Mumbai

It has been a terrible 24 hours (or more) for India. Mumbai is virtually a war zone, looks like a battle field. I started following the incidents from about 19:00hours from yesterday. Mumbai has been brutally attacked by 20 or so terrorists at 10 different locations; more than 100 people are said to be dead; among them about 6 foreigners and many taken hostage. It seems that the terrorists arrived in a boat from Arabian sea after having dropped from a mother-ship off the Indian coast. Most of the news channels around the world have been covering the incidents live with in-depth analysis of what has been taking place. How long will this continue? Hasn't human life got any value?

There will be a lot of questions asked in the next few days. Who are responsible? How can a bunch of people just come in a few boats and attack a country which claims to be the biggest democracy and boast of third largest armed forces in the world? What are the politicians and the government doing?

India is not a stranger to indiscriminate terror attacks. Such attacks have occurred regularly, and with steadily increasing frequency, in recent years. In this year itself there have been bomb blasts in many major cities of India that has left many dead. Mumbai, India's financial capital, has been targeted before. So why did the government not have a Crisis- Management team in place? The terrorists it seems knew exactly what they were doing; where to hit , how to move around the city and even the layout of each hotel probably better than the security forces. Is this an intelligence failure or a Coast guard failure or a security failure or a total failure of law and order in the state?


Countries and individuals are of mainly 2 types; some are proactive, some reactive (early or late!)...In this case I felt that the government and authorities were almost inactive (with due respect to all the security, police and other forces who are still trying to rescue the innocent lives). It took the government about 24 hours to even establish a help line! I remember a movie which I watched recently called 'Wednesday'. In this movie a common man who was sick of living in terror, decided to act as he felt that the government and police were inefficient to maintain the safety and security of common people. No wonder people start thinking along these lines; There is widespread shock, anger and sadness around; especially anger against the politicians. I hope the politicians and authorities start doing something for their country. This should be a wake up call for everyone and let episodes like this never be allowed to be repeated again.

FSS syndrome and Time

Friday- Saturday- Sunday (FSS) syndrome is a new kind of experience which I am going through since my arrival in UK.

I would define FSS syndrome as the physical, mental, emotional and physiological effects and changes in ones body and mind before and after the period spanning between 17:00hours on Friday till about 8:00 am the following morning of Monday..

I did my schooling and undergraduate education in India and never thought that much about week-end and week-days (WEWD). Of course I may have been very naive or may be that I thought everyday is more or less similar. Anyway I never had this concept. Since my arrival here I slowly started to understand that everything here revolves around the concept of weekday-weekend cycle and it seems that every person in the west is a 'victim' of this condition in one way or other.

Most people work very hard, just to relax over the week-end, recharge their batteries, then again back to Monday- Friday cycle.... I know a lot of people have butterflies in the stomach from Sunday morning and have sleepless or disturbed sleeping on Sunday nights, called by the popular term Sunday night syndrome. Some people like to sleep on &on, on Saturday and Sunday mornings with out getting out of bed till noon to 'over-compensate' this...

"For six days work may be done, but on the seventh day you shall have a holy day, a sabbath of complete rest to the Lord; whoever does any work on it shall be put to death-Holy bible Exodus 35.2; So this is not a new phenomenon. Also this is not just limited to the western world. I can see this process very much in India and other eastern countries too. In the Middle-east this is TF (Thursday-Friday syndrome) rather than FSS...

One of the problems with this WEWD cycle specially for a full time worker (ie from Monday- Friday 9:00-17:00) is that everything comes to a halt after 5:00pm during week days. The only time they can do the shopping and other activities like Banking, post office etc is on Saturday. Thank god, in the last few years because of the Sunday Trading Act(a UK law governing a shop's right to trade on a Sunday) bigger shops open for 6 hours on Sundays.

It seems that in UK all we know is Monday morning ie starting a new week and before we realise it is Friday and then the same WEWD cycle. How fast time moves....or is it just normal? I remember recently reading an article on time. 'Clock time' may be about minutes and hours, but 'Real Time' is down to how we experience it, which differs from person to person depending on what we're doing.

