During this summer I with my friends have been hiking in and around Calgary Rockies every Saturday. This Saturday too we planned to go on a hike, but we kept hearing these horror stories about hungry bears attacking happy campers and hikers. The reason sited all round for this bizarre bear behavior is non-availability of ripe berries, which the bears feast on late summer and early fall.
Calgary had a very wet summer. I don’t know whether its el nino or al nina. We didn’t have many sunny days. Berries need some good sun to ripe and lack of some good sun made the ripe berries really scarce. The bears are mistaking people for ripe berries I don’t blame them and we being on MacDeit doesn’t really help.
A wee bit hesitant to turn up on the dining table of a mama bear we set to Kananaskis country, which is a provincial park and has very active bear monitoring program. The rangers in ranger station didn’t sound very alarming, so feeling bit more comfortable about returning back to Calgary in one piece, we set out finding a good hike (note to self: decide where to hike the day before, it’s a never a good idea to decide a hike while driving). We drove till Highwood pass the highest motorable pass in the Canadian Rockies and found a parking spot.
We found a two-hour strenuous hike, which seemed to promise everything, a hike up above the tree line to an alpine meadow, a waterfall and an extinct prehistoric glacier. With wetted appetites, we being intrepid explorers set on this hike. It seemed that this hike is pretty popular and we kept on encountering people all through the hike. The hike was up a ridge and we kept on gaining elevation constantly. It was bit tiring for the members of our party, yours truly never really owns up of being weary. With ample of pit stops we reached this beautiful alpine meadow on the top of the ridge. It was full of the beautiful flowers and a small stream running through it. By looking at this stream u could never realize that this stream has enough enery to gorge out deep incision into the outcrop. The incision is at least 5-8 meters deep. I figured out the secret of its energy, just read on.
We walked on and the landscape changed to that of the glacial wasteland, but I couldn’t see any. I looked around and there they were all the tell tale signs of a glacier the sequence of terminal moraines and stretching horizontal moraines. There were deep striations on the bedrock too. This was that extinct glacier. It must have been living and kicking not long ago in geologic past, if I could foolishly hazard a guess( I am no glaciologist, geologist by anyways) it would have been extinct in last couple of centuries. This explains the deep gorge; the stream is just a shadow of its powerful self, which ran of from this powerful glacier to gorge out this deep canyon (can I call this so?)
As we were hiking back, a storm moved in and it started raining heavily, we hurried back into the car in time and started back to Calgary dry and in one piece.

In mood to be a bit on the philosophical side. Why is everyone so afraid of death? Isn't death going back to the steady state which we all belong to? Life is just a whim of few billion cells. They have had their time and are back to the steady state. Why are we so afraid of it?

I don't know, I haven't thought about it much either, a wiseman once remarked that youth doesn't think much of death and old doesnt think about anything else at all.

What sparked my interest on death? India recently hanged Dhanonjoy Chatterjee who was convicted on raping and then murdering a fourteen year old girl 'Hetal Parekh' a very heinous crime. He was hanged on June 25, 2004 at 4 am IST (Indian Standard Time). As Calgary is twelve and half hours behind I kept on counting the minutes as the day went on. I couldn't get any work done.

If I were to know that I would die in at four in the morning how would I feel? Would I be able to sleep? Would I be desperate? Would I be angry? What slough of feelings would I be experiencing? That was a scary thought. The hangman who hanged Dhanonjoy later remarked that he was baffled by how Dhanonjoy took it; Dhanonjoy was calm and quite and even told him that he doesn't harbor any bad feelings towards him.

Two days ago Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross a famous physchiatrist who fought for the dignified ends to terminally ill patients passed away. Earlier in her career, she was appalled by the way terminally ill patients were treated. She studied terminally ill patients and fought againt the apathy of the system. According to her, any terminally ill patient passes through four stages, Rejection, anger, depression and acceptance. Don't know what stage he was in. I guess he must have accepted his fate.

Indians are very good at accepting their fates. We strangely believe that we deserve everything that's happening to us. If something bad happens we are told to accept it as a payback or a retribution for what we have done in earlier births. This strange sense of destiny unnerves me. That's a topic for an other day.

The point I want to make is, we can not really know what the other man is going through, we have to be in his shoes to know what he is thinking. Every human being has this super human strength in him which every one can muster if he is going through dire circumstances. We being humble, naive and stupid falsely attribute this strength to God.

Well I haven’t been blogging for while…(didn’t you notice? I don’t blame you, nothing has changed.)

I like the idea of the movie ‘It’s a wonderful life’ where the protagonist who is disenchanted with his life gets to know how it would have been if hadn’t been born at all. That’s an interesting thought isn’t it? If I look back and think and wonder what would have been different if I wasn’t born at all? Nothing, Zilch, Nada. What a worthless existence!

Anyway moving on from the existential anxts, I read about this ‘Great man Theory’ [wikipedia.com] according to which few ‘great’ men shape the history. Schomos like me don’t even get to clap in this grand historical drama leave alone taking part in it. Seriously, do few men shape our history? What would have happened if Hitler were not born? What would have happened if Gandhi were not born? (I personally believe that India would have gained Independence much earlier, so much for the non-violence crap). So if this was true our world’s future is at the mercy of few ‘great’ men. That’s a scary thought.

Lets analyze the ‘Average Joe Schmo’ theory, which contradicts the ‘Great men theory’. Suppose there is a society living on an isolated island and populated not so great average Joes. Each content on catching some big fish and feeding their families. Wouldn’t they have history? Would their (hi)story be as boring as after lunch philosophy lecture? Do they need a ‘Great Joe’ to spice it up by waging a war with a neighboring Island and killing and raping few people?

I don’t think so, I think each and every one of us play a very small but important role in this grand historical drama. We do influence the course of it. Few great men do appear once in a while in this show and do something so monumental and dramatic that they change the course forever and they disappear. Schmos then take over and carry on with the grunt work till another ‘great man’ gets ready for his gig.

Bismarck once spoke thus “A Great statesman always runs to catch up to hold the coat-tails of God who is marching through the history” or something like that. Something to munch on…