The Integral

Now don’t get too surprised, cos I am not talking about 104.8 FM MEOW!!!!

Since last few days, surprisingly, a couple of cats have been showing up the door of my apartment. One of them, a white one, just comes there, sits and keeps ‘meowing’ till I open the door.

She is cute, and clean And loves a bit of fondling [well who doesnt!]… and then its time for her summersaults… She is cute… I’ll miss her when I go to Pune…

“Main hoon Don!”

“Aur aap?”

“It Tickles…~~”

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Today, I could no longer hold these beloved articles close to me anymore. My house is running out of space and for that matter, I don’t even have a cassette player anymore. These tapes were just accumulating dust and fungus in the Mumbai humidity!

It had lots of Enya, Backstreet Boys, Savage Garden, Westlife, Boyzone, AR Rehman, Vengaboys etc etc…

Now I have almost all of them with me on the computer… but those were the days… I still remember how I used to connect my cassette player to the computer (Pentium One) and record songs on the computer in WAV format…

Those were the days, but today my dear cassettes, you got to go!

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It takes a sub conscious mind to reach the point of thoughts where you are yourself, where you are Just Yourself and nothing else, and there is nobody around. No sounds you can hear, no smells you can smell, nothing. It is just you and the vastness of the cosmos.

It takes nothing but music to move you, nothing but innocence to touch you.

We (me and Unitechy ) were on a Photowalk… and planned to cross the southern end from Gateway of India, to Nariman Point. Things somehow went the other way when we discovered a few kids, getting themselves dirty, learning stuff and enjoying themselves…

We decided to “look into the matter”…

http://www.flickr.com/photos/dybydx/sets/72157605843339802/

Thats the link, so check it out

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I had registered on this website www.zoomin.com which basically lets you upload your photos and store them. But the main business of the website is to allow you to print those photos and deliver them to your place. And on registration I got a discount coupen for 25 free prints. It also lets you to import pics from Picasa and Flickr.

So I imported my pics from Picasa and ordered prints… 25 free prints! All I had to pay was about Rs 30 shipping charges. The delivery took less than 48 hours… and here is what I got… ofcourse along with the pics.

The courier pack:

The photo pack:

The free album (backside):

The free album (front side):

The thumbnails printout:

A few of the photos:

And the photoframe:

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It’s been almost twenty three years and a half… I’ve been through stages of life, places on earth, people in the world… I’ve done things, been at places, met people, seen imageries, heard sounds, this, that…

I’ve had memories. I’ve stored them well. Not in buckets or ibibos, but deep in my mind or deep in my heart.

And even today, when I close my eyes in the dark, i can go back to those days, good and bad, happy and sad, be there at that time, feel what I felt then…

I still… remember…

When I went for that interview to nursery and the Father (of the School) gave me an eclair…

When one day my dad came to drop me to school and turned back without saying ‘bye’ to me, and I cried…

When I fell sick and vomited in the school, and told my classmates “those are digestive juices”…

When my bench-mate who used to eat samosa everyday in the canteen, bumped a pointed pencil straight into my wrist…

When I played ‘nibbles’ (snakes) for the first time on a computer way back in 1991…

When I fell down from a tree, while I was trying to climb it, in order to look beyond the compound wall, where we believed there were ghosts in the pond out there…

When my masi bought me a toy BEST bus and I drove it all over her house…

When I walked through knee deep water during floods to reach the hut of our maid servant, just to check if her family was alright…

When I used to sleep on the floor in the afternoon, trying to observe the dust particles that would be clearly visible through narrow rays of light coming through the little space below the door…

When I drew the flag of India and waited eagerly for my dad to come back from office so I could show it to him…

When my mom bought me the first ‘hot-wheels’ car and promised to buy me one every month so that I could make a collection…

When in 1994 I would carry my brother double-seat on my cycle to his teacher’s place…

When I ventured too far away from home cycling on my new cycle in the rains and my grandfather came walking all the way looking for me…

