Annual Melancholy

Ah.. Another year just whooshes out of our hands, as we gear up to face the heat of another one, hopefully not as forgettable(purely subjective) as this one. Being the much celebrated fan of desultory lists that I am, I propose to lay down a certain set of events that have shaped my attitude on life, the universe and everything, whipping me up as a more concrete and credible cynic than I was previously. Let's begin, at the beginning.

* The most unmemorable New year's eve honked my nose and poked me in the eye on 31's December 2008. After politely severing myself from the tripe of a new year's party that the clods in my block of flats put together, with as much courtesy as I could feign, I braced myself to face the fateful evening with literally nothing to do. Being the heart and soul of any party that I am (to be read in a scathingly sarcastic tone), this predicament made me take a sharp breath in and snort at the possibility of not being tormented by dunces who prance around with a full bladder, claiming that's their move, and keep asking me why I don't smile often or laugh at their lifeless punchlines at the end of inane drivel they call jokes. Anyway, even though I was away from such high-spirited magical pony-riding clotheads, my spirits did little to lift itself as I morosely gazed out to Chennai's lifeless skyline from my terrace.

* As I convinced myself that the next semester would be better than the previous, my tactics of self-delusion were shattered as a certain gentleman(name not divulged for obvious reasons;actually if you're in my department, you'll know anyway) strutted into our classroom. Apart from staying married to a 70's style projector and pointing fingers at it strategically to impede ideal viewing, he(or she? in tone with said teacher's anonymity, the gender has been marginally obscured, if you're smart, you'll figure it out, if not, you'll figure it out anyway) did nothing to lift our spirits. His classes were ideal for solving crossword puzzles, something I would regret doing a few months later, June, to be precise, and general birdwatching from the vantage point my seat in class offered. The classes were more or less the reason I began to love life as much as I do now (this too, to be read in a scathingly sarcastic tone)

* As that term ended, I promised myself that the ensuing summer would be most idyllic and uneventful. Well, you want one, but you get another. I was coerced into a project at IIT, and shuttling between here and there was a most harrowing experience. Not because, the commute was long, not because we had to work, but because it was like rubbing in the fact that I could have got into this place if only I studied harder. Moreover, I hated to be reminded of the fact that how a campus can be if it's located at the right place. With spotted deer grazing on one side and huge trees dotting the landscape, it was a stark contrast to my campus with dusty heatwaves, prickly semi-arid flora and a unique assortment of blood-thirsty cattle. As much as cows are revered in Hinduism and held in high regard, as far as I'm concerned, cows reek. They are on the top of my list of pests to be exterminated when I take over the world followed by the afore-mentioned professor and a couple more, just for kicks. It wasn't all bad either. Trips to IIT spawned a great deal of ingenious ideas like sniping sitting on an elephant in IIT, and many more. Acquaintance with a professor who wasn't mid-bogglingly dense was an added perk, a rare phenomenon on this side of the world. This made me realise you don't get what you want, hell, you never do. Life stinks.

* A new term, a new hostel, a new room, the same old idiots. This was the running tagline of the new term. My room number being 42 did little to lift my spirits, the hostel building grimly reminded us all of Auschwitz. Barely in the campus, I unscrupulously skived off classes for apparently no reason at all, was at home more than I was in the college. With the swine-flu scares and what-not, it turned out to be quite eventful, as teachers mercilessly appended an endless list of 'a's against my name in the attendance register. As the term drew to a close, I was frequently spotted hitting myself in the head for my past indulgences, dreading the inevitable. Anyway, at the end of the day, the inevitable never happened(irony noted). Moral of the story: My actions have no consequences, I'm that unimportant in the grand scheme of things.

* After pestering my parents for nearly a year, I finally got myself a laptop that wouldn't fry itself trying to add two and two. Noting that my previous laptop was an elaborate contraption involving a glorified calculator and a broken typewriter, it was a giant leap forward. But I still found reason to be unhappy, the reason being, laptop: too little, too late. With hardly a week to spare before my exams, a laptop was the first thing on my list of artifacts designed to wreck my grades. With a great deal of abstinence, I denied myself the temporal pleasures of gaming by stripping my laptop completely of all things worthwhile having. Bereft of entertainment and biting my fingers off for want of a better job to do, I truly appreciated the meaning of the phrase, 'A slip between the cup and the lip'.

