Tuesday, 24 November 2009
Symphony of Science - 'Our Place in the Universe'
Lyrics
[Narrator]
With every century
Our eyes on the universe have been opened anew
We are witness
To the very brink of time and space
[Robert Jastrow]
We must ask ourselves
We who are so proud of our accomplishments
What is our place in the cosmic perspective of life?
[Carl Sagan]
The exploration of the cosmos
Is a voyage of self discovery
As long as there have been humans
We have searched for our place in the cosmos
[Richard Dawkins]
Are there things about the universe
That will be forever beyond our grasp?
Are there things about the universe that are
Ungraspable?
[Sagan]
One of the great revelations of space exploration
Is the image of the earth, finite and lonely
Bearing the entire human species
Through the oceans of space and time
[Dawkins]
Matter flows from place to place
And momentarily comes together to be you
Some people find that thought disturbing
I find the reality thrilling
[Sagan]
As the ancient mythmakers knew
We're children equally of the earth and the sky
In our tenure on this planet, we've accumulated
Dangerous evolutionary baggage
We've also acquired compassion for others,
Love for our children,
And a great soaring passionate intelligence
The clear tools for our continued survival
[Michio Kaku]
We could be in the middle
Of an inter-galactic conversation
And we wouldn't even know
[Sagan]
We've begun at last
To wonder about our origins
Star stuff contemplating the stars
Tracing that long path
Our obligation to survive and flourish
Is owed not just to ourselves
But also to that cosmos
Ancient and vast, from which we spring
(Visit http://symphonyofscience.com for more science remixes)
Wednesday, 11 November 2009
The Wall of Falsehood
Imagine a huge wall of lies, erected brick by brick, to split a city of truth for carving up a fantasy enclave of untruth. This seemingly impregnable wall has lured many, including the elite, and dismayed many others. Neither of them have ever visualised the fall of this concrete barrier of falsehood, until it collapses and is reduced to piles of debris, like a pack of cards, when hit by just a breeze of truth and freedom.
This metaphorical wall harks back to a real and apparently impenetrable wall that was thought to exist forever until it fell twenty years ago when men and women surged forward to escape from the ideology of untruth. The Fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989 was cataclysmic for Communism, for it marked the beginning of the end of the totalitarian ideology in the Soviet Union and the Eastern Europe. The Cold War ended with the collapse of the Wall and the Western liberal democracy has since been widely embraced as a good model that can ensure freedom, peace and prosperity. Of course, terrorism inspired by resurgent Islam is a major threat to liberal democracy and the conflict between the divergent values inherent in Islam and the liberal democracy raises the spectre of uncertainty and insecurity. But, as The New York Times columnist Ross Douthat says in his November 9 op-ed piece , Marxism, unlike radical Islam, seduced the elite of the West and rendered the liberal societies more vulnerable.
The day after the freedom-loving people celebrated the 20 th anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall, I had a feeling that I was witnessing the fall of another wall, not the tangible wall that was pulled down by the Germans, but an equally opaque though unreal one made up of bricks of lies. The byelections in West Bengal and Kerala saw the people chipping away at that metaphorical wall. The communists in the two Indian States have received severe drubbing at the hands of the people who saw through the wall of falsehood and gave an electoral verdict that they, both the people and the commies, truly deserved. The electoral outcome in the byelections is not going to mark the end of the communists in the two States. On the contrary, they will put up a brave face and sport more belligerence as they carry out their customary anti-American, anti-imperialist, anti-globalisation, anti-Manmohan Singh and anti-anything campaigns. It is a wonder that the two communist parties that have espoused the totalitarian Stalinist ideology have survived the Fall of the Berlin Wall.
From a different perspective, the communist parties in India are just debris of what used to be a strong and apparently unassailable communist movement that at one time appeared to be on the road to power through a battle of ballots. Feeding on people’s fears, the communist ideology could win the minds of both the unsophisticated and the elite for long, but as time goes by, the more intelligent among them become less susceptible to the scare-mongering. You cannot dupe someone for a long time.
