A changing world

A month has past since I last posted here.

I had written about the gap analysis between the Governor’s HLC report on Visva Bharati / Santiniketan and what we think today as necessary steps.

The world, meanwhile, is a month older, and so are we. What has changed ?

Well, for one thing, I had made a trip to Guangzhou province of China to inspect and take part in the sea trial of a newly build ship, which is being readied for delivery.

Other than that, there is a newly formed NGO, which is not yet registered, where I am part of the group that founded it. The name of the group is Vancouver Tagore Society or VTS. I have to get used to that abbreviation. Anyhow, the main idea was Duke’s. He got involved with another established NGO, named World Poetry Reading, regarding celebration of Rabindranath Tagore’s 150th birth anniversary. The upshot of that collaboration was a day long event on the 10th of September, at Richmond cultural centre, performed by a varied group of people, towards RNT150 (an abbreviation of Rabindranath Tagore’s 150th anniversary). And I had agreed to make one presentation - Tagore’s efforts at Rural Reconstruction as a basic step in nation building.

There are others that also contributed. But, from my perspective, this is perhaps the second time I came on stage to present anything relating to Tagore before a crowd. In 2008 December I had presented a ten minute piece on how Santiniketan, and Tagore’s ideas, had influenced my thought process and personality. That was presented at a function called ‘শান্তিনিকেতনের সেকাল ও একাল’ or - Santiniketan, past and present, staged at Natyaghar, the main hall in Visva Bharati University in Santiniketan.

I met Pushpa Jain at the RNT150 at Richmond Cultural Centre. She did her PhD in maths in 1997/98 in Santiniketan, taught maths in Simon Fraser University in Vancouver and took early retirement due blood cancer.

But apart from me, Richmond Cultural Centre, VTS, and RNT150, what else has been happening in the recent months? Visva-Bharati is waiting for a new vice chancellor. We were hoping that Piyali Palit or Udaya Narayan Singh might be selected. But the politicians manipulate these things - so the person selected might turn out to be very different.

For one thing - the global economic allergy is still persisting. The more I think about it, and read about it, and I have been doing so for over a few decades now, I feel more convinced that there is no real solution to ensure further sustained grown, globally speaking, and the reason is that we, mankind, have over-extended ourselves. Believing that we are the chosen species by God and therefore have a license to kill the planet, have proceeded to do just that. So, in the largest perspective, the current civilization is unsustainable. Mankind will either learn to reverse its damaging trends on its own wisdom, or it will be forced to do so. But before any such corrective measures take place, the planet will be much worsened, and a lot more of the ecosystem, flora and fauna will disappear.

Even vultures are going extinct in India an surrounding countries. In the 1990s the vulture population, Griffon cultures and oriental white backed vultures, started dying off at alarming rates, over 40% every year. Some of these species, especially the white backed, has now lost 99.99% of its original population and can be considered as good as extinct.

Why ? Apparently a cattle painkiller drug called diclofenac is the culprit. It stays in dead cows and vultures that eat these carcasses have rapid failure of their livers. The drug has been banned in 2006 but is still widely available. There are frantic efforts ongoing to save the species by various means. The latest report is that the efforts are not succeeding much. The rate of their population decline is faster than any known bird species, including the famous dodo that went extinct around the 17th century through man’s intervention.

Vultures play a very important role in the south Asian ecosystem. The goings on is an example among many others, showing the disastrous effects of human technology or its false promises, on the future of the living planet.

So, what else has happened? US military is still in Iraq and Afghanistan. Obama appears a good talker but not much else. Jack Lytton died of cancer. Steve Jobs is suffering from Pancreatic cancer and gave up his post at Apple. Japan is reeling under multiple bad news - Tsunami followed by failure of the nuclear power plants at Fukushima followed by leaks of radiation. This came at the end of a decade long recession and a major mental depression of the nation.

Binayak Sen was given bail by the Supreme Court of India. Julian Assange remains in house arrest in the UK.

Worlds oceans have been overfished by industrial nations to such an extent that major depletion of fish population is affecting the ecosystem and animals as well as men have to adjust to it. The Sea Lions and Seals are re-adjusting their food habits and hunting grounds, apart from experiencing decline in population. Toothed whales are fairing no better, including the famous killer whales. On the human side, a lot of coastal fishermen communities are devastated, and some have turned criminal - example the rising piracy off the Somali coast. While there is a lot of talk on eradicating, or controlling this newfound piracy - no politician is willing to talk of the underlying problem - overfishing.

The arctic ice sheet is melting away ever faster. The Canadian north is opening up. Global warming will make more species go extinct and more low lying lands go under water.

Turkey got angry at Israel for killing a number of Turks in an attack on an aid flotilla for Palestine and then refusing to apologize for it. Its Prime Minsiter is the new hero for the middle class Arabs, while embarrassing the Arab leaders and alarming the Israeli and Amaricans.

Nato pounded Lybia and helped force a change of regime. No idea what the new regime will compose of. Ruper Murdock got into hot water over embarrassing leaks of illegal activity of its British media company News of the World. There was a Royal Wedding in London, which most of us were unaware of and did not watch.

The proposed oil pipeline project from Alberta to Texas is drawing protest. Naomi Klien of Canada was arrested, among many others, sitting in to protest it in the US. Dalai Lama has joined the protesters.

The Arab Spring turned out to be less than a watershed event. We knew nothing much about Tunisia before the spring, and know as less about it after the spring. Egypt tossed out Mubarak, but the Army is in power and not the people nor democracy. Lybia is still in turmoil and Assad is still in power in Syria. Saudi Arabia is still a monarchy, as is many other smaller nations there.

Meanwhile, democracy has been overblown and as far as India and many other nations are concerned, is compromised and degraded through corruption.

The biggest hero to emerge out of it all, in my book, is Anna Hazare and his team. Time will tell how it turns out.

Stone age India is another piece of news that got my attention. There is not enough room to write about it properly here. Suffice it to say, the hominid species that migrated out of Africa and inhabited various regions of the world say 80,000 years ago are known in Europe and the middle east - but not much was known of them in India. That is now changing due to archaeological excavation works in Andhra Pradesh last century and a fresh effort now. Also, the story is linked with the Toba explosion, 74,000 years ago, when an Indonesian Island erupted in a major volcanic event. Indian subcontinent got covered in several inches of ash and the sulfurous particles in the atmosphere prevented sunlight from warming the earth. The eruption blanketed sunlight for years. Some climatologists claim that the planet got into a thousand year long cold snap as a result of that eruption. 99 percent of modern humans perished at the time, along with many other species.

Somehow, India played a crucial role and the excavations in Billa Surgam Caves of Andhra Pradesh is proving to be crucial. If I get to India, I intend to see if there is any chance of me visiting that site.

A Burmese elephant is being treated by a veteranarian. It wandered into Thailand and stepped on a land mine and injured itself. Another bizarre news in Thailand is that a tourist park in Pattaya region was flooded during high waters, and a large number of crocodiles escaped. Now the park authorities are frantically searching for them.

Floods and resultant outbreaks of decease has again ravaged North Korea, which reportedly faces a new bout of starvation and food crisis.

Many news papers and nature magazines are putting up colorful pictures of Corals and Coral reefs - because such reefs are suspected to go completely extinct as the first entire ecosystem to vanish due to man’s activity.

Well, thats all I could write up before feeling sleepy. I might add to these later on.

Tonu