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I am planning to build a house to live. I am thinking out-of-the-box and thinking big. Really big. I am planning on building a 50-storey residence for myself and my little family. You think that’s a bit big for a single family? No, no, let me explain.

The first five floors of the building will merely constitute the car park for all my cars and those of my guests.

The next five floors will be service floors that will house various amenities such as a laundry and warehouses to stock food supplies, etc.

Then, the next ten floors will be for my guests. There will be master bedrooms and massage rooms and Jacuzzis and gyms and sprawling bathrooms and facilities for playing lawn tennis and basketball and squash.

The next five floors of the building will house a common library to provide intellectual stimulation to my friends as well as me.

There will be five floors on top of these devoted to entertainment. There will be 5 movie theaters with various seating capacities.

There will of course be an IMAX theater in there as well. You see, I just love watching the crazy stuff that these NASA astronauts do up there in space. So, I would like to enjoy watching some of that on an IMAX screen.

The five floors on top of those will be devoted to gyms and bowling alleys and an indoor golfing green. Of course, I like to play the odd round of lawn tennis and basketball and squash at times, so, those will be in there as well. You see, I have got only one life to live and I want to live it fully.

There’s nothing wrong in that, is there?

And, yes, I am planning to take care of the environment in my building by devoting five entire floors of it to indoor gardens. There will be an entire floor growing organic roses of every color from every corner of the world. The Mughal Gardens will pale in comparison.

And I will have an entire floor full of tulips – something to surpass the best that Netherlands has to offer.

Of course, I will be doing all this with the use of indigenous technology and expertise and manpower predominantly.

Then, I will have two floors’ full of banquet halls done up in different ways: neo-Gothic and antebellum, Roman, Mughal, etc.

When somebody gets to attend one of my parties, I want that person to remember that party for the rest of his or her life. And if some guests happen to be frequent invitees, even then, I want to make sure that there will be surprises galore in store for them as well so that they don’t feel as if they have seen it all.

There will be two floors of conference rooms with different seating capacities to cater to meetings of different sizes.

There will be two floors devoted to lounges and two personal floors devoted to bathrooms and bedrooms for my family.

The top two penthouse suites will have office chambers for me as well as a small observatory so that I can indulge my hobby of star-gazing. It occurs to me that there will lots of stargazers outside of my home looking at this awesome 50-story monument to my achievement and admiring it and learning the skill of dreaming big like me.

I think that sums up to 50 floors. Actually, the plan I have in mind is quite flexible and evolving at this point in time. As the construction work begins, if we need more floors, we could choose to go a bit higher into the sky, say 60 floors, and we can also go a bit lower by building a few basement floors. But, really, I don’t want to take away from the extraordinariness of this building by adding something as cheap as basement floors.

Wait! An Eureka! moment just occurred to me. What about installing a small nuclear power plant in the basement of the building. That will make my house a net generator of electricity and instead of having to depend on the vagaries of an uncertain power situation, I would be able to lend some electricity to the grid and appear noble in the process.

By the way, one day I want to conduct the marriage of my daughter in the most spectacular way possible.

I have a few sites in mind. I am planning on hiring the lawns of the White House in D.C. or the grounds of the Eiffel Tower in Paris. With the rising influence of India and China, it could be a good idea to host the marriage in India itself. I could take over the grounds of the Rashtrapati Bhavan in New Delhi. I could hire one of our aircraft carriers from the Navy and we could have the marriage off shore. Even just thinking about the prospects and the options makes my heart rate go up to 200. The doctor has advised me not to get too excited about anything as getting too excited might result in my getting a free ride all the way to heaven. I do think about my mortality and about the poverty that still prevails in my beloved India. But, I don’t think I can do much personally to eradicate it.

Some people did suggest to me that my building project seems kind of grandiose but I just realize that not too many people are as far-sighted or visionary as I am. So, I let people shout and my response to incidents of that nature without fail is that when an elephant walks, dogs will bark.

