The Blind Man Who Taught Himself to See

One of the fears I have, son, is of going blind. Mainly because I would find it difficult to read and use computers. It's one of those generalised fears we all have. 

But after reading this article, I think I've managed to ignore and conquer that fear. Echolocation is just a tool and its the mental attitude that's more important. Fascinating indeed. 

People like him are noteworthy. Who don't give a shit about what people think and do their own things. Never let anybody dictate your shortcomings son. Or let your fears overpower you. One of your biggest enemies are those who tell you that you cannot do something. Frequently, that's you yourself. Don't listen to them or yourself when they say you cannot do something. 

Love

Baba

The Blind Man Who Taught Himself to See
http://www.mensjournal.com/the-blind-man-who-taught-himself-to-see/print/

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The Blind Man Who Taught Himself To See

Daniel Kish has been sightless since he was a year old. Yet he can mountain bike. And navigate the wilderness alone. And recognize a building as far away as 1,000 feet. How? The same way bats can see in the dark.

by Michael Finkel

photograph by Steve Pyke

The first thing Daniel Kish does, when I pull up to his tidy gray bungalow in Long Beach, California, is make fun of my driving. “You’re going to leave it that far from the curb?” he asks. He’s standing on his stoop, a good 10 paces from my car. I glance behind me as I walk up to him. I am, indeed, parked about a foot and a half from the curb.

The second thing Kish does, in his living room a few minutes later, is remove his prosthetic eyeballs. He does this casually, like a person taking off a smudged pair of glasses. The prosthetics are thin convex shells, made of acrylic plastic, with light brown irises. A couple of times a day they need to be cleaned. “They get gummy,” he explains. Behind them is mostly scar tissue. He wipes them gently with a white cloth and places them back in.

Kish was born with an aggressive form of cancer called retinoblastoma, which attacks the retinas. To save his life, both of his eyes were removed by the time he was 13 months old. Since his infancy — Kish is now 44 — he has been adapting to his blindness in such remarkable ways that some people have wondered if he’s playing a grand practical joke. But Kish, I can confirm, is completely blind.

Meltdown

I remember those days son. We were in India at that time. For supposedly a group in a country which made revolutions into an ideology, they were useless at making the coup happen. 

Couple of things son. First is that coups and attempted fratricide like this are extremely dangerous not just in the short term but in the long term. When kings and presidents are overthrown by force, something happens to the national psyche and causes faith in the state to be weakened. Until and unless something extraordinary happens, once there is a coup, there is a good chance that it will happen again. Look at Pakistan and Bangladesh for examples. 

Militaries therefore have to be kept under very very tight control. Read up on a classic book by Samuel Huntingdon on civil military relations if you want to know more about this. 

Second is my experience with the Russians. One of my saleswomen in Russia once told me, you are lucky that you own and live your own history. Russians have always been very badly blessed with atrocious leaders and they always had a tragic history. Something about that country, that vast huge awesome country just makes one look and shake one's head. It has always promised much and delivered little. So putting your money in there should be done very carefully if at all. Strange place. 

Love

Baba

Meltdown
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/06/20/meltdown?page=full

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Meltdown

For the first time, Boris Yeltsin’s right-hand man tells the inside story of the coup that killed glasnost — and changed the world.

BY GENNADY BURBULIS WITH MICHELE A. BERDY | JULY/AUGUST 2011

“That scum!” Boris Yeltsin fumed. “It’s a coup. We can’t let them get away with it.”

It was the morning of Aug. 19, 1991, and the Russian president was standing at the door of his dacha in Arkhangelskoe, a compound of small country houses outside Moscow where the top Russian government officials lived. I had raced over from my own house nearby, after a friend called from Moscow, frantic and nearly hysterical, insisting that I turn on the radio. There had been a coup; Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev had been removed from power.

Five minutes later I was at Yeltsin’s dacha, an unassuming two-story yellow brick building, where a small group of his closest associates soon gathered. In addition to me (at the time, his secretary of state), there was Ivan Silayev, the head of the Russian cabinet; Ruslan Khasbulatov, the acting chairman of the Supreme Soviet; Mikhail Poltoranin, the minister of press and mass information; Sergei Shakhrai, the state councilor; and Viktor Yaroshenko, the minister of foreign economic relations. Anatoly Sobchak, the mayor of Leningrad, and Yuri Luzhkov, the deputy mayor of Moscow, arrived not long after. Everyone crowded into Yeltsin’s small living room.

For months we had half-expected something like this. By the summer of 1991, the Soviet Union was falling apart at the seams. The economy was imploding, the deficit was ballooning, hard currency and gold reserves had been decimated, and Gorbachev’s stopgap reforms had only exacerbated the crisis. The notion of a “Soviet people,” unified under the banner of socialism, was collapsing along with it. Legislatures in the republics, which had already demanded greater freedoms within the USSR, began calling for independence. By the spring of 1991, five republics — Armenia, Estonia, Georgia, Latvia, and Lithuania — had declared it officially. In Russia, democratic forces wanted an end to Soviet totalitarian rule. Our aim was not to allow the chaotic dissolution of the USSR, but to transform it into a confederation that would afford each republic considerable self-determination under its aegis.