The Story Of God With Morgan Freeman (National Geographic, Friday, 10pm)

I am sure most of us have wondered about this sooner or later in our lives, and more often so in recent times - how can so much evil exist in the world created by God? That was the topic of discussion in yesterday's episode.

So it came as no surprise that instead of discussing the concept of evil in a particular religion, the episode started off with an interview of a psychopath - someone who is behind the bars for raping and killing many women. Freeman asked him why he did that over and over again and the killer simply said that it was not pre-meditated. He did it because he felt like doing it at that moment each time and he was not able to control his impulses. When Freeman asked if he felt any remorse, the killer replied that he doesn't feel that. Then he went on to say that he is wired differently from the rest - that answer sounded a bit rehearsed to me. But then we were told that the brains of some people are structured differently and they show more inclination towards such antisocial behavior. It was shocking when the expert said that earlier the age at which this could be detected was around 15-16 but lately it has come down to 12-13 or so.

The next stop was Luxor - the tomb of someone called Menna. Here the Egyptian concept of the Judgement Day was laid out in all its glory, so to speak - the heart of the dead person being weighed and the decision made to send him to heaven or hell. One look at it and you would know the origin of the expressions such as 'with a heavy heart' and 'person of pure heart'.

The city of Varanasi with its Pishach Mochan temple was shown next. Here people offer Pooja and do rituals to make sure that their ancestors' spirits are at peace because it is believed that these restless spirits create all sorts of issues in the lives of their living kin. I watched in utter disbelief as people cooked food and threw it in a pond that looked sickeningly green as an offering to the departed. I cannot be sure but I think I saw a dead animal or two in the pond. Horrifyingly, people were seen taking dips in that green mess. Hell, I wouldn't put a toe in it even if my life depended on it. It was sad to see this dark side of the religion that I am born and brought up in. :-( I guess the only silver lining was the message that we all are capable of doing good as well as evil. It is upto us to decide what to be. And that evil can be brought over to th good side.

The previous episodes of this series have covered ideas in religions like Hinduism, Islam, Christianity, Judaism and Buddhism. For the first time, the Zoroastrian religion was covered in this episode. I did a double take as Freeman was ushered into the Fire Temple. At least in India, non-Parsis are not allowed entry into the Agyaris, as these Fire Temples are called in India. I didn't know that the concept of the devil originated from this religion and made its way into Islam, Christianity and Judaism. Here too the message was that good and evil exists in us all. Sadly, the concept of the devil wasn't explored more - except for a discussion with a priest about the Original Sin.

An interesting experiment conducted in a school was the next to be featured. A group of children were each asked to throw a dart and promised a reward if it hit the designated spot - the only condition being that they have to throw the dart over their shoulders. A hidden camera in the room recorded their movements but the children didn't know about it. So many of them chose to cheat because they thought that no one was watching them. A second group of children, however, were shown an empty chair and introduced to an invisible character called Princess Alice who would be watching over them. Interestingly, but not surprisingly, the children did what they were told to do, this time honestly - because they thought that someone was watching them. One little girl actually patted on the chair to see if she could feel the princess sitting there but she also threw the dart honestly. That makes you wonder - is God just a concept created to make sure that people towed the line? Will people be more evil if they stopped believing in God?

The Buddhism teaching that the source of evil is inside us and we all have to make an effort to locate and eliminate it was mentioned. And the episode concluded with an interview of a person who once was a neo-nazi skinhead but has since mended his ways.

The next offering in this series is about Miracles. Looking forward to it. :-)

These days, there are two ads that have been making me stop whatever I have been trying to get done during the ad breaks and watch. The Vodafone ad shows a son on a video chat with his mom who is at an airport. He asks her to approach a counter and hand over the phone to the person there. When she does that, the son requests the lady to give his mom a window seat. When the lady hands her the phone back, the mom smiles and remarks that though she knows everything her son acts like this. I just love this ad every time I watch it. It perfectly captures the classic mother-son relationship in the Indian context. The son is protective, a bit over-protective perhaps, of his mother. He wants only the best for her and thinks that he knows the best, afflicted as he is by the typical Indian male superiority syndrome. The mom is proud that her son cares for her but also wants to do things on her own, kind of pushing back against his patronizing in her gentle way. I just love the way she smilingly says 'My son is like that, what to do?' Absolutely brilliant!

