Naushad from Morocco

It was in the winter of 1997 I reached Prien am Chiemsee, a small town in the Bavarian region of Germany. This was my first trip outside India [I believe we consider Nepal as an illegal extension of India] and that to, to a country where they speak in a strange language as if they are having a fight.
Prien has a small centre for learning German language, at that time was run by Frau Rothkirch. The institute bears her name – Language Institute Von Rothkirch.
All people who were coming to Germany for the first time, from different part of the world and working for different divisions of Siemens AG, had to spend at least one month for learning the basics of the language.
It also served as a melting pot of diverse cultures and getting to know them.
Prien had a very elderly population. The old couples, mostly retired and living alone, rented their house to the students. It also helped the students in picking up German faster as they hardly spoke anything but German, that to countryside German [Bayerisches Deutsch].
I was allotted a room with a lady called Frau Neumann. There were two rooms in the attic and I was told to choose one.
She told me that the next room was booked for a gentleman from Pakistan [although I was expecting a lady from Russia]. It gave me a subtle pleasure that at least I would not spent hours talking in English or broken German. On the other hand it was also the first time I would meet a Pakistani – flesh and blood. The 1993 Mumbai bomb blast was still fresh and the word Pakistani did not evoke much camaraderie in my mind.
Naushad Alam checked in around four in the afternoon. He was very thin [I found out when he removed his warm clothes], around the same height as mine, bespectacled and I could feel him shivering beneath the layer of three coats that he was wearing and in spite of the heater turned full on.
We shook hands, introduced each other in English and then he went to his room to get fresh and change.
He came back to my room, looking a bit fresh but I could feel that he was a bit scared. I made him a cup of tea and offered him some biscuits.
He sat there in the bed, palms crossed between his legs, shivering in pulses. He seemed as innocent as a terrorist.
He was from Karachi and had joined Siemens only a year back. He has never travelled outside Karachi, leave aside being abroad. His chance came by proxy as the person who was originally scheduled to come fell sick. In a short notice he had to make arrangements, like getting his passport and then visa, buying warm clothes, food items, pressure cooker, pulses etc. He paid almost the same amount as his ticket fare in excess baggage and it was only a miracle how he lifted his stuff alone on the second floor of the building.
He was so shy that he refused to lift his face up while speaking to me. I felt a little disconcerting but carried on the conversation. Naushad spoke in a very soft voice, as if he has not yet reached his puberty.
“It is so stupid that in spite of being neighboring countries we are speaking in English.” said Naushad.
“Yes, but as per rules we should be speaking German. By the way what language do you speak?”
“I speak Urdu only, and you?”
“I speak Bengali, the language they speak in erstwhile East Pakistan and a bit of Hindi.”
“No, I do not understand any of the languages.”
“But Hindi is not that different from Urdu, except for the script.”
“Maybe, but I have never heard the language. But I heard that many in India speak Urdu.”
“Yes, maybe in the erstwhile princely state of Hyderabad and Lucknow.”
“Ah! Hyderabad, which was invaded by the Indian army and forcefully annexed it to the Indian state.”
I was totally foxed by his statement, Hyderabad – attacked by Indian Army – annexed. It was a total spin and I was left flabbergasted.
“Your army also invaded Goa and more so many people got killed, India was acting fascist at that time.”
We were sitting and having our discussion in a country which has a history of Fascism about forty years back, but no one has dared call India fascist.
“And what you did in Nagaland, killing the tribal, just because they refused to be a part of the Indian state and demanded their freedom. Their leader Phizo was exiled and continued the fight from England.”
“Excuse me, Phizo who?” I was almost sweating.

The soft spoken, gentle Pakistani was telling me the history of my own country which I was totally unaware off or was it a Pakistani propaganda.
I told him that I need to go out and make a call to my family. I rushed to the nearest telephone booth and called my father and asked in sequence what Naushad had told me. It was a part of history post independence and who in the world of our age cared about history.

But some countries do like Pakistan. When you want to inflict hatred against someone a counter productive history comes handy.
You obfuscate a part of it, mould it to suit your goals and brainwash the people. Pakistan had no history – a country only forty years old and having a series of leadership change, junta rules, and a country born on the principle of hatred cannot have a history.

