Random Rambling.

I am going to go wherever my mind goes today and live up to the alias of Minds Nomad.    There have been things simmering in the background.  Giving my mind a break from logically connected thinking.  Hail to Randomness!

Three weeks ago a Cyclone hit Myanmar(formerly a British colony re-named Burma for convenience, derived from the name of the majority ethnic group, Bamar).  So many are dead. The official death numbers vary.  There is no way to know the exact numbers because of the political situation in Myanmar.  So many are homeless and aren’t accounted for.  Their Government is a Military Dictatorship, very wary of interference from any western nations and I guess they do have a good reason to be wary. It’s a matter of holding on to the Political power the Military has and the fact that the West doesn’t have a history for aiding any Nation without some Economic/Political Gain/Interest. 

I was listening in on the NPR program “World have your say” a few days ago and it was very apparent from what the host was saying - that the West wants to use this disaster for political leverage. They want to offer aid on the condition that the Myanmar Government take steps to become a Democratic nation.  I call it the Wests three step Evangelization program -1. Democratic Evangelization, making way for  2. Religious Evangelization,  making way for 3. Economic Evangelization.  They also want a West Friendly Government(read, a government that will succumb to any pressure that the West uses to make a Economic or Political or Religious headway within that nation) installed. One of the questions the Host asked was “Is it true that the US would not win no matter what they did.  Whether they send in aid or if they don’t send in aid, either way they are going to be wrong?”  Most people who called in to answer went into an explanation why that is so.  But the host got a little too aggressive(of course that’s my opinion) when he cut off their explanations saying “that doesn’t answer the question”.  I thought the answer was obvious “Yes, they are in a no win situation and they have no one to blame but themselves. If you need proof look into the history of their aid offering to other nations; it is always followed by some kind of pre-condition.  They move in like the Camel, in the story of the Camel and the Tent- example Okinawa in Japan, military bases in Europe, military presence in Middle East, Africa, South America and Asia.  Basically telling the other nation – “Now I’ve got you by your tail Buddy.  I am going to sit in your nation and watch you like a hawk, let me see you escape this.”

Now what makes me feel bad is that numerous people will die because of the Egos of the Political Factions within the Nation and the Greed of the ones who can offer add.  This probably has always been and will always be.  But can you blame me for hoping that human beings will show their Nobler side?  That the powerful will offer aid just because they can and not because they can negotiate what to get for that aid?  That is my Idealistically Emotional side speaking.

 

On the other hand, my Philosophical Witness side watches the way Nature takes care of herself.  Yes, she is becoming more polluted in her waters, in her air etc.. the Reason – Population of Human Beings and the hazards we bring in with Civilization and Modernization .. the solution – large scale removal of life.  A sort of cycle of cleansing, just like our body – what we put in, is sorted into what can be used, repaired, stored and thrown out and there are organs doing just that. When our system gets overwhelmed with the repairing, we age and die.  I watch nature do the same, with respect to our Earth.

The other sad news was of the earthquake in China.  Again so many are dead, or buried under the rubble.  Schools have collapsed with students in them.. I cant imagine the grief the Chinese Parents feel, who by law can only have ONE child.  Life as they knew it, is done.   I could go on and on about how disaster can change ones life, but it will not really make much of an impact unless we experience it. 

There were simultaneous bomb blasts in Jaipur, in places of worship and places where people were gathering in large numbers.  Yes, terrorist attacks.  India has a thorn on her head(Jammu and Kashmir) and it cant be removed given its historical perspective.  So we go through the constant desecration of our holy places and death of our people and move on.  A few more deaths among a billion right?(sarcastic)

I had a friend at college who I considered my best friend.  She fell in love and had a complete personality change and then changed her religion too.. Something I didnt approve of. If someone wanted to convert after studying and practising a particular religion and felt that it resonates with their nature, its the right thing to do. In her case, the way I saw it, being Hindu was good enough to fall in love with, but it wasnt good enough to get married.  The condition that she had to "convert to the Man's religion"  to marry; well, it smacks of a politico-religio agenda not Love. But I let it go cause I thought she was happy.  I didnt ask her why she made such a drastic decision when all that she was, was partly because she was Hindu. I wanted to, but I didnt, I thought that was overstepping the bounds of friendship cause, I dont believe in having to dig something out of a person, if she trusted me enough she would have explained without my asking.  But the thing I couldnt get past is that she did not come to my wedding.  We havent met since that day. I miss her, I keep  her in my thoughts but I am not in contact with her.  Would I want to?  Yes, some day when my heart doesnt smart at the thought of all the unanswered questions. Rationally I know I sound petty, I should let this go, but its not everyday that I get married and it wasnt that she was Far away from where I was getting married, just about 10 kilometers, it wasnt that she wasnt well either. 

