What are we doing to ourselves?

I am simply uphauled at the way we treat ourselves, how we go to any lenghts to achieve what we want without any regard for what impact our actions can have on others, on our world and even on ourselves. We forget that we are also humans and now we care not for our fellow beings, our world and are ignorant about what we are doing to ourselves. Greed, selfishness, lust and desire for more and more power is making monsters out of us. We are destroying ourselves, our world and thus trading our future for present pleasure and momentary satisfaction of our greed. We are never satisfied with what we have. Once we have a slight taste of these, we crave for more and it becomes an addiction. We either throw away our knowledge, wisdom and discretion and take up satisfaction of our excesses as our top priority or we simply dont have any wisdom from the beginning and the only way we know forward is to satisfy our excesses and crave for more and more and get whatever it is that we want, taking and getting it by doing whatever must be done and without any regard to what it might cost to the world.

We might be the dominant species on this planet, but we are acting as if we are the dumbest now as we are threatening our own existence and well being. We are thinking about only the present and we dont really concern ourselves about the future and what impact our actions have on it. I sometimes think about a dialogue in the movie 'The Matrix' when agent Smith interrogates Morpheus. He says that when he tried to classify humans, he found that we were more like viruses, those which used up all the resources in a particular area and then moved on to another place and used up everything there, finally, destroying the host and then moving on to another area. But for us, there is no another area. We have only one planet and we are destroying it. We are spreading hatred, violence and we cannot tolerate someone who practices another religion, someone who believes in different things. We value money above everything else and forget even ourselves in its pursuit. We forget how we treat our fellow beings, our world and how we treat ourselves. We turn to the devil inside us and let that rule our judgement and gradually drive out all that is good in us.

A little bit of patience, some kindness and honesty are the answers to all our worries and problems. These are not just words, these are not to be defined with the help of other words or their meanings to be understood from the dictionary; they are to be defined by practise, understood by experience and propogated through action. We also must abandon our egos and must try and understand or atleast know about the situation of people in this world so that we will realise how fortunate and thus will not forget how lucky we are which will enable us to throw away our greed and hunger for more than what we need.

Oru CWRDM Dairykkurippe

Well, I am doing my PS-1 at Calicut in an organisation called Centre for Water Resources Development and Management, where 10 of us, 6 from Goa campus and 4 from Pilani are supposed to gain our first exposure to working in an organisation. But I really doubt what we are doing here does any justice to the aims of the course. Infact, to make fruitful use of the 50 days that we would be here in Calicut, my roommate(Ijaz from Pilani campus) and a friend of mine from Goa (Vishnu) decided to learn swimming in the evenings at a facility close to the town. I suppose whatever marks we get, of the 10 of us here, these two would be the ones who would have learned something from their PS-1! As for me, although I dont know swimming, I decided not to go along with them. The reason? Plain obvious if you ask me! I am too lazy to do that! Travelling for close to 1.5 hours a day, tiring yourself out etc are not stuff on my list of top ten things to do! The most I would be learning from my PS would be how to be patient as we have spend a lot of time waiting and watching for things to happen and also by listening to words of wisdom and instructions that we have received from someone who used to work in Pilani and that someone I think is coming to Goa and THAT might mean some amount of trouble for me.

The first few days, Antony and me stayed at Ashwin's place(both of them are my friends from Goa) as there was a lot of confusion regarding our accomodation and our sir even created a lot of confusion in that. At first, we had three people in a room (Ijaz, Sabin-both from Pilani- and me and then Vishnu, Antony n Nandu in the other one) which was slightly uncomfartable for all of us but we managed to get one more room which gave us some amount of space, but we are back to the old system again now. Arif(from Goa) has his home in Calicut and so is commuting each day. So is Nikhil and Alim(we are working-read that as loafing around-in the same department) and these are the ten men who will be in the battle field @ CWRDM, Calicut!

The title is a slight reference to a Malayalam movie and also to the fact that we have to record in the Diary what we all did during each day for our PS.

With nothing better to do, we resort what we do at college! Movies and games and just hanging around in each others' rooms, although we do not have DC or LAN or IP mssngr. But it simply speaks volumes about the resourcefulness of BITSians when I think about how we connect our comps with LAN cables and transfer files and also those working in the remote sensing department have also managed to find some additional files for our purposes!!!(:P)

All has not been fun and games so far as we had to write a report for which, we got a list of corrections to be made longer than the report itself, then we had to conduct a seminar, we read a lot of books and reports and Antony and Nandu covered an area of 1200sq.km collecting readings and measurements from Valapattanam river basin but they seemed to have enjoyed some elements of it but the biggest benefit of the trip was the fact that they did not have to receive the daily dose of instructions like those who stayed here itself had to bear! We still got one more report, seminar and also the second group discussion. The first group discussion was simply too enlightening that all of us were at a loss of words to say anything! The topics, I am not mentioning since it will make you say WTF? I am leaving our previous GD at that and hope the next one has a semblance of sensibility to it.

I have been able to give only snide hints and remarks about what actually goes on in here, but you should realise that we have not finished our PS-1 here and our grades are not anywhere near being finalised. So, I am being slightly cautious, just taking into account all possibilities.

When I am posting this from college, PS is all done and all of us back at Pilani or Goa, starting off with our all important CDCs! I must say, PS-1 was more about meeting new people and making new friends and working with them and having fun together, going out and 'Bird-Watching!!' and the different atmosphere in which we were all living.

I can't end this post without the ridiculous nicknames that the guys from Pilani have given themselves! Ijaz is referred to as 'God' and it was done by them all, a nic that has its origins from the fact that he plays Age of Conquerers unbelievably well! Sabin is called 'Meesha', the malayalam for 'moustache' for the thick one that he sports. Aleem is called 'Kalam' and it can be for the brains, but the more important reason is his hairdo. Nikhil is called D'souza, for a rather strange reason. He, I am told, had a crush on a girl who had that surname, but this is ridiculous. Ah, well, thats what nicknames are all about isnt it?!

PS- Could post it only after the PS was over and I was safely back in college!!n btw, PS, except the one used before the beginning of this sentence means Practise School.