Mr Milei of Argentina was invited to the annual meeting of WEF at Davos this year, a few days ago in 2024. And to oblige the other attendees, he derived a speech. It was a not-so-cleverly out together a speech on the expected lines –
a) How some misguided do gooders are calling for a restriction of unlimited capitalism for the benefit of poorer section of the human population on the planet. Argentina, Mr Milei continues, is an example of how capitalism has elevated the wealth level in Argentina, including the poorer class, which socialism breeds poverty.
Although this is an age-old and often travelled path, I shall try to put a fresh perspective on the topic, stating that both sides of the argument are dead wrong. It is not capitalism or socialism. that is killing the human society along with the earth. It is the misconception, on both sides of the aile, and perpetual growth of any kind is possible on a finite element that is planet earth.
“This is my first post here in a while. The world I knew a few years ago, is gone – never to return. In all my life, I never imagine that the world I knew could unravel so fast, in such a breathtaking speed. Virtually every paradigm that provided stability in this society was about to evaporate.
I knew that the world forests were fast disappearing. I knew nature and wildlife were facing an existential threat, and for a long time. I knew we the planet was going through the sixth mass extinction phase. The first five were doe to geologic events and happened much before humans appeared on earth. In all of them a large portion of living creatures perished in a very short time. The last one brought an end of the age of dinosaurs, and was caused by an asteroid strike on earth. But this sixth one is wholly man made.
I knew all that. And still, when it came, I feel overwhelmed by its suddenness and its omnipresence. There is no escaping it, no corner to hide in. My mind is still grappling with its relative unexpected sudden arrival and its all-encompassing omnipresence.”
First sign for me, was loss of friends
Friends started dropping off. Few of us had the mentality to not take everything that the Medical establishment was saying as gospel and started thinking independently. There is enough evidence that the medical establishment has caused problems in the past. Take Thalidomide, the pill for pregnant women a few decades back. How many children were born with birth defects before the same establishment agreed to pull the drug off the table?
But many of our friends were thinking that way. They left the health issues to the establishment and opposed our views of not wearing a mask or not taking a vaccine. They started thinking we were conspiracy theorists and nut cases.
Then came the relatives. Most painful was the story of my younger brother – younger by nine years. At age 63 he decided to take his first covid jab. I warned him against it. Now that he retured, he should relax and enjoy life. But he was aiming to take on a new job offer as a consultant for a few years, and it required for him to be vaccinated to meet clients. So ie took the shot. Next few days he started having heart problem for the first time. Four days later the doctor said he needs a surgey to bypass some blockage. He was arranging to go to a good hospital, but six days from the shot he suddenly dropped dead, before he could sort out where he should go for the operations etc. Talking to his wife and telling them about the vaccine got her agitated for passing false information to them and they have stopped contact with me.
Then came the other friends. Its the same story always.
Consequently, you learn to keep your sanity and stay mostly by yourself and contemplate the changing world. That is what I mostly do these days.
Locals in Canada I had become friendly with are to be divided into categories. The early friends, who became friends on account of my travels across Canada with Shiv Chopra and Thierry Vrain, to talk about Glyphosate and GMOs – how bad they were and what one can do about it. That was the time when I was the only activist in the teams while the other two were kind of scientists with some experience of the industry’s might in controlling government policy to give preference to agro chemicals and not doing sufficient independent tests to prove its safety. It was the new dark ages when science was captured by the industry and profiteering became the new God.
I was only beginning to learn all this, through my link with a few American scientists that were genuinely involved in researching and investigating Glyphosate and its actions in finishing off the living planet. There were, Don Huber, Stefanie Seneff, Anthony Samsel. They were old school and elderly. Today they are old and some of them have retired. They took my call doing the cross Canada trip and told me the answer to what the people were asking from the crowd.
Flashback to 2019 and a Canada-India comparison. Here is a post and a poster from that time.
I am going to india next month for a revisit after a 4 year gap. One reason for the long gap was – vaccine certificate was necessary for flight on a plane. I did not vaccinate and decided travel is less important than my health. Staying decease free and healthy was more important than travelling.
This level of recognition about the ravages of western industry promoted hysteria about covid and near mandatory vaccination as a ploy to destroy the fabrics of human society came upon a small segment of polilation. As a result, I stays in Canada and restricted my travel to what I could achieve in my own car.
Recognition of the root problem is perhaps subdued in Canada. Here people seems to swat at local symptoms and ignore the root cause, which is capture and enslavement of the Government agencies, Science faculties, Agriculture and Medical systems – all by the industry. Profiteering at the expense of human safety, plant safety and animal safety became the new God. You cannot become an honest doctor, scientist, politician, or anything, without sleeping with the Devil first. I know it sounds harsh, but this is self criticism. I am as Canadian today as Indian. It hurts me that in Canada, the struggle seems to dissipate into irrelevance. This hurts.
I understand modern Canada’s history and mindset. It is a vast nation with minuscule population. This makes Canada somewhat unsuited for meaningful people’s movement. India is the opposite.
In India, these factors involving corporate influence in government policy making, too, is real, but the resistance of practicing organic farms and farmers and sections of the middle class have joined in this struggle, thinking independent from the western propaganda, is still on. The battle is ongoing and intensifying, The jury is out.
Life is changing so fast here is most of the western nations that it has gotten difficult to keep track of all, except for the “Woke” crowd. A major problem is the state propaganda here, and the main stream media not covering any of it because they are dependent on state subsidy which obliges them to portray what is acceptable and what is not.
The geopolitical shift and the changing of global balance of power is happening right now which, according to experts is going to crash all the fiat currencies in the world. The only ones that might survive appear to be Russian ruble and the mechanism that is supposedly being put in place by the BRICS+ nations with a commodity backed currency. I am not sure exactly how that will work except for the Russian ruble.
Russia is already more or less out of the petrodollar based fiat system due to sanctions and having been kicked out of the swift etc. It has survived thanks to safeguards it started putting in its finances many years ago, including internet. I do not know enough of what the Chinese have done because they are straddling both systems. But the Yuan with some sort of multi commodity backed multi currency is being worked on its way The third country is India, which to me is very similar to China in the sense that it has its attachment with the fiat because of extensive trade with usa as well as Indian born diaspora earning in dollars and the pro-US bias by the Westernised half of the population, and same time its wish to be non-aligned and be able to trade outside of the western circle. America has set two different kinds of target on China and India, for refusing to stay within the petrodollar world.
