The Safari - Part 2

Mama bear and baby bear went on a safari and saw humans. They completed the couch potato safari and the rich safari. As the bus entered the poor safari, they smelled something foul, the smell of rotten food and rotten flesh. There was filth all around. They saw a couple and a boy seated on the bare earth. The father wore tattered black colored trousers and they could see his ribs though the stretchable skin. The baby had matted hair, a bulging stomach and his legs were twisted. The woman was digging the ground with a stick. She wore a green colored saree that barely covered her body. 

Baby bear asked the mama bear, ‘Who are these?’

The mama bear replied, ‘They are the poor’

Baby bear asked, ‘What about the story you wanted to tell me in the poor safari?’

Mama bear replied, ‘Many decades ago, humans ruled the world. As the years passed, they lost their moral values and became greedy and selfish. The gap between the rich and the poor grew wider. The poor got angry that they could not afford the basic necessities like food, clothing and education. They saw the rich splurging on food, clothes and drinks and they grew bitter inside. They attacked the rich. The attacks grew into a war. In the war most of the humans were killed except for a few, whom we see in these enclosures all over the world. The governments are to be blamed for the increasing gap between the rich and poor. There were policies to provide education and food for the poor, and a better lifestyle but the politicians did not let the money go to the poor and pocketed all the money. The politicians supported the war in the initial stages for their selfish motives; little did they know how harmful it was to support the war.’

Baby bear asked, ‘Who are politicians?’

Mama bear replied, ‘We will see them next’.

The bus moved into the politician safari. As soon as they crossed the black colored gate, a portly man in white clothes came and prostrated before the bus and did not let it move.

Baby bear asked the mama bear, ‘What happened?’

Mama bear replied, ‘The politician wants money.’

‘Money?’

‘Yes, unless and until we give him money he will not allow the bus to go farther.’

After a few minutes, a few other humans in white shirts and trousers made a line alongside the bus on either side and shouted, ‘Safari down down’.

 

The animals were amused at this new development. The crane, who was the driver, asked the animals to give the packets of leaves to the politicians. These packets of leaves were given to the animals along with the ticket. The animals did as they were told. The politicians allowed them to move. 

Baby bear looked at the mama bear and said, ‘Why the leaves?’

‘Leaves are money for the politicians. The zoo keepers understood the hoarding...collecting nature of the politicians and they made them believe that leaves are the new currency.’

As the baby bear looked around, he saw white colored shapes sleeping on beds of leaves, greedily looking at the piles of leaves and a few of them were on top of the trees plucking the leaves.

Baby bear thought to himself, ‘Now I understand why the trees in this safari have a lot less leaves than the others’

The safari ended with the tamasha by the politicians.

Mama bear and baby bear went home. As soon as they went home, baby bear turned on the TV and dipped his hands in a bowl filled with honey and licked.

Mama bear scolded the baby bear, ‘Don’t be a couch potato. Turn off the TV and do your homework’

Baby bear reluctantly turned off the TV and walked towards his room.

Image from http://libraryfortheartist.blogspot.in/2012/01/mama-bear-card.html

The Safari - Part 1

Mama bear and baby bear went on a Safari at Bannerghatta National Park. They rode in a green colored bus with meshed windows. The bus was filled with swans, ducks, bears, dogs, hyenas, lions and tigers. Everybody was excited to go on the Safari.  All of them wore their best attires and the bus looked colourful. Mama bear wore a pink colored frock and the baby bear wore black half-pants and a yellow shirt. They sat in the first row. The crane, which was in the driver’s seat, wore navy blue trousers and shirt and a black cap. The crane stepped on the accelerator and off they went on the safari. 

They passed through the black gates and entered the couch potato safari. The place was covered with glass rooms. In these rooms, they saw several couch potatoes seated on a sofa, watching flat screen TV’s. There was a bowl full of chips beside them. The couch potatoes were too busy even to notice the bus full of animals. They kept on munching the chips and intently watched the TV.

Baby bear asked the mama bear, ‘Mama, what is this human?’

Mama bear replied, ‘It is a couch potato’

‘Couch potato?’

‘Yes. They just sit and watch TV all day and do not go outside. They eat unhealthy food. They are heavy because they did not exercise. The zoo keepers had to put up with a lot of struggle to get them to this place. They carried them along with their sofa in huge cranes and moved them here’

‘Oh! I don’t like the couch potato’, said the baby bear.

After the couch potato safari, they entered the rich safari.