When I made paper planes from lot of junk paper and flew them out of our new flat on the seventh floor, the year we shifted to Bombay…

When I was made to sit with the worst performing student in the class, who used to sing everyday, pulling my cheeks: ‘you are my masala dosa, you are my vada paav’ …

When I used to play cricket in the school lunch breaks and used to make fun of the vice-principal’s driver, who always pissed on the wall we used to mark as our stumps…

When I went for an interschool competition where none of my schoolmates came to cheer their team, but when I went to collect the first prize on the stage, I happily saw my father standing in the crowd and clapping…

When I used to go back to Baroda for a couple of days, the homely feeling that I always got there, something that I missed in Bombay…

When I was thrown out of Agrawal Classes with Ketan for apparently ‘being too happy’…

When we used to make infinite fun of the teachers and teaching methods followed by them at Agrawal Classes and Bhavan’s College…

When I was at home for one whole year after 12th, walking every evening to the temple, hoping for better days to come…

When I had a fight with my parents regarding which bicycle to buy, when they came to leave me at IIT…

When I spent the whole night distributing chits with my name in all the hostels, promoting my candidature in the gymkhana elections…

When I was made to play nude football in the hostel grounds, on the rainy day in July 2005…

When I first saw the glimpse of beautiful Trishul peak from very close neighbourhood in the Himalayas…

When all I could eat for a month was curd and ice cream, while I had got total mouth ulcers as a result of injections I had to take after I had fallen off a bike and got stitches…

When Roshnai fell down from her bicycle, trying to hold the umbrella in one hand and control the cycle with the other, and still got up with a lovely smile on her face…

When I stayed awake all night, grumbling but determined to complete an assignment all by myself…

When I walked my way back from the lab to my room through the student market and restaurants during my 10 week internship in Korea…

When I played endlessly in the snow near Nathula border in Sikkim… and then could no longer bear the cold and the sunshine getting reflected from the snow…

When me and Roshnai had mango milk shake with ice cream that one last time in kgp…

…

And the rest are all recent memories…

Memories will keep accumulating. Some with some sounds, some with some picture,  some just as a memory. Eastman colour, or maybe just black and white…

The piano keys are black and white,
But they sound like a million colours in your mind.- Katie Melua

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Unitechy tagged me over here and i believe i have to list down things for me

4 Jobs I’ve Had (in chronological order)
None… I’ve done only internships that too in university labs and NGOs:
IIT Bombay
INHA University, S Korea
Apne Aap Women Worldwide
ZS Associates (yet to begin)

4 Movies I Could Watch Over and Over
The Classic (Korean)
Maeumi (Korean)
Our Happy Times (Korean)
Life Is Beautiful (Italian)

4 Places I’ve Lived (in order)
Vadodara, Gujarat (little more than 10 years)
Mumbai (little less than 13 years)
Kharagpur (little less than 4 years)
Incheon, S Korea (about 2.5 months)

4 TV Shows I Like
Lonely Planet
Megastructures
Those are too many I guess…

4 Favorite Foods
Ice creams
Milkshakes
Pizza
Bibimbap

4 Places I’d Rather Be
Incheon / Seoul
Beijing / Shanghai
Kolkata
Gangtok

4 People I’m Tagging (who havn’t been tagged in this game before)

Hunee
Chhavi
Manasa
Sumit

Disclaimer: Doing this cos it doesnt take much time, and I’ve not much to blog about right now.

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Part 1: My new specs frame!! Published December 9, 2005
—
Part 2:

So this is my new frame.. I dont think it’s that clear in these pics.. but anyways it is.. A coffee shade with anti glare plastic lenses. Cost: Rs 1800 for the frame and Rs 700 for the glasses –> Rs 2500.

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Simply, I am a 23 yr old guy, recently graduated with a degree in Electrical Engineering. Born in Baroda, Gujarat, I’ve spent a considerable number of years staying in Baroda, Bombay and Kharagpur. I do not know what my native place is and where I belong. I speak many languages and love to think a lot and write a few things.