My friend Claudia asked me if I ever felt unworthy in my own eyes.  This might seem weird, but I never found the need to measure my worth.  I am a bundle of contradictions, goodies and flaws, sometimes I am on top of the world, sometimes I am in a bottomless pit, sometimes I am in between, I am not a genius but I am not stupid either, I just oscillate between the two at different times. I try not to have illusions about what I am capable off or how I look or what I know or dont know.  I just know that what ever I am at that moment, is what I am, as I cant erase whats done.  When I am aware, I notice I dont have an ego when it comes to connecting with trees, rocks, rivers, earth etc. but my Ego does comes in the way of connecting with people, I notice the fear and conditioning I hold that has been handed down to me.  I notice times when I feel hurt because someone I cared about looked down on me, but I cant stay hurt all the while... I am too lazy, I dont have the perseverance for it. I cant hold grudges for the very same reason, I get tired of it too quickly and I will find something else to do, something that is actually joyful.  When I am not aware, I  become, petty, angry, impatient, judgemental, lose perspective and make the biggest blunders a person of my size could ever make.  I figured that no matter where I am in my life, there will always be people above me and people below me, so I spend my effort, learning from those above me, teaching those below me and walking carefully so that I dont trample either ones to get where-ever it is that I need to get to.

My cousin, who my Mother Admires very much, said something very profound. I asked her what she thought life was.  She said, its those few Grand Events and lots of maintenance to get to those Grand Events.  She is 3 years younger than I am.  I wanted to hug her for what she said but I didnt cause I didnt want my Mother say  "See I told you she was Wise".  As amazing a person my Mother is, its rare for her to appreciate anything I am.  The ONE person I would like approval from never grants it to me.  Its one of those puzzling ironies of my life. When I complained about this to My Other best friend from College, she said "Let it go, your mom's old, she could pass anytime, let her go in peace" and I had to retort "which is more of a reason why she should tell me she appreciates me" Of course, we laughed about it.  Yes, I was being childish.
 
I cant figure how to act 37 years old.  I dont feel 37, some days I wake up thinking I have to get to college(about 16 or 18 years old)  but other days, I can hear my bones creek and I just want to curl up and sleep for a week.  Somedays, my husband says that he cant make out the difference between me and  my kids....hmm.. he needs glasses doesnt he? Today I am tired, the reason being this new kid at the school where I work part-time... He's very young and not ready to go to  school. He is doing everything he can to ensure his staying home.  Today, he threw 3 tantrums in 2 hours, I literally prayed for Compassion for him.  We had to make sure he doesnt hurt himself so One of the teachers had to sit with him.  Finally we had to call his mother to take him home.  We have to balance the time spent with each of the kids at school, if we pay all our attention to ONE then the other kids get shortchanged. These are the times, I wish I was psychic, so I could read what was going on in his head, it would have helped to figure how to help him transition into a school going kid.

Its late and this blog is long.  I better get some sleep. Got to work tomorrow.

Peace always
Rashmi.

Leadership

I have very little faith in the Political process,  mostly because I dont trust Politicians, cause part of their job description is to MANIPULATE the populance into giving them their vote.  Most forget their promises once voted into power.  That is the legacy of having power in most Countries of the world, it removes the leader's accountability.  About 2 years ago, I had made a list of things I thought defines a Leader. The blog is here.

Today I was reading an article on Parade.com by  Jim Webb, a  democratic US senator from Virginia.  I liked a few things he pointed out about being a leader, so I am posting it here. While most of it is about his experience in the Vietnamese War. He does touch on the crux of being a good leader- "When you have the authority to make decisions, you inherit the responsibility to accept the consequences and the obligation to use your authority for the common good" (those are the most important phrases- Authority and Responsibility for COMMON GOOD). 

