The Moonlit Sun (or Screwing With The Notion Of Objectivity)

The title of my poem, respectful Sirs, is The Moonlit Sun.

The Moonlit Sun? Ha ha, goodness, you must be joking boy, What age do you live in, we are men of science we are and we know better than that, do we not?

Oh, but you are old, old men and poor

That have not the gift of nonsense, beautiful nonsense

Oh, but do try dear Sirs and you shall see him as I do

He stands there, like a battle-ready warrior in his chariot

Eight horses made of fire, of fire and stone and light

Looking up into a star-studded night sky and his face is lit

Not by fire, kind Sirs, nay, but the soft, caressing glow of the Moon.

Tosh, boy, and stupidity! A diamond cannot be scratched as it is the hardest of them all and the Sun cannot be lit, it is the brightest of them all – use your head and get on with it!  

My head, polite Sirs, is where I seek, like all great scientists and poor fools of this age

We have found the particle, did you know, knowledgeable Sirs,

Higg’s boson has been found,

After searches high and low and now the scientists, bless them,

Face questions twice as profound

The answers to which, they shall delightedly tell you, they as yet do not know

For where is the wonder of seeking when all that is sought has been found

And where is the wonder of seeing when all that is to be seen is known!

Oh, open your eyes, obliging Sirs and you shall see him as I do

Tall and dark, a smile upon the lips...

...A discus in the right hand, a conch in the left and the Egyptians call me Ra

I stand here, basking in her light, her beautiful, mellow light

“Mellow coz’ its reflected light, reflected light!” they mutter

Ahhh, reflected light, that may be

But what a beauty, what a beauty is she!

Every night in that exquisite hour

Before the break of dawn (another story, that)

I stand here, the dutiful sun

I would rather bask in her glow (reflected, I know!)

For ever, and ever and more

But she has other places to see

And I shall follow where she goes…

You may think me a fool, wise Sirs

A charge I shall plead guilty to

But use your head, you said, and this is what it sees!

For one magical hour when the stars are all but gone

For one magical hour before his daily run

He stands in his chariot of fire,

A tall man of contented heart,

A smile on his lips and a glow on his face,

The Moonlit Sun.

Tiger - A Follow-up

So, here’s another side to the previous post (http://www.aapukuruvi.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/tiger.html). Injured tigers in the wild often turn man-eaters since men are typically easier prey. This brings these tigers into villages. In one such village in south India, a man-eater had killed a woman and was spotted by villagers who promptly called the officials. After a tense chase and some drama, the tiger was hunted down and shot – but not to kill, he was shot with a tranquiliser dart and taken to the local zoo. A stark, stark difference in attitude with the tiger in Cologne. This tiger had killed a woman – not in any attempt to escape – and killing it would therefore have been justified. But the villagers and the officials chose to tranquilise it and send it to a zoo. The headline for this article? “Man-eater tiger of HD Kote caught.” (http://www.deccanherald.com/content/274416/man-eater-tiger-hd-kote.html). It could just as easily have been “Village rid of murdering tiger” but thank goodness it wasn’t!

The other issue here is on my stand with zoos. I have had a lot of discussions with friends (and family!) since the previous post on whether zoos should be abolished. The main arguments for zoos are a)they protect endangered animals that human beings would otherwise kill in the wild and b) they raise awareness amongst the public. I shall answer the second argument first. Raising awareness I think is not as strong an argument nowadays as before – we have excellent cinematic and other visual media that provide us with a wonderful sense of the world these animals live in. In fact, I think it is rather demeaning to see predators being fed, and rather than raising awareness actually diminishes their majesty. This episode presents strong support for the first argument. What happens when a tiger is injured in the wild, by natural causes – is it then alright to ship it to a zoo? In such a case, I accept a zoo can serve as a nursing home – we cannot afford to let an injured tiger die since we have so few of them left, so our only option is to nurse them in a zoo – with a view to releasing them back in the wild if and as soon as possible (this may not be feasible in case of a man-eater since once they taste man-flesh they find that the preferable option!) . Do I still think zoos should be abolished? Yes – as zoos, as tourist attractions that cage healthy animals, they should. Their existence as tourist attractions lets us escape having to make the choice between having animals in the wild and letting them die out. However, I concede they could serve a good purpose as temporary nursing pens - or in this particular case as an old age home, for injured wild animals.

