Green-1-columns

The Green Issue

Vol. 1#3

2The Green IssueColumns

3The Green Issue Columns

Contributors

1. Epifunny - Krushna Dande

2. Monocle - Sushrut Munje

3. Eureka! - Saahil Dama

4. Ionic - Nikhil Mane

A Saahil Dama, Ishan Dabri, Krushna Dande production.


EpifunnyGames

At some point of time in the previous month I was attacked by the crushing desire to go retro gameplay wise. Was this because I was tired of the games of today? Well, of course not! After all, the crushing variety we have today is unmatched!

Three different games

So I tried to relive fond childhood memories with the cel shaded, 8 bit games of yesteryear. But in every direction I found dejection. I tried Mario, but the ghoulies and beasties of world 8-2 destroyed my lit-tle Italian mustachiod plumbing body and sent it to Bowser’s castle where a nice barbeque was held.

I tried pac man, but after the third time I woke up with blood on my hands in a strange hotel room with electronic music playing after


chomping too many pills I decided that enough was enough.I wandered the streets morose, when suddenly inspiration struck. I remembered Pokémon.

First a history lesson to those too unfortunate to have a real child-hood: Pokémon were gods on the playground in the early 2000s. It was a franchise owned by the gaming company Nintendo, which is well known today as the company that makes the DS and the Wii, or the two most popular consoles in the history of mankind.

Seriously, everything these guys touch turns to gold

Everything there guys touch turns to gold

There was a phase in my life when the furry little creatures manu-factured with the expressed intent of being marketable governed everything I did. I say this without any shame or regret, even though I spent about three years in an absolute waste of time, and instead of hating Nintendo for swallowing up an appreciable fraction of my life in a hopeless fad, they planted the tiny seeds of ideas inside my nine year old mind, which grew into trees with multiple ideas of brain-wash and world domination. This is because if you can make the chil-dren of the world love your two hundred-odd creatures with creepy eyes, I can make them love me. George Orwell also receives further thanks for his novel 1984, Megatron for his idea of building gigantic robots that can crush buildings when they fall, and Stephen King for filling my heart for such hatred of humanity that the only logical op-


tion in my head was to subjugate it and make it perform my bidding.

This franchise also gave me enough fodder to understand obsessions. Entire websites related to them sprang up, seeing eager twelve year olds and creepy forty year olds devoting themselves to finding catch ratios, documenting the attacks of Pidgey until level 99 and drawing up fan art of Professor Oak; all this not for money, mind you, but for simple obsession. Statutory warning: avert your eyes.

Told you.

This is the kind of obsession I fully expect from all those minions who live in the bowels of my castle, all writing treatises of praise and songs in my honour. They will love me. (Scared readers: do not panic and tell all your friends about this megalomaniac who runs a magazine. Wait until tomorrow, go to sleep peacefully tonight, because there is no way someone would sneak up on you and suffocate you by pressing a cushion against your paranoid face. Especially not the said megaloma-niac running a magazine).

Budding world dominators, take out your pencils and start taking notes: These are the things you can learn from Nintendo that you can incorporate in your plot of aforementioned domination: 1. Create mascots. Cute ones. Cute so that the kids will love them, and cute so that adults will feel nauseated and avoid them like hellfire. 2. Gather finances. They say the children are our future. They cer-


tainly help in mine. Make the little blighters watch your show. Give it a good gimmick, and many merchandisable paraphernalia. Then the rotters will force their parents to pitch in with their paychecks, so your future subjects will finance the takeover themselves.3 . When the show is so cute that any adults in the room spontane-ously fall into piles of gibbering dementia, unleash your plan. During its peak season, when a billion kids are watching it worldwide, make the most fan loved character tell the kids that their parents are in fact ruled by (insert villain name here) and the only way you can free them is by installing the Mind Controlchip® that you bought in the latest soft toy/promotional campaign/trading cards into the small of their backs. Then wait for five minutes as half the world’s population is un-der your control, and seeing as the kids are watching TV, it is probably the rich half.

So now you have a majority of the world’s adult population in the palm of your hand. What do you do? Your choice. The world is your Cloyster.

As in it’s a dark, dark, evil, painful place.

- Krushna Dande

Krushna is also the author of http://loltothegrave.blogspot.com/


http://loltothegrave.blogspot.com/



Like my earlier article in the Blue Issue, I would again like to stress on the global power-play rather than rant about the happenings in Egypt, as if they were an isolated incident. But then, this is a start. The revolution has inspired people of other regime-ruled nations to re-volt. Soon, we’ll witness more governments topple. Why is there no reason to be happy?

