Huts torched to avenge ‘forbidden’ marriage

Even as the whole world is crying foul about the growing racism across the globe, here in the East comes the report of yet another macabre incident propelled by obnoxious racist elements.

In a gruesome act of racial spitefulness, an unruly mob of Hindu fanatics torched hundreds of houses belonged to Dalits (of the Adi-Dravida community) in three colonies near Naikkankottai, a small hamlet in Dharmapuri district of western Tamil Nadu in Southern India.

The Hindus’ fury left the entire Dalit community terrorized and shocked. As many as 268 huts were set ablaze by the mob. It all began when a Hindu man named Nagarajan allegedly committed suicide over his daughter falling in love with and marrying a Dalit boy who hailed from one of those colonies.

According to reports, there was no casualty as occupants of the houses escaped and took shelter in another village. Ninety persons were arrested and cases registered against another 500 “unidentified” persons, say the reports.

And the love story that led to the horrific incident: A 23 year old Dalit boy Ilavarasan fell in love with a 20 year old Hindu girl Divya. Despite strong opposition, both of them got married a month ago and approached the police for protection fearing attacks from Hindus.

A kangaroo court was convened and it was decided that the girl should return to her parents which she refused. Following this the girl’s father committed suicide.
According to reports, an angry mob entered the Dalit colonies and set ablaze the dwellings indiscriminately.

And this is India, the land of ancient wisdom!

Hurricane Sandy leaves lasting scar

Hurricane Sandy battered the mid-Atlantic region with powerful gusts and storm surges that cause epic flooding in the coastal communities of New Jersey, New York and Connecticut, knocking down trees and power lines and leaving more than eight million people – including large parts of Manhattan – in the rain-soaked dark. The mammoth storm packed maximum sustained winds of 80 mph. Those powerful winds, driving rain and storm surge are blamed for 98 deaths in the United States (although numbers still vary), including two small boys who were swept out of their mother’s arms. The toll of the storm is staggering, including a rampaging fire that reduced more than 100 houses to ash in Breezy Point, Queens. New Jersey took the brunt, officials estimating that the state suffered many billions of dollars in property damage. Residents began the long, slow process of recovery.

Sexism, misogyny raise ugly heads

Shobha De was at her sarcastic best when she sneered at Sunanda Tharoor  in one of her several weekly columns while justifying Narendra Modi’s disparaging remarks of ’50 crore girlfriend’.
Well, it is most unlikely for a columnist like De to look down upon a fellow female, given the fact that De herself has been victim of sexism and misogyny several time. (She told me once about people turning too nosy about her ‘sexy’ write-ups).

Why should De be so blissful when a son of a bitch tries to grope Sunanda and gets tight slaps for the job?

Maybe she is too attracted to Modi. Or so jealous of Sunanda for being Shashi Tharoor’s invaluable lady love. The Union Minister has always been any woman’s dream man at any given point of time, not just in India, but across the globe.

One can understand Modi’s frustration and his misogyny. We know he is getting frantic about the diplomat turned politician’s wealth – emotional, intellectual and material.

But De should have respected another woman. She should have extended unconditional support to Sunanda. But she didn’t.  She is one wicked woman, Shobha DE.

There are women with spine and guts. They don’t advocate sexism and misogyny. They boldly fight it. Australia’s Prime Minister Julia Gillard is for one.  “I will not be lectured about sexism and misogyny by this man. Not now, not ever,”she thundered, earlier this month, coming down heavily upon Tony Abbott, the leader of the Opposition Liberal Party.

Her angry rhetoric was during a debate on a debate about whether the speaker of the house, Peter Slipper, should resign for sending lurid text messages denigrating women to a former member of staff.

All woman haters around the world, you are as silly as King Fahd University to state that allowing women to drive would “provoke a surge in prostitution, pornography, homosexuality and divorce.”

No one dies; death is an illusion

All these while, I have been under the impression that the whole life is an illusion and it really doesn’t exist. Not only that, my impression was that the entire universe is an illusion and there is nothing like this ever existed. But now I tend to change my mind, especially after reading an article written by Robert Lanza, MD, Biocentrism.
Quoting Albert Einstein, he begins with the conclusion - death is an illusion.
Well, the common perception is that the world has an independent existence. Majority of people think life is just the activity of carbon and an admixture of molecules – all creatures live for a while and then die and rot into the ground.
What Lanza is trying to say is we believe in death just because we’ve been taught that we die one day and no one is an exception to this rule.  It is just because we associate ourselves with our body. Yes, bodies do die, but we don’t.
And that is this new theory – biocentrism – is all about. Death of a human body is not the end of the story. It is end of just another chapter of an unending fiction.
Lanza says, “Amazingly, if you add life and consciousness to the equation, you can explain some of the biggest puzzles of science. For instance, it becomes clear why space and time – and even the properties of matter itself – depend on the observer. It also becomes clear why the laws, forces, and constants of the universe appear to be exquisitely fine-tuned for the existence of life. Until we recognize the universe in our heads, attempts to understand reality will remain a road to nowhere.”
It all about what we feel.  Perhaps what we see around us may not be in the form an colour that we perceive. You see a blue sky, but the cells in your brain could be changed so the sky looks green or red.  According to Lanza, with a little genetic engineering we could probably make everything that is red vibrate or make a noise, or even make you want to have sex like with some birds. “You think its bright out, but your brain circuits could be changed so it looks dark out. You think it feels hot and humid, but to a tropical frog it would feel cold and dry. This logic applies to virtually everything. Bottom line: What you see could not be present without your consciousness,” he says.
Yes, our eyes can’t all things in the world. Whatever you think you see, hear, smell, taste or feel are information passed on by the brain. In the same way, space and time are simply tools of our mind. When there is nothing called space and time, where is death then?
After the death of a human body, the person will go to some new world that his dead body never understood.
Lanza says: Life is an adventure that transcends our ordinary linear way of thinking. When we die, we do so not in the random billiard-ball-matrix but in the inescapable-life-matrix. Life has a non-linear dimensionality – it’s like a perennial flower that returns to bloom in the multiverse.

