Children and stubbornness

It was a sleepy Sunday afternoon, was channel hopping and found the Maniratnam's Tamil movie, Kannathil Muthamittal (A Peck on the cheek). This is another of Maniratnam's touching movies which talks about a child who is brought up in a very loving family and finds out on her 9th birthday that she is adopted. The movie is about the search of the girl for her mother who is involved in the Tamil conflict in Sri Lanka.


Though the movie was on the very good movies I have seen, one thing which I found striking in the movie is the girl's characterization. The girl, on finding that she is adopted, is hell bent upon finding her real mother. The girl is so passionate, or do I say obstinate, about this quest, that she and her family braves the conflict in Sri Lanka and tries to find her mother among mortars shelling and gun fights.

I was surprised; can children be so stubborn, almost on the verge of dogmatism. It sounds strange that her parents would go to such lengths, as to go to a warzone to yield to the whims of 9 year old girl.

But then we never know, how stubborn can children be. I have seen some very extreme cases too. There are also stories about Birbal, Akbar and a child who was obstinate and how none other than Birbal could convince using all his wits.

How stubborn can children be?

Scientific Adam

Menfolk of the world unite... we are all brethren, this is not a figure of speech but truly we are all scientifically brothers, cousins and the like. When I say, "menfolk of the world", I literally mean it. Sounds strange? So did It for me too.

Spencer Wells, a genecist, is carrying out a research on finding the Scientific Adam. His research is to find how the present day man has evolved all over the world and can we trace the genetic history of every man today. I thought that the idea on the whole itself was far fetched. But then every scientist has a theory. Wells' theory is based on the fact the Y chromosome in humans' which basically distinguishes a man from the woman genetically, gets passed on from father to son, then to his son so on and so forth. So any mutation or genetic changes in the Y chromosome of the father gets carried on to the son too. Hence, the presence of the similar mutation in the son can prove that he is related to the father.

Using this theory he has examined the genes of men from all parts of the world and conclusions are startling. Apparently, there are certain genetic changes which can be found in all of the men indicating that all of the men did emerge out of a family tree whose pioneer was the "Scientific Adam". That is quite a discovery or let us say at least a claim which is startling. Wells, also claims that this person would have hailed from East Africa around 2000 generations ago, definitely not like Michelangelo's Adam :-)

Theory goes on to say that mankind had come to a virtual extinction around 40000 years ago reducing to a handful of people of which one was our "Scientific Adam". This man being a true leader and better of the lot managed to raise sons and grandsons, who then travelled all over the world and so giving rise to the billions of humans we are there today.

I have tried to find my family tree for the past few generations which in itself is not complete, imagine going back to Adam. How many generations of your ancestors can you trace?

Economic Growth in India

Last week the CSO announced that the economic growth in India has touched 9.5%. That is very good news.. We are one in the top few countries which are achieving this kind of growth rate. This means we have more money to spend and our standard of living is improving leaps and bounds.

I guess it is true to some extent based on the amount of vehicles being added to the road, the number of apartment complexes coming up, the mall culture hotting up, consumer durable sales on the rise etc. Every one seems to want to have a refrigerator, television so on and so forth.

But on closer examination, is it really true. There are so many people whom I see still find it difficult to make their ends meet even the basic food and shelter. I can see so many of them in the cities themselves, god help the rural areas. Is this whole economic growth a farce, are they just numbers and statistics, being skewed by the growth of a small population and retrograde growth of a whole bunch of others. May be.. I am not sure. I am not an economist to be able to get to the details of these, but something does not seem right.

Today I saw an article on news media; "50% of the worlds riches is owned by 2% of the population" and "85% of the worlds riches is owned by 10% of the population". These numbers are really shocking. This shows the disparity among us. Should there be a better way of the wealth being spread among the population? I know I know where this is leading too.. but I am not talking about communism, but then this too is not good.

The Oscar entries from India

This year's official Indian entry for the Oscar's is "Rang De Basanti", the hit Hindi movie. It was selected over many other movies including the other block buster hit, "Lage Raho Munna Bhai". But Vinod Chopra was not satisfied with the selection and he is planning to take his movie to the Oscars as an independent entry.

I happened to see both the movies and just want to see how these two movies are off track from most of the other Indian movies and how both of them are good candidates for the nominations.

Both movies talk of trying to bringing a reform in the society, but then the narration of both is so different, but with a similarity.

Rang De Basanti, shows how we have to become part of the system to change the system. The group of student's there take to the path of violence and actually assasinate one of the ministers who they feel has wronged. The story moves further, that they find that their act, instead of painting the minister as a bad guy, exonerates him and makes him a martyr. Towards the end, they try to correct this my trying to reach to the people through the mass media finally becoming martyrs themselves. A very compelling and thought provoking movie, making each of us introspect of how we can contribute back to the present system we are in now and what paths we should take.

Lage Raho Munnabhai on the other hand, attacks the reform at a different level. It uses the concept of "Gandhigiri", a colloquial version of Gandhism. It pays rich tribute to the Father of the Nation and makes us all think how we can all adopt Gandhi's principles in our daily life. It portrays how the simple and effective tenets of Gandhi's philosophy, non-violence, integrity and perseverance, can create wonders; just like he did in getting Independence for India. The narration is in a very light and comical script to deliver a powerful message. Again in this case we see the use of a mass media to effect the reforms.

One amazing thing here is both the movies show the usage of Radio as a mass media to actually reach to the larger audiences in accomplishing what the protagonists wanted.

