picture time

A (perhaps brief) detour into the mundane with some pictures! (Of Seattle, my place, and most importantly, my car)

 

the comfortable life?

There has been pressure applied from certain quarters (ahem) to produce a second post that measures up to the first one in this blog. I was (and am) pleasantly surprised that my previous post attracted the attention and kind comments of other members of the blog world, and for that I am grateful. I do not anticipate being able to offer much of particular interest in my posts from now on; they will often be boring and mundane, but I’ll try my best.

Starting out as I am in the real world (as opposed to the academic one) I cannot help but recognize and realize that I am, through circumstance and effort, afforded the ability to live a pretty comfortable life. I feel no sense of guilt per se over this, as I’m just starting out, and my parents and I have had to make my share of sacrifices ‘to the system’ to arrive at this point. And now more than ever, people the world over are on average able to live more comfortable, less unstable lives (I’m deliberately being fast and loose with a proper definition for this to get to the main point of this post). Generally speaking more people are now able to live comfortably and without worry of hunger and instability than in decades and centuries past. I’m referring here to the notion of Human Security and the remarkable Human Security Report which argues forcefully that in the past decade, there has been a striking and unprecedented decrease in the number of conflicts, wars and genocides and loss of life due to such forms of political instability and violence.

 

new beginnings

Well, an inaugural post. Let’s see how often I actually update this thing. Blogs are necessarily exercises in ego-massage, and the blogging world seems to be dominated by those who enjoy pontificating instead of doing (myself included?). So, I’ll resist the temptation to go off on political rants (except when something’s really outrageous.. and, well, there’s enough of that nowadays) and mostly stick to amusing, or interesting stories and pictures from my sojourn out here in the ‘real world’.

Parsis

I was rather delighted to see an article on the challenges faced by the ever-shrinking Zoroastrian community in North America and elsewhere. This is a subject somewhat near and dear to me for a few reasons. Coming as I do from Bombay (and I use the old name of the city deliberately here) both my parents and I grew up knowing many Parsis (as Zoroastrians are known in India). Indeed the world’s largest Zoroastrian community (that in Bombay) played a profoundly important role in the development of Bombay’s (and more generally, British and Independent India’s) institutions and civil society. I also spent a lot of time researching Parsi history and culture, and the ‘challenges of modernity’, for a final paper for my freshman seminar, further increasing my interest and background on the subject.