For most people Eyjafjallajokull must now feel like a distant memory...and thank god for that. Frankly everyone's had enough of it! In the interest of brevity I'm going to call it 'The volcano' henceforth and hopefully that will also make it just a little easier to read :-)
Notwithstanding the immense dislocation, inconvenience and pain the volcano had indirectly caused to millions of travellers and businesses, I can't help but smile when I look at the other side of the story...Mother Nature had the final laugh. It's almost as if she wanted to prove a point to us lesser mortals than our reckless and disdainful attitude towards nature and conservation shall not go unpunished, and she has her own way of reminding us that in the larger scheme of things she and she alone calls the shots. Mother Nature in a week had done what greenpeace activists can only dream about. Tens of thousand of planes off the skies for a week...can you imagine how many barrels of oil have been conserved.
Needless to say the Volcano has been a pain in the wrong place for millions of people. Pardon me for the use of such crass language but I feel it truly captures both the sentiments of people and the reality of what happened i.e. several million people stranded in airports across the world sitting on their bottoms for days on end waiting for the winds to change direction...quite literally! Enough has been said about the economic loss resulting from the Icelandic volcano. No one was spared - Airlines who had to ground flights for nearly a week, countless tourists who had to pay exorbitant rates to extend accommodation in some fancy resort (nullifying the money they had 'saved' through deal hunting!), missed business meetings and conferences, and tragically missed funerals and weddings too. The list is endless.
However as they say this "ash" cloud too has a silver lining, quite a few actually. Some businesses surely made a killing. Demand for hotels rooms skyrocketed. Ok..granted that they probably didn't have inbound guests checking in as planned, but hey when existing guests are desperate to get a room to park themselves overnight, charging 'reasonable' rates was the last thing in the hoteliers' minds. Ferries, trains, taxis, and I believe bicycles were in short supply...unbelievable!
What I find more interesting to ruminate on is the legacy that the volcano is bound to leave behind including a huge number of business opportunities for budding entrepreneurs and well established businesses. Almost certainly the likes of GE and Rolls Royce have set up teams to exploit the commercial opportunity that has presented itself from literally from the bowels of the earth (fyi..I'm referring to volcanic magma here!). "Volcanic ash resistant jet engines"..sounds fancy ain't it! Equally likely is the possibility that some financial wiz in Wall Street is developing a fancy insurance product to deal with risks arising from Volcanic ash. It's an altogether different matter than no one including the originator of the product probably has any idea of how this financial instrument will work...who cares anyways. Pardon my cynicism.
The list of beneficiaries is longer. Risk management specialists are probably working on new risk mitigation and disaster recovery strategies. Academicians in B-schools will inevitably come up with case studies on the events gone by. While this might seem extreme politicians in the opposition were probably even plotting on how to bring down the incumbent governments for their inadequate response to the volcanic ash (definitely a possibility in South Asian politics).
All is well that ends well and hopefully all of us will pick up a few good lessons for life from Eyjafjallajokull!
Sunday, April 18, 2010
Sunday, April 11, 2010
Interesting news clip on Hinduism in Russia
This is an interesting article I came across. It was originally published in 'The Hindu' in 2000. One more example of how ancient Hinduism is and no one truly knows how and where it all began!
Historic ties
Sir, - It augurs well for strengthening the bond between India and Russia when so many political leaders have openly acknowledged the importance of the age-old relationship between India and Russia, during the recent visit of the Russian President, Mr. Vladimir Putin (The Hindu, Oct. 5).
While Mr. Vajpayee has drawn our attention to the correspondence between Mahatma Gandhi and the Russian novelist, Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910), I would like to go back much earlier even to the Puranic age when India had established cultural contacts with that part of the globe which is at present called Russia.
It appears that a few years ago a Russian orientalist by name Prof. Ribakov from Moscow went to Kanchi to have the darshan and receive the blessings of the late Kanchi Paramacharya. The Paramacharya asked the Russian professor: ``Does not the northernmost part of Russia have more Sanskrit content in the language?'' The professor was stunned. This scholar, who came to ask questions, shed tears of joy at the very sight of the Paramacharya and was dumbfounded at the depth of his scholarship. The Paramacharya further explained to the Russian that Russia was called `Rishi Varsha' in ancient Indian geography, because it was the land where our Rishis like sage Yagnavalkya had their conference on the Vedas. This could further be corroborated by the fact that some women in the northernmost point of Russia have names like Lopamudrova, which is stunningly close to Lopamudra, wife of sage Agastya.