The other ad is of Dainik Bhaskar. Of course, I am yet to see it with the Mute button off but I doubt if that has diluted the message in any way. We see a school classroom where a father barges in and orders his daughter to come with him. The small child reluctantly picks up her stuff and trots off after him. Her classmates follow her. We see the disappointment and disapproval writ large over the face of the teacher. As the child starts to walk away from the school one of her classmates puts her arms around her friend's waist in an effort to keep her back. The rest of the classmates follow her lead and soon the father is engaged in a sort of a tug-of-war with the classmates over his daughter. The teacher looks on with a smile on his face while the father gives up the fight. The children all fall onto the ground and the child's friend hands triumphantly hands her school bag to her. The message is that we have to insist on bringing about the change and the world will change. The skeptic in me does ask - what will happen when the father doesn't send the child to school the next day? But I choose to ignore it and smile with the children.

These days I have been acting like a Black Hole as far as Whatsapp goes. I am reading what I am receiving but I am not forwarding any of it. It has been two weeks since my last forwarding and I feel blessed already. I have been a late follower of Whatsapp - compelled to use it because almost all of my friends have joined it and no one would SMS anymore. Also there is no denying the fact that it allows me to stay in touch with dear friends who have moved out of India. I remember being overjoyed (sure took me to my childhood days!) when merely 5-6 hours after sending my mobile number to a friend on LinkedIn, she pinged me on Whatsapp. She would have laughed out aloud if she had seen me grin ear-to-ear. Then the floodgates opened as friend after friend found me on Whatsapp and began sending jokes, cute pictures, funny videos. I am guilty as charged as I consumed and forwarded them in droves. But I knew that in a quiet corner of my mind a tiny voice had already started ringing the alarm bells - watch out or you will become part of the zombie group that you used to laugh at. It was only a matter of time before I decided to pay heed. It was not a question of 'if' but of 'when'.

That 'when' happened about 2 weeks back when I had kept my silenced phone away, deliberately, for an hour. When I finally dared to check it, there were 16 messages from 3 chats. I am sure in the world of Whatsapp it probably is on a scale even below minimum but for me it was nothing short of a wakeup call. I opened the chats up and calmly deleted all the videos without as much as glancing at them. I muted some groups for a year (why don't they have an option to Mute them for eternity?), exited rest of them and cleared all the jokes, images and quotes that I had planned on forwarding. I briefly toyed with the idea of requesting my friends not to send me anything henceforth except for a personal message but then decided against it. Amazingly, as if they have sensed my decision through cosmic energy or whatever it is that binds all of us together, they too have gone radio silent.

You remember that alien from 'The Independence Day' telling the US President in no uncertain terms that he means business - "Peace? No Peace". I used to feel like that earlier. Now, I really feel like chanting 'Om Shanti Om' :-)

My Struggle II - E06, X-Files, Event Series

The tagline for this episode should have been 'Apocalypse Now' instead of 'This Is The End'. Dean Winchester would have put it more succinctly with his trademark 'Seriously?'.

The episode spins the premise of all the alien-related episodes of the original series - that the aliens have been kidnapping humans to study them and the government is keeping this information from the public to avoid wide-spread panic - on its head. Now we are told that an alien DNA has been injected into the American citizens as a part of a wider conspiracy to shoot their immune systems to hell so they, and the world along with them, can be eliminated in an outbreak of a contagion. This is purging of the earth where only the privileged few - like Dana Scully - are destined to survive. You can almost hear the conspiracy theorists blurting out to each other 'Haven't I been saying this for years?'. :-)

It was good to see Agent Monica Reyes after such a long time but hard to accept that she chose to remain with the Cigarette Smoking Man - even if to sabotage the Syndicate from within. I bet Agent Doggett must be feeling totally left out :-) I must say that after this I lost the plot completely what with Scully and Einstein racing against time to locate the alien DNA in Scully's body using various medical theories.

Though the episode, and the mini-series, ended bringing up excellent possibilities of further development of this plot, I can see that when, and if, the show does come back, it will not have much scope for the plain-vanilla cases. It then risks sounding like countless Hollywood offerings in this genre.

अर्ज किया है.....

