Civilizations in Space

Carl Sagan, one of the greatest astronomers of our times, said there could be as many as 50,000 civilizations in our Milky Way galaxy alone. Imagine the number of civilizations in the millions of galaxies since time was born about 8.4 billion years ago. Strange, looking at the way the earth was born and evolved. The astronomers and scientists have put together the sequence of events that may have triggered life on earth beginning 4.5 billion years ago. They use rocks and fossils and conduct geotechnical investigation to weave this catalogue.
Some of the main events that are documented include accretion of matter in the space around the earth to form the planet 4.5 billion years ago. This was followed by the heating of the core of earth which spilled out molten lava to the surface of earth which formed a sea of churning hot mantle. The number of times the atmospheric composition the earth has undergone over the period due to geological happenings is amazing. Somewhere in between life evolved and underwent a phase of extinction. Then the ice age was followed by the age of the dinosaurs. The infinite fossil fuel we are consuming has formed over millions of years of the birth and death of animal and plant life embedded below in sedimentary rocks hundreds of feet below the earths crust and even under water.
To evolve the right kind of temperature and atmospheric composition and the tilt to the axis of earth so that seasons could have been made possible. To have water and fertile land for the nourishment of human life! To have an ozone cocoon above the atmosphere to protect the earth from obnoxious rays of the sun! And for the sun itself to be the harbinger of life on earth! There are umpteen factors that are a reason for running plant, animal and intelligent human life on earth beyond these. The composition of human body has an immune system that is compatible with its resources. The body make-up has a human form with male and female permutation with its capacity to repeat. There is an abundance of metals and minerals- recipes for the industrial revolution.
If evolution has really taken place in the order scientists believe and if parameters required for the survival of life are so complex it seems difficult for life to exist on other planets with the same parameter as exist now. Either there has to be a short-cut or another set of extremely similar parameters to be repeated which look difficult. Yes life can exist in a very different form with very different senses but then it could be very difficult for us to recognise those however well we use earthly telescopes or techniques known to astronomy.

When were you born

This is in view of a female claiming to be 145 yrs old.
The oldest living person (a female) Jeanne Calment lived to the age of 122 yrs and 164 days. The list of 100 has 10 females in the top of order and also comprises of more number of females proving the longevity of the fairer sex beyond doubt.
Not a single Indian male or female fare in the list of 100 oldest people living or dead. Not a single Indian male or female exists in the list of ten living males or females on Earth. In the days of the Ramayana it was common to live up-to 200 yrs by consuming Amrit (a drink made out of the extract of a plant in the Himalayas) (Oh! Where is the plant gone?) at the age of around 18 yrs . Sages in the olden times who lived an ascetic life lived still longer. Indians believe they consume the best vegetarian (let us forget the argument of organic Vs manure food for some time). Lots of sages and cults make their appearance during the Kumbh mela (every few years) (smitten by ash on their foreheads and bodies) when Gods are supposed to release Amrit and yet we don’t find many living to a century in India. Or at least claims are not made. Or do we don’t have a proper record or evidence to prove the same.
I was trying to figure out if there was a method to calculate the age of a person? Many Indians who were born about 60/70 yrs ago have no records when they were born. Dates were assumed so that they could retire from government jobs, given a retirement age. I bet in to-days time too we have places in the interiors of India where these is neglected and midwives deliver kids to the joy of their families. We know that the age of a tree can be found out by counting the annular rings (Herbchronology). Is there any method for humans or animals? Unfortunately there is no method to prove the age of a person. Looking at the face of a person and his/her body language a lot of people can derive the age to an accuracy of 5 yrs. We can scientifically derive the age of a person from the degeneration of bones, muscle, skin or teeth. We have some methods of testing genes in blood or brain tissue to come to some conclusions. But nothing can find out what date you were born.

