Fun Using हमारे (or is it मेरे) Google to Translate Things From English to हिंदी

1. A Bug's Life — एक कीट की जीवन
2. Midnight's Children —> आधी रात के बच्चे
3. Pursuit of Happyness —> प्रसन्नता की पीछा
4. As Good As It Gets — जैसा अच्छा जैसा यह हो जाता है
5. Royal Tenenbaums —> शाही Tenenbaums
6. On Golden Pond —> सुनहरा ताल पर
7. Citizen Kane —> नागरिक केन
8. Avatar —> Avatar
9. Sphere —> क्षेत्र

Keyboard Fundoos And Fundas

The funny thing about India is that anyone who's literate is most probably English-literate as well. Of course, by English-literate, I don't mean to say that the person has necessarily mastered Shakespeare but is conversant with the English alphabet.

The spread of computers and cellphones will have an inevitable role to play in the evolution of the place for English in our lives.

Much of the scientific and technical literature exists in English as of now and pretty much ALL of the technical/engineering education happens in India using English. So at the higher end of the education spectrum, folks are all English-literate.


But the cellphone which came 'recently' has far overtaken the penetration of computers among the population so that it won't be at all unusual to find housewives in villages in veils using cellphones. These ladies may not necessarily be familiar with English. How are cellphone companies 'catering' to these customers? Are they trying? Do savvy marketers send SMSs in 'local' languages to these ladies to NOT to forget to 'buy' this or that thing to 'propitiate' this or that God? Surely, the HLLs,  Nirmas, ITCs and Reliances of India must be 'smart' enough to recognize a 'market potential' when they see one. My mom doesn't read any of the English SMSs she receives and they just lie there unread and unloved. If the service provider was smart enough, it would have bothered to send her SMSs in her own language and not in English.

Indian Sex Tapes?

I don't know that there are plenty of them. This Tehelka article deals at length with them.

I sure hope it's true that Indian youth are making sex tapes just for fun.

Because Indians clearly need to grow up and get over their prudishness about sex.

Indians keep on PRETENDING as if sex does not exist or as if it's a bad thing. Even in our language, there's no 'normal' word or phrase to refer to sex or porn, is there? What's Hindi for sex? For porn?

Anyways, so much "good quality" stuff of international origin is available in all the 'genres' of porn that Indians, if they are in the "game" are probably laggards here as well just like India ranks 156 or something in football.

We really need to change our mindsets and I mean in a revolutionary fashion. Porn and sex are NOT BAD just as much as 'sati' was bad. Who'll be the Rammohan Roy of the 21st century?

How Stunning What Humans Have Wrought

After their Google Earth, driverless cars and Google Glass projects, this is one more innovative, useful, and important project from Google.

These resources that Google is developing using Landsat imagery from NASA and USGS provide a revealing picture of how humans are transforming the planet in short spans of time.

Such continuous record has never been available before and starting from now onward or since satellites started taking pictures of the Earth's surface, these pictorial records of our planet will be maintained forever as long as humans live on Earth.

So wear your seat belts and explore!

Since Google is partnering with Time magazine, this article is worth a read!

Coursera Enthusiasts

It's interesting to look at the Coursera communities around the world. Here are the Top 10 cities on the list.

They are: 1) Stanford, 2) New York, 3) London, 4) Bangalore, 5) San Francisco, 6) Moscow, 7) Athens, 8) Toronto, 9) Washington, DC, 10) Mumbai.

What to make of this list? No wonder four American cities are in the list. Multi-cultural London is there. A bit odd to see Moscow there but not Beijing or Shanghai or Hong Kong. Good to see Bangalore (or is it Bangaluru?) and Mumbai (and not Bombay!) on the list. Athens is probably the biggest 'surprise' presence here.

The next are: 11) to 15): Kyyiv, Chicago, Vanderbilt, Barcelona, Sao Paulo; 16) to 20): Hong Kong, Delhi, Singapore, Los Angeles, Boston, and Madrid.

The next 11 are: St. Petersburg, Seattle, Melbourne, Pune, Chennai, Hyderabad, Sydney, Paris, Philadelphia, Beijing, and Bogota.

Modern Day Healthcare — Touching Lives

We often fail to appreciate the marvels of modern medicine. What would have been considered "miracles" once upon a time are now merely routine.

That magic combination of Ethambutol, isoniazid, pyrazinamide, and rifampicin worked for me just fine as it does for millions. No need to go for Second Line or Third Line therapies.

Ordinary housewives are living ordinary lives taking care of their kids while having been a patient with CML for over a decade. And they have no obvious external physical indicators of their being cancer patients. The miracle medicine is of course Glivec.

