Nature and its reset button!

2018: Everyone is a Hero (Malayalam; 2023)
Written and Directed: Jude Anthany Joseph

This must surely be the first successful full-length disaster movie ever done by filmmakers of Indian cinema. Unlike the usual endeavours where the final outcomes appear inferior to an average B-grade Hollywood flick, this one is for real; it looks it anyway. It is India's entry to the 96th Academy Awards under the Foreign film category.

It tries to recreate the 2018 significant floods that hit Kerala. Monsoon was particularly bad that year, with unusually high rainfall that resulted in the worst floods in the century. 483 people died, and 15 went missing. In the aftermath of the floods, Keralites realised and feted not only the government-sanctioned rescue teams but also the role of the general public in helping each other out. The fishermen were particularly mentioned for rising to the occasion with their fishing boats. This movie is also to honour these people. Everyone is a hero when he acts selflessly.

Many characters' lives get entangled when a small village gets badly flooded. As strong as Nature is, it resets the order of things. A discharged Army is sometimes sniggered upon by villagers. He leads a quiet life, waiting for his visa application to Dubai to be ready. The ex-soldier turns out to be a hero later. A patriarchal fisherman family is upset that the second son is not interested in the family profession of fishing but is interested in modelling. Even his girlfriend's family rejects him mainly because he is from the lowly fishermen clan. The fishermen community became heroes later when they went around rescuing stranded villagers, including the family who looked down on them.

A long-distance grumpy interstate lorry driver from an arid-dry region of Tamil Nadu who is transporting dynamite to a group of dam protestors has a change of heart after seeing so much devastation. He becomes a hero and distributes ration food. A couple amid separation renew their bond. A couple who had built a new home is devasted their house is destroyed but is happy that they still have each other.

The thing that struck me about the movie is the part where the managers of a dam and their decision to control the release of water to balance between preventing the breakage of the dam and flooding of human habitation. Not that it had not happened before. One of the reasons cited for the recent massive floods in Pakistan was precisely this. Unable to pay for the maintenance of their dams, torrential rains caused dams to overflow and cause devastation.

Quite recently, the tragedy that befell Libya comes to mind. In an arid country like Libya, the dams that were built were like heaven-sent. Unfortunately, after years of neglect culminating from internal infighting and corruption, this oil-rich nation with the most enormous reserves in Africa never saw Nature giving them a curveball. An unprecedented storm and rainfall resulted in the dam being filled to the brim. A lackadaisical, contented attitude led to a chaotic warning system. Poor maintenance showed when the dam burst. Floods killed over 4,000 people.

Some say building a dam can be a curse. Perhaps it is just fighting back. The world over, many ambitious dam projects have proved disastrous. On top of all the news of dams overflowing with heavy monsoon and glacial waters, the ill-thought King Zahir's ambitious plan to build a massive dam to change Afghanistan to a little America only turned the country into a poppy-planting lawless one. Meanwhile, Russia has been embarking on projects where rivers flowing towards the Arctic regions are diverted artificially to irrigate lands where it is needed.

Worth the watch.

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Something about blue gold...

Credit: topdocumentaryfilms.com

We all know the drill - that up to 70% of our body is filled with water; that 70% of the Third Rock from the Sun is covered by water and that it is the elixir of life. We also accept oxygen and hydrogen molecules could be alien visitors who landed on Earth via meteorites that reached here.

Scientists agree that water is indeed a strange chemical. With its composition, it should be in a gaseous state, not liquid as it is. Unlike other solids, water in a solid state is less dense, encouraging lifeforms to live and prosper under an iceberg. Capillary action ensures that water reaches the highest leaf of the giant redwood and the minuscule of the body organs.

I will not do justice to the WhatsApp that my childhood friends and I share if I do not divulge some of the new things that were brought to my attention through them. Water has memory. Having been around for so long on this planet, it only makes sense. The same water molecule that was drunk by a dinosaur must be traversing in our bodies right now. It is said that information of contact with materials is kept trapped within spaces within molecular bonds in electromagnetic energies.