Easy Bliss

Hanami is picnicking under the sakura bloom. Sakura is the Japanese word for Cherry Blossom and sakura-viewing is ‘mono no aware’ meaning empathy towards everything. The tradition has been taking place for thousands of years. The Japanese view the bloom, which hardly lasts a fortnight, almost in a meditative way watching it hours on end. They also feel very sad when the bloom starts fading away. It is during March end or April month during which the cherry blossom tree blooms and during which time the hotels in Tokyo and Kyoto are booked years in advance to see the spectacle of the bloom.
Many Indians have suggested starting a similar festival of the Golden Shower Tree or Laburnum in India. The tree too blooms in April, summer time in India. At the peak of its bloom the flowers are so dense that you wouldn’t see a leaf or a trunk or a bark. You will find these trees lined up in many cities of India like Mumbai and Noida and in Kerala and many parts of India. They present a very soothing site during the scorching summer time and are relaxing and de-stressing. Authorities will need to create meadows lined up with these trees to create gardens and picnic spots. The festival has to catch the imagination of the authorities and the population at large. It is also vacation time for schools in India.
The Zen masters have known to teach meditation, relaxing with your body stretched in bath tubs. They have also prescribed meditative walks. In this you can sit on a sofa and imagine you change into a track suit and then wear your sport shoes. You then go out of your house in your mind, remaining in your sofa into a garden lined up with beautiful flowers. You simultaneously measure every step of your walk. You can return back from this imaginary long walk home feeling fit and retrieving on your sofa without moving a limb.
As for me I got up today in the morning to find a blanket of dark clouds on the dome of the sky with a steady drizzle. Sounds of thick drops falling from the 17th floor roof over three floors below me created music to the incessant shower. Green branches of tall thicket trees standing meekly in ovation. Sometimes the drizzle turned awry increasing in intensity to the howl of wind. I gazed at the Mumbai rains for an hour. It was a spell I will not forget for a long time. I recalled a similar hex standing on the bank of a lake in Chhatisgarh scattered with lotus flowers and watching the reflection of birds and passing billows of white clouds on the serene waters. It was bliss.

Olympics and India

India had won six medals in the last London Olympics. We won just two bronze at Rio. It was expected that they would win more this time around. Most countries have grown steadily in their medal tallies over the years before reaching stagnation.
There have been tweets and counter-tweets. People have blamed the sports authorities. There have been controversies on doping. Some people have criticized us for not creating good athletes in a country of 1.20 billion people.
The fact is that there is nobody to take responsibility. The sports ministry does not have targets. There is no organised planning and we have no clue to win an Olympic medal. Whatever financial resources are available are not channelized properly. We don’t know how to go about a sport. We don’t know how to pick talented athletes. We don’t know how to pick managers and trainers. Whatever we have achieved are mostly individual efforts.
Small backward countries including Kenya and Jamaica are creating legends. Korea, Japan and most small European countries produce winners consistently.
We have a vast country with varied climate and skins of all colors and fitness of all sorts. The north-east has stiff competitors, the Haryanvis are great wrestlers. Keralites are good athletes and weight-lifters. We have no dearth of talent. The government offers lots of gifts and free-bees in terms of money and property to winners (Sakshi Malik the wrestler bronze medalist will win at least Rs Three crores and lots of awards including Khel Ratna and accolades). What is wrong is with the way we are handling these affairs. We need to convert novices into qualifiers, qualifiers into medal winners.

