SONG OF THE CANNIBAL PROPHET

You feel submerged
In the women’s womb
In death also, relatively

You feel alive on lonely streets
At friend’s funerals
On a cloudy day, once

Everyday newspapers bring fears
Of discoveries
And we become un-communicating
With the concubines and ourselves

Can you come to me naked
A stranger
And sing a song
For a man may be lost soon
As he never returns again
Would you like to write or we write together
Of nauseating dreams

It is me, non else and
Most probably I would like now religion
And black magic
To be eternal in my youthfulness days
Being a cannibal prophet, of sort

I am spared so much that
I am falling asleep
In this springs today
Of hay

I have never seen a town so pathetic
Crowning me in glories
I know
The earth spills in us forever
In sporadic wars and attritions
Affections?

THE VANISHING FORESTS OF ORISSA: Vandalism in the name of development

The Forests and Environment Minister of India has recently revealed in the upper house of Indian Parliament that during the year 2003-05 the country has lost a total of 728 square kilometers as per the estimation of Forests Survey of India.
In respect to Orissa, the ministry separately said that at present it has only a meager 288 square kilometer of dense forests against a geographical area of 155707 square kilometers. Even as the Government insists the forests-land ratio to be 31 percent, the environmentalists have vehemently disputed the figure terming this as inflated. They have estimated it to be a dismal 10 percent or less. It may be mentioned that while at the time of country’s Independence, the state forests covered 48 percent of its landmass--since than, it has been regressing to a great extent causing much concern and triggering unprecedented environmental imbalances of gigantic proportions. According to norms the forests and tree covers of the state is seven percent less than the national average.
The exceptional loss of green covers of Orissa is the result of wanton destruction of trees by the unscrupulous timber mafia in connivance with some of the corrupt officials of the government and wayward politicians. However, the blame for this is very often conveniently shifted to the forests dwelling tribals, who over the generations traditionally lived, cared for, protected and depended on the forests, mostly for subsistence. The depletion of green covers has also led to the loss of valuable flora and fauna in a big way.
The rapid depletion of minimum level of green covers in the state has precipitated the process of desertification in the arid districts of Western Orissa, according to an independent research carried out by researchers of non-government organizations. These areas have been experiencing consecutive spells of droughts and heat waves that hovers around 50 degree centigrade. Additionally, rest of the areas of the state is also experiencing high level of heat wave, environmental pollution and water shortage including abnormal shifts in weather cycles. Though, the normal annual rainfall for the state is 1482 millimeter, since 1995 till 2004,the state had deficient rainfall for eight years except for the years 2001 and 2003. It is to be noted that during the last 45 years, except for only two years, Orissa went through the recurring agonies of either floods or droughts of severe magnitude.
The rivers and other water sources are increasingly getting chocked due to soil erosion and resultant decrease in the water beds. Now, the rivers carry less and less loads of water. Coupled with reduced rainfall and increase in urban population and industrial activities; water is gradually becoming a scanty resource. If the trends continues, it can be said that in coming 50 years the water shortage will be so acute that it may lead to large scale societal and environmental disturbances affecting not only the human population but also all other organisms.
One of the major causes of the mindless decimation of forests relates to over industrialization and mining activities. It is somehow believed by the power elites and business interests that it brings in prosperity for the people and for achieving that Utopian ends, the natural resource rich tribal and forests areas need to be cleared as soon and as fast as possible to pave way for faster economic growth of the state and the nation in general. Such economic activities have wrought havoc in the lives of people either displaced or still living in the periphery of the so-called prosperity zones in relation to the pulverized and damaged environment and in turn has resulted in artificially scripted human miseries. The damage arising out of such development activities is enormous yet, the all the governments of the day have preferred to ignore it to suit the business interests of a few, taking embargo under the covers of the so called intellectual jargon mainly invented to thwart the genuine aspirations of the people and to perpetuate their sufferings. No one requires cleverly couched statistics or rabid expert opinion of a select few to believe that the actions are not detrimental to the basic needs and interests of the stakeholders and inhabitants.