A child's school day(9:00-15:30) is like a 20-hour day for an adult. Children are experiencing everything for the first time, all their experiences are new. They also have an incredibly intense vision of the world, an amazing fresh perception. Children are amazingly awake to the world around us, so it seems time passes slowly for them. This is Perceptual theory first put forward William James. Also according to the theory of relativity, time is related to a lot of factors; its not absolute. So I think its all about our perception.

I remember as a child everything seems to be going slow especially each academic year at school. Everyone will be waiting for the summer holidays in each academic year and when we are through a few weeks (into the holidays) , think that the time is going slow and that we want to get back to the new year at school (for new books, new labels, new uniform , pen/pencils etc etc), some how as an adult we have fewer new experiences and so probably time goes too fast. Older people also tend to have fewer new experiences and this may be a reason why it feels like time is going fast.....It may be that Children don't have much responsibility and so feel like there is more time. Also an year is a long period for a child while for an adult it is too short!

If you have a meeting in London, rather than driving (though I love driving), its always better to take a train as one can get some work done or may be meet new people. In a long haul flight we can get 'more time' than our next seat sleeping passenger if we do something, even reading a book/ news paper.

So change your daily routines, bring in novelty, have new experiences. For example if you are an early riser try to do more at night and sleep late. For me who is a late sleeper and a late riser the best advice to follow would be....as the old saying goes..Early to bed and early to rise makes a man (and woman) healthy, wealthy, wise and may be slow down time too!!!

Growing clout?

Just now read an interesting article in BBC. ie The Indian navy has been given formal approval by the United Nations to go after pirate ships in Somali waters.

The background to this is that 2 days ago, on Tuesday, an Indian warship sank a suspected Somali pirate vessel after it opened fire on it in the Gulf of Aden. Piracy incidents have surged off the Somali coast. A number of Indian crews have been on ships hijacked by pirates.

I was thinking can United nations give authority to a member country to patrol another countries coast? Yes, I understand that it will be under certain circumstances that Indian warships can enter Somali waters. Buts still critics can draw comparisons between this and what is happening at present in the world especially Afghanistan and Iraq, though on a different scale....

Switch on your brains, ICC/BCCI

Common...Switch on the flood lights! I am wondering why can't the BCCI and ICC have that rule in place for the third one-day at Kanpur today. It was an even match considering how brutally England were beaten in the last 2 games in the ODI series. India now leads the 7 match series 3-0.

When a match is organised in Kanpur at this time of the year the organisers should have some sense that it will be foggy/dark in the evening by 16:00 hours. They should have made it a day/night match or else made the provision of switching on the lights in case of bad-light. One might imagine that the ICC would have learned the lesson from last world cup final debacle in Windies when Srilanka was made to bat for 3 overs in pitch-black darkness..

I am not sure whether carrying on the game with lights switched on, would have changed the result (other than the fact that India's win would have been in terms of number of wickets rather than 16 runs by Duckworth-Lewis method); but this would have given the English team a chance to fight and may be given them a chance to an unlikely victory making it 2-1 rather than 3-0 at this point in the series.

At least Pietersen and mates can be reassured by the fact that the margins of Indian victories have been coming down steadily ie 158 runs, 54 runs and now 16 runs. This may be due to the fact that this English team at last may be coming to terms with the opposition, the conditions and, perhaps most importantly, themselves (after the loss of 20 million dollars at Stanford match with Windies).

The end of Australian Domination

Australia ended a disastrous tour to India having lost the series 2-0 and the Border-Gavaskar Trophy. Does this mean the beginning of the end of Australian Domination or does it mean that other teams are catching up with them? It is clear that India has made tremendous progress in the last few years, specifically after 2000 under the leadership of Saurav Ganguly. He is the first Indian Captain who raised the profile of Indian Crickets image overseas by building a team with both experience and youthfulness by his astute qualities, leadership skills and killer instinct (which I thought India was lacking previously though individual players like Kapil Dev, Srikkanth etc exhibited this from time to time)

Under Ganguly's captaincy India won 11 Tests overseas including matches in Sri Lanka, West Indies, England, Australia and Pakistan. India's success abroad has continued even after Ganguly's tenure ended with the torch being handed over to Dhoni after a short 'delay' when Rahul Dravid and Anil Kumble were captains

"Winning at any cost", the Australian way, was simply lacking in this series. There may have been many reasons behind this, but the decision of Ponting to use his spinners on Sunday - and then watching them ease the pressure on India - instead of looking for a quick kill and thinking of the consequences later cost them the test , the series and the coveted Border-Gavaskar trophy.