French immunologist, Jacque Benveniste, in the 1980s tried to show to the world, that anti-IgE antibody, even when diluted to very minute undetectable levels, still evoked a response in the body when exposed. His findings were allegedly suppressed as it tends to support homoeopathic medicine where medications are given in very low doses to prevent ailment. No proper explanation could be given to this unique discovery. It is subsequently shot down and labelled as a hoax.

In came Nobel laureate, Luc Montagnier, who had a hand in the discovery of the HIV virus. He replicated Benveniste's findings and went one step further. Montagnier posited the idea that water has memory and its information is stored within the ring of water molecules. Diluting HIV viruses incrementally to an undetectable level, in a peer-reviewed study, he proved that water has the memory of having had HIV in the more concentrated mixture through electromagnetic measurements.

It gets more technical after that. Using a telephone line, the electromagnetic information of the water is transmitted to another location and through transduction process (PCR), he managed to recreate the HIV virus on the other side!

All these may sound Greek to most of us, but to the scientists, this is a great challenge what the practitioners of the classical sciences have come to believe. It opens the floodgates of quantum physics and other realms of the unknown. It is a paradigm shift in how we have come to understand science. Interesting.

To complicate things further, now a Japanese scientist, Masaru Emoto, has shown that the appearances of water crystals when exposed to different chantings, music or human emotions are different. Are they telling that our body, which is predominantly made of water, will react differently when exposed to different environments? Are they hinting that holy water has healing powers? Does chanting and recital of mantra serve a higher function that we, ignoramus fools are too simpleton to comprehend?

BBC clip on Water

2014 Documentary on Water Memory

Masaru Emoto's Water Crystal Experiment!

https://asok22.wixsite.com/real-lesson 

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The Elixir of Life?

The Shape of Water (2017)

Okay, this movie is a sci-fi romance flick which won an Oscar. It is modelled after 'The Beauty and The Beast', about a young cleaner-lady falling in love with mysterious scaly water-creature in captivity, initially captured in South America. There seems to exist more mystery behind the story of this mute orphan who lost her vocal powers probably after a neck injury. She spends a long time in her bath and gets an attraction to this creature. She spots the reptilian being in the laboratory, as he is being tortured.

The story goes predictably as she and her band of misfits try to kidnap him from the science facility. They discover each other and live happily ever after. Of course, it is made more interesting than that. The setting is 1960 Baltimore, in a government lab. It boasts of colourful characters, all with flaws in them. The mute protagonist, her colleague who has been through multiple poor judgements in relationships, a talented but unsuccessful painter as her neighbour and the nasty head of the facility who is a family man, but a dangerous boss, who would stop at nothing to prevent his prized scientific specimen from going missing. Amidst all this, there is a scientist who empathises with the sea creature but is also a Russian agent.

What fascinated me more was the title of the film. The 'Shape of Water' reminded me most of the character of water of having the memory of the things that they have come in contact. Scientists recently discovered that water droplets from different sources show different appearances when they are visualised under dark ground microscopy. When the same water is exposed to other objects, (e.g. a flower) the water clusters of molecules change appearance. Again when another flower is dropped in it, yet another shape takes form. This is labelled as the 'face of water'.

Yogis and religious practitioners over the years have been telling about the unique qualities of water, the elixir of life. It is the only substance in all three states on Earth in its natural - solid, liquid and gaseous forms. It is also the most potent solvent in the world, comprising more than 2/3 of our bodies and the world we live in. Interestingly, it has one of the highest surface tensions that allows creepy crawlies to walk on it and to enable water to be pumped up by capillary action high up xylem of a tree of metres high.

Water which is stagnant gives different vibes as compared to a fast-moving one. This must have been the basis for storage of water in particular earthen or metallic containers before consumption. Water chanted with verses of specific frequencies has medicinal and healing qualities. No wonder water plays such a vital role in cultural and religious rituals.

