Commonsense

I tried a few times to be inspired, ha, ha! To be motivated, for creativity and imagination to flow forth like the gushing rapids of the mighty rivers, consigning boulders fallen eons ago from exploding stars and  the land around, into awe. I tried, awaited with curiosity, but in vain! And kip engulfed me at all such instances, mastering my senses and physique pushing me gently into sanguine comfort and gay abandon. To wake up at dawn, an ordinary mortal more conscious of one’s limitation  Nature assigned. I tried for those moments of hallucination that great men of letters and art are alleged to have underwent, triggering their imagination and lay down in words, and visuals that we commoners devour, enjoy, cherish and fantasize.

Absinthe was consumed by Somerset Maugham. Did that help him in his literary exploits? Did the “Moon and six pence” evolve out of the hallucinations Absinthe might trigger? It is alleged that Lewis Carol had his moments of freakish fantasies. And “Alice in Wonderland” was the offshoot of such bouts. I could not find in my brief reading of his biography that he was assisted externally in his fantastic imaginative creations. Eric Clapton’s affairs with Vodka are too fearsome to look into. I wonder if the spirit stimulated him to be creative or if it was intimidating. Nearer home we have had the famous lyricists Vayalar Rama Varma and Kannadasan who it is said had to be enslaved by the spirit to produce creative diamonds, which they did while alive. The late John Abraham was one such who had to be influenced by external stimulants and the late poet Ayappan. Yes indeed the films and the poems that were created by them were too powerful for it to be the bizarre work of intoxicants.

And it happened the inspiration arrived and dawned as realization. Sitting back one night after a few glasses of whiskey, it was vivid, “and the moral of that is—Be what you would seem to be—or, if you’d like it put more simply—never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.” (Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland)

PESTICIDES,FERTILIZERS,PLASTICS, ALCOHOL & airlines

World over governments and countries have understood the importance of sustainable development and the dangers of environmentally retrograde actions. And many countries have started to react positively to environmental depletion. But unfortunately that is not the case in India, be it the various governments that occupy positions both in the states and at the center.

If nuclear power plants  are killers that become infamous through the wide barrage of intense publicity it receives through various mediums, pesticides used in agriculture and farming are certainly silent and slow killers , but devoid of the sheen and the gruesome glamour atomic energy possess...

The foremost responsibility of any government in a democratic political system is the betterment of the populace. But in contrast we have in this country governments and political parties who are intent in destroying the life of its citizens and bequeath gloom for posterity. The greatest misfortune people of India would have is the very governments they elect through suffrage, acting against their interest by lobbying and ensuring free hand for fertlisers and pesticide conglomerates.

Vijay Mallya will find a place of prominence amongst the top five industrialist and billionaires of India. He is a member of the upper house of parliament .Indeed the majority of our parliamentarians are millionaires, felons, rapists, thugs, murderers and convicts. While Vijay Mallya adorns the elite billionaire club of industrialists in the parliament it is also a known and not much spoken matter that he is also the don of industries and commercial ventures that  defraud and rob people off their health, wealth , wellbeing and also make exorbitant margins as profit, thereby.

Vijay Mallaya is the largest manufacturer and seller of alcohol in the world. He is the largest manufacturer and distributor in India and to poor third world countries pesticides as dangerous as Endosulfan.He is also the largest manufacturer of plastics. In fact he is the largest manufacturer and distributor of unsustainable fertilizers and pesticides. And he has the clout to influence and channel government policies and decisions to suit his commercial illusions, and ventures.

The history and evolution of agriculture pesticides has an interesting aspect.

