The Wish Coins

India is a place full of superstitions & inspite of modernization we still stick to the age old beliefs. It’s impious when you believe in India as growth engine to the world economy at one hand and at the other find people so grossly indulged in age old practices of spending money on deity’s. When u look at the contagion with which it has affected the people of India from rich to middle class to poor u can’t help itself giving it a thought.

There could be incidents when we all must have felt something of sort what I felt when I was travelling in train …For a particular time period which is like 60 to 70 seconds I see something really strange......Its the time when the train crosses over a river …

What’s so strange in that right??!! But when you see people of all kind from rich to poor,fatso's to slimmo's,aunties & uncles throwing coins in the river it does look strange..Its like "are they nuts"!!!

Each and every class of people do that, no matter whether they are highly educated or illiterate, its kind of mission for them. The moment train approaches a bridge over river the scene in the small compartment starts looking like of a circus with everyone having hands full of coins eagerly looking out of the window with a childish excitement, some smarter lot get ready in advance with a coin in the hand and others rush to find the lowest denomination coin from their pockets or wallets. Aiming between the pillars of the bridge they throw the coin down in river and fold their hands to get the blessings to fulfill their wishes.

 Is this way to wish something??Throwing coins in the river never makes sense to me…

It’s good to worship river as a God/Goddess if you believe in it, but money can’t buy god. It’s like you are paying your parents to take care of you and if it's about culture that’s not the only way to make a wish. Just folding hands with belief in thee is more apt than throwing coins, after all a river doesn't need money as a payback to whatever good it does for mankind.

What if coins were buoyant? If it would have been so imagine all the rivers covered up with a silver coat!!! Well, it reminds me the crow and water story…the story had a good ending, but if it happens here?? the bad ending of this story is not so far...!It may be blasphemous of me for whoever believes in throwing coins but if you are such a believer and do-gooder then save the coins in your pockets for the needy beggar on the next station. It may buy him a meal and get you the most precious & honest emotion exhibited by a human-the blessings.

Revolutions: Discerning the Blueprint

            A few days ago the hot news on every form of Media was Anna Hazare’s fast against the government policies, corruption and the lokpal bill. I thought this would be a failure as India’s middle class is always passive of corrupt politics unless their own interests are getting affected but the mass protests against the GOI shattered my belief. Recent Libian,Egyptian and ivory coast uprisings left me wondering how  a stable society can instantly be interrupted by revolution .It compelled me to look for the patterns all successful revolutions or uprisings had..

Types

When you look at the type of events shaping the Modern history the social movements can be categorized into two majors-(a) Reformative (b) Revolutionary. None of them are eternal; they have a life cycle of creation, growth, success/failures and eventual dissolution.

Dissatisfaction

You must be thinking poverty could be the reason because it is root cause of all the problems in the world, if this could be the reason then there would be revolutions all the time because most people in the world are poor. The main reason behind every revolution is the accumulating dissatisfaction among people over a period of time because of the bad socio-economic policies of the authoritarian or liberal societies.

Initiating Event

Every revolution needs a fueling moment; a spark to turn a million’s people discontent into a crowd on streets; an electrifying event that can fire up a public already deeply disillusioned with the system like the one Anna Hazare orchestrated in India, like the one Wael Ghonim pulled up in Egypt, the Tiananmen square for china, death of two students for Prague, mass incineration for Iran.

Participation

One of the major problems is to generate the spark and convince the people/ mass to the cause of revolution as everyone has a mentality of risk aversion. The rising popularity and widespread reach of social networking websites have played a big role in spreading & convincing the people to join a social movement but has also prompted governments like of China and Iran to enforce censorship of web and social networking sites.

Hijacking Important Places

Every revolution has gained momentum after hijacking of important places by mass protestors such as Tehrir Square in Egypt, Tiananmen Square in China,Jantar Mantar in India (Anna Baba’s fast).The ideology of movement gets associated with that particular place and has always helped in spreading the movement.

Success or failure

Every revolution comes to a point where either uprising topples the regime (success) or regime suppresses the uprising (failure) or the third way-negotiations, used in democracies where the movements are reformative and calls for a settlement. What collapses a regime is when insiders and men with guns turn against it, when the external pressure is in favour of change.

The recent "people power" revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt and demonstrations led by Anna Hazare in India have shown complete or partial success. These revolutions followed large support of citizens, reflecting deep dissatisfaction with their governments.
 

It’s not easy to find a common pattern among all the revolutions but it can be noted that wherever the security forces and high profile citizens have shifted their loyalty to the mass movements the possibility of success has increased else if the senior officials and security forces think they have more to lose from the revolution than by defending the regime, then even the large scale protests have been crushed, Tiananmen square being the best example.

