Subject: RT-5 Date: Tue, 28 May 2002 15:36:36 -0400 From: sankar Dearly beloved friends, Here is the latest installment of this mixture of serious and silly. Hope you enjoy reading them. (If not, please let me know) with felicitations, Sankar 1. Have been thinking a bit about this thingammy called life and death lately. I am a vegetarian but don't feel much better than all those carnivores out there. Because everything I enjoy comes at the expense of somebody or something. Somebody's sweat and toil, somebody's life, somebody's time has been sacrificed somewhere. Looks like that is the nature of life. Someone's loss or death is someone else's gain or birth. My parents sacrificed their time for me. Hiking in rock creek park, was thinking of the discovery of the bones of Chandra Levy. It was found only because some dog was looking for food. Looking for fish in the creek made me think of salmon that swim several miles upstream to lay their eggs, perhaps so their young ones can just float downstream to the ocean. In our body cells die constantly and new cells are born. The sun is slowly burning itself out so the planets can live. Maybe the best thing to do is to think of everything as cells in one universal body, so the death of one cell and the growth of a new one doesn't mean someone's loss and someone else's gain, but rather just a part of the life of the whole body. The native americans would offer a prayer to the soul of a dead animal before eating it. Perhaps that is the best way, in case you have to eat something to survive --to think that the soul of that animal is the same as our own soul. The idea that the whole universe is a continuous sacrifice is there in a lot of religions and philosophies. But of course, in practice one would rather offer sacrifice than accept it. 2. While hiking in rock creek park, sometimes it feels as if you are in a jungle, if only for a few moments before the silence is broken by a chainsaw or a siren. maybe this is the future of forests--we will have to find ways to live in the forest without destroying it by somehow hiding houses and roads within the forest. It is already happening in Africa and India. But that would mean the end of the pristine wilderness-- things that made human imagination soar before it was tamed by urban comfort and coziness. Nothing to inspire a Homer or a Kalidasa to imagine wild adventures and strange monsters -- atleast until we find ways to quickly travel to distant planets. 3. It is surprising how often even the most complicated machines respond to the random whack to the head. So many times I have wrestled with soda machines or computers or remote controls until I get thoroughly frustrated and simply bang it in the head--and then boom! It starts working again. Too bad you can't do it with people. 4. I want to make a collection of words and phrases that define a whole experience--for instance, a movie or a book or a band...For starters, here are a few well-known words and phrases that completely define a movie: "I'll be back," "hasta la vista, baby," "I see dead people," "Life is like a box of chocolates," "Make my day," "Elementary, Mr. Watson"...... 5. And a couple of news items that made me pause and laugh: Here is P. Diddy (Sean "Puffy" Combs) in a Newsweek interview talking about whether he was hurt that Halle Berry didn't thank him when she was awarded the Oscar for "Monster's ball." It took me a few seconds to realise that he is actually saying something very nice: "...And truthfully, she was the only one butt naked on the screen - she didn't have to thank me or anyone else for that." And here is a gem from the Shaq Daddy, talking about his team losing game 1 in which Kobe Bryant didn't play well due to food poisoning: "We didn't lose that game because Kobe was shaky. We're at home now, our chefs, our food, our wives." -----------------------------6798744112036223637511268467 Content-Disposition: form-data; name="op-upload" Upload Files