On faiths

A satori I had heard once that I would like to share.

There were once two sects of worshippers in a village in India. One set of people loved Shiva and were to wear horizontal ash lines on thier fore head.The other sect who worshipped another God Vishnu, used the long vertical Vermilion mark on thier head. They would use every oppurtunity to prove who was right - the horizontals or the verticals.

One day there was a huge flood in the village and all the people gathered into the one large common hall to shelter from the rain and storm. The horizontals noticed that there were vertical rafters and were upset . "We will not tolerate anything vertical" they said.:mad: They began tearing down the vertical rafters. The verticals noticed and were upset even more. "We will not tolerate any Horizontals!!" said they, and cut down all the horizontal rafters. "The Roof! The Roof !" cried a few people with common sense. But alas with rafters gone, all the hay came tumbling down equally on both the horizontals and the verticals, leaving them open to the merciless rain.
:)

The Importance of Being Prime

Being inspired to write during a math lecture, I came up with this piece and I think it is good enough to share.

The importance of being prime

In this world there are two kinds of people- the Primes and the Non primes. The primes understand cantors and functions and square root identities. The non primes watch wide eyed as the world is analysed into neat squiggly formulae, equations both linear and nonlinear. Primes are rumoured to speak ( write ) a language of their own. Some special Fermat primes can speak, write and actually describe physical reality. Primes are optimistic. They think that there are only primes in this world. They firmly believe that every non prime is potentially a prime and they, the non primes do not know it. The non primes also don't know why the primes are so enthusiastic about cantors and nonlinear equations.

I heard that it will turn out to be that primes are infinite in number. So are the non primes. In a larger crowd it is easier to find a non prime than a prime. The primes are happy, there are many more non primes who can be prime!

I think that being a prime is magical and mystical. You get to play a game in which even if you negate the square root of 8436 times the x squared and add it to the inverse of infinity and still you can never blow up the world or slow your tea from cooling down.

Queen of Hills- Mussorie

SOME INTERESTING SIGN BOARDS

On a shop sign

King of Suits in the queen of hills!

**************
on a public lamppost sign on mall road

**************
On a restaurant Board


No extra charges for revolving!!

******************
Tell the people at home we are greening the hills for them
- Ecotask force sign

watch out for the pics next post!

Queen of Hills

This is what I do

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/10/fashion/10Fitness.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

 Check this out

My new friend

My New friend is 16 but leads the life of a nine or ten year old.He loves to make Bows and arrows from twigs and strings and made tea yesterday all by himself.He loves mythology and talks nonstop about Gods and other divinities. A meeting with a life threating illness ( blood cancer) left him with Epilepsy and the gift of eternal childhood.He is in total remission but
suffers Seizures.He comes to "play " with me once a week.He is my teacher.

Yesterday he said "I have a costume on .A costume of being THIS" he said, pointing to his body. "If I go away in sanyas, I will cause pain to every one" he said." to my mother, to my father, to my sister, to my grandmother, to you. Thats why I am quiet. I donot talk about," he said.

I dont know if my freind is a great soul in this disguise or a mere child repeating things he has picked up. Thats not my right to know.But what really amazed me is his idea that his intentions may hurt people around him.

To deal with Ahimsa at the level of not disclosing even intentions of action that may hurt someone is something everyone can learn from my friend.

He doesnot have to be an avataar or a reborn saint. He is a great human being for me.

pain

thank you

you tell me I am alive

wake up

my

sleeping muscles

prick my being

into intolerable existence

yet

only you

show me

I am real

not

a wisp of Maya

floating in

in the unreachable depths of Nirvana

you are the here and now

excruciating

unbearable

pain

Karma Credit Cards- a card all of us have!

I stood outside the gate, looking at the burst water pipe discharging water in a stream on the road. My neighbour said “It is all our karma! There is so much water in front of us yet there is not a drop in the house. I must have denied water to someone at some time.” As I walked back indoors, I examined the popular idea of karma being interpreted by a sort of ‘Newtonian Karma Law’ (physicists, please excuse this phrase). This popular law states that “some action done in some past that is said to be recorded on people’s foreheads comes back and hits us in exactly the same way.” The karmic calculations of this ‘return ball Karma’ are really difficult and it leaves us like victims, bound by destiny and with no choice in our lives. In my reading of many scriptures I didn’t exactly come across this notion of action and reaction.
What then is Karma? I understand Karma like a credit card account. Each one of us gets a customized Karma credit card. Everyone comes with a credit limit or karma limit on their Karma card. Just like the credit card, it is a very personal thing. When your desire exceeds what your KC limit allows, you suffer as you will not get what you want. This is “bad karma”. If you desire things within your limit then it is possible to have great pleasure, this would be “good karma”. If you do not use your card at all you are said to be liberated. Just as in case of a credit card outward appearances cannot reveal your credit status so judgments about bad karma and retribution cannot be made. You can run bad debts (be unethical), pay high interest rates (pain) or some times by dramatic events change your card say by divine intervention of a God or guru .In the case of Shankaracharya for example, it is said he was saved from the jaws of a crocodile by taking sanyas. Part of the card customisation is also the body you have. Having the body to experience different aspects of life is also like having access to places which can swipe your card. You can swipe a karma card for sweets only if you are not diabetic.
When your credit card is cancelled you will die. You may however reapply, and change your card and come back with a new body and your credits are transferred to the new card in your next life. You can upgrade or downgrade your card by your actions in the current lifetime.
Perhaps offers have been included in the Karma credit card too. ‘Sharing love’ is a definitely a cash back offer and letting others use your card reduces interest rates. We also have add-on cards with the close people in our life and finally perhaps the divine can increase the credit limit at her discretion.
This karma card interpretation can be used to look at the interplay between what we want and what we have. It informs the idea of contentment in our everyday life. To be happy I just desire less. So I took a bucket out to the burst pipe and filled up my bath water with a smile.

