Today I did some reading up on advantages of vegetarianism, and came across some pretty compelling arguments. The main points that appealed to me:

1. Our small intestines are really long compared to that of other animals that eat meat, and meat is never digested in the small intestine, only fibrous food(read vegetarian food) is.
2. Our digestive juices(starting with the saliva down to the gastric juices) are apparently alkali-based, unlike that of our carnivorous friends in the animal kingdom which are acid-based. And meats require strong acid to be digested.
3. Coronary heart disease is unheard of in carnivorous animal species, whereas humans suffer a lot from it(even vegetarians do, but humans eat out of greed, not out of hunger, so that must be a common illness for all humans irrespective of their diets).

A more complete list can be found here:
http://www.celestialhealing.net/physicalveg3.htm

Being a vegetarian myself(I do consume milk products), I don't have much trouble agreeing with all this. Ethically, I feel we have only one issue: that of consumption of resources. One chicken, or one cow, consumes a lot of grains and fresh water before it can be consumed by us. I think in the interests of leaving a smaller ecological footprint, we must become vegetarians to the extent possible.

As Mahatma Gandhi said, "There is enough for everybody's need, but not enough for anybody's greed".

The Linguist.

I started fancying myself as one when I learnt the Kannada alphabet. Was so proud that I had managed to learn it against my own expectations, given that it has so many twists and turns than even Bangalore roads.

Of course, it helped that the alphabet has the same components as the Devanagari script which is used by Hindi, and I already know Hindi, having learnt it when I was younger and my mind more malleable.

But still, I had gone further than most people are willing to, and that has given me a false sense of purpose, courage and hope. This drove me to consider, just consider, targeting the venerable Chinese language. Its the language of an emergent superpower, and perhaps of the future, and its so mysteriously complex(with its simplified alphabet rumoured to have over 5000 characters), that I knew I should try it.

Of course, this has been at the back of my mind for quite a few months now, even though after my ego-trip of learning Kannada, I had stopped making significant progress in the actual speaking of the language. But something was gnawing at me, oh yeah, that was the small matter of how difficult it is to actually learn Chinese, alphabet, speaking, and all. So I run a search for "how difficult is it to learn Chinese", and this was one really educative link I ended up with. In spite of being written by an American from a European perspective, I think it would hold true for me as well:
Why Chinese is so damn hard

Its truly an eye-opener, and makes good, easy reading. And really makes we want to re-consider my desire to learn Chinese. Who knows, my ego might still get a chance to kill me.