Few days later, when we realized that I can understand his Urdu and he can somehow understand my Hindi [which he kept on arguing was Urdu, but the fascist Indian government gave a new name] I had asked him about his roots.
He thought for a moment and then he said with a smile,” We are decedents of a business family from Morocco, who came to make is fortune in Afghanistan and later settled in Karachi after Pakistan was formed.”
Naushad Alam would never even have a shadow of India cross his frame.

My Misadventures in USA -Part II

“I speak American.”
“How is it different from English?”
“English is spoken by the natives of England.”
“Yes, I understand, but how is your language different?”
When asked, “How are you?” we say,” I am good” and they say,” I am doing fine.”
“Anything more, that’s just an expression. I mean, semantically is there a difference?”
“Look here, my friend, we speak American and you ask those darn Brits what’s the difference?”

The first morning breakfast did not make me any wiser about the American way of life, but at least it was the beginning. The Americans are generally happy go lucky kind; take things as they come, not going deep or into the root of anything, quite superficial, which is in a way good and in a way bad.
When you meet anyone, irrespective of the fact that you are total strangers, you are always met with a greeting,”Hey, how are you doing today?” By the time you can gather your breath and mutter,” I am fine, what about you?” the person will be a mile [see, I started talking miles] away from you. But, it’s alright; it’s the thought that counts.

Our training was quite fun, the Americans have a nice way of presentation. It was much less of training but more of an interaction, the deeper understandings being told with lively anecdotes. Of the four days of training we only had a slide show of ten minutes and the rest all were like Hans Anderson stories.
The group was quite diverse, there were four people from Quebec, Canada and they spoke more French than American [English], three guys were from North Carolina and the heaviest among them [which already clarifies that all were overweight] kept on humming a CCR number, and I was the lone Indian and that too a dark one.

The organizers everyday placed a huge box full of Donuts of different types. After having one I realized why “Type One” Diabetes and obesity is so popular in USA, but went on to have more than four everyday and realized that it’s not the fault of the people but the Donut manufacturer, it is so difficult to resist.

Rockford in April was by no imagination hot, temperatures were hovering between three to twelve degree centigrade and a hot steaming coffee was my constant companion. But my friends in the class did not agree with me. While I was helping myself with hot coffee, they were filling their cups with crushed ice. Some chewed on the ice, making an awful noise and running a shiver in my spine, others just sipped at intervals to have the water from melted ice. Later I found that wherever you go and ask for water they will give you cold water with ice cubes. Some things in life are beyond logic and I treated this as one of them.

I was ready for the breakfast on the second day, ordered eggs [there is nothing singular in US, all are big, oversized] to be made nice and easy with brown bread and sausages with coffee on the go. Felt so satisfied. One of the French guys ordered for pancakes with maple syrup. When it was served, it reminded me of “set dosa” served with molasses.

My friend took me for dinner that night. It was a nice place, a sports bar sort of, but they also served the best steak in Rockford. Rockford is a small town and I think there are not much of Indians that live there.
The young bartender was nice and friendly and asked me,” What can I get you for a drink, Kingfisher or Stella Artois?” It was smart of him as it proved that he knows the taste of people as per their nationality.
For the main course I had already decided to try the Sirloin steak with mashed potato. The following conversation followed:
“So gentlemen, have you decided on the main course, the kitchen is about to close in one hours time.”
“I will have the Sirloin steak with mashed potato and ribs.”
“What’s the portion you want, six, eight or eleven ounce?”
“I will go for eleven ounce”
“How would you like to have your steak – rare, medium or well done?”
“Medium, I guess [I just want to eat my cow].”
“Will it be rare medium or medium well done?”
“Simply medium, I mean medium-medium.”
“That’s great; you would like to have salad or French fries along with the steak?”
“Salad, please.” [Please let me have my food, the kitchen will close by the time you are finished with the order].
“What dressing would you like to have with the salad?”
Now, that was enough, I could not take it any more.
“Tahina mixed with Hummus topped with crushed Mutabel.”
This completely unsettled the young man. He has never heard of these Middle Eastern concoctions in his life.
Still he faced up to my challenge and said,” Sorry, Sir, we don’t have those dressings – it does not go well with our salad.”
Now the address turned to a polite “Sir”.
“Do you have Thousand Island or Miracle Whip?” I was complete novice when it comes to salad dressing – but these names I have seen when I had been to Subways.
The bartender almost broke down,” No, Sir, we only have Ranch, Blue Cheese and French dressing and I will serve you samples of all and whatever you like I will serve you more.”
“Thank you; please rush before the kitchen closes.”

