Fresh produce

Imagine a family. One where all members live in amity, share what is available and believe that spending quality time with the family does not require anything other than the family.

Now imagine a family where the members constantly quarrel with each other on some matter or the other, do not share resources and believe that the new monster sized television with rock concert scale speakers will help the family spend quality time together.

The second, being the greater consumer, is too easy for businesses to exploit. They aren't the problem. You produce, they consume. The goal then, of all business, is to convert the first kind into the second.

This is essentially a problem of creating disorder from order. It's not as easy as it might appear.

A number of things need to happen before stability, contentment and harmony in a unit such as a family can be replaced with uncertainty, discontent and disharmony.

It will take time before the destruction is complete. Sometimes, a small seed of contentment that is left behind might spring back and spawn another contented unit – which will again need to be targeted. And all the while, raw materials are becoming scarce. These are the kinds of risks that businesses endure just to ensure that the world can continue consuming.

The first line of offense is misrepresentation. It is easy to cheat people who thrive on trust. The simple folks fall for this and start consuming petrochemical filled detergents quite quickly.

The second line of offense involves selling dreams. Wearing a pair of shoes made from petrochemical waste will never help you run a mile under 4 minutes, if you couldn't already. But wearing one will make you feel like you could, if you only tried and just did it.

The third line of offense is the instilling of fear. You are encouraged to plan for the future of your loved ones, by spending less time with them so that you can work harder to invest the extra money in complex stock linked insurance plans, the future of which the company promoting them cannot determine. The company though, expands, using your contribution.

The fourth line of offense is the spreading of hopelessness. Research, a word that signified thoroughness, honesty and humility (for no-one knows everything) has now been hijacked to promote sensational 'conclusions' like 'fighting couples will continue to fight until they die'.

The final line of offense is anarchy. Once humanity is out there, delirious with dreams, scared of the future and buying things without hope, there is a real risk of the smarter among them realizing that they are being had. One way to beat such a minority into eternal submission is to sponsor anarchy. By doing so, businesses obtain access to the revolutionary spark within each human – the one that springs hope for humanity – and convert it into a propaganda machine.

When anarchy has run its course, I believe, simplicity and contentment will seem refreshing.

Dig this

To begin with, we used whatever was already available on the earth's surface - water, plants, animals, rocks.
Then we used those things to build tools to get to the source nature's bounty. We dug.
The problem with pollution starts from this digging. We are digging stuff up from the bowels of the earth and burning it. the smoke from the burning fills the atmosphere and we try to stuff the residue back into the earth. What on (and above and below the) earth are we up-to?

Why dig?
Nature assembles a molecule using the available resources. When nature assembles a molecule, it creates a whole bunch of them until it cannot do so anymore. And then those molecules assemble themselves into bigger molecules and so forth. competing sets of molecules fight for resources and arrive at a 'natural' balance. Thus we are told by evolutionary biologists and is probably the most logical explanation we've got so far.

So, the human set of molecules digs because:
- It can.
- that is what nature intends (aka because that's the way our minds work.).
- The competition is weak

The end result is that the human race has become one of nature's runaway processes.
There is no set of molecules strong enough to contain our expansion except ourselves. Common sense dictates that a lack of competition leads to complacence and weakening until a point where a competitor emerges, thereby restarting the game.

How do we use the bounty?
Between the dug up earth and the polluted atmosphere, we have made the earth's natural produce unusable without "purification" but have 'pure' fizzy drinks and packaged food, both filled with chemicals from the earth's bowels. We have also increased our chances of survival, but all we can do with our extended lives is consume more fizzy drinks and packaged food while sitting inside our climate controlled houses.  Having eliminated all competition, we laze around and weaken ourselves. This recipe for weakening the species is actually the human race's heart rending cry for companionship. We have made disease our competitor.

Free lunch?
If you mess with the source, you are obviously altering the produce. I find it hard to believe that digging for oil thousands of feet below the surface of the earth will not necessarily have an effect on things on the surface of the earth. Plundering the earth cannot be a free meal. there is a price to be paid and humanity is only beginning to realize this, in fits and starts. But we are limited by our imaginations and can only think of danger and calamity in terms of what we see and feel.

Digger

Go, stop or escape
Escape is an option, but sadly, glorious visions of the human species plundering planet after planet in the limitless universe remain fantasy fit for celluloid.

What we've got is this one planet. So, our options are to either stop (not slow down) or go full steam ahead. Slowing down is useless unless we extract oil at the same rate at which it is created, which means that we can produce one automobile only every 2,00,000 years or so.

Stopping means leaving all dug up holes as they are and consuming only things that are on the surface. scraping rather than digging. Then we can talk about sustainable scraping, which would be closer to the realm of what is possible than sustainable digging.

The other option, which is the one we are currently practicing, is to have one big party and discuss sustainable development during brief periods when we are hung over from too much consumption.

So, why is it so difficult for us to comprehend the perils of plunder and loot? Is it a limitation of our senses? Perhaps we are at a stage in evolution where a new sense is being developed - one which will alert us to dangers not seen by the existing senses.

