The old Cherokee

One evening an old Cherokee told his grandson about a battle that goes on inside people. He said, "My son, the battle is between 2 wolves.

"One is Evil. It is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority and ego.

The other is God. It is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith."

The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather, "Which wolf wins?"

The old Cherokee simply replied, "The one you feed."

Economics for dummies - Part II (Petro Bucks)

In my post some time back I had talked about how the people of Squanderville sold bonds to Thriftsville to support their squanders. However that is not the only option Squandervillians have. Below is an oversimplified version of the other option that a country can take. It is, what I call a dummies version of this story. Read along to know what we are headed for.

Any sane civilization with some self-respect and dignity eventually goes to war, killing its own people and leaving the survivors in suffering. It was in those times that the United States of Warriors realized that they can make some money. Warriors supplied arms and ammunitions to its allies for gold, by the time the war was over, Warriors had amassed enough gold that their currency was seen as more stable than Gold. Oil, which everybody needs began to be traded in WarBucks (Currency of Warriors) just because the currency was percieved stable. The demand for WarBucks, therefore started rising, Warriors made use of the oppurtunity and started printing WarBucks and bought stuff with them. In effect they bought stuff for free! (If you are wondering why cant everyone do this, well, read Part I. In short, if I start printing currency and start buying stuff with it, the people who have got my currency will come back to me and want to buy some other stuff with it, if I print too much of my currency there will be too much money chasing the limited amount of stuff I have and will result in things getting more expensive - Inflation. WarBucks however, were used by others to buy not stuff at home but oil elsewhere thus no inflation)

Soon everyone has loads of WarBucks that they use to buy Oil. Now the United Emirates of Oilers decide to stop trading in WarBucks and use NewBucks, suddenly the world realises that they cannot do anything with WarBucks and they want to sell the WarBucks. WarBucks fall steeply against NewBucks, Warriors do not have enough stuff to sell if the countries decide to sell WarBucks for WarStuff. Essentially Warriors can go bankrupt. What are the options they have:
1. Start producing stuff, and do that more economically than others to make it economically viable for others to buy. Which also means that the cost of labour has to go down drastically (They obviously had been squandering all along with free stuff they had been buying with WarBucks)
2. Do what they are best at doing: Go to war, thereby forcing all its allies to use WarBucks again.

Option 2 obviously sounds much more sensible, doesnt it?

Movies: Life Is Beautiful

When:

This was a movie I saw with APS @ his hostel in IIT D. I saw this movie back to back with Schindler's List and Rise of the Evil both of which are also in my favorite list. Apart from the movie being just wonderful and possibly my #1 the watching of the movie itself was just wonderful and memorable.

Why:

I liked the movie because of its EXTREME simplicity. Of late I have realized that I see beauty in simplicity, the most beautiful to my mind are not the most exquisite and elaborate but the simplest. The wonderful music that plays in the background is also one of the highpoints of the movie.

What:

The movie revolves around a guy who believes that life is beautiful, through pain and despair he keeps smiling and brings hope to his loved ones and people all around him. It shows the power love has, it is love which gives him his ability to smile.

Wonderful movie... And I believe it too.. that life is beautiful... Just because there is always hope.... And love...

Kudos to open source world

I have never been a windoze fan, infact I have never really left an option to sabotage the name of M$. Having said that, I use windoze on my laptop, and though I work on a remote fedora core box, I still use windoze to check my mails, to keep my appointments, to write my documents, heck I spend 90% of my computer time on windoze. Last month I decided to change all that.

Last month AT suggested Ubuntu, and boy it works, just wonderful. OpenOffice takes care of the docs, Thunderbird totally replaces outlook, it can even setup meeting requests. Firefox & VLC obviously work just as fine on Ubuntu. Gaim/Pidgin is awesome and so is liferea & Amarok. Tomboy Notes is just the right application for me. The best part of Ubuntu is the ease with which you can install stuff, windoze should really do something about it (read cheat it and name Unified Microsoft Installer or something) to install amarok all you have to do is yum install amarok. It downloads/installs/configures the app for you, awesome, isnt it?

I tried quite a few flavours before/after Ubuntu, Fedora is difficult to configure otherwise I kind of like Fedora core. Ubuntu supports all my hardware, I was impressed with the way my wireless was automatically detected & configured. Even windows takes longer to configure!!

All in all its almost a month and the only reason I log in to Windoze is to play online pool with MS as pidgin does not support Y! Games. Kudos Open Source world. Hats off to you guys.

On lending a helping hand

Every now and then there are mails floating around asking the receiver to forward the mail to others as that would lead to the service provider paying up anywhere between 1 paise to 1 cent for every forward. This money in turn would help some poor soul to afford a terrible sickness. Today I got one such mail:

IIT Bombay student Anupam Biswas 5th sem. Mechanical Engg is suffering from Colukabki (caused due to excessive nabad and depression) a disease very rarely found (3 in a billion). His condition is very pathetic and the treatment is very expensive, obviously his parents are not able to afford his treatment. Orkut has agreed to pay 1 paisa after each time this message is forward. So please pass to all ur friends. please i request you to pass it to as many people as u can and lets try to save someone's life. I request please do not ignore this. It will take......

It made me wonder about a few things:
1. How naive can a person get!!! Colukabki ?????? nabad??????? Unimaginably random names.. Google is just a click away, it will take a second to know that there is NO ailment by that name.
2. What kind of people can start such sick chains! There will be many who would be forced to mistrust even a genuine mail.

3. There is a VERY small part, almost an appendix in us which wants us to help other human beings, someone in need, but there is a bigger larger sense that prevails and wants most of us to chill and relax and do our work, sit in our tight loop of what we call our lives. Unless it involves sending a mail [without even thinking twice of its implications] or writing a blog about the poor, most of us just pass. And though there is a struggle inside which really wants us to do something make some change somewhere, ultimately our better sense prevails... And we pass... and that.. sadly is what I have been doing....

I am reminded of MG... [http://www.noragging.com/], amazing to see someone doing his bit to bring about a change that can effect somebody's life in his busy schedule of work... hats off to you MG....