It gave me a good feeling to win a small physiological battle, but the steak was one of the best one I ever had in my life.

My Misadventure's in U.S.A - Part I

The Lufthansa flight, which was the first one to take off from Frankfurt to cross the Atlantic defying the dictums of the met department and the volcanic ashes, landed in Chicago O’Hara International airport in the wee hours of the morning. The airport was deserted except for few duty bound officials.
I had my turn in the immigration with a middle aged lady, who wanted to laugh out loud looking at the condition of the passengers but as per the training imparted on her had to maintain a stern face. After taking all forms of prints of my body parts and some frivolous questions, answered by equally mundane answers, she put a stamp on my visa and said,” Have fun.”

By the time I checked into the hotel, The Clock Tower in Rockford, it was around two in the morning and way past my sleeping hours. The lady in the reception handed my two access cards for the room to which I sheepishly asked,” Are they both for the room?”
May be it was a dumb question as she stared at me and said,” Excuse me.”
I took the strength to ask again,” Are these keys to the same room?”
She shook her head in disbelief and said, “Yes, any problems?” No, I realized I was in United States of America, where things are different if not somewhat through [as per them and stupid as per me].

I had been in Gulf countries and realized that they do things completely different from how we do things back here in India. That was contributed by the humorous fact that Muslims do exactly opposite to that of Hindus.
I nearly spend ten minutes trying to open the door, inserting that card, taking it out, waiting for the green light to blink and push the door lever down to enter. I am not a simpleton and it is not that it was by first visit abroad from Jhumritalaiya.
I went back to the reception, expressed my inability to enter my room. By now she was quite irritated; because I found out that I was causing a rift between her and her big fat burger [at two in the night?].
She came along me, after whispering a little sweet nothing to her burger [that meant a big bite] did the same things I did till she lifted the door knob UP to let me in. It was a second welcome to Uncle Sam’s land.

Since I could not sleep I tried to see all gadgets in the room, tried operating them [if it did not work in my way I always tried the opposite and in most cases it worked, they took pity and left the TV remote unchanged – Green button for ON and Red for OFF] and then realized that I was once again in trouble.
My hand phone was telling me to feed her with energy and there was a complete mismatch with the plug and the socket. I had one adaptor for Germany, Britain, Australia and even one for Mocondo, but nothing would go in. It was like a strict no, no without Durex [in America, use American].
Next day, early in the morning, I made my first trip to the famously infamous Walmart [thank god, they are open 24X7] and picked up an “all American adapter for the rest of the world” for $ twenty. My initiations to America were quite costly.

When I came back, participants for the training program were already at the breakfast. A little bit of self introduction and getting to know each other was interrupted by the waitress’s [she was a stout lady in her fifties] wake up call,” Hey, how are you doing today and what can I serve you for breakfast?”
I was about to say, Idli, Sambhar and Chatni separate [I have aligned my taste with the place I stay now] but realized that would be too much to ask for.
Wherever I have been, breakfast had always been a buffet, so ordering from menu was more or less the first time. I usually have a light breakfast of milk and cornflakes and sometimes an egg with a piece of bread.
I asked her if I can have a couple of toasts and an egg to go with.
“What sort of bread would you like – with butter, full fat or margarine or jam to go with? How do you want your eggs to be served and would you take coffee, tea or orange juice? And by the way you need to tell me if you want bacon or sausage along with the egg.”
Honey, you just shrunk me.
No one told me how my face looked at that point of time but I could hear the lady saying,” Don’t worry, Honey – I will get the right stuff for you.”

