I don't think our world will ever be the same again.

 

I don't think our world will ever be the same again. Look at what's happened. Everywhere there's carnage. death, and devastating occurrences. A never-ending tragedy of all sorts. What's going to happen to our future? Will peace be in the shadows from now on, while we fight in the name of peace? How ironic is that? Wars and killings take place to attain peace. Couldn't it be done another way? Don't people talk till they find resolutions anymore? The Earth is reeling and fighting back to help nature survive. So it's not just you and him fighting; Earth has also joined the fray.

Who do we blame but ourselves? People have become hostile to each other, not caring even for the children. These days, staying alive is hard. There are so many out there who are willing to kill for money. When you question them, their reasons are shocking. They want money to better their lives, and so they kill people who are different - different faith, different dressing, different colour, different anything.

Why have we bred this intolerance into our children? They will carry them throughout their lives, becoming worse than their fathers or their father's father.

There's a reason why the blood that runs through our veins is the same colour. To show that we are all the same as humans. The diversity is there to show the beautiful colours of mankind. Their mother tongues carry their namesakes to the graves, so someday people will know that we share the same grave when our time is over. Different people who made a difference in our lives. They had different names and shared the same soil when buried.

I feel so much for what's happening around the world. Can't we save Earth in some way from the madness that has taken over people?

-shobana-

Weekend Reads.

On SHOBANA's Poetry Blog: Don't Look Back: https://www.shobanagomes.live/2026/06/dont-look-back.html

Here are some weekend reads you'll love: If you liked the stories, please press the heart-shaped like button on the left, and please write a review. The books are entered for contests, and I appreciate your support.

Falling in love with a North Indian will take you to the streets of Trivandrum and back to the shores of Malaysia. Come join me in this exhilarating love story. https://www.inkitt.com/stories/1733283

The Frenchman & His Lady: https://www.inkitt.com/stories/689705

Gods of the Digital Commune: An inspiring story about a man who was brave enough to make his vision a reality. Read about Stewart Brand and the first paper internet. https://www.inkitt.com/stories/1768939

The Faction Revolutionary Modules 1-3 is a great book to read and learn about the 'fact into fiction' storytelling method. The book comes with a free copy of Nature's Poems. Get it here: https://shobanagomesbookstore.blogspot.com. 

Thank you for reading. Have a great weekend - shobana.

The First Global Paper Treasury - The Whole Earth Catalog

 

About a hundred miles south of Menlo Park, perched on the wild, rugged cliffs of Big Sur, sits Gorda Mountain. The untamed beauty is set in a landscape defined by dramatic cliffs that drop steeply into crashing ocean waves, where the constant flow of water rushes to the shores in outlandish motion.

Here in Gorda Mountain, overlooking the expanse of the Pacific Ocean, anyone could settle. Stewart Brand did just that. He treated the muddy, off-grid commune as a live-in laboratory, researching how people survived away from traditional infrastructure.

Brand became a cultural architect, bridging the gap between the sixties counterculture and the looming digital age. Armed with little more than an X-Acto knife, a typewriter, and a shoestring budget, he began compiling a revolutionary paper treasury known as the Whole Earth Catalog.

The Whole Earth Catalog is a mind-blowing invention which paved the way for the first global communication on paper.

On the day he got his insight, young Stewart Brand was sitting on a Victorian rooftop in North Beach, San Francisco, in the spring of 1966, when he noticed something amiss about the infrastructure before him. At the time, glass skyscrapers hadn't dominated the city. The 19th-century Victorian buildings were weathered, their grey and brown paint fading in parts, and packed tightly together.

His mind was hazy, and his eyes were glazed from the after-effects of LSD. A brisk, cold and biting breeze blew in from the bay when he concluded that the buildings weren't parallel. From the low roof, covered in tar and gravel, he stared out across the skyline. As the buildings rose towards the skies, they diverged slightly. And suddenly, across the horizon, he felt the terrestrial arc move beneath him.

In that fuzzy state of awareness, the truth struck him that we live on a sphere, and yet have not actually seen our own home from the outside.

He asked himself a simple question: Why haven’t we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet? He knew NASA would have a picture of the Earth, and yet it wasn't made public to the people who lived on the planet. Why?

The more he pondered the question, the more curious he became as to why an image of our planet wasn't accessible to us. He came up with a plan to have the question printed on twenty-five-cent buttons and mailed to NASA officials, Soviet scientists, and UN diplomats, which turned his plan into a movement. The movement connected us to the Whole Earth Catalog long before the internet. Brand built a paper universe, and decades later, Steve Jobs would perfectly capture its essence, calling it “Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along.”

Free to read on @Inkitt! Ever wondered what it takes to be a visionary? Read Stewart Brand's story. Dive into a legacy, a gift to our world and the world after us, 

and his monumental 10,000-year clock hidden deep inside a mountain. Vote for the story to be a winner by liking and sharing the biography. Thank you.

Gods of the Digital Commune:

https://www.inkitt.com/stories/1768939

"We are as Gods, and might as well get good at it." - Stewart Brand.

The opening line of the 1968 Whole Earth Catalog captures the back-to-land movement

and the personal computer revolution.

Stewart Brand created the first paper internet. A man of great foresight, he wanted the whole

world to see what the Earth looked like and created a button campaign to get NASA to release

images of the planet. Read about his vision to bring The Whole Earth Catalog to life.

The Catalog allowed a reader in a remote cabin to look up a tool, find a book on

solar energy, or connect with an organic farming collective.

It mapped out human knowledge exactly the way the World Wide Web does today.

Brand's genius wasn't just as a publisher, but as an information architect who

anticipated the digital age using nothing but paper and ink.

Other Free Books to Read by Shobana Gomes on @Inkitt:

The Frenchman and His Lady:

https://www.inkitt.com/stories/689705

Get a free copy of Shobana's Nature poems with every $0.99 purchase of The Faction Revolution Modules 1-3

https://shobanagomesbookstore.blogspot.com/2026/05/a-free-copy-of-nature-poems-with-every.html

On Shobana (Poetry) The FIFA World Cup Fever: https://www.shobanagomes.live/2026/06/the-fifa-world-cup-2026-fever.html

Happy Reading!

Shobana (https://shobanagomes.live)