Dear friends,  Hope you are all well and enjoying the snow,if you happen to 
live in the northern areas. Here part of the McMillan reservoir is now 
frozen, birds can walk across it. A section of the Potomac is looking like the 
Arctic Ocean, with slabs of ice floating on the water. And this week we got 
our first inches of snow and a good coating of ice to top it overnight, 
making it easier to slide than walk to work. This, my friends, is a good 
winter. 
 
Hope you enjoy this short letter. 
Sankar 
 
Random Thoughts (72) 
2/1/2009
1. As I was walking to work one day during on what was an unusually but 
consistently cold morning in DC I thought, I can get used to this. But you 
see, problem with Washington is that it never stays consistent. Caught in 
the tug of war between the Arctic and the tropics we have to be constantly 
on the alert for changes in the weather. Whereas during my stay in India or 
California or Hawai’i the weather report was rather boring and 
unpredictable, here it is always exciting and you never know what is going 
to come next. It is what I love about DC and it is what makes it so difficult 
sometime, as well. Our new President is already complaining that people in 
DC aren’t as tough as Chicagoans. Well, let us see what he says after a few 
more years of living here on a daily basis. 
2. Obama is so multi-dimensional that everyone sees something of him or 
herself in him. He has had African, American and Asian influences in his life. 
He is intellectual, yet cool and athletic. 
3. Apparently a Swedish betting site gave odds of various words appearing 
in Obama’s inaugural address. Words such as “Peru” and “soccer” had the 
lowest odds while “change” had the highest odds. I did a search using Word 
to analyze the speech and here are the results: It didn’t have the following 
words: Dream, Love, Brother, Duty and Poverty (though the word Poor did 
show up).  Iran, Russia, China, India did not show up but they were 
mentioned indirectly. The words that were predicted to appear most 
definitely such as Hope and Change did come up, among others: Change 
appeared twice, Virtue twice, Hope appeared thrice, Ideal thrice, Friend 
thrice, Peace four times, God five times.
4. Now that we have finished spending almost a trillion dollars on Iraq, 
there is talk about spending a lot of money developing the sinking 
economies of Afghanistan and Pakistan. While I don’t dispute the need to 
do this, it is sad that politicians are only now realizing the need to spend 
money on helping poor countries such as Afghanistan. I wish they had paid 
some attention to Afghanistan before 9/11 taught us the perils of political 
instability amid poverty. It is sad that a lot of money is going there only 
because the 9/11 terrorists originated there (and the US bombed the crap 
out of them). It is almost like telling people, if you want us to spend a lot of 
money helping your economy, train a few terrorists to kill a bunch of our 
countrymen. I hope they start working on Somalia before it becomes a 
terrorist base.
5. Lately due to a mix-up in the department I have been forced to use a PC 
instead of Mac. It is making me more aware of viruses. Yesterday (1/31) 
morning Google seemed to be infected with something. It made me think of 
the kind of people who would take the effort to gain pleasure in other 
people’s suffering. Perhaps they don't realize what they are doing. Every 
one of us lives at the expense of others. Our very survival depends on the 
exploitation and destruction of the lives of countless living beings. But at 
least we can take the effort to reduce the suffering and exploitation of 
others. Or at the very least refrain from consciously doing things that result 
in the suffering of others.