I was served with toasted brown bread with butter with a small accompaniment of jam, a fresh garden omlette with golden brown mashed potato, three big fat beef sausages and a steaming cup of coffee.
That was one hell of my first morning in the United States of America.

TIME WRAP - INTERNET CONNECTION

Exactly a decade back I was one of the privileged few who had a personal computer at work with an internet connection. In those days to have an email account meant filling up a series of forms, with justification for the need to have an “expensive” mail account, when there were regular mode of communication like telephone, fax or the post. The forms needed to be submitted to the departmental head who in his own great managerial demeanor would sit on the file till you poked him about the same. Then came the monologue which by then was known to any person even remotely connected to our business unit. It came to be known as the “Great Indian Management” jargon.
Without even looking at you, scribbling on a notepad, the great manager would rue about the rising cost, the need for austerity, how receivables are increasing leading to lesser profitability, reduced sale due to lesser demand [attributed to either bad monsoon or severe health problems of anyone in Gandhi family] and self restraint in these trying times.
Then he would look up through his glasses which were just left hanging on the nose and say triumphantly that he is no bigot, he cares for his people and understands that technology is the only way for the future.
That ultimately meant that you will get your mail account in the future which can stretch from few weeks to few months.
Nowadays the same manager, when fed up from not getting the office-boy on the pantry phone for a cup of tea, sends him a text message for the same.

I had just come back from overseas training and the business unit had set a precondition that I should have a mail account and an internet connection for faster communication and updates.
The form for the internet connection needed to be signed by the director of the company, it was even beyond the jurisdiction of the “great” manager who is responsible for the profit loss account of the division. They said it is for greater good and the cost needs to be adjusted across the divisions. At one point the feeling was that an internet connection was more crucial than a couple of senior managers.
Getting the internet connection was after all not that difficult. After the form was approved it took few minutes for a person to hook up a connector into my computer and say,” Open Sesame”. There you are in front of the World Wide Web and hardly knowing what to do.

I still remember the most popular search site was AltaVista [do not know if it still exists] and the first thing everybody worth their salt and an internet connection did was to open a Hotmail account.
I was no different [I was not married then, people generally say life becomes different after marriage].
The best part of the net during those days was that most of the contents were free as most things in life in the beginning are. There was hardly any filter and the greatest demand for the internet was after office hours.
People who started packing their bags at four to catch the bus at five to get back to home suddenly felt the urge to devote more time for the good of the company.

We had the internet connection but the computer we had would have been now an archeologist’s delight.
We calculated that the time taken by the computer to start up was exactly the time for a person to finish a “Will Navy Cut” cigarette.
After hitting the “enter” key by the time a new page loaded you could very well say,” Jawaharlal Nehru liked the smell of Lady Mountbatten’s armpit and she never used a deodorant.”
Gross, but we were acting our age.
We all made these things up, thinking that some day we would tell these stories to the next generation.

We chatted after office hours, made up names, age and also gender in the chat rooms – it was fun and we did it all collectively, not in the solitude, in the remote corner of a room.
I still am in touch with a friend I met on one of the chat rooms.
Ten long years – sometimes you do not even remember how fast time catches up with you.

Trapped by Nature

We think that human beings are the smartest animal on this planet and in our endeavor to prove that we are above The Ultimate we make wasteful expenditures like creating the world’s largest and highest energy particle accelerator in Switzerland. Billions of Euros has been pumped by CERN in the Large Hardon Collider (LCH) project which is a disaster for the environment, in the guise of finding the scenario that happened just after the Big Bang.

We understand a bit of physics which present scientists call history and have put under achieves as classical physics. It is much like the beautiful rock music of the sixties and seventies which is also relegated to Rock classics.
It made sense when we were told that apples can only fall down from a tree because it has no wings to fly up, the same reason why people cannot fly without an airplane. Gravity was understandable but anti gravity involved a lot of mathematics that went beyond our Famous Four of add, subtract, multiply and divide.

