Unintelligent designs, athletes and creation

How old is old? India turned 58 years old, which is not very old as nation-states go. The civilization of the region on the other hand is a few thousand years old. Even that is debatable if we take the creationist view of the world. Recently I read about an official who made some interesting comments about the age of trees. There is this super duper road development work going on in my hometown, Trivandrum, which mostly involves reworking the traffic arrangements every other day. The whole operation is aimed at testing and thereby improving the IQ, or “Irritation Quotient”, of the citizens to prepare them for the globalization challenges of the future. Well, the authorities decided to cut down some trees as part of this development. This official said that the trees were anyway old and cutting them down would be a boon to the city.

That set me thinking. Those trees were probably planted by one of the Travancore kings. Considering that Trivandrum became the capital only in the 18th century, the street that leads to the palace and the trees would be a couple of hundred years old at the most. Is that old for a tree? The oldest tree, as per the Guinness book is a redwood tree, which is 12,000 years old. The Jomon sugi (cedar) in Japan’s Yakushima Island is believed to be about 6 to 7,000 years old. Not all trees live that long, but I wonder if this official was a tree specialist to tell whether a tree is old or not.

This guy, I suspect, was educated in Kansas when they were teaching Creationism as science, replacing evolution. Creationism teaches that the world is only about 6,000 years old (based on biblical calculations). The world was all flooded over about 4,400 years back, when Noah built his ark and took along all species, etc., etc. There are also various profound studies on how dinosaurs and humans existed side by side and how the Grand Canyon could have formed in a few hours. They don’t explain how or why God buried all those fossils (made to look millions of years old, when in fact they were only a few thousand years old, just to fool us) so that Arabs could dig it up as oil and become rich and Americans could wage war, kill a few of those Arabs and keep some of the loot under their control.

Kansas decided to drop creationism and push for another theory called Intelligent Design. Mr. Bush, the almighty, supreme leader of the free world, is also promoting this theory. I have one question for the Intelligent Design guys. “Explain George Bush using Intelligent Design theory. And, incorporate the word ‘intelligence’ in the explanation without using qualifiers such as average and low.”
Talking of creation, whichever theory Kansas uses, it won’t say how “Brahma” actually did the creation thingy. This anomaly can be corrected when the Hindu right comes back to power in India in the future, which I’m sure they will. This was an unfinished agenda when they were in last time. Couldn’t complete the corrections to all the textbooks due to coalition pressures etc., though M M Joshi and his guys did try hard. I fervently hope they at least would explain how and why Brahma put the oil underneath Arabia and not, for instance, under Ayodhya.

P.S: We’ve been making our presence felt at the ongoing Helsinki World Athletics Championship. Ms. Neelam Jaswant Singh, a discuss thrower, became the first and only athlete to test positive. I was glad to hear this positive development, but at the same time slightly sad too. Glad because we’re almost halfway there in this sporting drug business. I was sad on two counts. One is that this stupid woman didn’t even qualify for the discus finals with all these drugs. Second is that Mr. Manmohan “Sonia” Singh failed to get Bush to deliver us the latest American technology for masking these drugs, which is what we need instead of bogus nuclear deals.

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