Patients are routinely cured from acute leukemia through the use of bone marrow transplants.

Former U.S. Congresswoman from Aizona Gabby Giffords was shot point blank and had a bullet pass through her brain but modern trauma care including craniotomy saved her life.

Stephen Hawking was diagnosed with ALS in his early 20s and doctors told him that he would probably live for another year or two. He continues to live and he is now a septuagenarian.

True Paradise for Space Buffs

So what does a space buff dream about? Of course he or she wishes that they were born to a Wall St. millionaire or hedge fund guy and had about $10 million in the bank.

I don't know about the U.S. but if you keep that amount of money in a risk-free 'Fixed Deposit' in an Indian bank, you will earn a very conservative interest of 8%.

For the typical space buff, an annual earning of $800,000 will be QUITE FINE, THANK YOU! [As an aside, the ALL CAPS reminds me of Henry Fonda challenging those trouts in On Golden Pond by calling them SOB while out fishing in the pond with his grandson ... or the 'son' he never had.]

Then the buff will devote himself or herself entirely to doing what he or she loves doing — which is space stuff of course!

Sure, he or she will apply to be an astronaut on the Mars One project.

And will keep a tab on where the ISS is ALL the time.

Delhi Rapes, Police, and Larger Issues

Well, it will be a good riddance to the Commissioner if it turns out that he's being "fired."

Is it my false impression that Neeraj Kumar is mostly busy currying favor with the political masters to ensure a "cushy" posting post-retirement ... or a transfer to a next high-profile job posting?
Let me share a "personal" perspective about my dealings with the Office of the Commissioner of Delhi Police.

I have sent umpteen emails to his office over the last one year complaining about incessant noise from loud speaker in gurudwara next to where I live.

It's a daily problem.

The only response I get to my emails is that the mail has been forwarded to the Jt. Comm. of Pol. of the relevant locality.

When I call up the JCP's office, I get informed that the mail has been forwarded to the relevant DCP's office.

I sometimes call up 100 frequently and even then the local police refuses to respond.

Just a few days back on "Vaishakhi", it was too loud and I complained and the police and a few old Sikh gentlemen came to my house!

The Bogeyman Called Pornography

This guy who has filed this petition is most probably an idiot as most  'senior' citizens of India are.

I will hopefully go through his entire petition in detail and come up with a comprehensive sort of response on this.

Here, I would only tell the Supreme Court two things:

1) Let's not go down the path of Khomeini in Iran who only wanted to 'purify' Iranian society.

2) Let's not go down the path of the Taliban. It's nobody's case that child porn should be allowed to "thrive." The existence of child pornography points to the "criminals" who manage to create these videos. Let the Government of India put in EVERY resource it has got into the effort to put an end to the sexual exploitation of minors.

And let the government also "implement" all the laws on the statute books that make child labor criminal.

Let the government implement all the laws against dowry.

Being Rahul Gandhi

Let's not pretend that Rahul Gandhi is anything other than an embarrassment. He is merely a beneficiary of dynasty.

Indians love to hate their politicians. Manmohan Singh is getting the flak too for numerous corruption scandals under the present government.

This has prompted certain numbers of people to become vocal advocates of a certain Narendra Modi.

It's as if the admittedly absolute incompetence of Rahul Gandhi or Sonia or the others in Congress were a proof of competence of the Gujarat chief minister.

The problem with considering Modi to be the "solution" to India's problems is that this pushes various inconvenient truths under the carpet.

Sure, Modi does not indulge in corruption. But he runs a personality-centered administration — perhaps somewhat like Putin. Critics are obliterated. Then there is the residue from that riot in 2002.

But as Lessig compared USA-land to Lester-land and argued that Lestor-land was in fact better; similarly, India's democracy is far from perfect.

Is it corrupted by politicians having to remain loyal to the donors like in the USA? May be the need to fund-raise is one of the aspects of why democracies attract corrupt folks to enter politics.

Those who are not interested in making compromises prefer not to enter the quagmire.

As it happens, corrupt businessmen fund the politicians; the politicians in turn focus on keeping the corrupt businessmen happy and being corrupt, they amass whatever wealth they can and try to perpetuate themselves and their clan as the "ruling class".

Kashmakash — Movie Review

A boat ride. A storm. Quickly reminds of The Life of Pi. But no, this is based on Nouka Dubi, a Bengali short story by the master Rabindranath Tagore. I don’t know how good he was in the craft of writing short stories.

But I am willing to bet on a Rituparno Ghosh movie.

