Op Rana is a senior editor with China Daily’s opinion department. He has a particular focus on international politics and environmental protection.
We have, with all grace and gratitude, mistaken it as a Christmas gift. The simple folks that we are, intent on always calling a spade a spade and never looking a gift horse in the mouth, we have failed to see it as a present irritatingly loaded with conditions and contradictions.
I am used to returning home late - not necessarily from office. But for some quirky reason or the other, I don't see them during other (and for me, more tolerable) seasons. It's only during the nerve-numbing Beijing cold that I see them huddled in circles on bustling-by-day streets that turn ghostly at night. The idea of working in the open during those deathly cold hours sends the iciest shudder up my spine even in the comfort of a well-heated taxi.
The world is obsessed with efforts to strike a deal in Copenhagen next month. But the 13th World Lake Conference in China, which is part of the same save-the-environment campaign, has largely gone ignored.
The ads are written simply on a background of blue sky with nebulous clouds, say news agency reports.
Times were when children considered it natural for elders to scold them in front of their friends. Times were when a son or daughter apologized to or sought forgiveness of parents even if he/she had the burning suspicion of being in the right.
They do not make films like they used to in the good old days till the 1970s, or perhaps the early 1980s, said my colleague.
One year on, one expected the world of economics and the economists, who set its paradigm, to have learnt a lesson from the worst global financial crisis since the Great Depression (though some perceptive analysts say the present crisis is worse). What we see instead is "more of the same".
History, for most parts, is the account of the ruling classes. There was a time when philosophy encompassed almost every subject from history and physics to economics and medical studies. No wonder, lines dividing many a subject appear blurred in the works of the masters, from Plato's The Republic and Kant's Critique of Pure Reason to Hippocrates' theory on medicine and Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations. Their works were welcomed because they didn't pose a threat to the ruling classes, for none of them saw human labor as a decisive factor in social and economic development. True, L.H. Morgan dealt with it in his Ancient Society, which later formed the basis of Engels' The Origin of Family, Private Property and State.
It's surprising that the modern oil industry is just 150 years old and we are already talking about the end of the "age of oil". The year, 1859, when oil was first drilled successfully - in Titusville, Pennsylvania - is like fraction of a second away from our times in terms of the Earth's age.
Brains over beauty or brawn, any day. That used to be my belief till the world got a Bolt from the blue last year.
The wise and knowledgeable of our times may debunk Marx for saying the poor suffer because of the rich. But global warming proves, on a much wider scale, how true it is. The poor countries are suffering the ill effects of climate change caused mainly by the rich countries. We will come to this later. For now, let's shift focus to the A(H1N1) flu virus.
Every human being enters this world with the inherent right to life. The corollary to this is the right not to be killed - perhaps God's first law, which he made after Cain killed Abel, according to the Bible. To live a human being needs air, water and food the most, all of which is found in nature.