Water, Water Everywhere

And not a drop to drink...

Samuel Coleridge brilliantly presents a dilemmatic situation (reference-Ancient Mariner) roughly two hundred years ago, and governments today use it to mislead their innocent people every other day.

Yes! I am referring to the predicament of widely acclaimed “water scarcity”. We the people are forced to believe that water indeed is a scarce quantity. There are advertisements, there are hoardings and there are public awareness programs initiated not just by the governments but NGO’s and many others. And as the awareness grows, this mantra spreads like an epidemic to every part of the world, to every corner of our brain. Even the educated fools (including you and me) blindly start believing the fact that water is indeed a scarce quantity. You might already be thinking what nonsense am I talking about, water is definitely scarce. But is it?...

According to scientific data nearly two-thirds of earth that we abode is nothing but water and a famous law states that all matter is essentially conserved (considering Earth mass in our case). There even exists a water cycle which maintains a balance in the world. Thus if water were to become scarce both this cycle would be dying out and mass of water on earth would be decreasing, which I don’t believe is the scenario. Water is a resource that is abundantly present and can sustain ever growing human population for next hundreds of years to come. Hence, start believing that water is not scarce but definitely precious and mustn’t be misused.

Then why cry, why this sham? It is because economies of today run on the fundamental power of scarcity. Those of us who have studied economics would know that only if a resource is scarce (and has a market at the same time owing to its multi-utility property) does a person get to sell it and make profit out of it. Thus if one is able to convince you that a particular item is scantily available you wouldn’t hesitate a bit to loosen your pocket in order to buy even a meagre amount of it. Our subconscious mind will be constantly edging us that we have to pay our hard-earned money (in most of the cases) to the ones who are providing us the privilege to consume that particular scarce item. And there it is... exploiting this philosophy by proclaiming that water is scarce, people (government and the multi-national companies) are successful in selling us a resource which is indeed not SCARCE. Imagine if they started selling it to us and we knew that it was abundantly available in the world, would we ever buy it? Never. A hundred years ago if Bisleri and Aquafina were to come in the market there would have been no takers. But today they are multibillion-dollar enterprises. This all is part of an endeavour wherein the purpose is to extract every penny you have (and wish to save for the future) to be given away on the daily necessities which definitely you cannot live without. In this way these people have confirmed a never dying-up source of income for themselves. And we, we pay for bottled water, we pay for using water to bathe, to cook, to wash and what not. All in all, we don’t give a damn whether or not we should actually be paying for something that is even worth the effort.

You know what... if we continue to live in this state of oblivion, the time is not far when we shall have to pay even to breathe an ounce of air. It just needs excessive propaganda and a few cunning minds, and another scarce quantity would add into our list of daily buying needs. And doomed as we already are we would buy it happily and live merrily, watching the world with closed eyes.

To be continued...

Life as we live...

I feel terrible for not being able to write anything for so long. I certainly have many excuses to defend myself from not being able to write but whom shall I dupe with those elaborately carved sentences?  Myself! What a shame.

We humans are just so good at finding ways for not doing what we are supposed to do and to top it all we frame “explanations” just to console our own conscience. We justify our actions to ourselves without thinking as to what we have done actually. In this process of fooling ourselves we get so engrossed or rather become so good at it, that after a certain span of time we don’t even feel the urge to justify our actions to the spiritual inner-self. This indeed is that state which must not be attained, but if attained one must try hard to reclaim oneself from damaging his soul further.

Now that is what you call deep thinking!!!  But every word I wrote is true to the core and the situation too applies to many of us if not all. Every one of us has a natural tendency to procrastinate the work assigned by the higher authorities or even what we ourselves initiate to do.

And so it goes... we either blame the authorities, the situation, the time and whatever it takes to not take the blame on ourselves. But never for once do we even contemplate the thought that we too are at fault and in fact more at fault than anybody else.

This attitude is what needs reformation and until we remove this embedded system from our processor we won’t be able to lead a contented life. The function “As always we shall delay and never shall we repent” needs to be deleted, in mathematical language it needs to be multiplied by its inverse in order to yield unity which is definitely less harmful than the predecessor.

Let us try to bring about a change in our ideology and implement it in reality. It is here where the catch comes into picture. This change that I so easily talked about is not at all easy to bring about in practical life. But my friends that is what life is all about, challenges that push you to the extreme. But believe me once anyone takes this road to transforming oneself, he shall never look back and neither will he grumble anymore about many of the things (definitely there must be some grumbling and fighting else the flavour is lost).