The anti-computer agitation launched by the Communist Party of India (Marxist) in Kerala in the 80s was a graphic illustration of the party’s lack of far-sigtedness and dependence on sloganeering. My generation of newly passed out college graduates were distressed by the party’s propaganda that computer would shrink jobs. What has happened is just the opposite of what the dyed-in-the-wool party apparatchiks have predicted. Now the same party funcionaries are carrying laptops. Years later, when the economy of India was liberalised, they forecast that the economic reforms would be disasterous as it would lead to a surrender of the country’s interests to the ‘imperialists’, by which they mean, the United States. The policies of liberalisation and globalisation, however, proved to be good for the country, by all standards. Their latest pack of lies, profusely used during the campaign for the byelections in the coastal areas of Kerala, is that the Indo-ASEAN Free Trade Agreement will badly affect farmers and fishermen in the State as it permits import of fish and farm produces from the ASEAN countries. The defeat of the commies in the three byelections in the State clearly shows that the people refused to buy the alarmist propaganda of any kind.
The walls of falsehood that the communists have erected have crumbled. It will take some time to clear the history’s debris and till then they will carry on with their old tricks to pull the wool over the eyes of the people.
This metaphorical wall harks back to a real and apparently impenetrable wall that was thought to exist forever until it fell twenty years ago when men and women surged forward to escape from the ideology of untruth. The Fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989 was cataclysmic for Communism, for it marked the beginning of the end of the totalitarian ideology in the Soviet Union and the Eastern Europe. The Cold War ended with the collapse of the Wall and the Western liberal democracy has since been widely embraced as a good model that can ensure freedom, peace and prosperity. Of course, terrorism inspired by resurgent Islam is a major threat to liberal democracy and the conflict between the divergent values inherent in Islam and the liberal democracy raises the spectre of uncertainty and insecurity. But, as The New York Times columnist Ross Douthat says in his November 9 op-ed piece , Marxism, unlike radical Islam, seduced the elite of the West and rendered the liberal societies more vulnerable.
The day after the freedom-loving people celebrated the 20 th anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall, I had a feeling that I was witnessing the fall of another wall, not the tangible wall that was pulled down by the Germans, but an equally opaque though unreal one made up of bricks of lies. The byelections in West Bengal and Kerala saw the people chipping away at that metaphorical wall. The communists in the two Indian States have received severe drubbing at the hands of the people who saw through the wall of falsehood and gave an electoral verdict that they, both the people and the commies, truly deserved. The electoral outcome in the byelections is not going to mark the end of the communists in the two States. On the contrary, they will put up a brave face and sport more belligerence as they carry out their customary anti-American, anti-imperialist, anti-globalisation, anti-Manmohan Singh and anti-anything campaigns. It is a wonder that the two communist parties that have espoused the totalitarian Stalinist ideology have survived the Fall of the Berlin Wall.
From a different perspective, the communist parties in India are just debris of what used to be a strong and apparently unassailable communist movement that at one time appeared to be on the road to power through a battle of ballots. Feeding on people’s fears, the communist ideology could win the minds of both the unsophisticated and the elite for long, but as time goes by, the more intelligent among them become less susceptible to the scare-mongering. You cannot dupe someone for a long time.
The anti-computer agitation launched by the Communist Party of India (Marxist) in Kerala in the 80s was a graphic illustration of the party’s lack of far-sigtedness and dependence on sloganeering. My generation of newly passed out college graduates were distressed by the party’s propaganda that computer would shrink jobs. What has happened is just the opposite of what the dyed-in-the-wool party apparatchiks have predicted. Now the same party funcionaries are carrying laptops. Years later, when the economy of India was liberalised, they forecast that the economic reforms would be disasterous as it would lead to a surrender of the country’s interests to the ‘imperialists’, by which they mean, the United States. The policies of liberalisation and globalisation, however, proved to be good for the country, by all standards. Their latest pack of lies, profusely used during the campaign for the byelections in the coastal areas of Kerala, is that the Indo-ASEAN Free Trade Agreement will badly affect farmers and fishermen in the State as it permits import of fish and farm produces from the ASEAN countries. The defeat of the commies in the three byelections in the State clearly shows that the people refused to buy the alarmist propaganda of any kind.
The walls of falsehood that the communists have erected have crumbled. It will take some time to clear the history’s debris and till then they will carry on with their old tricks to pull the wool over the eyes of the people.
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