It may be recalled that during the Sankalpa (a solemn vow to perform an observance) at the time of Pooja, we frequently use the term Jambu Dweepa. This term actually means the entire region covering Asia and Europe, as is evidenced from descriptions in Puranic geography. Even today I understand that in the USSR while writing the postal address, the name of the country is written first and then followed by such specifications as the city, town, area, street number, etc., in that sequence. This is an ancient Hindu tradition which we follow even today during our daily Sankalpa in Pujas.
B. M. N. Murthy,
Bangalore
Historic ties
Sir, - It augurs well for strengthening the bond between India and Russia when so many political leaders have openly acknowledged the importance of the age-old relationship between India and Russia, during the recent visit of the Russian President, Mr. Vladimir Putin (The Hindu, Oct. 5).
While Mr. Vajpayee has drawn our attention to the correspondence between Mahatma Gandhi and the Russian novelist, Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910), I would like to go back much earlier even to the Puranic age when India had established cultural contacts with that part of the globe which is at present called Russia.
It appears that a few years ago a Russian orientalist by name Prof. Ribakov from Moscow went to Kanchi to have the darshan and receive the blessings of the late Kanchi Paramacharya. The Paramacharya asked the Russian professor: ``Does not the northernmost part of Russia have more Sanskrit content in the language?'' The professor was stunned. This scholar, who came to ask questions, shed tears of joy at the very sight of the Paramacharya and was dumbfounded at the depth of his scholarship. The Paramacharya further explained to the Russian that Russia was called `Rishi Varsha' in ancient Indian geography, because it was the land where our Rishis like sage Yagnavalkya had their conference on the Vedas. This could further be corroborated by the fact that some women in the northernmost point of Russia have names like Lopamudrova, which is stunningly close to Lopamudra, wife of sage Agastya.
It may be recalled that during the Sankalpa (a solemn vow to perform an observance) at the time of Pooja, we frequently use the term Jambu Dweepa. This term actually means the entire region covering Asia and Europe, as is evidenced from descriptions in Puranic geography. Even today I understand that in the USSR while writing the postal address, the name of the country is written first and then followed by such specifications as the city, town, area, street number, etc., in that sequence. This is an ancient Hindu tradition which we follow even today during our daily Sankalpa in Pujas.
B. M. N. Murthy,
Bangalore
Saturday, April 10, 2010
The Italian experience
Having come back from a really hectic but enjoyable trip to Italy, it's only now that I've had a chance to sit back and reflect on the experience. We (my wife and I i.e.) had the good fortune to visit quite a few places in the short trip that we undertook covering Rome, Florence and Venice, and most important of all ran into some really good weather...after living in UK I've learnt to appreciate that good weather can be as big a gift as any!
I would be doing Italy a great injustice if I try to summarize the country and our experience in a few phrases. However if I'm pushed to the wall and have to pick a few it would have to be: awesome coffee, friendly people, great weather, country of enviable history, and most of all a country whose citizens have a highly evolved sense of aesthetics (the phenomenal number of historic monuments in Italy, many of which go back thousand of years are a standing testimony of this fact. If you are looking for more recent examples, how about the Ferrari!). It might seem funny I say this but one of the things I will never forget about Italy is the idea of walking into a Cafe and having a shot of espresso while standing at the counter as opposed to taking a seat. While this seems trivial, I found that a new cultural experience...so different from the way I have been used to having coffee/tea in any cafe be it in India or in the UK.
Each of the 3 cities were wonderful and unique in many respects. I will really struggle to pick any one of them as the city I liked the most. Especially given the fact we couldn't spend more than 2-3 days in any of them and that's hardly sufficient time to understand the true character of the city and it's people. As you'd expect, before heading off to Italy we had conjured up a mental image of each of the cities and what our experience would be like. By and large the high expectations we had were met, if anything, they were only exceeded. In my view any listing of the greatest cities in the world simply has to have Rome somewhere up there at the top. I am ill qualified to talk about it's history...seriously! It's innumerable museums, monuments, piazzas, fountains, churches, are just astounding. As a rule of thumb you can expect to see some monument/ancient ruin in practically every bylane of Rome, and what's more that structure would be no less than 500-600yrs old, often times several 1000s of years old! I can probably write a separate blog just about Rome and maybe that's exactly what I'll do! So let's move on...