POST POST: THE SNAIL MAIL

In a very fast expanding Internet age with virtual mailboxes and virus laden spams, the proverbial snail mail is taking a back seat and the charm of receiving scribbled mails is becoming a thing of the past. The sad demise of the hand crafted posts has drastically changed our conception of receiving the sentimentally charged personalized communication which acted as the subtle touch of the near and dear as well as the not-so-familiar ones. It invariably had the raw smell of the persona and the memories associated with it. When the traditional mail was the almost only preferred form of connecting, people invariably waited every day of the week, month and year to be called by the friendly postman in an expectant afternoon, to hand over a humble looking post card, envelope, inland letter, parcel or insured covers having values to be treasured. In fact, people jealously kept the delivered postal communications for ages, even lasting their life time and beyond as memorabilia and the people who wrote them outlived their own lives. It was a joy to visit the communication hubs dotted throughout the length and breadth of the country. Then, communicating with others was so inexpensive that people cutting across the socio-economic divide made it a ritual of sending or receiving their letters for the sheer ecstasy associated with it. It too was quite exhilarating and relaxing to go to the post offices and no one thought it to be separated from his or her own personal world. The postmaster and the postman invariably acted as the natural extension to the school teachers and their suggestions and advices were sought and taken with all seriousness that it deserved.
The shiny red mail boxes symbolized hope and reaching out to the persons of our want and choice instantly—though at times it took weeks to get back their much longed after letters. Few lines also mattered greatly. Even though mostly people never had their personal mail boxes at the front of the doors of their houses, invariable the postman would see to it that the delightful wares were personally delivered to the actual recipients. The encounters were intimate and no one thought of putting a mailbox to miss the chance to exchange pleasantries with the ever smiling friendly postman. Even where the mailboxes were hung, they went defunct soon because their limitations (but not the possibilities) were also discovered by both the postman and the recipients for some unexplainable reasons. For this most probably they connived for their selfish ends. The entire affair of transacting the communication through the postal system was in fact a kind of culture for the people. This is very fast vanishing in a modern world where technologies have taken over the personal touch of communication with emotion.

ENLIGHTENMENT

When darkness often reigns in our life, we long for a faint ray of hope to reinforce our faith in our own questionable existence of aborted triumph in self-making and also to recognize our pale and anemic faces hesitantly by proxy. In that overwhelming specter of the loneliness and shifting loyalties of kin, kith and beloved, who desert the much defeated you in quick succession in a massive mansion of rapidly crumbling avalanches of brittle hopes; we finding no other alternatives worth any name, but turn to the failed prophets and their surrogate masters for solace. Take heart, there is still hope apparently beyond the black hole like tunnel; though, you have to take it lightly to have enough strength to discover its ever…ever expanding and contracting depths and darkness. It is up to you to embrace enlightenment or not? Or perhaps you would like to wait for the day break, that would never to come-- yet is full of promises.

LUCKY YOU, YOU SHALL WIN

You can certainly win provided you are ready for the hour of the striking moment of happiness that you waited for; though at times you will have to make provisions for your graceful defeats as well, knowing fully that it is but natural and part of life. Tell me who has not lost a war or tell me who has not won a heart? I know, it is not you in most probability! But I must confide in you that it is me who never won a war or a heart. However, I always make it a point to wear a brave face and exude a rare manufactured confidence adequately stinking with the fragrance of deceptive triumph. I have discovered that it really works and people fall for it taking me for granted at the spur of the moment. To remain ever successful and victorious I to create enthusiasm around me, I prefer to distribute bitter pills to whoever comes to me for inspiration, and they come in droves without their knowledge; profusely giving a thick coating of sugar with utmost concern and compassion. By the time these seekers discover my maggot infested realities by any chance I would have long forgotten for my follies and foibles as well as failures. I only like to win and failures make me to win still more. It is addictive. May be I am a liar, may be I am a failure, and may be I am a perpetual gifted winner or may be I am another face amongst you. The truth is only known to you and none else. Somehow I think that we only loose to be the real winners in life. Lucky you, I am sure, you shall also win but keep your masks ready, in case you would need it to look mysterious or want to smile a lot as a public performance. I have plenty of them.