I always considered Steve Waugh as a much better captain than Ponting, but loosing one series doesn't make Ponting a bad captain either. I am sure Ponting will be back to his winning ways when Australia start their series against New-Zealand later this month. However, this series win by India will give a lot of confidence to other test playing nations to take on Australia whose "invincible label" is cracking especially after the retirement of Warne, Mcgrath and Gilchrist. Saying that even when these players were playing for Australia, India have always been a headache to Australians as they have lost 3 of their 4 test series in India in the last decade....

Oh Boy! America My America!!

Barack Obama has been chosen as the new president elect of US. What a resounding and convincing victory! This is probably one US presidential election that the whole world had been following with keen interest. It was clear watching the television-result-saga into early hours of morning, that Obama is going to be the first non-white president of US when he will be sworn in on Jan 20, 2009.

Obama has been a ray of hope to the whole world and specifically the US where its been bad news after bad news in every field. In his own words after the victory"America is a place where all things are possible and the "dream of our founders" is alive; "It's been a long time coming but tonight, because of what we did on this day, in this election, at this defining moment, change has come to America"

The whole world it seems hoped and prayed for his victory. In fact a recent BBC poll showed that all the 22 countries that took part in the poll wanted Obama to be the president of US. Everyone hopes that he will improve the situation in US and also its relations with other countries in today's multipolar world.

Amma 2008

Amma was in London on October 26-28th. On 25th there was the AR Rahman music evening at Rasa Restaurant at Holiday Inn, near Kings Cross; Santhi was waiting for us there. Divya and Sumesh too came with us. It took us a bit of time to reach Kings Cross because of the heavy central London traffic on a Friday. Parked our car just outside the hotel. The music night had already began when we reached there. The hall is rather small and so sound effects were not great. I would say the music was average; but Manoj's tabla and Suraj's performance were great. The food was good too...

On 26th morning we went to Alexandra palace. This time rather than Darshan tokens( which were already given away by the time we reached there) we were given different coloured cards. The idea was that if time permits we Amma would give us Darshan in the morning; otherwise it will be in the evening. Met Prasad and family, who did not want to stay too long as Kannan was getting upset. Nitin and family had also come. All of them were very overwhelmed with emotions after the Darshan especially his parents.

Amma asked all of us to sit near her after Darshan. Somehow just sitting there or spending time in her presence gives a nice feeling. Santhi had come as I insisted. But Amma on seeing him asked Santhi to stand near her for some time. He stood there for rest of Darshan that morning. Amma also told him to be there that evening. Met Renuka chechi; She is a Swamini who works as a supervisor in one of Amma's institutions in Perumbavoor (originally from Kannur). She had relatives in Grimsby too. In the afternoon we went to the washing area and did seva by washing all the waste plates. Amma's Prabhashanam in the evening was as usual in simple words. Stayed at Sumesh's flat that evening.

The next day too we went to Alexandra palace. I did not plan to go there, but just felt like seeing Amma again. Bhavani Chechi kindly gave us darshan tokens when I told her that we will be returning that evening and are not staying for Devi-bhava the next day. Darshan was great and when Amma was returning after the morning Darshan at around 17:00 hours, she came and stopped near me and asked how I was and asked specifically about Santhi! Vava at that time asked about Arathy

That evening we did Seva at the food stall. Manikutty was helping with serving the sweets! It was a nice feeling just being there. Mani took her new friend Eve (from Scotland) to the stage and was seen chatting to Amma. She gave Amma the pictures she had drawn. It seems she asked Amma whether she could stay with Amma for ever!! Amma just smiled back.....
Reached Leicester well past mid-night....

"May the tree of our life
Be firmly rooted in the soil of love,
Let good deeds be the leaves on that tree.
May words of kindness form its flowers
And may peace be its fruits"

Amma