Would love your comments on the fascinating debate this is turning out to be!

Tiger

A tiger recently escaped from Cologne Zoo, in Germany, after killing a keeper, but was shot dead before it could reach the visitor’s enclosure (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/feedarticle/10407911). Quick stats from Wiki tell that at a conservative guess there are 4,000 tigers on this planet and 7 point something billion people. That’s 1.75 million people to every tiger on this planet. A kidnapped man’s attempts to escape after shooting his gaolers would be praised as bravery. A man’s fundamental right to freedom. The only situation where this man would have stones flung at him, would be if the rest of the human population were kidnappers. All the headlines for this news article about the tiger read “Tiger escapes, kills keeper.” The headlines could equally have read, “Tiger shot dead while attempting to escape from zoo.” And therein lies my point. Are we a world of kidnappers? Do I have a stand in this? Yes – abolish zoos. The argument that a zoo keeps an animal safe is weak and pathetic. We have laws to keep our animals safe in the wild, we just don’t have the will to do so. Or the guts to say out loud that we don’t need tigers, we don’t need wildlife, we don’t need jungles. In my opinion, humans will survive as a race even if every tree on this planet were cut down. But that is not what I want.

Crystal Ball

She stands alone in the giant hall, the high windows letting in fingers of mellow evening light. She turns so her hands and the object they're holding catch the light. Suddenly there are a thousand stars in the room with her, of a thousand different colours, dancing as if they're being juggled, as the multitude of crystal faces catch the light, play with it and send it back.She stares hypnotised at its thousand faces, at the dancing stars, at the evening light playing hide and seek with the crystals, marvelling at the fragility of this imaginary universe. It looks alive, indescribably beautiful. The stars dip and shudder as she trembles in fear at what she suddenly knows - the price for such beauty is transience.


She watches her hands part. The ball slips through the gap in her palms. She steps back as if stung. The thousand stars race down the walls in slow motion, momentarily painting the notches and cracks in the pillars on their way. After what seems like an eternity she hears a crash that seems to come from far far away. The thousand stars fly across the room and out through the windows like butterflies that have found their freedom.She looks down at her feet, in a mixture of morbid fascination, fear and detachment, at the sharp, jagged shards of crystal lying all around her, a broken cage devoid of light. She stands alone in the giant hall, the high windows letting in fingers of mellow evening light.

Self Promotion

New post, on a new blog - up at www.afullbackpack.blogspot.com - a travel blog I've just started along with Richard, a friend of mine. Do visit and comment! :)

HTH (or A Journalistically Plausible Piece of Nonsense)

Not to put too fine a point on it, but this guy’s the dog’s bollocks. Ah! Sorry, gentle readers, I have jumped the proverbial gun. I shall start at the beginning. I was nosing around in Matlab forums for a piece of code and I finally found a thread with the answers, provided by this guy who signs himself as HTH. This is probably a good point in the narrative to ward off any blood-seeking gender activists by the following disclaimer: It could well have been any other gender, but to hell with that – I’m sure it’s a guy. Anyway, so this guy had the answers. I allocated him space in my crowded brain and filed him as ‘the Matlab guy’. Three days later, on a search for a solution to pesky ArcGIS problem, I find the answer being provided by, no surprise, the very same bloke (sceptical readers can find him here: http://gis.stackexchange.com/questions/12284/how-do-you-find-linear-mileage". Now this is something, I said to myself. ArcGIS and Matlab? I promptly enlarged his allocated space in my brain, renamed him ‘the geek’ and moved on. Now, this is where it gets interesting – a week on, I was looking at a Python forum (don’t ask me, gentle readers, why I was switching between languages like an undecided fly – the answer is disappointingly banal) when who should provide the answers, but none other than the geek, HTH. He has since occupied half my brain (3/8 right and 1/8 left, to be specific) and goes by the alias ‘God.’ Now that his omnipotence, omnipresence and omnibenevolence have been conclusively proven (gosh, proving the existence of God doesn’t get easier, does it!), I shall go on to relate to you, my readers, one of his exploits.