Fusion hot or cold was not as cool as fusion music and the names of scientists were as complicated as Max Plank, Schrödinger, Heisenberg, Einstein (a singular stone) as their theories were. I always thought that Schrödinger’s Cat was a distant relative of a Siamese cat, but never realized why it would be a statistical problem for a cat to live in a box with a radioactive particle.
Einstein deduced a simple formula E= mc² and said that the only way to retain your beauty is not to go through Botox or not a sip from the Holy Grail but to fly faster than the speed of light. That is the way of life, predict something unachievable and you get a Nobel and even if we do fly faster than the speed of light, Steven Spielberg intimidated us the problems we may land up with a series of “Back to Future” movies.

I am not against modern physics, but when you are stuck in Frankfurt for three days in a row because of a volcano which wake up from sleep after a period much longer than Rip Van Winkle took (it went to sleep in 1817), none of our brightest scientists could even visualize that such a thing would happen. Science is not meant for predicting the past; if it is so then the profession of scientist’s is as much as debated as that of soothsayers. It is to predict what may be the consequences of certain events or occurrence of events.

Scientists are also getting media savvy and using nice jargons – the other day I heard a scientist calling the event a “Black Swan’ event. An event which is likely to happen but it is beyond human predicament.
You can do nothing better that watching all the crap in the television while praying to God when he will again be merciful to us.
People, who are trapped and are atheists, should be given the last chance to fly out, because nature is nothing but a reflection of The Ultimate – whether you believe or not.

M.F. Hussain - Goodluck & Goodbye

I left Bharat and landed in Dubai,
On a plane ride so bumpy that I almost cried.
Clergymen in uniform and Amirs counting gold,
Everyone was there to greet me when I stepped outside.
Newspapermen eating kebabs
Had to be held down by big police.
Someday, everything is gonna be different
When I paint my masterpiece.

My apologies to Bob Dylan for twisting his beautiful lyrics to suit my purpose, but God’s like him are all forgiving.

But things are really “different” for Maqbool Fida Hussain has who has been leaving in self imposed exile for last four years. He exile, albeit self imposed, is more or less for the same reason as Ms. Taslima Nasrin is out of Bangladesh or Salman Rushdie has been collecting girlfriends in his self imposed hiding.

Maqbool Fida Hussain has been conferred the prized Qatari citizenship by Qatar’s powerful first lady, Sheikha Mozah bint Nasser al Missned, wife of the emirate’s ruler, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani and the “masterpiece” is a series of canvasses depicting the history of Arab culture.
Maqbool Fida Hussain has accepted the privilege with honor and has to give up the citizenship of India, the land where he was born.

While Taslima could not conjure so much publicity as she is more obscure because of her regional, gender biased writing and Mr. Rushdie has been a shade of his former self writing subdued novels from the dungeons, people are “fida” about Fida and shakes and stirs at the mention of his name.
Whether it’s New York Times or The Tribune, both local and international media have been crying foul about the “exiled” status of the painter, who has been dubbed as the “Picasso of India”.

Mr. Hussain has a summer residence in London and spends the rest of his time shuttling in Middle East countries.

But the basic question remains why Mr. Hussain is in self imposed exile?
If one has to believe in the reports of the “secularism” obsessed press, the reason is given below. The lines are from Mr. N Ram, editor of “The Hindu”.
“Since 2006, when the Hindutva hate campaign against him escalated, Mr. Husain has been living in Dubai, spending his summers in London. He travels freely except to India, where he faces legal harassment and physical threats, with the system impotent and not committed to enabling his return. Though the Supreme Court has intervened on the right side, it was too little, too late. The Congress-led government, it is clear, has done no better than the preceding BJP-led governments in protecting Mr. Husain’s freedom of creativity and peace of mind.”

Maqbool Fida Hussain was born in pre independent India in 1915 in a village in Maharashtra and went to Sir J.J. School of Art. He started is career (earning money) by painting billboards for Bollywood and then joined the Progressive Artists Group which wanted to break free from the nationalist Bengal School of Art and focused more towards the avant - garde modern redemptions in painting.

