Pori

I wished my daughter sang the song on annual day,
That I grew up singing,
And my son recited the poem
I still know by heart.
But my position is the farthest from mean normality:
As far as the stars are from each other;
Several light-years would it take to reach the mean,
Crossing through the sea of unknown dark matter.

My children?
They are called refugee here,
Here grief is as near as a circle is to its center,
And crime is circumscribed about law and order.
Their schools were burnt down,
So was our home,
where I grew my little tomato plant,
That I used to water everyday.
You will take care of it now, you say?
Like you are taking care of my country?
Sorry, she doesn't exist anymore,
Like the bridges and the hundred-year-old tree,
Like my youngest daughter, my little Pori.

Review of "Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution" by Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins and Hunter Lovins

“I don't want a nation of thinkers, I want a nation of workers.”— John Davison Rockefeller. John D. Rockefeller was an American business tycoon and industrialist. I quoted him to illustrate that how capitalism really works, and this book serves as a cornerstone to refute the claim that exploiting capital will sustainably maximize wealth without posing any threat in the long term. 

Even after 19 years of its publication, “Natural Capitalism: Creating the next Industrial Revolution” co-authored by Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins and Hunter Lovins, is still so opportune and meaningful.  The book is full of ideas of innovation and revolutionary examples which businesses or entrepreneurs can take inspiration from. Authors tried to distinguish Natural Capitalism from Capitalism, but, I believe, an integral part of the economic system called capitalism, is natural capital which has been ignored from the very beginning by not taking into account the environmental footprint or irreversible repercussions of the industrial actions into the cost of production. This is high time we got out of the short-term wealth maximization mentality for environment is where all the economic activities take place and we have been granted only one earth. “First, many of the services we receive from living systems have no known substitutes at any price; for example, oxygen production by green plants. This was demonstrated memorably in 1991-93 when scientists operating the $200 million Biosphere 2 experiment in Arizona discovered that it was unable to maintain life-supporting oxygen levels for the eight people living inside. Biosphere 1, a.k.a Planet Earth performs this task daily at no charge for 6 billion people.”  We have been exploiting nature— clean air, water, fertile soil, rainfall, ecological systems etc. as if it were free: Has any grain producing company tried to determine the value of 1mm of rainfall and to incorporate it in the "Liabilities" section of Balance Sheet or in the COGS? Poorly-designed business processes, population growth and wasteful consumption (both by individuals and businesses) are the main causes of depletion of natural resources and obstacles towards sustainable economy. 

Automobile transportation is one of the biggest industries of the world and in the chapter 2 of the book, the authors talk about how a transformation in the energy source and material can prevent the destruction of natural capital. Polymer composites instead of steel to make the body of car and hydrogen fuel cell to produce electricity in the cleanest and most efficient way are the two most game-changing ideas, but sadly yet to be put into effect in a commercial way. Coupled with sensible design of cities that limits use of car, Hypercar could reverse the erosion of natural capital. 

Chapter 3 is eye-opening exposing the amount of waste we produce (in 1999) because we fail to “close the loop” or recycle like biological systems do. “Two quarts of gasoline and a thousand quarts of water are required to produce a quart of Florida orange juice. One ton of paper requires the use of 98 tons of various resources.” “Total annual wastes in the United States, excluding wastewater, now exceed 50 trillion pounds a year. (A trillion is a large number: To count to 50 trillion at the rate of 1 per second would require the entire lifetimes of 24,000 people.” We also waste human capital. Rikers Island (in the US) is the world’s largest penal colony which needs an annual budget of $860 (in 2015) million with an average daily population of 10,000 inmates. Isn’t there something profoundly wrong with the design of the society that incarcerates so many people at an overwhelming cost to the society itself? 

The authors emphasized the fact that the society that wastes its resources wastes its people and vice versa by providing statistics of unemployment and disemployment rates which are rising faster than employment rate globally.  Companies are downsizing to increase the profit one more percent; but greater gains can come not from eliminating people, but from eliminating those wasted energy used by ACs to keep the temperature exceedingly lower in summer days, those extra barrels of oil that were mishandled and those wasted papers to produce hundreds copies of reports which could easily be e-mailed. 