I feel convinced now that the root issues behind the Ukraine war is the key to decide if the west (meaning the US followed by its satellites like Canada, Australia, Europe will survive unscathed or we are seeing the inexorable decline of the west – to be replaced by yet poorly defined Multi-polar system.
The Saudi-Iran realignment is a watershed event for the oil bearing middle east. It is geared to move the entire middle east away from US manipulations. And this detente happened, for the first time, by Chinese mediation and USA was not even invited into the discussion. This is a geopolitical bombshell. It is hard to imagine how the US will react. Saudis have already started selling their oil in currencies other than the dollar. It is hared to imagine the petrodollar will survive. And if it does not, then all other currencies and banking systems linked to it, including the world bank and the IMF may go and the currencies other than the ruble may collapse, at least partially. CBDC (central bank digital currency) might become a reality in most of the world.
For many of these reasons I had been focussing more on getting the news from within Russia, and having a real hard time getting through to the educated people there. I did not know Russia has so man layers and half of them are controlled, at least up to a point, by the US directly of indirectly. This is why the US can whisper about Regime change and/or assassination of Putin.
Russians know about that, but the reaction is not uniform. The urban english speaking population has a powerful section that is anti-Putin. They are in the academia, Judiciary, Parlament, Banking and NGOs. Furthermore, the Russian constitution was created with American help where they cleverly inserted clauses that prevent Russia for doing what is in their vital interest against US or outsider control. In 20 years of post Yeltsin control by Putin, he has not been able to remove the most difficult clauses within its constitution, like article 13, 15 and 75, despite trying a few times already.
But overall, Putin has over 80% public support and realization is dawning among the people that Russia cannot afford to lose the Ukraine war, because if they lose, there will be no Russia.
Meanwhile, the west has seriously underestimated Russian resilience in all spheres. It considered Russian economy to be seriously degraded – which was correct at the turn of the century, year 1999-2000. But the impressive revival of its industry, education, agriculture, science and technology has gone largely under the radar of the west. Only because of the Ukraine war that the west is discovering that the Russia Ruble an economy is insulated from the west and cannot be hurt by Sanctions. It is finding out that Russian science and technology in many sphere has leapfrogged the west. And Russia is not just a gas station – It has become the biggest food exporter in the world etc etc.
I am beginning to realize that the reason the western institutions so grossly underestimated Russia is because the western method for calculating stuff like economy, GDP, science, military status – all are based on fake speculations and theories. And thus, the US initiated a war it now cannot back out from and cannot win. Cannot back out because Russia for many reasons has gotten to hold maximum resources that the west must control in order to maintain its hegemony. And this is a war the west cannot win because it depended on faulty assumptions of Russia’s preparedness to withstand US sponsored proxy war between Russia and NATO through Ukraine.
And the silent revolution has started in Russia, where the anti-Putin elements are slowly being weeded out.
The biggest benefit for me has been discovering the Vedic link between India and southern Russia – going to a phase of Vaishnavite movement linked with Vishnu and his avatar Krishna, and the common roots of old Russian language with early Sanskrit. I had learned about the India-European language group linking Indian and west European languages, but the slavic languages were excluded from the group by western linguists two hundred years ago. Now I suspect this happened through an anti-Slavic bias by the western European linguists of the time.
Arrival of orthodox Christianity around 1000 AD complicated the story because, like the Muslims, the early Christians were engaged in destroying temples, and scrips. Only now, some of it is being rediscovered.
I came to know a few Russians that are practicing or experimenting this path again – mostly through a revival of the ISKON movement. They are more forthcoming to me regarding what is happening inside Russia today with regard to resisting US hegemony on one side, and promoting a multipolar world on the other.
These are keeping me pre-occupied because all of this is outside of much of the media. Even in India, only a small section is engaged in it, hut superficially according to me. The Governemnt, if they are aware and I suspect some key segments of it is aware, but they are not talking about it. And the media is, while diverse, completely out of it, and the public are, like in the rest of the world, exposed only to the western version of the goings on.
IMF has listed the global winners and losers on the economic ladder for 2022 and same time predicted the position of the major players for 2023 and 2024.
But I have a reason to seriously question IMF’s ability, or honesty in such predictions. And yes, the war against Russia has lots to do with it.
But first, let us check what the report says. It says advanced countries had a growth of 2.7% in 2022, which will fall to 1.2% this year and creep up to 1.4% next year. BRaking that down, it predicts the figures for the US are 2.0, 1.4 & 1.0. I have many reasons to seriously doubt such estimates. Everybody knows US GDP on purchasing power actually shrank last year and did not at all grow 2%. It however predicts an actual shrinkage of the British economy in 2023. But surprisingly, most European economies will continue to rise, though just barely above zero.
Then comes the so called developing nations. Earlier they used to call the rest as backward nations, but the west has learned to be more polite these days. China, considered as the most powerful economy in the world today, outpacing the Americans, are slotted within this developing group.
Check China, the largest economy today. It’s growth is reported to have been 3% last year, but expected to jump to 5.2 this year. Among the large economies, India seems to be the shining example in this report, and much talked about due to its contribution within BRICS+ and the collective clout of this group agaisnt the developped group. Along with them, there are more potential BRICS+ joiners that are also star performers – Saudi Arabia, Middle East & Central Asia.
Note – Russia is missing here.
It has taken me a long time to figure out that rankings, past statistics and future predictions of economic activity of nations around the world, projected by mostly renowned western intitutions, are tainted and in some cases, fraudulent, to give the wrong impression to readers, say about promoting Russophobia.
This is not unlike how Facebook, Google search, YouTube, the US Government, and mostly all media channels also project the news heavily biased to suit agendas of the folks that own or control these institutions.
Of recent – I have spent time and effort to dig into Russia, to figure out how a country, Russia, can not only fight off the collective might of the entire western nations plus a few non-westerns (e.g. Japan), if Russia’s Economy was less than a twentieth of the collective West+. To me, modern warfare is highly dependent on the economic, industrial, resource base & scientific details of the parties engaged.
On paper, the collective west has more than twenty times the economy, and incalculably high amount of financial, legal, social, and industrial capacity. Russia has often been described dismissively as a country that is little more than a gas station, ruled by a despotic dictator.
If the economic forecast, and calculations of industrial base are correct, then, considering the attack on all fronts, military, economic and everything else, directed agaisnt Russia by USA/NATO, then Russia should have been dismembered, sliced and gobbled up within a month of the beginnign of hostilities.