Tvlesion

The Television looked dusty and weather worn, like It had lived in a mud house among aluminum utensils, firewood stoves, cloth cradles and desperation; providing the only window into a world that appeared to offer a vision that something better existed elsewhere for someone and perhaps one day for the inhabitants of the mud house too. If those visions were real, there might have been hope.
By the TV stood various household equipment that humans collect by any means. Flat brown mattresses rolled up like beedis, parts of chairs tied up with string and rope, anonymous jute bags and Chinese fertilizer sacks made of viscose hiding unabandonable items whose worth could only be understood by the one who labored hard to procure them through debt or savings to fill a seemingly urgent need sometime in the past, but were pure baggage which had to be lugged around now. Can't get rid of them, no use in keeping them; dead weight covered in dust.
A woman sat on the railway platform guarding this sordid debris of the industrial revolution. She wore clean clothes and looked proud; whether of herself or her belongings or her having been able at some point to procure these things it wasn't clear. Not nearly as clear as her eyes.
As the train slowly eased its way out of Ongole's only railway station the heat hit like a sickle, sharp and shining.
As I continued to stand at the door to the compartment, fields of what might once have been fertile land passed by in various stages of drying up under the heat of the unrelenting Andhra sun. The sky was a mixture of blue and grey; a sickly industrial sort of globalised air. But for that TV there might have been just a little bit more of blue and the proud woman might have done something a little more fulfilling than watching unreal images of unattainable glamour and avarice.
A group of young and well fed youth stood behind me chatting in a foreign tongue. They looked proud too. They perhaps did not wait until their TVs gathered dust or their mattresses became flat; they bought a new one every 6 months. One of them finished a Coca-Cola® and threw the empty plastic bottle into the wash basin with what seemed like contempt.
The proud woman lugs her television around to guide her in raising her child so that he may one day buy numerous television sets and throw empty coke bottles into public wash basins with contempt.
What an enlightened age we live in, when the petty goals of the decadent are forced down the throats of the poor and sincere.
They have nowhere to run. Even when they run, they carry their Televisions with them.

09-June-2009 - Bangalore to Guwahati (Ongole)

A Capital mess

You see the powered window slide down; darkened with a promise of shelter from the searing heat that prevents you from opening your eyes fully.
You see a plastic mug drop out of the window, splattering the froth from a just consumed cup of cold coffee.
You get a glimpse of the girl who made the careless drop. She's laughing.
You see the window slide up again.
You see the car speed away, leaving behind yet another vestige of mindless consumption.


As you walk along a pavement, you try to ignore the puddles of spit and other bodily fluids that assault your senses.
You are able to ignore the fluids only because there are other things to assault your senses to greater degrees.
And then you find yourself being pushed violently from behind.
You might think there was a dire emergency and people were trying to make a getaway.
But no; it is just a fat kid who wants to force his way down the path of mindless consumption
And he will not brook your easy paced walking.


You dart through the traffic to make it to the other side because the traffic lights no not work.
As you press your survival instincts a gush of dust sweeps onto your face and fills your open mouth.
You spit your way through the traffic and survive.
Having made it to the semi clean environment of the metro station, you breathe.
But the train has to stop and you have to get out. Back into the dust and spit.


Platform #16 has been dug up. Fine dust is suspended in the air. a weather worn blue train slides onto the platform. dust re-distribution in full play.
New Delhi railway station has a single counter to sell platform tickets and about 10 ticket inspectors to check if people have valid platform tickets.
The queue is not serpentine. It more river-like; with a large delta near the counter. Morons like me are to be found in a bend in the river,
standing the risk of being cut off in an ox bow lake.


The theory goes that terrorists do not attack as often because their supply lines are cut off by "intelligence".
If this theory holds, it must mean that India is brimming with intellect.
An alternate and more plausible theory is that terror requires the presence of order, and order is scarce in India.


I elect a representative, I pay tax so he gets a salary.
He gets a nicely laid out road and a car to drive on it. I get what?

Breath Control

Everyone would like to choose exactly the level of civilization that they are comfortable with.
Little do they realize that along with that ever so useful light bulb comes a whole suite of
annoyances; at the very least, someone needed to make the glass and die from it so you can sit in
bright light in the dead of night and consume a little more when you were supposed to be sleeping

The human body is a machine. self repairing to some extent, but there are only so many run cycles that it can do. Each breath you breathe uses some of those cycles and also helps in the self repair. If you control your breath so that you used the least number of cycles, causing least damage and effecting maximum self repair...

You'd still be facked


In the process of controlling your breathing, apparently, something else happens which makes it obvious that you are no different from your washbasin, or that you had imagined your washbasin all along, depending on who told you how to control your breath.
When that dawns on you, you are hopelessly lonely in the conventional sense of the word,
but loneliness occurs only if there was someone around to remind you of it....
Your washbasin cannot remind you ...
anymore....

There is no need to talk ... hell there's nobody left to talk to

Yes... it uncannily looks like a description of death...

Consumption is the basis of life.
Too much is death.
Moderation is slow death.
Very minimal is slower death

What's your choice