The book is also filled with lots of examples of how businesses benefitted from small and smart changes in design and process making the system more efficient and cost-effective by wringing more service from a given artifact. Remanufacturing and recycling are essentially closing the loop and “saving energy equivalent to the output of five giant power stations”. For example, big companies like Xerox and IBM employ “Dedistributing” where products come back from customers for remanufacture. 

Chapter 5 and 14 are my personal favorite where in chapter 5 authors underscores the importance of building self-sufficient green buildings as oppose to just laying out some concrete blocks. Because we spend ninety percent of our time in them (nowadays it should be more than ninety five percent) and “one-third of our total energy and two-thirds of our electricity” are consumed by them. Also billions of tons of raw materials are being used annually to construct them and a major part of it goes wasted instead of going into the building because of improper planning. Incorporation of natural air and light handling, solar design, strong sense of community etc. would contribute to astonishing energy savings as well as to an increment of quality and value of human lives. One solution could be paying compensation to designers and architects on the basis of what they save in terms of energy consumption by the building, instead of paying them a percentage of the cost of the building. There are also various examples of innovations in the book, for example, photovoltaic power generation, superwindows, which could make buildings more efficient optimizing passive solar heat gains and passive cooling. 

The highlight of chapter 14 is how Curitiba, an archetypal Brazilian city with chaos, poverty, unemployment and pollution at its center of existence, became a standard in sustainable urban planning by being the greenest city or the most innovative city in the world in only three decades. Combining entrepreneurship, good governance and vital leadership, Jaime Lerner, an architect and also the mayor of the city by treating all its citizens not as burden but as its resource. If someone is intrigued by the book, but does not want to read the whole book, she or he may go through this one chapter.

Industrialization of farming may seem to be a triumph of technology, but actually it uncomfortably worsens the situation. Despite improving efficiencies, “….farming still uses ten times as much fossil-fueled energy in producing food as it returns in food energy. Our food, as ecologist Howard Odum remarked, is made wholly of oil with oil left over.” Industrial agriculture destroys soil’s organic richness and most civilizations collapsed because they destroyed their topsoil. It also uses about two-thirds of all water drawn from the world’s rivers, lakes and aquifers. One-third of world’s cereal are being fed to livestock which turns only 10-45% of grain inputs into meat. Organic farming, Biointensive minifarming could be the answer. 

There is a chapter dedicated to fresh water usage and designs to minimize water waste. Charging households for their actual use rather than a flat rate combined with education and awareness program usually saves up to a third of water usage. Harvesting rainwater, using of graywater for flushing toilets, biological treatment plants in neighborhoods are proving to be pioneering. 

The economic viability of the businesses who not only want workers, but also thinkers suggesting and designing innovative ways incorporating the value of natural and human capital should be considered by businesses. The simple proposition of this great work is that all capital be valued. If it is not practically possible to attach a value to a hundred years old tree, one may ask how much it would cost to make a new one. How much would it cost to make a new atmosphere after we are done destroying this, a new culture, a new Earth?

Pigeons and Stories

We are nothing but collections of stories;
On the pages of life,
They keep being written
With the ink of time.

Collection?
No, I am wrong:
One story, certainly, for one person,
Just the color of the ink changes
Like do change the seasons
And the pages are sometimes
As transparent as sky;
Sometimes, as white as pigeon.
Some has the tapestry of,
Oh, your dear village,
Magnificent hills, peaceful cloud.
And on some, your universe would turn upside down-
Rousing the magnetic poles to flip:
South becomes North,
North becomes South.


Some pages are as red as blood
Pricked and stabbed by the pen itself;
Purple they become over time
And they remain,
The stains remain, I say,
Permeating the next hundredth page...


We are nothing but stories.
Yours one would flash in front of your eyes,
(The whole of it in a second,
Like a series of pictures,
Swiped quick with a flick of your finger)
Before the stupid asteroid hits your planet
In the next chapter.