Some people have suggested that I could have built a 100,000 primary schools with the money I am spending on my house. Some say, I could built 5 IITs to take on the MITs and CalTechs of the world. Some say, I could have built 5 hospitals that would have been as good as anything that the West has to offer, such as the Cleveland Clinic or the Mayo Clinic or Johns Hopkins.

Others suggested that I could have been a pioneer in the efforts to develop new cures for cancer and AIDS. I could have promoted a new scientific institution to delve into the human genome and try and understand the causes of these dreaded afflictions and unravel the mysteries of such debilitating diseases as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.

Personally, I am interested in science & technology and I would have loved to found an institution to conduct fundamental research into the origins of the universe and into the fundamental constituents of all matter in the universe. I would love to see Indian scientists make the next great leap in rocket propulsion technology that will finally let us all be moon voyagers and will let us honeymoon on the Moon or on Mars.

But, I think, it’s not my responsibility to eradicate the poverty and backwardness of India. I have achieved enormous success in my chosen vocation and my wealth is merely a symbol of the tremendous faith that my company’s shareholders have in my skills and abilities. There are millions of people out there whose entire life savings consist of stock in my companies.

Moreover, I think I haven’t failed in my primary duty towards my shareholders: that duty being to provide my shareholders the maximum possible returns. There are countless millionaires in my large family of shareholders.

Anyways, I just wanted to ask you guys: do you think it’s okay for me to build this 50-storey residence for myself or do you think I should spend the money in doing something that will contribute to the larger society in some way.

I am sure that you have absorbed enough of my entrepreneurial genes to concur with my choice of erecting a 50-story mansion rather than spread the money over many projects which are without exception projects with a long gestation period and whose returns are not clearly visible and indeed may not fructify before my demise. What’s the chance for example that if I spend all my money to better the primary education infrastructure in India, I will be able to see tangible results from that investment in my lifetime?

So, I just want to extend a warm welcome to all of you to visit my home. It should be complete in a couple of years from now. Although, because of security concerns, I would request that you wait for my invitation card before making the journey to my own Taj Mahal. Or, may be, I should not say that, as I am building this to celebrate my own achievements and not to perpetuate the memory of someone.

Just a parting thought: it occurred to me that it would be great to create an artificial island in the middle of the Arabian Sea and build villas there and live on an artificial island. What do you think?

When people are ‘lucky’, they tend to reflect on their good luck and tend to thank providence profusely for it and reach conclusions such as “Life is Beautiful.”

I always wonder if life is indeed beautiful – and, even more pertinently, how valid an argument it is to reach that conclusion when one happens to get “lucky” by chance.

I recall numerous instances of people who survive natural disasters thanking the Lord for letting them live while others died. Without citing any particular incident, let us just think for a moment how fair that is – to thank God for letting you live. How about the others who died? Were they at fault somehow and deserved to die? The recent serial blasts in Jaipur killed many people. Did the good Lord decide that these people were unworthy of living and so deserved to die and so the terrorists were in fact agents of God. So, why spend so much resource in trying to find them and punish them?

The September 11, 2001 attacks in the US were carried out by people who were convinced that they were explicitly messengers of God and carrying out God’s work. So, perhaps those who died in the twin towers of WTC and in the Pentagon and the passengers in the planes were all somehow being punished by God for their wrongdoings.

The kids who died in the Bhuj earthquake a few years back on the Republic Day were also scheduled to die that day and the earthquake was merely the tool that God used to take their lives – is that it?

What about the Asian Tsunami? May be a case of when God wanted to end the lives of a couple of hundreds of thousands of individuals and the tsunami seemed to be a handy way to achieve that “target” quickly and efficiently.

The recently earthquake in China was also a pretty efficient manner of killing off a few tens of thousands of individuals – indiscriminately. Of course, they all, women and children included, deserved to die and so no need to grieve for them.

In Myanmar, cyclone Nargis was merely the tool that God used to “punish” a hundred thousand or so human beings for not doing his bidding.

Then, there are the kids who are suffering form chronic and acute leukemias – kids destined to die at the age of 5 or 6 or 10.