The movie starts being predictable with a guy with a “secret” story who is “forced” to marry sort of against his wishes. However, if this movie is about the usual predictable repressed sexuality of Indians, then this is not for me. Of course, these self-imposed restrictions remain to this day.

The film fails to capture the chaos that is India. The pulls and pushes of Indian society which we have to live with today, I believe, were there in those days too.

The overly-shy, teenage rural girl may not entirely be an artifact of the writer’s imagination, but it’s nevertheless un-endearing. The power outages when a storm comes … a reality in India since the early days of electricity.

No. I don’t like this business of wives not taking the names of their husbands. And I don’t like Indians treating sex as something dirty. The sexual instinct is deeply ingrained in us. It predates literacy.

A love triangle. But why hide? When you hide, the secret will tumble out in some unpredictable fashion. At least the guy seems to be an atheist.

Heartbreak leading to musical creativity is such an old trope and sort of difficult to believe.

An old-fashioned sort of love story; too conservative for my taste but perhaps will appeal to love-struck teenagers. I like more complex human drama as depicted in Satyajit Ray’s Charulata.

The movie is sort of slow-moving; I don’t know if that is to do with the requirements of making movies in India. I am not sure if something got lost in translation from the book to the screen.

The movie picks up pace towards the end with a few sudden, unexpected turns.

In conclusion, it’s an eminently watchable movie. It’s in the same class overall as Mani Ratnam’s  Kannathil Muthamittal and also Rituparno Ghosh’s other gripping movie Rain Coat. For comparison purposes, it’s in a different league altogether from the average Bollywood blockbuster.

For those who have faith in the idealized world and characters of the movie, it’s a superlative drama. For the cynical types like me, I can take off my cynic’s hat for a while and appreciate it within its framework and worldview.

And I did.

I have a doubt: how unique or commonplace is this type of short story?

Top 10 Crazy Facts About India

Here's a random list of things.

1.            Indians sometimes prefer to abort a fetus if they find out that it's female. (Or they just kill the new born baby after it's born.)

2.            There are more than 20 million babies born in India. EVERY. SINGLE. YEAR.

3.            Child labor is so commonplace in India that few notice it or consider it out of the ordinary. Kids work as waiters or dishwashers in roadside restaurants. Sometimes, kids ferry tea to the local police station from a nearby roadside tea stall.

4.            Massive numbers of kids and younger and adult women are employed as maids in middle class to rich households. Middle class houses might pay 200 rupees to a female who comes and washes the dishes. Rich houses might employ women permanently by paying them more.

5.            Cars in the Indian cities are washed in the morning by car-washers who tend to be young men who get paid around 100 to 200 rupees per month for this service.

6.            India is home to some crazily competitive exams. The IIT JEE and the IIM CAT have crazy ratios of applicants versus number of seats. Half a million candidates might compete in the JEE for some 10,000 seats. 2,00,000 candidates might vie to study at the IIMs which have around 2,000 seats.

7.            Getting jobs is tough. People in India love government jobs. Civil service exams are the gateway to the IAS and the IFS -- jobs that command a lot of respect with a heritage going back to the British Raj. So more than 3,00,000 candidates try to get selected for less than 1,000 seats. In March 2013, it was reported that there were 1.3 million candidates for about 1,300 jobs advertised by the State Bank of India, India's largest bank, a Public Sector Bank.

8.            Indians hold on to a crazy old caste system with an incredible complexity that no outsider would ever be able to penetrate the subtlety of. Luckily, it's so pointlessly complicated that even most youngsters today are probably given to overlook and discount it.

9.            The traditional arranged marriages with lots of haggling over dowry persists despite various changes to society. The reason for this is a complex set consisting of the poverty of most Indians which makes people attracted to wealth and the deep need for sex and the skewed male-female sex ratios.

10.          A strange persistence of monogamy. The facts would appear to be that some 95 to 99 percent adult Indians might be monogamous with their spouses. There are of course very few divorces after marriage. Which does not necessarily imply high rates of marital bliss. Quite the contrary.

Since a picture is worth more than all of the above words, here's one about India:

Clearly a list of this kind about a country as vast and diverse as India can have 100s of items. Add any item that you feel should be included in the list in the comments.

The Toll for March

We are about halfway through March. Let's make a tally of the dead from road accidents in India so far.

Of course this list is less than "perfect" as I am making a tally only of accidents that "made it to the news" and  for that to happen,sufficient numbers of people have to die.

