LUCKY YOU, YOU SHALL WIN

You can certainly win provided you are ready for the hour of the striking moment of happiness that you waited for; though at times you will have to make provisions for your graceful defeats as well, knowing fully that it is but natural and part of life. Tell me who has not lost a war or tell me who has not won a heart? I know, it is not you in most probability! But I must confide in you that it is me who never won a war or a heart. However, I always make it a point to wear a brave face and exude a rare manufactured confidence adequately stinking with the fragrance of deceptive triumph. I have discovered that it really works and people fall for it taking me for granted at the spur of the moment. To remain ever successful and victorious I to create enthusiasm around me, I prefer to distribute bitter pills to whoever comes to me for inspiration, and they come in droves without their knowledge; profusely giving a thick coating of sugar with utmost concern and compassion. By the time these seekers discover my maggot infested realities by any chance I would have long forgotten for my follies and foibles as well as failures. I only like to win and failures make me to win still more. It is addictive. May be I am a liar, may be I am a failure, and may be I am a perpetual gifted winner or may be I am another face amongst you. The truth is only known to you and none else. Somehow I think that we only loose to be the real winners in life. Lucky you, I am sure, you shall also win but keep your masks ready, in case you would need it to look mysterious or want to smile a lot as a public performance. I have plenty of them.

SAVE THE EVERGREEN MANGROVE FORESTS

It is believed that mangrove, the evergreen rainforests by the sea, originated in the Indo-Malayan area and later spread to India, East Africa and the Americas some 66 to 23 million years ago. Southeast Asia accounts for about 27 percent or 10.5 million acres of mangrove forests out of a total of 39.3 million acres combined total for the world. One of the most variegated and diverse, the species that nestle on the warm coastlines of the tropical oceans have attracted the attention of scientists and others alike. These specialized species thieve on the sheltered coastlines, river deltas and brackish wetlands in between mainland and sea growing and proliferating abundantly; usually unsuitable most of the other plant species. Mangrove according to some accepted classification comprises of 16 to 24 families and 54 to 70 species that could be the palms, trees, shrubs or ground ferns growing in the area in between the high and low tide of the sea. Out of these the Southeast Asia and Africa has about 15 distinct species each while 10 other occur in the Americas. It may be mentioned that about 50 percent of the mangrove forests are found in Mexico, Brazil, Nigeria, Australia and Indonesia. Mangrove would normally mean the propensity of a large number of plant families’ specialized adaptation to the tropical coastal environment. These plants are extremely well adapted to their salty and swampy habitats by having breathing roots.
Though one of the most diverse and productive wetland species of the earth, today the coastal woodlands or tidal forests is also one of the most threatened one, vanishing very fast than perhaps what we know about it or realize. The United Nations on the occasion of the World Wetland Day on February 2nd, 2008 has said that since 1980 the world has already lost around 20 percent 3.6 million hectares of the total wetland mangrove forests which grows in 124 tropical or sub-tropical countries and areas. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) divisional Director Wulf Killmann believes that "If deforestation of mangroves continues, it can lead to severe losses of biodiversity and livelihoods, in addition to salt intrusion in coastal areas and siltation of coral reefs, ports and shipping lanes. Tourism would also suffer." He further added that “Countries need to engage in a more effective conservation and sustainable management of the world's mangroves and other wetland ecosystems. But overall, the loss of these coastal forests remains alarming. The rate of mangrove loss is significantly higher than the loss of any other types of forests." By the year 2005 we were left with only 15.2 million hectare than what we had in the year in 1980, estimated to be 18.8 hectare.
It is extremely important to take effective steps to arrest the rapid decline of the mangrove forests. Otherwise, we would be bereft of a host of unique plants and organisms and expose ourselves to unprecedented natural calamities like the tsunami.