SAVE THE EVERGREEN MANGROVE FORESTS

It is believed that mangrove, the evergreen rainforests by the sea, originated in the Indo-Malayan area and later spread to India, East Africa and the Americas some 66 to 23 million years ago. Southeast Asia accounts for about 27 percent or 10.5 million acres of mangrove forests out of a total of 39.3 million acres combined total for the world. One of the most variegated and diverse, the species that nestle on the warm coastlines of the tropical oceans have attracted the attention of scientists and others alike. These specialized species thieve on the sheltered coastlines, river deltas and brackish wetlands in between mainland and sea growing and proliferating abundantly; usually unsuitable most of the other plant species. Mangrove according to some accepted classification comprises of 16 to 24 families and 54 to 70 species that could be the palms, trees, shrubs or ground ferns growing in the area in between the high and low tide of the sea. Out of these the Southeast Asia and Africa has about 15 distinct species each while 10 other occur in the Americas. It may be mentioned that about 50 percent of the mangrove forests are found in Mexico, Brazil, Nigeria, Australia and Indonesia. Mangrove would normally mean the propensity of a large number of plant families’ specialized adaptation to the tropical coastal environment. These plants are extremely well adapted to their salty and swampy habitats by having breathing roots.
Though one of the most diverse and productive wetland species of the earth, today the coastal woodlands or tidal forests is also one of the most threatened one, vanishing very fast than perhaps what we know about it or realize. The United Nations on the occasion of the World Wetland Day on February 2nd, 2008 has said that since 1980 the world has already lost around 20 percent 3.6 million hectares of the total wetland mangrove forests which grows in 124 tropical or sub-tropical countries and areas. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) divisional Director Wulf Killmann believes that "If deforestation of mangroves continues, it can lead to severe losses of biodiversity and livelihoods, in addition to salt intrusion in coastal areas and siltation of coral reefs, ports and shipping lanes. Tourism would also suffer." He further added that “Countries need to engage in a more effective conservation and sustainable management of the world's mangroves and other wetland ecosystems. But overall, the loss of these coastal forests remains alarming. The rate of mangrove loss is significantly higher than the loss of any other types of forests." By the year 2005 we were left with only 15.2 million hectare than what we had in the year in 1980, estimated to be 18.8 hectare.
It is extremely important to take effective steps to arrest the rapid decline of the mangrove forests. Otherwise, we would be bereft of a host of unique plants and organisms and expose ourselves to unprecedented natural calamities like the tsunami.

