Peak of Erudition

Yoga is a easy but exhaustive form of physical exercising that is practiced in some asian countries, especially India. It involves stretching of every part of your body in different directions on a structured basis, defined as Yoga asanas. Performing these asanas every day at least for an hour is expected to burn most of your excess calories and keep every part of your body in excellent condition. There are people in India who are practicing Yoga for years, and many leading Indian hotels and companies have started imparting Yoga for all their clients and customers and employees in order to keep them healthy.

India is set to get into the select group of nations that have sent their mission to the far away moon. The Indian space craft Chandrayan is set to land in the moon by November second week, after several weeks of traveling in space. The successful tracking till date in itself is a commendable achievement by the scientific community of Indian space research organization, which has been banned from procuring advanced technology items from other countries a decade back. Even then the Indian scientists have proven their mettle and successfully launched  and moved their space craft towards moon in the past few weeks. There are only five other nations that have successfully sent moon missions so far, including US, Russia and France.

Crude oil prices continue to tumble with more and more negative news flowing from US / Europe and other major asian economies. US automobile sales is dropping in two digit speed, Europe is also seeing major drop in their industrial activities, asian economies are seeing their export demands vanishing, and thus they are seeing their currencies weakening. All these are resulting in reduced demand for crude, and with the prices having crashed by nearly 60% in the last few months, many middle east oil producing countries which depend only on crude oil for their livelihood are forced to pump in more oil into the market, which is leading to further crash in prices. Now analysts have taken a U turn, and are predicting that the crude oil prices will touch as low as 30 dollars in few months. These same analysts of top notch firms were predicting few months back, that the crude oil prices will reach 200 dollars shortly. The tongue does not have bones, hence they twist easily, and take U turns. I was hearing some senior person murmuring, “TOO MUCH ANALYSIS LEADS TO PARALYSIS”.

Every fourth or  fifth person around is obese , and the primary reason for the same is the excess intake of fat food. Most of the people do not eat at regular intervals, and also eat available fast food containing lot of fat and spices which add to their calories. To complicate things, these people do not exercise regularly to burn their excess fat, and thus they turn obese. For those people who find it difficult to do exercising regularly, the only other option left out is to avoid taking too much of fat and spicy food, so that calorie addition is reduced.

Four to five months back all the metals like Aluminum, copper, tin, lead, iron, steel and also crude oil prices were at multi year highs and were anywhere between 30% to 200% higher than a year-ago price levels. At that time most of the economists and analysts were only predicting as to how much more these prices could keep climbing up. Within the last few months things have taken a U turn, thanks to the massive US financial crisis and failure of quite a few big institutions, all the metal prices are currently ruling at multi year lows, and many major manufacturers have already indicated that they are planning to cut down their production in coming months in order to reduce their piled up inventory.

US FED rates are already at record low level of 1.5%. Most of the market participants are expecting the rate to be slashed by at least half a percentage point to 1% levels in the coming FED meet. This is indeed expected to bring down the cost of funds for the banking system and thus for the US customers also, which is badly needed to pull back the economy from recession. Most of the weekly housing / job market data / production data clearly indicate that the US economy is clearly into recession.

The major Financial group Fortis went under last week and was bailed out by three European governments at a cost of over 14 billion US dollars. The pumping in has been done consciously to reduce the risk of more related failures. Already two major banks have failed in Iceland, due to their holding of invalid toxic mortgage papers issued by the now defunct Lehman bros and other weak US institutions. These failures are expected to pull down the growth of the Euro zone to nearly nil in the coming year, aver experts.

Russia has formally withdrawn out of major portion of Georgia after European Union sponsored peace deal was agreed upon. The six point agreement has lead to the withdrawal of russian troops from major ports of Georgia. South Ossetia is expected to continue to be a rebel region for Georgia since it is expected to announce independence anytime with Russian support. Major revolt in Georgia against it’s current President is also not ruled out, since the disastrous loss of face with Russia might force people to  align back with Russia for long term stability.

Lot of people have clear goals in their mind at around the time they get into employment. But most of them lose track of their goals once they are into fairly successful career after say five or ten years. That is why you find many a people in their late thirties and early forties showing slightly reduced focus on career growth and  lagging behind on their personal family front also. The reason is that they just blindly run their daily life without any goal or purpose. They handle issues at office and at home on a reactive basis. The only solution is to ensure that we keep reviewing our career goals and personal life goals at least once every year so that we have clarity on what we are running for and achieve the goals with perfection.

Just a month back Barak Obama was running a few points below rival Republican candidate John Mccain due to inexperience. Now with his aggressive never say die campaigning across every nook and corner of US, Obama has succeeded in not only reducing the gap with Mccain, he has in fact taken a few points lead over his rival which looks very heartening for the democratic party. Over the coming weeks, Obama needs to maintain his high profile campaigning in order to widen his lead over Mccain, so that he can become the 44th US President.