Reflections

I have been admonished by some of my readers that my blog posts are too long. Nobody, I am told, has the time to read long perorations. I need to make my posts shorter and snappier. It started with my friend Indrani who works for the British Council in Calcutta telling me and I quote “ your blog posts are now becoming more like book chapters”. Subsequently Yachana Prakash ,who was my student at SMIMS Gangtok, now doing her post graduation in Ophthalmology in Coimbatore told me: “umm...yes i do feel your posts are long sometimes, I haven’t been able to read some fully because of the length.you do write well and i never felt like telling you the same because you pack in a lot of info in all those paragraphs and it is of a lot of value to a sincere reader but yes, take this opportunity and try to make it more reader friendly. You know we are all lesser mortals here and we want to hear god in our own language!!!” Subsequently Nipon who studies in the final year at the North Bengal Medical...

There is a concept in wildlife biology called carrying capacity. This means that any stretch of wildlife habitat can support only a certain number of particular types of wildlife. Take for instance the tiger. A normal full grown tiger needs about 20 square kilometers of space. Thus s particular wildlife sanctuary can only support a finite number of tigers. Once it exceeds it carrying capacity, the tigers tend to leave the sanctuary to enter areas surrounding it with often fatal consequences as recently seen in Ranthambhore where local villagers poisoned two sub adult tigers which had entered their areas from the now crowded National Park. Unfortunately nobody thinks of extending this analogy to humans. The world population has increased to 6.8 billion and shows no sign that it will level off anytime soon. There is some hope that the world population levels will level off at 9.2 billion according to some estimates, other estimates are far more pessimistic. Occasionally we see idiot re...

This time when I went to Delhi, I had a free morning which I spent in the National Gallery of Modern Art. I have wanted to visit it many times in the past, but somehow it never happened. This time I was determined to go and we went on the Saturday morning the day after we travelled up from Ranthambhore. It is conveniently located, near India Gate and it costs just Rs 10 to get in. It is a steal. Looking at it from a Malaysian viewpoint, less than one Ringitt takes you to one of the most marvelous displays of art in India. India has always been at the forefront of art since the days of antiquity. The Mauryas, Kushans and Guptas have left behind some of the best sculpture ever created. However paintings from those times have obviously not survived. At a much later age the Mughals gave rise to the Mughal Rajput miniature paintings which according to one authority” is a remarkable synthesis between the imported tastes of the Mughals and the indigenous Indian sensibility.” We saw many pa...

There is a fairly good library here at the Technology Park where we have our office in Kuala Lumpur. I get to read many books that I might never have read otherwise, because it has a large number of books on business, the East Asian cultures and Islamic history which had never really attracted my attention in the past. One book that I recently read was The Miracle. Written by financial journalist Michael Schuman it describes how Asia has become the success story of the past 50 years since the Second World War and more particularly since the sixties, when first Japan, then Korea, Singapore and now several other countries have broken free from poverty and reached first world status. And now the story is of China and India which are finally also breaking free from poverty levels that had remained unchanged for hundreds of years while we were under European domination. India and China were the world’s dominant economic powers until 1600 when India and China together accounted for 52% of ...

In medieval times the route to Central India from the North lay through a gap in the Aravalli mountains, south of Jaipur, or rather, Amber. To guard this route developed the fort of Ranthambhore. It got its name from its situation above the Tambhore hill. This combined with the adjoining Rann Hill gave it its name. It was built by the Chauhan Rajputs in the tenth century and became their refuge after Prithvi Raj Chauhan was defeated in the battle for Delhi in 1192. It was lost to Muslim invaders and then recovered by the Rajputs and has had a chequered history since. The last major siege took place in the last year of the sixteenth century by none other than Emperor Akbar. Later it was taken over by the Jaipur throne after the heydays of the Mughals and was with them till independence. Today it occupies pride of place in the Ranthambhore wildlife sanctuary which it overlooks. Ranthambhore is one of the important Tiger Project Parks in India and it is one of the last remaining bast...