I have mostly written about things around me, and my life. I have written about people and places, posted photographs, incidents, talks, memories and feelings in general. I shall continue doing so as and when I get the time and opportunity for the same. Little things matter a lot to me, and many of my posts are inspired by little incidents. I write what I feel and am convinced about. I have not hurt any one through my writings and if I have, I wish they communicate with me personally.

I write a blog because I feel it is a good record of what I felt or thought at a particular time. I write a blog because I love to share most of my feelings with anyone willing to read me. I wish to show to the world, the people and places I come across, because everyone may not be fortunate enough to do the same.

In the last three years, I have written almost 190 blog posts, got more than 500 comments on them and have had about 15,000 visits. People have liked my blog posts and written me encouraging comments. People have criticized my writing, laughed at me, written sarcastic and teasing comments. I have not stopped blogging and would continue blogging, still blogging about what I feel, what I see and what I interpret of the life I see in and around me.

I do not see blogs as a way of social networking, but knowing different types of people through this platform of social expression is good. I have come across some really nice people and some absolutely horrible people. But that is the way it would always be~

I would not force you to like my blog. The way I feel about things, you may feel differently. You may or may not agree to what I write. I am thankful to the handful of regular readers that I have, and their comments often help me improve or edit my posts to make them more readable. If you wish to clarify something, disagree about something I have written and would like me to understand your point of view, or any type of communication, the best way to get me talking is by writing a comment on the relevant post, or just sending me an email!

Thank You.

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They are freaks! Beware of them!

—

They came to an end thanks to lots of Gamaxine powder. A few days later it rained heavily and the balcony got flooded, with that the core of the ants kingdom got flooded as well!

They were RED and BAD!

For a recap of the previous episode please refer:
#179 The Season of Ants

July 1997:
I got my first PC. Configuration: Pentium 1, 166 MHz, 16 MB RAM, 1.2 GB HDD, FDD, Creative 12x CD ROM, ESS Sound Blaster Sound Card, Running Windows 95.

By the next few months I also got a 9600 bps modem and a VSNL internet shell account. In another few months I was using a 33.6 kbps modem with the VSNL TCP/IP account and browsing the net on IE 3, or 2 not too sure, sometimes used Netscape, chatting on ICQ and YM, listening to music on Winamp, playing DOS games and a few Windows based games.

By the next couple of years I could download music from the internet and fill up the little hard disk that I had. Allan Border Cricket and then Jonty Rhodes Cricket and FPS Doom, Duke Nukem and Blood soon became my favorites. Soon I bought a CD of Cricket 97 and it became the hottest game of the season. I had a proud collection of almost 200 MB of music can you imagine? My source of  entertainment was my computer. It was everything to me.

One day it just crashed. I frantically tried to backup my songs from the DOS that was still working. Do you know how? By splitting songs using song splitter and then putting them on Floppies! That was 2001. The computer was put in the cupboard. And it stayed there for almost forever.

What I did not do with that computer was upgrade its hardware or software in time. But it would not have helped. The computer which cost me Rs 48,000 in 1997 and stopped working in 2001 had become obsolete in those 4 years. Pentium III was in by that time and so was Windows NT.

August 2003
Being almost without a computer for  two years, I was gifted with yet another PC! This time I knew what I wanted, though not really! So I got one: Pentium IV, 2.4 GHz, 128 MB RAM, 40 GB HDD, FDD, 52x Samsung CD Writer, 15 inch digital monitor running Windows XP and it looked good for Rs 40,000. But my misadventures started soon and they had to!

128 MB RAM was never gonna be enough for Windows XP. From somewhere I managed to get a 64 MB RAM. With complete enthusiasm I put that stick on the motherboard. It wont go in, but how the hell it defy my orders? And I switched on the CPU… WOOOOOOF… something blew off. The computer just wont start then.
I soon realised that I had put in an SD RAM in a DDR RAM slot. It should not have fit, it did not, but did I care?