Toxic chemicals were invented and manufactured by both the Allied and Axis forces in the Second World War. They were used at will in ammunitions and shells on the general population and troops of the adversary. Subsequent to the end of the Second World War, the manufacturers of such toxic compounds saw they were to be rendered job less as the use of such poison ceased to exist. In a brainstorming meeting of the manufacturers an idea evolved to use the poisonous chemicals and its variants as agriculture herbicides and pesticides. The powerful group of such people joined forces and marketed the poison as panacea for crop rot. They literally bought various governments and entrenched themselves. And since then, every grain of soil, land and water world over is being slowly rendered infertile and toxic. (Compiled and translated from Mathurbhumi Weekly)

Agent Orange is the code name of one such herbicide and defoliant used by the USA as a part of its herbicidal defoliate progarmme in the Vietnam War. According to the Vietnamese authorities 4.8 million Vietnamese were exposed to Agent Orange, resulting in the death or maiming of 4, 00, 000, and 5, 00,000 children born with birth defects. During a phase of ten year span of the Vietnam War the US military sprayed 8, 00, 00,000 liters of chemical herbicides in Vietnam, Cambodia and the former Laos. The intent was to defoliate the natural forest cover and rural dwellings and eliminating the food cover for the guerillas. This was also aimed at depriving the rural population of life in the country side and forces them to run for cover to the urban areas occupied by the US. Thereby depriving the Vietnamese guerrillas’ chance for base and support. The genesis of the Agent Orange had agricultural research. In the course of a research on the usefulness of a chemical compound in shortening the grain bearing span of Soya, scientist stumbled upon the fact that the chemical can defoliate crops. This was adopted by the US military to concoct a horrendous herbicide.

Imagine the revenue big chemical, fertilizer and pesticide companies will harvest and are continuing to harvest through dumping of toxic pesticides on the farming community and as deadly chemicals inside weaponry. Easier for them because human conflict is unremitting like human blunders and myopia.

                                                              Coffee Maker

And to compliment these endeavors of the business class, the poor mans’, labourers and tillers party the CPI ( Marxist) have made a fascinating inexplicable turn around and  have begun lobbying for genetically modified crops.

Scripted in the USA- " Thou shall be liable"

This is something that may come up in Wikileaks a few years from now.

Scene -1

The Ministry of public health and safety Government of Japan, Tokyo.

Bureaucrats and the cabinet minister are huddled around the conference table. Officials from the Ministry of energy are also standing around with devastated looks. The camera zooms into the middle aged man seated at the head of table. He is wearing a black suit with gold crested buttons. He is the only person at the crowded table who seems to be relaxed and gay.

The camera cuts and moves to focus the huge video screen at the far corner.

Scene -2 to interlay with scene 1

And it is the General Electric HQ in Connecticut USA

GE officials are cloistered in the brain storming room of the headquarters and are in video conference via satellite with the ministry officials in Tokyo. The GE officials are all grim faced.

Cut to the cabinet minister in Tokyo

Minister displays an exasperated look

“Gentlemen, to you guys in the USA, we have explained the terrible problem of radiation we have on hand here in Japan. All your lousy reactors have gone broke and are sending out toxic fumes. If this goes like this we will not have any edible blue finned tuna to consign you and no more sushis. No great sharks to slice the fins for soup, and no mink whales to hunt for hamburgers. We are already running out of birds that nest here in Japan and so no more 'bird- nest -soup' for us."..

Cut- to the GE HQ on the video screen

GE chairman beseeching and pleading - “Sir you must understand the stringent quality we maintain in all reactors manufactured here. Though we have dual standards that are adopted one for the reactors to be used here in USA and the other for export to the third world. Shhhh now Sir this is off the record please. But believe me the ones we sent you are better than and not as bad as the ones we are holding for shipments to India”.

Cut- to the Cabinet minister- “Ok CEO now this is getting a bit too far. Let me ask in simple English you guys stole from the English.When can we expect the accident liability compensation from you?”

-Cut to the GE CEO

 Sir, I implore you, please you must accept a reduced level of compensation. You see like the General Motors we are just about limping back from economic crisis. And a hefty compensation claim will put us out. You see my friend Anderson at the Union Carbide paid only $ 400 million to the blokes who got gassed by his company in Bhopal India. And that as well after twenty odd years!