HTH, for he is benevolent enough to allow free use of his Christian name, went on a date once, when in the Old Blighty. He acquiesced to his partner’s demands and went to a wine and cheese night despite being particularly unfond of blue cheese, because he’s a decent chap, but mainly because the disadvantages of a strong after-taste far outweighed the disadvantages of an empty eye-socket. And of course, a few extra glasses of wine on a date never did one any harm. As expected, the after-taste got less and less sharp and more and more likeable, helped along by the increasingly companionable attitude of his partner. And, Stilton is after all, the king of blue cheeses. To cut a long story short, the cows of Leicestershire and the grape vines of Bordeaux had their existence thoroughly justified that night. Now as we all know, the unmoderated consumption of Stilton before one sleeps can result in strange mental goings-on. In fact, there is a direct link between the consumption of Stilton and dreams populated with vegetarian crocodiles. If you do not believe this claim, gentle readers, I refer you to
"http://web.archive.org/web/20060115000115/http://www.cheeseboard.co.uk/news.cfm?page_id=240" and hope that this shall, for once and all, put your natural scepticism to rest.

In fact, that night, in the throes of a Stilton-induced dream, HTH saw himself wrestling with a Greater Flamingo while trying to save the life of a vegetarian crocodile that had got lost while attempting the Annual Nile Run and ended up in the Guinean mangrove swamps of Sierra Leone. HTH sat bolt upright in his bed. His partner murmured, what’s wrong, honey, all that cheese? Do you know something absolutely startling I read the other morning? Scientists have found, and I do not speak lightly or for that matter kid you, that a proven way of losing weight is to eat less! Can you believe that? If you can’t (my gentle readers), here is incontrovertible proof: "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-14882832". No, said HTH, it’s something far less startling. There is a mission I have to undertake. A vegetarian crocodile is in trouble. He seeks answers on ‘how to subdue a Greater Flamingo’ but doesn’t have access to the internet and cannot get on to the usual forums. Now you may be thinking, my dear, and be all too justified in doing so, that this is bunkum, but this lizard of the Nile is in fact a distant relative of his Indian cousin (mentioned here: "http://www.thehindu.com/arts/magazine/article2512203.ece") though he doesn't share his passion for rice balls." "Hmm," said his partner. "That might be because basmati rice well-cooked is the olfactory cousin of tiger piss. It's a territory thing." "What nonsense." "No, look here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11787325." "Goodness, these are strange times we live in. Gosh, I must go now. I’m sorry, darling, don’t keep the breakfast out. I’ll be back for lunch. Goodnight." And as the partner watched, HTH vanished.

He took a few minutes to get to Sierra Leone, having stopped off en-route in a Tesco’s for a fish-wrap, a Go Outdoors for an oxygen tank and a Nalli’s in Chennai for a lungi (for the uninitiated of you, a lungi is a colourful piece of cloth wrapped around the waist, worn by males). For the place he was going to was no ordinary West African town as you shall soon see for yourself. He landed, he wore the lungi and he laughed out loud until his lungs were empty, he fixed up the oxygen tank and laughed out loud for a few hours more. And only then were his omnipresence, omnibenevolence and omnipotence re-established. For, he was in the land of Lungi-Lol. Now if you do not believe the existence of said land, my gentle readers, I refer you here: "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-13688683". And he went forth, this God, to the swamp where the vegetarian crocodile had got lost, a victim of extensive landscape changes caused by profiteering land-grabbers. He gave the crocodile the fish-wrap and his I-phone, specially equipped for access to the internet regardless of where you are. The crocodile googled how to subdue a Greater Flamingo with a fish-wrap (I shall not bore you with detail for I am sure you are no longer the sceptics you once were). He found an answer signed HTH, and needless to say, all, my gentle readers, is well.

Hope That Helps.

Embrace

Inspired by a chat with a friend on embracing the unknown :)


A stream gentle yet hurried
With whirlpools, mini-falls, autumn leaves
Unsurprising, expected, yet pleasant to observe until a shadow
A shadow hints, teases,
Forces you out of an observers complacence,
There is more beneath the pleasantly surprising
An unknown waiting to be discovered, felt, embraced,
You resist,
Remaining on the bank,
After all you don’t know to swim
And there’s much joy in watching the water, the leaves,
Yet the undertow beckons,
A whisper formed, meant for you
Reaches you on the crisp breeze, special, irresistible,
And you dive in
You who don’t know to swim
Abandoning thought, embracing the unknown
A splash breaks the surface,
Ripples emerging from the darkness beneath
The stream hurries on gently,
Whirlpools, leaves and all.