Water memory is the purported ability of water to retain a memory of substances previously dissolved in it even after an arbitrary number of serial dilutions. ... Water memory defies conventional scientific understanding of physical chemistry knowledge and is not accepted by the scientific community. [Wiki]

https://truththeory.com/2017/01/14/german-scientists-discover-water-memory/ 

https://asok22.wixsite.com/real-lesson

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Is it that easy?

Billions in Change (Documentary 2015)

My brother from another womb sent me a teaser that introduced me to this Indian American millionaire, Manoj Bhargava. He moved to the USA as a teenager with his family. He dropped out of Princeton University after freshman year to live amongst monks in India for twelve years. He made his money through his caffeine-plus-vitamin elixir, a '5-hour Energy' drink. His nett wealth worth is said to be USD 1.5 billion and was Forbes' listed. In 2015, he pledged 99% of his wealth to the half of the world population who are immersed in poverty.

Billionaire Philanthropist Manoj Bhargava

He recruited a group of same-minded scientists to invent simple, cheap and long-lasting simple devices to pay to society. The primary target of his selfless endeavour is the rural poor of India. Through his company, Billions in Change, he and his team have come up with simple devices which could potentially be the game changer in their lives. It is intriguing and may be sceptical how something so simple was not thought of by others before. It makes one question whether his endeavour will eventually be fruitful in ending rural poverty.

His primary areas of concern are generating electricity and providing usable water to the poorest segment of the world, which in his projection, comprise half of the world's population. His team has also introduced a cheap, clean form of fertiliser and a medical device named 'External Counter Pulsation' to clear impurities from the body to ensure wellness.

His power-generating bikes can generate electricity for an average rural household for 24 hours by merely pedalling for 2 hours. He hopes that this device will provide half of the world population with no electricity, clean energy, and no CO2 emissions.

Another one of his novel inventions is the suggestion of using graphene wires drilled to the centre of the tap the massive heat under the Earth surface to transmit heat. To solve the safe drinking water of the world, his team has proposed a very affordable way of desalination of seawater.

Another pet project of his company is the production of environmentally safe fertilisers which do not upset the nitrogen cycle of the soil. They claim that their ideas help farmers get higher yields and healthier plants.

If a single man with a small team of a handful of men can come out with so many new innovations, imagine what would happen if we all put their thinking caps towards this end? A positive outlook towards the future.

https://topdocumentaryfilms.com/billions-change/#comments

Economics: Amma's style

Back home in RRF, money was always hard to come by. Many a times we, as children, wished that those frequent squabbles of our parents over money (lack of) never arises. As part of economising and savings, Amma used to ink down a monthly budget for the family. Sundry goods were always enlisted and bought in advance from a particular shop, with cash of course. Amma made it a point never to buy on credit as she believed that it would always spiral out of control. She learnt her lesson well, thanks to her father who singlehandedly burnt off his whole family fortune in a single generation!

When I look at the budget that she had penned, it would appear as money was just enough. No place for unexpected misfortune or malady. Of course, she would supplement her income through her sewing skills. Pretty soon she carved a name for herself amongst the occupants of RRF. When the coffer started welling, never overflowing, she would give out loans to pathetically poor and uninitiated inhabitants of RRF who turned out to bad paymasters and I would be summoned to be the debt collector!

Her bank was gold. With the little savings, she would buy gold ornaments. To me, it appeared like a waste of resources, paying for the workmanship and risk of theft and I would express my displeasure and absurdity of displaying openly her
wealth for prying eyes and jewel thieves to see. Well, she looked at it differently. It was her status symbol, to be put in high esteem by her neighbours and friends. In case of emergency, she would quietly board the LSS green bus to pawn her priced jewel at a particular pawn shop near Prangin Bus Station. She is not dependant on anybody for alms. Periodically she would peruse the pawn chit to make sure that she does not miss the pawn expiry date. When the tide is high, she would proudly redeem her jewel, otherwise it would be another 6 months' lease. Hold behold, the day she missed the pawn expiry date. Everyone in the house would be in the line of fire for no obvious reason.