Cut- Camera zooms into the cabinet minister in Tokyo-

“Look, you stupid, your good old George Bush had ensured that the liability in case of accidents on the reactors you send to India will only be pea nut skins. And that foolish Indian Sardar has signed the dotted line. Why do you fret then? You can add some of the liability you will not pay to India into our account. In any case we have an agreement that the USA will clean up the mess should it ever happen. You know that”.

Cut- camera zooms in to the video screen- 

The CEO displays a face of relief. And says grace to George W Bush.       

Musings

Ten meter high wave, traveling as fast as a jet plane. Each carrying tones of water. Ploughing under all and anything in its path; more than 1300 feared dead and tens of thousands unaccounted- missing! Literal decimation of a city. Ships, tugs and yachts berthed in the port twisted and thrown around like nine pins. The power of nature- its fury unleashed in proportions that is nightmarishly frightening for real and leaves one behind in awe. The collateral damage – unceasingly burning oil refineries, multitude of fires, four missing trains, and a catastrophic shutdown of a nuclear power plant! That was the Tsunami, the outcome of a massive seismological shake up down below in the tectonic plates and measuring 8.9 on the Richter. The most massive since the recording of seismic events began in the very early 1900’s.Those were the events that were unleashed in the past week in the Japanese costal town. Imagine a few such earth quakes can unleash with inconceivable abundance, forces that can literally wipe out the “Lord of all that he surveys- Man”.

A few years ago a similar cataclysm saw hundreds of thousand being swept down under by gushing sea water in the Tsunami that hit the Indian Ocean states.

Time and again, what more does Nature have to exhibit in blunt  terms and tell us, “Man you are an insignificant bit of star dust and do not matter in my scheme of things. You are not the cog in the wheel that triggers the sun to rise and set, the moon to rise and dazzle in splendour, the oceans to churn, the fishes to festally swim in aura of colors that spellbind. The mighty whales to go distance, the birds, the butterflies, the chameleons, the bees, the crickets, the gregarious little ants and the beasts of the jungle to enhance the grandeur of this world! The seasons to change , the rains to cool, the trees to bloom and fruit, the skies to stay blue, the tempests to beat, the stars to glow and wink! For your decimation can be in a whiff which you may not even notice! Therefore why this audacity, this lordliness, this avarice, this pride, this impulsiveness and false hood? Think,think you are only an aid of the things that are better and necessary for this World to turn around. And a dispensable bit of aid”.

The Tsunami was another instance of Nature imploring man to be just and kind with all that she has  and she owns..Because, for she is not powerless or dead. She can change the world and change it for ever and for good.

 Watching clear midnight skies

suddenly intense storms come alive
showing her rage
as each lightning bolt strikes
Mother Nature no longer sits
idly by

A plink and a plank is heard outside
once she tears up
and starts to cry

Windows rattle
foundations shake
as the roar of her thunder
is heard miles away

Mercy her violence does not show
causing many to scatter
while others are shattered

This mother 
has single handedly 
earned her respect
proving once and for all
a match for no man

---Sherry Lynn

"Whose Life Is It Anyway"

I remember the movie so well. I guess I saw it sometime in the early 80’s. And now the renewed interest in Euthanasia triggered by the Court ruling on a petition to assist mercy killing, begs that I get the movie DVD and see it all over again.

That was a memorable movie “Whose Life Is It Anyway”, with Richard Dreufus in the main role of a sculptor who is consigned to the hospital bed as a quadriplegic, paralyzed down below the neck, after a car crash. He eventually wins the case for his right to extinguish his life.