A dozen school children dying near Jallandar is clearly good enough to even make it to the Sky News website. But wait, that's a UK website. Didn't Indian newspapers/websites find the dozen deaths newsworthy? Well, some like NDTV apparently did though I don't remember it being the top headline on the prime-time 9PM news that day. Why is that? Is it because Jallandar is not Delhi or Mumbair or Bangalore? Remember that school-bus accident more than a decade ago in Delhi which led to the Supreme Court guidelines about yellow school buses and speed governors and what not? I guess accidents are still happening and SC guidelines are still being violated. I see many rickety Maruti Omnis zooming around in the morning and afternoon through the narrow lanes and bylanes of Delhi. The drivers of these dilapidated vehicles can even be found talking on their cellphone while reversing the vehicle. It's a wonder more such accidents are not happening.

I guess it's a regular feature on the roads of India that accidents happen when people are returning after attending a wedding reception. This accident in Navi Mumbai on the Mumbai-Pune Expressway is the latest accident with a toll of seven dead. Availability of free liquor and good food at wedding receptions must make for a rather deadly cocktail —> you over-do the alcohol and get intoxicated, eat too much of the tasty food and then try to return home in the middle of the night when the body is more used to being asleep. With a high alcohol content in the blood, obviously the driver becomes rash and has impaired judgment and is sleepy to boot and trying to stay awake. If they have to drive on a highway where there are no dividers in the middle of the road, well, then the slightest error of judgment can lead to fatal results. India has two marriage seasons —> one during the summer months of April, May, and June and another during the winter months of December and January (roughly). And we are not even in the thick of either of the wedding seasons. Arguably, there will be more deaths as we get into the thick of the wedding seasons.

The other seasonal madness that occurs in India has to do with various religious festivals at various places; the Kumb Mela comes to mind. There's the Rath Yatra in Puri, Odisha. There are umpteen such religious occasions in India and I am the last person who would be an expert on them. However, I imagine that devotees going to and returning from these vast crowded affairs must also often meet with road accidents. Here's an accident involving UP visitors visiting Puri in Odisha. And here's an accident involving Oriya visitors visiting the recent Kumbh Mela in Allahbad, UP. Of course, these two accidents did not happen in March but I am including them in this list as examples to emphasize the point that these accidents occur with the regularity of a metronome.

BTW, news organizations should by now get the name of the state right. It's Odisha changed from the earlier Orissa and therefore, the people of that state are to be referred to as Odia rather than Oriya.

To return to the toll of March, here's an accident that killed two teenage cousins one of whom was probably in a hurry to reach his matriculation examination center on time. Two young men riding a bike get hit by a bus and fall off onto the road and a truck comes swiftly along and crushes the teens to death.

Here's a report about two accidents in the North-East that killed eight people. Buses and other vehicles falling off those curving mountain roads in Himachal Pradesh must be a recurring cause of death. Driving on a bike on the road from Chandigarh to Shimla, I was struck by how unsafe those roads were and how close I was to being involved in an accident. All I could do was drive as safely as possible but teenage boys and those in their 20s would be rash drivers because of all the hormones in their blood. Indeed, the HP government bus drivers were quite audacious drivers too. I suppose if you spend all your time driving on those dangerous roads, you would get used to the danger but surely, one day, your luck might run out ... the break might fail when you need it or a tire might go flat.

Ten people died when a bus rolled into a gorge in Rajouri in Jammu & Kashmir. A father-son "duo" dies in a road accident. Five dead in three separate accidents in Trichi and Tiruvarur. That's a short history of death on the roads of India focused mainly on half the month of March.

The Genius of Ramanujan and Paul Erdős

Mathematicians are strange creatures. Here's a story about Paul Erdős.

In addition, as many of Erdős's collaborations were handled via mail, and because he
dealt with so many people he would sometimes forget what they actually looked like. On
one occasion, Erdős met a mathematician and asked him where he was from.
"Vancouver," the mathematician replied. "Oh, then you must know my good friend Elliot
Mendelson", Erdős said. The reply was "I AM your good friend Elliot Mendelson."

Paul Erdős's first paper was a new proof of Bertrand's conjecture which states that there is always a prime number between any number and twice that number.

Erdős is the most prolific mathematician in history with author credits for 1521 academic papers. He was a prolific collaborator as well and collaborated with 509 authors.

Here's Paul Erdős talking about child prodigies.

Both Erdos and Ramanujan appear to have interacted with G. H. Hardy.

Of course, Hardy 'discovered' Ramanujan and considered it the one 'great romance' of his life.

Among his many contributions to number theory, Ramanujan's various formulas related to the value of pi are quite remarkable. These formulas continue to be used today as the value of pi continues to be calculated to trillions of decimal places.