सोच रहा हू के कुछ दोस्तोंपर मुकदमा कर ही दू
इसी बहाने, हर तारीख पर उनसे मुलाकात तो होगी

(Forwarded)

The E-Myth Revisited - Michael Gerber

How to Think Like a Computer Scientist - Allen Downey

Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength -  Roy F. Baumeister, John Tierney

Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World - Jane McGonigal

The Story Of God With Morgan Freeman - Who Is God

A controversial question. In fact, the most important question since the time more than one religion came into existence on earth - what with each of them claiming to know the answer or at least part of it. I was curious to see which aspects the program would cover.

It began with a story in the land of Egypt - of a pharaoh named Akhenaten, who ordered that the worshiping of all existing Gods be stopped and only the Sun God be worshiped - through him. Needless to say, the priests weren't pleased but they did as told while he was alive. The moment he passed away, no efforts were spared to destroy almost every possible sign of this Sun-worship and the boy-king who ascended to the throne, Tutankhamen, was forced to tow the line. That was the end of perhaps world's first religion that spoke of one God.

Most of us have seen Stonehenge but at least I hadn't heard of the durrington walls which is a structure that lies in the same vicinity but predates Stonehenge. It was a massive structure of underground giant stones erected to face a particular group of hills. Alas, its story is lost in the mist of time. But perhaps it was an early form of religion that worshiped nature.

Freeman next took the viewers to Varanasi and the Hindu religion of multiple Gods - each one of them with a different form, story and purpose. Ganesha, the well-known elephant-headed God was mentioned and then Freeman attended a Pooja ceremony for a deity called Lalitha. The city of Jerusalem, which is significant for Judaism, Christianity and Islam was the next stop. Here I learnt an interesting story about the Islamic prayer call. It is said that one of Prophet's followers heard it for the first time in his dreams and told the Prophet about it when he woke up. If you hear it in a noisy city, you would probably move on, unless you happen to be a Muslim of course. But last year I had been to Munnar when on one evening I was sitting in the back garden of the cottage as the sun went down in the hills. As the evening turned to night, a prayer call was heard from the village below. It sounded so reassuring and calming that I was sad when it stopped. Funnily enough though, its association with God did bring back images of fragrant temple premises and elaborate Pooja rituals to my mind. It is true that none of us are born with a religion but for most of us whatever religion we are brought up in remains forever a part of our lives. The Navajo ritual called the Kinaalda ceremony which is conducted when a girl is 12 years old was covered next along with their belief in the Navajo deity called the Changing Woman.

The last part of the program covered a relatively new field of science - Neuro-theology. It studies how brain reacts to spiritual or religious practices or thoughts. Freeman was injected with a solution that contained a special radioactive dye that would show up which parts of his brain get activated and then was asked to meditate. His brain was then studied and it was found that the frontal lobes were activated - here I must say that I might not have described it accurately. But the gist is that these studies have shown that a specific part of the brain shows activity when religious matters or religion are discussed or thought of. The catch is that this happens with only people who believe in God. If an atheist thinks of God, his brain does not show any activity in that region because he/she does not believe in God. Fascinating, isn't it?

So, it looks like unless the Almighty decides to make a grand appearance on earth we all have to find our own answer to this question - be it a single God, multiple Gods or nature as God. I guess some questions are best left unanswered. What say?

"Babylon" - E05, X-Files, Event Series

Contemporary? Definitely. But X-Files? Probably not. That was how I read this episode of the Event Series. Sure, nothing will showcase that the X-Files are truly part of the 21st century like a group of terrorists blowing up themselves and others in a big bang. But Mulder getting the required information from a comatose terrorist while being under the 'supposed' influence of some hallucinogenic mushrooms is way 'out-there' for me. And I am not even talking about the whole thing being nothing short of the Placebo effect. I really struggled to make sense of the scene in which Mulder sees the dying terrorist in the arms of his mother in a ship piloted by the Cigarette Smoking Man (I have always hated him!). When I couldn't, I told myself that it probably means nothing more than an image conjured up by Mulder's "drug-addled" mind. When I later searched on the net, I found that that scene has some biblical reference. I really wonder how non-Christian folks are supposed to understand all this?

Just when I thought that the episode has ended, Scully and Mulder were shown walking along holding hands. It has been quite a few years since the original series was re-telecast in India. But I doubt if I remember the agents doing something like this back then. A sign of changing times, perhaps? Another such sign was the presence of more of Asian faces in the cast of the mini-series. I am sure I saw one even in the Homeland Security team that troups in to confront Scully and Miller. I have forgotten the name of the Indian nurse working in Scully's hospital but I remember thinking at that time that it was definitely a masculine Indian name, unless the nurse in question happened to be a Punjabi (which she didn't seem to be!) - they have a 'Kaur' after the masculine name to signify that the person in question is a woman. I sincerely hope that Mr. Trump didn't watch this episode - he would have wondered if these 'aliens' were legally in the country or not.