The life of Aruna Shanbaug is no life for the past 37 years. One has to look at assisted dying without the prejudice and emotions attached, and necessarily sans the antiquated philosophy camouflaged as ethics, incited by religious conditioning. The court made an admirably enlightened observation in the ruling on the mercy killing petition that a carte blanche acceptance of Euthanasia on the statute would be dangerous in the society we now live. It said that the ethical values are abysmal that the law will be misused by the unscrupulous society. I liked that comment. When someone introspects and tells that indeed we are mean. It is refreshingly in contrast to the hyped moral and ethical values of the society that many often trumpet.

Disconcerting and ridiculous is the reaction of the medical staff of the KEM hospital where the unfortunate woman has been confined as a piece of vegetable. Though the medical staff have providentially taken care of the quadriplegic and orphaned woman, their sloganeering in praise of a long life for the crippled woman and death to the petitioner who sake the court ruling to accept euthanasia was conceited and bizarre. The very same folk who braved and demand their right to take care of Aruna Shanbaug until her natural demise was crying for the blood of the petitioner. Is this hypocrisy, illogical passion?

Euthanasia must be legalized and with sufficient riders that will ensure the law is not and never misused and arrogated.. The anachronism in our criminal law is the section 309 which punishes attempted suicide. Perhaps the gentry who demand capital punishment as retributive justice may even think of sending to the gallows a person who killed himself. The British did that on the corpses of the Diwan of Travancore, Velu Thampi  and Kunjali Maraikar, the Admiral of the Zamorin of Kozhikode. They killed themselves before they could be captured and in fury the British hung their dead body on lamp posts. Can we term those suicides as cowardly acts and indulgence of sick minds? Apart from the psychological factors that may push a person into the extreme ground for suicide, I  see it as violation of  fundamental right if one is  prosecuted for deciding enough is enough in this world. If one does not have the right over one’s life, is that not against the very foundation that ensures fundamental rights? Similarly if a person who is absolutely perfect in his bearings decides that he has had enough of agony and suffering from the terminal disease he is afflicted decides to seek assisted euthanasia, why not?

What right do we have to say that one has to suffer and wait till a natural factor consumes life? It is cruelty and unethical. As for Aruna Shanbaug who has spent the last 37 years as brain dead, it is travesty of justice for her. “We will not let go her until natural death intervenes”, says the staff of KEM hospital. A group of hospital staff who love life so much in the same breath shout death for the petitioner.

The bottom line is if we cannot play God and alleviate the hardship why secure that the sufferer suffers till the day natural cause intervenes? All the more in cases as special as this?

It is crocodile tears of a society, moral outrage of a society that is awash with false and archaic notions, that deny mercy killing. Euthanasia must be legal. It is for the courts and the legislature to think and devise riders that will ensure the act is out of ethical considerations only.

A society driven by edicts of faith, still consign the dead to the funeral pyre or dump in pits in back yards of churches and temples instead of donating the cadaver to medical dissection, and thereby enhance the value of learning and opening new realms in human physiology for posterity; a society that still desist from donating harvestable organs after death, should not cry against the idea of Euthanasia. Legalising Euthanasia will be a right step forward.Help people live with dignity if  that is impossible let them die with dignity.

"The Copulating Lions"

It is not quite usual to write a post on a post. Generally comments are posted in lieu. However since no such written rules or precedents are in place I thought, I rather write something I felt on the post of Balachandran "So that you know how much I loved you",and his follow up observations with the bewitching verses of Richard Ebehart.

Those were powerful and glorious ode to the act of taboo. The word “taboo” is not of my volition. It is something I felt like interposing after noticing that only a few responses came by.The act of copulation is still

considered  abhorring to speak about. The poem “The lions copulating” on the great African plain brought out like in a three dimension picture the greatness of the vast continent and the majesty and dignity of those beasts.