As they entered, they heard loud music. Baby bear covered his ears, the music was too loud for his sensitive ears. They passed though a huge room with disco balls hung on the ceiling. Humans wore glittering dresses that sparkled in the sunlight and they were drinking some transparent liquid in tall glasses. They were laughing, talking and snacking on plates filled with meat and vegetables. 

Baby bear asked the mama bear, ‘Who are these?’

Mama bear replied, ‘They are the rich. They feast all day and night. They drink, they dance and they party.'

Baby bear asked, 'Where do they get money from if they party all day?' 

Mama bear replied, 'They got the wealth from their ancestors, not a single penny is their hard earned money. They waste their wealth’ 

Baby bear said, ‘I like them’

Mama bear replied, ‘They are the ones who caused the war which wiped out all the humans, except for a few, whom you see now. We preserved the humans in the same state that we found them in, in their natural habitats'

‘How did the war happen?’

Mama bear looked at the safari brochure and told the baby bear, ‘I will tell you that story when we are in the poor safari’

Image from google images

To be continued...

Mashup of tastes

Fruits taste a particular way and we are used to that. We know how a banana tastes like, sweet, a little bit sticky and very soft. We also know how it looks like, yellow in color. What if a banana takes like a strawberry and looks red in color and a pineapple tastes like a grape and also has the color of black grapes ?

Philips has done a three month research on making hybrid fruits. They came up with a kiwi that tastes like tangerine, a banana that smells like strawberry and a pineapple that looks and tastes like a grape. To answer your question, 'No Philips is not getting into fruit selling business, they are marketing their new blender, Walita'.

Watch people eat these hybrid fruits and see how surprised they are.

Memories forever

In life we meet a few people who leave a lasting impression on us. We cherish the times that we spent with them and when they are not there, we relive those memories from time to time.

One of my uncles was my personal favorite. My earliest memory of him was when I was about 1^st or 2^nd standard. On the day of his visit to our home, I used to wake up early, get dressed and help mom with her chores and be ready to hear his footsteps approaching our door.

When he came, he held me close to him and said, ‘Oh! S--- is up so early and she has done so much work.’

 

His appreciation brought a huge smile on my face. His compliments were very genuine and I loved to do anything that he told me to do. He had a way with people which made ever body love him. 

I remember one such compliment given by my uncle, when I was doing my Bachelor’s. I used to stay in the hostel for namesake and I always used to shuttle between my hostel and my uncle’s place when the classes were not going on. 

One particular day that I was at my uncle’s place, I was cooking a sweet dish made with lentil and jaggery. I was standing in front of the shiny steel stove which had two burners. On one of them was the vessel, which consisted of yellow lentils and jaggery, with just enough water to cook the lentils. After the mixture was partially cooked, I added cardamom. As the cardamom disappeared into the dish, the aroma of cardamom filled the room. The stove was placed in front of a wall which had a big enough window through which I could see my uncle sitting on the bed. He wore a white lungi and a baniyan. His hands were placed beside his hip. His head was bowed down, he leaned slightly forward and his hands clutched the rim of the bed as though the intensity of his thoughts transferred to his hands. The smell of cardamom filled the kitchen and wafted into the other room in which my uncle was there. 

He raised his head and looked at me through the window and saw that I was cooking something. He asked, ‘What are you cooking?’

I replied, ‘Sweet dish made with lentils and jaggery.’

He complimented, ‘Sweet dishes made by a sweet lady.’

I smiled and immediately blushed. That was the one of the best compliments that anybody has ever given me. It was also the last compliment that I received from him.

I replied, ‘Thank you.’

I looked at him, his hands still held on to the bed. Even the aroma of my sweet dish was not successful in completely bringing him into this world from his world of thoughts.

How humans exploit us

I am living being too you know. I have feelings too. I experience pain. I wince when somebody has intentions to harm me. It hurts when somebody plucks at my leaves or breaks my branches. Humans never realize that.

We plants have served humans for a very long time. Our leaves, our roots, our shoots became their food. We are the ones responsible for their survival. All the best parts of us, our fruits and the roots were mercilessly plucked and eaten by them.

Humans progressed and so did their acts to pollute nature. The machines that they use to live and travel emit poisonous chemicals and we take in most of those pollutants. They have killed us by hordes without any remorse, to build new homes. We have served humans by providing food, by cleaning up their messy pollutants and yet they continue to exploit us, harass us, maim us and kill us.

I make my food from light, you know through an act which has a very complex name. I use the energy from the sun and convert it to an energy which will be used by me to live, grow and become strong. The wicked humans have even come up with ways to tap into my energy source and take away all the energy that I gained from the sun, as electricity to power their noxious gases emitting devices. They want to kill us by not even providing an opportunity to grow.

