Over the past one month, a lot of noise has been made of India's triumph at the world stage. It started off with the Twenty-20. Then it was Viswanath Anand. Last week it was Dr. Pachauri, though the Nobel is meant for IPCC, which he has been heading since 2002.
A lesser known individual, Dr.Ullas Karanth has won this year's WWF Paul Getty Award for conservation leadeship. Dr.Ullas works in the area of wildlife conservation in general and tigers and elephants in particular. He has been fighting with the Government of India, to adopt newer scientific methods of counting tigers in the wild. These new methods like capture- recapture technique will lead to the real number of tigers alive, which have been inflated by the government as we saw in Sariska.
In an interview, Dr.Karanth says that the tigers will survive to the next century. We still have hope, as long we have men like Dr.Karanth and Mr. Valmik Thapar.
Monday, October 15, 2007
Little known Great Indians
Sunday, October 07, 2007
A saturday spent as Earth Day
Back after a hiatus. I was supposed to be busy with the 4th trimester exams for the past 10 days. We, the future corporate honchos were to be sensitized on the environmental issues over the weekend after the 4 th trimester exams. So, I went to the class today prepared for sessions of boring ppts, graphs and value matrices.
An old man entered the class. His name was Prof. Narendra Sakhalkar. He kept me spellbound and most of the class as well for the next hour and half. It was so intellectual that I attended the same session again with another batch. His speech made me déjà vu of having read A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson.
His speech covered a variety of topics from history, astronomy, geology, religion, physics and biology. The gist of what he spoke was:
We, Homo sapiens sapiens are in deep trouble regarding our survival as a species, because of the past 150 years of Industrialization, which might over the next 50 years, ensure a doomsday in any of the various possible ways. Whenever it has happened before, the most dominant species is the one which gets hit the most. This time it will be us and mammals in general.
He classified the past 4 lakh years from the Homo eructus to today into 4 time periods as,
Man within nature - The period when we lived as scavengers eating the dead animals in the jungle.
Man with nature - This was when we started agriculture. He made an analogy of this being like a child scratching its mother's face with its nails. Agriculture was the first time when we brought monoculture against the poly culture (diversity), which is nature's design.
Man against nature - This started with the industrial revolution in the Europe, and the laying of railway tracks, which lead to destruction of large tracts of jungle.
Nature against man - This is where we are now, when the earth has started showing the signs of refusing to accept whatever we have been doing for so long. Melting of glaciers as large as the size of California in a single year , increase in surface temperature of oceans and hole in the ozone layer of some of the signs which have been documented to prove beyond doubt that we have arrived here.
The most frequently said way out and why each of them will not happen are,
1.God created man as his image and hence He will not let us perish - All religions say that God is the creator and manager of the entire universe, the size of which we are still not able to comprehend. That being the case, He will not interfere into the affairs of a spec of dust called Earth, that too for a problem created over 150 years, which is not even a second in the cosmic clock.
2. We will evolve technology that will save us - This could be a possible solution if we can arrive at a consensus on this within 2010. We will need the top 1 percentile of the human intelligence to be dedicated to this. But it is unlikely to happen, as most of them are involved in the development of arms.
3. We will conquer other planets and galaxies and make it our home - This is the most ridiculous solution possible, surprisingly suggested even by Stephen Hawking. All the planets in the solar system have been ruled out. The current travel speeds in space achieved rule out reaching them before 10000 years even if we start now.
So, the bomb has started ticking. Its not a question of 'if' anymore, Its a question of 'when'.
____________________________________________________________
Part 2
In the afternoon four of us, flat mates decided to visit Gilbert Hill. Its a 65 million year old hill made of molten lava, located at Andheri, 10 minutes drive from our place. It offers panoramic view of Mumbai from the top, which can be reached by the stairs cut in the rocks. We could see as far as the Juhu beach, Hiranandani, Borivili and Thane. To reach it one has to pass through a shanty town. High rise buildings have come around the hill over the past 3 years until the Mumbai High Court passed a stay order early this year.
An old man entered the class. His name was Prof. Narendra Sakhalkar. He kept me spellbound and most of the class as well for the next hour and half. It was so intellectual that I attended the same session again with another batch. His speech made me déjà vu of having read A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson.
His speech covered a variety of topics from history, astronomy, geology, religion, physics and biology. The gist of what he spoke was:
We, Homo sapiens sapiens are in deep trouble regarding our survival as a species, because of the past 150 years of Industrialization, which might over the next 50 years, ensure a doomsday in any of the various possible ways. Whenever it has happened before, the most dominant species is the one which gets hit the most. This time it will be us and mammals in general.
He classified the past 4 lakh years from the Homo eructus to today into 4 time periods as,
Man within nature - The period when we lived as scavengers eating the dead animals in the jungle.
Man with nature - This was when we started agriculture. He made an analogy of this being like a child scratching its mother's face with its nails. Agriculture was the first time when we brought monoculture against the poly culture (diversity), which is nature's design.
Man against nature - This started with the industrial revolution in the Europe, and the laying of railway tracks, which lead to destruction of large tracts of jungle.
Nature against man - This is where we are now, when the earth has started showing the signs of refusing to accept whatever we have been doing for so long. Melting of glaciers as large as the size of California in a single year , increase in surface temperature of oceans and hole in the ozone layer of some of the signs which have been documented to prove beyond doubt that we have arrived here.
The most frequently said way out and why each of them will not happen are,
1.God created man as his image and hence He will not let us perish - All religions say that God is the creator and manager of the entire universe, the size of which we are still not able to comprehend. That being the case, He will not interfere into the affairs of a spec of dust called Earth, that too for a problem created over 150 years, which is not even a second in the cosmic clock.
2. We will evolve technology that will save us - This could be a possible solution if we can arrive at a consensus on this within 2010. We will need the top 1 percentile of the human intelligence to be dedicated to this. But it is unlikely to happen, as most of them are involved in the development of arms.
3. We will conquer other planets and galaxies and make it our home - This is the most ridiculous solution possible, surprisingly suggested even by Stephen Hawking. All the planets in the solar system have been ruled out. The current travel speeds in space achieved rule out reaching them before 10000 years even if we start now.
So, the bomb has started ticking. Its not a question of 'if' anymore, Its a question of 'when'.
____________________________________________________________
Part 2
In the afternoon four of us, flat mates decided to visit Gilbert Hill. Its a 65 million year old hill made of molten lava, located at Andheri, 10 minutes drive from our place. It offers panoramic view of Mumbai from the top, which can be reached by the stairs cut in the rocks. We could see as far as the Juhu beach, Hiranandani, Borivili and Thane. To reach it one has to pass through a shanty town. High rise buildings have come around the hill over the past 3 years until the Mumbai High Court passed a stay order early this year.
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