But the way it looks, the collective west is fallling on its face.
To me, this is a very strong indication that the western projection of most all data, economic included, is fradulent and has been misinforming the people about facts and misleading them down the wrong path.
Russian economy, after the Yeltsin induced free fall, was considered to be ranked way below the top ten and somewhere at par with perhaps Spain. I know in my guts thats a lie, because Russia is able to shrug off near total sanction by the entire west, and is able to outproduce the west in military hardware, and able to invesnt, design and produce deadlier weaponry, staying ahead of the west, and its currency is strengthening instead of weaking.
This tells me two things:
1) Russian economy, science and industrial base are far stronger than projected.
2) The economic predictions by the western financial institutions are crap.
I have mulled into the reports, as a marine engineer and not as an economist, which I am not, I have actually placed a lot of data in my own giant spreadsheets to check how they look if I try to projust something taking into account various factors within my own knowledge and hunch.
PricewaterhouseCooper International is an intriguing source. It is a vast network of accountancy firms spread across the globle, that provides assurance, tax and advisory services. They are everywhere, including India. They make their own predictions, and some of it is interesting, and often different in the message they send out, compared to the US Govt, the World Bank or the IMF, or what you might read in Financial Times.
The attached chart is from this network of accountancy firms. If you see their 2016 data, the so called emerging economies already carry more punch than the so called advanced nations (G7 versus E7). You did not know about it because G7 is an established group that meet every year and take collective decisions. E7 did not up to recently. They do not even identify themselves as E7. But much of that is now changing, thanks to BRICS+, and the Ukraine conflict and US hegemony.
Thus, the Ukraine conflict has been a massive game changer that is threatening to shred the existing world order as well as Klaus Schwab’s GEF based plans of a new kind of world order.
By 2050, it looks like game over for the west. Six out of seven top econolies will be non western, the US being the only exception. Indonesia, who nobody hears about, will be the 4th largest economy in the world.
But what about Russia? Well, PWC is also a western network. Somehow, their study is likely based on western projections. Even then, Russia is present, at 6th place in both columns. This too, I suspect, is biased and wrong.
I have heard some Dutch experts comment that Russian Economic and Industrial might is not understood well by the west and they are now highly biased against Russia, hence the projections show them absurdly lower than others. I think he was speaking the truth.
WIthout being an economist (thank heavens), I suspect the Russian industrial/scientific/economic acumen, combined with their near inexhaustible richness in resources like energy, food, and gold, their actual ranking should place them between 3rd and 4th today. I cannot predict 2050 since it is too far away.
Then, considering the top Emerging nations – E7, is already stronger than the G7, and are mostly aligned behind Russia in this Ukraine conflict, I cannot help but suspect that the combined West might be facing a long term sunset scenario. The only direction open for them is sliding downhill. Unfortunately, USA exerts a near iron grip on the groups outlook and activity. So USA is likely to drag the rest of the west along with them.
IF we do not have a nuclear holocaust, or a financial meltdown with GEF initiated digital currency surveillance world, which the non-West are possibly likely to reject sooner or later, once they get their act together – I think it may be game over and a reverse migration era will start. People of the west will try to learn Mandarin, Hindi, and Russian, and hope to get a job away from home, much like many Europeans for two hundred years, took all their belongings and hopped a ship heading for New York.
I am still mulling how to connect these dots. But I am already guessing that Russia is at the fulcrum. It is neither eastern nor western. It is Euratian. It appears close to west, but is anchored in Asia. Russia is, in my thinking, likely to be the largest swing state.
Apart from Russia being at the fulcrum, there are more things to connect the dots. Example:
The coming collapse of not just the US dollar, but the entire banking system, where we are to see out money in baks dsappearing or being inacessible. There ill be bank runs across the planet. A new kind of mandemic is to be declared globally – the cyber pandemic, and everybody will be subject to severe control on expenditure.
Russia will be blamed for the pandemic, although Russia will have nothing to do with it and the crisis was either organic, since the banking was going to collapse on its own weight for creating too much fake money.
BRICS+ is seriously chaning the global balance of power. Ukraine and its importance, along with NATO, are all going to be less important.
US acknowdges defeat in Ukraine and stops funding it, and begins to pour money into Indo-pacific region to bolster AUstralian naval power to challenge, along with the US and UK the new global enemy – China.
Biden is asked to step down due to corruption charges. Kamala Harris becomes the short term president. She has no chance to win any election on her own, so the Democrats will not nominate her to lead the party in the next election, making her a lame duck with nothing to lose. She will, therefore, declare tha the US is pulling out of Ukraine, essentially conceding defeat.
New shift to Indo-Pacific under new alliance called AUKUS (Astralia+UK+US) will also mean US funding for new nuclear.subs and weaponry to be given to Australia will need huge funds, so Europe/NATO/Ukraine will stop receiving funds. This is the death knell for both Ukraine and Europe.
Role of India not properly undestood – this has remained under the radar till now. But world’s focus eventually will turn here. Will India compete with Russia for for the top spot as the Swing State. Indian Govt is tight lipped but appears to be very sane, level headed and not inclined to brag about whats going on. Watch India.
This is a carry over from my previous post, on connecting dots.
They say, writers get writer’s block, where they go into a phase when they cannot seem to write even a sentence. Well, I am not a professional writer, thankfully. But I often get into the opposite of a writers block. Too many different ideas, opinions and views crowd into me when I start writig. They jostle with eath other for my attention. One wants me to move this way, and write up about this issue. Another tugs me the oppsite way, reminding me not to ignore something else. I am being pulled in many directions to write about many different things that, together, helps connect the dots. Was I always like this? I know I was always full of questions and used to drive everybody nuts. Anyhow, now that I am busy connecting the dots, too many views crowd into my head and I try the filter through them to chose what I would write first and what next. In the process I end up explaining myself and my life as part of the story. Perhaps my life can help explain why I think the way I do. And by my life, I mean both the place and time that influenced my growing years, and the genes that I share with my parents and my siblings. Both my siblings – my younger brother and my elder sister, are no more. I am all alone on earth right now. But the urge to write continues … since this is such a complex world today, with so many dots moving in so many directions in so many different speeds in three dimension. My writers anti-block keeps pulling me differnt ways. Some of them pulls me to analyse how I grew up to be influenced by how many different things in how many ways, to have a mind set that makes me want to connect the current dots and to make sense. I never before had this feeling that the world is moving ever faster towards a combination of multiple kinds of doom.