Toppled governments will result in temporary anarchy. And then the restored governments will be back, working according to the inter-ests of world’s powers. So we had a dictator, removed from power, replaced by another corrupt government which chooses to re-elect itself after regular intervals. Such a wonderful world.

The Devil Reincarnate

Egyptian CurryMonocle


Hosni Mubarak was an air force commander who held the reins of this 3000 year old civilization after the assassination of his predeces-sor, President Anwar El Sadat. During his 30 year old rule, he is said to have ignored the rise of crises at home; instead preferring to pose with other world leaders, including American presidents & our very own Indira Gandhi. He was finally ousted after continuous protests across the nation. The army stepped in and refused to crack down on the protesters. After Mubarak, the vacuum has been temporarily filled by the army. An army of a nation that has been extravagantly funded by USA.

The protests are now spreading to Bahrain, Libya and other similar nations. If successful, they might create power vacuums in the re-gion. Something that can enable a certain world power to support the proxy democratic government and control more reins. Very in-teresting.

As a result of protests, the Egyptian economy lost quite a lot of mon-ey as lost revenue, among others. The ruling dictator had made sure, like any other dictator would, to root out possible parallel authori-ties. Thus, the power vacuum.

Can we really afford a power vacuum in all these neighboring coun-tries? Can we, at all, afford weak nations in an area with Iran, Somalia and a prominent ‘Al Quaeda’ base? Is there a stage being carefully set, as a part of long-term strategy? We may only wonder.

Understand that revolutions across the world, especially in develop-ing countries like Venezuela, have always been planned by external forces- the dominating world powers who are displeased with the present government of the state. Displeased, because the govern-ment seeks to please its people instead of the world powers. Thus, they bend the countries into submission using economic sanctions, economic hitmen, revolutions or assassinations of the leaders. This


has always been the strategy for muscle flexing across the globe.

We cannot afford such chaotic revolutions, not when each of these countries face an eminent power vacuum and are already neck-deep in debt. We should learn from the Egyptian Curry, which the world press enjoyed as a delicacy. What we need is a change from these flawed rules that we refuse to look beyond. Liberate your mind and live free.

Love and peace.

- Sushrut Munje

Sushrut is also the author of http://sushrutmunje.com


http://sushrutmunje.com


Humans have a thing about apples. We cook them in about eleven billion ways, we use them to bait pigs which are then roasted with their final meal still in their mouths, and we read books wih their pic-tures on the cover.

A really lost and unfortunate apple

But apples have been important for mankind in another way: the re-ligious. Remember Adam? Not Adam Gilchrist; the naked Adam. Lone man walking. The one who had it off with Eve. The father of all, Justin Beiber included. He ate an apple and suddenly his own nudity em-barrassed him. Quite a shock, it must have come as. You can’t blame the poor fella. Where would he get clothes from, anyway? Must have

AppleEureka!


been a turn off for him and Eve. We simply can’t ignore the pivotal role the apple played here. One of eradicating poverty. The noble fruit.

Somewhere down the line chugged along the hapless Newton, all with his laws and all. The lucky bastard was only sitting under an ap-ple tree when the red fruit conked him on the head and turned his world around. He became a star overnight, for discovering a thing that was staring in our faces all the while. What about the modest apple? Did anyone pass it a second thought? It deserved credit, not Newton. Clearly no other fruit had the potential to do what it did. Grapes are too low, mangoes are too high and a watermelon could have quite easily killed him. Apple was not only at the right place at the right time, it was also the right thing. Round, fresh and red - sim-ply perfect. So after apple did it, people found their feet. They realized that they weren’t birds after all. They didn’t have beaks and hence couldn’t fly. Some giant sucker kept pulling them down. They jumped, they fell. They tried to be Superman and fell. Yes, gravity, and hence the apple, have been helping these people get out of the gene pool for millenia. At times I wonder where the apple is now. I hope the hun-gry bastard didn’t it eat.

A possibility


Apples are highly evil and vindictive too, and specially so for doctors. They are utterly destructive for the business of the hard-working, life-savers of humanity. ‘An apple a day keeps the doctor away-’ that one line has nearly ruined lives of half the doctors, some kind of a wicked euthanasia programme to kick them out of business. Apple is an en-tirely no-doctor fruit. And if anyone brave soul dared to delve into the murky depths of history, he might find sufficient evidence for this phenomenon. Maybe a doctor accidentally stepped on an apple, or something even more heinous, that gave rise to the bitterness in the apples’ hearts. If things go on as they are going now, apples might soon doom all docs. The frightening fruit even gives Satan a run for his money in being evil.

