Apocalypse Now

No, this will not be a review of the movie. I switched on CNN last night, and I was greeted by horrific images of the damage caused by Hurricane Ike. I changed the channel and looked elsewhere. About a week back, it was Hurricane Hanna that had caused large scale devastation and I'd done essentially the same thing, changed the channel.
This morning I opened the newspaper, and staring me in the face from that colorful front page was the news of the demise of the Lehmann Brothers enterprise. Lehmann Brothers is (or was) one of America's largest financial tycoons. Just late last year, the company had declared record profits and just yesterday, it filed for bankruptcy. It turns out that Lehmann Brothers is only one in a long line of institutions that have drowned or are about to follow suit (AIG for example) as a result of the sub-prime crisis and economic recession in the US and economic slowdown around the world; a deadly cocktail of rising prices and falling income.
Desperate for some better news, I quickly flipped over pages and then again, images of the effects of a devastating typhoon around Taiwan.
All of this transpires in the same week as the Delhi serial blasts and in a year that has seen the following:

1. Record oil prices
2. (An unsolved) Global food crisis
3. Huge number of natural calamities
4. Economic crisis and record inflation figures in most countries. Zimbabwe just recorded inflation of 4000 percent. A meal in that country costs over 10 million Zim Dollars! The central bank in Zimbabwe just issued a 1 billion ZD note and then collapsed seven zeroes from the currency to rescale things back to 'normal'. You could just as well make paper planes of that money and blow it all away.
5. Almost a record number of terror attacks, no less than four serial bomb blasts in India within this year itself.

Looks rather ominous doesn't it? Its almost as if everything we've done over the last hundred years has somehow come around to bite us where it hurts most in the year 2008. All the mistakes have somehow piled up and the day this year dawned, the limit was breached. I don't mean to be a doom prophet here, but we'd better not change the channel or flip over pages anymore.

Save yourself. (And as I write this, I notice a blue button at the bottom of the page that aptly reads, "Save Now")