I wish that we had evolved along with humans. I wish we had the power to gobble up humans when they desire to hurt us. Few of my relatives are carnivorous, you know, all of us are not as docile as you think, but we have not evolved enough to consume humans. I wish I could transform myself into modern weaponry at a moment’s notice and shoot pine cones and sharp pointed twigs at the people who intend to harm us. Earth is our home too, you know and we have every right to live on it. If you do not stop these atrocious acts of destruction against the tree-kind, we will stop serving you and start revolting against you, then where would you go?

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I was inspired to write this short piece based on two articles.  Prof. Ramaraja Ramaswamy from UGA College of Engineering developed a technology in which thylakoids, structures in the plant cell are modified and immobilized on a nano-material to generate electricity from photosynthesis. I could’nt help feeling sad for the plants after I read the article below and thought how human truly exploit plants to the maximum extent possible.

http://www.treehugger.com/clean-technology/researchers-discover-new-way-harvest-electricity-plants.html

The second article is about an artist Sonia Rentsch who created the beautiful guns and other weaponry using materials like leaves and sticks. I looked at the images in the article below and I was awed by the creativity of the artist. I also felt uncomfortable to see the plants depicted as modern weaponry which are used to kill humans.

http://www.treehugger.com/culture/sonia-rentsch-harm-less-guns-made-nature.html

My Mother - Part 2

The phone rang again. My mother picked it up, “Hello…I will not call the police…tomorrow evening at 7:00…” and she hung the receiver. She looked at me and smiled.

After a couple of hours my uncle came in. My mother asked me to go to bed. As I lay on my bed, I could hear hushed voices. They were discussing about the ‘naxalite’ but I could not make out what they were talking. I was feeling sleepy. My eyes closed.

 Next day was a regular day. I woke up and got dressed for school and went to school. My mother came to pick me up in the evening. I saw the sky blue colored maruti car waiting for me at the school gate. I was surprised that she drove all the way to take me home. The distance from my school to home was about 3-4 km and I went to school and came home in a school bus. I went home, freshened up and sat on our dark green colored sofa with a book in my hand. The clock ticked away without any worry. I could not concentrate on what I was reading. My mother was walking to and fro across the marble floor and her pink saree rustled as she moved. The phone rang. Beads of sweat formed across her well shaped brows just above her red bindi,  and as she picked up the receiver her hand trembled. She said, “Hello…yes I will be there” and hung up. She called somebody else and said, “He will be here in 5 minutes. Yes…yes I will do it”. Then she went downstairs to her clinic and the maid came upstairs and watched over me as I looked down into the book. (Our house is a one-storey building, downstairs is my mother’s hospital establishment and upstairs is our home).

After half an hour she came upstairs, huffing and puffing. I put my booked aside and watched her.

She called my father on cell phone and said, “He came. He was tall lean and had a cap, which covered his features. He did not say anything; he just stood there in the Out patient (O. P) waiting room and looked at me. There were also other patients in the O. P. room. I went close to him and asked, ‘What do you want? Why did you come here?’. The patients heard me talking loudly and looked at him. He became nervous and he started walking away. May be he did not expect other people to be present. I walked after him. The patients and their male relatives realized that something was fishy and they followed me as I went behind the guy. He started walking fast, as I was catching up with him. I increased my pace. I shouted at him, ‘Is it you who asked for money? Are you really a naxalite or are you looking for easy money?’ He walked faster and we approached the main road. As we walked on the road, the people behind me and a few on the road joined in and shouted at him, ‘Stop! where are you going?’ Just about that time the police jeep approached and he ran away. The police went after him. I do not think he was a naxalite. I came home. After a few minutes, the S. I. came and said that they lost him. He asked me to report if I received any more calls from him’…Ummm”.

She put down the phone came to me, smiled and said, “Everything is fine”.

After that day we did not receive any prank calls from that ‘naxalite’ or any other person claiming to be such. This incident made me realize that my mother is a strong and courageous woman.  

My mother at my marriage, 8th August 2012

My precious!

Over breakfast, my husband Pradeep Kumar Gouda and I had a very casual discussion about the dropping gold prices. He told me, 'Gold price has come down to Rs. 26000', I replied, 'We should buy it', he retaliated saying, 'No, we should not, it harms our economy'.

Our small discussion intensified his desire to write about why buying more gold is harmful to the Indian economy and he offered to write a guest column in my blog. So here it is!

