Past, Future and Present Tense!
The downing of a civilian passenger plane by a missile has provoked a huge outcry in the world community and justifiably so - A fine line has been crossed and the fear is that there is no going back now.
Close to 300 innocent and absolutely clueless lives were vaporised in an instant when the surface-to-air missile chased and ruthlessly hunted the defenceless aircraft at a height over 32,000 feet (10 km or 6 miles) from the surface of the earth. These victims came from many countries across the world and hence there has been a universal outcry of shock and grief.
In a very cruel twist of fate, the crashed plane was a Boeing 777-200ER, the same model as that of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, which disappeared while travelling from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing in March 2014.
Investigations are piecing together a theory that this probably was the case of a mistaken identity i.e. This was not the intended target. Even if we were to reach that conclusion, we would need a brave person to present the findings to all the families of the lost souls.
The biggest mistake that WILL be made eventually is to treat these two tragedies as disconnected unfortunate coincidence. Be as it may appear to the logical mind, it is critical that lessons are learnt from here. Our world is currently in the throes of relentless violence all across which is surely not a coincidence. If it isn't the endless strife in the name of freedom, there are innumerable separatist movements raging in multiple regions in the name of religion or other ill-founded causes.
The two horrendous World Wars that we faced in the last century were power struggles on the lines of regional conflicts that escalated into a global crises. The victors of those wars felt justified in going on a mission of weapons production the likes of which had never ever been witnessed in the millions of years of our planet's History. Their pretext was to have adequate self defence capabilities and they hired the topmost brilliant politicians, consultants and lawyers to coin a new term - DETERRENCE (can be defined as the use of threats by one party to convince another party to refrain from initiating some course of action).
This resulted in a bewildering race to amass and horde all sorts of imaginable and unimaginable types of weaponry that would be sufficient to reconvert our precious planet into one of the trillions of lifeless objects floating across the universe.
What is emerging out of all this turmoil is a new world order where sense and logic have taken the back seat or even maybe have been thrown out of the car for good riddance. We are hurtling from one crisis to another. The haves and have-nots are juxtaposed in a very fraught eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation with just a wink separating our lives from becoming vaporised. Today it isn't just countries with technical know-how or economic might who can claim to hold and control the precious knowledge of making nuclear or chemical weapons.
The world is indeed a very small place now - anyone sitting anywhere can throw a stone and pluck out a huge plane carrying hundreds of souls out of the sky and then say "I didn't do it... Check my hands... They are clean!"
The world is also a very accessible place thanks to proliferation of technology. We have a briefcase in which codes can be entered by an individual that can annihilate our entire planet in the matter of a few minutes. The irony of the situation is that at the end of it, there will be no hand left to show and no eye left to check cleanliness.
Let's hold this thought for a moment and take a different perspective into account here:
1) Mother Earth provides ample provisions for each and every living creature. She charges no tax, creates no boundaries, does not differentiate between man and animal
2) Her love and care extends seamlessly to existing and non-existing entity. She provides all necessary means for survival through a delicate self balancing miracle of Nature
3) She has no WMDs, Nuclear weapons, Chemical weapons, Missiles, Rockets or chemical weapons because she understands her and our unique position in the Universe - for all the scientific progress that we have made, there is no current evidence of any other life form existing anywhere else save our planet
4) In her compassionate loving heart, there are no religions or ethnic divisions, no governments or rebels, no rich or poor, no need space for evil, greed, hatred or terror
5) She nurtures and cares for the tiniest and the largest, the weakest and the strongest by treating all equally
6) Her heart breaks, her tears flow, her soul cries upon seeing her own children create these artificial differences of nationality, religion, status, power and use these to hurt, maim, kill, destruct and destroy one another and also our own Mother!
7) She cannot comprehend as to exactly what is missing in her ever giving, ever caring and ever loving nature. She yet tries to silently soak in all the pain, anguish, suffering as much as she possibly can. She sobs silently while mankind plunders, loots, burns and ravages her every moment
8) Global Warming, Deforestation, extinction of precious species of animals, uncontrolled exploration and exploitation of natural and precious resources, uncontrolled weaponisation are all challenging the fragile balance of Nature and steadily pushing her to a point of no return
9) What we term as the fury of Mother Nature is just her fearful and confused misery on account of the unimaginable destruction that mankind is unleashing on her from all directions
To bring together the two perspectives is an eye opening realisation that we are slowly but steadily navigating ourselves towards self-destruction. There have been two largely covered near-misses of nuclear wars in recent decades and they both required a massive doze of luck to be avoided.
Unless we learn and urgently implement the lessons of the PAST, our FUTURE as a living planet is under tremendous threat and hence our PRESENT (is) TENSE!
