Atlantis is back....

Last saturday, NASA's STS-117 mission involving the Space Shuttle Atlantis returned to earth successfully, bringing home the record-breaking Sunita Williams and six other astronauts. A section of the thermal blanket, which protects part of the shuttle from the blazing heat of re-entry, had peeled back from its left engine pod mount during the launch, rekindling the memories of Columbia disaster. Space walker Danny Olivas secured the torn blanket with medical staples and pins. An initial inspection found a slight gap between the blanket and the surrounding heat tiles after landing, but the anchor pins were still in place.

Hats off to Danny Olivas and the NASA.

But who ensured that the pins wouldn't give way?

Here they are;




Whatever we do, let's do it with dedication and devotion as these little ones demonstrate :-)

When I Surprised Myself!

The Smiles From My Shelf [3]

It's quite some time since my last post on this topic. Not that I had run out of 'Smiles' to post, perhaps I was not in the mood for a smile, or to write about one.

One day this past week as I was driving to college I saw a colleague and stopped my car by the side of the road. In another couple of minutes I heard a screeching noise followed by a thud at the rear. On looking back I saw a young man on his bike, struggling to move his vehicle away from the back of mine, his head bowed in apparent embarassment. I sat on in the car without bothering to get down to check the extent of damage he had caused. He slowly and hesitantly moved his bike to my side. With no words spoken and without raising his head he smiled at me through the corners of his eyes, a guilty smile.

And for once I managed to 'retaliate' with a broader smile, albeit with a tinge of reprehension!

Now that surprised me for I had never thought of myself as someone capable of doing that.....

Signs of aging and disinterest?!

Of Farmer Stars and the 'Star's of the Farmers….

A couple of months back I had come across a news paper article about the plight of cotton farmers in Maharashtra. It explained how at a time when the Indian textile industry was struggling in the international market, at the behest of the Government, the farmers had agreed to supply the cotton at lower prices in order to allow the industry to sustain itself and recover. But the clever ‘blue chip men’ managing the companies misled the farmers and they continued to supply the cotton far below the market prices long after the crisis blew over. As the leeches grew fat, the farmers began falling into debt traps. And finally when the death punch was delivered by the Mother Nature in the form of drought and pests, resulting in huge losses, the fat pigs chose to look the other way! And one by one the poor farmers chose a glorious exit instead of going out with a begging bowl.

In the recent past, the actions of two ‘arrogant’ CMs from the North and the South of the country had made life difficult for two of India’s popular personalities, one a ‘multi-mega’ star and the other a ‘mega’ star. They did no wrong, just decided to make a living as Gandhiji had advised. They saw immense pride in declaring themselves as farmers and so thought of owning some farm land. But these ‘rampaging’ CMs had other ideas. They ‘went out of their way’ to grab the lands owned by these ‘poor farmers’! Don’t they know about the contributions of these two men who over the years, through their distinctly masculine voices, exhorted people to fight corruption, exploitation, nepotism, injustice and what not?!

P Sainath is one of my favorite journalists. He had come up with another ‘op-ed’ on the topic in The Hindu last month. It told the story of Ms. KALAVATI BANDURKAR, the mother of seven girls and two boys in Jalka village of Yavatmal district in Vidharbha. One of over a lakh of women farmers across the country, who had lost their husbands to farm suicides in the past 14 years.

Her husband's debt of over Rs.50000/- led him mortgage even her mangalsutra. But their nine acres yielded just four quintals that fetched Rs.7000/-. The day he sold his cotton, he redeemed his wife's mangalsutra with the money, went out to the field and killed himself. Kalavati, always a fighter, decided to carry on. "Farming is what we do," she says, as per the report, without a trace of self-pity. "We'll keep on doing it." She now runs a failing nine-acre farm and also works on the land of others for Rs.30 a day. In the off-season she earns just Rs.20 from fetching and selling firewood. Her last source of income is the milk from a buffalo she owns, Rs.60-80 a day and sometimes a little more. On these earnings, some ten human beings survive. Right now they sell all the milk. Even the kids at home don't get to consume a drop of it. She had worked hard and paid off most of her husband’s debts.

And this ever-smiling, matter-of-fact grandmother never got a paisa's compensation from government! The reason: the land they cultivate is not their own but leased from others!! So when her husband Parsuram, hit by debt and crop failure, took his life, his death was not recognized as a "farmer's suicide". The official logic: if there's no land in his name, he's not a farmer!!! She's annoyed at not being recognized as a farmer and thereby losing out on the compensation. "We do own 3.5 acres in Chandrapur district," she says. "But that land is still in our parents' names and has not yet been settled in our names." So technically, they are not ‘farmers’!