What can be more tragic than kids dying – whether it’s from malnutrition or cancer or earthquake or some other natural calamity.

It’s like the end of a life before it has even begun properly. It is like a flower bud getting plucked before it has had an opportunity to grow to become a complete flower.

So, dear folks, do you really think that there’s really the hand of providence at work when all these natural calamities strike us and people get killed randomly and others survive equally randomly.

How justifiable is it to shower glowing praise for letting us live – and equally unjustifiable to blame superior powers if our loved ones get killed. Of course, the best course is to imagine ourselves in the place of the parents of the kids who die in these disasters or to put ourselves in the shoes of parents whose kids have been diagnosed with cancer or may be, even less dangerous diseases, say, Down’s Syndrome.

Personally, I don’t believe in all this spiritual stuff. And I also find the “I am spiritual but not religious” thing to be pretty crazy as well. It’s like being half pregnant.

If we make even a superficial study of the recent history of humanity, we will realize that as the reach of science has expanded to embrace new phenomena of nature, the role of religion has receded from our lives.

Now that science is trying to extend the envelope of its understanding even further, we should this occasional clash between the guardians of various faith systems and scientific leaders.

I have in mind the perennial debate with respect to the use of birth control techniques.

And the rising tide of clamor as scientists who are involved with embryonic stem cell research try to delve ever deeper into the mysteries of life to try and understand what makes us who we are while in the process hoping to understand why we develop various neurological and other disorders such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s and cancer. Out of research such as these, these scientists would try to discover the Fountain of Youth or may be learn how to make us immortal.

But, various religious leaders object to scientists trying to delve too deeply into matters which these so-called god men consider to be in the domain of the Gods.

Indians are particularly susceptible to these “miracle-mongerers”. We have all these assorted folks who claim to be able to cure every disease from rheumatoid arthritis to cancer and AIDS.

I can’t understand how anybody can take these charlatans seriously – let these “super doctors” first try their hand at curing us of simple diseases – such as a blockage in the arteries, or a broken bone, or a cataract in the eye or a tumor in the brain. And once these new fangled healers have shown us that there is really no need for all these multi-crore super-specialty hospitals in this country and they can be trusted with the country’s healthcare system, then they should think of taking up bigger challenges like cancer and AIDS – fearsome dragons that modern medical science is yet to slay.

And let there be a price to pay – if you make a claim, you better be able to substantiate that claim. If you’re really able to cure one AIDS case or one cancer case, you should be able to repeat it without fail to cure millions of similar cases. There is no point in going to town about having cured one AIDS patient or one cancer patient.

But that’s sort of besides the point. We all need to question the fundamentals ourselves in a deep and thoughtful manner and reach conclusions that have a substantive basis.

It’s not enough if our parents are alive and well – we need to look at others and think about whether their parents are alive or not.

It’s not enough to be thankful to God if our kids are ALL RIGHT – we need to bother about other kids who are NOT ALL RIGHT and put ourselves in the shoes of their parents.

It’s a difficult route to take admittedly – to study world history and literature and astronomy and biological and other sciences. Because, indeed we need to study all these and make ourselves aware about all these diverse human endeavors. It’s only then that we will become qualified to talk about the “big” issues.

How can you not study astronomy and astrophysics if you want to learn about the true size and extent of the visible universe? Does it matter to you that the Sun is a star that is basically a fusion reactor that has been working since the last 5 billion years and will work for another 5 billion years.

The fact is that our Sun is but one of some 400 billion stars that make up the Milky Way galaxy.

The Milky Way galaxy spans some 100,000 light years across. And there are some 100 billion galaxies in the visible universe that spans 15 billion light years. There are literally more stars in the visible universe than there are grains of sand on all the beaches of planet Earth.

What a majestic vista that is?

Carl Sagan had mentioned in one of his books that “We are star stuff.” That is literally true. The molecules that comprise our body were originally made inside stars. As a first generation star nears the end of its life, it grows to become a red giant and the carbon molecules combine to form heavier elements all the way up to uranium and that’s the way all the elements comprising the Periodic Table that we are all familiar with from our school days were formed.

