Vortex....Interesting Photograph

I had been reading an article about Vortexes in The Wikipedia and found that this image is very interesting. It is real and shows the turbulence generated around an aircraft's wing as it moves on. Colored smoke was used to show the pattern of the vortex that formed around the wing as the plane takes off.
More on the image and the article can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vortex
BTW, Wikipedia is an excellent place to read about things, whatever they are. Eversince I've started using the Internet I've fallen in love with this place in the cyber space.

Dowry.......This Goes To All 'Educated' Men

This particular word "Dowry" sounds very sweet to Indian men, but it is oblivious in the western world. Dowry is something that a woman brings to her husband's house after marriage. This is a purely ceremonial thing and is just a way of supporting a new household. Any newly wed couple requires a lot of help, financial as well, from people on both sides and this in most cases, is a requisite and allowable.
But look around in our country, it has crossed all leaps and bounds, it has crossed all bounds of reason and surprisingly more so with "highly educated" youth. This subject has always irritated me, it irks me a lot because people are simply unable to see that they are cutting the branch that they are sitting on. It is a completely pathetic situation that is prevailing on our intellect. It is a fact that millions of girls have/are just vanished(ing) off the face of the earth, even before they were born, just because of "enlightened" youth we come across, and how could we trust youth like these to lead our nation?
I had discussed this topic with several people and often received disgusting remarks and suggestions from them, and all the people I've talked to are well educated. I am so surprised and dismayed that nobody just gets the point right!!
Here is a peek into what some of my 'enlightened brethren' had to say :
A software engineer said just after he got his first job - " I am thinking of getting a car and a house and may be a million rupees in cash. It's got to be at least that much for taking care of the girl for an entire life"
A chartered accountant said - " Whatever reason it is, women cannot do without men, and for this reason at least they got to pay before marriage(shows me some bungalows and says that something like that would be great !!)"
Another chartered accountant said after a discussion - " All this talk is unreasonable, I'm gonna see how you'll get married without dowry "
All religions hold this institution called marriage in high esteem and is in fact the best of all relationships in the world, more so because it keeps the world going !
We don't love people in the world, not even our own closest ones. Can't we unconditionally love the person we are going to stay with for the rest of our life?
Can't we be grateful to the woman who so painstakingly brings another being into the world? Can't we have respect for a woman just like our mother, without whom we are just bone-bags ?? Are we marrying people or money and wealth ?
And it is sometimes disheartening to see even women in thirst for dowry for their sons, just forgetting what their parents had to face to get them married.
Lastly, one very disheartening situation I've come across, an acquaintance of mine showed me nuns in a parish and said in a mocking tone " most of these people are not here with true devotion, they are here because their fathers cannot get them husbands "
Truly, I am not sure whether that is true, if it is true, what a shame have we brought upon ourselves and in which we take pride to dwell !!!
All religions talk about a time to come when all love from peoples' hearts evaporates into thin air, this is that time we are living in, shame on us, we cannot even love our closest companions !!

Now Hear This

This animated film from 1962 is one of the best animated films I've ever seen. This was directed by Chuck Jones and often features in the Looney Tunes series of animated films shown on various cartoon channels like Pogo.
This cartoon shows a high degree of creativity which impressed me a lot. The message of this cartoon also is quite good and deep. It tells the story of a man who finds a listening horn, which actually is the lost horn of the devil. The man tries the horn and finds it more appealing than the horn which he already possesses. So he decides to relinquish his old horn for the newly found attractive red horn.
When the man starts to hear through the horn, it sounds incredibly good after which follow all the travails and finally the man, after going through a lot of physical trouble, decides to throw away the red horn. The creativity displayed by the creator of the cartoon is incredible and the cartoon is also apt for the present condition prevailing around the world. The world has chosen to go ahead with 'sweet sounding' reforms while dumping all care and here we stand, at the threshold of another great global recession. Governments have chosen to over look what had happened before the IInd World War(the great depression of the thirties) and here we are, reaping the results of all we have chosen to do.