Painting, when made commercial, by nature is a bourgeois form of art. It is understood by limited people, adored and appreciated by much lesser population and can be afforded only by the rich and famous.
Even a canvas painting from an outgoing student of Pune School of Art will command a grand. We, the middle class, know more about Hussain’s painting after the auctions at Christies or when bought by a connoisseur by spending an amount which could have eradicated poverty in few small African villages. For the 450 million people living in villages Maqbool Hussain may resonate with the name of a person living in the nearby village.

Painters are creative people, but creativity does not feed you in today’s world. You need to sell and to sell you need to be popular and the easiest way to create popularity is to create a controversy.
Hussain’s paintings started earning him rich dividends mostly after the controversy broke out on pictures which were drawn few decades back.
The controversy started with his Ramayana and Mahabharata series and his depictions of Hindu deities in the nude.
Most of us who would like to discuss Hussain, due to lack of any current topics on making money or cricket, have no credible information about the drawings and all their coffee table dissertations are based on hearsay.

The Hindu belief in God is based on mythology as Hinduism does not have a flesh and blood proponent in the form of a Prophet or Son of God. The belief is older than any man made religion and the scriptures profess equality for all rather than having an expansionist view. That is why we have seen Gautam Buddha choosing a different path and forming his own sect and the same holds true for Jainism. Hindu philosophy is like a huge Banyan tree which shelters other sects and sub sects to grow in peace.

The mythological figures have been in our sub consciousness from the time we are introduced to them and we are given an option to choose our religion and not forced as in case of others. While the same mythology depicts Goddess Kali in the nude, whose form depicts destruction, and through the centuries the idea of that picture is instilled in our head, the same depiction of Lakshmi or Saraswati, Goddess of fortune and knowledge is in their purest form.

It hurts sentiments of people, who are devoid of understanding to that extent, the Indian version of selective freedom of speech, more so in case of abstract art, when such deities are depicted in impure form.

“Indeed, Husain has painted several goddesses from the Hindu pantheon in the nude, including Saraswati, the goddess of learning, Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth, and Durga, a martial goddess who slays demons. These are bold works that reshape our thinking about Hindu myths, revealing them in new light; they are not lewd drawings meant to titillate. His nudes delineate the body in sharp lines, elevating it to an abstract realm, suggesting the formlessness of divinity.
This explanation, which is faithful to Hindu philosophy, is too abstract for fundamentalists who have protested against his works, and in some cases, ransacked art galleries in India displaying his art. Some Hindu groups have also used the courts: More than 1,200 cases have been filed against him.” - The New York Times

For common man the above report in the New York Times is pure Esperanto.
We are as we present ourselves to the world and whatever be the form of art, the representation should not be a matter of ridicule.

Maqbool Hussain made a film titled “Meenaxi – Tale of Three Cities” which was pulled out of the theatres after four days of release.
A religious Muslim body found a qawwali number in the film, ‘Noor-un-Ala-Noor’ as blasphemous. The council claimed that the song featuring the film’s main protagonist, contained words directly lifted from the Quran.
The response of Hussain to his withdrawal was succinct,” I have not made the film to make money, nor have I sold it to anyone. Therefore, I need not give any reason for the withdrawal of the screening of the film to public.”

We clearly live in a world of dichotomy and our actions are guided more now by commercial and political motives than by any of our bodily organs.
We can accept the depiction of Sita in nude riding on Hanuman’s tail, claiming it as a form of abstract art or may find it objectionable.
When a greater mass find the painting objectionable then it should be mated with the same fate as that of the Danish Cartoon, Satanic Verses or Meenaxi.

These drawing have been made not for Hussain’s bedroom but for public consumption in the western world. Hussain may have received loads of support from quarters that profit from religious divide in the veil of pseudo secularism, but there had been criticism that supersedes the appeasement.
Satish Gujral has gone on record to ask Husain whether he will be bold enough to treat icons of Islam in the same manner.
According to a senior artist and former President, Bombay Art Society, Gopal Adivrekar, “Nothing is bad in being creative but the artists should not go for such artwork, which may hurt the sentiments of a segment of the society.”

The biggest noise was made by the media, who nowadays play more of a disruptive role rather than the constructive role that they are supposed to play.
Hussain’s acceptance of the Qatari citizenship is a blow to their pseudo secularist role and that’s the reason you see only passing remarks about this issue.