It is nice to see that we are producing movies of such good quality which actually makes one think, of what he can do to change the society or system he or she is in. I am not sure how much of effect these will have and whether it can be measurable at all. But surely, these are steps in the right direction. We are in times, where each one of us need to contribute to help change the society towards the better and any help in this regard via movies or however is always welcome..

Who let the Sparrows out?

I remember when I was a kid, I lived in a house in Bangalore which had a huge garden. As a corollary, our backyard used to be frequented by various different birds ranging from crows, pigeons, humming birds and last but not the least the then ubiquitous House Sparrow.


The House sparrow (Passer domesticus), the small brown and gray bird, which would come down the moment my mother would toss out some rice grains. I can still picture the sparrow, turning its head from one direction to another, trying to gather as many grains of rice it could eat. The high frequency short chirps it used to make are still vivid in my imagination.

But off late I don't see these birds in Bangalore anymore, for that matter I don't see it in Chennai too. Where have they all gone? Have they deserted the cities? Have they gone in search of "grainier" pastures? It is so surprising that once so abundant sparrow is hardly been seen now in the cities.

Who let the Sparrows out? :-)

Man-made vs Natural

Man-made and natural.. how many times have we heard about these phrases? Virtually all literature in school text books, fiction and non fiction books, in articles, papers, even in our day to day talk.. we talk about these.

Any talk or literature about environment cannot be devoid of these phrases. We talk about man destroying nature with all that he creates. So what does man create which contributes towards destruction of nature.

Man creates pollution of air through his industries, automobiles and all the other things. This creates problems for our Ozone layer so on and so forth

Man creates concrete jungles and uses lot of wood for paper, building material and for all the paraphernelia for a comforatable living. This results in deforestation and trees and forests are vanishing fast. This causes many species of flora and fauna to go extinct.

Man creates non bio degradable waste like plastic which pollutes the water sources including the subterranian table and also soil etc.

The list can go on and on.. Is this blog sounding very familiar? You bet it is.. just an another environment talk by somebody who is concerned about environement.

But I just want to put a different perspective to this. What is man-made and what is natural? Is man not "nature-made"? Is man not part of nature? If not then who made us? How did we evolve? Darwin has provided us a very plausible theory of our evolution from the very simple living beings like single celled organisms to water living creatures to amphibians to land animals to mammals to primates to homo sapiens, what we are today. We call all of the living beings till the primates except homo sapiens are nature, but then only homo sapiens are'nt? This does not convince me.

Why is there a distinction like this? Has it been created by us just because we have one more sense, may be only numerically, more than the other creatures in nature? Or is it just because we want to make ourselves different from nature itself?

We have seen in the past that nature has found its own ways of regulating itself. We understand now that that there has been different stages in the life of earth, when nature has so called kept itself in check. The rise and fall of the dinosaurs, the very carefully crafted food chains so on and so forth. May be man is one such ploy by nature itself. We are part of nature. If we do not stop doing things as described above, may be man will play the part of the asteroid(??) which destroyed the dinosaurs, albeit in a different way.

Though this article is talking about man being part of nature, I do not subscribe to the fact that we should just continue doing what we are doing towards our environment, but we need to see how we can safegaurd it. We really need to ensure that we take care of our environment and not destroy it.

It is just that there can be nothing called man-made and natural. Everything is natural, because we are part of nature. So what we do is also natural. We just have to do what we do naturally better :-).

I simply dont understand when a weaver bird can weave its nest with all kinds of material it finds (may be including strands of plastic :-) ), it is called as a stroke of brilliance of nature, but when a man builds a house it is called man-made and not natural. Sounds goofy.

Racism in sports

I thought we are moving forward from the dark ages of racism into much better era, but I guess we still aren't there. Just couple of days back, we had Dean Jones sacked in disgrace by Ten Sports from its commentary team. The offence - he made a racist comment against a South African Cricket Player.

The circumstances are actually more intriguing here. Apparently Dean, made the comment about Amla, during the break between the overs, a time where normally all the channels take an ad break. But it was'nt Dean's day. One channel did not seem to have taken the ad break, and so his comments were aired live, the South African board protested and Ten Sports promptly sacked him.

Now what we need to see here is why are such comments made in the first place. Dean claims that it was a rush of moment that he blurted out something and he did not really mean it. I sincerely hope what he is saying is true. Nobody other than him would know the truth. But then, commentrators and other personalities in the media, have a great responsibilty especially with live transmissions. I mean, have you tried being politically correct always. It is so difficult. So it is all the more a challenging job.

As far the incident, Jones seems to have apologized to great lengths to everybody including Amla, the board, the company and to all listeners. But then I hope he really means it. He was not a bad commentrator and would like to see him back in the commentry box, but defintely with no such thoughts as this.

And I support Ten Sports' prompt action and it defintely should reflect as a precedent to any such incidents in future.

Talking about racisim in sports, the recently held FIFA World Cup held in Germany emphasized so much on abolishing racism from sports. Sure, the Fatherland has come a long from days of Nazis. I was so happy at seeing the strong message being sent out with huge banners at the start of each of the matches. Kudos to FIFA and German organizers for chosing that as the theme for this year.

About anything

As the title goes, this blog is where I am going to "write" about anything. From the time I started my blogs, I had to ensure that my blogs were somewhere around my blog title, not that somebody would cut my hand off, but then, the blog title means something after all, does'nt it.