Again some bloodshed,
Again some heart aches,
But the pigeon would always try to fly,
And when it does,
Sky would embrace it,
The sky and cloud.
So sip your tea, peacefully,
The ink hasn't run out.

(Picture Credit: Google Images)

Review of "Shoe Dog" by Phil Knight

I came by this book on "Gatesnotes", blog of Bill Gates, where he routinely shares ideas and reviews of his favorite and recently-read books. The book is written very expressively with a wee bit of humor here and there. The outset is very vibrant where the author reveals his experience and highlights of a world tour which he went at the age of twenty-four in 1962 with a destined and steadfast goal- to sell shoes. With this plan, he visited shoe companies in Japan and finally placed an order of $50, borrowed from his father. The rest of the book unravels the journey from being $50 indebted to being worth $160 billion.The hardship, entrepreneurship, the spirit of never-giving-up and the belief in one's dream are the cornerstones of mighty Nike. But the most vital reason for Nike to prosper and sometimes to stay the course is its outstanding team consisting of compatible and talented members. The inclination to embrace the trends and innovation essentially cemented its competitiveness.

Author's writing was primarily good, but lengthy and tedious in some parts which could have been curtailed easily.

Divisible Death

Your soul is the prisoner
And the prison are your cells,
Escaping is not the panacea
For any of the agonies and distress.
Because death is not extreme
And neither do you die once-
Ask yourself how many times you already died.
How many times you felt you are holding
Your heart in your unflinching hands
While running to catch your last hope?
How many times you were choked by all those people around you,
And against you
When you stood up to speak?
And how many times your body
Healed the cuts and bruises
Adorning the facade, betraying your wish?
How many times you wanted to scream
Only to realize your vocal cords were filled with
Social norms and propriety?

Escaping the body would be easy;
Let your soul tame the body.

You do not die once,
Neither do you die completely-
Like every other being
Like every other animal, tree and energy.

Look at all the stars;
They glimmer and multiply,
Rejoice and die,
A divisible death, transforming into matter and energy.
Wait, you are made of those stars,
They make the nucleus
Of every cell of your body
Made of some protein from the same A, C, T, G

Review of " Thinking, Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman

This is one intriguing tale of how two thinking processes of human mind shape every decision we make from the everyday ones, such as, which peanut butter to buy to somewhat more significant ones like which treatment to choose for a patient or which saving plan to enter into. The author defines and explores two ways of thinking: fast and slow, where the first process is intuition-driven and the later is deliberate and logic-induced. But there is no definite border beyond which the territory of only one system lies and inside of which lies the another one's. Hence the interplay and influences between the systems become dramatic and this is what the book delineated with great deliberation and enthusiasm. Lots of relatable and familiar situations are explored and dissected which give life to the book and make it non-tedious.

"Although system 2 believes itself to be where the action is", the automatic system 1, the intuition-driven one, "is the hero of the book". Because system 2's conscious reasoning takes input from the system 1 where the impressions, feelings have already been created. So the slow thinking is ought to be biased since the fast thinking has its own likings and dislikings, some come with us when we are born and some are cultivated and sculpted by experience.

Finally, the author talks about how we can get rid of some biases that we tend to overlook, not because we are nonchalant to those but because we do not identify with them with our limited rationality and inherent indolence of system 2 to make careful consideration and calculation.

Lastly, after reading the book, I came to conclude that we have at least two systems guiding our thoughts, not only two.

Of Miracle And Reality

The wall was building

Between you and your dear yearning

To see the crisp summer entering your door,

But succeeded the cancer in distressing your soul.

One brick was still left to be placed on the wall

One angel was still crying

And beseeching for its removal.

Alas, you did not believe in me,

Your eyes declined to see.

I was miracle;

When the lights went out in meandering street—

I was about to happen.

I would just be passing by

But you gave in to what your eyes see,

What your progenitors had passed on,

Or what your friends did fear.

You gave up your destiny,

In the name of norms and normality.