Am I going nuts as a sign of senility creeping up or is this rational thinking that the world as we know it is going to vanish suddenly and that 21st century doomsday is nearly upon us, hanging like the sword of Damocles? I know the world medical ssytem has been working for multiple generatiosn now, slowly, to begin a system to make kankind sick for their entire lives, so everyone is a lifelong customer for the medical idustry. I know the new age moden agriculture is likewise trying to make agriculture dependent on acrocorporation products that makes our food sick, so we are permanently dependent on these industriess in order to eat. So our food and our health, has already been captured. What else is left. Well, there is about wealth. And finally, there is the planet, with everything on it. Am I delusional or am I being rational? I have the data to claim most of my suspicions.
But let us first go back to how I grew up, as one of the factors that influence my dot-plotting.
Thats me, two years old, and my year older sister. Far as I know, this is my earliest picture that has survived. My opinion and world view started being formed from this time.
Back to Facebook.
Odd as it may sound, I am now looking back at my life and same time being pulled towards toying with the idea of comparing our 22nd century mega social giants, such as Facebook and Google, as Black holes in our society and our subconscious. They are physically invisible, and yet, they are like an invisible parallel world that have gotten inside our psyche, and playing with our brains to shape the way we think. They are way more powerful than any drug or pill or jab invented by Big Pharma and they are eating our humanity from inside out.
It is a supergiant thingamajig that you can never see nor photograph nor visit, but is so huge that it literally bends, curves and convolutes the space around it and in a way defines our universe. Whether we can identify it, or not, is the thing. Today, I have come to the cross road where I wonder how my life’s journey took me from village India, to Facebook and how I now toy with the idea of comparing it with a Black Hole. But, how are we influenced by our movement through flow of the stream that we call life on earth?
Self went to inspect a ship in Hong Kong harbour in the 1990s,. I am standing between the British Captain and his wife. The captain was a friend, who asked me to bring my wife alone, so I did. She is standing next to the captain.
From those days and even earlier, from books we read, village drama we see at night on stage, or the chanting of religious or seasonal festivals – we have always been influeced by what we see and hear, to form out public opinion.
Public perception of life was being controlled by private enterprise for a while. Two generations ago, people use to say about Hollywood – There is no business like show business.
I remember the the details of first movie that I saw, in Kolkata, India, with my mother. It was a bengali movie, the title would translate as “Song of the road”. It was from 1955. It got a whole slew of national and international rewards and literally launched Indian cinema on the world stage, winning award after award across the planet, except in Hollywood. But decades later, its director, Satyajit Ray, in his last days on his death bed, earned a long distance lifetime achievement award by American motion picture award ceremony in Hollywood. The picture was a tale of the views around his world from the eyes of a very young kid, barely five or six year old, living in a very small village in an abjedtly poor (in comparison with the rest of the world) rural family. The family was leaving their ancestral village since they lost their mudhouse home. All their belongings were packed, occupying half of a single small bullock cart. The other half was the sleeping quarter for the father, mother and the boy. They finally came along a railway track. The boy had never seen a rail line or a train. He vividly recalls his dead elder sister, who had once asked if someone could please take her to see a train.
The movie – Song of the Road, in Bengali, was the first movie that I remember seeing, possibly at the age of six, that my mother took me to see. This movie left a vivid effect on it, till today.
Even today, as I remember how my mother held my hand and took me to the cinema hall, and how I gawked at the giant screen as the movie played out. I was myself perhaps six years old. I am now going to be 73 in a few months. Even today, the memory of it raises the hairs in my arms, the experience was so vivid and touching.
Santiniketan, India. This is where I was born, and attended school barefeet
Thus, my own world view has emerged and evolved with events throughout my life. The fact that I went through my school years withuot footwear, fact there I lived in a place where there were no junk on the street, when plastic was not invented and everything was naturally biodegradable, that my feet had little other than dust when I ame home, fact that we all had to wash our feet before entering – every bit of it influenced my world view as I grew up. I understand my views were markedly different from boys that grew up in cities in India. One could not and did not live the way I did. Nobody completes schools in cities without footwear. Even homelss street beggars have footwear.
But I was not quite poor, per say. Our expenses where way lower. The family income was way lower than in cities. We had no ceiling fan inside home. IN the heat of the summer when sleeping inside was a torture, we slept out in the open in our frant lawn. If it suddenly started raining at night, and Indian monsoon can be torrential, we woudl wake up, take our mattress, pillows and mosquitto net and run indoors. That was all very normal. Your life was in sync with nature. ANd I never got cold, or malaria, or any illness because of living close to nature.
This is how my life’s journey took me from Village India, to Facebook
Birbhum district, West Bengal, India – from days that are behind us now, but it was real when I was a kid.
That picture describes my neighbourhood surrrounding our small University townlet of Santiniketan in Bengal, India. Homes where mud walled. Roofs were of straw. Transport was on bullock cartsm made of bamboo, Wheels were at first wooden. But steel rims around fooden wheels made inside the village was entering the fray. And then wholly steel wheels, without tire, was the next step of self sustainability, where the money stayed in the village and did not go to city corporations and factories far away. Sustainability was not just a catch phrase. It was real and omnipresent. That was part of the essence of my childhood. But all that was already changing and at a breakneck speed. I did not realise it then, but my world was being put upside down, little by little, till it comes into multiple crisis at the same time.
I did not know it then, but the agents of such change, the horses of apocalypse, were both the rich and the poor, the left and the right, the corporations and the politicial parties. I did not know it till I was well into my senior years. I thought I knew much of the world when I was a teen and a post teen. But I can now say – I knew only the surface ripples of a very vast and deep system.
Me in the middle with my siblings. My younger brother at left and my elder sistem, wearing colour, at right. It was at the Santiniketan version of the Holi festival, of Vasanta Utsav, which translates as Spring Festival. Today I am the only one alive.
Fast forward a tumultuous phase of decade after decade of growing up, studying and epansion of our horizon, for good and bad, till I ended up living in Hong Kong just before the turn of the millennia and internet came to the world. Hong Kong was very advanced compared in the early and mid 1990s, to most western regions, and dial up internet came to my home, when Apple computers, Macintoshes, were ahead of the Microsoft PCs to embrace internet and recognise it as what it was soon going to be. Bill Gates caught on soon enough and made a total about turn, covertig the entire PC industry into an internet promoting enterprise.