Please note the irony,……. the status so easily acquired by the Farmer Stars!

She pays only Rs.10,000/- a year to lease the nine acres, an indication of the poor quality of the land. It's hard work, but Kalavati has no complaints. What bothers her is that the costs of inputs are rising too much. “No more cotton for us. We have to do something else.” she says. Despite the hardships, it's said to be a smiling if very noisy household ruled by lively youngsters.

Ms. Kalavati Bandurkar is one survivor who asserts that she would like her children too, to go into agriculture. This is a rarity in our countrysides these days where people desperately seek jobs outside farming for their young. But she's already planning for the next season. "We'll stay with agriculture" she reiterates.

While emphasizing that nature had provided sufficient gifts for use of all man kind and the other species, Mahatma Gandhi had stated that there was enough for the satisfaction of every man's need, but not for any man's greed.

The vast wealth of our nation & the planet as a whole, generated due to the rapid strides in technology, science and engineering over the last few decades should be more than enough for all of us. But the structures of power within nations and between nations continue to reward the few at the very top while penalizing the majority at the bottom of the pile.

There is a saying that we tend to imitate the very people whom we criticize most. So why blame the 'super heroes' who had to teach a lesson or two to a variety of villains for the most part of their lives?

Die Entropie der India strebt einem Maximum zu

The Entropy of India Tends Towards a Maximum

I pity the plight of Rajastan’s ramp walking CM, reaping what her party sowed. But I feel that the political parties of left, right and centre should take a serious note of the happenings in Rajastan instead of trying to fish in troubled waters for the issue has the potential to spread to the other parts of the nation. India was never a united country, although we often use ‘sugar coated’ phrases like unity in diversity. Our biggest chance at national integration was provided by the British. But once we got our freedom, the people who came to power and those who clamored for it began the process of ‘disintegration’, by dividing people to meet their narrow interests.

We are of course ‘unique’ and to the outside world India had always remained a puzzle. When our ‘growth rate’ is said to be 9.5% on one side, more and more communities in India take to the roads demanding ‘backward status’ and those who are already ‘enjoying’ the status either oppose these demands or seek to be classified as ‘most backward’. So the not so informed people in China or Europe will be wondering if India’s progress is in the ‘backward’ direction!

The situation has come to such a state that, the MPs and MLAs of ‘cadre-based’ national parties offer to resign en masse to show solidarity with their communities, A a direct fall out of giving priority to caste and communal considerations over leadership skills and loyalty to the ideologies of the party. Of course, I doubt whether any political party in India follow an ideology these days.

Sometime back one of my friends, who is a follower of a certain religious cult, had mentioned the ‘end of the world’ during a conversation. Out of my curiosity I asked him how it will happen, the apocalypse. He declared that while the rest of the world will be destroyed by a nuclear war, in India the same will be ‘achieved’ by the communal strife. By mere coincidence the cult has its head quarters in Rajastan! I had dismissed it as a joke then. But now, as an old fashioned Indian, I feel concerned about the future of my motherland. And I prefer the death in the Nuclear War to the latter. If our political parties have even a handful of people who can see the dangers lurking behind the games they play, they should take the lead in correcting the course we as a nation had taken.

But what can be done?!

Years ago a visionary, a man of steel whom even Stalin dared not to touch, dreamt of uniting his feuding people under a single nation. But a few years after Josip Broz Tito faded into history those who succeeded him managed to bring down his dream.

In one of the saddest stories I had read about it at the time, one little boy stood at the doors of his house, tears rolling down his cheek, and waved good bye to his Father one last time…..no his Father didn’t die in the civil war…….. he was walking away on the orders of the local militia, himself holding back tears, into the ‘Muslim Areas’ in Bosnia……for the sake of his son and wife, who happened to be a Croat. The next day the little boy accompanied his maternal Grand Father to the local authorities to officially change his surname from the Muslim one of his Father to the Croat one of his Grand Father…

How easy is it…… to wipe away the relationships?!……

Marshall Tito used to have a close associate…..a certain Pt. Nehru……..

And he too was a dreamer…..

Although I can’t agree with the kind of politics practiced by Ms Scindhia, unlike her detractors from within and outside her party I sincerely hope that she’ll find a way out of the present mess.