Heritage trees ( another assignment)

I think that I shall never see

a poem lovely as a tree.

….

Poems are made by fools like me,

But only God can make a tree!



(-Poetry, A Magazine of Verse

By Joyce Kilmer)



If we cannot make a tree

We immortalize it in poetry,

While God makes us a tree,

We make it history!
 
-Me



When nature becomes a part of history very specifically, trees are earmarked as ‘heritage trees’.

“Every country has its heritage trees - old trees, wide trees, tall trees, rare trees, "weird and wonderful" trees, and trees with historical and cultural significance.” describes a heritage tree protection website. The movement to protect trees that are linked to cultural memories of people and local histories of people illustrates the coming together of history and the environment in a very unique way.

Recently the Karnataka heritage society began a project to identify and protect trees that were designated as heritage trees. The most notable heritage trees are the banyan and peepul as they often are very old (mark the passage of time) or are very huge. Heritage trees are trees which are exceptional or notable for a variety of reasons, such as;

1. Veteran trees of great age and antiquity

2. Trees which are closely associated with our culture or history

3. Trees of exceptional size and record dimensions

4. Botanically rare or unusual trees

5. Trees associated with historical figures

6. Named trees

7. Trees which form part of historic landscapes



The heritage tree movement traces its conservation from the Romantic Movement of conservation started by John Muir, who founded the Sierra Club in 1892. Jesse Hoskins in the same year protected 90 acres of old-growth Giant Sequoias by homesteading and residing in the base of the Hercules Tree. Many cities and countries have heritage tree preservation movements both for nature conservation and as sites of historical events. Some environmental organisations have taken on heritage tree preservation in Bangalore and even have a tree walk in Lalbagh to identify rare and unique trees.

On one hand there is the need to preserve trees as a part of the urban greenery; on the other hand what is evident is that trees become place markers for events and spaces. Trees are planted by VIPs, trees that were planted by historical personalities (such as Tipu Sultan) all become “Heritage Trees”. Why is it that trees become markers of history?

This is not a new phenomenon in a nation where trees have symbolized events for a long time. The Bodhi tree where Buddha attained his enlightenment or the Asoka tree forest where Sita was imprisoned - all form a part of the cultural memory of the subcontinent’s people.

Yet the new wave of planting trees by VIPs is different. The tree is not the symbolic discourse or a representation of a cultural or religious event but a spatio-temporal marker, indicating a particular place and time. It does not, like a foundation stone, remain an unfading testimony to a visit or an event in the past. It doesn’t even automatically carry the name of a VIP like a cited plaque. Instead it grows only sometimes marked by a short-lived board that says ‘planted by so and so’. It is instead marked in the memory of the people, passed down through the medium of oral and written histories of landscapes— “This tree was planted by the prime minister.” The growth of the tree strengthens the memory of the person who planted it, a living testimony to an event. In the same conversation is also included, the whole value accorded to planting trees as an act of altruism (as the kings did in the days of the yore). In one tree-planting ceremony multiple discourses are captured − History, environmentalism, gaining merits (Punya) as well as privilege of the land on which such an event has occurred.

Public trees that were not planted very specifically by VIPS or kings also share the historical memories of people for their everyday life. The banyan tree bus stop or the old house next to a peepul tree functions as space-time markers for people. Here the marking is more spatial than temporal. The tree provides a background for the events to occur. The tree under which the chatwallah sits or the bus halts would be an example. In that sense it goes back to the original symbolic meanings that it would have for people like the Bodhi tree or the Aswattha (ficcus) tree.

What is interesting is how nature as trees become history and history becomes nature in the construction of the discourse of Heritage trees. In this interaction between human memory and nature we cannot deny that there is a strange symbiosis of Human and nature, each preserving the memory of the other. Not that the tree remembers of course, but by its very presence it becomes a dynamic pneumonic for the human.

Last but not the least, in the development plans for the city in Bangalore a number of trees will be cut. What is being ultimately erased is history- history that is not written in pages in print but history that is written in the landscape in the memories of people. People forget soon and it is trees that acted as mute reminders. When the tree is no more, the history around it would also be no more.

this is a part of an academic paper I am writing and so please donot directly copy this material any where.