This, I think is the economic dynamics in most South Indian low middle class wage earning family in Malaysia a generation ago. The family on the outward may look patriarchal but deep down when it comes on to dollars and cents and the daily running of household, the duty falls on the wife. Answerable to the head family, in spite of the meagre income, she somehow stinges here and there to ensure non collapse of the family economics. She could use her ingenuity and living skills towards this end. She would sing the song of melancholy and hopelessness even in the best of times. Come dire straits, she would somehow needle out here and there out of thin air!

So, it all boils down to management. And that applies to all fields that we indulge or given the responsibility to take care.

In a lush equatorial country like ours with rain in abundance throughout the year with rainfall of close to 100 inches a year, we still have to keep up with embarrassing headlines of water shortages and water rationing hogging our newspaper. That why it is a water management board is there in the first place - to manage water and ensure supply during dry spell, not just cut water supply of non payers or just put up water disruption notices. You cannot blame in on the rain, the lack of it, contamination or
simply God. Period.

The disgraced lip-synchronising duo of Milli Vinilli

Holistic holy fun at the Holi?

Freud's suggestion that human beings are irrational creatures was proven true by the turn of events this weekend. The ushering of spring, which was initially celebrated with pomp and splendour by pagan farmers was given a religious perspective by including some event in the scripture. Whereas, some quarters sneer at their behavior for they were referred to as 'April Fools' as they were thought to be oblivious of the creation of the Gregorian calendar and were unaware of fast forwarding of days!

 

Evidence of irrationality came to fore during the recent colorful event of Holi. People who were particular fussy about getting any part of their body wet or soiled, decided to forgo their stance. If normally they would run away from the rain, this time around they decided to hire a container load of water to splash water on them. If appearing neat, fair and presentable was their forte, this time too, they dirtied themselves with stashes of brightly hued colors so much so that they were indistinguishable from one another, colour wise. With an array of mixed colours and water, they all looked in various shades of rust.

 

People who were remotely pious also joined in the festivities. A convoy of tourists were seen beelining in a single file in a near 2km walk from the nearest train station dressed in their typical touristy attire - thin Tshirt, short shorts, Japanese slippers and sling bag, to join in the foray. Looks like the temple celebrations must have made it to list of tourist destinations.

 

After a good 3 hours if immersing themselves in spray of water partially aided by nature's outpouring, colouring themselves pretty dirty, swinging to sounds of Hindi film songs set in Holi festivals and even modern songs to keep with the times (Harlem Shake), everybody went home happy after some free vegetarian snacks, courtesy of some kind soul. The only thing missing in the festival was bhang (hashish laced milk). But who knows what they had before to last 3 hours of non stop dancing!

Pix courtesy of N Lal
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Water rationing in floods!

We all live in uncertainty. Nobody actually knows what is going to happen next. We are all just trailing along like a school of fish with no leader, no direction and no purpose.
Any few months ago, the drinking water levels in my state became dangerously low. This is ironic as we are living in a tropical country with way too much abundance of rainfall. There is lush greenery everywhere, even in the gutter of the roof.
Then there was talk of looking at alternative ways of harvesting drinking water like ground water drilling. Then the politicians moved in saying that it is not the supply but the distribution. The management unit grumbled that their earlier suggestion to build adequate infrastructure was not heeded, hence the shortage.
The Meteorological Men moved in to warn that the worst of the dry weather to yet to come with the ever-changing weather patterns.
Just as soon as they said that, the following day, down came the rain in vengeance like in Noah's story. Before you know it, the state had more water than it bargained for. Water not only in their pipes but everywhere, their porch, bedroom, carpet and cars.
Then, nobody talks of water shortage. The discussion moves on to drainage system, uncoordinated development, lack of environmental impact assessment reports and so on.
Water shortage now seem like a bad word. Nobody wants to be reminded of the days of cleaning the fine dry muddy sand which just would not go away from the flood victims' household, the persistent grainy feeling that stays in their sole of the feet and the damaged household items. http://christopherteh.com/blog/2012/06/selangor-water/