Brown Motion

Reader Alert - this is a long monologue that might put you to sleep - may be its only redeeming quality. I am going to tackle two complementary yet opposing ideas that I kept thinking about over this weekend. One of Anonimity -  Just like this author has the ability to express what amount to anonymous thoughts on a wide variety of subjects - without getting personal - and have a decent readership there is some credence for remaining Unknown. Another example may be one where you board a transcontinental flight and have just you and a seat mate to while away around five hours.  Chances are you may strike up an innocent conversation like making an observation about the state of air travel.  That may lead to some further banter and if the seat mate seems inclined to expand on their points of view a wonderful back and forth, all while not even introducing oneself to the other. What is this type of exchange and how does it work?  Partly because ...

What makes any thing or any one great? A society, a country, a civilization. Since man began counting time and recording history it is evident that there have been many a tale of rise and fall of entire civilizations over short and long periods. As I recently watched a film about what the Ancient Indians knew, hosted by an Australian and produced by the help of English and Americans and broadcast on a US cable channel I was struck by the disconnects at many levels. It is plentifully clear that the ancients (in the Indus valley) and what is now called India were a learned bunch to the point that the nucleation of complex mathematical and scientific thought occurred here. That subsequently translated into a plentiful state of being and a truly/holistically wealthy society. Take that visionary thinking then and fast forward to 2012 and you see large scale variance in almost any metric you could care to measure in 'modern India' (another oxymoron for the books). Greed and ab...