EARTH AND OUR COMMON FUTURE

Though, I am not the self proclaimed prophet of a doomsday cult or a distinguished scientist of any description, or a born for ever genius; yet, it surely dawns upon me that man (allegedly the most intelligent and conscientious of all) is rather all out to cannibalize and guzzle up and ultimately annihilate mother earth that sustains life and consciousness (of our varieties and understanding); perhaps, in the entire cosmos. It certainly is too scary to realize that slowly, we are heading towards an unprecedented apocalypse beyond our imagination that would spell the end of the so called divine kingdom ours, believed to be established by god, who is further supposed to be the ultimate source of all of the existence in the ever expanding and contracting universe.
At times, I am forced to conclude that most probably without man the world would have been a much better and safer place with rest of the creatures and creations. Evidently, with a superior and complex brain man has acted not prudently and sagaciously but with utter carelessness and stupidity with a false sense of invincibility that is anything but stupidity of gigantic proportion. The main cause of this destructiveness of ours is rooted in and appears to be our gargantuan greed and arrogance that is misconstrued and nakedly silly. We are falsely under the impression that we are the best and most powerful species, having a so called soul (thought of as part of the Holy Spirit) that qualifies us to become the self appointed sole arbitrator of all the matters pertaining to the earth and beyond. It is rather funny to even think that man by any standard has an iota of commonsense and intelligence for he knows not what he does and he does what he knows not. His understanding of the intricacies of nature which basically means to discover some of the apparently working or workable partial natural laws at best just translates into a few jumbled up and mumbled up utilitarian ‘knowledge’, usually limiting and leads us further to more of the confusions than solutions. Today, our earth faces the gravest of dangers because of the senseless actions and of course inaction of human beings and the most absurd and imperfect knowledge that we have accumulated over the long years or ages of our so called intelligent existence. I would rather say that our absurd insights have been our main enemies for they are the insights of limitations and not expansion. This is so because, our quest to solve our problem are so much narrow and unidirectional that we have not been able to think that there are also other aspects to the problems or that the discovered solutions are not the real solutions at all. It in fact, it has created more and more problems for us and those insignificant‘others’, who form a symbiotic relation with us for our life’s continuance and living and theirs too. We have utterly failed to realize the simplest of the premises that it is virtually impossible or suicidal to proclaim that anything that lays beyond us are as a rule insignificant and we can carry on without them.
We must admit that the earth belongs to all of us that encompass the other organisms equally and when we think of our future, it certainly is tied up with their future also. We have to recognize the importance of each components of nature and have to stop treating them as mere appendages--the candidates for exploitation. This will help us to prevent the acceleration of the deluge which is unfolding at a very faster pace.

THE PANGS AND ANGST OF A FLEDGELING BLOGGER: IT SUCKS!

As a fledgeling blogger and a computer nerd, a few years back, I had no clear idea of the big nasty pond called World Wide Web and the queer blogsphere. Today, however, still it has not gotten any better. With every passing day, instead of becoming wiser, curiously I am turning into a frog in the pond, byte by byte. I remain isolated, quarantined and ignored even now and intensely feel the pangs of ostracization. Tell me what have I done to be ignored like an insignificant fly? Need I start blogging my epithet?
Like the gone by agonizing yesterdays, today also I keep on burning the midnight and midday oil and scarce bandwidth to daydream about my shiny visitors and readers hoping against hope that someday they will drop in, in droves to enthuse and encourage me to churn out extremely brilliant and seminal original posts and other palatable stuffs, not available elsewhere in the cosmos for sure. Yet, often I have felt being let down by my own estimation of myself and my abilities to attract the most precious but nowhere to be found cyber guests. I must inform you that in spite of my long…long wait like the hungry spider, the preys are nowhere to be seen or found—my be they are the much touted white elephants or near extinct species or more precisely they are the Dodos and nothing more. I have even come to console myself that actually the fellows do not exit at all and only part of a myth or folklore created to bamboozle some simpleton like me.
In my desperation and trough occasional bouts depression and angst, I have often prayed gods and tried to appease them by various known and unknown means to send me some visitors, who would drop by piously to say me hello and chant the encomiums. The gods have surely failed me and my faith is very fast eroding in forcing me to question the efficacy of divine intervention to procure visitors for my extraordinary and outstanding blog. Perhaps it is my sins of the past and present life that prevents me from being surrounded by the cooing, booing and jeering all important would be faithful followers of my blog empire.
The life of a sincere and hardworking blogger is certainly miserable as in my case, you know, when the comment boxes remain barren and the stat counter, digit less. It is therefore a sort of Herculean task to keep the nuts and bolts of my blog remain greased and kicking on the face of a cruel and parched drought of the never showing future visitors. I have, frankly left no stone unturned to appear attractive to lure the extra proud netizens with a neatly laid out side bar, alluring ad options that would perhaps made the cash hungry clickers a billionaire, overnight but to no avail. I often wondered, has the blogsphere is in fact a black hole into which I am sucked—for at this stage I am not able to say you for sure whether I am a matter or anti-matter?
It is question of getting noticed, receiving attention and being cared for. Without all these I am very fast becoming hapless haggard and a pathetic avatar with lonely times and a blog largely bereft of the footprints of my admirers. It is a difficult situation and I do not know how to get out of it?
May be tomorrow there will be a stampede and my blog will be at the top slot of Alexa traffic ranking and have a Google page rank of 11 out of 10. May be someday I will be famous and rich by blogging. May be after reading my post, the most holly and sacred and ubiquitous search engines would have pity on me and put at the top of any and all searches that will be sending me avid visitors leading to occasional crashes and clashes at my blog. May be very soon, I will have sooooo… much visitors that I will be issuing them tickets and ask them to be in queue and patient to view and read my important posts. But, before anything of that sort happens, and I am sure it would be, are you listening to me and ready to be my repeat visitor?