Soon I was to leave Hong Kong, as the free wheeling and near tax free British Colony was going to be handed over to Communist China and there was fear that the place was going to change and non-chinese people might be kicked out. A huge exodus started out of Hong Kong. Industries, banks and people started moving out. Head hunters from around the world set up offices and channels to catch entrepreneurs, skilled people and industries, to help them resettle in various parts of the west. Kiosks, fairs and shows started coming up in Parks on weekends in Hong Kong, from various such sources. Even the Governments of Canada and USA were organising picnics, shows and taking up Booths in cultural fairs, to attract potential immigrants. It was quite a show. I had not decided to leave initially, but eventually I too got swept in the tide, when a ship owning firm in Miami, Florida, gave me a call and offered me a 7 days free of charge vacation to Miami, if I agree to an interview by the CEO, for a potential job as an executive. No kidding.
And my life changed. However, I was alreay well into the internet, thanks to Hong Kong. I even managed to change my own web page and sight, with a new account from a service provider in Miami, paying for it with my newly acquired credit card linked to a Hong Kong bank, and shifted my web home page there, with a hotlink to my existing Hong Kong based web page. It was all very exciting those days and I was pleased that I could do all that with relative ease, while most of my friends still did not much know what the heck internet was.
Fast forward a few decades and I was then in Canada and first got interest in a host of new social media platforms cropping up everywhere. Facebook was one of them. There were many others and the competition was fierce. Internet connection was by then moved on from telephone dial in, to broadband, in the US where I lived for some years, to Canada, where I migrated to. I have forgotten some of the other platforms, but eventually estabished myself on Facebook, primarily as it was here that I could communicate with the townspeople from my birth place – Santiniketan, West Bengal, India. There it was still dial up, but local system providers where getting busy hooking people up with dial up modems etc. I think broadband lines were still into the future. Those were the heady days.
Today, I have almost nobody in my home town that communicate with me. Many have passed away. Others have drifted away. Some have separated frm me on ideological differences.
Tagore
You see, internet has been, same time, a great uniter and a great divider. WHen you do not get to hear or read too much from your friends, do you not know too much of his or her world views and ideological bend. So friendship remains stable, though superficial. As internet broadens the communication channels and people spend more time expressing themselves, sometimes fissures come up. For me, life has been a great educator, and I have always had an open and questioning mind, not anchored on any ideology. Nothing was ever written in stone for me. Not religion, not phylosophy, not political affiliation – not nothing. Everything was worth exploring, worth admiring for its good points and criticising for what I considered its bad points. I was perhaps more influenced by my genes, my parents and the only person who greatly influenced my world view – Tagore.
So, I was once a socialist, then a progressive, a liberal, a secularist, then an ism-less humanist, then promoter of small entrepreneurs (I even started a trading company myself in Hong Kong, before realising I was not a businessman at heart, and closed it down after a few years, but not before I had made a few thousand bucks, involved in breaking of ships in western India, through links in Hong Kong, and paid in US dollars). But most of my birth place friends were anchored in stone. Eventually we fell apart.
Things have now come to a head and I have started detesting some of my friends. A young classmate from my school days, who ended up being a professon in a famous Univerity in Delhi, even psoted to me on Facebook that – I was endangerign mankind by refusing to wear a mask and hugging people everywhere and mising with them. I was such a threat to mankind that he was going to report me to the Canadian police, so I would spend my remaining days in jail, and save mankind in the process. No, he was not a mad man. He was a profession in a shiny famous University in the Capital city of India. So much for professors. Suffice it to say, I had by then learned how to block people.
So, my link with the leftist, or left leaning crowd of my own past, drifted apart from me. I myself, through life experiences had leared that some people were too block headed for my taste and childhood friendship was not enough to stay in touch if I was not allowed to speak my mind of items that I thought were ruining the planet, and that neither the left wing, nor the right wing, were honest or path finders.
Eventually, rather late in life, I began to understand how social media like Facebook, Google search and other stuff, where actively engaged in altering public opinion of the entire planet, and have more power to control people, than national governments, and how they were seriously trifling with free flow of information and exploration of the mind.
I have also been aware how some of these corporations have acquired unebelievable power over the people, though mind control, or through stifling opposition, and by having enough money to buy up governments, of not just small countries. There is now a famous joke in America – USA is the best governemnt in the world that money can buy.
And so I engaged in a multiple year effort to get away from, and wean people I like, away from the clutches of Facebook. I have mostly failed in my effort. But that is okay with me. It is not so much the result, but the effort, that makes life worth living, for me. Besides I have largely been a lone ranger in my activism that stretches decades well into my teen years in India. I have rarely ben happy joining any big group, for all sorts of reasons. Mostly I found these group leaders, including political leaders, lacking in ethics and for being in it more for themselves, than for any root social issue.
MeWe was another example of my failed efforts. It looks and behaves similar to facebook. In my judgment, opening a second house on MeWe should be least painful for Facebookians. I tried my best to enourage people to move there. Why? Because Facebook seriously and viciously restricts free speech when it comes to certain burnig topics of the world today, and MeWe does not. That alone should be enough for people that are aware of it and are actually engaged day and night criticising Facebook and Zuckerberg, to move there. But I failed in my effort. I now know more about the Artificial Intelligence tools that Zucherberg uses to keep people hooked and unable to leave FB. I admire Zuckerberg for his smartness and detest him for his efforts to guide and shape global public opinion.
But, Zuckerberg is not the guy I have to live with. I am that guy I have to live with. So, my effort on MeWe, as well as others, continue. I have succssfully boycotted Youtube without cancelling my unpaid membership. I have largely transported by recent stuff out of Facebook and on to other channels and platforms. MeWe is one of them. And here is what I have to show for it.
I have only a few hundred friends, who almost never respond or comment on any of my posts, and never generate any conversation that can amount to a conversation.
Do I get that in Facebook ? Not quite. If you have 5,000 friends, over 10,000 followers and another thousand wanting to be my friends – thats a total of 16,000 or so. And then I get less than one meaningful conversation a day on life altering events going on around the world. Sure, lots of folks are busy making small protests nearby on some of these issues. But I can see that virtual protets on the same Facebook that is cleverly engaged in controlling public opinion and acting as a super controlled-Opposition promoter.
But facebook too has been an useful tool for me in my last years. it is a reasonable rough diary, to hone my writing skills. this helps my brain to remain active. Brain is after all the largest and most fuel consuming organ of the body. exercising the brain as as strenuous as running several rounds around my block, but for keeoing differnt parts of my body healthy.
