freedom

I am what you can rightly describe as a relaxaholic.A Relaxaholic is the just opposite of a workaholic. But the relaxaholic doesn't relax himself to death. He is not bothered at all for not having something to do. I have been a relaxaholic for some time now. It requires great facility of mind to remain one. The only time I get a bit irritated is when people ask me if I don't get bored.I think it is a question born out of ignorance. One has to be really stupid to get bored when one chooses to do nothing in particular. Boredom creeps into a mind that is devoid of ideas and imagination. What happens to most people is that in their quest of whatever they think brings them happiness , be it wealth, securiy, fame, social status or just something that offers them the excuse to be busy, they forget to nourish their minds - with serious consequences when the day comes when they are not really required by others to perform the job which they foolishly believed only they could do.Then they find themselves completely at sea since they are no longer needed to do the only job they really know. It is a really pathetic situation. As I had already said only stupid people get bored.It was a wise man who said"If I am going to be a prisoner of my mind ,I prefer my cell to be well-furnished." Really wise words, those and applicable to all those workaholics out there whose minds are as blank as the wall they will be left to stare at when they no longer will become indispensable to the very job they thought will remain unfinished if it were not for them.

Recently, a friend of mine ,an avowed vegan ,made an extraordinary remark. He said that if a majority of the population of the planet turned vegan,it would effectively counter global warming ,the scourge of this century.Millions of cattle are bred to feed the meat eating,milk produce consuming population.These animals being ruminating, emit huge quantities of methane gas that are more lethal to the atmosphere than carbon dioxide. Besides, to raise these animals, an enormous quantity of fodder is required which results in the production of vast quantities of nitrous oxide that is even far more deadly than methane!Thus by a simple act of switching to an altruistic diet, if the planet can be saved besides causing less violence and bloodshed , is it not worthwhile to give this a try ? In addition to saving our Mother Earth that has sustained all kinds of life forms for millions of years,you can look at what you eat not as a plateful of pain.But then meat producers will surely come up with some wonder drug that wil stop cattle from burping and make them less flatulent. They will even claim carbon credits for their effort!

A dad was taken aback when his seven year old son came home and asked what sex. was.The man was
 truly shaken and didn't know what to say or do.He talked this over with his wife who also didn't have a clue and was equally disturbed. The next day he asked his colleagues at   the office and one of them gave him a CD on how to break sex education gently to a youngster. Thus prepaared, he called his son next morning and broached the subject with trepidation, ' Son, about what you asked the other day... umm I mean about sex" , he began. To which the boy replied nonchalantly, " Oh that ! Miss Gardner told me all about it," and to the gaping father the little fellow continued ," there was a question in the form we had to fill and she told me to tick 'M ' on mine"

A black stain on a white sheet will invite instant attention and all the attendant adverse observations and reactions that go with it. The whiter the sheet, the greater the intensity of the remarks and the joy of the critics in having found a flaw in so perfect an object.This is a universal truth and it knows no religion, caste, creed, gender or nationality. In a way it is like death, the great leveller.In the place of a white sheet if it is a famous personality ,the result is the same.Critics will descend on him like so many vultures ,tear him to pieces then strut around what is left of him .
I found out that I am also not any different in feeling highly elated at having noticed a mistake in a person /place where a mistake is considered akin to sacrilege.The white sheet in this case is none other than the popular novelist John Grisham. The offending stain appears in his recent novel "Playing for pizza ".The word flaunt is used when the correct one would have been flout - not once but twice in successive sentences. An American football pro playing for a small town team in Italy is held in awe by his team mates for having flouted the law ( roughing up some one). It is here that the word flaunt is used. Coming as it does from as high a place as Grisham, this is all the more interesting - more so because it is not a simple printer's devil.

I have always felt that honesty is not just the best policy , it actually is the easiest policy. Most of the time, things become quite simple and easy when one is being honest not only to oneself but also to the world in general. Being honest to oneself is easier than being truthful to others but is as important. A person can be honest to oneself but not to others. But he can never be true to himself without being so to others. That is why I feel it is more difficult to be honest , I mean unreservedly honest to the world is comparitively a more demanding task.

All this came to me when I read a news report about a commercial pilot who , by just telling the truth made so many people happy. A Pakistan Airline commander walked into the passenger area and apologised for the takeoff delay because, he said he was late in getting to the airport. Instead of handing out standard official explanations about technical snags, he chose to tell the plain truth and was warmly congratulated by his passengers who immediately recognised and appreciated the simple honesty of his statement. Isn't it surprising how very basic, simple actions can ease a tense situation and bring warmth and cheer to so many ?

Recognition of the Dignity of labour is universally acknowledged to be an American virtue.America is credited with recognising the nobility of work no matter how menial it seems to others. But I tend to see this in a different light. Any work is regarded as just work or not much importance is attached to the intrinsic quality of work. That is , in America work is graded according to the dollars it earns. This does not signal a great understanding of the nobility of labour. Elsewhere work or vocation has different scales. For example an academic earns more respect and is given a higher esteem rating in society than ,say a cab driver or a dust man. This does not mean cab driving or cleaning is not work.It is just that they do not compare equally on the social scale. But in America , the cab driver becomes an object of veneration over the Professor if the cab driver happens to earn more than the learned professor.This happens only if the income of the cabbie is more than that of the professor.What does this show? Certainly not the vindication of dignity of labour. It only shows a crass and shameless approval the place, not value , money occupies in American society. There money is worshipped and the man who makes more money is God. This blind confidence in money is what makes the American society consider the quality of work insignificant and the rest of the world mistakenly describes as the great American tradition of recognition of the Dignity of labour. If it was solely the dignity of labour that concerned them , then the cabbie would have earned the same respect as the man of science or culture or art if the cab driver's income was less. But that is not the case. Therefore, Dignity of labour in the American context is a misnomer. What it really is an abject admiration of money. There is nothing wrong with it. In fact there is a whole world of good in such a hedonistic attitude. But it should not be confused with the higher values such as dignity of labour. That is a grave mistake.