One of the most fascinating account of Victorian social life and the intertwined hypocrisy was unleashed with subtleness and vehemence by D.H.Lawrence in “The Lady Chatterley’s Lover”. The novel depicted the amorous physical liaison between a aristocratic woman and a commoner. The book could not be openly published in the U.K. And ipso facto was banned in many countries and includes the ban in puritanical British India and followed up by independent India as well. In the late seventies and early eighties,when I was frequenting the British Council library in Thiruvananthapuram, I had frantically searched for the book but in futility. In 1982, I finally got a good print edition from a road side vendor in Connaught place, New Delhi. Reading it was different experience. The notoriety and the explicit passages were subservient to the more contrasting mind and body of human beings. It is in one's noticing and comprehension that obscenity and beauty is born.

The ruling of the court in the U.K when the publishers of the book were hauled up in the 1960’s is an enlightened example. The publishers could defend the “obscenity trial” and prove the literary merit of the novel. It was convincingly argued that the word “fuck” was certainly not lewd, and the act of physical union was only a primitive biological factor,detached from the human mind and body..

The Lions on that vast plains in the African savanna are unique examples. If bringing in  physical relationship of opposite sexes, man or beast as subjects into literature is filthy, repugnant, obscene and abhorring then it is obvious that the vast majority of men and women are indulging in the very nefarious conduct in real time. And beasts too!Quite a few of the mythical and religious classics must be banned or restricted The Gods may also be hauled up for salacious conduct.

That reminds me a contrast- a post I uploaded borrowing from a source. It was on the ubiquitous 'Lungie', and I still often see comments flowing in about the post and raving it.

Not seeing, feigning to have not noticed ,ignoring the literary value, aesthetics of imagination, and magical words in a creation as in the poems in question ,is blatant hypocrisy. I wonder if the signs of absence of comments constructive or otherwise suggests only the general conservatism of the society. The silence and closed eyes may be wicked extensions of denying what is there on the surface and beneath. The openness is found wanting.

 

We caught lions copulating on the plains
Of Africa. ….,
I pressed so hard on my 8mm. color film
I almost lost this gigantic naturalism, 

…………,
But saw the King of Beasts with his head high, 
His mane imperial, no expression on his face, 
Prodding in and out of the great female 

…………………………………….. ,
For his great face had no expression at all
While his lower being worked mechanical, 

Then he fell away, and stood off, and lay 
His full length on the ancient earth
While the lioness with a sumptuous gesture 
Rolled over as I have seen other females do

.......................................,

Stood in their historical posture of superiority 
And ambled across the limitless plains in silence
Without a thought of the lucubration of man, 
Trying to signify their big natures in empathy. 

The 'detachment' in discussion is worth some deep pondering! :-)

I can only see the majesty of the beasts and the incomparable vastness and feel of the great African savanna. The act of copulation is secondary to the imperiousness of nature.And also with the subtle depiction of the  act and the vastness of time around one should be in sublime mood..

And as in the poem  "So that you know how much I loved you"

“Yet I wonder, what is it that I loved in you?

Was it the person or the persona, the mind or the body,

That I had desired more; maybe both, maybe it is that

I wanted it all, with such a hunger, such an appetite…”

“…………………………………….,

So that I bled you, my sweat stank of you

My lips and yours one

My spittle and yours one......

.

Unfortunately candid expressions are frowned or shooed underneath. Surreptitious or false notions stand out as moral values. They are like the cloak that suppresses forthright feelings.

However there were a few comments that sensed the depth of the words. Whether the detachment which is instilled in the male species as mentioned by Bindu, or the words of discernment of the Doc and other couple of bloggers, it can be seen that there are people who have the right senses to appreciate the magical words and thereby ideas and imaginations laced in works of literature and consign hypocrisy to places it richly deserves.

“Like the feline with eyes closed

Lapping up milk in stealth

I fornicated day and night

All the while I comforted in the belief,

When my eyes were closed the world seldom saw

My act of promiscuity ”.

Musings

What difference can you tell?

In my offering the lord above

Money and in kind, thence supplicate in askance,

for his munificence in abundance.

And the man in the corporate hive

Decked in attire ,princes of the past shall envy.

Coddle and bespeak the khadhi clad varlets

For their largesse in abundance.