After driving more than 1000 km in 24 hrs through towns, villages, mountains, dense forests, swerving and trying not to kill wild life running in front of the car, rivers, I know what I want to do next..drive more! That is how I felt when we finally arrived in Sydney.
Walking along Terry’s creek a mid suburb nature patch is a joy. Not too long or laborious,
its only a couple of kms but packed with all the nature’s contours found in a typical forest.
The most astonishing find for me was these amazing rocks lying or stacked up just agains one another in these strange formations.
Using my imagination I could bring out the shapes hidden in those. Letting camera render my imagination and ‘Cloud watching’ the rocks in the forest I spotted some hidden giants.
There is even a little waterfall formed by the water of the creek falling along a row of raised rocks.
Timeless, the beauty of the hands,
that sculpt
the hands of God.
Hands that God created,
to sculpt his hands.
A hand with chisel,
to create a hand with sword,
A hand with hammer
to sculpt a hand that blesses.
Over a Friday coffee break on a Microsoft Teams chat ( now that’s one of the ways how coffee break works these days, online!), I got asked by a guy who had recently joined my team at work, how does it feel being in IT for so long, twenty three years! Well it feels great, the experience you have sells, you have built a trail of systems you can be proud of, humming away making money for big corporations, banks, governments, charities and some not so great people..you know the ones that kept you awake at night for all the wrong reasons, giving you fears that you might have a stroke or a heart attack, then some nice people, some achievements and so forth. We hung up and I locked my screen, so I won’t be ‘Available’ anymore and hopefully people won’t bother me that much, and hopped out to my backyard to soak myself in a a bleak fleeting ray of sunshine that I know won’t last too long before the cold blast will take over, the one coming from the South, the Antarctic, over Tassie over Melbourne and breezing past the edges of Pacific Australian coasts. Which would mean in addition to the cold winds, it will also carry moisture and bring some breeze, adding to the experience of the cold, like the toppings on your ice cream.
As I strolled over the backyard with a cup of warm coffee in my hand, I started to ponder what is it really like to be an IT guy for so long. What have I made, what lost, where have I been, the journey, the highs, the lows, the corporate jungle, some sanity breaks along the career, though very brief. Giving it few thoughts a thought finally stuck.
It feels like you are a magician, who has done the tricks million times. You know every single move, the preparations, the plannings, the risk assessments, the contingencies, the communications with your support, the fall backs, the roll back plans and every aspect of IT processes seem to come into play, in magic. So does IT feels like magic? Sometimes it does, with decent frequency. It can also feel like labor, like giving birth. The pain the baby gives you, the openings of the passage, the horror, the satisfaction..finally. The magic is there too in the baby analogy nevertheless. But at a point of where I am, after two decades, the magic starts to be too familiar, it stops being so magical, it starts to feel like a ritual. So when you see someone doing it, you immediately know the tricks, the deceptions. Even when you can’t see the actual movements you know what’s going on in the background, you don’t feel thrilled, in other words fooled. Never thought that being fooled would be thrilling! It does, in magic. So when sometimes you are really ‘fooled’, your eyes pop out brightly, you get excited, you get thrilled. Is that something people look for after being in an industry or a job for too long, a so call new ‘challenge’? Even though the job itself is not too bad. A thrill, to be fooled, by magic, a fulfilment?. A moment of not knowing what happened, and wanting to find out, curiosity kicking in, wanting to be able do do this new trick, that childish smile in you that you lost long ago.
Russia, the land that gave to the world the likes of Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Anton Chekhov, Maxim Gorky. I remember as a teenager getting myself completely immersed in Russian and Soviet literature, the writers would bring the mysterious, far away, cold, beautiful land right into the doorsteps of my imagination. I can still feel shudders of joy and anticipation remembering the short stories of Chekhov, the depth and intellect of Dostoyevsky, the grandness of Gorky and Tolstoy’s stories. There used to be a few Russian libraries in the nineties Kathmandu, of which I used to be a regular visitor and borrower. From them I learnt to write myself, express my thoughts in a way I never knew existed. It helped create a new me, a mini writer who wanted to publish a collection of his own works, poems and stories and so forth. In high school we used to enthusiastically study Russia’s history, the revolutions, War and Peace, geography. The largest country in the world spanning multiple continents, so many time zones, Siberian forests, the Tundra, Vladivostok – Moscow Trans-Siberian train, the Red Square in Moscow, St Petersburg.
But what has happened recently in Ukraine completely blows my mind, a completely different Russia, bitter, angry, divided, occupier, brute, hopeless, scared, bully, fear mongering and worst, threat to the world. This is far far away from the great minds Russia had and still possess. This is Russia that seems to be hijacked and altered to bring out the worst by a maniac stuck on his own ideological mad house full of fears, suspicions and terror. Yes they do have valid security concerns because of the attitude of the West and expansion of NATO, but why Ukraine? Go hit the West if that is what is your concern and if you have the galls. The price Ukrainians are having to pay for basically just to survive the onslaught of one of the most powerful military turned schoolyard bully and having to die fighting for their freedom with unprovoked attack from the Russians cannot be justified in this century, their hurt will never heal, it will surely sow seeds of contempt for tomorrow.
The situation that brought Russia to this corner of history surely has many contributing factors. But the main architect definitely is their current president, who has stolen the narrative of the Russian history and moulded into his own ideological footprint. Putin seems to be erudite on one version of history where everything revolves around Russia, whether it is good or bad, and sovereignty and safety of others do not matter. He has repeated this with many smaller neighbours around his country, so who will be next if he is not stopped? Russia’s neighbors have valid reason for fear and are scrambling to join NATO, another long lasting threat to the world peace.
Russia of great power, brain power, literature and civilisation seems to have vanished and replaced by a powerful bully. Or has the bully just came to surface? We hope when the war in Ukraine ends eventually, it would be a different nation that would find its virtues and peace.
Ravi Tandukar 