The train arrived in Florence quite late in the evening and we were really weary by the time we got there. As planned we headed straight to the hotel to give our legs the much needed rest they deserved. Though we spent just a day in Florence (not such a great idea in hindsight), it was arguably the best day of the trip. It has everything you could ask for. For the history buff, it had monuments, museums etc which could rival Rome in terms of their antiquity and historical significance. For the shopaholics, Ponte Vecchio must feel like Mecca. For the foodie, it's cafes and ristorantes can quite easily rival any other city in Italy in terms of delectable items that were on offer (we particularly enjoyed our meal at Osteria Antica Mescita San Niccolo, one of the typical family run restaurants). Florence had the feel of a being a compact city which made it easily navigable and enjoyable, especially for a visiting tourist. Possibly an area where it scored over Rome.
Of the 3 cities, Venice stood out in terms of how different it actually was from what I'd previously imagined. One almost got the feeling that island of Venice had been frozen in time and is now exactly the way it was say in the 11th-12th centuries. I was expecting to see a maze of canals with quaint, brightly coloured houses on either side, people peeking out from the windows, gondolas criss crossing the canals and so on. Yep..and that's exactly what I saw in the main streets of Venice. Btw, there are no motor vehicles in Venice, all roads are pedestrianised. The main road were like beehives teeming with people, lots of canals, bridges and shops and overall the experience of walking up and down the innumerable bridges was just great.
It was an altogether different story in the side alleys which probably accounted for probably 60% of Venice by area (that's my guess)! The buidings were not exactly in great shape, most of them seemed to be unoccupied and almost derelict with plaster falling off, graffiti all over, and the ones that did have plaster on them could definitely do with a coating of paint. Do the locals lack the means to keep them in order (that will be hard to believe given the number of tourists coming in), or have they been deliberately left to deteriorate (to give a feel of the old world perhaps!). That question still plagues me. Hopefully I'll find out the answer soon. Now this might seem like a radical statement to make but some parts of Venice looked exactly like how a chawl would look in one of the not-so-affluent suburbs of Mumbai!! Really to me...there are in fact two Venices. The Venice I really enjoyed was the charming city that has managed to preserve it's resplendant beauty, retain it's historical way of existence including a slower pace of life, wonderful canals, bridges, shops etc. The other Venice which I've described i.e. unkempt, shabby and at times scary I didn't quite relish. Having said that, the other islands in the lagoon like Murano, Burano, Lido etc were superb.
Got to sign off now folks. More from me later. Ciao!
I would be doing Italy a great injustice if I try to summarize the country and our experience in a few phrases. However if I'm pushed to the wall and have to pick a few it would have to be: awesome coffee, friendly people, great weather, country of enviable history, and most of all a country whose citizens have a highly evolved sense of aesthetics (the phenomenal number of historic monuments in Italy, many of which go back thousand of years are a standing testimony of this fact. If you are looking for more recent examples, how about the Ferrari!). It might seem funny I say this but one of the things I will never forget about Italy is the idea of walking into a Cafe and having a shot of espresso while standing at the counter as opposed to taking a seat. While this seems trivial, I found that a new cultural experience...so different from the way I have been used to having coffee/tea in any cafe be it in India or in the UK.
Each of the 3 cities were wonderful and unique in many respects. I will really struggle to pick any one of them as the city I liked the most. Especially given the fact we couldn't spend more than 2-3 days in any of them and that's hardly sufficient time to understand the true character of the city and it's people. As you'd expect, before heading off to Italy we had conjured up a mental image of each of the cities and what our experience would be like. By and large the high expectations we had were met, if anything, they were only exceeded. In my view any listing of the greatest cities in the world simply has to have Rome somewhere up there at the top. I am ill qualified to talk about it's history...seriously! It's innumerable museums, monuments, piazzas, fountains, churches, are just astounding. As a rule of thumb you can expect to see some monument/ancient ruin in practically every bylane of Rome, and what's more that structure would be no less than 500-600yrs old, often times several 1000s of years old! I can probably write a separate blog just about Rome and maybe that's exactly what I'll do! So let's move on...