To the pseudo secularists, art lovers or those who pretend to understand art, Maqbool Fida Hussain, may be the Picasso or Paul Gauguin of India but to me, like the majority masses of India, it is just another name and his acceptance of Qatari nationality will mean that we have one less citizen.
Good luck and Goodbye – Maqbool Fida Hussain.

Future is Bright, so We Think

The natural resources to support the world population of more than five billion is depleting faster than a piece of camphor left in the open and so is the resilience of the society.

The Amazon rain forest is vanishing faster than the speed of night and along with them the indigenous tribe of the region. The forest of Amazon, known as Amazonia is called the 'lungs of the earth' as it produces twenty percent of the total oxygen in the world. It is the largest ecosystem on earth.
The constant fight between survival of mankind and its environment is pushing them to extremes. The ever increasing population needs more space, grow more food or build infrastructure so that they can support their livelihood. Illegal mining for the benefit of the money mongers and corrupt politicians is taking a toll on the forests across the globe.

The animals are also not spared. The ecological balance is being destroyed for innate fancies of human beings. The population of tigers in China is a miniscule twenty. Tigers are being raised in Chinese tiger farms to be slaughtered for their pelt, meat and bones. The bones find use in traditional Chinese medicines and aphrodisiacs. Despite a ban by the Chinese government the trade is flourishing and now with the year of the Tiger ushered, the poaching has shifted to Indian forests where there are hardly fourteen hundred tigers left (the figure is again disputed).

The global warming due to excess of carbon emissions is resulting not only in higher temperature but also rising sea level. Based on the projected increases, the IPCC TAR WG II report notes that current and future climate change would be expected to have a number of impacts, particularly on coastal systems. Such impacts may include increased coastal erosion, higher storm-surge flooding, inhibition of primary production processes, more extensive coastal inundation, changes in surface water quality and groundwater characteristics, increased loss of property and coastal habitats, increased flood risk and potential loss of life, loss of nonmonetary cultural resources and values, impacts on agriculture and aquaculture through decline in soil and water quality, and loss of tourism, recreation, and transportation functions.

We are busy fighting to whom Mumbai belongs, but we do not care for the fact that in few hundred years Mumbai, which is an island, would seize to exist. We are fighting for a lost cause and for vested political interests.

The deep sea water fishing (bottom trawling) brings up a whooping 20 million tons of fish from the bottom of the ocean every day. This destroys the entire ecosystem of the ocean. The fishes are not getting enough time to breed and there is depletion in the fish population. Almost quarter of the haul perishes before it reaches the market. The fancy of the Japanese for whale meat has driven the species to near extinction.

The biggest problem that affects us directly is the depletion of the ground water level. This affects not only sustenance of life but also for agriculture. To suck up water from the ground one needs to dig deeper or needs to use more powerful pump, which in turn needs more energy. There is a huge scarcity of potable water. In Sub African countries more than sixty percent of the population does not have access to potable water. Even a modern city like Mumbai has to depend on rain God and on the artificial lakes for their daily source of water. When the rain God plays truant, the taps run dry and the shortage of power is imminent.

In a strategy of sort countries have started buying tracts of farm land and water bodies in Africa or in countries like Brazil. Most of the Middle East countries and China have bought around five to ten percent of farms lands in the African countries like Ethiopia, Niger, Kenya and Mozambique. War is being promoted to reign in instability and for profiteering of some advanced countries.

The facts are known to all of us and we can do nothing but be mere spectators and watch in delusion the slow destruction of the mankind. These are collective follies of our race as we try to outsmart nature, of whose powers we do not have any credible information.

We bring up the next generation by imparting them the best of education or vocational skills but do we have the moral fiber to tell them that they have to go for days without having a bath, or they have to go to a museum to see a stuffed tiger or to an aquarium to see a common Tuna or Sardine or be prepared for the dark days ahead as there will be so much scarcity that only might may prevail over knowledge.

All I wish for is a careful introspection of our consumption pattern. We earn to live a good life but the good life is not restricted to us, our next generation also deserves a bit of that if not the whole.