Fueling Thoughts

IF ONLY Guns don’t kill people, people kill people!! Alcohol doesn’t kill; people just die from liver cirrhosis, Tobacco trees never choked anyone; people just die from lung cancer & Helmets definitely don’t safe lives as a person dies from old age anyway..  Judging life’s progress by reminiscing the various sweet first times and “would be happy to forget” last ones, there are also the memories of different individuals with whom, whether willingly or otherwise, we spent any length of time. And surprisingly, while the nice, pleasant and good, are thought of only once in a while, it is usually the memory of the unsavoury ones that come cropping up every now and then. For me one such living example of God’s follies was of all things, an editor. I am not taking about Rajan here, but a certain individual who once headed an Auto journal for a short duration before he successfully drove it into the graveyard of dead publications. My association with him stemmed fro

The following article had been carried in the U.S. publication  Whole Life Times  and had been reproduced from its website. The article is also mentioned in the database of  the Australian National Library.   When I boarded the last bus from Tezpur to Rangapara, in the heart of India's north-eastern  state of Assam, the orb of the rising moon already dominated the winter evening. I knew a  Purnima (full moon) was approaching, more so because I was on my way to attend an  obscure Buddhist festival. And these are inevitably held on full-moon nights.  When the bus finally moved, the tiredness and irritation of the day's travel gave way to the  intent of studying the moonlit countryside. This lasted until the vehicle turned off the  highway to the side roads, which in daylight resembled nothing so much as a bombed airfield,  were even worse in darkness. The moon I had so enthusiastically planned to observe kept  bobbing up and down outside my window, disapp

snake oil  (dictionary.com) noun 1.  any of various liquid concoctions of questionable medical value sold as an all-purpose curative,especially by traveling hucksters. 2.  Slang. deceptive talk or actions; hooey; bunkum.  From commuters puttering to work on miserly two-wheelers, to those who splurge on the latest imported four-wheeled status symbol, albeit a diesel version and the industrial sector for whom it comprises a major recurring expenditure, high prices of Fuel are a painful reality for all. However, whenever a technology that promises to save a few litres of the all-precious fluid is announced, it is instantly relegated to the category of Snake Oil Salesmen, in which none but the most gullible would believe in or actually spend any money on.  But do they work? The only question ever uttered about any of these wonder devices, additives or technologies is invariably “does it work?” Unfortunately, there is no single universal answer, as the field is varied

Sometimes in the autumn of 2010 I was flying from Mumbai to my hometown Guwahati, as usually on the cheapest air-ticket with a tradeoff in having a long looping route, via Kolkata and Agartala. The short stretch between Agartala and Guwahati is actually a quick aerial hop over Meghalaya, which if luck accords, would remain cloud-cover free offering the sight of marvelous verdant mountainsides, steep gorges and snaking brown rivers below. It was during this flight, when thanks to exceptionally clear weather I noticed the scattered pockets of deforestation on seemingly inaccessible hillsides, ones caused not by commercial logging but by the nearby villager’s mundane need for firewood. Deforestation; caused by indispensable human need for Firewood, an endemic problem of all the mountain areas of India.   I remembered instantly how once as a guest of the venerable T.G.Rinpoche at Tawang in Arunachal Pradesh (another mountainous State with pockmarked hillsides), my host who was a mo