Chak De India

Congratulations to the 20 - 20 winners, my team, India. Felt genuinely very very happy after a long long time. My God! what a match it was ! Reminded me of childhood, where India used to play Pakistan more often. No doubt a fantastic victory to a new fearless India (and Pakistan too - poor Misba Ul Haq) with nerves of steel. Credit should go to Dravid, who sensibly kept himself and other ageing and heavily overrated players like Tendlya and Ganguly out.

Great stuff and hearty congratulations to Dhoni and team !

Every 14 days one language dies

Throughout human history, the languages of powerful groups have spread while the languages of smaller cultures have become extinct. As big languages spread, children whose parents speak a small language often grow up learning the dominant language. Depending on attitudes toward the ancestral language, those children or their children may never learn the smaller language, or they may forget it as it falls out of use. This has occurred throughout human history, but the rate of language disappearance has accelerated dramatically in recent years. Read more here about the study conducted by National Geographic.

Surprisingly the study did not list India among the endangered language regions, considering the fact that India once upon a time flourished with hundreds of more languages and thousands of more dialects. This makes me worried that I may not be able to pass on my language to my kids and through which the rich oral culture it embodies. Telugu may be one of the dominant languages and not endangered per the study, but it may soon be forgotten and less spoken by the onslaught of English.

Am I not hypocritical blogging here in English? Anyway let me at least remind myself of the sayings of two great Telugu persons ever born - SriKrishna DevaRaya and Srinadha Kavi about my mother tongue and feel good about it.

Jai Ganesha

Avignamasthu - Best wishes to family and friends!

Life of a vegan

Living a life of a vegan is sometimes tough, especially when you are in an alien country surrounded by meat chewing people who cannot relate to people like me. The vegans of more extreme variety do not even consider me as vegan, who do not use any animal based products like leather shoes, cow milk, honey etc.. :-). That's why the airlines (or whoever) coined the term "Indian Vegetarian" - which is close to lacto-vegetarianism in vegan terminology. Vegetarianism in India has no strict rules, but loosely based on the principles of compassion towards the animals - like milking a cow or buffalo after the calves have had enough, eating plant based food consisting mainly grains, pulses and vegetables.
Apart from other disadvantages like finding a vegetarian dining place while living or visiting another country there is this little known occupational hazard - participating in team lunches and undergoing the ordeal of eating Buddhist delight (uncooked vegetables in soy sauce and vinegar).

Collapse

Of late, I was reading this interesting book by Jared Diamond - Collapse. The author describes how societies around the world historically had chosen or choose to fail or succeed by adopting environmentally critical choices posed by mother nature. One of the factors he mentions, particularly comes to my mind - "massive application of toxic pesticides, insecticides, and herbicides in rich agricultural areas". Guntur district, the place where I come from, is perhaps one of the agriculturally most abusive regions on the environment. The heavy usage of pesticides including banned and adulterated ones, by farmers of commercial crops here has eradicated almost all the native birds like crows etc. I have noticed this in my recent visit, where we Hindus practice the ritual of feeding birds in memory of forefathers.