Fortunately, being still in warranty period, I got my mobo repaired for free. It would have cost me anything between 7-10k. Things went on. Soon I added another 128 MB RAM to it and things looked better. Slightly better if not much. Little did I know that Windows XP needed a minimum of 256 MB.

May 2008:
This is what the same computer has gone through in the last 4 years (after 2004).

1. Addition of a UPS.
2. A few formats and fresh Windows installations.
3. A couple of linux installations and deletions.
4. Two changes of SMPS. [This really runs your computer! Ask me how]
5. Few thousand GBs of downloads: movies, songs, softwares, games, almost everything!
6. A final addition of 512 MB DDR RAM stick!
7. Fresh installation of Windows Vortex. [You would not want to know what this is!]
8. A new keyboard since the first one was done away by ANTS!
9. Oh did I tell you that I even painted the sides of my monitor with red and blue water colours?

And for a list of resource intensive applications that worked, if not worked wonders on it:
1. Mozilla Firefox!!!!!
2. Matlab 7.1
3. Adobe Photoshop CS2
4. Corel Draw X3
5. And now Windows Vortex… that is Vista on an XP engine!

And it is working well…

Key points to note so that your computer works well for years to come:

• Keep it clean, from outside, but more importantly inside. A clean motherboard works much faster.
• Keep a check on your softwares, OS and accordingly use an appropriate RAM. Obviously a 256 MB RAM would not be enjoyable if you are using Windows XP!
• Format your computer atleast twice every year! It helps to clean up the useless registry entries that stay when you install and then uninstall any programs.
• Keep a backup of the installations of your softwares and if possible use the versions that suit your computer configuration the best. You need not use the ‘latest’ versions.
• Decorate your computer. An old computer looks a bit repelling in its natural beige colours. If you personalise it with stickers and some paint, you will not want to part with it even years later.

If everything else fails to work with you… Do the following:

• Sell your PC for Rs 200. That is what I did with my first PC. I just gave it to a junk yard.
• Use your CDs to decorate your car or house by hanging them at the window or wind shields.
• Break open any floppy disks you have and use your own creativity.
• Use the CPU cabinet as a stationary box!
• Sell away your monitor to PC vendor. Old monitors still sell well in India.
• Break open your keyboard and use the keys to play scrabble.
• Give the mouse to your cats and dogs to play with
• Keep your UPS for yourself, you would want to use it with any electronic gadgets you have. It is a safety hazard to dispose a UPS without careful considerations.

I soon wish to buy a laptop but my old PC will keep working.

Like mine, I hope your computer does no longer stay as a consumer electronic, but become a Consumer Durable!

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Photgrapher: Me ofcourse!

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One fine day, walking along a city street, me and my friend saw something like this… (characters and poster changed)

On a closer note… I remarked at the girl in the poster:

Me: Mast hai bhai… (man, she’s gorgeous)

My friend: Bhai, mast hai tabhi toh poster pe hai! (she is there only cos she is gorgeous)

The End.

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The first day of February 2008 would stay special for me for a long time to come. It was on this day that I got to meet a person of whom I had read so much in the last few years. Astrophysics happened to be my first love ever since I started learning science. It has and it always will fascinate me the most. The last time I met an internationally acclaimed astrophycisist was in 2003. I still remember that day, I ran out of the exam hall, writing just half the paper to attend a lecture 25 km away from my place. That was the day I met Roger Penrose, the person who worked with Stephen Hawkings on the Black Hole theory. The lecture was about much more than just that. It was about something I was looking into those days. Gone are those days.

This time I happened to meet Lawrence Krauss. A professor at Case Western Reserve University who teaches physics and astronomy. Or better, Astrophysics. His books talk about the strange dark matter than exists around us, in between the planets, stars and galaxies. He says it is the most important thing that makes up most of the universe. Something that we cant see, is all that matters for the universe…

I was fortunate to meet him up for an interview for the campus newspaper. Though, politics, press politics as you might want to call it, this article did not see the light of the printing press!