Whereas you or I might be happy to know the value of pi to, say, four decimal places, mathematicians like to go berserk and since the advent of computers from round about the middle of the 20th century, there has been an esoteric race going on in this sphere.

In the 21st century, with the aid of capable supercomputers, the value of pi has been determined to more than 10 trillion decimal places.

Here's the chronology of computation of pi.

Dowry Seekers Please Excuse

If you are a male of a certain age in India, of course you are seeking a suitable alliance.

The below is a compilation of the definitive characteristics of the Indian female.

This should help the grooms find and choose their perfect life partner.

1. Girls are traditional … and with a Fair complexion too.
2. They carry Positive attitudes and expect the same.
3. Their Priorities are more to family values and Indian culture.
4. They’re often simple and sober.
5. A beautiful girl of high oral values, strong character, righteous... virtuous... kindhearted, God fearing.... straight forward... traditional values and modern outlook... done PG (anthropology **** University). 
6. They’re sincerely from core and strong will power.
7. They’re god fearing and trust on god very much.
8. They’re very Ambitious.
9. my famly believs in horroscope matching so, please provide ur birth details along with ur inteterest.
   & those who support dowry... please xcuse.........
10. Hobbies: Cooking & Dancing
11. They believe in sanctity of Sri Guru Granth Sahib Ji
12. They believe in family values

Richard Feynman on God

If you expect us scientists to give answers to all the wonderful questions about what we are, where we are going, what the meaning of the universe is and so on, then I think you could easily become disillusioned and look for some mystic answers to these problems. However, scientist can take a mystic answer ... I don't know because the whole spirit of ... well never mind ... I don't understand it but anyhow ... if you think of it though ... the way I think of what we are doing is we are exploring, we are trying to find out as much as we can about the world. People say "are you looking for the ultimate laws of physics?" ... "No, I'm not. I'm just looking to find out more about the world. And if it turns out that there is a simple ultimate law that explains everything, so be it. That would be very nice and ... but if it turns out it's like an onion with millions of layers and we are just sick and tired of looking at the layers, then that's the way it is. 

But whatever way it comes out, it's nature it's there and she is going to come out the way she is. And therefore when we go to investigate it, we should not pre-decide what it is we are trying to do except find out more about it. If you say ... "but the problem is - why do you want to find out more about it" if you thought you want to find out more about it because you thought you are going to find an answer to some deep philosophical question, you may be wrong. It may be that you can't get an answer to that particular question by finding out more about the character of nature.

But I don't look at it ... my interest in science is to simply find out about the world and the more I find out, the better it is and I like to find out.

And there are very remarkable mysteries about the fact that we are able to do so many more things than apparently animals can do and there are other questions like that. But those are questions that I want to investigate without knowing the answer to them. And so altogether ...

I can't believe the special stories that have been made out about our relationship to the universe at large because ... they seem to be too simple ... too connected, too local, too provincial ... the Earth! He came to the Earth! ONE of the aspects of God came to the Earth! MIND YOU! And look at what's out there and how can you ... it isn't in proportion ... 

A Universe Not Made For Us — Carl Sagan

Our ancestors understood origins by extrapolating from their own experience; how else could they have done it! So the universe was hatched from a cosmic egg or conceived in the sexual congress of a mother god and a father god or was a kind of product of the creator’s workshop; perhaps the latest of many flawed attempts. The universe was not much bigger than what we see and not much older than our written or oral records; and nowhere very different from places that we know. We tended in our cosmologies to make thing familiar. Despite all our best efforts, we have not been very inventive. In the West, heaven is placid and fluffy; and hell is like the inside of a volcano. In many stories, both realms are governed by dominance hierarchies headed by gods or devils. Monotheists talked about the king of kings. In every culture, we imagined something like our own political system running the universe; few found the similarity suspicious.

Then science came along and taught us that we are not the measure of all things; that there are wonders unimagined; that the universe is not obliged to conform to what was considered comfortable  or plausible. And again if we are not important,  not central, not the apple of god’s eye, what is implied for our theologically-based moral codes? The discovery of our true bearings in the Cosmos was resisted for so long to such a degree that many traces of the debate remain; sometimes with the motives of the geocentrists laid bare.

So what do we really want from philosophy and religion? Palliatives? Therapy? Comfort? Do we want reassuring fables or an understanding of our actual circumstances? Dismay that the universe does not conform to our preferences seems childish; you might think that grownups would be ashamed to put such disappointments into print; the fashionable way of doing this is not to blame the universe which seems truly pointless but rather to blame the means by which we know the universe, namely, science. Science has taught us that because we have a talent for deceiving ourselves, subjectivity may not freely rein. Its conclusions derive from the interrogation of nature and are not in all cases pre-designed to satisfy our wants.