For now folks, I am done! Let me get ready to write my next extra brilliant post with renewed vigour and hope to enter the hall of shame and cause of blame.

SIRIDI SAI BABA AND A MIRACLE

Everyone goes to him, said a friend and I thought I should too meet the saint, to ask him about my life’s sojourn. Though I was in a hurry, I failed to keep my date with him for months. When I finally met him, he readily blessed me and I unburdened my pains and sufferings to the saint asking him to resurrect me and rescue me form the dungeons and blind alleys. He appeared serene and I was in awe, for he was such a nice friend who agreed to listen to all that I would say to him and be with me whenever I needed. I felt nice and reassured and thought I would share my feelings with others who would need him for unburdening their sorrows.
On the same day, one of the much awaited miracles of my life happened, immediately thereafter my return from his temple. It just happened. I was readied to forgo a friend after spending a much longed for time of togetherness and bliss—the way I had imagined and awaiting for days in agog; so that her life could be filled with happiness. It was the best that could happen on that beautiful day with the grace of the Siridi Sai. Though, I do not know exactly as to why it happened that way or how it would still unfold in the future--but certainly it started to reach ultimately to its logical ends.
If you are ready and want, you can also reach to him and make him your friend and experience his love. Probably, like me you would too like to experience his miracles.

FULL MARKS TO THE FOOLS

Do not fool yourselves in thinking that as a rule the fools can not mull or that those who are not the bull are the mule. While it is quite cool to pull the legs of the gullible to droll and bamboozle, it is quite another thing to conclude that the fool even did not attend the life’s school and is simply in your hand, a funny tool. By the way, do you still compare the fool with a mound of ass stool and find yourself to be the only one, wise and sensible? It is however plain stupid to conclude and condemn the fool as the garbage pool. The buffoon is really the best of the persons that god could make and is certainly not the brain grey matter deficient numskull. Believe me; it is always wise to give full marks to the fools. Believe me, the fools are the salt of the earth and of course, the sugar. Our dear world is a bit safer place and boasts of a lot of amusement only because of the ubiquitous presence of such meek folks, who are thought of as bereft of the intel (this one is the original trade mark owned by god). Since the fools fail to understand and comprehend the finer nuances of life and living, or more appropriately prefer to pretend that they are the perpetual naivetes, the earth still spins.
For your information, the fools are also fondly and popularly known and addressed by the genius and Wiseman/woman as: (Master/Mister/Mistress) ass, birdbrain, blockhead, bonehead, boob, bore, buffoon, butt, chump, clod, clown, cretin, dimwit, dolt, donkey, dork, dope, dumb ox, dunce, dunderhead, dupe, easy mark, fair game, fall guy, fathead, goat, gomeral, gomeril, goose, halfwit, idiot, ignoramus, illiterate, imbecile, innocent, jackass, jerk, lamebrain, laughing stock, lightweight, loon, lunkhead, meathead, moron, nerd, nincompoop, ninny, nitwit, numskull, oaf, omadawn, ownshook, pushover, sap, schlemiel, schmuck, silly, simpleton, stooge, sucker, turkey, twerp, twit, victim.
Include my name above, if you like (I promise, I will not mind, in fact I will be happy) or your own name, if that is what you are comfortable with. Please decide too, in which side of the world you actually belong to, naturally—the FOOL’S PARADISE or the HALE’S HELL. It is absolutely free!
Wish you all a happy April Fool’s Day 2008 ya folks!