AM : Me Me
LK: Professor Lawrence Krauss

AM: The Scientific American has quoted you as one amongst the only few living ‘Public Intellectuals’. What do you feel about it?

LK: The key is to reach out to the public. I try to connect science broadly to culture and politics. It’s truly a great honour for me. It’s a nice feeling.

AM: What is you latest book ‘Hiding in the Mirror’ all about?

LK: It’s about the fascinations that humans have towards the concept of extra-dimensions. It is not just about that, but about the ways in which the idea has evolved historically in literature, art and science.

AM: As a kid, what was your greatest motivation that helped you dedicate yourself to astrophysics?

LK: As a kid, I used to read a lot. Books were the greatest motivation for me. I was particularly inspired by the writings of Arthur Clarke and Isaac Asimov and scientists like Gamow, Einstein and the rest.

AM: When you talk about the Powers of Ten show that zooms in from the very big to the very small, you say that it misses the most exotic black matter that is out there, what are you talking about?

LK: My lecture for you guys is all about that ‘most exotic black matter’. If you remove the planets, the suns, the galaxies and everything that is visible to you and me, including humans, the universe wouldn’t be affected at all. It would be largely the same. All this is just ‘cosmic pollution’. All the matter is completely irrelevant. Dark energy is all that is important in the entire universe.

AM: In the most recent developments, you have said and written that the President of the US should be an “educator-in-chief” along with being the “commander-in-chief”, and that science and technology should be an integral part of the presidential debate. How do you look at it?

LK: I believe that science is and would play a major role in public policy making. In the future, science is going to be the basis of the same. Security, economy, health, environment are all linked to science.

AM: India has had a rocket scientist as the President; does it really help in changing the world order?

LK: I’ve had the opportunity to meet him recently. Well, I don’t really know how much it would help in changing the world order, but all I want to say is that the leaders should be educated! They should be literate and effective, and should have an understanding of science.

AM: Do you believe that the Asian countries would race ahead in science and technology soon owing to their human resources, who “score much better in math and science tests” than the Westerns?

LK: Laughs at the poor condition of American school students and his own quote picked up from an article. Oh it’s highly possible! Right now the US is still the most attractive place for graduate study, but that could change. As far as Asian students are concerned though, they have too much respect for authority… the key thing is to question everything, including your advisors!

AM: What is your view on the relation between science and religion?

LK: They are complimentary to each other. I would like to quote a friend of mine, Steven Weinberg here: “One of the great achievements of science has been, if not to make it impossible for intelligent people to be religious, then at least to make it possible for them not to be religious”.

AM: Today, top universities like IIT are losing young brains to high paying jobs in the banking and finance sector, consultancies, software and the like. How can things be changed to get more youngsters to do research in Astrophysics or say any field in general?

LK: Well that is a problem in the US as well. We are losing most students to lucrative jobs in almost the same sectors. We need to focus on science. We need to convey the sheer excitement of discovery to the youth and convince them that knowledge is as satisfying as money!

AM: Who for you is or was the one greatest scientist ever?

LK: It is difficult to talk about one, but I would call it a tie between two: Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin.

AM: Your homepage on the Case Western website calls you ‘moderately photogenic’ but the sheer number of ‘really cool pics’ points that you are ‘highly photogenic’! What do you say?

LK: Has a hearty laugh at this one. The website administrators just love to have some fun with my photographs. It seems you have done a good research on me!

The interview was followed by a walk of almost a kilometre. That was a wonderful moment.

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Kolkata Phototour

Date: May 13th, 2008
Camera: Sony DSC-H1

Route: Maidan-Victoria-Babu Ghat-Howrah-Babu Ghat-Esplanade

Rabindranath Tagore’s memorablia in front of Elliot Park, Chowringhee.