I have always been reasonably healthy. I do not take any jab – not in last 65 years. I never get an infection. My medical bill has been zero for the lat forty or more years. And, thankfully, my brain is still active and my fingers are still nimble enough for me to be baning keyboards to try my writing skills.
Examples of my failed attemps on Facebook to find answers and develop a dialog. I did not know, even three years ago, that Facebook was exactly the wrong platform for this.
So, MeWe and the rest are not necessarily examples of my failure. I have often, and repeatedly, failed in my efforts to engage socially about issues that matter to us socially. But for me, these failed activities were still memorable. These are proofs of an active mind that does not like to give up easily. And I have found a good use for Facebook – a rough diary.
Here is how similar my home page on MeWe looks like my FB page. I think I need to change my profile picture. I instinctively dislike hiding myself behind phony nakes or pictures while socialising. And I like the idea of wrapping text around my picture to express my opinion. I was born opinionated.
We are living in an unbelievable time of change. It may be impossible to grasp all of it by anybody living on earth currently, because so much of it is happening in so many different levels in so many places simultaneously. The collective outcome is likely to change the way we live, think and exist, in so many profound way. And all this is happening so fast that it can make your head spin.
We all know, unless one is brain dead, that the Ukraine conflict is an extremely small tip of an extremely large iceberg, and that too much of the details are underwater and invisible.
A love letter from Zuckerberg
Take Facebook for example. It has only recently helped me understand the extent to which globalist’s control of social media can help manufacturing or shape public opinion. Facebook is an example par excellence. Most people do not even know that half the worlds population are Facebook members. If you account for the fact that the other half could be children, too old to care, or folks that aer poor do not have internet, then you can guess that nearly 100% of the connected mankind of the entire planet are Facebook members. Now, consider that Facebook unilaterally and illegally applies extra-ordinary levels of control and censorship on your use of certain opinions relating to certain globalist programs, such as on Covid19 pandemic or vaccine, for example. This control, on 100% of the internet connected humanity of the world, helps controlling how the world perceives as public opinion, which has been illegally manipulated to favour whichever God Zuckerberg prays to. You have been suckered. This may help you to begin to understand, if you are capable of analysing anything independently, how you are being suckered, not as a prank, but on issues that can make or break the current state of humanity.
This is one reason I am constantly moving away from Fake-book and am determined to eventually leave behind all my thousands and thousands of friends, followers and other contacts here. Even half the population of the planet is not good enough for me to stay in a cage where I cannot speak what I consider to be of a life-and-death importance for mankind. I am not a messiah, but I was born free and wish to die free.
Zuckerberg
Anyway, enough of Zukerberg and his hold on Facebook, and Instagram as well as WhatsApp through Meta.
I write this particular piece as a blog to get back into the habit of promoting my blog. But the world is changing so fast, that writing a blog is for the freaks. Everybody talks into a phone camera and shares it on tiktok or instagram for their half a second of passing fame. That is what is trending. Writing anything in a blog is prehistoric.
The thing is, I am going to be 73 years old in a few months. I myself will be compared to the dinosaurs by the new generation, which might be generation X,Y,Z or perhaps new style non-latin scripts such as µ, ß,å, ≈, ≥ etc. But, I am still for writing, though even a saurid like myself have transitioned from writing by hand into a diary, to typing on a typewriter, to punching keys on a computer. I made a stop there and have not transitioned to two finger tying on a smart phone. Even a saurid can dra a line.
And that is not all. I am opinionated and do not shy away from saying what I feel, even in english, complete with my Indian accent, which I refuse to let go. I was born with it and grew up in it. I have made near 1000 videos, half of them on YouTube before I started boycotting it for the same reason I am slowply boycotting Facebook – they too censor public opinion and freedom of speech that I do not agree with, and pretty much for the same reason – blocking all dessenting voice on Covid19 and its vaccines. WHO is the God. Bill Gates is the prophet. And anybody that disagrees will be banished from YouTube. Hence, my polite address to Youtube would be – F*CK YOU.
And so, I have never ever been as busy as I am these days, trying to catch up with the fast changing world while staying away from all main stream and most of the privately controlled social media. Searchign for honest news has gotten harder than finding God. Yes, we are living in an incredibly unexplainable phase on the planetary history in the age of Anthropocene. If you never heard of the age of Anthropocene, I suggest you research it. It will be a very relevant education on the current geological time.
Pepe Escobar
Pepe Escobar
It is time people like myself begin to forget people like Zuckerberg and focus more on people like Pepe Escobar. Who is this man? Well, yes, he is a man. You gotta be careful about gender in this newfound western discovery of the cancel culture. First, there was Copernicus who found that the earth is far from being the centre of the universe. And then came the neocons, the neolibs and the neo-whatever to invent the cancel culture. Whatever you thought of anything, is wrong. A man is not a man, a woman not a woman, and we all need to hate ourselves for being born whichever way we were born.
Back to Pepe. He is a man, period. From his name, you might guess that he was nor born in any Anglo-Saxon family and perhaps belongs to the Hispanic diaspora. Actually, Spanish is not his mother tongue, I suspect. But Portuguese might be, since he was born in Brasil.
Pepe Escobar is a reporter and columnist. He has been an editor-at-large at Asia Times and an independent geopolitical analyst focused on Eurasia. For over 40 years, he has lived and worked as a foreign correspondent in various places across the planet such as London, Paris, Milan, Los Angeles, Singapore and Bangkok. Perhaps the only continents he has not lived in for work are Latin America, Africa, and Antarctica.
He is the author of countless books; his latest one is Raging Twenties, with subtitles stating – “Great Power Politics Meets Techno-Feudalism”. You get the picture?
Well, Pepe recently wrote an article in the Cradle. If you have no idea who or what is “Cradle” – itdescribes itself as “The Cradle is a journalist-driven media platform that provides in depth coverage and analysis of West Asian geopolitics from within the region.”
Comprende ? Pepe seems to be gravitating towards the non-west, or dare I say – Global South?
Anyhow, the article that Pepe wrote recently, in the heat of the Ukraine battle, is titled: Global South: Gold-backed currencies to replace the US dollar.
The article starts with:
Let’s start with three interconnected multipolar-driven facts.
First: One of the key take aways from the World Economic Forum annual shindig in Davos, Switzerland is when Saudi Finance Minister Mohammed al-Jadaan, on a panel on “Saudi Arabia’s Transformation,” made it clear that Riyadh “will consider trading in currencies other than the US dollar.”
