Tuesday, September 30, 2008

C

'C' is a very strange letter and has wide morphisms - exotic, erotic, eternal, extraordinary and what more.... my vocab is not that good. One morphism however stands out to me, one of my favorites - Choice. Choice - it's just like a human brain; rarely used to full capacity in an average life span of an average human being. Not even Einstein used it to 100%. Just like a prosthetic limb waiting to shrink and dissolve into the frothy stream of time and let us evolve into something we never were. Or never would be.
However, 'C' stands for another thing. The new kid in the town - Climate Change. And everybody is talking about it as if it has been wild boar walking in a bikini in city centre. We, at our organization also talk about it. It is the latest buzz word in our daily routine now a days. Recently heard that GLT Energy Marshalls group managed to save 56 tones of CO2 in the last 3 months. Vow. Appreciative. 'C' also stands for confusion. So without dwelling too much into it, I would come to the point. Which however here is that what took us so long to act? I remember the very first imprint of a climate change article in the recycled pages of a Hindi newspaper in my small town. It was almost 10 years ago. And even after reading about climate change 10 years ago, I chose not to act for it, And now after 10 years of time, I shoved my ass in a rainforest in the middle of leeches and snakes to plant trees.
Why did I need something like an organization to push me into this? 10 years of extra carbon footprint!!! Vow. I wonder how much of my contribution would have been in the melting of arctic ice cover? And how much inches I would have pushed a specie closed to annihilation? And how much 6 billion homosapiens walking this globe would have contributed?
I chose the word 'homosapiens' because we didn't choose. Choice is what makes us a human - A Woman or A Man; someone who can define their destiny, someone who can defy their destiny. When we don't chose, we just let other factors 'decide' our destiny. And that's exactly what we have been doing - despite knowing tons about Climate Change, we have always chosen to be a passive spectator of it.
Now, we need to 'choose.' It will be foolish to say that now its the time to think. No. The time to think has died a lonely death under the cartridges of our ever buzzing printers. Now is the time to act. Now is the time to choose between an imposed destiny and a desired world.
Now is the time to shape. Now is the time to break the shells we have been breeding ourselves till date and stop being incumbent on somebody else to motivate or push us. Now we have to take the charge with or without others. Move beyond the walls of our cubicles and balconies and reach out to the world and tell them that our earth is being scarred by their carbon footprints. Its now the time to tell people that everyone of us has a responsibility to the air we breathe and the water we drink and the food we waste in our dinner plates. Its time for mankind to take another giant leap.
And its not just about others. Its time for us to choose what we would like to be remembered as - as hypothetical Climate Champions breathing withing the space of our organization, burdened by the titles inferred on us, or as free human beings who set out to change the world, shape it for better.
We need a vision, something that we need to carry on this difficult road uncharted since recorded time. Just like what the greats of Da Vinci or Galileo or Gandhi or a Mandela. It's time to choose our own destinies. Now.
An interesting person once told me his equally interesting theory - what if the world was not made for 6 billion people? What if it was only made for 3 billion people? And may be that's why this Climate Change is happening so that people and animals can die and the earth comes back to what it can support. I totally agreed with him. But then I also believe that since the dawn of time, humans have had the audacity to fight the erasing fate destiny had chose for them. We too, belong to the same race. We too have to carry the honored legacy of being a 'human.' If Climate Change is out there to kill us, then we fight. We stand tall until the very hand that wrote our destiny salutes us and feels a secret pride of having created us.
So let's justify the most honored tradition of humanity, break the shackles of our title and change this beautiful earth for the better. Let's choose to defy destiny. Once again.

Monday, September 22, 2008

The Theory

This isn't a physics class but this is about a spring - the coiled piece of wire which retracts back if you leave it after you have pulled it along its length. The spring, the spiral - a circle coming out of another circle and merging into yet another. Endless as it is, hypnotizing it can be, dangerous it often becomes. This is the spring, the life.
It has been an unending debate about what life is, how it is and there are billions of explanations - money, position, fun, love, family, friends, adventure, self and more and more and more..... And at the center of everything is a circle, no beginning no end, a lowest point and a highest point and a multitude of points in between; and an invisible pointer moving along those points traversing the invisible locus, the circle. It simply means that everyone in life has an equal share of goods and bads, happiness and pains, riches and rags, success of failures and so on..... and all this keeps repeating and is never constant. Just like day and night. Just like spring and autumn. And as strange and unknown the universe be, everything follows the same thing - the motion of planets around the sun, the motion of electrons around the nucleus. Nature manifests itself in everything; even in us and even in our life. It doesn't change, it doesn't alter, it goes on in the same misunderstood way since the day time has begun. And it continue to be so.
So that is life. The unsaid law of life. But what next? People say that if life is a circle then it means that man has a destiny which is pre-decided by an invisible hand even before we are conceived in the wombs; our choices loose their meanings; our conflicts loose their truth. But thats where the spring comes in. A spiral - a tiny spec of earth decides to move away from its roots and in its tryst it pulls apart and grows like a stem out of the very thing that defines it and it takes the same course and the circle becomes a spiral, a spring. A new dimension is added to what already was, what already was conceived by another hand, what already was shaped by others. The new circle is a new choice - made by the living. A good choice or a bad choice is non significant. All that matters is a choice. Or else, nothing would matter. Nothing would be controlled. Nothing would be chosen. And this is the only thing that would make give us the right to call ourself 'humans.' Else we are all animals.