Iqbal Sir, I just cannot reconcile how can someone a senior well respected original ground breaking thinker/ philosopher like you can support PM Narendra Modi, you wrote in response to my question What are the prospects of global warming? Ask Mr. Modi please. I like him dont worry too much about it. ( I know I am asking for trouble here) Sir, PM Modi is on record to say Climate has not changed. We have changed. Our habits have changed. Our habits have got spoiled. Due to that, we have destroyed our entire environment. I want a detailed response Sir Iqbal Latif. A. Joshi Here I reproduce my old article, how do you know I have not sent my articles to CM Modi? It is not him, it is me who is the skeptic may be! Haha We have becomes billions of hypochondriacs bunched together!! At TED Global in Oxford, I was shocked by this graph, shown by David McCandless. It shows the media mentions of scares, all of them false alarms. Hurricane Irene fell short of the doomsday predictions of record-breaking storm surges in North Carolina and Virginia. Irene was a minimal Cat 1 the prediction was strong Cat 3 or higher storm. NASA or Metrological forecasting wants to conquer the worlds Mars but got this one completely wrong; we live in a scaremongering sensationalist culture. If it not Irene it is the Avian flu or Sars or Swine Flu; the real challenge mankind faces is poverty that is diminishing human infatuation from our hearts , a child globally still dies of hunger every five seconds, eight years on from a pledge to halve the worlds hungry by 2015. At turn of millennium the notorious Y2K was a hype. Notice the huge peaks for swine flu and bird flu. Notice how video game fears peak twice a year, once in November when video games are released and once in April, the anniversary of the 1999 Columbine massacre. Notice the Y2K peak. Notice that mad cow disease re-emerges in 2003, the year when human deaths rose again after falling for a number of years -- by one (from 17 to 18).Notice above all the disappearance of such scare stories for a while -- in September 2001. Age of knowledge should wake us up, while our new flows 24/7 around us plot to make things more complicated; we can swing the equilibrium in our support by being ever alert against the distractions of media. The way we humans have survived over past hundreds of thousands of years is through trying to beat the odds arrayed against us we the humans; we always have won the race of extinction by our optimism not pessimism. Just take all the negative influences out of your life and be positive; nature is inclined to wipe us clean we keep going by avoiding the pit falls. The biggest success of this optimism is our prolonged existence. Go my friend bestow your love even on your enemies if you touch their hearts what do you think will happen. Rumi Happiness is to steal that one piece of happy moment from million of sorrows. That one moment of glee over despair every day will pull you together.Why are you so enchanted by this world when a mine of gold lies within you? Rumi In 2005, a Flu that never came with 100 million forecasted imminent deaths. Mass mortuaries that were never required. Media hypes for naught, live goes on as world media tries to find another disaster to instil fear and horror! Fear and destruction appeals to mass consumption, happiness is a routine matter. Our grandfathers has it easy, they were not distracted by ever increasing inflow of information, we are deluded with all kind of information telling us how bad it is going to be, the connectivity has finished the aura of trepidation. News of disasters in distant far-off lands inundate us 24/7, or the latest hype of the politicians. Tweets, emails, face book and our vastness of horizons have made us a unique individual in a ear where we are at the cusp of a new take off. Lets rejoice the fact and not agonize about our future. We are surrounded by a media that paints worst of picture for every turn and twist of our life. Why have we become mass of 7 billion hypochondriacs bunched together. Yes, prevention is better than cure, but overkill each time is inacceptable. Even this time Obama joined in the foray of the hurricane; it was dying down it was on a path that was wide and had lost its impetus. Lets rewind a bit here, in Jan- 2005, sensationalism and mass panic ruled the waves, Science magazine observed that expert opinion held the odds of a global outbreak of avian Flu as 100 percent. The new U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt told the Associated Press in early August that an influenza pandemic was now an absolute certainty, echoing repeated warnings from the World Health Organization that it was inevitable. Likewise Science magazine observed that expert opinion held the odds of a global outbreak as 100 percent. In the same grim spirit, the British press revealed that officials were scouring the country for suitable sites for mass mortuaries, based on official fears that avian flu could kill as many as 700,000 Britons. When science becomes too invasive, sensationalism and spreading of unfounded fears based on poor science becomes the objective! Now in a repeat action we are being swamped with predictions of catastrophe. World Health Organization announced today that there is no evidence that an outbreak of swine flu in Mexico represents an act of bio-terrorism. The EU had warned travellers on Monday to stay away from Mexico and the US as governments worldwide moved to contain the spread of swine flu, and the first confirmed cases of the disease were reported in Europe. The world economy already reeling under the pressure of credit crunch was dealt another death blow. A month hence the virus disappeared only leaving the marks of mass stupidity that we all tend to buy in cheap. Sars, Avian flu were over hyped, global flu strains that are rare like this one swine flu sells very well. It is fear and exaggeration that creates media galore. Look at the BP unpleasant incident recently the world drowning under oil was overhyped with same passion. Mountains Out Of Molehills. What the media around us do is to help us go and buy the gutter moments by making us listen to despair and disasters all the time. Y2K was avoided as a result of preparation but fear of plane dropping and power station blowing up was stretched far beyond reasonable limits. We can let the mere idea of a possible swine flu plague create chaos, or we can settle down and fight it with vigilance and reason. In this connected world the media preoccupation of scares, all of them false alarms is not conducive for peace of mind, these wrong kind of passions result in wrong kind of attitudes and threat that actually impedes the progress of repair. If any given strain of normal run of mill kind of viruses is traced in this world we will see far more multiplication in a period of 15 days. We by nature are looking for some disaster that wipes us out, if not anything else we will look at global warming as issue and spend trillions in regulation, after few decades like Club of Rome report or demise of dire predictions of Malthus we look for new avenues to create panic and fear. Look at the costs of Swine flu hoax ! £1.2bn spent to beat swine flu and just 26 lives saved. The £1.2billion spent on tackling the swine flu pandemic that never was may have saved as few as 26 lives at a cost of up to £46million each, an astonishing study has found. The vast sum spent on vaccinations, anti-virals and facemasks prevented such a paltry number of deaths because the virus turned out to be far less deadly than normal flu. The £46milllion cost of saving each life is enough to pay the salary of almost 2,000 nurses. Our real enemy is famine, hunger, and mass poverty, all these monies can be well spent to remove the Somalias hunger that is killing a child every four minute, lets spare a moment for that child. Martin Seligman (Fox Leadership Professor of Psychology in the Department of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania) is known as the father of the positive psychology movement. It is the groundbreaking research that he and his team have done in this arena that is very much shaping our world. Research shows that people with an optimistic life-view tend to outperform pessimists in all respects. Pessimists are up to 8 times more likely to become depressed when bad events occur; they do worse at school, sports, and most jobs than their talents would suggest; they have worse physical health and shorter lives; they have rockier relationships. Live as an optimist versus a pessimist, you will do better, search for that silver lining. Maulvi said that: Do not feed both sides of yourself equally. The spirit and the body carry different loads and require different attentions. Too often we put saddlebags on Jesus, and let the donkey run loose in the pasture. Do not make the body do what the spirit does best, and dont put a big load on the spirit that the body could carry easily. Optimism vs Pessimism - Its Learned - Which Means You Can Change It!
Posted on: Tue, 16 Sep 2014 22:07:10 +0000