Lesson in Statesmanship!

Recently HH the Dalai Lama in an interview gave a masterly demonstration of statesmanship. He gave the Beijing government very positive feedback on their excellent handling of the relief efforts of the earthquake. As an example, he reproached the Burmese junta for wilfully mishandling the equally severe natural catastrophe in Burma. 

By praising the Beijing leaders and linking their praiseworthy efforts as being a signal of change within China, he also slips in criticism of their handling of the Tibet issue. Then he also shows the amount of dissent among the Tibetans about responding to Beijing with peaceful means. This is a cloaked message that when the Dalai Lama is no more, no one may be able to keep these angry young people in check.

By raising the Beijing leaders on a pedestal, he requires them to behave in a more elevated manner. Spiritual Noblesse oblige through mutual recognition and compassion – this is a very different vision from the ‘destroy through violence, those who are different’ policy used by those engaged in armed conflicts in different parts of the world. 

Abraham Lincoln, in a speech, referred to the Southerners as fellow human beings who were in error. An elderly lady chastised him for not calling them irreconcilable enemies that should be destroyed. “Why madam,” Lincoln replied, “Do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends?”

Sell More by Sharing on Peer to Peer Networks

They say that piracy on the Internet decreases sales. Everywhere you hear figures in hundreds of millions dollars/euros of revenues lost by sellers of music, movies, software and books.

Is it really true? Can you have a different take on sales by sharing? Here is a different story.

Paulo Coelho, author of books such as “The Alchemist” and “The Witch of Portobello”, sold over 100 million books last year. He puts this success down to BitTorrent, as he saw a huge increase in sales when his books appeared on sites such as The Pirate Bay.

Software, movies and music are essentially different from books. They can be consumed and used electronically very easily. But people still prefer to read paper books. So a ‘taster’ on pirate sites actually pushes sales up. Should the music and movie industries learn something here rather than moan.

Are Finns Ethnocentric?

Recently on a visit to India, some people who regularly deal with Finns asked me to explain why Finns are ethnocentric. Historically small nations tend to be ethnocentric. But is ethnocentrism still valid in a modern context? The term ethnocentrism is often based on the premise of racial superiority over other races/ethnicities. 

'Finnish ethnocentrism' is actually a misnomer and ethnocentrism is highly misleading in the context of Finns. Finns have actually the opposite sentiment as they feel that they are tucked away in a tiny sparsely populated country far away from the centre stage of the world. Many a Finn would quip “We don’t have much culture, we just came out of the woods recently”. 

Now this is not meant to be taken literally, but should be understood as self-irony, which characterises Finnish humour. A Finn and a Norwegian would joke that in spite of very different languages and cultures, they have at least one thing in common; a challenging neighbour to the east. You can actually discover people of Finnish origin almost anywhere on the globe. Whether they learn Hindi and Marathi and blend in downtown Mumbai or live in Patagonia, Argentina as sheep farmers, you can recognize them from their names at least.

E-Democracy in India

Elections used to be such a messy affair in the old days in India. The special ink they used to mark the index finger of the voter could stain your clothes. There would be mass rallies, spontaneous fighting or ‘hungama’ as it’s called in India. Electronic voting has changed much of this. Democracy is not new in India. The father of Buddha was a democratically elected king in the sixth century B.C. Unknown to most of the world the largest democracy in the world is also a functioning E-Democracy.

What now is an E-democracy? The term originates from the combination of the words ’electronic’ and ’democracy’. It usually means the usage of electronic facilities such as the Internet for implementing democratic processes like voting in a republic or representative democracy. Electronic voting has been successfully used in countries like Estonia, Brazil, India, Ireland, and the United States.

Gorbachev - the Second Reed in Moscow?

John Reed (1887-1920), the American journalist, poet and communist, famous for describing the Bolshevik Revolution in Ten Days that Shook the World is only one of two non-Russians buried in the Kremlin. Has Gorbachev become a reed in order to survive the winds of change?

 There is a 14^th century proverb from England “A reed before the wind lives on, while mighty oaks do fall”.

 There is also a Jamaican proverb ” When cotton-tree tumble down every nanny-goat want fe jump over” (When the mighty fall the weak want to take advantage).

 The ex-supreme leader of the Soviet Union, Mihail Gorbachev, maintains himself by advertising. This time it's Louis Vuitton bags. He’s been at it before, advertising Pizza Hut, so he knows how the gig works. As a Nobel Peace Prize winner and Grammy award winner, he is quite a media person. 

 In 2007, speaking at New Orleans, he volunteered to lead the people of New Orleans in a revolution in 2011 if the US government failed to repair the levees by then. What would Gorbachev be sponsored by if this took place - Camel Boots, Che Guevara T-shirts, Castro Cigars or Mao attire?

Is Love a Mammalian Prerogative?

Love is an abstract concept. 

One can experience love but cannot sufficiently explain it to another who has never experienced it.

Philosophers, poets, artists and singers have tried to describe love for the entire length of recorded history. Humans and divine beings in all mythology and religion deals with different forms and expressions of love, loss of love and consequences of love not socially accepted. What is considered taboo or punishable by death in one context is the norm or highest ideal in another, e.g., falling a love with and marrying a partner is considered a fundamental right in Western democracies but in many other societies one gets harsh penalties for such behaviour.

Some scientists approach love through a biological model of sex and tend to view love as a mammalian drive like thirst or hunger. Helen Fisher in her book, Anatomy of Love takes a scientific look and divides the experience of love into three partly overlapping stages: lust, attraction, and attachment. Lust exposes humans to others, romantic attraction encourages people to focus their energy on mating, and attachment involves tolerating the spouse long enough to rear a child into infancy. If we view the positive connotations of love, we could see loving as acting intentionally, in sympathetic response to others, towards promoting mutual well-being.

Is love only a mammalian prerogative? How do we know that reptilians or insects never feel love? How do we know that the buzzing of a bumblebee is not a serenade or the movement of a tapeworm is not an erotic dance?

Two worlds inside our brains

What happens inside our brains is the most fascinating mystery of the universe. 

If in doubt about your cerebral capacity, think about this.

The human brain is said to have 100 billion neurons, like the number of stars in our galaxy. There is indeed a principle in alchemy - as within, so without.

We know that the human brain has two interconnected hemispheres though we are not usually aware of their differences in functioning. The hemispheres communicate with each other through a thick band of 200-250 million nerve fibers called the corpus callosum. It seems that each hemisphere of the brain is dominant for specific behaviours - the right brain is dominant for spatial abilities, face recognition, visual imagery and music while the left brain may be more dominant for calculations, math and logical abilities. These are generalizations and in healthy people, the two hemispheres work together and share information through the corpus callosum. Much of what we know about the right and left hemispheres comes from studies of people who have had the corpus callosum split or suffered other injuries. 

Neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor tells from personal experience the different roles each brain hemisphere play. During a massive stroke she she felt her brain functions slip away one by one, speech, movement, understanding - she studied and remembered every moment and describes it here.