Fresh Reading Material

The annual question from Edge.org: what should we be worried about?

A remarkable essay by Eugene Wigner on the The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences.

A look back at Aaron Schwartz's life in The New Yorker.

Here's the detailed story of the discovery of the Higgs boson in The New York Times by the renowned science writer Dennis Overbye.

You can't miss this Esquire interview with the Navy SEAL who actually shot bin Laden.

This is a fascinating article about the future by Bill Joy, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems.

Articles about the Iraq war in the New Yorker.

Engines of our Ingenuity —  a radio program that tells the story of how our culture is formed by human creativity.


Jonah Lehrer articles from the New Yorker.

Jonah Lehrer article about memory in Wired.

An article about the human urge for exploration from the National Geographic.

Are you living in a computer simulation?

Mordechai Vanunu

The extraordinary tale of Israel's nuclear whistleblower perhaps remains less highlighted than it should be. Here's a documentary about him.

If Heaven is Real ...

Then, perhaps the world is going to hell.


I wonder how all those authors who have written NYT bestsellers would be feeling ... Tom Friedman wrote The World is Flat which went to the top of the list.


I wonder if any of Richard Dawkins' books ever reached no. 1 or not. Same for Christopher Hitchens' books. And so many of the world's real talented, professional writers.


I could tell them: so you've written an NYT bestseller? Well, so what! No big deal! So has 11-year-old, Mr. Heaven-returned young man.


I would tell all those NASA astronauts: so what if you guys have got PhDs from CalTech and MIT and wherever! Can you write like an 11-year-old?


I find the gullibility of Americans to be really scary. Perhaps the Europeans are not so gullible.

India 2030

The recent census has shown that India's population grew from 1,030 million to 1,200 million (growth of 16 percent) in the last decade. China's population increased from 1,240 million to 1,340 million (growth of 8 percent) in the same period.


Assuming a growth rate of 15 percent, India's population will be 1,380 million by 2021. China's population meanwhile will reach a figure of somewhere between 1,450 million and 1,500 million.


How can anyone get one's head around these enormous numbers? How many people can anyone connect with at a personal level? How many people can a human brain remember?


I don't know about others but I can speak about myself.


I probably have 200 relatives. Strangely enough, I've very few friends from my school or college days. Probably 20. During those bygone days, there were social networks and the passage of time makes memories fade. I can probably remember about 100 colleagues that I've worked with over the past five years. I am a bit of a news junkie. So, how many authors and historical and current personalities do I remember? I am not sure but it can't possibly be greater than one thousand.


So the total tally comes to around 1,500 at the most. That probably makes sense.

On A Dinner Table

No. It's not about THAT.


Nothing HAPPENED on the dinner table. In fact, I don't have one. And that's the point.


It occurred to me out of the blue about the fact that I do not own a dinner table while most people do. (Of course, when one talks of India, probably it would be truer to say that most people in fact don't.)


But clearly the readers of this blog would likely belong to the dinner table owning class. So, the point is this: how essential is it to own a dinner table?


Does one's quality of life degrade in any noticeable manner (let alone significant manner) on account of not owning a dinner table? Clearly, the stark fact has to do with our sense of priorities. We make these choices and so many of them. Some of these choices are conscious and some are unconscious. There are individual choices made and societal ones too.


Individuals choose to worry over dresses or dining tables or door frames or dogs or whatever.

The Mission With An Infinite Multiplier Effect

It occurs to me that there is one human endeavor which stands apart from all others in terms of what its outcome might mean for the human species.


Humans have taken control of their fate in a way that no other species has been able to do. No other species even comes close.


Our endeavors are extraordinarily diverse. We create art, music, painting, sculptures, literature, etc. We have invented language to communicate our thoughts to each other. We invented publishing and thereby learned to pass on the knowledge of one generation to another.


Thus we can say with some certainty what happened a hundred years ago. Once we are able to accurately keep track of events, we can create a history of our species. Before we had written history, people used to pass on their knowledge in the form of spoken stories -- the realm of mythology.

Since the last couple of centuries, the most important human endeavor would appear to be science as it has led to new discoveries and inventions that have improved human lives in countless ways.

The Curious Case of the Closed God

While walking in the evening the other day, I was passing by this temple close to my house at 9 p.m. I happened to overhear a couple of couples who are standing there and discussing something.