Finally, as this year draws to a close, I again find myself with nothing to do, the same old terrace, same old skyline. The same old apes in my block have organised another celebration of mediocrity, cheap street music and second rate events to please no one.

P.S: If I have missed anymore depressing events, feel free to remind me in the comments section as we celebrate another year in the era of utter pointlessness.

A Planet's Plea

I don't know why I'm thinking so much these days, I think it's got to do with all the free time, you know, with this being holidays and all. Anyway, what has been plaguing my mind is the incessant talk about climate change. I know there are many heated emotions involved when it comes to being eco-friendly and all that, but I wanted to say this anyway. What do we know about global-warming? What do we know about weather patterns? How can we decide the cause of climate change when there are close to a million variables involved? We have no way of making sure why our planet is getting warmer. All we do know is that the earth is never stable. It is always changing. The whole universe is a giant cosmic symphony in dynamic equilibrium. There is no reason for the earth to be otherwise. We've had ice ages, four of therm huge, in the past, we've also had intensely warm periods in between. Antarctica was a lush temperate haven once, it was still close to the poles then. Why is it a frozen desert today? We've had mass extinctions, nearly ninety five percent of all species disappeared at the end of the Permian era. It was the worst mass extinction till date, and there is no reason why another one shouldn't happen. Whatever happens, unless the sun dies, or perhaps even then, life will go on. It is resilient. It can adapt, it can evolve. It never stays the same. We've been in this grand scheme of things for a mere wink of a few thousand years. How can we know the sheer magnitude of this ever-mutating planet of ours? We might be in the middle of a mass extinction ourselves, we might survive, we might not. Most probably we will survive, advancing sea levels are the least of our problems. The maximum we lose is a chunk of land creating space shortages throughout. We perhaps might not have vast open spaces, but we'll still survive in a dense closely packed society that's busy and crowded to the point of choking. We already live in such an environment, and we call it the triumph of civilisation, a metropolis. Large cities symbolise everything that will remain under such an event. We already are fascinated by busy roads and glittering skylines, we'd hardly know the difference. It would just seem like a leap in the rate of urbanisation. One might ask, what about agriculture, we'd need vast open spaces for agriculture, I'll tell you, you underestimate human ingenuity. The Japanese are already farming on their roofs, we could do the same. The Japanese economic miracle will be repeated in every country. If you look at it from that angle, it is not all that apocalyptic after all. But then, we have no idea how the earth reacts to the smallest of changes that appear seemingly insignificant. The outcomes have not always been good though. Let me go back to the most favourite example of paleontologists worldwide to show how bad things can go. First, a large meteorite crashed onto Siberian flat lands. This would no doubt kill most life in that region and some around a large radius through pyroplastic fumes and some more in the nuclear winter that follows. This would be one of the day to day mass extinctions like the infamous K-T extinction that killed terrestrial and aquatic dinosaurs. Things would have normalised in a few years or so, with a lacuna of life left behind filled almost immediately with new forms of life. But things didn't end there, Siberia happened to be a weakness in the earth's crust and the meteorite made it a lava trap. One would have seen vast curtains of fire shooting out for nearly as far as the eye can see. Something like Mordor in the LOTR films. Things would have heated up unimaginably at ground zero, obviously, and it would have been a hell in full swing for life in and around Siberia. Besides being instantaneously fried, evaporated, cooked and burnt at the same time, the plumes of dust would have cooled the earth drastically killing off cold-blooded creatures everywhere except near the equator and a radius of tolerant temperatures around Siberia itself. This nuclear winter lasted a tad longer than a normal meteorite crash and because of the volcanic traps, tonnes of carbon-di-oxide were pumped into the atmosphere. By the end of the nuclear winter that followed, which was after a few decades from the impact itself, nearly three percent of the earth's atmosphere was carbon-di-oxide. This would raise global temperatures by five to six degrees celsius. This is almost fatal for every living thing, but not nearly enough to kill almost every form of life. But it was enough to warm up the seas. The oceans then were a minefield of frozen methane, anaerobic life-forms