I hope I haven’t bored the reader, but if you have actually come this far then probably you must have found something worthwhile in the words that I just assembled. I wrote “assembled” as I believe that all the world’s knowledge exists within us, but in the form of a puzzle which needs to be solved. And the beauty of this puzzle is that there is no one way to solve it and there is no one result that you may obtain. Every time you try solving it you shall discover a new possibility.

Discover!!! The world dwells within us.             

MOOD-I VS FACEBOOK

You might be wondering as to how can a “cult fest-MOODI and a social network-Facebook” be at war with each other. Don’t worry, they aren’t… But once you go through this post I am sure you will figure out as to why these two were at war in my mind.

A few days ago I attended the cultural festival-MOODI organized by IIT Bombay, where an interesting and devastating incident took place. The creative writing competition held, had the topic-“COLON P” and this is what I wrote.   

COLON P

Genesis of my four day long Mood-I sojourn was the moment I was handed a registration booklet with the moody ‘babaji’ on the cover.  After going through the rules I figured out that this booklet acted as my identity but didn’t have any space to write down even my personal details. I must call this; a perfect example of the mood-Ian representation of an irony. Going through the events, an event “license to Quill” caught my eye and I decided on the spot to participate in it. Ecstatically I waited for the event and after seventy two hours the day finally dawned.

A saying “present is a present which is present every day since Einstein restricted our species from travelling in time” is what I commenced that day with, and got ready to get going. But today had to be different, at first I dropped ketchup on my shirt, secondly had a fight with the bus ticket seller and finally at the venue- a pie-piece shaped structure I got to write on a topic which I had no clue as to what it meant. The icing on the cake being the hundred word limit which after calculation meant, no more than an A4 page. I guess! The organizer didn’t want to take the pain of lifting more than hundred-micron thick sheets.

Nevertheless, I feel a creative writer has the liberty to innovate and interpret the topic in his own way and henceforth this is my story of ’COLON P’ or as the beautiful invigilator wrote on the board in brackets- [:P].

Now this is what happens when you aren’t Facebook savvy. The only thing that I could relate colon p at that time was Facebook and some smiley stuff that too with 0.4 probability only, which wasn’t enough to proceed in a particular direction. And hence I wrote what you just read. Definitely worth a laugh…    

You might be thinking that I am actually kidding. But believe me, this is word to word what I wrote in that competition. It was only after another few days, when I shared this incident with my brother that I got to know what colon p actually meant.

But this event will linger as a beautiful “khatti-meethi” memory in my heart forever.   

THE FIRST BLOG

Since this is the first blog I am writing I think it should be a little special in its own way. Memories as they are, some sweet and some that hurt, but certainly they make us nostalgic when we retrospect. And hence I shall be writing a bit on some of my many first time experiences.

The first time on stage-The time when I was in nursery...Didn’t really know what was going on around me, as I was concentrating on performing my trick. (I was a magician both in dress and in action)

The first day at school- Felt abandoned and tricked by my parents as they told me that they will never leave me alone, the very same morning.

The first medal- Won it in a frog race and was in kinder-garden at that time.

First school trip- A one day trip to Gwalior when I was in the 4^th standard. I don’t remember anything except the fact that I didn’t miss my family at all. It maybe because the trip was so short that I didn’t even get the opportunity to miss them in the first case.

The first slap at school- I was monitoring my classroom and suddenly a teacher came in. She misunderstood the situation and happily and with tough hands... and I do mean happily, because the teacher had a reputation at stake.

The first and last choir- In the 6^th standard at the annual day celebration, when we sang “let love be the gift of the season” and two other songs which I don’t remember.

The first garlic-bread we made at home- It was a great experience to see the bread grill in the oven as our hearts pound, since we all thought that it might burn or loose moisture, but what came out was a savoury experience that remains embedded as a beautiful memory in my heart. I can say with cent percent guarantee that it can beat Pizza Hut’s counterpart effortlessly.

School’s Jubilee year celebration- I was perhaps lucky as the same year our batch gave the tenth board exam, and the result gave me the opportunity to become an integral part of the celebration. Twice I was called upon the stage and given an award, in front of a gathering of probably ten thousand or more. I definitely felt to be on “top of the world” for a minute or two.

School farewell - A memorable day as saw, many of the usual known faces for the last time. (Leaving the board exam time, since all of us had the same centre.)

The first day at I.I.S.T- An unforgettable experience as the photograph on the ID keeps reminding of how horrible we looked after a tiresome day of drifting here and there for getting through with the admission and registration process. And definitely the fact that I figured out the entire span of our temporary campus within the whole process keeps reminding me as to how small the campus was.

And so it is...

There are definitely many more first timers, but I guess I can’t share each one of them with everyone (as it is a blog), some of them are quite personal to me and so this shall be all.