AN EXCITING COMMENT

Udaya Kumar 

Dear Ajithan:

Greetings! My name is Udayakumar, a friend, reader and admirer of your dad. We met a few days ago here at Idinthakarai and he gave me your blogspot url. It took me a few days to get to it. I have gone through some of your representative works; let me tell you how impressed I am. Not because you are the son of a friend but because you establish yourself as a creative, thoughtful and reflective young Nature-lover. This country and the world need more and more young people like you. As Swami Vivekananda says, "A hundred thousand young men and women" such as yourself can and will change the fate of this Earth.

NIBBLING NATURE ALMIGHTY

 

          I happened to watch a video on YouTube recently. It is a stand-up comedy by George Carlin in which he digs on environmentalists (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eScDfYzMEEw). There is a part in the video where he raps “Our planet’s been through a lot worse than us. it’s been through Volcanoes, Earthquakes, plate tectonics, continental drifts, solar flares, sun spots, magnetic storms, the magnetic reversal of the poles, hundreds of thousands of years of bombardment by comets and asteroids and meteors, worldwide floods, tidal waves, worldwide fires, erosion, cosmic waves, recurring ice ages and we think…..some plastic bags” well, sure I was laughing, not at the uncertainty as it is intended but the irony. Plastics can alter our environment in future not far less than the entire geographical and astronomical phenomenon he has mentioned, considering the massive scale it’s been produced.

INDIAN ROLE MODELS - A COMMENT

 Hi Ajithan, 

Very good set of articles. I enjoyed reading them. Lot of original thinking and lucid write-up. 

I especially liked the one of intuition. There is a fair amount of research going on currently in cognitive psychology on this subject. I've done a couple of studies in this area. If you wish to, could send some references about the current thinking in this line of research. I think you would enjoy reading about "dual process" theories of cognition, that tries to link tacit-associative mode of perception and judgement with conscious-analytic mode. Recent studies in this area try to theorize and test on how these two modes are not necessarily at tension with each other, but rather, are constitutive of one another. [Akin to what Poincare once said: logic is the instrument of demonstration; and intuition, the instrument of invention. Demonstration and invention often co-evolve.] 

MYNAHS ON THE PROWL

Ground feeding birds under the realm of opportunists

     

      Woke up in the morning listening to bird chirps, chuckles, gurgles and coos.Lying on the bed I fancied our Hibiscus tree studded with birds of blue, red, yellow, white and so on. After couple of minutes,finally making up my mind,picked myself up to reach the balcony and to my surprise, and slight disappointment, all I could see is a tree of noisy bunch of purplish brown birds, the Common Mynah¹. The incident, though it wasn’t possible then to perceive ample scale of the phenomenon- phenomenon of Common Mynahs taking over other ground feeding birds, stayed on me as an image, a notion.

The Common Mynah 

       

GREYED OUT OF MIND?-AN INTERESTING COMMENT

Rajesh Srivastava,

   I saw this site quite accidentally and exited to read this article. I noticed in your profile that you are still an undergraduate student. The language and presentation shows maturity of a senior research scholar. I wish to appreciate you for your natural brilliance and erudition.

I am not a man of science. My interests are in yoga and mysticism. I don’t know whether you are interested in it or not -probably not, because it needs an age and experience to enter in these kind of thoughts. 

As per our yoga tradition which is an integral part of Eastern mysticism we have four levels of mental existence. Jagrat, svapna,sushubti and durya. I may compare them with the modern psychological terms conscious, subconscious, unconscious and collective unconscious. Well, actually there is sharp difference between these eastern concepts and western terms. Western psychology assumes these states as structures and we think them as functional modes.

DEFENDING DIAMOND-2

\\Kumaarasami perumal

Your arguments and language of expression is really good. You have the skill to narrate things brilliantly. But I want to clear myself. Western academic world is very vibrant one. It is funded by their corporate sector in a grand manner to collect and process various data from all over the world for their trade purpose.This large quantity of data inevitably produces theories. 

You can observe this, at every five year period we can see a new theory emerging and dominating the entire thought in every field of knowledge and people are carried away by it. In the past few years we read a lot about thinkers like Claude levi strauss, Theodor W. Adorno, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida …Their theories were discussed with great enthusiasm for few years all over the world and suddenly they lost their importance. New theories arrived and replaced them. 

DEFENDING DIAMOND-1

 

         I came across a comment recently, by Mr.Kumaarasami Perumal, on my blog, saying that my article on foreign vegetables(What would make Gandhi's salad bowl?) is inspired by Jared Diamond and talks only in geological terms and is least concerned in political issues. I have come across many criticisms with similar views on Jared Diamond's theory and addressing it as simplistic and inadequate to explain what he intends to.

 

WHAT WOULD MAKE GANDHI'S SALAD BOWL?

 

 (Mediterranean and Native American Invasion in our Vegetable Diet)

               

                 I was discussing with a friend of mine on a restaurant, lately. It all started with me picking on him about his food habit. He was having Chinese, I remember, and I was having south Indian. He interestingly hit me back with a question ‘What ingredients my food has that yours doesn’t?’ Ironically, I had no answer to tell him. Not only that we had same vegetables on our plates, but they were all foreign in origin.

                 Having read Jared Diamond’s “Guns, germs and steel” I already had an idea of Native American vegetable species dominating other vegetables all over the world. It was, basically, an European point of view who had been having vegetables originated from Mediterranean and Mesopotamian (Parts of Iran) regions. From an Indian point of view, the domination is adjoined by European vegetables as well.

GANDHI ON TECHNOLOGY

TRANSLATION OF AN EXCERPT FROM ‘INDRAIYA GANDHI’

BY JEYAMOHAN

             To look at Gandhi in the context of technology is to understand that he was a man who had his doubts on modernism and looked beyond that….

       ….When once asked ‘Do you hate machines?’ ‘No’, answered Gandhi ‘While my body on itself is nothing but a meticulous machinery How can I dismiss it? My spinning wheel or even this toothpick, for that matter, is a machine. I hate not the machines, but this growing passion for machines. I hate the passion for the machines which work upon diminishing man power. Some talk about machine which could spare man power when thousands of people are thrown jobless on the streets. Yes, I want the human toil and time to be spared not just for a sect of people but for the humanity. I want the wealth to be accumulated not just in few hands but for all the people in the world. Today machines favor putting handful of people on top thousands.’

GREYED OUT OF MIND?

(ECLIPSING OF SEQUENTIAL THOUGHTS OVER EARTHQUAKE PREDICTING INTUITION¹)

                 
                        The day after Christmas 2004, it was an ordinary morning for all of us but the pet dogs, until we learned about nasty tsunami that had just struck East Indian coastline. Running amok and howling they seemed restless. We are housed at least 7 km from nearest seashore for any kind of signs to be felt apparently. Later, I came to know from my friends that we are not the only to witness this extraordinary pet behavior. Although I’ve heard about animal intuitive prediction of natural calamity before² this direct witness urged me to learn more about this phenomenon. This phenomenon has been observed throughout the history and has heavily tinted our folklore. And this phenomenon has been venerated and harnessed adeptly by many Human societies3 familiar with and are prone to natural calamity

                   

                    The question that rises at once on one’s mind is ‘How is this possible?’ Well, the researchers have a great deal of struggle with answering that one and the claims are as diverse as, explaining it as an inborn capability which are genetically embedded, to, much familiar hypothesis of associating the behavior with senses⁴. The next question would be ‘Why is this capability restricted to animals?’ Inclined towards hypothesis of natural calamities being sensed by the animals, I’d try to answer the second question in this article with backing of scientific facts.