Second: The Central Banks of Iran and Russia are studying the adoption of a “stable coin” for foreign trade settlements, replacing the US dollar, with the ruble and the rial. The crypto crowd is already up in arms, mulling the pros and cons of a gold-backed central bank digital currency (CBDC) for trade that will be in fact impervious to the weaponized US dollar.
Third: South Africa holds this year’s rotating BRICS presidency. And this year will mark the start of BRICS+ expansion, with candidates ranging from Algeria, Iran and Argentina to Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
Author – Tony Mitra
This is huge and may be difficult to comprehend properly by the current generation of people. The Petrodollar dependence in global trade is fifty years old. Very few people even remember how the world was when currencies used to be linked to gold or other commodities. Fiat currency, printed out of thin air, or created out of the click of a mouse is the norm today. Even that mouse has disappeared, replace by a button or a touch pad. The very meaning of money, or wealth, or savings, have become incredibly complex to properly understand. But here and now, the global South is beginning to do something about it.
Try to understand, and comprehend the enormity of the decision, if you can.
The very of financial system behind the global economy and commerce, are going to change, significantly. Its heart is being taken out and replaced. And the donor is not from the west. There is almost zero western input into this work. The western economic henchmen are little more than curious onlookers that are not invited to join the party. If you do not believe this is big, then you and I have different interpretation of “big”.
Try to grasp the enormity of it, and see if you can connect any dots with the current Ukraine conflict? One of the two adversaries, Russia is with the Global South, while the other, NATO is not. Also, the core that triggered all this, and whose work started long before the Russian soldiers walked into Ukraine, is BRICS, and the person that made BRICS happen, is Putin, or Russia. It started with RIC – Russia India China. Then Brasil and South Africa joined up and made it BRICS. Then many more want to enter, so it is now called BRICS+. But it was Putin & Russia, that made it happen. And the same Russia, is one of the warring parties in the current proxy war.
Connect the dots?
India: here is another country that is mostly out of spotlight, but I believe, is playing a major and ground breaking role. More on this later, perhaps. Now is not the time to talk about India. Meanwhile consider just the following paragraph also penned by Pepe in that article:
India’s purchases of Russian crude have increased year-by-year by a whopping factor of 33. India is the world’s third largest importer of oil; in December, it received 1.2 million barrels from Russia, which for several months now is positioned ahead of Iraq and Saudi Arabia as Delhi’s top supplier.
3300% jump in oil import from Russia in a single year, concurrent with the West’s imposition of total sanction agaisnt Russia. Now remember, India is among the most populous nation on earth, at par with China, having 1.4 billion people, and are on a fast rising economic path, among the fastest in the world, often ahead of the Chinese growth rate. India started a generation late into the sprint to the top, and is significantly behind the Chinese GDP as of now but threatening to catch up with both USA and China is a decade or two, leaving the rest of the world very far behind. Thsi is assuming that USA retains its economic might – which I now suspect might be impossible, and USA is eventually following Europe, into economic irrelevance. We shall see, though I myself will not be around, unless I can live past a hundred.
Anyhow, the current growth in India and also China means – a huge swath of human population are going to be as individually rich as the rest of the west. And when you multiply this with the population to measure the national wealth, these nations may have three, four, or ten times the economic clout of the combined west. China and India by themselves are about half the world population. Therefore, if people of these two nations become, man for man, as rich as Americans, this means these two countries together will have several times more economic clout than the rest of the world put together. And then you start adding all the other emerging economies of the non-west. Try to draw the picture of the world a generation from now.
This rest of the non-west is already an economic power block that is not with the west regardig Ukraine. This block, with their own rise in economies and vast resource base, along with Russia the riches resource base on earth, plus China and India are forming this new BRICS+ arrangement wanting to get away from Petrodollar dominance. So – where is the world heading?
Sit down, have a coffee and think about it. This is not a hypothetical mid-summer night’s dream. This is real, this is happening right now and at a breakneck speed.
Now let us go back to Pepe. How did the term R5+ come up instead of BRICS+. Well, we are here talking about currencies and not nations. The “R” comes from an intriguing side note. The currencies of the current BRICS nations all start with R – Real, Ruble, Rupee, Remnimbi, Rand. Thus – R5. And R5+ simply means other currencies of the member state too.
As it happens in the emerging market nations, these currencies, especially Remnembi, Rupee and Ruble are the most liquid.
Then comes two names that you might consider following up, who add value to the depolarisation effort of the Global South – Zoltan Pozsar and Sergey Glazyev. The first is an American and the second is a Russian.
Zoltan Pozsar is the American born Global Head of Short- Term Interest Rate Strategy department of Credit Suisse. And Credit Suisse Group AG is a global investment bank and financial services firm founded and based in Switzerland. Also, he formerly was in the IMF, US Department of Treasury, and New York Federal Reserve.
Zoltar wrote two recent articles that have become highly controversial and disliked by the western world – “War and Commodity Encumbrance”, and “War and Currency Statecraft” where he writes about how the war in Ukraine is creating new financial channels.
Zoltan Pozsar
He is also a committed supporter of Bretton Woods III – an idea that has been getting enormous traction among the Fed-skeptical crowd. If you do not know what Bretton Woods is, it may be time that you brush up a bit. The Bretton Woods is a system of monetary management that established the rules for commercial and financial relations among the United States, Canada, Western European countries, Australia, and Japan after the 1944 Bretton Woods Agreement. Bretton Woods III is just a name given to a recent reincarnation of it, proposed by, yes, Zoltar Pozsar, based on a commodity based currency – something that the Global South is proposing and working on, in order to get away from the US dominated Petrodollar and the US hegemony promoting banking systems. What the inner goals of Bretton Woods III is, and if it supports a backdoor takeover by the west,like a trojan horse, or a genuine wish to join the new club as an equal member, I do not know, since I am just a retired marine engineer and not an pretend economic expert.
Sergey Glazyev
Meanwhile the Russian counter part, Sergey Glazyev is the Minister of the Eurasia Economic Commission (EAEU). Yes, there is an Eurasian Economic Commission and yes, there is a Minister, and that person is Russian at the moment.
But who is Sergey Glazyev? Well, for a start – he was born in 1961, (11 years younger than me), but in a very interesting place – Zaporozhye. Yes, the same place where Russia is right now battling Ukraine in the region known as DPR, or Donetsk People’s Republic, in Donbas, in eastern Ukraine. That’s right.