And as if all this wasn't enough, Mulder appeared to hear a sound of trumpets by the end of the episode. I guess Lucifer and Amara should leave the humans and angels in peace and start looking for God in the X-Files. The truth definitely seems to be out here as far as the divine presence goes!

P.S. This episode had a scene in which Einstein (wow!), Miller, Scully and Mulder get introduced to each other as 'Special Agent'. I might have asked this before but why does the FBI have only 'Special Agents'? Are there any agents who are just 'Agents'? :-)

The Chitters - Supernatural, Season 11

Honestly, I don't know quite what to make of this episode. It seemed based on something straight out of the pages of a book like 'Creatures of the Magical Kingdom' from the curriculum of Hogwarts. What's next? Pixies? Unicorns? giant man-eating Slugs?

And the biology, or the lack of the same, was completely baffling. The Bisaans do not seem to have any reproductive organs, hence their need for the human bodies to bring about the next generation. But then there are eggs (how?), so whatever emerges from these eggs has bodies. How then are they able to possess humans? Why do the hosts die when the eggs are laid? None of these questions were answered. I guess the writers wanted some breathing room while they tried to figure out what to do with Amara, Lucifer and God. I don't mind the cases - even for the rest of the season. I would be glad not to have to lay my eyes upon either Amara or Lucifer. But hey, you gotta make them cases more interesting, and not something that feels like re-heated versions of dinner leftovers. It would have been nice to see Jessy and Cesar team up with Sam and Dean on future hunting trips. They have been going at it by themselves since Bobby, Kevin and Charlie bid adieu. Alas! That was not to be.

BTW, I hope the Winchesters have added information about these Chitters to the Lore so that the next generation of hunters, if there is one, doesn't have to reinvent the wheel.

मॅजेस्टिक बुक डेपोच्या विलेपार्ले शाखेत पुण्याच्या देशमुख आणि कंपनीतर्फे पुस्तक प्रदर्शन भरवण्यात आलं आहे. इरावती कर्वे, , विभावरी शिरुरकर, वि.स. खांडेकर, ना. धों. ताम्हनकर ह्यांची पुस्तकं उपलब्ध आहेत. हे प्रदर्शन ३० जूनपर्यंत सकाळी १० ते संध्याकाळी ८ ह्या वेळेत खुलं आहे.

(लोकसत्ता मधील जाहिरात )

WSD Book and Garage Sale on 11 to 13th May, 2016 - 10 am to 8 pm

The Welfare of Stray Dogs (WSD) is an animal welfare NGO that sterilizes and immunizes stray dogs. We also have an adoption program for abandoned pets and pariahs, an on-site first–aid program and an education and awareness program in schools, colleges, streets and slums. WSD has so far sterilized more than 51,000 stray dogs and impacted the lives of over a lakh and forty thousand through first-aid, immunization and adoption.

WSD spends Rs 7, 00, 000 per month on the above activities and we depend on the largesse of donors to fund these activities.

One of the methods of raising funds to sustain our costs is our  regular garage/jumble sales and we are having a BOOK and GARAGE SALE from May 11 to 13, 2016(Wednesday to Friday) from 10 am to 8 pm.

Venue : LAXMI BAUG HALL, Avantikabai Gokhale Road, (Auto Spare Parts Market Lane), Off Lamington Road, Near Opera House, Girgaum, Mumbai - 4

On Sale -Books, Crockery, Cutlery, Paintings, Kitchenware, Toys, Knick knacks, Artefacts, Glassware, CDs, DVDs, Gift Items at Throw Away Prices.

You will find a treasure trove of BOOKS on various subjects including Children, Fiction, Non-fiction, Self-Help, Hobbies, Poetry and New Releases books at Special Prices.
Special items: Evolution clothes dryer, wood/glass coffee table, wood/glass cabinet, L Pavoni coffee mill, handheld blender, automatic pet feeder, 27 inch Aiwa TV (not flat screen), old glass lamp shades, Yamaha keyboard, guitar, Ab Exerciser bench, 3-seater upholstered sofa

The proceeds of the Garage Sale would be used to fund the above–mentioned programs.