The train arrived in Florence quite late in the evening and we were really weary by the time we got there. As planned we headed straight to the hotel to give our legs the much needed rest they deserved. Though we spent just a day in Florence (not such a great idea in hindsight), it was arguably the best day of the trip. It has everything you could ask for. For the history buff, it had monuments, museums etc which could rival Rome in terms of their antiquity and historical significance. For the shopaholics, Ponte Vecchio must feel like Mecca. For the foodie, it's cafes and ristorantes can quite easily rival any other city in Italy in terms of delectable items that were on offer (we particularly enjoyed our meal at Osteria Antica Mescita San Niccolo, one of the typical family run restaurants). Florence had the feel of a being a compact city which made it easily navigable and enjoyable, especially for a visiting tourist. Possibly an area where it scored over Rome.
Of the 3 cities, Venice stood out in terms of how different it actually was from what I'd previously imagined. One almost got the feeling that island of Venice had been frozen in time and is now exactly the way it was say in the 11th-12th centuries. I was expecting to see a maze of canals with quaint, brightly coloured houses on either side, people peeking out from the windows, gondolas criss crossing the canals and so on. Yep..and that's exactly what I saw in the main streets of Venice. Btw, there are no motor vehicles in Venice, all roads are pedestrianised. The main road were like beehives teeming with people, lots of canals, bridges and shops and overall the experience of walking up and down the innumerable bridges was just great.
It was an altogether different story in the side alleys which probably accounted for probably 60% of Venice by area (that's my guess)! The buidings were not exactly in great shape, most of them seemed to be unoccupied and almost derelict with plaster falling off, graffiti all over, and the ones that did have plaster on them could definitely do with a coating of paint. Do the locals lack the means to keep them in order (that will be hard to believe given the number of tourists coming in), or have they been deliberately left to deteriorate (to give a feel of the old world perhaps!). That question still plagues me. Hopefully I'll find out the answer soon. Now this might seem like a radical statement to make but some parts of Venice looked exactly like how a chawl would look in one of the not-so-affluent suburbs of Mumbai!! Really to me...there are in fact two Venices. The Venice I really enjoyed was the charming city that has managed to preserve it's resplendant beauty, retain it's historical way of existence including a slower pace of life, wonderful canals, bridges, shops etc. The other Venice which I've described i.e. unkempt, shabby and at times scary I didn't quite relish. Having said that, the other islands in the lagoon like Murano, Burano, Lido etc were superb.
Got to sign off now folks. More from me later. Ciao!
Thursday, April 8, 2010
A novice enters the world of blogging!
For people who know me this might be a case of stating the obvious, but I believe over the years I have acquired the reputation with my friends and acquaintances as someone who's got an opinion on pretty much everything. Of course I'm not for a minute suggesting that my opinion/views actually matters.....it would be highly immodest of me to say that and that's definitely not my intention either J
The unfortunate consequence of my penchant for "interesting" conversations, is that I've sucked many an unsuspecting soul into conversations (often ends up being a debate) that they wish they hadn't begun in the first place. Most folks who know me have by now developed the art of seeing it early and ducking (some people might say avoiding but I rather call it ducking!) out of such conversations. Hopefully you are not conjuring up an image of me similar to that of a lonely pensioner hanging around in a park in the evening eager to latch on to anyone opportunity to engage in conversation! It ain't that bad. To cut a long story short on many an occasion I have felt that blogging is a good way to convey my views on matters that I feel strongly about. Hopefully someone of it will find resonance with some of you.
Until now however I have never actually gotten around to doing this, and now that I have I hope to keep it going. I can't thank my wife Aneeta enough for pushing me out of slumber. God knows how many times I've told her that I'd like to blog but did nothing about it....until now i.e.
More from me later. Ciao!
The unfortunate consequence of my penchant for "interesting" conversations, is that I've sucked many an unsuspecting soul into conversations (often ends up being a debate) that they wish they hadn't begun in the first place. Most folks who know me have by now developed the art of seeing it early and ducking (some people might say avoiding but I rather call it ducking!) out of such conversations. Hopefully you are not conjuring up an image of me similar to that of a lonely pensioner hanging around in a park in the evening eager to latch on to anyone opportunity to engage in conversation! It ain't that bad. To cut a long story short on many an occasion I have felt that blogging is a good way to convey my views on matters that I feel strongly about. Hopefully someone of it will find resonance with some of you.
Until now however I have never actually gotten around to doing this, and now that I have I hope to keep it going. I can't thank my wife Aneeta enough for pushing me out of slumber. God knows how many times I've told her that I'd like to blog but did nothing about it....until now i.e.
More from me later. Ciao!
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