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!