Birla Planetarium from Chowringhee. Seen behind it is St Paul’s Cathedral and in front is Indira Gandhi’s statue.

Maidan in front of Victoria Memorial. Far away are the flood lights of Eden Gardens getting ready for the IPL match.

Vidyasagar Setu: The new bridge over Hoogly. Lovely architecture.

Horses and Ponies at Maidan.

Magnificent Victoria Memorial.

Stalls to cool the customers on a hot afternoon in summer.

Front facade of Victoria Memorial.

Ghoda Gaadi

Inside the ferry from Babu Ghat to Howrah.

On the ferry to Howrah.

All so magnificient Howrah Bridge.

“Ferry us across the river.”

“Vrrooooooooooooom”

Millions cross the bridge everyday, either in a bus or on foot. Thousands cross this bridge everyday on their way to calling Kolkata their new home.

Howrah Station. One of the oldest railway station complexes in India.

The Howrah Ferry Wharf.

The end of it with an awesome Lebu-Chaa (Lemon Tea).

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In the last 23 years and a half… in no particular order as such…

I have:

1. Been to a ground altitude of more than 12,000 feet.
2. Felt what 0 C is and what 50 C is.
3. Played snow ball fight and made snow man in the snow.
4. Put ice cubes in my aaji’s (grandma’s) saari.
5. Traveled in a train at more than 300 km per hour.
6. Eaten one litre of ice cream in one go.
7. Watched an international cricket match at the stadium.
8. Lived at ‘home’ in almost 4 different cities.
9. Traveled 25,000 km in India within one year.
10. Thrown a duster at a friend’s head [:(]
11. Dreamt that I have killed someone and am running away from police.
12. Got dead scared on seeing a snake on the street while cycling.
13. Have played more than 10 different types of computer cricket games.
14. Stood first in a metro city in an interschool competition.
15. Made a sincere attempt to learn 7 languages. Achieved fluency and reading / writing ability in 4. Can understand and read / write two more languages and mastered the script of a seventh language.
16. Ancestral roots in Greece as much as in India.
17. Fallen in love with a song which nobody amongst my acquaintances knew that far.
18. Played over arm bowling cricket in a space of less than 50 feet by 15 feet.
19. Played a cricket match of 0.3 overs.
20. Done underwater swimming in a run off stream.
21. Slept for 16 hours at a stretch.
22. Done a self inspired research on rain mud (kichad) thinking it to be quick sand while I was in class 2.
23. Met two internationally acclaimed astrophysicists.
24. Shouted out “Daaku Mangal Singh” at a passing tractor’s driver.
25. Seen a perfect sunrise from the sea.
26. Jumped off the cycle after throttling it to full speed, thinking myself to be Amitabh Bachchan.
27. Walked all the way from home (Andheri) to Siddhivinayak Temple (Dadar) on foot before my Class 10 results.
28. Loved someone more than anything else ever, and still do
29. Got the lowest marks in the class in drawing, and still was the only student from the entire school to win a prize at an interschool drawing competition.
30. Been a troop leader in school scouts.
31. Written a blog with more than 180 posts, received more than 480 comments and 13,000 visitors.
32. Owned a web domain, and still do.
33. The ability to eat food with chopsticks.
34. Had a crush on a class teacher in school.
35. Been to an international cricketer’s house.
36. Eaten pork intestines.
37. Drunk rice beer.
38. Traveled 420 km in a bus in four and half hours.
39. Watched a 3D movie in a cinema hall.
40. Been to watch a movie all alone.

Well there certainly should be many more in this list, just that I dont remember them

You may send any clarifications at aditya@aditto.info

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The flame keeps us warm on cold nights. It gives us light. It makes holes in the darkness when the Moon is new. We can fix spears at night for tomorrow’s hunt. And if we are not tired, even in the darkness we can see each other and talk. Also - a good thing! - fire keeps animals away. We can be hurt at night. Sometimes we have been eaten, even by small animals, hyenas and wolves. Now it is different. Now the flame keeps the animals back. We see them baying softly in the dark, prowling, their eyes glowing in the light of the flame. They are frightened of the flame. But we are not frightened. The flame is ours. We take care of the flame. The flame takes care of us.

