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!