Should we stop bearing children

During the last 50 yrs the population of Europe grew by 10% from 400 million to 500 million. American population will rise by a 100 million in the next 50 yrs. African population is destined to grow from the present 16 to 25% in the next 35 yrs. The only consolation is Asia’s population rise will fall from 60 to 54 % in the next 35 yrs.
Looking at the growth it is imminent that there will be immigration to cities. Cities will grow tall but mostly wide. Agricultural land will be encroached. Managing natural resources would be difficult and changes like increased temperatures and flooding will result in degradation of the environmental.
All this leads to my insecurities. This is quite a depressing scenario. The words fading, waning, depleting, hounding ring in my ears.
Sometimes I wonder whether our future generations would have enough space to sleep and enough fields to grow the grains we require. I have been living by such scares since childhood. It all began when we were trained in school to hide below benches on the siren hooting began on the attacks of fighter Pakistani planes during the 1965 Indo-Pak war. We were in Pune and the ammunition factory in Pimpri was their hot target. It drove a childs mind wild in imagination of what lay in life. The perception of a bomb killing you and all your aspirations shattered were nerve racking.
Now I believe life goes on. If we are short of land we may migrate to another planet. If we are short of resources we might tap from a passing asteroid. Nothing will stop!

Humans, Aliens and the third Entity and the philosophy that makes us

What we consider as the natural way of things could be abstract in the cosmic sense.
Let us begin this with our own body. Essentially we have a head with two upper and two lower limbs joined by a diaphragm. We seek a similar figure of an alien with extensions of this typical body like longer arms or a bolder head and so on.
We tend to think that the oxygen or the composition of the earth’s atmosphere keeps us going. There is a very big theory about the position of our planet earth with respect to the Milky way galaxy. There is something called the goldilocks zone in the Milky Way galaxy in which our Sun is located and the distance of the earth from the Sun and the ideal temperatures that overwhelm the presence of life on earth. We look for planets and aliens in space with similar circumstances whenever we surf through the Hubble or the Chandra Space Telescope.
We feel that the earth is going because of the intelligent life we are and because of the Flora and Fauna around us. We tend to think that the physical abilities/disabilities we are bestowed with is almost perfect and nothing can come close.
That the Sun rises in the east and sets in the west with variations due to the tilt of the poles causing seasons and all this is very ideal. Also the proportion of ocean to earth space and the dissimilar climates makes up the very essence. Also the layers of atmosphere that the earth is surrounded by and the ozone cocoon above that due to which the radiation and the ultra violet rays are blocked is how we live in a cosy comfort.
These and other endless parameters make up the success of earth as a habitable planet. Some saintly people have ascribed all these parameters to be fulfilled to be the intervention of the almighty God otherwise it would be impossible for so many unlikely happenings to come together. So your lives and ours are God gifted and use it to nurture kindness for we are all one.
Let us think this some other way. Imagine that this very God made a separate set of parameters and made another intelligent life whose perception we don’t have at all. Neither can that other ever come to know about us! How will we recognise him? How will we know him? Imagine that it is not water, oxygen, food or climate that is required for his survival. He does not require shelter or is there any need for him to wear clothes. He does not require civilization or industrialisation or for that matter the need of brooks, rivers and seas. There is no need of hills, mountains and rains. Imagine this human having a sack like form without any limbs or head. He has an immune system that does not carry any diseases. That he does not have emotions and feelings and cartilage and boons.
I think it is a possibility. He may be around us or we may be around him. There may be this universe that he may see like we or a parallel universe with entirely new parameters that may co-exist or entirely separated out.
The aliens mean that they are a part of our universe. That we may encounter them some day! That we may speak, eat, fight or have a war for survival of our own community!! May be these are not the parameters that work for the other entity which God created for a parallel universe with other parameters.
Also there is a possibility that there may be infinite universes with any number of parameters. Like, we tend to think these days about having 13 dimensions.
I think it is the eyes that make up the humans. I don’t think only the mind would have worked. The others appurtenances make us formidable enough to think about the entire universe and its philosophies.