The subject matter of their discussion was the great dilemma they were faced with. You see, the temple gates had been locked. God was apparently closed for business for the day. So, they were discussing about what to do. Where to find another God who'd still be open for the day.


I'm thinking, God must do some skillful time management: think of the millions who keep asking for favors (and that too in these recessionary times) not to mention the wannabes who want to win lotteries and dancing competitions on TV and singing competitions of TV.


God must be a pretty patient creature though to tolerate these flocks who keep bothering for every tiny little thing.

LETTING GO by Atul Gawande from the New Yorker

Sara Thomas Monopoli was pregnant with her first child when her doctors learned that she was going to die. It started with a cough and a pain in her back. Then a chest X-ray showed that her left lung had collapsed, and her chest was filled with fluid. A sample of the fluid was drawn off with a long needle and sent for testing. Instead of an infection, as everyone had expected, it was lung cancer, and it had already spread to the lining of her chest. Her pregnancy was thirty-nine weeks along, and the obstetrician who had ordered the test broke the news to her as she sat with her husband and her parents. The obstetrician didn’t get into the prognosis—she would bring in an oncologist for that—but Sara was stunned. Her mother, who had lost her best friend to lung cancer, began crying.

The doctors wanted to start treatment right away, and that meant inducing labor to get the baby out. For the moment, though, Sara and her husband, Rich, sat by themselves on a quiet terrace off the labor floor. It was a warm Monday in June, 2007. She took Rich’s hands, and they tried to absorb what they had heard. Monopoli was thirty-four. She had never smoked, or lived with anyone who had. She exercised. She ate well. The diagnosis was bewildering. “This is going to be O.K.,” Rich told her. “We’re going to work through this. It’s going to be hard, yes. But we’ll figure it out. We can find the right treatment.” For the moment, though, they had a baby to think about. 

“So Sara and I looked at each other,” Rich recalled, “and we said, ‘We don’t have cancer on Tuesday. It’s a cancer-free day. We’re having a baby. It’s exciting. And we’re going to enjoy our baby.’ ” On Tuesday, at 8:55 P.M., Vivian Monopoli, seven pounds nine ounces, was born. She had wavy brown hair, like her mom, and she was perfectly healthy.

The Challenge of Being Learned in the Modern Age

Clearly, this is a problem without a solution. We live in a world where knowledge is being created at an ever growing and ever increasing pace. In literature, there are the classics that are must reads. Then, there are modern masters who have written perceptively about recent times. Then there are the contemporary writers -- the ongoing literary endeavor to capture the human condition and place it within the context of the 21st century. One needs to read all of this. There's history. And science. Biographies and auto-biographies. At least, some of them must be read. So, how does one find the time to read them all.


For those involved in scientific work, the pace of change is even more staggering and perhaps nausea-inducing. Admittedly, different branches of Physics, for example, are at different stages. The Standard Model and Supersymmertry and String Theory have been the cutting edge in our understanding of particles and forces for a few decades now. However, observational astronomy is perhaps going through a golden age with astonishingly capable space-based observatories looking at and mapping the universe across the breadth of the electromagnetic spectrum. Astronomy has placed before us incontrovertible evidence of astonishing phenomena such as gravitational lensing or the thousands of planets being discovered around nearby stars in our galaxy by the Kepler telescope.

Columbia's Last Flight from The Atlantic by William Langewiesche

Space flight is known to be a risky business, but during the minutes before dawn last February 1, as the doomed shuttle Columbia began to descend into the upper atmosphere over the Pacific Ocean, only a handful of people—a few engineers deep inside of NASA—worried that the vehicle and its seven souls might actually come to grief. It was the responsibility of NASA's managers to hear those suspicions, and from top to bottom they failed. After the fact, that's easy to see. But in fairness to those whose reputations have now been sacrificed, seventeen years and eighty-nine shuttle flights had passed since the Challenger explosion, and within the agency a new generation had risen that was smart, perhaps, but also unwise—confined by NASA's walls and routines, and vulnerable to the self-satisfaction that inevitably had set in. 

