Couldn’t stop watching this video! Perhaps because there is so little to cheer about these days that we are moved by any effort that cheers an ordinary and random act of goodness.

It’s a great way to begin the week. Happy Monday to you all.

It is not an exaggeration to say that there is no other movie star like Elizabeth Taylor. An incredible beauty whose face was known the world over long before the Internet. A movie star whose film career may have ended in the 70s, but was impactful enough to shine the spotlight on her decades after it was over. Of course there were the marriages and addictions that made regular headlines. And yet somehow she managed to stay above it all and never making any excuses for her choices. An amazing woman who led an amazingly full life.

We will remember her for the incredible loyalty she showed to her friend Michael Jackson. Through ups and downs and while the world mocked and sneered at him, Elizabeth Taylor stood firmly by Jackson’s side. Everyone should have a friend like that.

But the lasting legacy Elizabeth Taylor left behind was her work to bring awareness to the AIDS epidemic. In the early 80s some of us had just begun to hear the whispers about this new disease called AIDS. Elizabeth Taylor was the first celebrity we remember talking openly about it. In the two and half decades since then Elizabeth Taylor used her celebrity to raise hundreds of millions of dollars through her work as the national chair of AmFar and her own AIDS foundation.

Rest In Peace Dame Elizabeth Taylor.

It takes a disaster to wake us up to the things around us that pose a risk to our health and lives. From Hurricane Katrina to the Japan Catastrophe, Exxon Valdez to the Gulf Oil Spill, and Chernobyl to Bhopal, we are reminded time and time again of one thing – human beings don’t have all the answers.

Yesterday Germany became the first country to shut seven nuclear plants in the wake of the crisis in Japan. India declared they are doing safety reviews, but have no plans to stop building new nuclear plants. They’re even testing food imports from Japan for radiation.

Now head over to Tehelka and read some of their findings of the nuclear power industry in India -

1. trucks carrying exposed uranium ore leaving trails of dust,
2. 30,000 people living within the supposed ‘exclusion zone’ around nuclear plants
3. incidents of scientists and workers exposed to radiation.
4. Utter lack of transparency in medical records and testing for patients suffering from cancer, or dying from radiation exposure.

So India is going to move ahead with its nuclear power plants, and nothing and no one will be able to do a damned thing about it. Land will be forcibly acquired to build the plants, villagers will be displaced, a few thousand of them who don’t move might contract cancer, a few accidents here and there will happen and no one will ever know, radiation will leak into water and again no one will know.

Which leaves us all asking one question – Where Is India’s Erin Brockovich?

We often need reminding that for every corruption scandal, human rights abuses and poverty stories that come out of India, there are an equal number of stories of good and ordinary people doing extraordinary things to bring about change.

One such story that inspired us today was that of Shukla Bose, who left behind a corporate career to start the Prikrma Humanity Foundation.

Powerful and inspiring.

Of course Gandhi is in hell. Sure he railed against inequality and injustice, fought for the rights of the poor, scorned wealth and power, practiced vegetarianism, abhorred violence and hatred, preached tolerance, generosity and kindness, and led his nation to freedom from its oppressors using peaceful resistance and non-violence. All virtues that Christ tells Christians they must aspire to. All reasons why Gandhi would go straight to heaven, if only his parent had had him baptized. If Gandhi were baptized he would now be enjoying a life of eternal salvation in heaven…alongside Hitler.

This is what many Christians believe. And they are vociferously challenging Rob Bell, a Christian pastor and author whose book ‘Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived‘ is igniting controversy even before it hits the bookstores on March 29. (Book trailer video below)

Absurd, ridiculous, ill-informed, ignorant, irrational, nonsensical, illogical balderdash. That’s what I would say to anyone who believes Gandhi is in hell. And yes, I am a Catholic who believes that damnation or salvation is determined by actions over a lifetime, not by the few drops of water put on our infant foreheads during a baptism ritual.

But Gandhi had a better response when he said, “I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.”

~Genevieve