The art of swimming

Most people who know swimming will tell you that the key to good health is swimming. There is no exercise better than swimming! It is also a great pleasure to float on water and that every muscle and sinew gets a rub.
In my school days I used to visit my maternal uncles village during summer vacations. The crops are harvested by March and in May when we visited the fields used to be parched. However there was enough water in the wells to swim and wash your clothes. The learners used to be tied around the waist with branches of drumstick wood entwined with a rope (they are extremely light in weight and can float along-with the weight of your body). I was the type who was extremely scared of water and got choked-up and wary. Every-one around advised me the lifetime rewards of being a perfect swimmer. But still I fled away with a morose face. Again I returned the next vacation to find my mentor, a very senior farmer, again persuading me to learn swimming and I persisted with my fleeing habit.
All the good resorts in the country today have shallow swimming pools with deepest end being 5 feet. All those who know swimming can have a good swim free-styling or breast-stroking and all those who don’t can have a dip quite enjoyable. You can sit, thump your legs on the floor of the pool and get a floating feeling. Worst you could sit on the side-lines and watch people swimming. This is no less meditative!

Disciplined in-discipline

We are not perfect. There is nothing called perfection. Only God may achieve it. The Japanese exhibit this in a way. You have a perfectly mowed landscape with trees and plants meticulously shaven. What the Japanese will do is spread it around with, may be, foliage. This is to show that perfection does’nt exist. This they call perfectly imperfect.
The cosmic set-up too is extremely disciplined. Moons move around planets, planets move around the stars, stars move around galaxies and galaxies around groups. But there are indisciplined objects like quasars and pulsars which exhibit strange characteristics. Yet there is a discipline in the cosmic set-up.
In an office setting everything cannot go with military discipline. There have to be moments of camaraderie and linger and laughing and joking. It is like all work and no leisure. But if these periods extend beyond certain limits it can be harmful to the office environ which may begin to unabashedly start creating groups, exhibit prejudices and start loose talk and become gossip friendly and so on.
What probably we are looking here is disciplined in-discipline. This is not easy since there a lot of human characteristics with various hues existing in an office set-up. Probably what can come to the managements rescue here is the setting-up of targets, having training sessions, meetings. All in all keeping the staff on their toes.

Tattoo and Henna

Tattoos are permanent, Mehndis/henna don’t last long. Both are art forms to beautify parts of your body with permanent and temporary dyes. Tattoos are insertions of indelible ink in your skin of various colours to form all sorts of figures and manuscripts either to beautify, identify, show descent or convey messages etc. Mehndi is temporary, a natural green herb, when applied through a nozzle/cone to your palms and fore arms and sometimes feet colours reddish pink on drying and fades in about 10 days as it ages and applied during festivities and weddings especially to brides in the Indian subcontinent and in Arabia.
The fact is that you grow. You grow in height and shrink with age. Your palms may grow and your arms may swell. You sometimes grow obese and may pale after going through a bout of health hazard. You also grow in thought and maturity. What happens to the tattoo of an adolescent as he /she grows up. You may end up thinking yourself stupid. What if the lion you had tattooed grew into a parrot.
Tattoo is of male bastion, Mehndi is of female. Tattoo has its origins in the west. It is more macho but modern women have taken to it. There are studios, parlours and professional experts in tattooing . Modern day there are some professionals in Mehndi but basically it is a bastion of the cultural past. The brides friends talk of the romance on the wedding day and night when applying Mehndi and there is a lot of giggling and camaraderie.

Monogamy, Polygamy and Gay

There are males who run a harem like the lion. There are females who run an organised hive like the bee.
There is one husband and four wives and there are is one wife and five husbands. Some are queer stories of some having husbands and wife both and vice versa. Then males marry males and females marry females. That means you have all sorts of possible combinations
There are male trees and fruitful trees. There are flowering plants and those that reproduce through stems. There are shrubs and bushes and there are savannahs and equatorial forests. There is symbiosis and weeds that multiply in water.
There are galaxies and stars. There are planets and moon. There are quasars and neutrinos.
From celestial objects to tiny microorganisms order and disorder exist alongside each other. In fact disorder is a part of order or vice-versa.

