Posts filed under 'Life'
The World Challenge 2006 Winner
The Word Challenge 2006 winner has been chosen, and it’s none other than Maximus, the Sri Lankan papermaking firm that makes high-quality products from a variety of wastes, including paper from offices and bark from banana trees, and most interestingly, elephant dung.
A pale blue dot
Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there–on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994
Pushing your limits
A few of my best friends are in Japan, doing their higher studies. One of them has come back on vacation, and while talking to him I was amazed to hear about the insane hours he’s working there. Apparently he gets two hours of sleep before heading off to work on the night shift at a restaurant, and then comes back to have one more hour of sleep before going to uni the next day. I never thought the human body could endure such torment, seeing how I get dizzy after a couple of days of sleep deprivation. I mean, it’s not like my friend is using polyphasic sleep, but here he was, fit as a fiddle, and yet sleeping only three hours a day.
“Come September” - Arundhati Roy
Not many of our generation know the history of the Palestinian/Israel conflict. Not many of us understand the hidden agendas. Of those who know and understand, not many have the eloquence of Arundhati Roy.
September 11th has a tragic resonance in the Middle East, too. On the 11th of September 1922, ignoring Arab outrage, the British government proclaimed a mandate in Palestine, a follow-up to the 1917 Balfour Declaration which imperial Britain issued, with its army massed outside the gates of Gaza. The Balfour Declaration promised European Zionists a national home for Jewish people. (At the time, the Empire on which the Sun Never Set was free to snatch and bequeath national homes like a school bully distributes marbles.)
How carelessly imperial power vivisected ancient civilizations. Palestine and Kashmir are imperial Britain’s festering, blood-drenched gifts to the modern world. Both are fault lines in the raging international conflicts of today.
General Killed
Major General Parami Kulatunga, the third-highest ranking officer in the Sri Lankan army and a veteran of the civil war, was killed in a bomb blast by the LTTE.
Indi has a brilliant post that sums up the situation in this country (and elsewhere) really well.
Theena: Tamil. Not a Terrorist.
I weep because I am a Tamil. Not a terrorist. Like me there are others, Tamils not terrorists, who weep at the state of things in this country.
But I look around and I see the proverbial silver lining and I smile.
The best college essay ever
Hugh Gallagher sent this to colleges.
It’s a wonderful piece of writing, and I was delighted to read the line: I have won bullfights in San Juan, cliff-diving competitions in Sri Lanka, and spelling bees at the Kremlin.
Emphasis mine.
We are honoured, as a nation, to have been his host ;-)
Fossed
The last few weeks have been incredible, for the FOSS community at large, and personally to me as well. First, there was the FOSS-Ed for Hackers conference, where I had a wonderful time (and where Anuradha W presented me with a hard-bound copy of Free Software, Free Society, thanks mate!). And then, a couple of days ago I got confirmation from Google that I was accepted for the Summer of Code 2006. Awesomeness.
Vesak and Dhamma talks
Today is Vesak, the most holy day for Buddhists. I’m a Theravada Buddhist, the school that still follows the dhamma as taught by the Gautama Buddha, twenty five centuries ago. The Sinhala people of this country preserved true Buddhism through a troubled history of wars, famine, pillaging invaders and a dark era of western colonization. Their numerous sacrifices made it possible for people like me today to be thankful for being born a Sri Lankan.
Failed State my ass
This is old news, but a discussion on TV today got me thinking. So the Fund for Peace spat out a list of failed states and the Foreign Policy magazine published it. Incidentally, Sri Lanka is the 25th on that list.
