 were contaminated with toxic waste. But the Ivorian contractor it employed to pump out the hold of its tanker dumped them around inhabited areas in the capital city and the countryside. Tens of thousands of people fell ill and 15 died. While the settlement says that the slops could at worst have caused a range of short-term low-level flu-like symptoms, and anxiety, it is one of the world's worst cases of chemical exposure since the gas leak at the Union Carbide factory in Bhopal. But in all other respects the Trafigura case is unremarkable. It's just another instance of the rich world's global fly-tipping.

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The Trafigura story is a metaphor for corporate capitalism. The effort of all enterprises is to keep the profits and dump the costs on someone else. Price risks are dumped on farmers, health and safety risks are dumped on subcontractors, insolvency risks are dumped on creditors, social and economic risks are dumped on the state, toxic waste is dumped on the poor, greenhouse gases are dumped on everyone.

Is this really Gandhigiri?

IIT faculty turn to 'Gandhigiri' for pay hike

"We are, in all of our intellectual capabilities, ahead of most scientists in the country. And the HRD ministry does not realise that the faculty at these institututions does not just teach, but also does work on a variety of platforms, including research and other avenues," said Chakravarthy.

Chakravarthy reiterates that the fight is not about money, but about losing integrity by being at par with the faculty of local universities under the University Grants Commission (UGC).

"It was a real shock to us when our salaries were expected to be as low as that of faculty from local colleges, when we are no less than any professor teaching in the universities of US. There are many like me who have left leading companies to work as a faculty at IIT because of the value attached to the institute,"he says.

Chakravarthy added that the IITs also do a lot of research work for the government without charging money. The demand is not money here, but prestige, which the hit rock bottom with the HRD's directive.

This is quite appalling as many of these people are supposed to be the 'gurus' of some of the most intellectually capable fellows in the country. Going by this definition, any place where you do not use the sword to get your work done is gandhigiri. Bollocks!!

A necessary condition for non-violent action to stem from someone is the total absence of ego and a clear understanding of unity of all life despite the apparent variations in form. The founding principle of non-violence is that all violence is at its root caused by some manifestation of ego. And, ego needs ego to sustain itself. So, a violent response to it feeds the original ego and adds fuel to the violence. A non-violent response on the other hand stumps the source of violence, ego. The source ego now has no material to continue its existence and will have to dissolve with time. Now, here, IIT profs are openly strutting out their egos by declaring themselves to be superior and claim injustice because their salaries are equal to professors in say universities like Anna University. Quite appalling behavior. In ancient days, if a student continues with his/her egoic ways, the student will get thrown out. Its a sign of our times that many of our supposedly best gurus are full of that!


Read below a beautiful email sent by a professor from IIT Madras to his colleagues, on teachers day, on why this is not a genuine cause that they are fighting for!

Judging by the current scenario, we are getting overwhelmingly agitated and are setting ourselves up for a future in which we are likely to remain dispirited (instead of inspired), with the permanent feeling "I deserve more". This does not augur well for us and all those around us. Surely, we are capable of a much better (inner) response. Surely, there are lessons to be learnt, and as teachers and researchers, we need to learn them. Perhaps, for this, we can look up to ancient wisdom, to our "gurus", especially on the occasion of Teachers' Day.

The first lesson we can learn from them is that this problem is not unique to us. It is everybody's story. And as long as we remain stuck in a depressed "in the box" state of mind, we will continue to suffer and continue to blame others (a few babus in MHRD, in this case) for our inner state of mind. We need to somehow get out of the box, and it gets increasingly difficult to do so when we cling to the box ("I deserve more" in this case) and provoke others (consciously and unconsciously) to do this. We need to create a healthy environment for our sake and for the sake of all others.

The second lesson we can learn is that all suffering is caused by inner resistance to whatever is happening in the present moment. What is happening is the resultant force of many vectors in time and space -- far too many for us to fathom -- although we tend to localise and pinpoint the blame on a few individuals. Yes, we need to "set right things", to the best of our understanding, by taking appropriate action. But our options increase enormously when we are able to stay out of the box, when we stop resisting mechanically, when our hearts are at peace, when we genuinely focus on the well-being of the overall 'system'. Wisdom can dawn only when our hearts are at peace. There is a quiet state of Being inherent in life, which is independent of all our actions and reactions, that we seem to be missing.

