Showing posts with label physics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label physics. Show all posts

Tuesday, December 30, 2008

Small is beautiful...Green is elegant


11th hour is part 2 of inconvenient truth.. Al Gore’s impressive documentary which makes you feel ashamed for being lifelong consumer of fossil fuel and raises hazar questions on the life style we got getting accustomed to without even having the pangs of irreversible destruction we are causing.
We all know Leonardo de Carpio, the man who has a public image of being sensible and earnest about things he does. And after Al gore he is the right choice of voice that binds these plethora of freewheeling interviews. Tthese sound bites are just long enough and crisp enough to communicate what a one whole book worth has to say.
I mean 2008 is heating up with the so many sane minded people coming out and making their voices heard. Obama appointing Steven Chu as a energy advisor, makes one hope for some path-breaking changes in world in which we live today. We have seen millions of people getting affected by food shortages like never before , unprecedented floods and storms and draughts.... all the result of haphazard use of fossil fuel, trapping of too much of green house gases in biosphere, leading to rise in average temperature causing arctic ice to melt. Its caouse and effect even 4th standard kid can understand took us wiping clean of half the O3 umbrella and 3/4th of rain forests to learn. Right now we are witnessing a tipping point and if we don’t stand up to that, we will not live to see the future. It’s basically you are not saving the environment , it will continue to live but then human won’t be there to see the aftermath 'cause it won’t be a livable anymore. There are so many catchy lines in this: Introspecting US academicians quoting Churchill, “Americans often do the right thing, but only when they exhaust all the other possibilities”. (make sure you turn the subtitles on even if you are watching it English. Made me remind of, not long ago, we have George Clooney’s Batman, in which a middle aged environmentalist woman was portrayed as a villain and laughing stock of the whole party. Seriously, we have come a long way from there.
Central theme of this documentary is nicely punctured with 3-second video-clips of natural events and somber voice over that adds to amazing effect. Hearing about what we notice and but chose to ignore sometimes makes us be conscious of the gravity of those things
‘Go green’, but how? Kindly package it for me, for the masses.. what can we do at my level.... may be run a blog/website where people suggest tricks / hacks / strategies to reduce ones carbon footprint. Unlike Americans we are not big fan of SIGs special interest groups possibly because we already have so many cults and sects and are a divided society. Of the top of my head, we should make a PIL in consumer court to start putting carbon values (how much green house gas this product led to into the environment in its making) on the products and we stick to buying those which are the least...market forces are the strongest, there is no denying once it comes into effect. All you need is right push in right direction and it will self-evolve. So far the oil lobby driven the geo-politics and the wars and the tensions in the second- half of the 20th century, but Obama promises some change in the time to come. As an Indian we should be ready to gear up ourselves with the values of frugality and 'small is beautiful’ and ’green is elegant’ attitude. Gosh, it worth a Tantra T-shirt slogan. 
Otherwise our politicians will sell us off as a dumping ground of the greedy and set-in-their-ways so called immature developed countries.

Lurkers... any thougths... what can be done to drag the hand s of clock backv inot the time frmo the 11th hour...

Tuesday, July 22, 2008

I start feeling consistent again...

I see people around me who have some or the other way some itch for physics. ..every designer some point of his life wanted to make his career in physics... although theoretical physics is tucked away nicely in the mysteries of advanced mathematics... it always eludes one when he sets out make career choices that are at that time of life look pragmatic and worldly. But the quest for philosophical foundation is always on...in some form...some call it spiritual or some knowledge, some search for completeness...

I grew up in a school where a day used to start with recitation of 16th adhyay of Bhagvadgita.. for reasons beyond my understanding even today.. they say it explains so many things, mostly behaviral dos and donts but I still pick my choices on my own on every cross-roads and those codes of conduct fails to come to my mind. Later in the day we were taught physics which tries to define the world view of space, time, object, matter, cause and effect.. separate isolated belief systems were under constructions ... I am sure folks from school wanted us to learn Upanishads but with no broader framework as to why it is good to know these ancient scriptures... so the answers are now getting clearer. Its when Fritjof Kapra runs you through the simplistic understandings of philosophical basis and limits reached by western way of critical inquiry into things, lets call it quantum physics deep downward and relativistic model upward. In his book "Tao of physics" he draws parallels from Hinduisms and other eastern mysticisms and I feel my both ends somewhere meeting. I start feeling consistent again.

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