How to stop smoking?

Well, I know this is one question that pesters every smoker in every part of the world. Don’t worry. Nothing is impossible other than putting the toothpaste back into the tube right after squeezing it out completely once.
Before telling you the technique of quitting the habit, I want you to know the grim fact: Smoking may kill as many as a billion people worldwide this century.
As per researchers, only in both the US and the UK, smoking ranks higher than obesity as the leading cause of preventable deaths.
According to a study, those who smoked throughout their adult lives were overwhelmingly more likely to suffer and then die of lung cancer, heart disease and stroke. Even those who considered themselves light smokers, smoking less than ten cigarettes a day, were twice as likely to die early when compared to non-smokers.
Quitting before middle age, however, was shown to dramatically reduce that risk.
So, if you really want to kick the butt, then make up your mind first. For I, once an obsessive compulsive chain smoker, successfully did it. Then why can’t you?
I know it is hard to suppress the itch for nicotine. But once you make up your mind, say NO to yourself, then, let’s see how to combat the urge to smoke.
Go to a place where you need to be around the whole day long, but no way allowed to smoke, not even take a break. And if you stay alive for more than eight hours without smoking, then you can stop it. Then try going to the same place for some more days and lo and behold you will know that you can survive without cigarettes.
Now you know nothing would happen if you don’t smoke. So stop smoking and start fighting  the withdrawal syndromes and regain your lost power!

School kids’ new game: ‘Fantasy Slut League’!

You must have heard of Premier Cricket League, Premier Hockey League or Premier Football League, but did you ever hear something called 'Fantasy Slut League'?
If not, here is the bizarre news! It is a new game started at a high school in California where boys can earn points by having sexual encounters with girl students.  For the past five or six years, boys on some sports teams at Piedmont High School had been allegedly playing this game until last month, when school management reportedly discovered their “game” following a date-rape-awareness assembly.
And last week, the school management spilled the beans to the parents and the media. Yet, they haven’t taken any action against this disgusting practice. They reportedly found “after an investigation, they concluded both male and female participants felt pressured by their peers and older students, but found no indication of sexual abuse.”
And no student was accused of criminal conduct nor any action was taken against them. Ridiculous! They even justified their stance as they “didn’t have details on individuals involved and the league’s activities occurred off-campus.”
Though this ugly incident made headlines, nobody seems to ponder over how rampant this practice is in the country.
In an article appeared in New York Times two years ago, popular columnist Maureen Dowd wrote about a similar “fantasy league” in Landon, an all-boys private school in Maryland. It was quoted that the boys “evidently got points for (the sexual equivalent of) first, second, and third base,” and “money was going to be exchanged at the end of the season.”
But Landon defended it saying that it was an “extensive ethics and character-education program.
This fantasy-football format game has a callous nature of a scoring system where the game is sex, not football, and the “fantasy” league is—at least reportedly at Piedmont High School—shockingly real.
Experts see this as a in a wider perspective. Abigail Jones, co-author of Restless Virgins, which examined a widely publicized sex scandal at a New England prep school in 2005, says the problem lies in the broader context of teenage sexuality today.
The Daily Beast quoted him as saying: “Girls and boys have always been sexually active, but the culture in which teenagers are coming of age today is dramatically different in that everything is put on display.”
The fact is kids these days are growing up in a sex-saturated culture. They see only sex everywhere, on billboards, Internet, magazines, movies, and TV.
It may be remembered that some Piedmont girls told local reporters that they didn’t mind “being on the list” of draftees!

Don’t kill those animals!

Notorious South Indian elephant poacher and sandalwood smuggler Koose Muniswamy Veerappan had met with a gruesome ‘death of a demon’ several years ago, but his tribesmen are still flourishing in other parts of the country.
They resort to most inhumane and brutal acts to make easy money. The heartless felons kill animals for making fortunes. And they use most barbaric means to kill the hapless animals. It should be prevented.

The world is talking about massive elephant poaching in the Ganjam district of Odisha in India. Those savages are using homemade electrocution tripwires to kill those innocent and majestic elephants for ivory.

The poachers use these tripwires made from power lines to kill elephants. According to official statistics,  a staggering 295 elephants have been poached so far this year in Odisha and out of them 61 have been killed of electrocution.

Officials blame it on electric companies. They say Odisha’s electric companies spread electricity to remote and rural areas without any proper supervision.

According to reports, several remedies have been given to electric companies, including building taller, more insulated power lines, to help ensure the elephants’ safety. Also it was suggested that cutting off power to areas with large elephant populations during strategic migratory periods would reduce the risk of electrocution.

Energy officials should be held accountable for these inhuman acts. Poachers should be caught and prosecuted. Forest and wildlife officials should make sure the safety of animals.