The third lesson we can learn is that we need to TRUST the Universe - or God, if you will. That our merits, if any, cannot go unrewarded, but events are unlikely to unfold exactly as we want them to unfold. That there is something higher than us, the IIT administrators and MHRD, that "knows" what is "right". Abiding by that implicit trust, we move on and do our best, with our spirits held high. We operate in love and abundance, rather than fear and lack.

Finally, true fulfillment does not generally come by the things we seem to believe will make us happy. A few thousand rupees per month are not going to make the tremendous difference we think it will make. Nor will it provide as great an incentive as we imagine, to attract young faculty to our institutions. The boundaries will keep shifting, and, "in the box", we will always find ourselves wanting more, ever living in fear and lack. Out of the box, we can always find creative and ethically sound solutions to making more money, if that is our need. As for our 'dignity' and 'self-respect', do we really believe that these are qualities that we can demand from others?

May we discover the "guru" latent in all of us!

No, not the grizzly too!

Grizzly bear decline alarms conservationists in Canada

Photo from Guardians page about the news (linked above)

First it was the giant panda, then the polar bear, now it seems that the grizzly bear is the latest species to face impending disaster. A furious row has erupted in Canada with conservationists desperately lobbying the government to suspend the annual bear-hunting season following reports of a sudden drop in the numbers of wild bears spotted on salmon streams and key coastal areas where they would normally be feeding.

Temple hundi message

Had a small thought experiment today. What would happen if every hundi* in every temple in India had the following notice prominently displayed next to it?

Dear devotee,

The one and only consequence of you dropping money into this hundi for you is that you will become poorer by the amount you just dropped. You will receive absolutely NO benefits whatsoever either materially or spiritually. More specifically, no monetary bonanzas, no betterment at job, no guaranteed placement in heaven etc etc. This money will be used for the maintenance of the temple and the payment of salary for the temple staff. We do not think there is anything illegal or immoral in this mode of spending money.

Thanking you

Presiding deity

* For those who did not know, a hundi is a drop box for money kept in many temples in India. Conventionally, many people have prayers and request for assistance from god when they drop money in it.


PS: Karnataka minister offers Rs 45 cr-worth crown in Tirumala

A fight for the Amazon

A fight for the Amazon that should inspire the world - Johann Hari in The Independent

So the indigenous peoples acted in their own self-defence, and ours. Using their own bodies and weapons made from wood, they blockaded the rivers and roads to stop the oil companies getting anything in or out. They captured two valves of Peru's sole pipeline between the country's gas field and the coast, which could have led to fuel-rationing. Their leaders issued a statement explaining: "We will fight together with our parents and children to take care of the forest, to save the life of the equator and the entire world."

Garcia responded by sending in the military. He declared a "state of emergency" in the Amazon, suspending almost all constitutional rights. Army helicopters opened fire on the protesters with live ammunition and stun-grenades. More than a dozen were killed. But the indigenous peoples did not run away. Even though they were risking their lives, they stood their ground. One of their leaders, Davi Yanomami, said simply: "The earth has no price. It cannot be bought, or sold or exchanged. It is very important that white people, black people and indigenous peoples fight together to save the life of the forest and the earth. If we don't fight together, what will our future be?"

And then something extraordinary happened. The indigenous peoples won. The Peruvian Congress repealed the laws that allowed oil company drilling, by a margin of 82 votes to 12. Garcia was forced to apologise for his "serious errors and exaggerations". The protesters have celebrated and returned to their homes deep in the Amazon.

Sex in India

Finally, India has de-criminalized consensual gay sex. Yipee! There are many such pathetic and archaic laws in the Indian constitution that are legacies from the British Raj (this particular law was drafted in 1860). Thankfully, one of them is down and gays in India do not have to fight saying 'Us against the world'. As expected, some religious leaders have stated that they reject this law and that gay sex is against the will of God! Yawn, whatever!

Its really crazy why the Indian government and the religious leaders are obsessed so much with peoples sexual preferences. Recently, the Indian government banned the popular Indian toon porn star Savita Bhabi. Not just the ban, but the way these things are banned in India are so pathetic. Some babu decides that this should not be there and whoosh, the ISP's block this site (Of course, no one in India knows about proxies!). No reasons given, no explanations from the owner entertained by the government! Wonderful!

We really need to bring such issues out of the closet. Jai Osho! :p