Bright Future

The future has always been bleak. When I graduated as an Engineer 36 years ago it was a dark world I had entered into. Jobless people, depleted resources, limited access were bothering the nation. “It would be very difficult to manage this menacing population’’ people said. It was quite depressing and the future had really no hopes. My nerves broke down very frequently.
36 years later the problems are not very different. But my nerves get seldom broken down. There is hope everywhere and the planet has evolved better.
Radio first changed to Television, Audio cassettes to CD, Phone to mobile, typewriters to computers, warfare to terrorism, cafes to internet cafes, trousers to jeans. The poor class has turned middle class, wheat is sold at the same price in rationing as 36 years before. The world became a better place to live in.
Since then things have further evolved. Televisions have turned LED’s, CD have become obsolete and music systems rare (everything is available on www free), computers have become household and supercomputers have replaced them (hence internet cafes have dwindled and wi fi has taken over), jeans were torn in between and there is so much scope to improve here. The world has become a still better place.
And I see the future. LED’s becoming 3D, printers churning out 3D houses, cities under water and skyscrapers taking shape as fast as ever (in fact I am being part of one). The cosmos will become still better.
What have we to lose? Dont get bothered! Live like a free bird!!

Meteor Strike

An extraordinary celestial event occurred on the midnight of Feb 6th. A college employee Kamaraj dies and three people are injured due to a meteorite strike in Chennai campus. It was later confirmed by a National Physical Laboratory scientist to be indeed a meteorite strike which had created a small crater and embedded within was a stone remnant.
You and I have heard of Leonids (occurring around 17th Nov), Perseids (occurring around August 12th). We have heard about Quadrantis and Geminids. There are at least 20 known such meteor and asteroid showers which are seen as shooting stars in the sky. They originate from splinters mostly of passing comets which disintegrate due to the Sun’s rays as they are composed of shards, dust and ice. Some comets which have completed several approaches in their orbits to the Sun finally disintegrate when there is very little mass left in them and they are no more able to hold on to each other. Some minor planets like Phaethon release these asteroids from the asteroid belt located between the planets Mercury and Jupiter. The gravitational tugs in the solar system drive all of these objects haywire and some of these meteors come close to the Earth. They are mostly burnt out at the entry of the earth’s atmosphere where there is a lot of friction but some who probably have more mass do enter and impact the earth’s crust. One of the most important such meteor was the strike at Tunguska in Siberia which burnt an area of 2000 sq kms. There have been many more of such strikes in China and America and in India as well.
These meteorite showers have caused little harm to humans (some people have died in farms and cities) but have provided with a celestial delight over the centuries. The Leonid showers were a delight to watch in the winters of 1999.
Astronomers look for evidence of water, amino acids and chemical and metal composition of meteorites. Comets we know are some of the oldest objects in the solar system. Comets existed before any planets were formed. So they can give us clues to the formation of the solar system. Meteorites have been found on earth in North Africa the most. However they have been found almost scattered on the globe. There are laboratories available all throughout the world to find out whether a rock is an earthen rock (it is called a meteowrong) or a meteorite.

Reflections

I gaze from my window in the uniformly cut glazing and aluminium cladding that envelopes the entire 10 storey commercial building that provides me with an uninterrupted view of the various parameters related to Physics I learnt in school and college relating to Reflection.
I can see in it the views not provided to me directly eg I can see a convex image of heads and bodies diving into the swimming pool which is behind the 17 storied building I stay in. I see people walking along the jogging track and their bodies warp, elongate and shrink as they cross one glass facade joint to other followed by an interruption on account of the aluminium panel and again appear on the other side with subdued figures. The angle of incidence and the angle of reflection, the convex and concave mirror effect play havoc all day long! It is also a matter of my viewing distance and the reflecting distance. Objects may appear smaller or bigger than they are depending on the convex and concave effect.
We are told there are 70,000 thoughts passing through a human mind an average day. These are reflections of your past life which the neurons in your brain cells have saved for an eternity and beyond into the past lives as well, since the development of the brain is genetically improving over generations. (Hence you may be having a better brains than your forefathers ).The worrying thought that occupies your mind the earlier in the day may surpass a number of thoughts involuntarily without creating any flutter as they flash by. It is a healthy mind that can capture the important flow of these and analyse them to your benefit.
In a Virtual Reality game your eyes are obliterated from the real world around you which you naturally see. It is shrouded by an artificial world to make it real. Probably you like to see some of those pictures you have imagined all your life but were not able to decipher them as real pictures. Somebody has obviously thought out wisely for you to get into that virtual world as real. How difficult it would be to get out of this trance and come back to the real world again. Which world is the real? The one you entered into or the world you see around with your naked eyes. Virtual world could be fragments of the seventy thousand thoughts or so that flash out from your mind daily to which you have attached yourself to some extent.

