http://blogs.fullhyderabad.com/showblog.php?blogId=32 A travelogue on my journey of life in this city Help! I'm vocabulary-challenged! I'm looking for a word to use in this post, and for a change, no dictionary in this whole wide world (or world wide web, to be precise) would come to my rescue. I'm looking for a word to denote everything that falls outside what can be called 'nature'....... artificial / man-made / technology......... no, they're almost there, but not right on the spot. So, "!@#$%^&*" would be my placeholder name for that - it's easy to type too :) Press the shift key and type 1 to 8 - and lo! you've got !@#$%^&* :) My initial glitch out of the way, let me get to the point. You have nature on one side and you have !@#$%^&* on the other, waging a constant battle. Nature was all powerful to begin with, and !@#$%^&* was hardly there - it just had a pair of wheels to write home about. Without doing a recap of the history lessons, we can safely say that !@#$%^&* is now pushing nature into extinction. We see mountains flattened and lakes filled up with earth to be made into prime real estate, forest-cover getting swiftly replaced by the ever-expanding concrete jungles and farmlands, possible linking of river basins (you could mistake it for a minor plumbing work, from the ease with which the subject is being discussed), ecology destabilizing dams, atmosphere polluting factories, highways a 1000ft wide (wondering if elephants are allowed to cross them :) ), real estate reclaimed from the sea (by dumping earth into the sea - this way it doesn't sound as heroic as 'reclamation', does it?), genetic engineering (Biotech is Godzilla!!! :D), cloning (of human beings too, some day?)...... i'm back to doing what I do best - writing laundry lists :) (maybe I should use less of my PowerPoint skills and more of my brain. Now let me make an attempt) They say life is a constant struggle between the good and the bad, between the God and the Devil etc etc. I have never got the hang of this good / bad thingy (keeps changing every few years, what can I do?) and I've seen neither the God or the Devil - so I can't vouch for either's existance. But I see nature and I see !@#$%^&*...... I see they're fighting...... and I see nature losing the battle for survival. http://blogs.fullhyderabad.com/showblog.php?op=ViewArticle&articleId=205&blogId=32 Sat, 22 May 2004 20:37:32 +0000