The choice as always is ours to make!!
The downing of a civilian passenger plane by a missile has provoked a huge outcry in the world community and justifiably so - A fine line has been crossed and the fear is that there is no going back now.
Close to 300 innocent and absolutely clueless lives were vaporised in an instant when the surface-to-air missile chased and ruthlessly hunted the defenceless aircraft at a height over 32,000 feet (10 km or 6 miles) from the surface of the earth. These victims came from many countries across the world and hence there has been a universal outcry of shock and grief.
In a very cruel twist of fate, the crashed plane was a Boeing 777-200ER, the same model as that of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, which disappeared while travelling from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing in March 2014.
Investigations are piecing together a theory that this probably was the case of a mistaken identity i.e. This was not the intended target. Even if we were to reach that conclusion, we would need a brave person to present the findings to all the families of the lost souls.
The biggest mistake that WILL be made eventually is to treat these two tragedies as disconnected unfortunate coincidence. Be as it may appear to the logical mind, it is critical that lessons are learnt from here. Our world is currently in the throes of relentless violence all across which is surely not a coincidence. If it isn't the endless strife in the name of freedom, there are innumerable separatist movements raging in multiple regions in the name of religion or other ill-founded causes.
The two horrendous World Wars that we faced in the last century were power struggles on the lines of regional conflicts that escalated into a global crises. The victors of those wars felt justified in going on a mission of weapons production the likes of which had never ever been witnessed in the millions of years of our planet's History. Their pretext was to have adequate self defence capabilities and they hired the topmost brilliant politicians, consultants and lawyers to coin a new term - DETERRENCE (can be defined as the use of threats by one party to convince another party to refrain from initiating some course of action).
This resulted in a bewildering race to amass and horde all sorts of imaginable and unimaginable types of weaponry that would be sufficient to reconvert our precious planet into one of the trillions of lifeless objects floating across the universe.
What is emerging out of all this turmoil is a new world order where sense and logic have taken the back seat or even maybe have been thrown out of the car for good riddance. We are hurtling from one crisis to another. The haves and have-nots are juxtaposed in a very fraught eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation with just a wink separating our lives from becoming vaporised. Today it isn't just countries with technical know-how or economic might who can claim to hold and control the precious knowledge of making nuclear or chemical weapons.
The world is indeed a very small place now - anyone sitting anywhere can throw a stone and pluck out a huge plane carrying hundreds of souls out of the sky and then say "I didn't do it... Check my hands... They are clean!"
The world is also a very accessible place thanks to proliferation of technology. We have a briefcase in which codes can be entered by an individual that can annihilate our entire planet in the matter of a few minutes. The irony of the situation is that at the end of it, there will be no hand left to show and no eye left to check cleanliness.
Let's hold this thought for a moment and take a different perspective into account here:
1) Mother Earth provides ample provisions for each and every living creature. She charges no tax, creates no boundaries, does not differentiate between man and animal
2) Her love and care extends seamlessly to existing and non-existing entity. She provides all necessary means for survival through a delicate self balancing miracle of Nature
3) She has no WMDs, Nuclear weapons, Chemical weapons, Missiles, Rockets or chemical weapons because she understands her and our unique position in the Universe - for all the scientific progress that we have made, there is no current evidence of any other life form existing anywhere else save our planet
4) In her compassionate loving heart, there are no religions or ethnic divisions, no governments or rebels, no rich or poor, no need space for evil, greed, hatred or terror
5) She nurtures and cares for the tiniest and the largest, the weakest and the strongest by treating all equally
6) Her heart breaks, her tears flow, her soul cries upon seeing her own children create these artificial differences of nationality, religion, status, power and use these to hurt, maim, kill, destruct and destroy one another and also our own Mother!
7) She cannot comprehend as to exactly what is missing in her ever giving, ever caring and ever loving nature. She yet tries to silently soak in all the pain, anguish, suffering as much as she possibly can. She sobs silently while mankind plunders, loots, burns and ravages her every moment
8) Global Warming, Deforestation, extinction of precious species of animals, uncontrolled exploration and exploitation of natural and precious resources, uncontrolled weaponisation are all challenging the fragile balance of Nature and steadily pushing her to a point of no return
9) What we term as the fury of Mother Nature is just her fearful and confused misery on account of the unimaginable destruction that mankind is unleashing on her from all directions
To bring together the two perspectives is an eye opening realisation that we are slowly but steadily navigating ourselves towards self-destruction. There have been two largely covered near-misses of nuclear wars in recent decades and they both required a massive doze of luck to be avoided.
Unless we learn and urgently implement the lessons of the PAST, our FUTURE as a living planet is under tremendous threat and hence our PRESENT (is) TENSE!
The choice as always is ours to make!!
