Norway wants to shift its border by 20 meters so as to gift a mountain to Finland, which has none while Norway has many taller ones! Read about it here. If only all countries could be this friendly, the world would have been very beautiful. But friendly gestures are done when countries are in friendly terms. And in most cases friendly terms is a phase, until there is some bad spark somewhere because of whatever reason - an illegal immigrant, a terrorist attack, a resource sharing conflict or a passionate sporting event. But such is the world and its ways. There will always be friends, non-friends and foes, different ones at different times.
But let's focus on another aspect of that gesture - gifting a mountain!!! I mean of all things... a mountain! Those guys must be really obsessed with risen masses of land - the Norwegians and the Finns - one to think it's a treasure they have and the other to miss them enough to consider it a gift. May be the latter actually meant - shuru kisne kiya - when it accepted the gift. If there's real joy in all this, it's cool indeed. But then, what's the fun if things are indeed as they are shown to be? Still... a mountain? Really? It's a strange obsession humans have - for all things sticking out - more the better. A similar obsession is with making tall buildings. There's this recent news that Saudi Arabia is building a 1 km long tower (read here) - 200 floors tall - I guess so tall that the highest floors would be in clouds whenever they visit Saudi Arabia. Would be fun to stand on the terrace and pee into the passing clouds that would go and cause rain in another country! Must be great living in the desert and doing hankypanky with clouds that are not yours anyhow.
In India we have some of the tallest peaks in the world. Our neighbors also have some. Some of our Gods live there... no kidding! I recently saw the movie Everest. It's one sad story of trekkers and their expedition to scale the tallest peak going terribly wrong. I once went with a few friends of mine to climb the tallest peak in the Sahyadris - Kalsubai. We didn't really know it's the tallest when we went there. It was a lazy Sunday morning during the rainy season, and we just wanted to go somewhere for fun. So, clearly, we didn't prepare much for something this big. I don't want to describe this whole trip... long-story-short - we gave up after climbing half way up - it got dark and scary, we ran out of food and we were tired. Well, I don't know if it was really even "half" the way up that we went, but what the hell! I even write in my CV in the extracurriculars section: Avid Trekker - scaled Kalsubai - the tallest peak in the Sahyadris! Well, I did visit the place... That's how CV's go. You do a few lines in Java and you are qualified to write Java under your skills. You get something self-published and call yourself a published author. You stand for some time in a hip-deep swimming pool and say you know swimming. It's fair.
Speaking of mountains, there's mountain of work piled up. Lemme take care of it. It's only like that one Finnish mountain, though - not very high. So can take it off soon. Bye for now.