Moreover, this mission was a yawn—a low-priority "science" flight forced onto NASA by Congress and postponed for two years because of a more pressing schedule of construction deliveries to the International Space Station. The truth is, it had finally been launched as much to clear the books as to add to human knowledge, and it had gone nowhere except into low Earth orbit, around the globe every ninety minutes for sixteen days, carrying the first Israeli astronaut, and performing a string of experiments, many of which, like the shuttle program itself, seemed to suffer from something of a make-work character—the examination of dust in the Middle East (by the Israeli, of course); the ever popular ozone study; experiments designed by schoolchildren in six countries to observe the effect of weightlessness on spiders, silkworms, and other creatures; an exercise in "astroculture" involving the extraction of essential oils from rose and rice flowers, which was said to hold promise for new perfumes; and so forth. No doubt some good science was done too—particularly pertaining to space flight itself—though none of it was so urgent that it could not have been performed later, under better circumstances, in the under-booked International Space Station. The astronauts aboard the shuttle were smart and accomplished people, and they were deeply committed to human space flight and exploration. They were also team players, by intense selection, and nothing if not wise to the game. From orbit one of them had radioed, "The science we're doing here is great, and it's fantastic. It's leading-edge." Others had dutifully reported that the planet seems beautiful, fragile, and borderless when seen from such altitudes, and they had expressed their hopes in English and Hebrew for world peace. It was Miracle Whip on Wonder Bread, standard NASA fare. On the ground so little attention was being paid that even the radars that could have been directed upward to track the Columbia's re-entry into the atmosphere—from Vandenberg Air Force Base, or White Sands Missile Range—were sleeping. As a result, no radar record of the breakup exists—only of the metal rain that drifted down over East Texas, and eventually came into the view of air-traffic control. 

GETTING BIN LADEN from The New Yorker by Nicholas Schmidle

Shortly after eleven o’clock on the night of May 1st, two MH-60 Black Hawk helicopters lifted off from Jalalabad Air Field, in eastern Afghanistan, and embarked on a covert mission into Pakistan to kill Osama bin Laden. Inside the aircraft were twenty-three Navy SEALs from Team Six, which is officially known as the Naval Special Warfare Development Group, or DEVGRU. A Pakistani-American translator, whom I will call Ahmed, and a dog named Cairo—a Belgian Malinois—were also aboard. It was a moonless evening, and the helicopters’ pilots, wearing night-vision goggles, flew without lights over mountains that straddle the border with Pakistan. Radio communications were kept to a minimum, and an eerie calm settled inside the aircraft. 

Fifteen minutes later, the helicopters ducked into an alpine valley and slipped, undetected, into Pakistani airspace. For more than sixty years, Pakistan’s military has maintained a state of high alert against its eastern neighbor, India. Because of this obsession, Pakistan’s “principal air defenses are all pointing east,” Shuja Nawaz, an expert on the Pakistani Army and the author of “Crossed Swords: Pakistan, Its Army, and the Wars Within,” told me. Senior defense and Administration officials concur with this assessment, but a Pakistani senior military official, whom I reached at his office, in Rawalpindi, disagreed. “No one leaves their borders unattended,” he said. Though he declined to elaborate on the location or orientation of Pakistan’s radars—“It’s not where the radars are or aren’t”—he said that the American infiltration was the result of “technological gaps we have vis-à-vis the U.S.” The Black Hawks, each of which had two pilots and a crewman from the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, or the Night Stalkers, had been modified to mask heat, noise, and movement; the copters’ exteriors had sharp, flat angles and were covered with radar-dampening “skin.” 

A Great Collection of Articles

http://dspace.dial.pipex.com/town/park/di21/art_tech_ec_files/art_tech_ec_index.htm

Inspirational Heroes

I want to talk about real heroes today à not the kind we elevate to the status of demi-gods too easily and unthinkingly.

“There’s a secret society of geniuses who weave and shape the fabric of our culture,” somebody had said about Subrahmanian Chandrasekhar (he was known among his colleagues as ‘Chandra’) on the occasion of awarding a medal to Chandra.

Yes. Chandra was such a genius and so was Srinivasa Ramanujan.

It is not widely known that one of NASA’s space telescopes (‘Great Observatories’) is named after him? à the Chandra X-Ray Observatory. The most well-known of the space telescopes is of course the Hubble Space Telescope which has revealed so much about the wonders of our universe in its 20 year long lifetime.

Every educated person must consider it his or her bounden duty to be acquainted with the images and the results of these great space projects.

To give just a bit of a primer about Chandra, some of his areas of work included these

·         stellar structure,

·         theory of white dwarfs,

·         stellar dynamics, theory of radiative transfer,

·         quantum theory of the negative ion of Hydrogen,

·         hydrodynamic and hydromagnetic stability,

·         equilibrium and the stability of ellipsoidal figures of equilibrium,

·         general relativity. mathematical theory of black holes and theory of colliding gravitational waves.

Just reflect for a moment – if you will – about the greatness of the scientific endeavor which has given us mere humans the tools – mathematical – which we can manipulate to understand the interiors and evolution of stars or when a star will turn into a black hole and when it will end up as a white dwarf or a neutron star.