What It Means To Be a Leader

By Senator Jim Webb
Published: May 18, 2008 Adapted from “A Time to Fight” © Jim Webb (Broadway Books, 2008). 

On June 5, 1968, I had the honor of taking the oath of office as a second lieutenant in the United States Marine Corps. Thus my professional career began with a vow to protect the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, at a time when the country was riven by external and internal conflict.

Our instructors at the Marine Officers Basic School were handpicked from among the finest young officers in the Corps. Almost all had been in combat, and many bore visible scars. As the months at school went by, they repeatedly and unendingly challenged us with an age-old mantra: What do you do now, lieutenant?

Just before we graduated, a tough but insightful lieutenant colonel who had fought in World War II, Korea and Vietnam gave us a speech, a warning that echoes in my memory almost every day. He recounted a story of a fight in Korea that went incredibly bad—where, for all his experience, he made an error in judgment.

“I had the enemy pinned down on a ridge,” he said. “I set up a base of fire and sent 13 Marines into the tree line in order to envelop the enemy. Thirteen Marines went into the tree line, and all 13 were killed. And, gentlemen, there is not a day that goes by when I don’t think of that.”

The colonel then spoke of the inalienable bottom line of combat leadership: While all Marines are equally in harm’s way, it is the leaders who must make the decisions about what to do, then live with the results. What he may not have realized is that he also spelled out the responsibility that sits on the shoulders of all leaders.

In the long months I spent as a rifle platoon and company commander in Vietnam’s infamous An Hoa Basin, the colonel’s admonition resonated again and again. We constantly operated in blown-out populated areas, moving from village to village and digging new perimeters every few days. The An Hoa Basin was a bloody, morally conflicted mess. Enemy contact came in every imaginable form, from small cells of local Viet Cong to regiment-sized North Vietnamese Army units. And every day, we who led the squads, platoons and companies were required to make decisions that would have confounded the seminars on ethics and philosophy at universities where some of our peers now grappled intellectually with the war we had been sent to fight.
 
 Sometimes such moral dilemmas became deeply personal. “Clearing” village bunkers was a normal process when we were facing enemy contact. Every Vietnamese family had a bunker next to its porch. When firefights broke out, families went into their bunkers. But it was a common tactic for enemy soldiers to hide there as well, often allowing them to open fire on us from behind. So a routine developed, which the Marines and the villagers understood. Marine teams would move from bunker to bunker, telling villagers to come out. After that, a Marine would throw a grenade into the bunker, then one of them would enter it, making sure it was clear.

During one sweep, the Marine who jumped into the bunker following the blast found that three people had not come out. A younger man, probably a local Viet Cong, had been killed. Hardened by combat, we shrugged him off. But the other two stopped my heart even in the mind-numbing repetition of tragedy that defines war.

A gray-haired man in white pajamas, probably a grandfather, was dead, having wrapped himself around a small boy to protect him from the blast. It was clear that his final thoughts were of the boy. His shocked, opaque eyes and his still-curled body were the very definition of love and human sacrifice. The boy was still alive, although barely.

We were in contact with the enemy, and night would soon be upon us. I walked through the village, setting up our defensive positions and calling in a report to our commander. A corpsman followed me, cradling the boy in his arms. He and I had now served together through seven months of hard combat. We had seen a mountain of tragedy, and we kept nothing from each other. He was insistent: “Skipper, if you don’t get this kid out of here right now, he’s going to die.”

I called for a medevac, but I knew what the answer would be. Emergency medevacs were available only for Marines. We were in a high-risk landing zone. Vietnamese civilians could only be given “routine” medevacs when landing zones were calm and all Marines had been taken care of.

What do you do now, lieutenant?

I couldn’t lie to my chain of command. There weren’t any wounded Marines. I made a case for the boy and lost. “They’ll only bring it in as a routine,” I told the doc. We knew this could take hours.

“All right,” he answered, clearly exasperated. “Then you watch him die.”

The doc put the boy on a wooden box next to our command post. Over the next half hour, as I spoke on the radio, the boy lay near me quietly, never making a sound, all the while watching me. Nor could I stop watching him. And as we stared at each other, he slowly died.