Nirvana Logo:Symbol of Grunge

We all must have at least listened to the famous song “Smells likes teen Spirit” which has been rated among top 100 greatest rock songs of all time by Rolling Stones and some must be even die hard fans of Kurt cobain/Nirvana Grunges but little may be known about the famous (or say “I think that its famous”) Nirvana Smiley-the one with the tongue out (a $3 sticker).

The Smiley has always been the perfect feelgood symbol of all times & dates back its origin to the era of 60’s when the first smiley face was adopted from a kids TV channel with a comic touch.When I see a smiley two pictures pop up-one the Forest Gump- Tom Hanks's mud-spattered T-shirt second the nirvana smiley logo of the official Nirvana Nevermind T-Shirt (you can buy one in $18).

So What was the Nirvana smiley which became a fad of such sort-Within a perfect circle, there is the simplest, most childlike depiction of a face: two vertical eyes made with cross and a large, upturned semi-circular mouth with tongue outside. Why he created it is known better to kurt himself as there are many theories behind it.

One of the most apt theory is that it is a picture of Axl rose Kurt Cobain drew during nevermind sessions and was used on the invitation for the never mind release party. The band mates just liked the smiley and started using it. Another story is that there was a popular place called 'The Acid House' which Kurt visited and they used a smiley as it's logo, that's where Nirvana got their idea for the modified smiley but the former explanation seems to be more justified than the latter because of numerous heated disputes that happened between Axl rose (lead vocalist of Gun’s N Roses) & Kurt Cobain after cobain declined twice to do the opening act for Gun’s N roses.

Some of the incidents which support it are like-At the 1992 MTV Video Music Awards Cobain's wife Courtney Love, jokingly asked Rose to be the godfather to their daughter, to which Axl replied "Why don't you shut your bitch up?" Kurt then allegedly turned to Courtney, and jokingly said "Shut up, bitch!" prompting an angry Rose to challenge Cobain to a fight, shout at him and call him a homosexual. Cobain later mocked the situation by saying "I couldn't help but laugh because I've never been in that kind of situation since the sixth grade."

Another comment which Cobain made was that one thing he likes about Gun’s N roses is that "They totally fuck things up and then they sit back and look at what they fucked up and then try to figure out how they can fix it, whereas we fuck things up and just dwell on it and make it even worse."

The incidents clearly point that the bands didn’t like each other & it was kurt’s stab to Axl as the smiley was like a mockery of Axl rose, something like the phrase in his suicide note "Better to burn out than fade away"

Though kurt didn’t live to see the craze of the logo or the famous Nirvana Smiley he drew, still after so many years the smiley smells like teen spirit on the Official Nirvana Tees & has become cult tattoo youngsters love to have.

Aftermath in Japan: What’s the next big step?

After the Haiti Earthquake last year, Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and of course the tsunami in Indian Ocean in 2004 the 9.0-magnitude earthquake and tsunami which struck on 11 March 2011 shall be considered as the greatest or say the worst natural disaster in the modern times considering the turning up of consequent events which were quite unimaginable in terms of turning the beauty of nature and life into an unforgettable pain for Japan after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima & Nagasaki.

When we look at the scale of devastation the earthquake has bought one cannot stop oneself to compare it with the atomic bombings of 1945.It has been considered as a horrendous time again in 65 years of rebuilding a nation.

                              

                                    1945                                                                                2011

The traditional Toril entrance gates to these shrines were among the few structures that survived 65 years ago and in 2011 also.

The very first question strikes one is how fast will Japan be able to recover from the pain, sufferings & devastation of this scale??

When we look at the condition of Japan one advantage that it is having is that of a developed nation which none of the nations earlier struck by disasters had which is in fact supported by the fact that it has not issued any major call (of course excluding that from Russians to send the radioactive treatment ships) of assistance. If we see the first thing after a disaster, is the start of fund raising activities without even knowing how much part of the country is affected/struck by the disaster. Does Japan need the funds from foreign charities?? Of course not, being one of the world’s richest nations we have already seen how well The Bank of Japan has responded by pumping more than $700 billion dollars into the Japanese economy.

 

Nuclear wasteland - entire blocks of Hiroshima
disappeared in the atomic blast
 

A Japanese man is pictured

 in Nagasaki in 1945

 Japan had resisted some of the immediate support offered (that of offered by U.S.), yet that is not to say aid is not desperately needed. What is needed at this point of time is the participation in the relief effort which US, New Zealand & least to forget the quick response of china (the first ever participation of Chinese coast guards in international relief efforts) in search & rescue missions with Japanese military.



The tsunami washed away most of
 Rikuzentakata within minutes

Though the world is not so simple to construct as beautiful to paint still the calm, courageous & determined nature of Japanese people will surely help them to come out of a disaster in a way more severe in past 65 years since World War II and surely will become something to be admired worldwide.