Wednesday, 21 April 2010

Selfishness


I see everything happening in and around the world, always have some resemblance in our personally life, too. The recent volcanic ash incident brought various political, psychological and scientific thoughts in my mind. Until last Thursday night, everything was fine on the ground and in the air in the UK. But, when I tuned into news on Friday morning, I found that due to ash clouds from Icelandic volcano has caused airspace closure and there is no flights to and from UK airports. The situation worsened during the weekend as that ash covered most of the Europe and literally whole Europe was under no fly zone.

The weirdest part of the whole incident was that everything felt very calm and normal on ground level. There wasn’t any single thing I noticed different in day-to-day life. But when I read more about the affects of airports closures, almost no commercial flights services and economic effects of it in almost every parts of the world, I released how severe the problem was.

We all know that we are helpless against nature’s will. We don’t have knowledge to predict such an event neither we have power to stop such a thing happening. But, we are definitely strong enough to help people after this kind of incident. And, I have seen that UK government has helped people and authorities in such events, more recently in earthquake-hit Haiti, Southeast Asia when Tsunami struck, etc. But, I see very less help on this case when hundreds of thousands of British people are stranded all over the world. There has been some development in bringing these people back to home, but it’s a very little effort when you know how much resources British government has. If government really cared about their own people, they just could use their unused military aircrafts, they could use money to hire private aeroplanes so that they can take stranded passengers from UK to their destination country and bring British people back to home. But, they aren’t doing such a thing. I see government is letting commercial Airlines’ to sort this issue out. And, we all know that Airlines are not in business to help people, they are in business to make money.

All these lead to me a typical human behaviour. We do not act very fast and with confidence when our loved ones asks for our help or when they ask us to be there in their side in problem. This is a very common but a bizarre psychology that I have seen in people. Why some of us act very fast to help someone else's issue and why we hesitate to help our own people? When a person or as in above case, government, justify this by giving reason that because they are our own people, they will understand why they have given them second priority while placing something else before them. I strongly disagree with that. How can we expect British people to understand why government is not acting to bring them quickly to home while sending millions of pounds to a country where they do not have direct connection? How can a person understands a reason when his or her loved once put her or him second and gives a priority to a third person?


I believe that if we can take care of our own family first, and if everyone does so, then the whole world will be a far better place. Sadly, most people consider this kind of act as selfish. But, I don’t see that way. I firmly believe that we have to be on the side of our loved ones first before we think about how that decision will affect anybody else. Even if that means that we may not be able to satisfy everyone but at least we will be able to make our loved one happy. And, if we will be able to do so, then I am sure that everything will work out for the best at the end for everyone.

Friday, 16 April 2010

Lisbon visit

Portugal was a second country I visited in mainland Europe. As I was here for a business purpose, I didn’t get chance to visit any other parts of Portugal apart from its main city and capital Lisbon and its surroundings. Lisbon is located on the coast of Atlantic Ocean where river Tagus flows into the ocean. Although it was almost end of November, the weather wasn’t very cold as compared to the UK and apart from 1-2 days of light rain or shower, my 7 days worth of time went good.


My hotel was located in middle of historic old town and commercial district. Hence, it was very convenient for me to go to my work place and sightseeing in the evening and in weekend. From my hotel to the company, the journey was about 15-20 minutes ride by Taxi. And, that was the most weird and shocking part of my daily activity. And, the reason was Taxi drivers. Unlike other rich European countries, Taxi fares were very cheap and I found that most of the Taxi drivers are from poor financial background. And, there was a language issue as well with my conversation with drivers. Hence, each trip to and from company had different experience with drivers’ behaviours, towards me and in general, as well. Later I found out that it was due to shorter trips. As this was very short trip between company and hotel, the average fare I paid was around 5 Euros. And, most of the drivers didn’t like that et al. But by law are required to take these short journeys, they weren’t happy.
  
Lisbon’s old city has a quite a few historic buildings. Most of them were built after 1755 as major earthquake in that year demolished most of the city. New city was built afterwards and due to visionary thoughts from then equivalent to Prime Minister, Marquis of Pombal built the city with larger space between buildings and hence you will find very wide roads and good size pavements, which are very unlikely to see in any other larger city in whole Europe. Portuguese are very proud of the achievements of Vasco de Gama and they have honoured him with creating a fantastic Vasco de Gama sports centre near the coast. In the nutshell, Lisbon is a city with modern architect, nice coastline, cheaper than other European cities and also a great place for shopping.