Positive Thinking, Luck And Achieving Heights In Life

Well, the heading reads great and inspiring to a lot of people and there have been umpteen books written on these lines and umpteen bestsellers and equally good number of people who became rich by writing books on these lines. But if you could see carefully there is one word that seems pretty odd...yes it is 'Luck' !! This is what many achievers and many many authors who write about achieving things in life usually hate or at the least have a disliking for. The word 'Luck' is both lucky and unlucky as well, as it is seen by people in different ways, both favorable and unfavorable.
I like to use another word 'Chance' for our word 'Luck', why ?? It goes something like this.......it is by chance that you got conceived, it is by chance that you are what you look like , black or white , beautiful or not, see red as red and green as green and so on.
These are pretty trivial things that we come across, while there are some other more important things like one can be born with a gargantuan amount of brain power, some might simply never cross childhood even after they cross their thirties, some might be born in cozy homes while some might be born in the midst of famine, war, sickness and unfathomable peril. What if somebody was born in the middle of a raging war, bitter poverty and could never go to school ?? Psychologists say that a person's behavior moulds mostly upon his/her early experiences and stimulus received from parents and others around, what if circumstances were not as favorable ?? Nobody can become what they are not made for.
Then what is the point in striving anyway ?? Yes there is.There is one basic fact that people tend to forget in all the mayhem, it is that we are what we are and not more than that. It is always good to understand one's self and set goals accordingly. Respecting one self and understanding limits that one has does a lot to the mind and body. Always giving the best that can be done and never giving up will conjure magic by giving good results and also imbibing great confidence.
In the race to succeed, people often scramble for answers in books that were written about achieving things and reaching unprecedented heights, often citing examples of great people like Albert Einstein, Newton and so forth. It is for sure that those great people never became great by reading books written about achievement. They had the intellect to contemplate things of such grandeur and magnitude. What if the same person Einstein were to be born a retard ??It is never good to over-estimate one's self but the one thing that surely can be immensely beneficial for personal development is to do one's best and never give up on what can be done. If not once the second time and if not, the third time and so forth. Even in thick forests there is always a trail and a pathway along the way people daily tread. Once there is a tendency to compare one's self with others there is every chance that the person loses respect in his/her own sight which is a chief cause of stress and depression, and it is a fact that a rising number of depression cases among youth is due to over estimating themselves and loading themselves with excessive targets.
The key to having a fulfilling life when it comes to learning, work and achievement is to understand one's self properly, knowing one's limits and respecting them,stop comparing with others,putting in the best efforts and never giving up on what effort can be put into.

Expensive Food

Well this doesn't seem to be a very interesting thing to blog about but this is something that has been going on in my mind for a while. There are a lot of restaurants around, some with international brands that make very simple food stuffs and charge a very huge amount for what they server.
The best example is pizza. It gets as exuberant as it can get for a loaf of bread and a very little amount of toppings on it. If one can shell out bucks to have a lunch in restaurants that serve stuff like these, it would easily cross the average monthly salary of an Indian farmer who actually breaks his back for growing wheat and vegetables in his farm. There are a lot of instances around the globe where farmers struggle very hard to get the minimum price for what they produce while there are people eating the same food shelling out hundreds of times more money. Are we deceiving ourselves by encouraging people who sell these exuberant food to us ?? Yes, absolutely !!
There are farmers across Africa who just cannot sell their products because of cheap dumps from rich countries, there are farmers across India dying of hunger only because they cannot get the right price for what they have produced after breaking their backs in the burning sun. All this happens while the rich sit in luxurious restaurants paying thousands of bucks for simple luncheons while it is a courtesy to go half hungry even after paying so much in the restaurant.
Situation cannot change until people understand what they are doing and governments wake up to the conditions and seek ways to solve the inequalities between rich and poor, this also means rich countries and poor countries. It is a fact that all the rich countries that are now rich are rich at the expense of poor countries who cannot match the purchasing power or the production capacities of the richer countries. An instance could be drawn from what is happening to Italian furniture makers after the Chinese entered the market in a big way.

GOD

This subject called GOD fills my mind to a great extent and keeps my mind occupied for a significant amount of time. This is because HE intrigues me a lot and most of what I do is bound by what I believe about this entity. So here is my take about what GOD is.........
Before I talk about whether GOD is there or not there is one question that lingers in my mind viz., when did human beings start to develop a fear about dead men coming back from graves when there were dead animals as well around? Where has this fear of ghosts, demons and supernatural beings come from? The answer to this lies pretty much in the question itself.
There certainly are somethings we simply do not understand, around us. The one thing I believe to the core is that we shouldn't say that something is not there if we do not understand it.
It is rather better to say that we do not understand that instead of saying that it doesn't exist at all.
Things so far don't put forward that GOD exists but an important question can be asked, are we thinking in the right direction?
I personally believe that GOD is somebody/something that exists above everything and yet is present in everything and guiding everything. GOD is something that cannot be explained. The proposition is simple......if something is shown and said that it is GOD it simply isn't. This is because there could be something above that and from which this thing has emanated. Ultimately HE is something that cannot be perceived or understood with the limited intellect we have.
This is where the major division among religions in the world comes up. There are just two kinds of religions in the world viz., the ones that don't attempt to name or attempt to explain this entity and others that try to explain the entity and therefore have given the entity a name.
The next big question that comes to our minds is, if GOD does exist why all this uncontrollable destruction and pain in the world, more so as people consider GOD to be good ?
The answer to this question is simple too, consider this - Try to save an ant that is in trouble and it is most likely that it may bite, it doesn't understand that we are trying to bail it out.
Although this isn't the best analogy I can draw to drive home the point, we can easily see that it is difficult to see what HE is doing. HE has through many ways made it clear that we should just listen to what HE says and everything will be fine. But it has never happened that we did that.
Well, this leads to a very controversial topic viz., "Free Will", I'd make an attempt at digging this soon.