But that is not all.
In 1983, he graduated from Moscow State University named after M.V. Lomonosov, majoring in Economic Cybernetics. This man is also a Russian politician and economist, member of the National Financial Council of the Bank of Russia, and, since 2008, a full member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Glazyev was minister of Foreign Economic Relations in Boris Yeltsin’s cabinet from 1992 to 1993, a member of the State Duma from 1993 to 2007, one of the leaders of the electoral block Rodina from 2003 to 2004, a candidate for the Presidency of the Russian Federation in 2004, and advisor to the president of the Russian Federation on regional economic integration from 2012 to 2019. As of 2021, he is the Commissioner for Integration and Macroeconomics within the Eurasian Economic Commission, the executive body of the Eurasian Economic Union. That is who he is.
Collapse of the dollar – BRICS in focus?
But it is difficult to write about connecting the dots on the fast moving geopolitical chess board without mentioining a bit more of the dedollarisation phenomenon. An impending collapse of the US dollar as the world reserve currency and the currency that all developped and developing nation must accumulate in ever larger quantity, in order to trade and purchase ever increasing demand for oil – is a near certainty, and a serious contributory reason for the US beginning to lose sleep over it.
Understanding it is equally challenging since it requires the reader to reject long held notions about many things economical, such as fiat currency, the root of the American wealth, and continuous global wars mostly instigated by the US, al because of the never emptying well of dollars and more dollats printed out of this air for benefit of the US but picked up by everybody else. But that gravy train is about to derail itself as an immovable object is noted on its track – BRICS.
An ever growing block of nations, cmprising of more than perhaps 3/4th of mankind, does not like the US hegemonic hold on the globe based on its dollarised economy. These people want freedom from US and dollar dependence. And BRICS appears to be the best vehicle to date, that can bring this freedom. If you like, listen to this 53 minute video. It may prove eye eopening for the uninitiated, about how a natural calamity – collapse of the dollar because it is too top heavy, can be used to pin another blame on Russia – in the form of Cyber hacking terrorism that causes all banks to fail. This is most likely in the plans. Is this an excuse to initiate a nuclear exchange to punish and dismember Russia? Are there many layers of Agent Provocateurs
These two persons, diametrically opposite in the geopolitical global matrix, are strangely, talking in similar lines and even mentioning each other. Some of Zoltar’s highly controversial articles are as recent as the last week of December 2022 – three weeks ago from my writing.
Pepe Escobar thinks, with good reason, that Zoltar and Sergei – from opposing poles, are converging. I believe this convergence might actually be a western Trojan horse, or an indication that the Geopolitical shift in balance of power is real, and that the west is getting scared out of its wits and scrambling to adapt, while different corners are breaking away and splintering from the main unified body.
Click on the picture to read the full text
According to Pepe, what Glazyev proposes now is for Russia to boost gold mining to as much as 3 percent of GDP: the basis for fast growth of the entire commodity sector (30 percent of Russian GDP). With the country becoming a world leader in gold production, it gets “a strong ruble, a strong budget and a strong economy.”
You can guess, that Sergei is not an idiot, and that Putin is beginning to get a good team of colonels to fight the rest of the west off.
This, the financial shift in the centre of gravity of the planet, has many very astute players. Pepe’s article on the new commodity based currency system being worked out of the Global South, with BRICS+ or R5+ members are a very big thing, the biggest thing to happen to this planet since the second world war, and that it is literally turning the old hegemonic west-controlled system and the global balance of power on its head.
And most people that still clings to the western idea that West is the only representative of honesty, rule of law, fairness in trade and economics, and also the only super power – are all to be proven wrong.
Click on the picture to read the second paper from Zoltan Pozsar
My view is – this economic stuff is just one angle of a very large puzzle. Ukraine is just one, very small and visible tip of a super gigantic iceberg that we shall likely need a long time to understand, or accept in our minds. But the iceberg is here, and the change in balance of power is real and present, and the BOOK is to be re-written, is right now being re-written, by people and countries that took absolutely no part in compposing the previous edition. The writers of the current edition are not linked with NATO or the west, or even Japan, the pseudo-west.
But, what do I know? I am just an uneducated marine engineer who does not understand either geopolitics, or finance.
If you have an opinion or a comment, I encourage you to use the below comment box and write something that helps stimulate human communication and exchange of ideas.
Being a resident of Delta, BC, Canada, i live in the coastal region bordering the pacific ocean. Consequently, I have seen my share of plovers, particularly the black bellied plover, and, occasionally, a golden plover. These are shore birds with a difference. To start with, they are not always at the shore line and can be seen further inland, much like many other shorebirds. But unlike the usual group of peeps – sandpipers – these are slightly more bulky and less streamlined, with a recognizably thicker and robust beak. Clearly, they are designed to digest a different range of food from your usual dunlin or pectoral sandpiper.
Golden plover in the bush
I have always found it difficult to see plovers up close, no matter where I sit or stand, Open shorelines offer little camouflage for someone like me and I have never taken the trouble of carrying my own blind.
Lastly, I see far more black bellied plovers than I see American or Pacific golden plover.
But all that changed when I came to Manitoba, and went north to Churchill by the Hudson Bay in October 2022, in the hope of seeing some polar bears in the wild. Apart from polar bears, I ended p seeing a lot of plovers up close. And voila, they were golden plovers, and with no confusion on the species because the “gold” in the golden plover was so brilliant and so close to me.
All I had to do was stay still, hold the camera to my eye, and wait for the wary bird to step out of the bush, in the open, without scaring it off.
The world may be entering the twilight zone. I myself, at my age, may never be able to return to Manitoba to see the diminishing groups of polar bears again. I may never again see the beautiful golden plover so close in the bush again.
But for now, I was thankful for the planet offering me another glimpse of how life should’ve been.
এত কথা আছে, এত গান আছে
এত প্রাণ আছে মোর,
এত সুখ আছে, এত সাধ আছে
প্রাণ হয়ে আছে ভোর।
Translation – I have so much to say, so many words, music, so much pleasure, and desire still left in me. It still fills my life to the brim.
– Part of a poem by Tagore, written in Bengali, over a century ago, explaining how frozen ice in the mountains breaks free and releases itself climbing down into torrential cascades in spring rivers, spanning through the land, offering life sustaining catalysts, breaking the chain of immovable frozen silence of the iceberg, and exploding into colourful music of life and till it reaches the ocean.