So, that’s another wonderful thing to realize, I think.

If we study about Darwinian evolution, we’ll realize how it is possible to have the diversity of life on the planet that we have. The geologic fossil record is full of clear evidence that points to the sustained effectiveness of this Darwinian mechanism. We were not created by a Creator on an As Is basis – we have EVOLVED to be what we are. We are products of an evolutionary process that has been ongoing for many millions of years. It’s a slow process and so not observable over the period of one human lifetime. Dinosaurs did indeed roam the planet for some 150 million years.

How long have we been here? When do you start counting? That depends on who is it that you define as human. Were our Neanderthal ancestors human? Would we be able to live in a village with a bunch of them? Oh, they didn’t live in a village – they were hunter gatherers who roamed the jungles and hunted.

Forget a hundred thousand years, we have traveled such a long distance in a thousand years – indeed, we have traveled light years technically in the last 100 years.

And what is the future that we can foresee if we extrapolate this rate of advancement into the future? Where will we be in a hundred years from now? A thousand years? Ten thousand years? Hundred thousand years? Million years. . . Even a billion years if we want . . .

Is there life elsewhere in the universe? I think that is the single most important question that is facing science and scientists today. We are only today acquiring the tools and learning the skills and technologies to be able to look for planets around other stars in our neighborhood. We will need to keep expanding this capability drastically to enhance our reach far beyond this tiny region of the universe.

I have tried to touch upon the many wonderful options that science opens up for us. But, it’s a difficult route to follow – there are no certainties on this route. We are building this road as we go.

Then, there is this other route – of religion and spirituality. This route provides answers to all the difficult or deep questions of life. There is comforting certainty to be found down this route. We are told that there’s someone looking after us and our near and dear ones. So, it’s understandably easy to be persuaded to go down this route.

And through our history, religion and spirituality have provided comfortable shelters. It’s a tough task to let go of those certainties and well trodden paths and choose to chart new routes in an unexplored jungle.

The choice is up to all of us.

The certainties of religion or the uncertainties of science – what do you want to embrace.

There is a square; there is an oblong.

The players take the square and place it upon the oblong.

They place it very accurately; they make a perfect dwelling place.

Very little is left outside.

The structure is now visible; what was inchoate is here stated;

we are not so various or so mean; we have made oblongs and stood them upon squares.

This is our triumph; this is our consolation.

Read at your leisure – and read slowly and deeply.

 

“

We have a treasure-house of literature, going back to the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans. It is all there, this wealth of literature, to be discovered again and again by whoever is lucky enough to come upon it. A treasure. Suppose it did not exist. How impoverished, how empty we would be.

 

We own a legacy of languages, poems, histories, and it is not one that will ever be exhausted. It is there, always.

 

We have a bequest of stories, tales from the old storytellers, some of whose names we know, but some not. The storytellers go back and back, to a clearing in the forest where a great fire burns, and the old shamans dance and sing, for our heritage of stories began in fire, magic, the spirit world. And that is where it is held, today.

 

Ask any modern storyteller and they will say there is always a moment when they are touched with fire, with what we like to call inspiration, and this goes back and back to the beginning of our race, to the great winds that shaped us and our world.

 

The storyteller is deep inside every one of us. The story-maker is always with us. Let us suppose our world is ravaged by war, by the horrors that we all of us easily imagine. Let us suppose floods wash through our cities, the seas rise. But the storyteller will be there, for it is our imaginations which shape us, keep us, create us -for good and for ill. It is our stories that will recreate us, when we are torn, hurt, even destroyed. It is the storyteller, the dream-maker, the myth-maker, that is our phoenix, that represents us at our best, and at our most creative.

 

That poor girl trudging through the dust, dreaming of an education for her children, do we think that we are better than she is - we, stuffed full of food, our cupboards full of clothes, stifling in our superfluities?

 

I think it is that girl, and the women who were talking about books and an education when they had not eaten for three days, that may yet define us.

 

”

And tell me, how do you like it – and who wrote it?