After Newton passed and gravity remained, came Steve Jobs and brought along with him another apple, this time a half-eaten, multi-national one. It became a symbol of technological advancement, of advances in fields that were only borderline acceptable.

On phones, iMacs, iPods, iPads, iWhat-the-shit-not. However, the apple remained elusive because of the prohibitive prices of the prod-ucts. A subtle reminder of it being the forbidden fruit, I think. Then came Gates and Windows, Jobs’s and Apples’s competitors. The rest, as we know, is history.

Something lame Apple!


Red, curved, sweet, healthy, fresh; the fruit defines us. It has changed our existence. Name your first kid Apple. He’ll probably save the world from the 2012 apocalypse. Or wait, was it Applecalypse?

- Saahil Dama

Saahil is also the author of http://sadamned.blogspot.com/


http://sadamned.blogspot.com/



Spain or La Roja, the Reds, as they are popularly known to football fans made history. They went and did the impossible. Football lovers and critics, worldwide, noted that the winners looked a shadow of their older incarnations. The Spanish teams of yore had been divided by geography and socio-economic policies. The team that won on 11th of July, 2010 looked united

It will surely take more than a game, though, to settle Spain's inter-nal contradictions. These are similar to the ones in other post-impe-rial democratic European states like Belgium. The United Kingdom doesn't even manage to field a united national team, let alone a winning one. But Spain's challenges are varied - borders containing people of several different national identities, who speak different languages and operate a variety of autonomous constitutions. The country also has a recent memory of dictatorship, and a nationalist past.

All the feelings of resentment are falling away in the triumphant march of the football team. The young Spain wants a united Spain. A united Spain is obviously far stronger on the field than a divided one. With unemployment rising and public spending falling, who can blame them for wanting to spend a Sunday in front of the telly cheer-ing on the lads. The whole of Spain is suffering as la crisis (the credit crunch) bites hard, so why let questions of geography, socio- econom-ics or politics get in the way of having a big fiesta?

IONICSpain


Spain is reeling under economic concerns even as FC Barcelona faces debt troubles and Real Madrid negotiates galactic salaries. The win will certainly be a boost to Catalan pride.

Many people in the Basque country and Catalonia would like it. At the weekend, before the final, hundreds of thousands of Catalans marched through Barcelona in protest at a recent Madrid court ruling that declared: "Our constitution recognises no country but Spain." This contradicts Catalan efforts to declare greater autonomy, backed by all the area's major political parties.

In the latter half of the 19th century, Catalonia became an industrial center; to this day it remains one of the most industrialized parts of Spain. In the first third of the 20th century, Catalonia gained and lost varying degrees of autonomy several times, receiving its first statute of autonomy during the Second Spanish Republic (1931). This period was marked by political unrest and the preeminence of the Anarchists during the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939). The Anarchists had been active throughout the early 20th century, achieving the first eight-hour workday in the world in 1919. After the defeat of the Republic in the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), which brought General Francisco Franco to power, his regime suppressed any kind of public activities associated with Catalan nationalism, Anarchism, Socialism, Democ-racy or Communism, including the publication of books on those sub-jects or simply discussion of them in open meetings. As part of this suppression, the use of Catalan in government-run institutions and during public events was banned.

After Franco's death (1975) and with the adoption of a democratic Spanish constitution (1978), Catalonia recovered political and cultural autonomy. Today, Catalonia is one of the most economically dynamic regions of Spain. The Catalan capital and largest city, Barcelona, is a major international cultural centre and a major tourist destination. Not to mention, home to 7 of the starting 11 for the La Roja, that won


the World Cup.And if any Catalans were having trouble finding cause to celebrate, then they might take solace in the fact that the victory had been as much for FC Barcelona as for Spain, both in terms of starting players and tactics used.

Any fan of Spanish football must have seen the banners at any Barce-lona v Real Madrid match proclaim: "Catalonia is not Spain."Will the magic wand of football glory change that in an instant?I think not.But it might provide Spain with a semblance of stability after decades of internal strife.

- Nikhil Mane

Nikhil is also the author of http://rtcodek.blogspot.com


http://rtcodek.blogspot.com

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