The joy of winning a battle

He was busy with his work in the laboratory in an elite community in the country, which was largely isolated from the chaos around. His glance went to the open window and the eyes lit up. He had not realized that the sun was fast loosing the day to darkness. "Another hard time ahead", he thought, as he decided to leave for an evening munch. He knew the tough few minutes ahead to escape from the sky bombers. For every day, dawn and dusk, people in his community have been terrorized by these random shootings. He had never seen dawn, like most in his community, but has suffered a number of horrifying dusks. And he prayed today wouldn't be one.

As he came out of the attack proof buildings to the open area, he looked around and could hear the chaos in the sky building up. He ran towards his vehicle, for it would help him to escape the dreaded land quickly. He escaped a few arsons thrown at him, like the Indian film heroes escape the hand grenades thrown at them by the goons. He ran in a zig-zag manner, but didn't know if it would really help.

He carefully maneuvered his steps by keeping them in places where there had been no recent attacks. For he thought that the probability of attacks in that place is less. It is a belief in his community that the assault structures have a fixed positions. Though such beliefs have been proved wrong at times, they have given a fair chance of survival. Their community had stopped looking above a long time now for the fear of attack on their face and don't even check if the attackers exist or not. He quickly latched on to his vehicle and again took the least attacked areas with prayers in his lips. Soon reached the Security Kiosk near the SJSOM building, where he deposited the keys of his laboratory which is in Electrical Engineering department. As he did so, his face beamed a victory smile on his face, as he felt that he didn't have to utter this poem:


Dirty birdy in the sky
Drop some whitewash in my eye
Me no scream, me no cry
Me thank God that cows don't fly

Accepting Defeat and Sustainability

Prof.A.W.Date re-presented his keynote talk that he gave in ISME conference last month during yesterday's CTARA seminar. Though the title of the talk was 'Mechanical Engineering and Sustainability', one of the lasting theme to it was this: There are times when we need to accept defeat as an engineer (as a scientist). And if we want to look things from a sustainability perspective, this acceptance is very important to move forward.

Most of the positive mindset people (heck! I don't know how they define it) brand such defeat acceptance as 'negative thinking'. They would quote from many of the 'great thinkers' that we should not think negative or we would never move forward. Once when I mentioned to my friend that we should stop using the plastic cover for every damn thing we buy (we were buying vegetables then). I got the familiar reply, "Don't worry, Science will find a way out".

Is this really negative thinking? It is about the perspective, I feel. For, during his talk a couple of weeks ago, Sir Robert Swan summarized his 'Walk the talk' with a quote which was something like "The last thing we should do to save our planet is to say that someone else will save it". If we look at sustainability from this perspective, not having a sustainable lifestyle is actually negative thinking and accepting defeat need not necessarily be negative.

... to be continued, but do share thoughts....