rules the deep seas. The methane was almost instantaneously frozen due to the depth and vast quantities of this toxic gas lay frozen underneath. As the waters warmed up, these glaciers began to thaw, releasing tonnes of methane into the atmosphere. Methane as we know is twice as effective at green housing radiation as carbon-di-oxide is, and this raised temperatures even further, the last nail in life's coffin, temperatures shot up to nearly seventy degrees celsius in some parts of the planet. One now understands the domino effect that brought a huge cataclysm that almost wiped out life from the planet. But there's nothing we can do about it. If the whole planet burns, we can we go? It is indeed an unsettling thought, but we need to accept the fact that things like these happen all the time. There have been dozens of mass extinctions in the past and the one that might be happening now is no exception. It need never be a result of human activity. We know that only 0.035% of the atmosphere is CO2, and of late. it has risen to about 0.04%. This change is hardly enough to change global temperatures gathering from what we know. But there are plenty of other factors involved. The tilt in the axis is proposed to be the reason for the ice ages and the warmer periods. We can never really find out. The Suns orbit also plays a part, but we don't know what part. It is all really hazy as to why our temperatures are rising, if at all they are, and they need to rise uniformly. Many countries like Iceland have actually cooled. Greenland's melting, So is Western Antarctica, but Eastern Antarctican ice shelves are actually thickening. So global warming is not global in it's literal sense. Even the rate at which it rises shows no discernible pattern, some regions heating up faster than others. This is not characteristic of the greenhouse effect. Winds distribute CO2 concentrations more or less equally on a macroscopic scale and yet changes are visible even over broad vast regions. What we take are small scale readings and average them out but what we really need is a temperature gradient. Even if we establish that the earth is, on a broad scale, warming up, we don't know how much of it is human activity. We have previously tried to rectify changes in the environment, things have only ended in disaster. For example, take the Masai Mara in Southern Africa. Elephant and rhino preservation centres were established. Elephants thrived, rhinos did not. Why? Because both the species were kept in such close proximity that they started competing with each other for resources, elephants were successful, rhinos were not. Moreover, indigenous elephant populations were nearly wiped out due to hunting and local clashes before the park was established, and elephants from other parts of Africa were let loose, most of them young ones of more or less the same age. Elephant society is complex, very comparable to ours, and we did not understand this fact. This made these young elephants grow without a firm check from the other big elephants, which were all killed for ivory, and these adolescents grew into aggressive, bullying males that harassed females and other animals. One of these other animals was the rhino. These animals systematically hunted down the rhinos, reducing their populations even further. This problem was resolved later by importing gigantic tuskers, the old experienced ones, that would act as a stopper to these boisterous out of control adolescents. This problem, however, was resolved so late that rhino conservation is an optimist's dream today. What would have been a normal extiction was just accelerated by human intervention. Who knows, the rhinos might have bounced back if we hadn't intervened. We think preservation is maintaining status quo. We feel that cordoning off lands will stop them from dying out. What we fail to realise is that species disappear all the time, only to be replaced by new ones. We need to understand something before we declare it's broken and try to fix it. I'm saying all this because we shouldn't jump to conclusions about our planet. It is complex, dynamic and chaotic. What we do today will have huge consequences tomorrow. I read something about covering glaciers with a mirror-like material to reflect the sun's rays. I'm very earnest when I say, please don't do anything like it, it'll most probably end in disaster. We have no way of knowing what might happen to a planet that reflects most of the heat back into space. The stakes are very high this time, our survival is questioned, and the best thing to do is let the earth do it's job. Only nature can do it's job the best. Let the world run like it always has, let us bother, like every other life form, about changing ourselves to fit into our surroundings. The other way round only brings about catastrophe. If left to itself, we at least have a chance of survival. It's the only planet we've got, please don't mess with it. It'll spell doom if we don't know what we're doing and nine times out of ten, we don't. Leave the planet alone.