There is a very famous example of how the world you see around you can change your perception once you add extra dimensions to it. What is the difference in the view of the world when a fish is watching swimming from the insides of a rectangular shaped water-tank from that when it is viewing from a hemispherical shaped glass vessel? The lens effect will change the entire world for the fish. They will change the way they swim. They will change the way they eat and they will change the way they live.
Reflection is what you see in a mirror, a glass or a clean stainless steel utensil. One of the most important reflections is of my earlier days as a boy going to a hair-dresser and watching the reverse side of my head into umpteen numbers of reflections set off by slight inclinations of the mirror in my front view and exactly opposite rear view set on the opposite wall behind the back.
What is important is whether the mirror is giving you exactly what you are or a deceptive image of what you are not. Is this your mind playing you around with or the reality? Is this real or virtual? Have I really so many grey hairs? Has my body got so many wrinkles? Are the rivers and seas and the sunshine and the moon real or is somebody manipulating it for me?
You will fall into a maze!

Myths busted

That the Lion is the king of the jungle:
Until not long ago it was The Jungle book and The Lion King who ruled the forest. The lion would dictate terms except in books like Animal Farm where even pigs could have a say.
With their nimble gallops they would attack the prey and gorge with all theirb kin was the humble image in my mind. We looked at the lion with awe and would like him to be in the jungles and our memories. But now we have flaunted them in our zoos making them appear as if they were not captives and lived in their abode as always although humans coded them numbered them and watched every movement the lion could never think of.
The worst is all those TV channels who feigned innocence of protecting them, watched, filmed and tamed them. They even shot movies of counter attacks on lions by the wild buffalos caring for its kind and a herd of elephants protecting its infant. The lions were helpless and retrieved to my dismay.

Innocence once existed: The simplicity and purity of thought and giving.
India still remains a paradoxical country with reference to its demography. On one hand you have tall sky scrapers on the other there are slums. The forefathers of these slum dwellers were innocent migrants from various parts of India who came to make two ends meet. The present generation somehow have a genetic changeover of two generations as well as the education they have partaken and who understand life beyond simple measures of the value of their homes or the standard of living since TV’s and Fridges have become a part of life and affordable. Thus innocence which had remained in the masses and who came from agricultural background (who came from close to nature) has been waning in the two or three decades like never before.
Innocence is being gradually taken over by education but yet there are innocent people around us. This is to be taken as universal innocence a characteristic one inhibits at birth. Some of us are more wise than others and it could be said that some of us more innocent than others. Although the number of innocent is waning it is also a pure form of humanity. The wicked may want to have the innocent for them to be used but humanity needs innocence to sustain itself. The innocent can look at the world without wearing lenses.
Holocaust/doomsday theories:
As a boy the scariest part of living was the Indo Pak war of 1964. Pasting newspapers on windows to avoid light getting outside the house so that the enemy planes won’t see the city below (the government need not have to bother about blackouts). Hiding yourself below benches (as we were then trained to do) in schools when a hotter installed in all localities went louder. I then kept thinking whether this was the end. Wouldn’t we live to see the beautiful life laid in our future? But now I am sure nothing can destroy this earth. No holocaust, no doomsday as all these theories were propagated through a scare. The earth is capable of surviving on its own. It is designed to! Whatever the circumstances! Let countries have nuclear warheads, let there be terrorism, let there be religious dogmas or let there be a divide between the rich and the poor we are here to remain forever.
Cities will burst at their seams:
They have already burst. Mumbai, Dubai, New York have traffic jams where people are struck hours on end. A citizen new to Mumbai will not be able to board and alight a suburban train at peak hours. If this is not bursting what is! More vehicles are offloaded on to the roads everyday in all megacities of the world without bothering to add equivalent length of roads. People and government are not ready to accept that the cities are so overcrowded the meagre footpaths are not sufficient to walk, the pressure and tension to cross these roads is so immense that they just cross without bothering about their lives but don’t complain and even if they do it is so superfluous.