There are still moments when I look back and see the little boy’s brown eyes and the curled corpse of the grandfather whose last thought had been to save him. I will never forget them, nor should I. The An Hoa Basin filled us all with a lifetime of such stories.

When you have personalized death, looked into the eyes of innocent people as the life drained out of them, watched lives torn apart not once but hundreds of times—friends, enemies and those caught in between—it brings not only sadness but also an oddly stubborn wisdom. When you have watched an enemy fight with ferocity and often with honor, you tend to conclude that on some level you have more in common with those you were trying to kill than you do with people who view wars only as an intellectual debate. And when you have served among good people, fellow Marines, some of whom you came to love with the same intensity as you do your own family, there are few others you will meet in your lifetime who can ever gain that same level of trust and respect.

As the colonel intimated in his talk, a sense of accountability is the burden of leadership, whether in combat or on Capitol Hill. When you have the authority to make decisions, you inherit the responsibility to accept the consequences and the obligation to use your authority for the common good.

What has this got to do with the politics of today?

Everything.

Our country is in the middle of a profound crisis. This crisis has many causes, but much of it has been brought about by poor leadership decisions at every level of government. In addition, our electoral process is dominated by financial interests that are threatened by the very notion of reform.

Elections shouldn’t be media circuses, nor should they be auctions where a candidate sells himself to the highest bidder. They should be moral contracts between those who wish to lead and those who are consenting to be led.

What, then, must we do?

In one form or another, this question is asked daily in every community and in almost every household around the world. In authoritarian societies, it’s whispered; in others, it is debated. In America, we quite frankly find ourselves doing a little of both.

Our challenges lie in improving the way we’ve been selecting our leaders. To the American voters, I offer this advice: Be as shrewd and ruthless in your demands on our leaders as the wizards running campaigns are in their strategies to get your vote. Do your part to send to Washington people who truly want to solve the problems of this country from the bottom up.

You won’t regret it. You will benefit from it. And the stakes could not be higher. Sometimes the business of politics seems silly. It can also be infuriating. But you must stay in the game, because you and your grandchildren will be the inheritors of both our successes and flaws.

Jim Webb (D.) is a U.S. Senator from Virginia.

Adapted from “A Time to Fight” © Jim Webb (Broadway Books, 2008). 

Things that give me Joy

When I look at the things that make me happy.  I realize its the simplest things.  Here are a few Things that give me joy. There are a lot more, these are only the things that were on the top layer of my brain file.

Watching -
the sunrise/sunset
Rain, thunder, lightening
movies without running commentaries
Tom and Jerry and other kid cartoons
people

Listening to -
Doors being closed gently
songbirds
Music that soothes the soul
 people, specially children laughing

Walking barefoot-
on dewy grass early in the morning
on sand at the beach
Planting, playing/working with soil(I dont like wearing gloves)
Cooking something special for the ones in my life.

Drinking-
 Iced tea on a Hot Day
My first cup of coffee in the day

Smell of -
popcorn popping
the first rain on dry soil
Roses, jasmine, sandal, lemon, camphor, lavender
sunshine in kids hair
cardamom while it is being cooked
roasted peanuts
food being cooked for a festival

Sleeping in on a cold day
Sitting by the fire on a cold day
Reading a book in one sitting, without interruption
Combing a loved one's hair
Giving/getting a massage

Eating -
hot pakoras on a rainy day
Icecream on  a hot day
Chaat at the corner stall(this is a particular one back home)
Mom's fried chicken, pork curry
Aunt's Biriyani
Dad's Fried fish and dried fish curry
Gran's sesame/peanut chutney with Rice Roti

Will stop for now, cause I am hungry...:P

Picture Perfect - Gossamer

 

Click on the word,  For the meaning of Gossamer

Bubbles,
of life
of laughter
of thoughts
of ideas
of concepts
of imagined worlds.

Enjoy the Feeling
- Safe
- Secure
- Free
- Happy
- Loved
 and appreciated.

Floating a while,
Rainbows Flash,
Bursting Eternally.

 

I took this photo 2 years ago, on a cold, yet seemingly warm sunshining day.  My kids love blowing bubbles, it keeps them entertained for quite a while. Sometimes they have a competition for who blows the biggest bubbles.  It keeps me entertained, watching their dedicated efforts at making a BIG bubble.

Click here --> the Picture Perfect Tour and other Entries