EARTH AND OUR COMMON FUTURE

Though, I am not the self proclaimed prophet of a doomsday cult or a distinguished scientist of any description, or a born for ever genius; yet, it surely dawns upon me that man (allegedly the most intelligent and conscientious of all) is rather all out to cannibalize and guzzle up and ultimately annihilate mother earth that sustains life and consciousness (of our varieties and understanding); perhaps, in the entire cosmos. It certainly is too scary to realize that slowly, we are heading towards an unprecedented apocalypse beyond our imagination that would spell the end of the so called divine kingdom ours, believed to be established by god, who is further supposed to be the ultimate source of all of the existence in the ever expanding and contracting universe.
At times, I am forced to conclude that most probably without man the world would have been a much better and safer place with rest of the creatures and creations. Evidently, with a superior and complex brain man has acted not prudently and sagaciously but with utter carelessness and stupidity with a false sense of invincibility that is anything but stupidity of gigantic proportion. The main cause of this destructiveness of ours is rooted in and appears to be our gargantuan greed and arrogance that is misconstrued and nakedly silly. We are falsely under the impression that we are the best and most powerful species, having a so called soul (thought of as part of the Holy Spirit) that qualifies us to become the self appointed sole arbitrator of all the matters pertaining to the earth and beyond. It is rather funny to even think that man by any standard has an iota of commonsense and intelligence for he knows not what he does and he does what he knows not. His understanding of the intricacies of nature which basically means to discover some of the apparently working or workable partial natural laws at best just translates into a few jumbled up and mumbled up utilitarian ‘knowledge’, usually limiting and leads us further to more of the confusions than solutions. Today, our earth faces the gravest of dangers because of the senseless actions and of course inaction of human beings and the most absurd and imperfect knowledge that we have accumulated over the long years or ages of our so called intelligent existence. I would rather say that our absurd insights have been our main enemies for they are the insights of limitations and not expansion. This is so because, our quest to solve our problem are so much narrow and unidirectional that we have not been able to think that there are also other aspects to the problems or that the discovered solutions are not the real solutions at all. It in fact, it has created more and more problems for us and those insignificant‘others’, who form a symbiotic relation with us for our life’s continuance and living and theirs too. We have utterly failed to realize the simplest of the premises that it is virtually impossible or suicidal to proclaim that anything that lays beyond us are as a rule insignificant and we can carry on without them.
We must admit that the earth belongs to all of us that encompass the other organisms equally and when we think of our future, it certainly is tied up with their future also. We have to recognize the importance of each components of nature and have to stop treating them as mere appendages--the candidates for exploitation. This will help us to prevent the acceleration of the deluge which is unfolding at a very faster pace.

THE PANGS AND ANGST OF A FLEDGELING BLOGGER: IT SUCKS!

As a fledgeling blogger and a computer nerd, a few years back, I had no clear idea of the big nasty pond called World Wide Web and the queer blogsphere. Today, however, still it has not gotten any better. With every passing day, instead of becoming wiser, curiously I am turning into a frog in the pond, byte by byte. I remain isolated, quarantined and ignored even now and intensely feel the pangs of ostracization. Tell me what have I done to be ignored like an insignificant fly? Need I start blogging my epithet?
Like the gone by agonizing yesterdays, today also I keep on burning the midnight and midday oil and scarce bandwidth to daydream about my shiny visitors and readers hoping against hope that someday they will drop in, in droves to enthuse and encourage me to churn out extremely brilliant and seminal original posts and other palatable stuffs, not available elsewhere in the cosmos for sure. Yet, often I have felt being let down by my own estimation of myself and my abilities to attract the most precious but nowhere to be found cyber guests. I must inform you that in spite of my long…long wait like the hungry spider, the preys are nowhere to be seen or found—my be they are the much touted white elephants or near extinct species or more precisely they are the Dodos and nothing more. I have even come to console myself that actually the fellows do not exit at all and only part of a myth or folklore created to bamboozle some simpleton like me.
In my desperation and trough occasional bouts depression and angst, I have often prayed gods and tried to appease them by various known and unknown means to send me some visitors, who would drop by piously to say me hello and chant the encomiums. The gods have surely failed me and my faith is very fast eroding in forcing me to question the efficacy of divine intervention to procure visitors for my extraordinary and outstanding blog. Perhaps it is my sins of the past and present life that prevents me from being surrounded by the cooing, booing and jeering all important would be faithful followers of my blog empire.
The life of a sincere and hardworking blogger is certainly miserable as in my case, you know, when the comment boxes remain barren and the stat counter, digit less. It is therefore a sort of Herculean task to keep the nuts and bolts of my blog remain greased and kicking on the face of a cruel and parched drought of the never showing future visitors. I have, frankly left no stone unturned to appear attractive to lure the extra proud netizens with a neatly laid out side bar, alluring ad options that would perhaps made the cash hungry clickers a billionaire, overnight but to no avail. I often wondered, has the blogsphere is in fact a black hole into which I am sucked—for at this stage I am not able to say you for sure whether I am a matter or anti-matter?
It is question of getting noticed, receiving attention and being cared for. Without all these I am very fast becoming hapless haggard and a pathetic avatar with lonely times and a blog largely bereft of the footprints of my admirers. It is a difficult situation and I do not know how to get out of it?
May be tomorrow there will be a stampede and my blog will be at the top slot of Alexa traffic ranking and have a Google page rank of 11 out of 10. May be someday I will be famous and rich by blogging. May be after reading my post, the most holly and sacred and ubiquitous search engines would have pity on me and put at the top of any and all searches that will be sending me avid visitors leading to occasional crashes and clashes at my blog. May be very soon, I will have sooooo… much visitors that I will be issuing them tickets and ask them to be in queue and patient to view and read my important posts. But, before anything of that sort happens, and I am sure it would be, are you listening to me and ready to be my repeat visitor?

For now folks, I am done! Let me get ready to write my next extra brilliant post with renewed vigour and hope to enter the hall of shame and cause of blame.