Sustainability

The biggest curse of modernisation is probably the environmental damage out of green house gases and carbon emissions. Consider the falling air quality index levels in metropolis and the pollutants and toxins released by municipalities in rivers and seas. Global temperatures are rising, weather parameters are taking a bad shape and what the earth would undergo in a hundred years is a wild imagination guessed by scientists and meteorologists. We have all become well conversed in all this over the past few years.
So what have we done to correct this situation? Modern management stresses not to have corrections or mitigations but to have a solution and system devoid of it.
A small news item in a newspaper has triggered my mind. It says a device made out of a paper, pencil and a Teflon tape can generate enough electricity to operate a remote control that requires a 3 Volt charge. I chanced to encounter recently with a kitchen basket that converts household trash into compost and requires nothing to be disposed away (Imagine how you could get away with the entire garbage disposal system of a city). I recently saw a video of an artificial tree depicting wind energy which had about one feet long rotating cylindrical wind-mills jutting out vertically from its several branches producing electricity (what an amazing sight?). A successful entrepreneur, taken to a social cause, has manufactured a bicycle when run for an hour manually, can produce enough electricity to light 24 filament bulbs and a fan for a day.
Magical inventions, are they not?
We long back devised water falling on turbines through penstocks so as to generate electricity. We have used invertors to store electricity so as to be used when there is a shutdown or for starting cars. Likewise there are eco-inverter air conditioners that are power saving. There are LED lights replacing CFL’S that are more energy efficient.
We are at the cusp of a revolution. Humanity will survive as long as the wind keeps blowing, the sun spreads light, the rivers keep flowing and the seas keep churning. There is enough hope. Back to nature!

Visions, Images and Reality

Recently I read of an artist who saw two planets in the two halves of an apple. He saw the entire cosmos in a Roti, the Indian bread. Some others saw constellations in other food articles. However this is an art of magnifying the object under the scrutiny of photographic frames.
We know of phenomena when the patterns on a bed of sand make different objects. These could be elongated arms and legs and weird faces with stretched eyes and elongated nose. We see white sponges of clouds on a moonlit sky moving swiftly in the wind taking different shapes of animals and trees.
In the 10th Chapter of the Bhagwadgita, the epitome of Hindu philosophy, Krishna tells Arjuna that he exists in everything. He is the centre of the cosmos. He is the God of all God’s. He is the embodiment of all knowledge. He is the pinnacle of the Himalaya. He goes on to explain his presence in the best of everything existing.
The artists visions of the cosmos and the phenomena of watching patterns in sand and the clouds are perceptions coming out of a foggy mind groping to see something. It could be just that the cosmos exists in a piece of bread or in the moirés of sand or in the formation of different images in a cloud. But what Krishna says is very clear. We need to have certain beliefs to start with. Then we can build on them and see the eternity of life.