The sky is important. It covers us. It speaks to us. Before the time we found the flame, we would lie back in the dark and look up at all the points of light. Some points would come together to make a picture in the sky. One of us could see the pictures better than the rest. She taught us the star pictures and what names to call them. We would sit around late at night and make up stories about the pictures in the sky: lions, dogs, bears, hunterfolk. Other, stranger things. Could they be the pictures of the powerful beings in the sky, the ones who make the storms when angry?Mostly, the sky does not change. The same star pictures are there year after year. The Moon grows from nothing to a thin sliver to a round ball, and then back again to nothing. When the Moon changes, the women bleed. Some tribes have rules against sex at certain times in the growing and shrinking of the Moon. Some tribes scratch the days of the Moon or the days that the women bleed on antler bones. They can plan ahead and obey their rules. Rules are sacred.The stars are very far away. When we climb a hill or a tree they are no closer. And clouds come between us and the stars: the stars must be behind the clouds. The Moon, as it slowly moves, passes in front of stars. Later you can see that the stars are not harmed. The Moon does not eat stars. The stars must be behind the Moon. They flicker. A strange, cold, white, faraway light. Many of them. All over the sky. But only at night. I wonder what they are.

After we found the flame, I was sitting near the campfire wondering about the stars. Slowly a thought came: The stars are flame, I thought. Then I had another thought: The stars are campfires that other hunterfolk light at night. The stars give a smaller light than campfires. So the stars must be campfires very far away. ‘But,’ they ask me, ‘how can there be campfires in the sky? Why do the campfires and the hunter people around those flames not fall down at our feet? Why don’t strange tribes drop from the sky?’Those are good questions. They trouble me. Sometimes I think the sky is half of a big eggshell or a big nutshell. I think the people around those faraway campfires look down at us - except for them it seems up - and say that we are in their sky, and wonder why we do not fall up to them, if you see what I mean. But hunterfolk say, ‘Down is down and up is up.’ That is a good answer, too.

There is another thought that one of us had. His thought is that night is a great black animal skin, thrown up over the sky. There are holes in the skin. We look through the holes. And we see flame. His thought is not just that there is flame in a few places where we see stars. He thinks there is flame everywhere. He thinks flame covers the whole sky. But the skin hides the flame. Except where there are holes.

Some stars wander. Like the animals we hunt. Like us. If you watch with care over many months, you find they move. There are only five of them, like the fingers on a hand. They wander slowly among the stars. If the campfire thought is true, those stars must be tribes of wandering hunterfolk, carrying big fires. But I don’t see how wandering stars can be holes in a skin. When you make a hole, there it is. A hole is a hole. Holes do not wander. Also, I don’t want to be surrounded by a sky of flame. If the skin fell, the night sky would be bright - too bright - like seeing flame everywhere. I think a sky of flame would eat us all.

Maybe there are two kinds of powerful beings in the sky. Bad ones, who wish the flame to eat us. And good ones who put up the skin to keep the flame away. We must find some way to thank the good ones.

I don’t know if the stars are campfires in the sky. Or holes in a skin through which the flame of power looks down on us. Sometimes I think one way. Sometimes thinks a different way. Once I thought there are no campfires and no holes but something else, too hard for me to understand.

Rest your neck on a log. Your head goes back. Then you can see only the sky. No hills, no trees, no hunterfolk, no campfire. Just sky. Sometimes I feel I may fall up into the sky. If the stars are campfires, I would like to visit those other hunterfolk - the ones who wander. Then I feel good about falling up. But if the stars are holes in a skin, I become afraid. I don’t want to fall up through a hole and into the flame of power. I wish I knew which was true. I don’t like not knowing.