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King Parikshit, descendant of Pandavas once went hunting. Kali, the evil of Kalyug appears before him and asked him to allow him to enter his kingdom. The king denied but Kali pleaded a lot. The king accepted and told to restrict Kali to only places where there is alcohol, gambling, prostitution and gold. Kali happily accepted the offer  and the first thing he did was to sit in the King's golden crown and corrupted his brain. The activities which the king did later that day led to his eventual death and end of the dynasty.  The king fell because of the evil in the gold. The same evil thing is hurting Indian economy very badly!

Indians for a very long time are fascinated by the yellow metal. The country's merchants sold spices and other goods and brought gold home.  Indians have amassed huge amounts of gold and our hunger for gold has never decreased. Today, India is the largest importer of gold and the recent drop in the gold price has not affected our demand for gold. In the last month, blame Akshaya Tritiya, our imports of gold has actually doubled putting a serious pressure on our current account deficit. India imported 1,015 tonne of gold in 2012-13.

Lets look at why we like buying gold. I agree, gold is amazing when it comes to jewellery. It adorns women greatly and men to a little extent. A recent statistics say that close to 70% of the gold we Indians buy is in the form of jewellery. Ironically, most of the jewellery we purchase ends up in lockers and in my opinion the new generation is not interested much in wearing jewellery to work place and there are very few occasions in a year where a person gets to show off the jewellery.  While we agree that gold can be used as a last resort to save family in case of any crisis, the real question is what percentage of families actually sell physical gold or mortgage the family gold? This number would be very low.

People bought gold to hedge themselves from the high inflation the country saw in last 2-3 years.  The rally in gold price started after the 2009 Subprime Crisis when people moved to safer assets like dollar and gold while stocks and other assets failed miserably. In August 2011, when S&P downgraded US dollar, Gold broke loose and rallied significantly. People thought value of gold will always appreciate which made them buy more and more gold.  Eventually, gold did great when compared to other asset classes like stocks, bonds, real estate etc till the recent fall.

So, how is our hunger for gold affecting our economy? Gold, unlike other metals & commodities has frankly no economic value but only aesthetic value.  As a metal, it has some awesome chemical properties but because of it price, it is not used like Copper or Silver. This was well recognised by John Maynard Keynes who opined that the Gold standard is a 'barbarous relic' and introduced new monetary system expecting that world will give gold lesser importance.

The economic growth of a country is directly linked to savings done by citizens and organizations. The money saved/invested by the people in bank savings accounts, fixed deposits, stocks, bonds, real estate etc provides funds for entrepreneurs to do business and helps in economic growth of the country. But investment in gold goes nowhere and has no positive impact on the economy.

The gold purchase has negative impact on our economy in two ways. Firstly, all the money that is "invested" in gold is getting locked and is not helping in the economic growth. Secondly, the country had to import lot of gold to meet the domestic demand. When we import anything, there is a downward pressure on Rupee vs. other currencies. Our obsessive gold imports (luxury) together with oil imports (necessity) have contributed significantly to depreciation of rupee. Rupee kept sliding as we imported more oil and more gold. This resulted in increased inflation and our monetary watchdog RBI had no option but to increase interest rates. Higher interest rates and inflation means higher cost of doing business and thus slower economic growth.  The Gross Domestic Savings decreased from 36.8% in 2007-8 to 30.8% in 2011-12.

Gold is also causing significant harm if you look from environmental angle too. Today, gold production is less when compared to demand.  Rough estimates indicate that to extracting one ounce of gold leaves 30 tonnes of rubble in open pit mining. Gold mining in West Africa, Philippines and places in Amazon have affected lives of local population and other species. Miners use harmful chemicals like Mercury and cyanide in the gold excavation process and these eventually contaminate the water stream.

The present government tried its best to curtail gold purchases. They imposed import duty on gold, they imposed tax on purchasing of gold, but results are very disappointing. People continued purchasing gold. Government has introduced two schemes with which they are trying to divert money being invested in gold into other assets.

Firstly, government is offering tax incentives upto Rs. 25000 for money invested in stock market under Rajiv Gandhi Equity Savings Scheme. Secondly, RBI is coming up with inflation indexed bonds starting from June 4. These bonds will not only provide interest on the capital but the capital itself is protected against inflation. The capital on which interest is calculated is also adjusted with the inflation. Even though, RBI presently indexed inflation with Wholesale Price Index instead of Consumer Price Index which reflects the inflation faced  by a citizen more accurately, it is a really good step.  These bonds are better as an investment alternative as your capital will always be protected against inflation. Also the money invested will be used productively and will aid in the development of the country.

I hope the recent fall in gold prices will make Indians consider other assets like inflation indexed bonds, stocks etc and help our country in its economic growth.

-Pradeep Kumar Gouda