Water

Every astronomer is thirsty. Yes! Thirsty of water. It is the most talked about word in the glass cubicles of astronomy theatres and in books written on astronomy. When deep penetrating telescopes, like the Hubble and the Spitzer, return with views from the skies astronomers look for clues relating to the existence of water on those objects. They are happy when they see ice on the moon, Mars, asteroids, comets and elsewhere in the cosmos. The presence of water vapour too increases the possibility of a habitable zone. Why they have affinity for water and vapour is that it raises the possibility of life. Life in any form from microbes to humanity or any other higher forms!
The water molecule has two components - hydrogen and oxygen. Both are very precious. Oxygen you can breathe with and other can be profusely used to create energy. When our Chandrayan confirmed ice on moon all Indian were proud about it. The euphoria generated by patterns of streams on Mars surface lasted a decade until it was confirmed that water did exist on Mars indeed albeit in the form of ice. And now European Space Agency’s Rosetta’s lander Philae has found water on Churyumov Gerasimenko the comet.
Besides Hydrogen and Oxygen, Carbon for the formation of fuel and Nitrogen are important. This will entail the formation of amino acids.
What is common to the solar system could be possible anywhere in the light years of the cosmos. However it is to be seen if life can exist without these basic elements. There is a possibility that what we consider as building blocks of life may then have more hues of combinations. May be some other life exists around us which our senses may not have the receptors to feel them!!

Mrinalini Sarabhai

What a way of paying homage to a departed soul. Dancing in its physical presence! That is what Mallika Sarabhai and her daughter Anahita along with Mrinalinis students did before taking her mortal remains for the last rites. Mrinalini Sarabhai aged 97 years practised and preached the art of dancing all her life-time. Almost 75 years of dancing in a lifetime. The only perfect way to pay homage was to dance for her.
Everybody is born to die. But what ensues in those years in between of birth and death, matters. It becomes more extraordinary when you know that it was in those times when dancing was taboo in good families and considered an art to lure the wealthy as courtesans.
Mrinalini Sarabhai never lived a life in the shadow of her late husband the doyen, the pioneer of Indian Space Explorations Vikram Sarabhai. She was as dedicated to her art as Vikram was dedicated to space. She set up the Darpan Academy of Performing Arts in Ahmedabad and nurtured it and created a legend of Bharat Natyam dancers. You can only dance this long with creativity. She created her own masterpieces. Dance was the breath of her life.
She will remain in the minds and hearts of her followers.

The Art Of Kite Flying

Yesterday was 15th Jan and the day of winter solstice in the northern hemisphere. Generally the winter solstice is on the 14th Jan but since this is a leap year with 365 days and February a 29 day month it fell on the 15th.
It is also a season of harvesting in India and the sub-continent and the day is celebrated with a lot of gusto and passion under different festival names eg in Maharashtra it is Makar Sankranti and in the south of India it is Pongal and in the north east it is Bihu.
It is also a season of kite flying. The kites vary in sizes and shapes with a straight bamboo stick woven with a bow shaped stick perpendicular to it and made out of paper and Chinese plastic. A soft breeze flies them high into the skies and Oh! The colours are delightful. Horizontal stripes and vertical stripes of different colours made into national flags, religious emblems and famous film stars and sometimes with religious and philosophical and advertorial messages inscribed.
There is an art in tying the cord to the kite which makes all the balance possible and to manoeuvre the kite in the skies. The strand that connects you and the kite in the sky is the most important thread. As a boy I use to coat this thread with crushed glass mixed with glue and colour. This is the thread that is the combat weapon when taking on another kite in the sky. This is where the entire art of kite flying is exhibited. There is a definite methodology on taking on a foe. There is an art of diving over another kite to cut its stings. Another is to get deep under it and pull the string of your kite fast enough to create a friction and cut the others strings. There are various other ways like jerking, leaving the string of your kite over the others and releasing gradually. What follows a cut of another kite is a loud cry of exulting a win over another kite in the sky.
At the end of the day you have flown a lot of kites and the echoes of the surrounding sky fill your heart with joy and grief with the wins and losses and blood oozes out of the joints of your finger due to the cuts of the crushed glass coated strands.
And then you salute to the setting sun and darkness envelopes the skies. Here begins another joy of releasing sky lanterns as you light a candle inside the pink balloons which take off one after the other and fill the night sky with bright luminaries.