The other day , at our usual session where almost everything ( not every one) gets scrutinised, the conversation veered round to pleasant subjects like pollution, cancer, climate change etc. A friend mentioned the hazards of smoking and its close, well established links with cancer and other debilitating conditions this habit induces. Another one , a friend I mean, who is also an inveterate smoker protested and pointed out , according to him rightly, that 379 parts per million is the CO2 already in the atmosphere and it is the highest in 6,50,000 years. There will be a 5 degree celsius rise in global temperature by 2010 which will devastate about 20 % of the bio diversity. Besides, a host of lethal enzymes and juices are released into our system each time we get emotional or angry. Against all this the threat posed by smoking is negligible and hence he sees no reason to forego a habit that gives him so much pleasure. Now this argument will seem reasonably logical to a casual observer. I have mentioned this here only to show how such a stupid argument will seem to be very logical superficially. It would seem so even if it is pondered a little deeper. This is because the argument while it appears to have been intelligently thought out ,is devoid of one main ingredient - Common sense.Without common sense any argument becomes plain nonsense. A statement may have logic but if it has to be logical common sense must be there. Common sense is pragmatic intelligence based on sound principles of observation, judgement and practicability. A person who swears by logic alone and has no common sense is at best a fool and would be ready to walk into a stream to cross it because he had calculated the mean depth to be less than his height ! My friend belongs to this category. What can one do with a mind like that?

Equality is a beautiful word . When we say all men (and women ) are created equal , what a wonderful feeling it exudes! A world where every body is equal is just too great. But is this possible? Politicians of whatever hue swear by equality and want us to believe that they mean it when they say all men are created equal. They promise us a better tomorrow and keep the good today for themselves.

But is it correct to say that all men are created equal ? I beg to differ. Ineqality is a fact and like the DNA , is etched indelibly into our system. To think otherwise is to fool ourselves. No man is created equal intellectually. As long as there is intellectual inequality , there will be no social equality or finacial equality. Even in a socialist or communist system equality among citizens is a myth - there is a wide chasm between the leader and the led. Trying to bring about equality through legislation will never succeed as it is against nature and anything against nature is artificial and is doomed to failure. It will be like making all the fingers of the hand the same length and shape. Imagine that ! The hand will become useless if all the fingrs are of the same type. Threfore all this talk about equality is just futile exercise . One may engage in it if it makes one feel noble and great . That is all it will achieve. Inequlity has always been there and will continue doing so.

We say an object is there because we can see it or feel it. We know of its existence because of certain properties we perceive they have on the basis of which we say the object exists. We ,with our superior intellect which we pride ourselves so much with, have given certain units that give the object its existence - like length , breadth,shape color etc. But are these units absolute to make them real so that we can depend on them to prove the existence of any object?

Take distance (length, breadth etc.) for example. We say a table is two meters long. But to an ant at one end of the table , it may be not so. It will say the table is one Km long or half a day long. Who is right? Both perhaps.Similar is the case with breadth and all units of distance. A man travelling by air from London to Ny will say it took him nine hrs . But another man travelling the same distance by sea would say it took him several days. Both are right . So the unit of distance which is the basis of existence of an object is not absolute - only relative and hence unreal. Now take the shape of the object which you say is real and existing before your eyes. The shape of the object depends entirely on the nature of your optic lens and attendant optic paraphernalia. If another animal has an optic lens different from man's what is round or square to us may be some other shape to that animal. Or if one has a lens of a different type than the rest of us what he sees and feels will be different from what others see. I mean he may see a round object as some other shape. Color and smell also depend entirely on the property of our respective sense organs. These vary from species to species and even person to person at times. Therefore it is clear from all this that every property or attribute that gave an object physical existence is only relative and not absolute and hence unreal. In short all this goes to show that what we see is/are not really what we think we see. This is quite unsettling. It gives man's cocksuredness a full body blow. Suddenly the real becomes unreal.

The airline industry seems to have strange ways.Its practices are even stanger, sometimes bordering on the bizarre. British Mediterranean Airlines is operating a flight from Heathrow to Cardiff without a single passenger . It flies an empty Airbus round the trip of 240 miles emitting ten tons of carbondioxide into the atmosphere.This is the equivalent of carbon gases emission per day of a town of 2000 inhabitants. The ostensible reason given out by the airline officials is that they are forced to resort to this in order to retain their landing slot at Heathrow which once lost can be got back only at a huge cost. The going rate now is around ten million pounds. All the grand talk about strict measures taken by the airline industry in the direction of cutting down GH gas emissions is just talk when it comes aginst hard cash.

Now we come to the bizarre part. A British Airways flight from Delhi to London strapped the corpse of a passenger who died in midflight to a seat in the first class right next to another passenger. The passenger later said he had a harrowing time sitting next to a dead body that slippd down every now and then and had to be hoisted back and strapped again by the cabin crew. All through the flight the passenger was in mortal fear that the body might decompose. When later he complained to the officials he was advised that he would recover from the experience. He is lucky that they had not pointed out how thankful he should be for getting such a quite and least troublesome copassenger next to him !