- Carl Sagan, Cosmos

Many people find it very surprising to learn that I hardly read. I dont enjoy reading long things. I can atmost manage small books, or short stories, articles and information. The few books that I have read till the last period have been mostly on astrophysics. Infact there have been just two of them.

The best that I have ever read, is Carl Sagan’s Cosmos. The above is an excerpt from that book.

Cosmos is a book wonderfully written and that too in a very lucid language. It is the perfect book for the layman.

Stephen Hawking’s books are actually good only for people who have atleast little knowledge about science or specifically Astrophysics. Cosmos does not need you to be intelligent. It just needs that you have the ability to understand and appreciate the beautiful language and the beautiful Cosmos described in it.

12999

I had to change the title of my post after a lot of complaining comments I hope I am not misleading my readers any more

Here I would like to present, to the delight or the headache of most of my friends, the Load Characteristics of an average student at IIT Kharagpur.

‘Load‘ is the measure of weight borne for a trouble or a difficult concern. It is normally used in sentences such as…
“Abbe tu exam ka load kyun le raha hai?”
“Abbe tere life mein bandi (gf) ka load chal raha hai kya?”

Normally it is measured in indefinite nouns such as…
“Hoohaa Peace” = Absoultely no load
“Peace” = No load
“Load” = Nominal load
“Hoohaa Load” = Major load

At times, some people become ‘load’ benchmarks. Lets say if there is this girl called “Dipika” (name and sex changed for privacy) who is well known for taking ‘load’ on most trivial matters… then load can be quantified in terms of ‘Dipika’…
1 Dipika
10 Dipikas
1/2 Dipika, etc

The few loads commonly experienced by all students on this campus are:
Academic Load
Hall (hostel) Load
and Future Load (Job / CAT / GRE)

There are many other loads which are not really experienced by everyone in general. Those may be:
Bandi Load,
Project Guide Load,
Exam Passing or SQ Load,
Irritating Room-mates Load, etc.

All these loads lead to a common result, Frustration.
When a guy is ‘loaded’ with Frustration, he gets ‘frust‘.

I have just made a little graph to show the common tendencies. Orange, Blue, and Green are respectively Academic, Hall and Future Loads. At the top of them is the Black line showing Frustration levels. These graphs are plotted as functions of time.

Key observations:
Orange: Check out the spikes… the small ones and the big ones
Green: The huge drop after the tallest peak…
Black: Ever increasing…

Is this the same for an average engineer as well?

Antzzzzzzzz Oh what a mania they are, especially in this place Kgp, and more so in the season of summer that comes right after spring. They are just everywhere. Outside my room, inside my room, on the walls, on the floor, on the clothes, inside them too, on the monitor, inside the cpu, keyboard, plug points, everywhere…

What is it with ants and summer? Why dont they just die?

Continue reading ‘#179 The Season of Ants’

Living by the sea, and thinking of the snow clad peaks. That defines me the best. Rather than defining myself, I should look at defining the world today. A lot of things have actually changed the way I used to look at the world or the way the world seemed to be to me. In so many years, I have seen a very distinct change in the world around me. I have seen a change in the way I fit into this world. Today I have seen the larger world than just the one I had seen sitting behind my dad on his scooter.

Continue reading ‘#178 The new world order, of heights and beauty’

After so much of planning, and so many disruptions, the much awaited trip to East Sikkim did materialize. Frankly speaking, I have no words to describe the experience. It was just awesome. I had been to Sikkim in 1999 and trust me, it no longer looks the same. Gangtok has been completely renovated and made into a truly world class Hill Station. It was the first time ever that I was amidst fresh snow and played a lot in snow. I also had the opportunity to experience the first ever Snow Fall. It was absolutely beautiful. Roshnai’s presence made the trip the most lovely trip I’ve ever had. Not to forget Golu and Bollu.

Wanna read more and see about 80 photographs from my trip? Click the link below…
Continue reading ‘#177 East Sikkim Trip - April 2008′