Baby eaglet

Black eyes with grey pupils, occasional blinking would reveal silvery eyelids.... it lay there, crouched, helpless, and frightened to death. After all the initial commotion and hushed oohs and aahs, it lay forgotten, battered and unattended.

I wondered what all the noise was about as I climbed up the stairs of hostel, and i saw instantly a sight that was hard to miss

Because it was the most beautiful and heartbreaking sight. A magnificent eagle, lay at the corner of the balcony, for a moment i felt as helpless as the eagle.

"Ooh what happened"...Rims was as awestruck as I, we just stood and gasped at the sight. What do we do? What do we do? Flurry of phone calls, and finally Harsha comes from PFA(people for animals). By this time, we were fast friends with it, Rims was playing radio mirchi songs to him, and we were in the process of baptising our friend.

"it so clichéd",...said rims sounding disgusted, and wouldnt let me name him Angel.

Harsha spread his beautiful wings, and I was scared,

" he’s not had water for a couple of days, so has fainted of dehydration, he’s barely 20 days old"

"Ooh a baby eaglet!

"A baby eaglet...there's no such thing as baby eaglet".

We fed him water, and he was up in minutes. "Can he fly"

"sure, in about a month"!

"That long"?

"Yeah, coz it cant hunt yet"

"so its really a baby eaglet"

"i said there aint nothing known as......"

"Where are you going to take him?"

"Animal hospital"

"can we come visit him"

"we have about fifty birds, you wont recognise him"

Harsh then put eaglet in a shoe box...and I made one last desperate attempt ."can I carry him"

"uh, no thanks".... And he was gone,

We named him eaglet (and that’s not clichéd?)

Phone rings an hour later saying he's in the ICU and will be fine.
Some how the image of eaglet in ICU on the ventilator and nurses fussing over him cracks me up.
"You can visit Saturday’s and Sundays", which cracks me up further.

I don’t think I’ll visit him,
One day when I look up at the sky, I wouldn’t be surprised to see my angel...er...eaglet soaring high watching over me.
And who says I wont recognise him.

Bombastic

Okay, i had to say this, as am sick of hearing what blessed Uncle Sam's troupe have been upto! one day they are bombing Iraq, Afghanistan the next, recently it was Somalia, and why, coz of its alleged link up with al-Qaida, recently this report on NDTV got me livid..

The head of US spy operations has said that Pakistan, while a key ally in their hunt for terrorists, represents a major source of Islamic extremism and a refuge for top terror leaders.

So now that they admit it, why dont they start bombing Pak? Why does the victim always have to be some backward, war ravaged nation ?
I feel benevolent compassion for the people of Pak though, out of 60 years post independence, 50 years were under military dictatorship, the present one with a benign smirk on his face was to hang his boots way back in 2004, but now as things are going, ahead of the presidential elections its likely that he'll continue till 2011.

War and games

Yet another new year! Celebrations, firecrackers, champagne......It was none of those, in fact even hearing 'happy new year' repulses me, let alone saying it!
Every time a new year comes, we promise ourselves a year of peace and happiness, and yet another year goes by with more blood and gore.

How Can there be a celebrations when there are hundreds of parents weeping for their kids at the nithari village, i cringed when i heard the UP PWC minister terming it as 'yeh sab choti- moti ghatna chalti rehti hai......

There are fire crackers alright, when dozens of Innocent civilians in Iraq are killed everyday by the Americans....How long can the world remain a silent spectator to the brutal hegemony of US. Its a joke to be called the most civilized country in the world when their actions are that of a blood thirsty barbaric nation. If this is what 'civilization' means, then I'd rather that we remain poverty stricken .Guess the higher we go up the ladder of evolution, the more and more are values get eroded.

Speaking of values,is there supposed to be champagne when a person is being hanged a day before new years eve for the whole world to watch! Being in the media,its mortifying to watch things happen and not being there to change it. Happy New Year indeed!It just depresses me to hear that...coz there's nothing to be happy about,but there are things that helps me though, to see things in a better perspective, like this column i read in the Newspaper.

War and games
One thing that seems to be common between war and game is that,in both, you need to be insensitive towards the other. If you are sensitive towards others' feelings, you can't defeat the other. Today, when children play video games, Internet, watch violent cartoons, they get in-sensitized. These games have turned into real life situations, leading to class room violence. The last decade has seen unprecedented instances of violence in schools. Dropout rates in schools in Washington DC is an alarming 50 per cent and there is an increase in gang violence amongst the adolescents the world over.

His Holiness Sri Sri Ravi Shanker excerpt from speaking tree column, Times of India, December 13.

His Holiness's view help us understand things from a larger prospective, this is the kind of knowledge that the world is in desperate need of today.

To solve a problem, we need to understand it first, and for that we need to go back to our roots, to ascertain a sense of identity, coz we don't identify ourselves with the right things,need to ask the right kind of questions - who am I? whats my purpose in life? Well i guess with this knowledge i am ready to begin the new year,though not quiet convinced what it holds for me, but just knowing that the biggest war and games which we are subjected to are not always external.